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The Internet

Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile 180

Posted by timothy from the muy-bien-tal-vez dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking."
The Military

Pentagon Selects Companies To Build Flying Humvees 302

Posted by Soulskill from the yes-really dept.
longacre sends in a quote from Popular Mechanics: "The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected two companies to proceed with the next stage of its Transformer, known as TX — a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs. Lockheed Martin and AAI Corp., a unit of Textron Systems, are currently in negotiations with DARPA for the first stage of the Transformer project, several industry sources told Popular Mechanics at a robotics conference here in Denver." The picture included with the linked article says it all, really.

Comment The Root Cause (Score 2, Insightful) 702

by AlexCorn (#33221020) Attached to: The Case Against Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is only an issue because the government is already interfering with the ISP market. The government grants all kinds of franchise contracts and emminent domain (redistribution of private property) to telcos and ISPs, which distorts the market by creating the very monopolies that we all hate. Once the ISPs have comfortable monopolies, the services go to shit. I don't understand why anyone thinks that additional government intervention will have any other effect than to make things worse.

Abandon net neutrality legislation. Forbid municipalities from selling franchise monopolies. Do away with emminent domain. Then any number of solutions will appear on the market - ISPs will compete to lease land from property owners to run infrastructure, neighborhoods and housing associations will cooperate to run their own wires and contract with ISPs to hook into their networks. Multiple ISPs in the same region will actually compete with each other, much like we are seeing with Comcast and Verizon where FiOS is being introduced. And the notion of having the government tell the ISPs and telcos how to carry traffic will disappear.
Crime

Music Festival Producer Pre-Sues Bootleggers 422

Posted by samzenpus from the nipped-in-the-bud dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, if you even have been *thinking* about bootlegging the Mile High Music Festival this coming weekend in Denver you've already been sued. No joke. Event producer AEG has already filed trademark infringement claims against 100 John Does and 100 Jane Does in anticipation that they're going to bootleg the event. Since none of the sued parties have actually done anything yet, no one's showing up in court to protest the lawsuit either, so it moves forward... meaning that AEG can use it to get all sorts of law enforcement officials (US Marshals, local and state police and even off-duty officers) to go seize bootleg material."
Businesses

The Case Against Net Neutrality 702

Posted by samzenpus from the who-needs-equality dept.
jeek writes "While I certainly don't agree with it, this article tries to make the case that Net Neutrality may actually be bad for America. From the article: 'If the government regulates net neutrality, policies for internet access are set by one entity: the FCC. However, if the government stays out, each company will set its own policies. If you don’t like the FCC’s policies, you are stuck with them unless you leave the United States. If you don’t like your internet service provider’s policies, you can simply switch to another one. So which model sounds better to you?'"
Education

Monkeys Exhibit the Same Economic Irrationality As Us 254

Posted by samzenpus from the I-wanna-spend-like-you-oo-oo dept.
grrlscientist writes "Laurie Santos is trying to find the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primates make decisions. This video documents a clever series of experiments in 'monkeynomics' and shows that some of the stupid decisions we make are made by our primate relatives too."
Government

Senate Confirms Elena Kagan's Appointment To SCOTUS 618

Posted by Soulskill from the release-the-kagan dept.
eldavojohn writes "As expected, by a vote of 63 to 37 Elena Kagan has been appointed as the 112th member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kagan, only 50 years old, has no judicial experience. The Washington Post explains: 'Other justices have corporate law backgrounds or a long record of arguing before the court. Kagan worked briefly for a law firm and argued her first case before an appellate court 11 months ago. It happened to be before the Supreme Court, the first of six cases she argued as the nation's first female solicitor general.' Her fair use views and free speech views have made her a focus of Slashdot recently."
Image

Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools 650

Posted by samzenpus from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."
Businesses

High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay 1018

Posted by kdawson from the crying-all-the-way dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Programmers who design and code algorithms for investment banking are unhappy with their salaries. Many of them receive a low 6-figure salary whereas their bosses — who manipulate these algorithms and execute the trades — often earn millions. One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."
The Internet

The End of Forgetting 329

Posted by kdawson from the you-can-always-say-i-don't-recall dept.
Hugh Pickens recommends a long piece in last week's NY Times Magazine covering a wide swath of research and thinking in the US and elsewhere on the subject of the perils to society of recording everything permanently, and the idea that perhaps we ought to build forgetting into the Internet. "We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism, and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is, at an almost existential level, threatening to our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew. In a recent book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites the case of Stacy Snyder — who was denied a teaching certificate on the basis of a single photo on MySpace — as a reminder of the importance of 'societal forgetting.' By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.' In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded 'will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.' He concludes that 'without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.'"
Power

Micro Plane That Perches On Power Lines 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the look-up-in-the-air dept.
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about a microplane that perches on power lines to recharge its batteries being developed as a surveillance device at MIT. As you can imagine, landing on a power line is hard to do ... and charging off transmission lines has its own problems.
Government

Industrial Marijuana Farming Approved In Oakland 690

Posted by samzenpus from the grow-em-if-you-got-em dept.
Trintech writes "According to MSNBC: 'The city of Oakland, California on Tuesday legalized large-scale marijuana cultivation for medical use and will issue up to four permits for "industrial" cultivation starting next year. The move by the San Francisco Bay Area city aims to bring medical marijuana cultivation into the open and allow the city to profit by taxing those who grow it. The resolution passed the city council easily after a nearly four-hour debate that pitted small-scale "garden" growers against advocates of a bigger, industrial system that would become a "Silicon Valley" of pot.' Yes, you read that right. MSNBC just compared computer chip fabrication to pot cultivation."
Displays

Does Anyone Really Prefer Glossy Screens? 646

Posted by CmdrTaco from the no-way-no-how dept.
An anonymous reader asked a question that I've been wondering about too: "I live in a small southern European country where natural light abounds. This may sound good, but it is a pain when it comes to using laptops that come with a glossy finish, making it impossible to work unless you are doing it in the dark. To make matters worse, since we are a small market, most manufacturers only offer a subset of their product line, and don't allow you to choose any options available in other countries (like matte screens). Buying abroad is not an option since we have our own very specific keyboard layout. Why are manufacturers doing this? Does anyone really prefer using glossy screens for day-to-day activities?"
Earth

New Photos Show 'Devastating' Ice Loss On Everest 895

Posted by timothy from the heatin'-up-the-whole-outdoors dept.
Simmeh writes "The BBC reports on new photos of the Himalayas taken from exactly the same position as ones from 1929 and compares the ice coverage. The Asia Society, which did the groundwork, are quoted as saying, 'If the present rate of melting continues, many of these glaciers will be severely diminished by the middle of this century.' I guess the previous claim wasn't too unrealistic."
Science

Your Feces Is a Wonderland of Viruses 211

Posted by timothy from the and-so-can-you dept.
sciencehabit writes "Thanks to an anlaysis of fecal samples from four sets of Missouri-born female identical twins and their mothers, researchers have concluded that human guts harbor viruses as unique as the people they inhabit; the viral lineup differs even between identical twins. Even more surprising? These viruses may be doing good work inside of us."

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