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The Courts

Judge In Pirate Bay Trial Biased 415

Posted by CmdrTaco from the aren't-we-all dept.
maglo writes "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."
The Military

DARPA's Map-Based Wiki Keeps Platoons Alive 86

Posted by samzenpus from the a-wiki-of-one dept.
blackbearnh writes "One of the biggest problem that a platoon on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan faces is that when a new unit cycles in, all the street-sense and experience of the old unit is lost. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs, or even which families have a lot of domestic disputes, can spell the difference between living and dying. In response to this, DARPA created TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Developed as much on the ground in active warzones as in a lab, TIGR lets platoons access the latest satellite and drone imagery in an easy-to-use map based interface, as well as recording their experiences in the field and accessing the reports of other troops. In this O'Reilly Radar interview, two of the people responsible for the development of TIGR talk about the intel issues that troops face in hostile territory, the challenges of deploying new technology meant for combat areas, the specific tricks that they had to employ to make TIGR work over less-than-robust military networking, and how TIGR is impacting platoons in their day to day operations"
Image

Robotic Penguins 118

Posted by samzenpus from the unending-march-of-the-penguins dept.
Corporate Troll writes "Robotic penguins were unveiled by German engineering firm Festo this week. Using their flippers, the mechanical penguins (video) can paddle through water just like real ones, while larger helium-filled designs can "swim" through the air. The penguins are on show at the Hannover Messe Trade Exhibition in Germany. Each penguin carries 3D sonar which is used to monitor its surroundings and avoid collisions with walls or other penguins."

Comment Re:HOWTO: Using a SUBSET to create LOCK-IN!!! (Score 3, Insightful) 186

by onitzuka (#27565911) Attached to: Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support

Your theory falls flat when you hit point #2

The following packages do not exist. google.io.*
google.threads.*
google.db.*
google.util.*

If, in the future, google does add those libraries, I would fully expect them to be opensourced.

I can see how you misunderstood the posting. Please, let me help you.

I will do this in two parts:

[PART-1]
I am sure that you only missed the that I used "e.g." (what is an e.g.?) in the above, otherwise you would not have made the mistake of thinking that it could have been referring to anything else other than an example being posited for the discussion.

Those names were examples... hypothetical, if you will.

Now that that is all cleared up, give the post a re-read... but only after reading PART-2 which comes next...

[PART-2]
Also consider another good point: Why block the ALREADY open source standardized community developed and supported implementations only to provide your own replacements? Even if as you suggest that you "would fully expect them to be opensourced", WHY NOT support the existing open source community? WHY NOT support the existing open source solutions?

Comment HOWTO: Using a SUBSET to create LOCK-IN!!! (Score 4, Insightful) 186

by onitzuka (#27564723) Attached to: Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support
  1. Remove APIs for Threads, File Access, ThreadGroups, or whatever you feel you want removed (eg. java.io.*, java.lang.*, java.util.*, etc...)
  2. Replace those features with APIs that offer features only available on the Google's application server. (eg. google.io.*, google.threads.*, google.db.*, google.util.*, etc...)
  3. Have developers write their code for your Google application server.
  4. Snicker knowingly because you know that Java Servlet/JSP developers can and do use Threads and file systems and network access in their applications. In fact PHP developers use file systems all the time along with network access. Why do you snicker? Because you know they cannot simply copy their applications to Google App Engine without reimplementing it and creating a version JUST for Google App Engine. As the implementations are different and we know that developers time costs money($$$), managers will eventually have to decided whether to continue to support the open Servlets/JSP implementation (which could be ported to Tomcat, Resin, JBoss, or any others) or if they will just go with the Google App Engine version.
  5. Laugh when they cannot port their applications out WITHOUT reimplementing all of the private APIs.
  6. Profit
The Almighty Buck

Paper Companies' Windfall of Unintended Consequences 284

Posted by kdawson from the pulp-nonfiction dept.
Jamie found a post on ScienceBlogs that serves as a stark example of the law of unintended consequences, as well as the ability of private industry to game a system of laws to their advantage. It seems that large paper companies stand to reap as much as $8 billion this year by doing the opposite of what an alternative-fuel bill intended. Here is the article from The Nation with more details and a mild reaction from a Congressional staffer. "[T]he United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies.... even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry — handsomely — to use more fossil fuel. 'Which is,' as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the 'opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.'"
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - BattleCell : MMO cross between Chess and StarCraft (battlecell.com)

Submitted by
stavrica
stavrica writes: "Self-plug, but I bring it up for two reasons:

1.Excellent example of pushing the envelope with Google Maps API
2.Excellent example of what a group of 7 (2 programmers) can do with some creativity and determination.

"Social Network for Enemies"

BattleCell is a cross between Chess and StarCraft. It follows the spirit of the board game, Risk --but has 55 million cells overlaid onto Google maps and is designed for millions of players. An in-game Instant Messaging system automatically translates among 30+ languages.

Professionally produced videos provide "out-of-band" intelligence information as well as an entertaining story line. Everything about the show is directly inspired by the game itself. As such, the show's notable military and political forces, characters, events and strategic information are determined directly by the players themselves.

The first video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkRAKjKROAM

And the BattleCell theme song is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ce0mm0qGQ

Ultimately, our little company's goal is to break language and cultural barriers. With BatteCell, we try hard to provide participants with reasons to collaborate in ways that transcend real world motivations and limitations. Imagine taking the passion that gamers have put into StarCraft, and redirecting it into the desire to converse with someone on the other side of the world.

BattleCell is a free web-based game. It is available as a Facebook application and through the web at http://www.battlecell.com/"
The Media

Paid Shilling Comes to Twitter 134

Posted by kdawson from the follow-the-eyeballs dept.
An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers' products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick's post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company's products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: "So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."
The Internet

The Net — Democratic Panacea Or Autocratic Tool? 204

Posted by Soulskill from the or-tubular-googocracy dept.
Alex writes "On April 6, 10,000 protesters organized in Moldova against the nation's Communist leadership by utilizing new media like Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating the ever-increasing potential of the Internet as a democratic and liberating tool. But in the current Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov critiques the view that the internet will inevitably democratize autocratic regimes like China, Russia and Iran. He argues that the Net's democratic effects are not inherent, and that autocratic regimes have been successful in controlling electronic media to disseminate their ideology. Will the net ultimately spread American democracy, or just American entertainment?"
Networking

New Fundamental Law of Network Economics 106

Posted by kdawson from the move-over-metcalfe dept.
intersys writes "A new fundamental law of economics has been formulated by Rod Beckstrom, former Director of the National Cyber Security Center. In Words: The value of a network equals the net value added to each user's transactions (PDF) conducted through that network, valued from the perspective of each user, and summed for all. It answers the decades-old question of 'how valuable is a network.' It is granular and transactions-based, and can be used to value any network: social, electronic, support groups, and even the Internet as a whole. This new model or law values the network by looking from the edge of the network at all of the transactions conducted and the value added to each. One way to contemplate the value the network adds to each transaction is to imagine the network being shut off and what the additional transactions' costs or loss would be. Beckstrom's Law replaces Metcalfe's law, Reed's law, and other concepts which proposed that the value of a network was based purely on the size of the network (and in the case of Metcalfe's law, one other variable)."
Debian

Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support 425

Posted by timothy from the types-like-this-kept-me-out-of-good-schools dept.
mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive. This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."

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