Brian Lewis - Slashdot User

Comment Privacy (Score 2, Funny) 259

by Brian Lewis on Monday December 24, 2007 @12:55PM (#21806930) Attached to: British Drivers Destroying Surveillance Cameras

It's time to build some tin-foil hats for your cars people.

That, or get some kind of cool preditor laser thing that will somehow find the camera and shine it directly into the lens causing it to go "blind" for the brief period that you are in it.

Submission + - Ultracapacitors soon to replace many batteries? (ieee.org)

Submitted by

einhverfr

on Thursday November 01, 2007 @09:54PM

einhverfr writes: "According to an article in the IEEE Spectrun, the synergy between batteries and capacitors — two of the sturdiest and oldest components of electrical engineering — has been growing, to the point where ultracapacitors may soon be almost as indispensable to portable electricity as batteries are now.

Some researches expect to soon create capacitors capable of storing 50% as much energy as a lithium ion battery of the same size. Such capacitors could revolutionize many areas possibly from mobile computing (no worries about battery memory), electricity-powered vehicles, and more."

Submission + - Hondata sues open-source project over DMCA claims (pgmfi.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27, 2007 @03:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: Hondata, a company that provides engine management software that runs on OEM Honda engine computers, is suing the ex-owner and moderator of PGMFI.org. A user posted a program to download the ECU code from more recent Honda ECUs using Hondata's hardware, which is useful for downloading the OEM code as well as the modified Hondata code. The man being sued has long since sold the site on to someone else.
PGMFI.org is dedicated to the grass-roots development of Honda tuning software. Hondata's demands included becoming a secret moderator of the site with full powers to edit and delete posts. This is a worrying proposition because their commercial product has incorporated the work of PGMFI users into their product without permission in the past. PGMFI has always had a policy against reverse-engineering commercial tuning products such as Hondata, and this program's most likely use was as an inexpensive way to gain access to unmodified Honda ECU code. Hondata is also suing "Does 1-50", who allegedly downloaded the program. The link provided goes to a full timeline so far.

One thing very interesting about all of this is that neither Hondata or any of the grassroots projects ever completely replace Honda's OEM software, they merely add new subroutines and change parameters. Nobody has a license to do this from Honda; So why does Hondata think that they can litigate over what is essentially someone else's IP?

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