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Comment Re:Anything to keep the status quo going... (Score 1) 144

Right, and that's what the librarians are doing. Making sure users make an informed decision.

I don't think any librarian on the planet wants Google Books to go away. It's going to be a massively valuable resource for research, in addition to being unimaginably valuable in terms of preserving books that might go out of print and become so rare that no one can ever get access to them. For keepers of the written word, this is as close to a holy grail as they'll ever get.

But it does come at a cost to the end user - there will be a central database containing lots of information on what you read, research, etc. A database owned by a company that's already shown reluctance to give up a scrap of its hard-earned data.

This isn't the Apocalypse, or anything like that, and Google is hardly the worst offender in terms of privacy violation, but they have made a decent business model out of buying your privacy from you. I think the librarians make a good point, "caveat emptor", but go ahead and buy if you are aware.

PS: Before anyone thinks I'm a crazed paranoid, I happily use Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs, Google News, Google Voice, Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. I'm selling bits of my privacy for convenient tools. I'm doing so with the full knowledge of the value of what I'm selling and feel I'm getting a useful service in return.

Know the facts, THEN make your choice.

Comment Re:Long term (Score 1) 611

Why do you say that? Directional antenna would mean that the drone would only "listen" for communications coming from the positions of other nodes in the mesh network. Unless the enemy can put jammers all around, including in the air and above the drone aircraft, at least some comm would get through.

Right. Maintaining proper antenna orientation during a dogfight is going to be fun... Besides even directional antennas are susceptible to off-axis jamming as long as you jack up the power.

One time pad encryption means the enemy can't hijack the drone.

The size of the one-time pads determines the maximum amount of data you can send. That seriously limits their usefulness, especially in this type of application (network communication). Anyway, encryption is not the weak point of drones (except in movies).

IBM

ODF Toolkit Announced 71

Sweetshark writes "IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"

Comment Re:OT Question about the link. (Score 1) 586

The strange "DNS nightmare" is actually utilizing the Coral caching system. Featured here . The Coral system is a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers and you can find out more information about it here. This is actually an attempt at preventing the "SlashDot effect" on the poor webmaster who runs this site.

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