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Politics

Submission + - Pirate Party founder steps down after 5 years

ktetch-pirate writes: 5 years to the day after he created the first Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge has stepped down as leader of Piratpartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party. The announcement was made in a webcast with Falkvinge and his deputy Anna Troberg, with Troberg taking on his duties effective immediately.
Businesses

CTRC Orders Big ISPs To Provide Matching Speeds For Resellers 91

Meshach writes "In Canada there has been a regulatory decision rendered by the CRTC ordering ISPs to provide the same speed to resellers as they do for their own customers. 'Smaller internet providers such as Teksavvy and Execulink had argued that without requirements to offer matching speeds, the big companies would put them out of business. Bell and Telus are selling internet connections of up to 25 and 15 megabits per second respectively over newer fibre-based networks, but smaller providers can typically offer speeds of no more than five megabits per second over older copper-based infrastructure. After holding a public hearing earlier this year, the CRTC now says it will allow phone companies to charge smaller providers an extra 10-per-cent mark-up to use their newer infrastructure in order to recoup the costs of their investments. The regulator also said it would require cable companies to modify their existing internet access services to make it easier for smaller, "alternative" providers to connect to them.'"

Comment Not just games (Score 2, Insightful) 228

This is like a modern cartoon. American children's cartoons tend to be the worst offenders. Backgrounds are usually static while only the foreground is animated. The background might even be drawn with different penmanship or a different style altogether (e.g. a watercolor background). Sometimes the effect works, as it does in some video games, but in particular if a character has to interact with an element of the background, then things start to look very out of place.

My personal favorite example was from a cartoon showing a series of fences. They were mostly soft, pretty detailed. Except every fence had a few panels in a line that were drawn with heavier lines and flatter colors. It was easy to predict that the scene included a character breaking through those panels.
Earth

BP Robot Seriously Hampers Oil Spill Containment 264

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "A high-tech effort by BP to slow the oil gushing from its ruptured well head led to a large accident yesterday that forced the company to remove a vital containment cap for 10 hours. Robots, known as remote operated vehicles, were performing multiple operations at the disaster site when one bumped into the 'top hat' cap and damaged one of the vents that removes excess fluid, according to the US Coast Guard. The robots weigh around four tons, and are controlled from vessels on the surface using advanced IT systems with both manual and automated functions. BP removed the cap for nearly 10 hours ... in order to assess it after a discharge of liquids was noted from a key valve. The cap's removal left the oil gushing out of the wellhead, largely uninterrupted. Admiral Thad Allen, US National Incident Commander for the response, told the media that part of the problem was the number of robots conducting simultaneous operations at an immense depth. A dozen robots are circulating the wellhead." Another factor that may hinder containment even more is the increasing potential for tropical storms in that area of the Gulf.

Comment Re:Who reads the manual? (Score 2, Insightful) 457

This isn't some kind of EULA situation where a provision in the contract will be thrown out: the cameras are stated to be for non-commercial use because no one paid for a commercial license. Suing would be quick and dirty, and the user would be at fault.

No. There is no provision in the contract to buy a camera stating that it is for personal use only, unless it's clearly marked on the packaging. This means the license could only bind the user if the patents are valid. If they are found to be invalid, there is no consideration and so the license cannot bind the user to anything. If the patents are valid, the user might still be found not to be subject to the license (since they would have to agree to it, and most users aren't even aware of the license's existence - they could still be found to agree without knowledge if there was significant notices attached to the camera that most people would notice stating it could only be used if you agree to the license, but to my knowledge no camera is like that), but then they would be at fault for patent infringement, which generally does not require intent.

Comment Re:patent trolling (Score 1) 89

Would be tough... Patents are a property right. We don't normally take peoples' property away if they're not using it in ways that we'd like, but maybe you could make an argument under Kelo v. City of New London that it's an eminent domain taking. Plus, it wouldn't be invalidating the patent - it would be assigning it to the government, who then releases it free into the public domain.

Some patent laws provide provisions by which a patent holder can be seen to be abusing their patent and have conditions forced upon them, but these seem to get rarely used (Here's Canada's Patent Act as an example).

Books

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis To Be Published In 2011 82

Dynamoo writes "The NYT reports that a two-part edition of PKD's Exegesis will be published next year. This huge work, a combination of journal and philosophical treatise, has been published in part before, but this is the first time that the whole version will be made generally available."
Open Source

Microsoft's CoApp To Help OSS Development, Deployment 293

badpazzword writes "Microsoft employee Garrett Serack announces he has received the green light to work full time on CoApp, an .msi-based package management system aiming to bring a wholly native toolchain for OSS development and deployment. This will hopefully bring more open source software on Windows, which will bring OSS to more users, testers and developers. Serack is following the comments at Ars Technica, so he might also follow them here. The launchpad project is already up."
Caldera

Novell Wins vs. SCO 380

Aim Here writes "According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO v. Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing ..." No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.

Comment Losing Appeal (Score 1) 310

The great thing about Gmail is that it is^H^Hwas a very usable email service that didn't try to tie you into a bajillion other parts of a website and other features you aren't really going to use. The more stuff they add, the more likely I am to complain loudly about the death of Unix. If they go far enough (and they're close) I'll do something about it by switching to a more Unixy mail provider, like postfix. The loss of flexibility (nice easy access from anywhere; easy to set up filtering) will be repaid in my sanity.

Comment Not a New Concept (Score 3, Interesting) 538

This is not a new concept, and it's certainly not fatal to the book:
  • The Encyclopedia Britannica costs $70/a for an online subscription. It costs $1300 for a paper copy. People still buy the paper copy.
  • A hardcover book costs 2-4 times as much as the paperback. People still buy the hardcover.
  • Public libraries exist. People still buy books.

Comment Re:Pay Now or Pay Later (Score 1) 194

I seem to have heard this argument before. The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.

The difference here is that they know what the current safe maximum is, so they'll operate it for a while, tear the thing down and replace them with interconnects with higher safe maximums, and start it up again. They are aware that the lower safety factor must also mean a lower-power experiement (not that putting 7 TeV of energy into a single proton is normally considered low power).

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