Comment Re:Paranoid libertoon garbage as usual (Score 1) 197

by jmce on Friday March 19, 2010 @09:07AM (#31535280) Attached to: UK ID Cards Could Be Upgraded To Super ID Cards

Welcome to "advanced, free and democratic" Europe. For those not-bothering-to-be-bothered-anybody there are, of course, plenty of EU edutainment materials and bedtime stories.

Comment Will card subjects learn too late? (Score 1) 197

by jmce on Friday March 19, 2010 @08:20AM (#31534828) Attached to: UK ID Cards Could Be Upgraded To Super ID Cards

When will the enthusiasts learn that

Ironically, many card subjects come to interpret this state of affairs in a contra view (the card helps streamline my dealings with authority, rather than the card is my license to deal with authorities). The Australia Card campaign referred to the card as a license to live.

The above is from the ID Cards FAQ by Privacy International. Highly recommended reading, for the sake of us all.

EU Publishers Want a Law To Control Online News 168

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 13, 2009 @06:38PM from the protect-yourself-right-out-of-the-market dept.

suraj.sun writes with news that European publishers are also seeking ways to "protect" their content from the big bad intertubes. Their rant, termed the "Hamburg Declaration," asks the government to step in with a legislative fix. "Most of the statements in the relatively short declaration, which will surely take its place among thousands of other European declarations on intellectual property and other matters that have come out over the past few years, hinge on the idea that 'universal access to news' does not equal 'free.' In this respect, the publishers want to maintain the democratic ideal of a 'fourth estate' that provides news to an informed citizenry, while simultaneously restricting access to that news to those who can pay for it directly. What sets this declaration apart from the other Hamburg declarations out there, or from the various Geneva declarations or Berlin declarations, is that this one is intended to give the publishers' favorite solution to the news-stealing problem, the Automated Content Access Protocol, the force of law."

Comment No appropriate censorship (Score 1) 203

by jmce on Saturday February 21, 2009 @05:05AM (#26939457) Attached to: Why Doesn't the IWF Notify Those Whom They Block?

A more fundamental question:
Why doesn't the UK dump IWF and censorship?

Why should we hope to have 'appropriate' censorship, or hope that censor 'mistakes' can be 'corrected'? When we accept censorship as a tool 'for the common good', and get caught in Byzantine discussions about which speech/'content' is more or less 'harmful' and should be less or more free (instead of adopting a simpler view like the one in the US First Amendment), we are already sliding down a very steep, very slippery slope.

Journal Journal: Life of CDs for archiving data

Journal by Jeff1946 on Sunday March 18, 2007 @12:40AM

One of the science fair entries I judged today was on the use of CDs to archive data and the expected lifetime. The students did accelerated lifetime testing at 80C to determine the failure rate of the cyanine dye on which is written the data. They didn't have enough time at 80C to detect any failures. Of more interest to me and /. folks is conversations they had with people at NIST and the Library of Congress. The students learned that CDs lifetimes have greatly improved d

Submission + - IBM launching an open desktop solution

Submitted by

DJ_Maiko

on Monday February 12, 2007 @06:36AM

DJ_Maiko writes: "IBM just announced their intent to release an open desktop solution which they're calling "Open Client Offering." The new offering will make it possible for big businesses to present their employees with a choice of running Linux, Macintosh or Windows software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code, which will cut the cost of managing Linux or Apple relative to Windows. If this project succeeds, it will make it unnecessary for companies to pay Microsoft for licenses for items that don't rely on Windows-based software. IBM plans to also roll this out in-house to 5% of their 320,000 employees worldwide. This sure seems like a promising endeavor.

From the article:
"We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source.

So what do you guys think, will this (finally) displace Windows as the flavor du jour in the business marketplace?"