judas6000 - Slashdot User

Feds Say They're Ready For Monday's IPv6 Deadline 120

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 28, 2008 @08:13AM from the upgrades dept.

netbuzz writes "By all indications and against all odds, it appears as though most, if not all, federal agencies will have met the mandate issued back in 2005 that their network backbones become capable of passing IPv6 packets by June 30, 2008. NetworkWorld quotes Pete Tseronis, chair of the IPv6 working group of the Federal CIO Council, saying, 'I have not heard of anybody who is not going to make the IPv6 deadline.' Those involved are calling this a significant milestone in what has been an extensive effort to bring IPv6 into widespread deployment."

Real-World Firefox 3 Memory Usage Leads the Field 406

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @05:25PM from the free-what-you-alloc dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The author developed a program to snapshot memory usage per process every 3 seconds on Windows. Using this he recorded 3 hours of memory usage for five different browsers under real-world usage scenarios: Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, Flock 1.2 (a browser based on Firefox 2), Opera 9.5, and Internet Explorer 8. A million data points indicate that Firefox 3 has a surprising advantage over the other browsers tested. These are real-world tests and not contrived benchmarks."

Real Snail Mail 103

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @04:38PM from the slower-than-pigeons dept.

A few news outlets, mostly in the UK, have picked up the story of gastropod-enabled email delivery. The RealSnailMail project out of Bournemouth University uses snails with RFID tags to deliver email. The service will officially launch at SIGGRAPH on August 11, 2008. While it's still under development, the perpetrators write, "For testing purposes some messages may be forwarded sooner than expected. Sorry we can not guarantee unreliability of service at this time. We hope to have RealSnailMail working less predictably as soon as possible."

First US Offshore Wind Power Park In Delaware 363

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @02:53PM from the doesn't-get-much-greener dept.

Dekortage writes "Offshore wind power company Bluewater Wind has announced an agreement to build America's first offshore wind turbine park off the coast of Delaware. 'Each turbine [will sit on] a pole about 250 feet above the waterline... the units are to be constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds. From the shore, the park will be visible only on clear winter days, and the turbines will be nearly invisible during summer months when Rehoboth Beach fills with vacationers. Each blade on the three-blade rotor is to be 150 feet long.' The wind farm will power 50,000 homes in Delaware, using about half of its capacity."

Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History 266

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @02:01PM from the memory-lane dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an exclusive video and feature of one of the most heavily guarded secrets in Lego: the security vault where they store all the Lego sets ever created, new in their boxes. 4,720 sets from 1953 to 2008. Really amazing stuff and a trip down memory lane to every person who has played with the magic bricks. All combined, the collection must be worth millions, not only because of the collector value, but also because Lego uses it as a safeguard in copyright and patent cases."

NetBSD Moves To a 2-Clause BSD License 67

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @01:36PM from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept.

jschauma writes "Alistair Crooks, president of the NetBSD Foundation, announced recently that it 'has changed its recommended license to be a 2-clause BSD license.' This makes NetBSD even more easily available to a number of organizations and individuals who may have been put off by the advertising or endorsement clauses. See Alistair's email and NetBSD's licensing information for more details."

Japan Imposes "Fine On Fat" 1271

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @10:35AM from the fat-man-vs.-the-state dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A recently-introduced law in Japan requires all businesses to have mandatory obesity checks (video link) for all their employees and employees' family members over the age of 40, CNN reports. If the employee or family member is deemed obese, and does not lose the extra fat soon, their employer faces large fines. The legislated upper limit for the waistline is 33.5" for men, and 35.5" for women. Should America adopt universal health insurance, could we live to see the same kind of individual health regulations imposed on us by the government? By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women."

Comment Re:common carrier? (Score 3, Informative) 85

by judas6000 on Tuesday March 11, 2008 @09:04PM (#22724038) Attached to: IFPI Turning To Lawsuits

Ireland, as a member of the EU is granted "mere conduit" status by the EU.

COUNCIL OF EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2007). Council directive of 21st June 2007 on Electronic Commerce (Terrorism Act 2006). (07/1550/EEC). Section 5 Paragraphs 1 & 2 read,

"(1) A service provider is not capable of being guilty of a relevant offence in respect of anything done in the course of providing so much of an information society service as consists in--
(a) the provision of access to a communication network; or
(b) the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service,
if the transmission condition is satisfied.

(2) The transmission condition is that the service provider does not--
(a) initiate the transmission;
(b) select the recipient of the transmission; or
(c) select or modify the information contained in the transmission."

Therefore as long as the ISPs stick to their guns and do not filter content on their networks then they will be ok, as they are protected by law as far as terrorism goes. However it would seem that this could be deemed to apply to other offences too, or at least thats my understanding of it, I should add that IANAL, so I may have misread what the EEC were getting at when they wrote that law.

In the COUNCIL OF EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2000). Council directive of 9th June 2005 Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) (2005/1529/EEC) Part IV Art 18. Paragrahs 2 & 3 read,

(2) A person acts as a mere conduit for a communication if--
(a) he communicates it in the course of an activity carried on by him, the principal purpose of which is transmitting or receiving material provided to him by others;
(b) the content of the communication is wholly devised by another person; and
(c) the nature of the service provided by him in relation to the communication is such that he does not select, modify or otherwise exercise control over its content prior to its transmission or receipt.

(3) For the purposes of paragraph (2)(c) a person does not select, modify or otherwise exercise control over the content of a communication merely by removing or having the power to remove material--
(a) which is, or is alleged to be, illegal, defamatory or in breach of copyright;
(b) in response to a request to a body which is empowered by or under any enactment to make such a request; or
(c) when otherwise required to do so by law.

This again would seem set out in law the fact that just because someone can alter the content of a communication doesn't mean they have to, and that even if they do remove content they don't have to exercise control over the content. This would pretty well seem to protect ISPs from whatever lawsuit may be brought against them by the IFPI.

What Do You Do With 1,500 Hard Drives? 1

Posted by samzenpus on Monday January 21, 2008 @01:50PM from the step-softly dept.

samzenpus writes "What do you do with 1,500 har drives? You have the worlds most expensive domino rally. I can't imagine how long this took to set up, hopefully it happened in one take."

Slashdot Top Deals