The OpenMoko phone is a fail because the community is trying to create iPhone effects while they are completely overlooking the base problems: no proper power management, unable to accept calls and calls failing, audio problems, no way to handle text messages, no proper contact handling. These are all basic phone things that are being completely ignored by people trying to reinvent the wheel using only square corners. Carriers have nothing to do with it and even the OpenMoko company does not want anything to do with it.

Is being able to report the SHA1 of the content not an admission of ownership? Reporting "I downloaded this data with this SHA1, and that was an illegal act" sounds like a stupid thing to do.

On the up-side, the SHA1 can come in very handy if you want to get the magnet link for a file, so I hope they create a Bitzi like page with "SHA1: this_and_that, is an illegal episode of Some Series, do not try to download it (quality is very good, I would rate it a 5 out of 5 for being very illegal)".

There are also metalinks available for download. They are a bit hidden, so I've posted the links on my blog http://log.logfish.net/node/68

My phone as 4GBs of memory, so I don't need the internet to have the same information on it. Also, my phone is compatible with popular energy-on-the-go solutions like solar panels, dynamos. I've even works to get a cell phone charged with movement.

Given I was out on survival, I would rather have a phone with color pictures on what the plants look like and a solar charger, then the 99 dollar black and grey thing.

To open source thesis work, you will have to get approval from the university your are working at. So I think it probably got open-sourced later then it was developed at least. Often (at my faculty at least) implementations are protected aggressively, to keep other people from getting the same performance.

Suspending his account is the most childish thing in the history of stupid that the PayPal.com people are currently writing.

Currently our university lectures are as appealing as having a news reader read the book of a teleprompter. Nothing society can do that will compensate that, get the scientists to be inspiring and then the only thing society has to do is give them some time on television.

With news like this, why do we think that the ATM system is still safe? And when will they come up with a better encryption for that?

Watching a DVD under Linux will probably always use more power then under Windows. Windows has the proper/proprietary drivers with the right hardware acceleration. Linux will have to "crack" the DVD decoding first and then probably do stuff in software where the windows driver can do in hardware (mpeg decoding etc).

So make sure that if you are checking power consumption to use something other than DVDs. Try compressing a file and see how far both operating systems get? I wouldn't be surprised if both operating systems get the same amount of bytes compressed, but Linux would just do it in less time, draining the battery faster.

Don't forget to try the other tips given about ripping the DVD before flight. (Try thoggen on GNU/Linux)

I was more impressed by this raytracer:
http://labs.flog.co.nz/raytracer/

I found that working through the different javascript benchmarking systems.

We still love you Alan! Pursue your happiness and we will be happy.

I second that.

GNUnet is another one, personally I like it more because it does not store not requested chunks on your local hard-drive (if you configure it not to do that). This means you don't help with all that child pornography. But, you do route data packages to create anonymous traffic.. so in the end you are still helping.

I would like to see a network where you can democratically decide wether something is right or not, where you can say: I don't like this content and I will help in finding who is distributing it if any node asks for my help in doing that.

This is just evolution. As far as I can tell, for the last 500 years these barbed leaves have done the trick: no moa attacked the plant. So if I was that plant, I would be all like "damn, I must be doing something right, I should keep this up!"

Seriously the stupidest thing I have ever seen. As all the above posts have already stated: the energy will come from the car, and thus form fuel. If you take it away from people (by putting the plate at the store entrance) I would consider that a nice experiment. This, however, is just plain stupid.

They may as well have customers park their cars in break-test rollers!