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Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop 218

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-is-fair dept.
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
Government

The Woman Who Established Fair Use 226

Posted by kdawson from the one-of-a-kind dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"

Comment 10,000 is a lot of fridges... (Score 1, Interesting) 217

by mobynewt (#26463119) Attached to: Networked Fridges 'Negotiate' Electricity Use

Lab simulations have shown the technology is capable of supporting 10,000 or more networked units, but West said a commercial partner was needed to enable the CSIRO to conduct a larger scale, real-world trial.

Isn't 10,000 already a pretty large scale? I can't imagine very many real-world commercial entities using more than that in one location.

Comment Re:Every Release of Windows is Hyped. So What? (Score 0) 848

by mobynewt (#26412835) Attached to: Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay
Well, according to this article, Microsoft had to start over on Longhorn, throwing out years of code they had alrady written for it. It's not quite the same as starting from scratch, since they reverted to the Windows server codebase.

While Windows itself couldn't be a single module -- it had too many functions for that -- it could be designed so that Microsoft could easily plug in or pull out new features without disrupting the whole system. That was a cornerstone of a plan Messrs. Srivastava and Valentine proposed to their boss, Mr. Allchin. Microsoft would have to throw out years of computer code in Longhorn and start out with a fresh base. It would set up computers to automatically reject bug-laden code. The new Longhorn would have to be simple. It would leave bells and whistles for later -- including Mr. Gates's WinFS, Messrs. Srivastava and Allchin say.
...
On Aug. 27, 2004, Microsoft said it would ship Longhorn in the second half of 2006 -- at least a year late -- and that Mr. Gates's WinFS advance wouldn't be part of the system. The day before in Microsoft's auditorium, Mr. Allchin had announced to hundreds of Windows engineers that they would "reset" Longhorn using a clean base of code that had been developed for a version of Windows on corporate server computers.

Comment As far as drivers go, Windows 7 == Vista (Score 0) 848

by mobynewt (#26403075) Attached to: Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay
Drivers for Windows 7 and Vista are one and the same, as indicated here:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9091618
Microsoft Corp. will require hardware makers to test their device drivers on Windows 7 to receive certification for Windows Vista, according to documents posted on the company's Web site.

Comment Re:OS or GUI??? (Score 1) 672

by mobynewt (#26383745) Attached to: Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES
Windows 7 is not a new OS at all, but merely a rebranding of Vista Service Pack 2. This explains why it has to be installed on top of Vista, rather than fresh, and how MS could finish it so quickly. It also cleverly minimizes compatiblity problems - when has upgrading to a 'new' OS ever been so painless? This represents a truly genius marketing move (Mojave++), and everyone who should know better seems to have fallen for it.

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