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Submission + - Why the IETF Isn't Working (gigaom.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Vidya Narayanan spent seven years working on the Internet Engineering Task force, and was nominated for the Internet Architecture board. But she declined and left the IETF because standards bodies are not able to keep up with the rapid pace of tech development. She says, 'while the pace at which standards are written hasn’t changed in many years, the pace at which the real world adopts software has become orders of magnitude faster. Standards, unfortunately, have become the playground for hashing out conflicts and carrying out silo-ed agendas and as a result, have suffered a drastic degradation. ... Running code and rough consensus, the motto of the IETF, used to be realizable at some point. Nowadays, it is as though Margaret Thatcher’s words, “consensus is the lack of leadership” have come to life. In the name of consensus, we debate frivolous details forever. In the name of patents, we never finish. One recent case in point is the long and painful codec battles in the WebRTC working group.'

Submission + - The Comcast merger isn't about lines on a map,it's about controlling information (consumerist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they donâ(TM)t compete because their service areas donâ(TM)t overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that donâ(TM)t currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of whatâ(TM)s involved in this merger â" broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?

Comment Re: Debtors Prison? (Score 1) 467

Now, if a magistrate signed off on throwing her in jail for not returning a videotape 9 years ago, then there's something very wrong - the magistrates are there to filter out exactly this sort of BS from wasting the court's time.

It's likely there was no magistrate involved today. The warrant she was arrested for was issued years ago, the police only now caught up to her and are acting on it. Warrants don't expire (apparently), so it's good enough to have her arrested and held. They don't need to ask a magistrate to hold someone with an active warrant.

Comment Re:Yankee Group (Score 1) 490

by tim_gladding (#33026164) Attached to: Survey Says Most iPhone Users Love AT&T

Yep. And it gets better. The author of the report the CNN Money article is based on, Carl Howe, seems to have a conflict of interests that is not revealed unless you do some digging. A conflict to the point that I would consider his entire report suspect (at best.)

Mr Howe's blog had an entry that denied that the iPhone 4 had an antenna issue just two days before Apple finally came clean. From it I quote "I haven’t found anyone here at Yankee Group who has reproduced the death grip problem with our iPhone 4s." Considering how easy it is to reproduce the problem, they're either clueless, in denial, or trying to warp reality to cover up the problem.

Oh, and his own personal website has a "Made on a Mac" logo at the bottom. I think it's clear there is a certain degree of bias with this guy, and therefore, the Yankee Group as a whole.
Idle

Sound As the New Illegal Narcotic? 561

Posted by samzenpus from the you-ever-see-the-back-of-a-$20-bill-on-sound? dept.
ehrichweiss writes "The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is warning parents and teachers of a new threat to our children: sounds. Apparently kids are now discovering binaural beats and using them to get 'physiological effects.' The report goes on with everyone suggesting that such aural experiences will act as a gateway to drug usage and even has one student claiming there are 'demons' involved. Anyone who has used one of those light/sound machines knows all about the effects that these sounds will give and to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best. It seems the trend in scaring the citizens with a made-up problem has gone to the next level."
Image

Anti-Speed Camera Activist Buys Police Department's Web Domain 680

Posted by samzenpus from the I-bought-the-law dept.
Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police Department site. The department let its domain expire and McCrary was quick to pick it up. From the article: "Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department's website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city's nose. Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras — like the one on US Highway 11E that caught him — and how people don't like them."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Power

Tiny ARM-Based Sensor System Makes Battery Replacement Obsolete 96

Posted by timothy from the transcend-batteries dept.
An anonymous reader writes "University of Michigan researchers have crammed an ARM Cortex microcontroller, a thin-film battery, and a solar cell into a package that is only 9 cubic millimeters in volume. The system is able to run perpetually by periodically recharging the on-board battery with a solar cell (neglecting physical wear-out of the system)."

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