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Comment Re:Number of Reciients? (Score 3, Informative) 37

by weinbrenner (#52958197) Attached to: The Ig Nobel Awards Celebrate Their 26th First Annual Awards Ceremony

With such a restriction we would have lost the the 1993 Ig Nobel Literature Prize: http://www.improbable.com/ig/1993/1993-lit.html

which was awarded to E. Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P.W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors,
for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages.

Comment Re:Gigaton Fail - (Score 3, Interesting) 420

by weinbrenner (#28351247) Attached to: A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

Oh, most people here would agree that police states are bad. But on the other hand they would say that there are exceptions (child pornography, terrorism etc.). And of course "our politicians would never do something really wrong!!!"

People in Germany live in a rich land which has last experienced war 64 years ago - so most people see it for granted that they will always live in a democracy, where their freedom is guaranteed.
Intellectually they know that in other countries this isn't so, but if you personally never experienced something else, then it is hard to imagine that this might change. And because they fail to grasp the fact that their freedom and their rights could be endangered they see no reason to defend it.
Censorship

A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany 420

Posted by kdawson from the sun-going-down dept.
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
Communications

In Case of Rapture, Check Inbox 2

Posted by timothy from the guess-you'll-find-out dept.
mattOzan writes "Wired reports on a handy new Web service at youvebeenleftbehind.com, where subscribers can have email notifications sent to 62 non-believing friends in the wake of The Rapture. Personal and financial documents saved on the website will automatically be decrypted and sent to loved ones as well, six days after the presumably sky-sucked administrators all stop logging into the site."
Power

Submission + - Does any company power down at night? 11

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 computers on desks, and any night about half of them are left on. I know, because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of "being green", has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? Eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. My esteemed director's view: "I log off of my PC at night". Or does it matter, security wise, let alone power consumption wise?
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available 100

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the put-the-daemon-back-in-the-box dept.
cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

Feed Techdirt: Digital Watermarks Are Not The Answer (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It was quite predictable that as the recording industry finally realized that DRM was a bad idea that it would move on to digital watermarking. The idea sounds appealing. It doesn't have the feature that people hate about DRM: preventing you from doing what you want with the music you've purchased -- but it does have a number of other downsides. First, it tends to degrade the quality of the audio. Second, it's often relatively easy to remove the watermark, making it effectively useless. Third, if watermarks are used to link a specific file to a specific user (which the industry insists it isn't doing... yet), it suddenly becomes a huge liability just to have those music files. Imagine if you lose your iPod full of watermarked tracks, and all of those tracks find their way onto file sharing sites? Even more importantly, the whole concept of watermarking is counterproductive to what music files should be about. If the industry were smart and understood the basic economics of what was happening, they'd want people to be sharing music. They should want people to be their biggest (free!) promoters of music. They should want people to be spreading the music of their musicians as a way to get the word out. The whole concept of watermarking goes against that very idea. It's more backwards thinking from an industry that is more focused on protecting an old way of doing business, rather than recognizing the opportunities of a new way of doing business.

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Privacy

Interview With Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge 515

Posted by kdawson from the stepping-away-from-total-surveillance dept.
mmuch writes "In the wake of the recent copyright debate in Swedish mainstream media, the P2P Consortium has published an interview with Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. He comments on the mainstream politicians starting to understand the issues, the interplay between strict copyright enforcement and mass surveillance, and the chances for global copyright reform." Some choice Falkvinge quotes: "What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy — forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance — realized they were under a serious attack... for the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is 'thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief'... Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding... When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around."

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