Google have a nice new toy called Google Trends – here’s some searches that I’ve come up with that are amusing..
Fun for all the family!
Just in on the ABC news:
Federal Human Services Minister Joe Hockey has signalled that private sector companies like banks and supermarkets may be given access to information stored on the Government’s “smart card”.
Joe Hockey says:
So a blanket policy saying that the private sector can have no access to the card, or a blanket policy saying that only certain government agencies can have access, or a blanket policy saying that individuals can or cannot change the information, I think is crazy at this particular point of time
No, Mr. Hockey, I think you’re crazy for considering letting private companies get access to this data!
My good friend Rich Boakes has blogged a powerful story about a man in Suffolk who is selling gallows to foreign states for a cool 12,000 GBP a pop – including such pillars of human rights as Zimbabwe.
Too many crims needing to be dealt with ? Well he can help you out, as the BBC says:
The execution equipment he says he sells ranges from single gallows, at about £12,000 each, to “Multi-hanging Execution Systems” mounted on lorry trailers, costing about £100,000.
As Rich puts it so succinctly:
This month Mr. Lucas is going to make a killing. Next month killing will continue, but Mr. Lucas will just have his regular customers; if they still want to do business with him.
Rich’s article has the details if, like me, you’d like to avoid doing any business with Mr David Lucas (below).
May 2006 General Meeting – LUV News, Linux News, Computer Bank, SE Linux in Fedora Core 5.
Tuesday 2nd May 2006, 7pm at The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.
There’s an unofficial pre-meeting curry at the Classic Curry Company on Elizabeth Street around 6:15pm.. yum!
I’ve been using my Nikon D-100
However, RAW formats are proprietary – each vendor will have many different versions as their cameras evolve and they want to add all that new shiny information into them. These undocumented formats then need to be reverse engineered by the open source community to make them usable outside of proprietary information silos – for instance Dave Coffins dcraw program supports over 208 cameras so far – but because the formats are completely undocumented there’s no guarantee of a complete implementation!
So, this brings us to OpenRAW billing themselves as “Digital Image Preservation Through Open Documentation”. Why should we worry ? Well, how about this :
Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.
and
In some cases manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.
So it’s the same issue as it is for proprietary document formats, once the vendor moves on and looses interest in the older formats you may find that you have problems properly accessing (or even accessing at all) the contents of those proprietary files. Simply put, the photographer does not fully own his photograph in this format.
OpenRAW argue (correctly, in my opinion) that camera makers will not consent to use a single, standardised, RAW format, but their solution is pretty simple:
We want camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats — past, present, and future.
Personally I’ve got to agree, can you imagine being an archivist 100 years from now trying to access RAW photos made by a company that may not exist & written by people who are dead when you have no access to the source code or documentation ?
Ouch – http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_13965,00.html:
AMD has identified, and subsequently corrected, a test escape that occurred in our post-manufacturing product testing process for a limited number of single-core AMD Opteronâ„¢ processor models x52 and x54. No other single-core AMD Opteron processors, and no dual-core AMD Opteron processors, are affected.
[…]
You must be operating single-core AMD Opteron x52 (2.6 GHz) or x54 (2.8 GHz) processor-based systems, AND you must be running floating point-intensive code sequences.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001959:
Advance Micro Devices Inc. on Friday said that it has discovered a potential heat problem with a small percentage of Opteron chips run under extreme conditions, and said as many as 3,000 processors at customer sites could be affected.
Update: oops.. here’s an unfortunate advert to appear over the Information Week article.. 😉
Found on the Planetary Society Blog:
So far, it has generally been assumed that all comets originate from the other two known reservoir regions: the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt. The main asteroid belt is home to, well, asteroids, not comets. But Hsieh and Jewitt have proven that there are comets in the main asteroid belt, and that they almost certainly formed there.
Pretty interesting given that the current assumption is that all water on Earth arrived via cometary bombardment early on in the life of the solar system.
You can read more on Henry Hsieh’s website and peruse the abstract of their paper “A Population of Comets in the Main Asteroid Belt” from Science Magazine.
The BBC reports that Mr Justice Peter Smith encoded a message into his judgement on the “Da Vinci Code” copyright case.
Seemingly random italicised letters were included in the 71-page judgement given by Mr Justice Peter Smith, which apparently spell out a message. […]
Italicised letters in the first few pages spell out “Smithy Code”, while the following pages also contain marked out letters.
I liked the fact he said:
I can’t discuss the judgement, but I don’t see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun,
Nice one your honour. 🙂
From the ABC:
Federal Cabinet has approved the introduction of a smart card for all people who use Government health and welfare services.
The card will include a photograph and personal details, and will be used to access Medicare rebates and family benefits. […]
Announcing the decision, Prime Minister John Howard says the Government has decided not to continue with a proposal for a national identity card for all Australians.
So if you want to be able to claim your Medicare for going to see the doctor, you will have to have one of these cards…
It would appear a coalition of the repressive wish to expand the remit of US Copyright law, including the DMCA, to make it even harder to do research, play media on any OS but those you have to payed Microsoft/Apple for, or defend yourself against damaging software they put on silver circles they claim to be (but are not) Compact Discs.
Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. “If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we’d all be violating this expanded definition,” Litman said.
Even the current wording of the DMCA has alarmed security researchers. Ed Felten, the Princeton professor, told the Copyright Office last month that he and a colleague were the first to uncover the so-called “rootkit” on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs–but delayed publishing their findings for fear of being sued under the DMCA.
..and how do they propose to get this through ? Fear of course! That resurgent American political tool.
During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is “encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft,” Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, “quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities.”
Ed: my emphasis added