http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/468744p-394363c.html
YouTube is Time's invention of year
BY BILL HUTCHINSON DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
The breakthrough that turns home movies into Internet blockbusters is Time magazine's Invention of the Year.
YouTube, which sparked a revolution by allowing Joe Schmoes everywhere to get their 15 nanoseconds of Web fame, beat out a supereconomical car and a soldier-saving robot for the eye-opening honor.
... But the magazine contends the trio's creation would have been lost in cyberspace if not for the would-be filmmakers, singers, science-project enthusiasts and amateur daredevils uploading 70,000 new videos a day on YouTube.
It's also become the place to go for the latest "gotcha" videos of imploding politicians.
"They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension," the magazine wrote of Chen, Hurley and Karim - who came up with the way of taking videos in any format and making them play on nearly any computer's Web browser.
So are we still in an ice age?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/06/1942231&from=rss
Global Warming Debunked?
Posted by kdawson on Monday November 06, @03:11PM from the concensus-or-what? Dept. Education Science
limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence."
The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.
Like the Y2K problem, they never saw the end-of-year situation before... Oh, wait. Doesn't this happen every 12 months or so?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/06/2320235&from=rss
Computer Date Glitch May Limit Next Shuttle Launch
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 06, @10:28PM from the 1999-called-they-want-their-date-bugs-back dept. NASA Technology
n3hat writes "Reuters reports that the next Space Shuttle mission may have to be deferred if it gets too close to the New Year because the onboard computers do not handle the changing of the date in the same way as the ground computers. From the article: '"The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover," space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing. The problem, according to Hale, is that the shuttle's computers do not reset to day one, as ground-based systems that support shuttle navigation do. Instead, after December 31, the 365th day of the year, shuttle computers figure January 1 is just day 366." [No way to manually reset the computer? That is the design flaw! Bob]
Perhaps we should outsource the entire space program?
Indian scientists to discuss manned mission to moon
Submitted by aftababedin on Mon, 2006-11-06 11:43. India News
Bangalore, Nov 6 (IANS) India's space scientists and technologists will hold a brain-storming session here Tuesday to explore the viability of undertaking a manned mission to the moon by the end of the next decade (2020).
... "Though we have the capabilities and resources to undertake such a mission, we need to cover a lot of ground to assess its viability in terms of the prohibitive cost, materials and manpower involved. The issue is not whether we can do, but at what cost and how the country would benefit from it," U R Rao told IANS on phone.
So would this require a whole new set of laws?
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SEC_CEO_BLOGS?SITE=VALYD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
SEC Chief Suggests Blogs for Disclosures
By MARCY GORDON AP Business Writer Nov 7, 1:58 AM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the first official communication posted to a blog by a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox said he was intrigued by the idea of letting companies use Weblogs to disseminate important corporate information.
Some interesting (some strange) quotes...
IBM watchdog system scans digital video
Smart Surveillance System issues real-time alerts to security guards about intruders or other suspicious activity
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service November 07, 2006
Early next year, IBM will start selling advanced video surveillance software that can sift through thousands of hours of digital video in a matter of seconds.
Called the Smart Surveillance System (S3), this software uses a number of analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected on the video. For example, it could be used to warn security guards when an intruder had entered a secure area, [Surely there are better ways than depending on computer review of video footage... Bob] or keep track of cars coming and going from a parking lot.
... One retailer is developing a system that looks at customers at its return counter and then searches to see if they were actually carrying the product when they entered the store. This system should make it harder for criminals to get away with a common scam in which they purchase a product, bring it home, and then come back to the store to ask for a refund on something that they have just plucked off the shelves.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1162548325026
Lack of Internet Access Muddies Case Against Sex Offender's MySpace Site
The Associated Press November 6, 2006
A convicted sex offender accused of posting his own sex offender registry photo online was in jail with no Internet access when he allegedly last logged onto his page at the social networking site MySpace.com.
Christian Paul Dutton, 47, of Wheeling, W.Va., is accused of failing to register his MySpace Web page with the state police. [Is this new? Bob]
Dutton's MySpace site shows his last log-in date as Thursday, a day after he was booked into the Northern Regional Jail, where inmates don't have access to the Internet
If they had video or audio it might be a good source of Bush-isms. (Those quoditions about dwadling)
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012931.html
November 06, 2006
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush
"Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush -Each Public Papers volume contains the papers and speeches of the President of the United States that were issued by the Office of the Press Secretary during the specified time period. The material is presented in chronological order, and the dates shown in the headings are the dates of the documents or events. In instances when the release date differs from the date of the document itself, that fact is shown in the textnote. Files are available in ASCII text and PDF formats."
This may have wider application for “subsidiaries”
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/#00001014
Cat-herding
Posted by Sean @ 12:47 GMT Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Zango and the USA's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement last Friday. Zango agreed to pay the FTC $3 million. The agreement also contains language strongly clarifying what is required as consent from installers of Zango's software. See Part V in this PDF.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061106/201138.shtml
The Electronic Voting Movie Diebold Didn't Want You To See... Even If They Hadn't Seen It
from the and-here-it-is dept
As ever more reports of e-voting irregularities are coming in from across the country as we head into election day, the producers of the e-voting documentary "Hacking Democracy" have put the entire movie up on Google Video for viewing. A bunch of people submitted it, but I finally had a chance to watch the whole thing. This is the movie that Diebold tried to stop from airing last week -- though, the details showed they were protesting a different movie. The movie is a bit overly melodramatic, and the suspenseful voice-over voice and background suspense music are unnecessary and (if anything) take away from the seriousness of the movie. At times the documentary also wanders a little too far into hinting at conspiracy theories in places they have no proof. However, what you actually see in the movie is a very good summary of many of the stories we've all seen over the past few years about problems with these machines. It shows what a marvelous job Bev Harris and Blackboxvoting.org have done over the past few years to both find out what's going and publicize the matter (a tremendous effort). It also shows how some elections officials stonewall or ignore the issues while a few, such as Ion Sancho, did what was necessary. What the movie leaves out of the Sancho story in Florida is how Diebold first mocked the results of the hack shown in the movie and later caused additional problems as he tried to find replacements. And, of course, now that it's election day, there's not very much that can be done about all of these problems. The movie is worth watching, if only to convince people to stand up and make an effort to make sure these machines are no longer used in future elections. Update: And, as long as we're watching videos about e-voting, might as well watch the Daily Show's take on the issue, as explained by "resident expert" John Hodgman: "These voting machines are shiny. They go 'beep' and 'boop.'"
Another case where the draft is far more interesting than the “politically correct” final version will be...
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061106/155823.shtml
Australian Government Calls BS On Bogus Copyright Industry 'Losses'
from the about-freakin'-time dept
We've spent years complaining about the completely bogus stats put out by the likes of the BSA, the RIAA and MPAA about just how much "piracy" is costing them. These stats usually make a few really bad assumptions, such as the idea that every unauthorized copy is a lost sale. They also fail to take into account any promotional impact of the material. More recently, the MPAA has expanded on the already bogus stats by claiming that they're even bigger because you need to take into account the ripple effect of the losses through other industries that support the movie industry. Of course, they conveniently ignore that (a) this is double counting and (b) that those ripple effects counterbalance themselves by making more money available for other parts of the economy. The most unfortunate part about all these bogus numbers, however, is that they're continually quoted in the press and by government officials as if they're factual when they're highly misleading.
That's why it's great to see this following bit of news, submitted by Greg Nelson. Apparently, the Australian government has done its own research into some of these numbers and the draft version of the report has found them to be a bunch of "self-serving hyperbole" that fail to explain clearly how these numbers are anything real. In fact, the report calls the numbers "absurd." Specifically, they claim the numbers are "unverified and epistemologically unreliable." [Ooh, don't you get all tingly when someone uses “epistemologically” in a sentence? Bob] They then worry about "the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," which is already pretty common. They also found that, despite repeated claims about a connection, there is no known connection between unauthorized file sharing and organized crime. It's a bit surprising to see such bold statements out of a government document -- and already the agency putting this together, says it's just a draft by a consultant, and suggests that the language will be toned down. In fact, they say that the language in the report is "hyperbolic" which is exactly how the report describes the copyright industry's claims. Meanwhile, the industry representatives themselves brush off these accusations as if it's a to-may-to/to-mah-to difference: "They're entitled to say they're not convinced, but not necessarily entitled to say it's unverified." Of course, he doesn't say who verified the numbers or how they were really verified.
So... This failure in their computer system is going to cost them $10 per customer. That's in addition to all the free “We can't trust them” publicity it generated.
http://www.kaputz.com/blog/my-short-lived-excitement-from-pre-ordering-playstation-3
Nov 5, 2006 12:55AM
A forum post in fatwallet.com says that bestbuy.com is taking pre-orders on PlayStation 3 60GB model (System-ABC SKU: 8008489). Without any hesitation, I entered my credit card number and my order went through! Realizing that this is too good to be true, I don’t put up my hope too high and expect my order to be canceled soon.
... I received a confirmation email from bestbuy.com a few minutes after that.
... I started to think that this may be a real deal. I log on the bestbuy.com and check my order status:
Status: 1 item(s) preordered, release date is 11/17/06.
So far so good.
... An email from Best Buy ends my excitement … Oh well, at least I get $10.
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