Comment Re:OS analogy (Score 1) 439
i can almost guarantee I wont get a +5 insightful.
Somehow I don't think that's because you use a multitasking operating system...
Comment Re:Flaimbait? (Score 5, Informative) 311
where does the article say that *ALL* conservatives are would vote for this and *all* NDP, Bloc, Green and Liberals would vote against ?
I don't think you understand how Canadian politics works. Unlike in the USA, the Prime Minister is a member of the house and has direct control over the party stance. This, coupled with extremely strong party discipline (you vote with the party EVERY time or you get kicked out, ruining your career), means that the P.M. is far more powerful than the President (within the political system; not in terms of overall world power) because in a majority government, the P.M. can pass basically any law he wants, as long as it satisfies the constitution.
That's not the case though, since he only has a minority of seats. Unfortunately, if a law fails to pass and it's an important one (read: whatever they want, so basically all of them), then the government fails and we have an election. But the Liberals won't allow this because they are very weak and would likely lose more in another election. If they go to the polls, it'll be about the budget or the Afghan war, not a copyright bill.
TL;DR:
The bill will pass because the opposition Liberals have too much to lose in the election that will be called if it fails. End of Story.
Practical Jetpack Available "Soon" 237
Ifandbut was one of several readers to point out the arrival in Oshkosh of the first practical jetpack. It was invented by a New Zealander Glenn Martin, who has been working on the idea for 27 years. He plans to sell the gizmos for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K. While previous attempts at jetpacks have flown for at most a couple of minutes, Mr. Martin's invention can stay aloft for half an hour. Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however: The device is huge and it's incredibly noisy. And, "It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. 'This thing flies on a jet of air,' he said. Or, more simply, it flies."
Best Presidential Candidate, Republicans 1481
A few days ago we posted a story for you to discuss the best presidential candidates for Super Tuesday, but I figured it would be an interesting idea to try that again, but split the discussion into 2 halves. This is the Republican half — please only discuss the Republican candidates in this story. Huckabee, McCain, and Romney only.
Best Presidential Candidate, Democrats 947
This story is to discuss the remaining democratic candidates for president. Please keep discussions limited to talk about Hillary and Obama. Keep discussions of the other party in the other story.
Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly' 510
Dotnaught writes with word of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Apple late last month. Information Week has the story, a suit charging the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. "The complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. 'Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,' the complaint states. 'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'"
Copyright Cutback Proposed As RIAA Solution 709
An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe proposes a novel solution to the ongoing spate of RIAA lawsuits over alleged music copying. He suggests legislation which cuts back corporate copyrights from 120 years to 5 years. 'We should do what we do to children who misbehave,' he writes. 'Take away their privileges.' Wolfe says this is regardless of the misunderstanding surrounding the latest case, which apparently isn't about ripping CDs to one's own computer. As to those who say copyrights are a right: "That's simply a misunderstanding of their purpose. Copyrights, like patents, weren't implemented to protect their owners in perpetuity. They are part of a dance which attempts to balance off societal benefits against incentives for writers and inventors. You want to incentivize people to push the state of the creative and technical arts, but you don't want give those folks such overbearing protections that future advances by other innovators are stifled." What do you think; is it time to cut off the record industry?"
Journal Journal: Bushite Congress Kills RIAA's Anti-piracy Efforts 2
The Law of Unexpected Consequences is expected to soon take an ironic twist. As reported in The Guardian, the WTO will issue its long-awaited ruling next week on Antigua's complaint against the US for its law that prohibited banks from allowing money to flow to and from offshore Internet gambling sites.
Cause of Aurora Borealis Confirmed 172
An anonymous reader writes "There are reports that satellites have aided scientists in confirming why the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) exists. 'New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun. The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights.'"
Best Buy Hands Out Cease & Desist Letters for Christmas 332
arrenlex writes "Improv Everywhere, a NY-based comedy group, was served a Cease & Desist notice by Best Buy for selling 'improv everywhere' shirts modeled after the blue Best Buy uniform. But that's not the interesting part. From the blog post: 'Here's where the story gets interesting. Today, Best Buy sent a C&D to our friend Scott Beale over at laughingsquid.com threatening legal action unless he removes the blog post referencing our shirts! They're threatening to sue someone for just covering the news story of the shirts!'"
US Government Caught Manipulating Wikipedia 471
surfi writes "As The Inquirer points out, someone with a House of Representatives IP address has been feeding propaganda into the 'invasion of Iraq' article on Wikipedia."
Well at least they are in good company with trustworthy institutions like
the CIA and the Vatican.
Submission + - KDE and KOffice rebuke OOXML; GNOME dithers 3
Peter writes: Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Have GNOME's leaders completely sold out their free software credentials to corporate and anti-consumer interests? And will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?
Journal Journal: Open-Source Briefing for Congressmen?
I was chatting with one of my elected representatives recently, and he asked me to give him some material to educate himself on the subject of Open Source Software and its variants. I immediately mentioned The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Open-Source Definition, but after that I had to start scratching my head. I've been working with FOSS since the late 1980s, but I've never thought about explaining it to a politician. Any ideas on good magazine articles, introductory texts, or other basi
Google Maps GPS Simulator 205
garbletext writes "A new version of Google Maps introduced this week includes a beta feature dubbed My Location that was designed to simulate the GPS experience on mobile phones and handheld devices that do not include GPS hardware, like Apple's iPhone. Essentially, the My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near non-GPS equipped mobile phones to approximate the device's current location on the map down to about 10 city blocks. "It's not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average)," the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant explained on its website. "We're still in beta, but we're excited to launch this feature and are constantly working to improve our coverage and accuracy." The My Location feature is currently available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices."
Russian Police Seize Kasparov 495
An anonymous reader writes "Russian police seized Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion, for staging a political rally against Vladimir Putin. IBM's Deep Blue computer was the first to beat a world champion when it defeated Kasparov, who is one of the strongest players in history." He's also been a giant critic of the Russian administration which is increasingly restricting free speech.
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