Anti-consumer copyright bill

Posted by on June 7, 2010 No comments

This is classic! The ministers that are introducing this copyright bill have admited to contradicting it by having lots of music and TV shows on their iPods.

“Last year James Moore admitted he watched “more television on my iPod than I do on an actual conventional television set or through my personal video recorder.” (Canwest News, May 10, 2009) Under his own government’s previous copyright legislation, Bill C-61, this would have been illegal, making Minister Moore liable to punitive fines and jail time. Why is Mr. Moore today proposing legislation that might limit his own use of digital material?

Industry Minister Tony Clement amassed a whopping 10,452 song collection on his iPod by breaking Canada’s existing copyright laws (Canwest May 27, 2010). Today in the Globe and Mail, digital rights expert Michael Geist said he’s “expecting the legislation will lack a flexible ‘fair dealing’ provision that gives users broader leeway to use copyrighted works without permission for legal purposes such as research, reporting, or private study.” (Globe and Mail, June 1 2010)”

Read the full story Here

Flash Destroyer!

Posted by on June 2, 2010 No comments

This is pretty awesome! It tests flash memory to see what its actual write limit is. Of course it destroys it in the process… but they are currently testing it on some flash that has a 1 million write limit (in theory), but as of this writing its already at 6.7 million writes!

Link Here

Education is a marketplace.

Posted by on June 2, 2010 No comments

Here is a sad, but true article from slashdot. You can get the paper saying you have a degree in computers, yet know very little practical information about them. Also education is a huge business! How big are most students loans? Huge! As such colleges and university are run like a business, to make money. This means advertising will be less then forth coming. I have also heard that important things are being left out of the curriculum to be replaced by what a company’s “Human resources” are looking for, which often has little to nothing to do with what you will actually be doing at the job. This is probably why I keep seeing clueless people running I.T. departments and find very talented people as the grunts (of course this is not the norm, but I see it enough to be disturbed).

“Advice Line’s Bob Lewis comments on the mixed state of IT education in the US, which sees some students graduating with computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code. And while some institutions are emphasizing the value of teamwork in their curricula, an approach that fosters specialization in lieu of uniform standards, others are simply advertising their ‘success rates’ in graduating students. ‘Education is a marketplace, and if you have the money and want to buy, you can find someone willing to sell,’ Lewis writes. In other words, ‘If you want a degree that indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers, you can get one.'”

Original Post Here

Swedish Pirate Party is now hosting “The pirate bay”

Posted by on May 22, 2010 No comments

It should be very interesting to see how this turns out.

Original link Here

campaign finance reform bill

Posted by on May 20, 2010 No comments

Looks like the NDP is introducing a “Campaign Finance Reform bill” because of the government (In Victoria) blatantly ignoring the people about NOT brining in HST. They speak of making sure the people have more democratic power instead of who is financing the government / parties, but lets face it, as long as your choices are “I’ll give you $150,000” and “Just do what we ask” … doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot of people will go for the money, especially since if they “do the right thing” it usually means a battle with the other guys, not exactly a lot of incentive.

I fear this change will not be enough. We need to make changes to our whole system. We need to move towards The Venus Project.

Here is a little bit more about the “Campaign Finance Reform bill“

Digital Economy Consultation

Posted by on May 16, 2010 No comments

Here’s something interesting. The Canadian government is taking public input regarding how Canada should adopt a more dominant role regarding technology moving our economy forward. Although a nice though, I personally believe we need to start taking more drastic steps then simply taking public opinion on how to keep the current broken economic systems going. We need to start thinking of other possible systems like a resource based economy.

You can check out the “Digital Economy Consultation” Here

Funny pics

Posted by on May 14, 2010 No comments

I was looking through my pictures folder getting rid of stuff I never actually look at, when I came across my funny pics folder. I thought I should post a few here ^_^

The Owned one reminds me of some guy I played with in SC2 (beta) about a month ago, he demanded I play like him, and when I didn’t, he did nothing but complain to every one.

The cheque one I think is just funny ^_^

Internet can be taken down through the BGP

Posted by on May 14, 2010 No comments

This is a little disconcerting. Basically the internet can be taken down through the border gateway protocol in about an hour (Its a protocol that tells internet traffic how to get to its destination). There is no security to verify that the BGP routes are legit (they auto update each other in order to know where everything is) so some one could put out some fake BGP packets and have routes go to the wrong place (where they usually just get dropped). This has happened a few times already, but more due to mistakes in setting up new routers then actual malicious intent, which took down certain parts of the internet for certain people. What is really odd is that this is a known issue since before 1995. The problem with a fix is that every one would have to be on board, and large company’s usually only act when its in their best financial interest. So to sum it up, until it is actually exploited in a large and devastating way, not much is going to be done about it.

You can read the article here.

Ubuntu Light

Posted by on May 12, 2010 2 comments

Seem as though Canonical (Ubuntu guys) has created a version called “Ubuntu Light” which can boot in 7 seconds to a working web browser on a dell mini 10v using a solid state drive. They are still actively developing it, so its not in its final release yet, but may be of interest to people who are tired of waiting for the computer to load when all they want to do is check email or Facebook. This will definitely give Google a strong competitor vs. their “Chromium OS” since Ubuntu Light still runs apps off the local disk, as apposed to Chromium which runs most things off the cloud (aka internet servers).

You can get more info Here

Good point about Windows & Ubuntu

Posted by on May 11, 2010 1 comment

I read a good article about how people say “Linux is not user friendly” but what they really mean is “Linux is not Windows”. They are so used to windows that they expect all other OS’s to be exactly the same. If you take a person who has no experience with computers, they’ll probably pick up Ubuntu faster then windows.

Click Here for the article.