Archive for January 16th, 2008An anonymous reader writes “The video game industry is finally forming a PAC by the end of March to get some political clout. A story in The New York Times yesterday reports that the video game industry has finally woken up and realized that in order to stay strong going forward, it can’t rely on 13-year-old pimple-faced children to promote its agenda.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Dr. Eggman writes “Ars Technica has posted a lengthy follow up analysis of the 2008 New Hampshire Primaries outcome. The article deals with the O’Dell machine/hand-count table that has been circulating through emails. It also points out the combination of factors that resulted in such an odd symmetry of numbers, although the article notes that these numbers have been corrected. The corrections still indicate a discrepancy among the tallies. The article also goes on to speak about the nature of the communities that arrived at these numbers and what/how the handcounts proceeds. This process has been inconclusive; something that does not bode well for the rest of the primaries and indeed the election itself, as only 16 says currently mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. The New York Times is reporting on two new investigations into Microsoft business practices opened by EU antitrust regulators. The new cases center on the company’s positioning of Office and World wide web Explorer, and were apparently partially prompted by Microsoft’s earlier heel-dragging. “‘It would have been preferable if these issues could have been resolved amicably with Microsoft,’ stated Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the European competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes. ‘But that has not proved to be the case. Therefore we have opened these formal investigations. That does not prove there’s a violation. We will only be able to come to a conclusion after investigations.’ The legal battle that ended last year involved the bundling of a media player with Windows and the availability of information required to make rival software operate smoothly with Microsoft products. In September, the Court of First Instance, Europe’s highest after the European Court of Justice, endorsed the commission’s 2004 decision to impose record fines on Microsoft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. This is your usual Slashdot reader-generated interview, except we’re only going to pick five questions, not 10, and we’re going to send the same five questions to all the major-party presidential candidates and publish each one’s answers (in our Politics section) as soon as we get them. Please try to come up with questions the candidates have not been asked in the many interviews and debates to which they’ve already been subjected, all of which have been notably light on Slashdot-popular topics such as software patents, Internet regulations, and personal file formats. Note, too, that we’ve no idea how many candidates (if any) will actually answer, and that whether their campaign staffs do or do not think you are worth a few moments of their time is telling in and of itself. Read more of this story at Slashdot. Wowsers writes us with a story from The Guardian about FBI interest in connectivity between its own database resources and those abroad. It’s spearheading a program labeled ‘Server in the Sky’, meant to coordinate the police forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to better fight international crime/terrorist groups. The group is calling itself the International Information Consortium. “Britain’s National Policing Improvement Bureau has been the lead body for the FBI project because it is responsible for IDENT1, the UK database holding 7m sets of fingerprints and other biometric details used by police forces to search for matches from scenes of crimes. Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record, or have yet to be matched to a named individual. IDENT1 was built by the personal technology arm of the US defence company Northrop Grumman. In future it is expected to hold palm prints, facial images and video sequences.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. elhaf writes “The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they’d the software prepared and Saturday’s event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots isn’t rocket science.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. With the elections continually in the news there’s constant discourse on what each candidate has done or will do. However, rarely do people get the chance to state what they would do. Here’s your chance, you’ve been elected President of the US (god help us all), what items go to the head of the class and how would you handle them? Read more of this story at Slashdot. 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 Celebration. 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 state is ‘thief, we’ve our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief’… Whereas we are speaking 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.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Raisey-raison writes “There is a proposal in the UK to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders in an effort to free up more space in British jails. The article states that uses are being considered both for home detention, as a means to enforce punishment, as well as for sex offenders after their release. Many view this as a slippery slope leading to much wider use; starting as a purely voluntary act and gradually becoming more compulsory, it would endanger human rights and privacy. There are also health questions involved, given that long-term studies have linked similar implants to cancer in lab mice and rats. Ironically, the same technology has been proposed for medical purposes as well. In the USA, some state agencies have already made decisions about this issue. Read more of this story at Slashdot. GSGKT writes “Today’s Washington Times runs a story about the increasing problem with space junk orbiting the earth. Debris from the anti-satellite missile test by the Chinese military last year threatens the integrity of more than 800 operating satellites, half of them belonging to the US. Two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being damaged soon after the incident. Air Force Brig. Gen. Ted Kresge, director of air, space and information operations at the Air Force Space Command in Colorado, estimates that “essentially (Chinese anti-satellite tests) increase the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth by about 20 percent”, and the debris might threaten spacecraft for up to 100 years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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