From Technolotics
Police State Miami
- Although Miami hasn't been hit by a terrorist attack - authorities convinced it is a credible target
- To confuse Al Qaida and other wanabe terrorist - displays of force
- And maybe [1] maybe not [2] unconstitutional random ID checks
- Police state anyone?
- News Sources disagree as to whether displays of force
- random collections of large amounts of officers at hotels, banks etc
- more worryingly on trains and buses - plain clothes and uniformed + long term surveillance
- will include ID checks
- Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears."
- Interestingly - sources disagree as to what the ACLU have to say!
- Washington Post: officers on street patrol (making informed decisions on which individuals to stop), which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution," Simon said. "We'll have to see how it is implemented."
- Associated Press: "What we're dealing with is officers on street patrol, which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution," Simon said. "We'll have to see how it is implemented."
- I feel safer already
Science Under Attack
- The retiring head of the royal society has spoken out against climate change denial and fundamentalism [3]
- Scientists need to speak out against climate change denial
- Core scientific values under threat from resurgence of fundamentalism
- Threats to world ecology real - climate change, loss of biodiversity, re-emergence of diease
- Applies to both sides of the debate - Global Warming Deniers & Anti-Nuclear power campaigners
- Ironically in the same week that the Royal Society have spoken out against free / open access scientific journals [4]
- Nature suggest a more rational approach to open information sharing / web service integration of data in science [5]
Dvorak on Dead Media
- Are DRM and quirky vendor only cables, connections and formats, leading us into a world of unreadable data
- Dvorak has lots of media tech - cameras, memory sticks, DAT and video cassette tapes - which are, or will shortly be unreadable
- He compares this - rather disingenuously - to the burning Great Library of Alexandria - where much of the collected knowledge of the classical world was lost
- What if the *.gif liscence enforcement had been stricter
- What if *.jpg had been DRM'd
- Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and its European equivalents - cracking these obsolete and abandoned formats is as illegal as DVD Jon's cracking of the DVD so he could watch his movies on Linux
- Dvorak's forum in PC Magazine has some interesting suggestions from readers [6]
- Abandoned technoloties lose patents
- Companies which don't use a given copyright or patent in a 5 year period lose it - "How many ideas and inventions are there that could ease our healthcare, population control, transportation, or energy problems that we are blocked from implementing because of some corporation's greed?"
- A registry of hardware and software readers - and those qualified to operate them
- Format certification / standardisation - although open source formats do this by default!
- Forbidding media patents
- Media Death / Obsolescence - a function of a variety of factors - how 'closed' media is, how widespread / multivendor, physical durability, 'length' (duration) and 'breadth' (popularity) of use - All of these factors are getting worse - due to market fragmentation, rampant DRM, quick upgrade cycles, and inherently unstable technologies (high capacity magenetic storage)
- Enduring Future [7], create a heavy gauge metal book with 'your story' - hardly practical for digital media - but you probably squeeze in DECSS and the basic math to read it!
- Don't use formats that require proprietry software / cables - e.g.: Apple, Sony
- Interestingly, and to his credit, Dvorak responds to comments (even negative ones) on his forum
Short Stories
ATI speeds up video * 5
- ATI's new "Avivo XCode" encoding tool - which only works on its latest X1000 series GPUs
- can massively speed up video encoding of MPEG 4 (Divx, Xvid), H.264, Windows Media 9, DVD etc
- An example of what happens when software functions are moved to hardware
- This will have a huge impact 2 - 3 years down the line on home video incoding
- Only a drop in the ocean compared to the future impact of fully featured rendering on the GPU
Googleblogger: Google Space, Google Boutique Store Opens
- Londons Heathrow airport is home to google first shop
- where everything is of course free
iTunes Music Store (finally) on Linux
- DVD Jon has released a free (as in beer & speech) interface to the iTMS [8]
Engaget: How to stream anything with VLC
- Get the most out of the best media player ever [9]
- Stream your movies and music around your lan or wan
Jason's Friend's Friend in drug blog hot water
- A malaysian blogger has been forced to take down all drug related posts on his blog
- The guy had been blogging about his experiences while on various substances (crystal meth, heroin etc.)
- A Malay tabloid newspaper found out and put him on the frontpage
- The authorites contacted him and he is considered *very* lucky to only have to remove the posts
[10]
Media Pimp
Jason
Cloud [11] - A truly original game?
Francis
Porn Hacks [14]
Gareth
Boingboing.net [15]
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