Cody Taylor

Every year the United States releases the Special 301 Report, which examines the intellectual property laws of important trading partners.

Advertisers have finally picked up on what we’ve known all along: nerds are the modern day rock stars.

Tomas Norström, the judge who presided over the Pirate Bay trial, has been accused of bias once again. After the trial against TPB he was accused of bias as he is well connected with quite a few different pro-copyright and intellectual property organizations. A retrial is one alternative for TPB, and this will be decided by a higher court later.

Didn’t they just launch these CPUs? And they are phasing out already?

For Linux users who don’t need absolute top-notch 3D performance, Intel is considered the preferred graphics solution, not least because the company develops its drivers as open source within the framework of the X.org project. However Intel’s drivers are currently in a state of some disarray.

Vincent West writes with this excerpt from The Register: “Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith’s announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds. The system — uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times — is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers’ networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency’s Cheltenham base, ‘the concrete doughnut.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

crankyspice writes “I work routinely in environments where a camera cannot physically be present (e.g., federal court), which really limits what I can carry with me. For instance, I’m a Mac guy, but there’s no way to order a MacBook without a built-in webcam (which I’ve never used on the machines I’ve owned that have had one). Ditto the iPhone. I’m left with a BlackBerry 8830 and the bottom rung of the [W|L]Intel portables. Even then, when I ordered a Dell Mini 9, I had to wait more than a month because I specified no webcam when I placed the order. This is a relatively common (government, law, sensitive corporate environments) requirement; what have other Slashdotters done? Disabling the camera with a script or somesuch won’t convince the /hour security guard that there’s no camera. How can one easily find portable devices without a built-in camera?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wjousts writes “IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on ’25 Microchips That Shook the World,’ including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: ‘Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For 50 years now we have been inculcated by science fiction, so we have to take the blame for it as writers, I guess, that computers are inherently evil. Starting with HAL in 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey), every computer that Captain Kirk every dealt with, The Matrix, the Terminator films … all of this stuff preaches that AI, artificial intelligen