Contents

1. Colleges Struggling With the Digital Bathroom Wall
2. Wikipedia Disputes Editor Exodus Claims
3. OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
4. Flexible, Color OLED Screens For E-Readers
5. Apple Forced To Clean Up Its Fine Print
6. Algae Could Be the Key To Ultra-Thin Batteries
7. 3D Video Game Collaboration Used To Solve Crimes
8. Google Attack On the Mobile Market Rumored
9. New Evidence For Ancient Life On Mars
10. In AU, Film Studios Issue Ultimatum To ISPs
11. Cancer Vaccine That Mimics Lymph Node
12. Home Router For High-Speed Connection?
13. Engaging With Climate Skeptics
14. Building 3D Models On the Fly With a Webcam
15. Plasma Device Kills Bacteria On Skin In Seconds
16. Facebook Putting Batteries On-Board Its Servers
17. Life and Work On the LHC At CERN
18. EU About To Grant US Unlimited Access To Banking Data

Since noone posted this yet… - by andi75 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m so going to whore karma with this obligatory Penny-Arcade reference.

Mod redundant at will.

PC, huh? - by FatSean (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Political Correctness is just a new version of Politeness. Those who make sad and angry noises about PC are just upset that their version of PC is out of style. Perhaps they were Emily Post fans.

We now frown on slurs and other degrading language where once that was celebrated. We now allow discussions of topics in public that were once forced by the Olde PC to be kept private to the determent of those who needed the topics aired.

When someone complains about ‘PC’ they’re just complaining that THEIR version of right/wrong in public has been pushed out by the majority.

Re:PC, huh? - by NoYob (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
That depends on what you consider to be PC or un-PC.

Bill Cosby said some things about his community a while ago that was very un-PC, but he felt it needed to be said. White people have said the same things before (as well as less prominent Blacks) but were then called “racist” or “bigots”, then ignored and in the meantime, the problems in the community continued. Of course, all of those problems were always blamed on others and never on the community - ex. not getting education because it was a “white” thing and then being angry and pissed when the only jobs they can get are janitors which then lead to more rancor and beliefs about being oppressed and what not.

And it’s not only the African American community it’s across all racial and religious lines . Although, it’s just that it’s PC to say anything about white males.

futile struggle - by Odinlake (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Really, it’s futile in the long term to try and ban “harassment comments” or whatever you want to call it, unless you want to really compromise free speech and become worse than China. Maybe instead stop being so bloody touchy about stupid things stupid people write? What is it we’ve told our children for ages - “stop caring, don’t give it attention”?

So, it’s… - by Voulnet (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
4chan for Harvard?

My own experience. - by taxman_10m (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I joined recently to update the page of a candidate running for Ted Kennedy’s seat (election will be done and over with by January). I wasn’t updating much, adding the candidate’s birth date, linking to a book he had written, and adding the part copied from other candidate’s wiki pages that links him to the Senate race. After a full day of back in forth with an editor deleting whatever I had just added, the only think that made it through was the link to the book he had written. And I think that just slipped through. Not worth the effort at all trying to update a page with new info. That ends my time working with Wikipedia.

Not a decline - by paul248 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The number of Wikipedia editors is not declining. In fact, their population has tripled in the last six months.

Wikipedia hits 3 million, dies. - by David Gerard (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The online encyclopedia, knowledge base, social networking site, essay repository, blog, search engine, news aggregator, dessert wax and floor topping Wikipedia has reached its three millionth article and ceased all editing as everyone gives up this “free” foolishness and goes home, to read newspapers and watch network television for the rest of their lives.

Dr Felipe Ortega reported that only 1% of edits by random users were kept. “They were all unspeakable shit,” said burnt-out administrator WikiFiddler451. “All of them. No, I’m not exaggerating. Go to Special:Newpages and read a day’s entries some time. You’ll start by deleting the whole database, before you get onto plotting the doom of humanity. Christ, why go on?”

Recent media coverage has highlighted the “inclusionist/deletionist” wars of 2005, including enquiries from Endemol looking for a “passionate deletionist” to join Big Brother 11, “preferably one with big tits.” It is thought that Wikipedia could have had ten million articles by now had they not viciously abused their editorial powers by deleting your valuable contributions about you, your teacher at school, your garage band or your dog or the many cameraphone pictures you uploaded of your penis.

“Everything’s already been written,” said WikiFiddler451, burning the last of his Star Wars figurines before leaving for his rehabilitation course in social interaction skills and basics of hygiene. “Do you have any idea how big THREE MILLION articles is? A BILLION GODDAMN WORDS! Are you going to read more than a droplet of that in your life? No you aren’t. You’re following your goddamn Twitter.

“But hey, only two million articles are The Simpsons in popular culture or Doctor Who in popular culture. No-one actually reads this stuff, they just write it. We have LiveJournal for stuff people write that no-one wants to read. ‘Oh, I wandered lonely as a cheeseburger/ My passionate angst filling my Coke with darkness.’ Or Knol. KNOL! I’ll just Bing that one.”

Shell-shocked veterans of Wikipedia are at a loss now that it’s all over — wandering the alleyways of the Internet, mumbling to themselves about “ANI” and “we had to delete the village in order to save it,” threatening the policemen moving them on with “arbitration” and bursting into tears when the policeman answers “citation needed.” Mere children, sent into the culture wars to save knowledge from horrors they barely understood, and coming home as crippled wrecks. No victory parades for these brave men and women. There is only so much Citizendium, Uncyclopedia and 4chan can do for these child heroes. With your help, we can build Potemkin wikis for these honorable veterans, where they can safely ban and unban, revert and edit-war, and correct the naming of Danzig^WGdansk^WDanzig^WGdansk without the possibility of damage to actual human readers. Please donate so that they may never bug you again.

Oh, you can tell - by CRCulver (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

They also note that it’s impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return, as their account still remains there.

I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2004, IIRC. There were plenty of cases who people left and you could tell they weren’t likely to return, as their User or Talk page had some spectacular meltdown where they cursed the entire project and — in the cases of the more qualified editors — they vowed never to write anything about their field outside of academic rounds ever again.

Anecdotes are not data - by mdwh2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The point being, there’s no automated way to do this, in order come up with statistics about the site.

An anecdote of “Well I stopped editing in 2004, and so did some people I know” may make for interesting discussion, but doesn’t tell us anything useful about trends in Wikipedia editing as a whole, and certainly doesn’t support the recent story.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is one of Slashdot’s blindspots - where the usual thought out points go out of the window in the groupthink, and mod points are dished out purely on who can criticise Wikipedia, for whatever reason, be it a personal bad experience of editing there, or some axe to grind against its policies.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD - by lord_rob the only on (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

Article is trollbait - by bmo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Goddamnit, is this /g/?

> gentoo, gobo, arch

You have been trolled.

> compiling from source no matter how little performance boost it gives

Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren’t we?

> using Debian

This is a good choice

> Switch to OpenSolaris

No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don’t call it Slowaris for nothing, y’know.

> Mature ZFS

Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don’t forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don’t have a use for it, you’re wasting your time and your system resources.

> FreeBSD

Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You’re already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?

> Corporation vs not-for-profit

Doesn’t make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it’s crap.

8/10, would rage again.

— 
BMO

Re:Article is trollbait - by CMonk (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Way to keep the troll alive. I know you are just trying to get a rise out of people, but come on, digging up a term from like 1995 isn’t very convincing. I personally run Solaris (and production systems at work) because there is nothing in the space that scales like it. Even for single thread applications (and only one of them) with no memory requirements it is just as fast (now at least, early x86 versions of Solaris didn’t perform as well as their SPARC counterparts) as FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, etc.

I could go on to bash Linux et al but, but what would be the point? What ever suits your needs the best is the best OS. Oh, I remember, this is slashdot, we make uninformed, brash comments here now. In 2000, this was a forum for killing FUD, now it is hear to spread FUD.

To the original poster, I think, if you want a better debate, you should take it to serverfault.com

Performance boost? - by scsirob (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I am always surprised when people make this claim about compiling from source giving a performance boost. Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else’s system?

Unless you know how to tweak the compiler flags for this particular app (and know them better than the developer who distributes the binaries), the binary delivered with the distribution will be just as quick as the one you compile yourself.

Re:Performance boost? - by shutdown -p now (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

For x86, you may get a very slight boost, because binaries in conservative distros/OSes (like FreeBSD) are still typically compiled for i686. Turning SSE and other such stuff on can let gcc generate more optimal code, particularly when floating point is involved.

On x64, it is of course quite meaningless.

In practice, either way, it’s not worth the hassle at all.

Re:No! Larger please. - by The Evil Couch (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Why is it they have to step forwards to color already? What I want is much larger greyscale displays with better contrast for cheaper. Seriously, give me a U.S. Letter size display with better contrast for under $100 and I will jump on the e-reader bandwagon.

Because that’s a false dichotomy? They’re going to need to go color eventually and there’s no reason that research into both cheaper, bigger monochrome displays and color displays can’t be done simultaneously.

Does anyone know… - by wizardforce (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

Did they ever solve the problem that older, flexible, OLED displays had that caused visual distortion as the OLED display was bent or is this still an issue?

The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. - by Oscar_Wilde (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Oh for goodness sake!

The last thing you want in an e-reader is for it to be light emitting. There’s a reason we’re putting so much effort into developing better eInk displays.

The only people who don’t seem to understand this are the ones who don’t read much or haven’t read much on an eInk screen. It’s a huge improvement over anything that works by shining light directly into your eyes.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. - by bertok (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Absolutely nothing, light is light, irrespective of the source.

Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. - by Fallen Seraph (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
There’s something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind’s primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon’s light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it’s a light source, but because it’s a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.  
 
That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it’s not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.

Re:Does such a fabled place truly exist? - by badzilla (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

A Brit friend was visiting the USA and phoned the operator (could have been the internal operator at his large company) to ask which international dialling prefix he should use to call home. A short silence then… “United Kingdom? Is that an amusement park?”

Misdescribed Goods - by Donkey_Hotey (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

iTunes lists rap stars as recording artists . Would that fall under the “faulty or misdescribed goods” part?

oh, that - by overcaffein8d (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

you mean, the iTunes clause:

??

Re:oh, that - by ls671 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Different thing, the clause is wider and it is telling you not to use the software for very mission critical applications:

* This software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of 
  * aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or in 
  * the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear 
  * facilit. Licensee represents and warrants that it will not use or 
  * redistribute the Software for such purposes.

http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/demo/applets/Clock/Clock.java

Re:oh, that - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

So you’re saying we have evidence that Apple copy stuff from Microsoft.

Could be - by j00r0m4nc3r (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
Well, anything could be the key to ultra-thin batteries. Wake me up when you find the thing that is the key…

Re:Does anyone remember this? - by wizardforce (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Geobacter Is capable of doing precisely what you describe. The bacterium extends electrode like pili into its environment and degrading various materials ranging from hydrocarbons to Uranium salts. However, Geobacter creates an electrical current in a very different way than these algae batteries would. The algae battery looks like it uses the cellulose as a supportive structure in rather than using biological processes to generate an electrical potential.

BSG - by Kethinov (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

Sweet! So that means when we find the Algae Planet, it’ll solve our food AND fuel problems! Why steal Tylium from the Cylons when you’ve got algae?

Re:BSG - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
…can also be used to make a type of cellulose that has 100 times the surface area of cellulose found in paper. Not to mention the super-absorbent toilet paper we could make.

green tech - by timmarhy (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
i wish other industries could make such wild claims and have everyone believe them.

Awful idea - by l00sr (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

So, by shooting someone in the game, they’ll end up actually shooting someone in real life? That sounds like an awful idea.

DeltaSphere scanner from 3rdTech - by helser (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
“IC-CRIME’s laser scanner” is actually supplied by the company I work for, and it’s called the DeltaSphere 3000 We’ve sold dozens to police departments, CSI units, and such in several countries. More pictures at the website, of course.

Re: - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Incest?

Similar Experience - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I use to work for a programming shop that use to (among other things) make 3D rendering and design tools used for criminal court cases. The prosecutors found it was becoming more and more difficult to get juries to convict people when evidence was displayed in a traditional manner since juries seem to now have higher expectations in how evidence is displayed due to shows like CSI and the like. This was around 2006-2007 so it doesn’t surprise me that stuff like this is in development in 2009 though frankly I would have thought this would have occured sooner then that.

Re:Similar Experience - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I’m more concerned about juries convicting just because the prosecutors show up with an animation of the alleged crime.

Two words, “whose network?” - by Jawn98685 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
RTFA, folks. Google is far, far from posing a threat to the wireless carriers. VOIP over Wi-Fi is one thing, but VOIP over 3G wireless (or whatever) is something else entirely, something that the actual carriers have the means, and certainly the motivation, to fuck with at will (as we have already seen). Unless/until Google starts putting up their own towers, there is nothing new here, at least nothing revolutionary or “game changing”.

The article may say something incorrect - by Myopic (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The article says

For the first time, a single company will control everything from the software in users’ phones to the services they use to make calls and surf the web.

But wait, every phone I’ve ever had the hardware, software, and services were controlled 100% by my phone carrier. So in that way, the Google phone would be the same.

To me, the difference is that I trust the hardware, software, and services from Google, but I don’t for a second trust AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. They have proven that they refuse to provide products and services that I want, but Google has proven that they very much understand and want to provide the products and services that I want. I share the privacy concerns about Google, but at this point I’m just being vigilant, watching for Google to violate my trust. So far so good.

Google! Please put the dinosaurs out of business! I want to stop giving them my money! I want to give you my money for better services!

Where is the network? - by zogger (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

At first I thought, whoa, the google phone company, then I broke down and RTFA…You still need a “plan” of some sort from a carrier unless you are using this google phone at some free leeched wifi spot or at home on your network. If you are at home..no need for a special phone, just use your headset and the software like you are now.

If this takes off and people drop voice and go to data only plans, the carriers will just restrict the heck out of them, maybe even dropping the caps from five gigs to one gig, then a hundred bucks a gig after that, whatever they say, or stop offering data only plans, etc. In other words, they aren’t going to get “cut out”, you will still be horking over ca$h to attverizonsprint whatever.

I am digging on much better quality phones though..eventually I think the mobile phone will more or less be your computer, and at home you’ll just have a wireless connected screen and keyboard and mouse, etc with some NAS action.

Adapt or else - by gmuslera (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Remember when web mail providers were giving like 4Mb of mailbox capacity, and then Google came with 2Gb (oh, yes, and a spam filter that actually worked)? Most providers didnt vanished, just had to adapt and still are here, giving a better service to their costumer. For cellphone industry that is something very needed, someone that come with a disruptive idea and weight enough behind to actually push it. Wont kill all companies, but to survive they will have to improve, not just giving the latest gizmo and charging you a lot.

The carriers will attempt to unite and squash this - by BuckaBooBob (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

This will be very interesting to see how this will work out as every Cell Phone Carrier will do what ever they can to Quash this as its attacks their revenue streams.

This should prove to be an interesting battle as google has the funding to fight tooth and nail to ensure the cell carriers don’t lock them out.

Re:So here we have spent huge amount of resources. - by ianare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If it wasn’t for the spacecrafts sent to Mars, it would not have been possible to identify the meteorite as coming from Mars. From the article : “Scientists were able to trace the meteorite back to Mars, as its chemical composition matched the relative proportions of various gases measured in observations of the atmosphere of Mars made by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970s.”

As for the rovers sent later, they were not sent to investigate life but mainly to study the geology and climate.

Re:Mars origin - by MichaelSmith (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

TFA:

Re:Mars origin - by wizardforce (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Can someone explain to me why the set of meteorites are considered more likely to have originated on Mars than from an impact on Earth itself?

Gas bubbles found in the meteorite have a composition that is very much like the atmosphere on Mars. The gas inclusions don’t resemble those of Earth.

Re:Well - by wizardforce (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

As a iochemist, it was my understanding that the habitable zone was already known to extend out toward Mars. Although really, I’d say that the concept of a habitable zone needs to be expanded anyway considering the possibility of life in the Jupiter system. I believe that it is becoming increasingly clear that there isn’t just a single habitable zone around a star like our sun but also pockets of habitable space underneath the surface of various moons and terrestrial planets like Mars.

Oh wow - by Dartz-IRL (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

It’s life.

Or was life.

If this is true. It’s just staggering to me. If there was life on Mars… there may still be. If there was life on Mars, then how common is life elsewhere in the galaxy? If it can exist on ancient Mars, there’s no reason it can’t exist on any of the other millions of planets scattered through the billions of stars in our Galaxy.

If life is found on Mars… or found to have existed… then it can be anywhere.

Under the ice of Europa aswell?

While we may never meet our neighbours… it would still be nice to know that yes, they may well be out there… somewhere. The Galaxy may well be teeming. I sure hope it is. I mean, if it becomes clear that rather than being just blacks, whites… whatevers… on a cosmological scale where there is actual non-terrestrial life… shouldn’t it be clear that we all are just the one race?

I agree with the recording industry - by timmarhy (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I think ISP’s SHOULD deal with infringement notices, but they should also not have to do it for free. a fair administration charge would be applied to each request, say $1000. after all the isp will effectively loose a customer as well as wear support and legal costs out of it. oh whats that, that lunch wasn’t free?!?! boohoo.

Get out of the industry? - by M-RES (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Perhaps if the entertainment giants can’t change their business models to suit the realities of the modern marketplace it is THEY who should get out of the industry!

Re:Yeah, so? - by maxwell demon (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Indeed. If they want a law, they’ll have to buy it.

The auto industry creates death machines! - by psyque (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The auto industry should also immediately take responsibility for all the death and cost due to people running over and robbing people/businesses with cars! They profit from death and destruction!

Same to you, buddy - by cheebie (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

How about if they start taking their responsibility seriously and let those works pass into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, AS WAS THE ORIGINAL INTENT. Give us back our culture, damnit!

Re:Treatment, not vaccine… - by geekoid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

it’s a therapeutic vaccine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine

Re:Really cool… - by AnotherUsername (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Or vampirism.

Re:Really cool… - by geekoid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

depends, if it cures your cancer now, but it will give you cancer in 20 years it may be worth it.

8.5 millimeters .. - by geekoid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If it cures my cancer, I don’t care if the think is the size of a hockey puck and they have to stick it in my forehead*.

*Ass was too expected.

Re:interesting - by larry bagina (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
The immune system does attack HIV, and that’s kind of the problem. HIV infects T4 lymphocytes, which get killed off by the rest of the immune system, which then allows opportunistic infections to cause problems (and death).

You poor bastard - by Sloppy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT

I don’t have an answer to your problem (other than “get a computer”), but you have my deepest sympathies. It is so hard to hear of my fellow human being having such horrific adversities inflicted upon them, and I cannot help but wonder: could this misfortune fall upon me some day?

I can only hope that you overcome the terrible burden of a 100 Mpbs internet connection thrust upon you and your residence, and somehow, god-willing, find a reason to keep on living, in order to set an example for others who may some day suffer the same fate. No matter how dark and hopeless things look right now, don’t give up! If you can survive this calamity, maybe I can overcome my own problems as well.

Bless you, my friend, and good luck!

I Beg To Differ - by didde (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
I’m on an unmetered 100 Mbps line, bursting up to 300 Mbps from time to time. Just like you, I had a tough time finding consumer-grade hardware able to keep up with speeds > 30-50 Mbps. After going through most of what’s on offer here in the EU, short of DIY routers, I ended up with D-Link’s “Wireless N Gigabit router DIR-655”. Believe it or not, but I have actually seen throughput close to 150 Mbps (using NAT) on the WAN while on this network.  
 
Of course, YMMW, but my search ended with this piece of hardware.Of course, it’s priced slightly higher than the average router, but IMHO it’s worth it.  
 
On a side note: I personally, had no luck what so ever using Linksys offerings, including the WRT54*. Most “premium” hardware platforms in the consumer sphere only offer throughput close to 30-40 or even 50 Mbps while on NAT.  
 
Good luck. And enjoy the speeds you have been blessed with, son.

Mikrotik - by Obliterous (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

Mikrotik Routers, despite some bad press, are good. They are inexpensive, can be build with commodity hardware, and easily handle that level of traffic.

hardware specs on mine: 2.4Ghz P-IV, 512MB Rambus RAM, 1 * T100 Ethernet port (motherboard)connected to modem, 5 * 10/100/1000 ports (NICs) connected to home network and one 802.11g wifi NIC (operating as a hotspot), 1 256MB flash card in IDE adapter.

FIOS connection gives me 60*5 with one IP, and regularly sustains that with as many as four separate machines running BT at any given time, 2 public game servers, as well as various other uses. 60+ firewall rules, full NAT with 20+ port forwarding rules, it runs like a champ.

http://www.mikrotik.com/

If you already have the hardware laying around doing nothing, go ahead and give them a look.

Re:Mikrotik - by zn0k (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Or buy one of the lower end RouterBoards. A 450G would be a fairly good fit for this situation and comes in at under $150 with a case and a power supply.

Linux firewall + gigabit switch - by steveha (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.

Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security. 
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.

steveha

People are debating the wrong question - by sp3d2orbit (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“Global warming is caused by CO2 and the CO2 comes from human sources. ”

Most intelligent people who have researched the issue have come to this conclusion.

“Curtailing carbon emissions is the only way to prevent further global warming.”

Intelligent people should immediately recognize the fallacy in this statement. Curtailing carbon emissions is but ONE possible response, it is not the only response and it is not necessarily the best response. The debate, at this point in time, should focus on the response. “Believing” in global warming does not need to translate into “believing” politicians can fix it with more power.

What is wrong with giving the government(s) power to curtail carbon emissions?

For one, it gives the government control of every faculty of human life. Almost everything we do, from eating, to breathing, breeding, and working has a carbon footprint. Giving the government control of carbon emissions gives the government control of everything. Students of history should recognize this pattern very well. An external force will harm us all unless the government is given enough power to protect us. Governments don’t protect, they repress. What happens if the government decides large dogs have too much of a carbon footprint. Or horses? Or more than one child?

Secondly, cutting emissions in the US will do nothing about China and India. In fact, cutting oil consumption in the US will make oil cheaper for third world factories. It is supply and demand. Personally, I would rather see the fossil fuels burnt in the US, under EPA standards, creating American jobs than to have it sent to China or India where it will be used in a much less efficient manner.

Third, it is unclear that cutting carbon emissions drastically in the near future will save us from tragedy. Global warming proponents admit this, but still advocate cutting emissions for lack of a better alternative.

What is the alternative?

While it isn’t my preferred approach, one alternative is to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Oceans will rise, the world will get hotter, and people will adapt. All of the carbon we are pumping out of the ground and burning once existed in the atmosphere anyways. Plants and animals consumed it, fell to the ocean floor, and were buried under ground. The world survived with extra carbon in the past and could again. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus, no matter how much oil we burn.

Of course there will be costs for doing nothing. For one, a lot of very wealthy people are going to lose their expensive beach front properties. Many bailed out bankers will see their mansions succumb to the tides. Tough shit.

A lot of poor people, mostly in third world countries will have to move. Even in the US we may have to move certain cities like New Orleans instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to wall them off from the seas. This will be expensive, but probably less expensive than curtailing global emissions enough to have an effect.

Arable farming land will lost. Some will be gained, but overall there will probably be a decrease in the amount of land available for agriculture. Farmers may have to stop selling their prime lots to housing developments. People may have to stop bitching about genetically modified food and learn to adapt. But most people will not starve to death, we will adapt.

Is there a better solution than doing nothing?

Like I said, I am not a proponent of doing nothing. I think we should do something that actually stands a chance of working. The best way (notice how I didn’t use the word “only” here) to curtail carbon emissions is to give people cheaper options. I don’t mean solar or wind, or osmosis generators or tide machines or biofuel or nuclear fission.

Perhaps I have read one to many sci-fi novels, but I think we should take the hundreds of billions being spent on cutting emissions and put it into nuclear fusion research. If nuclear fusion can be perfected in the next decade or two then there will be no reason to burn fossil fuels, conserve energy, or give the government a fascist grip on the economy.

Forcing people into impoverished lives - by Kohath (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

The real AGW arguments (and the motivation of all the parties involved) seem to be about the remedies rather than the climate. The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.

They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data. They refuse to publish the code for their computer models. They refuse to rationally refute skepticism. They refuse to understand human behavior as described by the discipline of Economics. They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder. They refuse to identify the “correct” temperature, let alone describe how they arrived at that temperature. They refuse to close the loop on their proposed remedies to objectively weigh the benefits against the cost.

If Global Warming was simply an academic question rather than a life-or-death political struggle for power (or against power and for freedom), then it could be discussed as such.

AGW is going to lose the political struggle because of Climategate. It was already reeling from the fact that it hasn’t warmed in the last decade. And it faced an uphill battle due to the depression: rich people can afford to pay for environmental spirituality, poor people can’t. If the political struggle ends, this can go back to being about whether carbon release causes warming, and how much, and what it really means.

Oftentimes, simply no… - by MoellerPlesset2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I’ve got to say ‘No’. 
In a lot of cases, if not most, dialogue on the merits of your scientific work is simply impossible with a layperson. 
 
I work with this stuff. Every day. 40 (well more like 50-60) hours a week. It took years of study for me (and everyone else) 
just to get to the level where you can properly understand what it is, exactly, that I do. That’s what being an expert at something entails. 
Now when I get into a dispute with someone, they typically have the same level of expertise. They know more or less everything I do. I know what they’re saying, and they usually know what I’m saying. 
 
Now you bring into that situation some layperson with their religious reasons or ideological reasons or crank personality, who wants to dispute the results of my work. So they pore over it, and they simply don’t understand it. (And ignorance breeds arrogance more often than humility, as Lincoln said) But they think they do. And then they formulate their criticism. Even if that criticism makes sense (often not), it’s typically wrong at the most basic level. And that will practically always be the case - because there’s virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn’t thought about already. You’re just not going to find a professor of physics having made a mistake of forgetting the first law of thermodynamics. 
 
Now I’m happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism. But a scientific debate is *NOT* where anybody should be TEACHING anybody science. What kind of ‘debate’ is it if every answer amounts to “That’s not what that word means, read a damn textbook.” It’s not the scientists who are being arrogant then. Hell, since when didn’t scientists bend over backwards to educate the public? We write textbooks, and popular-scientific accounts. Research gets published in journals for everyone to see, etc. It’s not like we’re keeping it a big secret - The problem is that some people are simply unwilling to learn, yet arrogant enough to believe they should be entitled to ‘debate’ with me, and that I should be personally burdened with educating them in the name of ‘open debate’! 
 
(Just to pick one out of the climate bag. How often haven’t you seen someone say “Yeah but climate change is cyclical!” - What? As if _climate scientists_ didn’t know that?! Refuting someone’s research with arguments from an introductory textbook) 
 
The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn’t even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of ‘disproval’ of global warming (which wouldn’t have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they’re simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it’s in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there’s a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.

Good faith and bad faith - by Kohath (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Why should climate skeptics be asked to make a good faith effort when the climate scientists have been so clearly and obviously shown to be acting in bad faith?

Decide there’s global warming and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.

It’s a big pseudo-scientific world out there.

Re:Good faith and bad faith - by apoc.famine (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Can you cite a source for that? 
   
I’m dead serious. Show me a solid, scientific study that shows a concerted effort by climate scientists to be acting in bad faith.  
   
The fact that you got moderated interesting is ridiculous. There’s this big uproar about climate science in ONE place. Where? In the media. Why? Because nothing sells like scandal or death.  
   
I’m working on a PhD directly related to climate modeling. I’ve got access to four climate models, from four competing organizations, ranging from middle-school simple to research grade. And they all give about the same results. In my office, I have a poster from a paper presentation where my research group compared seven different climate models, and looked at how well they agreed. There were differences, for sure. But they all were similar. Why are they all similar? 
   
IT’S ALL A BIG CONSPIRACY BY THE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS!!!!! 
   
Well, except for the fact that we would love to rip the shit out of another organizations research. In that seven-model comparison, we were looking to rip apart some of the models. Where they were different, we did. Had we found one that was totally different from the rest, we would have figured out why, and published that. The fact of the matter is that the science is well settled.  
   
While I think you’re an asshat, I do agree with your last statement. It is a big pseudo-scientific world out there, provided you define “out there” as “in the media”. Those of us actually involved in science know that it’s not. You get ahead in science by taking heads. We know Darwin’s name because he wiped out hundreds of scientists’ work on biological diversity. We know Einstein’s name because he wiped out hundreds of theories on atomic interaction and the nature of space-time. We know Maxwell’s name because he invented coffee.  
   
As a scientist, surrounded with scientists, and friends with a lot of scientists, I can tell you, there’s nothing any of us would like to do than destroy the establishment. If I could disprove evolution, I’d do it in a heartbeat. If I could prove General Relativity wrong, I wouldn’t hesitate. It would put me in the text books. It would make me famous. If I could prove climate change wrong, I’d do the same.  
   
But I’m in the middle of that science. And I can’t. It’s solid, despite what the media makes it out to be. If it wasn’t, I’d be famous. You have to realize that most scientists want to know the truth. And as humans, we like nothing better than to be able to yell, DUMBASS in a very loud voice, while pointing at the dumbass so everyone notices. I believe in science because if I screw up, that will happen to me. So I try really hard not to screw up. As do all scientists. The ridicule of your peers is a very good tool to keep you honest. While there are some bad scientists, we all know who they are. They’re the ones that we watched get called a dumbass at the last conference. They’re the ones who published an article last year, which was utterly demolished by one this year. I’ve been to those conferences. I’ve read those articles. Scientists are blood-thirsty, brutal individuals. If you do poor science, you’ll be ripped to shreds. That’s how scientists advance in levels. :)

Academic projects versus commercial applications - by Frans Faase (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
There seems to be a huge gap between these kind of academic projects and the commercial available programs. I have come across several commenrcial applications that can do these kind of things, but these applications cost at least a 1000 dollars or even more. And then there are all these academic projects (going on for at least two decades), which present nice video’s and papers, and sometimes release some software. But when you look at the software, you discover that you first have to download nine other package and compile the whole thing and what you get is some kind of script you have to run, with all sorts of command line options. But sofar, I have never found an application with a solid interface on the level of the Gimp or Blender for the matter of the fact. I find this rather strange. I am almost getting the impression that some of the results are sold to the developers of the commercial packages.

Re:Academic projects versus commercial application - by Telvin_3d (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

The major reason that these types of programs don’t get expanded into commercial products or bought and integrated into existing products is that they are cute tech demos but not particularly real-world interesting.

Almost without exception anything simple enough for these types of reconstruction programs to handle is too simple to bother with. The paper church in the demo video for instance. The final wire-frame product is, sadly, crap. Neat and interesting crap but still crap. There are at least 3 times the polys that the form needs and almost all of the significant edges are in the wrong place. In the time it would take to clean up the data into something worth using I could build a better model form scratch including textures.

There are perhaps some very niche uses for this in terms of augmented reality. It could be integrated into a game or chat program to give a more realistic version of those make-an-avatar-from-your-webcam gimmicks that seem to gain attention every once and a while. If this guy has developed some very good algorithms he might get the interest of some of the match-moving software companies like Syntheyes.

But the reason this kind of this never shows up in profesional 3D packages is that if you are good enough to be using the software professionally you are good enough not to need these kinds of crutches. It’s the 3D equivalent of Dreamweaver’s auto-generated spaghetti code.

3D vision for robots - by cptnapalm (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

I was thinking about robots one day and I was wondering why those who work on computer vision didn’t do something like this. Instead of trying to get the machine to understand the analog world, why wouldn’t it be better for the machine to have an internal representation of the world by making a 3d map? Quake 3 CoffeeShop, if you will.

The idea I had was that the vision system creates a 3d map with entities, mapped from the vision system as well, inside. The AI works within the 3d representation of the world. If the AI wants to move from A to B, it signals the body controlling subsystem to start walking. When the 3d representation, being informed by the vision system, tells the AI that it is at point B, then the AI signals to stop walking.

Hardware constraints not withstanding, is this model any good?

I’m just a lowly, early middle aged novice C programmer who has never actually done anything with robotics, so if what I said made no sense or is obviously idiotic, I do understand that my ideas are comin’ outta my ass.

Simultaneous location and mapping - by Animats (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

That’s called “simultaneous location and mapping”, and in the last five years, good algorithms have been developed and quite a few systems are more or less working. Search for “Visual SLAM”.

The Samsung Hauzen vacuum cleaner uses Visual SLAM. There’s a video. This is way ahead of the blundering Roomba.

Re:The Death of Hollywood - by RAMMS%2BEIN (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

In theory, we can make good computer games, too.

But how many open-source games can you name that have great graphics? And how many closed-source games with great graphics are there?

I don’t think Hollywood is dying just yet.

I’ll bite - by xigxag (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Rachael Ray?

Re:Surface only, though? - by Dunbal (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

If it’s germ free and not large enough to be visible, does it matter?

      It does if you’re a surgeon. There’s something called the foreign body response, and we’ve seen it happen even with particles of the STERILE talc they line some surgical gloves with to make them easier to put on. Problems aren’t only caused by bacteria. Depending on the person’s immune response, virtually anything can cause a life-threatening reaction to normally “inert” things like nylon suture or titanium rods/sutures. Things like dirt and human hair are more likely to provoke a reaction.

Re:Good bacteria? - by Cedric Tsui (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
The same thing that happens to them when you wash with antibacterial soap.

Re:Good bacteria? - by Dunbal (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

The same thing that happens to them when you wash with antibacterial soap.

      One of the most overrated products in the world. Everyone thinks they’re getting “anti-bacterial” protection.

      If you want “clean hands” while washing with antibacterial soap, make sure you do like we surgeons and wash each hand for 15 minutes. Even then you’ll have critters living in your sweat glands… but your bacterial count will be very very low. For the regular “less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song” hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.

      Now hands up who spends 30 mins washing their hands every time they touch something.

Re:Good bacteria? - by Dunbal (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Its about time we have a decent solution instead of 15 mins of washing, where are the scientists on this one, 15 mins * few times a day * 1000000 surgens at their salary levels = billions of dollars wasted time.

      There’s a problem with your accounting: you’re forgetting to offset this by the cost of millions of infected patients staying longer at the hospital, the antibiotics used, and the inevitable fatalities.

      The standard infection rate for most wounds is around 10% in nature. Aseptic procedure (hand washing, sterile equipment, etc) has brought this down to under 1%. So tack on a week or so in the hospital (plus the fatalities) for 9% of all surgeries performed in the world, then compare it to hand washing.

      Not to mention the ethical side. We wash our hands because it’s part of our “do no harm” credo.

This may be a better solution than a regular UPS - by mhollis (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

I used to work at a company that decided to install large, monolithic UPS systems after the power company hit them with a spike that took the entire system down for over a half hour. As they’re a broadcasting company, they (rightly) felt that feeding their network affiliates nothing was not a good idea.

As a result, they have these UPS “rooms” that hum like the dickens when you’re passing them in the hall, all with batteries that will need to be replaced regularly (just like the Google server battery systems, so it’s the same problem no matter what). Reason for the hum?

The hum is caused by these giant transformers that step the power from DC to AC and create 110 volts of AC current at whatever amperage is required for normal devices. But there is a lot of wasted energy in doing that.

Computers and servers all run off of DC power. They plug into AC power and then run that AC through a “power supply” that converts that to DC that the computer can use. That takes power, but power is plentiful when it comes from the power company and you pay your bill on time. But when you take the power from the power company, then change it to DC to charge batteries and then take power from those batteries to change it to AC to power normal wall outlets only to take that through a server’s power supply to change it to DC again for the computer to use it, you’re looking at lots of wasted energy in just changing from AC to DC, back and then back again, as well as changing to the kind of voltage and amperage needed to run the microprocessor, power the memory and power the drive arrays.

So this is all about lowering consumption. And if you lower consumption, you lower your electricity costs.

The hobbyist magazines were all aflutter some years ago about using photovoltaic (solar) energy to power a house. But what everyone had to do (early on) was to change their appliances (or order special ones) to run on DC — not because you couldn’t make AC current from the DC output of the photovoltaic systems but because it took a lot of energy to do that and these hobbyists were all about trying to save so much energy that they could take themselves off the grid.

Here, on a large scale, you see the same idea. It’s just more efficient to do this. And one of the big arguments in the early years of electrification was between DC power distribution (Thomas Edison) and AC power distribution (George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla). We may wind up fighting these battles again in the near future.

I’m sure this looks great on Powerpoint - by SuperBanana (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Facebook says the move will slash its power bill and save millions in capital expenses on UPS systems and PDUs.

And it’ll move the complexity and unreliability to the server. The whole idea behind centralized UPS’s (and by the way, you still need PDUs) is that you have reliability, serviceability, and economies of scale and efficiency. Now you have to monitor and service the batteries in thousands of pieces of equipment. And guess what happens when one of those batteries fails by getting cooked? Sulfuric acid all over the place (yes, even the “sealed” lead acid batteries can fail and leak) instead of the batteries being in, say, a battery room. God help us if they use lithium-ion, which would introduce us to a world of server fires and water damage, since a lot of datacenters are now dry-pipe to save costs. Nevermind that batteries and their associated electronics take up space, and that space has to come from somewhere.

So, now you have each server getting more expensive, more complex with both hardware and software (server now needs its own battery power management) heavier, bigger, featuring toxic materials, and now non-standard, non-commodity design which vendors will charge more for as they specialize the equipment.

I’m sure this all looks great on a powerpoint slide simplified into “if we put batteries in our servers, we can throw out our expensive UPS and save money!” This is just another hot/stupid trend; just because Google is doing it, doesn’t make it brilliant. I stopped believing everything google was doing was a Best Practice around the same time gmail started going down for hours (and for some users, more than a day) at a time on a regular basis.

I tuned out of the article around the point where the guy from Facebook complains about cosmetic features interfering with airflow. Uh, guess what, bud? Dell’s pretty front panel has been optional (saving you a few bucks sometimes) for years.

Re:I’m sure this looks great on Powerpoint - by ThreeGigs (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Another idea behind a UPS is _a_single_point_of_failure_. Moving the power backups to the individual servers eliminates that worry. Plus, since the servers are already redundant, you don’t need the redundancy on the UPS, inverters, etc., which should save money. 
And since it’s long-term, I’m willing to wager it won’t be lead-acid, but NiMH. So no real maintenance issues. And your “what happens if…” scenarios apply equally to a battery in a megawatt UPS or a battery in a server. 
As for battery management and ‘specialized’ power supplies, etc.: go check out a laptop. That wheel has already been invented, and better yet, has benefitted from mass-production.

The best solution? - by LWATCDR (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

This is interesting to me in a couple of ways. 
The idea is that it is cheaper to have just a battery instead of a UPS. A UPS will also have to have an inverter. 
Okay I can see this but they why have it at the server level? 
Remove the power supply from the server and put it at the rack level? Have a big redundant power supply for each rack and batteries for each rack? 
Or why not use DC for the entire data center and put the battery at the Data Center level? 
Seems to me that there may be more than one way to skin this cat and each have it’s pluses. If you are using a large number of low load balanced servers where having any one go down isn’t a disaster then putting the battery on the server would give you a good trade off. You are probably more likely to have a single server to fail than a more centralized system would but the odds of taking down the system would be tiny. 
I would love to see a study of the benefits of each type of system with the trade offs.

Oh good - by ArchieBunker (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

What would the world be like if facebook went offline… I’m not sure I could continue living.

Anatoli Bugorski - by Picass0 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

source : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/science.html

====== snip====== 
So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski’s skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don’t know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead. 
====== snip======

Working physicist - by Pezbian (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Look, kids! A real life working physicist. He’s got a job that doesn’t involve waiting for an internship to open up at a University.

A Modest Proposal - by eldavojohn (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

So you’re saying it’d be pretty painless? You could revolutionize flawed processes we have in the United States by providing an alternative that may have a more expensive start up cost but would solve budget problems by providing needed services for both our prison system and science research at the same time. I mean if we ignore the ethical problems with televised executions, the costs of an LHC could be mitigated by commercial segments …

mythbusters have to test the 87kg of TNT part now - by Joe The Dragon (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

“It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body.” jamie wants big boom

Re:mythbusters have to test the 87kg of TNT part n - by Lord Byron II (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Yeah, even a few billion atoms (which isn’t very much at all) and you’re already talking about hundreds of Joules.

I forget the exact energy specifications of the LHC, but if you’re interested in getting a feeling for the power it packs, do a search for “LHC beam dump”. This is a huge block of solid material (some sort of a lead-composite, IIRC) that’s only job is to be vaporized if they need to shut down the beam quickly.

EU Has Finally and Completely Lost It - by MinistryOfTruthiness (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

As a US citizen, I say “WTF Europe — are you insane?!”

I believe in the right of every country to protect their sovereignty, and this sound like a gigantic ceding of that sovereignty, and as egregious as the formation and delegation of power to the EU. The absolute best way to avoid tyranny on a massive scale is to ensure the distribution of power to the greatest extent possible. That’s why I believe in states’ rights, and why I believe Europe is being a bunch of asshats right now. I’m as patriotic as they come, but I understand the capability of anyone — Americans as much as anyone else — to become drunk with power. In the same spirit, I applaud that no American financial data will be given to Europe. At least they got it half right.

It’s even worse than that - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They’ll give access to all inter-bank transactions. The whole issue started with the revelation that US intelligence had access to SWIFT data through SWIFT’s US data center. SWIFT then shifted its operation to its other data centers and will cease channeling EU transaction data through the US data center by the end of the year. So the loss of access for the US spies is the SWIFT data, but the treaty will give them access to all inter-bank transactions, even those which are not processed by SWIFT. This is a classic rebound technique: The EU cannot spy on its own citizens like that, but they do get information back from US spies.

Who’s to blame? The US, for shamelessly exploiting the people they often call their friends? The EU council, for betraying their people? Why choose…

If this goes through on Monday, there will be calls to punish the EU Council for treason, but of course nothing will come of it.

Re:It’s even worse than that - by Anonymous Brave Guy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

As far as I’m aware, the EU still takes more public money than any other organisation that has failed to produce audited accounts, and it’s been doing so for more than a decade now. I think we can safely assume that they are above the law. And if they’re not, as we’ve recently seen with the Lisbon treaty, they are quite capable of rewriting the law until they are, without needing any mandate from the people.

Re:About Time! - by Monkeedude1212 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Is it worth catching corporate criminals at the cost of civil privacy?

Also, there are lots of ways around Taxation laws, legally, that require NO money off-shore. Using Charity receipts, holding companies, and company expenses, you can essentially cut your profits down so you don’t get taxed as much while everything you want to purchase is owned by various companies (which you own but not directly).

It’s kind of like you run company A, and Company B owns your car, Company C owns your house, Company D buys food, etc etc, and while the paper trail exists, theres nothing illegal about it. Shaw Communications (Cable company here in Canada) has mastered this technique. Yeah, the CEO is driving his Porsche around Calgary, but on paper he makes under 30k a year.

Re:About Time! - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So US tax cheats get caught at the expense of EU privacy? F***ing s**t deal if you live in the EU. My transactions have got cock all to do with you.

And Americans wonder why everybody hates them.

Signal to Noise ratio over time