There was talk on The Minor Planet Mailing List about a small asteroid that approached Earth with a 99.8% probability of colliding. The entrance to the Earth's atmosphere took place October 7 at 0246 UTC over northern Sudan, releasing the energy of about a kiloton of TNT. The asteroid was assumed to be 3-4 meters in size; it burned up completely in the atmosphere, causing no harm. For those advanced enough in astronomy to observe, check the MPEC 2008-T50 and MPEC 2008-T64 circulars. NASA's JPL Small Body Database has a 3D orbit view. The story was picked up by CNNand NASA.
It's Pluto and it wants revenge.
It's the end of the world and bankers everywhere rejoice!
Those all-too-familiar "stats" surrounding the cost of piracy are being trotted out in an attempt to push through a new "Copyright Czar" position. "In urging President Bush to sign into law the ProIP bill, which would give him a copyright czar (something the Justice Department had said it doesn't want), the US Chamber of Commerce is claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy. Yet, it doesn't cite where that number comes from."
If we just hire 750,000 copyright czars, well there ya go. That would be mavericky, you betcha.
Yes but then we have created a problem by removing 10,000,000,000 pirates from the market. Pirates need to eat too. Studies also show that 12/15 of those 750,000 are part-time ax-murderers. I think the statistics show the real victims here.
Shortly after the release of Iron Man on Blu-ray on October 1, people started complaining of defective discs; the problem turned out to be that all the Blu-ray players downloading additional content brought down Paramount's BD-Live servers, causing delays while loading the disc. Which really makes you wonder what will happen when they decide to shut down this service in a couple of years.
"Live content" means "that movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
Now that they've got their servers back up and running, let's slashdot 'em! Now I remember why I decided to go with software development over network administration!
As a network administrator, let me be the first to say, I hate you.
The feeling is mutual. But, look on the bright side… at least we're not database administrators :-)
And you know why we become DBAs—we don't just hate you, we hate everybody. Us Oracle DBAs even hate ourselves.
And what about those poor AS/400 (iSeries, System I, i5, whatever) DBAs? Whom do they hate?
They're not dead yet? Damn modern medicine is keeping people alive forever… so much for quality over quantity… too bad euthanasia is not legal ;-)
In Arista v. Does 1-17, the RIAA's case targeting students at the University of Oregon, the Oregon Attorney General's motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena — pending for about a year — has reached a perplexing conclusion. The Court agreed with the University that the subpoena, as worded, imposed an undue burden on the University by requiring it to produce 'sufficient information to identify alleged infringers,' which would have required the University to 'conduct an investigation,' but then allowed the RIAA to subpoena the identities of 'persons associated by dorm room occupancy or username with the 17 IP addresses listed' even though those people may be completely innocent. In his 8-page decision (PDF), the Judge also 'presumed' the RIAA lawyers' misrepresentations were an 'honest mistake,' made no reference at all to the fact, pointed out by the Attorney General, that the RIAA investigators (Safenet, formerly MediaSentry) were not licensed, rejected all of the AG's privacy arguments under both state and federal law, and rejected the AG's request for discovery into the RIAA's investigative tactics.
Several years ago a New Mexico Judge instructed the RIAA to bring further suits against individual defendants rather than join several in one action. For example, there is no accusation here that the various students acted in concert to infringe copyrights—whatever each of them allegedly did, it was done on an individual basis. Did the University raise this issue with the judge? Does the ruling address it?
A number of judges, more than a dozen, have held that it is illegal to join the John Does. But the University did not raise it. The tenor of the motion was that they were looking out for the University's interests rather than those of the students.
Good thing the penalty for bribery is very severe.
Sure, how many judges do you know that have been tried and found guilty of accepting bribes ? One, two maybe ? Oh, is it zero ? Right, because no judge would dare inconvenience one of their own, especially when the tide of corruption is unstoppable, why bother with such a damaging case ?
It's the kind of thing that puts your career to sleep, much like that young hotshot cop who thinks he's going to clean up the force. Next thing you know, he's doing traffic in some dead boring district because nobody wants him snooping around.
If you ever end up using latex again, these Makefile rules might prove
useful to you.
RERUN = "(There were undefined references|Rerun to get (cross-references|the bars) right|Table widths have changed. Rerun LaTeX.|Linenumber reference failed)"
RERUNBIB = "No file.*\.bbl|Citation.*undefined"
%.pdf:
pdflatex $<
egrep -c $(RERUNBIB) $*.log && (bibtex $*;pdflatex $<); true
egrep $(RERUN) $*.log && (pdflatex $<) ; true
egrep $(RERUN) $*.log && (pdflatex $<) ; true
clean:
rm -f *.aux *.log *.bbl *.blg *.brf *.cb *.ind *.idx *.ilg \
*.inx *.ps *.dvi *.toc *.out *.lot *~ *.lof *.ttt *.fff
You'll notice the first two are definitions for constants. These are
strings that get searched in the output from pdflatex (complains if you
need to rerun it if you're using bibliographies). The grep and &&
statements work together to automagically rebuild it for you.
Remember, Makefiles default to the first command unless you specify one.
Hackers have released source code that allows the 'backup' of RFID-protected passports, although the tool can potentially be used to create fake or cloned documents. The Hacker's Choice, a non-commercial group of computer security experts, has released a video showing a cloned passport being approved by a security scanner at a Dutch airport. When the reader scans the passport, it is revealed to belong to one Elvis Aaron Presley, complete with picture.
Reports of the hackers serenading security staff with 'Are You Clonesome Tonight' are unconfirmed.