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Thanks… Here’s a dollar. In change. Mostly pennies.
I don’t know why, but this is cracking me up as I imagine someone saying this, then awkwardly walking away while the other person is still laying there in bed.
Filed under: lulz, offtopic, photo/pics | No Comments »
Porsche Automobil Holding SE, the company that owns Porsche AG and has sought a controlling interest in Volkswagen AG, will not be on the list of government loans in Germany this year according to the latest reports. Porsche is already actively seeking help from outside sources, however.
Porsche had sought a $2.45 billion loan from Germany’s state bank KFW, but the bank rejected the loan on Tuesday, reports Reuters.
Earlier this week Porsche rejected an offer from Volkswagen in favor of a deal still under discussion with Qatar’s state-owned Qatar Investment Authority. The end goal, whatever the source of funds, is to find a way to service the roughly $12.5 billion debt the company holds.
The takeover attempt on VW was made to get access to cash, but when Porsche’s share stalled out at just over 50%, that access was still out of reach, so alternate routes were explored.
Porsche’s dramatic saga with Volkswagen has been well-documented – too well, really – and so while this latest development lacks the excitement of an espionage scandal, it’s potentially more important in the long term. Since Porsche now knows it has no safety net, the fight for integration with VW is one of survival as much as expansion.
Filed under: offtopic, politics | No Comments »
All of a sudden, Congress is paying close attention to Ron Paul.
The feisty congressman from Texas, whose insurgent “Ron Paul Revolution” presidential campaign rankled Republican leaders last year, now has the GOP House leadership on his side – backing a measure that generated paltry support when he first introduced it 26 years ago.
Filed under: ron paul | No Comments »
Microsoft’s recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of file system patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft’s FAT file system. 
A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue including FAT in Linux without using methods that are covered by Microsoft’s patents.
The patent dispute erupted in February when Microsoft sued portable navigation device maker TomTom. Microsoft claimed that TomTom’s Linux-based GPS products infringe on several of its patents, including two that cover specific characteristics of FAT, a file system devised by Microsoft that is widely used on removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives and memory cards. The dispute escalated when TomTom retaliated with a counter-suit, but it was eventually settled in March when TomTom agreed to remove the relevant functionality.
Filed under: copywrong, free open source software, linux, micro$oft, ugh | No Comments »
The latest Guardian column, “When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?” describes the process the writer’s wife and he went through when they drew up their wills and realized that their encrypted hard-drives and their network passwords would go with them if they died or were incapacitated,
and how important it was for them to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if they were to croak.
I don’t want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that’s because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries’s laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else’s keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own.I discarded any solution based on putting my keys in trust with a service that sends out an email unless you tell it not to every week – these “dead man’s switch” services are far less deserving of my trust than, say, my wife or my solicitor.
Filed under: howto, privacy, security | No Comments »
Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. 
GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world.
The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site.
The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.
“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.
“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.
Filed under: copywrong, pir8 | No Comments »
The day Firefox 3.0 was to be released I went to the Mozilla website and changed the version numbers in the URL and was able to download the official release version of 3.0 well before it was officially released. As most of you know FF 3.5 is releasing today (apparently) and I did the same thing to the URL.
I installed it and the welcome page does say “Thanks for testing this release Candidate” but the url to that page is “whatsnew” so they probably just haven’t put the new page in place yet.
Help->About shows version 3.5. Can anyone running the RC tell me what the version says in the about box?
Filed under: firefox, free open source software | No Comments »
Comics writer Mark Sable was detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for carrying a script for an upcoming comic book about a writer who is detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for writing a comic about terrorism.
“Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley’s Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for ‘extra screening’. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings.
TSA agents then ‘discovered’ the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.”The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.
“I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer’s scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks.
“In the end, I feel my privacy is a small price to pay for educating the government about the medium.”
Filed under: tsa sucks | No Comments »
I vaguely remember a number of lawsuits over the years of Microsoft vs “The Little Guy.” One that I distinctly remember was Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft. It was a legal dispute between Microsoft and a Canadian high school student named Mike Rowe over the domain name MikeRoweSoft.com. 
The case received international press attention following Microsoft’s perceived heavy-handed approach to a 12th grade student’s part time web design business and the subsequent support that Rowe received from the online community. A settlement was eventually reached, with Rowe granting ownership of the domain to Microsoft in exchange for training and gifts.
The MikeRoweSoft.com domain now forwards to a bing.com search page. Ironic, I think.
Fast-forward to 2009. Microsoft has a hot, new search decision engine: Bing.com. This is the first real change Microsoft has against search giant Google.com. While searching for a bing.com logo to use in a past blog post I made the mistake of typing “Bing” in Google’s Image Search. Not only did I not find any Bing.com logos, I was staring at a page saturated with hardcore pornography images… namely a pornstar named Carmella Bing. Although I have “safe search” turned off, I turned it back on and the results were still just Carmella.
Filed under: copywrong, micro$oft, ugh | No Comments »
Google has questioned Microsoft’s entire approach to online infrastructure, 
while taking some wonderfully sly shots at the company’s new decision engine search engine.
The undeniable highlight of Thursday’s cloud-happy Structure 09 conference was Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture. As he described how Google’s famously distributed infrastructure shames the Redmond competition, he would occasionally point his audience to relevant online materials using a deadpan line that put Microsoft’s incurable Mountain View envy is sharp relief. “If you Bing for it,” he would say, “you can find it.”
Filed under: google, micro$oft, news | No Comments »
Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the battle brewing now between Google and Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. 
Even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it might not matter because of the strength of Google’s brand. An independent usability and consumer preference study, which we’ve obtained and embedded below, suggests as much. It was conducted by the Catalyst Group, a usability research and design firm located in New York City.
The study was an intense focus group in which 12 subjects were monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches. Afterward, they were interviewed and completed a survey. Prior to the test, all the subjects used Google as their main search engine. Following the test, 4 out of the 12, or one third, said that overall they preferred Bing. The other 8 said that they preferred Google because they were already familiar with it, used other Google products, or that Bing’s improvements are simply not enough to make them switch.
Filed under: google, micro$oft, news | No Comments »
Clearly the work of computer graphics or God himself (pick one, there are a few), who knows, but if my laptop decided to do that, I’d probably go and check with the doctor to see if I haven’t got a brain tumor eating away at my cerebral cortex.
Filed under: FTW, apple, cool, offtopic | No Comments »
The ACLU is suing the Transportation Security Administration for illegally searching and detaining Steve Bierfeldt, a US citizen who was detained, cursed at, and threatened by TSA agents for carrying $4700 in cash (which is legal and doesn’t require disclosure in advance) at an airport in April.
The TSA agents surely would have gotten away with violating the Bierfeldt’s Constitutional rights had Bierfeldt not recorded the half-hour interrogation on his cell phone.
“I do not believe I should give up my constitutional rights each time I choose to travel by plane. I was doing nothing illegal or suspicious, yet I was treated like a potential criminal and harassed for no reason,” said Bierfeldt. “Most Americans would be surprised to learn that TSA considers simply carrying cash to be a basis for detention and questioning. I hope the court makes clear that my detention by TSA agents was unconstitutional and stops TSA from engaging in these unlawful searches and arrests. I do not want another innocent American to have to endure what I went through.”"Mr. Bierfeldt’s experience represents a troubling pattern of TSA attempting to transform its valid but limited search authority into a license to invade people’s privacy in a manner that would never be accepted outside the airport context,” said Larry Schwartztol, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Just as the Constitution prevents the police on the street from conducting freewheeling searches in the hopes of uncovering wrongdoing, it protects travelers from the kind of treatment Mr. Bierfeldt suffered.”
Filed under: privacy, tsa sucks | No Comments »
The truth is she’s a crippling dyslexic, and she really loves the guy in the picture whose name is Alan. You guys are really making their relationship unstable, could you please just chill?
Filed under: lulz, myspace facebook twitter, offtopic, photo/pics | No Comments »
SAFFORD, AZ – The Supreme Court says a school’s strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal. 
The court ruled on Thursday that school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding, who lives in Safford in rural eastern Arizona.
Redding was a 13-year-old honor student when she was called to the principal’s office.
Officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs.
Filed under: politics, privacy, ugh | No Comments »
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