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Comment: Re:how bout (Score 1) 932

by Incongruity (#36038446) Attached to: Draft Proposal Would Create Agency To Tax Cars By the Mile

Of course, you realize that thinking like that effectively hits the poor the hardest. Many working poor have cars because they need them to get to work but could not afford to replace them with the new fuel efficient vehicle you want them to. It will be years before the more fuel efficient cars are cheap/used. In that time, the lower-income earners will have seen a disproportionate amount of their already low discretionary spending eaten by the higher gas prices you want.

Comment: Re:Nothing to see here, move along (Score 5, Informative) 145

by Incongruity (#31357676) Attached to: Why PyCon 2010's Conference Wi-Fi Didn't Melt Down

Of course, the top answer to the question you link to comes from Sean (Jafo), the same person who authored the story submitted here. Sean's been nothing short of a hero @ PyCon for a number of years now – the one or two times we tried to replace him with a sub-contracted internet solution, it always ended painfully... or, well, more rightly, with Sean coming in and saving the day.

So, as someone who has worked with Sean on making PyCon happen, I can say, without a doubt, that he really knows how to get it done. My hat's off to him and


Obama Admin Fights Missing White House Email Lawsuit 345

Posted by Soulskill
from the what-happens-in-dc-stays-in-dc dept.
DesScorp writes "The AP reports that the Obama administration has picked up where the Bush administration left off on the missing White House email issue by trying to have a lawsuit dismissed that would have kept investigating whether or not email was still missing. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President expressed disappointment with the Obama administration's actions. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government. The Justice Department 'apparently never got the message' from Obama, Blanton said."

Comment: Re:Non-Free license (Score 1) 54

by Incongruity (#26647923) Attached to: U.C. System and Springer Agree To CC-Licensed Journal Articles

See that "Publicly Perform" bit? You may not do that for commercial advantage.

Right -- that means you can't get up on stage and read the article and charge a fee at the door for people to hear you doing so. Similarly, you can't record such a spoken-word performance, etc. etc.

It in no way prevents you from using the ideas therein towards your own research by my reading and standard usages of licenses.


Survival-Horror Genre Going Extinct? 166

Posted by Soulskill
from the scary-proposition dept.
Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.

Hubble Finds Unidentified Object In Space 716

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the cosmic-dust-on-the-lens dept.
Gizmodo is reporting that the Hubble space telescope has found a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. Some are even suggesting that this could be a new class of object. Of course, without actually understanding more about it, the speculation seems a bit wild. "The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."

Washington Bans Chemicals; Industry Freaks 373

Posted by kdawson
from the quit-polybrominating-our-kids dept.
Frosty Piss writes "The governor of Washington is scheduled to sign legislation today to ban flame retardants called PBDEs in furniture, televisions, and computers in the state. This is despite the more than $220,000 the chemical industry has spent since 2005 to defeat the legislation. At a time when the federal government is largely ineffectual in regulating long-used but potentially dangerous industrial chemicals, the Washington ban could be the beginning of the end for PBDEs across the nation. 'The industry that makes deca and PBDEs is freaking out because they lost so severely in Washington state and other states will follow,' said a spokeswoman for the Washington Toxics Coalition. 'It really is a message from Washington state and policymakers that we won't accept chemicals that build up in our bodies and our children.'"
The Internet

Net Neutrality Never Really Existed? 157

Posted by kdawson
from the cry-me-no-tiers dept.
dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.

Vista and the Music Industry 438

Posted by kdawson
from the locked-down dept.
BanjoBob writes "Vista locks down all the DRM functionality and actually reduces the quality of playback of some media. This includes both audio and video content. As a company creating music and video products, how can we use Vista to create, distribute, and use legal media? I have read nothing to indicate that Vista has a model to allow 'authorized' use without causing problems. Currently we use Windows 2000 and Linux products. If what we understand is true, Vista and future Microsoft products won't be viable options for us since prior to publication, media must be copied multiple times, edited, moved around, re-edited and often modified into various forms (trailers, etc.) before, during, and after production. This naturally includes backups and recovery. If Vista is intent on prohibiting these uses, then Microsoft is intent on keeping their products out of the realm of content creation and editing. How do others deal with these issues?"

+ - The Auto Efficiency Wedge

Submitted by
Prof. Goose
Prof. Goose writes "In this piece, I wanted to take up a more precise consideration of how much auto efficiency improvements might contribute to solving what I called the terrible trio of energy dependence on unstable regimes, global warming, and the peaking or plateauing of liquid fuel supply. My examples are all US, but I think the lessons mostly carry over (if a little less urgently) to other developed countries.

I'll be reasoning mainly by looking at what we did in the 1970s, which was the last time we faced severe energy constraints that bled through into requiring a demand side response.

To begin with, let's refresh our memories about the history of oil prices, which tells the story of the oil shocks quite well. 32"
