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some random stuff I find interesting today ....
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March 04 2010
robots.net - Robots: Swarming Satellites
nice podcast to hear also what there plans for the future are
Tags: tech swarm satellites robots
Posted by: juxileitner
March 01 2010
Powering cube satellites
Tags: cubesat propulsion
Posted by: juxileitner
Concept for swarming "display blocks" Boing Boing
Tags: display tech augmented reality
Posted by: juxileitner
February 28 2010
February 25 2010
February 24 2010
Serious threat to the web in Italy
But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.
Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.
But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.
These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.
Posted by Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel - Europe, Middle East and Africa
February 22 2010
The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.
February 19 2010
Announcing Hackerspaces in Space, the space blimp contest

Here's an exciting challenge from Workshop 88, called Hackerspaces in Space. It's an inter-hackerspace challenge to send a weather balloon into space, capture some amazing data, and retrieve it. This could be a great team project for an established space, or even a good way to motivate a group of people to get together and form a space!
I can't help but notice that it also seems a timely and appropriate response to Martin Gittins, who recently noted that "The horizon of our vision for technology is no longer interplanetary travel but multi-touch user interface designs." While there are certainly great reasons to improve the usability and reach of technology, we shouldn't forget that there is a huge universe out there to explore, and that you don't need to be NASA to get a glimpse of it.
Of course, weather balloon won't technically make it into outer space (more like the stratosphere), but are certainly an accessible way to get pretty far up with backyard technology. From their press release:
NAPERVILLE, Illinois - February 16, 2009 - Workshop 88, Chicago's only suburban hackerspace, has announced a new competition. Hackerspaces from around the world will participate to send weather balloons, with payloads, into near space hoping to capture pictures of the Earth's horizon. Inspired by many recent amateur weather balloon endeavors across the country, Hackerspaces in Space aims to turn this phenomenon into a full- fledged competition.Launches will begin in June and run till the end of August. At the end of competition teams will post their results and pictures on the web where they will be judged on a variety of criteria like: retrieval time, weight of payload, and total cost of the project.
Motivated by the excitement of the challenge, or in some cases a personal vendetta, nine hacker spaces have already signed up for the challenge. So don't delay, check out the competition website for the official rules and to register. See you... in space!
Image courtesy HeatSync labs
More:
- DIY SPACE - Make: Video Podcast
- Hydrogen balloon camera project
- Successful High Altitude Balloon!
- Spanish students beat NASA
- How many balloons does it take to lift a person?
This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)
If you are a pirate, this is what you get (via Making Light)
Pow!
February 18 2010
February 17 2010
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...

