Category: outside

Office phones are filthier than toilet seats. Nice. I knew there was some reason I don’t like talking on the phone much.

Robert X. Cringley has some thoughts on Sveasoft‘s replacement firmware for Linksys routers (with lots of nifty features) and how they have chosen to get cash from their user base. Their software is released under the GPL and a lot of people claimed their pricing terms were in violation of it. Cringley sets things straight and includes some interesting tidbits about how the GPL works and how open source developers can make a living.

One of the two competing implementations of Ultra-Wide Band, the wireless technology that is expected to replace USB and possibly FireWire, has been approved by the FCC. The article is mostly some smack talking between the two competing camps, but it suggests some of the potential. In a few years, you may not need wires between your computer and the display and any external hard drives and other peripherals. Additionally, the wires between your DVD player and TV will go away, too. Neither of the implementations have yet been approved as a standard by the IEEE, but they seem to both intend to bring products to market anyway. It’s not certain which one will win out at this point so only really early adopters will join in on the fun right away.

Paranoids and Conspiracy Theorists, start your engines! The government has been increasingly turning to private companies for information that is either difficult or illegal for them to obtain in other ways. Many private companies share information freely with the government without any sort of subpoena or other legal requirement. In addition, data aggregation companies have been amassing tremendous databases of all available forms of information and provide data mining services for a fee. The government is one of their customers and is not restricted in any way from using the information it obtains. I’m generally not especially disturbed by the notion that there are ways to obtain highly detailed information about a person, but I do think it’s important to try to keep a mental picture of what information may be available and how it may be used.

There are laws in many cities around the country prohibiting heavy trucks (classified as having a gross weight over 6000 lbs) from driving on residential streets. They are designed to keep the trucks on larger roads where they are less of a danger and annoyance. It turns out that many SUVs are also illegal to drive in residential areas. Most large SUVs are designed intentionally to be over the 6000 lb line because that’s also the the point where they become a tax write-off commonly employed by the wealthy. Funny twist, eh?

The FCC has ruled 5-0 that VoIP (voice over IP) providers must comply with wiretapping requirements previously set for traditional phone lines. This isn’t really surprising, but it’s good to keep up with what communication methods are not safe for planning crimes. Instant Messaging and ‘pure’ VoIP that doesn’t involve traditional phone lines is currently not included.

Via Slashdot: The European Space Agency is studying the potential for employing human hibernation in future long distance space journeys. They don’t know for sure if its possible yet, but there are some positive indicators. It seems obvious to me that some sort of hibernation will be necessary before we’ll be able to get very far out into space, but maybe I’ve just watched too many movies.

More and more universities are signing on with Napster to provide legal digital music download service to their students. The fees going to Napster are being drawn from student fees and are mandatory. It doesn’t seem fair to tax all students for a service that only some will use… and even less fair to impose a tax of this kind on all students because of the illegal actions of a few. I don’t like the smell of this.

Some scientists in Russia have figured out how to use all of that blood thrown away by slaughter houses all the time. They have a process to turn blood into imitations of foods like coffee, chocolate, and milk. They apparently do not differ in taste from the originals and they can be metabolized twice as fast… hmm.

Microsoft was suing Linspire, a company making a Linux distribution aimed at being a full Windows replacement, over their use of the name ‘Lindows’. Microsoft didn’t like how much ‘Lindows’ resembled ‘Windows’. During some of the ensuing court battles some judges started to question whether or not ‘Windows’ is even a viable trademark AT ALL. For instance, the original Macintosh was out before Windows 1.0 and it already had visual screen representations of applications and folders that were referred to as ‘windows’. It looks like Microsoft has decided to decline to follow up that line of debate any further and has settled with Linspire fairly nicely. Score one for the little guy?