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Corvus Crow
The Fireraven
Tuesday, 09. February 2010, 4:06
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Monday, 08 February 2010
The US space agency (Nasa) plans just four further shuttle missions after this one - and all of them are planned to launch in daylight hours.Endeavour's mission is an important moment for the European Space Agency's (Esa) contribution to the station project. Both the new modules were manufactured in Italy by Thales Alenia Space. That's pretty much the end for cities on the moon and manned flights to Mars that the last generation was imagining for these years.
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Sunday, 07 February 2010
In the wake of iiNet's recent court win, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy has said that he wants the film and internet industries to sit down and try and work out a code of conduct to prevent pirating of copyrighted works rather than working towards legislation changes."I think it's always disappointing when situations like this end up in court in the first place," Conroy said. And if the court would have ruled differently, industry executives and politicians would have hailed it as a victory for everybody. Unfortunately for them, the judge thought a bit different, so now, basically ignoring the ruling, Conroy tries to force the ISP's into talks.
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Saturday, 06 February 2010
The US is threatening to stop working with Europe in the fight against terrorism after an EU parliamentary group rejected a proposed data-sharing agreement.Members of a European Parliament subcommittee dealt a blow to US-EU relations by voting to reject a proposed bank data sharing deal between the US and Europe in a preliminary vote on Thursday. Members of the parliament's civil liberties committee voted by 29 votes to 23 to reject the SWIFT deal, arguing that the deal fails to protect the privacy of EU citizens. Sorry that european privacy laws are more strict than in the US. Unfortunately, I like it that way and if the US now throws a tantrum then I really don't care. Lyndon B. Johnson already said it: "Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private". Besides, the threat not to work with the EU against terrorism is meaningless; because it would fire back and I don't think that US politicans assume that the EU will work with them against terrorism while getting nothing in return. That aside, US terrorism investigations don't seem to be that valueable: Bin Laden still isn't caught and Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
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Friday, 05 February 2010
The company once known for its "don't be evil" motto is now in bed with the spy agency known for the mass surveillance of American citizens.The company pinkie-swears that its agreement with the NSA won't violate the company's privacy policies or compromise user data. Those promises are a little hard to believe, given the NSA's track record of getting private enterprises to cooperate, and Google's willingness to take this first step. Google isn't evil? Now wait. They have lost that status long ago for things like supporting regimes like China in their efforts to censor everything.
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Thursday, 04 February 2010
After all, what do you do if someone inadvertently fed a page upside down into the fax machine? You simply turn the page over or, if you get an electronic version, use the reader software to rotate it. Apparently this is not within the standard operating procedures of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. No, if your fax comes in upside down, they send you a message in return saying that they can't accept it and to re-fax.The USPTO has to manage patents and inventions, not making them. I can't imagine what would happen to the universe if the patent office would start being creative and produce cunning solutions for drastic problems, like, for example, rotating pages by 180 degrees. On the other hand, this plan might be already patented.
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Random quote from Lord Kelvin: Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
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