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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Opinion: ACTA – speaking out the unspeakable
Kader Arif, the Rapporteur for the ACTA agreement in the European Parliament has today resigned over the issues he sees with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (AKTA). To express his views and issues as a member of the European Parliament he issued the following statement on his blog (in French – English translation below) …
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Quote of the day: Internet regulations are like witchcraft
The fact that there is no such thing as witchcraft didn’t stop them from burning a lot of “witches”. By the same token the ineffectiveness of the “remedy” is actually worse for us. It’s like the “five-year-plan” that produces no wheat that yields an even more drastic “five-year-plan” that also produces no corn …
Cory Doctorow @ 28C3 28-December-2011
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Internet: The Great Firewall of the USA – Stop SOPA before it is too late
On November 16th, Congress is holding hearings on the first American Internet censorship system.
If this bill passes it certainly will be the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history. The House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA soon, but has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.
If this bill passes, the Internet and free speech will never be the same. And so will U.S. society and the Internet industry as a whole. In the U.S. where this industry in total is larger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining or utilities, this bill will put innovation and thousands of small to mid-size companies at risk….
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Technology: The Biped Robot on a bike
There are quite a few tasks that for humans seem to be very simple and do happen nearly automatically, but for robots and their creators these have turned out to be rather challenging. Walking, running, balancing things and of course bicycling are some of those tasks.
Now here’s a robot with two legs riding on a bicycle…
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DMR 1941 – 2011, RIP
At the age of 70 on 12-Oct-2011 tech giant and Turing award winner Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and C has passed away.
RIP, our thanks will always be with you. Very few things that today hundreds of million people use on their computers everyday would have been possible or here without your work…
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U.S.A. – The weather and climate change in 2011
With climate extrema continue to expose human and natural system vulnerabilities, natural disaster cost are skyrocketing and dozens of billions in damages each year become common, many are asking how this will continue.
According to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) 2011 is estimated to become the costliest year for weather-related disasters since they began tracking billion-dollar disasters in 1980. There seems to be a pattern of more extreme, more frequent and more hazardous weather disasters emerging. Based on HVRI data (in 2009 USD) 6 of the 15 costliest years of the last 50 years where during the last decade. With losses of property & crop in 2009 totaling up to USD 67.4 billion after the record losses of USD 111.6 billion in 2005 and the almost 3 times the average (USD 11.4 billion) year of 2004 with USD 30.4 billion, losses of USD 23 billion in 2008, USD 16.2 billion in 2001 and USD 11.9 billion in 2006 these 6 peak years of the last decade combined have caused damages of USD 260.5 billion. That there is a change in extreme weather phenomena happening becomes even clearer when looking at the overall damage totals from the last 50 years (USD 573.6 billion) where those 6 peak years of the last decade represent more than 45% of all losses occurred during the recorded time frame (HVRI has data published from 1960 – 2009).
The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) tracked 3 more than an USD billion disasters for 2010 and 2011 has already topped their 30 year record of 2008 (8 events) with so-far 10 (multi)-billion disasters (Hurricane Irene being the 10th) …
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