Looking Real Good: fashion shots of normal people

in

Cory Doctorow:

Pete sez, "Last week my friends and I quietly launched our new project; the basic premise is that interesting people upload photos of themselves looking their best. Every day there's a new person to read about on the homepage/RSS for 24 hours. There's no profit motive, and no opportunity to comment or vote or any other cruft; it's just an opportunity to wake up and see a fresh new face."

Link

(Thanks, Pete)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Google’s driving direx from New York to Dublin, Ireland

in

Cory Doctorow:

Hilarious: ask Google Maps for driving directions from New York to Dublin, Ireland and they'll give them to you, including this step, "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi." Weirdly, they instruct you to swim to France, drive the Chunnel to England, then take a ferry back to Ireland. Surely there's a more efficient totally impossible route?

Link

(via Kottke)

Update:
Dave sez, "Of course, you'd have to swim about 4.9mph for 29 continuous days to achieve this time. Considering that the worlds fastest swimming records (in a 50-meter race) are just over 5mph... your mileage may vary!"

(Via Boing Boing.)

Core’s Successor Announced

in

Ars reports that Intel released details on Penryn, which will be the 45nanometer successor to our Macs’ beloved Core 2 Duo processors. There’s all kinds of geeky specs and details if you’re into the mechanics of computer processors.


But if you’re just in it for the looks, er, something like that, here are a couple of juicy deets that should make some sense to you.



  • We can expect video codec processes to see a 40% speed increase

  • 1600MHz front side bus with 6-12mb of L2 cache

  • Enhanced Power Saving features - should be great for portables!


But the biggest news seems to come in the Virtualization arena where they claim a 40% increase in virtualization processes. This should make running any other flavor of OS on our Intel Macs that much sweeter. Oh, and upwards of 3GHz clock speeds and beyond. All in all, next year should bring some mighty speedy Macs.

(Via The Apple Blog.)

Trademark Law Spinning Out Of Control

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Trademark law is unlike copyrights and patents in a very important way. Copyrights and patents are designed to give specific ownership over an idea or work to those that created it. Trademark, on the other hand, is not at all about ownership -- which is why it probably shouldn't be included under the "intellectual property" umbrella. It's really about consumer protection. You don't want consumers to be confused into buying a product believing it's one thing (say, Coca-Cola) when it's really something else (say, Bob's Cola). Unfortunately, with the growing intellectual property obsession among lawyers in this country, there's been an effort underway to stretch the intended meaning of trademark law away from just consumer protection into outright ownership. The latest is that lawyers are encouraging clients to trademark all sorts of phrases to prevent their general use without a license -- which seems like a clear First Amendment violation. One example given is a phrase that a former boyfriend used to say to Anna Nicole Smith. Apparently he (and his lawyers) are hoping that the trademark means that anyone who uses the phrase in "movies, books, TV programs, Internet programs and stage plays" will now have to pay up first. This is not at all what trademark law was designed for, and yet when we're taught that you can "own" ideas and concepts, it's no surprise to see people try to take ownership of simple words and phrases as well.

(Via Techdirt.)

Julie Amero Sentencing Delayed Again; Prosecutors May Be Trying To Figure Out How To Back Out Gracefully

in

The Julie Amero case has been getting plenty of attention lately, after prosecutors (and the local press) in Connecticut condemned a local substitute teacher after the classroom computer she was using was overrun with porn popups from spyware. For this, she was facing 40 years in jail. While the local paper and the prosecutor kept insisting that everyone didn't know the full story, once the transcripts became available it became clear that it was the prosecutors, the local police and the local press who didn't seem to recognize the full story. While the local Norwich Bulletin continues to insist she deserves to be thrown in jail (update: they no longer support jailing Amero, but still get twisted about trying to explain how she's guilty of something), it sounds like the prosecutors on the case may be recognizing that they were wrong. The sentencing has been delayed for another month, and the suggestion is that its the prosecution that's looking for a way to get out of this mess cleanly without looking too bad. In the meantime, the Hartford Courant put together a good article summarizing the details of the case that make it clear this whole thing was something of a witch hunt.

(Via Techdirt.)

Secure Programming Exams Launched - Jacob Quoted in article!!!!

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An anonymous reader writes "The SANS Software Security Institute, in conjunction with organizations such as Siemens, Symantec, Juniper, OWASP, and Virginia Tech, has announced a program for testing whether programmers know how to write secure code. The Secure Programming Skills Assessment is split into separate language families (C/C++, Java/J2EE, Perl/PHP, and ASP/.NET). Director of research Alan Paller says 'This assessment and certification program will help programmers learn what they don't know, and help organizations identify programmers who have solid security skills.' The pilot exam will be held in Washington DC in August, followed by a global rollout."

(Via Slashdot.)