EU to Microsoft: We still hate you.

The European Union slapped a further fine of 899 million euros (about 1.4 billion USD) on Microsoft for failing to live up to a 2004 ruling that centred around the bundling of Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer with the (also crappy) Windows OS and the release of key portions of code the 3rd party developers. The company has since complied with the ruling, but only after late October of last year, meaning that the fine is a punishment for basically everyday Microsoft spent not complying and probably trying to find a way to weasel out of it.

Meanwhile, Apple fanboys unhappy with the modest refresh to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups yesterday (and seriously, are MacHeads ever totally satisfied?) may not have to wait long foe the next round of upgrades. AppleInsider reports that the next refresh may come as soon as June as Apple incorporates a second round on Penryn chips that apparently boast a 1066 MHz front side bus. And you have to be a BIG dork to get excited about that. For those of you I just lost, you can go here and catch up.

Crops that can survive Judgement Day

Norway has just done us all a favor by opening a 'doomsday vault' that will protect up to 4.5 million seed samples to protect crop diversity in the event that climate change, disease, natural disasters, or part of the world getting nuked require us to come up with resistant crops to feed whatever is left of the world's population. Located under a mountain on an island is the Svalbard archipelago, the facility was completed in less than a year for about $8 million US. Never hurts to plan ahead, especially with some of the people we've put in charge lately.

It seems one way to stop cops from killing people out of hand with supposedly safe weapons is to give them regular training on what constitutes a reasonable use of force and paying them top dollar for it. That's just what the Ottawa police have been doing, and it seems to be working. In the year since the training premium was introduced, Ottawa saw the fewest incident of Taser use, only 12 in a city of more than a million people. Use of guns and and just plain beating people up ("physical control") were also down, while use of pepper spray was flat. Which does slightly beg the question of why isn't training on the appropriate use of force mandatory? It seems like a reasonable thing to do to sit your officers down once in a blue moon and remind them that they're there to protect society and not be a threat to it. Because having more dirty cops is not an option.

In another positive development, Alberta's Privacy Commissioner has upheld the compliant of a man who felt a night club was going to far by scanning his driver's license before allowing him to enter. Just to be clear, bars are aloud to see your ID in order to verify your age, they are not allowed to scan the magnetic stripe and collect all your information. The club's owner claims the practice keeps away troublemakers. Oh, so this is another ridiculous trade of privacy and personal freedom for security? No thanks.

Eventually you discover that everything you learned in elementary school is wrong. A new study reported by National Geographic says that the 'eyespots' often seen on moths are not intended to mimic the eyes of a larger, meaner creature but instead are to give an indication of unpleasantness simply by being 'visually loud'. And now you know.

That is the Sound of Inevitability

Two big names called it quits today. Fidel Castro threw in the towel as President of Cuba, while Toshiba announced that it is dropping HD DVD. I know these two topic are unrelated, but Castro was Cuba's head of state for 49 years while HD DVD has been in a format war for 2 years. You'll find plenty of people ready to argue that both went on for too long.

Another battle looms: sides are being drawn in the net neutrality debate. Those in favour of treating all data the same: Sony, Vonage, and numerous consumer advocacy groups. Those in favour of not letting you have the bandwidth you paid for and intrusive packet inspection: Comcast, most large phone carriers, and everybody's favourite pack of weasels, the RIAA. Yeah, keep blaming Big Content's problems on Bittorrent. Saying that something is true over and over doesn't make it so. I think you can infer my opinion from the above, even though I suspect that my ISP already throttles me. Grrr.

Still on the topic of networks, the undersea data lines that cut off swaths of the middle east and India from most of their internet bandwidth earlier this month remain a mystery. One break was determined to be an accident, the other four are still under investigation and sabotage has not been ruled out.

Finally, Apple has trotted out a refreshed iPod Shuffle lineup. We have the usual aluminum casings and selection of colours, including a (PRODUCT) RED version (Wow! Misuse of capitals and parentheses!). Notably, there is now a 2 GB version at $79 US and the price of the 1GB model is now a paltry $49 US. Now give the MacBook lineup a boost and I'll be impressed.

Happy President's Day!

Although given the guy currently running the White House you may wish to toilet paper his lawn rather than celebrate. It's not a holiday in Canada, at least not for Quebec and Atlantic Canada. It's Family Day in Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and the newly-minted Louis Riel Day in Manitoba. Someday I want to get a day named after me for nearly starting a civil war. Folks in BC also get a holiday, although I'm not sure what it's called. Calls to make it a national holiday will probably fall of deaf ears because of endless bitching from businesses.

There's even a new country today, depending on who you talk too. Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia today to the jubilation of some and fears of ethnic persecution for others. International reaction is mixed. Russia claims that Kosovo's declaration of independence is illegal, the US supports the move because it lets them indulge in more high-minded talk about freedom, the EU and Canada are sitting on the fence. Serbia is, of course, fuming and accuses the US of supporting Kosovo's independence only to further its military presence in the region. The UN meanwhile is appealing for calm while wondering what effect this might have on other separatist groups around the world. Stay tuned.

NASA has determined that early Mars was probably unsuitable for life as we know it. While wet, the planet was probably too salty and acidic to support the kinds of chemical interactions believed to have started Earth's earliest life.

Hybrids: the Silent Battering Ram

Well, you all new it was too good to be true: the National Federation of the Blind has criticized hybrid cars which use all-electric drive under low-speed conditions for being too quiet. Ugh. As if the noise from the 2-litre inline four in my very much conventional Ford Focus does a great job of stopping people from just wandering out in front of me without looking. I almost took out three people in the parking lot of my local supermarket the other day, all of whom walked out within feet of my car while looking the other direction. And too my knowledge, none of them were blind and all would have had a clear view of me if only they had bothered to look. Can you imagine if your nice, quiet hybrid car suddenly had to be equipped with a some sort of noise maker so no blind people walk out in front of it? A bill is even before congress to make it law that all vehicle shall emit a minimum level of noise. Those of you living in cities with existing noise problems may wish to write your congressman.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has placed Canada as the world's third worst country for piracy after China and Russia. Canada's crime? Not so much that th making of say, bootleg DVDs is rampant like in China, but that Canada "has taken no meaningful steps toward modernizing its copyright law to meet the minimum global standards of the WIPO internet treaties, which it signed more than a decade ago". Oh, would that be the same treaty that lead to the introduction of the DCMA? Yes, it is. I see that worked out really well for you folks south of the border. I wonder what our representative was thinking by signing it in the first place. Can anyone really blame us for not introducing a draconian solution that hurts the general public so big content can make money? Apparently the IIPA can. Ars Technica suggests that maybe the reason the IIPA decided to put Canada so high on the list is because it represents an easy target. The article curiously focuses almost exclusively on piracy of video games which are of course part of the puzzle but not the only area of concern. While copyright reform is definitely needed pretty much everywhere, the Canadian version of the DCMA has met an immediate backlash and an alternative solution is clearly required. But don't expect one anytime soon. With Canada in its second straight minority government, no one want to touch copyright reform with a ten foot pole.

Film is dead and the music industry is killing itself.

Polaroid announced on Friday that it was getting out of the film business, which by my reckoning makes film officially dead for still photography. The company says that it is interested in licensing its technology, but somehow I don't see any buyers for what is by now an irrelevant product.

Meanwhile, the RIAA is at it again in what seems increasingly like an attempt to piss off consumers until we stop buying music from the big labels altogether. On Friday, the top weasel was speaking at a conference in Washington, DC and was (I think) trying to make some kind of intelligent response to the recent realization that filtering for copyrighted content at the ISP level would not work because users could easily break such a system by encrypting file-sharing traffic. And this is the stink bomb that came out: move the filtering software to user's computers. As it I'm going to put software on my machine to break any of its functionality. Sorry, RIAA, that is what we call a virus. The perhaps 10% of users who are computer literate enough to use P2P software but not enough to recognize a blatant threat when they see it is not going to get things back to the days when the big label's business model made sense.

After this monumental gaffe, the RIAA parachuted in a spokeperson to say that the big weasel was "simply musing" and that the direction the filtering strategy would take had not been decided. Yeah, nice try. Enjoy the ride into irrelevancy, it won't stop anytime soon.

Audio pundit Steve Guttenberg finally found a home theatre system he likes in the Kipnis Studio Standard, which has a projector capable of four times the resolution of the maximum HDTV standard (1080p) and delivers 11 315 W from 8 speakers and 8 subwoofers. It cost 6 million dollars, takes up a garage-sized room, and will send your power bill through the roof and your neighbors running for cover, but it does get the Guttenberg stamp of approval. It's also one of the most disgusting cases of overkill I have ever seen.

And finally, those of you suffering from the debilitating condition of Blackberry Thumb can now soothe those aches and pains with a specially designed brace. Mike Yamamoto over at Crave struggles to find an adequate description of what the thing looks like. I know what: the Goa'uld hand device from Stargate SG-1. Creepy.

Fully Completely

Sometimes I mean to update this blog and real life just keeps getting in the way, like having to take a quick and totally unplanned trip to PEI this past weekend. In the meantime, much has happened and my Google Reader queue has gotten away from me fully completely (it's a Tragically Hip song, look it up). So here's some highlights from the past few days in no particular order.

As you probably know, the Giants defeated the Patriots 17-14 in Superbowl XLII Sunday night. While I'm a bit sore at the Giants for knocking my Packers out in the conference championships, I am thrilled that somebody managed to knock the Patriots of their high horse. I think one headline over at NFL.com best summed it up: Eighteen and D'oh! I can't wait to see the NFL Films treatment of the fourth quarter, that was 15 minutes for the ages. Going into the playoffs many of the pundits acted like the playoffs where merely a formality and that the Patriots were already the champions. Which really sucks in terms of entertainment value for the fans. At this point I'm glad I can file those predictions under things Eli Manning can laugh about when he sits down with big brother Peyton and tells war stories over a few beers.

If you work in a cube farm like me, you know that the printer has replaced the water cooler as the gathering point of choice. The throughput of the average office means you might be waiting for a while for your document to make it to the top of the list on the print server. Crave shows us the most massive printer I've ever seen, and possibly the largest printer in history. The top of the line from Canon is 28 feet long and costs a cool $280 000 US.

Ars Technica reports that an anonymous sponsor is trying to get the US Patent Office to throw out patent 5,235,431, a notoriously overbroad patent filed in 1991 that relates to digital image compression for use on web pages. Bought by a patent troll called TechSearch in 1999, the patent has since been used to prise exorbitant licensing fees from everyone from the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the Green Bay Packers. Perhaps this will be the case that finally stops such clear abuses of the legal system and copyright law? Probably not, but I can dream. The headline refers to this as "hunting trolls", in which case I suggest that people involved in such pursuits be called Patent Warlocks.

Rather than complaining about the effect some features (and lack thereof) in the recently arrived Macbook Air, Appleinsider has published a lengthy piece which examines the design trade-offs which allowed Apple to come out with what it claims is the thinnest notebook in the world. Which, as an engineer I know all about design trade-offs and like to look at product design in this way. Things start making a lot of sense when you use that perspective.

Travelers in and through the US can now get some answers from the Transportation Security Agency the next time they are held up at the airport for violating one or more of the agencies bizarre and ever changing rules. Personally I think someone over at the TSA is spiking the kool-aid or has a copy of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field generator. But you can now get the official justification via the TSA's blog and decide for yourself just how full of shit they really are.

In an only slightly related story, Crave has published its list of bomb proof gadgets. Feel free to write your own segway.