"Genetically modified potatoes developed by Monsanto, the multinational biotech company, have been fed to sick patients in an experiment. Rats that ate similar potatoes in the research suffered reductions in the weight of their hearts and prostate glands.
Dr Michael Antoniou, reader in molecular genetics at Guy's, King's and St Thomas' School of Medicine, said use of humans was "irresponsible and totally unethical, especially when already ill subjects were enrolled. These people truly were guinea pigs." Other scientists said the trials were too short, on too few people, to give meaningful results of long-term effects.
Monsanto said the vegetables were safe, and the researchers conducting the experiment said effects on the rats were within "permissible" limits."
LINK
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
This makes my head ache.
"PALMER, Alaska, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Free wireless Internet service at a public library in Palmer, Alaska, doesn't mean its available for use after hours.
A Palmer man has been waiting to see if he'll be charged with criminal wrongdoing after a patrolling police officer seized the laptop he was using to play online video games in the parking lot.
Authorities told the Anchorage Daily News Saturday that Brian Tanner, 21, had been chased out of a number of locations around Palmer where he had been latching on to wireless service.
Police said that although Tanner was using an essentially free service, there are library rules governing its use and Tanner wasn't following them." LINK
A Palmer man has been waiting to see if he'll be charged with criminal wrongdoing after a patrolling police officer seized the laptop he was using to play online video games in the parking lot.
Authorities told the Anchorage Daily News Saturday that Brian Tanner, 21, had been chased out of a number of locations around Palmer where he had been latching on to wireless service.
Police said that although Tanner was using an essentially free service, there are library rules governing its use and Tanner wasn't following them." LINK
Pushing the limits?
"Those amusing YouTube video clips that Internet users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the Net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn.
It's an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.
But no one disagrees that the Web's capacity is being pushed to its limits."We don't see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading towards," said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network's center." LINK
It's an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.
But no one disagrees that the Web's capacity is being pushed to its limits."We don't see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading towards," said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network's center." LINK
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Second Life Revolution- Is virtual terrorism terrorism? Is Linden a government?
Man, so many of these stories out of Second Life feel so surreal, but they raise important questions.
People are demanding a right to vote in Second Life, and are turning to violence.
"Cahill saw a bleak future, but he felt powerless to stop them. So he detonated an atomic bomb outside an American Apparel outlet. Then another outside a Reebok store."
The army has staged a number of protests in Second Life to publicize its position. Three gun-toting members shot customers outside American Apparel — bullet wounds in Second Life are not fatal but merely disrupt a user's experience — and Reebok stores last year.Then they stepped up the campaign, exploding nukes, which manifested themselves in swirling fireballs that thrust users at the scene into motionless limbo."
LINK
People are demanding a right to vote in Second Life, and are turning to violence.
"Cahill saw a bleak future, but he felt powerless to stop them. So he detonated an atomic bomb outside an American Apparel outlet. Then another outside a Reebok store."
The army has staged a number of protests in Second Life to publicize its position. Three gun-toting members shot customers outside American Apparel — bullet wounds in Second Life are not fatal but merely disrupt a user's experience — and Reebok stores last year.Then they stepped up the campaign, exploding nukes, which manifested themselves in swirling fireballs that thrust users at the scene into motionless limbo."
LINK
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
OLPC kicking a**, taking names in every possible way.
"For example, there is no reason why your copy of Solitaire should be able to browse through your tax records and send interesting tidbits to organized criminals in Russia. Today's generation of antivirus, antispyware programs work by having a list of all these bad programs and scanning for them. The OLPC approach is to simply deny your Solitare program from being able to access the network or browse your files. Why should it need those capabilities, anyway?"
LINK to article about the security systems on the OLPCs.
LINK to article about the security systems on the OLPCs.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Despite laws saying that Government docs are public domain, lawyer finds drm block
I hate PDFs with the fire of a thousand suns, but this goes far beyond that.
"DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain...it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying...I have no hacking skills; I'm just a non-profit lawyer trying to read a government document. Normally I'd buy some software utility that would let me do this, but such a utility is something the DMCA definitely prohibits. I better start writing my petition for a Copyright Office exemption next time they grant them in two years."
LINK
"DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain...it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying...I have no hacking skills; I'm just a non-profit lawyer trying to read a government document. Normally I'd buy some software utility that would let me do this, but such a utility is something the DMCA definitely prohibits. I better start writing my petition for a Copyright Office exemption next time they grant them in two years."
LINK
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Soon, Disney will just own Childhood™®
Hm. Disney is always scary, but this is something else.
"You probably are not aware that earlier this month Disney applied to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand for sweeping trade mark protection around works that Disney did not create.
You may be astonished at the breadth of the application being lodged by a company that has done no more, in this case, than produce adaptations of classic works of children's literature. Ditto for Snow White, Peter Pan, Pinocchio and a list of characters from those works.
This is not trivial. It would be understandable for Disney to try and protect its interpretations of existing characters, but its application for so-called "word marks" implies something much more than that: it implies exclusive rights to use all those characters. There have been at least 14 English-language films based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (which itself drew on classical sources), and many more in other languages. If Disney was to obtain such trade marks (which cover "motion picture films"), would it then become impossible to make - or at least market - another one without Disney's permission? Would it be a copyright lockout via the back door?"
LINK
"You probably are not aware that earlier this month Disney applied to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand for sweeping trade mark protection around works that Disney did not create.
You may be astonished at the breadth of the application being lodged by a company that has done no more, in this case, than produce adaptations of classic works of children's literature. Ditto for Snow White, Peter Pan, Pinocchio and a list of characters from those works.
This is not trivial. It would be understandable for Disney to try and protect its interpretations of existing characters, but its application for so-called "word marks" implies something much more than that: it implies exclusive rights to use all those characters. There have been at least 14 English-language films based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (which itself drew on classical sources), and many more in other languages. If Disney was to obtain such trade marks (which cover "motion picture films"), would it then become impossible to make - or at least market - another one without Disney's permission? Would it be a copyright lockout via the back door?"
LINK
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
