Month: September 2004

AUSTRALIA is being flooded with pirate DVDs – and the money is helping fund global terrorism. The number of pirate discs recovered by police and customs during the first quarter of this year has already matched the total for last year. And Interpol is warning that counterfeit discs have overtaken drugs as the biggest source…

The Federal Opposition says it will spend $21 million on anti-smoking campaigns if it wins next month’s federal election. Opposition health spokeswoman Julia Gillard says the money will be spent over four years on television advertisements that encourage people to quit smoking. Ms Gillard says Labor wants to drive smoking rates down to 15 per…

The new iMac G5. Yum. you did take a look at it already didn’t you? 

I don’t watch tv. it surprises me that people do watch as much as they do. 

A security flaw in the way many Microsoft applications process JPEG images could allow an attacker to gain control over a computer running the software, Microsoft warned this week. Any program that processes JPEG images could be vulnerable, Microsoft says in Security Bulletin MS04-028. To take advantage of the flaw, an attacker would have to…

NEC Corp is aiming to make more than 10 per cent of the plastic it uses in PCs biodegradable by 2010. The company will release notebook personal computers that use biodegradable plastic this month.

Does John Howard have election dysfunction? He just can’t seem to get it up past 2%! Does he really think his tiny Clean Energy Target is going to satisfy anyone? At the upcoming Federal election, use your vote to tell John Howard that size really does matter. Climate change is already hurting Australia through the…

Stanford Professor Mark Lemley argues that the notion that intellectual property resembles property ‘represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property…. the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning…

Michael Moore’s Blog: “1,000 Dead — How Do You Sleep Mr. Bush? Watching TV, the anchorman says, ‘A milestone tonight, the 1,000th American soldier to die in Iraq.’ 13 soldiers have died in the past two days. We don’t know how many Iraqi civilians have died in the bombing of Fallujah and Sadr City today,…

We know what you’re thinking. A robot that totes around human sewage, digesting living beings for energy? What, you’re not inexorably excited about this? The EcoBot II (ah, what a benign, nonthreatening name) is fed flies into 12 sewage-based bacterial fuel cells, which break them down, digest them, and use the electrons released as current.…