Technology

Corning have released a followup video to their original A Day Made of Glass video which had more than 17 million view:

She talks like Miss Whaleoil…who is also 13..especially the uh-huh comments:

via Boing Boing

Only the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys could stuff up so badly.

 A French commercial court has found Google guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Google Maps application and ordered it to pay a fine and damages to a French mapping company.

In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.

The court ordered Google to pay 500,000 euros ($660,000) in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a 15,000 euro fine.

The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.

“This is the end of a two-year battle, a decision without precedent,” said the lawyer for Bottin Cartographes, Jean-David Scemmama.

“We proved the illegality of (Google’s) strategy to remove its competitors… the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application,” he said.

A Google France spokesman said the company would appeal.

Of course Google could tell the Frnech to nick off, refuse to supply services to their piss-ant failed country and watch as they get left behind.

It seems that Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak exists…in the lab at least:

SCIENTISTS in the United States have reported a further step towards a celebrated ”invisibility cloak” by masking a large, free-standing object in three dimensions.

The lab work is the latest advance in a scientific frontier that uses novel materials to manipulate light, a trick that is of huge interest to the military in particular.

Reporting in the New Journal of Physics, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin cloaked an 18-centimetre tube from light in the microwave part of the energy spectrum.

Those hoping for a Harry Potter-style touch of wizardry would be disappointed. To the human eye, the object was still visible.

But, say the researchers, the experiment is important proof of a principle that so-called plasmonic meta-materials can achieve a cloaking effect.

A war plane cloaked with such materials could achieve ”super-stealth” status by becoming invisible in all directions to radar microwaves, said co-lead investigator Andrea Alu.

Running a blog generates email. Loads of email.

I dealt with a total of 37,967 emails in 2011. You can get a similar email report from Toutapp.

Elections create email.

Emails by the Week: I send more emails in the beginning of the week

Emails by the Day: I send most of my emails between 9PM-10PM

Someone put a little spy camera in Lynn’s office…he is a legend in his own mind…I can’t believe he self-describes as a ‘sysop’.

The graphic tells it all as the representatives cave against relentless tech based pressure.

Now can we please have the politicians tell the buggy whip manufacturers to go take a hike over their proposal for us all to carry buggy whips in our cars. it not the government’s job to protect out-moded business models.

Both SOPA and PIPA have been indefinitely postponed. We will continue to take updates about lawmakers atsopa@propublica.org

As popular Internet sites shut down or blacked out in protest on Wednesday, users flooded our SOPA Opera news application and inboxes to let us know what their members of Congress were saying about SOPA.

Uh huh, very accurate…we have all sat through this.

The monopoly provider of international bandwidth has dropped their prices now that competition is looming:

The operator of New Zealand’s only international internet cable has cut wholesale prices by 44 per cent as one of its potential competitors announced progress on a rival project.

The Southern Cross Cable Network runs between Auckland, Sydney and the United States and transports all the internet traffic coming in and out of New Zealand.

The company – which is half owned by Telecom New Zealand – said cable upgrades and lower costs had allowed it to almost halve what it charges internet companies for trafficking international data.

But despite a sharp drop in wholesale prices, commentators say it could be a long time before these cuts flow through to consumers.

InternetNZ chief executive Vikram Kumar said the lower wholesale rates apply only to new contracts and consumers will need to wait until internet companies re-sign with Southern Cross before prices change.

That is weasel words and excuses. It isn’t like they are shipping oil and need to deplete existing stocks here. It is light! The new prices are available immediately. This is nothing but feather-bedding and continuing to charge customers far too much.

Here is the thing though, if they can offer these pris now with no changes in existing infrastructure, foor how long then have we been ripped off by Southern Cross charging monopoly rents?

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Paul Brislen agreed the cuts would take a while to reach the retail market.

“It’ll increase data caps eventually, but because the ISPs are buying capacity on a 10-yearly cycle – the contracts run for quite some time – the odds are you won’t mostly see much of anything in the short-term at all.”

I can’t believe Paul Brislen fell for that crap. The supplier can drop the amount they charge their clients anytime they please. He needs to be a little more strident in representing his clients.

The other day Boing Boing published an article about the Police in Georgia (the country not the state) and their new iPad like devices. In the article they added the following comment:

“100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services.”

Boing Boing is clearly very widely read because the Georgian government responded. The letter is awesome and shows how you can turn a silly comment into a social media win. Labour should take note:

The article published on [Boing Boing on] January 12, 2012, about the initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia to introduce new portable field computers (so called “Police Pads”) ends with an anonymous quote declaring that “100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and Russian gambling services.”

Stereotypes like this are easy to toss out—but are quite simply incorrect. This quote does not reflect the productivity, effectiveness, transparency, and reliability of the police force in Georgia today, but rather the bygone era of the 1990s, a reality that has drastically changed thanks to an ambitious and successful reform process.

The reform process in Georgia began immediately after the 2003 Rose Revolution. The new government inherited a completely corrupt and bloated law-enforcement system. The systemic corruption and the high level of crime throughout the country resulted in a very low level of public trust: fewer than 10% of Georgians had confidence in the police, according to 2003 polls. And the very low average policeman’s salary (approximately $68 per month) made the soliciting of bribes routine.

Georgia has since made the creation of an efficient and modern police force a national priority, undertaking a series of reforms that sought to rebuild the national police force literally from the ground up. The entire national police force was fired, and a new force hired, trained and deployed with the aim of meeting the highest international standards of professionalism.

These reforms are widely regarded as an unqualified success. Having reduced corruption and bribe taking to levels comparable to those in Europe, the police in Georgia have earned the trust and respect of the public they serve:

•According to Transparency International’s latest Global Corruption Barometer, in terms of public perception Georgia has the world’s 5th least-corrupt police force, placing it ahead of Germany or even the United States;

•According to the survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in November 2011, 87% of population have confidence in Police;

•According to a survey funded by the EU and conducted by GORBI Institute in 2011, Georgia has one of the lowest “victimization coefficients,” a measure that reflects public perceptions of crime and individual security.

On the subject of the so-called “Police Pads,” reforms have transformed what was once an antiquated backlog of paper files for car imports, registries, and customs. They have been replaced with new, cutting-edge technology capable of streamlining requests and filing paperwork in record time.

Georgia has much work to do in shaking off the vestiges of nearly a century of Soviet occupation, but the transformation of our police force into a modern and professional service is an achievement that Georgians are deeply proud of, and a symbol of our commitment to retake our rightful place in the European community.

January 16, 2012
Press Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia

No one will be under any illusion now as tot he fact that Georgia is a vibrant, modern, improving economy climbing out of the wreck of Soviet domination.