Author: Serkadis

As anger towards the Digital Economy Bill grows, some are fighting back against the bill in a variety of ways. ISP Talk Talk, who had been vocally against the bill ever since it was first proposed, has apparently now announced that it will not follow the more draconian aspects of the law. In an official blog post by the company, it says that it will fight in court any attempt to force it to do things it feels are unwise, and will continue to fight against the law politically:

After the election we will resume highlighting the substantial dangers inherent in the proposals and that the hoped for benefits in legitimate sales will not materialise as filesharers will simply switch to other undetectable methods to get content for free.

In the meantime we stand by our pledges to our customers:

• Unless we are served with a court order we will never surrender a customer’s details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
• If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

Who knows if it will actually help, but it is nice to see an ISP willing to not just give in at this point.

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Article Tags: Carbon Trading

WARSAW: Poland has sold Japanese private sector entity carbon dioxide emission quotas worth 30 million euros (40 million dollars), Poland’s environment minister said.

A private sector entity from Japan recently “paid 30 million euros for CO2 quotas,” Environment Minister Andrzej Kraszewski, told Thursday’s Dziennik daily without specifying the identity of the buyer. The cash will be used to help improve energy insulation on public buildings, he said.

“This year we will sell, according to our preliminary estimates, carbon dioxide quotas worth 150 million euros,” the minister added. Carbon dioxide is regarded as the principle greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

The Kyoto Protocol sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These amount to an average of five percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.

Last year’s UN Copenhagen summit on climate change failed to produce a new global treaty on tackling climate change.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

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Pokefans rejoice! Nintendo has announced a new set of Pokemon titles that will soon invade its handheld platform. Coming to Japan later this fall, Pokemon Black and Pokemon White will be the 5th generation installment of the

Article Tags: BBC

The first round of UN climate talks since December’s bitter Copenhagen summit opens in Bonn on Friday with the future of the process uncertain.

Developing countries are adamant that the UN climate convention is the right forum for negotiating a global deal and want it done by the year’s end.

But others, notably the US, appear to think this is not politically feasible.

Some delegates are concerned that the whole process could collapse, given the divisions and lack of trust.

Click source to read FULL report

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

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Article Tags: World Temperatures

The first satellite to measure Arctic and Antarctic ice in detail has successfully taken off.

The ‘ice mission’, led by British scientists, will show how melting ice could affect weather patterns in the future in the so called “Day After Tomorrow” scenario. The European Space Agency satellite, that cost £122 million to build, took off on a Russian launcher rocket from Kazakhstan and has already sent signals back to Earth.

Duncan Wingham, a climate physicist at University College London, was relieved to see the launch after a previous attempt landed in the sea five years ago. The 1,543 pound CyroSat 2 will be able to measure the thickness of Arctic and Antarctic ice to within a centimetre – an accuracy unmatched until now.

The film The Day After Tomorrow imagined that the melting of the polar ice caps would cause a second ice age by reversing the gulf stream. Prof Wingham said that scenario was “silly” but the satellite will give scientists a better idea of how fast Polar ice is melting, which can affect weather systems around the world, including in the UK.

“If anything, this mission is even more important now than a decade ago when we first proposed it,” he said.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

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Article Tags: World Temperatures

At last December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, former Vice President Al Gore shrilly proclaimed that “The entire polar ice cap … could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.” As implausible as Gore’s claim already was at the time, recent developments in the arctic have only served to make the fear of an ice-free polar zone all the more absurd.

During the most brutally cold period of this past winter, some pundits were recommending that England’s poor should burn copies of Gore’s book in an effort to stay warm. Now the online edition of the The Times of London is noting that the deep freeze extended far north of the British Isles. According to an April 4 article (“Arctic ice recovers from the great melt”), Gore’s supposed meltdown has frozen over:

#IF you thought it was cold in Britain for the time of year, you should see what is happening around the North Pole. Scientists have discovered that the size of the Arctic ice cap has increased sharply to levels not seen since 2001.
#A shift in the chilly winds across the Bering Sea over the past few months has caused thousands of square miles of ocean to freeze.
#The same phenomenon, known as the Arctic Oscillation, is also partly responsible for the cold winter experienced in northern Europe and eastern America.
#It allowed icy blasts of air to escape from the Arctic and make their way southwards. Provisional Met Office figures for December to February suggest the UK had its coldest winter since 1979, with an average temperature of 1.6C — a full 2.1C below normal. Last week a teenager was killed in Scotland when a school bus crashed in the snow — just days into British Summer Time.

Source: thenewamerican.com

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We were recently writing about how there seems to be a massive double standard when it comes to “sampling” in books vs. music. But that was really only focused on fiction books. When it comes to non-fiction, it appears the story is a bit more complicated. Author Marc Aronson recently took to the pages of the NY Times to complain about how copyright is massively stifling non-fiction works, due to the difficulty of getting permission:

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Unless we nonfiction writers are lucky and hit a public-domain mother lode, we have to pay for the right to use just about anything — from a single line of a song to any part of a poem; from the vast archives of the world’s art (now managed by gimlet-eyed venture capitalists) to the historical images that serve as profit centers for museums and academic libraries.

The amount we pay depends on where and how the material is used. In fact, the very first question a rights holder asks is “What are you going to do with my baby?” Which countries do you plan to sell in? What languages? Over what period of time? How large will the image be in your book?

Much of his concern is how these costs will multiply in an age of ebooks, but it seems like a serious enough issue from the start. Just the fact that authors who are discussing and building on the works of others are being blocked due to copyright is hugely problematic. In this context, it hardly sounds like the new works would act as substitutes for the old works at all — but could actually drive more interest in those original works. It’s difficult to see why or how copyright policy makes sense in these cases.

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Another week, another awesome trailer for Rockstar’s upcoming western epic shooter Red Dead Redemption. Get a taste of the games open world online multiplayer aspect after the jump.
 

As Google (Public Data Explorer) and Microsoft (Pivot) are getting into the mix of online data visualization tools, it is evident that this is a realm to carefully watch. Public data is de rigeur and blogs in this field are becoming ubiquitous, hence the perfect storm for online visualization. While public data is not necessary for online viz, it certainly makes it easy for the masses to enter the fray of data analytics.

As we announced a few months ago, we will be starting a new feature aimed at reviewing visualization tools. There are many tools out there that suit different needs and sport varied features. This ongoing feature will hopefully shed light on these tools and if they might fit into your workflow. In the meantime, please feel free to give your opinion on this new reviewing feature in the comments section below. Should we change any of the criteria? Are there any inaccuracies? What did we miss?

Our first software review will focus on the arguably current big three of online dataviz tools: Swivel, Many Eyes, and Tableau Public. During the next weeks, we will be publishing these in succession and culminating with a comparison of all three.

We chose the criteria based on user comments from our previous posts. Additionally, Benjamin, Patrick (who is reviewing Many Eyes), and I collaborated on refining the list and adding features we thought were compelling. We included a list of supported charts at the end of the post.

First, we want to focus on Swivel. Swivel was an early entrant to this field and thus is playing with the big kids in terms of online visualization. Benjamin Wiederkehr of Datavisualization.ch completed this review of Swivel.

Next week we will review IBM Many Eyes. Stay tuned and please let us know your interests and ideas in the comments below!

Benjamin Wiederkehr is founding partner of Interactive Things where he’s responsible for everything User Experience Design and Data Visualization. He shares his passion for data visualization with the readers of Datavisualization.ch by documenting and discussing findings in this field.

Kim Rees is a partner at Periscopic, a socially-conscious Information Visualization firm specializing in helping nonprofit organizations and like-minded companies convey important messages and elevate public awareness.

Don't hate the player…

Is there an opposing correlation for the story of Rip Van Winkle? Seriously, if you had been asleep for the past 20 years and woke to read the news these days, you’d think the “Northern War of Aggression” played out to a much different outcome 160 years ago:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has issued a proclamation that “quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.”

When pressed for an explanation of this patently ridiculous and tone-deaf play for voters on the farthest end of the Republican spectrum, McDonnell replied that:

the move was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.“

So McDonnell’s brilliant PR strategy to honor the sesquicentennial of his state is to celebrate its secession from the Union. Now that’s one edgy, political chess maneuver there. Not.

Between this latest Uptighty Whitey maneuver and the continuing misplaced (and conspicuously stoked) rage of the Teabaggers at having to suffer the indignities of being governed by the country’s first black President, it’s no small wonder that this country appears to be coming apart at the seams.

After the initial high of Obama’s election, there is now a changed atmosphere in the country. Violence is an inescapable companion to racism. And violence, or violent outbursts racially motivated, are certainly on the increase in the U.S. Threats against President Obama have increased by 400% since President George W. Bush left office, the highest numbers on record.

What makes this situation particularly worrisome is that they come not only from fringe elements in society. Thinly disguised, they also originate from certain political leaders who seem intent on creating an atmosphere of violence and disrespect around the President and the presidency.

Of course, having Nativist, minority vote-suppressing asshats like Hans von Spakovsky infiltrating state electoral boards isn’t going to help race relations any.

I realize that the interwebs have been inundated with a wealth of navel-gazing theories on the source of the Teabagger frustration and anger, but I think this post (at a motorcycle forum of all places) is particularly apt:

[I]t ain’t just President Obama. It is a lot else: If your job can be done on the Indian sub-continent, who are you better than? If China can launch a spaceship, who are you better than? If the world looks at the mighty Dollar as little better than an American Peso, who are you better than? If an immigrant can work your ass into the ground, and do it smiling for a lot less money, who are you better than?

Because all this hate, all this violence – it’s not all about race, per se. It’s about the consumptive death of the self-aggrandizing myth of American exceptionalism. And while for the small-minded, it’s easier (and more emotionally satisfying) to point fingers at the historically vulnerable, we have no one but our failed political system to blame.

Great news guys, Activision and Infinity Ward has finally revealed the release date of the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package for the PS3 and PC.
 

We were confused a few weeks ago when the USTR started promoting letters from lobbyists in support of ACTA. After all, of course the lobbyists want ACTA. They’re the ones who wrote much of it in the first place. In the meantime, thousands have been writing the USTR to express their concerns about ACTA… but the USTR doesn’t bother mentioning them at all. It’s as if the USTR is flat-out admitting that it’s controlled by the lobbyists.

So it should come as no surprise that the USTR is gleefully hyping up two more letters from lobbying groups in favor of ACTA. But why won’t it put forth the letters against ACTA or worried about the process? And, of course, as Jamie Love points out, isn’t it weird that these lobbyists are proudly supporting an agreement when, technically, they’re not even supposed to know what’s in the agreement?

What’s even stranger is that all of this comes on the same day that the USTR has released its plan on being more open. How about, for a start, you open up ACTA, stop hiding behind lobbyists, and allow for a real open discussion involving the real stakeholders? Or is that too much to ask? Well, included in the openness plan is the following:

During the building of this plan, recommendations centered around two issues: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations and all other trade-related meetings. There was a desire to make all advisory committee, negotiating, and policy development meetings, and texts available to the public in “real time.”

And yet, rather than any sort of real time release of information, we get the USTR still hiding the documents behind a bogus claim of “national security” and then showing off the fact that it’s in the pocket of lobbyists who aren’t even supposed to know what’s in the document.

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Using a Ferrari F430, Turkish pop-singer Metin Senturk became the world’s fastest unaccompanied blind driver hitting a top speed of 182 mph. Senturk broke the previous record of 176 mph held by a British banker.

Senturk, who has been blind since the age of 3, wept tears of happiness as he came out of the F430 at Urfa airport in eastern Turkey to learn from Guinness World Records officials that he broke the record.

“I don’t think there are any words to describe this feeling. I am really happy. It was really hard, like a dance with death,” said Senturk.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: Reuters

Production of the 77 limited-production run of the Aston Martin One-77 is underway and while we still don’t know for sure how many Aston has sold (it was reportedly sold out last year), one customer in the Middle East has purchased ten units. Yes, you read that right – 10 units at a price of $1.5 million for each One-77.

Why so many? According to reports from European media, the Middle East buyer want to purchase 10 units for his family. However, he gave Aston Martin one major condition – they have to have all 10 units completed by September 2010 and even though the production schedule has been set, Aston will abide by his stipulation. Why? Well, he transferred a total of $17 million to Aston as an incentive.

Of course, by now a lot of you are wishing that you were a part of his family.

Click here for more news on the Aston Martin One-77.

Refresher: Power for the Aston Martin One-77 comes from a 7.3L V12 producing more than 700-hp. The engine is mated to a new 6-speed gearbox that allows the One-77 to go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds with a top speed of over 200 mph. Only 77 units of the One-77 will be made.

Aston Martin One-77:

– By: Omar Rana

Source: CarsUK