The Canadian Copyright Board has ruled that Canadians can legally download peer-to-peer music files, although uploading them is still illegal. So long as music is being recorded purely for personal use, and not being sold, rented, or otherwise disseminated to other people, its use is legal. It does not matter whether the source of the recording is a pre-owned track, a borrowed CD, or a track downloaded from the Internet, the board said. The combination of the latter two rules means that recording a CD for a friend is illegal, but handing the CD to the same friend and letting them make a copy for their own use is legal
The US Navy has proposed the development of 28,000 acres within the endangered Red Wolf recovery area as the site for the new Super Hornet Outlying Landing Field and supporting buildings
An Adelaide rocket scientist who called police to report thieves were trying to break into his home and steal his cannabis plants wound up getting arrested himself
Number three ADSL internet service provider TPG has jumped on the download bandwagon, offering a true unlimited service after Telstra and Optus both changed their download allowances
Australians will be offered an array of new pay-TV services next year after Foxtel reached an historic agreement with the competition regulator, securing the green light for its $550 million digital upgrade
Sanyo is launching a TS41 mobile phone in Japan that you can use just by pressing it to your face. Tiny vibrations from the phone travel through bones in the face to the ear. NTT DoCoMo, has an experimental model called Finger Whisper that is merely a wristband with a microphone and earphone in it. Users talk into the wristband while sticking a finger in their ears, sending it vibrations that the ear and the brain convert to sound
Fancy a glowing rubber duckie USB key ring drive? Shame it only goes up to 16MB. As you’ll need somewhere to plug your duck, may we recommend the Hello Kitty USB hub. Hello Kitty responds to your keyboard motion by talking and moving in either Japanese or English.
The T-Cube is a new tiny, orange, cubic PC intended for sale in China. It runs some wacky OS called T-Engine.
Be the envy of your friends with a fuel cell toy. Pour in the water and watch it separate into hydrogen and oxygen, forming a gas to power your vehicle across the floor.
If you’ve ever wanted to eat a hologram, LightVision Confections are selling giant lollipops with edible holograms embedded in them.
MAME is a project to allow for the emulation of every video-game ever minted, but what if you’re more the pinball type? No fear: a group of MAME hackers are building virtual pinball machines that lovingly emulate every jot and tittle of every pinball table under the sun.
If you’re not into geek toys, why not try a jelly bath. This stuff turns ordinary bath water into a soothing puddle of brightly-coloured aromatherapeutic slime that looks like weird alien porn.
My favourite selection is the Catapult Watch that fires teeny projectiles from your wrist. How can you not like a company that has an entire section on trebuchets? They come in sizes ranging from the annoy your workmates desktop model through to the 1/10th scale Warwolf that is still large enough to have your neighbours firing off complaints to local council.
The lovely Feòrag sent me an amusing story this morning. It seems that having obnoxiously plastered their flag everywhere, Americans are upset to note that Canadians have a flag too and that they are sporting it to avoid being mistaken for Americans.
Canadians should be careful not to appear
boastfulto Americans, who are insecure because of the war in Iraq and admit they are annoyed by northerners showing off the red maple leaf on their luggage when they travel…
A country that wraps everything in the flag, to the point of condemning their own countrymen as unAmerican if they dare to suggest that slapping the American flag on a toilet seat cover may be just a tad tacky, dare to have a go at their neighbours for using a sticker on their luggage. You have the laugh at the double standards. Funnier still that it has taken them this long to notice the maple leaf on Canadian luggage.
Unfortunately Americans have a well-earned reputation as obnoxious tourists, even within their own country. They are loud and opinionated, and while sometimes they have every right to be, mostly they just embarrass themselves, those around them and generate some really bad karma that is likely to bite the next unfortunate American tourist who follows along in their wake.
At one point my cousin was conducting tour groups where you take a bunch of tourists on a 4WD type bus, bounce them through the bush and point out interesting things. She used to bring back stories of US tourists that always made me wonder why they travelled abroad and how they survived to adulthood.
One particular pair, we’ll call them George and Martha, highlighted the closemindedness that is a frequent complaint of the breed known as the ugly American. The object being pointed out was a Banksia, a tree with particularly large and hideous seed pods. Instead of listening to the tour guide, George loudly informed Martha, and the entire bus, that the tree had a tumour. No amount of explanation to the contrary was to be entertained. No doubt, George and Martha’s friends and family back home now believe the Australian bush is full of trees with tumours.
It’s travellers like the loud and ignorant George and Martha who have forced Canadians to arm themselves against pissed off tour guides and harrassed foreign citizens. Even the cannier US travellers will pretend to be Canadian when abroad to avoid being mistaken for the ill mannered morons who have sullied the name of their country with their appalling behaviour whilst overseas.
When you’re overseas, you’re not just on holiday, you’re also an ambassador for your country. If you behave like a complete wanker, the people you deal with are going to believe that your behaviour is an example of how you would behave at home and be very wary of dealing with your countrymen in the future. So don’t be surprised if your neighbours are just as embarrassed by your behaviour in public and take steps to be recognised as Canadians.
Pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more reliable than electronic means. However, while there is still the occasional packet loss, this is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking
Aiirnet will next month begin installing the largest single Wi-Fi deployment in the nation in the city of Cerritos in Southern California. Ultimately, anyone with a laptop or wireless device will be able to surf the Web from virtually anywhere in the city’s 22km² area
Don Baggs, an amateur historian from Monmouth, south Wales, intends leading 5,000 archers to a second battle of Agincourt in an attempt to defeat plans for a wind farm at the historic site in France — via Southerly Buster
Bored with Lorem Ipsum? The clever little rodents who brought us the entertaining Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer quiz have developed another fine tool, based on years of careful research, for generating carefully crafted dummy text to enhance your latest masterpiece
Li Zhi, a former government worker in southwest China, was jailed for eight years for posting essays and comments online criticising official corruption
The UK has taken matters into its own hands and is making it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them, the law is in effect now. Unfortunately much spam originates from the US so the UK had previously asked the US to co-operate
Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore announced that his office had made its first felony indictment under the state’s antispam law. The charges were filed against North Carolina resident Jeremy Jaynes, also known under the pseudonym Gaven Stubberfield, for allegedly using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail
If you’re based in Denmark you can call TeleDanmark directory service on 118 and get them to do google queries for you. So now you can avoid harassing your friends in front of computers and pay your monopolistic telco $2 instead
The site rates a mention as an example of stylesheet switchers over on Joe Clark’s site
By 2020, we might actually have wireless Internet interfaces that ordinary people will feel comfortable having implanted in their heads, just as ordinary people are today comfortable with having laser eye surgery. All the signs — early experimental successes, societal demand for improved healthcare, and military research — point in that direction
The Kyoto protocol is dying a death of a thousand cuts. Last week, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the US, reiterated that it wants nothing to do with the only international agreement designed to save the world from runaway global warming. The European Union, Kyoto’s main promoter, revealed that most of its members will miss their emissions targets. And Russia once again seemed to be on the point of wrecking the protocol completely. But there is a plan B, called contraction and convergence, which has been gaining ever more influential converts
Animals with neophobia die younger, suggesting that a lifetime of fearful stress can take an accumulated toll on health
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