The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes

The HiRISE instrument would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets, such as Jupiter.

This is an image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at 5:20 a.m. MST on 3 October 2007, at a range of 142 million kilometers, which gives the HiRISE image a scale of 142 km/pixel and an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a Moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disks of the Earth and Moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth/Moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

HiRISE | The Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars (PSP_005558_9040)

This is absolutely mind boggling.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad... Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Seriously!? In my time I've seen many examples of lawyers abusing the imbalanced negotiating position present in employment contacts but this takes the cake. An agreement not to press charges for rape? Are you fucking kidding me?!

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux.

30 United States Senators voted against this? What could the basis of their opposition possibly be? Al Franken is not above political grandstanding at all, but when push comes to shove, why would you oppose this? I've searched on Google for an alternative perspective to no avail. Does anyone know a source where these people have articulated their position? As LeMieux put it:

"I can't see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have her right to go to court."

If anything Franken's amendment does not go far enough. This is prima facie evidence that there is a serious structural problem with employment contracts. No contract clause of this sort ought to be respected in any context relevant to US law and major reform of rules surrounding US employment contracts is needed.

People who voted against this amendment include:
Alexander (R-TN)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Corker (R-TN)
Isakson (R-GA)

The Halliburton/KBR employment contract rape clause.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

I seem to remember saying something like this was going to happen a while back. If people thought the current recession hurt, wait until this gets stacked on.

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent

A SCOTUS case on the Docket this year relates to business method patents, which has caused a slew of amicus briefs from anti-software patent organizations. This article links to one of them.

I'll admit to not having given this question a thorough analysis but my inclination has always been that the anti-software patent crowd was too radical. There are obviously some serious problems with the patent system as it relates to the computer industry. Patents take too long to get and they last too long. Its too easy to get a patent on something that you aren't actually selling or even things you can't actually build, and so there is a big problem with patent trolls scooping up patents for futuristic concepts that haven't really been created yet and they certainly didn't create, later suing when someone else actually reduces them to practice. These are all policy issues that deserve attention.

On the other hand, patents play an important roll in the software startup space, where they serve as a proof point that a new company has a real technological innovation and investors have a real asset that they've purchased with their money. It is not fair to say that software patents only hinder innovation - they both hinder and help it - and furthermore I think a lot of that hinderance could be addressed if there was sufficient effort to do so.

A lot of time and advocacy that could go toward building a better patent system for software has been instead spent on eliminating software patents. To me, concluding that "software" as an embodiment of ideas is beyond patenting is to argue that patents should not exist at all in any domain, and I think that is the real goal of many of those who oppose software patents.

All engineering is the reduction of principals to practice. What difference does it make if that reduction occurs in a microprocessor or in a test tube? If we cannot see where the line is between science and engineering in the practice of computing it is because we haven't sought to find it. We deliberately mislabel most academic software engineering programs as "computer science" when they are doing nothing of the sort. If software is, indeed, truly special, it makes more sense to craft our policy in such a way that the concept of a patent works consistently across all domains of engineering, rather than to create an inconsistent policy environment by exempting software in order to uphold ancient distinctions that our advancing knowledge has blurred.

In any event, I would guess that the court will deliberately avoid engaging the question and narrowly limit their conclusion to business methods, which is the matter at hand. There will be a lot of hand wringing on Slashdot, and that will be the end of it.

Groklaw - SFLC files Bilski brief: Software should not be patentable and don't forget the 1st Amendment

Dark matter is either weirder than we thought or does not exist at all, a new study suggests.

Galaxy study hints at cracks in dark matter theories - space - 30 September 2009 - New Scientist

Welcome to Celestia
... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

Celestia: Home

In a recent blog post, which you cannot read because it was censored by a DMCA takedown notice from Texas Instruments, I used the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" to refer to a situation in which a distributed key cracking effort is targeted at a public key that is widely known and widely resented. This term has an origin in the annals of computer security research and my use of it might be misunderstood so I felt that I should elaborate.

Matt Blaze originally coined the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" in a paper he wrote back in 1996 about government key escrow. The term and its origin are burned into my brain because I recall being excited at the prospect - a democratic check upon communications security!

In Blaze's paper a person would broadly distribute shards of his private key. If that person was later accused of a crime the police might issue a public call for shards. If a large number of people were sympathetic to the call they might reveal their shards, allowing the police to proceed with monitoring that person. Its sort of like replacing judicial warrants with a grand jury system, enforced with hard mathematical constraints that cannot be subverted. If the police want to intrude upon someone's privacy they'd have to convince a large enough group of people in the community in order to do so. A very interesting and brilliant idea with numerous variations.

But if you think about it, every key faces a threat to its security from the general public in a world where distributed key cracking efforts can be organized, regardless of whether the creator of that key intentionally escrowed it with the public in the first place. I think the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" is fitting in any situation where there is a public effort to crack a key. Its a risk that designers of crypto systems need to consider - how widely distributed is your public key, what is the key strength, and how much public resentment might exist about it? If the key is weak enough and the resentment high enough, you might fall victim to a public cracking effort.

A perfect example of a place where this might be useful is the context of a computer worm like Conficker. Conficker.B currently controls about 5 million hosts on the Internet, and the security experts who monitor it are concerned that those infected nodes represent a collective threat to Internet security. For example, they could be used to launch denial of service attacks if the Conficker bot master was able to update them. Fortunately, the bot master is blocked through a daily effort by members of the Conficker Working Group to contro... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

On the definition of 'Angry Mob Cryptanalysis'

This treasure paints a new picture of our past and the Dark Ages.

What makes it outstanding is the sheer quantity - we're talking about 1,500 objects, almost entirely precious metal.

Normally you would expect a handful of objects each year of this quality for the period in question, which is the 7th Century.

A metal detectorist finding just one of these objects would consider it the find of their life. To find 1,500 is bizarre and it would blow the average person's mind.

BBC NEWS | UK | Hoard shines light on Dark Ages

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

SPACE.com -- It's Official: Water Found on the Moon