I would love to rig this up with a few hundred LED's in bizarre patterns, then take it for a spin on the dimly lit city streets at night. Besides the obvious cool-factor, I could see a healthy number of freaked out people doing a double-take as I whir down the street.

Thanks for the heads-up on this! I am grabbing up as many free PDF's of recommended writers as I can these days, reading some and discovering more and more good authors. If I like "The Green Leopard Plague" I may find myself buying this latest work.

Fun post Cory =)

I appreciate being reminded of things from my childhood - as an expectant parent, it's great to file these things away for the near future! I remember loving the mini super-soaker that I painted my house with until my parents caught me, and realized I was making lasting marks in the dirt on our house. Ah well, it motivated them to clean it!

As for ZOMBIE and MHY, I consider you both hopelessly serious people with poorly considered opinions regarding the issues of water conservation. I grew up on well water, appreciating the value of a productive, healthy aquifer. Your time would be much better spent campaigning to limit building height & weight maximums in cities, in order to save the aquifer. Or promoting general conservation in manufacturing. Or policing businesses who store dangerous chemicals outdoors and allow rain runoff to contaminate massive areas.

You should already understand that the biggest threats to our water systems don't come from over-use by residential customers. If you didn't know that, take a little time to self-educate before coming here to annoy people with your ignorance :)

Ugh, this hits below the belt imo. This vulnerability is very common in retail wireless routers, among other things. Pretty much every device has a function that allows flashing the firmware, but only some allow it via the network. This could eventually be the vandals equivalent of an unsecured network.

This collection of posts by two so-called security guards are a veritable forum legend, and a very funny read. Take time over lunchbreak to really dig through it all :)

So cool, so nerdy... it takes me back to my youth. Sadly, white-collar IT frowns on open displays of violence in the workplace these days.

@19 Hellhead

Yep, or just keep it in your phone (most modern phones accept micro SD cards now). I could ostensibly carry my OS, all my important files, and an incredible quantity of photographs of public places... all in the side of my LG.

The irony of the terrorism security farce is the complete lack of effectiveness it is capable of. I would venture to guess that there aren't more than 1 in 1,00,000 rent-a-cop thugs capable of comprehending that a laptop is booting off a HDHC card rather than a hard drive, or spotting extra OS's on a drive. Even with the current linux boot disks out there, I don't know of one that could present a UI splash screen simply enough to alert a boarder patrol officer that there are state secrets on Random Guy's laptop.

I've often considered snagging a few of those high frequency ringtone/mp3's to play on my phone just as a countermeasure. I'm in my late 20's and can still hear it fairly well, but it should annoy the person who is trying to listen to the tinny death metal rattling from hanging earbuds.

I would love to land one of these - I would wear it on my other wrist on days that I wear a watch lacking the date indicator. Very nice.

Those of us in the rust belt are in dire need of shops like this! Cleveland Ohio is a wasteland of post-apocalyptic CNC shop castoffs of the pre-9/11 era auto industry and small shop gear from piecework outfits that moved overseas and south back in the 1990's.

The really bigger picture to this is a social disaster; schools that have no modern equipment cannot foster interest in such technology in students, and the schools cannot acquire the teaching tools because the industry itself has left our country. Thus will not be a common career field, so we will face a generation with little or no knowledge of the backbone of manufacturing and machining that our country built itself on over the past hundred years.

Fascinating stuff to me. I'll stop rambling for a bit now.

#3 "It's purely Microsoft who's misbehaving here." - Snifty

You wish it was only Microsoft! There have been no shortage of smaller fiasco's such as this over the past five or eight years, damaging the concept of DRM as a "trustworthy" technology. Very few tech-savvy people would consider purchasing any media with DRM, as they know the eventual outcome may likely be an unusable product. Heck, a fair amount of media was unusable right out of the proverbial box (the Sony rootkit train wreck, for example).

The true irony is that DRM is pushing more normal folks (read: not just the nerds) toward illegally collecting media via newsgroups, torrents, and straight up DVD ripping & sharing with friends.

I know the common "FUCK THE RIAA" mantra may weary you, but there are solid facts and good reasoning behind this mentality... take a look around. It begins at treating customers like criminals, and it ends with illegal investigations and destroying the lives of normal innocent families.

Andy was speaking in generality here, about the whole of life. Not everything is relegated to a specific act! I think this directly relates to the emotional detachment we experience in regards to habits - once we do something a certain number of times, it becomes commonplace and shortly after that it becomes an unconscious decision. Just before habit, comes "jaded".

I ended up picking up the LG Venus because I could record up to an hour of video on it - crap quality, but for the same price as a half-dozen other random unattractive phones, it was the perk that got me interested.

Video is undoubtedly the next major frontier for phone vendors to get right, imo.

I have so much trouble with my feet/back/legs/knees, I'm going to give these a try. Having tried most major brands of work boots, expensive shoes & inserts, a variety of service industry style waiter shoes etc - none seems to help.

Just wonder how they'll work for driving stick, it's rather nice to have the hard sole of a shoe for kicking the clutch etc. We'll see!

I'm not sure how the mods feel about posting links, but here are some solid resources for photographers in the USA. I think it's valuable to educate ourselves (especially before charging out and trying to challenge misplaced authority).

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:
http://www.rcfp.org/photoguide/

Bert P. Krages "Photographers Rights" PDF
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

Andrew Kantor's "Legal Rights of Photographers" PDF
http://www.kantor.com/useful/Legal-Rights-of-Photographers.pdf

All three are worth reading, and are likely to save us a lot of grief if we get into a sticky situation. Merely getting upset and stating our opinions will get us nowhere - knowing our actual rights might at least save us a bit of embarrassment.

This kind of thing happens here in the USA too, but the Brits seem to be taking much more heat over it (why is that?). I am going to be hiking around the city near my workplace over the summer to see what kind of trouble might pop up, I'm very curious what the climate here in the midwest is like for street photography.

All that aside, the whole mentality of constant fear and suspicion just sounds like a euphemism for hating people outside your norm. People need to just live and let live, and by "people" I mean our governments as much as the guy next door.

I've been less than impressed by Creative for years, with crappy drivers and poor hardware quality control being my main gripe - this just completes the circle of "why?!" in my mind. I'm done with them as a vendor, I'll take my cash elsewhere.

This is happening at a frightening pace in East Cleveland right now, with over 1000 houses already demolished to avoid the fire hazard of leaving them leaning against one another and abandoned. This drain on the budget (it costs money to knock down houses) means that East Cleveland cannot afford to keep up with infrastructure, so roads and public utilities are suffering.

It's gut-wrenching to see this kind of thing happening, but it's what should be expected when a major city goes from over 1 million residents in the 1950's down to 450k or so now. Lots of houses with nobody to live in them.

This fight for free use is going to win, but only because of a few ISP's that are using torrents as a business model - not because the customer wants it, or because the gov't of any nations promotes fair business practices.

All of this stuff makes me sick, and simply justifies the torrent scene in their campaign to beat the "man". I'm completely with them at this point, where before I could have leaned in the direction of "oh that's illegal, might be better off just using netflix/blockbuster and not risking it".

My guess is that the RIAA will claim this is a "service" they provide to the artists, just protecting them and extracting enough cash to keep the wheels greased, not enough to pass down to the little guys.

The sad part of all this madness is the artists are being screwed out of a ton of the profit they should be rightfully earning. The wall standing between artists and consumers is bad, and I only hope a common, viable business model of direct sales or at least a thin interface industry will spring up to replace the present recording industry.

Old news, but given how I love my Eee PC, it doesn't bother me to see it praised! The real reason I went for this over a regular size laptop was size. Walking a little over a mile to the office from my car every day means each little thing I add to my bag makes a difference, and I appreciate saving the space and weight.

That, and the price is right. I'm over a month in, and I still love this thing!

I wonder if this is a precursor to something really major going down. It really brings out the crazy speculation in me when a huge thing like this takes place and the mainstream news doesn't catch it and blow it up.

@#3 - more coffee methinks, both of those posts were understandable imo :)

You might be surprised how many people change from optimistic joy-mongers into the most depressing and negative people you can imagine, all in the matter of weeks while interacting with a general public that is (apparently) viciously hellbent on being as offensively stupid as possible.

Of course, that just typifies our culture and political state here in the US of A. Sad eh?

@ #5MACISAGUY

Man you got a good laugh outta me on that one :) thanks for the smile this far away from Friday!

(added irony - I for some reason saw the MAC at the start of your name, and randomly thought 'good game, only a Mac user could really be that self absorbed')

This could really change the way many devices manage heat, exciting advance for technology! Thanks for posting this one Cory, really would have been a shame to miss it - not all the important tech news reaches /. or Digg (surprise surprise eh?).

Re: "#22: I am scared of that as well. Do you think it is traceable what MAC address downloaded the wrong files through your router?"

For most, yes. But it's not so simple as all that, unfortunately. If I may venture a guess, the logic you are hoping to use is "No PC in my house has that MAC address, so don't prosecute me/disconnect me/jail me!"

Although I like the idea, there is no way to prove that you never owned a PC with that MAC address. It's proving a negative, which isn't possible unless the actual device with that MAC address is located and they can nail that user and let you off the hook. As they say, somebody has to pay!

So in short, as ideal and nice as it is to leave it hanging out there, I'm not willing to risk my reputation/money/livelihood just to help random strangers a little bit.

There are really three responses in my book:
1. Free love. I like this one the most, as it seems Cory does.
2. Greedy selfish... to the Nth degree. Aka it's mine, don't touch it! This is how most people feel about something they pay for every month, or that's my best guess in any case.
3. Scared into security. I don't want to go to court because some child molester met with my neighbor's little girl, and used my 'net connection to talk with her on myspace/facebook and set the meeting time. Or be the access point over which was shared the latest movie screener two weeks before it hit theaters.

I fall into the third section. I'm not big-hearted enough to risk my life savings to defend sharing a resource that anyone can use simply by hitting the Starbucks around the corner. Ah well!

Re: #8 & #18 posted by mannakiosk

It seems your post was serious, and I can't help but chuckle in response. You apparently think any type of trauma (read: catching him) is going to be detrimental to the development of a child, and thus should be avoided. What method would you pursue in the interest of discontinuing his socially unacceptable behavior?

Personally, having caught my fingers in mousetraps at an even younger age, I can attest to the pain involved. It's almost as vicious as stubbing one's toe, the impact of which can similarly be such a momentous and life-changing event. I sympathize with the child in this, and hope his fingers have recovered fully. /sarcasm

Physical pain aside (as it is a trivial consideration), you also think the public humiliation is a stigma that will damage this child's development? This also earns you a quick laugh, but I'll respond just the same. Apparently the social context of theft was pretty clear to this child, as he ran to clean the evidence from his hand immediately to avoid discovery. He was aware that there would be a social response, and he risked the act of theft just the same. Now the social response has taken place, as he expected it might, and though he may be bitter that some form of punishment is taking place, nothing is out of order about this situation.

It is an ideal situation to learn from a mistake, since he will not likely be punished via an official Court. He will be ashamed because his peers are aware of his misconduct, or he will be hailed as a child hero of sorts. If ashamed, he may not be willing to risk this behavior again. If proud of his achievement, the weight of discouraging him from theft again may be either his parents or the school system.

Regardless of the final outcome, I consider people like mannakiosk to be one of the proverbial 'problems' in our society, as they discourage our social system from maintaining itself to any manageable degree. Folding in and following the politically correct nonsense people such as mannakiosk spew is degrading to our society as a whole.

-MTS