Welcome to the Engadget BBS! How’s it going? Sorry if you had a busy signal a bunch, the board’s been growing like crazy—we’re adding a third line next week, so check out the boards to get that number!

Engadget is a prefect example of the booming BBS scene springing to live on America's phone network thanks to the advent of affordable modems (short for modulator-demodulator). Engadget's lines have been busy almost all the time recently, so this fellow was nice enough to dump his scrollback log to one of these Internet Blog things. You can see all the recent posts to the Engadget BBS without having to wait for a line to clear up.. Check out the latest in cellular phones, personal computers, GPS receivers, game console units, and storage media.

This might lead you to believe that the Internet will eventually replace the BBS, but we all know that's a load of horse shit. BBS's Forever!!

Engadget 1985 - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Interesting concept.

Enter in your AIM screen-name (and anyone else's you want) and see how many people link to you, within three degrees.

There's no way to increase your own score by adding people. This score is specifically calculated by counting people who have *your* name, in *their* buddy list, and some sort of formula which weights their link to you, based on their own scores.

My score today is: 45989

For reference, here are a few other people I checked. Some are folks I know, and some are just random names I typed in:

Rattle: 3176
Gordon Walton: 40466
Kim Zetter: 4851
Llearyn: 36773
GMBreeland: 38804
Randal: 5435
Strick: 13136
Virgil: 17273
Grunch: 1608
Aestetix: 17502
Bryan: 13765
God: 77395
Bob: 157924

Funny that "Bob" is more popular than "God." ;)

Elonka :)

-- Its pretty neat that the score is based on who is online at any given time. Depending on the time of day God may beat Bob.

The Three Degrees of AIMfight.com

flynn23 wrote:

“When power’s out, the first 24 hours can be crucial to saving lives,” says Lyon. “If the system is already in place, and if a disaster strikes and takes out power, our network will still be operational. They are also very portable, so if FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] has a supply of them, they can move into an area that has lost power and set it up very quickly, mobilize search and rescue, do resource management. The infrastructure would already be in place, it could be functioning with VoIP all the time. For instance, the tsunami area… it would have made a major difference in that area. There are smaller examples all over the world.”

BRILLIANT!

I always thought it would be a neat Idea to tag birds and other animals with solar Wi-Fi chips. Spread networks to random places.

RE: Boulder Gets Solar-Powered Wi-Fi

I'm still not clear on why Cisco is going after mike lynn rather than ISS. It seems like ISS almost used him as the goods to extort Cisco somehow. By giving the presentation, its seems like he broke whatever extortion agreement Cisco & ISS reached.

What mike lynn revealed, Cisco claims to have already previously revealed, but lied about how fucked they were. Mike lynn disagreed with this on stage and demonstrated his point. The information he learned by researching for ISS certainly belonged to ISS, but he didn't reveal his research... He used the research. If i research something for someone else, the info is theirs to publish... However, if I am somehow enlightened by this info that I have been doing something a dumb way for a very long time and use this information as a REASON to stop this behavior, i don't see how this breaks disclosure. If i tell the person next to me, look dummy, you're fucking yourself if you do it the way you have been... And prove this by fucking myself onstage so you can see what happens... I still would not have revealed anything new by illustrating exactly how "fucked" by "fucked" cisco meant. So long as I wasn't using this research to show people how to make dicks to fuck themselves or others with, I've disclosed nothing. So I don't see the case here.

RE: The Shout | Jennifer Granick | ISS and Cisco v. Granick’s Gambling Plans

People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests.
Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.
Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Downloading 'myths' challenged

Acidus wrote:

President Bush has created a new senior level position to fight global piracy and counterfeiting that cost American companies billions of dollars in lost sales each year, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said on Friday.

Calling "piracy" lost sales is really misleading because you count "pirates" as potential customers. First, the language "Pirate" is inaccurate. "Hobo" would be a more accurate analogy. A Hobo might bum a ride but never buy a ticket. This makes a Hobo a non-customer. A Pirate on the other hand, steals the actual potential for something to make a sale. Does a Hobo? No... A Hobo takes up unsold space on a train. In other words, while there is an unfair product distribution, this does not impede the rightful owner from selling more product. An IP Hobo in some ways encourages other potential sales. Most artistic tastes rub off by group contact, so for every Hobo'd copy has a good chance of selling a real copy and widening an audience that otherwise would not have known about a product. Video rental stores and Libraries purchase at least one official copy of an IP product. IP Hobos are free to borrow these copies and absorb their content. There isn't much of a difference between this type of distribution, and P2P methods. There are the added benefits that a single copy can be passed seamlessly along to the next reader/viewer/listener without the need to wait for the first person to finish (which is ideal for an archive of information). In a Library model, the person returns the media borrowed, but in this case is it even important? Most of these people aren't reading the media over and over again, the work simply exists as a part of the library.

What's the difference between a song you remember, and a song on your computer? A computer might have a somewhat better copy, but I think the crucial difference comes down to means of access. You can hum the song, its not quite the same as hitting play, however it is a means of access and distribution of a copy-written work. You hum the song, before you know it, your friend is humming the song, and his friends, and their friends and so on. Are these people thieves? Or is the fact that "Humming" is a degraded copy make a difference? Hmm... Lets say one person buys a CD and his friends hear the content while in this persons car... Did they purchase the rights to hear this music? Did this person have the right to expose this material? Should these things come with memory erase pills, so that no one remembers "content," but instead only remember liking or disliking it so you can buy an official licensed edition? Lets say you hum the contents of an album, and release a torrent file of the humming? Is that any different then releasing a shitty recording of the actual music in a torrent file? Is the shitty recording in any way less of an IP violation then a higher quality release? How... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: The Other shoe: The Anti-piracy czar

TOKYO - At last, a way to end squabbles over which TV channel to watch — without buying a second set. Sharp Corp. has developed a liquid-crystal display that shows totally different images to people viewing the screen from the left and the right.

Sharp Develops 'Two-Way Viewing-Angle' LCD - Yahoo! News

Now this is a truly new application of a keyboard, which I am sure will be rather hellishly expensive, but will probably not have any problem finding people to buy it judging from how much some fools are willing to pay for the reduced-size "Happy Hacker" keyboard--particularly since they willingly pay even more for the version where no one bothered to silkscreen labels onto the keys.

I give it a whole three months of this thing on the market before someone codes up a Drempels-style hack to make the keys change color and so on while the keyboard is being used. The possibilities are damn near endless.

Pimp.

This man deserves a patent with a large sack of money pinned to it.

Decius Wrote:

Equipped with a camera and sensors, the Guardrobo D1, developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co, is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble.

Intruder Alert!

DO NOT MOVE! DO NOT MOVE! EXTERMINATE!!!

DigitalCamera@101reviews - Japanese Robot Guards to Patrol Shops And Offices

Michael Dell would like to license Mac OS X and ship it with future PC products, the Dell founder and chairman has revealed.

Dell 'happy' to ship Mac OS X-based PCs | The Register