Way too late, but still lovely.

Universal Adapter: Westinghouse Throws Its Support Behind Universal Adapter Concept

Green Plug’s technology allows every electronic device to communicate its own energy requirements to one adapter, allowing for several goods to use the same power box. But in order for the universal adapter to work, companies have to embed Green Plug’s firmware into their electronics.

Westinghouse, the first company to sign on with Green Plug, said the adapter would not only help it cut costs (it wouldn’t have to sell power adapters with each product if the consumer already has a universal one at home), the environmental savings are huge as well.

More maemo wireless hacking

Quickpost: Installing Aircrack-ng on a N800 « Didier Stevens

As some readers have informed me that the Kismet package for the N800 isn’t available anymore, I looked for an alternative and found aircrack-ng for the N800.

Ecosystems have complex internal connections. Who woulda thought it?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cod fall may speed ‘toxic tide’

The main cause of the blooms has been thought to be increasing levels of nutrients in the sea, with a second factor being sea temperatures driven higher by climate change.

Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus wash into the seas from agricultural land, and are also produced by some types of industry - a particular problem in largely enclosed waters such as the Baltic.

These nutrients stimulate the growth of types of phytoplankton - varieties of algae - that can form blooms.

As well as the toxins they produce, the process takes oxygen out of the water.

The scientific team - which also involved researchers from Germany and Latvia - assessed three decades of data on the Baltic Sea food web.

Basically, zooplankton (tiny marine animals) eat phytoplankton, and sprat (small fish) eat zooplankton. Finally, cod eat the sprat.

“Right now, in the last 30 years, cod have been the top predators in the Baltic, after populations of seals and other marine mammals declined because of hunting,” explained Dr Casini.

The data showed a simple correlation. As the cod population declined sharply from the early 1980s, the sprat population rose; zooplankton declined, and phytoplankton increased.

So much for the surveillance society

I Was A Teenage Bot Master | The Register

“That’s why I love this age, its all computers heh,” SoBe wrote in early December 2005, a month after Ancheta’s arrest, during an online chat. “All these companys have websites, etc. Its just funny going somewhere like Target, or Sprint then coming home and rooting there servers out of boredom. Makes some people feel like they can do anything.”

Now obviously some of these transcripts are from court records, but really if people are posting discussions of their botnets on IRC for months on end you sure don’t get much of a sense they were worried about being watched…

How to compare companies to countries

The Reality-Based Community

A much simpler measure would be employment. Multiply a firm’s headcount by some sort of population-to-employment ratio (about 2 for the U.S.) and you have the size of the population that the firm supports. Wal-Mart has 1.8 million employees; McDonald’s is second with 450,000. (Both of those numbers may be exaggerated by high ratios of part-time to full-time employees.) That makes Wal-Mart about the size of a smallish state or a tiny country: Oklahoma or Connecticut, Namibia or Moldova.

Nah, this doesn’t work either. The number of people companies employ doesn’t correspond very well at all to the amount of economic activity they’re responsible for. And, like profits, it’s wildy variable at the stroke of a pen. If Walmart outsourced 70% of its employees to a bunch of captive local subcontractors (as they already do with their cleaning staff to avoid certain liabilities) that wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever to their economic impact. You could probably do some kind of deep analysis of supplier chains to figure out what proportion of employees there should be credited to the top-level company (just as you can look at ecosystems to see what proportion of prey animals goes to feed a particular top predator), but the number isn’t at all easy to derive.

In addition, even once you’ve done that kind of accounting, it doesn’t account for the differences in revenue generated per person depending on the kind of work a firm does. So a multi-office law firm might generate as much money as a much larger (headcount) retail chain, rather like looking at the difference in GDP per capita between Liechtenstein and Togo…

Why don’t they just start burning viruses into rom?

Adware slips between pages of e-book | The Register

An adware package has turned up on the latest e-book devices from iRex, and will install itself automatically onto a connected PC if it gets the chance.

The infection appears to be the imgInSOY worm, which copies itself between removable media and uses autorun.inf to infect any Windows system it comes across. In addition to copying itself onto any more removable devices the worm operates as adware.

The Iliad is a Linux-based e-ink device which synchronises with a desktop PC to download books or other documents the user wants to read, as well as uploading sketches or annotations the user has made to existing documents. But when connected over USB the device also appears as a removable drive, and that’s when the infection can occur.

Fighting for the 9-hour day

BBC NEWS | Europe | Bus passengers in EU law ‘farce’

Western Greyhound in south-west England has broken one route into three so that passengers have to change buses twice.

The rules on routes longer than 50km (30 miles) are too costly to implement and the result is a farce, it says.

But the European Commission says there is no problem elsewhere in Europe and the companies are trying to bypass laws which ensure drivers are not tired.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think that having bus drivers working only 9 hours a day is a pretty good idea. Perhaps the bus companies should have little clocks saying, “Your driver has been on shift for XX hours” and see how the passengers react as the number goes into double digits.

Excellent barn-security advice

Marginal Revolution: What to do

1. As long as the Fed and Treasury are providing a safety net, insisting on capital requirements is entirely reasonable and it lowers moral hazard. If you’re going to bail out your friend in a poker game, you can ask him not to bet too much beyond his chips.2. When the “shadow banking system” does not have capital requirements, normal financial activities, as regulated by the Fed, are inefficiently taxed and too much of an economy’s leverage ends up in the unregulated shadow banking sector.

And so on. Great ideas, but about 15 years late. (There were plenty of people making arguments like this 15 years ago; they were called “out of touch”.)

As long as pigs fly

Big rise for the boss? That’s fine by me - Times Online

The findings, to be presented by Andrew Clark at this week’s Royal Economic Society conference at Warwick University, show that high pay among managers does not cause resentment because workers aspire to being paid such salaries themselves. “From the exterior, managerial wages may seem to be way too high,” the paper says. “But from within the firm, the picture may be far rosier. Others’ good fortune today may be my own good fortune tomorrow.” Even lower down the income scale, the research shows people are happy as long as they believe their own pay is not stuck.

And just how where shall we find those folks who believe their pay is not stuck? Certainly not in the lower ranks on this side of the pond…

Who will watch the terminally crazy?

State says developmentally disabled violent offender is too difficult to house:

The motion for amending the conditions of Sumner’s release was prompted by the fact that DAIL, the state agency that supervises developmentally disabled offenders found incompetent to stand trial, recently told the court it will no longer provide services for Sumner.Sumner has twice been committed under Act 248, which provides that developmentally disabled individuals who have been charged with violent crimes, who likely committed those crimes and have been found incompetent to stand trial, be held in the custody of the commissioner of DAIL indefinitely, even though they have not been convicted.