www.ntk.net
Girls may want to go out with Reeves but they don't necessarily want to fight interplanetary wars for a living. And if that first mention of the cards' unique "Santa Claus" capability to discern moral failings in carriers isn't terrifying enough, you really should read the government's new 160 page opus on how they'll be running the show. It's not about the ID cards: it's about the huge centralised biometric database the government is planning to smuggle in on the back of it. Couldn't they just put the biometrics on the card where we can see them, and then store a comparison hash or some other translucent database technique centrally? Feel free to add your own comments to the consultation, which requires replies by July 20th. And we're *so* sure they'll count all the responses correctly this time. Regarding February's revelations about eBay-advertised pyramid schemes: "Hi wonderful NTK people, Just read your article on matrix scams", writes a reader whose name we'll omit for the time being. End of", he continues (in fact, pyramid selling and other "endless chains" don't seem to be illegal in the UK yet, though they are in California), before kind of spoiling the whole thing by asking "Why aren't lawmakers getting ebay to remove these ads? Decent people working in legitimate network marketing companies (for instance me) are getting tarred with the same brush as these bastards". In other words, all the ingredients (with the possible addition of an unexpected bolt of lightning) for the creation of humanity's first self-aware electromagnetic flying brain-swarm, which will then proceed to hunt down horrified onlookers like the sentinels in "The Prisoner" or something. It's an experimental video codec released by Beeb R&D onto a sourceforge site under a GPL-compatible license. Now, what we know about video encoding could be compressed into a negative size bytestream, so we can't speak for its viability. Off the top of our heads, its mention of arithmetic coding is worrying, given how patent-encumbered that area is. But still, an open source streaming protocol with an eye to production video, and even a hint of a chance of being adopted by a large media organisation *cough*. If could even give Ogg Theora a bit of a kick, and that's got to be a worthy way of spending your license fee. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
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