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The surface of Earth's moon receives 12,000 TW of absolutely predictable solar power. The LSP System uses 10 to 20 pairs of bases to collect on the order of 1% of the solar power reaching the lunar surface. The collected sunlight is converted to many low-intensity beams of microwaves and directed to rectennas on Earth. Each rectenna converts the microwave power to electricity that is fed into the local electric grid. The system could easily deliver the 20 TW or more of electric power required by 10 billion people. Adequate knowledge of the moon and practical technologies have been available since the late 1970s to collect this power and beam it to Earth.

Sorry 'bout that.

Google's cache:

Realtime encoding to MP3 and (by Summer 2003) WMA
Realtime decoding of MP3, WMA, AAC, and ACELP(R).NET formats

Cached from Google

Realtime encoding to MP3 and (by Summer 2003) WMA
Realtime decoding of MP3, WMA, AAC, and ACELP(R).NET formats

Realtime encoding to MP3 and (by Summer 2003) WMA
Realtime decoding of MP3, WMA, AAC, and ACELP(R).NET formats

Well, it sure seems to me that all of these reporters were intimidated this time around. Or don't you think the two events mentioned above warrant coverage?

I don't know what these events may have looked like to reporters back then, and I'm not willing to speculate. This is skirting the real issue, which is that TWA 800 wasn't an act of war against the US.

Aren't you admitting here then that somebody can control the coverage, even if it means keeping all these reporters quiet? It seems to me you can't have it both ways... either the capability exists, or it doesn't.

It's not black and white. You can, under some circumstances, and you can't under others. I'm saying that the circumstances of the two events are different, and that you can't infer from one to prove claims relating to the other.

One theory I've heard is that the reason they had to keep TWA 800 quiet was because the accident involved a test of a missile banned by international treaty.

Still, not the same thing. It's not an act of war on the US.

What's funny is that you can probably better support the TWA 800 hypothesis than the 9/11 Israeli connection hypothesis, which doesn't make sense.

I will point out that the link you gave disputing the stories in the Washington Post and Haaretz is to a post in a newsgroup!

It's a verbatim quote from a post to a Yahoo discussion group. The original post is cached here. The author is Marc Ash, editor of truthout.com, and this is how much he likes Bush, in case you were wondering.

Didn't you earlier chastise me for basing my opinions on the above two papers?

No. Check your facts.

For those who don't know, Meccano was basically Erector in the US. It was first established as toys in the UK at the beginning of the last century.

Oh yeah?

You know wrong.

Guess what, pal? At $10/hour, they're making MORE MONEY than a good majority of the citizens in this country.

Ummm, no.

The 2003 median income in the United States is about $56,500.

This is a median (IQ 100) wage of $23.25/hr.

But forget for a minute about what the median income is -- let's see what $10/hr would actually get you in a technical field.

To a nonrural techie,
$10/hr is about
$8.5/hr after taxes,
$18.66 / day after housing ($600/mo - good luck),
$16 after utilities
$10 after cheap food ($2 / full meal),
$8 after commute costs (forget a car),
$6 after cell phone and internet access (line of work requires these),
$4 after mandatory investment in your tech skills (60/month on software, hardware, and books),

leaves you with $4 in your pocket for a hard day's work. (I predict you'll use most of this to fill in the gaps in your workplace health care coverage).

All ten dollars an hour is good for is the commute to stressful underpaid work, food and shelter, and a tiny subsidy on maintaining your technical skills (don't even think of doing this on your boss's time - remember, you're being driven like a slave). I've included NOTHING else!

The above breakdown is a starvation wage for a single person! By contrast, $20/hour (still below the median wage in the united states - see top of comment) would allow you to take care of each of the items above, and still pocket $60+ each day you work. That's enough to do most things a person would want to do in a day, or save up for a large ($600) expense every two weeks - by contrast, the initial ($10) breakdown wouldn't let you eat out a couple of times a month -- you would literally be making more money on a $20/week allowance from your mom than working full time as a $10/hr slave. It's not a reasonable wage for an independent, skilled adult -- it's a wage inappropriate even to a person with an IQ of 75 -- making less than half the median wage is unacceptable.

Just in case you forgot to read the top of the page...

Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting abstruse information on Ultima creator Richard Garriott's mysterious new MMORPG, Tabula Rasa, as referenced in a recent Slashdot Games post dealing with Korean MMO behemoth NCSoft, who purchased the nascent game for "$33.4 million in stock and cash" back in 2001. An online chat transcript from early 2003 noted that "many people that worked on [cancelled MMO Ultima Online 2] are now with NCsoft working on Tabula Rasa", and more recently, a Richard Garriott lecture at the Austin Game Conference mentioned that the game "will most likely utilize a massively multiplayer metaworld for player matching and instantiated spaces for smaller groups of matched players", but almost nothing about the game has yet been revealed. The clearest indication yet comes from several recently-posted pieces of concept art, as noted earlier this week, showing an alien planet called Eera as the main setting, and mentioning such oddities as "Eeran Wastelanders [which] will
beguile you with psychic hallucinations."

FP

While the situation is different, it may pay to remember Steve Fossett, an American who in 1998 crashed his hot air balloon off the cost of Australia after also attempt to fly around the world.

The rescue bill, which came to hundreds of thousands of dollars was footed by the Australian taxpayer.

It's not the first time we've helped out stricken adventurer's either.

I'm curious as to why the US or NZ bases just don't move him to an Australian base at Antartica and let him sort it out from there.

Pie menus are a naturally efficient way to operate a tilt-sensitive user interface. Scrolling up and down through one-dimensional linear menus with a device that can tilt in any directions is a waste of the device's potential.

Here's a cool research paper from Sony's Computer Science Labs, about "tilting pie menus". I love it! I can't wait till all cell phones can sense tilt. Tilt control rocks!

Tilting Operations for Small Screen Computers
By Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc.
More details: Tilting Operations for Small Screen Interfaces (Tech Note)
HTML version from Google

-Don

1. Immunity from biased administrative moderation.
   
2. A Meta section for users to discuss Slashdot itself, on-topic, without being administratively mod-bombed.
   
3. A public pledge to halt administrative astroturfing.
   
4. Admin moderation visible in moderation messages.
   
5. Accurate timestamps for moderation messages.
   
6. Public acknowledgment that admins and users are different.
   
7. A public apology from Michael Sims to Seth Finkelstein for defaming the only member of the original censorware project to actually accomplish something.
   
8. HTML that comes close to W3C compliance.
   
9. An open submissions queue for those paid users who opt-in to read it.
   
10. A 20-th century comment viewing mode.
    

As of 9:49 CST 11/10/03, this is it:

Important message from Belkin:
In response to a recent Usenet group posting stating that Belkin spams its customers through its routers, Belkin Corporation apologizes for the concern this has caused and is taking action to address the issue. To allay customers' worries, Belkin will offer a firmware upgrade that will be available via download from its website (www.belkin.com) on November 17, 2003. This upgrade will rid the redirect completely so that no additional browser windows will appear during the router's installation process. Questions can be directed to our dedicated networking customer support line at 877-736-5771 or e-mailed to kannynmc@belkin.com.

For reference, here is the orignal (from the Google cache:

Important message from Belkin:
Belkin is aware of some recent postings that claim that Belkin wireless routers are spamming users during the setup process and periodically thereafter. It is not now, nor has it ever been, the policy of Belkin to intentionally spam our customers or anyone else. Belkin offers a free trial of our parental control feature in our routers, and to make our customers aware of the feature itself and to give them the opportunity to take advantage of the free trial, we have tried to direct users to the information regarding the parental control features. However, since this has become a source of concern to our users, and it is Belkin policy to address the concerns of our users quickly, Belkin has decided to remove this function from the routers. Each router's firmware that incorporates parental control as an option will be changed.

Kharma whoring for fun and profit....

Sure, fellow freedom fighter.

As I am boycotting Adobe due to their DMCA terrorism, I feel that PDF files should be liberated into HTML. Here's a copy in HTML format.

...here's the HTML Version courtesy of Google.

spamhaus.org seems to be down. Probably being DDOS'd as well.

The google cache of the page is here but it's loading pretty slowly, so I'm not sure how much of the page info is actualy cached.

Not all 200 names on the list are from the USA, but American spammers do seem to be a large majority.

For anyone keeping score, that's what Siddhartha Gautama was teaching 2500 years ago...

Here on page 4 of a htmlized pdf

Google to the rescue (the first blog)

Yeah this guy was stupid. He acts like he is uncovering some conspiracy when all he is doing is talking about stuff he shouldn't. Of course they need Macs, how else will they develop software for them? Maybe it's to test Halo (ha). More likely it's for their next version of VPC (the one where they change something other than the logo)

I suppose they'll enforce sales tax on us by claiming that having membership (a userID) with a website you purchased from constitutes being in the same STATE/State/state as you make the purchase?

Everyone should go buy the book Cracking the Code or read it online from SupremeLaw.Org, or read information on your Straw Man and howto validate the alleged "Sales Tax."

More taxation may actualy cause more freemen (and freewomen) to appear out of the wood-work. I'm one of them. :-)

Bill Gates just made the Adam Osborne mistake. He announced "WinFX", whatever that is, as the improvement to .NET. Now a significant number of people will wait for WinFX, and Microsoft will lose the profits it would have had from those who wait.

Adam Osborne's company made an early personal computer. Adam announced a new model long before it was ready. Sales stopped because everyone wanted to wait for the new model. Adam's company went bankrupt.

It was amazing watching the bankrupting of the company on TV at the time. Osborne's company went from being one of the fastest growing to having insufficient money for operations in about two months.

It was a sobering lesson. Computer companies sometimes die extremely fast. Novell, WordPerfect, Corel, Fifth Generation Systems, and Central Point are examples. There are many others.

Microsoft has not been managed well. The company survives and profits because of having a virtual monopoly on operating systems and on office suite file formats. Think about it, suppose someone had a monopoly on water. That person could soon be much richer than Bill Gates.

For most businesses, the free Open Office is all they need. There are significant benefits to Open Office. It is much less quirky than Microsoft Office, for example. Most people are not very observant about the software they use, and they hardly notice the difference between Microsoft Word and the Open Office word processor.

Right now, many businesses use software that runs only under Microsoft Windows. However, there are many desktops that only need software that is already available for Linux. Those can benefit from the increased stability of Linux.

People don't care about the cost of Windows. The cost is only a few dollars of the cost of the computers they buy. The biggest issue against Microsoft is its adversarial behavior toward its customers. Using Linux means never having to say "My operating system company is partly my enemy."

Microsoft is on the way down. Most people don't realize that yet, however. Microsoft is one of the biggest management failures the world has ever seen. If the company could make a few changes in its behavior, it could stay profitable. However, it seems that abusiveness is more important to Microsoft than money.

Note that WinFX is someone else's trademark. WinFX is the most cracked and cheated program I have ever seen. There are 50 times as many links to cheats as there are to the product!

Microsoft has scheduled an MSDN TV program about "WinFX" for November 6 (Subject to change by Microsoft, of course.)

Microsoft claims that WinFX is their trademark. (The link is to a Google conversion of a .DOC file to HTML.)

Microsoft has a history of picking inappropriate trademarks. "X" means unknown. It was inappropriate to use the letter X in conjunction with "Xbox" and "ActiveX". Aside from being someone else's trademark, WinFX sounds too trivial for use with an extensive programming product. Traditionally, "FX" has been used to signify "effects".

They never saw it coming. Here's a google cache.

I hope you were being facetious. "UCSD" is an extremely well-known abbreviation for the University of California at San Diego.

I looked at the "nastygram" and it wasn't particularly nasty; it was very straightforward, not unduly legalistic, and indicated that UCSD had contacted the ucsduncensored.com people a couple weeks ago and had apparently been blown off. Furthermore, this isn't a case where the USCD in the domain name was referring to something else (it was clearly "the" UCSD), and it wasn't a parody site that could claim First Amendment protection--it was a community site for UCSD students, and one that accepted advertising (look at Google's cache of the site).

You can argue UCSD is being undiplomatic or churlish, but they're hardly acting out of legal bounds here--and I'm not sure it's that ridiculous to start with, because it's not a UCSD service and putting "UCSD" in the front of the name suggests it is. Independent publications in college towns that are there to provide alternatives to official services don't use the college name in their name, even if they may use it in the subtitle. For instance, the "Independent Alligator" is referring to the University of Florida Gators, but they're not the "University of Florida Alligator," and if they tried to call themselves that, UF would be firmly within their rights to slap them. (Yes, "UCSD Uncensored" getting dinged for this is ironic, but the legal point still stands.)

Is this a new exploit. I remember seeing this on grc.com. Seems like grc.com is not reachable but here is the google cache for it
.

What you are missing is that they transferred the data over UDT not FASTTCP

The press release at the national center for data mining says clearly that they used UDT. Google link to an overview of the protocol is here or the original.

This is Google's cache of http://www.fourmilab.to/documents/digital-imprimat ur/

Fortunately, Google can remember the past. Long live history, down with big brother!

Not really.. Here Though it is the frequency used by microwave ovens. Which makes me really wonder how healthy cordless phones (2.4GHz at least) can be. The power is very low, but all the means is you are slow cooking.

I dont think the SHIFT key is really the point in this whole story, but instead the informations he gives out about CD standards and how one can insert or bypass such errors in the CD TOC, check the original document, section 4. Yet, for those interrested, all those infos are since a long time on the net anyway...

Wide screens are great for watching DVDs. But the aspect ratio is *exactly wrong* for viewing web pages and word processing, which almost always call for a portrait orientation rather than landscape. When you put Word in "Whole Page" view mode on a landscape-oriented display, a ton of screen real estate is wasted.

What we really need is for all IT departments to shell out the few extra bucks for pivoting displays.

Just guessing, but did Microsoft make Pivx take down their web page discussing 31 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer? If so, it is good that Microsoft decided not to buy a billion dollars of bad publicity by asking Google to erase the cache.

The page is gone: Unpatched IE security holes, but lives on in Google's cache.

Google's cache: 11 September 2003: There are currently 31 unpatched vulnerabilities..

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:E2UQe7SL0YEJ: www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/+&hl=en&ie=UTF- 8

From Google's Cache: http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:-9shQSz6F5UJ: www.silicon.com/as2003/agenda_lists.html+&hl=en&ie =UTF-8

From TruthOrFiction.com via Google cache

"When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 million developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.

When confronted with the same problem, the Russians used a pencil."

This of course begs the question: if they can sell DVDs profitably in India for the equivilant for $6 US, why are we paying $29 for the same thing.

No actually it doesn't. It may however have raised the question in your mind.

I try not to nit-pick but this one bugs me. Granted it is now generally considered common usage.

Since the site is down after like 6 people visited it, here's Google cache link.

Googlie Good HTML

• hardcoded tablewidths of 780 are a pain in the butt if your normal windowsize is 640
• 'primary' purpose is ill-defined
• most wargames ought to qualify
• I'd like to see a single timeline for all entries, with short descriptions and links
• my overlapping timeline is here [cache]

The TWX used the same infrastructure as the AT&T telephone network. But it was regulated differently. ... In particular: Every call (even local) was a toll call. Bummer!

Oops: Turns out there were two versions. Here is a writeup from the Phrack archives (1989!) on the history of the TWX network.

Looks like the site has been slashdotted. Though at least two of the pages are cached on Google:

The Fastest Man on Earth (Overview and Index)

The Fastest Man on Earth (Part 2 of 4)

Google cached version

http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:ltX22XDG3_4J: www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Primestar/Primestar.ht ml+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

I really think that people should standardise the meaning of kilo-, and giga- to their SI meanings. The is a google cache link to a web page about the proposed changes where they would change to SI definitions, and new prefixes (kibi, gibi) would come into to define the warped computer terminology defintions of kilo- and giga-. It would be less fuss for most people, and everyone could then get on without all this trivial garbage.

In case of slashdotting IBM's Commodore64 servers, use this google cache.

Apology-- because of connection problems, the online version of my timeline doesn't include the new entries yet. Also, my host may be Slashdotted pretty quickly so here's the Google cache

Well, since it was slashdotted, I found the Google cache, the front page:

here.

It is looking a little slow already. So in case it goes down, here is a link to the google cache.