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see the book "The Physics of Superheroes". It's about exactly what you would expect.

When I saw the title, I was sure that this story was going to be about the recent book .

While having been a trekkie for years, I feel that I can spend my money in better ways elsewhere. However, I predict that the auction will bring more than they expect, because there are lots of trekkies who feel differently than I do.

Watching a documentary like Trekkies , one gets the impression that much extreme Trek fandom is pathological. I don't know what happened in these people's lives that they have to escape to a fantasy world based on a television series, but they need help. I feel especially sorry for the loved ones of people who spent all their time and money amassing Trek stuff and acting things out while neglecting those around them.

This seems like a mix between Technogenesis and Snow Crash but still in 2D... oh.. and less swordfights.

This seems like a mix between Technogenesis and Snow Crash but still in 2D... oh.. and less swordfights.

People hate change, and unless you force them to (Like the communist Chinese switch to simplified) people will spell the way they want. (Kind of like trying to get Americans to switch to metric)

Instead of a victory, the Chinese developments should be seen as a compromise. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was actually talk among intellectuals of switching to the Latin alphabet. Even Mao Zedong initially supported it. Eventually, though, the Pinyin romanisation scheme was used only in international contexts, and the simplified character system was set for internal use. Still, the amount of characters that were eventually simplified was much fewer than the early reformers actually hoped for.

Both S Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China (Princeton University Press, 1989)and John Defrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1986) give a good overview of the trials and tribulations of 20th-century writing reform. Defrancis is adamant that retaining the character system hurts literacy, but there is opposing research, and one can't deny how important the character system is to Chinese culture.

People hate change, and unless you force them to (Like the communist Chinese switch to simplified) people will spell the way they want. (Kind of like trying to get Americans to switch to metric)

Instead of a victory, the Chinese developments should be seen as a compromise. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was actually talk among intellectuals of switching to the Latin alphabet. Even Mao Zedong initially supported it. Eventually, though, the Pinyin romanisation scheme was used only in international contexts, and the simplified character system was set for internal use. Still, the amount of characters that were eventually simplified was much fewer than the early reformers actually hoped for.

Both S Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China (Princeton University Press, 1989)and John Defrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1986) give a good overview of the trials and tribulations of 20th-century writing reform. Defrancis is adamant that retaining the character system hurts literacy, but there is opposing research, and one can't deny how important the character system is to Chinese culture.

Ok... Black Rednecks...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312013493/104-85 97344-0175904?v=glance&n=283155

The use of stealing to mean copying information predates your existence on this planet. It was in use in the 50s. Stop trying to pretend it is others trying to redefine the language.

Did you moan about the identity theft article on slashdot last week?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/04/237 218

"The Soviets stole the atomic bomb from the US before you were even born."

Did they? They up and took a bomb? how did they get it out of the USA? Those old school nuclear weapons were pretty big. Im curious becuase i never heard this story before. Unless you actually meant they COPIED the usa's PLANS for the bomb, in which case they havent actually deprived the usa of anything. Its not even wrong for them to do this! Unless you somehow think that the USA has the only rights to make nuclear bombs...

You realize you look like a retard, right? Pretending to not understand what I said just because of how I phrased it?

Or others:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312013493/104-85 97344-0175904?v=glance&n=283155

Again, they stole the bomb. Yes, we could still make one too, but they stole it. Look it up. You want to argue about the meaning of words changing, note that this one had this meaning a long time ago. It is just you (and a few others) who think that steal can't mean to copy information without permission. And it's been that way for 50 years. So stop trying to pretend it is others trying to reinvent the English language.

Did you step up to the plate to complain about the "Identity Theft" article slashdot ran last week? Nothing was stolen, just information duplicated. If you did, I salute you, but I really suspect you didn't.

Because you know, everything thats ILLEGAL is wrong right? Good thing all laws are made by god and there are no unjust laws. Otherwise we might have to THINK FOR OURSELVES and determine what's right and wrong with our own moral compass. Imagine how sick that would be!

This isn't a question of morals. You said the two were the same, I pointed out there is a difference. You can't use one as a substitute for the other when there are significant differences.

"if you can't see how downloading something without the commercials could hurt a business who makes money selling ad space on the idea that you might view it, then you're pretty dim"

Do I care about the poor spammers whoes business are hurt by my spam filters? Why do you think these business have a god given right to make money? OFF OF ME no less!!! This is a new world. I get to say who makes money off of me. Im not a prostitute and the advertising companies are not my pimps.

I don't think they have a God-given right. If you don't like the ads, you don't have to watch the show. I think that perhaps as a recepient of these shows for no fee you would be appreciative and not try to bust the business model that is letting you do so.

Either way, redistrubuting the show without the ads breaks the business model and will lead to the end of it. That would mean paying for TV shows or having no TV shows. Does that sound good to you? It doesn't sound good to me.

I feel the ad agencies don't have a right to force you to pay attention, maybe you should even have the right to press a skip button. But I feel that for their money spent they deserve to have the chance to catch your eye and actually present an ad you want to watch. By removing the commercials, you deprive them of that possibility. I do feel ad agencies have gone overboard thinking you somehow have to watch their ads, even if they are crap. I don't agree with that. They should have to make their commercials interesting enough to hold your attention.

This whole thing comes down to you deciding you're going to take the law into your own hands. That companies aren't doing a good job with their property, so you're going to take control. It doesn't work that way. you do have a choice, a choice to not buy their stuff if you feel it isn't worth what you're paying. To not watch it if you don't fe

My recollection of developer lock-in tactics is different from yours, though I may be wrong. Most of my knowledge on the subject comes from an excellent book, Game Over (no I don't get a kickback if you follow the link...damn).

You're right that Console makers tried to ensure exclusivity in any way they could. However, my understanding is that the court cases you refer to were more than simple title exclusivity. Back in the height of their power, Nintendo's restrictions on publishers were pretty severe. Nintendo would only license two titles per year, and exclusivity was a requirement. This is legal, but I believe Nintendo tried to push it further by prohibiting licensees from developing *any* title for another console. This is where the revolts came.

However, the power has shifted (for the most part) towards publishers. No company, even Sony, could make such demands even if it were legal for fear that the publisher would simply jump ship. Imagine telling EA that they can only release two titles per year (hah!).

These days, Console makers have switched to the "catching flies with honey" approach to exclusivity. They either give big publishers sweet deals (Like Sony did to lockdown the exclusivity window on GTA III), or they buy out dev studios (like MSFT did with Bungie), or they entice independent studios with digital distribution (MSFT with Xbox Live Arcade, and now Sony with Playstation Beyond). Granted, you see XBLA titles that aren't exclusive (Street Fighter, Marble Blast, etc), but I'd wager the smaller name studios are bound by form of exclusivity provision. This doesn't mean that the console makers have given up being evil, but at the very least you get the facade of a benevolent company.

I don't see anything new here with the Playstation Beyond thing. Either from service itself (it seems no different from Xbox Live Arcade), or in terms of the furthering schemes of companies trying to lock-in exclusivity.

-Dom

Save yourself $11.08 by buying the book here: PHP Hacks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $11.38, or 38.56%!

Save yourself $11.08 by buying the book here: PHP Hacks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $11.38, or 38.56%!

I couldn't agree more. Although I do find these stories completely hilarious, in many cases calling the users "stupid" is a little too much. Like you said, lots of them can be blamed on the design, and most of the rest on the fact that users have better things to do than read man pages all day. Heck, some of them even go outside once in a while. ;)

Now, if Microsoft would start learning design a decent inteface, maybe Hotmail wouldn't suck so much.

I couldn't agree more. Although I do find these stories completely hilarious, in many cases calling the users "stupid" is a little too much. Like you said, lots of them can be blamed on the design, and most of the rest on the fact that users have better things to do than read man pages all day. Heck, some of them even go outside once in a while. ;)

Now, if Microsoft would start learning design a decent inteface, maybe Hotmail wouldn't suck so much.

Yet again Slashdot links to BN.com for kickbacks when Amazon has it cheaper.

The world may never know exactly how much Ken Lay was involved in the whole Enron fiasco. But although he probably wasn't nearly as devious and manipulative as CEO Jeff Skilling or CFO Andy Fastow, Ken Lay was still the captain of the ship and deserves much of the blame for Enron's collapse.

From what I've read of him, Ken had several flaws:

1. He was far more interested in the trappings of power (luxury homes, expensive jets, etc.) than running a multi-billion-dollar company. So he let his underlings do it for him.
2. He had a great aversion to interpersonal conflicts, so he rarely ever told anyone "no". It was common knowledge among the top execs that Ken was a pushover - just threaten to quit, and you could have whatever you wanted.
3. Because of #1 and #2, he wouldn't or couldn't control the executives under him, who ran wild as a result.
4. I tend to suspect that the oh-so-clever accounting techniques and special purpose entities Andrew Fastow cooked up to keep Enron's debts off their books was far more complicated than Ken could understand. (They're certainly too much for my little brain.) But instead of asking tough questions, Ken just shrugged and signed off on them.

So although Ken may not have been the greedy manipulator that his underlings were, he reminds me a lot of a pleasant, but wimpy and passive dad who's let his children run wild with no discipline from their earliest days, then protests that he's not to blame when they turn into terrors 10-15 years later.

For a fascinating account of the rise and fall of Enron, I would highly recommend the book The Smartest Guys In the Room. You don't have to understand all the arcane ins-and-outs of accounting to follow the story, which really is pretty fascinating. (I believe there's a documentary movie based on the book as well...)

Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult suggests that to win the favour of Rand's school, one must not only be a ruthless and free-thinking businessman, but one must also adore Rand as a person. For all the Objectivists' talk of self-reliance and independence, they really just want to pull people into their personality cult. If Ken Lay had paid his dues to Peikoff and quoted Rand on a regular basis, he'd be seen as their hero, but since he didn't, they probably don't care about him at all.

"Future Hype" by Bob Seidensticker gives some historical perspective on "revolutionary" technologies. It's an fascinating read and not too expensive. There are sure to be a few of Bob's "Technology Myths" touted as truth by Okin.
A link to Amazon (for the truly lazy:) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1576753700/
Gunz

No, some members of MoD also spent time in jail. I recommend this book (I have read it): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060170301/104-68 88419-6258359?v=glance&n=283155

What the quote probably means is that he was one of the modern generation of fraudsters who specifically focused on the type of stuff known as "identity theft" instead of the older free phone calls, self-generated CC numbers crowd.

Rockefeller's oil "monopoly" was good for the consumers. Read DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America for amazing insight in what Rockefeller did to create the most amazing market in existence. He lowered the price of oil dozens of times over what competitors were charging, and created new industries out of his vertical marketing of previously inefficient businesses. Rockefeller should have been praised, not sued.

Land line service was so heavily subsidized for GENERATIONS that there was never a push to wireless communications, which was the big "push" to get land line providers to up the ante on their bandwidth. We had so many preferential subsidies of the local telcos that they didn't want to give more than the law required -- namely cheap and basic 9.6k service. It was slight de-regulation of other industries that caused the Internet boom, but we'd have been there much sooner had the market allowed for competition, which we didn't have for generations.

Free markets don't implode, there has never been proof of a monopoly in a free market or a market that has fallen apart because government stayed out of it. There are thousands of market proofs that the opposite is true.

The tribes I'm talking about are extremely xenophobic.

Interesting, the one in the documentary I saw were too, or at least, they were extremely territorial. Yet, they had a meeting with another tribe in order to make peace (had been a long-standing feud, even some killings in previous clashes, iirc).

Their culture is extremely exclusive. I see no reason to believe in the "possibility" of their interbreeding just because our own culture makes that possible. Theirs does not, unless I learn otherwise.

For me, there are two things wrong with the reasoning in this paragraph:

1. You are assuming inter-breeding between populations is a cultural phenomenom peculiar to (say) western people. But inter-breeding a biological *neccessity*, shared not just among humans but all sexually reproducing animals. It should be fairly obvious that small populations, no matter how xenophobic, *need* to at least *occasionally* inter-breed with other populations to avoid dying out completely.

2. You are assuming that individual behaviour is bounded by the social norm. This is clearly wrong. Just because the social norms of some tribe are highly xenophobic and eschew external contact, it does not restrict individuals behaviour. (Especially younger individuals, who can be more curious and 'foolhardy' - particularly where social norms are heavily influenced by older, more conservative members of the population, such as tribal elders).

The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.

Well, (joking - no offence intended) you apparently were too busy looking for the hidden creationist agenda, which no one else saw it seems (I thought it was a good pop-science article on how statistics, networking theory and computer modelling can provide rather unexpected and interesting insights into connectedness of the human population), to notice they mentioned the book, Mapping Human History right near the beginning. He's a journalist though it seems, not a scientist. The work may have done by the DCU computer scientist, Mark Humphrys quoted in the same AP article, as this article more clearly suggests. I'd love to read a paper too, can't find one, but Dr. Humphrys has some articles on his site at least it seems.

Note that even if some Amazonian tribes have indeed been fully disconnected genetically from humanity for the last 600 years, that the conclusion instead becomes "we all, except for some statistically insignificant disconnected populations, share a common ancestor from as little as 2k years ago", which remains an interesting thought.

There is a large, well-funded theocrat movement at work in America today, priotitizing science in the media for subversion.

That's a great reason to start attacking one of the better-writen pop *science* articles, isn't it? :). FWIW, if the actual work was done (in part) by a DCU scientist, the (waning, thankfully) vested theocratic movement (Catholic and Anglican churches) over here at least strongly support the scientific method and evolutionary theories arising from it.

Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.

Most of those arguing this line with you, to my reading, have been trying to highlight the lack of evidence in the article to support your notion it's some kind of subtle pro-creationism piece. I'm wondering did you somehow read a different article to the rest of us. :)

Try forgetting about BushCo, Rove and the creationist nutters for ten minutes and reading the article again. You might find the interesting and enjoyable pop-sci article the rest of us read.

Save yourself $8.03 by buying the book here: The Information Revolution. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $8.26, or 36.56%!

Save yourself $8.03 by buying the book here: The Information Revolution. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $8.26, or 36.56%!

Once again Slashdot links to BN.com for kickbacks at its readership's expense when Amazon has it cheaper.

...closest i could find was the The Linux Bible: The Gnu Testament - so maybe this is what you were referring to ;-p

He seems to think that consciousness itself is a sort of soul, and once humans are entirely machine--which he thinks is coming fairly soon--we will still be "human".

I recently read The Singularity Is Near and gave a lot of thought to exactly that subject. Kurzweil makes a very strong case for the idea that there will be a robot me filling my role 100 years from now, and I'm pretty interested in whether that entity will actually be me, or a simulacra that kisses my wife (or her simulacra) goodnight each evening.

His thoughts mixed randomly with mine:

Our neurons die and reshape themselves constantly - such is life. The only truly enduring part of our brains are the patterns that exist in them. Science is making rapid progress in nanotechnology. Suppose that a perfect "robotic" neuron replacement is created, and that they are slowly infused into us over time. A neuron dies; it gets replaced with silicon (or whatever). Now, this process would be exceedingly gradual, but at some point you'd reach the stage at which your mental patterns were running on silicon more than on grey matter. The only difference would be in the physical process supporting those patterns, not the patterns themselves. You would never have experienced a discontinuity in your "self".

Would you still be you? I'm personally satisfied that yes, you would be. More specifically, I'm satisfied that I would still be me.

I assume you're thinking of a scenario like in Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers where "wireheads" spend all day stimulating their brains' pleasure centres. The textbook for the undergraduate psychology course I took a while back claimed that the latest research suggests that there really isn't a "pleasure center" as such and people really can't stimulate their brains that way.

In science-fiction novels where copying the brain into hardware is possible, like Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars future history, isn't the deep-brain scan usually fatal?

I figure I should take this opportunity to ask any of you who have travelled to Japan recently: has manga entirely overtaken traditional literature? I'm a big fan of such figures as Kawabata and Mishima (whose Sea of Fertility tetralogy is possibly the best thing I've ever read), but no Japanese young person I've ever met abroad has ever read them, even though they are seen internationally as the cream of the crop of Japanese literature. I've only seen young people read manga for pleasure. Is real literature totally dead in Japan?

Have you read Gene Wolfe's four-volume science-fiction masterwork The Book of the New Sun ? In the second book the protagonist encounters an alien species (the "Nodules") which are like paper-thin moths that swarm together and clog the respiratory tracts of their victims. When a character tries to strike them down with his sword, he discovers that cutting them only results in more of them at smaller size, a la the sorcerer's apprentice. So, even the paper-thin ones could be dreaded overlords.

I think these statistics speak for themselves.

Unfortunately they fail to take into account that the fighting during the Desert Storm conflict took place mostly outside of the urban cities. It is not at all surprising that there were fewer civilians hanging around the iraqi tank battalions in the middle of the desert and thus fewer civilian casualities despite the fact that fewer precsision guided weapons were used in the first Gulf War. If you don't believe me then perhaps you would enjoy reading the first hand accounts of Gen. Fred Franks, with extensive battle maps, who commanded the armored spearhead of 7th corps into western Iraq across the desert from Saud Arabia as told in Into the Storm: A Study in Command.

I've read two really good items on the subject of estimating software schedules. The first is Painless Software Schedules by Joel Spolsky, the Joel in Joel on Software. It's a quick read, and a lot of the comments here are giving the same advice all spread out. Even more useful is Waltzing With Bears by Tom DeMarco (ISBN 0932633609) (very talented author, I strongly recommend Peopleware to everyone), which is about managing risk on software projects, especially as it relates to time. This is one of the fundamental errors in the question "How long will it take?"--the inquirer wants an exact amount of time, so if you say it will take four hours, it should take exactly four hours. The problem is, you may luck out--someone may have had that feature in the program once already, and it was removed, so all you need to do is call some fully-tested code from a different place, or there may be high coupling, so that what looks like a really simple, straightforward change is insanely hard. Those two factors put together means giving an estimate should be something like "No more than forty hours, 75% probability of finishing within twenty-four hours, 50% chance of finishing within six hours, 25% of finishing within four hours, no quicker than an hour." As part of Waltzing With Bears, Tom DeMarco (and I assume others) put together a Riskology spreadsheet, intended to allow you to estimate schedule probability curves, which allows combining multiple probability curves to get an estimate more like "No faster than eight months, 75% within six and a half months, 50% within five months, 25% within ten weeks, no faster than four weeks." And always make sure the first number people hear is the worst case scenario--that's the one they're going to remember.

Other reading:
Coding Horror, How Long Would It Take If EVERYTHING Went Wrong?
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell
Google on Estimating Software Projects

I've read two really good items on the subject of estimating software schedules. The first is Painless Software Schedules by Joel Spolsky, the Joel in Joel on Software. It's a quick read, and a lot of the comments here are giving the same advice all spread out. Even more useful is Waltzing With Bears by Tom DeMarco (ISBN 0932633609) (very talented author, I strongly recommend Peopleware to everyone), which is about managing risk on software projects, especially as it relates to time. This is one of the fundamental errors in the question "How long will it take?"--the inquirer wants an exact amount of time, so if you say it will take four hours, it should take exactly four hours. The problem is, you may luck out--someone may have had that feature in the program once already, and it was removed, so all you need to do is call some fully-tested code from a different place, or there may be high coupling, so that what looks like a really simple, straightforward change is insanely hard. Those two factors put together means giving an estimate should be something like "No more than forty hours, 75% probability of finishing within twenty-four hours, 50% chance of finishing within six hours, 25% of finishing within four hours, no quicker than an hour." As part of Waltzing With Bears, Tom DeMarco (and I assume others) put together a Riskology spreadsheet, intended to allow you to estimate schedule probability curves, which allows combining multiple probability curves to get an estimate more like "No faster than eight months, 75% within six and a half months, 50% within five months, 25% within ten weeks, no faster than four weeks." And always make sure the first number people hear is the worst case scenario--that's the one they're going to remember.

Other reading:
Coding Horror, How Long Would It Take If EVERYTHING Went Wrong?
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell
Google on Estimating Software Projects

I've read two really good items on the subject of estimating software schedules. The first is Painless Software Schedules by Joel Spolsky, the Joel in Joel on Software. It's a quick read, and a lot of the comments here are giving the same advice all spread out. Even more useful is Waltzing With Bears by Tom DeMarco (ISBN 0932633609) (very talented author, I strongly recommend Peopleware to everyone), which is about managing risk on software projects, especially as it relates to time. This is one of the fundamental errors in the question "How long will it take?"--the inquirer wants an exact amount of time, so if you say it will take four hours, it should take exactly four hours. The problem is, you may luck out--someone may have had that feature in the program once already, and it was removed, so all you need to do is call some fully-tested code from a different place, or there may be high coupling, so that what looks like a really simple, straightforward change is insanely hard. Those two factors put together means giving an estimate should be something like "No more than forty hours, 75% probability of finishing within twenty-four hours, 50% chance of finishing within six hours, 25% of finishing within four hours, no quicker than an hour." As part of Waltzing With Bears, Tom DeMarco (and I assume others) put together a Riskology spreadsheet, intended to allow you to estimate schedule probability curves, which allows combining multiple probability curves to get an estimate more like "No faster than eight months, 75% within six and a half months, 50% within five months, 25% within ten weeks, no faster than four weeks." And always make sure the first number people hear is the worst case scenario--that's the one they're going to remember.

Other reading:
Coding Horror, How Long Would It Take If EVERYTHING Went Wrong?
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell
Google on Estimating Software Projects

James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets and in his numerous interviews with the press defended the NSA and said they really did change their ways after the scandals of the 1970s (telegram interception). Could it be that there never was a period of "gentlemanly spying" between then and September 11?

Yep, and if you want to travel back to the distant year 2000, Amazon is selling the book and CD-ROM combination for 24 cents. It'll go well next to your lava lamp and 8-trak.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines about these exact notions. He seems to think that consciousness itself is a sort of soul, and once humans are entirely machine--which he thinks is coming fairly soon--we will still be "human".

This one should work for most needs. It's multi-platform, and works with any currency.

Having blogged for several years, I've come to wish I'd started out and remained anonymous. While I might be willing to expose my own mistakes and foibles, the things I say can unintentionally hurt those I love. As someone who is active in my church, there are certain topics I dare not go near, and other topics I wonder if I'm just asking for trouble. The "Deb Series," while possibly some of my best writing, also caused problems.

I've watched bloggers get serious grief from families, co-workers and other communities they belong to because of what they write. The lessons are painful to watch.

In my own case, in the real world, I've trashed my career multiple times for things like accademic integrity and standing up for a co-worker who's being sexually harassed. I've lost friends for saying the truth, and God help me, it's made me a bit of a coward. I've been burned; I don't like it. I'm willing to be burned again, but it's going to have to be a serious fight. On some issues, I've backed down.

I hate that, but if I don't protect myself, I won't do anyone any good.

There's a book out right now, "Orbit by John J. Nance that speaks of a man alone on a doomed and communicationless 3 hour orbital tour. The man is free to write the truth because he believes he is going to die and the laptop will not be recovered for decades. He doesn't have to worry about what people will think. He also doesn't know there's a one-way connection to Earth, and billions of people are reading his every word.

I wish I could blog like that. I'm not sure why I haven't just scrapped my current blog and started anew, except that I doubt it would stay anonymous very long.

Anonymity provides a freedom that is both precious and necessary for freedom to flourish. Perhaps anonymity will be crushed beneath an over-reaching government. The loss may not be apparent initially, but in the long term, it will be devastating.

Freedom of speech often needs the freedom to be anonymous.

Just to note, the blurb suggests that Sharecrow's site is providing the commentaries. While it does aggregate links to a bunch of different commentary sites, the main place where aspiring commentators can have their commentaries hosted (first one is hosted free, others have a small fee--or you can link to files hosted elsewhere for free) is Commentary Central. This replaces the defunct DVDTracks site that Slashdot covered previously, which went defunct several years ago.

I'd also like to plug the commentary track that I myself recorded, for the Hayao Miyazaki film Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (which is getting a new special-edition DVD release from Mangled Video via Anchor Bay in just a couple of months, by the way--too bad it won't include my commentary!). I've continued to update and correct this commentary over the last few months, and it's grown into something I'm really proud of. Any comments on my commentary would be well-received...

It should not be surprising to people that economics provides the basis for explaining many interesting situations that occur in the real world in relation to computer security. Recall that economics is the study of how humans react to scarcity, or more bluntly how we behave in light of the fact that we cannot simply snap our fingers and have anything we want immediately placed in front of us all of the time (with the possible exception of Bill Gates and a few others, but they are not representative). It is precisely the ability of economics to insightfully solve common conundrums with deliciously counterintuitive explanations that seems to fascinate so many people, as evidenced by the recent success of books such as Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science and Freakonomics, despite the generally boring ways in which the subject is presented by our schools. If it involves human interactions and human nature then, ultimately, it involves economics.

It should not be surprising to people that economics provides the basis for explaining many interesting situations that occur in the real world in relation to computer security. Recall that economics is the study of how humans react to scarcity, or more bluntly how we behave in light of the fact that we cannot simply snap our fingers and have anything we want immediately placed in front of us all of the time (with the possible exception of Bill Gates and a few others, but they are not representative). It is precisely the ability of economics to insightfully solve common conundrums with deliciously counterintuitive explanations that seems to fascinate so many people, as evidenced by the recent success of books such as Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science and Freakonomics, despite the generally boring ways in which the subject is presented by our schools. If it involves human interactions and human nature then, ultimately, it involves economics.

People say "I'm going to kill you" all the time. People don't generally say "I've got a bomb."

Should Steve Ballmer be arrested for threatening to "Fucking kill" Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

Should this Amazon list be investigated as a death threat?

"Proper threat assessment" is definitely missing here. This kid is not dangerous, and never was. The teacher was a fool for thinking he was being targeted. The school's knee-jerk reaction doesn't make anyone safer. Meanwhile, the school's resources are tied up "protecting" idiots from their own stupidity.

Jon Katz is in upstate New York writing books about dogs. What, you don't believe me?

Seems like poetic justice to me, but I can't quite figure out why.

triv

Panasonic BL-C10A (Amazon note: they like to tinker with the price of this camera; I bought mine when they were $165)

I've got four of these setup at home to monitor the dogs while we're out of the house. They're not wireless (I have them mounted in fixed locations so I just ran Cat5e through the attic to the cameras) but I believe Panasonic makes a wireless version. Things I like about these cameras:

• Best image quality I found at the price - nothing spectacular, but you'll pay several times more for anything better.
• Decent low light images with an acceptable amount of noise. Again, much better than others I tried in the price range.
• Remote pan and tilt.
• Easy web interface for viewing single or multiple cameras at once.
• Motion sensor that'll email or ftp images when triggered. Excellent for the camera I have watching my front door.

It's not customizable in the sense that the embedded software is open source (at least I don't think it is -- probably the customized Linux they use is available somewhere, but I doubt the web service stuff is). However, they provide very thorough documentation (pdf) of the camera's cgi interface, so you can easily roll your own front end that talks to it. I had plans to do this, but I've found that their own front end works well enough for most accesses.

One thing that I have done is write a little perl script that uses wget to grab a still image every 6 seconds from each camera while we're gone. These are saved and later combined via an AppleScript that I wrote to create a movie of each day's activities. I've found all kind of interesting stuff by reviewing these movies after the fact -- like one day we got a mouse in the house, which the cat subsequently chased off.

"Actually, I think that copyright is sufficient to protect software in general, but that's another argument."

Covered in this book.*

*Hint: It depends on a couple supporting definitions.

The real "Dick Tracy watch has a really cool trick -- if you forget to pay your yearly $64.90 MSN-Direct subscription, it turns itself off when Microsoft commands!

For more on this subject, read this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195069056/002-21 42042-6755239?v=glance&n=283155