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Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."

Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."

Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."

Compaq - 1997

IBM - February 11, 1998

Dell - January 30, 1998

HP - February 14, 1998

Gateway - March 1, 1998

And those aren't introduction dates, they're just handy examples.

By the way, those listed companies were the top 5 PC makers in Q3 1998, globally and in the US, and they accounted for the strait-up majority of the US PC market at the time.

And Apple sold only a tiny fraction of the USB PCs bought in the era of the early iMac. "USB PC shipments were estimated at 20 million units in 1997 and 100 million units in 1999." So I'll split the difference and say 1998 saw 50 million USB PCs sold. How many were iMacs? Try 0.8 million. So that's 0.8 million versus 50 million. Let's be charitable and call that a 50:1 ratio or 2% of market share. Ouch.

Well, that wasn't a full year. How about 1999? We've seen the overall number of 100 million USB PCs, but in 1999 Apple sold only 1.8 million iMacs. So in 1999 USB iMacs again accounted for roughly 2% of the USB PC market. Still ouch.

So, the iMac was not the first PC with USB, the iMac was not the major but rather a fractionally tiny vector for USB into the marketplace, and the iMac did not "exclude all other port types."

In this insanely litigious society, I wonder what kind of copyright release (from all the grillions of Geocities content copyright holders) these "Archive" chaps got? I hope it doesn't come back to bite them.

There's already precedent with archive.org and Google's caching of web pages. Google was actually sued and won in this regard.

They don't have me, http://geociti.es/Heartland/Hills/5791 but archive.org does. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/5791

Its just scary that a page I created 15 years ago, and last updated ten years ago, is being archived. I had almost forgotten I had Geocities before this article. Thanks for bringing back memories I would perfer to forget.

This was pretty much how I shared links with friends before Facebook - I was just nieve enough to think that everyone in the world was as crazy about Dominique Moceanu as I was when I was 18.

Very true. Thanks for the added research. It seems too sudden to just be one company changing models, and yourZ.com appears to be dead. Anyway, I took another look and found there are a couple pictures in the tour page, and forgot how much of a Friendster clone it was --its AOLification is what made it win that battle.

Date-hopping on wayback machine tends to be a pain. Just last night I was browsing through some fan forums for a Showtime show ending on 2004. Less than a year later, the domain was parked, apparently without notice, and 2 years ago it was deregistered from DNS, to my surprise. What is interesting is clicking at the end and then back and back.

DNS aside, looking at the /. and Yahoo landing pages morphing throughout 13 years can be eye-opening too.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.

Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.

May 2000 seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of the domain changed here, as now the copyright message is for YourZ.com.

May 2001 they put up a maintenance page, and then in June switch to a page where you can sign up to receive news of what's going on. Seems to stay that way until May 2002, at which point it starts showing a blank page, or an almost-blank page.

Something happened in August 2003, but without the images I can't tell what. Another change of ownership or focus?

October 2003 seems to be when the social networking site was launched. The Terms and Conditions refer to MySpace LLC as the company behind it, so potentially another change of ownership here.

there was a web site that covered asian pictograph tattoos, short version that to chinese/japanese/korean people those tattoos read like they were written by schoolchildren, psychos, 'tards, or criminals.

you can check it out in the WayBack machine, pick a time snapshot:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.hanzismatter.com/

If we take into account the prices they were charging people for hosting 100K pages with one time setup fees from your 13 year time machine, it's interesting that they took the "free" route at some point. Well, we now know the whole internet did.

As visitors became the product to ad corps and data miners, the value or cost in myspace's business model must have remained pretty similar to those rates, and someone is paying for those. A kinda lowest ballpark of how much our visits are worth to sites like facebook.

I did see take interest to the simplicity and lack of immediate apparent user-driven content back then. That has morphed to the today's pr0n-site-like content layout (first illustration in the article) and the facebook-like social layout (second illustration.) Nothing original here, purge your myspace contact info now if you still haven't

I wonder which magic they are gonna recapture. This one? Or this?

I wonder which magic they are gonna recapture. This one? Or this?

I was trying to be moderate :-S but I seem to have strong views about everything. I thought as I got older I'd drift towards the centre, but instead I'm just more likely to ignore people whose views I don't like when it doesn't matter (e.g. here).

In the most recent election I voted Liberal Democrat, since the Green party candidate was a nutcase (I met him) and I hoped the Lib Dems would push through voting reform, which is very important to me. I did vote Green for the previous one, and various other (non-Parliamentary) elections.

Unfortunately the subject is a little misleading, because of how hard it is to get the particular keyboard I'm talking about. I'm lucky enough to have family and friends in Korea, and there was a company (which looks like it went out of business) called ARON Tech or ARON Digital that made mechanical keyboards. One of their models was an ergonomic (split middle) one, which I managed to snag. I love it. When I purchased mine, it ran for about $60 after the exchange rate. The USB version (which is what I should have gotten) ran for about $80, IIRC. Unfortunately it is supposedly tough to find these keyboards in Korea now.

You can see a photo of the keyboard here: http://fv521.egloos.com/2791639
Web archive also has a good set: http://web.archive.org/web/20030202083656/http://arontech.com/

The reason I mention this is because it looks like ARON just farmed out their manufacturing to a Chinese firm, and it appears that you can still get these keyboards:

http://www.diytrade.com/china/2/products/3290484/%E8%AF%9A%E6%8B%9B%E6%B8%B8%E6%88%8F%E9%94%AE%E7%9B%98_%E6%9C%BA%E6%A2%B0%E9%94%AE%E7%9B%98_%E8%A5%BF%E5%8D%97%E5%8C%BA%E5%9F%9F%E4%BB%A3%E7%90%86%E5%8A%A0%E7%9B%9F.html
OR
http://www.fzsky.com/aron/us/Pro_Show.asp?ArticleID=91

I'm also interested in a mechanical ergonomic, specifically for the USB interface. My current mechanical ergo is PS/2, and while it works great, and will for the foreseeable future, I'd also like to have a USB one.

Why oh why do people have a need to spread reverse FUD and give "linux" props it does not deserve?

Because Microsoft highlighted the TradeElect system in their "Get the Facts" campaign. Oddly enough, if you read the press kit Microsoft put together, you'd get the impression that a recent version of Windows and an optimised application was in place and doing very well. Maybe Linux does get some small slice of kudos after all.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070706203521/http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/casestudies/lse.mspx

MIT professor shows how it should be done (relevant bit begins around 12m45sec).

If you watch a bit more of the video, he does talk a bit about the delicacy of the operation, including the danger posed by the wind.

Here you go, current and a copy from 2006

They're doing Archimedes solar ray AGAIN? Aren't we up to three already (the original myth and two revisits)? Obviously I think it is fun that Obama will be on the show but frankly aside from that I really don't want to see that same tired Myth for a third time...

The important thing is to have a proper test. They often redo things which viewers complain loudly about. I say they should do this one over, but use the Arthur C. Clarke approach of 50,000 well-trained fans in a stadium with tin-foil reflectors. The Stroke of the Sun (later known as "A Slight Case of Sunstroke"). It's only 6 pages long... great read.

Actually, it is YOU who should go invent your own phrase, and YOU who is [sic] wrong. Open has a clearly defined meaning in English, and the OSI and FSF have no mandate to redefine the language.

You seem to be implying that, even prior to the invention of the term "open source", it already had a meaning, but this is not the case: the term was created at a meeting of the minds http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html specifically so that we could avoid this sort of mixup and not be accused of "redefining the language".

I already addressed this in the post to which you are responding; when you reply to me with an answer I already anticipated, you're supposed to address that, too. I had given an example of someone defining "open source" as meaning that the room door is open as you look at the source code --are you going to turn around and say that that use of the word "open" is invalid where yours is valid? Please see http://web.archive.org/web/20060423094434/www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.html Prior to that, the technical term was just used by spies to denote publicly available info, and was not even used in the software world.

But most telling of all is your apparent indifference to the way the software community is using the term "open source". When you say "nothing else matters", what you are saying is not just "the word 'open' already has a meaning" (ignoring its juxtaposition with the word "source") but also "I don't care how the rest of you use the English language as a mutually agreed-upon way of communication".

Don't agree? You'd need to cite a use of the term "open source" prior to February 1998 to mean what you say it means. Or else I'd ask you to get stuffed and take a hike. Well, of course I meant "obtain some stuffing and grab a fee increase"! What, are you saying that words have different meanings when used in certain specific combinations?

America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

Awww, just a portable Z-machine interpreter. I was hoping this was a new commercial publication channel for text adventures. You know, TextFire all over again?

That said, text adventures are pretty fun on portable platforms. I used to play some text adventures on Frobnitz (for PalmOS) back in the day, and it was awesome even without keyboard. Didn't really play it that much though...

Gerald North: The Mann et al study of 1999 draws conclusions that are more optimistic about our ability to estimate paleotemperatures than we would. We say that the averages over three decades are likely to be the warmest in the last 400 years. We also say that the average over the last three decades are plausibly the warmest over the last 1000 years. The statements by Mann et al. were a bit stronger than these. However, if you look at reconstructions of later reports by other investigators, you will find that they generally fall within the error bars of Mann et al., especially if you place error bars on the other studies comparable to those in the Mann et al. study.

Find any one of these and you'll have a few good lessons you can teach your students...

Ran across this interesting old movie theatre PSA at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/WeirdAntiCableTvPsa So if CATV was originally invented for regular broadcasts, I wonder when it started to morph into a competitor?

Maybe you're thinking of the Internet Archive.

http://www.archive.org/

You mean a "volume knob"? I hear they make a special one made of wood that dampens out distortions or something like that. It's a bit expensive though. Maybe it's no longer available - only links I could find were archived. Darn.

Not the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, but similar: Scientific Experiments for Fun and Instruction

QWERTY keyboard build into the steering wheel. Now you can text while keeping your hands on the wheel!

You mean like this police car keyboard?

The Wayback Machine has archives of his site dating back to 2003, which included home and work phone numbers, for the curious.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/kristopeit.com

It may be impossible, but we should try to convey as much of our data to our posterity as we can.

That's a nice sentiment and all, but as someone who is completely bored with ancient history simply due to its veracity and unbelievable nature, I guess I don't really care.

I see ancient texts as ancient, unverifiable fiction. And fiction, while it often has a basis in reality and is sometimes a great, insight-filled pleasure to read, is still fiction. And I, myself, am mostly bored with fiction.

So, presume for a moment that we can, from this point onward, forever record all data (or damn near). Who will read it? Who will sort out the sordid fiction from the genuine truths? No one man can do so by himself, if his own lifespan is finite.

I mean, honestly: Is it important for this very comment to be preserved? Will the works of adolf, #21054 some millennia from now, actually be useful or thought-provoking? I've got a big enough ego to say that I'd certainly hope that folks will study my written banter forever, but I'm enough of a realist to recognize that this simply won't occur.

So, then: Who's banter will be preserved and studied, instead?

I propose that it's impossible to predict what information will be deemed important or truthful ages from now. And that preserving all data instead of just some portion thereof really does does help any. I further propose that whatever we think is important or factual, today, may well be fictitious in a few thousand years. And that some legitimate fictions, as presented today, will be regarded as facts later.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana) is a lovely catchphrase, but it assumes accuracy in the remembrance.

I prefer the following:

"Give any one species too much rope, and they'll fuck it up." (Roger Waters), which makes no such assumption.

I did an experiment like that years ago, see: http://web.archive.org/web/20080624062729/http://el-muerte.student.utwente.nl/warez/

Initially I was actually sending data from /dev/urandom, first it was just a tarpit and files would never reach the 100%. But it didn't take long enough before it became too popular and I had to thicken the tar for the larger files. And a certain point I even added a limit to the number of concurrent downloads. And in the end it only showed the service unable error that 20 (non-existing) downloads were already busy.

I don't know if the university ever received a complaint about it, as they never notified me (they probably checked the the page themselves and saw it was fake).

The hexadecimal digit extraction formula for PI (that allows you to skip calculating the previous hex digits) is already known. It can calulcuate the N'th hexadecimaldigit of Pi without calculating most of the previous digits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula

A slower generalized version that can extract the n'th digit of Pi in any base (including decimal) has also been found: http://web.archive.org/web/19990116223856/www.lacim.uqam.ca/plouffe/Simon/articlepi.html
 

again, no. OP and the rest of this thread is about a ruling in a civil case, where the cause of action is civil copyright infringement. here's a link to the entire docket. Notice how there are no state parties involved? That's because infringement for non-commercial use is a civil violation.

17 USC 506 provides for criminal penalties in cases of infringement for commercial purposes or for financial gain. No one is accusing the downloaders in this case of selling their copies, so 506 is not relevant to this conversation.

Sorry, where exactly in the ruling do you think the judge says they don't have an actionable case?

http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.dcd.141268/gov.uscourts.dcd.141268.44.0.pdf

Read it yourself before you leap to judgment. It's actually pretty easy to grok, as these things go.

If it was a criminal case, you'd have real 4th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment issues. As it is, we're talking about a civil matter, and those constraints don't apply to non-state plaintiffs.

Judge Collyer isn't breaking new ground here- it's generally accepted by US courts that individuals can have no expectation that information they freely give to other persons is "private." I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing "personal" with "private." Your personal information is not necessarily "private," in either the ordinary sense or in the technical legal sense.

Your name is not private. Your street address is not private. Your vehicle license plate number is not private. In many states, your driver's license number and your driving records are not private.

In this case, the USCG is asking the ISP to give up the names and mailing addresses of people who were using certain IP addresses at a given time on a given date. Since names and mailing addresses are not private, neither the ISP nor the people using those addresses can claim "privacy" as a reason not to comply with this request.

That's just how it is. People who are reacting to this with surprise are wrong to blame the judge in this case- her ruling was made according to well-settled law. She cited this portion of her analysis to cases in the 4th and 6th circuit courts of appeals, and there are similar decisions from several of the other circuits as well.

You can read the whole order here: Order denying motion to quash.

Now, if the question was whether your ISP could turn over your DNS logs, effectively showing the list of sites you were connected to and the dates and times of connection... well, that's a very different sort of thing.

(why yes, I am a lawyer working on some of these cases).

He [Ford] relies on his thug, Harry Bennett, to enforce shop floor discipline with--that one historian compared to a totalitarian state. And so, in many ways, Fordlandia is Ford's attempt to recapture a lost innocence or this mantle of being history's redeemer. Ford revolutionizes capitalism, but then he spends most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle. In some ways, he's the--you could think of him as the sorcerer's apprentice. He attempts any number of experiments at social reform in the United States. He sets up these small, what he calls, village industries in northern Michigan that tries to balance agriculture and industry. Now, these were no match to the raw power of industrial capitalism. And he increasingly becomes idiosyncratic and quirky in his social vision. And Fordlandia, in many ways, is a kind of terminus of a lifetime of quite idiosyncratic ideas of how to organize society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he was into not only controlling the workers on the shop floor, but also their lives in general.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he conducted--he had his employees surveiled, watched what they were doing, how they were enjoying themselves. And did he carry that over into Brazil, as well?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, it was a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance, with the surveillance half increasing as the paternalist part fails in the United States.

In Brazil, it was a program of social regulation. He exported Prohibition. He didn't like drinking, even though it wasn't a Brazilian law. Or he tried to regulate the diet of Brazilian workers. He had very--you know, he had them eat--he was a health food nut, so he had them eating whole rice and whole wheat bread and canned Michigan peaches and oatmeal. He also tried to regulate their recreational time.

He [Ford] relies on his thug, Harry Bennett, to enforce shop floor discipline with--that one historian compared to a totalitarian state. And so, in many ways, Fordlandia is Ford's attempt to recapture a lost innocence or this mantle of being history's redeemer. Ford revolutionizes capitalism, but then he spends most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle. In some ways, he's the--you could think of him as the sorcerer's apprentice. He attempts any number of experiments at social reform in the United States. He sets up these small, what he calls, village industries in northern Michigan that tries to balance agriculture and industry. Now, these were no match to the raw power of industrial capitalism. And he increasingly becomes idiosyncratic and quirky in his social vision. And Fordlandia, in many ways, is a kind of terminus of a lifetime of quite idiosyncratic ideas of how to organize society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he was into not only controlling the workers on the shop floor, but also their lives in general.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he conducted--he had his employees surveiled, watched what they were doing, how they were enjoying themselves. And did he carry that over into Brazil, as well?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, it was a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance, with the surveillance half increasing as the paternalist part fails in the United States.

In Brazil, it was a program of social regulation. He exported Prohibition. He didn't like drinking, even though it wasn't a Brazilian law. Or he tried to regulate the diet of Brazilian workers. He had very--you know, he had them eat--he was a health food nut, so he had them eating whole rice and whole wheat bread and canned Michigan peaches and oatmeal. He also tried to regulate their recreational time.

If it's in the public domain you can download it free from many internet sources. No need to visit a library at all, unlesss you want the dead tree version.

Internet Archive
Gutengerg Project
lots of universities post PD books on the internet, as well as a lot of books that are still under copyright. I was assigned Only Yesterday in a history class I took in the late 1970s at SIU (I still have the book), and now It's on the internet as well. It's a good read, I reccomend it.

Plus, there are Creative Commons books out there as well.

Original slashdot story where the address was tracked down, archive copy of original article and follow-up slashdot story.

Captain, they've taken it down! Wayback machine to the rescue, sir!

http://web.archive.org/web/20071015141903/http://startrek.com/startrek/view/community/chat/archive/transcript/1086.html

Google is far move invasive than Microsoft...

Apparently you never heard of Microsoft's Hidden Files
SUMMARY:
Discuss this article with the author, and with other readers, in the Hidden Files discussion area of our forums!
There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two major things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft's Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you've erased them from your Deleted Items bin. (This also includes all incoming and outgoing file attachments.) And believe me, that's not even the half of it.

When I say these files are hidden well, I really mean it. If you don't have any knowledge of DOS then don't plan on finding these files on your own. I say this because these files/folders won't be displayed in Windows Explorer at all -- only DOS. (Even after you have enabled Windows Explorer to "show all files.") And to top it off, the only way to find them in DOS is if you knew the exact location of them. Basically, what I'm saying is if you didn't know the files existed then the chances of you running across them is slim to slimmer.

You object to Google taking a picture of your house that ANYONE walking by could take, or of making a note of any wireless nearby, which can also be done by anyone from public property. Windows doesn't "phone home" on a regular basis for nothing. While the info in the URL is ancient history Microsoft hasn't quit, they just gotten more sophisticated. Windows generates a GUID based on 10 components of your hardware that Windows is running on. EVERY document you send out has your GUId embedded in it. Every online transaction includes your GUID, regardless of whether you identified yourself or not. Microsoft takes the GUID from your Amazon credit card transaction and matches your name and address with the GUID you left when you posted an anonymous message or downloaded a file.

And you think Google is being invasive for putting up Google Earth, or Street View. Get real. This current anti-Google campaign has all the stink of one of Microsoft's dirty tricks combined with their classic "astroturfing".

In fact, you could be one of James Plamondon's "Technical Evangelists".

/. != Vast majority of people

I've found a lot of good music from eMusic that I would have otherwise not known about. And they are bands that play shows at any of the many music venues near where I live. They are also the kinds of bands that have no qualms about putting their live shows online, for free.

I agree with m50d that it is not relevant for the reason he gives above.

The Gödel theorems are interesting for the study of the foundation of mathematics and more specifically for the study of the relation between logic and mathematics. Using it outside that field is at least tricky, and more often than not crackpottery.

Out of a set of axioms (or out of a set of hypothesis) you use deductive logic to prove some theorems which are true if the axioms are true. The axioms together with the theorems form a theory. The question of completeness is: can we construct a proof for every true stament in that theory, or do there exist true statements which cannot be proven. The question of (in)consistentcy is: can we construct a proof for a false statement? All this is about the internal properties of a theory.

Now back to your question: relativity theory and quantum mechanics have different sets of axioms. The axioms of relativity do not lead to theories which are in contradiction with other theorems of the same theory (I am not sure about this for general relativity, there are however several sets of axioms for special relativity which have proofs of consistency*). I guess the same holds for QM**. The problem is: theorems of relativity are in contradiction with theorems QM, so this is a problem between two theories. The problem is that both theories are very solid and well-tested on their own right. A theory which tries to combine relativity and QM on a logical level is Branching Space-Time by Nuel Belnap.

* For axioms of special relativity, check: - Optical geometry of motion, a new view of the theory of relativity by A. A. Robb, 1911
- A theory of time and space by A. A. Robb
- The absolute relations of time and space by A. A. Robb, 1921
- Geometry Of Time And Space by A. A. Robb, 1936
- Orthogonality and Spacetime Geometry by Robert Goldblatt, 1987 (this is a first oder theory, so it is both complete and consistent - however it is not categorical
- Independent axioms for Minkowski space-time by John W. Schutz, 1997. This theory is of second order, so it suffers from the problems caused by the Gödel theorems.

** Check Quantum Logic by J. von Neumann (yes, the guy of the "Von Neumann Concept") and G. Birkhoff.