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A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable.

It has been reported that 14 years is closer to optimal.

Maybe reasonable would be 7 years, or two.

And of course these speaches on copyright make a good primer on what to expect when the copyright law is percieved to be unfair.

Hey, a starving man will be happy to gulp down a half-eaten crust. Sure, it's not perfect but at least it's sort of reasonable.

A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable.

It has been reported that 14 years is closer to optimal.

Maybe reasonable would be 7 years, or two.

And of course these speaches on copyright make a good primer on what to expect when the copyright law is percieved to be unfair.

Maybe you should support the Pirate Party? When (ha) we come to power we'll cut the duration of copyright to 10 years.

A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable.

It has been reported that 14 years is closer to optimal.

Maybe reasonable would be 7 years, or two.

And of course these speaches on copyright make a good primer on what to expect when the copyright law is percieved to be unfair.

KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used.

One neat thing about GVFS, the GNOME abstraction, is that part of it wraps FUSE filesystem modules. Any application, not just GNOME applications, can use filesystems mounted with GNOME's 'connect to server' feature, for instance. I think it's more desirable to write a FUSE module than a KDE-specific KIOSlave.

GNOME sometimes comes across as a hodgepodge of bindings and semi-coherent libraries, but there has been a great deal of work to consolidate and even eliminate core libraries, tighten up coding standards, get rid of deprecated symbols in GTK+ and GLib... At least they're trying to get things right, right up and down the stack.

GNOME 3 will be a big shift. I can't say I'm crazy about the new shell, and the Task Pooper scares the shit out of me (ha ha).

They'd have to screw it up really badly to make me go back to KDE. Even then, I'd go to 3.x.

Hooray! No one will target content towards you! Goodbye /., you will be missed.

I would be interested to see how many people adblock /. and deprive this wonderful site of revenue. It's likely similar to the percentage that do so to Ars.

I'd also wonder: What percent of those linux boxes were bought with MS Windows installed, and are thus also counted a satisfied customers by Microsoft?

When looking at the larger picture, almost none.

Never enough to have any real impact. Windows 7 surpasses 10% market share

These numbers are ultimately derived from retail costumers who bought OEM Win 7 systems. OEM Vista close-outs with the free ugrade to Win 7 - or the Win 7 upgrade retail boxed.

32 bit SE on the netbook.

64 bit Home Premium and above for everything else. It's no good trying to pretend otherwise.

Whatever. IPS makes it a typical high quality display -- though it would have been almost scandalous to use a TN panel in the iPad. Having high quality panels in a mobile device is sort of rare, but IPS and other high quality displays are far from rare in "real" display devices; I'm looking at two. The main advantage of LED lighting seems to be the lower power draw, I haven't really found any evidence that it's higher quality (really high end displays mostly still use CCFL) or longer life (other things tend to break before the backlighting). So in most contexts and particularly in the context of visual quality in direct sunlight, the iPad's display can accurately be described as a typical LCD. Untypical displays include eInk and the Nexus One's OLED display; though I'm not sure how well OLED does in bright sunlight and it certainly has it's own downsides.

World of Goo was pirated just as much as everything else even though it was DRM free and only $20
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

Pirates are motivated by a desire to pay without playing. You can't expect a publisher to just look the other way as 90% of the people that play the game don't pay for it.

apple could put a split-keyboard as 2 quarter-circles on the corners of the screen. one for the right thumb, one for the left thumb.

would take some time to get used to, but would allow for lengthier typing without having to place the slab on an awkward position.

this is one (rare) case where microsoft did right, but as usual, at the wrong time. here: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6348.ars

Actually, it looks like the answer is going to be to step away from silicon, and replace it with graphene. They can't make it anywhere near as small as silicon (yet), but there's other advantages. The linked article is a pretty good primer on the subject.

A young woman arrived in a WalMart in near Houston, with ~$4,700 worth of Walmart money orders. It has been proven conclusively that the money orders were genuine, and lawfully hers - but she was charged by the Walmart manager with trying to pass counterfeit money orders. False arrest and false imprisonment (which, by any reasonable definition amounts to kidnapping) committed by a corporation. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6932914.html

WalMart did not arrest and imprison the woman, the government did. WalMart has no power whatsoever to come to my home and arrest me. No power whatsoever to throw me in jail. The most WalMart can do is file a complaint with the government, just like any citizen can.

and they also enable the gubbermint to monitor your telephone traffic without warrants. http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2008/01/senate-blocks-vote-on-surveillance-bill-that-would-grant-telecom-immunity.ars

Once again, it is not the government that enables (or prevents) the corporation from doing this and not the other way around.

Corporations don't knock your door down, and sieze your goods? How about taking your property at gunpoint, in public, with witnesses? California

May 15-16, 2002 - The RIAA and Fonovisa representatives executed a series of voluntary surrender actions at two flea markets in Indio, CA and Torrance, CA. 11 vendors were issued notices and 3,637 alleged illicit sound recordings were recovered from both locations. Artist recordings seized included works from top-selling acts such as Thalia and Shaggy. http://www.grayzone.com/october2008busts.htm

Don't let the terminology fool you, in that story. A "voluntary surrender action" involves the presence of armed men telling you that you can't have certain items in your possession. In most times and places throughout history, this would be considered robbery.

That link doesn't even contain that story. What it does contain are several examples where pirates were found, government authorities were called in, and government authorities took care of the situation.

You are obviously missing the entire point of my post. Filling a complaint with the government and the government deciding to take some kind of action does not mean the person who filled the complaint actually has the power to do what the government can do.

Given the choice between overpowered government or overpowered corporations, I am far more scared of overpowered government because government has FAR more power to dramatically affect my life.

Corporations can't do what, exactly? Perhaps you should check out some of the draconian moves made by corporations over the past years.

A young woman arrived in a WalMart in near Houston, with ~$4,700 worth of Walmart money orders. It has been proven conclusively that the money orders were genuine, and lawfully hers - but she was charged by the Walmart manager with trying to pass counterfeit money orders. False arrest and false imprisonment (which, by any reasonable definition amounts to kidnapping) committed by a corporation. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6932914.html

Corporations routinely monitor your internet traffice, as well as your cell phone traffic, for reasons of their own, and they also enable the gubbermint to monitor your telephone traffic without warrants. http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2008/01/senate-blocks-vote-on-surveillance-bill-that-would-grant-telecom-immunity.ars

Corporations don't knock your door down, and sieze your goods? How about taking your property at gunpoint, in public, with witnesses? California

May 15-16, 2002 - The RIAA and Fonovisa representatives executed a series of voluntary surrender actions at two flea markets in Indio, CA and Torrance, CA. 11 vendors were issued notices and 3,637 alleged illicit sound recordings were recovered from both locations. Artist recordings seized included works from top-selling acts such as Thalia and Shaggy. http://www.grayzone.com/october2008busts.htm

Don't let the terminology fool you, in that story. A "voluntary surrender action" involves the presence of armed men telling you that you can't have certain items in your possession. In most times and places throughout history, this would be considered robbery.

Corporations do a lot of things that aren't publicized, and the ones that do get into the news are sanitized with meaningless phrases such as "voluntary surrender action".

it doesn't matter if the game is DRM free and $20 as the World of Good developers found out.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars
This type of DRM from Ubisoft is likely a last ditch effort by Ubisoft to support pc gaming outside of casual games and MMOs. Single player games like Splinter Cell are pirated like crazy on the pc. There's certainly a cultural problem with pc gaming where everyone dismisses piracy and just expects game companies to ignore the fact that most pc gamers are skipping out on the bill.
What isn't fair is that paying customers are subsidizing the entertainment of pirates, many of whom spend their money on gaming hardware instead of supporting developers.

• Assuming this story is correct. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Intrinsity is an unique company that produces technology capable of significantly boosting the performance of many ARM processors. Considering the ubiquity of ARM, this technology could've potentially benefited a large range of consumers; but, apparently, that benefit will, now, only fall on those purchasing Apple products.
• Apple's suit against HTC: This is an obvious ploy to impede if not completely halt the ascent of Android. Apple sues HTC for infringing on its questionable soft patents while refusing to pay Nokia for the use of its hard patents.
• E-book Price Increase: This is an instance of Apple using its virtual monolopy in the mind share if not the market share of mobile devices to hurt the consumer. Perhaps, previous e-book prices were artificially low; I won't argue that point. The fact remains that Apple's entry into the e-book business has resulted in higher prices for the consumer -- with one concrete instance being the 43% increase in NY Times subscriptions.
• Banning of Google Voice App: In additional to a multitude of other features, Google Voice allow users to make free domestic VOIP calls; so, the adverse affect to consumers of this rejection should be obvious. Furthermore, this isn't an isolated instance: Apple has a history of rejecting apps that compete against its products or those of its business partners.

• Assuming this story is correct. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Intrinsity is an unique company that produces technology capable of significantly boosting the performance of many ARM processors. Considering the ubiquity of ARM, this technology could've potentially benefited a large range of consumers; but, apparently, that benefit will, now, only fall on those purchasing Apple products.
• Apple's suit against HTC: This is an obvious ploy to impede if not completely halt the ascent of Android. Apple sues HTC for infringing on its questionable soft patents while refusing to pay Nokia for the use of its hard patents.
• E-book Price Increase: This is an instance of Apple using its virtual monolopy in the mind share if not the market share of mobile devices to hurt the consumer. Perhaps, previous e-book prices were artificially low; I won't argue that point. The fact remains that Apple's entry into the e-book business has resulted in higher prices for the consumer -- with one concrete instance being the 43% increase in NY Times subscriptions.
• Banning of Google Voice App: In additional to a multitude of other features, Google Voice allow users to make free domestic VOIP calls; so, the adverse affect to consumers of this rejection should be obvious. Furthermore, this isn't an isolated instance: Apple has a history of rejecting apps that compete against its products or those of its business partners.

It's actually like Earth Class Mail, which scans your mail, and has a government postal service outsource program. Notably, they do this for Swiss Post.

After reading Zumbox's site, I'm still trying to figure out why I would open an account there. It seems not only do I have to sign up for it, all my service providers do too. If my electric company is too dumb to offer e-bills, why would they offer this?

You obviously don't remember the this-site-only-work-with-Internet-Explorer years. The iPhone has the largest presence in the mobile web browsing market, and companies will code their sites for the one big player, the rest be damned. Netscape (do you even know there was a browser before Firefox?) had to adapt IE extensions and quirks to stay compatible.

Actually, my first web browser was NCSA Mosaic, youngin'! Anyway, a couple of points:

1. As you point out, we've been down this path before so people should be more acutely aware that we should avoid it.
2. Apple doesn't even have a majority of the smart phone market, so they're not nearly in the same point that IE once was, with >90% of the browser market.
3. If they're using flash on their main site they're now developing two incompatible proprietary-tech-based sites. That's even worse than the bad old days.
4. It never makes sense to turn away business (unless, say, the cost savings outweigh the lost revenue). My dim understanding was that IE-specific extensions of HTML were the result of their moves on the server side and using their sales relationships with corporations (to make a lot of active X based internal web apps). Furthermore, the web was not nearly as established and profitable then. I would think none of that is at play here.

So the situation looks pretty different to me. If as one commenter suggested, it's the case that flash authoring tools make generating an iPhone app from your flash site trivial, then that explains some of it. If Apple were somehow using its marketshare in some other sector to force this behavior, that would make sense, but it doesn't seem to be true. My only other thought is that maybe people are more likely to use an iPhone app then go through the web (since they went to the trouble to get the app and now have it on their phone), and if it make the barrier to entry higher, then it's something that favors larger businesses.

Interesting, IIRC Apple's original vision was that people would deliver applications to the iPhone via the web (AJAX and so forth), and it was only later that they added the "App Store", so it seems like this was not originally their plan.

The figure given in the stub, and the linked article, is inaccurate.

"The small percentage of what the authors termed "supertaskers" obviously left the authors considering the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. So, they created four pools from the scores from their tests (memory, math, braking distance, and response time) and used Monte Carlo sampling to create 100,000 random scores. Supertaskers appeared in only 0.16 percent of these, which indicates that the 2.5 percent figure they saw represents a real phenomena. "

Cite (seventh paragraph)

Out of curiosity, could someone actually provide a concrete example of a MITM attack ever being successfully carried out? Bonus points for anyone who can further provide reasons for why this means Firefox no longer likes self signed certs.

Well, there's SSLSniff that was used to demonstrate faking Paypal certificates (via NULL attacks in browsers). There's also the neat SSLStrip that transforms a HTTPS transaction down to an HTTP one.

They work by ARP spoofing right now, and if you combine with the IE WPAD (web proxy auto-discovery) mechanism, you could put together a pretty nice MITM attack unit.

And wasn't there reports of a box sold to governments that was designed to do this MITM stuff? Like this appliance? This one's better than SSLSniff as it uses subverted CAs.

More info - http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/03/govts-certificate-authorities-conspire-to-spy-on-ssl-users.ars

Hey, I'm not going to give my money to any company that does this and I just bought that new breakout clone game thingy earlier today. It's great.

I don't see this as a bad thing. But honestly, why is Google doing this? I mean it takes less than 30 seconds to download, install Flash, and reboot the browser after initial Chrome install.

I personally think it may be a response to Apple not allowing Flash on the iPad and iPhone. Google has stakes in Flash, such as their charts on Google Finance. Google also may have done this in response to Apple's new plans for advertising. And lets not forget that much of advertising on the web is Flash content. If Apple were able to make Flash obsolete and boost up its advertising strengths in the process, Google may loose one of its huge cash cows. In the end, Google doesn't want Apple to have complete control of Internet technologies.

The last story that they ran on here regarding EM allergies was in Africa.

    I went looking around for history on this. The oldest I could find online was a 2003 case where a school in Chicago refused to use wifi because it could potentially harm students.

    this story references Canada and the UK.

    Oddly enough, I found this story from Santa Fe (the same city as this case in this story), where Arthur Firstenberg, the leader of a group of wifi sensitives, sued the city to not allow wifi to be installed throughout the city. He lost.

    Coincidentally, this came up again in January 2010 in this story, where Mr. Firstenberg sued his neighbor for using wifi.

    And coincidentally, he's the same guy in today's article.

    So, if you follow the trail back, you'll find that he's been making noise about this for a long time.

    In this 2007 article is mentioned for forming the Cellular Phone Task Force

    He is in the citations with:
Electromagnetic Fields, (EMF) Killing Fields," Arthur Firstenberg, The Ecologist, v. 34, n. 5, 6-10-2004.

"Radio Wave Packet," Arthur Firstenberg, Cellular Phone Task Force, Sept 2001

    In 1997, his group published this mortality report. Obviously cell phones kill people. Everyone repeat after me "Correlation does not imply causation".

    But hey, who am I to call a guy an attention seeking lunatic. Just because it's been spouting crap for over a decade *AND* getting published for it (drama queens love their attention), doesn't mean that he's all wrong. Talk to the guy yourself. On his site, http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/, he asks you to contact him. e-mail: info@cellphonetaskforce.org phone: (505) 471-0129 .

    Yes, those were copy & pasted directly from his site. If he didn't want to call, he wouldn't have put the details up there.

Google phonebook reverses the number to his name.

    When you call, remind him that there's electromagnetic fields around everything electrical. That includes the wires running inside the walls of his house. Yes Mr. Firstenberg, you're allergic to your own house. Run, run for the Faraday cage in the mountains. It's the only place you'll be safe. Well, kinda safe. You gotta watch out for the government using their ELF radios. I saw a X-Files once, where a guys head exploded because of ELF experiments. If it was on TV, it must be true.

Dark matter being simply regular matter that is hard to see was in fact one of the first hypothesis put forward and of course hugely favored for its simplicity, and to this day it is believed to account for some dark matter.

However further observation has largely ruled out this possibility for the majority of dark matter. The large halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies should be absolutely flooded by the light from said galaxy. It's not like the lights in your room are off, it's like you've got a 10-billion watt bulb blazing away and still can't see anything. The fact that this matter neither reflects nor obscures EM radiation in any part of the spectrum makes it completely unlike any "normal" matter we've ever (not) seen or even theorized.

On the other hand, particles that have mass but don't interact electromagnetically don't violate any laws of physics at all. We have already experimentally confirmed the existence of several such particles. In fact in the time it took you to write your post, thousands of these particles originating from the sun have passed through your body, probably without interacting with a single atom.

The thing is, even if you could suggest a type of baryonic matter that was completely transparent with a refractive index of exactly 1 for all frequencies, it still wouldn't match the observed behavior of dark matter. Even such a type of matter would still be subject to the electrostatic forces that keep atoms of ordinary matter spaced well apart. When two galaxies collide, this ordinary matter should be slowed by interaction with the interstellar dust clouds that make up much of a galaxy's mass. We observe this with all the visible matter in galaxies, but the dark matter just keeps right on chugging through slowed by neither the dark matter of the other galaxy nor by the clouds of dust and gas.

So, it's not an assumption. It's a hypothesis based on quite a large amount of evidence. There were competing hypothesis that tried to explain the behavior of galaxies without resorting to non-baryonic dark matter, but even they have had to admit that they can't match these observations without it.

Which do you really think is more likely? That it's all "normal" matter that just happens to act exactly like non-baryonic weakly interacting (meaning... interacts via the weak force) particles contrary to all theory? Or that it's a weakly interacting particle?

Either way, if it's going to be proven wrong, it's going to be proven wrong by experiment conducted by the same scientists making this "assumption".

You'll be wanting folks to follow where they backed down, too. Or maybe the slashdot article...

And yet the very notion of "non-baryonic matter" challenges laws as fundamental and thoroughly-established as laws of gravitation.

Uh no it doesn't. Why do you think that? Who told you that? Gravitational theory itself has nothing to say on the subject of baryonic vs non-baryonic matter, and another thoroughly-established theory, the Standard Model, has predicted non-baryonic matter which has also been subsequently verified to exist (google up neutrinos, W and Z gauge bosons).

As the more detailed link on spacetelescope.com (EU hubble site) explains, this data actually confirms General Relativity in the relationship between lensing and red shift, plus confirms dark matter, plus confirms dark energy (accelerating universal expansion).

Multiple hypothesis and theories all come together and make a bunch of detailed predictions, that prediction is borne out to a T by actual experimental observation, that's called a phenomenal success.

Pretending otherwise is dogmatic in the extreme.

No your assumption that this causes all kinds of problems that it does not is dogmatic. Despite what you or whoever informed you thinks, the dark matter hypothesis is not inherently flawed. It's quite a good hypothesis, actually.

But further study is necessary, and the very true statement "we have no idea what it is" suggests to me that we don't even know if it really qualifies as matter. In that sense, calling it "dark matter" is misleading and potentially a case of multiplying entities. And having that pointed out should not embarrass or anger us.

It being matter is simply the leading hypothesis. And while it is understood that it might be something that isn't actually "matter" at all, that would be the case of needlessly multiplying entities. We know that weakly interacting matter exists. Adding in a completely new thing that acts like matter but isn't would require a very good theory and some very solid experimental evidence to back it up. Hypothetically possible at this point, but way more out there than it being matter.

In the meantime, the GP was not quite right, as we do have some good ideas what it could be, though of course we haven't confirmed it. The Neutralino is a leading candidate, and we may be closing in on confirmation of its existence.

This study didn't fare well under close scrutiny, it wasn't well-done. ArsTechnica investigated it further and critiqued it fairly well. Which doesn't put HFCS off the hook, but regular table sugar is still extremely damaging on any animal that consumes it!

Some people are going to be very unhappy about this. Unless it's an early April Fools.

Nothing new here move along.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=7640

Some people are going to be very unhappy about this. Unless it's an early April Fools.

While you may say "please step away from your Slashdot reality distortion field" in relation to DRM, Ubisoft's piss-poor DRM implementation has made a lot of people swear off their games on PC. Assassin's Creed 2 much? All the major game sites covered when Ubisoft's DRM server went down and no one could play it. So that shiny Ubisoft game you bought for your PC will only work when your internet connection is up and Ubisoft's DRM servers are reachable... even though you're not playing the game online. And this after the first one was bad ui, bad drm, bad port and had the same issues.

All of this is well outside the Slashdot reality distortion field and starting to clue people in that you don't actually own a DRMed game. You rent it. And you play it with the temporary permission of the publisher... which they can take away at a whim... or can be taken away by a simple network issue.

So before someone starts the whole "which codec is better" flamewar again: someone at xiph thinks theora is better, ars thinks h264 is better, and this guy has a do it yourself kit in the form of a shell script.

Have fun arguing, as the past few articles have been quite fruitful in that area. Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.

What, to explain that a legally binding decision actually is legally binding? In all seriousness, here's a link that states such a legally binding commitment exists.

Yes, the SVG support in the Platform Preview is definitely a work in progress; it really should be viewed as an early alpha in overall completeness and quality. However, MS has apparently committed to a full and proper SVG implementation in IE9. Some links worth checking out:

Platform Preview gives Web developers first taste of IE9 - Scroll down to SVG heading for a nice summary

SVG in IE9 Roadmap - Official IE blog post on SVG

The "misconfiguration" was apparently at the routing layer, caused by BGP. There are 13 DNS root servers, A-M. Several mirrors around the world actually share the same IP for a specific root server. Your DNS query to a root server IP is usually routed to the closest server with that IP, due to anycast routing. Apparently, a BGP misconfiguration caused an incorrect route to be advertised. Ars Technica apparently broke the story and has a very good description. They quote VeriSign spokesman Brad Williams:

"In our regular network checks, we recently noticed that routes were being announced outside of China for our anycast server there," Williams said in a statement. "As this was an aberration, we notified our technical partner in China and helped them resolve the issue. Our network checks show that the issue is now resolved."

Mauricio Vergara Ereche, a DNS Admin for Chile NIC, first noticed the problem. Queries to the I root server i.root-servers.net at IP 192.36.148.17 for www.facebook.com resolved to an actual IP address (in China) instead of redirecting to the .com DNS server as it should have. He posted this in his message to the dns-operations mailing list:

This is an example of what are wee seeing:

$ dig @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A

; DiG 9.6.1-P3 @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A

; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; -HEADER- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 7448
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.facebook.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.facebook.com. 86400 IN A 8.7.198.45

;; Query time: 444 msec
;; SERVER: 192.36.148.17#53(192.36.148.17)
;; WHEN: Wed Mar 24 14:21:54 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 66

You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.

You know, not all PR departments are nothing but lying conspirators out to twist and hide the truth. Most company PR departments do nothing but put out a little press release with some boosterism and self-congratulating -- just like university PR departments do. A lot of crappy science journalism gets its start with a boiled-down press release that proclaims that the university's researchers have released a study proving some fact when the study in truth doesn't say much of anything conclusive.

For example, look at the story that was recently on Slashdot about HFCS causing obesity in rats. Several respectable science journalists have taken the time to look at the study more closely and concluded that it was deeply flawed and didn't prove much of anything. (1 2 3)

So where did the wide-eyed, "Big News!" take on the study come from? Why from Princeton's press release. This sort of things happens all the time in headline-grabbing areas of science, like global warming, nutrition, anthropology / humanoid evolution, cosmology, etc. Universities know that donations and grants come to those institutions that make the biggest splash, and they are more than willing to trump up the importance of a study that isn't as powerful as the headlines might make it out to be. Just like all those massive industry campaigns you decry as so different, lazy newspapers pick up the PR piece and publish it almost verbatim as news.

The problem of self-promoting PR compounded by a lack of journalistic integrity and diligence is just as prevalent in science as in industry. You want to know where the whole "eggs are good for you, eggs are bad for you" debate comes from? It comes from press releases overstating the importance of a particular study before it's faced years of peer review and double-checking. And this sort of irresponsible bragging is a large part of why the public is so skeptical about science actually knowing anything.

Microsoft sued (and won) the long-filenames-patent-infringement lawsuit against TomTom in Februari 2009, when TomTom was weakened because of the bank crisis. That's really not that long ago. They haven't proven that they are no longer "the big bad" as you put it.

Or it could be Newton's laws (or General relativity) don't work in this specific context and need to be modified (MOND).

MOND was a plausible explanation for some observed problems of galactic motion that dark matter solves with traditional gravitational theory, but it cannot explain the observed gravitational affects that come from well outside galaxies. Even in MOND, the gravitational force is directed towards the center of mass. Therefore MOND also requires non-baryonic dark matter to work.

It turns out it's really, really hard to come up with a theory that both explains what GR explains extremely well, and the new observations, without inferring the existence of an unseen mass exactly like GR suggests.

As far as I know, neither possibility has been ruled out so far, and there is still no good candidate for Dark Matter.

MOND itself has not been ruled out, but like I said it can't explain our observations without dark matter.

There are certainly good theoretical candidates for dark matter. As I explain elsewhere, one of the top candidates at this time is the theoretical neutralino, a more massive neutrino predicted by Supersymmetry. This particle has not been conclusively found yet, but it's possible it will be soon.

If it's proven to exist, it will be a phenomenal confirmation of Supersymetry and the Standard Model, and GR as well for that matter. If it's not, well, the search will go on, including for alternative theories.

It can go either way, and claiming it's certain the laws are correct denotes a misunderstanding of the concept of Scientific Theory in itself.

Well good thing that I didn't say it's certainly correct, now isn't it? I said it works extremely well, which is a true statement and the test by which all hypotheses and theories are measured. I said that this means that dark matter is a prediction based on a theory that already has an outstanding record of successful prediction.

Further observation could certainly demonstrate general relativity to be incorrect, and in fact I would wager that is highly likely though it's probably going to involve more precision, not completely changing the relationship between mass and gravity (like, by having the gravitational force *not* point at the mass as would be required to explain away dark matter).

If all your graphs stop at 2000, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.

If all your graphs stop at 1998, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.

By the way; my graph is bigger than your graph:

http://static.arstechnica.com/Science/2009-2-9/GISS_CRU_smoothed_full.png

Here, learn something: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/climate-data-ugliness-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder.ars

If all your graphs stop at 2000, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.

If all your graphs stop at 1998, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.

By the way; my graph is bigger than your graph:

http://static.arstechnica.com/Science/2009-2-9/GISS_CRU_smoothed_full.png

Here, learn something: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/climate-data-ugliness-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder.ars

One candidate for dark matter is the neutralino, which is predicted by Supersymetric Theory and is basically a neutrino but heavier, and like a neutrino interacts through the Weak Interaction which allowed us to find neutrinos, and maybe even actual dark matter.

No, the neutralino does not interact through the weak interaction. This is why direct detection experiments for dark matter are quite different from neutrino detectors and why we try to indirectly detect dark matter from annihilations.

it is matter that is fundamentally different and doesn't appear to interact with regular matter at all, except gravitationally.

More specifically, it doesn't appear to interact electromagnetically. Which just happens to exclude all of our direct detection methods (i.e. telescopes).

One candidate for dark matter is the neutralino, which is predicted by Supersymetric Theory and is basically a neutrino but heavier, and like a neutrino interacts through the Weak Interaction which allowed us to find neutrinos, and maybe even actual dark matter.

Yes, people here are also saying that there is something wrong with the study, see ArsTechnica's take on it. It was a poorly run study. The tip off that it was a poorly run study is that the Princeton article on the study suggests that factors such as the bond between fructose and glucose could be accounting for the significant difference between HFCS and sucrose.

The guys at ArsTechinca say that a review of the actual publication shows much more questionable results, with contradictory findings between different groups (12hr and 24hr access to HFCS)and variations between repeated tests cycles. HFCS might be bad, but this research is apparently not the smoking gun. Try not to drink a gallon of softdrinks a day and you'll probably be just fine.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars

Also, some doctors are over hyping the evidence.

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/

Ars Technica covered this a few days ago, and their analysis (as opposed to the publicity blurb the university made up) said the study basically came out a wash. Some groups saw gains, some didn't, but there was no clear pattern.

I'm in the "HFCS should be avoided" camp at the moment, but this study doesn't really prove anything.

Arstechnica.com covered this same study the other day. Their writeup is better than mine would be so why don't you read their article? http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars

The abridged version of the abridged version is that this study does not conclusively prove much of anything.

Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually

Yup, I feel your pain. Right now ALSA is working with PulseAudio - after much monkeying around with sinks and mixers and modules (foot bone connected to the hip bone), which produced lots of variously ill advice in forums, turns out it was a bug in alsa-plugins, and it's fixed in the Lucid package. Now I can run FlightGear and hear my engine loop ;)

Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system

Is switching supposed to be straightforward? I've heard stories, but still it seems daunting.

Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart

Is it? From my user perspective, I wouldn't have noticed the change I hadn't read about it somewhere. I just read a bit about it, and this kinda gave me the willies:

Note that the job file format is not stable yet, so if you upgrade upstart later, you may need to fix existing files.

There's the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it

Maybe the omelette+eggs saying applies to OS'es too. Are other distros this daring/merry?

even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work

WFM

I honestly felt that the overall design was seriously less transparent than Windows

If you mean GNOME, yes. s/regedt32/gconftool/g.

Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?

Perhaps this is what the stereotypical home user can understand and appreciate. Remember what you heard in casual chats when Vista came out - all was about the new start menu, the Aero flippy thing, window chrome and maybe UAC; I remember trying to read some long articles detailing the new stuff beneath the shiny stuff but I couldn't really finish them.

I'm sure this applies to the casual Linux user too (someone who only opens a terminal to run specific commands). Let them be I say, and we who dwell in black screens will look at other news outlets for what's changed under the makeup.

Now, the spotlight on "social applications" is downright silly ;)

Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually

Yup, I feel your pain. Right now ALSA is working with PulseAudio - after much monkeying around with sinks and mixers and modules (foot bone connected to the hip bone), which produced lots of variously ill advice in forums, turns out it was a bug in alsa-plugins, and it's fixed in the Lucid package. Now I can run FlightGear and hear my engine loop ;)

Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system

Is switching supposed to be straightforward? I've heard stories, but still it seems daunting.

Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart

Is it? From my user perspective, I wouldn't have noticed the change I hadn't read about it somewhere. I just read a bit about it, and this kinda gave me the willies:

Note that the job file format is not stable yet, so if you upgrade upstart later, you may need to fix existing files.

There's the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it

Maybe the omelette+eggs saying applies to OS'es too. Are other distros this daring/merry?

even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work

WFM

I honestly felt that the overall design was seriously less transparent than Windows

If you mean GNOME, yes. s/regedt32/gconftool/g.

Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?

Perhaps this is what the stereotypical home user can understand and appreciate. Remember what you heard in casual chats when Vista came out - all was about the new start menu, the Aero flippy thing, window chrome and maybe UAC; I remember trying to read some long articles detailing the new stuff beneath the shiny stuff but I couldn't really finish them.

I'm sure this applies to the casual Linux user too (someone who only opens a terminal to run specific commands). Let them be I say, and we who dwell in black screens will look at other news outlets for what's changed under the makeup.

Now, the spotlight on "social applications" is downright silly ;)

Here's an alternate article from Ars. A little less technical but explains things clearly:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars

Windows Mobile will run windows with an IE like China 'sell out' browser.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/winphones-first-big-native-code-casualty-firefox-on-winmob.ars
MS will be happy to help track and report you via closed MS applications on sealed C# with Silverlight or XNA only devices.

i understand their position, but they're got to realize ours. hours wasted cleaning out malware/spyware does not make for a good browsing experience, period.

I would like to support sites by viewing their ads but if it leaves you more open to viruses even on high-profile sites then it is not worth the risk.

Very good point, especially in light of Ars Technica's recent plea to users to stop blocking ads.

I, too, would be than more willing to disable the protective measures I've got in place, but as long as these sites rely on third party advertisers that are more concerned with eyeball collection than system security, we have a stalemate. If sites want me to see their ads, they have the burden of making sure the ads are safe (less annoying, would also be good). If I lower my guard out of "friendship" for a site, only to get a drive by download as a reward, I'm going to take it as a major breech of trust.