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Take a look at "this".

We need to protect our privacy or we will no longer be a free nation we will be no better than old Communist Russia where you can't make a move without the government knowing.

You are absolutely right. Our forefathers had the wisdom and foresight to construct an unbelievable document that would span time. They wrote this document and the Bill of Rights (also referred to as the Rights of Man) after the War of Independence to keep future generations from suffering abuse and misconduct by the government. This "Living Document" has survived more than 200 years without revision, and I don't believe we should start now.

I'm sure that he has quite enough e-mail with which to occupy his time without me filling up his inbox; I suppose you could say that I'm too cynical to think that my opinion really matters - besides, I don't necessarily think that it's desirable (or likely) for someone like Linus to make the jump to PR figurepiece (and there's a difference between this and the spokesperson I mentioned his being in a previous posting): in any case, the mass market identifies far more readily with branded images than it does with spokespeople, especially those as genuine as Linus (by which I mean that he's no Connie - he actually has something to do with the *product*, which most successful spokespeople don't). Maybe I'm wrong - linux certainly isn't a 'product' in any entirely conventional sense of the word, and perhaps it's unfair for me to consider it as one.

However, whilst I see your point (and I fully appreciate that under certain circumstances this could apply), I don't know that it does apply here - the medium of publication is a newspaper whose circulation *isn't* the vocal minority (by which I refer to technophiles) - as you can tell from the front page, it's a local newspaper, complete with all that makes one of these, from local interest stories to the kind of quasi-fictional human interest stories which don't impact the demographic of readership which most newspapers utilise in order to catch peoples interest. Whilst due to the population demographic of the catchment area of the newspaper (read: silicon valley, as far as I can see), a significant proportion of the readership of the newspaper may happen to *be* geeks, but this doesn't indicate that this is the audience which the newspaper is aimed at.

But besides this, even discarding questions which seem to be fairly indicative of a linux-naive readership ("How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?"), one explicitly indicates that the journalist is aware that not all of the readership of the paper are linux-savvy ("For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?"). It may be that the readership of the newspaper is sufficiently diverse that the article requires questions like this *and* more complex ones which appeal to the technophile (and those in between), but nevertheless, this doesn't negate my point; the article *will* be read by people who don't have requisite knowledge to understand even some of the questions (eg. Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?) and this should have been taken into account, both by the journalist and by Linus.

Part of the problem may be (and I come from a family of journalists who've written regularly for local, national, and international newspapers) that local news doesn't always tend to be the best put-together in the world. ;)

As far as my wife goes, she doesn't regularly read *any* technological news outlet. I pried her away from coding html in order to have a second opinion by which to check my own, but I'm fairly sure that she'd be comfortable reading a site like slashdot (as she has in the past).

I'm sure that he has quite enough e-mail with which to occupy his time without me filling up his inbox; I suppose you could say that I'm too cynical to think that my opinion really matters - besides, I don't necessarily think that it's desirable (or likely) for someone like Linus to make the jump to PR figurepiece (and there's a difference between this and the spokesperson I mentioned his being in a previous posting): in any case, the mass market identifies far more readily with branded images than it does with spokespeople, especially those as genuine as Linus (by which I mean that he's no Connie - he actually has something to do with the *product*, which most successful spokespeople don't). Maybe I'm wrong - linux certainly isn't a 'product' in any entirely conventional sense of the word, and perhaps it's unfair for me to consider it as one.

However, whilst I see your point (and I fully appreciate that under certain circumstances this could apply), I don't know that it does apply here - the medium of publication is a newspaper whose circulation *isn't* the vocal minority (by which I refer to technophiles) - as you can tell from the front page, it's a local newspaper, complete with all that makes one of these, from local interest stories to the kind of quasi-fictional human interest stories which don't impact the demographic of readership which most newspapers utilise in order to catch peoples interest. Whilst due to the population demographic of the catchment area of the newspaper (read: silicon valley, as far as I can see), a significant proportion of the readership of the newspaper may happen to *be* geeks, but this doesn't indicate that this is the audience which the newspaper is aimed at.

But besides this, even discarding questions which seem to be fairly indicative of a linux-naive readership ("How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?"), one explicitly indicates that the journalist is aware that not all of the readership of the paper are linux-savvy ("For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?"). It may be that the readership of the newspaper is sufficiently diverse that the article requires questions like this *and* more complex ones which appeal to the technophile (and those in between), but nevertheless, this doesn't negate my point; the article *will* be read by people who don't have requisite knowledge to understand even some of the questions (eg. Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?) and this should have been taken into account, both by the journalist and by Linus.

Part of the problem may be (and I come from a family of journalists who've written regularly for local, national, and international newspapers) that local news doesn't always tend to be the best put-together in the world. ;)

As far as my wife goes, she doesn't regularly read *any* technological news outlet. I pried her away from coding html in order to have a second opinion by which to check my own, but I'm fairly sure that she'd be comfortable reading a site like slashdot (as she has in the past).

I'm sure that he has quite enough e-mail with which to occupy his time without me filling up his inbox; I suppose you could say that I'm too cynical to think that my opinion really matters - besides, I don't necessarily think that it's desirable (or likely) for someone like Linus to make the jump to PR figurepiece (and there's a difference between this and the spokesperson I mentioned his being in a previous posting): in any case, the mass market identifies far more readily with branded images than it does with spokespeople, especially those as genuine as Linus (by which I mean that he's no Connie - he actually has something to do with the *product*, which most successful spokespeople don't). Maybe I'm wrong - linux certainly isn't a 'product' in any entirely conventional sense of the word, and perhaps it's unfair for me to consider it as one.

However, whilst I see your point (and I fully appreciate that under certain circumstances this could apply), I don't know that it does apply here - the medium of publication is a newspaper whose circulation *isn't* the vocal minority (by which I refer to technophiles) - as you can tell from the front page, it's a local newspaper, complete with all that makes one of these, from local interest stories to the kind of quasi-fictional human interest stories which don't impact the demographic of readership which most newspapers utilise in order to catch peoples interest. Whilst due to the population demographic of the catchment area of the newspaper (read: silicon valley, as far as I can see), a significant proportion of the readership of the newspaper may happen to *be* geeks, but this doesn't indicate that this is the audience which the newspaper is aimed at.

But besides this, even discarding questions which seem to be fairly indicative of a linux-naive readership ("How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?"), one explicitly indicates that the journalist is aware that not all of the readership of the paper are linux-savvy ("For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?"). It may be that the readership of the newspaper is sufficiently diverse that the article requires questions like this *and* more complex ones which appeal to the technophile (and those in between), but nevertheless, this doesn't negate my point; the article *will* be read by people who don't have requisite knowledge to understand even some of the questions (eg. Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?) and this should have been taken into account, both by the journalist and by Linus.

Part of the problem may be (and I come from a family of journalists who've written regularly for local, national, and international newspapers) that local news doesn't always tend to be the best put-together in the world. ;)

As far as my wife goes, she doesn't regularly read *any* technological news outlet. I pried her away from coding html in order to have a second opinion by which to check my own, but I'm fairly sure that she'd be comfortable reading a site like slashdot (as she has in the past).

Understandably people are taking a closer look at the provisions under the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act now that the initial shock of 9/11 has worn off. The reaction to "do something" is not being governed by the climate of fear and the urgent feeling for a rapid response that followed the attacks, which also meant that many legislators didn't read or understand the entire bill. The fear of political opponents using a vote against a bill with the name "PATRIOT" didn't help.

Obviously many of those who are taking a sober second thought about the provisions don't like what they see, and this may be the start of a movement to let the sunset clause on the act take effect. It is set to expire at midnight (0h00) January 1, 2006.

Librarians are at the forefront of the movement and the American Library Association's USA PATRIOT Act campaign is one of many legislative and privacy issues that they address.

The July 4th weekend may be a good time to think about the USA PATRIOT act, argues the SJMC. Declan McCullagh offers his thoughts on the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 AKA PATRIOT Act II. You can also read EPIC's view of the DSEA 2003 and the original USA PATRIOT Act. They also have links to the text of the legislation and other info.

Two reasons, really.

If you had actually succeeded in hacking Apple, would you limit yourself to changing one graphic (it was an image with text) in the PowerMac section of the Apple store? Would you fill it with impressive but plausible specs? Most crackers would have changed the specs to something absurd, like quad 3GHz or something.

The other thing (to my mind) is that if Apple had gotten cracked, they would have taken the store offline for a longer period of time while they figured out how it was done and how to prevent it from happening again. As bad as it would be for Apple to admit to having been cracked, it would be even worse for them to leave an open vulnerability.

It was either a slip-up or a deliberate leak. My money is on slip-up. If Apple is preparing to announce new machines on Monday, then they've got to be working on new websites by now and someone just goofed and saved a graphic to the wrong location. Once somebody found it, the cat was out of the bag.

By the way, the San Jose Mercury News is now reporting that IBM has scheduled analyst briefings about the PPC 970 for Monday after Steve Job's keynote.

Problems like the graduation tests recently required for California high school seniors. The idea was that if you pass the test, you graduate with a diploma. If you don't pass the test, you get a certificate that basically says that you were there for all your classes.

It was a good idea. It would help to hold students responsible for their own grades, and make a diploma mean something -- not that you were just passes because you play water polo, or because the teacher didn't want to deal with you again.

Well, California's State Superintendant of Public Education decided that we won't administer this test anymore, at least not with its current requirements, because too many students are failing.

My problem with that: The math component of the exam tests you at an 8th grade level...and you only need to get 50% of the questions right to pass. You only need to know half as much as an eighth grader should know to graduate high school???? And that's too hard?

My wife's younger sister took this test as a sophomore, and she studied her ass off for it, and she passed it! Did I mention that she's been diagnosed with learning disabilities? How is it fair to her that stupid-ass students who don't even try to learn (or at least to learn enough to past tests) get the same diploma she gets? She's clearly earned hers, they didn't, and shouldn't get one.

If I ever have children, they're definitely not going into these screwed up institutions they call public schools in California.

Sony's Movies Division has more power than Sonys electronics division.

What these dumb companies cant understand is, that their electronics divisions wont exist if they end piracy.

the yahoo page is missing three paragraphs, what's up with that? the complete AP article can be found at http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/6073725.htm .

wonderful world, isn't it? How many years before we can't publish this kind of stuff on magzines?

• After the production team moved on to Australia, the concrete from the freeway was ground up for use as road base. The lumber was shipped to Mexico for building low-income housing, the foam cave broken down to become building insulation.

Nigeria has bigger problems than e-mail scam artists

• The Guardian: "Taking sides" (BBC reported false Scud stories put out by US & UK military)
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corp: " Iraqi TV reports fighting 150 km from Baghdad" (but no Scuds or WMD found in Iraq)
  
• Seattle Times: "Accidents cast doubts on Patriot missiles" (they didn't knock down many Scuds, but they were highly effective against British fighter jets)
  
• San Jose Mercury: "U.S. confident trailers were used to produce bioweapons" (no Scuds or anything else found yet really, but we definitely expect to find something really important Real Soon Now)
  
  

>> What's worse than that, though, is that they are still trying to pretend that it's not the case.

Since when? Jen-Hsun Huang admits defeat (But promises a comeback):

"Tiger Woods doesn't win every day. We don't deny that ATI has a wonderful product and it took the performance lead from us. But if they think they're going to hold onto it, they're smoking something hallucinogenic."

I "love" this quote from this article:
Crashing a data center by flooding it with traffic is certainly a form of trespassing and tampering with private property, [lawyer David Kramer] says.

What about spammers? Wouldn't that definition also apply to their flooding email boxes and servers with their crap?

Besides that, I can list several other things they are doing that is equal to that. For example they trespass and tamper with private property when they rape proxies, the same when they hack PCs and servers to relay their crap, their intent to trespass onto our property by trying to get around spam filters, etc.

If this is true, the spammers better realize that this applies to them as well.

Your gait betrays your identity
Watch your step! The Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new anti-terrorist surveillance system.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/5901464.htm

There was an older article somewhere about the UK using cellular towers.

Like Oreo cookies? Well, the leftist extremists want to make them illegal wherever kids can buy them, supposedly because of transfatty acids. Now I don't exactly eat mountains of Oreo cookies, but if someone wants to eat them, this is supposed to be a free country! Ban those and the liberals, er, leftist extremists will have opened the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from places where kids can buy them, which opens the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from this country for everyone. Now under the excuse of "health," the government will be able to dictate what we eat. This is Big Brother. It doesn't matter if right wing extremists or left wing extremists do it... the legal system is supposed to be the bare minimum, with a good education system teaching people how to think and use common sense, and to suggest how they should eat healthy stuff, be polite to others, not smoke, not drink, not do drugs, etc. But the minute the government can dictate which FACIAL EXPRESSIONS you may employ when talking to someone, or which FOODS you may eat, or where your money, that YOU EARNED is going to go, that is extremism and it is wrong.

I'm very sorry... The liberals/leftist extremists have gained control over the media and the schools. They have screwed up the education system because some people are less intelligent than others, so in order to be fair and to avoid hurting someone's feelings, they have reduced the quality of education in order to level the playing field. And this results in a lot of people being idiots... USEFUL IDIOTS, as Lenin said (see link for references).

It's fun to think about fusion reactors being practical sources of electric power, and it's fun to spend millions of dollars on Really Cool Toys and do fundamental physics research that nobody could do before and build really big computers for mathematical simulations of the physics. But it's really about testing new nuclear weapons designs, and modelling the aging of existing nuclear weapons to know when they need replacing. More detailed discussion on Stockpile Stewardship. After all, that's one of the things that you can do with very precise knowldge of hydrogen fusion behavior.

Furthermore, the Bush Administration recently got the Senate Armed Services Committee to approve $25M for resuming nuclear weapons testing and about $20M for designing new small nuclear bombs (less than 5KT) and big bunker-buster bombs (up to 1MT.) The small ones are presumably fission-based, while the bigger ones are probably fusion. SJMerc article. TheAge Article. (So just in case you thought the recent unpleasantness in the Middle East was designed to stop Weapons of Mass Destruction, well, no...)

Likewise: 2003-04-21 03:01:12 Inventor of the RDBMS Dies (articles,news) (rejected)

I found the news on alt.folklore.computers where they actually care about the history of computing.

My submission linked to the San Jose Mercury News obituary and Codd's original paper on the relational model.

Or if you're just avoiding the NYTimes, a quick Google News search of nanoscale +toxic turned up The Mercury News's run of it.

(No Karma Bonus checked to avoid Karma-whoring)

LA times story is mirrored at the San Jose Mercury-News as well.

'Free speech' is a thing of the past.

Don't believe me? Ask the Dixie Chicks...or Henry Norr.

At the point where Columbia was lost, the entry envelope was *DEFINITELY* under computer control.

At that point in the envelope, I believe only one human being has ever taken the stick, and he let auto-pilot take over. Columbia was doing it as planned: by computer.

Here, read the 8:49 a.m. section here:


Columbia was still going too fast, so at 8:49 a.m. it made the first of three planned sweeping S-curve maneuvers, banking first to the right and, later, to the left. These maneuvers extend the time the shuttle is in the atmosphere and can be slowed by friction.

The computer was still doing the flying, and that was supposed to continue until about three minutes before landing, when the astronauts would take computer-assisted manual control.

If something had gone wrong, said Rob Navias, a press officer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the astronauts could override the computers. It has never been done, and Hauck said it probably would not be done except in the most extreme circumstances, because computers can react more quickly than humans.


Word I have is that this S-curve maneuver has only had human hands involved with it *once*, and it was a quick default back to auto-pilot ... It was not 'done', and it has always been 'done' by computers.

Well, that list doesn't have nearly the weight as countries actually devoting troops, money or material. Just saying, "Yeah, we got your back, you go on," is just those countries covering diplomatic bases with the U.S. A lot of the poor ones still need aid money and the economic goodwill of the US government. A good number of their leaders and a majority of their people still condemn the war effort, publically even. It's rather disingenuous of some of the Republican leadership to state that this Coalition is bigger than Gulf War I.

GW1: 425K US, 35K British, 20K Saudi Arabian, 9800 French, 1700 Canadian, 2K Moroccan, 35K Egyptian, 8K Pakistani, 70K Syrians, 100K Turkish (on their borders), 6K from Bangladesh, Niger and Senegal sent 500 men apiece, Honduras 150 troops, and 450 from Argentina.
GW2 has 300K US, 45K British, 2K Australian and 200 each from 4 or 5 others.

Lawrence J. Korb -- a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration said to Salon, "We made a profit last time for heaven's sake. It didn't cost us a nickel." Conversely, this time "nobody's giving us any money, as far as I can see." Yale University economist William Nordhaus, author of one of the most detailed private sector analyses of the Iraq war's possible costs, estimated the full bill for the Persian Gulf conflict could range between $99 billion and $1.92 trillion, including the price of fighting the war, occupying Iraq afterward and rebuilding the country. But you're right at least so far as print media goes, even Foxnews.com says estimates run from $100 billion to $1.6 trillion.

Also, 1441 wasn't sold to the UN nations as being a pretext for war. Several diplomats report they were assured of this by the U.S. and there would be another UN vote before a war began. Hell, Bush even committed to going through another vote "no matter what the whip count is" during his press conference last week and bailed on it.

In other news ... ;) the last I read on Turkey is that they were holding up on flyover rights due to disputes about whether they were allowed to send troops into Iraq to make sure the Kurds don't form their own state. (Just read a bit more on this, looks like we're giving them $15 billion and allowing them to deploy 25K-30K troops into Kurdish-controlled areas of Northern Iraq for flyover rights. The Kurds have vowed to fight any Turkish presence. Looks like those Kurdish troops might not materialize to fight Iraq-proper after all.)

One reason I hate the media, only 2 stories I can find on yesterdays Turkish vote talking about troop deployment concessions. One here states the $15 billion expected for the flyover rights. The other one here says how Colin Powell has stated they will not pay for flyover rights.

I agree with you. The same thing is true regarding the protests yesterday in San Francisco. Most people who live in San Francisco are against the war already. So the protesters come and block intersections and prevent exit off of the interchanges?? The purpose of protests should be to convert people, not piss off people who already believe the same way you do. Unfortunately, this stuff makes national news... so they continue their behavior today.

Yes, They were Scuds, and yes, the UN really is blind. And no, you really don't know what you are talking about.

AP Wire

• Western Disposal recently canceled their computer recycling pick up day because of environmental justice issues including the low to slave labor rates some third world nations pay people to dismantle 1st world discarded computers
• I wish there was some type of charity that built Beowolf clusters out of older computers.
• Interesting to note that, in part, the computers are coming down in price due to their use of leaded plastic and less precious metals in their components (micro coating technology) both are disincentives to recycling
• China burns them in a huge fire and then harvests the metals they can recover after the burning

It's too bad that old computers don't smell.

Articles:

• 17 cents an hour
• Computer Dumping Polluting Asia

I found the way that the USGS down in LA ended up implimenting Load Balancing even more informative then the fact that Michael went to check the information of the website. After all in the many quakes I've felt, I've always gone to the USGS Website once during and a number of times afterwards to find out both the epicenter (One was too damn close) and the magnitude. And in two cases the website was updating the start and end of the quake while I was reloading.

It's actually nice to see a government agency attempting to save money by implimenting an open source solution rather then going out and plopping down 10K in our tax dollars rashly. Hell I wish ALL Public Agencies did that.

sorry about old links :-)>

I found the way that the USGS down in LA ended up implimenting Load Balancing even more informative then the fact that Michael went to check the information of the website. After all in the many quakes I've felt, I've always gone to the USGS Website once during and a number of times afterwards to find out both the epicenter (One was too damn close) and the magnitude. And in two cases the website was updating the start and end of the quake while I was reloading.

It's actually nice to see a government agency attempting to save money by implimenting an open source solution rather then going out and plopping down 10K in our tax dollars rashly. Hell I wish ALL Public Agencies did that.

sorry about old links :-)>

Oh I don't know. I think TiVo has made great strides recently, seeing as how both FCC Chairman Michael Powell and talk show host Oprah both love it.

Hell, Oprah's recent endorsement alone has probably done more for TiVo than any of their ads or 30-minute informercials ever did.

I'm not sure this new AOL vaporware thingie could pull off that kind of mindshare, especially if it is as crippled as reported.

Do not forget that the Silly Valley's native paper, the San Jose Mercury News, also published a report on how bad things are here. This report was a 4-part series!

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/50 77356.htm


This was published on 2/9/2003.

It is interesting, as each part showed a different point of view from a person of a different age.

I agree about the Chronicle, it's pretty dire. But the Mercury News is very good. Being the main newspaper of Silicon Valley it has a lot of good tech articles and the journalists are slightly more savvy than those in other papers, plus its national and international news coverage is fairly well-written. Pick one up next time you get a paper :-) It's worth it. Actually, i think you can read it online at bayarea.com.

I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.

But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.

If it comes to that though, rather than toss it in the trash, I'd rather pay a service like this to recycle it if I could -- the toxins in modern PCs are *nasty* and worth trying to recycle or dispose of properly. Tossing it in a dumpster really isn't the best idea, as a major recent reports (and several related news articles) have highlighted:

• http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/spec ial_packages/marchmania/4605025.htm
• http://news.com.com/2100-1040-844195.html
• http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50645,00 .html
• http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/technotrash.htm

There's a reason that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has the terms in that order. It's better to re-collect the production materials to be used in new products than to throw things away & need more raw resources, but it's better to stretch out the lifespan of existing products before giving them up for scrap at all. Even beyond that through, it's better to consume less at the outset than to stretch out the life of things that you maybe didn't need *or* recycle.

So yeah, it's better to reuse that old working Mac, but when the time comes to give it up -- and that time *will* come, sooner or later -- then it's better to dispose of it responsibly. Recycling isn't necessarily a very clean option, as the report in that last URL illustrates, so the longer you can avoid that the better.

And if anyone in the Boston area has an old iMac with, say, a dead motherboard, let me know :-)

I would be very hesitant to assume I knew anything about life as experienced by someone outside my own personal demographic. (The operative word is "assume". I don't wish to discount the work of those who have actually done research.) An article in today's San Jose Mercury News lends support to the premise that racial profiling is alive and well. CHP is accused of stopping only Latinos in Pacheco Pass and jailing MacArthur Washington for the "crime" of being African-American while driving away from a convenience store in the pre-dawn hours. No admission of guilt was made in this settlement. I can kind of understand pulling over Latinos when trying to stop a drug running operation led by Latinos, if that's what was going on, but I can't fathom stopping an African-American "because everyone knows that blacks get drunk" as the officers might have assumed. While it would not be fair to assume that all police officers are prejudiced pigs, etc; history and my personal experience shows that power corrupts, and the police have a fair amount of power in their realm. -- Skip

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago, Google bought Deja. com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet newsgroups, Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net. But now, Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." and yadda yadda yadda. All that may be true but I don't believe it. This is not about "content" and Google isn't interested in "content", the news service is the result of the reliability that Google brings to other people's resource and content and the Blogger deal is the next stage in the development of Googling the net. PageRank generates reliable sources of whatever kind of information you ask for, based on search terms generated by idiots like me. Bloggers have developed a whole new set of tools that is making the reliability of information much higher and is using massively distributed human resources to find and rank that information very quickly. A story hits the net and the Blogosphere, using newsreaders, Blogs with Trackback links and the usual power rule processes of the network evaluates that information and weaves it into it proper place in the knowledge universe very quickly. By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information. That's an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest. I've said for a long time that Google is not a search engine. Now we have Larry Page's word for it.

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. "Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

Here's another bit that makes so much more sense than most people get.

Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.

Google surveys the free part of the web. Everyone wants to be on Google, because if you aren't in Google you don't exist. So you had better be free, and good, and referenced, and linked to the universe, or you don't exist and if you don't exist you sure as hell don't do business. Can we call that part of the debate settled please?

Powell, 39, will help craft the rules of the road to a new digital promised land, where the lines between computers and entertainment devices blur and consumers have access to a vast array of new services. A die-hard Republican free-marketeer, he aims to do so with as little government intrusion as possible.

"Imagine if their intention is to further expand beyond the digital media space they've so far occupied and on into real-world objects?" It is. That is exactly their intention. And the company they are holding above water is probably the very same company that is going to be making watches, alarm clocks, and refrigerator magnets for them to transmit content via .NET technology over the FM radio subcarrier bands.

According to Prof. Gene Spafford in today's San Jose Mercury-News,, Microsoft "has a problem finding enough people trained in computer security." Muhawhawhaw. You already know MS security sucks and MS is not really interested in fixing the problem. The real wretched, awful truth is, the US Government does security even worse than does MS, and it is even less interested in fixing the problem than is MS. The US Government civil service is too cumbersome and politicized in its hiring process, as well as too low-paying, to attract IT talent; most Government agencies, instead, rely on "disadvantaged small business" contractors to do their IT security. And "doing IT security" means making sure users have 8-character passwords and that they download new virus definition files every day. That, and making the paperwork look good. If you only knew.

That's right. I said ass-lawyer.

Heh, I submitted a story about this last week, but Ed said "no way dude"

NY Times article I submitted

Non NYT article:

Copyrights Expiring in Europe

Two-thirds of any unclaimed settlements, up to $1.1 billion, will be given to California's neediest public schools to be used for computer equipment and related services in a program to be administered by the state's Department of Education. Microsoft would keep the final one-third of the unclaimed portion.

And a link to the article

Court Punts Sex.com Domain Case
4 Jan 2003
A dispute over the transfer of the domain name Sex.com may be heading
to California's highest court. In a decision published Friday ...

Tussle over sex.com
4 Jan 2003
... names and decide whether the nation's largest domain registry must face a multimillion-dollar
damage claim from the owner of the pornographic Web site sex.com....

Supreme Court Asked to Decide Domain Name Conversion Issue
7 Jan 2003
... true ownerâ(TM)s registration. The request is the latest turn in the
long legal battle over âoesex.com.â. The name was registered ...

News briefs from around California
4 Jan 2003
... SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A federal appeals court has asked California's top
court to rule on the alleged theft of the domain name sex.com.....

TECH TICKER
4 Jan 2003
... A federal appeals court asked California's high court to resolve questions about
the sex.com domain name in a dispute over whether VeriSign's Network Solutions ...

Putting a Price on Cyber Love
20 Dec 2002
... Although Kremen has since moved on to one of the Net's other profitable niches, and
is running the website Sex.com, he still views personals as one of the most ...

San Jose Mercury story: hundreds of mailboxes removed from San Francisco bay area, due to low usage, garbage thrown in mailboxes, fear of more anthrax attacks, etc. etc. I can't help worrying about all anonymous means of communication shutting down.

Most likely Dave Peterschmidt, He took out millions in loans from the company then laid me and 270 other people off the next day because there wasn't enough money.

I know Inktomi was going to let him get away with not paying back the loans, but hopefully Yahoo won't. On the bright side all the stock I own may soon be worth more than one digit.

bayarea.com

taggat

You might want to ask this guy

Man dies after falling

So, shouldn't someone sue Earth First! for worker's comp?

1) China
2) North Korea
3) Iraq
4) Iran
5) The United States of America

A short time ago the chief chicken-littles of the International Association of Environmental Alarmists and Extreamists (IAEAE) were collectively diving under their beds over a study showing how nearly every sq. inch of the planet has been hideously despoiled by nasty ol' humanity. Well, now comes a counter-study (partly funded by Gordon Moore) which claims "46 percent of Earth is still wilderness" - a salve sure to sooth the conscience of dollar sign-blinking land developers and construction workers everywhere.

Thus proving that, like statistics, politicians can pick a study to prove any damn thing they want. Meanwhile the truth continues to elude the media manipulated public.

2) Have a lot of them turn out right

3) ????

4) PROPHET!!!

Even more interresting are the predictions he made 10 years ago, in 1992

When looking a the future, it can be a good idea to look at the past predictions of the future. Here is a link to that. And you know, so much has changed since 1992. We were going through hard economic times, the president was a guy named "Bush" and the U.S. was in a conflict with Iraq. My, how times have changed. :)