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The 'models' that the Renaissance painters painted would all be obese by today's standards. Back then your next meal was not as guaranteed as it is today. ( i don't know this for a fact. Any time travelers are welcome to correct me)

Being skinny is not always a survival characteristic.

She would be considered a lard-ass by today's standards.
FFS just compare the supposed ideal versions of women. For men, and for women.

It's as if some higher power is deliberately trying to raise male and female humans with completely opposite ideal expectations.
In order to reduce birth rate or something?

I didn't get the link into the above story... oops:

http://unreasonablerocket.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-printed-motor-news.html

Seriously, this is the best opinion piece on open source and patents that I've read in a long long time. And as the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and author of the FOSS Patents blog, I read (and write) a lot about that subject.

There's a precedent to this settlement in which Red Hat definitely paid royalties: when it settled the FireStar case. It published a misleading FAQ on its website trying desperately to divert attention from what really happened. The non-confidential part of that settlement was published and leaves no doubt that Red Hat entered into an obligation to pay (even Groklie arrived at that conclusion, a website that I very rarely agree with). That payment was probably not on a per-unit basis. They might have made a one-off payment, or a royalty on revenues/profits, or some combination of both.

Concerning Moglen's discouraging anti-software-patent lobbying, it's interesting that he gets away with it (other than Bruce Perens criticizing him for it now) while I get bashed all the time for calling on people to be pragmatic. The first time I met Eben Moglen (back in 2004 together with a MySQL VP), he told us not to lobby against software patents. Instead he wanted money for his patent-busting efforts, which failed miserably (Microsoft's FAT patents are still in force).

I tried very hard to fight against software patents (in the EU) at the legislative level. I said on my new blog several times that at some point (more than four years ago, in fact) I couldn't help but arrive at the conclusion that it's impossible. It won't happen simply because the collateral damage caused to other industries is huge (you either have to do away with the largest part of the patent system, or you have to live with software patents) and there simply isn't any serious, meaningful support for the anti-software-patent cause by businesses. On LWN I gave an example by quoting what a staffer of the conservative group in the European Parliament once said: unless you bring in those middle-aged closed-source entrepreneurs with beards, bellies and glasses talking about how they suffer from software patents and how they may have to lay off employees because of software patents, there's no way that a political majority will do what the FOSS community asks for.

While my focus is on how to deal with the most important threat (exclusionary strategic use of software patents), Moglen never talks about that because he's been loyal to IBM throughout his professional life and gets funded by them. Instead, he always talks about IBM's (and consequently, his) favorite bogeyman, which is the wrong focus.

They didn't do it on purpose.

"Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data. "

In other words, they did what every other software engineer does: they reused old code to get a job done. This time the code happened to have a bug in it, or rather an unintended consequence, that collected snippets of people's personal information as the vans drove by people's unencrypted wifi connections, which they've since publicly admitted and gone on to delete, or at least they would have deleted it except now they can't because all the lawyers have gotten involved and want to extract money/publicity to themselves by suing Google.

The whole thing is a giant tempest in a teapot. Even worse, it's a major distraction from real, more important, privacy issues.

Such as the weapon used by Malkovich in "In The Line Of Fire"

Wow. He cut taxes for the rich, lowered food/water standards, gutted constitutional protections from unreasonable search, invaded two states and threatened more. And now he's called left wing by trolls? Life is harsh sometimes.

This is the problem: Those are not Republican ideals. Republicans are not supposed to be in favor of foreign occupations and violating the constitution. What happened during Bush was not Republicans, it was lunatics who called themselves Republicans. And many of them still do. But let's not forget what Republicans are supposed to be, because otherwise who is going to do that stuff? I ask in all seriousness, who is going repeal the Patriot Act if the people who call themselves "Republicans" are to the left of the Democrats (in the sense that "the left" wants expansion of government power)?

It's just like fortune cookies. Append "with a computer" and you get a software patent.

In that case, I would like to patent adjusting finance, making budgets and improving one's standing with a computer. Jonas 1 - Net banking 0.

(I got that from http://walikeetz.blogspot.com/2006/01/dirty-dirty-fortune-cookie.html)

Oh, I don't know... I think buildings of that scale were just too difficult to plan and construct for.

Yes, isolated skyscrapers are pretty wonky, more for type-A business dorks that want to be "above" everyone else. I think the more modernized, livable version consists of buildings that are still rather high, but have linked green roof parks, and central atriums. Some examples:

http://blog.urbangreencouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/eco-building415.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LyxZsaQuZO8/SjetV6OrEUI/AAAAAAAAFYs/SV-2Cwo0XBU/s400/8+Awesome+and+Wonderful+Green+Roofs+1.jpg
http://www.sierraclubgreenhome.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/green-roof-2.bmp

You'll notice the "Lilycity" towers have more of an internal ring or courtyard, so they kinda create interior spaces that people can relate to. Hopefully they can find some success starting off with relatively small projects they can link together.

It doesn't sound like they should need to commute between towers all that much. If so, yeah, just the 1000m elevator ride to the transit level will be pretty hard on their ears :P

Link

http://secunia.com/advisories/ and go there and look up your favorite webbrowser or Operating System (or even an app like Adobe Acrobat Reader), & see the lists of security advisories (and especially the UNPATCHED ones). They explain exploits in pretty good detail (could be better though, & more technical imo but I don't think they put up TOO EXACT of information because others can use that for even more crap against others I'd imagine is why), and, how they can be used against you. Sometimes though, there are "work-arounds" recommended even for these known & unpatched security advisories though (some are sort of hokey, e.g.-> "do not open untrusted files" being one example).

One thing you'll probably note though is the sheer amount of exploits that involve javascript exploits over time especially. That's usually the main tool I have seen that is used against users online in say, maliciously scripted webpages or even poisoned ad banners (yes, believe-it-or-not, especially if you haven't heard of that happening before? It happens also, and more than just a few times now for the past 4-5 yrs. in fact).

As to the addons like NoScript or AdBlock? Well, they're programmed themselves and may even bear issues/known security vulnerabilities themselves, so look into that too. That's the 1 problem with complex systems like computer programs of any appreciable relative size: Possible bugs in the way of exploitable code mistakes, and they do happen as well and might be something to also research on your part if you're concerned on this note also.

Now, on the note of maliciously scripted websites? This may help http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm because that is why, in large part, those folks make their custom HOSTS file for: To protect users against known bad sites online.

A good read on much of this is also here, in detail, from Mr. Dancho Danchev (3 yrs. worth of it in fact) as well:

http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/

For the past 3++ yrs. now that security researcher's done a great deal of very in-depth reporting on what you're looking for in fact - sites that are KNOWN to try to "hose your computer".

APK

P.S.=> Enjoy... I think that covers a good deal of ground here for you, per your request... apk

There's an old saying: "You can't con an honest man." Most cons work because they prey on the victim's own greed or baser emotions. I wonder how much of this was going on in this case?

While I'm sure there's some truth to it, I see the saying more as an elaborate rationalization, possibly at the cultural level. After all, if police entrap me into, say, committing a drug crime (maybe an undercover agent sidles up and hands me a lit joint which I proceed to puff), is it fair to say, "Sure, police entrapment is bad, but most of the people who fall for it are crooks at heart."? Most of society might answer "yes" (and for that matter be comfortable with the idea of police entrapment), but it still remains that entrapment means that police would be encouraging people to commit crimes that they otherwise wouldn't commit.

Even as a cautionary tale, this would have limited value. Don't be "mentally unstable with delusions of grandeur"? I better write that down in case I forget. There's a saying that I've read: "It is not humane to expose people to too much temptation." I think it's too easy to focus the victim's foibles and forget that even if people occasionally act like greedy idiots, doesn't mean they always are. It's possible here that the fraudsters in question may have by worming their way into his confidence, made his mental problems worse, and created the conditions for most of the con. Keep in mind that they were working on this guy for several years.

How would you fare if an associate were secretly planning to weaken you mentally? How about romantic attention from an attractive member of the appropriate sex which could lead to blackmail? Generally everyone has some sort of weakness that can be exploited (if only enough incentive were in place to bother). We can't protect everyone from themselves, but we can go after the people who do the cons. As I see it, fraud in a sense is a lot like the idea of rule by the strong. Focusing on the weaknesses of chumps in a sense is rule by cunning. That strikes me as one of the biggest problems with modern society. Namely, that we are ruled not by the strongest, but by the best con men.

It's pretty sad you believe that. For one, if you'd like a phone that lets you reflash the OS you are welcome to buy a Nexus One direct from Google. The nature of open source code means that the phones made entirely by HTC may do things you disagree with. But that's openness for you. Sometimes people will do things you disagree with. It would be fairly pointless to have an open source OS if Google had veto power over every way in which it was used.

I don't know what the potshot at management is about. I've worked here for over four years and have also had plenty of opportunity to observe Google management up close. If they were really as cynical as you believe, they wouldn't have ensured Android was open source and the Nexus One was reflashable out of the box would they? This is something that, what, 0.01% of people purchasing phones probably base a purchasing decision on. If that. Yet here we are, with a phone of highly competitive quality that is also open to operating system developers. I haven't seen any other organization produce such a device, have you?

or... you know... not

http://dotneverland.blogspot.com/2008/07/yet-another-benchmark-of-clr-vs-jvm.html

You are correct, I meant perspective.

I ain't buying it about the wider=older thing, though.

It takes some pretty special circumstances to make a contrail spread anisotropically. Once the hot vapor from the engines has expanded, condensed, and been contained by the vortices from the wings, it's a pretty stable situation with little spread unless something else gets involved.

really cool pick at an iffy link here:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rkPt7JME0-8/SbZndqgc2bI/AAAAAAAAAWI/8UVhtw4fwOU/s320/boeing+747+jumbo+contrail.jpg

I want that in a glossy 8x10 for my office.

To get the sort of triangular spread you're thinking of you'd need to have the contrail in a wind-shear, and wind-shear means turbulent flight, and a pilot wouldn't hang out in that for that long, so it should happens to the tails of a contrail, not to the whole contrail starting from the head, as we're looking at in the article's picture.

sheared contrail:
http://www.mdbsite.com/skies/contrails/info-3.jpg

So I'm sticking with perspective, not diffusion.

IP Vision in the UK are in a similar boat. They ship near-identical hardware (branded as a Technika 8320HD) to the Telstra T-Box, with the only difference being DVB-T2 twin tuners instead of DVB-T. They too run Linux and have a "legal information" dialogue box in the user interface, but I haven't seen any source code for the GPL'ed items they use either. More 8320HD info in my blog...

Article mentioning door buttons on new trains - these ones don't normally have any effect, but become useful when the train is stopped for a significant amount of time (e.g. at end-of-line)

I don't think these guys would be happy with their promotion being messed up.

I'm not going to dig up all the references, but this was one study I had heard of.

http://allankelly.blogspot.com/2010/08/study-on-benefits-of-tdd.html

The main conclusion is that TDD will reduce your fault count significantly, but INCREASES the time taken to deliver a feature. I have heard the same thing for other agile methods.

And from my own experience there are definitely times where 20% of the time was taken to implement a user story and 80% of the time taken writing test cases.

Where are you seeing these prices for new Sci-Fi? Last I looked they sure as hell weren't $6. All of them I've wanted have been higher with a little love note from Amazon pointing out that the price is now set by the F'ing publisher. Some of them were even more expensive than new paper books. The industry has gone the way of the music industry so far as I'm concerned. Screw 'em.

Here's an example from the action stuff I've been reading lately - check the paper and Kindle pricing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Spy-ebook/dp/B0038BZOYA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289098451&sr=1-2

Another - http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Empire-Fargo-Adventure-ebook/dp/B003XQEVD0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289098451&sr=1-1

NYT Bestseller - Hardcover is CHEAPER than eBook -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZK58WM/ref=s9_al_bw_ir01?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1YNQWHDQP69J4JEHSTCP&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1278657562&pf_rd_i=322189011

Here's one I wanted to read pretty badly - http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Dust-Masters-Disguise-Operations/dp/0743428528/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289098993&sr=8-1-catcorr Note the date it was released.....

Thankfully some authors are taking notice of this guy http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ and you'll also note that often the highest sellers on the Kindle lists are lower priced - like this guy's work. He even gives away some books on his site. Sadly it's just not my kind of writing but he sure does tell it like it is on his blog! The publishers are screwing us and the authors and piracy is ramping up as a result!

A "few months ago" I wouldn't have thought about pirating a book. I could get my favorite books for under $10 and I was reading them like crazy. Then here comes iPad and the bullshit deal Apple setup with the publishers to let THEM set the price and break Amazon's lock on E-books. Publishers, led by Macmillan, put the hurt on Amazon, and now they too are forced to let Publishers set book prices. Damn near overnight my buying of books came to a screeching halt as nothing I was interested in reading could be had for what I felt was a reasonable price. Some of the books I looked up were CHEAPER in hard copy! Books that have been out 6-7 YEARS for $12++?!

So I too looked towards Torrent sites and elsewhere and sure enough there was tons of books available. I haven't bought a single book from Amazon, hard or soft copy, since this change in pricing went into effect. the sad thing is that E-books are so small no one ever just shares one, it's ineffective. Instead you see huge collections thrown together in order to make the file size decent.

Thankfully some authors are getting a clue! Hopefully more will follow this guy's lead -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

Consumption taxes are fair because 1) why should to get to avoid paying taxes just because you don't make much money? (though the proposed FairTax deals with your complaint there) and 2) those "evil rich" everyone wants to complain about avoiding taxes? Yea, they'd have no way around it - if you buy a new house, you pay the taxes, buy a new Ferrari, you pay the taxes, etc. I'm curious as to your reasoning for thinking that some people shouldn't have to pay taxes? Don't you think there's something horribly wrong when 50% of the country pays 3% of the taxes and the other 50% pays 97%? (Those are rounded off numbers from 2008 income tax data that you can look up easily online)

Income tax discourages work because one, you have to work more to get the same amount of money, and two, because we use a progressive income tax system where the more you earn, the less you get to keep from the next dollar you earn. If you read up on economics and taxation, you'll find plenty of information on how income taxes discourage people from working (one personal example is my sister who refuses to work overtime - if she goes into overtime, she only gets about 10% of her overtime pay and the other 90% is taken in taxes, so it's not worth it for her to work).

Here's Mankiw's article (it's simplified due to being in a short newspaper column as well as being something everyone can read and understand) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.html?_r=1 and here's his response to people who had some complaints with it http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/10/response-to-queries.html

Basically it comes down to this - why put out the effort to work more / harder when you're not going to get much in return due to taxes. Oh, and here's a blog post that Mankiw wrote regarding consumption tax vs. income tax a few years ago http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/consumption-vs-income-taxation.html

Consumption taxes are fair because 1) why should to get to avoid paying taxes just because you don't make much money? (though the proposed FairTax deals with your complaint there) and 2) those "evil rich" everyone wants to complain about avoiding taxes? Yea, they'd have no way around it - if you buy a new house, you pay the taxes, buy a new Ferrari, you pay the taxes, etc. I'm curious as to your reasoning for thinking that some people shouldn't have to pay taxes? Don't you think there's something horribly wrong when 50% of the country pays 3% of the taxes and the other 50% pays 97%? (Those are rounded off numbers from 2008 income tax data that you can look up easily online)

Income tax discourages work because one, you have to work more to get the same amount of money, and two, because we use a progressive income tax system where the more you earn, the less you get to keep from the next dollar you earn. If you read up on economics and taxation, you'll find plenty of information on how income taxes discourage people from working (one personal example is my sister who refuses to work overtime - if she goes into overtime, she only gets about 10% of her overtime pay and the other 90% is taken in taxes, so it's not worth it for her to work).

Here's Mankiw's article (it's simplified due to being in a short newspaper column as well as being something everyone can read and understand) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.html?_r=1 and here's his response to people who had some complaints with it http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/10/response-to-queries.html

Basically it comes down to this - why put out the effort to work more / harder when you're not going to get much in return due to taxes. Oh, and here's a blog post that Mankiw wrote regarding consumption tax vs. income tax a few years ago http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/consumption-vs-income-taxation.html

A little more information for you. This editorial comment is from Ray Beckerman, regarding this decision:

"No surprises here, given the contents of the jury instructions and verdict form. The only surprises are that (a) the judge felt it necessary to have a predictably futile third trial, (b) the judge refused to instruct the jury that the statutory damages must bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages, which is a fundamental tenet of the law regarding copyright infringement, and (c) the judge has so far declined to reach the constitutional issue which is staring him in the face. It also seems odd to me that the judge had not instructed the jury that plaintiffs had proved a copying -- i.e. a download -- but not a "distribution" as defined in the Copyright Act. -R.B.]" [italics mine]

According to this, it looks like the RIAA was unable to prove any actual damages, and so relied upon statutory damages. Since you seem well-informed, I'm sure you've already spent some time on Mr. Beckerman's site. If not, it's a good place to read up on the RIAA and it's (il)legal activities.

Bicycling isn't really an ideal way to do things any more. Automobiles are much faster than bicycles.

This really depends what you're doing and where you are doing it. In some places, for some purposes, bicycles are faster than cars. And that's a good thing.

I so very much wish I had learned to do this. In general I try not to acquire things I want to keep, but even so, it's becoming a burden.

Ian M. Banks in The Algebraist describes a 'slow' species, the Dwellers, who live so long that their personal houses evolve into museums of antiquity.

Or "The Great Slow Kings" by Roger Zelazny... (referenced page contains a link to the full text of the story, BTW)

The plaintiff has not proven distribution in this case, so the damages in question are for copying the songs, not for distributing them.

What? FlashBlock extension exists for Chromium. Also Chrome beta includes plugin click-to-play behavior (FlashBlock is now obsolete).

hi....su manje read your post http://hubersuhner.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-technology-to-manage-your-time.html

Should have included this: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/

(I'm joking of course... it will take some getting use to not thinking of KT behind your posts, though)

This is a very interesting question. Plug-in electric vehicles generally rely on grid-purchased electricity to run, meaning that their fuel costs and that fuels' emissions characteristics will be determined by the policies affecting the overall electricity generation mix. In states with renewable portfolio standards, which require electricity suppliers to source a specified portion of their energy from renewable resources, electric cars may be displacing fossil fuels, whereas in other states, the electricity used for transportation purposes may come from coal or even oil itself. I write a blog about energy policy and technology, including electric vehicles and renewable power: http://www.energypolicyupdate.blogspot.com/ For more on electric vehicles, you might be interested in this post. Or check out this post for more on the mix of generation resources producing electricity that could be used to power electric cars.

This is a very interesting question. Plug-in electric vehicles generally rely on grid-purchased electricity to run, meaning that their fuel costs and that fuels' emissions characteristics will be determined by the policies affecting the overall electricity generation mix. In states with renewable portfolio standards, which require electricity suppliers to source a specified portion of their energy from renewable resources, electric cars may be displacing fossil fuels, whereas in other states, the electricity used for transportation purposes may come from coal or even oil itself. I write a blog about energy policy and technology, including electric vehicles and renewable power: http://www.energypolicyupdate.blogspot.com/ For more on electric vehicles, you might be interested in this post. Or check out this post for more on the mix of generation resources producing electricity that could be used to power electric cars.

This is a very interesting question. Plug-in electric vehicles generally rely on grid-purchased electricity to run, meaning that their fuel costs and that fuels' emissions characteristics will be determined by the policies affecting the overall electricity generation mix. In states with renewable portfolio standards, which require electricity suppliers to source a specified portion of their energy from renewable resources, electric cars may be displacing fossil fuels, whereas in other states, the electricity used for transportation purposes may come from coal or even oil itself. I write a blog about energy policy and technology, including electric vehicles and renewable power: http://www.energypolicyupdate.blogspot.com/ For more on electric vehicles, you might be interested in this post. Or check out this post for more on the mix of generation resources producing electricity that could be used to power electric cars.

"You are doing it wrong" is the perpetual excuse of Agilists when you say that agile methods have not worked for you.

That's because the most teams claiming being agile are not. It is hard to change to agile development, for example lower management fears losing power and sabotages it, developers are fed up of constant process change and hope it blows over, and more recurring problems. Only a minority of the companies I worked for as consultant the last 10 years are agile, even if they tell otherwise. Don't believe it, measure it! You could use an agile adoption test like http://www.piratson.se/archive/Agile_Karlskrona_Test.html or the Nokia test http://agileconsortium.blogspot.com/2007/12/nokia-test.html

Btw, I think agile ideas are older than 10 years. The ideas of Deming ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming ), born 1900, are very much in line with the agile manifesto, Lean, Kanban, etc. Check him out, he has some nice quotes.

What makes me wonder, why is the software industry so resistant to change... is control greedy management to blame or also the organisation lazy techies? I have lost a project or two over my career because I didn't agree with a difficult manager, but that's okay in my opinion, it allows me to keep a passion for the job and find better places to work for!

Cheers /M

The unemployment rate in November of 2008 was 6.9%. Today, it's at 9.6%.

Numbers might not lie, but one set of them doesn't tell the whole story. Job losses by month is a much more telling statistic.

I recently went to a thesis conference upon this very subject (e-vote protocols).

Not that I really understood the entire speech, but I do remember the conclusion being that such mechanisms will never be absolutly secure.

Got a link for the few french-reading IT-security-unterstanding guys interested.

This sounds a lot like the punchscan voting system. I am at work and not able to see the video right now, but I googled bismark and found this article, which has some details.

Punchscan and its variants do allow you to be able to prove to yourself (with a 50% probability) that your vote was counted as you intended. That might not sound like much comfort (only 50%?), but if the election authority tries to change 2 votes, their probability of getting away with it falls to 1/4, then to 1/8 with 3 votes, and so on. So stealing more than one or two votes becomes infesible pretty quickly.

However, I do believe that in all such schemes, the possibility of large scale vote buying becomes a real threat that has to be managed carefully, since the election authority has the keys that allows the all the ballots to be decoded. So if the Election Authority shares the keys with, say, the autoworkers union, or with GM, then those orgs would be in a position to decrypt the votes and thus coerce their voters. Of course, large scale intimidation of that type would be hard to hide from investigators. For this and other reasons, I think the threat of large scale vote buying is managable, and well worth the accuracy and accountability these systems provide.

The 2 key ideas that makes these schemes work are "cryptographic commitment" and the "cut and choose" protocol. If you are insterested, I've written up a detailed explanation of these concepts, and how punchscan like systems work, here.

Forgot the link, sorry: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html - Steve Yegge

you seems to forget that Google is a proponent of the offline browser capability, look at Google gear for what they have in mind.

Depressing, isn't it?

Video here explains FDM: First 3D-Printed Car Hits The Road : TreeHugger. It's additive where CNC and other milling processes are subtractive.

I like the idea of an "impossible" car body shape. This should be a hit with the Art Car crowd. Perhaps soon I'll own my very own motorized chicken.

If you think that self publishing artists are a threat to the industry, wait until you have everybody self replicating everything they need.

You still have the question of who owns the rights to copy the design. Not to mention who bears the legal responsibility if your replicated part fails.

Required reading: Ralph Williams' Business as Usual. During Alterations

There's a series of pictures at http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2010/01/goodness-of-men-and-machinery.html that tell you what the installer looked like in January. IIRC no huge changes have happened to it since then. But do try 4.8 or a recent snapshot (they come with installNN.iso files these days)

If it wasn't for the Shuttle, we could have had some interesting results from the Apollo Applications Program. The technological expertise that went into developing Apollo could have been directed toward building more of a permanent infrastructure without having to completely reinvent everything for a winged monster (and then throw it all away and go back to Apollo-style stacks thirty years later).

But even then, even with a cool on-orbit habitation infrastructure, we'd still have built ourselves mostly a space bridge to nowhere, wouldn't we?

The problem I have with manned spaceflight is that ultimately, there's nowhere practical to go. We can build all the capability and develop all the skills we want, but in the end the chances of actually colonising any other place in the Solar System on a long-term sustainable basis are much slimmer than of permanently colonising the wastelands of Earth.

If we had FTL that equation would change drastically: suddenly we'd have somewhere off-Earth for people to go (all those billions of Earthlike planets we suspect must be out there). But FTL, we are assured by the smartest minds in physics for a century, is not merely impractical but literally and forever impossible.

My money is on Einstein, Hawking and Wheeler being flat wrong when they say FTL is impossible, but that's an argument from coolness and pulp space opera, not from science.

What science has taught us about space in the last half-century is very, very depressing. Yes we can survive there, but there's no actual there there for us to survive for.

> Why is 300 variations a problem?

Oblg. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Or said another way ...

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/gcc-opensslc-fno-random-seed.html
People in the Linux community love to talk about how Linux is all cooperation and programmer love-making. But just take a look. These people don't cooperate. There are hundreds of slightly different distributions. Distributions don't talk to upstream. Upstream doesn't talk to distributions. Ten different programs are written to do the same thing in ten different shitty ways. When I ask two people to work together to solve my problem, I don't mean, "please independently come up with ten solutions each, none of which solve my problem. Thanks."

--
"When I was 20, 'wasting' time to get Linux/BSD work was an investment in learning; at 40 I'd rather waste time gaming / movies, then trying to dick around with all the package dependencies"
  - UnknownSoldier

No they don't.

Maybe you eyes don't feel strained when you look at blurry 2d stuff, but mine do.

Examples:
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/images/type/effects/light-burst/blurred-text.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__e75oHvC5rk/SQB11qe8d_I/AAAAAAAAAIM/DRtUohJMzrA/s400/First+Try+Ss.jpg

And the rest of my points are still valid even if you don't read or understand them.

The "blur"/out-of-focus effect is not specific or even required in a 3D movie. You can have everything perfectly in focus in a 3D movie.

The weight of the Earth comes in useful in calculating how many space habitats you could build from it. :-)

Let's see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Space_habitat
http://ramblingsonthefutureofhumanity.blogspot.com/2009/10/designing-space-habitat.html

You can support 15 million people with a habitat requiring 3000 million metric tons of mass (if I got that right), or about
3 billion tons. (One could also ballpark that mass calculation, but I won't right now, just by thinking about a shell of six feet deep material with some surface area.)

The Earth weighs, as above, about 5 billion trillion imperial tons (close enough to metric tons). So, if we vandalized and vaporized the Earth to build space habitats (not that we know how yet), we could build a trillion space habitats that each support 15 million people. Or, that would be about 15 billion billion people, or about a billion times more people than the Earth supports now. I have not double checked that, but it sounds more or less right within a thousand or so. :-)

Anyway, while I don't recommend disassembling the Earth to make way for a space habitat(or hyperspace) bypass, as there are plenty of asteroids and moons in the solar system that are easier to use for mass, and it makes sense to preserve Earth as a historical landmark to our past, this points out that people like William Catton who are spouting imminent danger from "overpopulation" are more just lacking basic math skills and some imagination. :-)
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954
Contrast with someone who though the empowered human imagination was the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

These calculations have life-and-death consequences as relate to human wars and decisions about having children or abortions. Seriously. Whether someone is stockpiling ammo for the "overpopulation die-off" or trying to get a job at NASA or private or volunteer efforts to build space habitats or even just design better solar panels hinges on this sort of basic math.

The consequences that flow from this simple calculation about the weight of the Earth and the weight of a space habitat in comparison are politically profound. They suggest we should not be fighting over oil as a form of dogma-driven collective "suicide" but instead should be putting a lot of time and effort in developing a serious space program and other advanced technology, but from an abundance paradigm where the wealth is widely shared, not a scarcity paradigm where wealth is tightly hoarded. See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based ap

To be fair, they ARE brilliant, but even brilliance doesn't always result in "wow, awesome!" A case in point, Wayne Cherry designed both the 1970 Vauxhall SRV and the Pontiac Aztec.

It's true that Wave made almost no ripples (sorry, bad pun), but I very much doubt "hacks" defines the vast majority of Google's workforce.

But the Japanese ebook market is already huge. In 2009 ebook sales in Japan totaled $600 million, more than triple the US sales, and without any Kindles!

So I don't know what your bizarre non-sequitur about digital sales was supposed to be about.