Slashdot Mirror

Most all data in commercial and government systems are "exposed" or "compromised" to one degree or another virtually all the time. So it is not surprising that as we focus more attention on breaches, we discover an ever-growing number of breaches. Under the presenting thinking, the growth will never stop. Should each citizen therefore be mailed 100 breach notices every day? Legally and ethically speaking, we do not have a competent definition of what is and is not a meaningful security breach. The result is confusion and excessive anxiety on the part of data holders, data subjects, legal authorities and the media. Ben

Oops. Eureka! This is what I get for looking. Intel just released the processor on December 31 2008, so this is pretty fast timing. I wonder if you can actually buy these yet. They're still not on Acer's website, but the press release (see article link) says they're available now. It's like half the price I paid for this stupid nw9440. I can't believe that I actually believe that Acer is an upgrade from an HP. One of my pals here where I live who works for the local community college extension campus says that he used to work for Acer and that he would have been able to replace a machine that went through as much as my stupid HP, so I guess I have half as much to lose and am twice as likely to get it than if I bought something from HPQ down the road.

DHS are the gestapo. They have been explicitly referred to as the Gestapo by two lawmakers, Luis V. Gutierrez(D-ill) and Sam Farr(D-CA).

They have been placed in charge of thoughtcrime and IP enforcement among others.

Are these the guys you want banging at your door at random for the inevitable(give it a few more years) state-sponsored "health and wellness" checks?

There seem to be some pics here: http://www.bookmarktheweb.blogspot.com/

What hardware would that be?

Okay, but don't laugh. It's a Pentium D processor, Intel onboard graphics, and I just recently upgraded from 1 to 2 gig of RAM. Compiz barely runs (haven't tried since the memory upgrade, to be fair). Kwin absolutely flies. I realize this is a battle of anecdotes and proves nothing, but it's my experience, fwiw. Also, I have never gotten artifacts with Kwin. I don't think I've ever seen it crash on me either (Plasma is another story altogether...)

The desktop and the panel are still different, although the same widgets can now go in both places.

No they're not. Plasma is built on the idea of "containments." Widgets, the desktop, and the panel are all containments. They can contain data and/or they can contain other containments. I wish I could find the link to Seigo's blog that explains this better...

And they do have to be widgets -- applications won't do.

This guy made a "window-swallowing" widget within about four months of the dot-oh release. Also, see the "web browser" plasmoid which is really just a stripped-down version of Konqueror. Granted, that "window-swallowing" link is more of a concept piece than a working idea, but yeah, it can totally be done.

The desktop background is not drawn by a widget.

No, the desktop is a containment. See above. Which is one of the cool things about this. There's no more "coding for a desktop widget" or "coding for a panel applet" or "coding for X or Y." You're just coding for Plasma. And as an added bonus, you can write for Plasma in whatever language you like. This is the same thing that allows Plasma to use Google Widgets, Screenlets, etc.

Really, I am far more interested in the technical improvements and concepts of Plasma than I am the eye candy factor. Not that that isn't cool, but as you say, it's been done. But this stuff hasn't been done before. No, it's not a paradigm shift in terms of user interface, but it most certainly is a pretty major shift in how you code for the desktop.

(This is the part where I skip over Amarok, because really it's not related to the topic, and I certainly don't like Amarok all that much either.)

And they did so by perverting the meaning of version numbers in the same way Microsoft has for decades.

Way to drag out Microsoft as a strawman there. Whether you like their version numbering or not, they told you what was coming. Some people did not listen, and that's their own damn fault. Some distribution packagers did not listen, and that's a damn shame, but there it is.

Granted. But Firefox 3 was over two years in the making, and they still managed to pull off a solid release.

Okay, but again, "making" means something totally different in the context of a single application (especially something like a web browser, which is a pretty well mapped-out space already), and it certainly means something different when your "making" means adapting and updating an existing code base. There may be other examples you could use in this spot, but Firefox isn't one.

Last year when this was first announced, I applied for my coupons on 1/1/08. I've been blogging about this for a year and a half at http://williambryson.blogspot.com/ (shameless plug), it's no surprise.

This site says solar has an EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of about 10, vs about 18 for nuclear

And how do you propose I stop anyone who doesn't read Slashdot from buying new music?

Baseball bats and firearms? ;)

Oh, you mean how do you convince them ;) Well, (in all seriousness) I'd start by showing them Ray's blog.

Sometimes firing programmers is a good idea. In that situation it would probably be better if they weren't hired in the first place, but that is in the past.

And remember that Brook's Law doesn't just concern programmers. Management faces the same danger, they are just less apt to realize/admit it. From what I've read of Microsoft*, it sounds like they are having not just programmer issues, but management issues as well.

* The thing about Mini-Microsoft's blog is that the author seems to have a different tone than he used to (juxtapose the old entries to the newer ones), and is less willing to tolerate criticism of MS... I honestly suspect that he's been found out, and is now just a mouthpiece for the company... But I may just be having trouble reading due to my tin-foil glasses (just a hat isn't enough)!

Just spotted this.

Microsoft Terminating employee's to save on severance and press release "layoff" ... CSS is evaluating Team Mgr's that have been in their level for 30 months to evaluate how to trim Team Mgr. Human Resources is pulling reports to see anyone who has "violated policies" this will assist in a terminations rather than a lay off and severance.

I can't vouch for the veracity of the claim but it's about what you can expect from any Fortune 100 company these days and M$ escpially.

But I don't see how they have much choice. As Mini says, the cash ain't pouring in like it used to.

On the upside: A dead Microsoft, or at least a much smaller one, is good for civilisation. :-)))

Not to mention as we have seen JavaScript ads can compromise systems and by trying to block the blockers you will probably need even more complex JavaScript.

I know this will probably get me flamed here, but I just have to say it: JavaScript in its current form is a BAD idea. It is a BAD idea for the same reason as ActiveX is a bad idea, in that running active code which often comes from a third party through the browser is simply bad security wise. Perhaps the answer is sandboxing, or perhaps the answer is a new more secure web language, I don't know. But I do know that in its current implementation JavaScript has become a hacker haven just like when ActiveX was at its peak. If something doesn't change then IMHO JavaScript will become such a risk for malware that it will die out just as ActiveX has.

I do know that there are page after page pointing out the same thing, that JavaScript on websites can do some serious damage. I seriously think there needs to be a discussion on how to fix the security problems inherent with running code on websites. And IMHO having JavaScript from third parties load on websites is just making it that much more dangerous.

NASA and DoD have dramatically different sets of standards they build to. Trying to modify Delta and Atlas for NASA's man-rated qualifications would probably cost twice as much and take twice as long as staying the course with Ares. There was a program that came before Orion, called the Orbital Space Plane, that pretty much figured out that existing EELVs simply aren't suited for launching manned payloads. And I think Griffin's comment was that Obama's transition team, not NASA, doesn't have the chops to make those kind of evaluations.

I can't find the OSP report online. But here's a summary that appears reasonably accurate:

According to the OSP-ELV Human Flight Safety Certification Study Team Report, the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets do not meet many of the NASA safety standards specified or referenced in NPG 8705, the Human Rating Requirements. Major changes needed to bring the vehicles into compliance would include at least: adding failure tolerance for critical systems, redesigning for greater structural safety factors (human-rated spacecraft use 1.4; Atlas V and Delta IV rockets use 1.25), adding fault detection and isolation functions, making the range destruct philosophy compatible with maximum crew survivability, wiring for insight and intervention by the crew and ground control, performing the detailed risk analyses needed for human rating, supplementing process controls in all phases of production, and flight testing to human rating standards.

Ho hum. Better structural safety factors and fault tolerance, more testing, more paperwork, not much else that requires significant money. What's supposed to be so costly that making a new vehicle from scratch is better than improving vehicles we know work?

Thanks for posting the contents of your India factbook from the 50s.

India, despite honouring itself as the largest democracy in the world, is - on the ground, at least - an exemplar of the class system.

Your higher classes are the rich families who go to boarding schools then usually foreign universities. The "better" ones may train as doctors, lawyers, etc., but many dabble in politics, where they take advantage of the pretty much universal corruption (especially in poorer areas) and ease with which one can lie to a mostly uneducated set of voters. I have a few family friends in this class.. some have minor royal titles (good enough to get HM The Queen to visit their wedidngs etc.). For them, money by Indian standards is no object, and while they may be socially restricted by tradition - childhood arranged marriage, for example - there's nothing that can't be wrangled out of with $ appropriately channeled to make it look like everyone's still behaving. The unwanted wife becomes a minor tax to pay and ignore.

Maybe you can tell us how many friends you have in the illiterate, uneducated, ... class so that we can truly assess your intimacy with the issues at hand.

What's more interesting, however, is the gap between the small middle class and the often illiterate, uneducated, unhealthy, dirt-poor, often racially inferior (by Indian standards) remainder. If you were you, in India, as a regular middle class Joe, you would have servants. I can't emphasise the extent to which a man's attitude to his fellow man changes when he keeps a gaggle of servants:

...

In the USA and Western Europe, the significant quibble is - contrary to the perception of the average (Slashdotting) progressive political activist, whose opinions align with only a minority - between working and middle classes. As the blue collar moves up to white, or unionises, he increases costs and competition for the existing white. But in India, there is such a deep, desperate blue collar pool that the whites are under no threat.

Maybe the Indian friends you have display such tendencies. I grew up in a middle class Indian family, and the domestic help worked with us only because both my parents worked long hours. Our domestic help was not suppressed or bought to work, she was as good as a nanny, a member of the family. It was to her benefit that she could find a job with her lack of education, and when it came to her children to be educated, my mother was the first person she looked to for guidance. (As an aside, the middle class is not small anymore).

In India, the primary concern is - as in any feudal state - that of the higher classes for the power of the middle. Laws must be written for arbitrary application to any undesirables in this class, while preserving that squeaky clean image for the ignorant voting proletariat that keeps them on your side.

{{Citation needed}}

This is merely one such law.

Finally, I have no idea what your diatribe relates to the porn law. Worse still, it smacks of the common argument that I see atleast once on every Slashdot article featuring India. What surprises me is that those comments were rated down rapidly, while yours was rated "5 Informative", which it certainly is not. (This common argument can be summarised as: "Look at the other systemic evils in India. Club it with this latest article. Hence any worthy achievement by India has the blood of oppressed people on its hands. Which we in the first world will not and cannot appreciate.")

Noone denies that the caste s

This article makes for very good related reading to the subject of work and happiness:

Two Kinds of Careers

I'm cautiously optimistic about Windows 7. I've held off moving from XP to Vista, but Windows 7 might convince me to leave XP. That said, here are my pet peeves that still aren't (and may never be) addressed.

I have a better FAQ - see my blog. Crap code on a monumental scale!

I'm one of MER's rover drivers; I've been on the project from the start. Which has been considerably longer than five years, as development started about 3.5 years before landing, so MER has been the focus of my life for nearly a decade now. I co-wrote the software (RSVP) we use to drive the rovers, and I've been using that software to drive Spirit and Opportunity ever since.

As a contribution to MER's five-year anniversary celebration, I'm blogging my personal mission notes from the early days of the mission. They'll be posted in "real time" -- roughly one update per day, five years after the fact -- at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/. First update will be tonight around 18:30 (Pacific time).

Be prepared to stick with it; it's a little slow for the first few days. And be aware that it's a personal activity, not a JPL-sponsored activity, so I occasionally swear and stuff. But if you're a fan of the rovers, it will, I hope, give you a new insight into what it's been like to be a small part of an historic adventure.

Ah, and for twitterati: you can follow the official MER feed at http://twitter.com/MarsRovers; you can follow me at http://twitter.com/marsroverdriver.

Xorg has implemented an extension to accommodate the need.

Except, those extensions don't always work out as they should. Take this comment lifted from the Linux Haters Blog as such a case:

X could be improved in many ways without awful kludges, by removing unnecessary restrictions, but instead the current elite chooses to write layers upon layers of complex and incompatible extensions. E.g. the original xrandr (X resize and rotate extension) was incompatible with xinerama, but I was happy with that, because I don't want xinerama crap for my telly, which is best modelled as a completely separate screen, not as box of a single megascreen. Now in 1.2 Keith Packard made xrandr xinerama only, and to rotate my TFT, I would have to share a single massive root window (equals screen in traditional X) among the completely separate telly and TFT, causing various problems with applications and wasting video memory for the unused space of the rectangular megascreen. Instead of the Xinerama madness -- that only provides a multi-view to a single-display model, instead of a multi-display model -- it would be far better to remove artificial restrictions in X that disallow moving windows between different screens/root windows, make the creation of root windows dynamic through the same function that creates any other windows, and so on. It's much the same with fonts. But no, these asshats just keep piling anti-choice kludges upon anti-choice kludges.

I'd also like to point out that no one said they hated X. Not in the summary, nor in the linked articles. You appear so biased towards X that you take any suggestion of it's replacement as a direct threat. That in itself is suspect.

Have you tried Netbook Remix? I have and I just did not get on with it, mainly because its been stripped down too far. Especially annoying was a lack of reiserfs support, which I'd taken to using due to the ability of ext2/3 to lose everything on an sd card under certain circumstances.

But Some people must like it. Surprisingly OSX runs quite well on a netbook, I took a triple booting hdd from a laptop and found the osx and ubuntu installs both booted up fine (Xp didn't but thats MS for you) I soon got wireless working on OSX using an Edimax usb card with a ralink 2500 chipset. It's certainly responsive enough but then again the Macbook Air has a 1.6 dual core CPU so a 1.6 atom isn't that much poorer (the image had been used on a 1.4 Celeron without issues).

Now we find that Android is also a possibility for a netbook, isnt that cool. So much choice, ok there are issues to be resolved for OSX (apart from legal ones) and also for Android and less so for Ubuntu and other Linux versions. XP works quite well, 2000 is good but no webcam driver.

quick google finds
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/12/22/atom-support-now-in-opensolaris/
and http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/ This second link has a picture of a EEE running opensolaris.

How can you not love having lots of options available, I am so tempted to build a collection of images to use with my netbooks.

choice is good very good :)

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/

Tobold: January 02, 10:40am

Massively: January 02, 3:00pm

Ancient Gaming Noob's 2009 prediction of the Tobold Cult are on target!

Clarification please: are you saying you worked an entry level job for 2 years and now can afford to live for 10-15 years on savings?

In UK average wage is about £28K. (pretax; most quotes are higher, eg http://freedomandwhisky.blogspot.com/2008/12/do-scotsmans-journalists-pay-income-tax.html) - that gives you £100 to live on per month (not allowing for interest payments! and having deducted NI and tax). My rent as a student 15 years ago was £200 for room only.

?

But you don't see Muslims protesting against suicide terrorists. And that's the big problem with Islam.

Actually, it happens, but the "mainstream" media don't seem to make a big deal of it - probably because it doesn't fit the Zeitgeist, and so isn't going to help their ratings as much as other kinds of "news" could.

• "Islam Against Terrorism"
• Fatwa issued against terrorism
• Protest in Bahrain against terrorism
• Saudi Arabia issues statement that Islam is against terrorism

There are of course many more examples - Google is your friend.

Another interesting note is that you don't really see Christian groups protesting against radical Christianity either. It does happen from time to time, but it's rarely reported on as it fits the Zeitgeist even less (both the radical Christianity and opposition to it are uninteresting right now from a news perspective)

Just to note: I'm not Muslim - in fact, I think they're all a bunch of kooks for believing in an invisible sky god. I think the same thing about Christians, Jews, Satanists, Wiccans and pretty much every other religion as well though.

IEEE Racism Some years ago a Professor in Belgium with the name: Michel GEVERS , Prof. of Automatic Control in the Universite Catholique de Louvain, published a series of articles on the Web about * Racism of IEEE * Various Financial Frauds of IEEE Officers Michel Gevers was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1945. He obtained an Electrical Engineering degree from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in 1968, and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, California, in 1972. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and he holds a Honorary Degree (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the University of Brussels. He has been President of the European Union Control Association (EUCA) from 1997 to 1999, and Vice President of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2000 and 2001. In 2004, he initiated a petition against the IEEE Racism gathering more than 5000 signatures. After being IEEE Felow he removed these Web Pages. However the site: www.anti-plagiarism.org in its earlier version published it Here is the GEVER's petition before IEEE elavated him in the "IEEE Fellow rank" We, the undersigned, state unequivocally that discrimination on the basis of nationality or country of residence goes against the principles of an international scientific organization. Failure to cease this discrimination jeopardizes the future of the IEEE as an international organization. List of Academicians that protest against the IEEE racism : http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/2009/01/list-of-academicians-that-protest.html

Now with the Fake papers in IEEE everything will be possible Except WMSCI many fake papers appeared recently in several IEEE conferences, because the IEEE grants its name and its logo to many local organizers that without any review process http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/, without reading any of the submitted papers http://anti-ieee.blogspot.com/. It is being argued that such conferences only exist to make money out of researchers that are looking for a simple way to publish their work http://bogus-conferences.blogspot.com/ Suddenly new publishers appeared like IARIA, http://www.iaria.org/ and HIGHSCI http://www.highsci.org./ As seen from their web sites, IARIA and HIGHSCI use the name of IEEE and the IEEE publishing services, thus attracting numerous papers. Some people to test some conference go further and sent the paper "A Statistical Method For Women That Can Help Our Sexual Education" in the IEEE Conference organized by IARIA. This paper receive automatical acceptance within a few hours with simultaneus "command" of direct payment. Unfortunately this paper was not published because the authors did not pay the registration fees. However the letter of acceptance is published on the web and anybody can check it: http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/

Now with the Fake papers in IEEE everything will be possible Except WMSCI many fake papers appeared recently in several IEEE conferences, because the IEEE grants its name and its logo to many local organizers that without any review process http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/, without reading any of the submitted papers http://anti-ieee.blogspot.com/. It is being argued that such conferences only exist to make money out of researchers that are looking for a simple way to publish their work http://bogus-conferences.blogspot.com/ Suddenly new publishers appeared like IARIA, http://www.iaria.org/ and HIGHSCI http://www.highsci.org./ As seen from their web sites, IARIA and HIGHSCI use the name of IEEE and the IEEE publishing services, thus attracting numerous papers. Some people to test some conference go further and sent the paper "A Statistical Method For Women That Can Help Our Sexual Education" in the IEEE Conference organized by IARIA. This paper receive automatical acceptance within a few hours with simultaneus "command" of direct payment. Unfortunately this paper was not published because the authors did not pay the registration fees. However the letter of acceptance is published on the web and anybody can check it: http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/

Now with the Fake papers in IEEE everything will be possible Except WMSCI many fake papers appeared recently in several IEEE conferences, because the IEEE grants its name and its logo to many local organizers that without any review process http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/, without reading any of the submitted papers http://anti-ieee.blogspot.com/. It is being argued that such conferences only exist to make money out of researchers that are looking for a simple way to publish their work http://bogus-conferences.blogspot.com/ Suddenly new publishers appeared like IARIA, http://www.iaria.org/ and HIGHSCI http://www.highsci.org./ As seen from their web sites, IARIA and HIGHSCI use the name of IEEE and the IEEE publishing services, thus attracting numerous papers. Some people to test some conference go further and sent the paper "A Statistical Method For Women That Can Help Our Sexual Education" in the IEEE Conference organized by IARIA. This paper receive automatical acceptance within a few hours with simultaneus "command" of direct payment. Unfortunately this paper was not published because the authors did not pay the registration fees. However the letter of acceptance is published on the web and anybody can check it: http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/

Now with the Fake papers in IEEE everything will be possible Except WMSCI many fake papers appeared recently in several IEEE conferences, because the IEEE grants its name and its logo to many local organizers that without any review process http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/, without reading any of the submitted papers http://anti-ieee.blogspot.com/. It is being argued that such conferences only exist to make money out of researchers that are looking for a simple way to publish their work http://bogus-conferences.blogspot.com/ Suddenly new publishers appeared like IARIA, http://www.iaria.org/ and HIGHSCI http://www.highsci.org./ As seen from their web sites, IARIA and HIGHSCI use the name of IEEE and the IEEE publishing services, thus attracting numerous papers. Some people to test some conference go further and sent the paper "A Statistical Method For Women That Can Help Our Sexual Education" in the IEEE Conference organized by IARIA. This paper receive automatical acceptance within a few hours with simultaneus "command" of direct payment. Unfortunately this paper was not published because the authors did not pay the registration fees. However the letter of acceptance is published on the web and anybody can check it: http://iaria-highsci.blogspot.com/

VFX? Is that you?

The NYT article mentioned some of the diamond is hexagonal: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/science/02impact.html

This is a type of diamond that seems to form when meteors enter the atmosphere and it a called Lonsdaleite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonsdaleite

This material is of interest as a replacement for structural steel since it can be formed in a simple manner using chemistry. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html

I assume that you would want to get rid of pictures like this and these as well? They are being actively encouraged to undo the damage done by people like you - so I suggest you avoid looking at religious art for a start.

In fact, given that most women these days breastfeed where ever their baby needs it, I suggest you stay in your basement and never come out.

This seems to be something started by the Mini -Microsoft blog. The blogger posted something he'd heard in the hallway, then MS insiders started chiming in... some to lend credence to the rumors, others to deny them.

Business journalists know about this blog, so some in the mainstream press picked up these rumors and ran with it. But all roads seem to lead back to Mini-Microsoft and the people who posted talkbacks. AFAIK there's been no confirmation that anything like a 10-15 pct layoff will actually take place.

What seems credible is that lots of contractors are being terminated; and that some number of people who did poorly on their last review may be told to find a new job within MS within X number of days or be forced out of the company.

Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction.

You're right we're offended... because that's a stupid and ignorant claim.

To wit: My first experience with IE7

It's coming. Be patient.

http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/09/platforms-and-priorities.html

Actually, at least Google, don't know about the others, do index flash content:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

This does not mean that I in any way think that flash is great.
I totally agree on making websites instead of flash clients.
Especially now, when so much of the same functionality can be obtained with other mean.

Happy new year!

Michael Robertson is a scumbag.

I thought he sounded familiar. As parent mentions, here's a link to the blog of Kevin Carmony, former President and CEO of Linspire, for similar-sounding story.

Everyone seems to be assuming that a fossil-fuel-powered generator is *the* answer and the only questions are "how big?" and "is the widow-maker male plug fine?"...

Goodness.

Try (say) solar and or wind and several days worth of lead-acid batteries with a suitable inverter such as Sunny Island or Sunny Backup or the Outback or Xantrex equivalents, which won't kill you with carbon monoxide and bad wiring, you don't have to refuel, and which doesn't destroy the planet in passing...

Oh, and you might get a subsidy or a tax-break for installing such a renewable-energy system too.
And you can export excess to the grid and get paid for it when the grid isn't out...

http://solarjohn.blogspot.com/

http://www.fieldlines.com/section/homebrew

Those widow-maker setups have that name for a reason, BTW.

Rgds

Damon

Even if they were new, five are Linux distributions. And that's not counting Android.

Yeah, Linux is cool, distributions are cool, but you'd think they would show some variety. Coolest one I've seen all year -- that is new -- is Archaeopteryx. Perhaps not a big deal, but weren't they doing the 10 coolest projects, not the 10 most important projects?

I would love to see LEDs make that final leap. But, for the love of god, if someone makes a critical breakthrough please don't sell the intellectual property rights to an existing lightbulb company. Innovations have disappeared before.

Exports from US companies are controlled by the Bureau of Industry and Security, part of the Department of Commerce.

In addition to the list of controls for each country, most people are really, really surprised to read the list of controlled items -- the Commerce Control List. The list itself is Part 774, Catetegories 0 through 9, plus Supplements 2 and 3, linked at the bottom of the page.

One concept not well-known is that merely discussing a controlled technology in the presence of a foreign national from the "wrong" country (think China and Iran, among others) is considered an "export" of technology, and has federal penalties (fines and prison time) just as severe as the actual physical transfer of an object. This tripped up J. Reese Roth, a retired professor now facing a maximum of 150 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for 7 January 2009.

You missed one point: PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATION.

Let me explain. Games serve only one purpose - to give as much fun as possible. We all agree that playing through the same game content multiple times is boring (not fun). Please notice that there are two possible solution to this:

1. When player dies - move back in time few seconds just before the death. (in some games that's an obsessive saving-loading sequence, which makes playing unfun, in Prince of Persia this is automatic).

2. When player dies - make sure that the game content (in new game) is totally different.

Solution 1. is the simplest one, so no wonder that everyone does it, but also it makes gam unattractive to play again, after it is finished (even without dying).

Solution 2 makes game always attractive to play, because even after it's finished, a new play will be totally different. Placed in different time, with different randomly generated quests and different.. everything. It's crazy difficult to make such a game.

Currently only roguelikes provide Solution 2. The "text" game interface makes it possible to do so, because it simplifies a lot level generation, removes a LOT of 3D graphics work, etc. It's a LOT because to have 3D graphics one would have to draw thousands of 3D tiles, and write extremely difficult level generation algorithms. And this is the sole reason why roguelikes have such a great following among those who tasted it. You live once, but each life is different. My pick is adom, and I tell you - no other game can give me the same fun and excitement because I live just once. Adrenaline gets high when I'm in tight situation and could die. It makes the experience a lot more real, and I like it.

Have a look here - it's a long read about that topic, but if you made such a long documentary addressing Solution 1, the perhaps reading through 6 pages about Solution 2 will be interesting for you: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/01/death-of-level-designer-procedural.html

(wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation )

Before you go banging the "Microsoft is doing well in a downturn," you ought to read the most recent Mini-Microsoft post where everyone is discussing massive layoffs and the day of reckoning that is coming to the company for mismanagement over the last few years -- some even go so far as to imply some kind of fraud is involved.

Level 63s are claiming MS is in the shitter and employees need to have CVs up to date.

What I've learned, through experimentation with open ended evolution by computer simulation, is that evolution will take a random path towards no particular goal as long as reproduction remains successful. If, however, there is an added parameter to maintaining survival, a particular evolutionary response (linear on average) will result. In extraordinarily simple self replicating machines, the process is nearly immediate, since it is necessary, but in more advanced systems, there is a great deal of redundancy and seemingly dormant code can "reactivate" to allow the organism to persevere. Also, interestingly, it is very common for complementary pairs of "genetic" code to form which each disallows the other from mutating. It is only when both of these is coincidentally mutated in the correct way that either of them can be changed successfully. This is a very natural, very common process, which acts as an error correcting mechanism very similar to that of a checksum. http://novaconceptions.blogspot.com/

CouchDB, which has been generating some hype lately (especially among Rails fans), is by Damien Katz, who did work on LotusNotes and Domino, and claims CouchDB is inspired by that.

According to him, Lotus got a lot of things wrong, but it got the database right.

I don't know if there would be anything to gain from the original (even just to read through it), or if we should all be focused on CouchDB now, but it would be interesting to find out.

Actually, my plan is sheer elegance in it's simplicity.

I cant seem to find out what finally happened after the verdict -- did she (Thomas) have to pay up the $222,000.00 ?

Nothing happened with it. It was set aside. A new trial is scheduled for March 9th.

The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.

Actually, the default appearance of the task bar is just a little better than horrible. Those huge icons are frankly unusable. But good news is that you can easily configure the task bar (task bar->properties) to have the *same* layout as in vista/xp. Moreover, you can keep the new transparency of the taskbar (I personally don't like it because it is distracting when you have maximized windows) and at the same time get that cool mouse tracking effect and other extras (like taskbar button coloring, group mini-preview etc).

I'm just surprised how few reviewers could miss that setting.

MIT's Daniel Nocera is working on fuel cells and solar power as the energy storage, if the economics can be worked out.

I'm no fan of MS, but what exactly do you propose they do?

Personally, I propose that Microsoft fuck off and die (in a chemical fire.) So far, they've declined my offer, though things look promising for the new year :)

Hamas is the democratically elected government in Gaza. Hamas considers themselves at war with Israel, and Hamas is engaging in military rocket attacks on Israel.

Actually, from 18th June until 19th December 2008 there was a Gaza ceasefire which Hamas agreed to. The rocket attacks in that period were launched by other groups. Wikipedia says that the following groups also manufacture missiles and shoot them towards Israel: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees, and Tanzim. During ceasefires Hamas asks the other groups to halt missile attacks. In that article, Abu Obieda, the top Hamas commander in the Gaza strip, said "To shoot rockets into Israel is not a goal of Hamas; it is not a real target. But when Israel attacks us, it is our only way to respond. We do not hope to kill people in Israel with these rockets but it's a necessary response." Apparently Islamic Jihad fire the most rockets in to Israel, and Hamas does not control them - there have been armed clashes between Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

It's a tricky situation - Israel wants to undermine Hamas by destroying their power base and support through economic sanctions, and then encourage other groups to remove them from government, but at the same time Israel complains when Hamas doesn't have the power to prevent those other groups from firing missiles across the border.