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Google states its position very clearly in its Public Policy Blog.

People here keep mentioning the cost of broadband, so here's a recent chart comparing costs worldwide. (Example: 34 cents/Mbps in South Korea versus $10/Mbps in the U.S., if it's even available where you live, which is why Open Access really matters.)

I relate the FCC's position to all the news about Dick Cheney a few weeks ago, how he relentlessly pressures political appointees who ought to be impartial. Could it be happening again?

I find this an extremely hard story to swallow, especially given the lack of details in the article. I'm surprised this story even passed Slashdot's screening process.

Here you go:

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts- on-copyright-offensive.html

all the best,

drew

The debate may be over for now at the European (i.e. EU) level, but it rages on in the UK, with recent decisions from the UK Intellectual Property Office ruling that computer program product claims are not allowable. See the following for more details:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/07/fallout-from- aerotelmacrossan.html
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-computer-p rogram-claims-at-uk-ipo.html

The EPO, however, have said that they don't even want to address the questions:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/epo-please-st op-asking-questions.html

The debate will rumble on for a while yet.

The debate may be over for now at the European (i.e. EU) level, but it rages on in the UK, with recent decisions from the UK Intellectual Property Office ruling that computer program product claims are not allowable. See the following for more details:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/07/fallout-from- aerotelmacrossan.html
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-computer-p rogram-claims-at-uk-ipo.html

The EPO, however, have said that they don't even want to address the questions:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/epo-please-st op-asking-questions.html

The debate will rumble on for a while yet.

The debate may be over for now at the European (i.e. EU) level, but it rages on in the UK, with recent decisions from the UK Intellectual Property Office ruling that computer program product claims are not allowable. See the following for more details:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/07/fallout-from- aerotelmacrossan.html
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-computer-p rogram-claims-at-uk-ipo.html

The EPO, however, have said that they don't even want to address the questions:

http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2007/06/epo-please-st op-asking-questions.html

The debate will rumble on for a while yet.

No, they've got time to do this.

Ever since the Democrats got a slender majority in the House, the Republicans in the Senate have been using filibusters to block even routine legislation from getting through. Unless there are 60 votes for this in the Senate it will die there. Or it won't come to a vote for months. And once it comes back after the veto, there will have to be 67 votes. The courts can't be relied on to fix things anymore because Bush stuffed them with ideologues and corporatists who will now have lifetime careers in the federal judiciary issuing judgments like this one. He almost got Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court- a woman who just illegally blew off a Congressional subpoena today, leading to the spectacle of an empty chair being screamed at in the House Judiciary committee. Steve Ballmer would have thrown it.

Somebody has to start making phone calls. For Internet radio the Senate bill to call about is S.1353. The House bill is HR.2060. Make especially sure to call Senators. Even as of today (12th) people are reporting that people in Congress haven't even heard of this thing.

...but I suppose he'll switch to Fusion once it's final. http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/2007/0 6/intel-ceo-paul-ottelini-uses-parallels.html

The GP complained about the lack of engineers and technical know-how in relation to the bill. I simply pointed out that the bill's author, Holt, has a Ph.D. in Physics, so he does have technical knowledge. It is semi-relevant in this discussion, since we're talking about reforms related to electronic voting machines. The bill doesn't tell anyone to use electronic voting machines (it leaves that issue aside entirely), but it says that if you are going to use them you have to meet certain minimum requirements (though states are free to do even more).

If you're not impressed by Holt's credentials, I might point out that this bill implements things suggested by a NIST study on the subject (that's a bunch of other technical people), and has been endorsed by many e-voting activists and computer security experts, like Prof. Ed Felten and Prof. Avi Rubin. So the idea that this bill is the result of lack of technical knowledge or forethought is baseless.

I am aware that getting SOMETHING done is often seen as necessary. However, I have a prejudice in favour of getting something done RIGHT. If more of our lawmakers worked on the assumption that a bad bill is worse than no bill, we'd all be better off.

Supporters of this bill believe that it will get something good done. At the risk of repeating myself: When you vote on a DRE today your vote is going into a black box. There is no way to know whether the vote that is recorded inside the machine is for the person you selected on the screen. There is no meaningful way to audit the machines, and certainly no attempt is made. This bill mandates that there is a voter-verified paper record of your vote, and it requires audits of the electronic tally in a certain percentage of randomly selected precincts to ensure (statistically) that the electronic tally actually matches the paper one. This clearly is a vital improvement, and it is one that should be made as soon as possible.

Perhaps you would like to see more? Passing this bill does not preclude further reform. Passing a good, but perhaps imperfect, bill now is better than passing nothing at all. If your prejudice is for waiting for a perfect bill, then it will result in nothing getting done at all, which leaves us all much worse off.

There are many examples in Congress of passing a bill simple for the sake of having passes something, but this is not one of them. This bill makes actual improvements.

You know, given the Vista experience, we're getting to the point where you know there's open source software afoot if the scanner simply runs without crashing something.

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Censored by Technorati

Some of the objections given at the beginning of the article seem to be worth considering. The straw man debate that follows is just idiotic, however. It might be useful to look at what some actual supporters have to say, supporters like the EFF, Prof. Ed Felten, Ars Technica, the Brennan Center for Justice, People of the American Way, TrueVoteMD, and Prof. Avi Rubin to name a few.

Combined with Senator Santorum's slip-of-the-tongue announcing summer terrorist attacks, and Homeland Security Chief Chertoff's "gut feeling" we'll be attacked this summer, I guess we can now assume the manner in which this attack will take place.

It will be a dirty bomb.

The New York Times story helps create a context in which the dirty bomb attack this summer by terrorists will be more believable. Not the part that we're attacked this summer. Or with a dirty bomb. The part where we're attacked by terrorists.

They can't afford another 9/11 or London Bombings -- where it is so clear that these were attacked orchestrated from within, or from Israel -- they have to dot every i and cross every t this time.

Santorum, Chertoff, The New York Times. Consider the sources here.

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Censored by Technorati

In fact Official Use Only was a category required by the Navy for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's dealings with Nuclear Fuel Services Erwin Plant in Tennessee. This OUO classification meant that after a major incident, a public licensing hearing was held, but nobody attended because the NRC could not even reveal the accident at the NRC licensed plant. The FOUO is being used as a work around to areas where there is required public disclosure (NRC rules) but a national security interest (how Navy reactor fuel is handled). This may turn out to be an abuse, but it is certainly the way it is being used http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/us/06cnd-nuke.ht ml. In the past, DOE handled military use of nuclear materials and NRC handled civilian use. Here we have weapons material being converted to fuel under NRC licensing, but with OUO restrictions. This is obviously not working very well at all.
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Do energy right: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I just wiped Gentoo from my box and installed Feisty. It is buggy as heck. Recently, there was a kernel upgrade that forced all PCs with ICH5 and SATA drives to not boot. http://dschneller.blogspot.com/2007/06/beware-of-u buntu-kernel-2620-16.html I have had tons of problems getting the NVIDIA driver to not crash; ubuntu has it's own nvidia-glx & co. modules, and I can't download NVIDIA's latest versions. I'm stuck with "nv" at this point. Ubuntu also doesn't come with any compiler. You have to apt-get build-essentials. What is with that? Sooner or later (usually sooner), everyone has to compile something if they run Linux. Oh, wait. /usr/local is not in the default LD_LIBRARY_PATH! Looks like they weren't expecting anyone to compile anything, even though I installed build-essentials. Now, I want to rip a CD. Whoops. ffmpeg is not compiled with MP3 encoding by default. The ubuntu wiki says that you have to compile ffmpeg to enable MP3 encoding. See what I mean about compiling? What else doesn't work? Oh, the vnc package doesn't work. Only tightvnc works. At this point, I'm ready to quit and use Gentoo, which always works once you get the USE flags right and have enough patience. I'm half-convinced that any binary-based distro will have a boatload of problems, since everything in Linux is changing so fast. What Ubuntu should do is to create an "emerge-like" tool; this will give people who can't run the binary an option to easily compile it themselves.

http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2007/07/authority-o r-community.html

Gmail uses reputation: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/email-bla ckmail-is-unnecessary.html

Mediocre, maybe. Sucks? I think that's overstating it a bit.

I wrote an in-depth review of Killzone when I finished it, which you can find here:

Killzone Review

For those who don't want to read the whole thing or skip down to the summary, I concluded that it was not as good as the "Halo Killer" hype, but not as bad as the post-release reviews would have you believe. I did manage to extract some enjoyment from it.

But if Killzone 2 is more of the same with some pretty added to it, it certainly won't be a system-seller for me.

I imagine that most people who don't pay attention to their electric power consumption can easily cut their power consumption in half, or more, with very little effort. I know I did, and it saves me hundreds of dollars a year.

The simple answer is to turn off equipment that's not in use. It's easy to start with computers and game consoles, but there are other big power consumers in most homes. Sadly, it is nearly impossible to buy equipment with any knowledge of its power efficiency and the performance of its "sleep" capabilities.

I challenge others to plot and publish their power consumption in KW-hours over time. In the least, its interesting to see how much power you use and how much you can reduce consumption without impacting your lifestyle. And it's likely that even if you do the bare minimum, you can save a few hundred dollars worth of power in a year.

Here's my average annual power consumption chart for the past 5+ years: http://lancej.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-much-energy -do-you-use.html

Try gimshop. It addresses many but not all of your issues.

http://gimpshop.blogspot.com/

Have you tried gimpshop? Basically gimp recompiled to make the defaults and windowing more like Photoshop.

http://gimpshopdotnet.blogspot.com/
http://gimpshop.blogspot.com/

Have you tried gimpshop? Basically gimp recompiled to make the defaults and windowing more like Photoshop.

http://gimpshopdotnet.blogspot.com/
http://gimpshop.blogspot.com/

Privacy is the right of an individual or group to be free from unreasonable interference in the conduct of their affairs or in their thoughts.

Well said! It seems that the anti-tobacco lobby has managed to get people REALLY upset of the issue. Reading the comments on here, it seems that people simply haven't bothered to do any research into the matter at all. Even the article claims that Nicotine is "deadly" which is just total nonsense. (Addictive, yes. Deadly, no.) The propaganda, however, just seems to be getting worse every year as the anti-smoking groups start using less science and more nonsense. Even Michael Siegal, a top public health advocate, thinks things are a bit out of hand.

Nicotine has been known to have positive benefits for some time now. It's no wonder at all that we're starting to see new applications for it. An excellent overview

I wonder how the responses would be different if the article was caffeine...

I wonder if the statement is based on this study: http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2004/Nov/02-573 349.html? Though the study seems a little circular. You're correct of course that you don't have to smoke to have these difficulties.
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Smoke free elecrtic power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

dude....you must be living in wonderland!!! or maybe trying to do some desinfo.... please read what this brit wrote about this last "attacks".... " WHOSE BOMBS? [The following is an extended deconstructive analysis quoting rather liberally from relevant sources. As far as I'm aware, it's the first of its kind to be published in either mainstream or alternative circles. Therefore, please circulate widely.]" http://nafeez.blogspot.com/ http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/05/strategy-of-ten sion.html

dude....you must be living in wonderland!!! or maybe trying to do some desinfo.... please read what this brit wrote about this last "attacks".... " WHOSE BOMBS? [The following is an extended deconstructive analysis quoting rather liberally from relevant sources. As far as I'm aware, it's the first of its kind to be published in either mainstream or alternative circles. Therefore, please circulate widely.]" http://nafeez.blogspot.com/ http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/05/strategy-of-ten sion.html

Well, more on the question is algae better than switchgrass http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html and it's one of my most popular pages. Apples are less orange than oranges.

I think google owns blogger so that should help them out a bit. Folks will generally spend 1:07 on a blog page that takes three scroll roles. Seems everyone reads faster than I do.
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Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I think it is a fair point that folks may be using an OS they did not choose. I was replying to a post that said all slashdoters are linux users. I've always used unix for work (though sometimes VMS) and for a while now I've had a windows box at home for the kids and for doing some lame stuff, like taxes. So, having linux at home is more of a luxury for me with more than one computer now. My son still bugs be to use the XP partition on this box but I rarely use it myself. It has just been that better computers always ran *nix and X was always way ahead of windows or apple's stuff. For running a browser, it probably does not matter what OS you use, though I find that there are some problems using a 64 bit browser with 32 bit plugins on linux. Don't know if the problem is general though. Still, since I was happy with mosaic I don't care that much. I just hack it again and it starts working again. It bugs me a little that I know what people are using. In repayment, I'll say that when you see the 2048x2048 screen in your stats, that's me.
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Solar is THE energy source: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

PS: I love Behind the Counter.

PS: I love Behind the Counter.

The articles for the in depth blog are made up of multiple sections. The left hand side navigation takes you to the different sections of each article. The secondary horizontal navigation takes you to the different articles. Although each page from the in depth blog is smaller than a blog entry from the mundane blog, if you added up all the section pages for any article, you would find that the articles from the transition choices site are larger than the entries from the blogspot site.

Thanks for the feedback on the colors. It's time to change them anyway.

The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.

Thanks for reminding me that I haven't read one of my favorite blogs in a while. Dig through for the older stuff.

I agree that there is room for both. That is why I have two blogs. My blog at the transition choices site is really for more more elaborate, in-depth articles. My blog at google's blogger site is for the more mundane reaction to today's news.

As you can plainly see, the transition choices blog site is more organized like a article publishing portal than a typical blog site. It has a three level navigation hierarchy, support for mini-sites, a rudimentary portal organization, an extensible search facility, and content syndication. All that and it's open source too.

I think there's an argument to be made about supporting a balanced blog ecosystem.

Obviously if everybody posts short blurbs, it just doesn't work, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1. What you're interested in, since often the shortposters serve the function of aggregating cool things, and 2. Where the 'blogosphere' action is. There'd be fewer conversations, and indeed, short posts are part of a conversation.

Luckily, there appears little danger of everybody posting well-thought-out articles.

Personally, I'm starting to reap the benefits of longer articles on my science/tech blog. Lots of repeat readers. But it's so hard to get exposure when you have fewer chances for 'hits'.

If I had to guess why it's worth $millions, I'd say it's because of Google Apps for the Enterprise.

Imagine you're wanting to make a service offering to host corporate America's email, which includes all of the private juicy tidbits of data that are in it as well. It makes a lot more sense, from the corporate entity's standpoint to have that interaction be with one outsourced company, not two like it is today (READ: Gmail for your domain currently uses Postini for anti-SPAM). Add onto that the compliance aspects of outsourced email (think: lawyers needing copies of email for lawsuits), which Postini is selling as an add-on feature for Enterprise Gmail, and you can see why they might want to tap that datastream for an administrator's "google for everyone's email with search terms X" for some lawsuit.

Apologies ... I typed the above on speculation before reading the linked article. Turns out my hunches are dead-on.

-Tim

A blog entry over at the BackChanne breaks down just how many customers Postini had in the enterprise market, the only surprise for me was that Microsoft chose to take-out Frontbridge and not Postini. Whats next? Yahoo buys Messagelabs for 300M? Half the market share of Postini.
For those of you with click fatigue, the market rankings look like this:
Postini 49%
Messagelabs 22%
Frontbridge 21%
MXlogic 5%
Blackspider 0.4%


Nick

Most of the traffic on my blog http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-real-e nergy.html comes from slashdot. There might be a bias that windows users are more interested in renewable energy but I kind of doubt it. The feedburner ratios wrt to XP in the last month are

XP: 1
Linux:0.402
Mac:0.179
Vista:0.089
W2000:0.069
And a few others

Feedburner seems to miss quite a lot, but unless it is really undercounting linux, it would look like slashdot readers prefer XP as a plurality.
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Windows is less efficient. You need solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Most of the traffic on my blog http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-real-e nergy.html comes from slashdot. There might be a bias that windows users are more interested in renewable energy but I kind of doubt it. The feedburner ratios wrt to XP in the last month are

XP: 1
Linux:0.402
Mac:0.179
Vista:0.089
W2000:0.069
And a few others

Feedburner seems to miss quite a lot, but unless it is really undercounting linux, it would look like slashdot readers prefer XP as a plurality.
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Windows is less efficient. You need solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

When I made that joke recently someone pointed out that the title of the original CMU paper is 'how lazy people do AI'.

The problems with CAPTCHAs are not just the fact that the problems are less difficult than they might appear. There is also the man-in-the-middle attack which I blogged on when there was discussion of the Microsoft passfaces scheme.

In the Microsoft scheme they had two million pictures of cats and dogs: distinguish one from the other. The problem is that regardless of what the acceptance criteria are we can use a mani-in-the-middle attack to get other folk to solve the puzzles for us. And if we need even more logins than we can get through man-in-the-middle we can take use the responses to sort the entire catalog of 2 million images in rather less time than the designers imagine.

The viability of CAPTCHA depends on the nature of the attack. They are quite up to preventing large scale ballot stuffing in Internet polls. They start to fail when there is money at stake. In particular if the value of breaking the CAPTCHA is more than the cost of paying people in Liberia or India to do so the scheme is broken.

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2005/12/differe nt-argument-for-right-to-bear.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/math-for-p rogrammers.html

Well rail guns are getting suborbital for small payloads so if you get self-assembly down you could use those already.

Bucky Fuller was interested in a worldwide renewables grid. It seems to me that getting going on the infrastructure would be a good idea: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/coast-to-coast .html.

George Monbiot gives an estimate that wind speeds rise by about 1 m/s for every 100 km you go offshore (Heat p. 105). This makes wind cheaper the further out you go since you need less equipment to generate the same amount of power. He also points out (p. 113) that when wind farms are 1000 km apart their power output is correlated at only 10%. This means that it is very difficult to have no wind power if you have diversified your sources.

Renewable energy systems look very different from our current systems because there is no fuel cost. A pure renewable system is going to be scaled to meet peak demand and then there will be extra energy available most of the time (off peak). This does not mean it will go to waste. There are many things we might do if some one said "here, please take this power off my hands." Growing crops in old coal mines comes to mind. Year round production, no chance of frost, can go closed cycle on the water, you just need to power lights during off peak when energy is basically free. In a pure renewable energy system we don't ask "How can we get energy?" but rather "How can we get rid of it?"
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ReThink Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The combination sounds new to me. Here are some ideas on the sea turbine bit: http://ocsenergy.anl.gov/guide/current/index.cfm.
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Solar is the start: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I was gillnetting for salmon in Puget Sound years ago. The net was monofilament and meshed for sockeye. At night, a grey whale swam up then down the whole half mile length of net. They know what is in the water.

On birds, the very large wind turbines turn quite slowly and this has proved much better for birds since thy fly faster than the blades move.
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Solar, the source of renewable: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

National Geographic reported a day later that the storms are not a threat: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/07 0706-rovers-dust.html.
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Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The rovers were designed for a short mission. The chance of this happening in a short time is low so it would be over design to include more storage. Solar power works well in the inner solar system, and it may be getting going for the outer solar system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft). It beats sending fuel when it works.
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Solar power on the go: Get a free move: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Painfully true. In particular, the religious wackos got to run the educational system. Over 90% of the doctorates issued in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". At the lower levels, most teaching time is devoted to religious subjects. The textbooks and teaching are standardized across the country.

One result is that few young Saudis learn how to do real-world jobs. Foreign workers do almost all the real jobs. The Government has a huge number of make-work jobs for their own citizens.

Because oil revenue per capita is dropping steadily, this isn't going to work much longer. There have been some attempts by the Saudi government to turn this around. But it's not really working.

For a cynical view on all this by a Saudi, see The Religious Policeman.