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My initial reaction is that it's somehow related to Blue Pill. See http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.as p for a brief discussion of Blue Pill. See http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2006/06/int roducing-blue-pill.html for the original publication.

Still, I doubt that security is the only reason for this. I mean, why the licensing restriction then? Wouldn't a configuration UI suffice? Also, from what I remember, Blue Pill is mostly about fooling the primary OS instance (the "host" instance), not about the "guest" instance. Why restrict the "guest" instance at all?

As usual, tag as "pigpile" to warn others not to click on Roland Piquepaille's adwhore blog...Grow up. Do you make the same claims when NewYorkCountryLawyer posts to his blog with [gasp] ads on it? Do you advocate tagging those articles with "cuntlawyer" or something? Look at his history... he's had 8 accepted stories since September alone! So cuntlawyer has more than your pigpile and he has no less than separate 5 blocks of ads on his adwhore blog. And his is the ultimate ad because the purpose of his blog is to sell you his legal services.

Or you can just block ads from anywhere you want and enjoy the submissions for what they are... interesting.

Here's an interesting take on this. Seems the high school is in an economically depressed area, (yet they have a nice web site); the kid is a bit of a shit-disturber; and even Christians feel really uncomfortable around this lunatic.

"But if my kid is aged 12 and he's kinda like dad, i appreciate what you've taught me but i've decided in my 12 years of religion that i'm gonna stop going to church, after i break his backside, we're gonna have a little attitude adjustment and i'm gonna say you're gonna get in the car with the rest of the family and go to church. you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're gonna do what i tell you to."

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:VHY1RmS0ZKIJ:r icharddawkins.net/article,335,Public-school-teache r-tells-class-You-belong-in-hell,Jim-Lippard+http: //richarddawkins.net/article,335,Public-school-tea cher-tells-class-You-belong-in-hell,Jim-Lippard&hl =en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=1

Public school teacher tells class: 'You belong in hell'
Jim Lippard

Reposted from:
http://lippard.blogspot.com/2006/11/public-school- teacher-tells-class-you.html

The following is from Paul L. LaClair, a NYC attorney who lives in Kearny, New Jersey, and is posted with his permission. David Paszkiewicz, the teacher described here engaging in incompetent teaching and dishonesty, is apparently a youth pastor at Kearny Baptist Church in addition to being a public school teacher. LaClair's son Matthew has previously garnered attention for protesting Bush administration activities by refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. He seems to be a principled and courageous young man who has caught a really bad teacher:

Kearny, New Jersey
November 10, 2006

A history teacher at the local public high school here may have bitten off more than he cares to chew this fall. Self-described conservative Baptist David Paszkiewicz used his history class to proselytize biblical fundamentalism over the course of several days at the beginning of this school year.

Among his remarks in open class were statements that a being must have created the universe, that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, "you belong in hell." Referring to a Muslim student who had been mentioned by name, he lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert. In an attempt to promote biblical creationism, he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies.

After taking the matter to the school administration, one of Paszkiewicz's students, junior Matthew LaClair, requested a meeting with the teacher and the school principal. LaClair, a non-Christian, was requesting an apology and correction of false and anti-scientific statements. After two weeks, a meeting took place in the principal's office, wherein Paszkiewicz denied making many of these comments, claiming that LaClair had taken his remarks out of context. Paszkiewicz specifically denied using the phrase, "you belong in hell." He also asserted that he did nothing different in this class than he has been doing in fifteen years of teaching.

At the end of the meeting, LaClair revealed that he had recorded the remarks, and presented the principal with two compact discs. The teacher then declined to comment further without his union representative. However, he fired one last shot at the student, saying, "You got the big fish ... you got the big Christian guy who is a teacher...!"

Commenting on the situation, LaClair's father, attorney Paul LaClair said, "In a few short weeks, this teacher has displayed bigotry, hypocrisy, arrogance and an appalling ignorance of science. The school's administrators seem not to appreciate the damage this man is doing to young minds. He has some real abilities as a teacher, but this conduct is the intellectual equivalent of the school cafeteria serving sawdust."

The student and his parents have requested that the teacher's anti-scientific remarks be corrected in open class, a

I had a professor who would make you sing the Star Spangled Banner in front of the class if your cell rang in class. He said that it only takes one student singing before everyone starts turning their phones off before class. My class got treated to two performances, apparently a first for that professor... pretty sad since it was a summer class with only ten students, in a class that normally has about 30 enrolled in the fall/spring.

Cool links.

I started learning to make machinima right after this ended, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out anyway. Check it out at http://civil-protection.blogspot.com/

I get "server not found" on that link. http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/ seems to work though.

About a year ago, I had a strange report on sitemeter, it said operating system unknown, and browser google 0.9. The weirdest was the ip was Microsoft's Redmond offices. here's a picture of it I thought it was weird then, and I still think it is weird. ~Thursday

Funny thing, I found this blog today when Googling something completely different, but found it very interesting. Anyway, I guess this book was written about you.

Lithium fires like those that occur when a laptop battery explodes are extremely dangerous. Just watch this video.

Pluto hasn't changed one atom based on which category we put it in. How things are classified is a human activity, and matters only to us. Which also means that we can do whatever we damn well please here. We're just calling it something. We can decide what to call it. All definitions are an agreement to use a word for a given meaning, whether the word is Pluto or pancake.

Biologists have been having this type of problem a lot longer than astronomers: the problem where you can't figure out which species something belongs in, for instance. And we biologists have the solution. (But will the astronomers listen? No-o-o. Of course not. ;-}) When new information comes in suggesting that something belongs in a new category, that something is renamed, EXCEPT when doing so would disrupt a name in wide usage. Then it can be conserved. In that case, only the scientists have to worry about where it "really" belongs, and everybody else can go about their business without a vocabulary list.

Conservation of names is an especially good idea in cases like Pluto, where the scientists themselves haven't entirely agreed yet. They could simply agree to conserve Pluto's definition as a planet, and then continue arguing about the exact definition, which, as the article says, never actually has to end in agreement. And that's because we're talking about a category here, a human construct, whose boundaries exist only in our heads. (I posted a bit more on this under What Pluto really is)

Robert Bussards improved electrostatic fusion reactor. It is 100,000 times better than standard electrodstatic fusion It needs 200 million to make a full scale reactor. Magnetized target fusion is another option that seems cheaper and simpler than tokomaks We should try some of the cheaper alternatives to tokomaks. 10-20% of the 12 billion tokomak budget for alternative fusion and fission power. Fission already works and we can make fission better for immediate major contributions to our energy problems. Current nuclear reactors can be made 50% more powerful by changing the shape of the nuclear fuel and adjusting the cooling water This would add 160GW to global power. Thorium fission reactors were made in the 1960's and would be better than our current uranium boiler reactors Thorium liquid flouride reactors do not produce transuranic 10,000 year waste and would not have weapon proliferation issues.

Robert Bussards improved electrostatic fusion reactor. It is 100,000 times better than standard electrodstatic fusion It needs 200 million to make a full scale reactor. Magnetized target fusion is another option that seems cheaper and simpler than tokomaks We should try some of the cheaper alternatives to tokomaks. 10-20% of the 12 billion tokomak budget for alternative fusion and fission power. Fission already works and we can make fission better for immediate major contributions to our energy problems. Current nuclear reactors can be made 50% more powerful by changing the shape of the nuclear fuel and adjusting the cooling water This would add 160GW to global power. Thorium fission reactors were made in the 1960's and would be better than our current uranium boiler reactors Thorium liquid flouride reactors do not produce transuranic 10,000 year waste and would not have weapon proliferation issues.

Robert Bussards improved electrostatic fusion reactor. It is 100,000 times better than standard electrodstatic fusion It needs 200 million to make a full scale reactor. Magnetized target fusion is another option that seems cheaper and simpler than tokomaks We should try some of the cheaper alternatives to tokomaks. 10-20% of the 12 billion tokomak budget for alternative fusion and fission power. Fission already works and we can make fission better for immediate major contributions to our energy problems. Current nuclear reactors can be made 50% more powerful by changing the shape of the nuclear fuel and adjusting the cooling water This would add 160GW to global power. Thorium fission reactors were made in the 1960's and would be better than our current uranium boiler reactors Thorium liquid flouride reactors do not produce transuranic 10,000 year waste and would not have weapon proliferation issues.

What is the scale of the solutions for the inconvenient truth? 4 Terawatts of global electricity usage and 13 Terawatts of total power. 50% of world electricity is from coal. Coal kills over 400,000 people per year directly from pollution. (Other sobering statistics in the report, called "Connecting Asia," include estimates of 6.4 million work years lost annually in China to air pollution, 178,000 premature deaths in major cities every year caused by the use of high-sulfur coal and the fact that 52 urban river stretches have been so contaminated that they are no longer suitable for irrigation. Those numbers do not necessarily incorporate the effects of deforestation, overgrazing, dust clouds, desertification and the strains of the great increase in internal migration and tourism. Add in rural deaths and deaths from other countries like the 27,000 that the American lung association estimates for the United States and you get well over 400,000 per year.) Solar power added 1.7 GW of power in 2005. Wind power added 12 GW of power in 2005. Existing nuclear power plants can be up-powered fairly easily by 50% This would add 160GW of power globally. Then we need to build more than the 50 or so reactors that are planned for the next 15 years. Mostly planned in China and India. GE and Hitachi are talking about being able to make 100 reactors in the next 20 years. There are several other makers of nuclear reactors France's Areva, the world's largest maker of nuclear reactors, and Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd said they would cooperate in this sector. Toshiba Corp. completed a $4.2 billion deal to take control of Westinghouse, the U.S. power plant unit of British Nuclear Fuels. We need to develop Thorium liquid flouride reactors which do not produce transuranic waste (the 10,000 year waste) and can process that waste we do have and which does not have the proliferation issues. We transition in 10-20 years to better reactors but we use what we have now to take care of the coal and climate problems first. We still push ahead as fast as we can with conservation, biofuels, solar, wind and other climate friendly energy options.

What is the scale of the solutions for the inconvenient truth? 4 Terawatts of global electricity usage and 13 Terawatts of total power. 50% of world electricity is from coal. Coal kills over 400,000 people per year directly from pollution. (Other sobering statistics in the report, called "Connecting Asia," include estimates of 6.4 million work years lost annually in China to air pollution, 178,000 premature deaths in major cities every year caused by the use of high-sulfur coal and the fact that 52 urban river stretches have been so contaminated that they are no longer suitable for irrigation. Those numbers do not necessarily incorporate the effects of deforestation, overgrazing, dust clouds, desertification and the strains of the great increase in internal migration and tourism. Add in rural deaths and deaths from other countries like the 27,000 that the American lung association estimates for the United States and you get well over 400,000 per year.) Solar power added 1.7 GW of power in 2005. Wind power added 12 GW of power in 2005. Existing nuclear power plants can be up-powered fairly easily by 50% This would add 160GW of power globally. Then we need to build more than the 50 or so reactors that are planned for the next 15 years. Mostly planned in China and India. GE and Hitachi are talking about being able to make 100 reactors in the next 20 years. There are several other makers of nuclear reactors France's Areva, the world's largest maker of nuclear reactors, and Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd said they would cooperate in this sector. Toshiba Corp. completed a $4.2 billion deal to take control of Westinghouse, the U.S. power plant unit of British Nuclear Fuels. We need to develop Thorium liquid flouride reactors which do not produce transuranic waste (the 10,000 year waste) and can process that waste we do have and which does not have the proliferation issues. We transition in 10-20 years to better reactors but we use what we have now to take care of the coal and climate problems first. We still push ahead as fast as we can with conservation, biofuels, solar, wind and other climate friendly energy options.

http://btetc.blogspot.com/2006/10/windows-penguine -advantage.html

Funny that he makes these remarks on television, the medium responsible for "reality" tv, and for Fox, no less, the corporation responsible for the worst of it. I read an article last year in the "Life, etc." section of my local paper that talked about how Americans go out and mingle with their friends disturbingly less often than in the past. After reading this well-thought out piece, my eyes wandered to the bottom of the page, where I saw an infobox entitled What to Watch, which listed the latest in reality tv. We sit at home on our fat asses watching other people live lives that we wish we could have... if only we'd get up and leave the couch. I've posted a long tirade about it here.

Oh, I get it - you can't tell the difference between me, the author of this blog
http://andune.blogspot.com/
who is posting in this thread anonymously (because I don't have an account) and a group of other people with unique accounts in this forum. I mean, just because I am stating I am responding to specific things you wrote, with quotes, and say specifically I am the author of a linked article writing about that linked article is not always enough to clue some people in that the person they are replying to is, indeed, a different person than other posters and is, in fact, discussing what they are talking about.

    Yes - when I say I am discussing a specific topic, that means I am discussing that topic, not something else. The quotes and urls tend to point in that direction. Your argument that my article is not relevant to this discussion is very weak for two reasons; one, you have given every indication that you didn't understand the article in question; two, your actions here indicate you can't follow a line of reasoning. So - let's try again.

    Sweden is a lousy example of a nation 'doing better than America' because they aren't. Most 'standard of living' surveys don't lower the ranking od Sweden for things like lousy housing or porr access to services, but give them higher scores for things like all-day pre-school, whether it is good for kids or not. If you look at just their unemployment levels and personal GDP shares honestly, you see that if you give them every possible benefit of the doubt and lean in their direction as far as you can, they still come up about 12% short as far as PPP income per person compared to America. They are facing manpower shortages in virtually every high-education field except for education, mainly due to a brain drain of talent and a disastrously low birth rate. Honest thrid-party analysis of their economy shows that the percentage of Swedes living in poverty and in near-poverty is just as high as in the US, but they have a fraction of our wealthy, showing that Socialist tax programs have done little more than eliminate the wealthy.

    I *did* say this, and I point to my blog article, linked above, for the independent resources that I used for my analysis. Statements about 'cherry picking' and 'bias' from you will be ignored unless acoompanied by statistics. Steve Kanga's "Oh, I love Scandinavia" statements are no better than yours, many of your listed resources (so far) are simply quoting each other or using the same source data, and a fair amount of the stuff you have linked is simply wrong.
    I look forward to it.

And again all the posts that are +5 are those that say the same thing over and over again.

The deal is done. Live with it. At least Novell tries to answer the questions people have. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. People asked that they wanted the details of the deal, so they gave them. They gave a lot of promises.

The IRC meeting will most likely also just be a lot of copy-cats yelling: Yes, but you signed a deal with M$ and we are so anti-M$ that we don't care about anything else.

So instead of yelling that it is so bad, come up with a realistic alternative what you want and what questions you want answerd. Be at the IRC meeting and/or see that your answers are asked on the site if you can't be there.

It is very much fun to react emotionaly, yet it is only spreading the FUD further, no matter who started that FUD.

The useal links:
http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-announc e/2006-11/msg00004.html
http://dev-loki.blogspot.com/2006/11/call-to-dump- suse-linux-wtf.html
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4287912423.html
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2168151/novells- opens-microsoft
http://en.opensuse.org/Meetings/Status_Meeting_200 6-11-08/transcript#The_Novell.2F_Microsoft_deal

In Indonesia, especially in area where the traffic is managed by real estate developers/mall developers/residents instead of government, signs can really contradict each other 100%. For example, a road can have an arrow going to it and forbidden signs together.
I think I'll start gathering such photographs. I'll post them at http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/examples-of-contradictory-road-signs.html

Let's try this very slowly. I stated in my original post that the Eu, as a whole, has a worse debt load than the US. You disputed this. I prosed it again. You dispute it again, now, with the claim 'no one knows'. Wel,, yes, they do - I have the links in my article. And, unfortunately for you, I didn't claim it was an 'insurmountable problem', I said i doubt that it could be solved without serious changes to existing social programs. No, really. I have my own words on my screen right now.And I never said it was unique to anybody, just worse in Socialist countries. Seriously - go read it again.

I *know* you don't remember what you wrote. Your 'rebuttal' to my article said:
"The author also ignores that a social security system can be changed, for example as a response to the European population getting older on average. His only 2 outcomes are either doing away with the system or letting it break down."
    This is flat-out false. Period. No way out of it - what you wrote here is factually untrue. I discussed in at least three places, arguably 5, that the consequence of demographic shift will be changes/reductions to social programs.

    Second, for all of your claims of me 'cherry picking' and being biased - my article has links to source materials provided by Sweden and other nations, the US Dept. of Labor, etc. providing a little thing I like to call 'independent data sources' supportimg my arguments.

    I don't care what in this thread you are attempting to dispute - i am replying to your attempt to mischaracterize my writings at
http://andune.blogspot.com/2006/03/follow-money-du ring-my-discussions-of.html
    Your description of my work is wrong. I am attempting to allow people to realize that your description of that article is full of errors.

The mini three feels rubbery... certainly not buckling spring. I reviewed it when it was released and the screens are great but the software at the time was bunk. Latest updates are more stable, but still quite limited. Extra bonus to adding a Gmail notifier button!

At some point oracle should take a look at their own legal standpoint and community reputation (if Larry Ellison cares about that).
Some basic facts for people to be aware of:
1. Dubious rebuild practices: They seem to be using centos as a buffer to Red Hat. See http://oss.oracle.com/linux/legal/oracle-list.html and search for centos. If you really want to have some fun, grab the centos source, and start matching the typos in the centos patches against the 'oracle developed' patches in their source.
2. Dozens of bloggers and community members are already calling it a failure. see the following for your current opinion: http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompat ible-linux/ http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/29/do-it-ri ght-oracle/ and http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2006/10/oracle-lookin g-past-ellisons-rhetoric.html

Oracle seems to be walking a very fine line with overall compliance with the GPL. They have taken some patches from centos and removed the user attribution.

Personally, CentOS http://www.centos.org/ has already proven to be a top notch alternative to RHEL, and while there's no indemnification, it works far better than oracle linux seems to at this point, and they provide more community support than oracle seems to want to.

The reason I support the Gyurcsany-goverment is the following: I think all of our political elite is revoltingly corrupt. But if I have to choose between being ruled by sated, well-fed wolves and being ruled by hungry wolves, I choose the sated ones. This is so simple.

Revolution? I'm in. But only if it's against the whole of the political elite. If it's only about putting Viktor Orban in the place of Ferenc Gyurcsany, then forget me - I don't think a hungry wolf is better than a well-fed wolf.

This has nothing to do with Left and Right in the Western sense: these are two political mafias. that but wear a "Left" and "Right" lablel. The difference is that the Socialist voters are wise enough to know that both are very corrupted and they just want to choose the one they think is the lesser evil - the better fed wolf. The supporters of the Christian Right think their politicans are clean, pure, pious and honest. That they are lambs.

How stupid.

Give me a real Conservative politician like Angie Merkel or George W. Bush, even Pim Fortuyn or maybe even - gulp - Berlusconi, and I'll vote him any day. But sorry, hungry wolves disguised as Conservatives I cannot support.

This solution (increasing H1B) makes the problem worse, suppressing salaries and discouraging new grads from going into engineering. The H1B program has many flaws that make it practically designed to artificially suppress wages.

Instead, U.S. education should be bolstered, permanent immigration should be increased for workers with these skills. See this post for more details and what should be done.

He has his own blog now. http://peterrost.blogspot.com/

Drivers in some areas, like in Indonesia, tolerate higher uncertainty because they know the "driving culture". Thus traffic signs is not so important.

People who have driven in Indonesia for a couple years will assimilate the "driving culture" in Indonesia. (S)he will be able to tell:
1. When a traffic sign is violate-able, when it will be strictly enforced. It's not a matter of whether there is a police or not. It's a matter of understanding the intention of police. This instinct is very useful especially in places where traffic signs contradicts each other.
2. Yeah, traffic signs do sometimes contradict each other in Indonesia.
3. When to yield and when to force your way, however the situation is.
4. How to act when there is no traffic signs.

See http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/driving-framework.html on the few last paragraphs about "driving culture" and http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/driving-tips.html for some tips when traffic signs is not clear enough.

Drivers in some areas, like in Indonesia, tolerate higher uncertainty because they know the "driving culture". Thus traffic signs is not so important.

People who have driven in Indonesia for a couple years will assimilate the "driving culture" in Indonesia. (S)he will be able to tell:
1. When a traffic sign is violate-able, when it will be strictly enforced. It's not a matter of whether there is a police or not. It's a matter of understanding the intention of police. This instinct is very useful especially in places where traffic signs contradicts each other.
2. Yeah, traffic signs do sometimes contradict each other in Indonesia.
3. When to yield and when to force your way, however the situation is.
4. How to act when there is no traffic signs.

See http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/driving-framework.html on the few last paragraphs about "driving culture" and http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/ 11/driving-tips.html for some tips when traffic signs is not clear enough.

There's nothing lowly about a law student. Look at the excellent contribution made by J. Cam Barker when he was in law school.

Strictly speaking, the copyright infringments covered have always been illegal; what the proposed changes are doing are making them 'strict liability'. IANAL, but as I understand it this means you can be held criminally liable even if you didn't intend or weren't aware you were breaking the law. The theory behind it is that police should be able to issue on-the-spot fines without having to arrest & push it through the courts. There are no guidelines in existence (yet) that explain to us how the laws will be applied, but given the breadth of the legislation regarding infringement at present (eg 'possession of recording device' etc), the potential for abuse is high.

Kim Weatherall's blog has a much better explanation of why the legislation is bad.

FWIW, I came out for something like this last April.

Shading the Earth won't get rid of the direct effects of excess CO2, such as ocean acidification and preferential growth promotion of undesirable plants like woody vines vs. trees. But the beauty of injecting a few million or tens of millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere is that it spreads out much more widely, the effects will reduce drought and heat stress which are killing plants and turning land into desert, and you might even cut the original pollution by taking the sulfur from some existing source.

Cutting heating and stress on plants looks like it reduces the CO2 problem directly, by enabling better CO2 uptake. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Keeling curve and tell me what else could explain the flattening in the two years after Pinatubo. Take your time, I'll wait.

Seriously, I never even noticed this supposed Web 2.0. Who decides these arbitrary numbers for a continuous process?

This fallacy is exploited in a number of little riddles that kids usually ponder. Where exactly is the line between a tadpole and a frog? There is none, of course. If you give a poor man a penny, he won't be rich - he'll still be poor. But if poverty cannot be removed by acquisition of a penny, then it can't be removed by another penny and another and another...

Most people grow up at some point and realize that it doesn't really matter where the lines are drawn. Nobody cares when exactly a tadpole turns into a frog, except retarded sophists. There's clear, unambiguous differences between the one and the other and so we give them different names and when we're faced with something in between then we say "it's somewhere in between".

A frog can breathe air. A frog has legs. A frog has no tail. There's no sharp transition when any of these somehow "suddenly" happen, but they're clear distinctions from a tadpole.

This is quoted directly from here:

The "old web" was all about information. Access to information. Bringing information "online". Putting information out on the web. That was a new concept. The big battles were about information-access. Between the ISPs and the ISP-alikes. And between the browsers and similar information-access infrastructures. The AOL and IE quasi-monopolies were forged then. This was a new concept and a multitude of schemes were hatched to see how one might make money of this. Some even successful.

The "new web" isn't about information and its access any more. We've figured that one out. Something like Firefox can still make a splash, but there's never going to be a "Netscape vs IE" battle again. Todays battles are about finding information, organizing information, structuring information. Search engines. Portals. Web-directories. And "web-communities". Anybody could have seen that one coming. As we already knew back in '92: The killer-app of the nineties is -- people.[1]

And the extremely thinly veiled admission that a thousand people contributing a little here and there beat any silicon infrastructure any day of the week. That's the Google admission, the DMOZ admisssion, the wikipaedia admission and in the end, yes, the MySpace admission. Don't try to solve any big task -- structuring the web itself, the encyclopaedic knowledge of mankind or even just simply to entertain your visitors -- when there's a million people out there who'd be happy to lend a hand here and there and the harvest of these little bits will create a better yield than anything any mega-corporation could produce. Any self-respecting nerd should recognize this as the open source model.

We all know these things.

And sufficiently complex systems cease to be binary: there's no sharp transition when a tadpole suddenly becomes a frog, but the differences between tadpoles and frogs are so obvious that we have different words for them. And in the same vein there's no particular single thing that marks the new web -- it's just that anybody with eyes in their head can see that this is a whole different critter from 10 or 15 years ago and so we give it some name to refer to this change: "Web 2.0". We could have done worse.

1. It's all 4 majors. UMG no more or less than the others.

2. I don't know how they bubble up... I just know that they are targeting the wrong people.

3. It's the RIAA's lawyers, not UMG's lawyers, who are involved, and it's not the lawyers that are controlling it, it's the RIAA. The lawyers on this case are attack dogs. They attack who they're told to attack, and don't stand up to their clients at all. Good lawyers don't just follow orders. These lawyers just follow orders. I don't know how they live with themselves, suing children, disabled people, people who never used computers, people on welfare, students. It's unbelievable.

4. What do they think they're accomplishing? I'm sure it's not the revenue stream; they lose money on litigated cases; they lose money on default judgments; and they make a little money on the settlements, just enough to cover the costs of their campaign. I'm convinced that their actual goal is something they don't mention publicly -- to try to monopolize the online digital music field. (See, e.g. counterclaims in Arista v. LimeWire. I don't think they will accomplish their goal, and I think that their litigation campaign is actually increasing, rather than diminishing, their competition, as they've succeeded in creating a whole new breed of music consumer -- those specifically looking for non-RIAA music. See my growing list of sources for non-RIAA music, which I call Liberated Music.

NORML's is here, and another one from a lawyer is here. Well worth printing out and laminating and keeping in your billfold. Two things to note: 1) If you happen to be on a military base, even just to turn around and leave because you made a wrong turn, your rights are severely abridged. If you are on their property the military is free to search anything they want. 2) The War On Drugs has created a lot more room for officers to manuever in if the key phrase "drugs" is used. Here is a rather disheartening discussion about this "special" area of search law.

Even if you do use them, the USA is not first, that place is still taken by luxemborg, and sweden and esp. norway are pretty close to that same top. Icidentely, all part of 'socialist Europe'. Your statement that if Sweden were in the USA it would be the poorest state is simply not true when looking at average income, or GDP per capita. 'Strange measures of well being like standard of living' happen to be the norm for measuring how well things work out for people for the simple reason that it compensates for 'buying power', whereas GDP per capita does not. Not compensating for this means that you are not measuring what people can afford on their local market.

If Google pursues this, I don't think they'll do so for financial reasons, but rather for PR reasons (just like they used the installation of a relatively large solar capacity as PR). But nowadays $200 Million isn't that much to Google, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them support the effort to some extent.

Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?

This year. This election. Here's a more-or-less random from the first page of Google results, but it shows the way to the local news coverage. Thousands of questionable registrations. The people involved were doing it systematically, but the group for which they were working ("ACORN") has been confronted over this stuff for the past several elections. Needless to say, they were shocked - SHOCKED! - that it would be happening, again, as they work to sign up more voters in dem-friendly urban areas. Shocked!

You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?

Gee, do you think that maybe the long-standing tradition of ambushing people as they leave polling places and finding the willing ones with time on their hands that will answer the polls may not be keeping up with the hyper-focused to-the-household campaigning, the huge shift to absentee balloting, and a more divisive than ever media-fueled distortion of reported opinions? Or that perhaps the exit polling consortium, which is funded collectively by a handful of media outlets, may be conducting their questioning with workers that tend to reflect the biases shown over and over to be present in the media companies they represent?

If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?

Oh, I don't know... like maybe a shred of evidence, perhaps? Do you have any idea the number of people and the scope of the conspiracy that would be required to introduce millions of phantom votes in a general election? Millions? That would involve thousands of poll workers, election board staffers, re-count workers, and so on. They'd have to run a tighter ship than the people that got thousands of NASA employees to fake the moon landing without a single person spilling the beans, right? I mean, you do also think that was faked, right?

Iraq is not a wedge issue, it is a monumental blunder. It has led to the mullahs of Iran becomming the regional superpower with effective control of the entire gulf. The war is not only a moral catastrophe but an economic and political one as well.

Kennedy's real complaint was that the bloggers don't like Blair.

Its a bit rich to have politicians complaining about the citizens not being interested in solving problems. Its not like they have shown a great interest in that over the past twenty years. Blair in particular brought US style soundbite and spin politics to the UK.

I blogged this earlier before noticing it was on Slashdot. In a nutshell I think that the real message of the blogs is that the people writing them are fed up of the media management of politicians and the trivial approach of the legacy media.

Good thinking. Here is an excellent law review article which agrees with you.

These days you get any freaky weather event, and it gets blamed on global warming. Even when it doesn't make sense.

Surely, more ice making it further north would, if anything, be supporting evidence for datasets that show the oceans are getting cooler? You might also note that some data sets suggest that the global warming trend is not present in the Southern Hemisphere.

There is some evidence that the icecaps melting around the edges, but getting thicker in the middle. Perhaps that's because the Sun's output is a huge factor to global warming, and there are no sunspots this year?

Helio is a joint venture between South Korea's SK Telecom and EarthLink. They launched a slick new device (don't call it a phone =)) last week called the Drift that includes a hybrid GPS receiver (real GPS and A-GPS). It launched with a couple of GPS-enabled services: GPS-enabled Google maps and Buddy Beacon. The latter sounds pretty similar to Boost's solution, but takes a different approach to privacy.

With Buddy Beacon, users must intentionally broadcast their location to their friends list. It does not constantly track your whereabouts and auto-broadcast your new locale. It's more like "find me here" than "i'm searching for so-and-so..."

Check out the CNet comparison. Look at the rankings from the editors vs. from the readers. Whoops, just noticed the article actually links to Wired when it says it links to CNet. No matter, here's the CNet side by side comparison: http://reviews.cnet.com/4321-6464_7-6551960.html?t ag=cnetfd.mt

Here's how the editors ranked the systems:

1. PS3 (8.8) 2. Xbox 360 (8.4) 3. Wii (8.2)

Here's how the readers ranked the systems:

1. Wii (8.0) 2. Xbox 360 (7.5) 3. PS3 (7.1)

Aside from the full one-point "grade inflation" the readers ranked the systems in exactly the opposite order that the editors did. Is this because the editors are playing on machines they didn't pay for? And with HDTV equipment most users don't have? Is it perhaps related to the relative advertising might these companies are flexing at CNet? Are CNet gamers more casual and fun-oriented compared to more hardcore CNet editors?

Whatever's going on, it looks interesting to me.

-stormin (shameless self-promotion, I covered this discrepancy in my blog yesterday: http://kiriath-arba.blogspot.com/2006/11/editors-v s-gamers.html)

One of my main issues with Justen Deal is that he claims that the entire IT budget is related to health connect. The entire IT budget is his $1.5G/year figure. In reality Health Connect is probably about 25% of that or less. Also he thinks he is some sort of superhero. Check out his web blog: http://justen.blogspot.com/

Anyways, to sum it up, we're not as bad as the british! w00t!

I figured out that my PCs were consuming more electricity than my fridge, dish washer, and clothes washer. Combined.

I made a chart of actual electricity use of various PCs and Macs on my blog: PC and Mac power consumption.

In a nutshell, my annual power consumption went down by 30% (!) once I started to power down my home-built "home server PC" when not in use.

I also figured out that when buying a new PC that is going to see a lot of use, power consumption should be a factor. If you're saving $100 in purchase price, but spending $50/year for additional electricity because the cheap PC's power supply is grossly inefficient, well, have you really saved anything if you keep that machine for 3 years? The short answer. NO.

Yeah--I'm sure you're out there trying to "protect the children."

Tell me again what you were chatting about with that 14 year old girl.

I'm sure you were trying to console her as she was viciously attacked by this vigilante criminal hate group...

...this vigilante criminal hate group who targetted her for soliciting sex over the internet.

I guess I just have a hard time believing there are pedophile hate groups out there targetting children. Of course, you didn't link to any evidence of your most unusual claims...

The links you did give involved targetting adults, not children...

And even if you did show evidence that some weird group was targetting 14 year old kids trying to have sex with 14 year old kids...

Like are you trying to make out me to be "the bad guy" because if I {assert support for the vigilante criminal groups which target children}, then I must therefore sympathize with these "vigilante criminal groups" that I've never heard of that target and harass some 14 year old girl you're chatting with?

This is assuming one has a survey knowledge of the sciences. Thanks, to MIT's OCW and webcast.berkeley.edu (among other various colleges) you can find material on the introductory level for everything.

Some less obvious sites:

modern physics (not too bad)
http://modphys.ucsd.edu/2dw05/video/video.html

organic chemistry (I haven't watched these at all)
http://chem241.blogspot.com/
http://www2.haverford.edu/wintnerorganicchem/

Before you judge the OP too hard, remember that learning (especially the autodidactic kind) should be fun. Not everyone wants to have gun powder skills +5. For whatever it's worth I agree with you, but without a basic knowledge of chemistry, the study of gun powder and munitions is going to be superficial at best.

I believe thawte offers a viable and professional alternative to PGP. If you're in the NYC area, please visit my site dedicated to notarizing thawte personal certificates. It's easier than you think, and transparent for most users.

I read on digg about three seconds ago, that it in fact does work. Set the installer to XP compatibility mode, and BAM! It works!

Now, I'd love to see vista flop, but it looks like Zune won't be it's downfall. A simple patch can fix the installer.

Full blog at http://vistazune.blogspot.com/