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Don't know if this has been mentioned here before.

There is a very nice book written for kids with great illustrations available at "The pig and the box".

from the page: The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes people take their copied items home in special buckets that act as... well, they're basically DRM. It's like a fable, except the moral of the story is very modern in tone.

To date, I have not seen anything approaching a casual description of DRM.

How about this little book "The Pig and The Box"? It was written to help explain DRM to kids.

oh wait... I thought you meant "Startup". :)

---
Best Freeware - Intros & Reviews
http://goodfreeware.blogspot.com/

Since this was on boingboing, I'd be surprised if someone didn't mention this already. There's a children's book that explains DRM.

It's probably worth trying an experiment expanding public defenders and prosecutors to encompass a greater percentage of criminal cases. Maybe even require private lawyers to rotate through those offices something like 1 of every 10 years. If successful, maybe it's worth trying with civil law, too.

FWIW, I'm not really "a liberal", but I did notice that more Conservative justices overturn Congress more than less Conservative justices. Which makes calling them "Conservative" ironic, and makes the Conservatives "activist judges". I don't think any of them, no matter how "liberal", act to overturn laws nearly enough.

Overly casual explanation? That I can do.

Also good if your friend speaks German or Chinese (or a bunch of other languages).

A bit light on real-world examples, though.

Well, I personally think that some people really like having cybersex with female elves. (NSFW) Myself, I would have trouble believing the 14 year old boy that is controlling said elf is really a hot chick, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Cool links.

You wouldn't, duh.

Cool links.

FYI - they block Doteasy as well. "I'm never wrong. I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken" http://celestial-reasoning.blogspot.com/

Yes the hard disk is fried.But nothing like exploding Dell laptop.

Even more proof that Stallman doesn't want any programmers making money off of anything.

I tell you, sometimes it's a chore being right all the time.

Shameless plug:

http://weblands.blogspot.com/2006/08/eulogy-on-dis c.html

With 5 Mpixels cameras capable of producing movies, I am sure people would eventaully love a 16 GB memory sticks ( I know this is not the dongle refered to in this article.) In our case, we could go on imaging Earth for the full 20 hours our balloon ( http://hasp-geocam.blogspot.com/ )is going to be up. For background, the reasons for undertaking this project can be found here at http://hasp-geocam.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_hasp-ge ocam_archive.html

With 5 Mpixels cameras capable of producing movies, I am sure people would eventaully love a 16 GB memory sticks ( I know this is not the dongle refered to in this article.) In our case, we could go on imaging Earth for the full 20 hours our balloon ( http://hasp-geocam.blogspot.com/ )is going to be up. For background, the reasons for undertaking this project can be found here at http://hasp-geocam.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_hasp-ge ocam_archive.html

Mac OS X Services is a menu that lives in your application menu and provides common functionality for any number of things.
For a better explanation, go here:
http://highschoolblows.blogspot.com/2005/11/mac-os -x-services-menu-you-never-go-to.html

Great article on DAR / CommandBurner usage under windows: http://jameser.blogspot.com/2006/08/tip-39-backing -up-to-dvd-using-free.html

You have to ask?

Cool links.

Hmmm....maybe I spoke too soon.

At least one democrat put a hold on it too, if this is to be believed.

http://tapscottscopydesk.blogspot.com/2006/08/as-p redicted-its-ted-stevens-and-he.html

These guys need to go.

Not a study, but I did write about it...

"When I send somebody an e-mail, I expect them to respond. One day is nothing. Two days if you're busy, I can understand and appreciate that. Three days is rude, and anything beyond that is stupid. We're not talking about sitting down to write an essay here, some grand quest to prove to everyone that you do actually know how to spell, use grammar, punctuation, and occasionally capitalize letters. I'm talking about a simple "Sorry, I don't have any information about that." How hard was that? It takes a few seconds to read, a few to comprehend, and a few more to pen an answer.

Seriously, what is the point of having e-mail if you aren't going to use it? How can you ever expect it to be useful when you treat it with all the responsibility of a two-year-old? When the phone rings, you answer it. You wouldn't for a second think about letting it ring, figuring they'll just call back in a few weeks. And what the hell makes you think you're so special that someone who obviously wants something from you is going to find it acceptable that you made them wait days if not weeks to be blessed with your response?

This past week, I sent an e-mail to an executive producer for a TV show that airs on the SCI FI channel. I'm pretty sure I sent that on either a Friday or a Saturday night, and got a reply on Monday. That's fine, business and all that. I pinged him back, and within minutes got another reply. He was obviously sitting right there still dealing with his mail, and I appreciated him taking the time to help me out with something. But that's the rub, I appreciated him not taking a month to get back to me, something that otherwise should be baseline. It should be commendable that you answer your email within hours, not that you answered it at all." [...]

Rest is over here - http://bitch-what.blogspot.com/2006/08/e-mail-is-b itch-and-so-am-i.html

http://farcefoundation.blogspot.com/

They have mercury in them, which actually makes them suck much worse if they do break. That said, they save a ton of energy, and while they don't work well (read: at all) with dimmers, good ones are intensely bright. I have them everypace in my house that they fit (maybe 50% of possible locations).

Most CFLs are not designed to be used with dimmer switches. Special adaptors are available for larger bulbs and General Electric make Soft White dimmables which are available in the US but not the EU. LEDs might be the best bet if this issue affects you...

Listen, I don't know how to phrase this, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm from the future.

I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. When I went to sleep last night, it was 2006 -- nearly seven years from now!

We had long since buried what you people, in this section of spacetime, circa December 1999, call "the new economy." We renamed that "the dot-com bubble." Over six long years, we learned to deeply regret having funded mediocre, copycat websites with humdrum ideas, cute names and wayyyy too much money to burn.

This "Red Herring" you read so avidly went out of a business after peaking at 600 pages. All of the startups it writes about and collects advertising checks from will soon be out of business.

I can't give away too much, because I've seen Back to the Future and know how dangerous it can be to frig with the timespace continuum. But I have a clue for you: when you see a cluster of companies whose names all sound like Atari 2600 games, WALK AWAY. I mean, seriously, "Rallypoint?" NumSum? S5?

Oh, also? There's going to be a presidential election soon. No matter how alike you think the candidates are, vote for the one from Tennessee, not from Texas. The Texas guy is a FRIGGIN' FRIGTARD.

Anyway, I gotta go try and crash some dot-com parties before I go to sleep tonight and end up back in 2006. Adios dot-com amigos!

Dear Tumor-infested rodent,

quoting Wikipedia on political issues? Bwa Ha ha, no wonder you're lost. I won't even go into why that's dumb. Go ask your elementary/high-school teacher.

On your second source, look here, Tool:

http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2005/04/lobbyists- in-sheeps-clothing.html

Your second source, is funded by powerful corporations who don't want social scruples (boycott experts) getting in the way of their profits. Similar to the group that went on Drudge and stated that Michael Moore had Halliburton stocks. Wonder why that story went away? Because it was bullcrap! ;-)

From time to time that is. I work for contact centers and one of the tasks is to create IVR systems.

There are a lot of
  - cowboys (switch vendors, so called consultants, whatever) creating IVR systems that don't know how this is supposed to work
  - people from the company that think because they understand their business that they can create an IVR system

I can tell you a lot about creating IVR systems, but the gist about it is the following.

You don't want to have a menu that is more than three wide by three deep, that is three choices per menu, and three menus before you reach someone. Occasionally you can violate that rule and have four wide. Or five if you really must, but then keep the descriptions short. But never four deep. That is too much.

Think about it. Would you have 4 deep x 4 wide = 16 different departments handling the customer calls? Nope you wouldn't. They all pretty much arrive at the same CSR/Agents/Whatever you call them.

So why let the caller make the differentiation?

The caller needs to make the first differentation between tech/admin/complains, and then the CSR needs to get the client nr and some additional info on why you are calling, to ease his live. This will greatly increase the stay of the agent in the call center (which is currently at 8-18 months or so, depending on the sector). This will aide you as well. The longer the agents are there, the better you are helped!

At the end of the call, the CSR will do the call classification; this doesn't need to be done upfront by the ivr - this is waisting time.

The best IVR is the one that
  - doesn't ask any questions (i.e. recognises you by calling nr, and guesses why you are calling)
  - or asks the minimum of questions and then puts you in the queue.

And then informs you regularly what your expected waiting time (ETA) to the agent is. And proposes you to be called back - on your current number or another one. And gives you a case nr already.

This is how I learned to make my IVR systems.

If you want to talk to me, see http://contact-centers.blogspot.com/ - I have an e-mail link in there sometime.

Mark

Very strange. I am a Croatian woman but I'm only 5'3" ... you can see my picture at http://lovcroatia.blogspot.com/

Glad to hear Croatia's government adopeted an open source software policy. I myself have adopted an open source policy for my novel about Croatia's breakup from Yugolavia called Under the Oak Tree. I have posted the first five chapters at http://lovcroatia.blogspot.com/ and will be adding a new chapter every week.

"My heart agrees with you: pedophiles are scum, and as a parent, their mass death wouldn't bother me one bit."

Well it would have to be a mass murder, because there are a lot of us and we aren't going anywhere. You may put a few hundred paedophiles in prison on child porn charges and some of the 10% of child sex abuses which are committed by paedophiles might result in prison sentences (and rightly so if it's sex abuse), however if you think you're going to have the 33% of people who have at least some attraction to children, or the 5-25% who are technically paedophiles killed, you're fooling yourself. It's not illegal to be a paedophile, because it is not illegal to exist, however it is illegal to abuse children and download child porn.

For the record, the huge majority of us spend time with children, without needing sexual relationships. I spend time with my younger brother's friend and I'm going to become a teacher. I don't need sex with young boys, even though I find them sexually attractive; spending time with them is enough.

People won't be able to fight paeds so hard in the future, because we're fighting back. See AN if you want an example.

And, if you're really so terrified of us, maybe you should learn more

~ BLue

BLOGGED BY Joseph Cannon ON 8/22/2006 7:23PM

The Men Who Knew Too Much? NSA Wiretapping Whistleblowers Found Dead in Italy and Greece

Adamo Bove and Costas Tsalikidis: Both uncovered a secret bugging system and both met untimely ends.

Was That Just A Coincidence? And Who Made Your Cell Phone?

Guest blogged by Joseph Cannon

Is someone murdering people who know too much about NSA wiretapping overseas?

Two whistleblowers -- one in Italy, one in Greece -- uncovered a secret bugging system installed in cell phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration.

Last month, Italian telecommunications security expert Adamo Bove either leapt or was pushed from a freeway overpass; he left no note and had no history of depression. Last year (March, 2005), Greek telecommunications expert Costas Tsalikidis met with a similarly enigmatic end. Both had uncovered American attempts to eavesdrop on government officials, anti-war activists, and private businessmen.

The Bove case relates to the long-standing controversy over the CIA's kidnapping of cleric Abu Omar, who was flown to Egypt and tortured. The post-Berlusconi government of Italy is attempting to arrest and try all of the CIA personnel involved. Bove used mobile phone records to trace more than two dozen American agents.

Bove had also revealed that his employer, Telecom Italia, had allowed illegal "spyware" -- undetectable wiretaps -- to infest Italy's largest communications system. His testimony helped to uncover the unsettling relationship between SISMI chief Marco Mancini and Telecom Italia head Giuliano Tavaroli. (Mancini, recently arrested by Italian investigators, has also come under some suspicion for his possible role in the strange affair of Major General Nicola Calipari, killed by American troops in Iraq.) In the 1990s, Bove had received wide praise for helping to secure convictions of two bosses in the Camorra, Naples' answer to the Sicilian Mafia.

The case of Costas Tsalikidis -- an engineer for Vodaphone, Greece's top telecommunications firm -- offers a similar picture. Tsalikidis discovered an extraordinarily spohisticated piece of spyware within his company's network. The Prime Minister and other top officials were targeted, along with Greek military officers, anti-war activists, various business figures -- and a cell phone within the American embassy itself. This page gives a full list of the targets, very few of whom could be considered as having even a remote connection to terrorism.

As investigative journalists Paolo Pontoniere and Jeffrey Klein report:

The Vodaphone eavesdropping was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America's National Security Agency.

According to Ta Nea, a Greek newspaper, Vodafone's CEO privately told the Greek government that the bugging culprits were "U.S. agents." Because Greece's prime minister feared domestic protests and a diplomati

Slashdot complains that tabs are redundant and have too much whitespace, even if you say they're code.

Anyone else remember the right-wing bloggers posting maps to the home of the journalist who did a fluff piece on Rumsfeld's vacation home? And the barely-veiled exhortations to their followers to go out and wreak havoc? Which were not rescinded, even when it was revealed that the whole thing was cool with Rummy?

Or pro-lifers who don't condone the Army of God or clinic bombers... but they don't condemn them, either. Same plausible-deniability nonsense.

Why aren't the racist apartheid zionists subjected to the same standard? When have they "opened up for inspection"? When did they sign the nuclear non proliferation treaty? How many generations can they get away with keeping people locked up into little bantustans with very little water, no way to work, and subject to daily attacks?

BTW, they just rocketed a few Reuters camerman and some civilians. Nothing special, they kill innocent people daily-and have a widespread and verifiable past track record of engaging in "false flag" operations, committing terrorist attacks and making it look like someone else did it. There have been many, here are two of them

remember the Liberty

remember 9-11 and the dancing "movers"

Well, if you care, here's a review of HL2:E1 that I wrote shortly after completing the game for the second time. Buy or don't buy whatever you wish, but you're missing out on something grand, sez I!

http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-of- half-life-2-episode-one.html

The biggest customers of Sony cell battery is of course the maker of Vaio, Sony Computer and mobile phone maker, Sony Ericsson.

Who's next? S.....
--
Best Freeware: http://goodfreeware.blogspot.com/

"They found out she was downloading copyrighted material (which is currently illegal) and sent out a court order to have her HDD seized, etc."

These assumptions on your part are not accurate, and may be the result of having read fifth hand accounts of the court's decision, instead of the decision itself.

In fact they did not find out about any downloading, on her part or anyone else's. All they knew is that a computer linked to her account had copyrighted files on it which were in a shared files folder that the RIAA was able to access one day through iMesh. They did not know if the files were obtained legally or illegally. They did not know if anything was done with them which was illegal. The judge even noted that the RIAA's own evidence was "scant and piecemeal".

Neither did they get a court order seizing anything. A lawsuit was commenced. As part of the pretrial discovery process, the RIAA sought, and obtained, an order directing the defendant to permit plaintiff to make a mirror image of her hard drive.

In his decision the judge expressed anger that defendant had used a defragmentation utility subsequent to the Court's order, and prior to the mirror imaging.

It is not clear to me when the judge is talking about "wiping" and when he is talking about "defragmenting".

I wonder if the programmers out there can help me on that one.

Now THIS is some amazing photorealistic vector artwork.

I'm so tired of this I blogged it a while ago
http://millionfirefoxconverts.blogspot.com/

This is practically the same as what I proposed on my blog a while back:

A proposal for a Trustable Electronic Voting System

Seeing how the failure of electronic voting to earn our trust is a hot topic today, heres my shot at a proposal for a secure electonic voting system.

1. The voting process starts with a voter walking into a polling station and presenting his/her ID. This is verified by the officials, and possibly representatives of the candidates, and once verified, the Voter is issued a Physical Token. This Token is NOT generated on demand, and can be something like the tokens used at game arcades. Each token needs to have a globally unique serial ID, which would need be changeable. Each polling booth is issued a fixed number of voter tokens, enough for the total number of voters expected to show up at a booth. Any unused tokens need to be returned to the Election Authority.

2. The voter takes the token (remmeber that this token is not associated with his identity in any way) and walks up to the voting machine. This machine consists of a touch screen with the poll options on it. The machine activates when the voter drops the token into its slot. The user makes his/her selection, confirms it, and is issued a printed reciept of his/her choice. The machine keeps a running tally of the votes polled, but does NOT communicate the vote to any central server. This information is kept secure inside the machine itself, and the machine needs to be made physcially temper proof and temper-evident. At the end of the polling process, all the voting mashines can be collected together and an authorized elction officer can instruct the machine to reveal the poll results. All results from all machines can be tallied to get the final election result.

4. The receipt format would be a standardized one, established by the febderal election officals, including the fonts, sizes and the information content. It will have on it, printed, the day/date and identifier of the particular election and the id of the machine which issued the reciept, and in large fonts, the selection made by the voter.

5. The voter checks on the reciept to make sure the information on the reciept matches what he had punched in. If not, the vote is invalid, and he/she gets to vote again.

6. If the reciept information is valid, the voter proceeds to another machine, where he/she inserts the reciept into a slot. This second machine reads the receipt using Optical Character Recognition, and maintains its own independent tally of votes polled. It also securely holds all the receipts in a safe vault inside it. The first machine and this second machine are not linked in any way.

7. The first machine and the second machine must not be made by the same manufacturer, or by companies with substantial holding by common entities.

8. Ideally, the token and the receipt would be federal standards, and the machines themselves can be made by any number of companies. They would need to get certified by a testing body. The certification test would focus on standards compliance (including such standards as physical size, accessibility, etc).

9. A single company may make both the machines, but in any specific poll booth, machines from two indepepdent manufacturers need to be used.

At the end of the election, the polling officials return to a central location with all the unused tokens, and the sealed machines. The total number of votes polled by both the machines, and the number of tokens issued is first matched. Then both the machines are activated and the total tallies of votes taken and matched against each other. In case of mismatch, the paper reciepts are retrieved from the second machine, and counted by hand.

The crucial points are:

1. Two independent tallies of the same votes, with a trail between corresponding votes (the receipt carries the token ID, so from the machines databases, one can matc

Adapted from my blog. I know this is blasphemous, but there isn't enough litigation over patents. By this I mean actual court cases, there are plenty of threats. Only 1.5% of all patents are litigated, and only .1% are litigated to trial (of that .1%, over 50% are invalidated). This is far too little. Let me explain.

We know the level of litigation is too little because of positive externalities associated with litigation. If the accusor loses, invalidating a patent benefits everyone, not just the firm that sues for the invalidation. If the accusor wins, clarity in validity also benefits others. So there is a free riding problem with litigation (especially since it is so costly).

Lets say I hold a patent on tennis shoes and I expect to make a million dollars from that patent. If another shoe maker named Nike sues me over the patent, how much would I be willing to spend to defend the patent? $999,999. How much would Nike be willing to spend to invalidate the patent? Invalidating the patent doesn't give Nike a monopoly, so assuming in a competitive model there are no (or lower than monopoly) profits for Nike. So Nike would be willing to spend less to invalidate the patent than I would to keep the patent valid. Thus it may in Nike's best interest to just license a completely ludicrous patent. That seems to be what happened here.

Not only is this litigation costly, but anyone found infringing on a patent in court pays TRIPLE the claimed damages! That is high stakes indeed. To add to this problem, the alleged infringer bears the burden of proof, that the patent is invalid or that they didn't violate the patent. The wording for proof is "clear and convincing evidence," that is strong wording. So it shouldn't be surprising to find that 95% of all defendants settle without going to court.

A good way to produce more clarifying litigation is to create incentives to litigate. One idea (which I think is a bad one) is to allow the government to challenge patents. A better idea is to offer a bounty on invalidated patents. One problem with the bounty idea is that mostly worthless patents would be invalidated this way, but if you limited the bounty to licensed patents, you could eliminate a lot of this problem. The bounty could be grant the patent to the challenger for a few years, or be a flat rate payment. Lastly, there are public interest groups already doing great work towards this end (such as the EFF and Public Patent Foundation), by funding them with incentives or grants we could improve the situation.

Another fix is to force firms to litigation. By capping the dollar value of settling, firms my opt for a court remedy rather than an out of court secret agreement. Limiting settling and other forms of collusion makes more information public, which can benefit more people.

The third option for getting more litigation is to reduce costs of litigation. Removing the 3X payout, decreasing the time in court, and changing the wording from "clear and convincing evidence" to something less strong. Even shifting some of the burden of proof towards the accusor would speed things along. One other option to make litigation more affordable is to penalize accusers for refuted claims--since the general practice is to claim as much as possible and see what sticks (see SCO for an example).

It is a crying shame that Apple just paid off the patent trolls here. Had they put up the $100 million into a legal fund and gotten this rediculous patent invalidated, it would have benefitted society. Who knows who else will get hit with this silly patent claim now? It isn't Apple's job to benefit society, but as long as we keep feeding the trolls, we'll have to keep paying.

The point of debating it is because we don't know it is a prank. You and probably some one before you just asumed it was a prank. Thats just a preconditioned "what if". Many more are availible.

Well, I guess we can read the motivation from the guy himself. I suppose I still will characterize it as a stupid prank even after reading this, but I can see how someone might disagree.

I would also like to know how close it comes to being OSI compliant.

I see too many people, including the submitter, use myself where me or I should be used. Hey, you don't sound more professional when you use myself in places it doesn't belong, you actually sound like a moron.

Here are some resources for anyone still confused about this.

"The trap-jaw ant has been clocked closing its mandibles at between 78 and 145 miles per hour"

Shouldn't that be in bites per second?

----------
Still here
http://blogoscare.blogspot.com/

1) Black ants can jump.

Yes, but white ants have sound fundamentals, and they are deceptively fast. It has been reported that with advancements in genetic engineering, Chinese ants will soon be just as good.

This was posted about an hour and a half ago. I suppose Google'll wanna pre-emptively combat any negative press on this issue.

No worries. I checked and this card is EGA compatible.

---
Only the Best Freeware
http://goodfreeware.blogspot.com/

I'm with you 100%. I'm a PC gamer through and though, but I've recently bought some consoles and games. There are definite differences.

If you hate load times then consoles are not for you. If you hate not being able to save anywhere then consoles are not for you. If you hate low resolution displays (even HDTV), low polygons, low quality textures, simplistic games with few buttons, paying for online play, paying for software patches (no Xbox Live = no patches), no mods, little choice in peripherals (no joysticks, for one), and poor if any backward compatibility, then consoles are not for you.

Between Windows XP and DOSBox I can play nearly every PC game I've ever loved over the past 20 years (but not the later DOS games - those are very CPU intensive to emulate). Thanks to dedicated FOSS emulators like SCUMMVM I can play my old 320x200 favourites in glorious antialiased 1280x1024. I can mute the game's music and play my own in the background. I can edit INI and CONF files to change the gameplay however I wish. I can extract PK4 and DAT files and snoop around the core data, extract the music, inject my own voice, and do all kinds of wacky shenanigans. And of course, I can download very professional mods like Classic Doom for Doom 3 and breathe new life or completely new games into old titles and game engines.

Modding shouldn't be blown off either. There are some potentially great games that are terribly ridden with bugs and unpolished interface like Oblivion that are stuck in the broken state on consoles. It may take 35 downloads from a few sites, but by the time you're done modding Oblivion you can finally consider it to be version 1.0 - something Xbox360 users will never see. And of course a little hot coffee can perk you right up!

Console games are great too, don't get me wrong. There are few greater virtual experiences than Katamari Damacy. Grandia II for Dreamcast had surprisingly vibrant graphics with great colours and really outstanding spoken and written dialogue. Resident Evil 4 is quite a masterpiece of design and it has some of the most realistic graphics I've ever seen, even though the consoles it's played on are the weaker of the bunch. These games take full advantage of their platforms and use some clever tricks to skirt their limitations - like doubling pixels in the distance or rendering some objects as sprites instead of 3D models.

However, all these games have occasional save points. This pisses me off to no end. Twice now I've played Resident Evil 4 for a 45-minute stretch without running into a save point and had to turn off the console, losing all my progress. In Super Mario Sunshine I'm prompted to save as many as 10 times per level (about 8 seconds per) if I find blue coins. And cheeses n' rice, why the hell do you need to buy a slow ass memory card if you have an Xbox with a hard drive? Saving sucks donkey balls on every console. I don't know how it's gotten slower since the NES days when they put watch batteries in the cartridges. Forward ever, backward never!

Trite as it may seem, you can see gaming as a toy or as a serious thing. A console is a toy. You pick it up, you play it as it's intended, and you put it back. PC gaming is so much more. You can play the game as intended if you wish, but you can delve into the data, extend or cripple the game, improve the experience with an incremental upgrade, and you can alt-tab out to load up a web page for a hint. PC really isn't much more expensive than consoles, if at all, when you take the television into consideration, so I find that budget argument pretty thin.

Consoles are getting closer to PC with innovations like Wii and HDTV, but they're still a much more static medium than PC. You can settle for scaled-down games that can never be made to look better, or you can play on PC.

PC FTW!

Snakes on a plane, man. Snakes on a plane.

(see the original blog that started the hype)

The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and 70% being dark energy. The challenge for early-twentyfirst-century cosmology will actually be to understand the nature of these mysterious dark components. A beautiful new result illuminating (if you will) the dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 is an important step in this direction. (Heres the press release, and an article in the Chandra Chronicles.)

A prerequisite to understanding the dark sector is to make sure we are on the right track. Can we be sure that we havent been fooled into believing in dark matter and dark energy? After all, we only infer their existence from detecting their gravitational fields; stronger-than-expected gravity in galaxies and clusters leads us to posit dark matter, while the acceleration of the universe (and the overall geometry of space) leads us to posit dark energy. Could it perhaps be that gravity is modified on the enormous distance scales characteristic of these phenomena? Einsteins general theory of relativity does a great job of accounting for the behavior of gravity in the Solar System and astrophysical systems like the binary pulsar, but might it be breaking down over larger distances?

A departure from general relativity on very large scales isnt what one would expect on general principles. In most physical theories that we know and love, modifications are expected to arise on small scales (higher energies), while larger scales should behave themselves. But, we have to keep an open mind in principle, its absolutely possible that gravity could be modified, and its worth taking seriously.

Furthermore, it would be really cool. Personally, I would prefer to explain cosmological dynamics using modified gravity instead of dark matter and dark energy, just because it would tell us something qualitatively different about how physics works. (And Vera Rubin agrees.) We would all love to out-Einstein Einstein by coming up with a better theory of gravity. But our job isnt to express preferences, its to suggest hypotheses and then go out and test them.

The problem is, how do you test an idea as vague as modifying general relativity? You can imagine testing specific proposals for how gravity should be modified, like Milgroms MOND, but in more general terms we might worry that any observations could be explained by some modification of gravity.

But its not quite so bad there are reasonable features that any respectable modification of general relativity ought to have. Specifically, we expect that the gravitational force should point in the direction of its source, not off at some bizarrely skewed angle. So if we imagine doing away with dark matter, we can safely predict that gravity always be pointing in the direction of the ordinary matter. Thats interesting but not immediately helpful, since its natural to expect that the ordinary matter and dark matter cluster in the same locations; even if there is dark matter, its no surprise to find the gravitational field pointing toward the visible matter as well.

What we really want is to ta

You're missing the mechanism, hope this helps

I assume you are today's elected lockstep mouthpiece for rightwing newspeak such as this. Unfortunately, you lack basic skills in statistics. If we take the article's numbers as correct, then the peacetime military loses 1286 of 1.4 Million active troops per year, or a death rate of 0.0009. The War on Terror in Iraq cost the lives of 746 coalition troops in 2005, out of a force of about 133,000 for a death rate of 0.0056.

Hi, I've been studying poker bots for a year or so. I'm not a /. member but somebody brought this to my attention and I thought I would post some useful resources.

The Alberta folks are the world's leading (publicly known) authorities on poker AI. (There may be others who are using their knowledge to cheat at online poker, but they're not talking).

Here is the link to the Alberta web site:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/

(Note: you have scroll down a ways to the doc links).

If you want to read just one paper about computer poker, read "The Challenge of Poker". Here is a link (PDF warning):

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/Papers/AIJ02.pdf

Some of the Alberta guys spun off into a local company that makes an excellent software product, Poker Academy Pro:

http://www.poker-academy.com/poker-software/

This software written in Java and offers a programming API so you can plug your own bots into their game. The programming API has an online forum:

http://www.poker-academy.com/forums/viewforum.php? f=3

Here is the resources page of one of Alberta guys, now a senior developer working on Poker Academy:

http://spaz.ca/poker/

And here is a blog written by a guy who has some excellent LGPL code available (left side of page);

http://pokerforprogrammers.blogspot.com/

Note: do NOT use the version of this software on the Code Project - it is out of date and buggy - get the download from this blog.

There's lots of other stuff of variable quality...all the pages linked here are high-quality content in the sense that the authors have thought deeply about the AI problem and/or are very skilled programmers.

Enjoy,
Jeff