Slashdot Mirror

I've done a writeup on this very story topic on my site which you can read here at The Halting Point and you can read the original Slashdot post that I made that sparked my writing of that piece.

While I'd very much so appreciate the clicks, (even though I've made all of .07 through adsense!), to sum it up for those who don't want to make the jump....there are several levels of in-game advertising in terms of invasiveness. And you can view it as a spectrum. On the far left you have extremely uninvasive and even welcome additions such as sponsorship logos in Gran Turismo. It fits with the game world since the game world is simulating reality and they are expected in that type of game.

Then you have things like billboards in MMOs like Anarchy Online and City of Heroes that, while appropriate for the setting (a city with billboards), still annoy you a bit because its trying to transplant culture from one world (reality) into a made up world where those companies do not exist.

Then you have your extremely invasive product placement with crap like what Sprite pulled in the Matrix game, or what McDonalds pulled in The Sims Online. That is the stuff that pisses off gamers because it is a blatent slap in the face. It doesn't add ANYTHING to the game and in fact detracts from it...all that for $60.

The interesting thing is how advertisers are trying to work their way into some of the more dominant games where the majority of titles are fantasy based like WoW. In my story I wrote a bit about possible ideas for working product placement into those worlds, but it requires advertisers to be able to have the balls to poke some fun at themselves, which I doubt they'd ever do.

Honestly...in-game advertising is only going to get more abundant. Whether it becomes worse or not (ala the intraweb) depends on the so-called "gate-keepers" of the games who will have the final say over how much of a sell out they want their game to be.

I'd expect more corporate sponsored guilds and guild events, more added material (like the CS map Subway made), and other new things we haven't considered.

If it gets to the point though where the games are starting to majorly sacrifice playability and content for ad revenue though, customers will complain and run for the nearest competitor.

But he is in it up to his neck for the same reason Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are: he's an oil man. Nothing more and nothing less. Oil and oil shares are the only things he cares about and he's as happy as the rest of them to kill a few hundred or thousands (especially if they are foreigners) to get them.

This guy seemed to like it ok:

http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

Sweet mother of marry google x bot? Crawler

I am going to agree. Java is just too far behind. It's the new COBOL.

American programmers are moving away from it (those that know how to see the future at the bottom of the coffee mug) because they realize that doing java in a corporate job is being at the end of the chain in a 60+ man project with all the remotely creative decisions done by people before the programmers, and they are just implementers of badly-written 500 pages spec that absolutely lack any spark of brilliance, all the while fearing outsourcing by Cognizant and IBM Global Services (yes, India, China, and various sundry other countries) and fighting against newly-minted foreign-born H-1 Visa-holding programmers who think that $63,000/yr would just be quite satifactory and who are itching to take on any project and demonstrate to foggy-eyed managers how many more lines of code they can produce than said American Programmers.

Enter Ruby, Python, and the very esoteric language known as C, and many other beasts (see Factor): tools all for the Great American Hacker to weave magical dream machines that web-service, self-introspect, metacode themselves, and baffle any attempt at explanation but are Rather Tiny, Dastardly Clever and Entirely Fast Enough; coded in 4 days rather than 3 months (as promised) + another 9 months (because management can't see Sunk Costs when it stares them in the face)of which said programmer grandly pronounce, chest a-puffing: "I was instrumental in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Garguantuan multi-million dollar soul-crushing Monstruosity", would rather effacably mumble "I dabble in computers" and return to watching the "you got an f" veedub commercial on youtube as soon as fleet-footed managers have returned to their dens of power with doors and minds that close.

Forget .NET. Go with Python. It has features that .NET doesn't support yet. They do try (see IronPython), but the Python C implementation has been years in the making is the love child of some of the brightest out there. It's getting to be plenty fast for most tasks, and is so insanely easier to use than java that it's not even funny. Classes are namespaces. Think on that a bit. Then, go run amok in Ruby land, following Matz's fantasy. At last, embrace the Way of UNIX, as so eloquently expounded by none other than ESR.

Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old. It should be so much better by now. Python is the same age as linux, both 15-16 years old. They are more mature, more robust, more accepted and accepting.

Alas, many will claim that java and .Net have more robust libraries, constructs, and frameworks. I shall remind you all that the way of UNIX leads to simplicity and depth of understanding. See Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines. (for those who grok that, see Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature).

"Peer to Peer financing has been around for decades. It is called a Credit Union."

Existing Credit unions are in fact quite different than these new P2P efforts; credit unions generally:
    1. require membership (member of a trade union, church, etc),
    2. are geograpically regional, and
    3. don't require or enable any relationship between the lender and the borrower. (the credit union institution is the middleman.)

These new P2P internet internet lending ventures differ on all of these points. Have a look at http://www.kiva.org/ for an example of a startup that is already doing P2P direct lending across the globe. (of note: See their interesting dev blog as they scale up their site at http://kivachronicles.blogspot.com/ )

There are many organizations with roots in the Microfinance and Microcredit space ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit for a lot more info ) that have done similar things ( example: http://www.oikocredit.org/ ), with new ventures like Kiva and Prosper taking things to a whole new level on the web.

I was interested in that myself - it appears that for most things, the Intel graphics are significantly slower than the Radeon 9200 in the PPC Mac Mini (Benchmarks and here)

i think this is a great idea. one of my biggest annoyances with writing java apps has been that if i ever wanted to release my programs and didn't want to make any assumptions about my users (mainly that they had any version of java already installed on their system let a lone a level of java that matched my own level) i would have to deploy a very heavy 50MB JRE with my 100K app... i think with the opening of the java source, much like in the linux world, someone will repackage the JRE and just keep the very bare-bones essentials so that instead of deploying a 50MB+100K apps i can deploy a 5MB+100k app.

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/

And, of course, these new Apple Macs will again have an in-built hardware DRM watchdog chip -- or "Fritz chip". Thanks Apple.

"This subtle change doesn't destroy the shackles of our broken patent system, but it certainly loosens the bonds that tie innovation down. And perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that the Supreme Court understands how oppressive the current legal system has become with respect to patent litigation. This decision is, perhaps, a portent of how the Court might feel about several other important patent issues it is schedulued to hear."

From Right to Create

Yes, we agree on many points. And I'm glad we managed to keep this civil. The points we disagree on are rather big though:

I do not believe that the death of tens of thousands of civilians can be justified by claiming to be bringing democracy.

I do not believe that you can force democracy on a country. All you can achive that way is a pseudo colony with a pseudo democracy. The kind of situation leading to the current state of Africa.

I do not believe that Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, nor that Iraq was closely tied to Al Quaeda, nor that Iraq was any kind of threat to the US.
I do believe that the "intelligence failures" were 100% intentional.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-15936 07,00.html
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/sp ecial_packages/iraq/intelligence/11901380.htm
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/sp ecial_packages/iraq/intelligence/12995512.htm

I do not believe that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian reasons.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
This count is most likely closer to the truth:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11 674.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/05/12/wirq12.xml
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2162249, 00.html
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1 186519,00.html
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArti cle.asp?articleID=8218

The list is endless but I'll stop here.

I believe that Bush does and will continue to do exactly whatever he feels will benefit him, with no concern what so ever for how many dies for his gain. Not that you actually need anything but his actions and his statements to prove this, but here are more links:
http://downingstreetmemo.com/archive/2004-10-31-Ho ustonChron-Herskowitz/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12 885.htm

I believe that Bush is now planning his next war of aggression.
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&trh=20 060511&hn=33036
http://www.rense.com/general71/tdarg.htm
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/05/ us-feverishly-works-to-frame-iran_13.html
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/839133.sh tml
http://english.people.com.cn/200605/13/eng20060513 _265252.html
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Condoleeza_Rice_ admits_she_responded_to_0509.html

Sure: http://googlemenus.blogspot.com/

Hams please read: The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology: News: DS2 200 Mbps BPL technology is working with ARRL Laboratory to work out BROADBAND OVER POWER LINES Interference Issues !!!!

read some more:
The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology

Hams please read: The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology: News: DS2 200 Mbps BPL technology is working with ARRL Laboratory to work out BROADBAND OVER POWER LINES Interference Issues !!!!

read some more:
The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology

jus read the BPL blog UPDATES: The new 200 Mbps BROADBAND over POWER LINES Technology: Google, GS, SENSUS,TXU, GE, EarthLink put $230M in Current Communications ~ 10 Mbps Symmetrical speed Broadband over Power Lines Internet service !!!

Live CD linux is the way to go...

I have tried/tested Kanotix and PCLinuxOS, both do multimedia very well. Mostly, I like to listen to internet radio stations on ShoutCast.
Now, when it gets right down to productivity, I had to make my own knoppix remaster. I have older equipment, and some newer, so I stuck with the 2.4.26 kernel in knoppix 3.4.

What do I do with it? Maintain web pages, keep up with the news, do a little graphics work with Gimp. For the news, I packed a bunch of RSS feeds in Opera, 13 in all, and just to keep those who use Mozilla Firefox happy, I put some on that toolbar also.

My favorite applications are EmelFM and SciTE, which I put in the remaster, and enjoy using.
Here is my (long and detailed) Getting Started Guide, so you can see what I have been up to.

Also have a blog, with some screenshots there. I have lots of applications that I put together:
This livecd linux can switch between several built-in mouse cursor themes in seconds, has a dial-up wizard of sorts, can copy itself to any hard drive partition for remastering purposes, and has an automated remastering application that takes a lot of work off whoever is doing that. Leaves just the fun part, adding or removing applications
Just asks one question, which hard drive partition is the "master copy" located in. Answer that, and the system does the rest, your iso is ready soon (depending on speed of box) for burning to CD. You'll have your own customized operating system!
I have a Wallpaper Control Center that can easily handle the saving of downloaded (from skins.be, of course) wallpapers in the configs.tbz, so they can be restored, and zoomed to fit on the desktop to suit the user. Allows you to handle the downloaded image files immediately, so you get desktop wallpaper right now. Built-in wizards to help you with any problems. Once fixed, you have your wallpaper applied.
Lots of other fun features in that application. Many scripts had to be made to go behind the wallpaper interface. Same thing for the mouse cursor theme setup. Nobody else has that, you are stuck with a default cursor, probably too small, and hard to see on laptops. No so with mine.
Also have a front end for XMMS, so internet radio connections can be made in seconds. Click on a station (only the best are preconfigured), and the music starts playing right now.
The system is protected by a preconfigured Guarddog Firewall, (can be changed) so the user does not have to do anything but surf the web, send and receive E-Mail, and do FTP, with the firewall in place as the system boots.
I have the /ramdisk "df" down to 1% on a 256 MB box, as all web apps load their home directory configuration just before they start. Most remove it on the way out, so the /ramdisk use remains low.
I sure have tried to put a lot of things in this livecd linux, to give Windows users something they could use as an alternative OS, especially if Windows gets where it won't boot.
I can't imagine anybody wanting to do "online banking" with Windows. I have Opera set up to completely delete the entire home directory files when it exits, and I crash-proofed Opera, also. I prefer Opera when I work on web pages, and like for it to stay up and running while I get things done. Here's a sample. Opera and SciTE make it easy to create/maintain pages like that. Wonder how they do that in Windows?
At least you have to give us linux folks credit for trying to provide an alternative OS, anyway.

Bottom line, the Nixon administration went as far as they could with the technology available to them. It is also worth pointing out that quite a few members of the current administration worked in the Nixon administration, most notably Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

I was going to say, with hundrends of million telephone numbers up for sale for anyone to find information on, why here why now and why this program? But then I read this article, and of course its the media who's concerned projecting onto the populace. And then it all made sense.

There has been a media uproar that just didn't take hold on the populace when it was reported earlier this month that the government agencies were posing as citizens to gain the information. It isn't admissible to the court, but does give good leads and they can always get a warrant later. And it seems people didn't care.

Whether or not I'm comfortable with my phone conversation data being up for sale to the public or government, the uproar makes more sense now. It isn't about national security it is about protecting anonymous sources -- for the media. While I have some reaction to being jerked around by them I'll just continue to take a calm look at what is going on and decide for myself. Now more than ever.

As a desktop Linux user since 1994, and the author of Manning Press's forthcoming "Desktop Linux with Ubuntu", I've spent a lot of time thinking about the viability of Linux on the desktop and who exactly the target audience is for desktop Linux. This has been a topic of some debate with my editor at Manning.

Let's note a couple of things about Mr. Golden's article. First, he's clearly not a technical guy at all, as several misstatements in his article reveal:

• He confuses a distribution with an operating system
• He talks of "Internet browsing" when he really means "Web browsing"; Internet browsing pretty much went out with Gopher
• He says "I couldn't transfer, via email or a disk, some complicated word-processor and spreadsheet files between my Linux system at home and Microsoft Windows on my work PC" which of course isn't what he means. The complexity of a document has nothing to do with its transferability, and in fact later in the article he says that he could transfer, he just couldn't preserve all the formatting from OpenOffice to MS Office
• He says "hacking" when he means "cracking"; that's OK -- just about every journalist on the planet makes this mistake.

I point these remarks out not by way of criticism, but by way of setting context. Mr. Golden is a classic end user, someone who has no in-depth technical understanding of the systems he is using, but someone who, by and large, is self-admining his systems.

Second: note the remarkable advances he mentions in the course of the article. Think, for a moment, to the state of Linux 5 years ago, and then think about these comments:

• "Installation went quickly and, for the most part, smoothly. All six systems recognized my disk drives, cable modem and wireless mouse. There's no need to dump Windows when putting in any of the Linux distributions, as long as there's enough room on the computer's hard drive. After installation, you simply select whether to launch Windows or Linux each time you start the computer." In other words, installation, dynamic repartitioning with data loss, and dual boot setup of the boot manager were all things the installer accomplished without the user having to know very much at all; and these tasks were accomplished seamlessly in six different Linux distributions.
• "Basic tasks like printing, email and Internet browsing worked easily."
• "The Linux systems could make sense for users who just want to send and receive email and surf the Web without the need for multimedia programs, or to perform home-office tasks without a lot of interaction with Microsoft systems."

While Mr. Golden did note a number of hardware compatibility problems, I tend to downplay those in the context of this comparison. As others on /. have noted, anyone buying a white box computer with no OS installed and hoping that Windows XP would "just work" with all of its components would no doubt be equally disappointed. Either do the comparison on the basis of installing Windows XP from scratch, or do the comparison on the basis of a computer with Linux pre-installed. Anything else is comparing pears and oranges.

Mr. Golden's greatest difficulty was with incompatibility between OpenOffice and MS Office when it came to complex documents or spreadsheets. This is not surprising, since these are Mr. Golden's professional tools. And the compatibility that needs to be there simply isn't there. If your spreadsheets involve pivot tables or embedded charts, don't expect good results when moving back and forth between OpenOffice and MS Office. If your word processing

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0412.html#11 http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-com pared-with-diebold.html This subject came up before, on cryptogram. I wrote a reply (first link above), referring a pretty nice paper (second link above). Summary: the Indian EVMs are much better, as much for non-technical reasons as for technical reasons!

like this one
http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com/2006/05/bon-echo- aka-firefox-2-alpha-2-review.html
if you want to link to an article of a blog and not just point to the main page...

I have started a new web project and looked at RoR. Having done an app with Tapestry/Spring/Hibernate, I was sick of all the work one has to do to bring up a bunch of views in a browser and then persist results. I love RoR and Ruby for all the reasons mentioned in TFA. Note - I don't like the pluralisation default, but one can easily turn it off by setting the following in config/environment.rb:

# Include your application configuration below
ActiveRecord::Base.pluralize_table_names = false

There were two scalability concerns I had about RoR:

(1) Ruby is interpreted and 'slow' - however, the JRuby team (http://headius.blogspot.com/) is working on running Ruby within a JVM (currently interpreted, but they are starting on a compiler). When they get to 1.0, the compiler won't be as good as Sun's, but it will probably be "good enough"

(2) RoR uses the Active Record Pattern and Hibernate uses the Data Mapper Pattern (http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article. tss?l=RailsHibernate). The Data Mapper Pattern is almost certainly more efficient when implemented well (as Hibernate does). The coolest thing about Hibernate is that it is much more efficient than I am without a big effort on the persistence side, and I am concerned that Active Record will not be nearly as good. However, what are the odds that someone (or some group of people) will work on implementing a persistence solution within Rails that uses the Data Mapper Pattern? Pretty good, I would say. Once again, it probably won't be as good as Gavin King's work, but it will be "good enough". And if someone else does not do it, maybe I will start the project.

Given the above and the speed with which one can develop in RoR, the choice was obvious, to go with Ruby and Rails.

Better article here.

The actual draft legislation hasn't even been released, yet alone enacted, so there are a lot of grey areas.

Format shifting is allowed, but in effect it's only for CDs/vinyl/audio cassettes. They say they'll be monitoring the situation with DVDs, so that might be legalised in a year or two (i.e., once all the cool kids are already routinely watching copies on their iPod Videos the way they play CDs now). The Q&A document explicitly says that software is excluded, so you're out of luck if you want to transfer those Apple II programs off a type of media that hasn't been made in a decade. We also don't yet know precisely what is included under "format shift": they've said that you can't just make a backup copy of a CD to another CD, say, but not whether that includes ISO disc images or other lossless transcoding.

There are various other copyright problems right now which, going by their talking points, it doesn't address -- things like search engine image thumbnails and the Google Library project.

Time shifting is allowed, but you can only watch the program once -- no taping shows to keep. A family of five can't watch a taped program at different times. That particular idiocy is completely unenforceable, but puts us right back where we were before in terms of half the country routinely committing violations.

They say that uploading your format-shifted music to the internet will be illegal, but without enough details to say whether that includes online backup/storage/search services like Xdrive or Google Desktop Search. Again, we'll have to wait for the legislation to see.

The nastiest thing is that they're making it easier for copyright holders to sue, specifically by granting the courts powers to impose greater fines and penalties on infringers. I fully expect a wave of lawsuits from ARIA against grandmothers who don't own computers, etc., just as in the US. Bad news.

>"You're deluded, dude. You must have missed the slashdot article a few days ago about >the polling results that show 63% of Americans support the NSA operations."

You are referring to the Washington Posts slanted "snap poll" of only 500 respondents.
Newseeek has conducted a larger poll since with proper methodology and has found:

41% say necessary tool, 53% say goes too far.

Atrios link

In any case, the extent of the violation of my privacy and my rights guaranteed by the constitution are not measured by counting snouts.

Actually GNOME has generally the same features as KDE, but it lacks the graphical widgets and controls to customize certain aspects. Most of GNOME customization is done through the included preferences, although gnome's gconf-2 editor will let you do the rest. While it is true that KDE is probably more advanced, GNOME does have the extra polish. KDE can also be made to have this so called polish too, but we're talking about desktop use here. People want a desktop out of the box with a decent looking desktop, well organized, and not extreme on ram usage. GNOME is chiefly based on C, although it does have Python and Perl integration also. I really would love the Portland project to work out between the two projects. As far as commercial applications, Alsa needs to always be a plugin or second bet, because if you drop OSS support, you are dropping compatibility for Solaris and *BSD. I can run Skype under FreeBSD with linux-compat-8 fine, but if Alsa is the only option, FreeBSD kernel developers will have to pump out a kernel module to translate the calls. Right now it's essentially native. There are a few things missing from BSD on the desktop which I outlined in BSDtalk #43 with Will Backman. Visit http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/ and subscribe if you want to keep in touch with BSD developers, users, and enthusiasts. Mac OS X will always have the edge over Linux and BSD because of the patenting issues, so it's very moot comparing them. Of course XGL and GNOME are far more flexiable then Aqua to customize, but there is definitely a limit which should be imposed to reduce confusion, when it comes to knobs and gizmos.

Enjoy!

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/conroe-perfor mance-claim-being-busted.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/intel-exec-do es-guerilla.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/clovertown-sc ores-revealed.html

Enjoy!

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/conroe-perfor mance-claim-being-busted.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/intel-exec-do es-guerilla.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/clovertown-sc ores-revealed.html

Enjoy!

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/conroe-perfor mance-claim-being-busted.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/intel-exec-do es-guerilla.html

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/04/clovertown-sc ores-revealed.html

Stephen McArthur in his Orwell's Grave blog notes that the NYT article written yesterday (that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility sent a fax on Wednesday stating they could no longer look into the warrantless eavesdropping program of the NSA because the NSA wouldn't give them the security clearance) gives evidence that "for the first time in its history, security clearances have been denied to OPR personnel by the National Security Agency, itself," and that "The Bush administration can take credit for the first-ever refusal of this kind."

Am I the only one who can't understand why newfound "Intel Apple fans" are the only ones thrilled about running Windows ?!?

You are. We live in a world where one sometimes needs or wants a Windows app. Emulation can be slow (PPC emulating x86), file compatibility can be spotty, ... Not having to own two machines is a huge improvement. Dual booting is fine for now, virtualization would be better still.

After decades of Mac zealotry ?!? Even MS's own employees have a thing called Mini Microsoft http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ .. Somebody must pay hard cash to keep up the good blogging of Macs running XP ...

No. Pick a site that has a World of Warcraft dual boot showdown, WoW on OSX/GL vs WoW on XP/D3D. XP/D3D kicks butt (for now), no more having to normalize the two computers, one computer running both OSs, a far fairer comparison. Comparisons like this generate a lot of organic grass roots excitement. Comparisons like this and being able to coneniently run formerly troublesome software is something worth getting excited about.

The Apple world is quite Orwellian. Yesterday's "enemy" is today's partner, get used to it. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, they've all flipped sides at least once. If you are going to be associated with Apple, get used to this and learn to go with it.

For those that actually read the article, the link to Flake's research on this is actually good, meatier reading (though not much more meaty). Granted, it's for another company, not Microsoft, but I imagine that Microsoft will try some similar approaches.

Basically, at Flake's company they have a tool that tells the degree of similarity between two programs. I'm not sure of the actual mechanics of this (if it's 1-by-1 instruction comparison, on a functional level, etc), but it enables them to build taxonomies of malware programs. Trees of programs that are variants of eachother, if related; separate trees if not. It somewhat reminds me of stuff in bioinformatics, though my knowledge of that area is extremely weak.

It's neat stuff if you're interested in that sort of thing.

The rest of you all can go back to bashing Microsoft.

I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that ethanol is a boondoggle.

I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that ethanol is a boondoggle.

I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that ethanol is a boondoggle.

I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that ethanol is a boondoggle.

Am I the only one who can't understand why newfound "Intel Apple fans" are the only ones thrilled about running Windows ?!? After decades of Mac zealotry ?!? Even MS's own employees have a thing called Mini Microsoft http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ .. Somebody must pay hard cash to keep up the good blogging of Macs running XP ...

It seems obvious to me that the Diebold machines will NEVER be secure. They are utterly too complex (and expensive) for the simple task that they are given.

In order for a voting system to provide a sense of validity, it must be simple enough that even the layperson can understand how the entire system works. Replace acryonms TCP/IP, SQL, SSL, PCMCIA, USB, and WinCE with the acronyms ROM, EEPROM, and PIC and you've simplified the system by many orders of magnitude. Not to mention the fact that the system would actually be auditable. Add a failsafe into the overall system that only allows each election worker a small number of votes that he/she could possibly tamper with and we're getting somewhere. Add a reciept printing device that has no hooks into the vote tallying mechanism and we're there.

The Indian model is a step in the right direction. It should be emulated and expanded (by adding the paper audit trail).

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol.

That's what the mainstream media would like you to think.

This is not my blog, btw. It's by an engineer who has done the math

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol.

That's what the mainstream media would like you to think.

This is not my blog, btw. It's by an engineer who has done the math

If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol.

That's what the mainstream media would like you to think.

This is not my blog, btw. It's by an engineer who has done the math

One service they're not offering.

But never fear:

http://lastgoogle.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-last geist.html

Let me make this easier. Remember we all live in the same world and science is a tool set we can all use openly.

I'll pull out a few of the links you didn't find at the page I refered you to. Go back and click links for many more citations in the complete discussion:

The links from the discussion of water vapor start with the new abstract:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005.../2005GL023 624.shtml

There's a long discussion with links to press reports discussing exactly the sort of error you complain about and demonstrate. With charts and graphics.

There's a summary below that with links to references (in the original each citation is a HTML link to the original)

".... It is impossible to understand the greenhouse effect without thoroughly understanding this point. Even the authors of Phillipona et al. seem to be a little fuzzy on this matter. They seem to think they are looking at the same water vapor feedback discussed in various review articles on the subject (e.g. Held and Soden (Annu. Rev. Energy Environ., 25, 441- 475. (2000)), Pierrehumbert et al. ("On the Relative Humidity of the Earth's Atmosphere" in The General Circulation, T. Schneider and A. Sobel, eds. Princeton U. Press 2005,) Pierrehumbert (Subtropical water vapor as a mediator of rapid global climate change. . in Clark PU, Webb RS and Keigwin LD eds. Mechanisms of global change at millennial time scales. American Geophysical Union:Washington, D.C. Geophysical Monograph Series 112, 394 pp1999), and the RealClimate article on the subject). but they are not. I shall try to explain...."

On your other points, the models are testable, and tested, and the statisticians do this in public. I'm not going to try to explain it on slashdot. You can look it up. Look at the places you read that models are not reliable -- do they give you references? Who tells you these things and can you check what they say?

On your final point, this is a common confusion. Weather and climate are not the same thing; there's a deep literature on the difference in how these are studied.

If you'd prefer a shorter and less academic summary on water vapor, this page is kept up to date:

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/01/water-va por-is-almost-all-of.html

First thing in the article:"Yes, we are still all about search". So THAT is what google is! I almost forgot!

Submitted: Thursday May 11, 2006, @09:38AM
Rejected : Thursday May 11, 2006, @09:42AM

Google has unveiled two new search tools in it's growing inventory of products. Today Google released Google Trends and Google Coop. More information is available at their respective faq pages. While Google Trends seems like a variation of Google Zeitgeist, Google Coop seems like an effort to actively incorporate user feedback into their search engine. No word about this in the Google Blog yet.

This information can already be bought from telephone companies by anyone. The NSA asked for and recieved the information. They didn't demand it from the companies or force them to hand it over. QWest even refused to do so without a warrant and the others could have done the same.

This is a story more about companies handing out personal information then what the NSA is up to.

See:

AMERICAblog just bought General Wesley Clark's cell phone records for $89.95

I've never emailed Cmdr Taco before, but I'm tempted to now. He wouldn't notice me, and I'd be deleted along with thousands of others with the subject Happy Birthday Old(er) Man.

Taco should really have a blog don't you think? How could a 30 year old in the tech industry not have a blog page? ;)
  Better rush to get http://oldishman.blogspot.com/

Ooops, it's already taken :-)

And google code jam in India http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-years- india-code-jam.html tempted "15,000 entrants" Wow .. !!

lol - it's almost like that....is anyone even releasing product on Win CE anymore with Windows Mobile 5.0 being such a defacto these days.

Also is anyone aware of the new entirely Java OS for mobile phones from www.Savaje.com ?

They are launching the first of their mobile hardware solutions at JavaOne next week in SF along with the sdk for your code.

Basically the idealogy behind savaje is that anyone can build java applications that will run on your phone today right now and best of all be able to interface with applications and devices over the data stream via the internet.

more info here http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/javaon e.html

I'll be on the Savaje stand at JavaOne (working for an as yet un-named 3rd party development partner)

Cheers,

Dean Collins
http://www.cognation.net/

you forgot to mention the book publishers :). for an excellent writeup head to

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/01/remo ving-middleman-part-1.html

"Consumers need a super sonic jet just about as much as they need a 300kph Ferrari."

There are enough consumers who "need" a Ferrari to keep them in business. Supersonic flight may be similar. The average college kid flying home for the holidays or family going on vacation isn't going to be able to afford a ticket on the next-generation SST, but there will be people who can. Instead of trying to be Ford and investing all the money required to develop a 200 to 300 passenger SST that will never be paid back, I think that the airlines and aircraft companies (and their customers) would be better served to try and be Ferrari and focus on a smaller investment in a smaller plane that caters to organizations and people who can afford it. One day, hopefully, the average John Q. Public will be able to afford 300km/hr cars and SST tickets... but it won't be in time for the next generation airliner.

Here is my suggestion, a small quiet supersonic business/commuter jet: http://ideasinprogress.blogspot.com/2005/06/japane sefrench-son-of-concorde-vs.html

But then maybe these aerospace engineers are smarter than we give them credit for. They don't have to worry whether performance of the jet will pay back the huge development cost if they can dupe the taxpayers into funding the development for them. Perhaps the jet doesn't even need to be built for them to make money if they can get the gov't to give them suitibly lucrative R&D contracts out of the NASA and JAXA budgets. It probably is a bad business deal for society in general and if the aerospace companies had to pay for the development cost out of their own pocket they would never be able to justify it economically, but thanks to gov't meddling it might be very profitable for a few well connected companies. You see, politicians know much better where your money should be invested than that mean old marketplace.