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Paolo Attivissimo's blog provides plenty of documented, photo and other evidence that the new Macs do have TPM chips in them. He started out skeptical but soon got plenty of pictures of motherboards from the new Macs. They plainly have Infineon TPM chips in them. It's not clear what if anything they are being used for, but there is no doubt that Intel Macs have TPMs.

Snakes on a Plane comes out in 2006.

see also http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/snakes-on-mo therfucking-plane.html

from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

Then keep an eye out on Ubuntu server. The latest alpha release has an "Install LAMP" option.

http://loktarogar.blogspot.com/2006/04/ubuntu-serv er-hot-hot-hot.html

Another Comment from http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/

A question from Rob "Xemu" Fermier regarding the lag in scrolling gestures.

[Rob] Very cool technology and a nice approach for demonstrating it. Using contemporary examples like Google Earth and Warcraft 3 is an excellent way of taking relatively abstract concepts and making them real for people. The gap between academia and "real world" software development is often pretty huge and it's great to see more approaches like this that can bridge that gap.

[Ed] Thank you. One of the things that I like most about my research is that computer games such as Warcraft III allow it to appeal to a larger audience. That is, my research is not only of interest to academics, but to the general public.

From http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/ I've been recently reading some forums commenting on work that I did at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Most of them are postive (there's usually a couple 'If your system could play some game I'd wet my pants' type comments) . A few conspiracy theorists seem to think that my demo is too good to be true - and someone calls me to task on my Warcraft skills.

First, I'd like to dispel the myth: this work is NOT fake, if you'd like to see exactly how we built this system please read our research paper. When you look under the hood you'll see that this system is really just a simple conversion of gestures and speech to standard keyboard and mouse commands.

Second, people commenting about how this system is not as good as a keyboard and a mouse are totally missing the point of this research. It's not about being more efficient than a keyboard and mouse but rather this work is about making actions public so that others can
double check to ensure the best outcomes.

Many things in life are not like WarCraft III where you can die and play again. Think about safety critical applications such as real life military command and control or air traffic control. Here the collaborative decisions have a direct impact on people's lives. By making actions public on the tabletop others can monitor your activity and ensure that you are doing the right thing.

Warcraft III is really designed as an example of a military command and control situation rather than a replacement for the keyboard and the mouse in the game.

Today it's like we each buy the right to an island, but there's no ships going to any other island--you're stuck there, unable to interact with the rest of the world. How do we build the ships? Make every form of communication open. This includes all networking protocols (among them, instant messaging and VoIP) and file formats. These are the ships, and if we make them open and free everyone will be able to stay on their island of choice but never be cut off from the rest of the world.

I remastered DSL before I decided to go with Knoppix 3.4 and remaster that.
Mine runs well on older machines also. One test that all livecd linux must pass 100% is the "testcd" one. Otherwise, you'll have problems booting on many machines. Mine boots on all boxes except the AMD 64 ones. I stay with the 2.4 kernel, and use it all day long on 200 mmx boxes. I moved the minimum ram to 128, if that or less, the "swap file configuration" comes up during bootup, to try and get the user to set up a swap. A lot of the older boxes have 95/98 on them, so that works out well.
To help out the older boxes with limited ram, I have the /ramdisk usage down to 1% as measured by "df" on a 256 MB box. Opera 8.54, for instance, loads a preconfigured ~/.opera into /ramdisk at startup, and then removes it on exit. Opera has 12 RSS feeds built in, which fill with stories in a couple of minutes on dialup. You can disconnect then, and read the summaries in Opera. Firefox has RSS also, and it loads it's ~/.mozilla at browser startup also. Same with Flock, but no feeds there. At last count, I have 40 custom made scripts to work with my remaster.
DSL automatically saves your configuration at shutdown, I don't do that, for security reasons. (yours). One rule with livecd linux is to try and keep as much off the hard drive as possible, just run from the CD. Can do "tohd" however.
I have a blog, and try to tell exactly what is going on with my livecd linux, and not hide anything.
My default WM is IceWM, also KDE, Fluxbox, twm available, and fully configured. I have 8 cursor themes, select one and have it running in 15 seconds. All bigger than the default Knoppix cursor theme.
So, any mention of "older computers/linux" catches my eye, I've been working on that problem for quite a while.
Check out my screenshots, in signature below, and the Getting Started Guide.

I remastered DSL before I decided to go with Knoppix 3.4 and remaster that.
Mine runs well on older machines also. One test that all livecd linux must pass 100% is the "testcd" one. Otherwise, you'll have problems booting on many machines. Mine boots on all boxes except the AMD 64 ones. I stay with the 2.4 kernel, and use it all day long on 200 mmx boxes. I moved the minimum ram to 128, if that or less, the "swap file configuration" comes up during bootup, to try and get the user to set up a swap. A lot of the older boxes have 95/98 on them, so that works out well.
To help out the older boxes with limited ram, I have the /ramdisk usage down to 1% as measured by "df" on a 256 MB box. Opera 8.54, for instance, loads a preconfigured ~/.opera into /ramdisk at startup, and then removes it on exit. Opera has 12 RSS feeds built in, which fill with stories in a couple of minutes on dialup. You can disconnect then, and read the summaries in Opera. Firefox has RSS also, and it loads it's ~/.mozilla at browser startup also. Same with Flock, but no feeds there. At last count, I have 40 custom made scripts to work with my remaster.
DSL automatically saves your configuration at shutdown, I don't do that, for security reasons. (yours). One rule with livecd linux is to try and keep as much off the hard drive as possible, just run from the CD. Can do "tohd" however.
I have a blog, and try to tell exactly what is going on with my livecd linux, and not hide anything.
My default WM is IceWM, also KDE, Fluxbox, twm available, and fully configured. I have 8 cursor themes, select one and have it running in 15 seconds. All bigger than the default Knoppix cursor theme.
So, any mention of "older computers/linux" catches my eye, I've been working on that problem for quite a while.
Check out my screenshots, in signature below, and the Getting Started Guide.

Last year that was a link to a blog entry called "Brazil: the hearth of FOSS" on LinuxToday talking about Brazil standing behind Linux and the good that it was doing to the poor neighborhoods. So I decided to post a comment on it, the first one actually, saying the same thing you said it here. Amazed me that most people just didn't really understand a thing about what goes on or what they really need in those poor neighborhoods.

I think your comment is one generation off. The current generation is all about sneaking in links with referrals, talking about their own blog, or pointing to some site they want people to join. They may make a few good points (or copy and paste some good points from an unreferenced website) but then degrade in to just trying to get you to click on their blog so they can get more AdSense revenue. Apparently listing a website in their settings is not good enough so they have to put a link or three (to the same page) in every post too. You can read more about it at my blog http://brilliant-corners.blogspot.com/

Actually you can't read more about it at my blog, it is totally unrelated, I just felt I really needed to be a hypocrite in this post :p.

There's certainly a way to help with PDFs, namely not to use the plugin at all! You can get Firefox to open the file externally by default. Details on my blog. Alternatively, use the PDF download extension.

What is a patent supposed to be?

A patent is supposed to be a well defined property right that gives an owner (not necessarily inventor) a monopoly, or significant competitive advantage, on a device. It should be clear what the patent covers, enforceable, innovative and temporary.

Why give monopoly power?

Innovation has positive externalities. Meaning it benefits more than just the creator. A negative externality means that it is under-produced. To get around this problem, we give away temporary monopolies so that creators capture more (not all) of the benefits they produce for others. The temporary monopoly with the new invention makes people better off than not having the invention would.

The trade off is that the workings of the invention must be public. Any expert in the field should be able to use your patent application to recreate your invention. That way, when the invention falls into the public domain, everyone may benefit. This is why the government offers patents.

What are patents currently?

Patents today are the right to TRY to exclude others from using a property right granted exclusively to you. They are not often innovative (prior art issues)1, often held invalid and most of the time not very well defined.

Why do we care?

This is actually a great question to always ask. So patents aren't doing what they were designed to do. So what? I argue there are many problems. Patents are designed to incent innovation. They may in fact discourage it (as we'll see later). Legitimate patents may be invalidated and the uncertainty with not knowing the validity of a patent has negative externalities (so it causes harm to many, so we have too much of it). Patents may deter entry into markets, so monopolies can be extended. Patents may harm consumer welfare. All these things are bad.

Why are we so far off?

In brief, because of a poor incentive system. It was designed just fine, but some problems crept up, weren't fixed and it has gotten worse. Don't believe me? Here are some statistics. In the United States there are 350,000 patents filed each year, and 200,000 accepted. That isn't to say that 150,000 are rejected, there is a backlog of about 750,000 patents as of 2004. Does anyone think there is that much innovation going on in the United States?

Over-Patenting

One of the biggest problems is over patenting. As the previous statistics should show, we are filing and receiving way too many patents. I don't know what the right number is, but we'll see that 350,000 a year must be too high.

Over patenting is bad for a lot of reasons. Worthless patents swamp valuable ones in the examination process. Which patents are worth carefully examining? Patents on non-innovative ideas are terribly harmful to competition. The value of a patent (and enforceability) is diluted with frivolous patents.

Problems with Filing a Patent

Because patents are first come first receive, there is the incentive to file early to beat out competitors. Many patents are filed just in case a discovery turns out to matter in the future. If the inventor (usually a firm) doesn't know the value of a patent, there really is no way the PTO can know.

The PTO bears the burden of proof. Meaning your application is considered valid until proven invalid. Patents are relatively inexpensive to file for (the fees differ on a number of factors) but since the PTO spends an average of 18 hours on each patent, they are relatively expensive to handle fo

It's worth noting that most mathematicians already think ideas like Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information are a load of hooey, despite the appeals people like Dembski and Behe make to having made innovative breakthroughs in these areas:

One good blog on this subject I've found is Good Math, Bad Math, and some posts relevant to this topic are:

-CSI is basically incoherent: if you translate the definition of CSI into non-obscure words, it essentially boils down to either "something that contains a lot of information, but doesn't contain a lot of information" or a definition for which EVERY piece of information is specified:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-last-stab -at-dembski-vacuousness.html

-IC, when translated into math, makes no sense. We can actually PROVE in math that there is no general proof that some system is the simplest possible (which IC requires), much like we can prove that we can never solve the halting problem.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/problem-with- irreducible-complexity.html

-Even if they did make sense, CSI and IC basically conflict with each other, arguing contradictory things:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/conflict-betw een-ic-and-it-arguments.html

It's worth noting that most mathematicians already think ideas like Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information are a load of hooey, despite the appeals people like Dembski and Behe make to having made innovative breakthroughs in these areas:

One good blog on this subject I've found is Good Math, Bad Math, and some posts relevant to this topic are:

-CSI is basically incoherent: if you translate the definition of CSI into non-obscure words, it essentially boils down to either "something that contains a lot of information, but doesn't contain a lot of information" or a definition for which EVERY piece of information is specified:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-last-stab -at-dembski-vacuousness.html

-IC, when translated into math, makes no sense. We can actually PROVE in math that there is no general proof that some system is the simplest possible (which IC requires), much like we can prove that we can never solve the halting problem.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/problem-with- irreducible-complexity.html

-Even if they did make sense, CSI and IC basically conflict with each other, arguing contradictory things:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/conflict-betw een-ic-and-it-arguments.html

It's worth noting that most mathematicians already think ideas like Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information are a load of hooey, despite the appeals people like Dembski and Behe make to having made innovative breakthroughs in these areas:

One good blog on this subject I've found is Good Math, Bad Math, and some posts relevant to this topic are:

-CSI is basically incoherent: if you translate the definition of CSI into non-obscure words, it essentially boils down to either "something that contains a lot of information, but doesn't contain a lot of information" or a definition for which EVERY piece of information is specified:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-last-stab -at-dembski-vacuousness.html

-IC, when translated into math, makes no sense. We can actually PROVE in math that there is no general proof that some system is the simplest possible (which IC requires), much like we can prove that we can never solve the halting problem.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/problem-with- irreducible-complexity.html

-Even if they did make sense, CSI and IC basically conflict with each other, arguing contradictory things:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/conflict-betw een-ic-and-it-arguments.html

Not really that surprising... I personally know 2-3 worms/viruses that infected more than one Operation Systems. http://www.kudige.blogspot.com/

For what it's worth . . . Ron Silliman's 1981 book Tjanting uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of sentences in each paragraph, starting with 1 and ending with 4,181; and the mid-century French Oulipo group is famous for its application of mathematical and other formal restraints to the production of poems.

"> reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be
>adding to man-made global warming.

Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.

I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.

I imagine some element of the ISP industry is complicit with these spammers in the way that banks don't seem particularly interested in stopping telemarketer scams.

As illustrated here:

http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/

Not to plug my blog, but I recently wrote about patent abuse. The problem isn't so much unethical companies, the problem is that the incentives to patent are all wrong.

Microsoft is remarkably clean of patent/copyright abuse. Most other companies have less than perfect records. Even companies we see as victimized (ex - Apple sued by creative over 'heirarchal displays' and the Apple record label) have sued others (ex - apple again suing over trade secrets and tried to get gag orders for blogs).

Yeah the Mac fans will bury this comment (just like criticizing Linux is dangerous on /.) but the patent system does need some reforming.

...than it could be drawing by hand.

Case in point is Brian Denham's Killbox comic. The work is amazing.

Regardless of which method is actually used, it takes a mastery of the art to produce great work. Understanding is probably the greater part of any art, the rest is actual technique. You can't just sit down with Illustrator or Draw and whip something out unless you understand the theories and concepts needed to make eye-catching drawings.

what about AdWords?

sorry, link should have been this.

• The Discovery of Global Warming
  
• Real Climate
  
• A Few Things Ill-Considered
  

Gates is a rich nerd but he read this blog. http://xpod247.blogspot.com/

This is what we will have if we don't have Net Neutrality: Possible ad: Introducing BellWest's new Internet service tiers.

Great... but I don't think home-users would need this.. most have a lot of space left on their hard disks even after storing everything they like... however, media companies might find this very useful... -- http://www.kudige.blogspot.com/

• DbC is a documentation tool. It specifies the behaviour of a class concisely and precisely.
• DbC is a design tool. The application is specified by means of classes equipped with assertions (I call this Contract Driven Design, or CoDD).
• DbC is an enhancement tool. Assertions can be added to existing code to make it more robust. I call this Contract Hardening, or CoHa.
• DbC is a maintenance tool. Assertions can be added to existing code to confirm (or improve) understanding of the behaviour of existing code prior to changes being made.
• DbC is a refactoring tool. Assertions make sure that desirable behaviour is retained even in the face of extensive refactoring. Eiffel code is so malleable when it is contract-equipped.
• Dbc is a correctness tool. Assertions in parent classes help ensure that child classes (which inherit the parents' assertions) are substitutable.
• DbC is an error-handling tool. Assertions define the success or failure of a routine and direct its error recovery during exception handling.
• DbC is a concurrency tool. Well, it will be when SCOOP is fully-implemented, because preconditions play a key role in synchronization.
• DbC is a testing tool. It enables a tool like AutoTest to stress-test your code for you, based on the contracts that you have specified.
• DbC is a project management tool, for maintaining and enforcing specifications.

Have I missed any?

By the way, here are some useful links related to the newly-open-sourced EiffelStudio, and you can find additional Eiffel libraries and tools at EiffelZone.

If you tracked deltas within files, you could look to xdelta as a filesystem, or possibly CVS.

If you were just tracking changed files, you could look to Plan 9 filesystem or Dirvish.

What might be up: Picture backing up a number of fairly similar machines (say, a group of Windows machines built from a common image), & noting duplicated files, only saving each once. You could count the space saved by a link as compression. If you have a homogeneous sample, you save lots of space & claim ridiculous compression.

You know, you can see pictures of the pretty well preserved skeleton here. I don't know why you said that, it's a skeleton, not an image of Jesus on toast.

"Physics is able to predict the future outcome of an experiment. Evolution is only able to predict the past."

Untrue, and a little bit ridiculous. One very easy example: Evolutionary theory is used to predict how organisms (such as, say, the Ebola pathogen) will evolve.

Moreover, it would be sufficient if evolutionary biology *did* simply make accurate predictions about the past. That is, of course, more than creationism can do. We look to the making and testing of predictions as a way of gauging whether a field is legitimately scientific; whether the event underlying the prediction has occured or will occur is not relevant, so long as the theory makes a prediction about an unknown outcome and that prediction can be tested.

I'm studying and working in International Development and there's a concept we talk about in class and the literature called "Inappropriate Technology". The idea here is that a country may have problems (i.e. too much labour) and the government, in its want to develop, imports labour-replacing technologies (i.e. assembly lines, or even lawn mowers), causing people to lose jobs and actually making it harder for the economy to grow.

This is how one can view the $100 laptop for Africa. Technology like this won't solve problems like ethnic tension, the taboo of discussing HIV/AIDS, or any other social and political ills. What will? Human interaction and discussion. In a continent where teachers go unpaid in many countries, you can't expect a government to buy laptops, even at $50 in 2010.

There's a reason why most of the interest (as far as I understand) is from South America.

---
Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research: http://i2r.blogspot.com/
Five Minutes to Midnight: Youth on Human Rights: http://www.fiveminutestomidnight.org/

I'd like to RTFA, but snarfed has been snarfed by Slashdot!

I haven't used Pine for a couple of years now, largely due to the advent of IMAP. My prefered mail client is Thunderbird, but it would be a hard choice between Pine and GMail. Now GMail has some obvious GUI advantages (point and click, drag and drop, images, etc.), but I find its threading to be erratic and searches to be less-than-spot-on. The main advantage of Pine is speed for short emails. This evaporates rapidly if you have to write anything substantial.

I'd argue that the author is probably making the wrong comparison. For most users, the choice is between Thunderbird / Outlook and GMail / Hotmail, especially if IMAP is an option.

Thunderbird is flexible about threading, but it lacks the indexed search of GMail. However, as most users are presumably familiar with text searches (a la grep or even the Window Find tool), Thunderbird search is perfect for my needs.

I enjoy the ability to use multiple accounts and the many useful extensions such as Engmail (for OpenPGP support), my own choice of dictionaries, and RSS support.

There are a few annoyances with Thunderbird, such as less-than-optimal support for multiple accounts, but workarounds are available. I've written about some of the problems and solutions on my blog.

There have been documented cases where the RIAA have fingered the wrong person. Witness the case brought against a lady who doesn't even own a computer. Their detection and identification methods aren't at all fullproof, but becuase nobody can afford to go to court with them, their methods have not stood up to a true test in court. Yes, they are opening themselves to various legal avenues for reprisal, but they also realize that most of the defendants can't afford to take the trial that far anyway. Hence, the extortion: the alternative to settling out of court would put such a severe strain on most people's monetary resources that simply giving in to the extortion is a much cheaper solution. Until one of these cases actually goes to court, the RIAA's "evidence" is of such dubious nature that it should not be considered a de facto proof of guilt.

Yes, and she didn't didn't settle. In fact, the RIAA is going to probably end up picking up her legal fees. If the RIAA presses then they are likely to find themselves on the hook for considerably more than legal fees. This is how the system *should* work. The RIAA made a mistake and they are going to pay for it.

Unless I'm mistaken, the RIAA's lawsuits are civil are they not? IANAL, but I don't believe the "feds" are allowed to get involved in evidence collection for a civil suit. I believe that it is completely up to the plaintiff to collect and present whatever evidence they feel would be necessary for a conviction. Again, the settlements in the RIAA suits are more or less a case of the defendants simply giving in because their pockets a much shallower than those of the RIAA.

Yes, the RIAA lawsuits are civil, but that's only because if the RIAA were to press criminal charges people would end up in jail for the simple act of sharing Brittney Spears music. Distributing copyrighted works on the scale that is alleged is a federal offense. The RIAA, wisely, in my opinion, is taking a different tactic than unleashing the federales on filesharers. Basically the RIAA takes a group of "John Does" to trial in order to force the ISPs to actually cough up contact information. Then, at that point the RIAA drops the John Doe case and files seperate civil cases in the appropriate venue against the various filesharers. At that point the RIAA has a huge club as they have evidence that the filesharer has committed a federal crime. Sure, it's possible that the ISP got the IP address wrong, or that the identity of the person had been stolen and used to purchase the services of the ISP (that's probably what happened to Marie Lindor), but its not likely in most cases. What's more likely is that the parents are the ones that are sued while it is really the children (or neighbors, or someone else that has access to the computer) that is actually to blame.

Not that it really matters, in most of the cases the person whose name appears on the account at the ISP has plenty of reason to settle. Maybe they aren't guilty, but chances are good that if they aren't someone in their family is guilty. Once again, pretty much at any point the RIAA could turn the case into a criminal case in which folks could go to prison. So instead of fighting the person *wisely* accepts the RIAA's terms.

I can't wait for the day that the RIAA takes on somebody who can afford a proper defense and take the case all the way to court. That's the only way we'll ever get a decision as to whether or not the RIAA's tactics are legal. Of course, the down side is, if the defendant loses, that sets precedent for the RIAA. We would most likely be assured of a renewed wave of lawsuits backed by this precedent. In reality, we need to change the laws... something that's hard to do when the RIAA has already taken all of your money.

You'll be waiting a long time, because it's not re

The last time I checked, one is innocent until proven guilty. To suggest otherwise and threaten presumably innocent citizens in this manner is extortion. Saying so is not a "lunatic fringe" statement. They are currently being sued for RICO violoations by an innocent woman in Oregon; more information is here.

This is true. Education is definately the key.

There is a high level of fear-mongering going on in the media. I have users come to me asking, "Should I block my child from Myspace? A reporter on the news last night said my kid is in grave danger using Myspace. Is he right?"

The problem with getting your technical info from *insert popular news show here* is they are rarely getting their info from real net savvy people. Add to that, fear makes good ratings. There is a risk of children seeing objectionable content. The truth is there is far more objectionable stuff on good old porn sites than there ever will be on Myspace or Blogger. I have both Blogger and Myspace accounts. I also have a six year old that I am preparing to enter the realm of the net. We have to teach kids that it is never OK to give out their real name, address, or phone number online to someone they have never met in real life. Parents, bookmark their blog and monitor their internet habits. You wouldn't let a child roam the streets without some guidance. Do the same for the internet.

At the same time, learn what these sites really are. They are tools for global communication with the possibility to elighten, expand horizons, or just blow a few hours reading funny stories. Children will find their way into the Blogsphere with or without help. If parents can just get their info from solid sources and pass it on to thier children we can make the Blogsphere safe and possibly educational.

Who am I kidding...Bloggers posting something educational...am I out of my mind...

I make a case for a Blockbuster bankruptcy here. The Netflix thing just makes it worse. http://www.worldoftech.blogspot.com/

wow great i wonder when this will come to india... lol not for a long time though :D

http://www.kudige.blogspot.com/

Perhpas a quote from "The Satanic Verses" taken from this page: http://justzipit.blogspot.com/ would explain it best.

Any new idea is asked two questions. The first is asked when its weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the 100th time, will change the world. ...... [the second questions is] WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU WIN? ...

Idealists don't understand compromisers, compromisers don't understand idealists. Idealists don't live very harmoniously in the world, compromisers don't change the world. Stallman decided to go for change. You say rigidity and stubborness, others say integrity and persistence. I think it's one of those cases where 'it takes all types'.

I asked google.. and it told me.. Brilliant!

I wrote up an idea similar to this on my blog a while back (substituting Apple for Google), when the RIAA was threatening Apple about raising the prices of the downloads. Pardon me for the blatant pimpage, but it sounds like my rant there might bear some interest for you :)

Danseglio said malicious hackers are conducting targeted attacks that are "stealthy and effective" and warned that the for-profit motive is much more serious than even the destructive network worms of the past. "In 2006, the attackers want to pay the rent. They don't want to write a worm that destroys your hardware. They want to assimilate your computers and use them to make money.

And therein lies the problem. I've said time and again that you can forget about viruses and worms in the sense of traditional mail mailing worms and the likes. The "antivirus" market has for the most part finally gotten through to consumers and they've been educated enough to contain virus outbreaks to small flareups, but not major outbreaks.

But when you've got a multi-million dollar company, permission based marketing, and some unscruplious hackers with ties to the russian mafia, the spy/adware outbreak is causing far more havok and is going pretty much unnoticed.

When I do virus/spyware removal at my job (I work for a service center at a retail electronics chain, so I deal with "average customers", not IT staff) it always comes to removing 100 pieces of spyware. The consumers all seem to just think that it's just the system getting old. When I tell them they're infected with spyware, most of their responses are to simply by a new PC (and get infected once more). I can tell you hundreds of horror stories, like the system I did last week that was turned into a server, uploading over 14k files to the Kazaa network, or the customer's system that was so badly infected it would cause all network traffic to halt on her home network because the system was sending out so much data traffic.

It's alot harder to bury a company like 180 solutions, Aluria, and the like when they've got million in revenue, backing of big companies like Ford and eBay using their advertising, and being able to hide in the EULA of some screensaver program.

The age of the half-hacker virus writer is dead. It's gotten much more organized once the money started coming in.

Suggested Reading: Sunbelt Blog

Woah, I knew there were a lot of global warming (or "human causation") deniers on slashdot, but I hadn't checked here in a while - didn't realize it was this bad! No wonder I don't come here much any more.

For all y'all's edification, I STRONGLY recommend:

The Discovery of Global Warming
Real Climate
A Few Things Ill-Considered

I'll come back when y'all have read those, ok?

From this article: http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2005/05/energ y-density-key-to-understanding.html

I'm just summerizing what I gleaned from the article, but it seems reasonable.

Profit Ratios (how much get for how much you spend)

Oil- 20:1 (Old discoveries)
Oil- 8:1 (New discoveries)
Coal- 10:1
Nuclear- 4:1
Biodiesel- 2.5:1
Wind - 2:1
Solar - 1.1?:1

Coal and oil obviously are the most profitable, thus the most popular. Nuclear might be much higher up if the regulatory and safety costs could be reduced.

Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility.

Have you read this?

Results: Client appcompat % hovering at <40% (GASP - INTERNAL INFO... better moderate this one out!!!!)

Radio Mix Tape is a new service that lets people make mix tapes, and swap them. Entirely out of the kind of free tracks that bands put on their website. And its starting to gain support from artists. Big ones too. On yeah and we now have fancy Blog Widgets (checkout this blog here
-Jason
P.S. Yes I own it, I made it, but we have a team working hard on our 1.0 version and I am extremely proud of it.

This story isn't complete without mentioning MP3 blogs and netlabels. Millions of songs were downloaded last week from the tens of thousands of MP3 blogs and netlabels dishing out free music from mostly non-commercial websites. A quick look at a few of the best ones will reveal that a lot of the music being served up is top quality.

• 3Hive
• Gorilla vs Bear
• Clever Titles are so Last Summer
• Music for Robots

This story isn't complete without mentioning MP3 blogs and netlabels. Millions of songs were downloaded last week from the tens of thousands of MP3 blogs and netlabels dishing out free music from mostly non-commercial websites. A quick look at a few of the best ones will reveal that a lot of the music being served up is top quality.

• 3Hive
• Gorilla vs Bear
• Clever Titles are so Last Summer
• Music for Robots

http://the-library-and-i.blogspot.com/2006/04/tmi. html

And then you start over and over again... nice joke I must say. This is a new type of Slashdotting Google's Servers?