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There is an interesting post at Right to Create that discusses Roberts and his penchant for being a strong IP-maximalist (in other words, a weak supporter of the freedom to create and invent), and points out that the Senate Judiciary Committee didn't ask him one question on this topic.

• Right to Create [blogspot.com]
• freeculture [freeculture.org]

Both of which routinely suggest actions you can take to try to turn this thing around.

Apple certainly is raking in money through the use of its ipod. This means that apple has given up on its apple Computer. It is using its Ipod to create revenues for it. But the apple name will soon be forgotten and iPod will stop creating the magic revenues for the Apple Company. So Apple should consider if it wants to be in the video business or in the Computer business. The people are helping Apple by lending their support by creating free items for ipod. Sooner or later they will begin asking what is in it for the people. Apple should pay attention to what is stated in http://www.newerawisp.blogspot.com/ this blog discusses the need for a new method of surfing the web that is serever oriented rather than client oriented. The hackers have proven that they will not let the web be successful unless the new method is developed. Apple should support the dcevelopment of this new method through the donation of a relatively small amount of capital as seed capital.

RIAA thinks it can stop the piracy by its high handed methods. It's sorely mistaken. Its members will loose all the following they possess. There is only one way RIAA and its members can win. That is by RIAA financially supporting the development of a method to surf the web that is discussed at http://www.newerawisp.blogspot.com/ When this method of suefing the web is dceveloped the piracy will be stoped overnight.

What, you mean like this weird one? :)

Now, of course that all flies in the face of common sense. But that's our patent system. Until we change it, that's what we are stuck with. If you are interested in doing your part to fix it, you should be reading sites like:

• Right to Create
• freeculture

Both of which routinely suggest actions you can take to try to turn this thing around.

Recycled from an above thread, already talking on the matter:

http://kenethmiles.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_kenethm iles_archive.html#107570569615970184

The main points:
- People saying "OMG EPA BANZ DDT AT FAULT!" are being simplistic and unscientific
- DDT is not banned from public health use is most places where malaria is endemic
- DDT is kept from most outdoor use because widespread and indescriminate use actually makes the spread of malaria worse... by increasing the mosquito population's resistance to DDT
- other insecticides are much better alternatives to DDT outdoors

...and to post the end of the article directly:

Most nations where malaria is a problem, and most health professionals working in the field of malaria control, support the targeted use of DDT, as part of the tool kit for malaria control. Most also agree that more cost-effective, less environmentally persistent alternatives are needed. There are some effective alternative chemicals for the control of adult mosquitoes, but preventing their further development is lack of invest ment by industry, because malaria is largely a disease of the poor.

Malaria is responsible for enormous suffering and death. The facts are readily available in the scientific literature. To blame a reduction in DDT usage for the death of 10-30 million people from malaria is not just simple-minded, it is demonstrably wrong. To blame a mythical, monolithic entity called the environmental lobby for the total reduction in DDT usage is not just paranoid, it is also demonstrably wrong.

Ugh no.

See: http://kenethmiles.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_kenethm iles_archive.html#107570569615970184 . In short, the myth of agricultural bans on DDT preventing the public health use of DDT is demonstrably false.

I read BBC news online because its news seems straightforward and mostly unbiased.

Please, the BBC is notoriously Anti-Semitic. The BBC reporting crying when Arafat died is merely one example.
You should take a look at Biased BBC.

http://cseg.blogspot.com/

Just start at the top and start working your way down.

A very short and simple (and cheap) book to get you started would be:

The Case Against Darwin: Why the Evidence Should Be Examined

(If you are not a religious/moral person, then just skip over the mushy parts.) The books he mentions in the text are good ones to follow up with.

As for specific sources about the fossil record, well, I should keep better track and I'm starting to. I think you will find this general argument in any book which looks at Darwinism with a critical eye.

A woman in London during the transit bombings went to a public webcam and used her cell phone to report her observations and feelings. She may be the first to step in front of the new mass media, by and for the masses.

I was personally awestruck by how Del.icio.us and Flickr became channels for democratized real time reporting during the London bombings. Bloglines and RSS connected everything seamlessly, essentially turning the entire universe of Blogs into one stream.

Phone cams at one end took pictures from practically everywhere during and after the attacks. Enough people posted pics to http://flickr.com/photos/tags/london to extensively cover what was happening on the ground. Bloggers close to the scene provided ongoing summaries and updates.

As fresh news rushed to the Web from everywhere, http://del.icio.us/tag/london offered real-time-most-recommended links.

A couple of interesting facts: Since Bloglines includes the number of total subscribers to any feed you have subscribed to, you can tell at a glance how popular that feed is. The Flickr and del.icio.us feeds went into the hundreds from only a few subscribers within a couple of hours.

Completely spontaneous emergent mass media, by and for the masses. The digitally connected masses have leached the mass from media, now adjusting to its rightful place as simply another niche. In short, viable grass roots media has arrived.

Another fine example of why the music industry is loosing support and people would generally just download music off irc or p2p. Good work sony! If sueing 8 year old kids that the RIAA cannot verify to actually exist http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005 /10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html is in question why not install a backdoor like a common botnet cracker. Dont wait in line for my purchace...

I'm not sure how far that effort is along at this point, although Tor certainly seemed to be making excellent progress and was patching all sorts of Gnome/Win32 bugs in various projects.

EvoWin32 progress here: http://tml-blog.blogspot.com/

Demo failed on GNOME Summit but as he writes otherwise, it should be pretty far with porting. If I remember correctly it is now about 2-3 months sice he posted first screenshots. And all libs are now in CVS and can be built

It's a long shot, but the Supreme Court just accepted an appeal that could invalidate most U.S. software patents in a single stroke. This would happen if Justice Stevens, the only justice on the current Court to have heard a patent "subject matter" case, follows his previous opinion in Parker v. Flook (way back in 1978!)and convinces the other "patent virgins" justices on the court to follow his opinion.

More information at http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/supreme-c ourt-takes-patentable-subject.html

It's a long shot, but the Supreme Court just accepted an appeal that could invalidate most U.S. software patents in a single stroke. This would happen if Justice Stevens, the only justice on the current Court to have heard a patent "subject matter" case, follows his previous opinion in Parker v. Flook (way back in 1978!)and convinces the other "patent virgin" justices on the court to follow his opinion.

More information at http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/supreme-c ourt-takes-patentable-subject.html

I'll sincerely welcome iTunes. It will change the industry - mark my words.

Hell, video-on-demand was changing the industry before this. In a blog post about pitching TV shows, John Rogers gives a little background on the TV industry; how studios used to produce shows at a loss with the money recouped when the show sold into syndication, but now are starting to recoup that money faster by selling DVD box sets. (I wonder how much money the first season of Lost is making for ABC?)

It's a fairly well-known anecdote that the box sets for the first season of Babylon 5 made enough money to pay the production costs of that season. (IMO, the same would not be true if it had been direct-to-DVD from the start; I didn't like the first season of B5 originally, and it wasn't until the show was over and I re-watched the first season that I came to appreciate it, though it's still not my favorite.) Everybody who reads Slashdot is aware of the role the sales of the Firefly box set contributed to Serenity being made.

Personally, I've bought one TV episode from iTunes music store -- I bought the premiere of The Night Stalker both to see if the show was any good, and to see what the video quality was like. To me, the initial TV offerings aren't enough to make me want to spend a lot of money on it so far; but if Apple were to get SciFi on board, and offer episodes of Battlestar Galactica? Hmm...

Jay (=

the only spirits in this here home office are stowed away in the fridge: captn' morgan and jack daniels and the spirit of the good old grey goose

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

While this has nothing to do with MySQL directly, I think it would be fantastic if the Mozilla people were able to come up with a decent book regarding the embedding of the Gecko rendering engine.

I think I remember seeing a book on this when I did my article on free books. Ah, here we are. If I'm not mistaken, "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" should cover the topic you're interested in. You can even download it at no cost as part of Peren's dedication to Open Source Books.

Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius

[Real men of genius]

Today we salute you, Mr. Anti-Software Patent Guy.

[Mr. Anti-Software Patent Guy!]

Some people only complain about patent quality, but you know enough to step it up to the next level: advocating the total abolition of all software patents. Patents? You don't need no stinkin' patents.

[Copyright is all you need!]

There's a specification - maybe even some drawings - and a bunch of claims somewhere in the back, but only you know that the only way to determine the scope of a patent is by reading the title.

[They're trying to patent the Internet!]

It could be Microsoft. Or Google. Or Amazon.com. Or some holding company you've never heard of. But whoever it is, their patents cover algorithms you thought of 10 years ago. And besides, the ideas are pretty stupid anyways.

[Don't forget the one-click-patent!]

While others rest, you can't . . . because somewhere a patent is being filed on code you are writing this very moment - and that patent's going to make someone a lot of money.

[It's all a scam anyways!]

So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light, Mr. Anti-Software Patent Guy, because if you filed a patent application for being smarter than the rest of us, you'd get a first-action allowance.

[Mr. Anti-Software Paaaaatent Guy!]

(http://271patent.blogspot.com/)

For a nice collection of material against patents and IP-maximalism, Right to Create is good.

Council of American-Islamic Relations condemns 9/11 in national full-page newspaper ad the next day.

Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon condemns Osama Bin Laden.

Grand Imam of Al-Azhar seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden (Plus official text)

Prominent Pakistani Cleric Tahir ul Qadri condemns Bin Laden.

Television preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi condemns Al Qaeda

Spanish Muslim Clerical authorities Issue Fatwa against Osamah Bin Laden. There are on the order of 250,000 Muslims in Spain.

High Mufti of Russian Muslims calls for Extradition of Bin Laden. Russian Muslims are 15% of the population there, so this is not a pro forma thing.

List of Muslim condemnations of Terrorist attacks. Also Scholars of Islam and the tragedy of 9/11 attacks

Expressions of grief and sympathy in the Arab world after 9/11. (Includes candlelight vigils in Tehran, anti-terrorism protests in Bangladesh)

Iraqi blogger Riverbend recalls the sympathy she felt on 9/11

You didn't hear any protests because it simply wasn't covered in American news. International news did pick up on these events. How about the people in Arab countries who donated blood after 9/11 because Qaradawi suggested it? What about the flower bouquets people sent in sympathy to the American embassy in Kuwait, so many that they ringed the fence?

we don't even have a concrete scientific definition of intelligence. So then how can "intelligent design" even be a topic of discussion?

This is one of my favorite points to make in this context. Not only is there no theory of intelligence, there is no theory of design. Complex functional and useful artifacts almost never spring from the minds of inventors complete and working, they are typically the products of many people working over many years, making and testing incremental changes- one interesting theory of innovation suggests that evolution may be one of the best analogies- check out The Evolution of Technology (my notes here).

It's funny because I think the source of the whole issue is a result of the industrial revolution, followed by advances in biology which too often used the 'machine' analogy when explaining biological processes. Religious types hope to advance their beliefs by observing that humans are intelligent, humans make machines, humans are like machines (though with a supernatural 'soul' making Free Will command decisions from behind the curtain), therefore something intelligent made humans. The reaction is happening now in this form because now science has basically unlocked all the major mysteries of life as we observe it now except for those of intelligence, the last front of the 'god of the gaps'- and since we don't have perfect records of the history of life/time-machines, deep history is a weak spot that can be assaulted in order to carve out a space for the interventions of the intelligent designer/s.

What is really humorous about the bottom line of the ID/Creationism argument is their argument that they have a theory that is more plausible than evolutionary scientist's. If you take two universes, one in which life sprang out of raw materials and evolved to sentience, and one in which a God created intelligent life in-situ, the first universe is one more worthy of awe than the second, because it is less likely or even impossible by the arguments of the ID/Creationists! Any old God can make his own complex multi-cellular organisms in Its image, but a universe that bootstraps itself up to having sentience is truly impressive.

Separate discussion, but fair enough.

I didn't get to see it before the server went down, but it almost reads like you're chasing down a guy like bin Laden...i.e. someone that definitely qualifies as wanting to cause harm.

Of course, I think I'm taking this way too far at this point!

(As far as the separate discussion goes, with regards to Iran, I found this link on AndrewSullivan.com. Interesting stuff...Iran scares me more than Iraq for sure, especially given the recent comments about Isreal. Scary stuff.)

In any case, it is possible to solve the mess in a way that gives the proponents of Intelligent Design exactly what they say they are looking for, sort of, and at the same time takes away the pudding.

First we give them exactly what they want. But we add things to it.

In the classroom, we have these kind of discussions:

What would be evidence of Intelligent Design? What would be evidence of intelligent Design, such as genetic manipulation by a scientist, vs. the normal structure of DNA? and what is the normal structure of DNA anyhow? Of Genes? Could you have copyright markers inside DNA?

Actual evidence. And we tie this into the ethics of Biology.

(Note that a recent news item reports that 20% of the Human Genome has already been patented, even through they actually did not design the genes, but have only isolated a possible speculated use)

Also, you can mention all the possible angles on who could be the speculated authors in the theory of Intelligent Design.

Do not forget to mention the Flying Saucer people, who are rumored to have manipulated the genetic structure of mankind for their own ends. What would be evidence of all of this at the genetic level ?

As a side note, there are a number of images of something resembling a double helix seen in ancient sumerian art. This would twist the nose of some folks, although, for the purposes of classroom discussion, you can discuss the coincidence as a coincidence, without being heavy handed on the subject.

[Taken from http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/2005/10/only-d ebate-on-intelligent-design-that.html ]
The only debate on Intelligent Design that is worthy of its subject

Moderator: We're here today to debate the hot new topic, evolution versus Intelligent Des---

(Scientist pulls out baseball bat.)

Moderator: Hey, what are you doing?

(Scientist breaks Intelligent Design advocate's kneecap.)

Intelligent Design advocate: YEAAARRRRGGGHHHH! YOU BROKE MY KNEECAP!

Scientist: Perhaps it only appears that I broke your kneecap. Certainly, all the evidence points to the hypothesis I broke your kneecap. For example, your kneecap is broken; it appears to be a fresh wound; and I am holding a baseball bat, which is spattered with your blood. However, a mere preponderance of evidence doesn't mean anything. Perhaps your kneecap was designed that way. Certainly, there are some features of the current situation that are inexplicable according to the "naturalistic" explanation you have just advanced, such as the exact contours of the excruciating pain that you are experiencing right now.

Intelligent Design advocate: AAAAH! THE PAIN!

Scientist: Frankly, I personally find it completely implausible that the random actions of a scientist such as myself could cause pain of this particular kind. I have no precise explanation for why I find this hypothesis implausible --- it just is. Your knee must have been designed that way!

Intelligent Design advocate: YOU BASTARD! YOU KNOW YOU DID IT!

Scientist: I surely do not. How can we know anything for certain? Frankly, I think we should expose people to all points of view. Furthermore, you should really re-examine whether your hypothesis is scientific at all: the breaking of your kneecap happened in the past, so we can't rewind and run it over again, like a laboratory experiment. Even if we could, it wouldn't prove that I broke your kneecap the previous time. Plus, let's not even get into the fact that the entire universe might have just popped into existence right before I said this sentence, with all the evidence of my alleged kneecap-breaking already pre-formed.

Intelligent Design advocate: That's a load of bullpoop sophistry! Get me a doctor and a lawyer, not necessarily in that order, and we'll see how that plays in court!

Scientist (turning to audience): And so we see, ladies and gentlemen, when push comes to shove, advocates of Intelligent Design do not actually believe any of the arguments that they profess to believe. When it comes to matters that hit home, they prefer evidence, the scientific method, testable hypotheses, and naturalistic explanations. In fact, they strongly privilege naturalistic explanations over supernatural hocus-pocus or metaphysical wankery. It is only within the reality-distortion field of their ideological crusade that they give credence to the flimsy, ridiculous arguments which we so commonly see on display. I must confess, it kind of felt good, for once, to be the one spouting free-form bullshit; it's so terribly easy and relaxing, compared to marshaling rigorous arguments backed up by empirical evidence. But I fear that if I were to continue, then it would be habit-forming, and bad for my soul. Therefore, I bid you adieu.

Google has a post on it's blog explaining why this happened.

Almost all of today's search engines also uses the content of anchor text (i.e. the text on the links that points to a page) when you search for something. Google has admitted that the linking of the terms "miserable failure" and "failure" to this particular biography page, is caused by link bombing -- i.e. an organized practical joke, where several pages (maybe hundreds) have been created. On these pages there are links to this biography page, and the link text (anchor text) uses the words failure or miserable failures.

If you're serious with your argument (that maybe Google's right), you have to be one of the biggest Google apologists I've ever heard of. Can that company do nothing wrong in your eyes? In my eyes they can. They're just humans, like the rest of us.

What search engine I do use? It depends actually. I use Google for international searches, but for local searches (I'm not American) I use local search engines. I also use Yahoo search a lot after installing the Yahoo toolbar (mostly because of the My Web functionality). But in Firefox I've also installed the MSN Search Mycroft extension. The quality of MSN Search increases all the time, actually, and given the rate of improvement I believe that this is the search engine that can -- in a year or two -- match or surpass Google quality wise.

I wonder if this has any relation to Mr. Brain's recent denouncement of God.

I've recently had good cause to lambast religion...

I just wrote down my justification an hour ago.

Elmartinos, thanks for the post, (which needs a +5, moderators) and above all the link to http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/. It's easily one of the best blogs I've seen. It's gotten a bookmark and been added to aKregator.

sorry to break the surprise but this news story / book / etc is at least 4 months old. why is it being announced now as new?

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

Here I present you The only debate on Intelligent Design that is worthy of its subject

Moderator: We're here today to debate the hot new topic, evolution versus Intelligent Des---

(Scientist pulls out baseball bat.)

Moderator: Hey, what are you doing?

(Scientist breaks Intelligent Design advocate's kneecap.)

Intelligent Design advocate: YEAAARRRRGGGHHHH! YOU BROKE MY KNEECAP!

Scientist: Perhaps it only appears that I broke your kneecap. Certainly, all the evidence points to the hypothesis I broke your kneecap. For example, your kneecap is broken; it appears to be a fresh wound; and I am holding a baseball bat, which is spattered with your blood. However, a mere preponderance of evidence doesn't mean anything. Perhaps your
kneecap was designed that way. Certainly, there are some features of the current situation that are inexplicable according to the "naturalistic" explanation you have just advanced, such as the exact contours of the excruciating pain that you are experiencing right now.

Intelligent Design advocate: AAAAH! THE PAIN!

Scientist: Frankly, I personally find it completely implausible that the random actions of a scientist such as myself could cause pain of this particular kind. I have no precise explanation for why I find this hypothesis implausible --- it just is. Your knee must have been designed that way!

Intelligent Design advocate: YOU BASTARD! YOU KNOW YOU DID IT!

Scientist: I surely do not. How can we know anything for certain? Frankly, I think we should expose people to all points of view. Furthermore, you should really re-examine whether your hypothesis is scientific at all: the breaking of your kneecap happened in the past, so we can't rewind and run it over again, like a laboratory experiment. Even if we could, it wouldn't prove that I broke your kneecap the previous time. Plus, let's not even get into the fact that the entire universe might have just popped into existence right before I said this
sentence, with all the evidence of my alleged kneecap-breaking already pre-formed.

Intelligent Design advocate: That's a load of bullshit sophistry! Get me a doctor and a lawyer, not necessarily in that order, and we'll see how that plays in court!

Scientist (turning to audience): And so we see, ladies and gentlemen, when push comes to shove, advocates of Intelligent Design do not actually believe any of the arguments that they profess to believe. When it comes to matters that hit home, they prefer evidence, the scientific method, testable hypotheses, and naturalistic explanations. In fact, they strongly privilege naturalistic explanations over supernatural hocus-pocus or metaphysical wankery. It is only within the reality-distortion field of their ideological crusade that they give credence to the flimsy, ridiculous arguments which we so commonly see on display. I must confess, it kind of felt good, for once, to be the one spouting free-form bullshit; it's so terribly easy and relaxing, compared to marshaling rigorous arguments backed up by empirical
evidence. But I fear that if I were to continue, then it would be habit-forming, and bad for my soul. Therefore, I bid you adieu.

I read this book while vacationing in the woods outside of Yosemite. Pretty fitting place to read it, actually. I posted a review to my blog (shameless pimpin') and was pretty shocked when Steven Johnson himself (or a poser, I suppose) posted a complimentary comment. Gotta love the web.

Anyway, I thought his point about gaming being brain candy, and the stimulating complexity of modern TV programming were well done -- and a welcome antidote to CW. But he gets way ahead of himself on a lot of points. And he skims blithely past a lot of important elements of modern culture.

As he said, as a cultural critic, he gets to do that. The hard work of researching and analyzing the points he makes is left to academics and other experts. Which is good, because it allows him to put his ideas into a nice, light, provocative, fun little book.

Is "free" a sufficiently low cost for virtualization? I very quickly installed Ubuntu using the instructions below on a Win2k and XP machine. The article links to a more complex instruction set on hackaday.com. The comments in that article include information about generating new file systems from scratch using qemu.

http://valentinlaube.blogspot.com/2005/10/vmware-p layer-hacked.html

Good luck!

Reminds me of an essay I wrote for a local paper about setting up effective conference calls. It's from an Indian perspective, but the points are valid for most such meetings. The link is to my blog, where the essay is mirrored.

If that were actually funny it would remind me of John Howard's blog (he's the prime minister of australia).

What about the GoogleBlog?

Although, admittedly, I would not count a blog a success without viewer feedback, to know that people are reading and what they think.

Harriet miers has been blogging for ages, and her blog is so much more fun to read! Check it out (-;

That's a load of bull. There's nothing that MS can do to "magically" make their apps run faster on the same hardware that other developers can't, and there isn't much that Windows does that is significantly different from the way Linux/X do things.

Tricks that could make Excel perform better might be

• Leaving data on the disk until its needed on screen(using memory mapped files)
• Not copying data into temporary data structures for display
• Writing meta data along with the spread sheet to help it load faster
• Avoiding excessive repainting and better buffering of screen updates
• Writing their own widgets that work better in a spreadsheet than just using the stock ones that Qt/GTK/Motif gives you
• Trading speed for memory by using hashing and other complex data structures to navigate dense data structures rather than using sparse data structures that directly map to the screen.

What makes this notion especially naive is denying that Linux/X developers know their environment just as well as the coders at Microsoft. If anything, the longevity of Unix style OSes and X should make it far easier to write high-performance code, because everyone should be aware by now what the OS related pitfalls are. Regardless of the silly incompatibilities between the various flavors of UNIX, there really isn't much to differentiate them other than slight performance differences caused by how each OS pages memory or handles threads. Any one should be able to get similar performance on any UNIX, or even Windows, if they design their app's data structures well and are using compilers can do similar code optimizations.

The reason OpenOffice runs like a pig can ONLY be attributed to poor coding by its developers, period. Microsoft has had TWENTY years to hone Office into one of the most accomplished software packages ever. Thinking that they do this by using "evil tricks" is just ridiculous. It would be much easier to believe that the OO.o programmers are still new to what they are doing and have very poor quality control.

http://armentage.blogspot.com/

Sure google started out as a simple search engine, but now it's threatning microsoft in much more than the search buisness. Especially if we are to believe therumors surrounding new google labs creations!

My point is while MS focuses on TRYING to reach google's level in search. Google will exploit the diversion to take over the world.

we are certainly looking forward to it, we are always out of the box. Any body can copy us, please. http://infoligence.blogspot.com/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Infoligence

The one thing I can't get past in this, is why they "waited" [...] until level 45 to change it?

Like Taco, I was snagged by the "no titles" clause - I was "Drcarrot" and "Drhand". I also blogged about this but I think more people read Taco's rant than mine :)

I'm working in both .NET and Java now. What absolutely stuns me is how quickly the Java world can turn around tools and frameworks. I still prefer C#; however I'm working in a Beta of C# 2.0 while Java 5--offering nearly the same feature set--has been out for months.

The Java IDE--there's really only one, Eclipse--is a 105MB zip file. You know how I installed it? Unzipped it. How do I run it? Click on Eclipse.exe.

You know how I install Studio? Pay $2500 for top version (not out yet btw but will be about that amount or more); Insert DVD; answer inane questions; walk away for 2 hours; return with at least 1.5_G_B less diskspace and a doubled registry size.

When I want something new in Eclipse, I wander around a bit on Google and Sourceforge; today I might add code coverage, tomorrow static analysis, throw in some metrics--essentially anything I need. Mostly free.

I have yet to exceed 150MB total Eclipse directory size, and I have replicated and exceeded the full feature set of VS.NET 2005--which hasn't fucking shipped yet.

Is this because Microsoft developers aren't as good as Java/open source developers? Hell no! (though it soon may be at current attrition rates) It's because middle and senious management make it impossible for smart people to get anything done, and vigorously punish them when they do.

Maestro is nice, but the problem is that NASA stopped providing Maestro data after Sol 120 or so (I forget exactly when, but it was a while ago).

Luckily, you can retrieve all the images from all the sols automatically using the Java program Midnight Mars Browser, available at http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/. Being Java, it should work on any semi-popular platform, and the program works rather nicely. NASA updates the images almost immediately after receiving them (on a daily basis).

One thing to note is that JPL's website(s) were down last time I tried to update, so if you get connection timeout errors when updating through MMB, you should try again later..

However, that's not Google's kinda marketing. They would claim that you own the content, and they are just a bookstore. So just as you can sell something on eBay, you should be able to sell it on Google. Fair enough. But then everything would end up on Google, and that's scary. Why have multiple bookstores when you can have one with everything in it, and its next door to everyone? read more

How is a distributed semantic web different? RDF standards describe the data structure in a common fashion, enabling search engines to aggregate this data. Anybody can publish something somewhere, and hope for it being found (or submit URL to google?).

In either case, service and application-centric web is being replaced by a data-centric one, where user's own the data, so no application boundaries exist. The only functions needed are publish and search. What's left for businesses to do apart from hosting? Show me the $$$.

Opera stopped spoofing itself as IE by default a while ago (before it went free, even).

http://operawatch.blogspot.com/2005/07/opera-to-st op-spoofing-user-agent-as.html

Did you vote?

Thanks to ramptant gerrymandering, your vote doesn't matter.

So you can get off your high horse now.

Freedom of speech faces greater challenges ...

"The Lawyer of Farid Modarresi and Hossein Abdollah Pour declared on Friday that his clients are to be tried today for charges of insulting high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic (two members of the Expediency Council and the former President, Mohammad Khatami) and taking action against the national security. Earlier trials had taken place through the Qom Revolutionary Court branch in June and July, leading to convictions of up to 90-day jail terms for these webloggers. This trial is, thus, an appeal hearing."
taken from http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2005/10/appea l-hearing-of-webloggers-from-holy.html

Regarding the original post, if a school doesn't want its pupils to blog, it can probably find ways to do so. In the same way, 20 yrs ago if you started printing unofficial newspapers/ student rags in your garage, your chool would be pissed off. As far as I am concerned it is a non-issue. The US and everyone else have bigger things to worry about and more prominent rights abuses

I use a old hotplate. I went to the local thrift shop and i bought it for 50 cents. it gives space between the desk and the laptop. i have also been thinking of wiring some fans from Fry's and adding a USB plug from a old (free after rebate) mouse for power. -- http://bullring23.blogspot.com/

See Google's Official Blog post:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/rumor-of-da y.html/

If it's what Google says it is, I don't see why this is any more threatening or buzzworthy than Sitemaps is.