Slashdot Mirror

How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:

Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997

Where Researchers Want to Work

BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs

Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools

MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)

HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings

I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.

How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:

Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997

Where Researchers Want to Work

BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs

Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools

MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)

HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings

I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.

I don't think you really understand compulsory licenses or what the RIAA is trying to do. Here is another article that should help a little.

Compulsory licenses are mandated by Congress. Radio would be impossible with out them. Individually negotiated licenses would be prohibitively complicated. Imagine spending several days negotiating a license for every 3 minutes of air time; even 20 minutes would be unworkable. Congress recognized this and set up the compulsory license.

The RIAA is doing no one any favors. Right now, the RIAA gets nothing for radio broadcasts. Congress decided that the record companies were compensated by the free publicity that radio provided, which sold records for them. It makes sense and it seems to have done pretty well for the record companies. It seems logical that this would extend to web broadcasts as well.

But the RIAA has never been happy with being left out of the radio royalty loop. And they see this as an opportunity to get a piece of the pie. So they are using the advent of a new form of broadcasting as a way to muscle their way in. Doing us a favor? Hardly. The RIAA would like to have all of the profits from music broadcasting, whether it be radio or web.

And that is why compulsory licenses are needed. There is no competition here. There are no "market forces". If they could get away with it, the copyright holders would suck up all of the profits from music broadcasting. A broadcaster doesn't have any other options.

Regarding the GPL, by using Linux you are agreeing to the GPL. Downloading it (making a copy) and using it are not "fair use" rights. Also, the GPL is not a compulsory license. A compulsory license is one that is forced by an outside party and generally refers to one forced by the government.

Anyway, reading the article will probably help.

Nathan

BusinessWeek published an article on Moxi's death spiral about a month ago. They found typical dot-bomb out-of-control expenses, and slimy things like renting expensive office space from insiders. Worse, someone at Moxi impersonated a BW reporter in a witch hunt to try to root out who was talking to the press.

Good riddance.

BusinessWeek published an article on Moxi's death spiral about a month ago. They found typical dot-bomb out-of-control expenses, and slimy things like renting expensive office space from insiders. Worse, someone at Moxi impersonated a BW reporter in a witch hunt to try to root out who was talking to the press.

Good riddance.

Which is the attitude I was critcizing, the Us vs Them attitude between technology haves and have nots.

This is very easily seen in comedy pages about tech support horror stories, Like Computer Stupidities. This is evidence of what happens when geek culture separates from the culture of those around it.

Note: in the USA "Working Stiffs" is a generic slang for people who work for a living, vs those born to money, and is a common enough term, and is not usually confused with the dead, except for moments of humor or irony.

People who recognize the term realize it is a term of respect.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb200 2/nf2002021_9293.htm

Retail computers are and will continue to be an important market, especially for first-time computer buyers or more casual users. I can't imagine that the retail outlets would ever allow one company to get any sort of real hold on this markets -- why deal with a monopoly on a commodity item?

Here's some more information on large-scale wireless networks that companies like Sprint and WorldCom are considering.

Also, here's a list of other areas where wireless broadband ventures are being explored.

You might this article Entertainment Execs, Fear Not the Net of interest in regards to this thread.

From here.

"Last year, however, Google did follow competitors in offering sponsored links - a form of advertising based on search terms - on the top and left of search results. Today such advertising accounts for two-thirds of Google's revenues, with the remainder coming from powering searches on other Web sites, including that of Yahoo. Observers have wondered whether Google's business model can survive, especially given the downturn in Internet advertising. Schmidt insists that the company has been profitable for the last two quarters, although he declines to disclose numbers."

From here.

"Google's advertising programs enable advertisers to closely match text-based ads with users' search queries. The result is a highly targeted service that consistently produces an average click-through rate four to five times higher than the industry average for traditional banner advertising. Google provides advertisers with a full complement of monitoring services to ensure the best results. Online advertisers, such as Acura, Expedia, Eddie Bauer, Ernst & Young and REI, consistently rank Google as their top online advertising choice."

From here.

"So, where's the business model? To this end, Google has started to diversify its revenue stream. It boasts 100 co-brand partners, such as The Washington Post and Netscape, that have selected Google as an embedded Internet search engine on their site. Most of these co-brand partners pay the company from $8 to $10 per thousand queries and from $600 to $2,000 per month in licensing fees. Google also has a program offering free search capabilities to smaller Web sites, with the caveat that it might begin inserting advertisements on search-query pages at a future date -- but no banner ads.

The company has also instituted a pay-for-play scheme called Adwords that allows an advertiser to purchase a word and place a small text ad on the page whenever that word is mentioned in a query. But Google is making the most money from customized intrasite search functions, built for a dozen select clients, such as router giant Cisco Systems and Linux provider Red Hat."

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find more.

This week's issue of Business Week has build-your-own-PVR instructions.

When a meme leaps from the pages of Popular Mechanics and Wired to the pages of Business Week and the Boston Globe, it's probably time for the networks and studios to pay attention and figure out how they're going to deal with this technology.

try to relax ...

Hey, I am relaxed, but thanks for caring. 8-)

The Chicago Tribune article refers to regulation of energy trading contracts "that Enron and other companies traded." Deregulating commodity trading has nothing to do with how a company hides assets or liabilities or losses in special-purpose entities. See this story [Business Week] for a history of the use of SPEs. Enron is not the only company to take "advantage" of special-purpose entities. They became popular in the 80s - long before Enron's rise to power.

We can argue forever about to what degree campaign and political contributions influence politician's behavior. I'd have to agree that there is some influence. Politicians are human, after all - albiet a much lower form of human life than /. readers. I'd have to argue, though, that ego is likely as large an influence on public figures. Look at Al Sharpton and Rush Limbaugh. Opposite sides of the political fence, but both obviously enamored with the attention they get and willing to do what it takes to get more attention. I can pull more examples from the left and right on this.

Here are a few more articles on the subject that IMHO are a bit more substantive:

From BusinessWeek

From M Commerce Times

Some Information on its Problems:

A brief primer from the Ultra Wideband Working Group

And a very in depth look at the history of UWB

-john

According to this article [www.businessweek.com], Google's revenue for 2001 was around $50M, it has been cash-flow positive since Q1 of 2001, and it became profitable at the end of Q3 2001.

That's a lie. Encryption is legal in China.

In fact, they encourage it to keep sensitive commercial information from the prying eyes of the NSA, et al.

Consequently, anyone who has anything subversive to send just puts it in a password-protected zip file.

Much easier than Navajo.

Well I was talking about the us. (think I mentioned that in my post, maybe not obvious enough). But actually, I have read the same for europe, in that most R&D spending goes mostly to military. Do you have reference links for your claims?

This article (page 4, sorry, its a pdf) shows clearly that the US spend way more money than anyone else on defense, which supports your case. From this article:

Currently, the EU pumps about 2% of its gross domestic product, or some $205 billion, into the military, vs. the U.S.'s $343 billion, or some 3% of GDP.

A one percent difference does not seem that big. I am not sure how to take these figures. I mean the almost 1.5 billion difference is significant . .. but, in terms of percentages it seems that there is not a huge difference in effort being spent on military. Dunno, do you have more info? or a better analysis of these statistics?

...five thousand years of warfare have demonstrated that war is often an extremely effective course of action.

Those same five thousand years also demonstrate that war is more often an extremely ineffective course of action.

Taking one of the largest examples of futility, the kingdoms and countries of Europe fought each other for nearly two thousand years and in the end, decided to put national differences aside and form the European Union.

Decisive outcomes are pretty rare. The evidence is simply that wars continue in the same places one after the other, century after century. The history of empires is one of decline and fall.

War is probably the most expensive way of acquiring property even excluding the cost in lives. (The main exception is conquering territories sparsely population by technologically primitive aboriginals.) The Japanese, for example, have acquired far more U.S. property peacefully than they ever could by war.

Curbing piracy begins when people have more than enough to feed themselves and their family. I just want to point out a few articles here, here, and here. The first two are about Shanghai, being the bastion of capitalism in China and all, and the third about N. Korea possible plans for experimenting w/ capitalism. This is what I prefer to see; allowing countries to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences, instead of telling them what to do.

Complaining about evil corporate behavior accomplishes nothing. You need to take the capitalist approach, in a capitalist environment:

The free market works a lot like democracy. Except you get to buy the votes. They're called 'shares'. It's the inverted Victor Kiam model: "I hated the product so much I bought the company".

Shareholder activism isn't just for gadflies with time on their hands. Moral suasion, when applied with enough hard assets, can be extremely influential in deciding what happens to a company, even if management is headed in another direction. For example, look at the havoc Walter Hewitt has wreaked on Carly Fiorina's attempt to merge HP and Compaq.

I will concede that sometimes the opposite approach is taken: shareholders vocally sell their shares to express their indignation with a company's actions. For example CalPERS (the $170bn-asset pension fund for California public employees) and TIAA-CREF (a monster teachers pension fund) getting out of Talisman Energy in response to its contributions to the dictatorship in Sudan and the usual human rights atrocities being committed there...

But the point derived is still the same: as an owner, and not some whinger on the sideline, you get the right to express yourself on the subject. Instead of just complaining about it on a bulleting board.

The other time-honored approach is to boycott the purchase of products from that company. Though it doesn't seem to work that well sometimes (witness the slashdot refrain: "I'd never use MS", and then look at MS's ever burgeoning billions of dollars revenues.)...

But once a few people got rich that way, naturally there was a "gold rush". It's no different than the Florida Land Bubble, the tulip bubble, or a zillion other speculative bubbles.

For that matter, how different is the stock market, with its rumor-chasing mentality? Or modern currency, which is valuable only because you can use it to buy Goods and Services -- which are produced only because they're worth money!

Which is not an argument for going back to the Gold Standard or shutting down Wall Street. It's just a reminder that speculation and fiat are both essential parts of a modern economy.

The basic issue is intellectual property rights, and how this applies to the artists who perform the music, and the record companies who market it. I'm not seeing much discussion about here, so I thought I'd do some research and post some more background.

The interesting thing to me is that recording artists and the record companies have vastly different opinions about the availability of music on the internet.

In general, artists would like to be able to sell their own music on the web -- however, they do want that music to be sold, not given away or stolen.

Artists who don't have labels are free to put their own stuff out there for download. They also have the ability to sell it on personally-made CDs or other media, although at this time they have no way to safeguard this media once it gets into someone else's hands.

Artists who are signed to a record company want to be able to market their music on the internet without going through their record companies (therefore getting the proceeds themselves, and not giving the record companies their 'cut'), presumably because the record companies are predatory. Predatory aspects of the record companies, for example, are a large part of Courtney Love's and LeAnn Rimes' opinions (below).

The record companies not only want to prevent 'their' CDs from showing up on morpheus, etc, they also want to prevent recording artists from putting other tracks onto the web for sale or for free. If artists could do this outside of their contracts, the record companies would of course lose money and customers.

Therefore, record companies want to prevent their CDs from being ripped or copied (hence this article), AND they want to prevent their artists from getting around their contracts by selling directly to consumers.

All in all, I think the record companies are RIGHT to try to keep their product from being pirated. However, not only is this basically impossible, but the MEANS they are going about it is going to cause a huge backlash and only hurt the record companies and the artists further.

Here's some more info:

From Intellectual Property Is an Oxymoron:

"There's an important difference between authors and publishers that the current intellectual property system ignores. Authors still perform a valuable service by creating intellectual property. Publishers perform an increasingly useless service, copying information that individuals who own computers connected by the Internet can copy on their own...

"...Publishers have become useless middlemen rendered obsolete by digital technology. The laws of supply and demand are driving their profit margins to zero... Notably, nearly 30 states are now suing the top record labels alleging CD price fixing."

Some artists' opinions:

Courtney Love: "Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. " (from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, as quoted on Salon.com.)

Business Week, writing about the Recording Artists Coalition (RAC) testimony at a Senate hearing in April:

"Musical artists represented by RAC want to be able to sell their music on the Internet without going through the bureaucracy of record labels. While many artists supported the copyright-infringement lawsuit the RIAA brought against Napster, they now want labels to aggressively award licensing deals to legitimate independent music Web sites in addition to the labels' own online services. That's something that isn't happening as fast as artists hoped."

a variety of artists at a Senate hearing in September, including Courtney Love, Don Henley, and LeAnn Rimes.

Alanis Morrissette (from Billboard.com): "'Artists today are not being given a chance to experience the normal ebbs and flows that result in an artist's evolution.'

"In Morissette's opinion, the Internet at one time offered great promise. Such companies as MP3.com and Napster, she said, 'offered a link between artists and audiences and was a way for less-established artists to have a forum to reach those who will be touched by their art.' Now, she said, those same companies have been 'litigated, vilified, and ultimately consolidated to the point where these opportunities [don't exist].' "Pointing to Napster's relationship with Bertelsmann, and the acquisition of MP3.com and Emusic by Vivendi Universal, Morissette said that the Internet has become 'a bottleneck for creativity,' because the media conglomerates are attempting to apply traditional, profit-oriented business models to the new medium."

The article states the PS2 already passed 20 million sold... which is quite off, at least according to Buisiness Week, stating it's more in the ball park of 6 millions.

For me that's enough to dismiss the whole article's credibility.

Where did you go to school Indonesia ? You would need to what is the rupiah down to 2 billion to the dollar ?

C|net Editor's Choice

New York Times Review

Business Week Sweet Music

Wall Street Journal Review

LA Times Review

PC Magazine 5/5 Rating

But more to the point, who has played the cell-phone style hidden game on the iPod? With new hacking sites popping up all over, has anyone found a firmware update that gives them any more games yet? Or playback of even more media formats or other abilities? Of couse it will soon have Windows compatibility and people have been booting off their iPods since the beginning, but lately I've seen someone modifying it for use as a simple address book, people trying to get it to work under *BSD and Linux, and development of a new graphic EQ for it. Anyone else made cool hacks?

Actually, Netscape never made much of their money from the browser business -- they made their money from server sales. You complain about Microsoft giving away a browser, but Netscape did exactly the same thing.

From a Business Week commentary circa 1998:

On Jan. 5, Netscape shocked Wall Street by disclosing that it expects to post a loss of up to $18 million in the fourth quarter because of a steep drop in Web-browser sales and fierce price competition for server-software sales from Microsoft Corp. and IBM. The Mountain View (Calif.) company says it expects revenue of $125 million to $130 million--far below earlier expectations of $165 million. That's because Netscape's browser sales fell 37%, to $17 million, in the fourth quarter, vs. $27 million in the previous quarter. A key reason: Microsoft copied Netscape's plan, giving away its Internet Explorer while the startup began charging a few dollars. And now, Netscape is down to a 60% share.

On a side note - Netscape started the meme "the browser is the OS." Microsoft paid attention while some scoffed. They attacked the browser, made the OS the browser, and are now preparing to launch .NET.

What I've come to realize is that for the majority of artists, this so-called piracy may have actually been working in their favor," testified alternative rock star Alanis Morissette. RAC also says artists who want to put their music on free sites like Napster should have that right -- something they don't now have.

That's from a Business Week article referenced from the Artist's Coalition site -- which, curiously enough, has the domain name "artistsagainstpiracy.com". Either they're missing something, or they've correctly realized that music sharing is not the biggest "piracy" going on here.

Anyway, as another artist put it in a senate field hearing:

"You give something to your audience, and it always seems to come back somehow."

Of course, the difference between the record industry and the artist is that the artist receives the goodwill and interest. So the record industry has to secure their return by other means...

While the greatest transgression that Nike has allegedly committed is not giving bathroom breaks,

If you think that's the "worst transgression" Nike's been accused of, you have another thing coming.

Apple is the only computer manufacturer who's making money right now.

Both Aplle and Dell are making money. See this Business Week article.

Steve M

I was amused by the notion that for Microsoft to follow in the footsteps of IBM, as a company that no longer sets standards, would somehow be the bad scenario. Well, things could have been worse for IBM. They had a near-death experience in about 1993. Sure, they had inertia, it could have taken them decades to finally fade away (a la Control Data, Unisaurus, DEC, and many others), but that they revitalized themselves rather than fade away is thanks to having reinvented the company (including their first-ever layoffs, just to pick one example). The best reference I could quickly find was an article from Business Week, which seems to capture the essential points.

The significance for Microsoft? Well it is pretty early to start pondering a post-Microsoft era and I'm not sure I see any signs of collapse in the various cracks which appear around the sides of the empire. But if a collapse does come, it could be more catastrophic than you'd think.

In 1999, 40% of AOL users are oversees.

AOL Latin America, 173 call centers in Brazil. Partnerships with banks reaching up to 17 million customers

German indicators putting AOL second and Compuserve third. (Remember Compuserve and AOL are the same thing.

AOL usage statistics of UK. AOL's three services are about the same level as the biggest Freeserve

AOL operates under a lot of different names in a lot of different places. Your friends can be using AOL and not even know it.

It's at: http://businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/sep2001/nf 20010914_2935.htm

Business Week is one of the more important and respected publications in business. While this isn't a scientific poll, I wouldn't be surprised to see it quoted, regardless of how it turns out.

It's almost a cliche rather than a legend. The tale is a cautionary one well-known among investors. It does appear to be historical, though, being the first recorded investment bubble in history. Go and read about it.

You can now read the book about it.

Actually, you're right, I don't like it. Gates tends to donate to causes like third world vaccines while he holds stock in biotech companies. Sounds like a conflict of interest there.

I thought most, if not all, graduate business schools have some sort of hard quantitative analysis. (That's why a lot of them have statistics or hard math requirements for admissions.) Of course, each school will differ in the amount of quant focus, but you could look that up in, for example, the businessweek rankings.

Check these sites for current rankings and contact admissions asap so they can start a file on you and track your interest in their program. Don't forget to contact financial aid asap too, and look for the free money, because it IS out there. Business Week B-school Rankings are at http://businessweek.com/bschools/index.htm US News and World Report rankings are at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/gradrank/m ba/gdmbat1.htm

ANY MINORITY APPLICANTS PLEASE CHECK OUT http://cgsm.org !!! They want to give you free money. Contact them immediately. I will accept e-mail questions about the program.

Good luck, the recession is coming.

1) Companies are not required to show an options grant in their income statement, but can show it in a footnote in their annual report. This makes the company appear to be more profitable than it really is. Motley Fool article, and part two
2) Deferred taxation. No one has to pay taxes when the option is issued, but they would if an equivalent amount of salary was paid. Business Week article, look a couple of paragraphs in.
3) Risk dilution. If a startup succeeds, the founders are going to be extremely wealthy. They'd much rather give up some of their potential gains in that situation, in exchange for a greater chance of the company succeeding. (Since their paying less salary up front.)
4) Tying the employee to the company. It's expensive to train someone to take over a position when someone leaves. It takes them a while to get familiar with what the previous person was doing.

For these reasons, issuing options can be a win-win, for both the employer and the employee. So even if employees are valuing the options appropriately, companies may still want to pay a greater value of options than they would of salary.

Pretty good article about SETI researcher Kent Cullers in Business Week.

what happened in my case is that the internet gave me a fifteen second attention span. i mean at least tv made me sit there now i cant even focus on tv for that long. because here im only a single click away from another interesting distracting bit of information, halfway through an article.

1) It has mistakenly assumed it could replicate the success of Slashdot simply by repurposing the Slashdot message board system for the purposes of broad-minded subjects mostly related to pop culture, pop technology and pop politics. They have failed to realize that Slashdot's success has come through its specialization. The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects, that all your base would belong to them. But they ain't CATS. They are on their way to destruction. They have no chance to survive, make their time. HA HA HA HA.

2) It assumes it can create value through the aggregation of the readerships of several specific content sites into one single site. YET MANY OF THE CONTENT SITES CONTRIBUTING PARTICIPANTS ARE LOSING MONEY, SOME AT ASTONISHING RATES. If you're a fan of Poynter, which you should be, you'd already have read articles chronicling the plights of Inside.com, Feed, ModernHumorist, and others participating in Plastic. - It prolly aint gonna be with us much longer.

HEADING TO ARBITRATION? Still, NSI has plenty of kinks to iron out. Competitors claim the company holds on to the domain names of clients that have defaulted on payments and then resells them for profit. Wolford refutes these accusations and says NSI returns these names to the public pool for anyone to register with any company. The dispute is likely to end up in arbitration before the multinational domain-name governing body, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN). Should NSI lose, it could suffer yet another public-relations black eye.

FEROCIOUS BATTLE. With a 43% share of that market, NSI might look like top dog. But don't be fooled. That figure represents a 57% decline from NSI's market share in 1999, when it had a monopoly on top-level domain-name registrations. Since last June, when the monopoly ended, scrappy competitor Register.com has grabbed 16.5% of the market and is growing quickly. NSI is fighting back with new marketing and added services, such as the new multilingual offering. But the fact that NSI and Register are locked in such a ferocious battle comes as a bit of a shock.

MacOS X Looks like a Champ Red Herring

Re-Engineering the Mac Universe Washington Post

OS X Won't Change the World but is Still a Big Deal ZDNet

MacOS X: Major Into in Minor Key Business Week

It's As Easy as A Mac Wired

And tons more, too many to mention. All from mainstream press, note... will wonders never cease?

A 'certain other company' ahem.. has spent years ensuring incompatibility between products to tie you into theirs, then make you upgrade regularly. It's very nice to see this policy backfiring on them in a high-visibility market space I'm sure they'd like to 'own' too.

I don't know about that. We've seen this before. In that story it wasn't the 'certain other company' putting their proprietary incompatible computers into space, but rather some other nut, and with NASA's blessing, so it doesn't look like their policy's backfired yet.

My initial reaction is not printable in a family oriented medium.

There's a saying in techdom about Microsoft: Don't moon the giant. Crossgain mooned Microsoft every which way. First, the ex-Microsofties poached some of their former colleagues to join them at the startup. Then they raised $10 million from investors, including The Barksdale Group, a venture firm run by Microsoft's chief nemesis at the antitrust trial, former Netscape Communications Corp. (AOL) CEO James Barksdale. A few months later, Crossgain named Mitchell Kertzman, an outspoken critic of Microsoft's business practices, a director. Kertzman is CEO of Liberate Technologies (LBRT), an interactive-TV software maker that competes fiercely with Microsoft interactive-TV technology

The last straw was Crossgain's decision to base its technology on non-Microsoft software. Instead of using such Microsoft products as the Windows 2000 operating system and SQL Server 2000 database package to develop its service, Crossgain opted for software made by rivals. ''It doesn't look very good for Microsoft if a company run by its former vice-president of developer relations is using software made by Oracle,'' says a former Microsoft executive.

With a potential lawsuit looming, Microsoft offered a deal, according to Crossgain and Microsoft. If Crossgain committed to building its service with Microsoft products, the company wouldn't pursue the noncompete claims. Crossgain sources say Microsoft specifically wanted to preclude the company from using Oracle database software. Microsoft sources deny that. Switching to Microsoft technologies meant huge delays and the loss of months of work for Crossgain, which hopes to launch its first service in March. But the deal also meant avoiding months, or perhaps years, of litigation with one of the wealthiest companies in the world. Crossgain execs thought they could win the litigation, but the time and expense to do it would be a huge drain.

[RANT]

It looks like what MS is doing my not be illegal, but that is only saying that the corporate equivalent of being a serial killer is not illegal. MS can intimidate, kill off, and consume their opposition because there is no law against being a monster. And the nicely legalistic judges say sorry, but they have to go free. Year after year the carnage goes on.

It is starting to look like MS is the Corporate Equivalent of Hannibal Lecter, in my opinion. And being rich, with all the lawyers, can make sure that such mass corporate murder and cannibalization is never made illegal. Again, in my opinion.

[/RANT]

Thank You for Your Support

Sounds like a good idea for a site, given the freshness of the movie in the minds of the public

The directive, which was negotiated among the EU governments over six years, guarantees European citizens absolute control over data concerning them. If a company wants personal information, it must get that person's permission and explain what the information will be used for. It must also promise not to use it for anything else without the citizen's consent. A company selling birdseed, for example, can't use its mailing list to hawk Audubon calendars. Citizens have the right to know where information about them came from, to demand to see it, to correct it if wrong, and to delete it if objectionable. And they have a right to file suits against any person or company they feel is misusing their data. One piece of the law is particularly stringent. Article 29 demands that foreign governments provide data protections every bit as rigorous as Europe's, under a similar regulatory structure. Those that fail, the EU warns, could find their data flows with Europe, the world's largest economy, outlawed.

I had the chance to walk aboard a huge seaship that carries iron ore from Brazil all the way to Japan, going under Africa. It then goes empty to Vancoucer, where it gets loaded with coal, and back to Brazil, by the straits of Magellan, under Tierra del Fuego (because the ship is so large, it is beyond the Panama Channel size). And then it flips coal for iron ore, and again it goes, always traveling eastward (it seems it the ocean currents favor that direction).

Turns out, for long haul, you can't beat the costs of sea transportation. It took large q's of rail wagons to load such a ship, you bet. And it is just unimaginable to make iron ore get to Japan more cheaply.

For the short haul, on the other hand, trucks tipically crush rail transportation -- simply because it goes from door to door, saving the change of transportation mode ("the last mile" is generally trucks, anyway).

Between a rock and and a hard place, rail companies are tipically subsidised (esp. in Europe) or having poor returns/facing consolidation (U.S.). Ok, I am not going to give the last word on this -- I haven't gone far enough in the analysis -- but it does seem to be a means of transportation under check. The "chunnel" was a money pit -- no investment return in sight, though a much more favorable situation than this pharaonic siberia-alaska tunnel.

The plan the article depicts is clearly aiming at long haul transportation. But, obviously (as it is a tunnel under the sea) it is competing with sea transportation. And, like the joke about the bear and the two hikers, it has to prove not simply that it can work, or that there are things to transport between Alaska and Siberia, but rather that rail would do it more cost efficiently than ships sailing over the pacific.

Dito.

-rcastro0

The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons. We've also known for quite some time that sleeplessness takes a toll on the workforce. According to some reports, 51% of Americans report that sleeplessness interferes with their productivity. People are going to bed late and failing to get up early, and not surprisingly, (according to that same source) a third of the population wishes they could nap on the job (and surprisingly, 16% of employers "endorse naps on the job" -- I wish I had that sort of employer).

Unfortunately, the outlook isn't good for people who fail to get their eight or so hours of sleep per night. Sleeplessness increases stress and raises bloodpressure (which can increase heart attacks), can precipitate ulcers, and can even promote alzhe ime rs. Sadly, very techies and engineers who are designing the technology that will preserve more information in the next few years than has been recorded in the history of humanity won't "be around" to see it happen, as debilitating diseases rob them of the ability to perceive the world they have constructed. What begins with immediate memory loss will ultimately be cemented in their old age.

The solution is clear. OSHA already has standards in place to prev ent RSI injuries in the workplace. Federal laws already exist governing how often and for how long truck drivers must sleep before returning to the road. New guidelines must be set for how much IT workers can be forced to work without sleep. In the footsteps of pioneers of the 10-hour work day of the nineteenth century, we must today pioneer the 8-hour sleep day. The safety of our IT infrastructure and ultimately of our fellow workers demands it.

Check this out to see where MS stands on .NET.

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."

Do not bet on MS releasing anything as big as .NET that does not run under Winblows. If you read this article, you understand my assertion.

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life."