Slashdot Mirror

The essay was an interesting read, but it is all theoretical as to what the future would be. It's obvious what the authors intent writing the article was by reading the last paragraph:

As a musician, I have come to believe that free file sharing is good for the soul. In the short run, we may lose money. But we are a tenacious lot, and we will figure out new ways to make money in cyberspace. If we believe in the future of music-- and I don't mean remarketing rock 'n' roll to each new generation but rather encouraging unbounded creative exploration-- then we should celebrate the open Internet.

My point would be that we should respect what the author of a piece of music wants. If the author says they do not want people copying his music, they should respect that. If another author or musician says that people can freely copy their work, let people do so. In the end, I see it as a matter of morality (if that exists anymore...).

I guess in the future they could also design all sound cards and recording devices to detect watermarks. Then you would be stuck looking for technology that predates these restrictions. I'm sure the music industry has a long term goal like this.

Check out this essay by Jaron Lanier for more on that idea.

Remember, it's not copy protection, it's copy control.

Actually, the U.S. Department of Defense has clearly outlined scenarios in which GPS would be locally shut down and/or jammed; Space.com had an interesting story about it earlier this month.
Another reason is the available of ultrawideband technology (UWB). It's really interesting, relatively inexpensive, and can provide tremendously accurate (1 centimeter) positioning.
No, I don't own stock in it or anything like that (although, as a U.S. citizen, I should).

http://www.discover.com/nov_01/featlovin.html

The reason that there are no Libertarians (or other 3rd parties) in office is because the so-called "democratic process" is biased against them.

• In most localities, it is extremely difficult to get on the ballot unless your party got a certain % of the vote last time. But you can't get % of the electorate if you can't get on the ballot! Chicken and egg...
• Strategic voting, aka "I don't want to throw my vote away." The current "plurality vote" system allows someone that almost 2/3 of the voters did not want to win. (May the Best Man Lose.) This encourages betraying your conscience to vote for the "lesser of two evils" to keep the worse guy out. There are alternatives, such as the Condorcet Method, which is essentially an improved IRV. If you don't have liberty of conscience...what do you have?
• "Winner-takes-all" voting in single-seat elections (like president) is also a problem. It hampers minor parties from being visible at all if you have to carry a whole state to get noticed.

Third parties often unite on these causes, regardless how divergent their platform on other issues. Vote third party on the principle of it. If you can't trust Dems and Reps to be fair during the process of getting into office, how can you trust them once they are in office?

Get informed. Push for change.

First surviving clone?

I thought the African Wildcat that was posted on slashdot was. (Sorry, can't find the url. Seems slashdot's search won't find stories more then a year or so old, and google can't find it either! Stranger yet, i was looking at that story a few days back because i was showing it to a friend, and now i can't find it!)

However some urls to actual stories (and some VERY cute pics!) are here and here.

D.

There is an article on Discover's website about a similar technology for gleaning energy from very limited heat sources, such as roof-top solar collectors or even waste heat. It uses Ammonia because of the lower boiling point.

This scenario isn't specifically mentioned (actually, the article is about powering an air conditioning system with solar heat), but I can imagine that this would be a good application.

See the article "A Love Song for Napster" on Discover.com.

This is actually rather old news. It was featured in an article in the Jan 2000 issue of Discover Magazine. The article had everything the Chicago Trib says and a LOT more details as to how it's done.

Module music in the "scene" carries samples of the instruments along with the file. Yet Discover magazine thought an MIT researcher's work in the field was so novel that he was a finalist in their 1997 Discover Awards (see "Bringing Music to the Web"). A project (whos name escapes me) combines audio data with the music to play it, and calls it a new format.

Anyway, there are plenty of players out there if you want to listen in. For MS Windows users, there's Winamp, although I personally prefer Modplug over Winamp, hoping that my favorite player of all time, Cubic, will be worked on again and make a comeback.

Linux users have their choice of a variety of players. XMMS has a plugin available with the engine from modplug. Several others also exist as well.

What has continued to surprise me is that no one seems to have caught on that this particular copy protection like this only affects DAE (digital audio extraction, isn't it?). Good ol' analog ripping - by way of the MPC/2/3 CD-Audio out from the CD-ROM drive, or even a 1/8" stereo mini plug, or better yet, a pair of composite RCA type plugs... into the line input of your sound card, or hell, any other recording device - would be a, perhaps inelegant, but still effective way to rip... and is that even circumventing anything? Is recording from a supposedly secure standalone CD player illegal yet?

I'm not bothered so much by purposefully garbled music as I am by the idea of authentication. Music that requires a certified legitimate player to show its papers, players that require music to do the same, all in the name of preserving the profit of record companies... Read this great article by Jaron Lanier over at Discover Magazine. (first saw it on a /. post some time ago, no I don't remember where/when) It's a great what-if about the possible future of secured music, and he makes a damn good point - all of the mechanisms for effecting complete control over what and how you listen are being slowly and for the most part quietly put into place... and that scares me.

discover.com has an article on FF graphics which touches on this subject. The squaresoft designers go into modeling flesh and why the skin has to be translucent to allow light to bounce off the blood and blood vessels beneath!

I can't get to the stanford paper right, but it appears that the squaresoft designers have known about, and used this in FF.

The article is at http://www.discover.com/july_01/featvirtual.html

Well, I missed the SciAm article, but Discover had a recent article on the subject as well. In it Newton's laws were brought to full force, and the conclusion was that wings indeed generate lift by pushing air down. They even have a neat picture of a Cessna leaving "a deep trough in the clouds beneath it, proof that it stays aloft by pushing air down. (photo courtesy of Cessna Aircraft Company)"
They suggest, though, that the answer involves more than just the "kite" effect that some responses to your post suggest. Here's an excerpt with their explanation:

To understand lift you need only Newton's three laws and something called the Coanda effect. The Coanda effect is just the tendency of air or any even slightly viscous fluid to stick to a surface it is flowing over, and thus to follow the surface as it bends. As air follows the upper surface of a wing, it gets bent downward -- because the surface is curved but also because the leading edge is tilted up (especially when ascending) at what is called the angle of attack. The air that is bent downward pulls on the air above it, distending it and creating a low-pressure zone.
To bend the air downward, the wing has to exert a force on it (that's Newton's first law). That action inevitably elicits an equal and opposite reaction (Newton's third law). By means of the low-pressure zone above the wing and the higher pressure below it, the air exerts an upward force on the wing: That's lift. The size of the force is equal to the mass of air the wing has diverted downward multiplied by the acceleration of that air (Newton's second law)."

The article was scanty on technical details, but pointed out some intereting facts that go in the face of Conventional Wisdom (TM) on the subject. For example, CW holds that for some reason the air travelling over the top of the wing takes the same amount of time to reach the back as the air passing under; the author calls this the "principle of equal transit times" and rapidly debunks it. It turns out that the air pasing over the top of the wing actually reaches the trailing edge faster than the air on the bottom.

If you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you posted the link to the SciAm article - I wasn't able to find it on their online archive. Thanks, and enjoy!

WireFrame Mockup Here
Chromed Mockup Here
Rendered version Here
Aki Hand here

---

WireFrame Mockup Here
Chromed Mockup Here
Rendered version Here
Aki Hand here

---

WireFrame Mockup Here
Chromed Mockup Here
Rendered version Here
Aki Hand here

---

WireFrame Mockup Here
Chromed Mockup Here
Rendered version Here
Aki Hand here

---

Here is the article. The CG is amazing.


Refrag

But the CG in this movie looks absolutely AMAZING. I dont think I have ever seen people rendered so realistically.

Go check out the "Virtual You" article at the Discover Magazine web site for a still image that is truly photorealistic quality. I've showed the print magazine to people who have had trouble believing that the picture is computer generated, and not a real person. (I submitted the article here, but it was turned down :( )
---

It's late in the game but here is my 2 cents. Katz didn't really weigh in one way or the other on global warming. It seems like his main point was that global warming will be a big techno-political issue, which seems like a no brainer since it has been for years now.

I am of the mind that we know jack-shite about how much impact we have on our environment and its a waste of time to endlessly debate these issues until more conclusive evidence is found. There are so many real CURRENT problems the world faces that should be addressed that it seems almost criminal for politicians and world leaders to even bother with it.

I'm not saying we shouldn't continue researching climate change, hell, spend more money on it. We need people and ships in orbit, colonies on the moon, people going to Mars to study its climate - real research yielding real scientific knowledge, not a bunch of rhetoric that accomplishes exactly NOTHING. The real problem with the global warming debate is that it shouldn't be a debate, there isn't enough knowledge to justify debate. It is just another hot button issue like abortion and confederate flags that serves no purpose other than to make our elected officials/world leaders look like they care and are really working hard to solve the problem when in fact all they are doing is avoiding the real work of solving the real problems that people face.

There is civil injustice all over this planet, third-world wars, poverty, government corruption, hunger, AIDS, ebola, breast cancer, colon cancer, snakes, poisonous spiders, you name it! But it is almost as if these fronts have been abandoned; deemed unsolvable by the powers that be. And now they are just trying to look busy.

Anyway, here are the links I mentioned. Both concern John Christy and atmospheric scientist and member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

http://www.discover.com/feb_01/featgospel.html

http://www.atmos.uah.edu/atmos/christy/march11_01. html

--
I'm terrified beyond all capacity for rational thought.

=-=-=-=-=

Although the Anonymous Coward was trying to be funny, he/she/it may have been on the right track. A recent article in Discover Magazine addresses the psychology problems associated with long durations in space.

NASA Engineers seen fairly confident now that the tip hung-up because of thermal expansion in parts of the arm. Modern mishap analysis teaches that there is usually a series of things that collectively add up to a mishap. Thermal expansion could be one of the material causes (an other possibility being poor engineering), but what of human related causes?

Perhaps Voss and Helms were not a peak performance levels while starting the checks on the arm. Voss has been quoted as saying, the tip of the arm "held on for a little bit longer than it should have, and then the built-up forces allowed it to release. It just backed off a little bit, came back in and contacted the grapple fixture, and then bounced off again." What were they doing while the arm was not responding as it should?

Look at the psychological factors the crew is experiencing. They has been onboard since mid-March. They have recently learned that their stay will be extended. They have dealt with a robotic arm that isn't working as it should. They have been frustrated by delays in installing the new airlock. And even Denis Tito talked about the grueling hours on mind-numbing tasks.

In June of '97, the Russian space station Mir suffered a nearly catastrophic mishap when a resupply ship collided with the space station. This mishap has since been at least partially attributed to human error. The cosmonaut at the controls was mentally exhausted from four month of living on a tiny ship that had experienced myriad problems already.

I think the future of space travel is going to see more psychologically related problems as we push ourselves for longer and longer. This isn't to say we should stop. We should instead forge ahead and learn as much as we possibly can from every moment.

Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.

Um, are you really majoring in physics? Are you just spouting off the top of your head? I'm not sure you know what you're talking about when it comes to dark matter.

First off, the story which /. failed to directly link to (as I have just done!) clearly states that dark matter is at the core of the experiment! They have used lasers to compress dark matter to the point where it creates an anti-matter star. While there would certainly be disastrous consequences if this ball of anti-matter were to come into contact with real matter (my first rough sketch comes out to a 350 Megaton yield for each square foot of compressed anti-matter, but feel free to double check) it is made very clear that this pseudo-star (is that what we should call christina aguilera?) is safely contained by the laser containment field.

The benefits of this research, namely determing the mass density of the Universe (from the Berkley dark matter paper: "A parameter known as the "mass density" - that is, how much matter per unit volume is contained in the Universe") is far more important than any possible laser containment field leak. Not that any such leak is likely.

Quit with your babbling and stick to the facts. If you want, you can learn more about laser containment fields here.

If I were you I wouldn't bother.

http://www.discover.com/june_01/featstar.html

-ted

...try this link(http://www.discover.com/june_01/featsave.html )

how about using some of that new-fangled hypertext

Sounds fair! Here are some solutions that would work, unlike the destruction of individual choice approach Katz advocates:

- Eat Locally - Make a goal for yourself. 10%? 25%? more? Try it for a month and see if you can hack it. It's not easy, but certainly worthwhile.

- Promote natural genetic diversity and redundancy in your garden - Centralized buying from major wholesalers like Lamb-Weston promotes at most two or three genetic varieties in potatos, one in soybeans, etc. Garden with the varieties that have been forgotten.

- Buy local foods - visit the local weekly farmer's market. Find area local foods organizations. Get better produce, picked ripe by family farms in your area.

- Consume simplier, healthier beverages - Know how much waste water and byproduct is created through double-stage fermentation (i.e. making beer)? Drink a better beverage - locally produced hard cider! (An added advantage is that most locally produced cider uses a major variety of apples - mostly kinds you'd never find at the supermarket - and promotes additional natural genetic diversity).

Unlike Katz's Soviet vision, the above can and does work, as long as you're not too stupid or lazy.

*scoove*

Nah - not true - lets kick the senators off the gravy train and elect the whole senate on a proportional representatoin basis.

Then, lets toss out the First Past the Post method for the members of the house and elect them via SOMETHING OTHER THAN FPTP: see
http://www.discover.com/nov_00/gthere.html?article =featbestman.html
not goats.cx - trust me

I think the best place to search for pro-Napster (and anti-Napster) info is Slashdot.

From Slashdot stories I could remember two articles :

• A Love Song For Napster by Jaron Lanier at Discovery Magazine online
• In Defense of the Free Ride by Robert X. Cringely at PBS online

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.

A classic treatise from the e-pen of noted intellectual Courtney Love.

If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy.

You can't have both.

This one's from the heart of rock'n'roll's Mr Wild, Jared Lanier.

I doubt Love would get out of bed for less than a Hollywood ransom and a noseful of gak. Might luck out with Lanier, though, if you can contact him in Virtuality before the imminent Eighties revival kicks in.

After their first 'virtual retina display' was prototyped, they had visitors in their lab looking at the device. One gentleman placed his right eye onto the scanner and went through the demonstration. When he was asked if he was thoroughly impressed with the demonstration, he replied, "Yes, but not with the demonstration itself, but rather the fact that I saw the demonstration with my blind eye."

The man only had the ability to use 5-10% of his optic nerves in his right eye. So he was partially blind but amazing nonetheless.

Here are other articles on the subject: an older zdnet story and '98 discover technology award

-sal terre

There's another good article on this in the April issue of Discover. You can find it online here: http://www.discover.com/apr_01/feattrap.html

Discover Magazine this month had an article entitled "Radio Flyer" about an inventor of a possibly similar technology. Does anyone know if this is related?

The post by apsmith illustrates a point we should keep in mind: Not everyone who wants to charge money for access to information is evil.

The American Physical Society (APS) is a great institution, and their line of journals (Physical Review Letters and Phys Rev A through E) are very highly regarded in the community. That high regard comes at a price (namely that of overseeing the peer review process; a staff qualified to do that doesn't come cheap), and though APS is non-profit, they do need to recover their costs. Bear this in mind next time you see someone assuming that anyone who suggests any sort of fee for information is a corporate stooge.

At the same time, we have the old "Information wants to be free" argument. It's true, information isn't subject to physical-world restrictions, so you can give it away and still have it, and essentially infinitely many copies of it can be made at essentially no cost to anybody.

So: "Information wants to be free", but "Information can be damned expensive." Wish I knew how to resolve this conflict.

I wonder if it's possible for organizations like the APS (or even for-profit entities) to make enough money from initial sales that they wouldn't need to care about attempting to implement ridiculous and enunforceable copyright restrictions? That is, sell people your information (there will always be those you can't wait for it to propagate enough for them to get it free, or those who voluntarily pay to support the organization's mandate), but don't try to control what they can do with it. Once they've bought it, they can spread it around as they like; you just have to hope that enough people buy it that you can sustain your operation. In the film world, this would be like needing to make most of your money off a film on opening weekend -- if you can manage to make enough, who cares if free copies are floating around on Monday?

At the very least, we need to work out a different approach to the legislation-and-encryption tack that seems to be the standard governmental response these days. As a friend of a friend of mine once said, "You can have copyright protection, or you can have civil rights, but you can't have both." Check out this article by John Lanier for a nice thought-experiment on the kinds of totalitarian measures it would take to really prevent the dissemination of digital music.

note this not a direct reply to the above message, only observations about fair use

The industry responds that fair use of music does not include the right to make entire backup CDs, and that consumers will still be able to make cassette copies.

So we are not allowed the make full back up of cds. This is new information to me, but on the other hand though I am always curious about copywrite I have never looked up the details. In my opinnion this is an issue that should be debated in court, but on here is good enough for now. Seeing how I do not have the right to make a backup (copy) of the information on the CD, then obvious I don't own the data, it not mine (even to the extend the licence I get allows me that being personal use). I own a round piece of plastic. I believe the "industry" are incorrect in their interrupation.

To understand the present one must understand the past. In the old days song writer never got paid unless they were comissioned by royality. Performing the music was what was important. In the oral tradition freely sharing the songs were the only way the songs could surive. When sheet music started being created on a large scale, the copy write laws enable the write of the piece to recieve payment when the music was purchased to be played. (but would a band playing a song they just happen to know be arrested for such a act?). Since the age of recorded music, copywrite hasn't been working so well. The purpose of copywrite is to get money to the people writing and performing the music so that they may survive at such a living. I'm not sure how things should be fixed to work, but I know the DMCA isn't the asnwer. Performer are still paid when they perform, but not it has become more like marketing for sale for recordings. The freedom of an oral tradition is now illegal.

I only listen to CDs on a computer. I also use my computer to DJ. This replaces buying very expensive CD decks. This idea put that into new method of DJ into jepordy. I can buy CD but I get pitch shift them on my computer because I can't rip them. (note DJ has all sorts of fun copy writing questions)

If Pride thinks his music will not show up on the internet, well he is crazy. With in a hour of the release of the copy-protected CD the music will be online by someone recording through the line on their computer. Then that one version will be copied and copied, not else needs to do any work what so ever.

So CDs will be replaced with "secure" devices in the future (ahem like DVDs which work great for business but screw the freedom of opensource ... see oral tradition). Well please view this artical found in Discover Mag. Which paints the future we find ourselves heading to faster and faster.

Please feel free to e-mail me at deck403@hotmail.com with any comment for I always indever to learn more

note this not a direct reply to the above message, only observations about fair use

The industry responds that fair use of music does not include the right to make entire backup CDs, and that consumers will still be able to make cassette copies.

So we are not allowed the make full back up of cds. This is new information to me, but on the other hand though I am always curious about copywrite I have never looked up the details. In my opinnion this is an issue that should be debated in court, but on here is good enough for now. Seeing how I do not have the right to make a backup (copy) of the information on the CD, then obvious I don't own the data, it not mine (even to the extend the licence I get allows me that being personal use). I own a round piece of plastic. I believe the "industry" are incorrect in their interrupation.

To understand the present one must understand the past. In the old days song writer never got paid unless they were comissioned by royality. Performing the music was what was important. In the oral tradition freely sharing the songs were the only way the songs could surive. When sheet music started being created on a large scale, the copy write laws enable the write of the piece to recieve payment when the music was purchased to be played. (but would a band playing a song they just happen to know be arrested for such a act?). Since the age of recorded music, copywrite hasn't been working so well. The purpose of copywrite is to get money to the people writing and performing the music so that they may survive at such a living. I'm not sure how things should be fixed to work, but I know the DMCA isn't the asnwer. Performer are still paid when they perform, but not it has become more like marketing for sale for recordings. The freedom of an oral tradition is now illegal.

I only listen to CDs on a computer. I also use my computer to DJ. This replaces buying very expensive CD decks. This idea put that into new method of DJ into jepordy. I can buy CD but I get pitch shift them on my computer because I can't rip them. (note DJ has all sorts of fun copy writing questions)

If Pride thinks his music will not show up on the internet, well he is crazy. With in a hour of the release of the copy-protected CD the music will be online by someone recording through the line on their computer. Then that one version will be copied and copied, not else needs to do any work what so ever.

So CDs will be replaced with "secure" devices in the future (ahem like DVDs which work great for business but screw the freedom of opensource ... see oral tradition). Well please view this artical found in Discover Mag. Which paints the future we find ourselves heading to faster and faster.

Please feel free to e-mail me at deck403@hotmail.com with any comment for I always indever to learn more

A good read.

A good read.

The Revolution was in part about taxes. It was just as much about the other abuses by government that I mentioned. Yes, the pilgrims left the Netherlands, which was even then a very tolerant nation. The problem with tolerance is that it can go too far into permissiveness. The pilgrims didn't want their religious beliefs dictated to them by the Church of England, but neither did they like the culture encouraging their children to abandon their beliefs.

Yes, the government may be better armed than I am. That doesn't do anything to the argument that by owning a gun I can defend myself, my family, and my property from criminals. The principle hasn't changed, and I'm certainly not going to roll over and die just because someone invents a bigger gun than mine.

I am all for a gov't with a strong third party presence. We won't get it in the US until we have a different election system, though. (Did you happen to see the November 2000 issue of Discover?) Personally, I prefer the Condorcet method over Borda, approval, and IRV. We also need to get states to rethink the "winner takes all" approach to their Electoral votes. Nebraska does just fine apportioning the votes by district. I believe keeping the EC is a good idea, though.

In a very general sense, Libertarians and Constitutionalists desire many of the same things, like smaller (constitutionally limited) gov't and all the things that go with it. However, the Libertarians are pragmatic while the Constitutionalists are principled. That means the L's want liberty for liberty's sake, so they can do whatever they please. The C's want liberty because it's the moral thing to do, and a gov't without morals will ultimately fail. (Oversimplification, but it will do.)

Cameras may cut down on random crimes, true. But they will definitely cut down on freedom. Many of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights implicitly assume a basic right to privacy. I won't give up that right. On the other hand, an armed responsible citizenry will also deter crimes. The major problem is that our present society is one that shirks responsibility. We see it all the time in the court system. Sue somebody, it's his fault; I plead innocent, I was raised this way; I can't help it, it's my genetics. That's a load of bull. If you're an animal, maybe you've got "your nature" as an excuse, but if you're human you've got a mind and an intellect to make decisions with.

The most important part of the article...

"The $1 billion fee would be the equivalent for the industry of selling another $5.4 billion in CDs, since the labels would have no additional production and distribution costs associated with that fee, he noted. "

Something for nothing for life + 95 years, and the major labels are fighting this. Really, that's been a lot of people's argument since the beginning. Something for nothing. But who is paying for the protection? And who is getting it?
--

"Even if the did get out, bacteria don't survive well in the atmosphere, they need a warm wet environment."

Actually there's an article in this month's Discover Mag that reports the discovery of bacteria that live in the clouds. They have their own natural antifreeze.

http://www.discover.com/feb_01/featnapster.html

In related news: by 2010 every HTML page will have JavaScript code to check whether you can read the text or not.

• You see this illustration accompanying the story and you're reminded of Goat Sex Man
• The words "© Copyright 2000 The Walt Disney Company" at the bottom of the article provoke a bout of ironic chuckling that doesn't stop until you hit your head against the wall a few times.

The main argument in the article is that adoption is generally used to increase the chances of your species' survival. However, this argument doesn't seem valid when you apply it to a species that's at the top of the food chain, decimates the Earth, creates great literature, produces crappy Hollywood movies and great cyberpunk novels, etc..

Some humans are just self-centered and don't take into consideration that somewhere on this planet, there's a child waiting to be rescued.

-Cyc

Yes, you're right. Just found the Discover article, which does indeed say that the lab-grown black holes wouldn't be the real thing. They would instead be "a small and completely safe vortex of cold atoms" that would let researchers study the effects of black holes.

I was under the impression that human males and females were near-identical from a genetic point of view. While some on Slashdot may not believe it, there aren't two distinct species of human.

They key word here is "near-identical", specifically the "near".

Yes, men and women are largely the same, and can largely do the same things. However, men have significantly better upper-body strength, on average. If a job requires that, then women are going to have a tough time with it. Running is another difference, although I don't recall exactly how it works. I believe it's something like men are better runners over short distances because the narrower hips work better for this sort of activity, but women do better for long distances because they have better endurance, or something like that. Women have proportionally greater leg strength for their body weight, at least.

Lest you think the differences are all physical, the brain is different as well. Men tend to have better spatial reasoning skills, women have better verbal skills. See this page for a barely-decent discussion.

This is not to say that there is any task that women can't do. All of these things are trends, tendencies, and averages. They will not necessarily apply to the individual. If there is some field where there are NO women, and no biological reason for it (e.g. you won't find any women impregnating other women, but that's ok), then you should probably question if women are being excluded. However, if there's a field that's only 25% women, then consider that there might actually be genetic reasons for men being more appropriate for the job, rather than it being just the result of a sexist society. Of course, not every field that's disproportionate like that will be due to genetics, but not every one will be due to sexism either.

Oops, meant "story".

Remember, the
<QUOTE source="http://www.discover.com/">
Objects more than a half-mile wide-- which strike Earth every 250,000 years or so-- would touch off firestorms followed by global cooling from dust kicked up by the impact.
</QUOTE>

OMG! Hell is upon us! The sky will rain bright flashy fireballs and bring on the end of humanity!

Well I guess satellites aren't a half-mile wide. Nevermind.

I remember a while back IBM announcing that they'll be using SOI technology with Alpha procs. CMOS 9S (not CMOS 99) and Alpha? What a team. The press release from the horse's mouth is here. Thet whole "low-k dielectric" thing reminds me of an article I read some time ago (June 1998) in Discover.

As for higher tax rates, I'll have you know that Alberta is moving to a 10.5% FLAT tax at the start of the new year. There will still be federal tax... but even at its worst, if you live in Alberta you won't pay more than 38% in taxes no matter how much you earn. And look at what you get - space, a clean environment, safety, cheap living expenses, etc.

I live in Ontario, please friend, ask Alberta (and the west) to stop voting Reform (Alliance). I really believe what we will find under the aura of this 'progressive' party who encourages 'change' is an extremely right wing, pro BIG BUSINESS (ala America) group that will very literally sell our Canadian community out. I agree that change is good, and I welcome new ideas with very open arms (the true debate in Canadian policy and politics is refreshing and a great source of pride), but I am not convinced of Mr.Day's intentions and his honest commitment to his fellow Canadians. I am also not disagreeing with the 'flat tax' idea - I feel it deserves analysis and debate...

Also, please read the article at Discover.com and contact your member and ask them to end plurality voting. It looks like the elections people have already had some analysis.