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2. No Pets. Scientologists like to release the "Thetans" in Pets. By killing them.

This comment reminds me of the hindus in India who think Catholics are cannibals because in the sacrament of Holy Communion you "eat the Body of Christ". [This used to be a widespread belief many years ago, and you still find it out in the less educated areas in India.]

The main criticism here is plain technique. FUD is best reserved for use by the Microsofties, not someone who is supposed to be intelligent.

I really dislike seeing FUD used by folks. Just a pet peeve. I greatly admire intelligent argument based on issues.

Philosophy is an Operating dSystem for the Mind. You have your OS, I have Mine. They have theirs. When was the last time you even looked at your own source code? For most people, it is spaghettifried code like you would never imagine. Some modules never fire up correctly.

(man - i got to get a job. Let's Play Quake Instead! ok ..)

They apparently succeed just because they have some kind of system for inspecting code. Just something, somehow. So they say in their own way. [They haven't gone away in fifty years, and they seems to be growing.]

Never mind if you would never agree to the design principals, or whatever. or are horrifried by what they do. If you want to rant and rave and spit blood, fine.

You probably know how to pull apart a piece of source code and criticise it from a design viewpoint. You can use that here in this context.

Saying "MS code sucks" is a lame statement. Being able to say how and why under what functionality is far more useful. Now applying that to the Operating System of the Mind could be useful.

You could critique various systems usefully, instead of FUDding around. You could what functionality would be useful, and which should be dropped.

Heck, it would even be an intelligent debate.

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Of all servers shipping with Windows software, as many as 50% (whatever the number is) have the Windows software erased and replaced by an alternate system that the owners believe to be simply superior, simple more usable and suitable (insert your favorite adjectives) for their own purposes.

I am sure it would be damning.

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I find this interesting in the context of other forms of technology survaillence, such as software back doors, etc. This ruling is probably more important than we first realize, just for that reason.

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for example, with hypnotism you can cause someone to experience and displayed the most amazing and diverse display of medical symptoms, all of which when examined by a doctor would be completely convincing.

Under such a situation, you could even have surgury ordered. But since the original cause would have been a hypnotic session, the symptoms would always return.

I do not recommend this as a personal experiment.

Under such a situation, the symptoms would be drastically real, regardless of the source. The problem is, of course, if you say to some one that it is "all in their mind" that the immediate reaction is that it is not real, that it is a fantasy. What that critic would need would be to live with a hynotically induced headache or toothache for a few days. This would be convincing as far was how much a fantasy it is. It would, of course, be under-helpful to criticise the person all along that they were imagining it all. The pain is real.

What all this seems to indicate is that there are multiple causes for the set of symptoms for Carpal Tunnel. And that mental conditions can contribute to the medical condition

and that the medical condition is quite quite real. Of course, do they know what it really is?

The list of hysterical diseases in the article is fascinating, but does not make even those conditions less real. Mis-diagnosed, maybe, but still real.

Of course, how are they going to treat this? just shout at everyone that they are hoaxing?

feh.

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makes sense to me.

;-)

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A long time programming friend of mine mentioned that the most useful courses he took outside of the programming course were a business law course, just to cover the basics of things like this, and a business accounting course, just to get his mind wrapped around modelling what bean counters were doing in the first place.

You would think with all of the legal issues running around, technical types could spend time just to get a toe wet, and get some familiarity with the concepts. It seems very much worth it.

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precisely the point. (sorry to see you moderated as off topic)

because some *will* see it as radical cool, and others recall in horror. The next big series of wars ( say, compared to the crusades, or the recent spat of european wars since napoleon) may be based on precisely this philosophical point.

I am sure that for many, it would be perfect, until it is over populated by the weekminded imps on weekend vacation, or all of the psychos get online. Imagine Borg Spam for example. Advertising right into your mind, and not being able to filter it! Imagine America, Land of the Free, home of the Brave, and Birthplace of the Borg.

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What people never looked at in the various trek series was how the Borg became the Borg.

My thought on this is that they would become the borg because in the beginning someone, somegroup, thought that all of that embedded/wearable technology is radically completely cool.

I can imagine the first network where a human can access computer data directly via a wire to that skull. Or where direct interfaces happen from brain to brain. Someone is going to have the equivalent of a religious experience as far as the significance of this vs Nirvana and the group mind.

People tend to become the things they resist. [Note for example, cops going criminal in their actions against crime] So already the seeds of the Borg are among us.

If you do not want to become a Borg in the present or future life, you will have to provide a better solution than the experience that the Borg will be.

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All if can imagine is the effect on house pets. Obviously it has to be above the range of human hearing. But if it gets into bat range, then it is far more directional.

Presumably they decided to do it this way instead of using IR because otherwise all of the sequences in the scanning of URLs just interfered with too many other remotes.

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I keep thinking about the problems with military gear where they have to worry about cosmic rays knocking out circuits. I don't know how usable these things will be in high radiation areas unless there is substantial redundancy built in.

And to speculate on what we'll run on this puppies. or the cooling systems.

Oh My!

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Actually, what you want is grey scale, not 1 bit Mono.

You can see the effect by taking any BW photo, and convert it to 1 bit color.

You also see this in printing. Laser Print IS 1 bit color, more or less, but you get true photo-grade at about 1500 dpi. Contrast this with grey scale, say on a screen, where 70 - 100 dpi is adequate for a photo, if you are using grey scale. 100 dpi in 2 bit color is horrible.

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The idea for the CL160 came from manufacturing and transportation companies frustrated with what CargoLifter calls b.u.f. - big, ugly freight.

Moving it often means working in the middle of the night and yanking utility lines out of the way or building roads and bridges into remote areas. Companies spend thousands of extra dollars assembling and disassembling large equipment that could be moved intact.

The bottom line: The biggest, ugliest thing about moving big, ugly freight is usually the cost. "Folks we talked to were desperately searching for something new," Edwards says. "Existing technology was holding them back."

In disaster areas I can see roads and transport being messed up badly, so againthe ability to go over the obstacles makes some sense there as well. Although clearing the landing site from things large boulders, errant children, panicked refugees, etc are separate issues.

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One of my favorite toys they have is the radio set wall clock . It checks itself every hour, and is great for things like daylight savings time, etc.

I am sure that this is not the only place to get this stuff, but a second source is always nice.

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Each week should make them familiar with some aspect of computers, with some practical info

something like:

week 1 basic ideas of computing. calculations. relationships of bytes to character to dots on your screen, etc.
week 2 computer insides. Open one up. see what happens if you disconnect somesomething. (error messages etc)
week 3: basic Concepts of OSen [guis, command lines, etc.]
week 4 basic concepts of word processors
week 5 basic concepts of spread sheets
week 6 basic concepts of databases
week 7 basics of games and networks
week 8 basics of programming and loose ends - how to learn more

make sure as you go along that you cover the things that make people truly clueless. Like how to follow directions, etc.

Make sure you give lots of practical details. (what to do when the computer catches on fire, etc) and what is wrong about computers you see in movies, etc.

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If they had said Win 2000, they would have been biased, according to some. and If they said Mac OSX, they are biased, according to others.

Of course, you realize that the only correct answer of this question, of W2k vs OSx is Linux. [runs and ducks to avoid getting hit by airborne vegetables]

(spelling error corrected)(apologies to the vegans)

I note that in the Slash moderation system, the author of the article can have unlimited moderation ability as far as comments to their story

We have a discussion about a shoot out between two Senior operating systems. And where there is obvious motivation on both sides to claim that the other is biased.

Obviously the author feels that discussion of other alternatives as a possible third choice is off topic, even if offered in a manner intended to be tongue in cheek.

Sometimes folks are just a bit too serious.

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If they had said Win 2000, they would have been biased, according to some. and If they said Mac OSX, they are biased, according to others.

Of course, you realize that the only correct answer of this question, of W2k vs OSx is

.
.
.

LINUX!

[runs and ducks to avoid getting hit by airborne vegatables]

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This was discussed here on slash earlier this year.

otherwise you have to sell them on the value of the "improved" service. For example, I think they charge 5 bucks a year(?) or something like that for the ability to do email attachments.

for some folks that will do the job, they do not need broadband.

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I wonder when someone will get a ruling against that.

Having seen some late night infomercials, I suspect that an awful lot of the money made in spam is made by the people who promote systems to advertise using spam, and that most small time operators do not get much out of it anyhow.

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Germaine Greer, who arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964, wrote "it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized." Nor does the official stance seem to have softened any since.

which sort of sums up the official attitude towards Tolkien. The Literatti are appalled that something with so much mass appeal would become so meaningful to so many people.

that said, while Tolkien may not have been the most profound or the most skilled of the twentieth century writers, the canvas that he wrote own, the size of his unified work and its' integrity has ensured it a place in the history of the 20th century. people tend tyo romanticize it a bit. seaking symbolisms thatmight not be true to the author. As is said of one review:

It fails to take Tolkien's literary project as seriously as he took it himself. "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations," he famously wrote in one foreword to the trilogy, warning readers against the temptation of finding in it "any inner meaning or 'message.' " Nearly every thoughtful piece of Tolkien criticism makes some kind of nod to the letter of that admonition, but very few can resist violating its spirit.

So simply it is its own creation, intended to be separate from the traditions that are part of our culture. In a sense, it is intended to be a true history of a different world. even so:

Because of its extra-cinematic life [online, etc], it can't escape being a monument to its own built-in cult, which is roughly the size of humanity.

sounds about right to me.

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I guess the idea is that if you have spare CPU cycles, the everything is fine.

Myself, I prefer dedicated hardware.

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Too bad other companies can't do the same thing.

not going to say much else, because I'm all ranted out for today

;-)

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This is not radical at all, although it is not immediately intuitive to someone who has not been deeply involved in the music scene. Artists and Musicians see this all the time, where the current establishment oozes praise over their pet projects, often and usually to the penalty of the talented no-name palying in the corner bar.

All too often it is who you know.

An example in the tech field is the IPO market. Who made the connection was often based on who knew who, and not on the merit of ideas. For every idea that got funded in silicon valley, I am sure there were hundreds, if not thousands around the country that got nailed because bankers demanded the souls and the first born of those looking to get started.

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I somehow think this would not fly. I am reminded of the French law suite vs Yahoo regarding Nazi materials.

But that was France where they are a bit daffy anyhow.

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MS has more than 25 billion dollars cash reserve. but they need the money, I guess

80 % of the Users use 20% of the features.

I have seen too many companies been bought out by MS where the technology vanished, never to be seen again. And where if you didn't want to sell out, your product became their innovation in the software, or the next urgeant core feature to the OS.

I do know someone is playing a kind of "keep up with the Jones" thing in buying software and Hardware. All of his "expert friends" (people who would get confused by a name like "slashdot") say you have to have "XYZ" this and "ABC" that. And the result is that this guy has thousands of dollars of software that he has never even used once. Things like Photoshop, PageMaker, etc. because of this clueless urge for the latest thing.

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And Aol is pushing to have the AOL Instant messanger be the standard or else it will start converting lots of its users to Netscape. or something like that

This somehow ties into the fight over Windows XP. The big companies didn't care as much when microsoft was going after smaller companies like Netscape. Now suddenly it is their lunch on the table, and it becomes important.

And of course, I am cynical about how all of these optional features are now suddenlly urgeant core features of the MS OS, but that is a rant for another day.

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[Insert Tongue in Cheek]

You would likely need a text mode version of quake. And play only other people on polar expeditions.

wireless text mode quake vs the russians.

could possibly compete with WAP mode Quake.

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Does MS have to pay out billions and billions of dollars?

Or will ATT be happy with MS removing the offending code from all versions of windows present and past? (in addition to a "smaller" fine?)

I am particularly fascinated by the idea of punitary damages, which traditionally triple damages.

Say the damage is assesses at 10 billion. times three is 30 billion, larger than their (MS) current cash on hand.

this is going to be fascinating to watch. After all ATT has enough money to feed the lawyers. And there could be a side effect to this in terms of ATTs ability to retain control of other market sectors.

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(yes I know about the Sammi people, and greatly admire the resurgence of their culture!)

But with the large social safety net, and the ability to go to university at low cost, etc. the stress that you experience in places like the US (gotta get successful NOW!) is simply not there. and this leads to an interesting perspective on the US.

I can imagine coming to the US is like coming in from Mars or someplace like that. There are going to be a lot of things that seem quite daffy.

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I tried to find a link, but it looks like it might only be on locally.

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Considering I tried to access it from work where we have the usual t-1 line, it I couldn't get it, what was I supposed to think? after all, not everyone has an OC line

And I've been maxed for months. I wish they would tweak/fix the moderation system so that I could use some more of the karma.

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No accounting for taste, of course. I'll pass the info on to the pair running it, a couple of of my teenage nephews.

(gotta help out family and all that)

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Here is the link to the copy in the Google Cache

enjoy!

(oops - forgot the password)

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http://www.newnetworks.com

It has all kinds of links to good stories on Broadband Issues, each of which would be worthy submissions to SlashDot.

enjoy!

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http://www.overclockers.com/articles154/

about wood computer cases by TechStyle Computers

There was this Ask Slashdot story on the EMF questions as well.

And Tech Style was featured in a slash story here

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California's problem is more of an infrastructure problem based on contradictory laws, many of which seek to avoid the consequences of the laws of nature. Mix that in with corporate and civic oportunism, and there is enough blame to go around to tar and feather everyone.

They have run into the classic "Pick two out of thre problem": Cheap, Reliable, Easy/Fast

They want to have all three, and it isn't there.

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This is the same thing as all of those internet consultants who advised spending huge amounts if investment capital to make a name and run up the stock price of a IPO. Who then bail out when the company has not enough income flow to justify the existance of the company in the first place.

After all they made theirs. Not that I am all that surprised.

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I've been maxed out on karma for awhile now. It is a summer weekend, and the odds on anyone one being interested enough to mod it up are slim. But that point was intended as a bit of irony given the polarized nature of the community. If a member of the polarized community can think this through, the enhancement of nueron connections will be theraputic.

;-)

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Exactly!

if you substituted all the terms so that it was MS giving amnesty to users of Linux, the MS freaks would complain that it was too mean spirited. and it would be just a bit chilling, since it would expose the inherent evil in the action a little too forcefully.

Flipping it around so that Linux users would be giving amnesty to MS users would be funnier as a satire.

You realize that with Linux would force MS to innovate. This is an admission that MS has not innovated in the past. a tragic slip of the tongue that reveals the truth

;-)

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Don't you love feedback loops? A classic example indeed!

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While the example of King Canute trying to order the tides to stop is an example of the overwhelming power of nature, perhaps this example is not entirely appropriate. Certainly the conclusions are not shared.

Humans as a force of nature have a certain capacity to muck up nature. Easy examples are areas where humans have lived for a while.

Evidence now suggests that Iceland was well forested when first discovered. The same applies to Easter Island. Both are devoid of trees now. In the Middle East we have from classical literature and the Bible mentions of the Trees of Lebanon, specimens of which are said to have been used for some of the pillars in the temple of King Solomon. Obviously, the region used to be well forested, and now it is not. (Isreal has a long term reforestation program in place). Similarly, the deserts of Iraq all used to be well forested, rich in plant and animal life. The removal of trees changed the climate. We now have a desert. I wonder how much of the Sahara desert is based purely on climate change, and how much climate change was human caused. The Sahara, too, was forested 10 to 15 thousand years ago.

In the Middle East, part of this was a certain type of political warfare. One of old religions there worshipped the trees, among other things. One of their competitors did not, and took to things like building homes out of wood. This went hand in hand with certain like the introduction of goats, etc.

so the point of this is that people in their short sightedness do things that are destructive to the things the like and want to preserve. Part of the problem here is the quantity of people who move in, so that by the time things are figured out, it is too late. If they figure it out at all.

Looking at the example in the NY Times article:

On the conservative Web site "FreeRepublic.com," the discussion began by referring relatively mildly to Mr. Sunstein's book about the political consequences of the Internet as "thinly veiled liberal." But as the discussion picked up steam, the rhetoric of the respondents, who insisted that they had not and would not read the book itself, became more heated. Eventually, they were referring to Mr. Sunstein as "a nazi" and a "pointy headed socialist windbag."

The discussion illustrated the phenomenon that Mr. Sunstein and various social scientists have called "group polarization" in which like-minded people in an isolated group reinforce one another's views, which then harden into more extreme positions. Even one of his critics on the site acknowledged the shift. "Amazingly enough," he wrote, "it looks like Sunstein has polarized this group into unanimous agreement about him." An expletive followed.

We see this in many places, even in Slashdot, where people familiar with technologies, philosophies, and even religions not condoned by the group are harrased and punished by the virulent commentary and conduct of some members. The alternate views are surpressed, even if there may be some benifit from them if you actually looked at them.

This isolates the communities and makes them easier to handle by outside interests. It isolates the slashdot community.

Philosophies are operating systems for the mind. It pays to understand the design principles of these operating systems in detail, and how they work and go together.

Coming back to our example of King Canute, the internet might not be like the ocean. To some extant, it may be like islands of territories that we are creating ourselves with our activities. It may be a universe built up of the activities of all of its participants. This universe, even though it is still growing at a large rate, is limited in thew technical sense. It may be large, but it is limited. You can control sections of it, even large sections of it. The game for some is to control the most important sections of it.

Thus we have MS usurping the jargon of calling the Internet the Net with their .NET. They are positioning themselves to control what they feel is the most important sector of the net, and marginalize the rest. Other interests are doing the same such as China, France, etc. each being polarized from the rest of the world.

The future of the Net (not the .NET) is difficult to predict indeed.

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Of all those nicely dressed Microsoft staffers, which ones do you think were manning the booths, shaking hands, handing out swag, and answering dumb questions on their own dime? How many of them do you think would hang around if the district manager called and said, "Hey, we're a little over budget this quarter, so would you mind staffing the XP expo for free?"

Even if one or two of them agreed to spend a couple of hours there off the clock, it would be ridiculous to think for a second that any of them would spend most of their spare time for months preparing for the show, making repeated calls to vendors, recruiting assistance, and attending to the myriad details that go into getting a show presence ready. But that's exactly what the SLUG show committee did, tirelessly, just because they wanted to.

This is what they are afraid of, because ultimately, a drone is just a drone.

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You get version 1.0 up which provides proof of concept and proof of potential coolness factor and lots of feedback.

This also gets you going on a basic website where you can find places to do basic merchandising for you life coffe mugs and t-shirts There are places out there that will seel t-shirts, for example, make their profit in the base price, and send you a check for your markup.

And then you can start moving to version 2.0 - Point being that you set yourself up so that the cost of everything is either free, or covered by the money you bring in.

Basic economics: Money In minus Money Out equals profits.

It is possible to be proftible from very early on, but it takes discipline

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Isn't this admitting that they had no innovation before?

sort of a fruedian slip there, accidently admit something that they wish to deny.

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More and more often little thoughts come into my mind, things like MS is to the Net (not .NET) as Ebola is to a Human. With the rising security issues raised by Gibson of GRC Research, this is starting to become realistic.

Ms is becoming the thing they say they are not. Because MS has adopted the position a that anyone else's freedom is evil. That is the voice of a fascist.

Maybe not using the words of a fascist, but certainly, in the heart.

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You can make the glass pellets small enough that they will spread out evenly over a large area.

It is that, or launch it into the sun, but we do not want a challenger type disaster when launching nuclear waste.

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http://www.ford-trucks.com/news/news88.html

Apparently there were going to run it off of propane.

But an even larger one is the Chrysler Unimog, snippet here:

http://www.climateark.org/articles/2001/1st/dachve hi.htm

which is somewhat imprssive:

DaimlerChrysler's decision to market its nine-foot-tall Unimog truck as a luxurious off-road vehicle has environmentalists fuming about the necessity for this oversized "dinosaur" on US roads. The 12,500-pound behemoth--bigger than General Motors' Hummer and Ford's Excursion--gets about 10 miles to the gallon. SUVs, driven by many urban and suburban residents who never go off-road, have come under fire for a number of reasons, including poor gas mileage and safety issues when involved in two-car collisions.

I have this picture of this being driven by a short little old lady who only visists the grandkids, and plays doom on the weekends.

(I really did know a silver haired lady who used to go into one store to get the latest doom expansion packs. It was funny as heck to hear her talk!)

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Fortunately -- the attacking machines were all security-compromised Windows-based PC's. In a fluke of laziness (or good judgement?) that has saved the Internet from untold levels of disaster, Microsoft's engineers never fully implemented the complete "Unix Sockets" specification in any of the previous version of Windows. (Windows 2000 has it.) As a consequence, Windows machines (compared to Unix machines) are blessedly limited in their ability to generate deliberately invalid Internet packets.

It is impossible for an application running under any version of Windows 3.x/95/98/ME or NT to "spoof" its source IP or generate malicious TCP packets such as SYN or ACK floods.

As a result, Internet security experts know that non-spoofing Internet attacks are almost certainly being generated by Windows-based PC's. Forging the IP address of an attacking machine (spoofing) is such a trivial thing to do under any of the various UNIX-like operating systems, and it is so effective in hiding the attacking machines, that no hacker would pass up the opportunity if it were available

This has horribly changed for the worse with the release of Windows 2000 and the pending release of Windows XP. For no good reason whatsoever, Microsoft has equipped Windows 2000 and XP with the ability FOR ANY APPLICATION to generate incredibly malicious Internet traffic, including spoofed source IP's and SYN-flooding full scale Denial of Service (DoS) attacks!

So we are left with the vision of Loads of potentially insecure Windows boxes - open to the world - being used for more DDOS attacks.

None of which will be pleasing to the MS loyalists

thank you microsoft. This last point is kinda important:

I hope it is becoming clear to everyone reading this, that we can not have a stable Internet economy while 13 year-old children are free to deny arbitrary Internet services with impunity.

and we wonder about the future of the internet.

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I believe that the majority of people who make the flight average then to twenty years older. I hate to say it, but at that point often you are starting to slide physically, even if you are peaking metally. This will take a whole new training approach as well, since you are dealing with someone with a technician/mechanic level of knowledge. Side note: you will be looking for the short guys. The day of the 6'4" astronaut is not here yet, just due to weight considerations.

Which brings up the idea of a new job title: space mechanic.

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