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According to the AP story, .web was not accepted because of "concerns that it has already been unofficially registered."

ehhhh?


__

I asked myself why there why there were so many idiots who claimed that they voted wrong, and then didn't figure this out until they got home. It hit me today when I was browsing through the AP stories that I missed (I got a long weekend for Veterans day).

This

Idiots every one.

-- Len

If Florida was that skewed, how can we be certain that the other states weren't, either?
--

A few things worry me a bit. First there's the part of the RACE working draft where they mention that if you don't follow all the MUST and MUST NOT statements "exactly", otherwise it's "likely to cause damage to the Internet"

Then there's the issue of the chairman of the IETF basically calling this premature...

"Getting this work done right is more important," he said, "than getting it done quickly."

Officials in the heavily Democratic Palm Beach County said 19,120 ballots in the presidential race were thrown out before they were counted because more than one candidate was picked; only 3,783 voters made that mistake on the U.S. Senate portion of the ballot.

I've never understood Islam. I mean, I know they're just out there, doing their own thing. But it strikes me that Afghanistan must be pretty warm in places? And they want you to keep a beard? [sigh] I'd already read the article, but I still don't get it.

I understand why Islamic customs make women wear all the headgear; apparently, the men get distracted when they're horny. Sure, fine, makes good sense to me. I can't condone it, but at least I understand it.

But, some of this is definately arid tropics where these people live. Don't the women get heatstroke? Even if Muslim men don't consider their women to be equals, doesn't a day of heatstroke at least reduce the quality of the sex when they get back to the tent that evening?

Understand that I'm not making fun, I'm just seeking an answer for what I consider to be a valid question.

No, no, try Kabul, Afghanistan for a great place to live.

Never forget: The religious masses are full of stupid people.

Does the term "Flipped SU(5)" mean anything to you?

Suggest you check out Hagelin's scientific background a bit more before you start suggesting that Hagelin isn't a "real" Quantum Physicist. It is easier to say than "theoretical physicist" or "Quantum Field Theorist," afterall. A good place to start would be Hagelin's scientific publications.

You might be interested to know that his former Physics professor at Harvard, Howard Georgi, says that "He's not a kook. He's an incredibly smart guy who has well-thought-out opinions on many things." As you can see, Professor Georgi isn't a kook, a pseudo-scientist, or an intellectual slouch, either.

RedHerring 's article, Excite's copy of Reuter's coverage, and Zdnet's article, not to mention CNN and the rest.

It's hard to say why the internet press is jumping all over this one: is it to appeal to their target audiences which include mp3 snarfers or is it just a big human-interest story, in the way Time and Newsweek and all the dead-tree rags have covered it. But at least Napster's demonstrated one thing: even people who aren't willing to pay for their music can still provide the eyeballs for banner revenue models. And ultimately, that's the only way any of these consortia will be economically viable.

a highly inflationary tax cut,

Now that is an interesting state of affairs. Letting citizens keep their own money is inflationary. He have to take it away via taxes to "save the economy" from the ravages of inflation. Has anyone stopped to think that inflation exists because of hte federal reserve? Inflation is actually devaluation of the currency, and is a consequence of there being "too much money" available. Of course, the reason there is too much money available is because the fractional-reserve banking system, lead and controlled by the Federal Reserve, has created too much money. The Fed buys government debt and gives the treasury credits in its Fed accounts. This acts as "reserves" for lending and as backing for the issusance of currency. It is money created from nothing. Commercial banks borrow money at the Discount Window at the Fed -- again, a debt-for-credit swap. This creates more money out of nothing. Banks make more loans based on deposits and Discount Window loans, making more money from nothing.

The sad thing is, because the U.S. has had a debt-based monetary system since 1933 (and earlier, but only partially), we can never get out of debt because it would destroy the money supply. Before the advent of debt-based money, there was usually little debt on national, corporate or personal scales (wars excepted; they simply printed money to finance early wars). 70% of all business growth was self-financed (financed without borrowing from banks) in the 20s. The Fed put a stop to that by offering loans at below market rates with money created out of thin air.

To pay off the national debt, we will first have to switch back to a commodity-based money system, such as the original silver-backed money system. Commodity money systems don't let the government inflate the money supply at will. The other thing we'd have to do is reform banking. Banks should protect your money, offer useful services, and charge fees for doing so. If you want to invest your money, then do that. Currently, a bank invests 97% or more of your money when you deposit it. This is what causes bank runs; if more than 3% of depositors want to withdraw their money, the bank runs out, because it's given it away to other people. Essentially, when you deposit money at a bank, the bank issues to several people the right to withdraw it. It does this by telling you that you can get it back out, and then loaning the very same money to someone else, who immediately withdraws it to pay for their house or whatever. If the bank runs low on "liquid funds," it borrows from another bank. It may also borrow from the Fed's Discount Window. All the loaning out of the money promised to depositors creates more money on the fly. This process gets recycled several times. I borrow $100k to buy a house. I deposit it at my bank to pay for the construction. The bank then loans it back out to someone else. I write checks; the builder deposits them; his bank loans the money out. Repeat. Because of reserve-fraction regulations made by the Fed, this process has a terminus; but it creates nine dollars for every dollar put into the system (approximately). This is the deposit multipler.

google
http://www.google.com/searc h?q =phoebe%20cates%20nude

altavista
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20 cates%20nude&kl=XX&pg=q&a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;a mp;Translate=on

yahoo
http://search.yahoo.c om/ bin/search?p=phoebe%20cates%20nude

raging
http://r agi ngsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?q=phoebe%20ca tes%20nude

lycos
http://www. lycos.c om/srch/?loc=searchbox&query=phoebe+cates+nude

hotbot
h ttp://hotbot.lycos.com/?MT=phoebe+cates+nude&SM=MC &DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&D E=2&AM1=MC

go
http://www.go .com/Split? pat=go&col=WW&qt=phoebe+cates+nude

excite
http://search.excite .co m/search.gw?search=phoebe+cates+nude

askjeeves
h ttp://w ww.ask.com/main/askjeeves.asp?ask=phoebe+cates+nud e&metasearch=yes

alltheweb
http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/search?exec=FAST+ Search&type=all&query= phoebe+cate s+nude

goto
http://ww w.goto. com/d/search/?type=home&Keywords=phoebe+cates+nude

-- .sig --

The weekend did not manage to quell the massive amounts of coverage the Microsoft infiltration continues to garner. Virtually every news organization has its own version of the Microsoft debacle, of which we've provided a sampling below. Meanwhile, we are left wondering why the crown jewels of Microsoft were left at the mercy of passwords. There are all sorts of other authentication technologies that we have no doubt Microsoft will be investigating. Perhaps utilizing the smart card support in Windows 2000 wouldn't be a bad idea. It's a shame it takes negative incidents like this to get people to consider security as a strategic business issue. Shame on you, Microsoft.

• The Wall Street Journal via MSNBC
• CNET
• MSNBC via ZDNet
• Reuters via Yahoo
• The Register

ou've heard it before and you'll hear it again. Threats are evolving. We've seen viruses retrieve and forward passwords before on a large scale, now they are becoming targeted and fast. Threat evolution is something that cannot be dealt with reactively; it must be part of infrastructure planning and design. Today, all attention is focused on Microsoft. The world's favorite target has fallen victim to a password-stealing virus that got a hold of passwords that can access the source code to upcoming versions of Windows and Office. It is unclear whether or not the perpetrators were able to use the passwords to actually access and manipulate the source code, however if the source code was accessed two questions remain. 1. Was the code manipulated in some way that could open the door for later attacks or other problems? Microsoft claims no, the code has maintained it's integrity. Other than to trust Microsoft's word we may never know the answer. 2. Does the ability for a criminal group to view the source code destroy the security by obscurity that is key to so many commercial software products? In the open source community, numerous hackers examine products and contribute solutions to flaws in the products. In the commercial world, many companies rely on their development team to produce secure code and then keep the source code secret to not only protect their intellectual property, but also to minimize potential attacks that could be launched against the product. In this case, the loss of security by obscurity could result in a criminal having intimate knowledge of the product development cycle to be able to develop targeted attacks on future Microsoft products. Regardless of the quality of Microsoft products, the mere fact that the company was able to recognize that this incident occurred is unfortunately unique. Many corporations might never know this had happened to them. In fact the ability to isolate the incident to specific networks or machine is quite difficult in many environments. The other interesting thing going on here is the Trojan horse attack. These attacks have been discussed for several years now and the current solution has been to use content filtering software to detect the attack. If you are one of the world's favorite targets, the Trojan horse writer will write the attack specifically at you. By the time the anti-virus companies know about the Trojan horse and are able to detect and stop it, it's too late. Unfortunately, it has taken a high profile incident like this for awareness to spread. One solution is to seperate general purpose computing such as internet surfing and email from sensitive computing such as accessing source code or controlling IT infrastructure. This is what the military does. They run 2 networks that are physically isolated from each other. A less expensive solution is to keep all executable content from reaching workstations such as executable programs, active HTML content, or documents that contain macros. This is difficult to acheive in reality so physical seperation is the the only way to be sure you are secure. The Wall Street Journal broke this story and pretty much everybody is currently running it. Look for more information and speculation to filter out through the rest of the day.

• Wall Street Journal via MSNBC
• Reuters
• CNNfn
• CNET
• Newsbytes
• AP via ABC News
• Reuters via Excite re: Microsoft Stock Price
• http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.hll w.qaz.a.html
• F-Secure's Qaz description via datafellows.com

You can also take a look at:

http://news.excite.com/n ews /ap/001027/02/exploring-mars
-and-
http://news.excite .co m/news/r/001026/16/science-space-mars-dc

You can also take a look at:

http://news.excite.com/n ews /ap/001027/02/exploring-mars
-and-
http://news.excite .co m/news/r/001026/16/science-space-mars-dc

Set up a free account with excite mail and use that for everything else. When it gets too spam-ridden, cancel it. Set up a new one.

I had 7 email accounts and usually got about 5 spams a day on some of them. I canceled those acounts, set up a new account which NO ONE but my friends/family gets, and set up an account at Excite (which is a nice one).

Email's cheap enough (free) that you can afford to set up a new one.

On the other hand, if you're already bombarded by spam, that is a problem.

Set up a free account with excite mail and use that for everything else. When it gets too spam-ridden, cancel it. Set up a new one.

I had 7 email accounts and usually got about 5 spams a day on some of them. I canceled those acounts, set up a new account which NO ONE but my friends/family gets, and set up an account at Excite (which is a nice one).

Email's cheap enough (free) that you can afford to set up a new one.

On the other hand, if you're already bombarded by spam, that is a problem.

Of course anonymous speech should be held to the same standards as a publicly known speaker. Slander, Libel, and insighting violence, etc. are all exceptions as we know.

Well according to the article on Excite the ruling only affects defamation of character which is (slander/libel) and is already an exception to free speech.

Second Law of Blissful Ignorance

Excite News has an article on one of the cases discussed by the NYT.

Name three in the top fifty.

Alrighty then:

Google
Excite
AltaVista
CNN
ESPN
Go.com
ABC News

These all use CSS.

Your term of 'Significant use' is subjective and thus irrelevant. CSS is used on these sites and used well with the exception of ESPN which is obviously developed and targeted for IE (the site uses CSS Positioning)

These are all high-traffic sites but I don't know who's on your Top50 list.

I'm posting anonymously because I hate when people whine about their submissions being rejected, but I sent this story in a couple of days ago with a *much* better headline: Scientists Find Planet Sized Balls

There's no real motivation for Sun to do that.

Cobalt has their business headed in the right direction. (See this graph and info.) and to boot, their stock price is hanging in a relatively buy-ripe price range.

So, given Cobalt will now not have to bleed cash into a new marketing organization and their trends for cash flow and revenue, they should be profitable for Sun.

Given that Cobalt's business really compliments Sun's, there shouldn't be too much incentive to muck things up there.

As usual, we'll have to wait and see how things pan out.

This question has been asked no fewer than two times before, and one time, I even answered in +3 detail on exactly what would be needed to make a PC-based TiVo.

But that's okay, let's rehash.

Since we're going entirely software-based, e.g. you're sitting a normal, icky PC in your stereo rack, or you're just using your PC as normal, you probably don't have a hardware MPEG encoder. The best you've probably got is a Matrox card with onboard MJPEG compression, and I don't think the Linux drivers support that.

Now, assuming you already know how capture a video stream and pipe it to an MPEG encoder (and trust that your system is fast enough to not drop too many frames; think P3/500 or better), the only thing you really need to do is add in TV listings, and integrate them into channel changing and record functionality.

Copy and pasted from my previous post, channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online.

As for integration, a lot of this work has already been done, at least for satellite TV streams. Klaus Schmidinger produced his Video Disk Recorder which performs channel guides and VCR functionality on his Linux PC, for his satellite TV using a PCI card. All GPL'd, so feel free to port it over to plain old TV cards, too.

--Vito

why a legal webcasting system will never be made unless you sleep with the RIAA. The RIAA is really silly, since all of the publicity about getting free MP3's via these websites have been made, more and more Joe Sixpack people are finding out where to download these programs.

Message to RIAA: Lawyers and these silly court decisions are sucking you dry!

• Excite
• Infos eek
• Lycos
• Webcrawler
• Looksmart
• Google
• Yahoo

Did you hear he had skin cancer? http://news.excite.com/news /r/000816/18/politics-mccain

Don't know if you want a guy in the White House who may have a painful, life-threatening ailment. Of course I think a potted fern would make a better prez than either Gore or Bush....

here's a right on article. not only did they (ron harris, associated press writer) explain the news, but they also spent the last half on the fact that freenet was available, worked as well, and was "inpenetrable" to court orders (well ... close enough).

http://news.excite.com/news/a p/000728/19/news-napster

They include Freenet, an anarchic network created by Irish-born Ian Clarke that doesn't rely on central servers, like Napster does to function as a clearinghouse. With Freenet, each user exposes his or her computer to the Internet, making each participating computer a file-sharing server.

Since it was released last year, 110,000 copies of Freenet have been downloaded, said Clarke, 10,000 of them since Wednesday's Napster ruling.

Clarke designed Freenet to distribute all kinds of information via the Internet without fear of censorship. He said he wasn't even thinking about copyrighted music files.

Unlike Napster, Freenet is invulnerable to any attack, be it from cyberspace or corporate lawyers, Clarke said.

"Freenet has been designed so that even one of its developers - I would have no idea how to go about shutting it down," he said.

point is, they managed to give some good press to freenet while still covering the story.

here's a right on article. not only did they (ron harris, associated press writer) explain the news, but they also spent the last half on the fact that freenet was available, worked as well, and was "inpenetrable" to court orders (well ... close enough).

http://news.excite.com/news/a p/000728/19/news-napster

They include Freenet, an anarchic network created by Irish-born Ian Clarke that doesn't rely on central servers, like Napster does to function as a clearinghouse. With Freenet, each user exposes his or her computer to the Internet, making each participating computer a file-sharing server.

Since it was released last year, 110,000 copies of Freenet have been downloaded, said Clarke, 10,000 of them since Wednesday's Napster ruling.

Clarke designed Freenet to distribute all kinds of information via the Internet without fear of censorship. He said he wasn't even thinking about copyrighted music files.

Unlike Napster, Freenet is invulnerable to any attack, be it from cyberspace or corporate lawyers, Clarke said.

"Freenet has been designed so that even one of its developers - I would have no idea how to go about shutting it down," he said.

point is, they managed to give some good press to freenet while still covering the story.

Assuming you're not a troll, I can explain exactly what I need to do with USENET searches.

I am a small-time computer programmer (for my own enjoyment) and local technical expert (called upon for practically all Windows installations). I fiddle with Linux a lot - my computer has a 17.2G drive for bloated software like Windows 2000, and a 4.3G hard drive devoted entirely to Linux distros (PC PLUS in the UK is great with this [Mandrake 7.1 this month.]) I also do a bit of amateur spamhunting (you'll see me a lot on news.admin.net-abuse.email.)

One of my most used tools is Deja.com/usenet. I have it on my slashboxes. With deja.com, I can immediately search out whether this pernicious "Find Out About Any Poor Shmuck Fast Now" spam (I recieve it every week or so) has been posted to N.A.N-A.S yet. Also, if I have technical problems I need to solve, I call up Deja first. I don't search AltaVista, partly because I don't like AltaVista (I prefer Excite or Lycos) and because all Web search engines, especially when faced with computer support queries, don't successfully find what I want. Also, several big pr0n and other dubious sites will definitely use support queries in META tags to drive you off the route - I've had this happen to me before.

Therefore, services like Deja help me to find out about new drivers, or how to make my Sony tape drive work - they help solve problems. This is the entire purpose of Deja - not to make up a huge Britney Spears fan collection, but for technical information. And yes, there is a demand for a better engine (for a start, one that you don't have to click three different time-consuming links to move into a thread) - but at the moment, Deja and remarQ are all we've got. And thankfully, we have them.

Sorry - here's the working URL:

http://clubs.excite.com/webpadfans

I know, I know... I'm an idiot. What can you do?

It's placing ratings on all games, similar to the ones used to rate movies.

If the laws are passed, you will need to show ID to rent or buy games with restricted ratings.

Now, honestly, isn't this redundant? The video games industry already has a rating scheme in place, the ESRB, and other such rating systems for PC games, etc. Why do we (or at least BC) need another rating system? Why not just enforce the existing one?

For more information, check out http://news.exci te.com/news/r/000717/16/tech-leisure-videogames-dc

J

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

Discs cost $50 there so you can see why they are concerned about gray marketing the US discs back to Japan. Also the article says there aren't many players in Japan, so disc sellers need to keep the prices high to recoup production costs.

Here's the article: DVD Players a Hard Sell in Japan

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Besides uReach, Yahoo!Mail is the only one I use for "real" mail because I'm hooked by the rest of Yahoo's personalized services, esp. Yahoo!Companion. The rest are just "throwaway's", good for pseudononymous transactions. If you're placing a lot of trust in Hotmail not to lose your data, or keep it secure, or always be available...I think you're being foolish.

The Reuters story at excite is pretty thorough; basically it's unclear whether the two hard drives were destroyed, lost, or stolen. Funny thing is, they were discovered lost May 7 - but the Energy Department wasn't notified until June 1. Employees are to take lie detector tests, and it seems they whole search setup is becoming a big mess.

The Washington Post story also has a good wrap-up. According to most sources, the drives were last seen in a suitcase in a vault in a Los Alamos lab. I think the confusion of the evacuation due to the recent fires might have something to do with this...

And here's the Los Angeles Times article.

By morning I guess most major newspapers will have it in print and on their websites, but in the case of something like this I've always thought earlier is better. Let's just hope the drives are recovered...

Hell, it can't even be found under today's news releases on the Excite@Home corporate site!

Excite@Home VP O'Leary said it all - "We are creating a new business that leverages two unique assets: our core network and our large base of broadband users."

In true corporate website fashion, there are no email addresses to contact officers, so I cannot express my opinion directly to him.

Excite@Home wants to be the next AOL. As a subscriber I am an asset to be leveraged, rather than a customer to be serviced. I view this as a Bad Omen{tm}.

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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

The new Athlons will be marketed under the same brand name but will be marked as "performance enhanced." AMD will offer them in speeds of 750MHz, 800MHz, 850MHz, 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz clock speeds. Pricing will range between $319 and $990.

And...

While the Dresden-made chips will be wired with copper, AMD said same-speed Athlons produced at the company's Austin, Texas, fab will use traditional aluminum wiring. Nothing on the products' packaging will note whether the chips, both made using the 0.18-micron process, contain copper or aluminum wiring, an AMD official said.

I'm not too thrilled about this last part, the fact that there won't be an easy way to tell the difference between an aluminium T-bird and a copper T-bird. I'd imagine that copper vs aluminium will make a big difference in terms of heat and overclockability. I would imagine that the copper T-Birds are going to run cooler and overclock higher than an aluminium chip.

I seem to recall seeing a web site somewhere that gave directions on how to decode the Athalon's serial number; and that part of the information available therein was which fab line it came off of. Does anyone have that link? Then, all I'll have to do is find a dealer who'll let me look at the serial # of the chip before I buy it. $319 for a 750MHz sounds like a sweet deal to me (The article didn't say if the prices quoted above are estimated retail or AMD's price for 1000 chip lots)

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

A quote from the article:

The U.S. Commerce Department favors this type of industry self-regulation, and President Clinton, together with EU officials, lauds the accord as a milestone in international e-commerce that will encourage economic growth.

The words e-commerce and economic growth should be emblazoned in red. Note that the word privacy does not appear in this paragraph. Privacy isn't important in the world of e-commerce, unless it is a product unto itself. Companies will sell you software to help violate someone else's privacy, and software to protect your privacy, which means that privacy itself is for sale.

The only interest of a commercial company is self-interest. Self-interest equals profit. Unless protecting my privacy becomes profitable, companies will sell my details to the highest bidder.

This leads to the question: is there a way to guarantee that it is in Company X's best interest to protect my privacy? Can public pressure and the threat of diminishing sales make all companies champions of privacy, hypocritically or otherwise?

If not, I see privacy crumbling before our eyes.

Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations

Scientists recently genetically engineered plants to grow faster. It's all coming to a head -- I love the idea of "singularity", it scares the heck out of people, getting them to donate to Foresight. ;-)

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It seems that the Canadian Goverment is only unlinking the tables of the database, moving them to different locations, and calling it "dismantling".

Well, that's one way to put it but they realy are not destroying any data !!

from http://news.excite.com/ne ws/r/000529/14/canada-bigbrother:

...
Stewart said her staff had now returned information to the federal tax authorities, had eliminated the computer program that linked the various databases and would ensure that all databases remain separate files.

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Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?

Back on topic, the whole thalidomide incident in the 60's was a good example of the different effects of chiral molecules. One of them was supposed to combat morning sickness. The other one led to serious birth defects (e.g., no arms, no legs, &c). Oops. Thalidomide is actually still used for leprosy. You can read more about future applications of it here - I won't bore you.

Also, I believe that one of those OTC pain killers (aspirin, acetomeniphen, whatever) also has an interesting chiral property. When they make the drug, it comes out ~50/50 each enantiomer. Even though only one of the enantiomers works in the body, they don't bother to screen out the other, but leave it in as "dead weight." Turns out the body converts the "dead" enantiomer into the functional, working drug one on its own. Isn't science neato? ;-)

---- Stultus

He was doing his own voice. This article talks about the gues voice appearance.

Aparently one of Gore's daughters work for the show.

"Downturn" ? Thats putting it nicely! When a stock comes crashing down from $255 per share to $49, as is the case with VA Linux Systems, i'd call that something other than a "downturn". Theyre worth less than their initial IPO these days. Even worse is Red Hat, which is hovering around $19 a share. Makes me happy in a way..Happy I didnt put any money into either company's stock.

Its not surprising, really. VA Linux Systems is barely a blip on the radar when you look at the facts. It has the second-worst sales record among Linux vendors, weighing in at a measly 5% marketshare. Only one company is listed as doing worse -- "Fujitsu Siemens", at 3%. See for yourself here if you don't believe me. Congratulations to VA by the way, for defeating the massive Fujitsu-Siemens juggernaut. Heheh.

It could be worse, however. You could own some Red Hat stock, which has plummeted to $19 (as of the time of this writing) with no indication of stopping. Not a big surprise here either. Red Hat has no product. Whatever they try to sell for a couple hundred dollars can be bought at LinuxMall or CheapBytes for 99 cents.

Perhaps this is why you wont see any of the major Linux players backing any efforts to provide large-scale support beyond including manpages and HOWTOs.. If they did that, they would have no tangible source of income at all.



Bowie J. Poag

I collect antique technology like TV's, phones, radios, clocks, etc. This product is just an interim kludge until PC's and TV's are integrated into a spectrum of related devices. (I think there will be boxes more geared to entertainment and others more geared to work and/or surfing, but all of the devices will have some capability at the other functions).

Also, they will all be connected to some sort of home network. Why should you need to print from your TV when your PC uses the same cable to get its Internet access? Why not just put a TV card in your PC and use a monitor for your TV (especially for DTV or HDTV)?

As indication of things to come, PC's outsold TV's in Japan last year.

Here.
My god! They found Telephone wiring in his home!