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I didn't, but hey, why not? We already got the MSN toilet. :-)

It's James Prendergast.. Who's he? Well, he works for Americans for Technology Leadership. And who are they? Well, last time they made the news, it was for a letter writing campaign, in support of Microsoft, in which thousands of largely identical letters were sent, including a number from dead people.

Can you say "Astroturfing"?

Taking a leap, I would guess that he meant megawatt-hour instead of megawatt. To put that claim into perspective, the energy density of gasoline is 12 MWh/kg. How much gasoline would such a 300 mile trip take and how much MWh is that?

If anyone sees a problem in my calculations, please correct it.

Given a 300 mile trip at 30mpg (my car can do 35 on highway, and that it is not a hybrid), gives us 10 gallons of gas.
1.3 x 10^8 J/gallon x 10 gallon = 1.3 x 10^9 J
Gasoline 4.4 x 10^7 J/kg
1.3 x 10^9 J/ 4.4 x 10^7 J/kg = 29.54kg gas
29.54kg * 12 MWh/kg = 354.54MWh for 300 miles.

Now, given that gasoline engines are not 100% efficient, it is much less than this. From here it implies that they are 15% efficient. Given that:

354.54 MWh*0.15 efficiency = 53.18 MWh.
53.18 MWh *1000 K/M = 53180KWh.
Cost of Electricity: ~$0.05/KWh
53180 KWh * $0.05/KWh = $26.60
Given that we started with 10 gallons, $2.66/gallon equivalent. Then again, he didn't say what car (a civic/VW bug is going to be way different than a tracktor trailor or pickup).

Haha! yep, the good old one-line ST escape hatch. And of course there's always "Please, not the red shirt! Anything but the red shirt!!"

As to BG .... I saw the premiere with a college group a few years younger than myself, and even in that ancient time, the uniform reaction from the audience was -- squirming in pain. We really WANTED to like it, but... It was stiff, contrived, predictable, looked plastic even to eyes not yet trained by 21st century SFX, and overall compared poorly to ST:TOS at its worst. Worst of all, it was BORING. But at the time, for SF fans it was the only TV available. -- A great deal of the initial ratings-making viewers were Lorne Greene groupies (he had a HUGE following among older adults), and I think those folks are largely what kept it on the air as long as it was.

Glen Larson (who is in the same ward as a friend here) got into trouble with the Mormon church over "revealing secrets", and has admitted that he really WAS trying to retell the Mormon mythos. And forcibly contriving people and plots to fit that mold can't have helped. A quick overview and links to other articles: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBW/is _1_44/ai_114478917

I could have lived with continuity no worse than say, ST:TOS (as you say, a lot of series -- and not just SF -- retrofit or outright ignore continuity as needed to fit the plot of the week), but that was a minor problem given the rest of BG.

Getting SF wrong isn't news with Larson, either (he does much better with mundane series, and one suspects, with leaving the people on the set more to their own devices). Remember Manimal? it had its good points, and the character was much more "human" than the plastic BG people, but it too was often painful to watch.

I haven't seen the remade BG, but one would hope it's better than the original if only because TV in general has become less simplistic.

Maybe it's a response to this. I don't think you have to be a space-faring nation to engage in space-warfare. Some other nations have been jamming our satellites, so we're deploying a superior response, I guess.

http://www.photosecrets.com/p14.html http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3601/is _n19_v38/ai_11742489 What a waste of time....

Quote from you:
"Catalysts increase the rate of reaction, but they don't increase the amount of energy released. I would be very, every surprised if increasing the rate of combustion in a modern internal combustion engine in turn increased the efficiency of that engine."

Because the gasoline/oxygen mixture stays in the cylinder for only a limited amount of time before being ejected into the exhaust system, the rate of reaction is a very important factor. You are right, adding small amounts of hydrogen won't increase the total amount of energy released. However, when igniting in an engine, gasoline only has a fraction of a second to push the cylinder and do work. Any gasoline that hasn't gotten around to burning in time will still release energy, but it won't be in a usable form. Hydrogen just helps the explosion to be more instantaneous.

There are lots of technologies that try to increase the rate of reaction. Just look at the large variety of aftermarket spark plugs and fuel additives that try to address this problem. This is the problem that the acetone promoting crowd tries to adress too.

I find that adding the quotes for the websearch helps a lot in google, as it actually searches for the phrase, not the words separately. Here are some links I found in a brief search:

Here are some experts discussing the topic:
http://icubenetwork.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1593 &sid=514a95e08fb5257758100b9a855bec32

Here is a link to a Discovery magazine article from 1999, where a different method was attempted, called the "plasmatron". Love the name.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is _7_20/ai_55030843

Here is a paper from someone in England on the subject:
http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/milage/hydrogens up.htm

Here is a really informative article. The bibliography he provides is prodigous, so would be useful for you if you wanted to study this in depth:
http://www.wlhs.wlwv.k12.or.us/students/marcusb/hy drogenfuelpage.htm

I also find google searches on "hydrogen enriched gasoline" were quite fruitful. The general consensus on all websites I visited so far is that hydrogen enrichment of the fuel offers a measurable improvement in fuel efficiency. It's a neat subject I am finding.

I hope that helps you in realizing that this isn't a crackpot theory, but rather, a practical application of a long known effect.

Full story here.

The FTC's survey sent unaccompanied teenagers, 13 to 16 years old, into some 899 retailers and movie theaters in 39 states, where they would attempt to buy M-rated games, R-rated DVDs and movie tickets, and Tipper-stickered CDs. 69% of customers succeeded at game retailers, compared to 81% of DVD buyers, 83% of music buyers, and only 36% of theater-goers.

On one level, the answer is obvious: scientists, members of the media, and the public, using open lines of communication, need to work together to combat ignorance. However, the tension between the three sectors is clear. One can't help but wonder if the public and the media perceive scientists to be so righteous and arrogant that, out of spite, they simply want them to be wrong. And let's face it, some scientists clearly enjoy the wall of mystique and complexity surrounding their fields of expertise.

Personality conflicts aside, if a member of the public reads an article from a major news source that quotes experts who claim doomsday is nigh, this should be a cause for rational alarm. Public safety is clearly important. However, individuals should act responsibly on such concerns. People have a right to demand accurate media reporting, but they also have a right to demand clear and unpretentious explanations directly from experts--especially when safety is a concern. Physicist Daniel Cebra, director of the Nuclear Group at the University of California at Davis, and active member in the RHIC project at BNL, personally phoned a number of openly worried members of his small community to calm fears after seeing their letters in the local paper. These individuals demanded a response from an expert and got it. This kind of outreach can only improve the relationship between the public and the scientific community.

However, if a scientist generates a media event by using phrases that are flippant, "brutally frank," or unintentionally alarmist, they probably need to rephrase themselves to match the language of their listeners. Mismatches between colloquial and technical language are at the source of much turmoil between science and the media. For example, scientists often speak differently from nonscientists when it comes to assessing degrees of probability. When expressing a "scientific opinion," without the direct benefit of experiment, most scientists are open to possibilities and enjoy using their imaginations as much as anyone else. A priori, truly unquestionably impossible things are indeed rare. If one discovers something that is really absolutely impossible, that's important and you remember it. Everything else can be categorized in varying degrees of possibility ranging over many orders of magnitude between probability equals zero and one. Considerable room for smallness exists between those two numbers. There is an art to assessing such probabilities responsibly and appreciating "effective impossibility" when you see it. But there is also an art, which many scientists seem to lack, to expressing impossibility to nonscientists; scientists feel guilty saying something is unquestioningly impossible. Consequently, ask a scientist if something is "possible" you may be asking for trouble. Be prepared to have all of your fears and fantasies confirmed with a heavily qualified "yes, but.[ldots]"

In turn, scientists should expect the public and the media to be able to apply basic critical thinking skills in order to process important information. Complex and heavily qualified answers from scientists are usually nor the forte of the public nor the media. Shades of possibility are generally ignored. Depending on the audience, events tend to be divided sharply between two choices: "possible" and impossible. In our cynical culture, raised on Murphy's Law, many interpret the word "possible" to mean "if the outcome is bad, it will happen; if the outcome is good, it won't." Many responsible atte

"Wrong. Nintendo was splitting the market with Sega."

Not really. Only the MegaDrive/Genesis ever competed with Nintendo. NES owned the market.

"The Xbox has BARELY surpassed the 'Cube,"

worldwide sales:

60 million PS2's (in 2003!...check the last link to see a rise to +_83 m. in 2005)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zd1up/is _200401/ai_ziff117173

18.7 million Gamecubes
http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5553

20 million xbox'
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=14 306&page=1

Check the last link for a decent comprehensive list of salesfigures. But those numbers represent the fact that a n00b sold more than an established player; but what's your point? Stability? Yeah...

"As for "history", it shows that the industry is STABILIZING."

Sure...an entirely new gamesconsole maker entering the industry and selling enough games to be able to create a second generation of it's console. If you mean stable as in 'profitable', you're right, but if you mean 'makeup of the industry', you're wrong. Plus,m the games market is still growing, it's not stable yet (stable means no growth or maybe a steady rate of growth...neither of which has happened).

"You got your chronology mixed up."

True, (by a year, too). But then again "with a game library that was significantly different from Nintendo's or Sega's offerings" (which is the point you made earlier) isn't really correct. One might try to make the point that Sony had more mature games, but that's a rather magnified claim when one looks at the actual games for each system. I might add that (as with ANY console) the ps1 was rather expensive when it was released too (especially in that year of grey imports).

"What happened was that the kids who were buying videogames in the 80s grew older and STILL wanted to buy videogames,"

That's true in a very limited way, which ignoresss the distinction between the geek/hardcore gamer and the 'casual' gamer (the one which has driven the market the past 10 years). What you say is true for just that core market, but it doesn't begin to explain the growth of the games market.
In the days of the NES/SNES/Mastersystem/Genesis, it was the hard-core, the gamers, who kept on playing games as they grew up. Not the masses, which reserved computergames for their youth and got social-pressured out of it as a hobby.
In the UK and europe, it was very definitely Sony's adds which legitimised gaming and changed it from a geeks dirty little secret to something which could be done in high end nightclubs (at the time). There is a large amount of literature on this subject, because it /was/ such an import image change which allowed the market to (for better or worse...in many hard-core gamers minds most definitely worse) grow and expand it's market to the non-geek. This and only this is the reason why the games market is larger than the movie bussiness (or more propperly and less media hyped, only if one compares the US national movie business to the worldwide games business).

Your oh-so-wittilly-snarky comment on the end tells me you really don't get the shift this last point has created for the industry. All I can say is go google (and talk to industry people, read industry commentary...shit, go read financial investment firms' commentary, as this was something HUGELY important for them.).

I enjoy a good discussion, and actually appreciate being correctee on my points (which is a great way to learn more), but don't try and be a condescending asshole about it.

and if you do a wee tiniest bit of Googling, you'll find that this guy has been peddling this vapor since at least 1997:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is _n2191_v43/ai_19951759

Move along, nothing to see here... This guy has been peddling this same story for a long time now.

Yahoo must be insane to have allowed this to happen, especially when their main competitor has a published philosophy including the statement: "You can make money without doing evil".

I'm sorry, but Google is one of the biggest contributors of the Chinese Censorship System.

This: http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/04/15/ch ina_censorship_working_google_workers_happy/

and

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is _200409/ai_n7184506

...are just small examples of this. Google can say "Do no evil" whenever they want, but it'll not change reality: the real world is about what you really do, not about what you say you would do.

2002 blurb

US Patent No. 5,717,235

US Patent No. 5,707,887

US Patent No. 5,602,791

US Patent No. 5,390,142

Are those figures for actual sales to end customers? According to this1UP article, Sony has an interesting sales counting methodology:

"As a rule, Sony prefers to release "sell-in" figures, or "units shipped" figures -- for instance, it recently announced that it "shipped" 70 million PlayStation 2s worldwide. What that means is that retailers have ordered and received 70 million PS2s, not that consumers have bought 70 million PS2s. Many of those 70 million PS2s have already been bought by consumers, and all of them may eventually be bought, but for now, the "shipped" figure is more impressive."

And also...

"Sony is going against type here. Though it's rounding off its sales figures, at least it is releasing genuine sales figures, a practice to which it is generally averse."

Are there really people here that value their time at a couple pennies per minute?

Sadly, the answer is yes. I've a friend who is very intelligent, well paid, and otherwise normal. But every year he spends hours filling out the "petroleum depletion allowance" form for the IRS because its gets him back about $1 (his house has some microscopic percentage of some mineral rights). And I know another business associate who drove across town rather than pay postage to mail something.

I have no hard data (except for a 2001 article suggesting that 1 in 37 online transactions has a charge-back and 1 in 100 are fraudulent), but I'd bet that a sizable fraction of the population would dispute ANY anomalous charge no matter how small. Such people would view the spurious charge as theft and dispute it. "It's the principle of the thing" that motivates these people. Sure, some people, such as yourself, do the personal math and decide its not worth it. But others, many others, are driven by principle, not rationality.

It's been known for years, if not decades, that parasites can influence their hosts' behavior to the benefit of the parasite. There are flukes (genus Leucochloridium)with a life cycle that involves being transmitted from snails to other animals—the fluke affects the snail's brain and causes the snail to become light-seeking rather than light-avoiding, which means the snails climb to the tops of plants, where they are easy prey for birds—the next host in the fluke's life cycle. More about that (and the evolutionary logic behind it) here. Another fluke has a similar life cycle involving ants, which it drives to the tops of grass blades where they can be eaten by sheep (which again become its next hosts).

A more obvious example might be rabies—animals with rabies ("mad dogs", most famously) have an irrational tendency to attack and bite other animals, unprovoked—which is how rabies is spread.

> Its not the federal governments responsiblity to plan cities and protect them from natural disasters.

Well, maybe it should be. If it's now going to cost the federal government billions of dollars in assistance, when it could have been planned for and at least some of the devestation prevented by properly planning and funding FEMA at the tune of a few million, then maybe that would have been a good idea.

If the feds had funded the Army Corps of Engineers then maybe this also could have been prevented. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/i s_20050606/ai_n14657367

I'll not contest that some public projects are haywire, especially in California.

But would you agree with the cuts they made over the past couple years like these?

Even worse, Congress didn't just approve the cuts, they increased them. Referring to the Louisiana Army Corps of Engineers budget:

The House of Representatives wants to cut the New Orleans district budget 21 percent to $272.4 million in 2006, down from $343.5 million in 2005. The House figure is about $20 million lower than the president's suggested $290.7 million budget.

Source: New Orleans City Business, 6/5/2005. Quoted rather presciently is Democratic senator Mary Landrieu:

"I think it's extremely shortsighted," Landrieu said. "When the Corps of Engineers' budget is cut, Louisiana bleeds. These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are (of) vital economic interest to the entire nation."

So...we blow the budget on a war that has no return on investment (unless you consider bloody civil war and likely splintering of Iraq into Shiite and Kurdish states a ROI). We also deepen the deficit with tax cuts that make the rich richer without targeting their dollars for reinvestment in the US. Our return? The poor drown like rats or get shot at like fish in a barrel when they can't escape the flooding in NOLA nor the shooting in Baghdad. Nice folks, the GOP.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/i s_20050606/ai_n14657367%5Bfindarticles.com%5D

Stephen Jeselink, interim commander of the New Orleans Corps district, told employees in an internal e-mail dated May 25 that the district is experiencing financial challenges. Execution of our available funds must be dealt with through prudent districtwide management decisions. In addition to a hiring freeze, Jeselink canceled the annual Corps picnic held every June.

Why did he wait until 2006 to cut the picnic if funding has been bad since 2003?

Cutting a picnic is a sign of seriousness not seen before now.

You left out the section on their creative solution to the budget cut!

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/i s_20050606/ai_n14657367

Stephen Jeselink, interim commander of the New Orleans Corps district, told employees in an internal e-mail dated May 25 that the district is experiencing financial challenges. Execution of our available funds must be dealt with through prudent districtwide management decisions. In addition to a hiring freeze, Jeselink canceled the annual Corps picnic held every June.

taxing people in North Dakota and Virginia to pay for protection for people who built homes below sea level.

Funny that you should pick North Dakota as your first example. For every dollar that those badlands leeches pay in income taxes, they get back about TWO dollars in federal largesse.

Care to know which states really deserve to complain about their tax dollars being handed out to others? That would be Wisconsin, Delaware, New York, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and the most robbed of all, New Jersey.

Congress cut the fiscal year 2006 budget to the US Army Corps of Engineers in the New Orleans district by $71 Million, the largest single year cut ever.

Ironically, a study to determine the effects of a Cat 5 hurricane was also shelved.

Moreover, the New Orleans district imposed a hiring freeze back in June, the first time in 10 years.

Congress may be partially to blame for the failed pumps and the long clean-up time.

"The French are the connecting link between man and the monkey." -Mark Twain 1879

Pull your head out of your ass and realize that if someone presents a different opinion, they're not automatically a Fox-drone.

The colonists sure owe the trappers for educating them about the terrain and conditions of say, Baltimore or Yorktown. After all, the colonists only lived there so needed help for these genius woodsmen. Use some thought, the Revolutionary War wasn't fought in Ohio or Michigan, it was fought in the colonies, where people lived. Also use facts, like the French fleet were important to Washington's winning the Battle or Yorktown.

Our Oldest Enemy : A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9b0af6ca-0409-11da-a775-0 0000e2511c8,ft_acl=.html

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/i s_200310/ai_n9331263

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/dollar-surfs-o n-a-wave-of-euro-buying/2005/08/04/1123125853217.h tml?oneclick=true

Oh, wait, I have that wrong, you thought the dollar was doing better...

I would also research books/articles on candidiasis, fibromylagia, liver detoxification (unplugging), orthomolecular and naturopathic use of vitamins, antioxidants and minerals. Unfortunately too many people have waited a short lifetime for ironclad "proof" that is activately obstructed. (see also "CODEX") Also reversal of MS/neuropathies is considered proportionate to time in condition with the Klenner protocols. *Intelligent* use of orthomolecular quantities of supplements is required and usually much safer than ANY drug i.e. aspirin. (maybe not fair, my college roommate's sister died of Reyes Syndrome, MD administered before "proof" on aspirin...) I like pioneering authors with dual doctorates, first in a chemical or bioscience then medicine, with egos in check (-95%) across a long, long career. Often great articles are surprisingly old, 1940s-70s stuff. Fortunately, the bedrock principles and facts of (bio)chemistry and physics do not change as frequently as the fads of patentable medicine and evanescent pharma marketing.

Carefully assess the real toxic limits of ALL supplements (retinols (A), B6, D, most minerals are usually the supplments to watch) for YOUR body and compare the potential benefit threshholds required. Idiosyncratic problems should be considered. Determine the best form of the supplement molecule, there are often several inferior ones. I look for B50 or B100 with 11 B-related compounds not just 8 (+PABA, inositol, choline). I totally avoid supplemental copper (my water pipes give plenty) and iron (dangerous for many males). Niacin (B3) needs at least equal or more C. For C and iron overload, google Walter Last. Mixed tocopherols are considered a better "vitamin E" with impaired organ functions, not the common synthetic or ester (alpha tocopheryl acetate, succinate) versions that cost only a little less. More Vitamin D3 is a special MS story with recent research.

For MS, these links may be especially interesting: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is _262/ai_n13675758/pg_1 http://www.townsendletter.com/May2003/klennerproto col0503.htm http://thecompounder.com/diseaseklennerpaper.html Personally I am injection adverse, and would use them as a last resort only after even larger oral trials.

As for anecdotes vs single vs double blind, unfortunately you often have to assess the evidence intuitively, carefully against multiple references, comparatively and with your accumulated experience and tests. Double blind can be useful, it is not the be-all, end-all claimed. A misconstructed test application (very frequent) is a bigger problem than degree of blinding (in my woods, we call it sandbagging a test - the real skill is being subtle enough that I might not catch you, if I am not allowed to run my own extensive tests), blinding o

EA was in serious danger of losing the football crown.
LINK

ESPN NFL FOOTBALL (2004)
216,000 units sold
$10.1 million in sales

MADDEN NFL 2004
3.4 million units sold
$167 million in sales

ESPN NFL 2K5
1.2 million units sold
$24.4 million in sales

MADDEN NFL 2005
2.3 million units sold
$111.4 million in sales

A 50 million dollar drop and 1/3 drop in numbers sold with sega's strategy of selling 2k5. Imagine if they had a 2k6, especially with the buzz they had with 2k5 (2k5 was/is so much better than madden 2005/2006). that's the general consensus.

Madden has "fixed" the same damn problems year after year. I mean, how many times can they fix a same passing game problem? or fix the same running game problem? Hopefully someone will release a 2006 roster update for NFL2K5 (basically what EA does with Madden, but charge an extra 40$ for).

I'm not sure where the problem is, but these two sources give the heat energy content of gasoline to be between 33 and 45 kWh per gallon.

The problem with batteries is that it takes roughly a thousand pounds of lead acid batteries to store the energy of one gallon of gasoline. More exotic batteries will only give incremental gains in storage capacity. Battery cars are a loser for all but the shortest trips.

I teach game development and do alot of 3D modelling. Alot of what you say above is false out of the box.

The state of 3D on Linux is far from sucking. Proprietary Nvidia drivers on Linux cannot be beaten, out-doing their Win32 counterparts alot of the time, even where frame rate (Q3a, Doom3, UT2004, AA) is concerned. Nvidia on Linux is an industry standard 3D animation platform in the feature film industry, for good reason. When teaching game development, if my students are sitting at machines running Nvidia binary drivers on a Linux OS, I'm having a very good day. Naturally, I'd love it if an open alternative could compete - you seem only aware of the open-source drivers, which are essentially blind to the rich talents of the Nvidia GPU. ATI's fglrx drivers are now (finally) on par with Win32 where pixel/vertex shaders (GLSL ) are concerned and close to a performance equal generally. The installation process is slightly more annoying, that is all. Many non-free distro's handle this for the user automagically (Mepis Linux comes to mind)

Secondly, binary compatibility is no more troublesome these days than it is between versions of Windows, eg running a game made for Win95 on XP - occassionally an issue. Installation of binaries can be done easily using a system like Autopackage if one doesn't want to find and or become an *.rpm/*.deb package maintainer.

Where devices are concerned, the trouble you speak of is many years in the past - udev works in userspace, and uses hotplug calls that the kernel signals whenever a device is added or removed from the kernel. Permissions, naming and control is all done in userspace.

Finally where sales of Linux games are concerned, I tend to agree that it is perhaps a little harder to market to Linux users, though from experience I am the first to buy a game that comes out for Linux. You will find though that due to existance of compatibility layers like Wine, publishers simply don't know how many Linux users are buying their games. I can account for around 14 windows games I've bought with the pure intention of playing them on Linux (for instance). Linux desktop market share is widely considered to be above or equal to that of the Apple OS. Whatever kind of market it is, it's growing.

Lastly, for the grandfather, Ryan, of Icculus is your best bet for a Linux port.

PS. Game development, as a culture, needs free software if a) small to medium sized developers are to survive and b) if micro-markets (like that of the indie-film industry) are to burgeon. Tools are increasingly expensive and publishers offset this cost with IP tradeoffs (buy outs). If I were you I'd ship the engine as free software (binary checksum for login, cheat protection and validation) and sell the data and/or subscription time. More on why here.

20 miles to a gallon is nothing.

A while back there was a model airplane that flew 1882 miles across the atlantic on less than a gallon of fuel.

Here's the article.

Luke
----
And Here's my shameless plug for my website

You want facts?

1. 1 in 4 Americans has a sexually transmitted disease.

2. Studies have shown that the use of condoms decrease the likliehood of getting sexually transmitted diseases by 70%.

Combine these two numbers .25 * .30

You still have a .075 (7.5% chance) of getting an STD from a new partner, and that's only if you always use condoms.

Also, in your post you stated "some people are happy waiting for marriage, but obviously the vast majority in our culture are not." There's a problem with your logic there. You assume that just because people are having sex before marriage then they are happy to do so. Another study showed that among those that have engaged in premarital sex, 40% of them regretted the decision.

Having done alot of work on high end Linux (Maya, Blender), Windows (3DSMax, Blender) and OSX (Maya, Blender) workstations, it's safe to say one can't look past Nvidia on Linux for raw polygonal churning power. Linux is an industry standard 3D animation platform, renderfarms aside.

Perhaps with a substantial license deal Apple may deliver a distribution of OSX to fit, but out of the box it's a poor performer. Of note is that the proprietary Aqua interface hits the GPU for fast 2D blitting. The last thing you want is a DE that hogs your precious GPU for mere interface beautification. Similarly relative customiseability is important where mission critical work is to be done, for this reason OSX is significantly less viable. As for Windows, it's barely safe for home users let alone dear Gollum.

Weta studios had an absurd number of IBM IntelliStations (Maya, Renderman, Alfred).

Seems a venerable KDE was their desktop of choice. More here.

Robert Epstein (last to receive a Ph.D. from B.F. Skinner) lists four strategies for generating creative output. These are

• Capturing: The main thing that distinguishes "creative" people from the rest of us is that the creative ones have learned ways to pay attention to and then to preserve some of the new ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills. In other words, get a PDA and learn how to use it.
• Challenging One way to accelerate the flow of new ideas is by challenging yourself--that is, by putting yourself in difficult situations in which you're likely to fail to some extent. A challenging situation is like an "extinction" procedure in the behavioral laboratory. We extinguish behavior when we withdraw the reinforcers that usually maintain that behavior. In challenging situations, a great deal of behavior goes unreinforced; it just doesn't work.
• BroadeningIf you want to enhance your own creativity, take courses in subjects you know nothing about. Once a year, at least, take a course at a local college in the last thing you'd ever want to know about. Land's own breakthrough invention came about because of training he had in crystallography, chemistry, and other fields. The invention of Velcro, the modern theory of electron spin, and countless other advances were made possible because their creators had training in diverse fields. Steve Jobs recently made a point of how his training in caligraphy contributed to the intitial success of the Macintosh.
• Surrounding Finally, you can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli--and, even more important, by changing those stimuli regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because, like resurgence, they get multiple behaviors competing with each other. If you put a Mickey Mouse hat and pliers on your desk in the morning, your thinking will move in odd directions during the day. Call these items distractions, if you like; they are great reservoirs of creativity

Sometimes, though, I wonder about the opposite--how can I learn to quit being "creatve" and just get the damn job done? It's not that I ever get any original brilliant ideas anyway--all really great ideas I have had, I've found out were conceived by somebody else before me.

Anyway, here goes:

As for physical objects, someone posted a link where a company selling a physical object (some sorta woodworking tool) has a EULA for it when you buy it. And per the EULA you can't sell the object without getting written permission from the company.

As for Cisco, yeah. Check thier page:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/csc/refurb_equipm ent/swlicense.html
"My company would like to re-sell or re-lease a used Cisco product that runs software that is no longer sold by Cisco. Can I purchase a license in this case?

Cisco will only sell licenses for current versions of software. This means that to use Cisco software in conjunction with the equipment to be transferred, a license for the current version must be purchased"
Some info here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/04/11/15gripe_ 1.html
"He also said companies that buy used Cisco gear from authorized channels have an easier time getting software licensing and support because they are included with the sale of a Cisco Authorized Refurbished Equipment product.

"If I go out and buy a box off of eBay, not only am I ineligible for a Cisco warranty, I have to buy a software license and pay for a Cisco inspection to make sure the box is in working order," before support can be purchased, Karmin said."
From: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/i s_200405/ai_n9439262
"Blanket prohibitions against licence transfer have been standard language in software licence agreements for many years. Only after the dotcom bust did it occur to hardware manufacturers that they could try to enforce them. IT managers report that Cisco Systems in particular has been aggressive in its demands for relicence fees."
"I made the mistake of showing a visiting Cisco rep the 2611 router I'd purchased on eBay for $1200," says Mark Payton, director of IT at the Vermont Academy. "Not only are they asking me to pay to relicense the software, but they are expecting me to get a one-year SmartNet maintenance agreement and to pay an inspection fee."

Although Cisco is only asking Payton for slightly more than $300 each for the software relicensing and the SmartNet agreement, the inspection fee alone is more than $850. Payton is still negotiating with Cisco. "If my sales rep can't get some of those costs waived, the total cost to me for the 2611 router is over $2700. Brand new through CDW without my additional discounts, I could get this same unit today with one year of SmartNet for $2300."
From: http://www.infoage.idg.com.au/index.php/id;9035707 40;fp;4;fpid;675408222

I'm sure there's more info on the net if you want to search around.
Essentially Cisco says its a liscense you are getting (not the ownership of your copy of the software) so they can control it anyway they want.

Coal is formed of mostly carbon and hydrogen, correct?

Perhaps a comparison to permitting the recording of live concerts from the audience is apropos.
The Grateful Dead constantly sold out their concerts and have permitted audience recordings since 1984. They began releasing their own archive recordings on CD and made huge profits there as well, now offering full shows online.
Just further proof that connecting to fans through more touch points will only increase their interest and loyalty.

It's an interesting phrase. Most often, in discussions of economics, the "tragedy" is assumed to be the overuse by one person of a common resource --specifically, the overgrazing of a village's common land because each farmer figures they can add a few more sheep to their flock. This tragedy scenario is used to argue that common resources will be destroyed by use, and therefore must be removed from common ownership and owned by some particular person or organization in order to preserve them.

Except that the whole idea is historically inaccurate. In reality, this scenario was avoided by a complex set of social norms. Everyone in the village had a stake in keeping the commons useful and generally managed to keep it so, despite the theories of economists. This worked until the land was enclosed -- divided up and put under private ownership, less practical on a small scale, and generally forcing small farms out, or forcing them to rent from a few giant landowners. In general, the few large landowners profited, and the many smaller landowners became poorer.

It's been noticed by many that the copyright of music and other intellectual "property" is the same kind of enclosure. It takes valuable things -- Beethoven's music, say -- out of common hands and places them into the hands of a few giant corporations. And in the case of the IP commons, we don't even have Hardin's argument for enclosure: no matter how many people listen to a piece of music, or run a piece of software, it's not going to get used up or worn out.

Speech is not faster, it's more natural.

What would be faster for a lot of people is humming intervals. Unfortunately some people are tone deaf, and even if humming turned out to be a superior system of communication, it would probably meet with the same resistance that the metric system has met. I wonder if people who would normally grow up tone deaf could learn to hum intervals. Music seems to have healing properties as well, so we could even improve our health!

This reminds me of a quote by the head of the USPO back in the turn of the century (wish I could find a link). He said that everything that could possibly be invented has been invented.

I know what quote you're refering to. It's attributed to Charles H. Duell, who was once the commissoner of the US Patent Office, and is normally given a date of 1899. However, the quote appears to be, at best, apocryphal.

To start with, no one has ever been able to find a definative source that he was the one who said it. The earliest source I can spot is from a 1915 Scientific American article, who attribute it to a nameless 1833 patent office clerk. The quote can also be found (those less frequently, thanks to the wonders of everyone just copying and pasting pages of quotes without checking them) to an anonymous 1875 Patent Office director (which implies Charles Duell's father), and to an anonymous British patent office employee (which is how I first heard it). These alone should be enough to set your spidey-sense tingling.

The truth of the matter is that the quote is completely out of character for Duell, whose 1899 report to President McKinley notes that the number of patents increased over the following year, and suggests that "aid and effectual encouragement" could help in inventors by "improving the American patent system". No mention of shutting it down, no mention of everything having been invented.

The article from which I drew most of this info from: Skeptical Inquirer: A Patently False Patent Myth Still! (May-June, 2003)

(As an interesting side-note, posts on various mailing lists which I found while searching for that article suggest that the quote was first identified as apocryphal by 60 years ago. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the NY Times for Oct. 15, 1995, where this tidbit was mentioned, so I can't check their source on that.)

Okay, and here's the link. it's a story. Falling asleep now 78 hi h7jy6umj

They don't own all of the patents on digital camerss, and there have been various lawsuits over them.

In fact, Kodak operates a lot like sco does, not really innovating anything but making money from litigation.

It would be better if they went out of business.

About supporting the claim of $9B/year:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is _1_55/ai_96403710

"Since 1990, the amount of Social Security taxes paid by illegal aliens has been increasing rapidly. Nearly $300 billion has been paid under bogus Social Security numbers."

$300B/16 = $18.75B

Ok, the $9B number is too low...

This reminds me of the old 'Blitzkrieg Server' article in Signal magazine some years ago...
(Links follow for a brief description):

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is _n114/ai_20783335

http://attrition.org/errata/www/pd.001.html

But, I think that there may actually be room for active-response systems. Also, properly employed, they would be perfectly legal.

There is no reason that such tools be deployed in public networks. Some organizations have networks (including large and complex networks) that are completely and totally privately owned, and totally segregated from public networks. Such organizations may (subject to appropriate risk - reviews) make judicious use of passive and even active response systems.

There are other ways to communicate than IPv4. There are indications in messages that active-response systems can't work becaus of spoofing. Suitable integrity and encryption methods can be used to validate source and ip address data.

There may be more modest active-response methods that may be more generally useful. For example, if traffic is located from a hostile system, the source of the traffic may be back-tracked, and shut off near its source. Not easy - and not necessarily today - but there could be places where such approaches may be deployed.

Sam Nitzberg
dontspamthis_______sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com/
http://www.nitzbergsecurityassociates.com/

I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"

I'm not necessarily defending the way space exploration has been going so far, or the current administration's plans, but to claim that we've already learned everything we could ever want to know about space is absurd.

Tangentially:

Oh, so we've already discovered everything we're going to discover in space, then? You sound like those people who wanted to close the Patent Office in 1901 because there was 'nothing left to invent'.

You've posted links that confirm the xbox as a loss-leader, but nothing else. The PS2 has never been sold at a loss in NA, and I doubt that any other current consoles are.

You know, it's aggravating trying to explain something to someone who refuses to believe it. What I'm saying isn't even a revelation- it's very common knowledge, but common knowledge that you seem to lack. In fact, had you even searched for yourself, you would have found the answers, which are what I'm telling you.

Consoles are normally loss leaders. The Xbox is, and the PS2 is as well.

You are absolutely WRONG on the statement of "The PS2 has never been sold at a loss in NA". That is just stupid, and you pulled it out of your ass because you don't want to accept reality and you're too lazy to find out for yourself.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is _3772/ai_56701165

What part of "However, Sony is planning to sell the console as a loss leader and make profits on DVDs, CD-ROMs and later, network downloads." don't you understand?

Care to back that up? I know about the Xbox, but I believe that's the only one.

I thought this was common knowledge, it should be.
Most consoles are loss leaders, and have been for quite some time. It's like the razor/blades situation.

Even the Dreamcast was a loss-leader, and the Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube are also.

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/17836.html

"Giga's Enderle told the E-Commerce Times in an earlier interview that console manufacturers typically sell consoles as loss leaders, recouping their profits on software titles."

http://www.dwightsilverman.com/xbox.htm

http://money.cnn.com/2001/11/15/technology/xbox/

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is _3772/ai_56701165

If you search around you'll find loads of information. Just search for "loss leader" and "console".

Still, drilling even 6 miles down is quite a feat

According to this 2000 World Oil article Google turned up, the current US record for true vertical depth in oil and gas exploration is 26,536 feet, or just over five miles (8 km).

Impressive, yes. But seeing as the record was set in 1977, I'd expect getting to six miles isn't going to tax current technology as much as people seem to think.