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The only "ethically challenged" group we can assert and assume with any certainty is the company providing the Apply Yourself services.

Its ethically criminal to provide a confidential service on the internet with virtually no security.

From (almost) the horses mouth: Noted web application developer and MIT professor Phillip Greenspun notes on his Harvard weblog:

• The ApplyYourself code had a bug such that editing the URL in the "Address" or "Location" field of a Web browser window would result in an applicant being able to find out his admissions status several weeks before the official notification date. This would be equivalent to a 7-year-old being offered a URL of the form http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20030817-utah-a ir-to-air/and editing it down to http://philip.greenspun.com/images/ to see what else of interest might be on the server.
• Someone figured this out and posted the URL editing idea on the BusinessWeek discussion forum, where all B-school hopefuls hang out and a bunch of curious applicants tried it out.

Liable and culpable? Apply Yourself and the B-Schools who outsourced to a cheesy service provider without, apparently, commissioning even a basic security audit.

Its of no consequence - no doubt there is at least one bright former-B-school student wannabe now contracting the services of a lawyer to sue Haavard - not for denying them access, but for allowing confidential information to be exposed to the internet. Seems to me such a suit is likely to return more than the cost of tuition to any other school in the world...

The information seems to consistently come from this article: http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg. tcl?msg_id=003HzF. whether Vin Suprynowicz is actually correct or not about this, I have no idea. I believe his contact details are available though, so you could always ask him if you're willing.

Would we be the richest nation on Earth if we did dump all kinds of money into a national health care system?

Actually, it raises the question of reality. If you're really the richest nation on earth, how come you're in debt more than most other "first world" countries? Or how come You don't generate as much money as many other countries?

I guess the answer to the question is: You're only the richest if you consider military spending as the sole indicator of wealth.

Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.

Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.

Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.

...other than How To Become Insanely Rich Through Dumpster Diving?

Maybe How To Justify Everything You Do, Hypocritical Or Not. Windows still occasionally bluescreens when you plug a new device in, years after this faux pas, in which Trey explains "that must be why it hasn't been released yet". Billions in cash, but still hasn't ironed out the bugs == "we don't really care about the bugs". Quality is not Job #1, getting the money is.

Should one judge the author of this code, Cotton Seed, unprofessional because of his colorful source code (never visible to an end-user)? Or does he get credit for having made an honest effort to write a high-quality, useful piece of software and then giving it away for free, with source code so that others can build on his work?" And then further credit for calling attention to a potentially important issue with words that are unlikely to be overlooked?

And how ... does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?

Well, he gets a job. He can't put the money into the Roth IRA without the job, so even if he's a young Bill Gates, the job is the essential first step.

Since $3k is probably about what a 15 year old can earn in a year, actually saving all of it would require superhuman self discipline. I'm going to give my kid $1 for every $1 he puts into a Roth IRA, starting the day he gets a job (probably about 5 years off). It won't be optional for him, as long as he's living in my house. I figure that this is far more important than funding his college, and about $90k cheaper.

If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.

Right now, subsidised student loan debt is running around 4% per year, and the interest is tax deductable. I'd say that there is no hurry to pay it back. As you say, ``The stock market historically returns 7% ...'', and long Treasuries return at least as much as your student loan interest, so I'd say it's a fools errand not to fully fund your IRA every year.

This says most of what you need to know about the Media Lab, I suspect.

Last week I was off the coast of Greece on my yacht ``Nippo-bux'' (I put the ``raft'' in ``graft,'' as I always say) with my close personal friend Al (``Al'') Gore. He asked me ``Nick--er, Hunter, how do you do it? You maintain a research staff of, in the words of Albert Meyer [an underfunded Course VI professor], `Science Fiction Charlatans,' yet you never fail to rake in monster sponsor bucks? I could fund Hillary's socialized medicine boondoggle in an instant if I had that kind of fiscal pull.''

I told him that it's merely a matter of understanding our sponsor's needs. Our sponsors are represented by middle-aged middle-managers who need three things: Booze, good hotels, and hookers. Keep 'em busy with free trips and the slick dog and pony shows, provide them with pre-written notes for their upper-managment, and the money will keep rolling in.

Do I worry that one day some sponsor will wake up and say ``Wait a minute--what the hell did I do last night? Did I shell out a million bucks to fund a LEGO Chair in the Media Lab? Tequila!'' Over the years I've learned not to care. I could pull the cigar out of W.C. Field's mouth and sell it back to him at a profit. And he'd thank me for the deal. I'm that goddamn good.

Originally, a large proportion of the Irish government's funding for university science research was going to be diverted into MLE. (Although to be fair the total funding was going to be enlarged as well.) Good riddance. Blame Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern. Evidently he got high on the media lab's promotional vapours. (Another gullible suit.) This isn't the first time he's pushed a grandiose, expensive, misconcieved pet project which eventually dies in an embarrassing fashion.

He's a fine one to talk about property rights, since his software empire had its foundation in ignoring Harvard's property rights.

What do you want to be when you grow up? How about a whiny little twit. The world really rewards them.

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing - Great book.

Yes. Everyone in the U.S.A. is sold a gun at birth. Fear us.

I'd worry more about Switzerland. Every household is required to have a machine gun & ammo.

There is one place in the United States where gun ownership is mandatory, also by household. Kennesaw GA.

Switzerland has the 2nd lowest crime rate in the world, and Kennesaw has seen a decrease in crime with an increase of population since the law was passed 16 years ago.

Some remarks.

Or save yourself the time and expense by ordering a Kodak Photo CD. For about $1 per slide (plus $10 for the media), they'll scan and store 100 slides. There's 5 copies of each image, ranging from postage-stamp sized thumbnails to an 18MB file (3072x2048). Do not confuse Kodak Photo CD with the inferior Kodack "Picture CD" (640x480). Then go read Greensun's Chapter 6: Adding Images to Your Site to adjust the image's range and sharpen with Unsharp mask.

Read the ladder theory first

Also see The Game.

Bill spending $20 million to get his name on a building is like someone with $500k of wealth spending $164.

So next time you buy a Games Console for your nephew stick your name on it to show everyone how generous you've been.

(And if it's an XBOX you're helping a very small amount to pay for another University building)

Yup - what a pain. According to this Bill is making roughy 14 million a day. and this says (as of this writing) that Bill is worth 60 Billion Dollars. Add to this Microsofts War Chest and we can geusstimate this to be about a total of 110 Billion dollars. At 20 million a day Bill and Microsquish could "only" keep it up for ~5500 days. Now doleing it out only on business days, taking your weekends off, but no real vacation, real this means that Bill could only do it for about 20 years, this is assuming of course that Bill and Microsquish never makes another dime.

Bill was born in 1955, which when the well runs dry in 2024 he will 59 years old, not old, but hardly young anymore. So though it is a stretch, but I think it is possible to argue - that Bill could do this every day for the rest of his life.

But how then shall he emulate master Gates? I mean what would any of us do without mommy's money? What besides that distinguished Gates from any other wanna be Unix fuck off in his early years? Arrr, harr, harrr, the asshole had the last laugh.

It's like when some time ago on this site somebody said Java could be faster than C due to JIT and all that. I replied that no way, Java could never be faster than an optimal implementation in machine code, and C is only a bit above it.

that's correct, but useless. it's useless because, for this to do you any good, you need to have an optimal implementation in machine code at hand. such beasts are very hard to even recognize, never mind write.

your friend was at least potentially right, because JIT compiling (and other recompile-at-runtime schemes) all have access to more info than a static compiler does: the code to be compiled is running, so a lot of knowledge about what it's actually doing right then and how it's been dynamically behaving since started up is at hand. optimizations can be based on this that static compilers can't perform.

consider byte-compiling at runtime from one processor's native machine code to another one's (Crusoe), or -- as a degenerate case -- to the same processor's machine code. HP have done a lot of research on this; their Dynamo project byte-compiles PA8000 code to PA8000 at run-time. the weird thing is that programs so interpreted occasionally run up to 20% faster than "native" machine code... because the system could micro-optimize the running program as it ran, focusing automatically on the pieces that needed optimization the most, and performing optimizations that no static compiler could do at all for lack of knowledge of how the code behaved dynamically.

To this what I say is: If you really needed it, you could use C to write your own bytecode interpreter in it, with its own JIT, that would be faster than Java's because you could make it optimal for your application.

yeah, you could. but Phil Greenspun would just shake his head at hearing of it and, perhaps, mildly pity you for your wasted effort. if you're going to go down that route, at least you could reimplement Common Lisp...

I don't need no convincing for a NSX!

No corners were cut; in fact, no expense was spared.

Is that why the watertight compartments weren't enclosed at the top (henceforth as the list of the ship increased the water spilled over from one compartment to the other) and the ship only carried enough lifeboats for just over half of the crew and passengers even though there was a design purposal that could have been adopted to carry enough for everybody?

Sorry -- even by the standards of the day the Titanic was a flawed design. If such a thing happened in the modern era (especially the lifeboat bit) I'm sure the White Star line would have been sued into non-existence by family members/survivors.

Nope, Gates was born with plenty of money and connections:

William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

Middle class? Non

Cut all the crap, here I come for your rescue

1) First Some Inspiration : Robert Rodriguez's 10-Minute Film School

2) Rough Guide to Camera Formats and some shooting tips.

3) Compare Sony DSR-PD150 Vs. Canon XL-1. Dude I am recommending something without knowing your budget. I am such a smart (_|_)

4) Hey where is the moderator, he allows imcomplete ASK Slashes and Rejects my Stories. >-

5) Hollywood & Slashdot are both illogical. :o

Check out Philip Greenspun's Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists. It is very insightful. In particular check out the graph that shows the relationship between your salary and education level. The pictures in the Achievement Gallery are just priceless.

Here's some nice living tips for PHDs if google didn't hire you :-)

PS: I'm also planning to get a doctorate in EE

According to the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, Bill Gates's current wealth is $57.9b.

According to the Microsoft Museum timeline, Microsoft was founded 28 years ago.

There are 2000 working hours in a year, at 40 hours/day, 50 weeks/year. As Gates is an officer and presumably exempt, he isn't compensated directly for overtime.

$57.9b/56,000 hours = $1,033,928/hr.

Note that the bulk of his wealth came following Microsoft's IPO in 1986, and most of it in the past ten years -- 1994 - 2004, if you follow the stock price. For the past ten years, his hourly equivalent is closer to $2,895,000/hr. While running what is still an illegal monopoly with a long, long, long track record of ongoing abuses.

Those lawyers are working for peanuts. Ain't no money in justice.

"As stupid as I found the idea of printing a book about Web publishing, the idea of stuffing a CD-ROM in the back seemed to belong to a whole new category of stupidity. Macmillan initially wanted a CD-ROM, on the grounds that readers think such books have more value. I said that if we couldn't get some complete RDBMS packages for the CD-ROM then there was no point in having it (and in fact as my book came out Oracle decided to make all of its software available for download on the Web so there would not have been any point even if we could have gotten a full Oracle for the disk).

I asked Macmillan to put in the standard CD-ROM pocket but fill it with a black cardboard disk, said disk to be printed with the URL for the book's virtual CD-ROM (http://demo.webho.com). Macmillan said that would be more expensive than a real disk so we ended up printing the inside back cover with a nice "no CD" symbol underneath which ran my text:

Would you really want to take Web publishing advice from someone who had to burn a CD-ROM to distribute his software? Come to http://demo.webho.com for electronic versions of the source code examples in this book, for live demos of the software in use, and for the packaged source code to larger systems. IMHO, this URL is better than a CD-ROM. You can't lose it. You can't scratch it. You can't leave it in your office when you need it at home. You can give it to your friends and still keep it for yourself.

People laugh when they read this so I think it worked."

"As stupid as I found the idea of printing a book about Web publishing, the idea of stuffing a CD-ROM in the back seemed to belong to a whole new category of stupidity. Macmillan initially wanted a CD-ROM, on the grounds that readers think such books have more value. I said that if we couldn't get some complete RDBMS packages for the CD-ROM then there was no point in having it (and in fact as my book came out Oracle decided to make all of its software available for download on the Web so there would not have been any point even if we could have gotten a full Oracle for the disk).

I asked Macmillan to put in the standard CD-ROM pocket but fill it with a black cardboard disk, said disk to be printed with the URL for the book's virtual CD-ROM (http://demo.webho.com). Macmillan said that would be more expensive than a real disk so we ended up printing the inside back cover with a nice "no CD" symbol underneath which ran my text:

Would you really want to take Web publishing advice from someone who had to burn a CD-ROM to distribute his software? Come to http://demo.webho.com for electronic versions of the source code examples in this book, for live demos of the software in use, and for the packaged source code to larger systems. IMHO, this URL is better than a CD-ROM. You can't lose it. You can't scratch it. You can't leave it in your office when you need it at home. You can give it to your friends and still keep it for yourself.

People laugh when they read this so I think it worked."

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg. tcl?msg_id=003dHL

That this case was decided (correctly, IMHO) against the person who committed copyright infringement is beside the point -- the main thing is the distinction between copyright infringement and theft.

-H

I might have to go back to school. I wonder if Google will open a University one day.

Link. Stupid HTML... More like stupid me for not previewing.

Recommended reading:

Data Warehousing for Cavemen by Phil Greenspun (of ArsDigita fame) -- some background, and implementation using SQL.
A dimensional modelling manifesto.
Wikipedia has good coverage.
MDX is the query language (look it up in MSDN). Personally, I don't like the syntax but who cares.
And then, when you're convinced OLAP is complex, have a look at Stevan Apter's Drilldown example. The source code is here, all of one printed page, including the GUI and generation of random data.

it was unfortunately premature and not very effective, but if the protesters were armed it would have been a major bloodbath

Isolated ancedotes can prove nothing one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that the Palestinian uprising owes most of its success to violence.

If not for the terrorism, the rest of the world would've ignored that area entirely, and the Zionists would've already pushed the indigs out into the desert. (cf "Why are Palestinians so violent?")

Also, it's not exactly true that functional programming lacks a big-name sponsor. Haskell research and implementation is largely driven by Microsoft Research. This is not the same as promoting (something like) Haskell to working programmers, but it suggests that Microsoft has its eye on doing so someday.

Here's what Philip Greenspun has to say about it.

Jobs versus Eisner & Gates. Hmmm. Eisner is under attack by the Disney family (having kicked the Son off the board, effectively) and has had a high profile contract loss (Pixar itself). Gates is reviled and ridiculed by roughly the same people since Greenspun made his Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock; this hasn't hurt him much at all. Jobs is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (without the genocide). Pixar had a disappointing earnings report

Will Time Warner choose sides?

Speaking of which, will this Internet/Media marriage have as much impact as TimeWarner/AOL? if so, this is non-news.

"I really understand this part: going after people who are taking active measures against your enterprise due to their disinterest."

Odd isn't it, how the people who'll swear blind (see rule #1) that the auto-generated email lists they use are 100% opt-in, yet they know that these "opted-in" recipients will have filters specifically designed to prevent that person from sending them email.

Apparently these people who desire emailed advertisements must have installed SpamAssasin by mistake or something...

In his book, Greenspun mentions that putting your phone number on the web is less annoying than putting an email, as the phone can only be used by a real human, who's paying the cost of the call, and can only contact one person at a time...

I also prefer the eager over the prima-donna. But not every skilled, experienced programmer acts like a prima-donna. An experienced, talented programmer who doesn't have a big ego will produce more quality work faster than an unskilled eager programmer. And I've worked with plenty of eager unskilled prima-donnas, too, and they poison the pool just as fast as the skilled ones.

Learning to program well takes a lot of time. A college degree or self-study can make for a good start, but programming well takes five to ten years to learn well, and you only learn it from experience and working with people who know more than you do.

See Peter Norvig's excellent article Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years and some comments on Philip Greenspun's blog.

More important than programming skill or knowledge of the latest cool languages is business experience. You might dream in XML but if you don't know accounts payable from payroll you won't be much use to a company working on accounting software. Without a degree I routinely get hired over people with more technical credentials because I know more about the business domain.

I've worked overseas, too. You'll have all of the same problems as here, with culture shock on top of that. The shock can range from mild (Canada, Australia) to extreme (India). If you can't get a job here, no foreign company will take the risk of sponsoring you. The people who get hired overseas are hired because they have unique skills and experience. Do you really think a four-year degree will make you exceptional in Bangalore?

Take it or leave it, but I've been employed without a break as a programmer/analyst for 26 years, without a degree, and I've worked at big companies like Nike and Apple that always put degree requirements in their job postings. In decreasing order of importance here's what you need to get a job:

1. Good network of friends/contacts, preferably people who have jobs. Don't pass up opportunities to socialize and meet people. To get a job you have to get an interview, and you get interviews a lot faster through contacts than you do replying to ads. A good recruiter can help, too, but you will have to work with a lot of them to find a few who have contacts and aren't sleazy.

2. Social/presentation/communication skills. Learn to write and type accurately. Join Toastmasters or a speech/debate club until you can comfortably talk to an audience. Look people in the eye when they talk to you. I can't even count how many interviewees I've seen sabotage themselves with social awkwardness and an apparent inability to communicate with other members of their species. How you present yourself is the single most important factor in most hiring decisions, and I'm not talking about which tie to wear.

3. Business domain expertise. This mostly comes from experience. Don't be too cocky, learn from the people you work with about their jobs. Learn the lingo. I've been hired over a room full of other programmers just because I know what LTL means in the trucking business.

4. Technical skills. A talented programmer can get at least conversant with a new language or technology in a few days. Some things (relational databases, web architecture, compiler design) take considerably longer and are best learned from a mentor. But employers are often happy to supply technical training or let you learn on the job if you are otherwise a good fit in the organization -- a good fit with the people.

5. Don't whine. No one cares about your unmet expectations or how your cubicle is too small. Make yourself useful to the employer before you demand to use a Mac. And when you're job hunting you aren't in a strong position to make demands, like "I only work with open source software" or "I only want to work on new projects in Java." You'll probably have to shovel shit for a while before you get to pick and choose. The boom is over and all t

Do people farm the ocean for gold?

Can't find the article, but yes there was a California-based ocean water gold extraction outfit in the 1980s, according to my uncle the geologist. This is a cheat, but there was also beach sand extraction.

The important point is that the trend of toxin accumulation is observed. It should be monitored so that correlations become better known. In this industrialized world, it ain't goin' away!

There are many, many examples of pollution wreaking havoc on humans and other species, for example the plummet in bald eagle population due to DDT. Estrogen analogs triggering gender ratio changes and mutations among amphibians. Lead's effects on humans date back to the Romans, mercury is still a factor today...

They gave them a monopoly by developing OS2, a competing operating system? Aside from that strange statement, you are in general correct.

Wow dude. You should read up on the history of PC's. OS/2 was written in the late eighties. It was a collaboration between IBM and Microsoft. Windows NT is a fork of the source code of OS/2. Anywho, my point was that the IBM PC was offered out of the box only with DOS. If you wanted one of the other 2 OS's that would run on it you had to send the original DOS disks through the mail and wait for months for IBM to send you CP/M or the other one (I forgot what it was). Meanwhile the unbelievably expensive electronic adding machine which you stuck your professional neck out to buy sits unusable on a table while co-workers also vying for the next promotion slide knives in your back. Got the picture yet? IBM undercut Apples price on hardware and effectively caused 99.9% of buyers to use DOS giving Gates a monopoly in the early eighties.

And he did it starting from scratch - something which is almost unheard of.

You really don't know, do you? Please read the truth. If being born with a million dollar trust fund in 1955 (back when a decent single family house was going for a few thousand) is 'starting from scratch' then how about giving me a little of that scratch?

I never said Gates was a poor businessman. That remains to be seen. But only an absolute idiot could lose the fortune that had been plopped in his lap.

You are SO on the wrong forum.

There are many places where you can get intelligent answers to this question, and somehow I doubt /. is one of them.

I'd bet most of the answers here will be, "get a digitial". Just because you see Philip Greenspun's amateur stuff here periodically doesn't mean this is a good place for tips :P

One of the things that we try to teach in the class (textbook is online at http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-w orkbook/ if you're curious to see what the students suffer through) is that being a good code monkey/CS nerd isn't sufficient to function well as an engineer. We try to give the students some experience with taking vague client specs and turning them into precise requirements, with presenting their work clearly, with constructively criticizing others' work in meetings, with conducting and learning from user testing, etc. The rationale for this is laid out in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web

So it was actually very gratifying that our guest speakers came in and demonstrated that state-of-the-art American IT development projects no longer involve plain-old-programmers in America. Our students need to learn this early so that they can plan their careers and further education accordingly.

One of the things that we try to teach in the class (textbook is online at http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-w orkbook/ if you're curious to see what the students suffer through) is that being a good code monkey/CS nerd isn't sufficient to function well as an engineer. We try to give the students some experience with taking vague client specs and turning them into precise requirements, with presenting their work clearly, with constructively criticizing others' work in meetings, with conducting and learning from user testing, etc. The rationale for this is laid out in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web

So it was actually very gratifying that our guest speakers came in and demonstrated that state-of-the-art American IT development projects no longer involve plain-old-programmers in America. Our students need to learn this early so that they can plan their careers and further education accordingly.

Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India. But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort: OpenCourseware ( http://ocw.mit.edu ), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given). During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system. In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi". It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

Like that doesn't happen already!

Archeologists work there entire careers for the opportunity to get a scrap of 1/3 a sheet of paper.
Say what you want, but in 3000 years those CD's will be in much better shape then a book.

Funny thet, but over here most archeologist would give their right hand for finding something like this, but then my ansestors wasn't very keen on books...

However, it was the second part of you statement I balked at. Even the the guys making CDs are only claiming a lifetime of 75 to 200 years, and that is probaly not achivable in real life. Others suggest a lifespan of 100 years, while people report that certain kinds of CD-Rs ain't readable after just 1 year. That aside, some of the riches sources of information archeologist has about life in the past is their rubbishtips - do you really want the archologists of the future to find several billion AOL-CDs?

As for taking up space in a landfill... you're right. Other things do take up more room, but a lot of what you give as examples are biodegrable anyway (espesially papar - it's just dead tree anyway), and every bit count, right? We don't have to leave the entire planet filled with waste for our children.
Still, unless these new, bidegradable CDs can be produced for the same or less cost than ordindary CDs, I can't see they catch on.

• Philip Greenspun runs and excellent photo site. It has been around for years, and the tutorials and/or comments are hard to beat.
• In print, the best starting point, in my opinion are four of Ansel Adam's books. In particular:
  1. The Camera;
  2. The Negative;
  3. The Print, and;
  4. Basic Techniques

"Security is not Job #1"