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A good excuse to file purchase orders, too. Eug writes "Writing in this Ars thread, Craig Hunter of NASA gives details about his much-quoted dual-G5 Power Mac benchmarks listed here. This should answer some of the questions posed around the net about the methodology and potentially the validity of his benchmarks."

The lines between viruses and spam is thin enough already. Joe Stewart writes "There have been a lot of news stories lately about how Sobig and spam are tied together. I actually revealed this in a paper two months ago. Now with the widespread Sobig.e, it seems to have become a topic again. However, the major antivirus companies have once again left out the whole story - most of them currently rate Sobig.e as 'low damage.' This is because they haven't fully understood how the real payload of Sobig.e is delivered. I've written a followup paper describing the entire mechanism that Sobig.e uses to facilitate spam, identity theft and bank fraud. Sobig has evolved, and it is much harder to stop than before."

Is this the beginning of a long goodbye? inertia@yahoo.com writes "Microsoft has updated their Mactopia Web Site to include a section on Virtual PC. It's taken them since February 2003 to do this. On the site, they mention, 'In August 2003, Virtual PC for Mac will be available through standard Microsoft channels of distribution.' So it looks like they aren't killing it after all."

Simplicity itself is a nice ideal. webword writes "Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark is now available online. As you might recall, Joe was interviewed on Slashdot back in December. Good stuff if you care about accessibility."

Not yet billions and billions served, but getting there. nzilla writes "The Internet Book List, which announced its creation earlier this year on /. has now reached 10,000+ entries and is still going strong. The Internet Book List (IBList) strives to be the IMDb of books. IBList is maintained exclusively by volunteers around the world."

Girlfriends drive strange endeavors. ceejayoz writes "This interesting article on MSNBC.com details the Degree Confluence Project - a project to gather a photographic record of the points on Earth where latitude and longitude lines meet. The article has links to some of the more interesting points. The project's website also has an interesting map showing all the completed confluence points."

We mentioned this project quite some time ago, and it's progressed quite a bit since then.

Uh, sir, you have some blubber on your collar there. Scoria writes "Chilean scientists have determined that a 12-meter mass of flesh discovered recently on a Pacific beach is actually a sperm whale, not an obscure 'giant octopus' as many researchers speculated. Scientists performing research at the Museum of Natural History in Santiago were the first to develop this conclusion after observing the presence of dermal glands unique to the species."

Code that pays tribute to the money in television. mondainx writes "Following(?) in the footsteps of Linksys, Tivo has made their source available for versions 2.0 through 4.0. Get the GPL source here. Sweet!"

But will they distribute diploma blanks as PDF files? perlmunger writes "Linux Journal highlighted this in the 'up front' section of the June 2001 issue (I knew I keep these old issues around for a reason). Apparently, MIT will (finally) be opening their Open Course Ware initiative on September 30th to the public. Looks like a great start from many departments."

Answer: it's a strong possibility. skinfitz writes "Following on from Google returning to China, New Scientist is reporting in this article that Chinese surfers searching Google are finding their Internet connection dropped for five minutes if they enter "politically sensitive" keywords, such as the Chinese president's name! Will this new technology find uses elsewhere? Is this the future of the web?"

My human transporter is still a station wagon. An anonymous reader writes with the text which by now many people have seen regarding the status of the world's most famous unavailable scooter; apparently it's not necessarily as far from available as an automated message from Amazon implied.

"Greetings from Amazon.com.

You recently received an e-mail from us regarding the Segway Human Transporter (also known as "Ginger" or "IT"). This e-mail was sent accidentally by an automated system and the information in it is incorrect.

In fact, there is no new information on Segway's availability. Consumer versions of Segway Human Transporters are currently being piloted in various communities throughout the U.S. The Segway HT is expected to be released to the general consumer market in 2003.

We apologize for the confusion. We will keep your e-mail address on our list of customers who wish to be notified about this item.

Sincerely,
Amazon.com Customer Service

Strong Opinions softsign writes "Apparently, Tim O'Reilly's recent article addressing the topic of Switchers was so popular and generated so much response that he felt compelled to respond to reader comments in his MacDevCenter column this week. It reads almost like the Apple Switch website, but there are some really insightful emails peppered with Tim's comments. Worth a read."

The moon's been asking for this for years. cscx writes "The mysterious space junk, or apparent "other moon" reported a few weeks ago, now is more likely to be an old Saturn V (from the Apollo program) rocket booster. Bad thing is, there is a 20% chance it could strike the moon sometime next year. More details at MSNBC."

We'll let you you borrow it for a while, sign here. An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has scrapped plans for subscription-based licensing of consumer products following the end of a 12-month trial in several countries including New Zealand. The Story says people were getting confused as to why they had to pay after the 12 months had gone by."

I find your lack of confidence disturbing. Longinus writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Western Digital is going to follow Maxtor's recent decision to cut their warranty of future drives from three years to one, with an extended warranty being offered at an additional price. The article goes on to mention that Seagate is rumored to also be considering such a cut, but nothing official has been confirmed. One can only wonder if this increase in price is to due to corporate cost saving measures or the fact that hard drives are becoming less stable magnetically as they increase in storage space."

psytek writes: "We have been collecting names of people that would like to volunteer and help set up computer systems and networks for the WTC companies. Go to www.webiest.com and sign up to help."

And rp44 writes: "There is a site collating offers of geek help in NYC and DC at srcdst.org. It's mainly focused on network infrastructure (came from seeing all the posts of assistance on the nanog list getting lost in the noise), but areas covered include telco circuits, space, geek help, and hardware. Last time I looked there were 50+ assistance offers there, if you can offer facilities, services or hardware, just register and enter them into the database. It's pretty functional in that you can maintain your own help offers in real time, come back later and modify/delete them etc."

caledon, volunteering in New York for the Red Cross, writes with word that "it looks from here as if the two items most desired here right now are: 1) Cash 2) Socks.

They have been swamped, but the Red Cross seems to want money more than the in-kind help. That way they can buy EXACTLY what they might need at the site or for other purposes. A lot of bandages might not help if what they need are asbestos masks. That's probably true of the tech stuff too here in the city.

About the socks, apparently these guys downtown like to change their socks as often as possible. It is wet, always wet, and they need their feet dry. Some of my socks (and, oh no, Linux T-shirts) were disposed of last night by my loving family while I was wiring together our little effort."

Drake42 writes: "This is an excellent analysis of why the terrrorists attacked the WTC." An anonymous reader pointed out this thought-provoking commentary on War and the Internet, which points out how certain hopes for the role of the Internet in promoting peace seem to have failed, at least for now.

Along with other moves to restrict freedom and privacy that many believe will follow last weeks events, darrellsilver writes: "The New York Times is running an article about the proposed, and probably little-opposed, security changes to the Manhattan area, Times Square and SoHo specifically. As the article quotes, 'A week ago, certain things would have been unheard of as safety options. But now you reassess, you reconsider.' What once stirred controversy now seems to be discussed as inevitable and welcome, such as face recognition software."

guygee also writes "Andrew Cohen , CBS legal analyst who correctly predicted key aspects of the recent ruling of the U.S. Appellate Court in the Microsoft case, has issued a warning of the coming government crackdown on civil liberties."

Rescue and recovery teams in New York are using some interesting technology: GPSguy writes: "This is still embryonic, but a friend in the broadcast RF business just had his stock of spares cleaned out. Seems that the latest approach to sub-rubble searching is to look for the security access cards all WTC employees had been issued. Excited by a low-power VLF source, they emit a response. Apparently, not the idea is to hit the pile with a much higher signal level and try to get a number of the responses and try to triangulate onto some of them. No URLs available, yet, and scant real information."

MrDelSarto writes: "From this zdnet article and this updated article author Steve Kirsch suggests a number of techniques for putting a plane in "safe mode" that auto-lands it's self in case of emergency ... hijacking or even the Payne Stuart situation. I'm sure /. readers will have a myriad of other ideas." As rackrent explains, "The article basically discusses locking out manual control of aircraft and forcing the autopilot to land them without any human control. Interesting idea, but certainly could have its problems, I say."

Liberal writes: "This article by a leading Iranian filmmaker is absolutely the deepest, most insightful thing I've ever read about that country. It was written before recent events; now that everyone is thinking about bombing Afghanistan, I think this should be required reading, to understand what the problems there really are, and to try and figure out what sort of long term solution may be possible (why it won't do just to massacre the Taliban)."

Finally, many readers submitted word of this photo album at Ars showing reactions around the world to the attacks. Sad though these pictures are, it may be one of the most encouraging things I've seen since Tuesday.