Slashdot Mirror

If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure--transportation and communications systems, water, and power. (...) Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive.

Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:

The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.

Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.

ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.

Saw this yesterday on hackaday. Looks like they're making a lot of friends.

they're not compressed they are "packed" in security industry terms, this basically means a mild form of obfuscation to stop people from doing disassemblies of the binary...they dont work very well, as you can see here

to all those who are interested in some serious proof, here it is and its pretty much indisputable...

http://www.memestreams.net/users/abaddon/blogid484 7145

Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).

I run a small internet community called MemeStreams that has had a feature like this for some time. MemeStreams has a thread bookmarklet. You can click on it when viewing any URL and see a discussion thread about that page if users of MemeStreams have commented on it. These discussions could clearly be moderated although there is not enough traffic to warrant it right now.

The idea is that any web page could be associated with a open, threaded discussion that is available one click away.

Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).

I run a small internet community called MemeStreams that has had a feature like this for some time. MemeStreams has a thread bookmarklet. You can click on it when viewing any URL and see a discussion thread about that page if users of MemeStreams have commented on it. These discussions could clearly be moderated although there is not enough traffic to warrant it right now.

The idea is that any web page could be associated with a open, threaded discussion that is available one click away.

I'm amazed I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but lots of people agreed over a year ago to send their checks to the EFF. The domain has since gone off-line, but SendItToTheEFF.org was mentioned on several blogs back in early 2003. It was also mentioned in EFF's EFFector newsletter.

>I guess Slashdot just isn't willing to admit that their dislike of Fox News lead them to post a false story

Led to post a false story? Every media outlet was reporting the same thing. Nice conspiracy theory you've got there, but fark, metafilter, googlenews, etc were running the same story. The truly say part is after Fox's REAL intimidation lawsuit against Al Franken no one thought Fox suing the Simpsons was at all suspicious.

Normally, Groening's joke would have been as a understood as one, but Fox's well-earned reputation as childish bullies diluted the satirical joke itself. Scary.

Considering Fox's reputation is in the garbage can anyway, complaints regarding 'over the fold' are silly and if people can't be bothered to click on the Read More link then they deserve to wallow in ignorance. It isn't Taco's job to make a flash presentation and embed it on the front page becaus e a news channel you like was subjecedt to a prank.

In SCO's last 10-Q, it claimed roughly $35M of earnings for the last six months.. So, lets just say they do $70M a year. That makes this suit the equivlant of aprox 42 years of earnings at SCO's current rate. [Insert Douglas Adams joke here]

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Comments from my blog at MemeStreams

MemeStreams already does this. When you find weblogs you like on the site you can organize them into circles. You can then do searches on those circles and the site will tell you what links those people agree are the most relevent for your search. MemeStreams also has a reputation system that automatically determines which weblogs you like the most, and you can search on that group as well.