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153-foot, 200,000-pound Boeing 727 stolen from airport

No, actually, it is Israel.
The old USSR _used_ to be No 2. But since the mid 1990's, Israel has had the honour.
See here, here and here for details.
Note that although they are being outdone in nuclear weapons, their large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons more than makes up for it...

That's not always true. Sometimes patches are the problem.

Almost without fail, hacking incidents at major companies are found to be due to security holes that have been known about and fixed for months, if not years.

Tell that to the victims of the latest BugBear worm. Admins who patched for the first worm were not protected against the latest variant.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/922529.asp?0cv=CB10&cp1= 1

In an attempt to avoid detection, BugBear attempts to turn off all antivirus programs, and it shuts down other security software. In addition, it uses a particularly nasty flaw in Microsoftâ(TM)s Internet Explorer program and its implementation by Microsoftâ(TM)s Outlook e-mail reader that allows the virus to infect machines whenever a victim simply previews an e-mail message loaded with the program.

It seems that it's not just Outlook but IE as well, and just "previewing" the email, not even opening the attachement, is causing problems... This is very recent...only 1 week ago, so even though the newest versions are patched, it seems to matter very little cause most of the outlook apps out there are not patched....

It was 9 / 11 that fueled (ahem) the beginning of the hysteria.

It's extremely incongruous for you to unload all your criticism for economic turbulence and fear (of which there really is not much anymore; "hysteria" is hyperbole) on the Dept. of Homeland Security and a TV news network conveying relevant news about terrorist activities and measures being taken to prevent future attacks, while omitting from your criticism the primary role that certain non-Republicans (i.e., terrorists, remember those guys? the Saudis?) played.

Here's more hysteria-fueling propaganda from MS[FOX?]NBC[.gov?]: The terrorists are here!

Are Linux terrorists and hippies worse than Windows terrorists and hippies? I don't get it.

Microsoft co-owns a cable TV news channel. Linux.org doesn't. Microsoft reserves the right to misrepresent anything related to Linux on MSNBC so far as it doesn't cross the line of slander.

I love how they love to change their numbers to make them sound worse. Something about that 11% figure seems wrong. A great quote from the msnbc article about it:

"While the RIAA has focused on illegal downloading, piracy is not the only reason for the CD sales slide. Other industry experts blame high prices, radio consolidation and an industry focus on hit-oriented artists such as Britney Spears, who may have short-lived careers"

So in essense, they are screwing themselves and want someone else to take the blame

The UK is at 5.1 right now

Proof

*BZZT* Thanks for playing..

I recently received an email from Earthlink stating that they were going to start collecting "additional taxes and fees" from DSL users.

An article ("Earthlink yields to net taxes") on MSNBC recently detailed some of the information. From the article:

EarthLink on Tuesday said it will stop picking up the tax bill for some dial-up services and its digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband services, resulting in higher bills for many of its customers.

The taxes will affect dial-up users in states that are not subject to the Internet Tax Freedom Act--namely New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. States that have approved the act exempt users from paying taxes for most Internet access and transactions.

Earthlink's Frequently Asked Questions about DSL Taxes and Fees also contains links to tax tables for home DSL users and business DSL users. I emailed Earthlink using their special tax questions form asking if they were going to start collecting fees from cable modem users. This is the reply I received:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for contacting us.

No, the taxes do not apply to cable users, as EarthLink does not handle
the billing for cable accounts. You may want to check with your local cable
company to inquire about taxes for cable service.

Gregg L.
Electronic Support
EarthLink, Inc.
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
CSR ID#: 989
Case ID 26018934

I was considering switching to a cable modem until I saw the cable modem tax article this morning. :(

Maybe the New York Times reporters should get screened as well ;)

Pearl Jam walked away from Epic records (see here). I submitted it here, but it was rejected. And here I was thinking that /. would appreciate that a major act was walking away from its label to distribute its music directly to their fans.

I guess since it didn't contain an anti-MS, pro-Linux slant, its not newsworthy.

This would be the ones they're releasing people from with an average weight gain of 13 pounds and a new Koran?

But that can't be right: obviously if I'd just succumb to mind-bending hatred of Bush, I'd realize that the government's been overrun by social-conservative fascists who will force us all to convert to Southern Baptism, we're working Muslims to death making bricks or something, and dissent is being crushed so that I can only find it by reading the newspaper, watching the television, or going to one of about 20 gajilion websites complaining about how they're being gagged because people mercilessly make fun of them.

All I can think of is that this is some sort of weird karmic rebound from when the Right was running around screaming that Clinton was a lying philandering dope-smuggling Vince-Foster-murdering sexual predator and that Janet Reno would be leading U.N. troops to confiscate our guns. Useful political discourse in this country may dying, but it sure as hell makes good entertainment.

I'm willing to bet we will see that change now that Pearl Jam has announced they will be independant!

Boy, that MSNBC article was bad. They even mispelled the researcher's name. It is "Akiko Mizutani" not "Aikiko Mizutani".

Here is some better coverage of the story. discovery, NationalPost, and Ananova.

And here is a nice page from the Insect Vision, Navigation and "Cognition" Laboratory at ANU, but it doesn't cover the dragonfly work.

wonderful world, isn't it? How many years before we can't publish this kind of stuff on magzines?

Hilarious excerpt: "ALTHOUGH SECURITY EXPERTS â" even those at Microsoft itself â" had pointed to the companyâ(TM)s latest server OS as the first test of the software giantâ(TM)s massive Trustworthy Computing initiative, representatives maintained that the patch did not mean the release had been a failure in its security practices. 'It actually highlights positive progress in trustworthy computing,' said Microsoftâ(TM)s U.K. security chief, Stuart Okin, explaining that Server 2003 is significantly hardened in comparison to previous versions of Windows."

It begs some questions: if this is progress... if this is hardened... what's he smoking?

Hilarious excerpt: "ALTHOUGH SECURITY EXPERTS â" even those at Microsoft itself â" had pointed to the companyâ(TM)s latest server OS as the first test of the software giantâ(TM)s massive Trustworthy Computing initiative, representatives maintained that the patch did not mean the release had been a failure in its security practices. 'It actually highlights positive progress in trustworthy computing,' said Microsoftâ(TM)s U.K. security chief, Stuart Okin, explaining that Server 2003 is significantly hardened in comparison to previous versions of Windows."

It begs some questions: if this is progress... if this is hardened... what's he smoking?

In addition, it uses a particularly nasty flaw in Microsoftâ(TM)s Internet Explorer program and its implementation by Microsoftâ(TM)s Outlook e-mail reader that allows the virus to infect machines whenever a victim simply previews an e-mail message loaded with the program.

Yet (as of this post) CNN mentions nothing of the fact that this is another virus that takes advantage of a Microsoft flaw...

And at the bottom of the MSN page"MSN - More Useful Everyday"

ah the irony of having your own news company...

On second thought the more likely answer is that people who buy stocks are idiots

Ashcroft wants Patriot Act widened
Testimony follows House concerns about lawâ(TM)s impact

ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, June 5 â" Attorney General John Ashcroft asked Congress Thursday to widen the USA Patriot Act so that suspected terrorists can be held indefinitely before trials and to let him seek the death penalty or life imprisonment for any terrorist act. The controversial law gave the U.S. government broad powers to use wiretaps, electronic and computer eavesdropping and searches and access to financial data when it investigates terrorist activities.

There's an interesting article at MSNBC about the "what-ifs..." After the disaster, NASA investigated what could have been done if they knew how badly the shuttle had been damaged during the flight. It's really very interesting -- it discusses how they might have repaired the damage while in space. Brings back memories of Apollo 13. It's a good read.

Hey everybody!

The RIAA is fighting Morpheus!

(Everyone shrugs and goes back to eating goo.)

They are apparently able to produce graduates who are now passing state bar examinations.

MSNBC Article

Looks like I was right.

Come on, as someone who has studied public service areas at great lengths it seems rather apparent that this is a ploy to add more money to the state budget, plain and simple.

LOL. If you want to ridicule a post by echoing it and "reversing" who it talks about, you have to make sure the reversal maintains atleast a smidgin of truth. Otherwise you just make yourself look like an idiot.

That black hole of a country

On that map North Korea is in fact a "black hole". It looks like ocean. The United states is by far the brightest region, with "the whole of euorpe" coming in a close second.

the world's LARGEST ARMY and LARGEST NUMBER OF NUKES.

You are demonstrating pure ignorance. China has the worlds larget army, 2.9 million servicemen, more than double the US's 1.4 million. Russia has the most nukes, well over twice as many as the US.

They are diverting their entire economy (what little there is of it) to supporting that army and building weapons.

North Korea spends somewhere between 20% and 30% of its GDP on its military while approximately 10% of its population has starved to death in recent years. The US spends somewhere between 4.3% and 5.7% on its military, and the US spends a higher percentage of its miliary spending on RESEARCH, compared to all western nations. The US provides food (food stamps) to anyone who needs them.

The North American government is incredibly isolationist

LMAO! Isolationist?? The usual complaint is the exact the opposite.

and paranoid.

The US thinks that there are terrorists trying to blow up Americans and American buildings. Americans and American builings are in fact blowing up.

In this document North Korea accuses the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency of conspiring to harm North Korea. Part of the "proof" of this supposed conspiracy is the fact that North Korea is reffered to as "North Korea" rather than as "DPRK". They take a "serious view" of this "insult to their soverignty". This document is fairly typical of North Korean perception on international relations. Not to mention their constant fear that at any moment the 38,000 US personel and South Korea's half million servicemen are going to charge head-long into what is undoubtedly the most heavily forified border in the world, against the third largest army in the world.

As for Liberation, Iraqis were in fact dancing in the streets and toppling Saddam statues. Somehow I don't think you are going to find many South Koreans welcoming North Korean forces.

-

24/06/2002 - The Register... Starting with a Newsweek exclusive which wonderfully quotes His Billness as saying: "It's a funny thing, we came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains." Which is cute, because it suggests that Microsoft's original plans to produce a secure PC that will protect the music companies' stuff from us have been spiked in favour of something much more positive and progressive.

That's right. Steve Ballmer even interrupted his ski vacation in switzerland for a last-minute attempt to "save" Munich from Open Source.

By the way, here is more bad news

You can find more details on this story over at MSNBC.

It includes Novell's threats of legal action:

"SCO's actions are disrupting business relations that might otherwise form at a critical time among partners around Linux technologies and are depriving these partners of important economic opportunities," Messman stated. "We hope you understand the potential significant legal liability SCO faces for the possible harm it is causing to countless customers, developers and other Linux community members. SCO's actions, if carried forward, will lead to the loss of sales and jobs, delayed projects, canceled financing and a balkanized Linux community."

I'm not sure this will work... For example, there are plenty of universities who license software for discounted or free student use and yet software piracy is rampant on campuses

From the link: " In addition, pirates need a place to store their 'warez' and often surreptitiously hijack third party servers to use as storage sites. This problem is especially acute at universities. "

• All commercial email must have an "unsubscribe" option (that actually works).
• If you opt out and are spammed by the same company again within 3 years, your ISP (but not you) can sue for $10/email, up to $500,000. Triple damages if it's "willful".
• It would be illegal to send commercial email to addresses scanned from web sites. (But how would they know where a spammer got the address?)
• Forged headers would be punishable by a fine up to $3,000,000. (It doesn't say if this applies to commercial email only, or all email.)
• It would be illegal to send commercial email with sexual content unless you follow FTC guidelines. (This one is bit scary.)
• There would be no requirement for ADV: in the subject line, unlike some competing bills.

easyCinema is being given the bird by Hollywood who will not allow it to show it's high cost movies for a low price for fear that it will create a domino effect in the future

Who in Hollywood will not allow it? Certainly this isn't a coordinated effort, as that would be collusion and that'd be illegal per US antitrust.

Even sending little "smoke signals" can get one in trouble, such as investigations kicked off by the recent $10 airline rate increase which has attracted DoJ interest again.

If this is indeed true, it would sound as if Hillary Rosen might have a cellmate to keep her company.

*scoove*

Yes, it's true that they're doing this. Check this out.

NASA will spend of order $100 million per life saved to make the shuttle safer. Are astronauts really worth so much more than the rest of us?

Meanwhile, nobody seems to have noticed that the rate of shuttle losses is completely statistically consistent with what NASA has been telling us all along:

According to NASA, the probability of a critical failure was 1 in 145 before 1998 and 1 in 245 from 1998 on. Plugging these numbers into the binomial probability distribution, we find that the probability of 2 shuttle losses by 2003 is about 16%. Most people find 5% to be the threshold for statistical significance, so there is no good reason to believe that NASA got the risks wrong based on the two critical failures!

This is not rocket science, it's freshman statistics.

Segway Thief?

FWIW this story wasn't buried. When I submitted this to Slashdot on Friday, it was on the MSNBC site here.

It was also in the Wall Street Journal on Friday here. [paid subscription]. It appeared in the print version too.

Probably no one will read this because its old news, but...

The technology cannot be hacked by programmers who would want to view the disc longer because the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology.

Two things: who cares about the orignal disc? 'Programmers' (now every programmer is also a cracker, according to MSNBC) will just copy it to a new non-degrading media. And of course, there will be real 'hackers' that will figure out the chemical reaction and a way to prevent it.

The technology used is called Lexan, and probably holds a patent, which can be viewed and figured out. When the article says recycled does that mean it will degrade? or does it mean it can be returned to factory to 'reset' the coating? it it's the latter, then we'll probably figure it out on our own sonner or later.

Who really benefits from this schema? not rental stores, which usually depend on late fees and impulse-rental that comes when returning the video. Probably only the distribution houses. Which brings another point. I assume this process adds a cost to the manufacturing and packaging of the DVD, yet the final price will have to be lower than a normal one (I'd guess between 5-10 dollars). So that means that the real profit comes from normal DVDs for the higher margin in the sale. Then, if they just lowered the prices for normal DVDs, they'd still make more money and not pollute the environment with useless DVDs.

Just some thoughts for now.

According to MSNBC, the process is "similar to rusting", confirming our suspicions that it is a reaction to the air. They also say it's a perfectly normal DVD in the interim, so bring on DeCSS.

right here... and there are dozens more on the internet.

Shock Exclusve - Reporter tells lies - wasn't there when he did it! Pix!

I'm quite surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, or submitted it as a story. He's being indicted for forgery and identity theft.

Confirmed here of all places.

In a country of 24 million people.

So, the question should be, "Is it totally unreasonable for France to put it's financial interests against supporting a dictator who slaughters his own people?"

Committee of the Missing

No, it's not. It's very reasonable. After all, it's not Frenchmen who are dying.

http://msnbc.com/news/910466.asp?0cv=CB20

it reminds me of pictures of the first transistors at bell labs- all bulky and ungainly

but in it's picture you see the future gleaming bright ;-)

oops! my post is a karma-whoring dupe! sorry! ;-P

But did anyone give this link here that says MS could be fined theoretically 2.2 Trillion for this security breach?

I say run that "Lets split up MS into 3 parts" settlement by them again and watch them enthuse greatly over how such a good idea it is if we forget about this passport fine.

Electronic paper on a roll

http://msnbc.com/news/910466.asp?0cv=CB20

it reminds me of pictures of the first transistors bell labs- all bulky and ungainly

but in it's picture you see the future gleaming bright ;-)

Wonder how many downloads they'll get once all the Apple geeks get all the Rush albums?

Truth hurts, doesn't it Apple?

What Apple doesn't want you to know: The truth hurts, doesn't it Apple?

"Oh, and for those concerned, I'm sure MSNBC will give Microsoft plenty of fair reporting. "

You'd think MSNBC would be quite pro-Microsoft. However, a lot of negative stories about MS have been reported on Slashdot with MSNBC as the source. Want an example? How about reporting of MS product flaws?

I wouldn't have any doubt that MSNBC has its biases, but I doubt that your view of MSNBC would support the idea that they'd question the usefulness of TabletPCs.