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Did you read the article?

The article states, "The security software company has said it isn't aware of any reward for anyone hacking into its software."

Perhaps the teacher was just kidding when he said the software company offered a reward? If so, this would clear the software company of any liability, I would think.

well, lets see... pigs have already flown... should be any minute now.

"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up

There is always a cultural undercurrent of fascination with retro from about 20 years ago.

Read an ;am using piece on this idea a little while ago. Damned if I can remember what led me there, but it was probably a couple of links away from an old Slashdot story. Anyway, their point was that the gap between a period and the point at which it becomes "retro" and "cool" is getting smaller and smaller.

There was another piece on this, I'm sure I saw it on Salon but I can't find it now.. it went further, and predicted a "Retro Horizon" at which point the gap would shrink to nothing, and the concept of "retro" would cease to exist.

But it's true.. like you said, in the 70's, the 50's was retro. But by the 90's, it was the 80's.. I betcha you could try to push the rave culture of the early 90's as retro now and get away with it. Peoples memories are getting shorter and shorter..

What's this got to do with portable 2600's? Well, forget old consoles.. try showing a PC game of just a couple of years ago (say, a 3D game that missed the 3D hardware revolution and only had software rendering) to a young Quake ]I[ kiddie.. "what, it only does 320x200?!?! In 8-bit colour!?!"

Now THAT'S retro!!

The 70-hour workweek is one aspect of some successful models of software development. Nevertheless, it is hardly a sufficient aspect. IBM and others have for years encouraged long hours and it seems in my experience this was just effort tossed away. Also, the extreme programming approach advocated by Jeffries and others puts a premium on proper design and pair programming work rather than isolated heroes, seems to be successful, and keeps within a reasonable workweek both so to not overly fatigue its participants and to be predicatable.

Simply put, a 40+ hour week is not sustainable for the long term. Further, it is not realistic as an HR policy. The participants will either get old enough to wonder about other things in their lives (and have made enough money so they can bolt and not give a damn) or pull back because of health reasons. And I really wonder about the ethics of an industry that says its doesn't care and demands such despite its effects.

Finally, one successful e-entrepeneur, Jeff Bezos, makes it a policy to demand he and folks around him get enough sleep. Or at least so he told the Wall Street Journal . It appears he's backed up by a lot of scientific evidence. There are recent articles about this in Kinko's IMPRESS magazine, the Washington Post, and the above-mentioned Wall Street Journal, unfortunately either only available for a fee or only in dead-trees form.

He loves some big corporations, but he doesn't love big tobacco (IMO, this ciggies for votes thing sounds like a setup) and he doesn't love Microsoft. In fact, on a campaign trip to Redmond last year, he got right in their faces and said that antitrust law should be applied to the software industry.

• story at Salon.com
• story at USA Today
• story at Seattle Times

That's it. Next census, I'm filling out name, age, and gender, and marking all the rest "refuse to answer". I will not sit idly by while the government uses this information against its own citizens.

I thought, 'Naah, this can't really be the Republicans. They wouldn't do something as stupid as spamming people for support.' But then I did some research...and apparently they really are this stupid.

Here is a Salon article from 1999 about a Republican senate candidate's spam. And there's an anti-spam spite with an article about the Californian Republican party spamming people. A mention in the Seatt le Times. And then of course there's EChampions, the RNC-funded group who sent the spam that hit my mailbox.

If I needed a reason not to vote Republican, this gave me one. Bastards. But I suspect that the next election will be far worse, with candidates spamming from all sides.

There's a movement throughout the US, called Greens for Gore, mentioned in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, that's advising undecided Green Party members living in swing states to wait until near the end of Election Day before voting. "If the last minute exit or public opinion polls in your state show Gore or Bush clearly projected to win, then vote Nader. If it is too close or undecided at that point, then vote for Al Gore," the group's Web site says.

Naturally, they won't give a link to the web site, because that would encourage people to vote strategically to get Ralph Nader more than 5 percent of the national vote by voting for Nader in states where the vote is being won by Bush and Gore in states where it's close. But it just happens to be at this web site.

Let the sleeper awaken!

The concept was originally invented by two Swiss researchers, and was announced 1 1/2 year ago in Nature.
I thought it was a joke because it was released on April 1st, 1999...

If you don't like a company, don't buy its product but do buy its shares. Become and owner and change the way it operates.

I'd have to recommend against that strategy. If you want to gain influence over the way a company operates, you are going to have to buy a lot of stock, more than most of us can afford. By purchasing stock in a company, you are telling it that you agree with its business practices, for the most part.

Instead, I'd suggest doing two things: 1) buying stock in the competition, and 2) speaking out against the company.

Remember, it is possible to invest in socially responsible funds.

According to the revised policy, the company shares customer information with its subsidiaries and affiliate businesses to offer services such as product recommendations and special offers. However, if Amazon.com plans to use the information in a way not specified in the new policy, it must seek customer approval.

In the previous policy, the company said it may "choose to sell, rent or lease customer information in the future," but it didn't specify the terms of such use.

The US has neutron bombs. Russia has neutron bombs. China has neutron bombs, having stolen the plans from the US. Pakistan has neutron bombs if it wants them. India probably has neutron bombs. The information is out there, and eager nations with a rudimentary level of manufacturing infrastructure and raw materials can build what they want.

Weapons aren't inherently "defensive" or "offensive". They only kill or maim people. "Offensive" and "defensive" are just a measure of political justification and the history behind intentions to kill or maim people.

The industry site for this topic is ccwatch.net. Another good article on the "Gak" factor is in the Seattle Times.

here's a guy in San Francisco that has been doing more than just making movies about it.
Interview with Nestor Makhno and also an article about the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

"Providing net cafes may help communities far more than, for example, providing electricity to every home. It is only when people have some access to education and information that they can hope to actually improve their situations."

While this may be slightly offtopic, it seems foolish to assume that Africa, one of the worlds most impoverished locations, would benefit from the introduction of internet cafes instead of basic necessities. Africa has been particularly devastated by the HIV virus. For an overview (yes, it's probably biased and not a perfect source) you can see the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Access to information will probably not aid the African problem.

"What you have not considered is the reason why Sudan or Chechnya (your examples) are impoverished. In most cases, poverty has little to do with a lack of resources and much more to do with politics."

This is entirely on target. Simply put, nobody wants to deal with Africa. The UN has made some minor steps, but very little action. Meanwhile, the continent is plagued with wars, rebellions, diseases, etc. After plundering Africa in the early 1900's most of the major nations seem to have washed their hands of it. Before Internet access will have any benefit, the political status of Africa needs to be changed.

That sounds more to me like dogma than a conclusion.

The "nature vs. nurture" argument about human development is a lot like the "particle vs. wave" argument about light.

The correct answer, according to the leaders in each field is the same: "We think it resembles both."

There is plenty of evidence that genetic programming dramatically influences our physical and mental health, and that a lot of our "environmental" conditioning begins in the womb, when factors like our mothers' hormone levels have a great deal of influence on our development.

There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that environmental and behavioral conditioning during childhood is very important, but before you assume that it is more important (as a typical Psych book from the 70's may have lead you to believe), you may want to read a little about David Reimer and Dr. Money's bold attempt to prove that nurture trumps nature. The results are not encouraging for his side, and his blatant fraud does not help his case (although it won him many accolades when he was still getting away with it).

I'm sure that Brian Walker will be getting a few phone calls asking to buy his technology.

Then again, who knows... Maybe there entire program consists of hiring the crazy rocket guy and blasting him to the moon. After all, the guy is crazy, and he's already had some training. It'd save the Indian project much money!
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seumas.com

The tribute exacted by the drug company is even more staggering, resulting in a net loss to society versus some more efficient mechanism.

I wholeheartedly agree that the profits that the drug companies make are obscene. Hence the reason I recommend effectively cutting their patent period in half (Currently, they have twenty years from patent application, but roughly ten years of that is lost in testing. I recommend 5 years after approval).

Drug research should be funded by those with a strong interest in keeping people healthy. Notably health insurance companies.

Actually, Drug companies & insurance companies have somewhat opposed interests, so I wouldn't want insurance companies in charge of drug research. Insurance companies make their profits by keeping health care costs low, in many cases, sacrificing appropriate treatment to do so. Drug companies, on the other hand, make their money by inventing new technologies with little regard to cost. A perfect example is the cancer drug Taxol. Initially, Taxol was extremely expensive due to its being created from the bark of a rather rare tree. Insurance companies would have looked at the expense & halted the research. Drug companies, since they are motivated by profit, gambled that they could reduce the costs by synthesizing the rare ingredients, something which they have succeeded in doing. By keeping the profit motive, you assure continued advancement, something that putting drug research in the hands of insurance companies wouldn't do.

And, contrary to what you suggest (and popular opinion) insurance companies don't really care about keeping people healthy. In fact if people become TO healthy insurance profits would probably drop since people would lower insurance on their list of priorities. In reality, an insurance companies main objective is to shift as much health care money as possible into their own pockets. For example, if insurance companies are so into keeping people healthy, why don't they actively support research into natural & alternative medecines, chiropractic, & other preventative courses? In many cases, there is substantial evidence that these programs work, & in many cases they actually work better then their "traditional" counterparts. It's rather telling that according to the WHO, the US health care ranks only 37th in the world (just below Costa Rica, just above Slovenia), even though our spending is the highest (See the Seattle Times story).

I should note that I wouldn't be opposed to an alternate system for drug research, but the suggestions you've made so far just don't seem to answer ALL the necessary questions.

I had always thought it was an urban legend, but the Sea ttle Times and other sites briefly mention singer John Denver's attempt to do the same thing in the early 1990s. He was quite the space fan.

From SPACEVIEWS UPDATE, 1997:

• John Denver: Singer/songwriter John Denver, a longtime member of the National Space Society's Board of Governors, died in a light plane crash in California October 12. Although best known for his hit songs in the 1970s, he was a founding governing member of the National Space Institute in 1976, along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Hope, Alan Shepard and others. He stayed on the board after the 1987 merger of the NSI with the L-5 Society, which created the National Space Society. "He personified the deep desire of many of our Society's members to someday travel in space," said Board of Governors chairman Hugh Downs. "We will miss his vision, his talent, his perseverance and his unique ability, through his words and music, to help others understand the fragility and beauty of this planet we call home."

As I recall, he asked NASA, who refused him. Not to be spurned, he then asked the Soviets in the same year, which didn't go over too well with American patriots. The jokes were talking about a real "Rocky Mountain High."

Seattle Times: Computer shrinkwrap license binding, court says.

A case where a bug in Timberline's software caused a $1.95M error in a submitted bid. They were sued, but the ruling was that the part of license agreement saying "We're not responsible for anything" could be held as a binding contract. Even if the customer hadn't read it.