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MacOS X is beating the crap out of everybody right now on the desktop and I for one don't see the point in chasing that market. Why is everyone so obsessed with desktop Linux anyways? Having a huge desktop userbase would be a quantum leap for Linux and the principles of OSS, yes, but the amount of resources that would have to be expended to beat Apple at its own game would make it a Pyrrhic victory. I look around and I see all sorts of smart, tech-savvy people who would have been running Linux five years ago, running Mac. If Linux can't attract those people, what's the use courting the rest?

And what more would desktop Linux offer anyways? The Mac OS I can buy today is stable, fast and runs Unix. Add to that a kickass, extremely well thought-out GUI that's years ahead of anyone else (don't agree with me? They do.) and I just don't see the point.

I'm not trying to diss on open source. I have all the respect in the world for the smart developers who gave me millions of dollars worth of free software which I employ on a daily basis. But let's admit it: usability has never been its strong point. And that's fine, because the tradeoff is increased power, and many of us are happy taking extra time to learn complicated tools that enable us to do, well, everything. My vote is for sticking to what we know best: stable, reliable software that looks great on an 80x25 text console.

but I would highly doubt that it would be something so lenient as to let people go running their mouths about everything that went on while they worked there

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration's first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins. (emphasis mine)

These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board. We provided the following citations to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves. (See links at left.)

Here is some more information about what was actually blacked out. The links on the left bar presumably point to articles that refer to the redacted information. If the information in the NY Times article was already public, then the White House is directly interfering with free speech. This is surely unconstitutional, should qualify Mr. Bush for prosecution for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

What line will this neo-conservative administration have to cross before the public realizes that Bush/Cheney and their neo-conservative friends have more in common with Benito Mussolini than with past presidents of America. Neo-conservatism and 1930's fascism have substantial overlap in that they both worship the strong and despise the weak. Typical modern neo-conservative quote: "I don't want my tax dollars going to help broken down single mothers and drug addicts. If they can't help themselves then they are weak and don't deserve help" Compare this with the way Hitler and Mussolini felt about the weaker and genetically deficient members of society. There is substantial overlap.

"Our experience dealing with [b]xxxx xxxx[/b] Iranian diplomats over Afghanistan and in more recent private conversations in Europe and elsewhere convince us that Iran will not go down such a dead-end road again."

The authors provided ample evidence that the information that was redacted had already been publicly disclosed.

Use www.bugmenot.com or register at your own risk http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/nyregion/29watch .html

Here's the link to the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/business/media/1 2book.html?ex=1307764800en=89d58b622aa65b7dei=5088 partner=rssnytemc=rss

I suppose you just forgot to mention that you were plagerizing that text from the AP article?

I believe the process they are suggesting would involve pumping all your blood out of your body and passing it through a machine which would electrify it and then return it to your body. This notwithstanding, the evidence of this process working is dubious at best.

All information on the process seem to be verbatim repetition of the patent application, which was taken out by doctors true, but if you look them up you'd realize that the doctors concerned are a gynecologist and psychologist from a very small school in NY. There appears to have been no peer review of the idea, and looking up the lead doctor involved indicates that his only other major achievement beside this patent is ignoring the anti-abortion protesters outside his clinic.

I believe the process they are suggesting would involve pumping all your blood out of your body and passing it through a machine which would electrify it and then return it to your body. This notwithstanding, the evidence of this process working is dubious at best.

All information on the process seem to be verbatim repetition of the patent application, which was taken out by doctors true, but if you look them up you'd realize that the doctors concerned are a gynecologist and psychologist from a very small school in NY. There appears to have been no peer review of the idea, and looking up the lead doctor involved indicates that his only other major achievement beside this patent is ignoring the anti-abortion protesters outside his clinic.

If you recollect correctly, that's interesting. Would like to see it documented though. It certainly isn't the case now.

The anecdote with Green/Red light

A little digging found this note at the NYT: "... the meaning of a red traffic light in China. It means stop. During the Cultural Revolution 30 years ago, an effort was made to change the meaning to ''go,'' but the idea did not take hold."

However, it seems a bit urban legendish to me, I've yet to find any first hand references. If it happeend at all it was very short lived. More likely it was a metaphor that someone took literally.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.

Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV). Additionally, there's tons of stuff in Mac OS X that's not in Windows.

And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.

Something doesn't have to be "a specification or an implementation" to be ripped off. Ripping off implementation is a copyright violation. I'm not accusing MS of violating Apple's copyright (except when they steal Apple's icons, which they have).

I also find it rather hard to take anyone seriously who implies Vista is the first version of Windows with overlapping Windows. You *do* remember we're comparing Vista and MacOS _X_, right ?

Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot. That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system. I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X? Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.

Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.

And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple. I don't have the time. Google it yourself, read this, watch this, or read this:

"[When I worked at Microsoft,] I was given a badge that allowed me entry to all but a few of the Microsoft buildings. One of the things that caught my eye was a large grid on the wall of a hallway in the building that housed the engineers that worked on Windows Media Player--building 50, on the 2nd or 3rd floor.
"The grid was labeled across the top with A, B, C, etc., and down the left with 1,2,3, like a game of Battleship. The grid was made of 8.5×11-inch pages, landscape orientation, showing color screenshots from Apple's iTunes software. Each sheet was a different screen of the application: each tab of a preference panel, each info window, everything."

Moving on...

Flip3D and Expose, two utterly different task switching methodologies

Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.

I'm too lazy to do a search, but I remember that too.

The USA's DMCA apparently extends to linking to information that can be used to defeat copyright protection schemes, as upheld in the 2600 case.

Also, people in the US have been arrested and jailed for giving presentations that indicated weaknesses in copyright protections.

Iraq, however, isn't the only issue. You've also got the problem that government spending has grown out of control, while the government is taking in less money than it otherwise would because it's cut taxes for the wealthiest few in the country, the people who are least in need of a helping hand. Overall, what it comes down to is that we're going to be very deep in debt for a long time to come, and that makes it extremely unlikely that any large-scale manned mission will survive the rounds of budget cuts that will inevitably come.

Is this supposed to be funny? The gov't is taking in MORE money since lowering taxes. Granted, there is a limit to this, but it appears we are still on the right hand side of the Laffer curve. What the NY Times calls a "Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit", is really not a surprise to anyone old enough to remember Reagan.

Another factor is that gov't spending improves the economy. It took WWII to get us out of "The Great Depression" because government spending put people to work. These people made money (which was taxed) and bought stuff (which was taxed), which led to more people getting jobs, making money (taxed) and buying more stuff (more taxes), which means more people get jobs... and it goes on and on. Now don't get me wrong, I'm against gov't spending in order to improve the economy. That leads to hand-outs, but spending on something productive, even paying for a moon base and the technology that comes from that endeavor, may pay for itself in the long run simply with the jobs it creates.

Finally, another way to create jobs is to cut taxes on employers. Yes, this means the rich. Cutting taxes gives the rich more money. Rich people don't stuff this money in a mattress, they invest it. The more they have, the more they invest. This creates jobs (see previous paragraph). In addition to these jobs helping to feed the government, they give those of us that are not rich the opportunity to feed our families, and even the chance to invest a little coin ourselves so that one day, we might be rich ourselves.

(BTW, previous post was not off topic. Commenting on how to fund such a grand endeavor and its benefits are certainly worth discussing)

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d14603c1e23e 6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&rf=bm
    -- kieran

Awards of 100% of real damages plus statutory punitive damages of $100 per victim per incident if negligence is demonstrated would do the trick real quick, I'd imagine.

Unfortunately, your imagination does not conform to reality. Punitive measures rarely have a dramatic effect on human behaviour.

This can easily be seen in actual data. Consider the death penalty.

North Dakota has one of the lowest homocide rates in the U.S. and has not had the death penatly since the 1930's. The homocide rate in Texas is ten times higher, and yet Texas executes people on a regular basis.

The rate of executions in Texas jumped from about 5 per year in the 80's to over 20 per year in the 90's, and this four-fold increase seems correlated with a ~20% drop in the homocide rate over the next decade, but no one who is arguing from the data, rather from their imagination, would suggest that increasing punitive measures is the best way to alter human behaviour. If a five-fold increase in killing convicted murderers brings about only a 20% drop in the murder rate, and yet making Texas more like North Dakota (but warmer!) brings about a ten-fold drop in the murder rate, an objective observer might suggest that we spend our resources figuring out what it is about North Dakota (or other north-central states, or Japan, or Canada, or Switzerland) that results in fewer people killing each other.

The data suggest that neither firearms ownership nor cultural diversity (Canada is one of the most culturally diverse nations on Earth, with criminal gangs drawn from the four corners of the globe all trying to set up shop here) nor punitive penalties are the most important differentiating factor.

And when one moves from the realm of individual to corporate malfeasence and negligence, it is more than clear that companies are willing to take enormous risks in the name of short-term profits as Merck did with Vioxx.

Ergo, whatever you might want to believe, the facts are pretty clearly in favour of punitive measures being a very poor way to influence human behaviour. They are sometimes necessary, but should be the last tool of social control that we reach for, not the first.

Here is the video:

http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=b26f 34614:10f95e37a71:-21d5&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166451673301&mp=WMP&cp f=true&fvn=9&fr=121806_092144_26f34614x10f95e37a71 xw21d4&rdm=78088.30855380128

Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a718 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814

The columnist trying to prove that Vista is not a rip-off from Mac OS X - I wonder who paid him to have his opinion...

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d14603c1e23e 6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&rf=bm

Key quote being "had The Times known of Mr. Enderle's work for Microsoft, it would not have sought out his opinion on the product". I don't know if this link will work for everyone, since it's a search result link, but doing a search on the nytimes.com main page for "enderle" turns up this as the first result.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990 DE1DC1F3FF933A25752C1A9609C8B63

Editors' Note
Published: November 10, 2006

An article in Business Day on Tuesday described a decision by Microsoft to offer movies and episodes of television shows for downloading through its Xbox Live online service in the United States.

The article quoted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, discussing the features that set Xbox Live service apart and its position in the market.

But the article did not note that Mr. Enderle had Microsoft as a client, a fact later pointed out by a reader. Mr. Enderle does consulting work for several of Microsoft's product groups, though not for the one developing the Xbox; still, had The Times known of Mr. Enderle's work for Microsoft, it would not have sought out his opinion on the product.

It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise.

Somebody needed to try out the search engine on their front page.

It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise.

Somebody needed to try out the search engine on their front page.

It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise.

Somebody needed to try out the search engine on their front page.

It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise.

Somebody needed to try out the search engine on their front page.

Time magazine has been losing readership. Many more people turn to the web for news. I think the impact of the mass of humanity on the web is something Time as a magazine feels threatened by. I think that influenced their decision and made an already pointless award from a lost magazine even more so. "New Design and Ad Rate Set for Time Magazine" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/business/media/1 0mag.html?ex=1320814800&en=ffbe981c48995c90&ei=508 8&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Did you attend the seminar? Maybe you can make it to one of the upcoming events.

No registration required either,

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=d14603c1e23e 6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&rf=bm

The XBox360's superiority in graphics and computing power has nothing to do with HD-TV, its far away from the Wii in SD-TV just as well. What is holding back the XBox360 so far is that a lot of games are still build for multiple platforms. If you see Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the XBox360 it won't look that much different then on a PS2 or Wii, the gameplay is all the same on every console and the much better bump mapping, resolution and light effects on the XBox360 won't change that.

All I know is what I've seen and what people in head-to-head reviews who've played both consoles - as evidenced in reviews at the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal for example, as well as G4 TV, Spike TV, etc - in that, sure, the xBox360 and PS3 have nice graphics, and they look cool close up (less than 4 feet for an HDTV that is more than 40 inches in size), but in the end it's all about the game play.

For most people, in 480p (standard TV), it really isn't that much different. And a lot of the PS3 releases don't even have good game graphics and camera controls - for example, water waves sloshing thru the land in a few, or bouncing into walls in Need for Speed 2, or whatever.

Again, it's all about the games. It's like my sports coupe - in the hands of someone like me, who actually knows the limitations of the vehicle, you can drive up to the ski hill with it, but the average Joe can't even drive their 4WD up to ski hill without getting stuck. Sure, they have more power, more clearance, they should be able to beat me there, but in real life they can't.

Now, the lead article is about first-week sales for the Wii in Japan of Zelda, compared to an already released user base of xBox360 consoles with a game that was released a couple of weeks before. It's like comparing pomegranates to oranges. Pomegranates may be better, but if they only are available right now, and people are used to oranges, you'll sell a lot more oranges.

From the link

The United States Mint, concerned that rising metal prices could lead to widespread recycling of pennies and nickels, has banned melting or exporting them.

Umm how can the US Mint "make" a law? Isn't that the perogative of Congress?

It's funny and sad at the same time. I've been think about this for about a year. It's sad that we have devalued
the dollar so much that pennies are now not worth their weight. We saw silver coins horded after 64, I think we'll
see pennies and nickels go the same way.

Number of abortion providers murdered in the last 15 years: < 25 (http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm)

Number of people killed by Muslim suicide bombers on Tuesday: > 60 (http://www.thedenverdailynews.com/?page=details&i d=5772&t=Archive)

I'm not going to defend anyone who kills an abortion doctor, or imply that each one wasn't a terrible tragedy. The truth of the matter, however, is that the scale of the two problems just doesn't compare at all.

(Posting anonymously to keep what little karma I may have.)

I don't think that this points out that Christian extremists are any less crazy than Muslim extremists, just that they tend not to kill themselves when they are promoting their agenda. How many troops have been interviewed who view this foray into Iraq as being like another Crusade? How much of the extremist American public views it as such? Is an extremist Christian killing a Muslim in Iraq any better than an extremist Muslim killing a Christian in Iraq? (The answer to this, if I were to listen to any mainstream media, would be that yes, it is.) If we're to take that into account, how many people have American Christian extremists slaughtered (albeit in another country) because they think they have a higher calling? The death toll for civilians in Iraq is many thousands, I'm sure even if only *some* of them were due to extremists (not counting extremist policy from a president who thinks that *god* is directing him to kill dark people in another country), we can start to see similarities in scale.

Problem: Any such changes would only affect those convicted (or possibly charged, not too sure on that) after the new statute came into effect. You can't just say that someone already in jail now has to serve 10 more years because the punishment changed, that's an ex post facto violation.

Of course, you can always just do what New York Governor Pataki did and commit sex offenders to mental hopsitals indefinitely when they've served their time:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/nyregion/22confi ne.html?ex=1321851600&en=d259e46fb50f2954&ei=5088& partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

They could. But that would be wrong.

Yes, and so was whatever crime they commited that made them a sex offender. Those that will try to do it again are the ones least likely to comply with the law in full. All this will do is help ostracize the ones trying to do things right from now on.

Ars Technica had an article about this also, here's a quote from it:

While we understand his concern, Ars has received e-mails from sex offenders who feel completely rejected from society by such restrictions, especially when they have been put on the list for statutory reasons (generally, having consensual sex with a minor).

That brings up two of the major problems with all this. 1. Many states have gone nuts with what they consider a sex offender, pretty minor things can land you on one, so the lists aren't useful any longer. Do you really worry that the guy living down the street was a year too old to have sex with his girlfriend and got hit with a statutory rape charge? 2. People who feel completely rejected by society often end up feeling they have nothing to lose. People who feel they have nothing to lose are more likely to commit a crime.

We need some sanity in all this, this proposal simply isn't going to work, it's way too easy to get new E-mail accounts and IM accounts. We also should be worried about the unintended consequences the law may cause. Iowa passed a law not too long ago (I can't find the exact date, but the news articles are from March 2006, article at FindArticles, same article at the NYT) that restricted sex offenders who had committed crimes with children from living within 2000 feet of a school or day-care center. This sounds somewhat reasonable at first doesn't it, they even restricted the class of sex offenders it applied to. Well it backfired, let me just quote this bit from the article:

A new state law barring those convicted of sex crimes involving children from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day-care center has brought unintended and disturbing consequences. It has rendered some offenders homeless and left others sleeping in cars or in the cabs of their trucks.

And the authorities say that many have simply vanished from their sight, with nearly three times as many registered sex offenders considered missing since before the law took effect in September.

"The truth is that we're starting to lose people," said Don Vrotsos, chief deputy for the Dubuque County sheriff's office and the man whose job it is to keep track of that county's 101 sex offenders.

So now they've lost track of many sex offenders they had track of prior to the law going into affect. Even if you think the sex offender registries actually help prevent sex crimes this is bad news.

You have to ask yourself, what unforeseen side-effects will this Virgina law have? Might it make registered sex offenders purposely use multiple accounts and only report one? Might it make them more cautious about what they do and say online, making it harder to catch them before they commit another crime? We don't know, but I don't see how there's any benefits to this law, at best only the ones who are trying to not commit another crime will fully comply.

Erm... Thats sad... According to Google the average Blog only has 1 reader... I don't know if that one person is really worth all the work of getting.

Seriously though, I don't Apple really needs to worry about this, there are plenty of "non-official" Apple blogs out there, probably more for Apple than any other vender.

That sounds like a perfect reason for nearly all of Google's servers to live distributed around the US, and the globe. With local operators for physical access, and global remote admins for most normal operations. Uh, they are already doing that, I.e. moving to The Dalles (Real close to Bonneville hydroelectric plant on the Columbia River.)

I think if you have not already you should read what if it's all been a big fat lie, a NYT article by Gary Taubes. The following paragraph is the choicest bit but the whole thing is important:

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''

And this is the other choice piece:

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.''

Basically, the government did some studies trying to prove that eating fat causes heart disease and couldn't do it. Then they had a study that said taking drugs to reduce cholesterol reduced your risk of heart disease and on the basis of that, they issued a food pyramid with carbohydrates at the base and the cap of the pyramid, and fat is relegated off to a minor compartment.

It makes you wonder just what they have against fat. Lobbying, anyone? I haven't found any evidence of that yet... but it is highly suspicious, because this was a time when the packaged food industry was gaining significant steam. After that time, they really took off.

I wrote an article for everything2 after reading the NYT article, entitled How the Government Fattened America. It's kind of an encapsulation of that article and brings in material from few other sources, so you may not feel a need to read it after reading Taubes' piece.

2) Good tasting food can have a stimulating effect on people with eating disorders, so will you ban good tasting food?

Yeah - luckily, that couldn't possibly happen, since that would be ridiculous.

The biggest problem is that we have two generations of reporters that believe their job is to undermine the government, and that that is an example of freedom of the press.

Well, it may cost me my karma, but I am simply not going to allow you to get away with saying this. It is complete nonsense.

It is not the press's responsibility to glad-hand or enable the government. It is the press's responsibility to ask questions and report the facts of the situation. Inevitiably, there will be bias. A story can consist of many facts, and which ones you choose to omit or include and on what basis of relevance can be considered bias. If, by some miracle, you can include all the facts, then the order in which you state them becomes the bias. There is ALWAYS bias. That is why it is so important to have a free speach, where all voices and all sides of the issue can be heard.

After 9/11, the press completely failed in these duties and, for all intents and purposes, gave a free pass to this government. In hindsight, our reasons for getting into Iraq have all been proven to be specious and false; at the time however the press was willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. In hindsight, we have learned about the HUGE gaps and red flags in the intelligence and fact-presentation of the rational in going to war with Iraq that were present at the time and went unreported because the press didn't want to seem unpatriotic. We have an American citizen being tortured and reduced to a "piece of furniture" in direct violation of our sacred Constitution. We have a President that is UNCONSTITUTIONALLY and ILLEGALLY spying on Americans and has gutted 1,000 years of legal process with his Military Commision Act and only a small handful in the media are seriously questioning it. We are in a huge mess, with our troops being killed and our treasury being drained, because the media didn't have the balls to question this President and his illegal administration. Even now, the media are still aiding this government by burying horrendous stories of Department of Homeland Security negligence.

So you'll forgive me if I don't believe your ridiculous assertion that we have two generations of reporters who believe that undermining the government is a part of their job. As a matter of fact, that is such a ludicrous outlook that I am simply apalled that you can write it in seriousness. Not only is it factually false, it's an excercise in intellectual dishonesty. A just and effective government would have NOTHING to fear from questioning. A government that governed by logic (as opposed to "faith" or "from the gut") would have NOTHING to fear from self-examination. Your statement does not reflect a conservative or liberal viewpoint (conservatives believe in limited government and appreciate a free press to keep it in check; liberals believe in personal freedoms and thus welcome freedom of the press.) Rather, your viewpoint is a fascist one and not supported by the Constitution. Your right to speak your views, however, are.

What if your idea is one that would generate revenue other than by advertising?

That's fine. I'm working on something that doesn't make money via advertising. But advertising is effective enough and well established enough that if you can fund it that way, it's encouraged.

Would Google still back it? ..and if they did and it was wildly successful revenue-generating wise would they setup some kind of profit sharing for you or would you just get a bonus and get back to work?

It would be backed, subject to the usual conditions of any other project. Profit sharing? I doubt it. I never heard of that. You are standing on the shoulders of giants, and many ... many ... people will be involved with the project by the time it goes live. Ideas are ironically both insanely valuable and insanely cheap - the right one can be worth millions, but everyone has millions. Execution is every bit as important. But who knows? The rules aren't set in stone.

I guess it all depends on those financial rewards you speak of.. and ultimately that comes down to the execs deciding how large a bone to toss you, right? From my personal experience - the people tossing the bone will always undervalue your contribution, and I don't mean 60/40 it's more like 95/5.

Depends on your ideas of wealth. This story gives a figure of $12 million. I didn't mention it before because I wasn't sure if it was public or not, but apparently it is so there you go. That may or may not sound like much, but notice the projects which were awarded didn't necessary make tons of money. They were just seen as important. Ultimately, Larry and Sergey are pretty fair and really want to reward innovation. If you invent the next AdWords I suspect they'll make sure you do OK. Look at it from their perspective - it's in their interests to have smart people effectively "rent" their business, as it means they not only take some kind of commission off the top but also get all the usual benefits of having good people work at your company.

I just happen to have been doing some research in a closely related subject, the new passports.

If you want information from the industry side, go look at: Smart Card Alliance. They provide a wealth of information on the subject.
There is also a paper on "contactless" smartcard security.

From the other side, you can read the paper on "Relay Attacks" by Kfir and Wool.
There is also a piece in the New York Times.

Most credit card companies are going to be coming out with these cards. This is what the MasterCard PayPass commercials are about. The main issues will be with the way the individual banks implement security. They aren't supposed to transmit your name, or provide the number from your card. What you are hearing about are the situations where the security wasn't implemented. I'm not saying there aren't concerns.

My question is what is going to happen when we have three of these cards in our wallet and we go to pay. Do we get prompted for which one to use? On a further note. It looks like they want to put the chip in your cell phone and you would be able to select your method of payment from your phone.

Seems like the free marketeers are dropping lot of talking points and propaganda, ignoring the reality anyone who isn't sunk in masturbatory ideology can see. A bunch of bobble heads parroting "a rising tide lifts all boats," or getting high thinking about the truth of how much good it's doing that the rich have their money in banks instead of a shoebox, or how much better off poor people are now that they have cellphones. News flashes: debt for working people is higher than ever. Health care is unaffordable. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation. Pensions are evaporating. And our "high employment" is only true if you're down with a part time job in retail. The poor and middle class are getting poorer. Hence the recent increases in the minimum wage. All this and the rich are richer than ever. Why? Sqeeze the poor and make more profits. It isn't hard to see that that's what's happening if you take off the ideological binders. How about some warrants! A couple easy to read ones, broadly applicable. From http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/articl e?res=F50912F8385A0C758EDDA80994DE404482 "It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. ''How can this be fair?'' he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. ''How can this be right?'' Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare. ''There's class warfare, all right,'' Mr. Buffett said, ''but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.''" That's an interview with Ben Stein, by the way, not Krugman. This one pulled the rug out from under my support of globalization. I think it speaks for itself. From the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/886583be-7a00-11db-8d70-00 00779e2340.html "The real income of the poorest 10 per cent of China's 1.3bn people fell by 2.4 per cent in the two years to 2003, the analysis showed, a period when the economy was growing by almost 10 per cent a year." So can we get back to reality? The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, and that is, contrary to popular belief, a BAD thing. Also in the newsflash department: a progressive tax structure is NOT the same as Stalinism. If raising taxes on the rich bombs the economy, we can lower them again. Last time I checked, the economy rose and fell to a more mysterious tidal pull than that. The people at the bottom don't care whether their healthcare is delivered in the most "efficient" way possible. They just need it, period. When we're talking about basic necessities, we need to start putting all this juicy and crackheaded free market theory in the context of life and death, and then see how it stacks up. C'mon, guys, your bosses aren't here, you don't need to suck up with your impression of the WSJ editorial page.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmon ey/15every.html?ei=5088&en=15efa5e07a61f354&ex=131 8564800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Everybody's Business
You Can Complain, or You Can Make Money
By BEN STEIN

THERE is extreme income inequality in this country. It is hard to say whether it's the fault of President Bush, since there was also extreme income inequality under former President Bill Clinton, and in fact there has always been extreme income inequality.

Just to give you an idea of current inequality, statistically speaking, the top 1 percent of all income earners in this great land earn roughly 20 percent of the total income. The top 1 percent of wealth holders have close to one-third of all wealth. The top 5 percent of wealth holders have very roughly 50 percent of all wealth in this country.

As you can see, that does not leave a lot for everyone else.

There are a number of ways to respond to this situation. You can become indignant and say that it's a violation of American democratic principles. This is a good way to put yourself into a sanctimonious mood, and it offers some psychic satisfaction.

I'm not sure that there is any historical basis, though, for believing that the founders of the nation wanted everyone to have equal wages. Certainly, many of them were wealthy men, and the Father of Our Country was said to be the wealthiest man in the colonies from his land and slave holdings. But, again, if you want to be exercised about inequality, you'll have plenty of company.

Another way, possibly more satisfying in the long run, would be to ask yourself how the top 1 percent of wealth holders and income earners got to be that way, and then to try to do it yourself. My own observation, having been both a critic and a moderately well-paid person, is that while it's nice to be a critic, it's also nice to have your own swimming pool. (The best is both, but that's another story.)

In other words, look at two recent business stories and decide which side of them you want to be on. Sumner M. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, recently fired the company's chief executive, Tom Freston. Mr. Freston was a pioneer at MTV, immensely well liked -- people on the Paramount lot literally wept when he said good-bye -- but Mr. Redstone decided that he had to go because he had not done a good job for the stockholders and the stock had languished.

In the last paragraph of an article about his departure, The Wall Street Journal dryly noted that Mr. Freston's severance package would be about $60 million and his pay this year was about $20 million.

An even more recent story has been about Brian Hunter, a commodities trader for the large hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. Mr. Hunter made big bets in natural gas trades and had been getting good returns for his investors. Then the market turned against him and he lost roughly $6 billion -- yes, billion -- for his investors within a few weeks. He's no longer at Amaranth, and the fund is being dissolved. However, it was noted that his pay for 2005 would have been between $75 million and $100 million. Yes, you read it right.

That is, Tom Freston, an undeniably great guy, gets $60 million for leading a company whose stock performance was deemed unacceptably poor (although it's been good lately). Brian Hunter is presumably still a wealthy man despite leading his investors to disaster.

You can be furious about that, and you should be. But you might also think how nice it would be to make that kind of money, or even a small fraction of that sort of wage.

For students slogging their way through school, here are the merest hints of how you can and cannot reach that top 1 percent, that place where you are paid well even if you make mistake

Dr. Michael Marmot, an author of the report, said the research showed that differences in health could not be ascribed to the "usual suspects," like rates of smoking, obesity or alcohol abuse.

Nor could varying levels of health be attributed to differences between the health care systems of the United States and Britain, he said.

"I'm arguing that it's due to the differences in the circumstances in which people live," he said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "Work, job insecurity, the nature of communities, residential communities, et cetera I think that's the place we should try to look."

Interesting, just a few months ago India was claiming they have a labor shortage. Hmm... looks like you can't turn an agrarian country into a high-tech hub with a wave of the magic neoliberal wand after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/business/worldbu siness/16cnd-INDIA.html?ex=1297832400&en=b9fcbd416 d93b147&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

There was a story about this in the NY Times as well, which included a little more detail about the network TV portion of this. CBS will only be showing small snippits of actual gameplay on the special. There's a quote from one of the special's producer's which I find really telling: "The one hurdle that was a challenge, and is still a challenge for video gaming...is you can't put people shooting at one another on network television."

Um... you can't? Better tell that to all those cop dramas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_informati on

People are way ahead. See

http://www.whosarat.com/

Don't forget the helpful insiders

this one
Sort of this one

this one

this one
this one
this one

there are a lot more. I'm not saying religion in totality is trying to spread FUD I'm sayign certain religious groups are stirring opposition for no other reason then to undermine certain scientific corner stones and theories they find inconvienant. Like parts of geology, astronomy, genetics, immunology, ect..

I am myself a moderate catholic. I find the exstremists and fundementalsist distasteful.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/science/earth/07 co2.html?ex=1320555600&en=803028cb05066921&ei=5088 &partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

This is one of the few "mainstream" news stories I have seen that even acknowledges that there is legitimate debate on the topic.

I am no climatology expert, and I believe that corporations must be held accountable for their waste *regardless*. However, it appears that (as with most scientific knowledge) this theory is not proven, it is just very well supported (there is a big difference). I, for one, would like to see more published about legitimate climatology debate so that I learn more about it.

-- SJN

Model releases are different, as the model is the main focus of the photo. In the US and the UK members of the public have a very limited scope of privacy rights when they are in public places. This is the key different, model releases come into play for studio shots. Basically, in public, anyone can be photographed without their consent except when they have secluded themselves in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy such as dressing rooms, restrooms, medical facilities, and inside their homes. See ThePhotographersRight.pdf for more details of the US situation; photoattorney.com has more of the same. You can find an overview of Australian law here

Finally the NYTimes covered a case where the subject of a photo in public sued because the photographer use it in an exhibit and was making money. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages and was brought under the NY privacy laws. It failed because the photo was consider art.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world's polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products,, meant that investigations of the toxin's provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

Stop the hysteria - someone needed to put pressure on Russia to agree to something which they refuse to do. I am sure it has nothing to do with access to Russian gas, oil or financial markets for foreign corporations.