Slashdot Mirror

When you are in a Costco, look up their motto.

Employees come first, Customers second and Vendors third.

Wiki has some info and links to articles

And the NY Times Article

Didn't he write Darwin's Black Box? I wouldn't take anything he says too seriously. After all he was disproven recently.

...all of the top level government officials right now have an interest in stopping research that shows that global warming is not increasing..... oh wait.

And, of course, noone is trying to stop scientists from speaking out about the dangers of global warming.... oh wait.....

I'm confused about what the WSJ is doing publishing this and why people don't realize that there are extremes on both ends of this and that there are people with vested interest in any policy change that happens at that large of a scale?

This doofus sounds like he's bitter about missing out on a grant or something.

Indeed.

Another problem with patents on algorithms is that patents are only supposed to apply to inventions - not discoveries. If you come up with a novel way to produce steel, for example (one that's more effective or yields a higher quality steel than the current ones), that's an invention, but if you notice that factoring a (large) number into primes is a comparatively hard thing to do, then you've made a discovery. I think this is something else that's wrong with the patent system today; in addition to obvious problems like the fact that obvious things get patented, and the fact that software (both the market and the technology) changes too fast to justify 20-year state-granted monopolies (which is what patents are), there's also the problems that facts are being patented left and right today.

For more information, take a look at Michael Crichton's "This Essay Breaks The Law", for example (I think this was posted on Slashdot a while ago, but I may also have gotten it from elsewhere - I don't recall).

That being said, Paul also writes about how patents are used for defensive purposes, and how he doesn't see anything wrong with that. I think he's missing the point there - the *only* purpose that patents have is to foster innovation, so if a company has to patent stuff just to be able to defend itself and to be able to exist in an uneasy truce with other companies, then that's a symptom showing that the system is fundamentally broken. As he says - you probably can't even tie your shoes without violating a patent.

I agree with Paul (and also with the parent poster) when he says that not all patents are evil, but I don't like his "all or nothing" approach (which essentially seems to boil down to "if you're against any type of patent, you're against patents in general") - that's essentially a strawman. The essay is an interesting read overall, but I would've expected something better than that from Paul.

Ah well.

Sorry, the tag was broken and I didn't catch it in preview.

This is the article.

Not yet anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/science/07evolve .html?ex=1302062400&en=c4dfe0138d4cdb4b&ei=5088&pa rtner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Actually, Bush has behaved entirely responsibly with regard to global warming.

Have you even RTFA? If scientists need clearance from government officials to talk to media, wouldn't you agree that somehow, Bush is not completely candid about it?

It's just hard to grasp how wrong your statement is. When Bush just came into office, the US had already signed the Kyoto protocol. Bush used the classic political manoeuvre of parking the whole issue in the "we need more research" department, meanwhile pulling out of Kyoto, the only framework we had of reducing greenhouse emissions worldwide. Of course it was only a first step, but Bush is argueing from both sides: it's insufficient, India is not participating etc. and also it is too much, too costly etc.

After that, he continued the political game by rallying countries for an alternative emissions agreement, which is based on voluntary cutdowns (and we know how well that works, voluntary reductions was also the basis for his environmental policies in Texas when he was the governer there). Then the administration tried to prevent the people from realizing that global warming is, indeed, a threat, altering climate reports, putting pressure with funding and now deciding who can and cannot talk to the press.

And this you call "responsibly".

Certainly I'll provide a pointer. Just look at Moulton's earlier replies to my postings. That's what I was talking about.

In general, the ID people try to exploit the inherent ambiguity of the term "Intelligent Design", because it could be interpreted as meaning many positive things. But the fact of the matter is that they have defined the term to mean one thing in front of Evangelical Christian audiences (Creationism), and another thing in public (Science). It's that flip-flopping meaning of the term that we're discussing. Or at least trying to discuss, but Moulton keeps trying to change the subject of Intelligent Design to non-stupid industrial design, and the subject of Creationism to creativity, or whatever he can come up with to avoid directly answering the questions I'm asking.

This technique is a page out of the Discovery Institute's playbook. It's no accident that they chose the terms they did, nor is it any accident that Moulton is pretending to be so confused. It's called the "Wedge Strategy".

The Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture are notorious for their intellectually dishonest practices in support of Intelligent Design. They are the organization that sponsored the Anti Evolution that Rosalind Picard signed her name to, along with the name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I'm a huge fan of MIT, the AI Lab an the Media Lab, and I owe them a lot. I find it reprehensible that Picard would drag their good name into the wrong side of the Intelligent Design debate.

-Don

Unfortunately, the mainstream media feels compelled to provide a "balanced" story including both sides of an issue, even when a little basic research would prove one side utterly wrong. This means ID has been given far more respectful treatment in the press than it has deserved, and gained credibility as a result (not unlike the Swift Boat liars in the last presidential election).

I do think the press has given its head a shake on the topic of ID though - the NYT ran a front-page article on the "missing link" fossil discovery announced today. I suspect 6 months ago they'd have buried the story on page A24 to avoid angering the creationists.

What digital divide? Read this NY Times story about the lack of one: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/us/31divide.html ?_r=1&oref=login (Registration required, or get credentials here: http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.nytimes.c om)

Your assertion that intelligent design comes only from the ignorant is just that, an assertion. It never ceases to amaze me how a proponent of evolution can sound exactly as ignorant as they fantasize their detractors to be. One of my favorite archived stories about the growing number of educated and PhD.'d who subscribe to the notion of intelligent design:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/books/review/14H OLTLT.html?ex=1144468800&en=7edd724c54c5cc80&ei=50 70

So, have another drink, while the rest of us continue reading our books.

found this from anandtech forums, it didnt require me to register, has a pic and a model, interesting.

Actually we don't have to wait,there was a story about a lawsuit like this. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent, it was about a patented fact. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/19/18 16207 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19cricht on.html?ex=1300424400&en=9addb806498d2739&ei=5088& partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

When you're giving away that $28 billion to organizations which you, or your business compadres, already control it makes perfect sense.

See, for example this guy.

There is always an ulterior motive and, in today's US, multimillion dollar charity is just a PR front for the pyramid scheme.

YEAH, that bastard never helps anyone except himself.

G(lobal) W(arming) Bush has admitted that global warming is real and that humans contribute to it.

Nobody likes to register so try this link.

I apologize for the karma whoring.

The time to start monitoring is key. If quasars generate random bits at a high enough rate, it become infeasible for a third party to just start recording bits from some quasar then search for a particular one time pad.

A few years ago, I heard a talk by Micheal Rabin that explained how completely secure one time pads could be obtained from a satellite (or some other data source) that generated random numbers at a high enough rate (see New York Times Article here). It seems like a collection of quasars could play the roll of the satellite. Once again, the key to his approach was that the satellite generated too many random bits for them all to be recorded.

In his approach, traditional cryptographic techniques can be used initally decide when two parties should start sampling random bits to generate one time pad. That pad can then be used to decide on additional pads. If a third party intercepts every communication, they could potentially generate the pads themselves, but they would have to act very quickly, because once they failed to record bits from the satellite (or quasars) those bits would be gone forever.

Normally, if you intercept an encrypted communication, you can hold on to the message and attempt to break the decryption over time. With this approach, if you don't decrypt the intial communication right away, you've missed out on the one time pads, and thus the captured message is nothing more than random bits. It can never be decrypted.

Nah they hava already made the ipod flea

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

I think more devices like this and others are coming out of the woodwork because psychiatric organizations, big pharma and government facilitators have lost credibility. Pharmaceutical "treatments" for psychological problems have never worked as advertised, and the cat is well out-of-the-bag. The new trend is now "devices".

Even the brain imaging techniques hyped over the last years are being called into question ( "Can Brian Scans See Depression" from the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/health/psycholog y/18imag.html?ex=1143867600&en=9d110b78060d7e34&ei =5070 )

Now in the last few months we have had news about "vagus nerve stimulators" to shock people suffering depression (Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/20/AR2006032001192.html

Then there was also the new GED device(Graduated Electronic Decelerator) which is a new FDA approved device used for "aversion therapy" used to shock retarded people and individuals who can't "control" aggressive or self injurious behaviors (New York Newsday) http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-li shok194670358mar21,0,7313668.story?coll=ny-linews- headlines

I think as the pharmaceutical modality continues to get exposed for the sham it is, there will be more "devices" coming down the pike. I expect they will be described as useful for some "extreme" condition such as retardation, autism etc. but then they will be shown "to have promise" for an expanding group of victims. Most "news" about psychology these days is just marketing.

The "mental health" field is a mess and many of its administrators are not to be trusted.

Keep in mind all this is in addition to what in the US we call The New Freedom Initiative" that allows for programs like Teen Screen; a so-called suicide prevention program concocted at Columbia University. To get all their federal funding schools will have to screen kids (even preteens despite the name)for suicidal tendencies via a short list of questions. Being depressed for more than 2 weeks is one sign and one of the signs of depression is not liking school (if you can imagine that).

Of course the drug companies lobbied for this, and the corrupt and psycho-politically motivated psychiatric associations are in full support. Sadly the Bush administration is also behind this and its based on a program from Texas. Of course there is little in the media about all this.

The bats are trully in the belfry and it is the inmates running the asylum and I feel bad for kids who have to grow up under this sort of crap.

Those positions could be entirely consistent. You don't have to resort to the hypothesis that there's more than one person on Slashdot and that there's a diversity of views.

Nobody's shown a concrete reason to worry about Lenovo, the wiretaps of "potential terrorists" led the FBI to complain that their time was being wasted with dead ends (not to mention that the complaint was that the wiretaps were against the law), and the 9/11 commission pointed to port security as a serious and deadly weakness.

Maybe you're seeing a position which holds that intelligence resources should be spent to protect the country against real threats and not wasted.

That would be the US Embassy in Moscow.

The U.S. government is showing many signs that it is not a government BY and FOR the people.

Cheney's company is building prisons for the U.S. government.

World Trade Center building 7 fell in exactly the same exactly symmetrical way as WTC 1 and 2, and it was NOT hit by an airplane. ALL the collapses looked like controlled demolitions. See the news footage in the movie Loose Change. It is a work in progress, but already very informative.

Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?

The "Social Security" plans are designed to get amateur stock investors into the stock market, where the professionals, who back the plan, can take the amateur's money. To make money in the stock market, it is necessary to find buyers at a higher price than was paid. The social security plan would insure that there are many new, inexperienced buyers.

A government that does some things in secret cannot be a democratic government. Citizens cannot supervise what they don't know. Yet many actions of the U.S. government are through secret agencies like the CIA and NSA, and some whose names citizens are not allowed to know. But the citizens are expected to pay.

[US] Ambassador Khalilzad said that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari to be the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc.

Even when Bush invades, creates a bubble government, controls the voting, he still creates a catastophe. No wonder we're planning to abandon them to civil war and Iranian annexation.

Intelligence officials had serious concerns about turning loose an army of amateurs on a warehouse full of raw documents that include hearsay, disinformation and forgery. Mr. Negroponte's office attached a disclaimer to the documents, only a few of which have been translated into English, saying the government did not vouch for their authenticity.

Scott Shane, "Iraqi Documents Are Put on Web, and Search Is On", New York Times, March 28, 2006

Ever since Nixon was run out of the White House, the GOP has searched for the perfect Republican President. Reagan came close, but his perfection was the result of organic processes. Mr. Bush epitomizes the Republican ideal. With GW, all denials seem quite plausible.

Yes, but thankfully you have the OPTION of upgrading to a newer version of the OS. From a New York Times article, "In those five years (Since XP was released), Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system" Now, say what you will about the expense of upgrading, of buying a new OS almost every year, but I've found that those upgrades were always worth the money. At the very least, it shows a company thats not stagnate, and that will be able to react should a huge, unpatchable flaw appear in their OS. I predict Apple will release 10.5 before Vista comes out.

It's great to have all these Iraqi documents, I'm just wondering when they'll post all the documents related to Iraq that were created by US and British officials. This includes all the notes from meetings where decisions were made about the need to go to war. Such as the recently revealed memo by David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time the decision to go to war was made. I know a young man who recently died in Iraq. He extended his enlistment because he was foolish enough to believe Bush's lies about the need to go to war against Sadaam. Bush lied, thousands died. It's a great bumper sticker, and it's true.

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides....

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

...The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Ultimately, they concluded they needed to find a way to start all over with their OS. Microsoft will wind up doing the same, eventually.

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, although it would be a welcome one. They're going to put out Vista first though, come hell or high water.

As the NYT article states, MS holds backwards compatibility sacred. And yes, they've broken it in small ways in the past (XP SP2 was probably one of the largest breaks in recent years), but nothing big. They're scared of breaking it in a "big" way because they know it could cause market fragmentation -- if I'm stuck on Windows because of some proprietary app that we lost the code for years ago and that's essential to my business, well if Windows 2010 breaks it, then why should I stick with Windows?

Frankly, I think they're a little over-concerned on this front. Yes, there are a number of apps out there like that. But that's solvable now -- they could spin up an entire virtualized copy of XP in a VM. It'd be slow, but it'd at least work. And most businesses would stick with Windows over the alternatives because that's what their IT knows, it has the widest range of apps available, and the widest hardware support.

Heck, how much crap could they be rid of if they simply ditched DOS and the entire 16-bit layer? What about for crap like WMF and other archaic data formats? Would ditching FAT32 as a bootable FS (or an FS for "special" files, like profiles and swap) buy anything?

Of course, I suspect that that's not the real sticking points when it comes to "compatibility". There's craptastic API calls all over the Windows API. There are entire layers of APIs that MS stopped promoting years ago, but are still used. And what about the craptastic IE5/6 renderer? Talk about a support and development nightmare.

Apple had the "fortune" circumstance of being a bit player. Microsoft doesn't. If Apple fragmented its market share, well, there wasn't all that much to lose in the first place. The same cannot be said for MS, and MS's entire business plan has revolved around a unified OS (supplied by it) for decades.

Click here.

What if there are elves inside the volcano? How would you like it if an alien race drilled through your house? The people of Iceland are so insensitive.

sigh... apparently, this is one of those government and business promulgated myths that is going to take years to undo, if even undoable. There are a ton of "scientists" out there who are emotionally and economically dependent on the current established "truth". Bad science is killing us all. But, here's the pointer. Read it.

Returning natural amounts of fat to our diet is essential for getting our weight back under control. As we've reduced our fat intake percentage, we have increased our food intake to take in the same overall amount of fat, hence the threefold increase in diabetes.

And while you're at it, add the following to your reading.

I can't find one right now, but there have also been several studies that were suppressed by those funded by the established theories indicating that high concentrations of free iron and calcium, both of which are as essential to the formation of plaque as fat, in the blood stream are more closely associated with heart disease than fat intake. So, yeh, go choke down some more iron and calcium laced supplements if you'd like to die young. And you might throw in the fact that family history, i.e. genetic makeup, is the number one best predictor.

In short, I've decided that your body knows what's best more than current established "science". Since deciding this, I've lost 50 pounds eating what I want instead of what's "good" for me. And the substitution of bacon grease in place of crisco in my corn bread last night was awesome.

the source spoke to me on condition of anonymity. The source is someone who works in retail tech, and knows whereof he / she speaks.

The point is that people are so afraid of the ramifications of giving quotes like this that they won't speak except on condition of anonymity.

"There is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous source." -Daniel Okrent

In addition to his snappy quotes, Okrent makes some good points in that article, I highly recommmend it.

Then, how about a follow up piece uncovering specific punitive actions Microsoft has taken against various retailers? It'd make a great piece of investigative journalism.

I propose a swap. We exchange the spammer for Abdul Rahman.

Thoughts, anyone?

Insightful? Off-topic! and incorrect.

We don't have a Social Security crisis. It's all crap propaganda. It definitely needs to be tweaked, but the politicians are just trying to rile people up and divert attention from real issues. And they're succeeding.

We have a surplus of SS money for at least until 2040. The projections go out for 75 years and sometime before then, we start having a debt regarding SS taxes coming in and money going out. Congressional Budge Office (CBO) studies show that if we don't extend Bush's tax cuts after 2009, we'll have SS surplus until 2050. So at worst, we'd have to reduce SSI handout out if we don't increase the retirement age or increase the budget towards SS. But a temporary debt is okay because population levels fluctuates. After the baby boomers die, our SS situation will be fine again.

Including health care costs for wounded soldiers, Iraq war and occupation could top $2 trilion. How about those tax cuts? I saw a NY Times article stating CBO projections estimated a difference in revenues of $1.7 trillion over the 10 years. A San Francisco Chronicle article mentions a difference of $737 billion. The difference could be due to when the projections started and ended. This doesn't include reports of the economy improving slower then from any previous recession and being short on the administration's projections of jobs by millions (just think of the revenue difference there).

If even a portion of those funds went to social security, we would have not debt for social security for 75 years! The fact remains, the US government takes out enough money from taxpayers to pay for Social Security for the forseeable future.

The problem isn't the social security system. It's the men and women of the Executive and Legislative branch that balloon the deficit with pork barrel spending. Even if we remove the SS blanket, there's no gaurantee that these people wouldn't spend the money elsewhere. Before we talk about changing social security, we need to have people that would be fiscally responsible.

Right. These C&D's have been going on from at least the 80s. I love how Cory likes to ignore this fact and assumes this is something new. As far as being 'our word' umm I don't think so. I don't like the ownership of words as its prone to abuse but this is pretty legal to me. The guy who owns the word stealth should be getting this attention and criticism. Seriously, if Cory thinks this is an illegal use of trademark and copyright why doesn't he sue Marvel and DC over it? I'm sure whatever money needed could easily be gathered from donations, but he seems to be happy just being the voice of "cool overopinioned download my book" web guy. Hell, I'd donate just to see if there was some validity here. It sure beats just bitching on a blog someplace. A lot of Doctorow's complaints really do need to be tried in court. The court of public opinion is getting him and his supporters nowhere.

Seriously, put it to the test. To win all Cory needs to prove is that most people associate the word superhero with characters outside of Marvel and DC. Prove the trademark is truly diluted and therefore must be revoked.

Not to mention there's a workaround here. Stop using the word superhero. Just stop. Many writers have abandoned it. I believe Alan Moore used "Science Heroes" in his Promethea series. It would be nice to see everyone abandon the word and let it become stale. Then the term superhero would be associated with dusty and irrelevant characters from the past. After a while fans will cringe upon seeing it. It would represent overlitigious nonsense and hackneyed stories of men in tights beating up muggers.

"hardware is but a fraction of the cost of a laptop"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/technology/30gat es.html?ei=5090&en=3e90b107dc9a4d71&ex=1296277200& adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=11425 25465-ocesH4iewp00qNOD9NJq1g

So a cellphone is to be Microsoft's "alternative" to a laptop. Granted, there's a point...

A cellphone is better at communication. IF YOU HAVE a cellphone network.
A cellphone is using less power. IF YOU HAVE any power at all.
A cellphone is smaller. WHO CARES, this ain't Hongkong.

Let's not get into the comment about "small, blurry displays" here...

I mean, I can of course see the reason why MS would consider this a better idea. You get people onto the cellphone craze and create more addicts who simply CAN NOT LIVE without sending short messages and press those thing (that would certainly become some kind of status symbol there as well as they did here) against your ear.

You hook people into year long paying contracts that make them pay now, pay tomorrow and pay forever. Instead of having them pay ONCE for their laptop that will serve them for years to come, that might even be used by the next generation of students too (since Linux does not need more horsepower with every generation of the OS).

It sure is more interesting for MS. But the interests of MS don't matter here.

A functioning link to the NYTimes article.

Also interesting is the component pricing total that reveals why Sony will most likely have to take a loss of hundreds of dollars per console to remain competitive.

I'm sure I could go through every doctor's waitlist in every hospital in every city in every province and do a real study of the issue. Frankly, I don't care enough about the subject to do that.

My point is this, and only this: in Canada, you have to go on a waitlist for medical treatment. In the US, we have no such thing as a waitlist, and consider having to be on a waitlist for treatment to be shocking and inhumane. Hell, my dog doesn't even have to go on a waitlist for medical procedures, and she's just a goddamn dog. These are people we're talking about here.

If you're more interested in this issue, feel free to google for some articles and/or research on the subject. For instance, I found an article about illegal private hospitals in Canada. Here's a quote from the article:

But a Supreme Court ruling last June -- it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists -- appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.

"The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services," the court ruled.

This isn't some sensationalized media report. It's the opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada that your healthcare system "fails to deliver resonable services." The sooner you admit you have a problem, the sooner you can go about solving it.

Feel free to research the issue. It's happening in your own backyard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmon ey/12sliver.html?ex=1299819600&en=b93a73a9426aeb16 &ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

And for those who won't RTFA:

"ANDY STEWARD, a successful London computer consultant and sailboat racer, became exasperated when trying to watch his favorite sport on television. There were a few half-hour recaps of some major sailing races, but they were always shown late at night.

Mr. Steward looked into creating a sailing channel on the Sky satellite service in Britain, but his idea was soon dead in the water. He would have had to pay £85,000 (nearly $150,000) to start the channel and £40,000 a month (nearly $70,000), as well as the production costs. That was a lot of money for an untested concept.

But in January, he did introduce a sailing channel, one that is rapidly filling with sailing talk shows, product reviews, programs on sailing techniques and, most important, intense coverage of the sort of smaller races that don't make it onto traditional television.

His new channel, however, will not be available over the air. And it won't be found on cable or even on satellite, at least not yet. The channel, called Sail.tv, is broadcast only on the Internet, which enables video to reach a much larger worldwide audience at a much lower initial cost than a satellite channel. Because "we didn't have any idea how big the audience would be," Mr. Steward said, he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible. "Internet television is an investment we can grow into," he said.

In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.

Perhaps more interesting -- and, arguably, more important -- are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.

In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase "the long tail" to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop -- think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.

"The next wave of media is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests," said John Hendricks, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, which is developing a series of specialized video services. "Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack -- because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines."

Already, there are specialized video services serving hundreds of specialties, including poker, bicycling, lacrosse, photography, vegetarian cooking, fine wine, horror films, obscure sitcoms and Japanese anime. There is also a growing market for Webcasts of local news and entertainment from every country and in every language, aimed at expatriates.

"We're adding two or three new channels a week," s

But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.

Pay closer attention, then. And those are just the conservatives who are normally supportive of Bush...

Check the source at the bottom

Your shining jewel of a health care system is looking like it is going to be doing as well as ours soon.

This NY Times article speaks to that. For these under 30 somethings in NYC, success is not so much about doing something new as it is about doing something that another company, with deep pockets, wants. The exit strategy is being acquired.

You can fool some people with marketing but not everyone multiple times. The fact is the ipod works amazingly well. Is it perfect? No. But I think its the best out there and I'd buy another one if this one dies (its 2 years old, and running gread (knock on wood).

David pouge has 6 reasons in His NYTimes article...

In fact, at least six factors make the iPod such a hit: cool-looking hardware; a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel; an ultrasimple software menu; effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows; seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes); and a universe of accessories. Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/technology/circu its/09pogue.html

A curious characteristic of many memory systems is that mnemonic devices work despite being (or possibly because of being) illogical, arbitrary, and artistically flawed. "Roy" is a legitimate first name, but there is no actual surname "Biv" and of course the middle initial "G" is arbitrary. Why is "Roy G. Biv" easy to remember? Medical students never forget the arbitrary nationalities of the Finn and German. Any two of the three months ending in -ember would fit just as euphoniously as September and November in "Thirty days hath...", yet most people can remember the rhyme correctly for a lifetime after having heard it once, and are never troubled by doubts as to which two of the -ember months have thirty days. A bizarre arbitrary association may stick in the mind better than a logical one.

"It really helps us a lot in school," she [Erin Luley] said.

"(Media presence) makes it more nerve-wracking," said finalist Chester Santos from San Francisco.

"I really did not expect to win," Foer said. "I thought maybe I'd crack the top five."

I thought I would add a link for fairness. Just coincidently a recent article. The last sentence from an oil analyst.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/business/worldbu siness/09opec.html

There's a lot more out there on this "capacity" deal. And the figures for 'superfields are well known, there just aren't finding them anymore..

The bottom line is they can cut production, or production can get cut due to outside unplanned for forces, but as to adding to production, very few places can do that now,the article claims only saudi arabia has any spare capacity at all. If we are taking the whole supply chain into account, it's even more iffy, given recent geopolitical events and natural disaster events..

It's sad that the film industry spends all this money on explosions and high tech, when what it really needs is to have a good story and stick to it.

Take this article:
In Mr. Moore's account of his career, the villains are clearly defined: they are the mainstream comics industry -- particularly DC Comics, the American publisher of "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" -- which he believes has hijacked the properties he created, and the American film business, which has distorted his writing beyond recognition. To him, the movie adaptation of "V for Vendetta," which opens on Friday, is not the biggest platform yet for his ideas: it is further proof that Hollywood should be avoided at all costs. "I've read the screenplay," Mr. Moore said. "It's rubbish."
http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytim es.com/2006/03/12/movies/12itzk.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP= 3a55fddbQ2F@nK(@4l_gQ2FllCO@Oyye@yQ60@Q3EO@slQ7BQ3 FKg@Q3EOQ3FCZ6kQ3DCsQ5D