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No soul-sucking required.

Oddly, the one group that does not trust Nielsen is FOX. From NYTimes (no reg): Nielsen's introduction of new electronic television meters in the New York area last winter, for instance, prompted a torrent of criticism from Fox Television, which saw the local ratings (and potential revenue) of several of its programs suddenly plummet. FOX started an astroturf campaign against Nielsen. All the other players in that industry like to bitch about how Nielsen is expensive, unresponsive, and a de-facto monopoly, but they never seem to claim dishonesty.

I use "class" to mean "economic class", which is the normal interpretation today, although countries older than the USA sometimes consider economic and social class to be partly distinct.

more class-ridden society than modern Britain,

Britain still has strong vestiges in the House of Lords and of course the Queen, but those are more like strong cultural memories than facts of daily life. In practical terms, their policies have slowed the creation of mega-rich, and the oceanic barrier has prevented the influx of unauthorized immigrants which make up the USA's poorest class.

there is almost no representation of this in the shows we see over here.

In the USA, race correlates highly with class, and it is more visually obvious, so it is often what gets discussed first (if the author desires to make social commentary). Easier to simply hire a dark-skinned actor than to write & direct a script providing subtle non-vocal cues of economic background.

For example, many UK shows include as characters both an upper-class family and the servants of the household. The USA stereotype is that the servants must always, always be Mexican immigrants. So you have race and class in one.

Additionally, Britain is a denser country, so multiple classes are more frequently squeezed together (especially if you factor in the tradition of butler service).

Is class a taboo subject in America?

If you're really interested in reading some class anecdotes from the USA, nytimes.com has a series of twelve articles on the subject under the title "Class Matters".

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.
• Linux Lab set up shop in Bangalore!
• Daniel Robbins decided to sell out his open source compatriots by taking a job with Microsoft in Redmond, Washington!

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.
• Linux Lab set up shop in Bangalore!
• Daniel Robbins decided to sell out his open source compatriots by taking a job with Microsoft in Redmond, Washington!

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/national/12cnd-j ackson.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/technology/13dri ll.html

The movie biz is bitching about movie downloads. They're citing stats gathered from people's hard drives.

Hmmm?

With what degree of knowledge or cooperation from the people who's hard drives were scanned?

Or were these people just hacked? (Linux and OS X probably not just cooperate quite so readily to an invasive procedure like this, so is it just Windows that tattle-tells?)

An enquiring mind wants to know...

back in feb04, sylvain chomet ( les triplettes de belleville (2003)) contributed an interesting article to the times opinion page about the cartoon characters (definitely no longer free reading) that make the decisions at the mouse. it's not very complimentary.

nor should it be...

back in feb04, sylvain chomet ( les triplettes de belleville (2003)) contributed an interesting article to the times opinion page about the cartoon characters (definitely no longer free reading) that make the decisions at the mouse. it's not very complimentary.

nor should it be...

Is there any way to correct the misleading copyright statement for the NY Times news article archive http://query.nytimes.com/search/advanced of 1851-1922?

Aren't the articles from 1922 and earlier are now in the public domain.

According to the NY Times article, Apple was "disappointed" with the Cell processor. It may just be too tricky to get high performance out of the Cell. Console developers are highly motivated to get maximum performance, but that is unlikely to be the case for companies developing software for what is (in numbers, at least) a minor platform.

With IBM looking at the hundreds of millions of units going to the console market vs the few million Apple would sell, it's easy to see IBM's point of view on this.

I am so glad they newly appointed Mike Griffin is gutting the old regime, and I was expecting this for weeks. Not only is he a scientist, he has an MBA and common sense.

Common sense is something missing from NASA and NASA's hiring practices, contracting rules, and even grant administration.

I hope my own bosses get the axe too.

Failure plagues NASA ever since NASA embarked on an astounding gender and race based hiring and advancement program a few years ago. Many of the female led programs have had resounding failures, and the waste and delays from SBIR (ethnic third party procurement rules) and other racist programs have destroyed NASA in many ways.

There reason the MAJORITY of recent mars missions failed is gender and race bias in hiring and promotion against whites and asians.

Vital FACT! Nasa switched to forced female hiring in most of the recent Mars failures.

For the first time ever ONLY WOMEN called the shots on the largest mars mission that failed. read :

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/04 1899nasa-women.html
(remove spaces if needed, Slashcode ads them)

for the first time ever all three KEY positions of the failed mars missions were female :
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer

Current hiring rules from the new top level NASA female administration dictate this new female forced hiring policy.

NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. In fact they now PREVENT job related award honors and bonuses based on how many females you hire and how many females and black contractors you hire!!! This is a fact!

NASA publicly has stated this from the woman in charge. I can't tell you about my own memos.

NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of wack with societies norms.
The mars missions are even more than 2% female.

The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.

NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in! NASA apparently requires all 50 states to have minority participation in parts design and supply for the mars missions! REGARDLESS of competence! Sex and race are the prime criteria in current years. Check out NASA own detailed list of female and minority small contractors at : http://sbir.nasa.gov./ SBIR is a euphemistic acronym for small business innovation research, but as you can easily see it is actually a gender and race quota based system spearheaded by the new women helping to run NASA now.

from the female mars leader :
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."

Also from the female mars leader Gavit:

"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."

The

This sort of behavior is encouraged by the Bush Administration if results are fudged to favor its position on the environment. Anybody catch this story in the NY Times about the White House doctoring reports on climate change? Here's an interview with Warren Olney about the incident. It seems to me that if we can't trust scientists to tell us the truth regardless of the political implications or of pressure from outside sources, we're really fucked.

This is slightly faster Reg free link

(Thanks to New York Times Link Generator)

OTTAWA, June 9 - Final talks in a patent infringement lawsuit involving the popular BlackBerry e-mail messaging device have reached an impasse, the two companies involved said Thursday, raising the possibility that the BlackBerry service could be banned from the United States market.

The two companies, Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, which makes the BlackBerry, and NTP, a small patent-holding company in Arlington, Va., reached a settlement in March to end an infringement suit that is three and a half years old. R.I.M. agreed at the time to pay NTP the unusually large sum of $450 million to end the suit.

On Thursday, however, it was apparent that negotiations to reach a final settlement had failed.

Late Wednesday night, R.I.M. asked a United States federal court to enforce the settlement reached in March. Meanwhile, in court papers filed Thursday, NTP denied that the settlement was ever clear-cut, and urged the court to reject R.I.M.'s request.

In a conference call Thursday with analysts, James L. Balsillie, the chairman and co-chief executive of R.I.M., said he could not comment on the specifics of why the talks had foundered, citing a confidentiality agreement between the companies. He emphasized, though, that R.I.M. had not tried to alter the settlement's terms, and blamed NTP for the impasse.

"This is an enormous amount of money, one of the largest settlements in the history of any patent system," Mr. Balsillie said. "I'm at a loss to understand what in the world one would want beyond that."

In its filing, however, NTP said that it had pressed R.I.M. for a complete set of documents detailing the terms of the agreement during three days of negotiations in March.

"Nevertheless, because of R.I.M.'s pressing need to leave town, the signed agreement was limited to a vague, ambiguously worded term sheet," the court papers said.

NTP had won the right to ban Blackberry e-mail in the United States in an earlier court decision, but that ruling was suspended when R.I.M. appealed. In its filing Thursday, though, NTP said that if no settlement was reached, it would again ask for an injunction on the sale of BlackBerry pagers and e-mail service in the United States. Research in Motion is dependent on Blackberry sales in the United States for about 75 percent of its revenues.

Gregory E. Upchurch, an intellectual property lawyer in St. Louis, said that about 80 percent of the time, courts enforced previously announced settlements. "Courts are in the business of resolving disputes," he said.

The NYTimes wrote an enthusiastic article about the conference.

NYT disagrees. Anyone have a decent source?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.h tml

So long as we're linking around... try here or here.

I don't know how to win the "war on terror", but this is sure as hell a way to lose it.

Note that these powers have not been granted yet, which this Slashdot post fails to mention. The Senate Intelligence Committee has approved the bill, meaning it will go to the full Senate for debate. However, there is no guarantee that it will pass the Senate without massive modification, if it passes at all! Here is a quote from one of the Senators on the committee: (registration required) "This bill must be amended on the floor to protect national security while protecting Constitutional rights, said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md."

Rather than reading a single blurb and responding with the knee-jerk reaction that many Slashdot readers have shown here, perhaps it would be wise to research news for yourself. Indeed, thinking for yourself is supposed to be the foundation of democracy. Maybe those of you so concerned about "the backslide of American democracy" should look to your own habits for ways to remedy it before you slam the government.

A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."

Yes. A little perspective here, please. Whatever you think of this proposal to expand the Patriot Act, recognize that it is only a proposal. The original article states:

The FBI has gained new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval...

The FBI has gained nothing. No laws have been changed. There is no new secret, Judge-free subpoena power. It is possible that there will be such a power in the future, but this is just one of the very first steps needed to get it done.

Other commenters in this thread have bemoaned that poor state of education in the US, that so many citizens don't know what rights they have. Well, it's not quite as grand as all that, but here's a little civics lesson for those of you whose main political information comes from /.:

Laws in this country must be passed in both the Senate and the House. The process is often very messy and cantankerous. Even a very popular bill can get stalled using different parlementary techniques, and it is not uncommon that a bill that looked unbeatable in January will end up dying in some comittee and not passing by the end of the year. More controversial bills are even harder to get through, and there is a very complicated chess game that goes on in which bills are ammended and revised as they move through the process.

This particular bill apparently passed the Senate Intelligence Commite, 11-4, a couple of days ago. If you look in more serious news accounts, they make it a lot more clear that no new powers have been granted, and this is but merely the opening salvo in a long Congressional negotiation on this topic.

From here, the bill travels to the Senate Judiciary Committe, where "Feinstein and other Democrats planned to again offer amendments." Even if it makes it through there as-is, it would need to be considered by the whole Senate. Even if it passes there, a parallel bill will have been going through an analogous process in the House. Those two bills probably won't be the same by the time they pass both houses of Congress, so from there it's off to the joint committee to come up with a "compromise version" that everyone expects will pass both houses. Finally, the House of Representatives and Senate both vote on the final version, and, if it passes, it goes to the President for his signature.

It is quite impossible to say at this point if some provision voted into a bill in an early Senate committee is going to make it into law.

I believe concerns about this particular provision of the bill to be a bit misplaced. As best as I can determine, this takes the existing system for issuing subpoenas to companies for relevant documentation that exists in "foreign intelligence" cases and applies the same standard in domestive "terrorism" cases. So, for example, if the CIA turned up evidence that someone trained in Pakistan and is a member of Al Qaeda, as it stands right now, they could issue a subpoena without a Judge's prior approval to gather information from (i.e.) the phone company to try to build a case against him. However, if the FBI determined that a purely domestic terrorist was planning on blowing something up, they would not be able to use the same power.

I would like to see a frank and open debate in this country about the privacy and expectation of privacy of records owned by companies. Under the existing US Constitution and laws, if I make a phone call, the record of that phone call belongs to the phone company, not me. The phone company has no fourth amendment protection against "unreasonable searches and seziures," and it is therefore much easier, from a constitutional basis, to get a warrent to request some documents. As well, the phone company has no particular interest in fighting such requests, so it complies with the

In case you don't have NYT subscription, here is the original article.

And while this may be old news, to me it indicates that AOL (now pw3nd by TW) is trying to copy Google. No surprise that Google is worth more than TW.

http://bar.baen.com/
or
http://bar.baen.com:8080/

In the "The New Guy" conference. This requires registration prior to access.

He's not much on talking about his work. I'm surprised he finally published. I suspect he's gotten a patent on the IQ boosting drug he's stated he's been working on.

He did post a link to the NY Times article on the 7th.

NY Times article

I had the good fortune to see it with my wife and a group of friends this past Saturday night.

Sadly, no http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/05/art s/carpet.slide.9.jpg Sara Ramirez at my show. Rawwwr.

Beg, borrow, steal or kill for tickets if you're a Python fan.

Well... there's this I guess...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.h tml

People should use the non-reg links when posting about a NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/technology/06uni ted.html?ex=1275710400&en=022fb6cd810b1719&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Dammit, I forgot the part about monkeys paying for sex!!!!! That's definately going to be part of the design for my next computer!

This is a huge blow to PowerPC's credibility, though.

Not according to the NYT.

By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. And while the microelectronics business as a whole is strategically important for I.B.M., it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services and software. A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, estimates that the company's technology group - mostly microelectronics - will account for less than 3 percent of I.B.M.'s revenues and 2 percent of its pretax income this year.

For years, according to industry analysts, the work for Apple has been barely a break-even business for I.B.M. When the two companies were negotiating a new contract recently, Mr. Jobs pushed for price discounts that I.B.M. refused to offer. For I.B.M., "the economics just didn't work," said one industry executive who was briefed on the negotiations. "And Apple is not so important a customer that you would take the financial hit to hold onto the relationship."

I'm more interested in this quote:

However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Too bad. I'd like to run OS X w/out having to pay an Apple hardware premium.

Taking over the G5 line doesn't seem that farfetched. In today's NY times article on the subject, they reported that losing Apple isn't considered a major loss for IBM; and no one else out there is buying PowerPC chips.

According to the NYT (registration required), Mr. Jobs is expected to announce the transition to Intel chips at Apple's annual developer conference. Further it explains why this will not hurt I.B.M. much since this apple only accounts for about 2-3% of its revenue. It will be interesting to see if Apple can get the developers on board to change their software to use the Mac OS-Intel platform. I for one do not think Microsoft will go since this will represent a treath on its market.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/technology/06app le.html

The New York Times reported this morning that industry executives were informed Sunday of Apple's decision to switch from IBM and Motorola to Intel for chips -- and the article specifically says "Intel processors for [...] Macintosh computers" -- and that there are obvious and reliable indicators that Apple will in fact announce this today.

The article cites reports by CNET News.com on Friday of the planned announcement and the Wall Street Journal's earlier article that Apple and IBM were in negotiations (neither party commented on the latter article).

Analysts interviewed for the NYT article said that Apple is "increasingly alarmed by IBM's failure to deliver" a cooler-running G5; the company currently uses the older G4 processor made by Freescale Semiconductor, which spun off from Motorola last year. The article makes it appear that a switch by Apple would be balanced by the earlier decision by Microsoft to switch to IBM for its XBox 360 video game system processors.

IBM's Apple processor production represents less than 2 percent of chip production at their largest production facility, but Apple gets about 50 percent of their processors from IBM; the rest come from Freescale, which makes the cooler-running processors for the Mac Mini and the iBook and Powerbook lines of notebooks. IBM's "technology group" accounts for less than 3 percent of revenue and 2 percent of pretax income this year, according to an analyst interviewed in the article, indicating that the company would not be hurt by Apple's switch to Intel. IBM barely breaks even manufacturing Apple processors, according to industry analysts.

The company began using IBM and Motorola chips in 1991 to "counter Microsoft and Intel," but -- as we all know -- Apple owns a rather small share of the computing market. This may change, however, with rumors that Apple programmers have been working on a project known as "Marklar," an Intel-compatible version of the Macintosh operating system possibly dating back to Steve Jobs' Next Inc., the company which Jobs left Apple for before selling the company to Apple and returning to his former employer. If true, this could mean that Apple is trying to give Microsoft a run for its money again by targeting their users directly, rather than by selling MP3 players.

Of course, as reported on engadget.. first time ever.. since 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/technology/03TBR F1.html?ex=1118030400&en=cb60405e864fa27a&ei=5070

Anyway, Jayson Blair is not on the NYT's payroll anymore, so there must be some truth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03dinosa ur.html

now if you tell me that dna will degrade over 70 million years and be unrecoverable, then i will believe you

but if you also tell me that they can recover soft tissue with capillaries and cells visible from 70 million years ago, i wouldn't believe you

but that's what they did

so now i don't know what to believe... isn't some sort of t. rex dna recovery possible after all then? granted, it would be fragmented, but if we are talking dessicated soft tissue, can't the fragments be recovered in some sort of context that might make reconstruction possible?

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.
• Linux Lab set up shop in Bangalore!

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03dinosa ur.html

now if you tell me that dna will degrade over 70 million years and be unrecoverable, then i will believe you

but if you also tell me that they can recover soft tissue with capillaries and cells visible from 70 million years ago, i wouldn't believe you

but that's what they did

so now i don't know what to believe... isn't some sort of t. rex dna recovery possible after all then? granted, it would be fragmented, but if we are talking dessicated soft tissue, can't the fragments be recovered in some sort of context that might make reconstruction possible?

They must have responsibility, and those responsibilities must be enforced by the government.
Yes, there are countries out there with that philosophy - it's called socialism, where governments control everything that companies do.

Not so true. For the very rich creating charitable trusts can be a helpful way of avoiding taxes that normal people would have to pay.

There is a very interesting article in the NY times by David Cay Johnston: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21ENCOU NTER.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5007&en=21e3450ac9e31ab3 &ex=1387342800&partner=USERLAND

Excerpt: ...
Blattmachr's genius is in seeing the whole and these holes in the whole. He then sells this genius to his clients. One of his early insights was that it is entirely and legally possible for the superrich to reap unlimited stock profits without paying a cent of capital gains tax. The rich can do this by manipulating charitable trusts. These trusts are a common enough device used by generous people who own an asset, usually stock, that has appreciated in value. Instead of selling the stock, paying capital gains taxes, and then investing the after-tax proceeds, a person can instead donate the stock to a charitable trust that he controls. The trust can sell the assets tax-free and invest the untaxed proceeds. The income from that investment -- typically 6 percent annually -- is paid to the donor for life. When the donor dies, what remains in the trust goes to charity.

Blattmachr took this clever gimmick and supersized it. He figured out a way to turn that nice little 6 percent annual income stream into a torrent -- 80 percent returns a year for two years. So on stock gains of $100 million, the owners would get back at least $96 million, as opposed to the mere $72 million they would have gotten if they had sold the stock outright and paid capital gains taxes. Then the trust would fold, and some charity would get the remaining $4 million. The government would get less than nothing since the gift to the charitable trust would create an income tax deduction. ...

On another note, can I get one that fits in my PC and shuts up the godawful fan noise?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/technology/30hil lis.html?ex=1275105600&en=4a1c68b85a47519f&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Reg free link.

Yes. Everything's been tried before by someone. http://free.seekon.com/Strongheart10/ . I hope someone plasters that across my Epitaph: http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm and http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopini ons/forums/editorialsoped/opedcolumnists/johntiern ey/index.html?offset=186&fid=.f7535d8/186 . Someone slap a 5 on this thing for Funny.

Last week, I wrote about some of the changes Microsoft has in store for the next version of Windows, which is slated for the end of 2006. Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column, probably because so much may change in the next 19 months.

But a few of you fired off diatribes about how I'm either a Microsoft "shill" or an Apple "apologist" (or maybe it was the other way around). It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word "Apple" or "Microsoft" without getting hate mail from somebody or other.

It's kind of amazing that various extremists could find the same column too pro-Microsoft AND too pro-Apple. But hey--that's the nature of ideological soldiers, whether they're in the conservative-liberal war, the evolutionist-creationist war or the Hummer-Prius war.

The Mac-Windows war, though, is especially pointless, protracted, and winnerless. There will always be people on each side who are every bit as rabid and un-convincible as those in any other religious war.

Still, I'd like to suggest, as a starting point of civility, a few pointers for participants in the O.S. war. Consider it one man's version of, "Can't we all just get along?"

1. Hate something for its failings, not for its success.

It's totally fine to criticize something because of its flaws--to hate Windows because it's bloated and cryptic, for example, or the iPod because it's too easily scratched. But condemning something just because it's the dominant product is just sour grapes. Arguments along the lines of "I hate Bill Gates because he's rich" or "I hate the iPod because everyone has one" add nothing to the dialogue.

2. No condemning something until you've tried it.

If everyone abided by this idea, about 95 percent of all the Windows-Macintosh diatribes would evaporate overnight. But here it is: If you haven't tried something, then you really have no basis to comment.

3. Execution matters.

I'm so tired of reading discussions like this: Person A: "I love Mac OS X Tiger! That Spotlight thing is so cool: press a keystroke, type a few letters, and get an instantaneous listing every file, folder and program containing that text."

Person B: "You pathetic loser! It's called hard-drive indexing, and Windows XP has had it from Day One." Of course, the truth is that Windows Indexing Service is to Spotlight as Thomas the Tank Engine is to a bullet train. In Indexing Service, you can't search with a single keystroke, the speed is nothing like Spotlight's, you can't search for metadata (115 kinds of secondary information, like music genre, Photoshop layer names, camera settings in digital photos, etc.), the index isn't updated in real time as you create or delete documents, and so on.

It goes the other way, too. "I love how Windows XP lets me delete or rename files right in the Open or Save dialog boxes."

"What's the big deal? On the Mac, we just switch to the desktop and delete or rename things there."

Sorry, but that's just not as good as being able to do it within the dialog boxes.

The bottom line: How well something works and how elegantly it's been built is also relevant to the "which is better" discussion.

4. Don't make grandiose purchasing plans by guessing on technology's future.

This pointer is directed exclusively at Mac-bashers, particularly the ones on the nation's boards of education.

If you decide to standardize on Windows across all schools, fine. But make sure you have legitimate reasons like economics or the need to run some Windows-only software suite.

"We want the kids to learn what they'll one day use in the business world," however, is NOT a good reason. If you think you know what anyone will be usi

You mock how you expect a lie from the AC account about owning an airline, wherein we should all just accept the fact that you are a grown, well-travelled person because you are using the mzwaterski account (with a very high UID, I might add--what, have you had that account for like a week or something?).

I do not recall where I claimed to be a "freedom minded person." I simply pointed out that your trust in the logic that goes behind the TSA prohibited item list is naive, because: there are many complaints about the inconsistencies of the list (such as how you can't carry on a lighter, but you can carry on 4 boxes of matches), how the policies are enforced, the very fact that your gold-standard document you hold up explicitly states that it is up to the TSA screeners whether to abide by the list or not, and you also seem to give yourself such self-importance that if it hasn't happened to you then it just doesn't happen, or happen often.

Yeah, right. I'm just making all this stuff up. I made up all those newspaper articles too. But I forget my place; I am conversing with THE mzwaterski, a barometer of the people, a man with the pulse of the nation. If it hasn't happened to him, or if he doesn't know about it, then it must not exist.

Your comments are based on rumors and I highly doubt you've ever had anything mentioned above confiscated from you.

On the other hand we know what I am (among other things): AN EVIL ANONYMOUS COWARD!!!! Oooooooooohhhhh! I'm gonna corrupt your women and upset your traditional way of life!!!!

Games created for two next-generation consoles - the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony - will display video in wide-screen high-definition format if the console is connected to a high-definition TV. Only Nintendo's entry, code-named Revolution, will not cater to HDTV's.
...
Regarding the increasing development costs of games: To compensate, publishers can be expected to raise retail prices - even Nintendo, though it is forgoing high definition. "We'll see if we can push prices up to $59, using 'Collectors' Edition' content," George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. This Christmas, the company will offer a special edition of its Legend of Zelda franchise at that price.

So it sounds like the cost of the consoles isn't the only thing that's going to be increasing ... the games will be getting more expensive too, though the point of the article being referenced here on slashdot is that this technology of Microsoft's is supposed to reduce the burden on developers somewhat, so we'll have to see how well that pans out.

"During a two-day period they watched as the intruder tried to break into more than 100 locations on the Internet and was successful in gaining root access to more than 50. "

Though I agree with the sentiment of your assessment and would not normally leap to Newsweek's defense, the incident, details, and effects (riots in Afganistan) have been widely mis-reported.

Even before Nesweek's apparent vindication by the FBI report today (see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/26/politics/26koran .html), reports from the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the US State Department had made it clear that the Afghan riots were not tied to Newsweek's report on Quran mistreatment (see http://usinfo.state.gov/usinfo/Archive/2005/May/12 -273892.html?chanlid=washfile).

Your misinformation is understandable based on the pitiful fact that Reuters reiterated this error as recently as 6 hours ago. (In case you're still prone to believe that Newsweek's article prompted the riots, a quick Nexis search will reveal at least four stories similar to Newsweek's in major US and international periodicals since March 14, 2004 - all with no associated violence.)

I'm not suggesting that Newsweek was right to run with an apparently poorly-sourced story. But Newsweek does not "make us American's (sic) look stupid in the eyes of Muslims." Rather, our lying, corrupt administration and their lackeys who engage in torture and other crimes against humanity in the name of freedom make us look stupid, morally deficient, and hypocritical.

Further, as you suggest, the media's inability to report on meaningful topics is negligent and compounds the problem. (I would add the horrific situation in the Congo, Iran's nuclear program, Israeli-Palenstinian relations, and to turn to domestic issues, the spiraling debt and impending collapse of critical social programs to your list or stories that should be better covered.) Their failure to get their facts straight for those topics they do choose to cover is incompetent.

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to? OSDN == Offshore Software Development NOW!!! Read how OSDN is helping to offshore American High-Tech to the Third World!

Check it out! http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/business/mutfund /23cnd-bbc.html