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It keeps redirecting me to this page which only shows the first 50 words of the article and not photos, even if I'm logged in. I'd have to pay $2.95 just to view the single article, still without the photos. I don't know how you are getting through.

But, buyers are seldom "perfectly rational." Once someone bids on an item, the bidder forms an attachment to it -- when outbid, there's a competition with the other bidders. Bidders rationalize raising their previous "maximum price", because they really want the item, and "maybe it's worth more than I thought."

I think you're right. On a side note, it's fascinated me to watch the drama surrounding some of the Greek pins on Ebay. Some members got very concerned about "rescuing" their organization's pins from outsiders, and as a result, the prices have jumped. http://college3.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2002/0 8/11/1029512.xml

Instead of/in addition to posting about the error here, why not send off a note to the Times to let them know about the important flaw in their coverage of this story?

I know for a fact that several people sent letters to the Times. It worked. The Times posted a correction today.

After a flyby of Mars in 2008, and another in 2009, it settles down for orbit in 2011.

That last long ago (30 years) visit was only a flyby.

So all that confusion is about getting the right orbital velocity to stay, plus we get good science all along the way.

Here is the registration required link. Don't even think you can pull that "parnter=rssuserland" crap around here, buddy.

http://nytimes.com/ads/lincoln/ (no registration required as this is part of a campaign by Lincoln.)

Not real high tech but kind of cool nonetheless.

Micro$oft gives out millions of dollars to catch people who exploit bugs in their browser! Now Linux gives out cash directly to people who find the bugs, rewarding engineers instead of snitches. I hope the major news outlets cover the huge difference in paradigm here- good cop instead of bad cop.

Everyone failed my last Gmail invite challenge, and I'm up to three invites, so here's a new one: there are sixteen factual errors in this article. I'll give you one for free: Bush is not a downhiller! Spot them all for a Gmail invite.

-Exmet

I find it interesting that the New York Times version of the story is titled, 'Apple Chief Has Emergency Cancer Surgery' seems they had to throw that 'Emergency' in there. The other places I have seen the story never mention 'Emergency' in the title or the body of the article.

To put that in perspective:

Super Mario 64 - 5.94
Grand Theft Auto 3 - 5.35 (million copies sold)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 2.63
Metal Gear Solid - 2.43
Enter the Matrix - 5 million(?)

Which one of these things...is not like the others? Admittedly these numbers are US sales, perhaps Enter the Matrix sold these ridiculous millions of copies in Europe and Asia. Again, though, that seems somewhat implausible.

Also, as anyone with any sort of business acumen will tell you, units sold speaks very little about net profit. And let's not forget that Shiny reportedly paid $10 million for the Matrix license. What's that smell? Ah...fresh books. Delish.

I guess my only real reason for writing this is that I find Bonell to be somewhat unsavory and feel somewhat unnerved by the possibility that anyone takes him or his company at their word. He strikes me as something of a con man. I don't like that he bought and is now wearing Atari's rough-sewn skin as a branding rain-slicker and I don't like his comments about the future of gaming what games are supposed to be:
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21GAMES.html
For an excellent summation of why Bonnell's comments are a proverbial avalanche of bullshit:
http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_12_01_blogchive. html

Anyhow, the only point of that rather shallow tirade was that I sincerely hope no burgeoning game designers are being led astray by the parade of delusion that is Infogrames' press releases.

By the way, the source on those statistics is http://www.the-magicbox.com/Chart-USPlatinum.shtml

The New York Times has an especially good write up at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/science/29CND-CR ICK.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091149523-HKLChJ0/j SjultBM63EKHA as well as a special section at http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/healthspecial/ index.html.

The New York Times has an especially good write up at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/science/29CND-CR ICK.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091149523-HKLChJ0/j SjultBM63EKHA as well as a special section at http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/healthspecial/ index.html.

According to the NY Times there were no hard feelings between her and Crick.

Read this section:
One of the problems caused by the book was Dr. Watson's implication that the pair of them had obtained Dr. Franklin's data on DNA surreptitiously and hence had deprived her of due credit for the DNA discovery. Dr. Crick believed he obtained the data fairly since she had presented it at a public lecture, to which he had been invited. Though Dr. Watson had misreported a vital figure from the lecture, a correct version reached Dr. Crick through the Medical Research Council report. If Dr. Franklin felt Dr. Crick had treated her unfairly, she never gave any sign of it. She became friends with both Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson, and spent her last remission from cancer in Dr. Crick's house.

Hardly the miscredited dark lady some people claim her to be.

A Trip to a Far Galaxy That's Fun and Funny... sniff, before the dark days, before the Midi-chlorians.

The New York Times has reviews of the books published way back when they were released. Of the three, the first and the second are by W.H.Auden, who was one of the staunchest fan of Tolkien and it's quite interesting to read what he thinks about fantasy.

I disagree with your statement that a regulated economy is more corruptible than an unregulated one, and have seen no evidence to support this. Russia's government barely exists, and yet they have what must be the most corrupt market in the industrial world. Corruption happens with or without the government; the only difference is that it's easier to change a government than it is to change a market aristocracy. You claim it can't be done, but it happens all the time across the world, and if you haven't noticed it's happening now. Bush was in many ways a god-send to us, he woke the faithful up. The Party is so weak right now that it's primed for conquest, and we intend to take it. Liberal grass roots fundraisers raised over 100 million for Kerry this time around, making us his cash support, not big companies. We also raised dozens of millions for a support for liberal 527s, which push our agenda as much as they do Kerry's. Wealthy liberals plan to raise billions over the next few years building a liberal political apparatus. If the Democrats won't clean up then we will finally have a machine we can use to get a third party into the White House, destroying the old Party in the process, but I expect that once they see that you can win doing the right thing they will. I'll include the link from NYT "Wiring the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy", it's a very interesting read and quite encouraging from my perspective. You might like these guys too, they are somewhat Libertarian, although they are more Left-Libertarian than I would expect you would like. Soros, for example, has spent millions on trying to end the drug war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOC RATS.html?ex=1248408000&

How does doing the right thing not hurt the bottom line? Using safer equipment costs more money than more dangerous equipment. Not firing your broken employees costs you money. Cleaning up environmental messes cost money. That's why none of these things were standard practices in the laissez faire days. Maybe in the long term these things are helpful, but capitalism has always had a blind spot for the long term. Most companies don't even plan beyond a few years; you think they really care what the area around their plants will be like in 30 years, or what happens to employees no longer able to help them as efficiently as another? And noticed I never said unethical companies were punished under our system, unless they break the law in which case they are, but not as severely as they should be. Really what the system does is take the question of ethics right out of it; Regardless of what kind a scum bag a CEO is, his employees have the same disability protections as a good CEO. Normally, the scum bag CEO could have passed the money saved on not providing this kind of insurance on to the consumer, selling his product at a lower price but at the cost of the livelihood of his employees. In a completely free market, he would have the advantage, and so his practices would become standard. Also, I don't expect the government to be perfect, as long as I can change it when it's obviously corrupted.

I've got work to do, so I'll wrap this up without going further into the income tax argument than I have and instead poke out something funny about your example of Kerry flip flopping.

"KERRY: "George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." (ABC News, Democrat Presidential Candidate Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/4/03)"

"KERRY: "I am -- Yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have,

Fear of Fraud, by Paul Krugman Discusses what has happened in the past with electronic voting and what problems we will face in the next presidential election.

• It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
  
  When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
  
  This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent.

Offtopic, I know, but the thread where you and I discussed the Florida voting mess has expired, and I wanted to direct your attention to this article on that topic.

What guarentee do you have that the people you're buying commercial, and closed source software from are trustworthy? Is every developer of VxWorks given a background check and top secret clearance? Seems doubtful, especially when you consider that most of VxWorks' toolset is based on GNU and BSD. Microsoft employs lots of people all over the place.

There is a very real threat that software you buy could be manipulated by a government. I'm reminded of the story where a Canadian company gave some software to Russia, only after being given assistance by the CIA to ensure that it would not be safe for use by anyone. You can read more about it .These days, COTS is the mantra contractors chant, and we all hear about developers moving overseas for cheaper labor. With the current market collapsing I think it might be easy to place a man on the inside one of those commercial-off-the-shelf vendors.

With that counter argument in mind, ask yourself why the author hasn't pointed it out. If you look at green hill's website, none of the jobs even mention security clearance. They even list jobs working on the kernel, and don't mention that you have to be a US citizen. Either a) Green Hill is leaving out critical details or b) Green Hill is equally protected from the kinds of problems O'Dowd has discussed. You'll notice that he never even mentions how his own company outcompetes Linux, or exactly how the DO-178B Level A certification protects against intentionally malicious software!

• 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?

Bill Gerstenmeier, space station director at NASA, said that if the shuttle started flying again in the spring, as planned, construction would resume in earnest on the half-built station, with the Japanese and European modules going up as early as 2007. Crews could expand from three to six members as early as 2009, he said, depending on construction at the station and positioning a second, three-person Soyuz rescue craft there.

some room in the United States' Destiny science module for experiments would be used for a support system to regenerate water and air. Mr. Gerstenmeier said some displaced capacity would move to room in partners' modules where the United States has rights.

Are we moving to a society that fears anything that could potentially look like a bomb to an uneducated twit?

Let's stifle the economy!

The New York Times published a review today as well. (no reg)

I once asked the Slashdot editors why they didn't replace reg-required NYT links with reg-free links. They pointed out that there is a chance that the NYT could get its panties in a wad, and do something stupid. Lawsuits, goatse redirects, the works. Lawsuits... that would just be wrong!

Anyway, here's the obligatory reg-free link:
Are you looking at ME?

(Courtesy of these fine folks)

If so then are the recent 'non-technical' political stories a sign/symptom of this website sweeps phenomena?

Interesting idea, but I think it's more that people (at least in the U.S., and probably in other parts of the world as well) have suddenly become more vehement in their political beliefs. What GW and those who are now in power are doing is frightening.

A movie like this one (OutFoxed) would barely have registered four years ago. See also the review in today's NY Times.

And whatever you think of Michael Moore and F9/11, it's not the most financially successful documentary of all time because of all of the Bush supporters rushing out to see it.

There was an interesting article in the NY Times Magazine on Sun 4 Jul 2004. Ted Fishman says in "The Chinese Century": "The Chinese government knows that foreign tech companies can be coaxed into sharing technology and training in exchange for easier access to the Chinese marketplace. The World Trade Organization forbids formal bargains that demand international tech transfers, but it does not police winks and nudges."

This!

[quote]
If you want to do business in China, you have to have a development arm in China to build your applications or your software. China is using their muscle to say, "Hey, Mr. Microsoft, or Hey, Mr. Borland, if you want to sell to our companies or our government, you have to be based here."
[/quote]

thanks to google news.

Huh, that's funny... nobody in Japan would want a Chevy. Bing! ;) Trust me, I worked at GM, and I'm suprised any of them are still on the road. You want absurd? The auto unions in Detroit.

Have you ever been to Japan? Seen how narrow the streets are? Probably not, because otherwise you'd realize that most of the Chevy cars wouldn't FIT. Also, gas in Japan, Europe, etc. is much more than in the U.S.

What about Subaru? GM owns 20%. Hmmm. What about Saab? Did you even realize that they're owned by GM (50%)? Hmmm. What about Suzuki? I see that you did GREAT research. So good to see American ignorance at work. Back-country dipshits like you shouldn't be commenting on the originality of others.

blinkx is just trying to head off Google, which is working on a utility that will apply Google's search power to your computer.

Story:
SAN FRANCISCO, May 18 - Edging closer to a direct confrontation with Microsoft, Google, the Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers.

Google's software, which is expected to be introduced soon, according to several people with knowledge of the company's plans, is the clearest indication to date that the company, based in Mountain View, Calif., hopes to extend its search business to compete directly with Microsoft's control of desktop computing.
...

Maybe this is a threat to Google, but I don't think the competitors are far behind. Nat Friedmans Dashboard and Sideboard have been mentioned elsewhere, and it seems like Microsoft is planning a similar application themselves.

Apparently Google is planning local hard drive searches as well, in a pre-emptive move against improved search techologies that will be a part of Windows/Longhorn.

So I guess Blinx won't be left alone for long. However, when it comes to search, the more players the better. Google is well on its way to become the new Microsoft, and I don't think it's in anybodys best interest to get a search monopolist.

1. I have pretty much abandoned reading my local printed newspaper, in favor of the online edition (and I'm sure I'm not alone).
2. When reading the local (printed) paper I read both local as well as national and international stories
3. Everyone (CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, Yahoo!, you name it) carries stories from the wire services (AP, Reuters etc) and since there are all the same stuff, does it matter that you are reading that story on CNN.com vs, for example The Des Moines Register?
4. My goal is to get my news and not spend all day looking for it. I can start with my local paper's site and then move on to other sources for more in depth coverage and/or different news.
5. The goal of most businesses is to make money and newspapers are no exception. If they keep a reader on their web site longer they get more page views and therefore, generate more ad revenue. I want my local paper to do well. Newspapers are not the profit centers the once were and many have scaled back operations over the years. I don't want to see this happen any more.
   

I prefer the New York Observer for my out of town newspaper delivery. It is cheap, compared to the times. Usually, I keep watch in two cities at once to help balance out shortcomings I might have in my present place of residence. Such as severe lack of culture, technophobes (or outright luddites), and the other bevy of small town prejudices that come with the cheap living I came up here for.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Look at the headlines they give in 50 point type, and then when it turns out to be wrong it doesn't even make front page news.

Yellow cake in Niger, for example, they hail him as nearly a god when he says there was no such thing, and that turns out to be wrong...see here here here here
here and here.

They've finally run a story about it, but wouldn't it have been a lot better for them to have investigated those Wilson allegations themselves, when they first happened?

That's only one of the latest...

• 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?

For the next 20 years, John dedicated his career to representing families and children hurt by the indifference and negligence of others. Standing up against the powerful insurance industry and their armies of lawyers, John helped these families... (from John Kerry's web site)

Ah...helping by taking doctors to the cleaners based on junk science claims, and topping off presentations to the jury by trance channeling the unborn. (See this New York Times article for details.) One wonders how such people live with themselves.

IBM recently announced *nix servers based on Power5, which makes me wonder if some of the resource going towards G5s got diverted to P5s. They're certainly not the same chip, but the similar foundation probably means they're produced in the same plant.

He probably means when this happens and society descends into anarchy. Not much time to watch movies when you need to find food.

Here is the registration-free link to that article.

Courtesy of the NYT link generator.

I hadn't heard of itfacts.biz so I followed the link to their page, which then provides an onward link to a New York Times article about the proliferation of Linux.

You have to subscribe to get into the body of that article, but from the first fifty words the tone does not seem to reflect the "Windows dominates the desktop" story of itfacts.biz.

They are:

GNU Linux, the free computer operating system, has had far more success in winning converts in corporate data centers than on desktop personal computers. But as more user-friendly software makes its way onto the Linux desktop, the free operating system is starting to make progress in its David-vs.-Goliath competition against

Leahy has been relentless in his attacks. Recently, he blamed the intelligence failures on President Bush while the senate committed determined in a bipartisan manner that the failures had nothing to do with the president, and everything to do with practices at the CIA.

It is rumored that Sen. Leahy said something to Cheney before Cheney's outburst.

Now give me Karma! ;-)

Maybe if your link worked...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/business/12barco de.html?ex=1090296000&en=0ba01a954e952cf8&ei=5006& ; partner=ALTAVISTA1

(Just great. Now I'm the karma whore.)

Yes, and everyone should read this eye-opening article, as well. Sorry, New York Times reg req'd: Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected

Fixed Link

Linkify, man!

With my reading threshhold, I didn't see the anonymous coward you were replying to, but I thought I'd comment.

I really don't understand the "we went to war for oil" charge. It doesn't make economic sense. First of all, the war and subsequent reconstruction cost much more than all the oil Iraq will generate for many years. Second, it would have been much easier for the evil Republicans/neo-cons/(oil companies) to just make oil money from the already corrupt Oil for Food program run by the UN.
A google news search for "oil food corruption UN" will let you choose the sources you find most credible, but I'm pretty sure they all say roughly the same things.

That said, though I supported and still support the war, I know there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about whether the US should have invaded Iraq. Much of the original intelligence leading to war was flawed; we expected to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and we haven't so far. This is disturbing both in the magnitude of our intelligence failures and the possibility that parts of these stockpiles were transferred to Syria or Iran. However, the information Saddam had regarding how to make WMDs was nearly as dangerous as the WMDs themselves, and Putin claims to have given Bush intelligence prior to the war that Saddam intended to commit terrorist attacks against the US. Of course, when "intelligence" is really just rumors it is easy for this sort of conversation to devolve into cherry-picking of sympathetic news reports, so I'll give my reasons for supporting the war.

1) The best prewar intelligence we had indicated that Iraq was a threat. Also, Saddam never cooperated with the inspections that were the condition for the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War.
2) Saddam's regime was bad enough that whatever we leave in its place has a very good chance of at least being better.
3) The sanctions weren't sustainable because of the harm done to the Iraqi people, but sanctions couldn't be lifted until inspections were allowed.
4) By the time we knew for certain Saddam was again a threat, it would be too late to avoid major consequences.

There are some good arguments the other way, too:
1) Containment/sanctions were working. As far as WMD production goes, it looks like that's right.
2) The suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam is not the US's problem. We aren't invading Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe, why Iraq?
3) The confidence level of the prewar intelligence was overstated, and Congress and the people of the US should have been given a clearer picture of how certain we were about needing to go to war. Again, the intelligence failures are very disturbing. I think the intelligence was oversold, but it was genuinely believed credible by the Bush administration.

There are plenty of good arguments against the war. Unless you have evidence to the contraty, the "Bush invaded Iraq for oil" is just character assassination.

Halfway between Indian Point and Shoreham. Less is more. I prefer the East River turbines they're testing.

R & D goes where manufacturing goes. Its a long article but worth reading. Relevant to the topic.

Also, read the article today itself.. tomorrow(sunday) it'll be moved to the archive section.

"I am just waiting.... waiting.... for a tourist from Russia go to Washington, take a few innocuous pictures, and get picked up by Homeland Security."

It HAS already happened. Except the tourist was from Nepal, and he was taking pictures in New York. See the New York Times (registration required...) article on a buddhist from Nepal falsely arrested for MONTHS for taking tourist photos in New York.

That story so well demonstrates what is wrong with PATRIOT Act and similar increases in powers of the law enforcement agencies to detain people without proper judicial process.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the PATRIOT Act

Americans read of course... but they read garbage. Self-help books and tv guides. Basically the only reading that actually creates an active and critical mind is barely covered in high school. Then maybe a few required courses on the classics in college. Active reading of nonfiction and literature does not permeate in American culture. Sure you have book clubs etc... but thats the vast minority.

Just take a look at the NYTimes Bestseller list.

Its filled with pulp fiction about nothing meaningful, self-help books on how to make money, how to lose weight (yet we are still fat) and just plain out crap. Most of the nonfiction books are about fiction books (da vinci code anyone).

What if us Americans were deeply involved with John Rawls, Plato, Locke, Marx, Chomsky, Zinn, Derrida, Heidegger, Mohammend, Mark, Paul, Lao Tzu, Samjaya, Nagarjuna, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Heinlein, etc.... I guess we'd be a population of smart people.