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IIRC, the Tupolev-144 was largely a carbon copy of Concorde, at least in it's later incarnation. The first prototype (that flew before Concorde) was configured differently. It carried more passengers than Concorde, but was a lot less fuel efficient (It was heavier, and needed more power). Details on the amount of spying that took place can be found here. It seems that Soviet Russia certainly did not have her eye solely on the USA.

Of course, popular theory would suggest the West would never have stooped to spying back, until it was discovered that the famous crash at Le Bourget, which sank the Tupolev's reputation was caused by maneouvres to evade a French Mirage photo-reconaissance jet ;-)

There was a comparitively recent NASA experiment on supersonic transport, using the Tupolev as a basis.

This could be considered OT, but it shows exactly how much those on both sides of the Iron Curtain would throw at a project to keep them one step ahead (Not that I would relish a return to those dark old days).

They put all of the functionality of GDI into the silicon

GDI from Command & Conquer? When are they going to put Nod into silicon?

Oh, that GDI. The Windows graphics driver interface. I guess pretty soon, someone will come out with an expansion card that pretty much runs all of the WinAPI in hardware. O u c h .

Those are not the only bad numbers. How about this example from the article:
The promise of HDTV, crystal-clear images with more than double the resolution of today's televisions...

According to this article, HDTV has six times the resolution. 1920 x 1080 vs. 720 x 486 (2,073,600 pixels vs. 349,920 pixels).

What's needed is something more like PBS, but online

Such as... PBS Online? :-)

www.pbs.org

Disclaimer: My own work is on pbs.org. I'm the lead tech on the Zoom web site. :-)

I, for one, consider happenings on the market of interest, and well worthy of slashdot.org's attention. Not only have the Web and tech stocks become the darling of Wall Street, the Web and tek is refashioning the culture and business' image of itself. Thus, if, hypothetically, a fall in stocks is hung, unjustifiably, on the necks of "new business entrepeneurs", that could well affect me, and many of us.

Even now, there are important dissenting opinions as to how good it is for the culture that the Web and computing is Center Stage, with a good dose of worry dashed in that computing may get a bad name. There is, after all, a tradition of this in the computing industry: Expert systems, strong typing, and the DoD's Ada all promised lots more than they could possibly deliver and never recovered from the Public Disappointment.

OTOH, there is a really interesting analysis by Bob Cringely about how ridiculous some of the pricing of the stock market is, and how remarkably inefficient it seems to be, despite the claims of, for instance, the Chicago school and monetarists. (I might add, at risk of introducing extraneous detail and incurring the Wrath of Moderation, that one needs, uh, patience going to the latter two sites.)

I admit that I haven't been following the Mozilla story as closely I as I probably should be over the last few months, but now I see the reason that there isn't a fully functional browser release. Since when has the Mozilla project been about a platform?

Since when? Since the beginning, at least for me. I remember to read some big gun at Netscape talking about the possibility of a new platform, years ago. This was the only reason I read see that could explain Microsoft giving a browser away.

Microsoft is always afraid of someone taking away their lock in the operating system. What could happen if Navigator turned into a platform, and you could try any OS you damn please, because all that apps you used to love and hate are there? Read Cringely's column about this.

This is what IBM has been trying to do for years. And Sun. And God knows who else. Too ambitious? You bet! But if they get to accomplish this, man how different will the computing world be!
--MSM

We have a story that we think is solid. We don't think anybody could ever sue us for libel. There are some twists and turns, and if you get in front of a jury in some states where the people on that jury are all related to people who work in tobacco companies, look out. That's a $15 billion gun pointed at your head. We may opt to get out of the line of fire. that doesn't make me proud, but it's not my money. I don't have $15 billion.

The suit claimed in part that a researcher for Brown & Williamson tobacco, Jeffrey Wigland, would be in violation of his severance contract's non-disclosure clause. The whole thing is well covered at the story's web page.

If you read Cryptonomicon, you heard a lot about tactical litigation. The way Philip Morris and RJR engaged in "tortious interference" against the corporation attempting to run a news story is another real-world example.

The biggest problem with the 60 Minutes debacle was that the decision to pull the story is that the network was up for sale at the time it was made, and that it was made on the recommendation of corporate executives, not news directors. The chairman of CBS received $12M, the general counsel, who recommended to kill the story, received $1.2M. They would not have made that money if Westinghouse didn't buy CBS at $5.6B, and Westinghouse would not have bought the company if it had a $15B lawsuit hanging over it's head.

Ironically, the story did end up making the news, not directly, but in stories by other news agencies, discussing not the spiking allegation itself, but the tobacco industry's litigious efforts to supress it.

--

We have a story that we think is solid. We don't think anybody could ever sue us for libel. There are some twists and turns, and if you get in front of a jury in some states where the people on that jury are all related to people who work in tobacco companies, look out. That's a $15 billion gun pointed at your head. We may opt to get out of the line of fire. that doesn't make me proud, but it's not my money. I don't have $15 billion.

The suit claimed in part that a researcher for Brown & Williamson tobacco, Jeffrey Wigland, would be in violation of his severance contract's non-disclosure clause. The whole thing is well covered at the story's web page.

If you read Cryptonomicon, you heard a lot about tactical litigation. The way Philip Morris and RJR engaged in "tortious interference" against the corporation attempting to run a news story is another real-world example.

The biggest problem with the 60 Minutes debacle was that the decision to pull the story is that the network was up for sale at the time it was made, and that it was made on the recommendation of corporate executives, not news directors. The chairman of CBS received $12M, the general counsel, who recommended to kill the story, received $1.2M. They would not have made that money if Westinghouse didn't buy CBS at $5.6B, and Westinghouse would not have bought the company if it had a $15B lawsuit hanging over it's head.

Ironically, the story did end up making the news, not directly, but in stories by other news agencies, discussing not the spiking allegation itself, but the tobacco industry's litigious efforts to supress it.

--

As has been documented elsewhere, such profiling is dubious at best and harmful at worst. Further, the dubious usefulness of anonymous tips have even been questioned by our current schizophrenic Supreme Court. Anonymous tipping in the hands of angry and powerless high-school students is simply ripe with abusive potential. No program of this kind will be able to successfully prevent school shootings, no matter how good it might make us feel to know it is in place.

- Rev.

Here is a cool applet that simulates an enigma machine.

... and this is how it works.

The latest Cringely has a very interesting take on the vast difference between the judge's way of looking at things and Microsoft's, and how that explains the failure to reach any agreement.

Actually, it is available for purchase through the PBS online store. Though I wouldn't hold your breathuntil your local Blockbuster get's a copy.

(Yes, I work for PBS Online. Yes, I wrote the Station Finder and TV Schedules areas. And yes, it all runs under Apache/Perl/MySQL.)

Click here to get your local listing

If you are having trouble finding out when the show will air in your area, go to this link: whatson and enter your zipcode. Then go to TV schedule and click on monthly program summary. This will show all shows showing for the current month. In my area (Houston, TX) Code Rush doesn't appear to air until April 22 at 5:00am.

If you can get past the liberal propaganda and PC nature of their programs, yes they are generally well done.

Still PBS's time has come and gone... what a waste of my tax money, a big freakin' ad for a failed company.

Gee, I think a lot of PBS shows have an obvious right-wing slant to them. I guess it's all relative.

Government grants (taxes) are only a small part of PBS funding these days - around 16%, as you can see for yourself at PBS Financials.

Government grants to PBS came to about $47 million in 1999, or about 17 cents per US resident.

Well, not the best possible interface, but try this:

http ://www.pbs.org/whatson/stations/fulltext.html?stat ion=KUHT&date=2000-04-01, except substitute your stations call letters and a date from the month you wish to examine. It will bring up the entire month's programming, and you can then use your browsers text search function.

(Let's see, Houston, 4th largest city in the US, lots of high-tech business: Code Rush, 5am, 4/21.
Beautiful.)

. . . here. They must have a lot of faith in it, huh?

darren

Have you heard of Stanley Miller's classic experiment? He mixed several simple molecules (hydrogen, water, methane, and ammonia) and exposed the mixture to an electrical spark discharge. This had the result of producing complex molecules including some of the amino acids which are part of living systems. The only "agent" required was the energy supplying the electrical discharge. More details here. There are many other examples of physical and chemical systems exhibiting self-organizing behaviour, with no violations of the thermodynamic laws.

For a less philosophical look at present robot mechanisms, check if your local PBS station is showing the "Robot Wars" contest this week.

The GE resercher's name was Ralph Mosher. That is the correct spelling. Anyhow, I have found two references to him:

One on Scientific American Frontiers. This link has a transcript of what is on the video (the episode you can buy).

The other link is from an article on "Industrial Lingerie" (WTF!? Cute girls, though), on a site called monk.com. The reference is on "page" 2.

Enjoy!

Tudor Parfitt researched an African tribe called the Lemba, who claimed to be of Jewish decent. As well as the anthropological evidence, DNA was used to link the Lemba with Jews, specifically the Cohen modal haplotype. (Cohanim being the Jewish priests.)

So I'm thinking DNA could also tell us who Kennewick Man is, and trace the history of American indians. Where in Asia did they come from? Were there any migrations from Europe? And are they related to the Ainu?

Tudor Parfitt researched an African tribe called the Lemba, who claimed to be of Jewish decent. As well as the anthropological evidence, DNA was used to link the Lemba with Jews, specifically the Cohen modal haplotype. (Cohanim being the Jewish priests.)

So I'm thinking DNA could also tell us who Kennewick Man is, and trace the history of American indians. Where in Asia did they come from? Were there any migrations from Europe? And are they related to the Ainu?

Great answer! At the risk of being redundant. This sounds like typical FUD tactics to compete against the Playstation 2. For a history of the relationship between M$ and Sony, check out Cringely's article. It's obvious M$ is afraid of losing the set-top box war with Sony, so the FUD machine is in high gear.

Until there's an actual box on their web site, this will be vaporware as far as I'm concerned.

You can pretty much count on Cringely for a good column every week but the one about the X box is last weeks (changes every Thursday)and you can get to it by clicking here.

Cringely has a nice article about this over at pbs.

Cringely has a nice article about this over at pbs.

They didn't unveil anything, they just put up a website! I don't see a product.

All this is is vaporware 2.0: Vaporware with a little but of cash spent on a logo and a colorful (yet ultimately disposable) website.

I'm gonna side with RXC on this one. Same old MS vaporware tactics.

This article contains the best discussion of why we can't trust MS's intentions with regards to consle gaming any more than in ay other arena. The strategy is textbook by now: perceive of a threat to your hegemony, release specs for a super-powerful, industry-breaking alternative that you may or may not have plans to produce, and the 3d party developers for the competitor will hesitate -- "should i wait and develop for this monster supermachine that MS is building?" Development for the competitor is slowed, and everybody loses except MS, who hides in the vapor until they can address the threat in some way that doesn't actually involve producing anything.

This sucks for gamers. I, for one, am pissed as hell at the idea that MS is worried about digital home delivery from Sony's PS2, and has chosen to f up *my* gaming opportunities because of it.

*sigh* Is anything safe from them? i would be willing to wager that if they announced a super automobile, 300 mph top speed, 900 mpg, with 200 cupholders, a heads-up in-winshield dvd player and a laser for shooting at pedestrians, to be introduced, maybe, in 2003, ford's stock would drop. this is vapor. it's marketing, and it sucks.

This would be ironic if Cringely was right in his recent column.

"What game developers should keep in mind is Microsoft's long tradition in the PC software business of introducing titles and initiatives that eventually just fade away."

Nvidia wouldn't be the first folks caught like that. Still, I was looking forward to getting a GeForce 256.

This is what Robert Cringley is talking about. Gates is freaked out about PS2, so he has thrown out some Vaporware in the hopes of drawing away some developers to slow the growth of PS2 and devices like these. he can afford to pay a few hundred programmers for a dead end project. If he is able to kill or hurt a possible competitor, even better.

I Cringley

In this case MS is coming into the game at a minimum $300 handicap since that's the cost in Win2K licenses it will have to eat before lousing money on that 32 meg RAM gap and the 200 Meg storage gap. ( that's how much extra you need to make it useful ).

Set top box, Computing appliance, Game console, MP3 jukebox. The names vary but in the end the functionality will not. MS will have to "pull an Amazon" and defy a few fundamental laws of mathematics in order to make the X box fly. However according to Cringly they probably have no intention of ever selling them in volume. His contention that it exists only to "confuse the market makes sense.

As for the "i600" Ingram is a volume business. They don't know how to sell small numbers of high priced crap. As such they will probably be able to make a profit selling these boxes at $200 to $300 in volumes of 50k to 100k per week. At that rate you can tune your manufacturing processes to make the thing profitable.

Note that it just says "600MHz Processor". This might be another Linus machine ( I.e. One with Linux as software and Cruso for Hardware ).

The law of gravity may be violated next.

I have to agree... and I live in the US.

This used to be such a great country, up until about 1930. Then, THEY took over. I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the great depression or the "big crash" of 1929 or not, but that's about when everything started going to hell. Giant mega-corporations were in control of everything in the form of monopolies; US Steel, Standard Oil; Carnegie and Westinghouse and Rockefeller and a very few others. William Randolph Hearst managed to rile up so many people about marijuana that he got it illegalized rather easily. This is pretty common knowledge, but what isn't common knowledge is why. Hemp had been very very prized up to that point for its incredibly useful nature; there are World War I posters that proclaim "Hemp for victory!" to encourage people to grow hemp for fibers (rope, clothing, paper) and biomass to make fuel out of. Then Hearst came along and decided hemp was threatening his timber industry, so it had to go. THE single most useful plant on earth, and one asshole manages to destroy it in the minds of the idiot sheep of America just by spreading lies about it that nobody ever bothered to verify. It had nothing to do with its drug properties as he claimed; it had everything to do with his greed. It all goes to show that he who controls the media (Hearst was the newspaper baron at that time, controlling almost all media outlets) controls what is perceived by the sheep out there as "reality." And that's exactly what 99.999% of the population of the US is..... sheep who never do any research for themselves, preferring to let "someone else" do it so they have more time to sit on their asses watching TV and eating microwaved meals that are about as nutritious as molten wax. We as a country have lost our way and our sovreignty and our very souls to Big Business.

And this is just another prime example of the pure evil that are corporations these days. In fact, it's about the third one I've seen just this week... and it's only Wednesday. We average about one major violation of ethics, morality, law, or just plain old common courtesy per day in this country, and every time who's doing it? The RIAA. The MPAA. The CIA. The NSA. The WTO. The World Bank. The UN. One arm of the government or another. China (both in mainland China and Tibet). Everywhere you look, it's the same; mayhem and chaos propagated by the Elite Few against people without any possibility of being able to defend themselves physically, financially, spiritually, or emotionally. It's always the easy targets that get hit too; 16 year olds in Europe, small start-ups in Canada, some guy named Coolio who may or may not have been the Coolio, etc. As far as all these gluttonous companies are concerned, they take priority over us, our property, our money, our lives, our very existence... and it's just a matter of time before there's an upwelling, a rebellion, against them and their totalitarian crap.

Picture the US before it was the US. Mid-1700's. England still ruled the land with harsh, unjust taxes and imperial apathy; as long as the raw materials and other goods kept flowing from the west side of the Atlantic to the east side, England didn't care what it had to do to maintain the status quo. And what happened? People got tired of it. Sick to death of it. Back then, people weren't sheep; they were hardened veterans of life, bruised by years of labor to benefit someone they'd never even met. Bitter, resentful people. Even the landowners, the businessmen, hated England as much as the laborers. And they, being the hardened capable people that they were, did something about it, didn't they? The American Revolution was the result, and this country was wrested from England's greedy claws bit by bit until finally they couldn't hold on anymore. And here we are, 200+ years later, in exactly the same position, but under a slightly different bootheel.

What to do, what to do... Are we hardened enough to do whatever it takes to rid ourselves of the blight of corporatism in this country? Are we capable of a long protracted fight against all that is evil? After all, We the People outnumber Them, the Leashholders by about, ohhh, a million to one... the only way we can lose is by never bothering to fight. Admittedly, the way the system is set up now means that just about the only means at our disposal that would be effective are illegal by one definition or another, but... but dammit, I'm sick of being a part of a country.. nay, a species... that screws its own over just for a little more cash. I'm sick of human suffering being ignored (or even caused) by the governments of this planet. I'm sick of Big Money being the driving force behind the perpetuation of damn near everything that is wrong with the human race (organized religions being the other half of that particular equation), and I'm especially sick of feeling powerless to do anything about it. Because I, the individual, am powerless. You, the individual, whoever you are, are equally powerless. But in a more global, unified sense, just who are we?

Think about it. This is the Information Age. The entire WORLD runs on the machines that we invent, set up, operate, maintain, repair, and control. Do you think there are any chairmen of the board, or vice presidents of marketing, or deputy directors in the FBI, who know *anything* about computers, networking, the net, etc? Could your boss, even, go into a PIX firewall and re-enable port 80 so that The Roads Can Roll? Who here remembers Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"?

"Men make an arbitrary code, and because it is not right,
they try to make it prevail by might.
The moral law does not want any champion.
Its asserters do not go to war.
It was never infringed with impunity."

"The law will never make men free;
it is men who have got to make the law free.
They are the lovers of law and order,
who observe the law when the government breaks it."

The more laws there are, especially laws that protect big business at the expense of the workers that (after all) support these businesses with the sweat of their brows and their proverbial strong backs, the less free we are as a people... not just America, but everywhere. And the longer we allow it to go on, the longer we're going to keep getting screwed by people like Jack Valenti (who is just a man, after all). I mean, why shouldn't we just go on letting the government put plutonium in us just to see what it does (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we let them do things like using human subjects as unwitting guinea pigs (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we.

Something has to be done... and fast, before they have obedience microchips implanted in our brains or something and we all become Financial Borg, helpless to do anything but service the collective... err, I mean, the powerholders of the world, our masters but for a little disobedience. It would be worth it just to get rid of all these insipid little animated banner ads on Slashdot and elsewhere, just sitting there sucking up my CPU and bandwidth for no reason (since I never look at them and probably nobody else on earth does now, either)...

I'll just sit here quietly now and wait for the Trilateral Commission's Black Ops Squad to come and pick me up.

A good link explaining the possibility of time travel using a wormhole is here.


Click here to crash Windows98

On "Through a Loophole, Darkly: Why the Internet Exemption From Taxes is Not Entirely a Good Thing", Bob Cringely warns of loopholes.
--

Hong Kong party line

There are funny tidbits like they only have 2 T1 lines for the whole country :) (they use proxies). Anyway, that's how it was in '97.

Why go to all the expense PBS has it free on its website:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ame x/bomb/sfeature/mapablast.html

Not really. The classic DDoS attack ( AKA what took down Yahoo ) simply has no defiance. Apart from perhaps having separate sites under different names with the same Data onboard.

What most people miss about those DDoS attacks is that they didn't actually overload the servers. On the contrary, they loaded down the pipes so much that the servers sat idle for hours.

See cringly's latest rant for more details ( not from him but a letter writer ). The only practical protection is to secure machines to prevent them becoming zombies in someone else's DDoS army.

As Cringley reported, Microsoft's entry into the streaming media market is causing waves. There's no doubt in my mind that if M$ wasn't trying to 0wn this market, that Real Networks would continue to ignore Linux.

I sometimes wonder if Linux will ever be seen by business as something other than a loss leader. Why do only floundering companies come to Linux? Why can't Linux attract mainstream developers on the strength its userbase and programming API?

Don't miss this - according to the story there's an upcoming documentary on the the who inside Netscape Mozilla coding scene from '98....

PBS documentary

Cringly mentions it in his latest column. The winning PDA will be one which gives away programming tools for third party applications. Good tools and good documentation for doing that will be a key.

If I had a PDA tightly integrated with my PC (running Linux, of course), that I could write new applications for easily, blah blah blah. Okay, all of my conditions are met today by one or more players in the market. I don't think it will come down to one killer app. There will be different applications for different markets.

If you didn't read the article do so, it makes more sense than many of the comments I've read here do. Moving right along.

Anyone who claims that standardized test are anything like fair or who gives some sort of credibility to the idea that they measures how well you will do in collage is ignorant of the facts. Check out Frontlines special on the SAT. To paraphrase the CEO of Kaplan (the number one provider of SAT tutoring), "For $400 I can raise any kids score 200 points in a week. Did I make them smarter? No, I just taught him the tricks to do well on a standardized test. So what does it mean then. It means money not intelligence will get you into college". Or from the vice president of the company that puts out the SAT (EM?, I forget), "We know that these test don't measure intelligence, but its a metric that is now the de facto standard". No one, not even the people most intimately involved with the test, believes standardized measures anything credible.

And when did disadvantaged and minority become synonymous. Poverty is the most significant disadvantage. If you live in a poor neighborhood, you pay less in property taxes which means local schools get less money and in turn, you get less than desirable teachers, text books you probably are NOT allowed to take home, etc, etc. So now you want to take a $50 test (hope you can afford it) with no other preparation. I will bet you $1000 to $1 that anyone whose parents make over $100,000 a year will do better than anyone who's parent (notice the singular) makes less than $15,000 a year. And I will win 99 times out of 100. Poverty is cyclical. The barriers to the world we live in (yes us, reading this on our computers), are extremely difficult to surmount and it isn't just will or effort that is required. You need a family infrastructure, you need money and you need a whole hell of a lot of guts.

At least these people at Colorado College are trying to make a more fair way. This may not be the answer but it's an effort to find a solution to a system that obviously doesn't work.


-------
Without spell check I'd be extinct by now.

Charging for software wasn't really a bad idea during the 80s. Selling software was used in a way to propell the industry which was ready and waiting to be rocked forward. During the 80s the Internet wasn't really all that big and most people that developed software didn't have a clue about networking and this would've REALLY held back open-source projects.

Everyone really needs to look at what happened during this time period again. If it wasn't Bill Gates is would've just been someone else. Look at the Internet revolution on the early 90s; It turned out to just be people in the right place at the right time. I'm thinking that everyone needs to watch Triumph of the Nerds from PBS.

Triumph of the Nerds

Nerds 2.0.1

Charging for software wasn't really a bad idea during the 80s. Selling software was used in a way to propell the industry which was ready and waiting to be rocked forward. During the 80s the Internet wasn't really all that big and most people that developed software didn't have a clue about networking and this would've REALLY held back open-source projects.

Everyone really needs to look at what happened during this time period again. If it wasn't Bill Gates is would've just been someone else. Look at the Internet revolution on the early 90s; It turned out to just be people in the right place at the right time. I'm thinking that everyone needs to watch Triumph of the Nerds from PBS.

Triumph of the Nerds

Nerds 2.0.1

At PBS.

Animals fall into two broad classes, deuterostomes and protostomes. For protostomes, the mouth forms before the anus. Starfish, jellyfish and insects and protostomes. In deuterostome development, the anus forms first. Vertebrates are among the deuterostomes. The early cleavage of protostomes is spiral. For deuterostomes, it is radial.

If one removes cells from a protostome blastula after the first few divisions, a deformed, partial organism will develop. Cell differentiation starts early. Deuterostomes differentiate later. An animal can develop normally after removing a few cells from a blastula even after the first few divisions.

Once cells begin differentiating, it is hard to clone them. Dolly was such a feat because the managed to reset that cell differentiation clock removing the DNA from a zygote, putting in the parent's DNA and doing some chemical magic.

This feat was accomplished with a mouse a long time ago. I saw it on Nova. Those researchers also fused two separate, very tiny embryos. One embryo was from a line of white mice; the other from a line of black mice. They got a mouse with patches of both colors.

Splitting a tiny embryo to make several embryos is an accomplishment. The work is difficult and delicate. Even though cell differentiation begins later in deuterostomes, I imagine it is still challenging to get the cells to survive and then to grow normally.

Cloning usually means making a genetically identical copy. It comes from the Greek word for twig in reference to the horticultural practice of cutting and grafting small twigs to make clones. Most pecan trees in the USA actually have the roots of another species. Pecan trees do not have sturdy roots. Grafting them onto strong roots solves that problem. These scientists, however, did not make copies of an adult. They cannibalized an embryo. Cloning is still good enough, I think.

The most insightful commentary I've seen on the merger so far isn't anything in this article -- it's Robert X. Cringely's take. Cringely proposes that, rather than seeing the merger as a sign of AOL optimism about its future, it should be seen as a sign of AOL's pessimism, especially regarding the market fortunes of Net companies.

It makes sense when you think about it. AOL stock has gone through the stratosphere based largely on the idea that AOL is a 'pure Internet play'. Buying a big old media company will end this perception and put a drag on the growth of the stock value. So why should AOL buy Time Warner outright, when they could get the same access to TW content through a less formal partnership, while preserving their hyper-performing stock value?

Cringely argues that AOL is betting that being a 'pure Internet play' isn't going to be a huge benefit for much longer -- in fact, it may become a liability if and when the market bubble bursts. If that happens, suddenly the Amazons of the world look like awful investments as their valuations are "corrected". But AOL doesn't look as bad, because it's got real-world value based on its ownership of Time Warner's many established brands, as opposed to the purely theoretical value that many Net companies have. In other words, AOL knows that it's had a terrific run at the tables, and it's cashing out its chips and socking the money into the bank before its streak turns sour. It's buying insurance while it can still afford to. It's turning its virtual wealth, represented by stock valuation (which could disappear overnight if the public mentality changed) into real wealth, in the form of Time Warner's media properties (which will hold value no matter how the winds blow).

Is this the complete rationale behind the merger? Well, probably not. But viewed in this light it sure does look like a vote of no confidence in the Internet Economy on the part of Steve Case & Co.

-- Jason A. Lefkowitz

Jim Lehrer interviewed Case & Levin last night. text & audio available

Whether they're the same company or not isn't the point, they will be banned from communicating with each other no matter what Bill orders from on high.
It's called a Chinese Wall (read about half way down this page to see what I mean)
Basically, this means everyone gets to see the same API ('cos IE and OS teams aren't allowed to communicate), no optimizations for each other etc.

KEYBOARD DEBATE
DECEMBER 27, 1995
TRANSCRIPT - Interview with Stoll.

A documentary transcript with bits from Stoll.

An interview with him on his book "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage"



LetterJ