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Take a look at the article from 'The Pulpit' from 2001.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2001/pulpit_20010628_000421.html

It cost him $1400 at that time, but things are much less expensive now.

In particle physics, proton decay is a hypothetical form of radioactive decay in which the proton decays into lighter subatomic particles, usually a neutral pion and a positron. Proton decay has not been observed. There is currently no evidence that proton decay exists.

Proton decay is one of the few observable effects of the various proposed GUTs, the other major one being magnetic monopoles. Both became the focus of major experimental physics efforts starting in the early 1980s. Proton decay was, for a time, an extremely exciting area of experimental physics research. To date, all attempts to observe these events have failed. Recent experiments at the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov radiation detector in Japan indicate that if protons decay at all, their half-life must be at least 10^35 years.

Stellar Era Ends: During this era, which will last from 100 million years to one trillion years after the Big Bang (and is the era we are currently in), most of the energy generated by the universe will be in the form of stars burning hydrogen and other elements in their cores. This long period will give way to an even longer lingering death for our universe.

Or you can apparently do this....

I Cringley article on hopping a wifi signal over a mountain.

Polar bears make very poor harry solar solar collectors. Their white fur has a very high albedo and their high latitude habitat results in high Angle of incidence. Generally speaking, grizzlies and black bears are a much better choice of harry solar collectors given their fur color and more equatorial habitat. So the correct solution is to hunt down all the grizzlies and black bears for their skins to make super efficient solar panels so that we can stop the global warming and thus save all the polar bears. There is also the case of the ghost bears, but I'm not clear on their IR albedo.

First, Gartner is pathetic.

Second, there are some virtual worlds launched by businesses that have been astoundingly successful. They're called MMORPGs.

But what if there were caching? Something like Robert X Cringely wrote about a while back.

As Bruce Fein (Associate deputy attorney general 1981-83) said, "the ultimate result of a signing statement is that the president exercises what's known as an absolute line-item veto. That's something the Supreme Court held was unconstitutional in the case called Clinton v. New York in 1998".

How about showing you the history of it, and the good and bad that's come of it?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/

the downside from deregulation came from the fact that people's wages were artificially high from barriers to trade. when those barriers were removed they thought that they'd still be earning the same amount of money because people would naturally want to buy higher priced goods believing them to be higher quality.

Turns out that reputations for quality have to be built, and tend to be significantly more important in smaller economic communities, and are significantly weaker in global markets. Cost matters more when there are no barriers to trade. Naturally many people have issues with this, but it does eventually work out for the better.

According to the guys that created the IBM PC (Bill Lowe and Jack Sams), they did it this way because they thought they were running out of time in an important new market (PCs). The Apple II had been introduced in 1977 and was a runaway success. IBM noticed Apple IIs being used in the engineering departments of their clients.

IBM's top management met in August 1979 to discuss their "PC crisis." In another year, the PC industry might be too big for even IBM to take on. IBM chairman Frank Carey knew that it took "four years and three hundred people to do anything" at IBM. Bill Lowe, who would lead the IBM PC development team, claimed that his team could provide their product in a year. Carey gave Lowe two weeks to set up a proposal. Two weeks later, Carey bought it.

From the transcript:

• [Cringely narrating] He knew the company was in a quandary. Wait another year and the PC industry would be too big even for IBM to take on. Chairman Frank Carey turned to the department heads and said HELP!!!

  Bill Lowe: Head, IBM IBM PC Development Team 1980: He kind of said well, what should we do, and I said well, we think we know what we would like to do if we were going to proceed with our own product and he said no, he said at IBM it would take four years and three hundred people to do anything, I mean it's just a fact of life. And I said no sir, we can provide with product in a year. And he abruptly ended the meeting, he said you're on Lowe, come back in two weeks and tell me what you need.

  [Cringely narrating] An IBM product in a year! Ridiculous! Down in the basement Bill still has the plan. To save time, instead of building a computer from scratch, they would buy components off the shelf and assemble them -- what in IBM speak was called 'open architecture.' IBM never did this. Two weeks later Bill proposed his heresy to the Chairman.

  Bill Lowe: And frankly this is it. The key decisions were to go with an open architecture, non IBM technology, non IBM software, non IBM sales and non IBM service. And we probably spent a full half of the presentation carrying the corporate management committee into this concept. Because this was a new concept for IBM at that point.

You can always take a look at Nova.

A PBS documentary that contains a lot of information on The Big Bang as well as an introduction into String Theory and Quantum Theory later on in the videos. Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

Excellent post- the parent can't be modded up high enough to stress the importance of the point raised. The one other point that I think needs to be stressed is that a lot of folks talk about subsidies because of countries like china. This tells me that they are not worried about global warming, just about doing something to impact the western countries. Taxing citizens (to provide subsidies) in order to try to promote carbon output reduction without penalizing countries that are still environmentally ignorant is just plain dumb. It makes no impact environmental impact if I reduce my emissions while you raise yours.

    Far more imporant is the overfishing in Africa. http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/episodes/dangerouscatch/experts/stench.html I'd rather see a tax on foreign fish than subsidies on "clean" power

Jere's a link:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/october01/civil2.html

Obviously, legal minds differ on the exact extent of protection, this context was with respect to excluding non-citizens from entry.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080215_004309.html This thing went on too long to be credible. I don't respect MSFT, but don't for a minute think that its management is as incompetent as it would have to be to buy a company that has so little to offer in the larger scope of things. This has been a great way to make MSFT look powerful, and YHOO look like a weak patsy - which is exactly what YHOO is.

... might just come out. This instead of focusing on this distraction of, and excuse used, for invading iraq.

Hint: Wrongful World Stock Market Manipulation

Follow the money winners and losers, Dot com boom and bust, worldcom, enron, etc..

9/11 WTC building #7 containing SEC investigation evidence..... Building #7 intentionally destroyed.

There's also the possibility of human-based global dimming:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimming.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

This can *possibly* mitigate global warming effects. Jury's still out, afaict. I agree with the sentiment of not fretting about the cause - let's just focus on realistic solutions!

They don't have to mandate it, just make everyone eligible and the private insurance companies won't cover you as a primary -- just like Medicare.

There already exists "universal" insurance plans for two segments of the population, Medicare for everyone 65+ and one for military personnel (I can't remember what it's called).

There was a great special on Frontline called Sick Around The World about 5 capitalist democracies (United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland) and how they provide universal healthcare. The show focuses on if the US can learn lessons from these countries.

More information on the role of the F-117 can be found at Frontline, AirToAirCombat.com, FAS as well as other sources on the intertubes. Last link has pictures of the aircraft as well as pictures and a non-Flash video of the aftermath of the only F-117 to ever be shot down. In this case, over Serbia.

the so called judges don't know a thing about Tibet, the history, the human conditions in Tibet, and talking through their noise about nothing. No wonder the Chinese people are angry.

I am the poster to whom you are replying.

What am I blind to? What am I ignorant of? Instead of calling me ignorant, tell me what I am ignorant of. I will listen to facts!

You see, I'm sympathetic to your argument that the Western media values sensationalism -- which sells newspapers -- over the truth. (The US once got into a war with Spain for almost entirely that reason, when the sensationalist press falsely reported that the USS Maine was sunk by a Spanish mine.) That's why I've been doing some research. Motivated by these arguments on Slashdot, I've taken the time to actually look for a good, logical case for Chinese control of Tibet.

It has taken a little bit of wading through ad-hominem attacks and other logical fallacies like those addressed in my previous post -- but I have found some real fact-based arguments. So here's the short story of how I found them:

I first stopped here . One can understand to some extent the arguments given -- and see why Chinese people are angry -- but they tend to suffer from the logical fallacies I addressed previously, so I moved on, looking for a logically coherent case for Chinese control of Tibet.

My next stop was here. Don't read the article itself; read lingjiewang's reply. The problem is that it mostly lambasts the British media, rather than addressing the accusations themselves. So, although I could sympathize with much of what was said, it still didn't pass the logic test for me.

So I followed her link, and ended up here. Finally, I found someone making a logical, well-reasoned case for the Chinese side, instead of falling back on ad-hominem arguments.

The arguments are, for the most part,

1 - Before China came, Tibet was a backwards feudal society where what was essentially slavery was practiced, and women were treated terribly. The average Tibetan is more free now than he was before China came.

2 - China has invested a lot of resources in Tibet, and Tibetans have seen concrete benefits: Life expectancy and other measures of quality of life have gone steadily up thanks to China.

3 - Claims of Chinese massacres of the Tibetan population are exaggerated. The numbers given are too large, it is said, to be plausible.

4 - Tibet is not being Sinoized: Han are not replacing Tibetans, Tibetans remain the majority of the population, and Tibetan culture is still very much alive and well.

Some of these arguments may well be valid, but I can't help but notice the striking similarity between them and the arguments Europeans used to justify their colonial empires. For instance, here is an excerpt from the poem, "The White Man's Burden," by Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
[...]
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Here, Kipling is essentially saying, "We white men selflessly lift the poor savages from their ignorance; we bring them the light of civilization, and though they resent us for it, this work is good because it improves their qu

The false "DOS was vaporware" version of what happened often gets modded up on Slashdot. This is the version told on that stupid made-for-TV, "based on a true story" docudrama Pirates of the Silicon Valley . A much better telling of what actually happened (with actual interviews with Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Jack Sams of IBM, and Tim Patterson of SCP) is available from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds (transcript of the relevant part available here).

The false "DOS was vaporware" version of what happened often gets modded up on Slashdot. This is the version told on that stupid made-for-TV, "based on a true story" docudrama Pirates of the Silicon Valley . A much better telling of what actually happened (with actual interviews with Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Jack Sams of IBM, and Tim Patterson of SCP) is available from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds (transcript of the relevant part available here).

I'd appreciate very mcuh if you could just spend a few minutes read through the following PBS post by M.A.Jones. I couldn't have done a better job summarizing all these: http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=68073

Here is one of the deepest discussion on Tibet I have seen which include many reference including statistics from academic source which may relate to your questions.
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=68073&sid=ce0b20590dd445725153c83b5ef21c7f

An intersting take on the lead-up and execution of the war in Iraq.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

For why Chinese people are angry over 'fair' and 'unbiased' Western media, please check the not so beautiful facts at http://www.anti-cnn.com/

For the 'peaceful' protests in Tibet, please check
http://www.peaceintibet.com/memory.html

For anyone interested in an objective opinion on Tibet from an Australian professor teaching in China, please check:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=68073&postdays=0&postorder=asc&topic_view=&start=0

Jack Cafferty, a resident curmudgeon at CNN, charged the Chinese people with a highly racism and despicable assault by saying, "They (Chinese) are basically the same bunch goons and thugs they have been in the past fifty years." (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0804/09/sitroom.03.html)
CNN and Cafferty refused to applogy to Chinese people for those comments.

Iowa corn is not food. Industrial corn farmers don't eat their corn. Nobody buys the corn that could become ethanol as a raw food item.

Yet, we still eat it. How? Agribusiness corn is essentially a feat of chemical engineering that turns sunlight, soil components & anhydrous ammonia into starch & oil. Just add water, and wait a season. Processed starches & oil become cheap food, but the raw material never started out that way.

Watch 'Independent Lens' feature 'King Corn' sometime (plays on your leftist commie pinko PBS station periodically, http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn/).

Why not just grow food? Why not grow a more efficient ethanol crop, like switchgrass or camelina?

These questions, and more, have nothing to do with the PATRIOT act.

Cheers!

LAPD is notorious for violent and abusive behavior. For those of us old enough to remember, officer Frank Serpico (of movie fame) exposed their corruption in the 70's and was gunned down by officers for it. They actually had officers convicted of being hitman, such as Richord Ford and Robert von Villas, although that was in the 80's. In the 1990's, we have this variety of killings by and and convictions of LAPD members: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/scandal/cron.html.

I don't see how randomizing their patrols will help such a historically corrupt department much, unless it helps prevent them from taking bribes from smugglers with regular routes. *THAT* might actually be a benefit of such a scheme, although it's not difficult to beat if you learn to understand the 'randomization' system.

explain to me what issues are there for which in 2008 we still have to resort to sub-sonic air flights?

Because when you go supersonic, fuel consumption triples.

I'm surprised that you didn't go into Horace Mann and Jefferson's efforts to create a public education system in DC that failed miserably because it wasn't within the constitutional powers of the federal government to get involved in education. He stated something like it would work with a state who wold have the authority to create and fund a public education system but in Washington DC, they had to rely on donations from the public.

Of course most of his problems and probably the first failing of the first public education system in the US stemmed from the constitutional powers granted to the federal government. I don't have a link to this but PBS did a show on public education a while back that illustrated this story quite nicely. See if this would link works. Sadly I don't think it would offer anything useful except maybe more information as a starting point.

Here's more about the Time-Warner merger: AOL/Time Warner Merger. Quote: "AOL Time Warner announced Wednesday it was reporting a $45.5 billion quarterly loss to account for the declining value of its flagship America Online property -- bringing the company to post an annual loss of nearly $100 billion, the largest annual loss ever in corporate history. (1/30/03)"

Robert X. Cringely had an interesting 3 part series on education that wrapped up last week. His last part was about how video games are the inevitable educational tool of the future. I actually thought it was the weakest of his three parts, but maybe I'm too old to see it.

I'd put my money on the Komodo Dragon it's bite is so septic that there has been one documented case of a human being bitten by one and surviving after a 6 months hospital stay. They must have a hell of an immune system just to swallow their own saliva!

If its not illegal, its fair game.

Before that, all I had was the used book store that sold bargain CD's. $2-$6 per CD wasn't so bad a premium to pay for something I might enjoy. And they were more than happy to buy it back for $.25-$1.00. So more of a rental service.

I'm waiting for digital radio to really fly. Stations can now afford to start dedicating air time to music that the labels wouldn't allow on the air (due to promoting the current flavor of the week) and hopefully that means a lot of experimentation or even better, an acute departure from top 40 radio. On a side, I've been absolutely loving TPT's soundstage which doesn't always play something I like, but it's enough for me to start supporting public TV. (I currently contribute to a local Christian station and a local Jazz station)

The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.

We already did pay for it. We were promised 45megabit bidirectional connections. We gave the telco's over 200 billion dollars for it. That money was stolen.

• Tax Break Prompts Millionaires To Create Private Foundations: Many of these same "feel-good" workers, though, have their own opinion about private foundations. And it isn't pretty. In the best of all worlds, they say, private foundations, like their public counterparts, would help address problems like hunger or illiteracy; in truth, they charge, such charities tend to address the whims and agendas of their benefactors, whose motivations don't always fit the notion of "charity."
• The trustees' perk that keeps on giving: The foundation's accountant, Martin Logies of Sunnyvale, Calif., defended the benefits, saying they had been approved by the foundation's board of directors. But he acknowledged that Sara and Anders Kierulf are the board's only members, and that they approved the benefits for themselves. As to the work the Kierulfs perform for their pay, Logies demurred. "I couldn't give you that information," he said.
• Deduction Ad Absurdum: CEOs Donating Their Own Stock to Their Own Family Foundations: Consistent with their exemption from insider trading law, I find that CEOs' stock gifts occur just prior to significant drops in their firms' stock prices, a pattern that enables the donors to obtain increased personal income tax benefits. This timing is more pronounced when executives donate their own shares to their own family foundations
• Tax Me If You Can: FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions -- created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks -- that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.
• How Tax Shelters Brought Trouble to Billionaire Clan: The panel's senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has been probing offshore tax evasion and money laundering for several years. The panel is also looking into how the elite New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP provided legal advice on offshore tax shelters to wealthy individuals, people familiar with the probe say.

The Chinese government gives the Sudanese government weapons in exchange for oil. The Sudanese government uses those weapons to slaughter civilians in the Darfur region. A representative of the government has actually stating that they delayed a peace agreement to end the north-south civil war in order to make sure they had a "lasting solution in Darfur" (ie, to make sure the region could not recover).

Saying "Foreign involvement and investment in Sudan might actually be helping the place" is ridiculous. It's like saying that you can send 10,000 pounds of cereal to a corrupt African government and actually expect them to pass the food on to their starving citizens. The reason their citizens are starving is precisely because of government corruption and interference. Those people are never going to see the food if you give it to their government.

Likewise, expecting a government that is actively slaughtering its people to somehow pass on any of their profits to those same people is ludicrous. The companies you reference are doing business with the government, not with the country's population, and certainly not with any resident of the Darfur region.

It turns out that "bug" was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878. This is no earthshaking news, of course, but simply reminds me how self-centered we are as an industry and there really isn't much that's truly new.

"Save Darfur has been trying to get China, one of Sudan's largest trading partners, to pressure Sudan's government into stopping the mass killings in Darfur's ongoing civil war."

First, Sudan's north-south civil war is a separate matter from the Darfur genocide. Second, it has not only been Save Darfur, but also the entire UN, that has been trying to pressure China to stop funding the genocide. However, China has refused to budge, and likewise have the powers of the world. The only real progress that has been made is for individual states, universities, and organizations to remove all of their investments in companies that do business with the Sudanese government and indirectly profit from the genocide. Sudanese divestment has influenced many companies to pull out of contracts with Sudan and it is definitely having some effect.

For an excellent introduction to China's role in the Darfur genocide, watch Frontline's special for free online.

To see how much your state congressmen are doing to divest contracts from Sudan, see DarfurScores.Org. The Sudan Divestment Task Force has info on which states and organizations are divesting, and which ones are sitting on their hands.

If they think there isn't money to be made (and can't figure out the potential of giving cable/DSL subscribers free WLAN access on the road as an extra, much like Fon does), well, then, as has been proposed years ago, just let someone else do the job, such as the Baptists.

A while back Cringely had a post about what sounds like a similar tech from Fusion Lighting and one of the drawbacks that he pointed out was that every one of those bulbs became a RF emitter in the 2.4Ghz range and thus would interfere with WiFi and the other numerous devices that use that unlicensed spectrum. This sounds very similiar, but so far no mention of the interference problem. Anybody know if this has the same issues? If it does, then it could be a polluter in both the visible light (as pointed out by many posts above) and RF ranges.

The US has been shutting down video sites for years, faster, and more frequently than China has ever dreamed. Now we're supposed to be appalled because they don't like one or two of the handful that are left? Give me a break. Even in videos where Americans complain about Chinese internet video censorship, we see American internet video censorship. Did nobody notice the blacked out screen denoting "THE FOLLOWING ABC NEWS FOOTAGE COULD NOT BE CLEARED FOR INTERNET USE" about 70% through part 6 of that documentary? American hypocrisy is truly stunning.

[Ralph Spoilsport wrote] Because the energy required to pull hydrogen out of water or methane or petroleum is going to be greater than the energy you get from burning the hydrogen

McMartin is one of my favorite and infuriating examples. Another is the "Little Rascals Daycare" case from North Carolina. On one of the several Frontline specials about the case, a juror actually said that they didn't believe any of the specific charges, but there were so many charges that they felt they had to convict to protect the children. So they knew the people were innocent and they sent them away for life anyway, just to be safe. Wow. "Think of the Children" literally cost a couple of people their freedom for life. The (much) later reprieve doesn't change the fact that a large number of people in a democratically elected constitutional government were willing to submit to a mob mentality when simple logic tells us that there is zero chance that the allegations are true. See the Frontline website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/innocence/etc/sum.html for more infuriating details.

Gene therapy = failure.

Sheer kinetic energy doesn't make robots interesting. What makes it interesting are the extremely difficult AI problems one needs to solve to make an autonomous robot. Nova's Great Robot Race was a facinating program to watch for just that reason. Nobody went particularly fast, and I don't even remember if anyone crashed. What I do remember are the teams weighing the tradeoffs between having sensors on a gimble or using software stabilizing routines. Or the problems involved in using stereovision, or getting the machine to combine color data from cameras and distance data from laser sensors to figure out where the road is. That's what's facinating, and remote control bots don't give us any of that. And the thing is, there's already 2 robot soccer leagues out there, all they'd have to do is televise it.

"but I'd be shocked if we haven't all accidentally sent debug code to production at some point or another."

Yep, even Cheyenne Mountain has done this.

Very similar groups of Black people in Asia reside in relative small numbers in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand in Southeast Asia. In Thailand they are commonly called Sakai. In Malaysia they have been called Orang Asli (Original Man). Pejoratively they are known as Semang, with the connotation of savage. It is very unfortunate that the contributions of these small Black people to monumental high-cultures characterized by urbanization, metallurgy, agricultural science and scripts remain essentially unexamined.

The presence of diminutive Africoids (whom Chinese historians called "Black Dwarfs") in early southern China during the period of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 250 C.E.) is recorded in the book of the Official of the Liang Dynasty (502-556 C.E.). In Taiwan there are recollections of a group of people now said to be extinct called "Little Black Man."

"They were described as short, dark-skinned people with short curly hair....These people, presumably Negritos, disappeared about 100 years ago. Their existence was mentioned in many Chinese documents of the Ching Dynasty concerning Taiwan."

Similar groups of Black people have been identified in Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, and it seems almost certain that at one time a belt of Black populations of this type covered much of Asia.