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Bob: You were in Triumph of the Nerds and did a beautiful job I thought. And of course Steve Jobs was in the show, too. You have a story about that?

Andy: Yeah. Steve came over to my house shortly after it aired in 1996. I asked him what he thought of the documentary. He said he thought it was really good, but when he watched it on TV he thought his comment about Bill Gates having no taste might have been a little too harsh. So he called Bill Gates to apologize.

I don't know how you call Bill Gates, but if you are Steve Jobs you get right through. He said, "Bill I'm calling to apologize. I saw the documentary and I said that you had no taste. Well I shouldn't have said that publicly. It's true, but I shouldn't have said it publicly."

And Bill Gates replied, "I'm glad you called to apologize, Steve, because I thought that was really an inappropriate thing to say."

Steve couldn't help himself, he said, "You know it's true, it's true you have no taste."

And Bill Gates responded to him, saying "Steve, I may have no taste, but that doesn't mean my entire company has no taste."

So Bill admitted he had no taste, but thought it was an unfair slur to say that MICROSOFT had no taste.

From an old Cringley article:

But Gates is still right... no matter how cool these new computers and their software are, they won't be enough for Apple to "win." And here is where we have to understand the difference between winning in Gatespeak and Jobspeak. When Gates speaks about winning he means WINNING, the whole enchilada, mastery of the universe. At this point in his career, every thought that comes out of Bill Gates' mind is grandly strategic. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, thinks solely in terms of tactics, not strategy. His wins are today, tomorrow, next week, next quarter. He revels in every little chance to push people around and make things the way he wants them to be. He can't help it. It was a bad strategy, for example, to snub Gates with Vanity Fair, but in the tactical mind of Steve Jobs, it was brilliant.

In Steve Jobs' mind, he has already won. Those of us who last for a few decades in this business find our own kind of peace and Steve Jobs' is best exemplified by the George Herbert quote, "Living well is the best revenge." Apple's future as a boutique computer company is secure. He dominates Apple completely. When he doesn't feel like being a high tech mogul, he can be a movie mogul, something Gates will never be. In Steve's mind, he has the best of everything. Apple software is cooler than Windows will ever be. Palo Alto, where Jobs lives, is trendier than Seattle. Even Jobs' plane, a Gulfstream V, is cooler than Gates' Challenger 604. It goes on and on. Gates has never even considered this latter point, but I'll guarantee you that Jobs has, and he revels in it.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2002/pulpit_200 20110_000718.html

a) They weren't exactly "modern"
b) Yes, they have, case in point
c) There were a number of factors that contributed to their fall.
      Nova produced an excellent episode about the series of unfortunate events.
      http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/

Some of the highlights as I recall are:

The towers were "cleverly" designed with most of their supporting beams in the outside
walls. This means that having a large object moving at high speed ripping into the
building seriously compromised the structure.

The joints and welding technique used were "sub-par."

There was inadequate fire-shielding of the beams.

Bingo. I think you've also touched, indirectly, on the bigger issue: original content. If you don't have any original content, then you can't well charge admission! Papers that basically just re-run the same wire service reports as everyone else, can't adopt the WSJ's business model, because there are lots of other, cheaper (free) sources for the same thing.

Yep - that's because traditionally, newspapers have been in the news distribution business, as well as the news gathering business. Since distribution got so much easier, quicker, cheaper and better after the advent of widespread internet access (and Google's indexing tech), the traditional newspapers are now finding it a much less lucrative business.

While it sounds like a really good thing (for the general public) that we're able to potentially streamline and improve news distribution so dramatically, it actually has some potentially destructive side effects as well... it turns out that the news-distribution side of the business was actually subsidizing the news-gathering operation, and so as revenues have fallen, the traditional practice of "hard journalism" has suffered.

That's not the only problem with the news, of course - another big one, in the US at least, is that the corporations which run the news outlets now demand that they be highly profitable (especially the TV news operations, which are facing a lot of the same issues as the newspapers are, due to the rise of internet news), and don't see much or any "public service" type of role for the news any more... Frontline recently ran a great report on the news media, covering that and related issues in depth.

It looks like major players are paying $10 USD / Mbps for backbone access.[1] (Yes that paper predicts a short term backbone supply problem.) In my case, that's actually the same rate I'm paying my ISP for 2.5 Mbps. And from the sounds of it, Americans get gouged a lot worse.

Next, I max out at 60 gigs of video in a month (and that means I would have spent all my spare time watching high-quality p2p movies and television and also downloaded a few entire seasons of tv shows and then decided not to watch them, or saved them for later) which averages to 185.19 Kbps.[2] So even as an absolute and total bandwidth whore, I'm using less than 10% of what I'm paying for in terms of backbone costs. This means the money is easily there to pay for building additional backbone capacity, and the ISP doesn't have a fundamental business model problem.

Of course the ISP has "last mile" infrastructure costs but that is something already need to have in place to meet their peak rate guarantees on a Sunday afternoon, and doesn't have additional utilization costs associated with it.

Frankly I think traffic shaping ISPs are just being greedy. At the scale they are operating at it is worthwhile trying to rip off their customers to save a small percentage of what they are raking in.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/media/InternetV ideo0.91.pdf
[2] http://web.forret.com/tools/bandwidth.asp

Bob Cringely did this years ago to get good Internet service to his house over a 10km Wi-Fi link:
First article and followup.

Bob Cringely did this years ago to get good Internet service to his house over a 10km Wi-Fi link:
First article and followup.

For a better look at points along the future timeline of the universe, see here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html

Mitch Kapor, I choose you! http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/006 .html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor

Al Gore should be offered a position in the administration: It would be a shame to waste all those PowerPoint and 3DSMAX skills. Plus the guy can take out a rowdy student with a laser pointer at 500 yards.

Bill Gates? Nay Bill. His first act would be to make all schools buy Microsoft, and recast the 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer' errors on all Government web sites. Then NASA would be forced to rewrite all their software in .NET. And we'd have to listen to him say "Cool" a lot. "Cool" is a cool word, but every time I hear Bill Gates use it the word dies a little.

Not since 21 June 2004: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june04/scot us_6-21.html

MARCIA COYLE: ... Nevada is one of 20 states that has a law that says basically, if a police officer has a reasonable belief that you are involved in a crime and he asks you for identification, you must identify yourself. You don't have to produce a document. But you have to say who you are. This police officer in Nevada was investigating a domestic assault. He stopped Larry Hibble who was possibly the perpetrator of the assault and did ask him to identify himself. Hibble refused 11 times, was arrested under the Nevada law.

JEFFREY BROWN: He left no doubt about it -- 11 times.

MARCIA COYLE: Right; 11 times. He was arrested and fined $250. He turned around and challenged the law saying it violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which protects you against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which says you have a right not to make a self-incriminating statement.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now the court did not buy those two arguments but it was quite close.

MARCIA COYLE: It was. It was a 5-4 decision.

When you add the amount of time, money, kit and effort that'd go into either burning that many optical disks or filling that many harddrives, then connecting them on the other end and reading it out makes it less attractive than fiber optics.

Do we really need a 747? Well, let's see. 15 PB of data, how many 1TB hard drives would that actually be? According to Wikipedia:

1 PB = 10^15.
1 TB = 10^12

Thus, 1 PB could be written as 1,000 TB of data. So 15,000 TB hard drives will do it. Use RAID 5, say 4/5 (where 5 disks replicate 4 images) so we'll add 25%. That brings us to 18,500 HDD with decent redundancy.

The weight of a 3.5" HDD is apparently as much as about 700 grams so we'll say that's around 25 ounces per drive. That's 375,000 ounces, or 23,437 pounds. But a Boeing 747 can carry about 10x that much!

Methinks you've seriously overbuilt your solution. Heck even a little 727 is still way overbuilt. (max load 58,000 pounds) And 727s are dirt cheap nowadays.

But is that actually better?

Fiber optics nowadays can be pushed closed to 1 Tb per second. That's certainly in the range of what we're talking about. Actual numbers looks like 1 Tb per second could conceivably transfer 15 TB every 5.5 days or so, assuming optimal conditions. How much "dark fiber" is there under the ocean? Not much, I'd wager. Meaning this may likely require another cable to be laid == big, expensive, long project.

So the 727 is probably the best bet, since they can get started pretty much right away, and won't have to put together a 5 year project to run cables under the ocean...

Hmm. more curiosity - a 727 burns about 1,800 gallons of fuel every hour - costing around $1.84 per gallon. 3800 miles, about 3000 knots, or 10 hours at 300 Knots... around $65,000 per round trip. Since the budget of the entire project is 6.7 Billion dollars, it would take over 10,000 such trips to equal 10% of the total CERN budget.

In short, it's a deal at twice the price!

Couldn't they just used the words "Microsoft has said it has no plans to sue after alleging patent infringements by open-source vendors."

How about you guys just license these specific patents to OIN, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051110-5553 .html , Oh I remember its that whole sharing thing Bill never understood. I personally lay the blame with his grandmother. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2000/pulpit_200 01123_000672.html

See also Triumph of the Nerds:
Vern Raburn President, The Paul Allen Group I ended up spending Memorial Day Weekend with him out at his grandmother's house on Hood Canal. She turned everything in to a game. It was a very very very competitive environment, and if you spent the weekend there, you were part of the competition, and it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock. And you know and there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing.

Sears earns more money from the interest and late fees the company chargs its credit cardholders than it earns from selling merchandise.
That is why Kmart bought them.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cred it/more/cement.html

Blah! Blah! Same old slashmeme. Read this then realize newspapers going away would be a bad thing.

How and why the towers collapsed is well understood and has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.

People do things for reasons

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stock market.html

It wasn't the first attempt on the world trade center.

Ted Turner said it was an act of desparation, then a week later (after he was probably threated by anthrax) he changed his statement.

The anthrax was a non-conspiracy government official with enough clearance to not officially inspect the anthrax store of the military base it was traced back to. This person knew enough about anthrax, as anyone trained would know, to do the dirty deed. But as a single person, [conspiracy requires two or more,] but who couldn't guess what the republican political party would do with the results? Those who are stupider'er than politicians? As it would certainly play into controlling the media for Bushes war drum banging....

Fact is, the world stock market gamble caused a very big problem world wide, except for china who wasn't playing that game but got front row seats via hong kong lease ending.

CNN and ABC did stories on the problems this gamble was causing south east asia, banks were closing and mothers couldn't afford to buy baby milk. Indonesians (CIA reports its 88% Muslim) knew it was teh americans but didn't know how they were doing it. They knew their own government was corrupt but this was beyond even that, and they knew it, just not how)

World Bank (run by the US) offered to bail out south east asia for interest payment on such a loan. That did not go over at all. Ultimately interest rate went to 0% even in the US as part of the "saying sorry".

Muslims in general are not to blame, as we Americans simply provided a very good excuse for radical extreamist to promote their cause against the US, so to enlist such a large following as they have. The war Bush waged on Iraq was in no way aimed at Bin Laden, though 9/11 was the excuse for the war. And that only pissed more off.....go figure.

Why the pentagon and white house 9/11 targets? Simple: the target wasn't about hitting those directly responsible, as few knew where they were, but as a statement something along the lines of "wrongful world economic manipulation back by politically controlled military".

I don't like Lil'natzi Bush, nor do I like radical extreamist. However, the Trillion dollar bet was VERY VERY WRONG!!! An dit is what gave cause to 9/11 by radical extreamist and a major excuse for Bush to finish his fathers work against Iraq.

That much money doesn't just appear out of nowhere and then vanish into nowhere and some of the participants have been in teh news, mostly the losers like worldcom, enron, etc... and note the timing on the dot com boom and bust. Some of the winners had to put their easy winnings somewhere (easy come easy go)..... follow the money....

That said, doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of the complaints here seem to be along the lines of "why lock my car door when someone can steal my stereo by breaking the window anyway?"

There are at least two legitimate concerns:

1) Various fairly obvious terrorist responses to these counter-measures will greatly increase the danger to bystanders without materially reducing the risk to the President.

2) There is some suspicion that this has more to do with making it harder for legitimate democratic protesters to co-ordinate their actions than it does with preventing terrorism.

Whether either of those things is sufficient to trump the needs of presidential security is a matter for debate, unlike the nearly-zero-cost behaviour of locking your car doors to protect your stereo. There is a point where people are going to say, "Enough! We've had it with all the intrusions into our daily lives in the name of counter-terrorist activity. I come from a society that has always valued liberty over security, and this is more than I am willing to give up."

While the particular policy of jamming cell phones is relatively minor, it is symbolic of many other more significant intrusions.

Read more here here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blac kout/themes/california.html

> the outsource firms are bringing workers here on HB-1's and then *who* trains them? They do, or American companies do?

On the comments on Cringely's two recent IBM stories http://pbs.org/cringely, it was American IBMers training the very same Indians who were to take over their jobs. The Indians went back to India, and the Americans were fired (except of course, IBM's generously compensated CEO).

As a follow up, PBS has an internal, independent ombudsman. You can contact the current ombudsman, Michael Getler, at pbs.org or call him at 703-739-5290. You can also find and contact your local PBS member station as they control your local content schedule. The less stations that maintain Cringley programming, the less likely it is that PBS will retain him, and the less relevant he becomes.

As a follow up, PBS has an internal, independent ombudsman. You can contact the current ombudsman, Michael Getler, at pbs.org or call him at 703-739-5290. You can also find and contact your local PBS member station as they control your local content schedule. The less stations that maintain Cringley programming, the less likely it is that PBS will retain him, and the less relevant he becomes.

I have no problem with Cringley being called a hack. But like the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Whether or not he's got his numbers exactly right, if you've got any doubt there are massive layoffs occuring at IBM, read the comments attached to Cringley's articles:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_200 70504_002027_comments.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_200 70511_002058_comments.html

Not to mention reports from other IBMers here:

http://www.allianceibm.org/jobcutstatusandcomments .php

Also, consider that IBM's employee headcount doesn't include contractors. I don't know how much including them would effect the headcount, but it's certainly by a substantial amount.

Being an idiot doesn't necessarily preclude his occasionally being somewhere in the ballpark of the truth.

I have no problem with Cringley being called a hack. But like the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Whether or not he's got his numbers exactly right, if you've got any doubt there are massive layoffs occuring at IBM, read the comments attached to Cringley's articles:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_200 70504_002027_comments.html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_200 70511_002058_comments.html

Not to mention reports from other IBMers here:

http://www.allianceibm.org/jobcutstatusandcomments .php

Also, consider that IBM's employee headcount doesn't include contractors. I don't know how much including them would effect the headcount, but it's certainly by a substantial amount.

Being an idiot doesn't necessarily preclude his occasionally being somewhere in the ballpark of the truth.

The debate does not "keep renaming itself." Climate change is an ambiguous term chosen by neo-cons to reframe
global warming (a more accurate description) as precisely what this article portrays: more days to eat ice
cream, neglecting the fewer days to ski. They're notorious for clouding the minds of the masses with such
tactics, compare "partial birth abortion" vs. "late-term abortion." Frank Lutz and his ilk are at best
amoral twits, and at worst evil incarnate.

People get the government they deserve. If 1,000,000,000 chinese aren't concerned about their own basic civil liberties why should I?

I couldn't agree more. However when 10,000 of their most active members and leaders gather at around Tiananmen Square and get shot dead and run over by tanks it tends to discourage the rest. The few exchange students and workers from China around here are timid and compliant. They don't even admit they know anything about those events. They are completely into the consumer culture and fashion. There is no life in them. Its like with the today's Irish. Hundreds of years of British oppression and brutality made sure that the only ones that are left are the descendants of the cowards, the collaborators and the incompetent. I am reminded of this whenever I visit the shithole Dublin has become.

The Tamk Man was the last rebel...

You need to learn a bit more before you rant about such things. It's not hard. Try reading a variety of things,
or maybe watching PBS. In fact, there was an excellent (misnamed) series "America at a Crossroads" about Islam
recently. It addressed a variety of issues around modern funamentalist Islam including "close mindedness"
(which ain't so dissimilar from what you are advocating in your bashing of multi-culturalism and tolerance).

http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/ especially http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_fait h_without_fear.html

"Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else..."
Like fun it doesn't. There are very few things it does not cover, and the exclusions are fairly basic such as
inciting to riot, "Kill the president!"...

Now just to get the point across: Fuck Jehovah, Fuck Allah, Fuck Buddah, Fuck Moses and Fuck Xenu too.

You need to learn a bit more before you rant about such things. It's not hard. Try reading a variety of things,
or maybe watching PBS. In fact, there was an excellent (misnamed) series "America at a Crossroads" about Islam
recently. It addressed a variety of issues around modern funamentalist Islam including "close mindedness"
(which ain't so dissimilar from what you are advocating in your bashing of multi-culturalism and tolerance).

http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/ especially http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_fait h_without_fear.html

"Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else..."
Like fun it doesn't. There are very few things it does not cover, and the exclusions are fairly basic such as
inciting to riot, "Kill the president!"...

Now just to get the point across: Fuck Jehovah, Fuck Allah, Fuck Buddah, Fuck Moses and Fuck Xenu too.

When the Shroud of Turin was shown to be fake the nuns didn't commit mass suicide;

For Slashdot readers, I think a far more fascinating (and accurate) video is Robert X. Cringely's PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires. I think this documentary is where Apple fanboys got their often-quoted "M$ has no taste" line (from that black turtleneck guy). The transcript is available at PBS's site.

Though its "inefficient" (with only ~15% of PharmCo budgets going towards research), it's still got more money in it than the pharmaceutical research in the university system. Universities have the right to patent and license the drugs they create, by the way.

Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.

Wrong. The Pharm companies fund the testing of their own drugs. It's usually north of a billion per drug.

You call these companies "middlemen" because the universities find the exact chemical problem to solve and then the pharm companies take it from there. You forget, obviously, that the latter is much more impressive and expensive to do. Actually, it's many times more expensive.

The strange part is, if we'd opened the patents on AIDS drugs 10 years ago all over the world, these new ones wouldn't exist. Somehow you're trying to say that it's different now?

There was a great Frontline on this issue which you obviously need to see.

It's not outsourcing, it's incompetence. My opinion: If you read the links carefully, you will get the impression that IBM is an incompetent company run by someone with no technical knowledge. Death is normal for an incompetent corporation.

Links: General information: IBM Employee.com.

Cringley: "... the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway..."

IBM employee: "They just cut nearly half our team Tuesday, wtihout even notifying the customer (Who is going apeshit). And 40% is indeed the workforce reduction I've heard bandied about." That comment is anonymous, of course. However, that fits with my experience, which is that IBM is an amazingly incompetent company. The incompetence has been there for a LONG time. Remember, IBM lost more than $2 Billion on OS/2, which in the beginning was fundamentally better than the competition from Microsoft.

IBM is run by a technically ignorant CEO: Samuel J. Palmisano is a technically ignorant CEO: "He holds a Bachelor's degree in history..." Note that his official IBM biography carefully avoids mentioning anything that would give a true picture of his incompetence.

I don't think the IBM layoffs are about outsourcing. They seem to be only about incompetence. Only technically ignorant managers contract with IBM, a company run by someone as ignorant as they are.

Also, I don't think outsourcing is working. U.S. companies get an EXTREMELY bad reputation when calls are answered by an under-trained person who can't speak English. Outsourcing is more an abuse of people outside the U.S. by U.S. managers than it is a way to get things done, apparently. Outsourcing call centers is a very effective way to sell customers on the competition, if the competition has competent employees.

Look at the web sites of any online bank. They are stupid, stupid, and purposely stupid. After people in India learn how to write good banking software, magically some company owned by an Indian will have the best banking software.

There is only one reason for outsourcing. Non-technical managers want the technical responsibility as far away from themselves as possible. It is dishonesty only.

Walk down any street in India and ask yourself: Why are people in India so poor? They are poor because their culture is extremely self-defeating. No matter how well an Indian who is first- or second-generation educated is trained technically, he is still guided mostly by his culture.

The claimed cost savings are not there. They simply are not there. The "cost savings" come from situations like this:

1) It is cheaper to hire Indians for a sloppy, poorly defined project than it is to hire people in the U.S. for a sloppy, poorly defined project, and the result is the same.

2) Many top managers today are like kings. They have complete control, can be as destructive as they want to their company and to other people, and are very ignorant. So when it comes time for a technical improvement that will be a lot of work, and require a lot of responsibility and decision-making, moving the entire project 10,000 miles away seems attractive. The distance offers lots of excuses, and it just doesn't matter to the king how much money is wasted. The "cost savings" are what the king says they are.

We are going through a time in which most managers of technically-oriented companies know nothing about technical issues, and don't want to know anything.

Bob Kahn, Inventor of TCP/IP, said as much in his 2006 interview.

Apparently, withstanding a nuclear attack was only a passing consideration.
The primary objective was creating a standard means of sharing data across diverse networks.

9. Staging
  a. The following rules apply to each of the four debates:
  (v) Except as provided in subparagraph (d) (viii), TV coverage during the question and answer period shall be limited to shots of the candidates or moderator and in no case shall any television shots be taken of any member of
the audience (including candidates' family members) from the time the first question is asked until the conclusion of the closing statements. When a candidate is speaking, either in answering a question or making his closing statement, TV coverage will be limited to the candidate speaking. There will be no TV cut-aways to any candidate who is not responding to a question while another candidate is answering a question or to a candidate who is not giving a closing statement while another candidate is doing so.

(viii) Notwithstanding sections 9(a) (iv) and 9(a) (v) a roving camera may be used for shots of an audience member only during the time that audience member is asking a question.

As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.

Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action.

I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.

I think you can clearly define "hate speech" in the current culture and there's no reason we shouldn't make an effort to stop it.

To me hate speech is [1] a severe form of slander and libel [2] which is pushed upon one entire ethnic group or race. [emphasis added]

Should I be able to create a book detailing with no real scientific proof, that african americans are an inferior race of stupid people who should be shot an hanged on site for merely existing? Absolutely not.

no ordinary people pay any attention to these kind of useless propaganda any more.

Somehow, DOUBLECLICK is the biggest concern? Not a chance. This is media hype perpetuated by the competition crying foul. I really wish people would concern themselves with actual privacy issues. It's just advertising data, people.

Ti you it make seem like just advertising data, but it qualifies as stalking in Texas.

It's interesting that Homeland Security looked to someone from doubleclick to protect personal privacy.

It's kinda funny how marketing-speak changed the name "web bugs" to the almost religiously enlightened sounding "web beacons" that help track what you've read, and through your IP, where. They say you can opt out. That sets a cookie!
Web bugs can be in email, web pages, even some documents.

The combination of web bugs and other techniques can still mine considerable data even with cookies off or frequently deleted.

I generally have liked Google, but it seems this is not the only instance of them connecting with slime.

http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/TLSF/theme_a/ mod02/www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.shtml

real motive behind 9/11

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stock market.html

what kind of games would such a coward as you play?

The News War documentary is free online here. Highly recommended!

I remember a PBS show about showing how Magnetism an Electricity have the same properties, given a 11+ dimensional universe; The mathematicians involved choked on demonstrating how the same approach could be applied to Gravity. It looks like as "Time" proceeds, Mathematics is collecting more tools to refine our understanding of the universe.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript117_fu ll.html

Read that.

MOYERS: We are devoting our entire broadcast tonight to one important question: Are everyday chemicals harming our kids? In my lifetime, more than 75,000 synthetic chemicals and metals have been put to use in America. Chemicals, that in many cases, make our lives easier and better. They kill insects and weeds, clean our clothes and carpets, unclog our drains, create produce and lawns, pretty as a picture.

Most people walk around with those chemicals in their bodies. A few generations ago, the only "chemical" that might be in your body was lead. And you go off on some fuzzy logic rant about being responsible? You don't have a choice anymore, and know body really knows what these all this compounds do in the human body. Oh, that's right, this is slashdot where any half baked libertarian drivel about responsibility gets modded as insightful.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, October 20, 2004 (ENS) - The blood of ministers from 13 European Union countries is contaminated with dozens of industrial chemicals, including some that were banned decades ago. The officials have an average of 37 industrial chemicals in their blood, according to tests conducted in June and released Tuesday by the international conservation organization WWF.

The chemicals found in the European officials include those used in fire resistant sofas, non-stick pans, grease proof pizza boxes, flexible polyvinyl chloride, fragrances and pesticides.

-- http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004/2004-10-20 -10.asp

And:

The results further show that the highest number of chemicals in one person was 54, while the median number of chemicals detected was 41. At least 13 of the same chemicals were found in every single person tested, including chemicals banned in Europe over 20 years ago as well as chemicals in widespread use today such as phthalates and perfluorinated compounds.

-- http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/policy/t oxics/news/index.cfm?uNewsID=12622

Moyers' own "results" were the result of blood and urine tests. A combined total of 84 out of 150 they were looking for. And the details of what they are were not released, other than a few "eye popper" ones such as DDT. See http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden .html for details. Urine tests reveal chemicals leaving the body and do not necessarily represent a sustained level of toxicity. There are substances the body passes through without using ... like corn kernels. ;) Thus, the presence of a substance in a urine sample does not mean the substance had any effect on the body.

Many of the "industrial chemicals" listed include things like the paint or wood finish you buy at your local hardware store, or the weed killer you buy from the store. News articles tend to downplay those. Note the distinct lack of details (in teh news articles) beyond the headline grabbers such as DDT. Why is that? DDT gets attention due to the great DDT scare/hoax. But as even the above referenced studies state regarding DDT:

Thus far, there is no conclusive evidence that exposure to DDT and its breakdown products at the levels found in the environment, affects reproduction and development in humans. The possible association between exposure to DDT and various types of cancers in humans has been extensively studied, particularly breast cancer, but no link has yet been established.

This is like other chemicals/substances where you only read/hear about them saying things like "In high concentrations/doses...". Why? because small doses/exposure does not show the dramatic effects. News flash: Dihydrogen oxide in high doses/concentrations

String theory is not "untestable". There are many string models which can be tested (and many of them have in fact already been ruled out).

My qualification "essentially untestable" was intended to address this. Sure, there are version of string theory that can be rejected. But positive confirmation of many of the artifacts of string theory seems elusive. Since the margins of this Slashdot comment are small, I'll let Sheldon Glashow respond on my behalf.

On the subject of "elegance", in the end, that's largely in the eye of the beholder. One of the reviews of Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell says that "it is for anyone who wishes to experience the sheer beauty and elegance of quantum field theory". I suspect if someone were putting out string theory books more like this than like Greene's, string theory might have better PR. Marketing the theory first to the same laypeople who enjoy Deepak Chopra, and only second worrying about people who might actually be able to understand and critique the theory, is not a good sign.

Besides, even if QFT is conceded to be ugly, it's useful. String theory still can't compete on that level. Having better theories to replace or augment quantum theory would be fantastic. String theory has had a long time to achieve that, but the results haven't been very good, and we have to consider that maybe other approaches deserve more attention. Since Greene opened the door to trial by populism, I'll defer to USA Today on this point.

I spent a week watching all the Nova PBS episodes, learning about this and string theory. Even though I'm not a mathematician or physicist, it certainly caught my attention.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

Remember the SARS outbreak? About five people in Asia died from it and it was reported as a 'worldwide pandemic.'

Your other examples are better; The World Health Organization disagrees with your death count, and I heard it more described as a potential pandemic. I don't think you seem to grasp the full threat from the multi-century periodic epidemic outbreaks. They are the single greatest natural threat to humanity's precarious dominance on this planet. And as someone who heard first hand horror stories about the 1918 Flu from one of my great aunts, pandemics are no laughing matter; she went to Camp Devens to watch her older brother die, because the army doctors were overwhelmed and helpless. She didn't tell the stories often, and never before I turned twelve, but she felt it was an important part of the family history to pass on. Even so, I got the sense she was leaving worse horrors out.

Yes, SARS turned out to be a dud, and the media over-hyped the disaster... but if anything, they understated the possible danger. If SARS had been only a bit more effective at airborne transmission, it could easily have dropped the planet's population by a couple percent; if it had also been one of the rare more-deadly-than-not viruses, North Korea might have been in a good position to conquer China today.

"When they say it's not about the money, IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY." The sad truth is that news and other content isn't supported by ads, the ads are supported by the content. For the younger crowd, check out Merchants of Cool: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool / and for the older crowd, read I Was a Junket Whore http://www.ericdsnider.com/snide/i-was-a-junket-wh ore/. The big stir in the media industries these days isn't in that they fear the internet for being able to deliver content in the way that the consumer want (and therefore lose content control), but in that it's taking their advertising income. Look at any newsstand magazine - nearly half of it's page space is ads. The thing that always bothers me is that we pay to receive this stuff... we pay for our televisions, cable, satellite, computer, and our cell phone connection. We pay to be blasted by advertising and then let these big media conglomerates tell us how to use what we pay for. It falls back that one of the best ways to make money is not to offer a product, but to offer a service. Media outlets are simply services for advertisers.

The Washington Post reports on the probable abuse of the National Student Loan Data System.

Well color me surprised. Or not. Anyone in the financial services industry is well aware that students are prime targets for all sorts of jacked-up offers. That data needs protecting, but the whole credit system in this country needs a major overhaul.

PBS says otherwise read about the history


Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted the military to circumvent the constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense.

The order set into motion the exclusion from certain areas, and the evacuation and mass incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, most of whom were U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens.

These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

They were forced to evacuate their homes and leave their jobs; in some cases family members were separated and put into different camps. President Roosevelt himself called the 10 facilities "concentration camps."

Some Japanese Americans died in the camps due to inadequate medical care and the emotional stresses they encountered. Several were killed by military guards posted for allegedly resisting orders.

At the time, Executive Order 9066 was justified as a "military necessity" to protect against domestic espionage and sabotage. However, it was later documented that "our government had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage." (Michi Weglyn, 1976).

Rather, the causes for this unprecedented action in American history, according to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, "were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

Almost 50 years later, through the efforts of leaders and advocates of the Japanese American community, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Popularly known as the Japanese American Redress Bill, this act acknowledged that "a grave injustice was done" and mandated Congress to pay each victim of internment $20,000 in reparations.

The reparations were sent with a signed apology from the President of the United States on behalf of the American people. The period for reparations ended in August of 1998.

Despite this redress, the mental and physical health impacts of the trauma of the internment experience continue to affect tens of thousands of Japanese Americans. Health studies have shown a 2 times greater incidence of heart disease and premature death among former internees, compared to noninterned Japanese Americans.