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You grow up. Anybody with the technology to build a missile with enough range, payload and accuracy to hit those targets effectively has the ability to make a nuclear weapon - which makes the issue of accurate targetting moot.

Yes, YES! This is such an insightful post! We all know you don't have to target nuclear missles! Especially not at the white house! There is no nuclear bunker in there! They have no such defenses against the powerful european, chinese and russian nuclear missles! Hell we could fire one of the superior socialist missles and be off by 200 miles and it would still destroy everything and everyone! These silly Americans have been fooled by their facist propaganda to believe they are safe. They continually vote for the dictator George W Bush and we all know George W. Bush rigged the 2000 election so that SUV owners, oil companies, Republicans, white men, and the Christian Coalition could kill Muslims.

Just FYI, most nuke warheads are designed to detonate at low altitude, to increase the pressure damage due to an increase of the shock wave doubling on itself. See:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/mapabla st.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon
Not to say that water wouldn't still dampen some of the overpressure wave and radiation, but we're not talking about a Bikini Atoll-type explosion.
Derek

The Aswan High Dam.

Here
and Here
and Here

This has a nice timeline of time warner.

Still - it could have been Worse . Imagine an ISP owned by microsoft. no... wait... :D

I think he's referring to Vince Foster, a lawyer for the White House (who came with the Clintons from AK, and had worked on the Whitewater case), who was charged with cleaning up the "Travelgate" scandal. This was one of the first scandals for the Clinton presidency, where several employees of the White House travel staff were fired under the pretense of misconduct, so a new set of employees could be put in place. The fired employees got together and sued for improper removal, and a big mess of investigations into the travel budgets ensued. Foster committed suicide, whereupon it was discovered that all of his legal papers were now in the possession of one Hillary Clinton.

Have you ever just had fun playing with your brain?
...
If you do it right you can trick your brain into thinking you have another limb or two.

I recall seeing a documentary about a doctor that cured a patient of problems with a "phantom" limb. The patient had lost a hand, had problems with feeling as if it was still there, but in an uncomfortable position. The doctor fixed it by making a simple box that created a mirror image of the missing limb, and telling the patient to place his hands in the box. The mirror image tricked the patient's brain into thinking the hand was still there and allowed him to move it around. Here's a link I found.

There was also some connection between missing limbs and tactile senses on other parts of the body. Apparently, the human body maps onto the surface of the brain. In some cases, when people lose a limb, the unused sensory area on the brain gets confused with nearby areas that correspond to different parts of the body. Here's a link.

As for what you are talking about - tricking the brain about your limbs - there is some mention of that as well.

Have you ever just had fun playing with your brain?
...
If you do it right you can trick your brain into thinking you have another limb or two.

I recall seeing a documentary about a doctor that cured a patient of problems with a "phantom" limb. The patient had lost a hand, had problems with feeling as if it was still there, but in an uncomfortable position. The doctor fixed it by making a simple box that created a mirror image of the missing limb, and telling the patient to place his hands in the box. The mirror image tricked the patient's brain into thinking the hand was still there and allowed him to move it around. Here's a link I found.

There was also some connection between missing limbs and tactile senses on other parts of the body. Apparently, the human body maps onto the surface of the brain. In some cases, when people lose a limb, the unused sensory area on the brain gets confused with nearby areas that correspond to different parts of the body. Here's a link.

As for what you are talking about - tricking the brain about your limbs - there is some mention of that as well.

Have you ever just had fun playing with your brain?
...
If you do it right you can trick your brain into thinking you have another limb or two.

I recall seeing a documentary about a doctor that cured a patient of problems with a "phantom" limb. The patient had lost a hand, had problems with feeling as if it was still there, but in an uncomfortable position. The doctor fixed it by making a simple box that created a mirror image of the missing limb, and telling the patient to place his hands in the box. The mirror image tricked the patient's brain into thinking the hand was still there and allowed him to move it around. Here's a link I found.

There was also some connection between missing limbs and tactile senses on other parts of the body. Apparently, the human body maps onto the surface of the brain. In some cases, when people lose a limb, the unused sensory area on the brain gets confused with nearby areas that correspond to different parts of the body. Here's a link.

As for what you are talking about - tricking the brain about your limbs - there is some mention of that as well.

In science, a theory is a rigorously tested statement of general principles that explains observable and recorded aspects of the world. A scientific theory therefore describes a higher level of understanding that ties "facts" together. A scientific theory stands until proven wrong -- it is never proven correct. The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago. Indeed, many scientific advances, in a range of scientific disciplines including physics, geology, chemistry, and molecular biology, have supported, refined, and expanded evolutionary theory far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.

The name is Frank Luntz. "Climate change" was a euphemism he offered to Repubican politicians. You can read the transcript from the PBS Frontline special, "The Persuaders". It was infuriating to view.

Watch Frontline "Persuaders" a documentary about some of marketing and advertising in the world. Marketing and Advertising is a strange interesting animal.

"Ok, it doesn't have to, as the average american does have a substantial credit card debt, but that's another story."

Yes it is.

Indirectly related to fuel costs is that people will stay home more. Video games are perfect for that trend.

Not sure if this will help, but Cringly mentioned a tri-band card for the sl-6000 from sharp that supported wifi and at least one cell phone archetecture for data connectivity in http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040930. html

I did not find any information on the links page for that article that identified what card that is.

The SL-6000 supports both a CF slot as well as a MMC/SD slot. However to the best of my knowledge the MMC/SD slot does not support a communications archetecture, so I presume the tri-band card indicated is a CF card. I have not had any luck searching for a 'tri-mode CF 802.11' card however, so unless he is using a card that is no longer available (very possible) he may be switching between wifi and tri-mode (gsm/gprs) cards as needed.

Good luck.

-Rusty

More than 20 years ago Apple had three divisions - Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh. Why have separate divisions? "Because it's easier to shut one down," --Steve Jobs.

See http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040520. html for the article where I found the Steve Jobs quote.

Gradually, TV and movies have devolved into very little content, but a lot of sex and violence.

How do you know? You haven't watched TV in four years.

But of course, we must pander to the mindless majority. If someone speaks up, he/she is just an old prude who wants to stop everyone else's fun.

No, he/she is someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else, and should therefore make their decisions for them.

And you are free, of course, to use your first ammendment right to support the dumbing down of America.

And you are also free to not support the "dumbing down" by not watching this crap. I don't like it either, but there are alternatives to broadcast smut. Before "moral" groups start taking away my choices, perhaps they should exercise some restraint like you did.

Check out frontline for some really good programs. There's a lot of stuff worth watching on that page.

Adult stem cells have already yielded some big successes in this area. Dr. Lima from Portugal is doing the work with olfactory cells, more info.

Really?

Then there's Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which includes a chapter called Los Alamos from below. His observations on physical security on the Manhattan project:

One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate begins to wonder what's happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.

The Feynman anecdote demonstrates that the usual response to the unusual hasn't changed much in six decades--if something weird is happening, try to arrest someone.

To be fair, I quite agree with the parent--this does seem to be little more than empire-building by security officials. But I can't resist noting that even the nation's most secret wartime project had some serious security issues. There's just no such thing as a secret--it just sometimes takes Russia or China a couple of years to get the papers.

As I understand it, Hollywood casting is 0wn3d by the Pink Mafia, which is why we get pretty boys like DiCaprio instead of real men like Jackman.

Oh yeah.

How in the world does someone have polio these days?

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028. html

Actually, the unique thing is that it can supposedly stream TV quality images over a much lower bandwidth connection (384kbs) than other systems. It uses a custom card for this. See this Cringely article for another take on it.

Cringely had an article about this a few months back http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028. html/. He gives a good overview of the tech and why it is so cool.

Our favorite geek writer covered this in a nice piece about a month ago.

I remember that from a show on PBS.

BOB BALLARD: [W]e're trying to find out what the temperature [of the black smoker] is and so we take our mechanical arm out and we stick it in there. And we look at the, and it pegs off scale. And the pilot says, "That's hot." And then he removes the equipment- the temperature and it's melted. And then he says, "I just want to let you guys know that the probe's made out of the same material as the porthole." And we were like, three feet away.

ALAN ALDA: And moving toward it.

BOB BALLARD: And moving toward it.

"Apparently, they walked across the Bering Strait during a period of severe drought in Central Asia..."
Not necessarily completely true. There's an issue with clovis tools. Seems that these clovis tools keep showing up early in history than they ought to and they can't track them back over the Bering Strait path. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/clovis.html

If the studios are for it then that means it's Doubleplus good for us. Right?
You can be sure that this will be a user-hostile situation. M.I. type discs, "Mr. Phelps, this disc will self destruct in 5 seconds." after watching something.

They do NOT want to allow us to keep anything.
They want recordings to operate like PPV, pay each time you watch it, even if you've recorded or BOUGHT it.

No matter how loud people bitch and squeal, they'll force this on people, one way or another.
I've got a number of old TV's. Several of them are in great condition, nothing wrong with them at all, but they won't receive HD programming. So if I want HD programming (which I don't) I would have to either buy all new TV's or some sort of set-top tuners. But, no worries, they'll make me do it anyway, I've got one more year of use out of my old legacy TV's and rabbit ears.
All the local stations have begun dual-casting in HD and analog and are hawking the new technology in PSA's, urging everyone to hurry and buy a new TV set before they turn off the old.

I like the analog way. When there is a signal problem with digital, the picture breaks up and almost completely fails and the sound is either mangled beyond understanding or is muted completely. In the old analog world (that I still live in) the signal can be weak but the picture and sound is still viewable and understandable. I can turn my old TV on, turn the rabbit ears around and get the local news. It looks like crap but it's more than good enough to get the weather report. If it were digital and the signal was that bad it would have already muted the sound and put up a message on the screen "Please stand by, acquiring signal"..

So, just like they are forcing digital TV upon us, they will force whatever media type gives THEM the upper hand, the most control. They will NEVER gives us any technology that gives US the upper hand..

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

Read the above and realize that the consumers do indeed pay for it.

Well he was certainly wrong about the election!

Back on December 26, 2002, Robert X. Cringely stated this would happen.

Oh no! Contracting isn't like cocaine. THIS! is like cocaine. Think drug dealers crossed with loan sharks. Be very afraid.

The American way is business, lawyers, all that s--- follows some cool, cultural moment. When did it, if ever, did it feel like the others guys kind of came through the door behind you and started to do whatever they did?

It's a point that's actually fairly definable. At the point when the overall take from the music business probably passes, let's say, a billion dollars -- now it's off the top of my head, the actual number you'd have to ascertain -- but there was a certain point at which the take got big enough to where the big boys got interested. They said, "Oh, wait a minute, that's some serious cash. I better go over there and rake off some of that."

When it all started, record companies -- and there were many of them, and this was a good thing -- were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music. ...

Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants. The shift from the one to the other was definitely related to when the takes started to get big. Somebody [in] a forensic accounting job could probably establish the exact moment at which it reached the level that brought in the sharks. ...

How did you know they were there?

Change in attitude, change in management, new management. You'd just be dealing with different people. You know, you'd go to a meeting with a record company and it wouldn't be a guy there who knew that you had written a new song and thought that was cool. It would be a guy who knew that he had moved 40,000 pieces out of Dallas this month, and he had no idea, pieces of what? None.

Maybe if more people did this the cable companies would get the hint. And even if they didn't, it wouldn't really matter that much. I have some friends who all share a Dish subscription (4 different houses - one bill) and so they end up paying about $20/month for Dish. If neighborhoods got together and shared services, it wouldn't be so cost prohibitive. Oh well, I'm just rambling, and I'm sure that the cringely link was on /. before...

I'm not sure about the actual percentages, but I believe you are right about marketing costs being outrageous. Like everyting else, drugs also need to be marketed. I'm not saying its right or wrong, it just is. It's estimated that it costs about $800 million dollars to bring a drug to market. Some of this is research, some is marketing and other expenses. Regardless, this is what it costs.

There is good reason to have long patents. Consinder when patents are filed, typically very early in R&D, a process that on average takes 12-15 years. If you have a patent that expires in 10-15 years, all your research and funding was pointless. But I do agree, there are way too many patents filed, in all fields.

I'm not sure about the actual percentages, but I believe you are right about marketing costs being outrageous. Like everyting else, drugs also need to be marketed. I'm not saying its right or wrong, it just is. It's estimated that it costs about $800 million dollars to bring a drug to market. Some of this is research, some is marketing and other expenses. Regardless, this is what it costs.

There is good reason to have long patents. Consinder when patents are filed, typically very early in R&D, a process that on average takes 12-15 years. If you have a patent that expires in 10-15 years, all your research and funding was pointless. But I do agree, there are way too many patents filed, in all fields.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walm art/

I've posted the above before [Watch out for the space slashdot inserts]

I recommend reading the entire section, but I especially recommend the "interviews" section.

I think you'll find that there's more to the "outsourcing" than people first think.

I believe you're thinking of "obscenity." See this recap of the Miller test.

I haven't studied this extensively (but have given it serious study in an effort to understand what may, and what may not, be provided on a website), but it is my understanding that pornography (and other material!) can be "indecent" or "obscene." If it's obscene, e.g., photographic depictions of bestiality, child pornography or incest, it can be banned nationally. Determining exactly what's "obscene" can be a difficult problem.

On the other hand "indecent" material may be acceptable in some communities but not others. A few states prohibit any depiction of penetrative sex. Some permit depiction of penetrative hetereosexual sex but ban penetrative homosexual sex. Some permit all (except the obscene items mentioned earlier). This is rapidly coming to the forefront as some aggressive prosecutors attempt to impose the highly restrictive standards of some communities nationally since the material is available in those communities via the postal system or the internet - in 1973 when the Miller test was invented "porn" was distributed in seedy adult theaters, not in the privacy of the viewer's home using either a VHS tape or broadband connection.

A further complication is the different protection offered to different media. The courts are loathe to ban written material, and drawings also get a fair amount of protection. One of the big questions before the court recently was photorealistic CGI and photoshopped images - as I recall the courts ruled that this material can't be banned solely because it -appears- to contain prohibited material.

BTW the Comstack act was late 1873, here. It criminalized distribution of information on birth control or abortions, and has never been revoked. As late as 1965 (just a few years before Roe v Wade) the state of Connecticut was still prosecuting doctors for prescribing birth control to married couples - see Griswold

In this case the exit polls showed that people were voting for Kerry but the counts showed otherwise.

Now what? How do we know which is true?

TERENCE SMITH: Why did the early numbers show Senator Kerry ahead?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, Kerry was ahead in a number of the -- in a number of the states by margins that looked unreasonable to us. And we suspect that the reason, the main reason, was that the Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters. That wasn't the case in every state. We had a few states that overstated the Republican margin. But for the most part, it was Democratic overstatement for the reason I just gave you.

TERENCE SMITH: So you're saying that some Bush voters would come out of the polling places and simply decline to participate; if so, why?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, in an exit poll, everybody doesn't agree to be interviewed. It's voluntary, and the people refuse usually at about the same rate, regardless of who they support. When you have a very energized electorate, which contributed to the big turnout, sometimes the supporters of one candidate refuse at a greater rate than the supporters of the other candidate.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, if you thought those numbers were suspiciously high for Senator Kerry, couldn't you correct the sample, as you say in your business?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, we recognized the overstatement in the exit polls in mid-afternoon, and we told the members of NEP about the suspicions we had, which they chose to ignore. The correction, in this case, is to wait for the vote returns in those same sample precincts and use that for projections. There were no mistakes in the projections. We were very cautious with them, and none were wrong, even though the exit polls did overstate Kerry in a number of states.

TERENCE SMITH: Right. Now, this is supposed to be not-for-broadcast information as it's passed along to the organizations, but in fact, it affects their coverage and influences their thinking as they work on the coverage, and obviously someone leaked it.

Who? Who leaked it? How did it get out so widely on the Internet that, in effect, by mid-afternoon, it was public information?

WARREN MITOFSKY: The information is available to all the NEP members. That's five television networks and the Associated Press. It's also available to all the subscribers, which includes major newspapers and local television stations. Any number of people had access.

The reason we have this information at midday is so we can go over it, find any problems with the way we're displaying it, laying it out, any problems that might confuse us when the polls close.

"To what degree is Wal-Mart pushing American suppliers to move their production to China and places like China in order to reduce costs? ...

The big-box producers, of which Wal-Mart is the leader, are all engaged in the game of pushing production offshore -- not necessarily that they're saying that's the ideal model, but basically, they go to their suppliers, and they tell them: "We want you to cut your cost by 10 percent. We want you to cut the price by 10 percent."

So the producer will try to cut it, and eventually, they'll come to the point where "We can't make it legally in the United States for that price." And then Wal-Mart shrugs its shoulders and says, "Well, if you have to move offshore, that's what you've got to do." I doubt that they say "Move offshore" directly. They just set the conditions making it impossible to meet their price demands unless they move offshore. ..."

"To what degree is Wal-Mart pushing American suppliers to move their production to China and places like China in order to reduce costs? ...

The big-box producers, of which Wal-Mart is the leader, are all engaged in the game of pushing production offshore -- not necessarily that they're saying that's the ideal model, but basically, they go to their suppliers, and they tell them: "We want you to cut your cost by 10 percent. We want you to cut the price by 10 percent."

So the producer will try to cut it, and eventually, they'll come to the point where "We can't make it legally in the United States for that price." And then Wal-Mart shrugs its shoulders and says, "Well, if you have to move offshore, that's what you've got to do." I doubt that they say "Move offshore" directly. They just set the conditions making it impossible to meet their price demands unless they move offshore. ..."

Go to work for these guys. They don't outsource their tech.

All this talk about large scale wireless reminds me of Tesla and some of his crazy ideas http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_todre.html.

Although Tesla can be creepy sometimes. When he was trying to do something similar with his tower he said, "In this system that I have invented," Tesla explained, "it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip... so that the whole of this globe can quiver."

I hope they're planning on making sure those access points are gripping the Earth hard enough.

Several fans discuss that issue in Trekkies 2. It would be humorous to dissect sports fanatics vs. Star Trek fans--but almost too easy. I'll wager that the average IQ of the guy wearing cheese on his head and screaming obscenities at a referee and the average Star Trek fan leave no comparison. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Frontline covered this in an episode called The Persuaders. It is about how brands are able to engender such loyalty and how marketeers work to get enough people to self-associate with an inert product.

What was interesting was how some of the original studies of fans (of wrestling and others. I guess you can include sports and Trek in there) were compared to the study of cults and how the social patterns were eerily identical. As if there's some sort of primal need to merge with an icon.

It suddenly made sense why people said "Trek/sports is a religion".

A quote from that show:

One team even proposes that the first Americans came from Europe, not Asia

Recently the PBS show "NOVA" had a whole show about the possiblity of people comming over earlier than first thought, and the possibility of them actually boating accross from Europe along the glacier that would of stretched from the north pole as frar down as Iceland.

There is RNA evidence that some native peoples here in the U.S. might have come from a population that was from the area that is now France.

link below to NOVA web site with the program

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

Clarke was one of the major figures interviewed in PBS Fronline documentary about cyber security. You can watch the full, streamed broadcast at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cybe rwar/view/

forgot to link it

Specific incident - DNA evidence overturned a prior convition that was based on eyewitness testimony

what aspects of science? I often wonder about factual content of *drama* television. If you talk to real scientists discussing CSI this year on www.RRR.org.au (radio live to web) you would get comments like 'equipment product placement', 'test that take days, weeks are solved in hours', 'people who happen to have expert knowledge in too many areas'. I cant find the exact link to the show but a couple of forensic scientists working in St Vincents Hospital, Melbourne ripped the shreds as to the factual content let alone scient content.

Real science is about discovery, measuring, observing then (the kicker) do some experiments, observe and write it up. The closest I see on television that emulates this is the BBC nature programmes started by David Attenborough. Though Americans may probably be more familiar to that other David, Canadas own David Suzuki.

Watch a show from one of these blokes and you will see the difference b/w the candy-coated hollywood version and the real messy world. Which leads me to my next observation ...

inbetween miami vice and the simpsons

Cringely had an article a while back that mentioned Google liking to use Pentium IIIs in their data center. Yes the Pentium 4s were faster, but if you looked at your datacenter as a whole system, including power, cooling, and space requirements, they were better off with 'old' Pentium IIIs. At the time, I think Google was worried they wouldn't be able to source new machines with P-IIIs, looks like Intel is following them this time. Intel seems to be following a lot lately, the megahertz at any cost mantra sure faded fast.

Something to watch.

Is Wal-Mart good for America?