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You might reference Robert X. Cringely and his articles on outsourcing.

Here are a few articles:
The U.S. Military is Busily Outsourcing Its Core IT Services, but Would a Really Disciplined Outfit Like Wal-Mart Do the Same?

How to Turn Around the U.S. Tech Economy in One Week With No New Laws, Regulations, or Tax Breaks Required and
Without Moving to India

When It Comes to Understanding Why Government Doesn't Understand High-Tech and Why Financial Markets Seem to be Working Against Our Own Interests, Well, We Did It to Ourselves

U.S. Leaders Either Don't Understand or Prefer Not to Understand the IT Outsourcing Crisis, So Here's the Cliff Notes Version

I believe there are more...

You might reference Robert X. Cringely and his articles on outsourcing.

Here are a few articles:
The U.S. Military is Busily Outsourcing Its Core IT Services, but Would a Really Disciplined Outfit Like Wal-Mart Do the Same?

How to Turn Around the U.S. Tech Economy in One Week With No New Laws, Regulations, or Tax Breaks Required and
Without Moving to India

When It Comes to Understanding Why Government Doesn't Understand High-Tech and Why Financial Markets Seem to be Working Against Our Own Interests, Well, We Did It to Ourselves

U.S. Leaders Either Don't Understand or Prefer Not to Understand the IT Outsourcing Crisis, So Here's the Cliff Notes Version

I believe there are more...

You might reference Robert X. Cringely and his articles on outsourcing.

Here are a few articles:
The U.S. Military is Busily Outsourcing Its Core IT Services, but Would a Really Disciplined Outfit Like Wal-Mart Do the Same?

How to Turn Around the U.S. Tech Economy in One Week With No New Laws, Regulations, or Tax Breaks Required and
Without Moving to India

When It Comes to Understanding Why Government Doesn't Understand High-Tech and Why Financial Markets Seem to be Working Against Our Own Interests, Well, We Did It to Ourselves

U.S. Leaders Either Don't Understand or Prefer Not to Understand the IT Outsourcing Crisis, So Here's the Cliff Notes Version

I believe there are more...

... They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. ... As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim. ...

-- Osama bin Laden in 1998

Never forget.

how many ISPs are you running now, and why are you still writing your column if you are a tycoon?

Something like the dude in the tow truck giving free tows just for the fun of it, even though he owns his own island?

This is the kicker here. It's the one wildcard in this whole mess. Were the Supreme Court to issue an order/ruling which is then negated by military action of some kind, it would signal the end of our Republic. The ultimate battle would be in the hearts and minds of the soldiers and commanders themselves. Do you follow a lawful order from the Supreme Court? Or do you follow the (presumably unlawful) order of your commander in chief? Most military folks are fiercly loyal to the CnC (heh, I just made that up), but this type of question would really tear up a lot of people. If the government were to endure such an event sans revolution, I think it would be little more than a puppet of a small group of individuals. It is at that point that the Great Experiment would be completed, albeit as an utter failure.

If this day comes, I can only hope that I've long since died. I don't know that I could live through something as aweful as this happening to the nation I love so dearly.

Here's the real deal. Someone in the town has found some of Nikola Tesla's lost notes, and is experimenting with wireless energy transmission. Some of his experiments did cause electricity to come up out of the ground, and burn things up.

Chase 2.0
Is that a supercomputer in your jammies?

A tool like this sounds exactly what Robert Cringely was describing after the death of his son, Chase, from SIDS.

As a parent, I'd broadcast my son's vitals 24/7 on MTV if it meant helping other parents save their children from things like this.

A tool like this sounds exactly what Robert Cringely was describing after the death of his son, Chase, from SIDS.

As a parent, I'd broadcast my son's vitals 24/7 on MTV if it meant helping other parents save their children from things like this.

This article reminded me of that, too, immediately. The father was Robert Cringely, and his weekly column is here . A link to the archived column is http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020425. html . I cannot find the WIKI he originally set up. For a while I checked in on the webpage he set up for the project, and I never saw any progress.

A couple of years ago, the oft-quoted PBS techno-pundit Robert X Cringely lost his son to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

In subsequent articles, he proposed a distributed computing project to try to track down the cause of SIDS by outfitting infants with wearable computers that would gather all sorts of data in the hopes of determining the cause(s) of SIDS.

He even had the brainwave of trying to sell the spare computing cycles of the devices to work on distributed processing tasks as a way to subsidize the development costs.

A couple of years ago, the oft-quoted PBS techno-pundit Robert X Cringely lost his son to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

In subsequent articles, he proposed a distributed computing project to try to track down the cause of SIDS by outfitting infants with wearable computers that would gather all sorts of data in the hopes of determining the cause(s) of SIDS.

He even had the brainwave of trying to sell the spare computing cycles of the devices to work on distributed processing tasks as a way to subsidize the development costs.

A couple of years ago, the oft-quoted PBS techno-pundit Robert X Cringely lost his son to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

In subsequent articles, he proposed a distributed computing project to try to track down the cause of SIDS by outfitting infants with wearable computers that would gather all sorts of data in the hopes of determining the cause(s) of SIDS.

He even had the brainwave of trying to sell the spare computing cycles of the devices to work on distributed processing tasks as a way to subsidize the development costs.

Frontline did an excellent documentary called "American Porn", where it talked about how obscenity prosecutions were put back on the agenda when Ashcroft was confirmed. They had meetings with old US attorneys who did obscenity work in the 80s, and this was only put on hold because of terrorism concerns. (You can watch the entire episode online.)

Two of the most interesting points: one US attorney basically said that no prosecutor should ever lose an obscenity trial since there is (no matter what the Supreme Court tells you) a common decency standard in 99% of the US: penetration. The second interesting bit is that one of the porn industry's main attorneys came up with a list of things never to be filmed if the company distributing it wants to stay in business.

I think that the government's resources could be better spent elsewhere, and for the most part consider myself a libertarian, but after seeing some of the more extreme parts of the porn business covered in the documentary I think I would be hard-pressed to not call it obscenity.

Frontline did an excellent documentary called "American Porn", where it talked about how obscenity prosecutions were put back on the agenda when Ashcroft was confirmed. They had meetings with old US attorneys who did obscenity work in the 80s, and this was only put on hold because of terrorism concerns. (You can watch the entire episode online.)

Two of the most interesting points: one US attorney basically said that no prosecutor should ever lose an obscenity trial since there is (no matter what the Supreme Court tells you) a common decency standard in 99% of the US: penetration. The second interesting bit is that one of the porn industry's main attorneys came up with a list of things never to be filmed if the company distributing it wants to stay in business.

I think that the government's resources could be better spent elsewhere, and for the most part consider myself a libertarian, but after seeing some of the more extreme parts of the porn business covered in the documentary I think I would be hard-pressed to not call it obscenity.

Frontline did an excellent documentary called "American Porn", where it talked about how obscenity prosecutions were put back on the agenda when Ashcroft was confirmed. They had meetings with old US attorneys who did obscenity work in the 80s, and this was only put on hold because of terrorism concerns. (You can watch the entire episode online.)

Two of the most interesting points: one US attorney basically said that no prosecutor should ever lose an obscenity trial since there is (no matter what the Supreme Court tells you) a common decency standard in 99% of the US: penetration. The second interesting bit is that one of the porn industry's main attorneys came up with a list of things never to be filmed if the company distributing it wants to stay in business.

I think that the government's resources could be better spent elsewhere, and for the most part consider myself a libertarian, but after seeing some of the more extreme parts of the porn business covered in the documentary I think I would be hard-pressed to not call it obscenity.

Here's a link to the playfair cypher which, despite it's age, does not have a quick solution. The only conputerized solutions I've seen are "shotgun hill climbing" algorithms that sometimes find and answer and sometimes need to be restarted. This cipher was actually considered impossible to break for a very long time.

As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.

Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. "

This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.

(apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)

As long as it was their honest opinion

But was it? I did not know that dead people had an opinion. Further, upon questioning many of the people who's names were used - they had no idea a letter had been sent in their name. By what stretch of the imagination is this an honest opinion? And yes. You should be fined. Doesn't always happen - but then if you have a pair of pliers in your back pocket after sundown in Texas you can be hung from the neck until dead and they don't do that either. Just because the laws are there does not always mean they are enforced.

Quite the appeal to fear there

All I can say is - yeah...right. If that was an appeal to fear then I'm Alfred Hitchcock. Come on - get it together guy. If you really have a point to make - then make it.

What you are asking for is for laws to NOT be applied to everyone equally

Oh really? Is that what I was saying? That due to the size, money, and influence which Microsoft has - that it is being allowed to set its own terms when it comes to punishment? To flaunt their ability to twist things around so they benefit from what they've done? Or, as the original story pointed out - the punishment does not fit the crime because Microsoft is so powerful that it only takes a few days to get past the punishment. Wow. So just why did we even bother to prosecute them in the first place? We spent hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of man hours, and we get new computers with Microsoft products installed into our schools so they can extend their monopoly even further? You know - that's like convicting someone of murder, giving them a slap on the wrist, and saying "Don't do that again." I'm sure they will be so afraid that they will never ever kill someone again. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... As I said before - yeah - right.

Listen. Your logic is heavily flawed. You are saying that because I said to apply the law that I am a hate monger. When in truth - I just want them to play and suffer by the same rules and laws underwhich the rest of us have to play. And simply because it is Microsoft and simply because you might like them - does not make the rest of us automatically hate mongers. So - sorry, I just don't see your logic.

If one is convicted of a crime one should be punished.

I certainly hope so! But realistically - it doesn't work that way. There was a recent court case in Galveston, Texas where someone who was clearly a murderer walked free. The guy had lots of money, hired a good lawyer, and although they could find parts of the body - they couldn't find the deceased's head. Therefore he walked free. That was certainly justice!

Realistically though. Why would IBM, Sun Microsystem, too many companies to list them all, lots and lots of people from all sorts of backgrounds (myself included), the European Community, Japan, China, in fact all of Asia, and even Australia - all of them not like the outcome of the Microsoft trial. Are we all hate mongers? Or could there just be a smidgen of truth here about how Microsoft was treated versus - say AT&T? Remember the baby Bells? Ever wonder why that happened? Think they are nicer today? No - they are back to their tricks again. (See: 1,2, 3, and many others via Google's search engine)

However! Tell you what! Without all of the personal attacks. Without all this hate monger junk - why don't you just present your points on whether or not you believe the Justice Department should or should not use a "Divide and Conquer" approach? That is what everyone really wants to know (myself included). Be waiting to hear from you.

Later!

I agree. Contrast the US government's concerns with that of Bhutan, where the king has said "gross national happiness is more important than gross national product" because "happiness takes precedence over economic prosperity in our national development process."

An episode of PBS's Scientific American Frontiers back in April of last year featured an MIT Media Lab student named Brian Clarkson who built this exact same thing himself. He wore it like a backpack with fisheye lens cameras on the front and back. One of the more interesting things he was able to capture and re-watch was the first time he met his then current girlfriend.

You can watch the episode online.

(The part featuring Clarkson is titled "Never Forget a Face")

Cringely says that M$ earns $600M per month in interest on their cash hoard. They can easily afford to make this payment and continue to torture Sun outside of court unencumbered.

Well, according to Cringely, $2bn is only2 months worth of MS cash. This article does a good job of explaining why none of this makes any difference

Jeff

Cheerleading the brits in 1812?

Man, what the fuck do your american text books teach you navel gazers anyway?

1812 Napolean was peaking, the French was the world's biggets supper power, and america was poorer than Canada (we had the fur trade). Most of britan's army was on the other side of the pond preparing for a real war, not trying to defend a second rate rogue colony of free masons and at the same time the FRENCH CANADIANS.

Sorry, your nation is great, but you over estimates (and rewrite) your importance in history.

"Marconi used Hertz's system initially, but sending the signal "S" across the Atlantic would not have been possible with that system. So it became obvious to Marconi and other experimenters of the time that Tesla's system was an efficient, powerful resonator that produced waves you could work with."

"The simple fact about Marconi's "S" is that he used the Tesla system to transmit signals and claimed that these were ideas he had developed himself."

"At the Marconi site on Cape Cod, the placards state clearly that Marconi used the Tesla oscillator to send signals."

"Marconi was a good businessman. He built the first practical equipment. And for that reason, his name is the one people remember when they think of radio."

True, the soviet union wasn't in a perpetual boom, but its collapse had more to do with its social policies (dictatorship) than with its economic ones.

Economic policy is part of social policy and it DID play an important part in the collapse.

Let me direct you to one of the minor players in the fall of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev. He had this to say in an interview:

Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can't resolve the problem of women's pantyhose. There's no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the dissident movement occurred.

So, how did you get it so wrong? I really want to know where you got the idea that economics was a minor part of the collapse. Seriously. Was it predjudice, mis-information, or what?

As more and more data is showing, it appears Mars once had a much denser atmosphere that probably supported liquid water. There is also evidence that Mars once had an Earth-like dipole magnetic field and magnetosphere which protected the ancient Martian atmosphere from the radiation of the solar winds. Many researches now believe that without a magnetic field the Martian atmosphere was simply eroded away by the solar wind.

I am merely a layman on this subject, but it seems to me that without somehow restarting the Martian dynamo to generate a global magnetic field, the idea of terraforming Mars will always remain science fiction.

With this information, it seems to me that the idea of terraforming Mars is a joke. Am I missing something?

References:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1 .htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3016_magn etic.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/17marsmagnet/

You sound vaguely familiar to these people. Recommend you read this so you can understand your phobias.

You sound vaguely familiar to these people. Recommend you read this so you can understand your phobias.

...this should make some of us pause and think about what could have been...

Indeed. I was only 5 when TMI happened, and while I don't remember hearing about it from my parents back then, I do remember hearing about it in 1986, when news reports of Chernobyl got them talking about the TMI incident and how worried they were in '79. Thanks to the west-to-east weather patterns, a meltdown at TMI would very probably have affected Philadelphia, 90 miles away. It would definitely have obliterated the state government, as Harrisburg is only 10 miles from the plant. I've had to go to Harrisburg a few times on business, and you can see the TMI cooling towers from the Turnpike. Even 20+ years later, the sight of them made me shudder a little.

If you want to see one author's take on what might have been, there's an old sci-fi novel called "In the Drift," set in an alternate Philadelphia of ~2079-- 100 years after the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

If you'd rather stay with this reality, PBS put out an interesting documentary on TMI.

~Philly

The media has forgotten, or has chosen not to comment on the fact, that this is exactly how Joseph McCarthy started the witch-hunts in the 50's.

The Democrats don't have a sterling record, but it isn't as uniformly black as the Republican's, lately. If you value freedom of people (as opposed to freedom of corporations), the Democratic party is still your best bet.

The world is full of small risks. Deal with it. You can't escape radiation -- you need it to live! (Unless you're an abyssal sea-dweller, of course.) But you probably run less risk from every-day radiation then you do from driving 10 MPH over the speed limit on your way home from work!

In all, there are 389 ratified U.S.-Indian treaties, and majority of these have been broken by the U.S.

-- from PBS interview with Donald Fixico, Thomas Bowlus Distinguished Professor of American Indian History and Director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas

NOVA ran a show a few months ago about the development and deployment of unmanned military aircraft. They have some interesting items here.

I believe the US government gave M$ a "pass" on security and allowed it to sell software to, for example, the Navy. (I am too lazy to look up the details.)

Cringeley... (the real one, not the fake ghost-written InfoWorld column version) discussed this very subject in his two latest columns...

1

2

I believe the US government gave M$ a "pass" on security and allowed it to sell software to, for example, the Navy. (I am too lazy to look up the details.)

Cringeley... (the real one, not the fake ghost-written InfoWorld column version) discussed this very subject in his two latest columns...

1

2

Yup a classic A lose - lose situation

IIRC the changeover is merely to over-the-air broadcasts, and would be of DTV and not necessarily HDTV. In other words, providers could digitally broadcast standard-definition (480i) signals if they chose to do so, which would be better than analog 480i, but it's definitely not high definition (720p, 1080i/p). They would do this so they can broadcast more standard definition signals on the same allocation of bandwidth that they would otherwise use up with one HD signal.

That string theory "explains a lot of things (aren't they trying for everything?)" and that "it is beautiful" has all the hallmarks of religion to me.

I don't see where I asked you to believe string theory.

This is the problem I have with string theory. People who defend string theory are asking for faith.

Here is what Jim Gates, theorist of string theory had to say. From the link;

Gates: String theory is often criticized as having had no experimental input or output, so the analogy to a religion has been noted by a number of people. In a sense that's right; it is kind of a church to which I belong. We have our own popes and House of Cardinals. But ultimately science is also an act of faith -- faith that we will be capable of understanding the way the universe is put together.

If that isn't "from the horses mouth", I don't know what is. He makes my entire argument for me.

There is no connection between string theory and the observable universe. This singular undeniable fact is the reason that it is not science.

String theory is a siren song, that people mistakenly cling to because it offers explanations and mathematical beauty. But the abstract string theory has no connection to the real world.. As the article pointed out (more eloquently than I could), string theory is the "fad" among scientists right now.

BTW, I am not a "troll" because I show skepticism about string theory. Is not skepticism the foundation of science, or is that the part of the "scentific method" that is not "correct" anymore? Indeed, disagree with a popular theory here on slashdot and even though you offer a rational explanation, you get modded as a troll. (Not that slashdot has any credence whatsoever).

It seems this is the problem with string theory too. It is popular among a few elitist scientists right now, and disciples are eagerly waiting for these "high priests" to "mete out" explanations on how the universe might work, without any scientific justification whatsoever. Hence the popularity of this particular book being reviewed. So if you stray from the "sacred doctrine" of string theory you are not playing "the only game in town". Peer pressure will haunt you even though there might be totally different and valid ideas that are worth investigating.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....it must be. Taken all together, string theory fits "religious thinking" better than it fits a scientific description of the universe.

Here is a very recent review of one such revival.

It doesn't offend me (yet), I just find it amusing that supposed scientists do not recognize the "religion" that they are escaping into. Truly a spectacle.

The URL is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/.

Heh, replying to my own post!

As I mentioned, you can download "The Elegant Universe" from the PBS website here.

It's divided up into 24 chapters -- 8 chapters for each hour of the three-hour series.

The PBS show "Scientific American Frontiers" did an episode in 2001 showing examples of this.

You can see info about the segment here.

They showed a man who was unable to use his hands, who was outfitted with brain-wave controlled electrical stimulation of his muscles. He was able to open and close his hand by thinking about it.

Why's everyone so gaga about Bell Labs? I'm sooooo tired of listening to the whining and pining about the good old days when Bell Labs was seen as glittering family jewels. As Moms Mabley would say "I was there in the good ol days and they weren't so good." I worked there for about 20 years on the development side of the house. The place was very far from the land called utopia.

• First of all Bell Labs only began grudgingly hiring African-Americans after people marched on Murray Hill. Back then the excuse for not wanting to hire us was that we were "unqualified" and now many of us are having a problem finding work because we are seen as "overqualified"! Go figure.
• Second, the place has been in decline since before divestiture 1.0, back in the 1980s. This article presents nothing new.
• Third, the transistor was a great invention (I'm using a few FETs and BJTs right now), but enough with the idol worship of the inventors. Schockley, the co-daddy of the transistor, was a bitter, white supremacist! Pu-leeease! These people were people, not gods!
• Lastly, I'm glad that the golden boys and girls (very few girls btw) of research were able to find work. However many of us who were on the development side of the house are still scrambling to find work in a market that has an increasingly skeptical view of our Bell Labs credentials. Too many potential employers see the Bell Labs experience on our resume as an indication that we are "too theroretical", and "not hands-on" (Say, what!???). If you're on the "R" side BL experience is good, but if you're on the "D" side it works against you; the sword cuts both ways.

Anonymous Coward (AKA Jesse B. Simple)

This kind of move is going to backfire on SCO, just watch.

Well, I have to admit that I'm surprised that this wasn't more common knowledge... another commenter posted this link which at least shows G.W.'s opinion on the subject... I don't recall where I saw the story in which it was reported that G.W. handed down the mandate, but I'll go look.

Will a story published by a real news site satisfy you? After all, I wasn't actually there, so I personally didn't hear it happen. However, pretty much anything published by (say) cnn.com is hearsay, if you personally weren't there.

Here's the interview:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/election2000/candidate s/bush_4-27c.html

Hmmm... very interesting. You must be a med student (or in the medical field). If not, you're a scary person! :-p

At any rate, I agree with your points. These days people assume anything they've not heard of before is somehow "pushing the envelope", or an otherwise amazing feat. While I am personally impressed with this, I'm not particularly surprised.

As for the ethical issues... when did the Hippocratic Oath take ethics into consideration? Both of the linked oaths (old and new) say nothing of such considerations. Whether you like it or not, a doctor is sworn to bring health to a patient at any cost that does not bring harm again to others. That's like the ethics behind a soldier shooting a woman with an AK-47 pointed at him, finger on the trigger. Ethics be damned, life and death are life and death and the woman is a threat to the soldier, his fellow soldiers and possibly the mission at hand. Ethics don't play a part in such things.

Hmmm... very interesting. You must be a med student (or in the medical field). If not, you're a scary person! :-p

At any rate, I agree with your points. These days people assume anything they've not heard of before is somehow "pushing the envelope", or an otherwise amazing feat. While I am personally impressed with this, I'm not particularly surprised.

As for the ethical issues... when did the Hippocratic Oath take ethics into consideration? Both of the linked oaths (old and new) say nothing of such considerations. Whether you like it or not, a doctor is sworn to bring health to a patient at any cost that does not bring harm again to others. That's like the ethics behind a soldier shooting a woman with an AK-47 pointed at him, finger on the trigger. Ethics be damned, life and death are life and death and the woman is a threat to the soldier, his fellow soldiers and possibly the mission at hand. Ethics don't play a part in such things.

I wasn't considering leaving Silicon Valley when this discussion started. But now I'll have to give it some serious thought!

The only downside I see to living in New Mexico is that when you travel to the rest of the country, you keep having to explain to geographical ignoramuses that you're not a furrener. I believe that's why New Mexico is the only state that puts "USA" on its license plates!