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We will just have to disagree there. Companies such as HP or Dell could load it and sell it. Aside from OS X, Apple could make iLife (already do for one component - iTunes) for Windows sell it to PC vendors who in turn bundle it with windows. Apple is not without options to try, if hardware fails to keep them solvent. No guarantee of success, but they have options.

There will never be an x86 version of the Mac OS. Darwin, maybe. But full blown Mac OS, with Aqua and all that? Never.

Never say never. Apple could have it done already (and it is technologically possible to do), and locked away in a vault. Remember, NeXTSTEP ran on intel.

Perspective here

I use Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company because in general, most people know who Henry Ford is (though they may not know that his business almost failed under the crushing weight of bogus law-suits brought on by his competitors). I also believe, that like Henry Ford, the right person has a good chance of getting the credit for thier own innovations. I try to not be a pessimist.

That brings me to another historic point. The IP issue is actually very well illustrated by Tesla and Marconi. Marconi was given full patent to the Radio, but as Tesla said, "Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.". This is actually a case where NOT defending one's IP led to failure.

I do not think that IP rights should be abandoned, but I believe that changing laws (or using laws in creative ways) to try to stifle a competitive market is very wrong and hurtful.

Finally, the stronger argument that I do NOT point out (because it's so over-used on Slashdot, that even I don't want to hear about it anymore) is the negative impact of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act]. I'll let the others continue on about the current impact of the DMCA. The problem is as 4of12's comment (above) points out, such current impact is hard to proove.

"No hanging chad problems... but no pieces of paper at all to count wasn't the solution we were looking for."

According to Robert X. Cringely, these e-voting machines have built-in (yet unused) printers.

I didn't think so.

Before that?
Anyone?

19 April 1995.

Check it out, it's a good read.

Excerpt: "So I went on the web to see how easy it would be to emigrate to India. I found NOTHING. I called the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC and asked how I could emigrate to India. They didn't know what I was talking about. What the Indian Embassy was prepared to discuss was how my U.S. employer might transfer me to India for some period of time. I told them PBS had no such expansion plans to my knowledge, though they might make an exception just for me. They were also willing to discuss how I might go to India as an entrepreneur, bringing capital into the country and starting a new business there employing Indians. I told them I had no money to invest. And the idea that I'd just arrive at the Mumbai equivalent of Ellis Island looking for a job, well they found that rather amusing. You can't just move to India it turns out. Someone there has to want you -- no, they have to NEED you -- OR you have to be bringing with you a big suitcase of cash to start a business. Journeyman techies need not apply. It's interesting that Indian immigration policies are more restrictive than U.S. immigration policies. There is no true Indian equivalent, for example, of our H1-B work visas. There is no quid pro quo. But then there is also no wave of U.S. engineers clamoring to move to India."

you've got no idea.

Check out Frontline and this is just really about one small segment of fraud when companies, like Haliburton of course, use fake leases to defraud the government of literally billions of dollars on individual transactions. The amount of discrepency in the Haliburton fuel probe is so small that that probably is an oversight. When they steal they go much bigger. Personally everyone who participated in such transactions should be hung as traitors, but that's me.

Corporations are paying about half in corporate taxes now as they had from 1950 to 2000. The 2000 is something of a coincidence because it just took that long to catch on because some were worried they'd get caught. The Republican congress did a good job taking care of that though.

Most of the very-rich people are using their capital to steal everyone elses capital.

no six foot long paintings hung on a curved wall

btw In museum circles horror stories of unsuitable trophy buildings like this are legion.

I recommend picking up a copy of Write Now: A Complete Self Teaching Program for Better Handwriting. It's available from Amazon (affiliate link) or the publisher.

Write Now is a handwriting guide developed for adults. It doesn't have stupid little animals or other kid things, although it does have handwriting trivia all over the place. If your handwriting is so bad you've long since given up and your printing is almost as bad, this is the book for you. It starts off teaching an italic form of printing, which then leads easily into italic cursive. It even has some pages on calligraphy at the end, but the main focus of the book is on developing a quick and legible handwriting. The authors periodically hold seminars for doctors, so it's got to be practical.

I bought it because I haven't actually done cursive in over ten years. Even I had trouble reading my printing. I needed to forget everything I knew and start from scratch. This book is helping, but it's hard to sit down and practice, so my cursive still isn't very usable, but my printing is better.

Give it a try!

No. You should be able to SEE your results before they go into the ballot box, but you should not be able to TOUCH the ballot.
That might allow you to remove it from the polling place and do $DEITY-knows-what with it.
It should pass from beneath a transparent panel to the ballot box when you hit the Cast Your Vote button.
Bev Harris writes knowledgeably about this.

Cringely has an even wiser suggestions: KISS.
The Canadians use a marker-and-paper-only system with "scrutineers". It works very reliably.

gewg_

As stated in one of the replys to your post, the DoD will probably be offering a long term contract to manufacture similar vehicles for actual combat/whatever use. The DoD has already done this with the new-gen X planes, as seen on PBS' NOVA. The DoD's JSF competition will probably end up paying the winner (Lockheed) some $1T in total contractual monies.

Who do you think is more, or less, likely to have assault rifles in the home: Bush backers, or Kerry backers?

And who do you think is the most threat with an assault rifle, a Bush backer or a Kerry backer?

This link has some interesting apropos historyQ: The history of photography was really the history of patents?

Given that context, I think this patent sounds plausable. Esp. if it goes back to 1987. I don't see what the problem is. Or, if it is a problem, its been a problem for 100s of years.

For some reason, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that they could have such a broad patent, or at least just as reasonable as the fact that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a biology laboratory protocol for making lots of copies from small samples of DNA, is patented.

This sort of ties in with the ideas of Robert X cringely, which can be read here:

For Love Not Money: How WhyFi can turn hotspots into a real industry

and

WhyFi Not? - Bob Defends his Wireless Networking Idea

Yes, I realise WiFi, not WhyFi - those are the titles.

This sort of ties in with the ideas of Robert X cringely, which can be read here:

For Love Not Money: How WhyFi can turn hotspots into a real industry

and

WhyFi Not? - Bob Defends his Wireless Networking Idea

Yes, I realise WiFi, not WhyFi - those are the titles.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/weapo ns/patriot.html

PBS Frontline has some more info on how the Patriot missile came to be and it's lackluster performance

A summary can be found here

Given Microsoft's creative email retention policies I doubt they'd find much. Someone's probably purging emails right now if they haven't already.

It's SONNY, man, SONNY.

This sounds like the stuff that's still being litigated - it's not clear that Microsoft owns these patents.

Ah, good ole days. That once was true. Television, and later color television, spread this way. Early adopters on both sides--folks taking a chance on some new gadget and folks taking a chance on providing content for that new gadget--set the path to a brave new world.

And for many years it worked. Color tv spread; AM stereo radio didn't. Market forces worked, and it was good.

Those days are gone. In the USA HDTV is law. Broadcasters have to broadcast it; manufacturers have to make it.

The market chose CD over DAT and DVD over DivX, but in this case there is no competing technology. If you don't want an HDTV, eventually your only option will be no TV at all.

BTW, if you're planning on buying in the USA a TV 36-inches or larger, and don't want to be forced to pay a few hundred dollars for HDTV hardware you don't need, butter buy before July 1.

What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading... [And several
other, equally valid points]

I want to expand on this, just a bit, to highlight the problem here.

It seems highly unlikely that the RIAA would allow the end-user to download their database of "song signatures" or hashes or whatever implements this, so that the end-user could filter songs locally, deleting unauthorized songs on the honor system. After all, if the RIAA trusted its customers -- and if the customers were trustworthy -- but that's all water over the dam, isn't it?

So clearly this means uploading either the whole song, or some derived signature, to RIAA, every time you want to trade the file. This means uploading not just music, but any traded file.

And this introduces a chilling effect on free speech. Because the files I might be trading -- or the samizdat that secret Falun Gong supporter Won Ma might be sending to his fellow Chinese dissidents -- might not belong to the RIAA, but might invite government scrutiny for being unpopular dissent.

Certainly, knowing that everything that was traded, from bootleg Pete Seeger protest songs to homemade iMovies juxtaposing images of George Bush and chimpanzees to recordings of parody songs about John Ashcroft's resemblance to Darth Vader, was reported to a central repository -- the RIAA copyright detecting server -- could make that repository an irresistible target of monitoring by unscrupulous government agencies interested in tracking dissent -- whether those agencies are in Beijing or Washington D.C.

Would a government employee or contractor, worried about maintaining a security clearance, feel as free to engage in lawful and even patriotic dissent if he was worried his bosses might be able to monitor the his trading, from his home, excerpts from the documentary Guns & Mothers to which the he had added his own commentary defending his Second Amendment rights? Of course he'd worry -- and thus be discouraged from exercising his constitutional rights under not only the Second but the First Amendment as well!

Might a closeted homosexual worry that trading documentary films about Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay could reveal his sexual orientation and make him subject to blackmail?

Might Christians living in a Muslim theocracy fear persecution for trading Bibles or Christian devotional music?

Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.

Whatever your politics, whether you trade files or not -- and, no, I don't --, this is something you must oppose, for it threatens the liberty of all of us.

You're knowledge of voting methods is obviously lacking. If you'd investigated the issue to any significant degree, you'd know that most countries using paper ballots have plenty of viable methods of working around the problems you mentioned. Stolen ballot boxes can be avoided by security and auditing at the polling station, and counting the votes onsite. Green votes can be avoided by counting the votes the same day they're cast. Recounts and endless challenges can be avoided by having each candidate provide their own counter, and have all counters agree on the vote count before the results are phoned in.

None of this is revolutionary, it's how the Canadian system works. In Canada, we know who our new Prime Minister (Canadian equivalent to a President, I guess you'd say) the same day the votes are cost. And the entire yearly budget for Elections Canada is less than the cost of a single election in a single major US city. Paperless elections are not safer or better, will not address the problems plaguing the US election system, and waste a ton of taxpayers money in the process.

In the interests of disclosure, I should note that none of these factoids are at all original or "mine" in any way, they're all from the I, Cringely article linked above. Read the article for a far more comprehensive overview.

The short answer is that Mars magnetic shield died, and the water probably was stripped away with the martian atmosphere by the solar wind. See more here: pbs.org

Look here for a series of clips discussing the string theory, the 'M' theory, and a lot of stuff that led up to it.

Nova transcript

It was a Monday morning, September 19, and I was trying, convincing myself that it didn't work, just seeing exactly what the problem was, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. I realized what was holding me up was exactly what would resolve the problem I had had in my Iwasawa theory attempt three years earlier, was -- It was the most -- the most important moment of my working life. It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant, and I just stared in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then, during the day, I walked around the department. I'd keep coming back to my desk and looking to see if it was still there. It was still there.

I'm sorry, I should have said indescribably beautiful.

I think the balence we have today seems not too far off the mark, but in the long run who knows?

I believe that after 2 decades of abuse US patent and copyright laws will be libralized significantly.

I think you may mean 10 (to 30) million years. This is known as the "Cambrian Explosion."

Very interesting to read.

Perhaps in Europe everything is opposite (well, having been there, it'd come as no surprise to me if this was true :-) ), but I do know one thing: There's a great deal of broadcasters in North America who lack any form of commercials.

Some of them are paid directly by people who subscribe to the programming, for example, HBO, and FSTV. Some of them broadcast for free and have absolutely no charge attached to them, for example, PBS, and, to some degree (if you live outside of Ontario) TV Ontario. FSTV also has a station without commercials.

Commercial free stations such as TV Ontario, PBS, FSTV, and the various religious stations regularly broadcast content which a great many would find objectionable if they didn't keep their TV sets glued to stations they actually enjoy. In fact, in spite of the fact the BBC forces a license upon people in the UK for their content, PBS manages to give away many of the exact same programs developed by the BBC themselves, and has continued to do so for years. Also, I am certain that the content broadcast on FSTV is FAR more objectionable to many than just about ANY other station I know of, especially the BBC.

Why it is that there are more commercial free programs being broadcast that I can pick up in North America for free than there are in the UK under forced licencing will always remain an unsolveable enigmah to me.

From their website:

Public TV's total national, regional and local revenue in FY00 totaled $1.6 billion, according to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Leading sources of revenue: members (23.5%); state governments (18.3%); CPB and federal grants/contracts (16.4%); businesses (16.1%); state colleges and universities (6.5%); and foundations (5.5%).

So, the federal government chips in 16.3% of 1.6 billion dollars. That's 260 million.

From their website, NPR's operating budget (total) is 100 million dollars. Congress pays for 18%.

The FBI budget: 4.298 billion, with $500 in new spending this year to develop counter-terrorism and high-tech crime fighting.

From their website "High tech" crimes outrank public corruption investigations, protecting civil rights, combating organized crime, and even upgrading the organizations technology to successfully perform their mission.

While I don't have a hard number, I can tell you if it's not close to 280 million, it's probably more.

It basically consists of interviews with people involved in the porn industry (from the front office to the business end of the camera) and talks about the environment in which they work. They spend part of their time focusing on a couple who are into making "extreme" stuff. The PBS camera crew actually walked out while these guys were making a "rape" video because they couldn't take what they were seeing, despite conceding that it was nominally consensual. The directors' only instructions to the woman were simply to "let it happen". Everyone knew what was going to happen (including being slapped around... and worse) except her!

Kind of makes you think a bit about what is and is not over the line with regard to "freedom of expression".

The full show is available online from the PBS web site.

It basically consists of interviews with people involved in the porn industry (from the front office to the business end of the camera) and talks about the environment in which they work. They spend part of their time focusing on a couple who are into making "extreme" stuff. The PBS camera crew actually walked out while these guys were making a "rape" video because they couldn't take what they were seeing, despite conceding that it was nominally consensual. The directors' only instructions to the woman were simply to "let it happen". Everyone knew what was going to happen (including being slapped around... and worse) except her!

Kind of makes you think a bit about what is and is not over the line with regard to "freedom of expression".

The full show is available online from the PBS web site.

That raises interesting questions. I believe the bulk of the killing and concentration took place between 1865 and 1880. That was the period during which Sherman waged his genocidal campaign. It was also during this period that the homestead act unleashed millions of colonists into the Indian territories. Like the Nazis, they superseded a deportation policy (The Indian Removal Act and the indian territory treaties) with one of extermination and concentration camps for the purpose of creating lebensraum. This was also the period of railroad expansion and the extermination of the buffalo, with the accompanying effect on hunter gatherer economies. But I don't have historical data on the extent of killings by time period. They didn't keep as detailed records as the Germans.

BTW, the German genocide didn't really extend to Croats. Germany created the modern nation state of Croatia (previously part of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, a.k.a Yugoslavia) and installed a puppet regime. They were, allies. Croats manned the concentration camps filled with Yugoslavian Jews, Bosnians and Serbs. There was Croat resistance of course. Tito, the most important Communist partisan leader, was a Croat. However, far more Croats fought on the Axis side, both in the regular military and the paramilitary Ustase. Or were you talking about the Serbian invasion of Croatia after the (perfectly constitutional) Croatian secession? Interestingly, I believe the current Croatia adopted the flag and currency of the Nazi sponsored Independent State of Croatia.

Man! There are so many things wrong with your post I don't even know where to begin.

It will only accelerate their impoverishment and send them tumbling the way of the USSR. Their economy is about as bad off as the old Soviet Union, full of positive reports to keep ministers from being executed.

The economies of Russia (past and present) and China are fundamentally different in many ways. First, China's economy has been evolving toward capitalism for more than 20 years since Deng Xiao Ping was in charge. As with any kind of change of this magnitude, growing pains are to be expected. A hickup every now and then should be expected. Banking scandals? We've got Enron, Worldcom, Martha Stewrt, etc. No big deal. Regardless, the point is that it is all moving forward at a managable pace. For a little historic perspective, it is worth noting that China was actually one of the Anchors that kept the Asian Economy from crashing even harder many years ago. The Soviet Union, had no control over the economic changes that occured in the aftermath of the breakup. It was basically a free for all, everyone for themselves kind of situation.

They've got entire villages infected with AIDS that are about to disappear

Like urban legends, this is just one of those things that won't die. The villagers who contracted AIDS by selling their blood has been reported so much by major media, it feels like O.J. Simpson all over again. Let it go, there's no point in beating a dead horse. At the very least, the article details medical aid being given to the villagers. That is a great deal better than how US treated many southern blacks who were intentially infected with syphillis a few decades ago.

They ignore it all to produce a few gems like cavitation torpedoes, a space program, and a couple of capitalist sector cities.

You need to get your facts straight. Cavitation torpedoes are not Chinese, they are Russian . With regards to "a couple of capitalist sector cities." - I was born in a part of China which when I left could very properly be described as the boonies. Rice paddies and water buffalos everywhere. As little as 10 years ago, , everything I had known was gone. The rural quietness bulldozed over and replaced with freeways and automobiles. Modernization is not just happening in Shanghai and ShenZhen, it is happening to the whole country. A great deal of the news you get from the American press in really no better than supermart tabloid reporting. I guess no matter how outlandish it is, there are still those who would swallow it all hook line and sinker.

Here's the deal. If large corporations agree to pay their taxes like everyone else, and not use illegal tax shelters, generally show a bit of civic responsibility, I'll agree to not pirate ANYTHING. /me just finished watching Frontline.

Look here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ta x/

Sound fair? Good. You cannot have your cake and and pie and cream puffs and every last damn thing you want AND eat it too. Greedy bastards.

0) Remember there is a difference between CO2 mass and carbon. The 6 Gtons is carbon. Much of the mass in your calculation (which is too high by a factor of 10 btw - consult e.g. a diving handbook) is in oxygen.

1) There is a difference between the GROSS carbon production by the biosphere, and the NET production. In general the biosphere "produces" something like 100 Gton carbon a year, BUT it also absorbs that same amount in growing things. The carbon emissions from fossil fuels is IN ADDITION to the normal processes; it has the effect of disturbing the equilibrium, because it doesn't get absorbed. You have to understand that if the full 100 Gton/yr of carbon went into the atmosphere and wasn't absorbed, the Earth would look like Venus very quickly.

Current, undisputed, data show that atmospheric CO2 levels have doubled in the past 100 years . Isotopic analysis of the C (i.e. C-12 vs C-14 levels) show that virtually all of this carbon comes from fossil fuels (the C-14 has decayed, so the carbon has been buried for a LONG time).

Long before the days of the South African government, Zulu warriors took a substance that had a very similar effect to the "bloodlust" spell in WarCraft. It would make the warriors literally "see red" and want to kill everything in sight. I saw it on an episode of the PBS show "Secrets of the Dead". They have a web page about it, but it doesn't make any reference to the bloodlust effects of the drug (I believe it is the Bushman Poison Bulb that has these properties). They also talk about some of the other crazy drugs that the warriors would be doped up on during battle.

One of the key indicators of just how well the ruse worked is that 60% of the working public was in one way or another invested in "Wall Street" during the late 1990's. The last time this many of the "regular working public" invested was during the 1920's.

Another, perhaps clearer indicator of how well the ruse worked is looking at just how much money was drained from the US economy (ie: your wallets and mine): $3.3trillion.

It's tragic, really. The technology was in some cases quite good. eBay roars along. Dell digitized their entire business model. And governments around the world have started to adopt Open Source works as the foundation from which to build upon. But greed extracted a huge price on the economy and our ability to reinvest those dollars in continued Research and Development.

... to control the future media distribution standard, and impose a 'Microsoft tax' similar to that they have on PCs today. Its importance to them cannot be overestimated, and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain its position. Robert X Cringely has a very interesting article on Microsoft's media strategy in his ongoing coverage of Burst.com's patent-infingement suit against MS/WMA.

AOL lost 100 billion in 2003. Even if you get to put your little finger to your mouth when reading the bank ballance, remember that it is still a finite number. If investors start to think that you are not going to get bigger, expect things to turn ugly really quickly.

A few years ago, there was an exellent installment of NOVA that looked into the whole natural/synthetic diamond business. Everything from the early history of how DeBeers cornered the market to the (then) latest attempts at producing gem quality crystals.

"...nobody deserves to have their hard earned work lifted without their permission..."

Transmitted Behavior Patterns: Koko and Michael> the gorillas learning sign language is a fine example of animals learning.

Arts: the Bowerbird will Decorate it's nest, actively arranging objects in a way that suits his aesthetic.
Koko and Michael the gorillas are also known for their paintings.

Beliefs? This one is Tricky. I'll leave it up to someone else to tackle this for now. Although animals showing signs of mourning (evidence shown under institutions) forms a good basis for beliefs.

Institutions? Such as social hierarchy. That is found all over in nature... wolf packs, bee/termite hives...
And the "human" institution of mourning the dead? Let's see... koko again. And Elephants mourning their dead is a well documented phenomenon.

" Heck, Bill has NEVER owned more than 50%. He and Paul Allen each had 50% to start with, until they went IPO. "

Not true:

"Bill Gates received 64 percent of Microsoft to Paul Allen's 36 percent, which explains why Gates is the richest man in the world and Allen is only number two or three on the list."

And expanding on buzzword betting pool: Buzzword Bingo

On a semi-related note, read Cringely's column on the evil that is a Powerpoint 'stack'.

Is it ethical to break the law?

Some would argue that it can be. She might. They might. He might. Heck, some people might argue that treason against one's country could sometimes be ethical.

Mind you, I'm not defending counterfeiting currency, just answering your question. Your question implies that you would say that breaking the law is unethical. I'm always surprised to hear Americans declare that the law is a measure of morality or ethics given that many of the best parts of our country came from civil disobediance. (I realize you might not be American, if so, my apologies. Still, the statement stands.)

Actually, in his second book (Shadows of the Mind) he (as far as I can tell) claims to prove that the human mind does things a universal Turing machine cannot and must therefore be based on different physics. Please correct me if I remember this wrong.

While I do not buy Penrose's argument, it is also not entirely clear to me, where it fails. The gist seemed to be: "In any formal system of logic there are statements that can be proven to be undecidable; however, we can see that they must be true, since if they were not, there would be a counterexample, which would make them decidable. Hence human reasoning is different from just following formal logic (which is what, supposedly, a computer following the laws of classical or quantum mechanics would do). Consequently the human brain must follow different laws - and quantum gravity seemed to be the [only|obvious] place left to look for them.

I really just couldn't hold any respect for him after reading The Emperor's New Mind, which is too bad since it's one of those "tour de force" books ala hofstadter
I think it is a great book, even though I disagree with his point on AI.

I don't think he should lose respect because of the ideas he has put forward, especially since he now tries to think up experiments on how to test his hypothesis.

I do enjoy those laymans science books. Any you might recommend?
I enjoyed reading Deutsch "The Fabric of Reality" (although it is in places very speculative and I do not agree with several points) and Greene "The Elegant Universe" (cf. also the BBC tv series).

I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but in case you haven't, I like Cringely's take on how to fix the voting system. Then again, since I'm a Canadian, my opinion is not without bias. But it certainly is nice to know who your new Prime Minister is the same day the ballots were cast! And hardly a computer involved, imagine that...

Bob Cringely has a good article on this as well, aptly titled "It's our own damn fault".

Also, from another perspective is this article from the India Times

Bob Cringely has a good article on this as well, aptly titled "It's our own damn fault".

Also, from another perspective is this article from the India Times