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This is untrue. For instance, here are Darwin's words, in his diary, on the death of his father in November 1848:

"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished.

"And this is a damnable doctrine."

But he was not quite an atheist. In later life, he wrote in his Autobiography, intended only for the consumption of his family:

"[A] source of conviction in the existence of God ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting ... I deserve to be called a theist."

His beliefs wavered constantly, and for this reason he avoided making public statements on his religious beliefs, but reserved his statements to constantly stressing that evolution was compatible with theism.

In his last years, he wrote in his autobiography:

"A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life ... only to follow those impulses and instincts ... which seem to him the best ones ... I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."

Source of all the above:
Darwin's Diary

Wal-Mart, a great company.

Do you know the Truth?
Not all of it, to be sure. But then none of us do. We've barely scratched the surface on how the universe works.

Or do you actually go outside at night see the stars and believe all that matter came from nothing?
Nothing? Why not? Just because we don't know all of the mechanics that make the formation of the universe work, or even the fact that we might not like what what information do have tells us doesn't automatically mean that the scientific explination is wrong.

Did your relatively simple computer and OS just happen, or did they have a designer?
Oh, yes. The "if x then y" argument. Very clever.

But the complex interaction between plants and animals, gravity and the solar system...... was it not desidned?
No, it was not designed. The solar system works because of the gravitational pull of the mass of the sun. As to why the planets all seem to be in pretty stable orbits, that's easy: all of the unstable stuff fell into the sun or into the other planets already. There's even a little bit of that stuff floating around. Or don't rocks fall from the sky in your world.

As for the relationship with plants and animals, why would a sane god make a plant that tricks an insect into mating with it in order to get it's flower polinated?

Geeks have brains, don't they, where did you brain come from?
Our ape ancestors. Why would a sane god create a baby with a brain so large that it puts the mother and child at risk of death at birth? And we're the only animal with this problem. Does that sound like a good design to you?

The Cringe (Bob X. Cringely) contested this with a simple argument in his column a while ago. Because Sequent documented the technology they developed in a generic way, not in terms of their specific implementation within Dynix (read the RCU paper here, for instance), it was possible to write a cleanroom implementation for almost any OS (even non-quasi-Unices).

The fact that it was partly written by the same talent in both Dynix and Linux is irrelevent, as the cat was already out of the bag.

As far as JFS is concerned, SCO can pound sand. The JFS patch for Linux wasn't even based on AIX code - it came from OS/2.

THANK YOU for highlighting a core cause of all this. Most Americans aren't interested in the math and sciences these days and the current trend with the administration is to squeeze funding out of the public American schools and pump that directly in the military programs and private companies like Lockheed and Raytheon. Recently I read a review about research jobs in the US military. Many senior scientists are retiring and they have an extreme shortage finding qualified American citizens as replacements. The question was raised who was going to develop the next gen. F-22 fighter plane? While the current administration loves to pour money blindly into current Pentagon programs, many of which under normal circumstances and budgets would have been axed for being too impractical and based on unproven technologies (exotic any damn nano-whatever technology or suits that gives our troops camouflage that renders them invisible in all environments). The sad fact is that politicians (esp. Republicans) enjoy blaming public schools for failing and keep trying to push the school voucher program to hold a high degree of accountability for our educational programs (Parents aren't helping much either these days when they take the blame out for their children's behavior on these poorly paid teachers. When its the parent's own failure to raise their own children).
It irks me when I here about Congress dropping the Pentagon's requirement to give an accounting balance of their spending. Before the Congress removed this requirement the Pentagon used to be unable to account for 4 Trillion dollars out 7 Trillion in their yearly transactions. Why is it that we turn a blind eye under such wasteful spending in the military-industrial-govt complex yet, bash the public school systems with very little funds and poorly paid teachers. Inside the Pentagon: Franklin "Chuck" Spinney story These children are the future of American minds who will be the engineers, programmers, scientists (with PhDs). Yet we squeeze the funding of education today for short term gains for private companies involved with the military complex, that lobbied heavily for these programs and where heavy contributers to our politicians. Point is that we are sacrificing our futures by not investing in education at the lowest levels today. Perhaps some of those American kids will take up programming or take up a research oriented science. Till then the trend will be that jobs like the ones in GE in be going to Russia, China, India and other countries that INVEST in public education and have strong math and science backgrounds. There are many poor people in South America and Africa too, but you won't see jobs heading out there or in the foreseeable future. Because they didn't invest in the education that requires their citizens to compete in a high tech world and for high end research jobs. Till then sit back and enjoy that Missile Defense Shield that will cost the American tax payers billions. Which could have been invested in to our schools and retraining for the recent unemployed. No, we won't do that because its not sexy enough when we make investments like that. Instead we're going with the advise of an imbecile Rumsfeld's "spiral" program of development of our weapons missile systems which don't require verification or enough tests to prove the system works. Translation: Blank check to the miltary-industrial-govt complex with no oversight or accountability. While our children funding for our schools is cut and teachers have to buy textbooks out of their own pockets for their students. Its a f#@king outrage and disgusts me that we allow this to happen in the country. Then blame other countries for taking our high tech jobs, when our own citizenary 'could' have provided those jobs with more investment in training and education. Till then sleep with the comfort that billions will be spent on a system that won't be protecting you and lining the coffers of private defense contractors, while our school system is allowed

Do you have anything to back up this claim?

From Wal-Mart's War on Unions:

When meat cutters at a Jacksonville, Tex., Wal-Mart voted for UFCW Local 540 representation in February 2000, the company refused to recognize the union--and suddenly changed the job functions of the meat cutters with a change to case-ready meat. Wal-Mart believed it had successfully circumvented the UFCW's first victory at one of its stores--until a National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge ordered the company to recognize and bargain with Local 540 over the effects of the change to prepackaged meat. This order comes more than three years after the original union election. Case-ready beef and pork is cut, processed and packaged in the meat slaughterhouses, then transported to the retail outlets already packaged and ready for sale.

There was a story in the NY Times sotry "The Wal-Martization of America."

Dude, Walmart sucks big time for their workers. A picture is worth a thousand words ...

Here is an interesting couple of articles on identity theft by Robert X. Cringely (or Mark Stephens, depending on your version of reality).

Ego, Super-ego, and ID Theft
How to Steal $65 Billion

Here is an interesting couple of articles on identity theft by Robert X. Cringely (or Mark Stephens, depending on your version of reality).

Ego, Super-ego, and ID Theft
How to Steal $65 Billion

Lots of other things get censored for almost no reason (say "fuck" once, have a sinister looking artwork).

That's not no reason. If I had an eleven year old, I would not want him or her exposed to music which uses obscene references to sexual references.

Wal-Mart doesn't just censor sexual references. The cover of John Mellencamp's "Mr. Happy Go Lucky" album was altered to remove an angel and a devil, because it was "insensitive to their non-Judeo-Christian customers". Sheryl Crow's self-titled album was flat-out banned from Wal-Mart because of one line of one song that cited an incident where a 13-year-old bought a gun at a Wal-Mart. (Source: PBS.com)

Here's the rub. Wal-Mart does not disclose what has been altered. "Mr. Happy Go Lucky" and "Sheryl Crow" are well known because Mellencamp and Crow raised a colossal stink about having to alter their work to meet the moral standards of one corporation. But how many other CDs sitting in American homes have been altered without the owner of the disc even knowing that the original version exists?

Wal-Mart and I share those values. I choose to support their choice of values. So do millions and millions of Americans.

Of course. They are, by far, the largest retailer in the United States. That gives them the power to justify anything they choose. Outside the entertainment department and magazine rack, it's all just goods for sale. Do you honestly think every single solitary case of motor oil Wal-Mart sells is a mandate for their campaign of moral enforcement? Many don't know, most don't care.

In the end, it still comes down to one thing: A massive corporation, with tremendous power in the marketplace, abusing that power to the benefit of its bottom line, and the detriment of "consumers". It's no more right for Wal-Mart to impose its morality on musicians than it is for Microsoft to force NGSCB onto your computer. Sure, as individuals, we have Linux and our favorite indie record stores, but at the macro level, Microsoft and Wal-Mart still win.

In the forward for "The Universal Computer" (by Martin Davis) there are a couple of quotes:

"If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincided with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence I have ever encountered."

Howard Aiken in 1956

Let us now return to the analogy of the theoretical computing machines... It can be shown that a single special machine of that type can be made to do the work of all. It could in fact be made to work as a model of any other machine. The special machine may be called a universal machine..."

Alan Turing in 1947

NOTE: In Mr. Aiken's defense, he is probably referring to a differential analyzer (which was an analog computer)

When I was in high school, my (supposedly) CS teacher read an article that stated, "the world would no longer need programmers". She attempted to persuade me from becoming a programmer because in the future no one would need programmers. It would be a dead profession. The year was 1994. Okay, she was half right (there won't be anymore jobs for a while, and they'll all go overseas...), but still.... You can't extrapolate. My teacher never would have imagined (or actually just read the other article) about the internet.

What if AI takes off? I think in the future even the soft sciences will become more computational. Look at fields like bioinfomatics or computational linguistics. There are all kinds of new areas opening up. The problem is that the world doesn't revolve around computers, but all the phenomena of our universe may be one really grand one. Programmers have to learn other skills. I see biologists, actuaries, and engineers (outside of EE/ECE) write code all the time. You need to attach an extra skill to your code.

All this just goes to prove, you shouldn't extrapolate about science or computing, unless your one of these guys:

Alan Turing
Albert Einstein
Kurt Godel
Nikola Tesla
Gordon Moore
Jules Verne

Of course, I'm extrapolating (and as you can guess, I'm not one of these guys...), so if you're a good philosopher you can safely ignore my post. Nothing to see here.... Carry on.

... I can't see any mention of this (last 4 or 5 paragraphs) in the archives. I can't believe no one bothered to submit it...

I discovered it yesterday, and like Cringely, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I might make its implementation my New Year's Resolution. (Gee, having a New Year's Resolution would also make a good New Year's Resolution :)

Obviously there are some addresses like sales@ which it would be inappropriate for, but for the rest of us...

Mmmmmaybe. For copyrighted works, the publisher does not want us in the equation because all we do is erode their markets. Commercially, it would be hard to unseat iTunes which the RIAA loves because it's still filled with gravy (unless you're cdbaby). I would consider having a public archive ala mp3.com for free or specially-cleared works.

However, Cringely kinda had the right idea with Snapster... imagine if a public library could obtain clearance to circulate songs on owned albums individually...and patrons could make playlists of songs they want to check out...and the system could schedule so that only a single patron was listening to a certain track at a time..heh.

Great idea, vonFinkelstien, thanks.

Hey, Saddam called some of later missile strikes "Operation Monica", not me. Though now that you mention it, I don't know why the news article called it Desert Fox, which it couldn't have been. My point is its hypocritical to say Bush is doing this as a PR campaign, or to deflect attention, when basically the same thing happened with Clinton and his many cruise missiles. I personally tend to give them both the benefit of the doubt. But this is Slashdot, so we should only give one the benefit of the doubt and the earlier one must have been good because we only have 2 year memories. I'm sorry you lost your buddy in Iraq; My family has lost relatives in every war from WW1 to Vietnam; We've been lucky since then.

Who launched a half-assed attack against Al Qaeda? Can you find a reference to "Al Qaeda" that exists before 9/11/01? Not likely. This is all made up bullshit.

Here you go, that took about 10 seconds. I guess you're technically right since it was only called "bin Laden's network of terrorist groups", not "Al Qaeda" then. Of course, 1998 was such a long time ago, and those cruise missiles were just a friendly gesture. Here's an interview where OBL himself mentions the attack. Half-assed is demonstrated in these two articles, however the latter one is written after 9/11 and it isn't fully fair, since hindsight is 20/20. But we could have done better, that's for sure. Here's another referenencing the attack. Calling it all "made up bullshit" sure sounds good, but its hard to rebut the facts of history. Do I think Clinton's scandal caused the 75 cruise missile attack? No, but the timing sure seems bad. Now tell me again why Bush is doing this all as a big PR campaign? Seems like "No War" would have been a hell of a lot more popular with the voters around here.

as a result of the previous Bush's actions

We made a mistake in 1991, but again hindsight is perfect. We're finishing it now; the sanctions and cruise missiles were just putting it off. Responsibility for OBL and Al Qaeda rest soley with Clinton and later GWB. Sure, the original Gulf War fanned the flames a lot, but that was a UN war, and our options were limited since the UN only knows limited/partial war, and all the limited/partial results that brings (see Korea). So who's your favorite leader? More likely than not they either (1) fought a war in which Americans died, or (2) ignored a security threat so that his successor had to fight the war instead. Don't even say JFK was your favorite... you'll have a lot more bodies to count.

Fox News Alert.
Perterson Case
Fox News Alert
Jackson Case
Fox News Alert
Toby Case
Fox News Alert
More Mindless crap.

Before 9/11, Faux News and others were spinning stories practically continuously, despite dire predictions by the Hart Rudman Commission and the Gore Report.

And this is coming from someone who in the past bought dish network so I could watch fox news. But that is before it turned into all trash, all the time.

The U.S. tilt towards Iraq began under the Carter administration, after the fall of the Shah.

I'm guessing that France and Germany have at least as much to worry about what Saddam might say about their support as the U.S. does.

What's with all the useless links in Slashdot articles? Granted, this article's links are more relevant than most, but it's still got a lot of links that are unclear where they actually go. It's almost as if the article with the most links gets posted on the front page rather than the article with the most relative links. Usually, it's very difficult to tell where the links go, and which link will give you the information you need.

For instance, this article. The Nova link takes you directly to the initial article. That's useful, but typically on Slashdot, a link like this will actaully take you to Nova's root website. It's often the little thing after it that says "article" or "report on" that takes you to the actual article text. Amos Ives Root takes you to a paper on Amos Ives Root, in case you didn't know who he was. Useful, certainly, but the Nova article already gives a lot of background information. The Scientific American link doesn't bring you to Scientific American's root website like you'd think, nor does it link to article about how they initially rejected (though it's briefly mentioned as unconfirmed) the article, it's just a Scientific American article about the Wright Brothers. Useful in a way, but not really relevant to the conversation. "Rejected his article", which in keeping with the Slashdot style, you'd think would bring you to the article, or at least to Scientific American's article about rejecting the commentary, instead brings you to a sight about beekeeping. Granted, there is an article about the rejection, and Root did publish it in a paper about beekeeping, it seems incredibly off topic and obscure, and as short as the article is, not helpful.

The words Wright Brothers brings you to an article about the Wright Brothers. That's intuitive, and if someone didn't know about the Wright Brothers, they might could use it, but the Nova article contains much of the same data and renders this article ultimately redundant. "Publish the article" brings you to the actual article, which is welcome, but I didn't know that this link would actually bring me back the article text until I clicked on it for the sake of writing this comment. The link on other experimenters just brings you to another Slashdot article (+1 linking to Slashdot) about one particular early experimenter. There's not much actual data there (New Zealander Richard Pearse may have very well made several flights... before the Wright Brothers) and doesn't clear up the matter of other early pioneers of flight not getting credit. Oh wait, the next link, entitled "credit they deserve" brings you to another Slashdot article similar to the first. Now I understand.

Investigating links to yet another Slashdot article, this time a fairly irrelevant Ask Slashdot article on "Great Computer Science Papers?" Last, we have the technology link, which brings us to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. Lots of good information, but not linked in a way that helps you understand what you'll be visiting if you click the link.

I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.

....A weapon of mass destruction.

Now if they can just find the other excuse for mass destruction.

Care to make a trillion dollar wager on whether they will or not?

For anyone who is as utterly clueless as I was about what's going on between China and Taiwan, take a look at this:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/china/china-ta iwan.html

I think he was the type that embraced technology and used every tool available to him. I think he would have at least tried and even liked it.

You can read the whole transcript here.
Experience Transcript

His Gear

Sophie

I think he was the type that embraced technology and used every tool available to him. I think he would have at least tried and even liked it.

You can read the whole transcript here.
Experience Transcript

His Gear

Sophie

A quote from a recent PBS documentary:

"He manipulated the work tremendously in the darkroom. He always said that the negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print is the equivalent of the conductor's performance, and the same piece of Mozart is conducted differently, performed differently, by different orchestras, different conductors, and Ansel performed his own negatives differently. ...I don't know, half or forty percent of the creative process occurred in the darkroom...."

I could only imagine what Ansel Adams could do with Photoshop!

You're right. I saw it on PBS.
Nova has made a nice documentary abt this.

It was called "Magnetic Storms." A little sensationalistic, but it does appear that we are a few millennia overdue for a flip. A flip is preceded by just this kind of drop in magnetic force, as "islands" of positive polarity start appearing in the negative area and visa-versa. Already a big one near Antarctica.

Take a look at the website. It has a great video of a simulated flip. Scary stuff.

It was called "Magnetic Storms." A little sensationalistic, but it does appear that we are a few millennia overdue for a flip. A flip is preceded by just this kind of drop in magnetic force, as "islands" of positive polarity start appearing in the negative area and visa-versa. Already a big one near Antarctica.

Take a look at the website. It has a great video of a simulated flip. Scary stuff.

My TiVo captured it but I'm not going to let my kids watch it because it's pretty alarmist IMO (and, frankly, there's nothing we can do about it anyway).

Or maybe we can?

Apparently, one could relatively easily design a system where the voter is issued a paper receipt, but neither him nor anyone else but the appropriate audit authority could read the receipt. Such a system should resolve this "buying your vote" thing... Bob Cringely speaks about this in his weekly column "the pulpit": Follow the Money: Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All

You make a very valid point here. Robert Cringely makes this same point another way in I, Cringely:

Now against this backdrop of failure, I can't help but make one technical observation that I think has been missed by most of the other people covering this story. One of the key issues in touch screen voting is the presence or absence of a so-called paper trail. There doesn't seem to be any way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of auditing the election at all. This is what bugs the conspiracy theorists, that we just have to trust the voting machine developers -- folks whose actions strongly suggest that they haven't been worthy of our trust.

So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in touch.

Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that somebody is.

Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?

This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

I, Cringely linkage...

Seeing the story of Diebold wanting to gouge Maryland for adding printers & an audit trail to their voting systems makes me think that Diebold did not just forget to put in a printed audit trail, but they deliberately do not want one.

I'm all for your suggestion. REQUIRED open source software in voting machines, with an extensive audit trail, not just of the machines, but the servers, protocols, etc. Competent crypto should be used extensively to protect the systems' integrity.

In other news, Zubrin is an armchar scientist and the people in the linked NYT article are real physicists. These specialists know what they are talking about.

Perhaps, but only in a very small area of expertise. Mars colonization is a big project for big minds... specifically, generalists.

More to the point... Zubrin? An armchair scientist? You must be thinking of someone else. This is someone who's been out stumping for Mars colonization for more than twelve years. He promotes, he gives interviews, he testifies before Congress. He was an engineer at Martin Marietta and went on to found his own company. He built a demonstration unit of the In-Situ Propellant Production design for $47,000. He is most definitely a hands-on guy.

A brief Zubrin bio: About FMARS - Dr. Robert Zubrin Crew Bio.
A slightly longer Zubrin bio: SAF's Ask the Scientists: Robert Zubrin.

The contractor often does.

What I've seen happen more often than not, is the company developing the software will loadup on middle management and bring the whole process screaming to a halt.

The project becomes mired in paper work that goes around and around.

In Cringley's lastest column he talks about companies that develop for profit only. There's little incentive for the program to actually work.

Also, keep in mind that 60 degrees farenheit is pretty far from freezing and that the inside of your house is unlikely to reach the temperatures required to freeze the pipes *inside* your home.

For the record, the inside temperature (at the thermostat, at least) was about 65 degrees when the pipes were frozen. This had happened before to earlier tenants, so there was a small access opening cut into the wall space where the pipes ran. I had to cram a hairdryer in and run it intermittently over the course of about an hour before the water started flowing again. By the way, we're talking about the edges of Zones 5 & 6 here. Not exactly North Dakota.

After that, I reluctantly left the tap on with just the slightest drip, and that was enough. Moving water doesn't freeze as easily. That winter got even colder for a while, but the pipes never froze again. Needless to say, I didn't renew my lease. Ah, campus slumlords.

The PBS Cringely was the third InfoWorld Robert X. Cringely writer. There wasn't really anything to "sell out" about, as he wasn't the first (or last) Cringely, merely the one who kept using the pseudonym after he and InfoWorld parted ways.

Your aurgument is flawed since ALL of the regular contributing volunteers left, not "just a few".
They took the logo they made and used they also took the layout they used. However they now have changed the layout and logo, since they do not have the deep pockets of their opponent.

You need to check out:
I Cringley and read why Robert X Cringley does not even have the rights to his own name in a certain unscrupulous magazine. However he can write under his own name elsewhere and that magazine can't stop him.

If Slashdot decides to allow AOL-TimeWarner to host this site, that does not give the host rights to change Slashdot.org into a static webpage, or a subscription only clone of Time magazine.

It all boils down to who owns copyright, the creator of the work or the publisher of the work. SSC published what the LG volunteers created.

Actually, I don't find the parent's post funny either. What I really don't find funny is the fact that this man has had a history of lying/exaggerating. Of course, lying politicians are as old as well -- politics. The big problem is that Al Gore was just so bad at it. In fact, even as Al Gore ran for office in Tennessee, he began to exaggerate for effect. During one campaign stop, Al Gore made a point to a largely farming community that he himself was a farmer and he had been involved in every part of the tobacco farming process. This was significant, because even senior members of his campaign began to warn him about his tendency to exaggerate in his public speeches.

Sure, Clinton didn't exaggerate. He outright lied. He lied very well. So much so, that we elected him twice. Of course, when Bill lied, it was for a reason. Perhaps that's the big difference. Bill Clinton got away with it because he always lied in a calculating fashion. He lied about things he hid anyway, and if the bigger scandal were to come out, no one would remember the lie.

I also think the jokes are legitimate. Bill Clinton is the Nixon of my generation. Al Gore is Clinton's Agnew. I've become cynical about the political process under his watch. Maybe that's just me coming of age or maybe it was his fault. I don't know.

This Tennessee farmer lie was featured on a PBS special that covered both the 2000 candidates. Frankly, I think it was some of the best journalism on the 2000 election. It was brutally fair in a truly bi-partisan way. It was a great piece of video journalism. IIRC, I believe the PBS program was Frontline: the choice2000.

Incidentally. I've included links to some articles about Mr. Gore's questionable quotes. The "Free-Republic" article contains other quotes relating to Gore's lies. To each site's credit, they refer to the Internet quote in the proper contextual manner.

A story about Gore's lies in general
A defense of Gore's Internet comment

Kennedy: Banging Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy

Bush: Banging Laura Bush

I don't care if GWB turns up in the next Paris Hilton tapes, there's no comparison in this category.

Yes, it's unbelievably muddled -- Cringely suggests that Microsoft could simply pick up the Windows GUI system and magically turn it into an X window manager.

The most intriguing explanation for the Big Bang I've seen recently come from String theory.

The idea is that the Big Bang may have been another universe colliding with our own at a single point in 11-dimension space. The energy of the collision resulting in a huge amount of mass being created.

If this is true, this means that there may be more than one Big Bang (or more in the future). For more on this read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, or watch tv series at here.

showering, maybe?

Yeah, here's a description of one particularly fanatical 'open-source supporter' (from PBS).

"If he was busy he didn't bathe, he didn't change clothes. We were in New York and the demo that we had crashed the evening before the announcement, and Bill worked all night with some other engineers to fix it. Well it didn't occur to him to take ten minutes for a shower after that, it just didn't occur to him that that was important, and he badly needed a shower that day."

Please step forward, Mr.Gates. But not too close.

Cringely made a similar comment here with respect to searching the Microsoft TechNet site, stating that Google returns more relevant results than Microsoft's own search engine.

....are always the ones to solve the major problems

Proof?
If a 45 year old college professor solved it, would this be news?

I think it's pretty well-known that among mathematicians, the older you get, the less likely you are to do anything really important. In other words it's not really "funny" that a college kid would solve this; it's pretty much the norm.

There's a PBS documentary about John Nash that I recently saw where this is talked about a bit; the commentators liken mathematicians to ballerinas, and Nash himself said he felt his best years were behind him at age 30 (and not because of his mental illness - in fact, his mental illness may have in part been due to the stress he was feeling). It's on DVD if you want to look for it - A Brilliant Madness was the title, I believe.

In fact, you're in luck - I just Google'd it for you and there's a web site here that includes a transcript of the program.

Especially since the Earth's magnetic field is weakening and preparing to flip from N-S to S-N.

Save your money.

Especially since the Earth's magnetic field is weakening and preparing to flip from N-S to S-N.

Save your money.

"In the late '40s, a single blue-collar job could support a whole family."

Follow this link. Bill Moyers covered some of this in "A question of fairness". When present day income is adusted. The modern day worker makes less than he did in '74. The main problem with the original poster's post is that he basically does this "Past cause and effect==future cause and effect" without even attempting to learn what's different between the past and what's happening now, and how important those differences are to the outcome.

"Firstly, the unemployment figures have been cooked to exclude everybody who was so screwed that they gave up and dropped out of civil society."

PBS covered this last month. Don't forget the people in prison as well. Also a LOT of people are underemployed. Way below what benifit they could bring to our society.

"We have to stash our little kids in warehouses so their mothers can work to keep the family solvent."

Notice how many couples are un(der)employed? The numbers have risen. The composition has changed as well. I've never seen so many suits at the unemployment office.

Whats that experiment? Shrodingers cat?

By observing the object, the object changes.

One example of this is the trillion dollar bet where the only way to protect against such misuse or stockmarket card counting, is to make it public where everyone uses it.

Something about making something untrue by making it public knowledge.

If such a algorythim is possible then it can be programmed into a music program to generate intellectual property...So to own all hits before they are.

Maybe we just need plugs in the back of our heads or our wallets...

Go read the National Academy of Sciences Report from their working group on climate change. Keep in mind that any politically sensitive report written by a committee of scientists is going to be very, very cautious in any conclusions. Scientists in general are loath to make any definitive statements, because it is in the nature of our training to always expect that we might be wrong (Certainty is for the religions). That being said, the mere fact that many scientists are saying in (for them) pretty strong terms that this is real and that this is a problem should make clear to you how serious this is. As for "overwhelming", well, what do you want - a personal note from God? Go educate yourself and keep an open mind. Learn the physics of radiative transfer and climate models. Understand the scientific method. Don't listen to either Green peace or Fox News but try to determine the truth for yourself. Read the primary litterature, but remember that science at that level is a debate, with people taking both sides. Things like the IPCC and the NAS report are the result of those debates, and it's pretty clear that the majority of scientists are coming down on the side of "global warming is real, mostly caused by us, and will be a problem".

I take it from your choice of words that you at least acknowledge that it is happening. That's a pretty big step that a lot of "skeptics" refuse to take. As for "why"; if there is one thing that we actually do understand very well, it is the effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the transport of radiation (heat) in the atmosphere. There is incontrovertible data (google "keeling curve") evidence for increasing levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. You would have to concoct some pretty unlikely scenarios for why such an increase wouldn't result in an increase in temperatures. The fact that we do see the temperature increase coincident with the CO2 increase is a strong indication that they are linked.

Now, "normal". We do know that current levels of CO2 (and temperature) have not occurred at least in the past 400,000 years (scroll down). There was an interesting review in Science magazine about 3 years ago that showed even more data - but I'm afraid I can't find a WWW link. In any case, we do know that current CO2 levels are not "normal" to the current climate regime, and that the CO2 increase is entirely due to human sources.

Now for "bad"; we are talking major climate shifts at a rate that we have never before seen in climatological data (ice cores, tree rings, sediment layers), with the possible exception of certain mass-extinction periods (KT, PT etc), where the rates may have been as fast, though it is hard to tell. We're taking a rather delicate, metastable system and giving one helluva horse-kick. This is where there is uncertainty; it might merely be the end of places like Bangladesh, while Canadian farming does ok. Or you might see the Gulf stream shut down and the West Antarctic ice sheet melt. Those are sort of the end-ranges of probable outcomes under the current assumption of a doubling in CO2. Note that if we keep burning coal into the 2100's we are talking about much more than a doubling of CO2. At that point most indications are for very bad things to happen (sea level rise on the order of 10-50 meters) etc. The models, like any work of science, admit uncertainties. But that normal "hedging" is misused by people with a political agenda to try and undermine the science. The fact is that basically all the models show warming; the question is just how much, and

offtopic wrt main topic but, what about SCADA attacks?

PBS did an excellent show on CyberWarfare highlighting that it's the points of weakness where attacks are most likely to occur. Milnet, siprnet, etc may be secured but could any *western* city be without power for a period of 6 months? Think asymmetric not conventional and you can appreciate how real such threats are taken.

offtopic wrt main topic but, what about SCADA attacks?

PBS did an excellent show on CyberWarfare highlighting that it's the points of weakness where attacks are most likely to occur. Milnet, siprnet, etc may be secured but could any *western* city be without power for a period of 6 months? Think asymmetric not conventional and you can appreciate how real such threats are taken.

offtopic wrt main topic but, what about SCADA attacks?

PBS did an excellent show on CyberWarfare highlighting that it's the points of weakness where attacks are most likely to occur. Milnet, siprnet, etc may be secured but could any *western* city be without power for a period of 6 months? Think asymmetric not conventional and you can appreciate how real such threats are taken.

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333505/2003 -08-13/2003-08-19/0
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333513/2003 -08-13/2003-08-19/0
http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/pid641. php
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cybe rwar/view/

The last url is a Frontline report,

"Slammer Worm to hit months after 911 attack" producers Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore and with the aid of Detective Chris Hsung, Barton Gellman from Washington Post, Robert Cressey and Laura Wygod Website Coordinator Mountain View.

Inside this program Richard Clarke, former Director CyberSecurity at the White House is interviewed. Clarke clearly holds Microsoft responsible for the Cyber Vulnerabilities which may be the cause for the power outage a couple months ago. The program discusses the power grid SCADA systems. During submitting his complaints to the white house and senate, Bill Gates responded by announcing Microsofts bug-hunting period in februari 2002. However Clarke's department was removed from the White House to Homeland Security in feb 2003. Subsequently Clarke was fired, but formally he resigned.

Robert

This was OK until the wholesale prices skyrocketted due to a combination of heat wave sent demand soaring, and the combination of a lack of new power plants built over the last 10 years, a drought that cut back the amount of hydroelectric power available, and outside power generators unable to supply enough power to the state.

The utilities were forced to sell power at a loss (due to the regulated retail prices) and began to go bankrupt.

Here is a summary of the CA situation.

Robert Cringely pointed out the benefits of this tradeoff (pure speed vs. low heat/hihg maintainability), pointing to Google's use of Pentium III-s for their server farms.