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The short term gain (if you can even call it that) will be over shadowed by the ultimate demise or irrelevance in the market place of HP. As Bob Cringly put it a few months ago, after the merger the "shot clock" was reset until the board could fire her. The shot clock cannot count down fast enough. She has decimated an excellent engineering company.

On the day they fire her ass, and she pulls the rip chord on her golden parachute, HP will be irreversably damaged...

it is just sooo sad.

Please indicate where abortion is mentioned in the modern hippocratic oath. Lots of things are said about the oath by people who have never read it, let alone understand it. Please don't fall into that trap.

[what ever happened to that?].

Christ man, haven't you watched the news?! Maybe you've heard of Enron? Go read.

...at first sign of Palladium. Told You So

A Nation of Thieves?

Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere -- while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.

These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.

People are noticing that something isn't quite right -- that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.

Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders -- i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.

This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction -- but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.

A Little History

Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).

And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).

And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).

Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total -- and how long will it be before there are even fewer?

It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies -- and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.

Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence -- i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.

The Art of Manipulation

It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.

Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.

So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread -- as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.

Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter -- for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.

In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 -- and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.

Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?

Power Struggles

The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money -- enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.

The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.

In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little -- if any -- power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens -- and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.

One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world -- a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.

A Nation of Thieves?

Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will -- but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law -- all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.

Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further -- but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.

What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.

More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.

This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist -- regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.

Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?

Protecting the Product

It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.

This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.

It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.

So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.

If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.

The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep through the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever -- i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.

As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available -- and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?

It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing -- consciously or not -- their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.

The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.

Don't Get It Twisted

That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.

For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?

In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".

And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.

Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...

If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases -- as it is threatening to do -- the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".

Conclusion

The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.

How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?

It all depends on us -- and it all depends on you.

[Ed: original used "2" for both "to" and "too" -- grammatical errors in that department are my fault. Only changes should be related to spelling, formatting and links preserved. Various Unicode characters translated to ASCII for the benifit of Slashdot. "Peer-2-peer" is kept as original.]

Of course, natural and/or synthetic fibres can be of any color. Fibres transmitting light are uncolored. They take the color of the light source which is connected to them.

Now add in a couple of digital controls, and you'll be able to flash colors like a cuttlefish

The Bubonic plague was probably the cause of the black death. The black death is the link to this immunity to HIV in white Europeans. The remaining white Europeans after the black death for some reason have a genetic mutation causing immunity to HIV. This was spoken of in the documentary Evolution on PBS.

How about the 1898 wireless robot boat demo? Even though the focus is on power, it seems to me like he is transmitting information.

But -- as was pointed out: Jonas Salk placed his vaxine into the public domain -- and thus saved millions of lives and made polio almost extinct (with the exception of 'defensive' bioweapons stores).

From one story about Salk:

The success of the vaccination effort won Jonas Salk unsought fame. The March of Dimes, hoping to boost publicity and donations to fund vaccination programs, lionized Salk to the point of offending his colleagues. He had applied the findings of others in a successful bid to prevent disease. Other researchers and doctors grumbled that he hadn't found anything new; he had just applied what was there. But the timing of his successful vaccine at the peak of polio's devastation made the public blind to that.

I have no problem admitting that Canadians are best at evading contact with the enemy!

But don't you dare slight our fine American snipers!

Robert Cringley talked about a couple weeks ago, details are available here.

Anybody who watches Frontline on PBS has already seen a lengthy and incredibly in-depth story about the future of xenotransplantation.

The scary part about pig-to-human transplants is the possibility of humans contracting pig viruses through xenotransplants that could mutate and cause widespread disease. Transplant patients have to take medications that suppress their immune systems so their bodies won't reject their new organs. Thus, the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.

Pigs being bred for transplantation are currently birthed by caesarian section directly into a bath of iodine and kept in a sterile environment from then on. But even so, it's unlikely that such animals are 100% free of pathogens. Anyone who receives a pig organ should understand that they will be considered as much of a disease threat as if they were HIV-positive for the rest of their lives. They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.

It's scary stuff and not to be taken lightly.

Anybody who watches Frontline on PBS has already seen a lengthy and incredibly in-depth story about the future of xenotransplantation.

The scary part about pig-to-human transplants is the possibility of humans contracting pig viruses through xenotransplants that could mutate and cause widespread disease. Transplant patients have to take medications that suppress their immune systems so their bodies won't reject their new organs. Thus, the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.

Pigs being bred for transplantation are currently birthed by caesarian section directly into a bath of iodine and kept in a sterile environment from then on. But even so, it's unlikely that such animals are 100% free of pathogens. Anyone who receives a pig organ should understand that they will be considered as much of a disease threat as if they were HIV-positive for the rest of their lives. They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.

It's scary stuff and not to be taken lightly.

Anybody who watches Frontline on PBS has already seen a lengthy and incredibly in-depth story about the future of xenotransplantation.

The scary part about pig-to-human transplants is the possibility of humans contracting pig viruses through xenotransplants that could mutate and cause widespread disease. Transplant patients have to take medications that suppress their immune systems so their bodies won't reject their new organs. Thus, the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.

Pigs being bred for transplantation are currently birthed by caesarian section directly into a bath of iodine and kept in a sterile environment from then on. But even so, it's unlikely that such animals are 100% free of pathogens. Anyone who receives a pig organ should understand that they will be considered as much of a disease threat as if they were HIV-positive for the rest of their lives. They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.

It's scary stuff and not to be taken lightly.

KIP THORNE: I believe we will know in ten to 15 years when we have the
full laws of quantum gravity in our hands. My best guess, and I would
be willing to lay a fairly heavy odds on this on a bet with Hawking
but he won't take the other side, my best guess is that when we have
those full laws in our hands they will say no, you cannot make a time
machine and go backward in time ever. But until we have those full
laws we just have to leave it as a possibility that remains a
possibility.

STEPHEN HAWKING: I wouldn't take a bet against the existence of time
machines. My opponent might have seen the future and knows the answer.


I think this sums things up quite nicely.

however, some of the press coverage has been sensationalistic. Some either decry that the object was found after closest approach (rather than before) or express concern about the "blind spot" otherwise commonly known to astronomers as the daytime sky.

The NASA page he cites says the plan is to map all the major near Earth asteroids by 2008. How is this pitiful? If extinction class rocks hit us every 10^7 or 10^8 years, how much time can we budget to defend ourselves against the next one? What if it took 10^2 years? Would that be an unreasonable amount of time to be confident we had detected most of them?

The rock last week was about 100 meters in diameter. Tunguska is estimated to have been 60 meters in diameter. Since the mass goes up as the cube of the diameter this one would have been about five times as powerful as Tunguska. The planetary.org article I linked to says one that size strikes us every couple of millenia. Is this program a failure if we can't detect and divert the next Tunguska sized rock? The article says the Tunguska strike was as powerful as the blast from a 16 megaton H-bomb. It said it devastated 2000 square kilometres. That would be a square about 42 kilometers on a side. Ie. Bigger than Monaco, smaller than NYC.

16 megatons? Rick Green's glossary of cold-war terms defined a "small-theatre nuclear exchange" as "Curtains for the actors after just one act, hence the prefix 'small theatre'". Sure, this could be devastating for lots of people, if it too didn't land somewhere relatively deserted, like northern Siberia. But civilization would survive, even if it landed on Hollywood.

The planetary.org article said 25% or more of the rocks that have hit Earth may have been long period comets. Figuring out how to detect and deflect long period comets that might hit the Earth would be much more difficult. Maybe so much more difficult we shouldn't waste any resources trying?

s/c//. First Class is HORRIBLE. I tried to use as little of it as possible when I was employed at PBS. The IMAP4 implementation is broken, so much that I couldn't use IMAP to access any of the folders (my inbox, and other conferences) through outlook at all. I had to pop the mail off.

Actually, it is not called the Horoscope Study. It is called the Barnum Effect. Horoscopes are an example of the Barnum effect, as are nebulous personality tests (usually the ones for entertainment).
A number of corporations that have utilized high quality personality tests as a part of the interview process experience lower employee turnover (thus lower training costs), and overall higher quality employees. Personality tests should not be the only thing used, but they are useful tool for finding people with the characteristics that fit the so called "mold".

The equipment is inexpensive, and every outlet becomes a network connection point. See Cringely's 8/15/02 article on the subject.

It's faster than 802.11b, too.

For instance, the existing ISDN line could be changed (note that ISDN and DSL can't share a wire pair) to run "dry pair DSL" to a telephone junction box down the road, with equipment kept in a nearby barn, or even just a splice to connect two SDSL modems in different buildings. Or at least it could, if BT weren't such fine arseholes.

Probably the best idea is to use a mains LAN if there are existing electrical power lines. As long as all the important outlets are on the same side of the final transformer, they should be able to communicate.

If the four buildings just need to be networked together, and you _don't_ need Internet access (a lot of other posts seem to think this is for Internet access, but neatan only mentioned the Internet for use with VPN), then you should be able to simply use the copper wiring to create your own little 4-building "DSL-LAN".

This was posted on /. a while ago: I, Cringely's Roll Your Own DSL. He gives you some basic direction for grabbing extra copper pairs from the telcos and plunking modems on each end. I'm sure there's more to it than what he describes, but that should give you 2Mbps symmetric bandwidth between your four buildings. The Lariat guys might be able to give you more help.

Homeplug could work if all the buildings are all on the same side of a transformer. Cringley has a timely article on Homeplug this week. Homeplug uses standard electrical lines to transmit up to 14 megabits-per-second. Quoting from his article: Now where the wire goes could surprise you, because HomePlug devices will work as long as they are on the same side of a power company transformer. In the U.S. an average of six houses share each transformer, which means your HomePlug network can extend next door or down the street. If you live in an apartment, your HomePlug network can cover the entire building.

It's a nice little technology called HomePlug and it might just be what you're looking for. In a nutshell, it's several tens of megabits over electrical copper and works on one side of the transformer. If the buildings are anything like a modern set of tract homes, they probably share a transformer. Simply use these babies and you get a nice little network via the already installed electrical lines.

Good luck!

My wife selected a few links from her homeschooling bookmarks, where you can find lots of free material:

Homeschool Central - Study Resources
TeacherFeatures.com
Homeschool Support on the Internet
HomeworkCentral.com - Lesson Plans by Subject
NGA: Teaching Resources: Loan Programs
Novel Study Guides for the Classroom Teacher
Outline Maps
100 Top Map Sites
Unit Studies (huge site!)
Lesson Plans & Teacher Helps
Newton's Apple
MathWork -- Math worksheets you can create in your browser
S.C.O.R.E.
homeschooling.about.com
A to Z Home's Cool - Homeschooling Web Site
Jon's Homeschool Resource Page

• Hooks up to stereo equipment allowing you to digitally record old LPs, cassettes or 8-tracks.

The one thing missing though is 802.11b connectivity. I don't have cat5 running to my hifi/video gear. Wireless connectivity would go a long way. Cringley has similar ideas

• Hooks up to stereo equipment allowing you to digitally record old LPs, cassettes or 8-tracks.

The one thing missing though is 802.11b connectivity. I don't have cat5 running to my hifi/video gear. Wireless connectivity would go a long way. Cringley has similar ideas

Bob Cringely wrote a column on the same topic about a month ago. He called Palladium a Rosetta Stone for malicious hackers. Sounds like a blast.

That's just what I want, another Microsoft initiative aimed at security. They've done such a good job at it so far that now I'm a whisper away from getting my account canceled by my ISP -- all because some Outlook/Outlook Express user somewhere has Klez and our e-mail address.

A couple years back, I read an interesting article about this parrot point. It can very well go beyond mimicry.

Couldn't find the original SciAm article, but this looks like an interview with the same researcher. read this.

Now, I believe this parrot is pretty old, and has been trained for years by Ms. Pepperberg. But Alex (the parrot) isn't just responding on cue, it is doing some abstract and symbolic thought.

And God Bless Donald Trump for having the balls to say it in public:

TRUMP: Well, I hate them. I think they're terrible. I think they're not imaginative. I would have liked to have seen the top 10 to 15 to 20 architectural firms in the country each come up with a proposal. I think that what's being proposed is just not good enough for what we all suffered through. It really deserves much better than what they've come up with.

- Donald Trump, on the WTC design proposals, transcript from Wall $treet Week Without Louis Rukeyser, July 26, 2002.

A good account of the state of the art two years ago can be found in the transcript of a NOVA show on diamond synthesis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2703diamo nd.html

When you send one of our diamonds to De Beers, right, the only way they can detect that this is not a natural diamond is really through phosphorescence. They take this, and they put in, they hit it with a UV light, and after the UV light goes off, this thing will phosphoresce for about three to five seconds. That is typical of a synthetic diamond versus a natural diamond.

NARRATOR:Faced with the future threat of synthetic diamonds being imperceptible to the trade, De Beers is already preparing its bottom line - one low-tech way to guarantee detection. They are putting minute logos on their diamonds.

STEPHEN LUSSIER: If we can give the consumer a little bit more help in telling him what's a good diamond, that regardless of what they know or what their jeweler knows, De Beers has told them that this diamond is natural from - as it came out of the ground, created by nature billions of years ago and not one that popped out of a machine last Wednesday in Kansas City.

A diamond ring for an engagement was a tradition started by Hollywood movies. It was briefly mentioned in the Nova TV show Diamond Deception

some tasty Mad Cow links:
http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/prion_evol.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madcow/prions.html

enjoy!

Try mutant_flies for some freeky flies.

then there's this story(not that great but interesting).
Or a video

or what your looking for?

A big part of the blame falls on the shoulders of a corrupt IPO system that over-inflates stock valuation to benefit a greedy few at the expense of the public and the firms that are being offered. Check out the Frontline (PBS) special dot.con. The crap some of the nations biggest investment firms are getting away with hurts the public way more than the insider trading / accounting scandals that are flooding the press today.

really are....It must be tracked...

Information and who's accessing it....

So as many may be trying to rationalize invasion of privacy by thinking only of terrorism excuses, perhaps there is the other side of the coin as to what the feds may be looking for......like those assessing information in order to see the truth:

take a look at this: World Meters

Take a good look at the different meters! Then look at this: What the World Wants

We have the technology and we have the funds to make good things happen.

So why is it not happening? You want to fight about it?

Assuming you don't want to fight about it, that fighting is not the goal or main desire of people, then there must be something else, something bigger that is the problem. You know, considering annual world military spending is $780 billion dollars (US) and to solve the major world humanitarian problems only needs 1/3 of that....

The problem has to be more than something under a trillion dollars.

A CIA Fact Sheet on Indonesia -- see the religion percentages (88% muslim).

OK, (given the above muslim population of indonesia): from the pbs trillion dollar bet article:

"In the summer of 1997, across Thailand, property prices plummeted. This sparked a panic that swept through Asia. As banks went bust from Japan to Indonesia, people took to the streets - events so improbable they had never been included in anyone's models."

and in Indonesia May 1998:

"Sources all over Asia tell Uscher that Asians know about local corruption but believe America is taking advantage of the situation to grab Asian markets and Asian wealth."

and (read the article!!!) another article from CNN:

"The austerity measures were a condition of the International Monetary Fund's $43 billion aid package to bail out the southeast Asian nation. "

World Bank wanted to help Indonesia out but charge interest (usery) entrapment???? Funny how China is the only country who did not participate in this stock game and are better off then the rest of us for not doing so.....

Where the US bailout was only (pbs article):

"We expect that they're going to explain to the members of this Committee why the Federal Reserve has organized the $3.5 billion bail-out for billionaires, why Americans should be worried about the gambling practices of the Wall Street elite"

And there is Something Else I have run across for that timeline as well (making the "trillion dollar bet" just icing on this cake?):

(note: overall I find information from this resource to be integratingly correct enough to be both useful and insightful, though with a touch of blind bias towards capitalism, though it does try not to be blindly biased, it is to subjective to capitalism to completely avoid it.)

"During the 1993-1999 bubble era of false economic progress, many CEOs, executives, employers, employees, even customers adopted the scams of clintonian-era politicians, lawyers, journalists, academics to become increasingly dishonest, corrupt, even criminal. The bubble-building, stock-market fraud began when Chairman Alan Greenspan clintonized the
Federal Reserve. He signaled that politicization by blatantly breaking a time-honored apolitical precedent when he sat as a special guest in the president's box during Clinton s first State-of-the-Union address. Greenspan, the former acolyte of capitalism-champion Ayn Rand, then married a socialist/clintonian journalist. His drive to create a Clinton-boosting, economic boom -- a high-tech bubble economy -- escalated from that point. He with Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton artificially increased the value of the dollar, relentlessly increased the M-3 money supply, recklessly created sloshing liquidity, and pied pipered consumers and corporations into bankrupting debt. He engineered those cancerous long-term policies to continually fuel the equity markets for baleful political ends and unearned glory.

The bubble burst in early 2000 causing losses of four-trillion dollars. After several sharp bear-market rallies, those equity losses launched a long-term economic decline -- the feared L-shaped recession or worse."

Oh yeah and this 5 year stock market link comparing the DOW with the S&P and most important the NASDAQ. Where you can tell where the money went and also know what the dot coms were all about.

Given the above

From theCBS article on the NSA (National Security Agency) total system failure:

"In January 2000, Gen. Mike Hayden, the director of the NSA, received a call from the agency's watch officer alerting him that all of its computers had crashed."

In that same article (in fact in the previous paragraph):

"A phone call intercepted by the NSA is often the first warning that a terrorist such as Osama bin Laden is planning an attack against Americans. To find that threatening phone call, email or radio transmission among the billions made daily, the NSA relies on rooms of supercomputers."

The date of this CBS article is Aug 29, 2001.

Do you really think maybe Y2K brought the systems all down? For what is supposed to be the top spy agency in the US? (they don't say what caused the three and a half day crash.)

Or do you perhaps see a simpler Truth to the matter, such as:

Stock market gamblers and Gov. screwed up the world economy so bad and especially for muslims that the NSA had damn good reason to KNOW what was going to happen and that they needed an excuse for their total inability to deal with it.

*And then there is this, how might Afghanistan participate in global* *humanitarian issues:*

And the Bill of Rights

How about now? Do you want to fight now? And if you were an Afghan Muslim, instead of a US citizen?

Targets....White House for it's political control over Pentagon military backed control over World Trade Center ....world economy.

We taught them how to do it, How to fight smart, how to learn what they need to know and where they can get supplies (anthrax, planes, etc..) from us to use against us....... then we lite a bon fire under their ass to motivate them into action while we turned our backs to intelligence....played ignorant......so they could more easily do it.

And Ted Turner (CNN) said something about the attack being an act of desparation. Which he later apologized for.....because of why?

amen

tesla was awesome, death rays, first RC toys, giant tesla coils, radio, even radar. The guy was nuts but that made him awesome. Imagine if his ideas of transmitting stuff across counties using electricity was realized and used today. The sky would look so awesome, lightning flying vertically everywhere, all our phone convos, the net, etc would be transmitting on bolts of electricity. How cool would that look??

check out http://www.pbs.org/tesla/

Since this is just for fun, let's do some calculations. It's been a while for me, so forgive me if my math goes astray.

Let's suppose there were a convenient target, MirrorWorld, roughly 1 light-year away. We send our message by pulsing a high-powered laser toward the spot where MirrorWorld will be one year from now.

Ideally laser beams are tightly collimated, but even the best ones spread a bit. Let's suppose that the beam we use starts out about a millimeter wide, with a spread of 1 nanometer (10E-9 meters) for every meter of travel.

Now a beam of light travels about 9.5E15 meters/year, so by the time our beam hits MirrorWorld, it will be 9.5E6 meters (plus one millimeter) wide. That's not so bad - only about 75% the width of the planet earth.

Now, of course all our calculations were perfect, our execution flawless, and nothing unexpected happened to distort the curvature of space, so our beam will hit MirrorWorld dead center. Also, MirrorWorld is, a perfectly flat, perfectly reflecting surface, perfectly oriented to reflect all of the incident energy of our laser back to the position where the earth will be two years after we fired the beam without any loss and without increasing the rate of spread.

Of course, the beam continues to spread at it's original rate. After 2 years total travel, the energy in the orignal pulses would be spread across a beam about 1.9E+7 meters across. That works out to about 1.1E15 square meters of surface area by the time the beam hits the lens/antenna that we placed just outside the atmosphere (to avoid losses). If the lens is a perfect collector of energy, 1 square meter in size, we will receive 8.8E-16 joules for every joule transmitted in the original pulses.

Now, a table found here suggests that a ton of Uranium-235, used as fuel, contains about 7.4E16 joules. So if you burned a ton of U-235 per pulse, and your reactor and laser were 100% efficent, you could received 65.12 joules per pulse per square meter of receiving lens/antenna.

Maybe you don't need a ton of U-235 per pulse. Maybe your lens can be very large and your receiver very sensitive. Still, it's worth noting that, according to this site the total combined production of U-235 by the US and USSR was only 1950 tons. That's 1950 bits of information or less, depending on your coding... so try not to be too wordy.

The above discussion took the long way around, just for fun, but you can dismiss this idea more quickly and easily by simply asking "where in the sky do I look to see a heavenly body (outside of this solar system) reflecting the light from the Sun?". If the answer is "nowhere", then there probably isn't any way for you to reflect a signal either.

I think I'll post this anonymously, in case I did something really stupid. Enjoy!

"These people ran on responsibility, but as soon as you scratch them, they go straight to blame," Clinton told WJLA-TV, an ABC News affiliate in Washington, referring to Republican leaders. "It's factually wrong. There was corporate malfeasance both before [Bush] took office and after. The difference is, I actually tried to do something about it, and their party stopped it."

Much as I hate to reply to a troll, there are a few people who might read this and believe it!
While there was a harmonic device which Tesla built which could indeed shake a building apart, this was not his intent with the Tesla coil.
His plan was actually distributing energy on a large scale without wires. Take a look at his Pike's Peak project.

In the past, broadcasters tried to promote the idea of using DTV spectrum for non-HDTV uses. You can read a little here about the process. Preston Padden of Disney/ABC got slammed by congress for even suggesting they wouldn't broadcast HDTV.

The broadcast networks are committed to HDTV at this point.

The problem is that there is no business model that pays for the increased cost of HDTV production and broadcast with increased revenue. Sad but true.

They did FILM this guy catching an 85' wave off the North Shore of Oahu on IMAX a few years ago. Nature did a episode on the storm that caused these waves.

He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"

Good questions, and he's starting to understand some of what is going on in the name of progress that is starting to encroach on the public good that he, and really all of us, are used to.

The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour, Washington Week, and The McLaughlin Group because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.

Of course, my dad also says that the problem with TV isn't that there is too little good stuff to watch, but rather that there is really too much. He loves his TV. :^)

He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"

Good questions, and he's starting to understand some of what is going on in the name of progress that is starting to encroach on the public good that he, and really all of us, are used to.

The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour, Washington Week, and The McLaughlin Group because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.

Of course, my dad also says that the problem with TV isn't that there is too little good stuff to watch, but rather that there is really too much. He loves his TV. :^)

He also brings up a lot of issues with meat and how it's raised. As a vegetarian (vegan), this is an important issue to me. There's a nice interview with him by PBS about meat. Here's one with the BBC.

I know it can be a problem, but like anyone else around here, i take my caffeine in 2 liter doses.

Just like I've seen the culture of a small Alaskan village cease due to the introduction of T.V. So will the culture of Bhutan. This letter to the editor is very convincing on that point.

When I was young, we were Alaskans. We had our own culture and music both the old (native alaskans) and the new Russians and Americans had forged a unique identity that was Alaskan. Then TV came. By the time I left High School you could see the changes.

My point is well illustrated by this story:
I graduated high school in 1992, the kids from our class did the Christmas dance theme on some cute "Stairway to Heaven" or other schmaltzy thing. The kids that were class of 1994 did "Christmas in da 'Hood". The '94 kids had gang violence in their classrooms. Kids bringing guns to school (with the intent of shooting other kids and not to show off their new hunting rifle), weapons, and grafiti became problems.

The ironic thing was that the younger classes were smaller ours was the largest graduating class.

I remember all the Rappers and the oppressed gansta' types sulking about the remote and wild wilderness of one of the remotest places on earth. Some people run away to the untouched beauty of Alaska to escape inner-city grime. How ironic that an aspiring young rap-star would be cursed with living in a place where there was hardly any crime and the government paid you to live there.

If religion is the opiate of the masses, then television is the crystal-meth of the glue huffing, crack-smoking, I-got-the-munchies masses.

Bhutan's top 10 cable channels.

They mean to tell me that they get HBO in friggin' Bhutan? I can't even get it in Canada!

BTW, PBS DigitalTV Site.

There's a huge glut of C-130 cargo planes, because the factory is in Newt Gingrich's congressional district. Really. So the USAF has been looking for other things to do with C-130s.

The "AC-130", A for Attack, is a 4-prop cargo plane with armor and guns. The guns point sideways, so the plane banks or circles over a target and fires. It's a big, slow cargo aircraft that can carry a huge ammo load. The usual application is that, after any enemy air defenses have been suppressed, the AC-130 moves in and fires 1200 rounds per minute into enemy ground forces until they're all dead.

Adding a laser to the AC-130 would give it some air-to-air capability, so it could deal with unexpected incoming air threats and then return to its mission, extermination of ground troops.

Let's not be hyperbolic here.

famine n.

1. A drastic, wide-reaching food shortage.
2. A drastic shortage; a dearth.
3. Severe hunger; starvation.
4. Archaic. Extreme appetite.

plague n.

1. A highly infectious, usually fatal, epidemic disease; a pestilence.
2. A highly fatal infectious disease that is caused by the bacterium Yersinia (syn. Pasturella) pestis, is transmitted primarily by the bite of a rat flea, and occurs in bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic forms.