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GPS, in some form, was operational in 1991, it was used in the Gulf War.

To be a bit cynical, violence and atrocities in the Middle East isn't particularly "new" news compared to large-scale attacks on the United States, which have been rather surprisingly rare, considering how many groups would be pleased to be have completed such an attack.

Is it surprising that Palestinians still talk about Palestinian land, "from the river to the sea", or that "In the Palestinian lexicon, Israel has no place on the map" (Frontline interviews)? Not really; even a "peacemaker" like Arafat has made, well, pretty much zero concessions. Ever. Other than saying, well, that he'd consider destroying Israel with demographics (unlimited "right of return" to Israeli land) than with military force.

And as a result of Arafat going against even his own negotiators and screwing over both Barak and Clinton by never making concessions, let alone a peace plan, and stipulating only additional demands, they got Gen. Sharon. The results are obvious.

Cringely already had a good article about this. It can be found here.

It's good to see that even a semi-literate like yourself can find gainful employ "teaching" others. Let's see if you can manage clicking on the following link to see how is name is properly spelled, you fucking half-wit.

Actually it looks like the Hindeburg disaster didn't happen because of the hydrogen but because of the coating of the fabric.

By the way, "virii" is not a word. Just to let you know.

Neither is "Slashdot," but most people just let it slide. :-)

At any rate, I would point to this Cringely column as a good start of what's beggining a new age in the development of viruses, and I think Code Red was a fairly nice piece of code, if not slightly flawed in its operation. Futher, I had the benefit to hear a talk given at the 2001 ACM Student Conference at UIUC, and a gentlement there discussed other developments possibly on the horizon such as viruses that, in crappy programs like Outlook/Express, don't even require the user to open them to run.

At any rate, though, I have little concerns for such things as it is. Though I do like to keep somewhat abreast of what's out there

Just a note, John Maynard-Smith did a lot of work with ESSs (evolutionary stable strategies) and the like. Axelrod's tournament was more experimental validation of M-S's work then new theory of its own (I'm discounting a lot of other history here). I'm pretty sure M-S is most responsible for the analysis of the "tit-for-tat" idea.

I agree with your point.

I also add that pets are furry and cuddly (and all the geeks on slashdot say "that's nice. Now shut up and go back to playing with your giggley-puff doll".) Won't lovable robots be just as sufficient and furry and cuddly pets?

In the mid 50's, a psychological researcher by the name of Harry Harlow, a pioneer in the study of attachment theory, did an experiment where he took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and put them in front of two different "artificial mothers": one made of wire that carried a bottle of milk, and one artificial mother made of cloth that didn't have a bottle. The infant monkeys vastly preferred the cloth cuddly mother "doll" over the wire mother "doll", even though the wire doll had a bottle and the cloth one didn't.

For more info on this (and to prove I'm not BS'ing), check it out here

I think it's a neat experiment what they're doing with the AIBO's, but in the end its still "Cloth doll vs. Wire doll".

But why is this man smiling?

For example how much smarter than average do you really think Isaac Newton was? Einstein?

Way smarter. In fact, those are probably the two smartest people in the history of the human race. Actually, this reminds me of the web site for a Nova episode about Einstein that I found really interesting (almost moving, to be honest with you). In particular, one section that asks the question "How smart was he?" where he compares Einstein and Newton to other genuises: "But there are two figures who are simply off the charts. Isaac Newton is one. The other is Albert Einstein. If pressed, physicists give Newton pride of place, but it is a photo finish -- and no one else is in the race."

There's so much hype around Einstein that it's easy to forget that the guy was really, really phenominally smart, and his list of accomplishments are almost unbelievable.

For example how much smarter than average do you really think Isaac Newton was? Einstein?

Way smarter. In fact, those are probably the two smartest people in the history of the human race. Actually, this reminds me of the web site for a Nova episode about Einstein that I found really interesting (almost moving, to be honest with you). In particular, one section that asks the question "How smart was he?" where he compares Einstein and Newton to other genuises: "But there are two figures who are simply off the charts. Isaac Newton is one. The other is Albert Einstein. If pressed, physicists give Newton pride of place, but it is a photo finish -- and no one else is in the race."

There's so much hype around Einstein that it's easy to forget that the guy was really, really phenominally smart, and his list of accomplishments are almost unbelievable.

"Ha ha! Microsoft is screwing up! The big bad Beast of Redmond got into a market it knows nothing about!"

This is different though. Microsoft regards this as a strategic endeavor. The X-Box is not just a game console, it's their point of attack in a war to secure dominance of your living room eyeballs. They already have your office eyeballs and your home office eyeballs (well, maybe not those of Slashdot readers, but most everyone else's). Now they want to make sure that when you turn on your TV or set-top box, it's to use Microsoft products.

They're willing to spend money for a long time in order to make this happen.

This is more than a game console. It's an economic battleground, and Microsoft donsn't give up easily.

Please note that this Robert X. Cringely is not this Robert X. Cringely.

Nothing is proven until it is peer reviewed and published in a prestigious journal, and then it must to be out there for some time before it is truly accepted. Also, there may be a mistake that throws the proof off for a few years.

Sounds very much like the program [abc.net.au] I caught on (Australian) ABC TV last night, which made every effort to look like a very current local production. They definitely made use of some of the same simulations that are shown on the PPARC press release linked from the story.

I don't think it was the same program. The PBS program was produced by Nova; it was entitled Death Star. A transcript is here. I suspect that everyone uses the simulations provided by the researchers, rather than create their own from scratch without understanding the physics.

Sounds very much like the program [abc.net.au] I caught on (Australian) ABC TV last night, which made every effort to look like a very current local production. They definitely made use of some of the same simulations that are shown on the PPARC press release linked from the story.

I don't think it was the same program. The PBS program was produced by Nova; it was entitled Death Star. A transcript is here. I suspect that everyone uses the simulations provided by the researchers, rather than create their own from scratch without understanding the physics.

Yea. We already gave it one shot. Covad, Northpoint, etc all jumped in the fray. And what do we have? Lawsuits over alleged abuses of a monopoly. Not quite the market we need.

Why do we need this competative market? Well, some theorize the Bells aren't really all that interested in DSL. If it weren't for the earlier flurry of competition, its likely nobody would have seen DSL rollouts at all. Now all we have left is a mess.

So if not the government, who else can possibly continue to place the pressure of competition on the Bells? Yep. Cable. And the Deathstar Corporation itself: AT&T.

When I moved to the Silicon Valley area, I was thrilled to have a choice of broadband service. I figured I would go with xDSL and select a nice third person provider. I put my order in. I even rescheduled when they failed to show. Three times. At that point, three months had passed filled with missed appointments, confusion, and even a DSL switch that sat there with a link light but no data for the last month. Then my wife saved our household with a call to AT&T cable. Three days later, packets were routing in and out of my apartment at a fair clip.

Was AT&T eager to rush data to my house and feed my broadband lust? Probably not. They sold me on a premium digital cable package. And soon began inquiring to our changing to their new digital phone service and long distance package (which was a part of the same digital cable network).

That's right. AT&T is gunning for PacBell's market. If we're lucky, they'll go after the other Bells too.

Wait. Did I just say 'lucky'? AT&T and cable companies. Versus the Bells. I'm not sure which to lable the pan and which to call 'fire'.

As slim a chance as it is... the only one consumers might have is in the hands of government.

If this is going to be a student initiative a wireless/ethernet combination is a g00d idea. You could have several computers close to campus communicating with a wireless network. These computers would act as the 'middlemen' between the the school and external machines. You'd hook up to these machines through cables and would patch that into another set of machines and so on. Problem is that it's expensive and hard to setup.

Another solution is dialup...but that limits you in speed. If you school is willing to jump through loop holes (regulations is all), you can setup your own DSL: info here. The cost to setup can initially be covered by the school and you can rent the modems to the students. A small fee to use the line can also be included in the rental charge.

Here at the University of Waterloo (www.uwaterloo.ca) the Residences have account quotas so that people don't download movies 24/7. Investigation into how you could do that would also be worthwhile, or just keeping track of how much a specific computer downloads (just to give people warnings).

but now everyone sounds like Stephen Hawking.

I have been wishing that Apple would release something for Intel, ever since I read this

I do enjoy the jokes though, I fell for this one. :)

Besides the obvious places to get free music, NPR and PBS are both good ways to avoid the big entertainment industries. As a matter of fact NPR even streams all of their programming (current and past) for free. If you want music they even have that too, especially jazz.

"Sound travels well underwater, but sound is slow and can't handle the data transfer rate required for video."

The program showed he was doing, and he seems to have kicked all that and went into AA, and he's not working at Apple anymore. Apple wouldn't answer any questions the reporters had about what may have been a violation of California labor laws for having someone so young work for Apple, but perhaps they tightened up their policy since then.

Which is the attitude I was critcizing, the Us vs Them attitude between technology haves and have nots.

This is very easily seen in comedy pages about tech support horror stories, Like Computer Stupidities. This is evidence of what happens when geek culture separates from the culture of those around it.

Note: in the USA "Working Stiffs" is a generic slang for people who work for a living, vs those born to money, and is a common enough term, and is not usually confused with the dead, except for moments of humor or irony.

People who recognize the term realize it is a term of respect.

Bob Cringley vs Fallen Angel III; sorry no contest.

Bad example. Didn't it cross your mind that 90% of people would rather watch 2 hours of JarJar Binks than Fallen Angel III?

Clicking the link certainly made me revise my interpretation of
4. Make a great dinner for the honey & reap the rewards

-

Personally I'm glad it appears the column will be kept, or perhaps expanded. Frankly I'm never excited to watch things on my monitor but prefer to read them. I've got a TV tuner and plenty of codecs, a fine screen and all but still I prefer my video on the TV laying on the couch with my feet up. Even when I do watch webcasts I find myself cutting out halfway through to come back later and read the transcript, check the commentary. Indeed I'd prefer this the other way round: Read the column and jump to the video if I'm intrigued.

Step 1: Download.
Step 2: Convert to VCD.
Step 3: Burn to CD or CDRW.
Step 4: Insert into any DVD player worth owning, or inexpensive VCD players.

Better: Spend the time & effort on any of a half dozen more interesting, more rewarding, less-of-a-hassle activities.

1. Sort socks
2. Clean out shed
3. Fix the IDs on the MP3 collection
4. Make a great dinner for the honey & reap the rewards

Sorry, Bob may put out a great program but there's no way I'd bother to burn it to a VCD to watch in the other room. Hell I've got a couple gig of porn VCDs littering the scratch drive I'd be motivated to burn to VCD before that.

Bob Cringley vs Fallen Angel III; sorry no contest.

Not so fast...

(yes, bad for quoting myself)
The bells at feeding time was one of the other experiments. He also did the showing of shapes to mean different upcoming events. One was an oval, the other a circle. Then he gradually rounded the oval until the dog could not distinguish between them.

At that point the dog would go nuts!

Shapes and Tones experiments by Pavlov

Ref to just the bell experiments

Pavlov shock experiments

I do remember Skinner doing various things AFTER Pavlov, like teaching pidgeons to bowl(?) and such.

Roll up your sleeves and get to work, mutherfukka!


I absolutely despise the attitude our society endgenders that you have to sit around and wait for the "professionals" to get around to serving your needs.

They expect you to dial 911 and wait for the police to (maybe, eventually) show up when someone breaks into your house. God forbid you take responsibilty for your own safety and plug the bastard with a .45!


If 1 person in 100 on /. set up their own link, that'd be 50,000 links. (of course, we'd need people who can connect us to a backbone -- I'm thinking universities here.)

A few years back, PBS ran a series named the "Red Files", and Episode 3 dealt with the Soviet's Korolev Lunar Lander.

If I recall correctly, they interviewed a NASA engineer who was able to take a tour of the lunar lander and compared it to a "flying garbage can". It really was awful, there were analog gauges and whatnot littering the interior - basically one step shy of having Cosmonauts just jump out of the orbiter and hope for the best!

Compaq was at a desperate dead end, and Carly Fiorina of HP wants to keep her job. Buying Compaq effectively resets the shot clock, buying her another 18 to 24 months before the HP board gives her the boot. This whole $25 billion deal is about executive ego. No other explanation comes even close to making sense.

I'm inclined to agree...

The problem with your conclusion is that waste is more radioactive when it comes out of the reactor. Radioactivity has to do with how stable a particular isotope is, it is not a measure of how effectively an element can be used as a fuel.

U-235 (the fuel isotope) is fairly stable but it fissions well. When you bombard it with neutrons, it breaks apart into isotopes of other elements. These isotopes are highly radioactive (unstable) but not easily fissionable. They will continue to be radioactive until they reach a stable isotope.

Now, most of the radiation is shed pretty quickly and within about 500 years the waste is less radioactive than the original fuel.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclea r-faq.html

The standford link has that info about halfway down under the question, "Q. What about nuclear waste?"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reac tion/etc/faqs.html

Now you are correct in wondering why we don't re-use fuel. In order for it to be re-used, it does need to be reprocessed because there is too much unusable waste in the way for the fission to be efficient. Thanks to the Carter Administration, the US doesn't do any reprocessing. So we have more waste and less efficiency.

Both those FAQ's are pretty good and cover your questions better than I can. Hope they help.

The data shown is not seriously disputed, and will hopefully hammer home the point (especially the second one!).

Ummm, this appears to be a regurgitation of a segment from Triumph of the Nerds . With the Microsoft guys saying that productivity should be based on getting a problem solved vs. the IBM guys saying that productivity should be based on LOC or KLOC (thousands of lines of code) or MLOC (millions) etc.

Being a "Data Miner" myself, I can certainly agree with the problem-solving-as-productivity approach, rather than the "how many inner joins can I throw at this to make it look like I am busy" approach.

Actually, the LOC as productivity is so foreign to MY thought process that I can not comprehend why anybody in management or in direct labor would bother to think about it.

The submission form is acting weird so here is the link again: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802. html.

This New File system sounds to me like something similar.

Well, if you are curious you might want to try the Nuclear Blast Mapper

This thing was made before terrorist nukes were taken seriously by the general public, so the smallest weapon they have is 1 megaton. Most experts have been saying that the terrorists will have a hard time just getting A-bombs. H-bombs are another matter. Anyhow, even if the bad guys got a 1 megaton bomb on the Capitol, everything inside the beltway would be safe except for fallout. The prevailing winds here are from the east--Marylanders take note, you will get most of the fallout. No more trips to Ocean City after that, and the bad guys would get a bonus of poisoning the Naval Academy if the winds were blowing in that direction.

Of course the terrorist nuke, if it exists, is about 15 *kilotons*. That would ruin a good portion of downtown DC, and send a lot of survivors into the 'burbs.

So, I too have been thinking about this a lot lately since I live near DC. I'd be lying in my bed at night, and all of the sudden it would get like daylight. Less than a minute later there would be a tremendous noise like a wierd thunder I assume, but the damaging blast wouldn't hit us. Then the next day we would either get killed by the survivors, or we would all come together to help them. I'm an optimist, I think the latter is more likely.

For an opinion about this antitrust issue and Microsoft's behaviour check Cringley's column this week.

the Vikings never made it past "new found land."

Perhaps. But there was a Nova segment on Kennewick Man who looks very much like an European. His skull is believed to be around 9000 years old and was found in Oregon.

I'm surprised that Portuguese people weren't the first to "discover" the Americas. They are very good sailors, they have been fishing off Newfounland for centuries. There's even a town called Port Aux Basques, I know, I know not the same as Portuguese but close.

And as some jokingly asked before about someone discovering the Chinese, it did happen. The show NOVA had a program on mummies from Western China but around 3000 years ago it wasn't even China and the mummified people were European(or from that area anyway). I guess that area of China these days wants to separate and so any talk of these people preceding the people there now is grounds for execution.

We'd better hurry up and find those 4 additional Earths, so there can be enough natural resources for everyone to be able to get online!

This is really a very, very, mammoth task. Most species arent real obvious like gorillas or rhinos. Most of these 10-100 million species are prokaryotes or insects or whatever (apparantly, the most successful group of animals is the beetle, go figure!). These arent easy to discover, identify and characterise. Therefore this is not an easy task, and it could take a long frigging time.

So why not sit back, relax and watch that mass extinction. Apparantly, extinction rates are around 27,000 species per year (although this is - of course - highly speculative). As long as humans carry on with their fantastically cool ability of destroying stuff (lets not get into the environmental debate guys, just go with me here), this should hold up for a few thousand years.

Therefore, lets presume their are 50 million species:

50,000,000 - 2,000,000 = 48,000,000 species yet to be discovered.

48,000,000 / 27,000 = 1777.7 years untill destroy all unknown species.

Not long, huh? Wait a few years longer and we will be down to 1 species. Dont worry folks, by then we will have biosynthetic foodstuff, terraforming units and day trips to jupiter moon.

Seriously though, this does raise an interesting point about preservation of species. There is ALOT of cool stuff out there in nature that is darn useful (chemical processess, drugs, food etc). Maybe we should think about discovering them before they go extinct.

Well actually, they can still appeal to the Supreme Court, so it's not "The end of the story". Regardless, the courts do make mistakes. I know you hate Microsoft, but it's naive to claim the courts have never imprisoned an innocent party, or set free a guilty party.

Terence Garner: An Ordinary Crime

Trial of the century ends with Simpson's acquittal

Yes the process has existed and is expensive, I went back and researched the original article, it doesn't mention the cost of these alumina sheets.

Years ago Nova reported on the gem quality synthetic ruby manufacturer (who dope's her rubies so that they fluoresce under black light). They're cheaper per carat for large stones than the kind mother nature provides, but far from dirt cheap. I guess it was wishful thinking on my part to assume the Germans had improved the process to where it was at a significant price reduction.

Of course on further reflection, I should have imagined a "ruby" iMac which was actually ruby!

Lee

See also Cringely's article on it.

Signed JerryMeander
5 years w/o an account

Didn't Cringely claim several months ago that they were going to try to do this? Well, not quite, but back in August he wrote:

According to these programmers, Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol -- a protocol owned by Microsoft -- that it will tout as being more secure.

So they decided to go up one level of abstraction. Hell why not, that way they break even more competing products.

I'm just a yungin' (20), but I always preferred older cartoons to the stuff that comes out these days. My all-time favorite short cartoon is Duck Amuck.

Apparently, Chuck Jones did a lot of cool stuff besides Bugs Bunny & Co. His biography says he directed another of my favorite cartoons, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Interestingly enough, my interest in science came from one of his cartoons. You know, the one with the mad scientist and his gigantic red hairy monster. Bugs Bunny outwitted them both, of course. But I was so impressed with the gadgetry that I declared to my folks that I would be a Mad Scientist when I grew up. I would even find empty bottles, "mix" their contents, and drink the "potion." In my head I was Jekyll and Hyde. But now I'm way OT...*Reminiscing for a moment*

[rant]
How come they didn't advertise this when he was still alive? Why all this list of achievements after I can't write him a letter to thank him? I know the answers, 1) The info is already out there and 2) Dead people make more news. But still, he'll never know how much I appreciated his work. Chuck Jones taught me what humor is. 1337 skillz are nice, but laughter is priceless.
[/rant]

Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens -- A life in animationwas a great documentary I caught a couple of years back. Among some of the fans giving there insights were Whoopi Goldberg, THE SIMPSONS creator Matt Groening, Ron Howard, TOY STORY director John Lasseter, Steven Spielberg, and Robin Williams.

But what kept bugging me while watching these people give praise to his work and what joy it gave to them, I couldn't help but think what a shame it is that a lot of the original works are cut or not shown in their entirety or not at all. Here in Canada, the only looney toons is the road runner show shown three times a week. Most kids growing up in Canada right now probably only have seen a fraction of the great classics. I understand it's much better in the U.S. with cartoon network but here viewings of the originals are practically nil.

One might come away from a first reading of this report thinking that the differences between the two are now only modest and, indeed, often favoring the 8-VSB. The results certainly do not give COFDM a sweeping victory, which its proponents had long-predicted. The 8-VSB did better than most had thought it would.

COFDM is clearly superior in large Single Frequency Networks that are used in Europe (Last time I looked, the USA wasn't Europe).
...
PBS will not support efforts to test COFDM as a replacement for 8VSB. The issue has been examined before, and based on technical factors 8VSB was chosen over COFDM. More recent analysis indicates the decision was the proper one.

As demonstrated by more than ten years of laboratory and field tests, 8-VSB is clearly the best system for broadcasting digital television in the United States. (once again - this isn't Europe)

Each transmission system has strengths and weaknesses. COFDM requires higher transmitter power output than 8-VSB for similar coverage. Higher power not only increases costs to broadcast stations, it raises the specter of excessive interference with existing analog service. This goes against clearly established public policy
...
The 8-VSB modulation scheme was chosen for reasons that far outweigh its multipath performance. The reasons remain valid, especially in the U.S., where the terrain and market structure call for performance characteristics quite different from those in most of Europe.
...
Canada, Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan have all chosen to use 8-VSB for terrestrial broadcast of DTV as part of the ATSC standard, and it is under consideration by many other countries as well. (I guess you didn't really mean "The Rest Of The World)