Slashdot Mirror

All kinds of neat things, photos, etc, and you can probably order the video too.

The original story linked above looks like the human interest story of the archeologist and the political interests in China made it relevant as a story, as far as the newspaper editors were concerned.

I can see the Chinese government trying to deal with politically inconvenient truths.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

All kinds of neat things, photos, etc, and you can probably order the video too.

The original story linked above looks like the human interest story of the archeologist and the political interests in China made it relevant as a story, as far as the newspaper editors were concerned.

I can see the Chinese government trying to deal with politically inconvenient truths.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

All kinds of neat things, photos, etc, and you can probably order the video too.

The original story linked above looks like the human interest story of the archeologist and the political interests in China made it relevant as a story, as far as the newspaper editors were concerned.

I can see the Chinese government trying to deal with politically inconvenient truths.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

I guess the DNA study is a recent development. P revious researchers think they may have been related to the Celts. The Weegas (God knows how many English spelling variations ther are) probably have some ancestry from these peoples. Some of them have blue eyes, which can be seen in other shows about Western China. They do share some cultural characteristics with the mummies. Over time the caucasoid gene pool was replaced by the mongoloid gene pool.

Check out PBS 1998 Nova's Mysterious Mummies of China and for 1999 the Discovery Channel's Riddle of the Desert Mummies

Why oh why is it that all the cool stuff about the history of mankind... er ah humanity is in countries that aren't friendly to America? China, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.

If you think the international politics are bad. Just check out our very own domestic Graves Act. It allowed aboriginal Americans to claim the 9,000 year old bones of the Kennewick Man as their direct ancestor. Nova also covered this issue with Mystery of the First Americans. His genes show that he's most closely related to the Ainu.

The peopling of the Earth is a contentious issue and probably will be until all our genes are thoroughly mixed and we become a uniform gray with no outward sexual differentiation.

I guess the DNA study is a recent development. P revious researchers think they may have been related to the Celts. The Weegas (God knows how many English spelling variations ther are) probably have some ancestry from these peoples. Some of them have blue eyes, which can be seen in other shows about Western China. They do share some cultural characteristics with the mummies. Over time the caucasoid gene pool was replaced by the mongoloid gene pool.

Check out PBS 1998 Nova's Mysterious Mummies of China and for 1999 the Discovery Channel's Riddle of the Desert Mummies

Why oh why is it that all the cool stuff about the history of mankind... er ah humanity is in countries that aren't friendly to America? China, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.

If you think the international politics are bad. Just check out our very own domestic Graves Act. It allowed aboriginal Americans to claim the 9,000 year old bones of the Kennewick Man as their direct ancestor. Nova also covered this issue with Mystery of the First Americans. His genes show that he's most closely related to the Ainu.

The peopling of the Earth is a contentious issue and probably will be until all our genes are thoroughly mixed and we become a uniform gray with no outward sexual differentiation.

Microsoft has a case of sour grapes and is trying to malign the whole profession of programmers, knowing that, even doing so, they can buy the average ones for a dime a dozen: give 'em money, and they'll program for ya.

If this is indeed what Microsoft is doing, it's extremely ironic. As Robert X. Cringely pointed out in his brilliant book, Accidental Empires , once upon a time, Microsoft understood the truism that one excellent programmer can outperform a dozen average ones. This was something IBM never understood during those heady days when MS and IBM actually collaborated on OS/2.

During that time, IBM insisted on measuring programmer productivity in terms of "K-LOCs". MS programmers seethed because they could re-write a huge, bloated morass of crap in a few dozen lines of code and IBM would view the result as a negative.

Back in those days, MS prided itself on its college recruiting, always seizing the best and brightest graduates, indoctrinating them into the MS cult of personality and putting them to work. Make no bones about it. MS got some hot programmers back in those days. Dave Cutler and Charles Simonyi come immediately to mind, and they didn't even swipe those guys out of colleges.

Even when they bought companies, it was hardly ever for the sake of buying code or products. It was almost always about buying the people at those companies. If MS truly believes that code and programmers have little value, then it is truly an enormous shift in their belief system.

Personally, I have a hard time believing that even the evil empire in Redmond has come to devalue programmers and their work so much. If anything, I think they're hiding their true feelings because they're scared of open source and the GPL and the power they have to destroy Microsoft's OS cash cow and its inherent monopoly leverage.

Given the NYT article: There is a need to explain some of the growth the article mentions and this NOVA show transcript "Trillion Dollar bet" can certainly help to explain alot. Here is the three major US Stocks these past two years. And it shows the impact of the Trillion Dollar Bet result.

Money was dumped into the tech IT industry in order to put it somewhere while the market seemed unstable, so it went into Dot Com and such. But we all know MS tries and makes things to be something they are not.

So the NYT article is in error about the growth it talks about, but not about the failure the tech industry has in rippling thru other industries. That's where the GPL comes in and corrects this problem.


3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!

Last month there was a Frontline/Nova special on PBS called Harvest of Fear. This is a very complex issue, the show presented a well thought out and balanced view of the issues. I suggest anyone concerned with this issue watch this show if they can find it. You can buy it from PBS for $20, though it says backordered. Just search for Harvest of Fear, can't post link to the item directly because of lameness filter.

Last month there was a Frontline/Nova special on PBS called Harvest of Fear. This is a very complex issue, the show presented a well thought out and balanced view of the issues. I suggest anyone concerned with this issue watch this show if they can find it. You can buy it from PBS for $20, though it says backordered. Just search for Harvest of Fear, can't post link to the item directly because of lameness filter.

Most of our enemies would see it most efficient to use prions.

These are what scientists think are responsible for mad cow disease, as well as the Kuru disease from Africa. Supposedly, if used as a biological weapon (which is years away, if even possible), they could be targetted toward specific ethnic groups and people with certain attributes. (Yes, each word in the above is a link to a resource.)

I'd have to disagree slightly about the motivation being wealth generation/accumulation, but concur with the reprehensible and destructive quality of this trend.

This morning, I caught this article on MSNBC about our Republican whitehouse wanting to seize private property to give it to electric companies

("Sorry Bob, but it's been a rough couple of months for PG&E executives and shareholders. It's only fair that we take your farm to help them thru the tough times.")

This is as disturbing, if not more, than former Clinton whitehouse private property seizures for national parks.

Who's looking out for the little guy when both parties are robbing him blind?

And last night, watching PBS's Islam: Empire of Faith, I was surprised to learn how Islam encouraged, cultivated and "open sourced" tremendous amounts of knowledge to the world - releasing it in numerous languages and promoting the distribution of paper-based texts.

No wonder they kicked butts for hundreds of years...

Somehow, the knowledge and property grab by large corporations seems entirerly inconsistent with the development of civilization, but I don't think you'll find wealth-generation as the motivation.

Small entrepreneurs pursue wealth-generation - heck, I'd expect most folks wouldn't mind improving their personal income a bit. But their wealth-generation is a means to a more comfortable end, not a means to raw, unadulterated power grab.

Instead, it's the major corps that have helped themselves to the PTO raid, greased both parties, created wonderful intellectual property scams like the Cybersquatting law and various other amusements, and in general, looted public and others private property.

So please... don't give the aspiration and achievement of financial security and success the blame for this theft. Call it what it is.

*scoove*

You might wanna read R. Cringely's report on Starband.

"If you configure the Starband system with a Windows PC, then switch to the router the moment the installer's truck has disappeared down the street, it will allow you to have a network without any Windows PCs. Mac zealots like that. It works just fine with Linux, too. I have a very mixed network with two Windows boxes, two Linux boxes, two Macs, and a Windows notebook. The Macs and the Windows notebook are connected through an 802.11 wireless connection provided by an Apple Airport. This, too, is something the Starband docs say can't be done. I love reading statements like that as I'm web surfing in bed, 100 plus feet from the Starband modem."

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010201. html

I think the best place to search for pro-Napster (and anti-Napster) info is Slashdot.

From Slashdot stories I could remember two articles :

• A Love Song For Napster by Jaron Lanier at Discovery Magazine online
• In Defense of the Free Ride by Robert X. Cringely at PBS online

In this article, there is a good discussion on the big bang theory and it's origins.

The discovery of background radiation is described well in this article. The work was done by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. As for the CNN article referring to this as the "cosmic match that ignited the big bang," classical theories break down at the singularity which we presume the universe began from. Because space and time break down at this singularity, how can we identify a cause? The only events in space and time that matter are the ones after the big bang. The article isn't well written and with what's written about it, it seems to be the same work done 36 years ago that I cited above. I'm sure there's a reason it's making the news now, but whatever the discovery is, the article doesn't do it justice.

No, no, no. winmail.dat is a good thing. It tells you which companies hire completely incompetent sysadmins. It's a big red flag that says "these idiots are going to get 0WN3D by kiddies and hammered by viruses for the next several years". It's a shame that so many organizations (such as PBS) fall into this category, but it's their loss.

Personally, I just wish that all webmail services provided a "view as plain text" option.

Bell Labs did in fact patent the transistor. Read about it here.

Of course patents only lasted 17 years then, so that patent expired some 35 years ago, before the Japanese electronics industries really got going.

The Creature uses a noddy state machine

So that's why my character acts so wooden.

The strength of B&W is that it went for a completely noddy decision system

Why not a big-ears decision system? Or a plod decision system? Or any of the other characters from Blyton's Toyland? And wouldn't Enid Blyton Ltd. be after their ass if they actually implemented a noddy decision system?

Nova on PBS is airing a show abotu this right now. It's pretty good. Also see the show's website.

...not a public-broadcasting problem.

The conversion to digital is not working particularly well. The equipment is very expensive and the benefits are limited (certainly not enough to justify the outrageous expense). People are not flocking to the new technology (as they did when color was introduced) and there is little cachet in a station going digital (or in a home going digital).

Public TV is in a bind because they have been given a deadline for conversion which makes no sense. The commercial TV stations have a large number of options: They can use the larger bandwidth for more stations while they wait for a market to develop for digital (thus bringing in more revenue). Such an option just gives public TV more space to fill.

The WNET lament about interactive content is laughable, however. WGBH in Boston produces the best web sites on the web (check out NOVA and Frontline for good examples of what the future of the web will be like for sites associated with TV shows. WNET is way behind in this, but it has nothing to do with anything except the bureaucracy at WNET.

...not a public-broadcasting problem.

The conversion to digital is not working particularly well. The equipment is very expensive and the benefits are limited (certainly not enough to justify the outrageous expense). People are not flocking to the new technology (as they did when color was introduced) and there is little cachet in a station going digital (or in a home going digital).

Public TV is in a bind because they have been given a deadline for conversion which makes no sense. The commercial TV stations have a large number of options: They can use the larger bandwidth for more stations while they wait for a market to develop for digital (thus bringing in more revenue). Such an option just gives public TV more space to fill.

The WNET lament about interactive content is laughable, however. WGBH in Boston produces the best web sites on the web (check out NOVA and Frontline for good examples of what the future of the web will be like for sites associated with TV shows. WNET is way behind in this, but it has nothing to do with anything except the bureaucracy at WNET.

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is already a private nonprofit corporation. They already play sponsored "messages" for corporate "underwriters." If public broadcasting is still short on funding for equipment, PBS should just give up government support altogether, and take commercial advertising. The same goes for NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

Sometimes I worry that I will develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is already a private nonprofit corporation. They already play sponsored "messages" for corporate "underwriters." If public broadcasting is still short on funding for equipment, PBS should just give up government support altogether, and take commercial advertising. The same goes for NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

Sometimes I worry that I will develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is already a private nonprofit corporation. They already play sponsored "messages" for corporate "underwriters." If public broadcasting is still short on funding for equipment, PBS should just give up government support altogether, and take commercial advertising. The same goes for NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

Sometimes I worry that I will develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.

PBS receives funding from three sources: charitable private donations, corporate sponsorship, and government. The government bit is permanently controvertial, corporate sponsorship is done in a way that avoids interrupting programmes with adverts - there's usually a thank you at the end of each program which goes through the list of sponsors, and programs might end up named after the sponsor too. Finally, private donations are solicited through telethons, where programming is suspended until enough donations have come in.

PBS is part of the CBC (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) which also runs a national radio network NPR. The latter is closish to a cross between Britain's BBC Radio's 3 and 4 in content.

Content varies as PBS is heavily regionised: all stations are nominally independent and usually have a reach covering a handful of counties. The two local PBS stations, from Miami and West Palm Beach, I receive here usually have a mix of imported news programs (from the UK's ITN and BBC), some news and financial programs from PBS, a documentary series or two such as Nova (equivalent, and I think sharing material often, with the BBC's Horizon series), and large amounts of imported British sitcoms varying from Blackadder (yay) to Keeping Up Appearances (God help us.)

OTOH, when I go up to Connecticut, as I do on a regular basis, the station tends to have some very high-quality home grown history programs and such.

The network is famous internationally for the Sesame Street series.

I can't comment on the financial comparisons between the BBC and PBS except in pointing out that the comparison is unfair on all levels. Not only are the sources of income entirely different, but the BBC provides two national TV stations with a small amount of regionalisation, five national radio stations, several hundred local radio stations, and even a symphony orchestra, for the price of the licence fee - a source making it accountable only to TV owners. (cable/satellite stations like BBC World TV and the World Service have seperate sources of funding.) PBS funds a heavily regionalised TV network, where the funding from each region will heavily impact the funding of that region's programming.

Does that answer the question?
--

The money should come either solely from the public, or yes, even from taxes. As it's been said, PBS is important to American citizens. Our taxes pay for this, when they should be paying for this. What could PBS do with $150,000,000,000 a year, I wonder? I can't tell you whether corporate sponsorship is an influence on PBS or not, but when it comes to MSNBC and other stations of that ilk, you'd have to be a fool to think it doesn't -- it most certainly does. And it will most certainly do the same, to PBS sooner or later, as it has before.

What news outlets do we even have left that aren't touched by some corporate influence? Not many, it seems. C-Span, I guess.

I don't watch TV much, but PBS falls into a class of
things that I consider vital to our nation's citizenry. I hope things work out ok

Those who really do feel PBS is "vital to our nation's citizenry," please donate money to PBS by becoming a member:

http://www.pbs.org/insidepbs/membership/local.html

And for those corporations that would like to help:

http://sponsorship.pbs.org/

I don't watch TV much, but PBS falls into a class of
things that I consider vital to our nation's citizenry. I hope things work out ok

Those who really do feel PBS is "vital to our nation's citizenry," please donate money to PBS by becoming a member:

http://www.pbs.org/insidepbs/membership/local.html

And for those corporations that would like to help:

http://sponsorship.pbs.org/

AI is definately going to be a Big Thing at some point. Neural Networks for desicion making would be extremely cool. Tack one onto napster and let it download music it thinks you'd like, and get it right! Where are my translating telephones? Where's the web shopping bots? Let's get rolling on all this Kurzweilian stuff before Bill Joy breaks up the party. just a thought.

linkfilter - fresh links daily.

Really excellent expose' on the DeBeers cartel and how they create an artificaial scarcity of diamonds worldwide to keep prices from falling below that of aluminum.

---

Really excellent expose' on the DeBeers cartel and how they create an artificaial scarcity of diamonds worldwide to keep prices from falling below that of aluminum.

---

Here's a neat little site that allows you to do a quick and dirty mapping of damage and fallout maps from a 1 megaton nuclear blast as well as a 25 megaton air burst. I found it rather interesting. It's also got explanations of the types of damage that you'd be likely to encounter at various distances from the blast center.

People have been jailed for several years in the US without trial. The INS claims that it has "secret evidence", but won't show it to anyone. In the meantime the poor SOB rots in jail.

Read for yourself

So why does this still qualify as "Stuff that matters?"

Peril n.: A sysadmin with a screwdriver.

>You blew it when you claimed that Compaq reverse engineered the IBM Bios

See part II of "Triumph ofthe Nerds" for an accurate history... search the transcript for "Compaq".

>IBM actually published the info about their bios. Since when is reading a book reverse engineering?

See part II of "Triumph ofthe Nerds" for an accurate history... search the transcript for "Compaq".

Personally I say a consortium should be created in order to monitor (fully monitor) patents and some of the broad circumstances in which the patents claim. Government is no good at monitoring private sector businesses and this has been proven time and time again.

Now can government be trusted to fully monitor whats going on, when some government employees who are on a time based scale of employment look forward to moving into the private sector, often taking jobs at these corporations who's patents they pass along merrily? It happened with the chemical industry.

Framework for the non profit could include, committee members who are voted into the corporation, just like a politician so there can be no form of monopolization. Patents would have to pass a rigorous full proof dissection to ensure fairness in the open market segments before being given a patent number.

This is whats happening in the justice system regarding technology based cases. Many people can scream and bitch on forums, to friends, etc., about the abuses going on in the justice system, but here is what it comes down to when dealing with the justice system.

Court
Jury of peers Highly unlikely 90% of the time the jury will be comprised of people who do not have any understanding of whats going on fully. These people are purposely selected by both lawyers, and the prosecution, depending on how they intend to fight the case. If the prosecution's job is to win by hiding facts about technology they'll option to choose as many e-illiterate jurors as they can and vice versa.

Lengthy trials
Jurors don't want to sit through boring trials such as these, and this combined with jurors that don't have a clue are a ticking timebomb set to explode in a very bad fashion. They will not look at any of the evidence, and rather they'd just wanna hurry up and go back to watching Oprah, Martha Stewart, and CBS.

Finances
Company X's resources are 1billion dollars for their legal teams while Defendant is almost dirt poor.

Companies who are bringing these patent suits should be held liable to pay for the entire trial along with damages for attempting to manipulate the legal system. Hefty fines should be imposed on them which could be used for research into the patenting system and its mechanisms.

Newflix

Its not that the music industry has failed to realize this. Its that they will not take advantage of it until they can assure they will have utmost control in the new medium. They could've started sellign MP3s years ago, but they feared that without control, piracy would run rampant (and it probably would).

Piracy is only piracy if copying is necessarily stealing. I have no time for arguing with people of the gimme gimme gimme generation who believe everything should be cost-free, but it's so easy to see how you could solve the on-line music distribution problem that it's frankly not funny. In a recent column, Robert X. Cringely pointed out that it would be a comparatively trivial matter to end up charging for music copying by just slapping a tax onto every blank CD-R and CD-RW sold that could be distributed to artists and recording labels according to their total "burning share", which you could estimate via reasonable statistical sampling of on-line traffic or polling. Yes, there are always weirdos who will buy an extra 80 gig of disk just for the sheer thrill of not paying for what they use, but they aren't going away in any event.

But for the vast majority of cases, everybody can get paid, if everybody agreed to do this. The problem, of course, is that record labels probably have zero long-term incentive to participate in this, since a world that distributes music primarily on-line is a world that really doesn't need the value-added services of record companies. Music retailers could be in an even worse bind.

And I don't know how you solve the political problem to get the recordables tax passed in the first place.

We keep hearing that Linux is hard to install.

User's think it's a problem with the OS, but that's totally misguided. The real issue is that OS's are tough to install and integrate on raw Open Hardware systems (search for "Compaq" to see how they reverse engineered the PC bios, igniting the Open Hardware revolution), and Microsoft doesn't allow the major OEM's to install anything but Windows (See the "Findings of Fact" [section V.C.4 for a most interesting study] in the Microsoft antitrust trial).

Try installing Windows on a raw system (with no OS or other OS). It is just as difficult.

Now they come up with an OS that only installs on very specific hardware, and only atop W98.

My guess is: Windows' lemmings won't complain a bit (they never do; they just get their brother-in-law to fix it for free).

I'm glad you're passionate about this -- if you read my post again, you'll notice that you agree with me 100% I'm NOT (repeat NOT) advocating a quarter-by-quarter strategy

To reiterate, MSFT doesn't live by the quarterly returns, as witnessed by the gobs of money they spend on research (some of which is pure research). Now, Bob Cringely has commented that this money is spent now, to be revoked if MS needs it to make their quarterly numbers look good. Maybe, maybe not.

Here's a summary, just to hammer the point home: I don't think a quarter-by-quarter strategy is good. I think a next-ten-years strategy is good, and I see some signs that RedHat gets this. Clear enough?
"Beware by whom you are called sane."

WE ARE FACED WITH A CARD GAP!!!

__________________

According to what I have read elsewhere, and as cited at PBS, Kittenger did go supersonic during his jump.

Have we learned nothing here in these last few years of being jacked over by corporations trying to sell products?
Where's your jaded /. instincts, boy???

Sure, this standard looks great, but for chrissakes wake up and smell the oligopolistic practices. Chances are this technology will be buried just as quickly as DSL is being kicked under the carpet. Its very likely that the new set manufacturers will simply not implement this technology into their sets, precisely because it will allow the existence of old sets along with new.

If people don't have to buy new sets, lots of them wont. If people know that old TV standards are headed for obsolescence, they will be more likely to buy new ones. This is the goal of Trinitron, RCA, Panasonic, and everyone else on the "Sell More Sets" bnandwagon. Its why DHTV was made in the first place, cuz everyone already has a friggin TV and they just can't sell as many as they used to.

We're jaded for a reason ladies and gents, don't forget that.

-chorder

The real, more subtle reason copyright terms are infinite is that bills keep getting passed to lengthen them.

For more information on perpetual copyright, read this writeup on Everything.

Here's how to get around perpetual copyrights and trademarks: Abstract the copyrighted expression away from the uncopyrightable idea by finding antecedents from before 1923 (or are otherwise Free). For example, derive Precious Moments from the Eloi people in chapter 4 of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine , and derive Noddy from Pinocchio renditions. This way you can avoid copyright and trademark infringement by taking a stereotype (uncopyrightable under Capcom v. Data East) and "making it yours" by changing just enough that the original expression is distinctive enough to overpower any copied expression.

This is why I no longer like Winnie-the-Pooh, as it has no Free antecedents.

The description above makes this book sound a lot like the Robert X. Cringely show on PBS a few years back (the name escapes me now). I wonder if this book is just a rehash of that show or if there is a lot of new information.

Mr Cringley had go on this very subject last week.

it's been what, almost a decade now since banners in their current form came into use.

The web didn't even exist a decade ago.

According to http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline/, the first graphical browser Mosaic was available in 93.

And http://www.zeffgroup.com/followup/zeff/sld004.htm claims that the first banner ad appeared in 94.

------------------

the navy and dolphins issue is also very interesting, a good summary can be found here.

This brief summary describes Hawking & Hartle's proposal for a no-boundary universe, in which the issue of what happened before the big bang is taken care of with some neat mathematics. The bottom line is that the progression of time from the big bang as a "beginning" is just something we perceive from within the universe - looked at from an appropriate conceptual/mathematical perspective, there's no problem.

In this model, what happened before the big bang is a little analogous to the problem of "where does all the water go that falls off the edge of the horizon?" was when we believed the earth was flat. The imagined problem disappeared once we comprehended the larger structure.

> The whole school system should be setup to push each student to the maximum of their potential, regardless of how high or low it is.

Things used to be that way, but times have changed. For example, check out some questions from the 1901, 1926, and 1999 exams.