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James Lovelock, one of the true ninja hacker lords, has suggested that of all planets in the solar system, only Earth looks like it harbors life, because only it has an atmosphere that is out of chemical equilibrium.

Lovelock, a atmospheric chemist and inventor who made his fortune on the ion-capture gas chromatography detector, is the author of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis. Romantic name aside, it's the idea that the presence of life alters a planet's environment to be more favorable to life. (The idea and name have been appropriated by eco-mystics who take it to mean that there actually is some sort of earth deity, but that's emphatically not what Lovelock is saying.)

On our planet, many atmospheric gases are grossly out of equilibrium. For instance, although the atmosphere is about one-fifth oxygen, there are detectable traces of methane, mostly from termites and "the farts of ruminants". If life were not continually renewing the methane, it would combine with the oxygen, and disappear in a few hours.

Of course, the presence of oxygen itself is an anomaly. It is so reactive that if it were not renewed by photosynthesis, it would bind with the copious free carbon lying about.

Lovelock gives many other examples in his excellent book, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. (He also mentions that the presence of fluorocarbons, like Freon, in the atmosphere is a clear sign, not just of life, but of intelligent life. Since you can determine atmospheric composition by spectrometry through a telescope, this gives a way to detect civilization if only you can image a planet hosting it.)

There's a clue in the simple appearance of the planets from space: compare the complex and constantly-changing appearance of the Earth's patchy clouds, liquid-water ocean, and of course its wildly varying landmasses (including snowcaps, yellow deserts, chlorphyll-green jungles, and seasonal temperate forests and grasslands), with the dead, relatively static appearance of any other planet in the system. Our nervous systems have life-detection circuits built in; honestly now, do you see any when you look at Mars?

The key is that Earth is alone in all the solar system in having a disequilibrium chemistry. This doesn't mean that there wasn't life elsewhere at one time; it may not even mean that there aren't small, isolated outposts that support some life, but not enough to control the entire planet. Certainly, life on Earth had to start that way.

Nevertheless, although there may indeed have been a time, early in its history, when life florished on Mars, it seems dead now.

...I don't know of anyone who honestly expected AI to arrive in 2001...No one is marketing HAL to the masses everyday....

Actually, didn't you provide the counterpoint to your own claim here?

Clearly, the guy who dreamt up HAL thought AI would be feasible by 2001. Of course, he wasn't selling products, but if you limited yourself to products that were announced but never shipped before the company went out of business, you'd have a hard time finding products anybody had ever heard of.

There just aren't that many spectacular flops every year. For every Androbot or Indrema, there are hundreds of companies nobody has ever heard of.

I'm Brazilian and as such I can tell you: most of Brazil's population will not be able to buy this computer. They wouldn't have the $200, or the telephone line, or the money to pay the phone bill. Pimenta da Veiga is actually helping Brazil's lower middle class.

Another interesting example is the Bangladeshi woman who used microcredit to buy a cell phone, which she rents out to her neighbors. Not a big business by our standards, but one that has a drastic effect on her and her customers.

The importance of both examples is that they show impoverished, even illiterate people gaining access to information. For people like this, information is power, money, and safety. A weather report pulled off a US Navy web site can mean life or death for a fisherman. Being able to talk to a guest-worker family member means their remittances don't get ripped off by go-betweens. There are no end of consequences.

The best thing about these programs is the way they promote mutual aid and collective responsibility. Microloans are administered by peer groups that make sure the recipient has realistic goals and plans. Groups that chip in to buy a computer are going to be personally involved in how it is used -- no dusty impulse purchase this!

__________________

Looking at his biography doesn't show much (unless you recognise the title of his book - Takedown), an interview with Salon Magazine reveals a bit more. But once you've read the front page of Takedown.com you find out that John Markoff did have a hand in arresting/tracing Kevin Mitnick. Oh, as well as book it's also a film
Richy C.

Isn't it telling that what most people consider to be the best of the SW franchise, "The Empire Strikes Back", wasn't directed by Lucas?

As the year 2000 limps to a close, the days when Slashdot's name was at the tip of every tech pundit's tongue, and Linux's rise to world domination seemed a foregone conclusion, are suddenly long gone. The prominence of free software in the tech and financial press has sharply declined. I mean, you know the buzz is fading fast when media outlets become so bored that they can't even muster the energy to harp on the declining stock prices of Linux companies. Sure, the dot-com downturn is responsible for a lot of the deflation, as is the normal news cycle that treats yesterday's news as, well, yesterday's news, but was it really only a year ago that VA Linux was breaking all records for IPO debuts?

Linux as an adventure is coming to an end. That doesn't mean things won't continue to get better and better but the excitement of the last few years is gone. You can feel it on the web sites - Slashdot is shrinking back to its pre-post--Columbine size, except for flamebait articles about the election and such, and discussion areas on other sites (advogato, Linux Today) are empty.

Partly it's that the rush of new people juming aboard has slowed. You can only have the same "Oh yeah? Well, according to RMS, ESR says the GPL..." discussion so many times.

And there's nothing really new around the corner. Since I've been using Linux, there's always been some exciting new development to look forward to. Either software (KDE, the 2.0 kernel, glibc, Mozilla, Gnome) or political (IPO's, 'letters', squabbling egomaniacs). Now Gnome is running stably, KDE 2.0 is out, Mozilla and the 2.4 kernel will slink in the door like teenagers out after curfew. At least for me, the only thing I'm eager to see is Evolution. (Nautilus? Yawn.)

Basically, the 'world domination' stuff is over. Linux has settled into its niche - a major chunk of the server market and a desktop share that's too small to support boxed Quake releases or a commercial office suite.

Now if that doesn't get Slashdot some more page views... ;-)

For those that don't know: A geek trying to prove the resourcefulness of the Web by holing himself up in his house for an entire YEAR! How ridiculous is that?

Salon has a good but lenghty article about the guy's lunacy

Sorry, you're right and I'm wrong. There were some additional provisions in the SHBA [unrelated to the SHBA, and favouring publishing companies over artists], but I think I'm a little off about the details.

SeeCourtney Love's speech gives the correct details.

First, there is no such animal as a "North American Patent" there are Canadian patents, and there are U.S. patents, but there are no "North American patents."

Second, you can not get a patent for "a secret formulation", since in order to obtain the patent, the formulation must be disclosed.

Third, I did a search of the U.S. Patent Office and of the Canadian Patent Office, and found no patents issued to Jocelyne Piret.

So, the above data is obviously wrong. Hope you didn't get all riled up.

I do expect that there is a patent application pending for this. However, that is not necessarily a problem, if the patent is licensed, either for a nominal fee or free. So, don't get annoyed before you have all the facts.

Thalia

i mean, i know it was a bit of a tough quiz and all, but goddammit, i want my president to know at least something about the world outside of texas and mexico.

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I thought, 'Naah, this can't really be the Republicans. They wouldn't do something as stupid as spamming people for support.' But then I did some research...and apparently they really are this stupid.

Here is a Salon article from 1999 about a Republican senate candidate's spam. And there's an anti-spam spite with an article about the Californian Republican party spamming people. A mention in the Seatt le Times. And then of course there's EChampions, the RNC-funded group who sent the spam that hit my mailbox.

If I needed a reason not to vote Republican, this gave me one. Bastards. But I suspect that the next election will be far worse, with candidates spamming from all sides.

Wow, i bet that's a fair and unbiased source for such information.

Read this.

-c

This is analogous to the situation with the government in Shockwave Rider, being forced to pay attention to its citizens, because of the ability of those citizens to communicate with each other and disseminate information via a ubiquitous network that is difficult to for any single entity to control.

Sure, there's a difference between Halflinger's actions, which essentially achieved the same end result as something like the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, and what's happening right now with Napster. But things aren't always as cut and dried as they often are in novels.

Saying that "Napster is the Dark Side of a free world" makes a lot of assumptions about the current state and direction of thinking regarding intellectual property. The thinking which leads to laws like the U.S. DMCA and Digital Signature Bill, which grants incredible power to corporations while removing it from customers, is wrong. And I don't only mean wrong in a moral sense, since certainly morals aren't absolute, but it is wrong in the sense that it cannot and will not survive. It will not survive because of the Internet - because of the ability for individuals to communicate with each other freely.

The cliche that "the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it" is being extended to society as a whole, but it goes far beyond just censorship. I would restate that phrase in a more unwieldy form: "The Internet enables individuals to treat attempts at central control and exercise of excessive power as damage, and route around it."

I think Patricia Seybold puts it well in the September issue of Fast Company magazine:

"The music industry is now at the mercy of customers who are taking it upon themselves to do the kinds of things that used to be done by studios and publishers: marketing and disseminating songs that they like. Now, you could just say, "copyright violation", and be done with it. But think about what's really happening. End users - customers - are voting with their feet (well, their ears) and bringing into question the longstanding roles of the studio, the producer, and the the publisher."

If all you see is "copyright violation", you need to look deeper. Think about issues like what "intellectual property" really means, what open source software can teach us about the benefits of open information exchange, and the direction in which the prevailing legal and corporate attitudes towards intellectual property ownership seem to be leading us. Patents on hyperlinks and one-click shopping? Legally enforceable restrictions on intellectual property far more onerous than anything that was ever applied to physical property?

Sure, Napster is also about "free stuff". But it's simplistic and short-sighted to see it as only that. The "middle layer" of the recording industry will either have to transform itself or get out of the way. It sat on its hands for decades watching digital technology develop, and bitterly fought anything that might weaken its monopoly on stamping and distributing bits of plastic. It's no longer about bits of plastic, though. The noise being made is coming from a group of wealthy but obsolete businessmen who are doing their best to resist being disintermediated, instead of trying to find ways of actually serving both the customers and the artists that are supposed to be the core of their corporate mission.

The more foresighted artists agree: Courtney Love, Chuck D, Limp Bizkit. Napster is a symptom of the rot at the core of the music industry. The only things that rot are things that are already dead.

I'll wrap up my rant with this great statement quoted in the Slashdot article Sony VP On Stopping Napster, by Steve Heckler, senior VP of Sony Pictures Entertainment:

"The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what. [...] Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC."

I'm not sure if this attitude arises from an "honest" distrust of individual customers, or from fear, sheer greed, or simple small-mindedness. Whichever it is, it's sad. But John Brunner has already shown us how it's all going to end, and I share his optimism.

There was another Slashdot story about the famous brain a while back.
Here is another book review by Craig Seligman of Salon.
And this is a whole site dedicated to the brain itself.

• What planet did you grow up on? How is this different from what they did to DR-DOS, or their documented intent to make using Netscape "a harrowing experience"?

Well, I guess you buy into the theory that Bill Gates wants Microsoft to be broken up then.

Boy that seems pretty brazen. I guess, after the faked videotape demonstration episode, I could believe just about anything of MS.

The problem I have with this is that this incident could come up during settlement talks between the DOJ and MS. The DOJ might ask for a potentially embarrassing dump of all email and source code changes surrounding SP6. Seems that if you had IBM/Lotus engineers pouring through the code and email discussions, you could pretty much prove that SP6 was designed to break Lotus, if MS did intentionally break Lotus software.

Proving something like that would make it very hard to settle, give basis for additional anti-trust charges at a later date and make appeals of any forthcoming decision against MS much more difficult.

The only way I could explain such an act would be to believe that MS managers want the company to be broken up.

I guess that's not so far fetched, but if MS wanted to be broken up now, they could just suggest it during settlement negotiations. You could argue that they want to be broken up AND look like victims to their army of supporters. It's possible, I suppose.

There are a number of clear misrepresentations made in the video, including a Microsoft executive saying "We have not made any other changes to this computer or Windows 98, except to run Dr. Felten's program." Microsoft later admitted that this was not true.

As Judge Jackson did not mention this apparent falsification of evidence in the Finding of Fact, is it unlikely that this incident will be used to prejudge Microsoft in appeals?

they'll defend wackos and more wackos, but what about your avg university conservative?

http://www.salonmag.com/col/ho ro/1998/12/07horo.html

-l