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When I first heard about THX certification in Computer Desktop I applauded the Idea. I just figured they were coming of age.
Now every major PC Speaker companies has some top-of-the-line THX certified set, and Creative even has a soundcard that is THX certified. It seemed that the THX certification was not that hard to get, since most of these system do not compare with real Home Theatre setups...

And then I read this article about the merger of ILM, Skywalker Sound an LucasFilm and most important : the fact that LUCAS SOLD THX to "investors including Creative Labs"

I'll bet that the other investors are some form of Logitech/Klipsch/AltecLansing related corps ;-)

The only valid reason to buy a THX set is when the THX-logo is big enough to put a homemade "-1138" emblem behind it...

Here is how an electric bolt may have occurred:

The tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The rough tiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trail acted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused enough damage to induce a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.

The solution is (d) all of the above.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2003/02/05/MN192153.DTL

-ThreeToe
-(two killed in battle with raging typhoon)

Not to mention the violation of privacy and civil liberties of those 250,000 innocent individuals...

In case you haven't seen it, here's a story running on the San Francisco Chronicle site about an amateur astronomer who photographed the shuttle during re-entry.

From the story:

'Photos show odd images near shuttle'

"The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.

"They clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly . . . when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," he said..."

In case you haven't seen it, here's a story running on the San Francisco Chronicle site about an amateur astronomer who photographed the shuttle during re-entry.

From the story:

'Photos show odd images near shuttle'

"The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.

"They clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly . . . when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," he said..."

CBS shines amid the scramble for news, video, answers

Tim Goodman
Sunday, February 2, 2003

This time, it was different. Another space shuttle accident unfolding on television, but not a shocking explosion after lift-off like the Challenger in 1986. Instead, Columbia looked like a daylight shooting star, mysteriously coming to pieces as it flashed over the country, 15 minutes from landing.

That vision, of a bright light streaking to no end, was played out repeatedly as networks and cable channels hunted for video -- most of it from amateurs -- to document the latest NASA tragedy.

As those involved in and around NASA would say repeatedly during the day, Americans had begun to take space travel and the space shuttle in particular for granted, assuming that structural problems from the Challenger era had been overcome and everything was safe as houses.

That certainly added to the sense of shock as the news unfolded. Limited early footage also left the networks scrambling to make sense of what they were seeing, while showing the same shot over and over again. From there, it was a race to find civilians who were filming the shuttle re-entry, so different perspectives could be shown.

Credit CBS News for getting the best angles and footage early on, with at least one clear video that allowed Col. Mark Brown, a former Columbia astronaut, to make educated guesses as to what went wrong. It was Brown who said the pieces were coming from the top, not the bottom tiles as others were speculating.

Guessing is the key word, of course, as it always is during unfolding tragedies. Networks scrambled to get experts in place and, as usual, that reflected on which networks were journalistically strong and which ones were thin and reliant on uninformed talking heads.

Both CBS and ABC did well in moving the story along, with CNN trying admirably to recapture that sense of being the go-to network it was when the Challenger exploded. Unfortunately, CNN's main anchor, Aaron Brown, was nowhere to be found and, instead, Miles O'Brien found himself in over his head,

often fumbling for direction and looking disturbingly lost.

Dan Rather at CBS and Peter Jennings at ABC were in their anchor chairs quickly, with Russ Mitchell acting as a kind of co-anchor along with Rather, something not seen often in major breaking stories. Tom Brokaw was also missing at NBC, but Brian Williams was in place. However, NBC seemed a step or two behind developing situations.

The network did redeem itself partly by being the clearest at explaining the shuttle's re-entry and detailing that, in the earliest pictures, what we were seeing wasn't just a piece of metal hurtling by, but a fully intact Columbia, followed closely by its disintegration. That relatively simple explanation was hard to find elsewhere as the video played over and over again.

CNN was quick to get the mood at Mission Control and also replay the last known contact with Columbia, which was broken up and followed by an eerie silence on both ends. But again, O'Brien and the technical aspects of CNN both seemed disjointed.

The need for real news often exposes networks that don't have solid reporters, like Fox News. CBS stood strong here by relying on space reporter Bill Harwood, who was the first to report that several inside NASA sources believed the weakness came from the left-wing side. That news was later confirmed for everyone else at the NASA news conference. NBC, with Jay Barbree covering the space beat for 45 years, also was in good position to advance the story, but it was Harwood who seemed to own it.

With local Texas stations filing footage of debris strung along highways and in remote fields, the ever-present streaking-star footage of Columbia was replaced with yellow tape and National Guardsmen watching over unidentified hunks of metal. Most people seemed to be heeding government warnings that the debris was dangerous, but at least one predictable posting of a sale on EBay wasn't too far behind.

When there were lulls in the story, a scramble to profile the seven crew members began, with specific interest on Ilan Ramon, who was Israeli, and how his death impacted that country. But it was CBS's Harwood who best set the stage for the ramifications not only of future flights to, say, the international space station, but who would be on them. He talked about another teacher-astronaut following Christa McAuliffe's lead and how her trip, coming as soon as 2004, would likely be derailed. CBS, however, was the first to leave the story, going over to its golf coverage when it deemed news at an end.

Other advancements in the story came from a NASA statement, then a brief speech from President Bush whose heavy reliance on religious symbolism recalled then-President Ronald Reagan's statement after the Challenger explosion, then finally a last NASA news conference where some failure analysis took place.

The bottom line to the story, however, was evident to anyone who snapped on the TV in the morning. Another shuttle had blown up, and there wasn't anything that could be done about it but watch and mourn.

And that's why it will never happen.

"Since the technology exists to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to insignificant levels, why, one is led to ask, does the industry keep nicotine in cigarettes at all?"

Because our government is in on the deal. It scolds Big Tobacco with one hand and lights up with the other.

These Guys have the right idea. Say what you want about their cause, they got noticed (I was with them, as a matter of fact). The media can't pretend stuff like that didn't happen, and as long as you don't take it overboard (like these guys), you will gain much support.

These Guys have the right idea. Say what you want about their cause, they got noticed (I was with them, as a matter of fact). The media can't pretend stuff like that didn't happen, and as long as you don't take it overboard (like these guys), you will gain much support.

is this something they're taking down, or returning to its spot under a bridge.

I bet somebody could cook up a hilarious caption for this picture.

"The bionic dorsal fins aren't what scares me, it's the frickin laser beam attched to it's head!"

If not... well, I care more about my safety than I do about miles per gallon. I agree that most people don't need gas guzzlers such as SUV's, but the sacrifice of auto safety on the altar of the environment has been going on for way too long.

I honestly hope you weren't implying that SUV's are safer than other vehicles. There's plenty of articles that state otherwise.

Here's a better column about the whole debate from the San Francisco Chronicle. Basically, you have a bunch of uptight people over there, over a technology that hasn't even been used by the public yet. Fortunately, other cities, like Sacramento, are waiting to see whether there are any problems caused first, before acting.

• So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of?
• Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again.
• Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay

...

Have you seen Sun's latest quarterly report ?

--
Sun Microsystems Inc., saddled with huge acquisition costs, posted a $2.3 billion quarterly loss on Thursday -- its largest ever.

That translated to a loss of 72 cents per share in the fiscal quarter ended Dec. 29, compared with a $431 million loss (13 cents per share) in the year- ago period.

Excluding the one-time charges covering the acquisition and other costs, however, the Santa Clara firm actually turned a modest profit. It earned $10 million (0 cents per share) in the past quarter on revenue of $2.9 million, compared with a loss of $99 million (3 cents) on sales of $3.1 billion in the year-ago period.

--

At the very end of the article:
Garfinkel has learned his lesson. As an undergrad at MIT in the 1980s, he failed to sanitize his own hard drive before returning a computer to his father. His father was able to read his personal journal.

Ouch.

And even Pixar is not immune from copyright problems (e.g., Monsters, Inc. has characters and situations lifted entirely from work done by underground cartoonist Stanley Mouse, as referenced in an earlier /. story from the SF Chronicle)

For the ground-effect boats, the "wingspan" is a figure on the order of the length of the boat, and the altitude is the separation between the flexible skirt and the surface -- only a few inches. The ground effect parameter is somewhere down around 0.001-0.01.

Not quite what I had in mind. Refer to this and this; neither one is equiped with a skirt or any sort. Also, I recall reading about a model capable of operating at a height of several meters, though I can't find that reference at the moment.

FCC Chairman Michael "Deregulator" Powell got a TiVo, for Xmas, and christened it God's Machine. He also said he'd like to share recordings with his other TV's and his sister. Perhaps this is good news for those of us who are worried about broadcast flags, etc. that are coming with digital TV adoption?

From now on, anyone caught using nuclear weapons in California must give a sample to the state's DNA registry of criminals. No longer will nuclear holocaust get in the way of unsolved crimes.

That said we come to this line:

I would say real-estate type of property.

I have seen the argument made that Real Estate is not completely your property, in that if you stop paying taxes on it, the government comes and takes it away from you. Taxes being a sort of rent paid to the government.

I have to think on this one. My brain cells hurt when I don't have enough coffee in the morning. [d'oh!]

Court Punts Sex.com Domain Case
4 Jan 2003
A dispute over the transfer of the domain name Sex.com may be heading
to California's highest court. In a decision published Friday ...

Tussle over sex.com
4 Jan 2003
... names and decide whether the nation's largest domain registry must face a multimillion-dollar
damage claim from the owner of the pornographic Web site sex.com....

Supreme Court Asked to Decide Domain Name Conversion Issue
7 Jan 2003
... true ownerâ(TM)s registration. The request is the latest turn in the
long legal battle over âoesex.com.â. The name was registered ...

News briefs from around California
4 Jan 2003
... SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A federal appeals court has asked California's top
court to rule on the alleged theft of the domain name sex.com.....

TECH TICKER
4 Jan 2003
... A federal appeals court asked California's high court to resolve questions about
the sex.com domain name in a dispute over whether VeriSign's Network Solutions ...

Putting a Price on Cyber Love
20 Dec 2002
... Although Kremen has since moved on to one of the Net's other profitable niches, and
is running the website Sex.com, he still views personals as one of the most ...

This is all part of legal issues arising out of a multimillion-dollar damage claim in California from the owner of the Web site sex.com.

The ruling could lead to numerous lawsuits against domain registries, particularly the largest one, Network Solutions Inc., based in Mountain View. If the court decides a domain name (a website name) is property that can be converted, NSI, as the custodian of domain names, can be held responsible for allowing a wrongful transfer even if it wasn't at fault.

Just last week, Reuters bought and CNN published as a front page story this Amazon /Segway press release. Reuters must not employ any of those hard-driving investigative reporters we loved in old 30s movies.

For example the "story" "reports"

• "pre-orders already place the high-tech scooter in the top half percent of sales" Yeah? Each Segway costs $5000, while the average Amazon item costs maybe $50. So if Amazon sells 100 Segways in a month, it's in the same percentile as a book that sold 10,000 copies in the same month--that's pretty impressive sales for a book, pretty lousy sales for an item that got the publicity buzz Segway did, an item featured on Amazon's front page.
• "It's selling better than many of our digital cameras" Yeah? And is Amazon the only retailer selling digital cameras, the way it is the only retailer selling Segways? In fact, do you know anybody who would go to Amazon to buy a digital camera?
• "Frazier declined to provide actual pre-sale numbers" I am sure the carefully phrased hype provided is much closer to what CNN readers care about.

Some Reuters Clark Kent may have added one note of reality in the final sentence: "in San Francisco a debate is raging over whether the human transporter should be allowed on that city's streets. " That debate stopped raging a week before this press release came out. According to the Dec. 20 SF Chronicle , after extensive public discussion 9 of 11 supervisors have voted to ban the Segway, enough to overturn the mayor's veto if he decides to try one.

Here are some newer ones, sorry: SFChron NYTimes Try here for more.

I saved a link from an earlier story posted on Slashdot about a year ago.

It may be cruel to say, but every time I read that article, I feel pretty good about my current job position.

Probably should have provided a link.

The study, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Taxes they pay. Care to back that up with numbers? Are you even sure they even paid any taxes? Maybe you should have a look at this article in SFGate. Yes, that's right, neither Cisco nor Microsoft paid ANY federal taxes.

And just for a twist, have we considered how many jobs may have been lost because of Microsofts actions?

But lets put all that aside. What if there are millions of pissed of Joe Blows? Millions of Joe Blows that don't have the money to buy themselves votes. Is a rich person's opinion more important more important than yours? Is your opinion worth less because you didn't pay anyone to give it?

"Crichton stretches out another nano-idea" brightened my morning the other day.

More info is available at Google News."

The Last Comdex?
Slashdot-18 minutes ago
linuxwrangler writes Key3Media Group Inc. which produces the Comdex trade show
may be unable to make it's debt payments and could declare bankruptcy. ...

Key3Media May File for Chapter 11-Seattle Post Intelligencer
Comdex organizer says it may file for bankruptcy-San Francisco Chronicle
Low-key Comdex to highlight gadgets-InfoWorld

Here is the article article about the hay incedent. The lady crying while on the episode is here.

You can also do a search on Google searches for Tranding Spaces hay, Trading Spaces cry, or Pam Herrick to find out more about the show.

Things that they don't tell you on the show:
You sign a contract stating what room is to be changed, what can NOT be touched (They ignore this), what you would like (colors, themes, etc). Trading Spaces then assigns a designer (none of which have any formal design education) to do what ever they want, not what you want. Most of the work is done off camera by the crew. Sewing done on camera is just for show...they have a crew to do that. Same with carpentry. The furniture is made super cheap...particle board bookcases come to mind on one show. I just got to the point where I started laughing at the shows. Some had interesting decorations, but most were a joke. You get around $1000 to change the room, but nothing if you don't like it. You are responsibie for carting away trash (they will pay the disposal fee, but it's just a hassle). You also have to put up with that annoying Paige lady. That would be the ultimate deal breaker for me regardless of the rest.

Here's the article I think he's referring to: Oakland survivors of home decorating TV show try to paint over cracks in friendship

How could I not vote Libertarian for CA HR-12?

1. decently remunerate their cultures
   
2. cancel the third world debt and begin some real funding, instead of relying on the exponential reimbursements. We could, for example, ask some small but healthy countries to tutor some countries, not financially speaking but by publicly councelling every and each of their foreign-economy issues.
   
3. re-consider the very concept of third world debt
   

Here's the article about the woman that was jailed for 3 weeks for refusing to give out information 30 years ago.

My stomach just lurched. Must be the kickback from history repeating its loop.

YET. Rents are way down here, and foreclosures are up, which means banks will be dumping property cheap - exactly what this ridiculous housing market needs.

Brown calls S.F. voters 'ass-backward'

Shame on any politician for putting a picture of himself/herself/itself on web pages his/her/its department creates. Oh gosh, would you look at that, the author's placed a picture of himself at the bottom of his article.

They want the new Federal law, which would only forbid sending mail with forged headers but not other noxious practices like opt-out only lists- to superceed strong state laws.

State laws could remain stronger. Federal law would only trump state law if for some reason the state law was more lenient than the federal. The CA medical marijuana case is a prime example of a state attempting to create a law that effectively legalizes activities federal law prohibits. Likewise states often enact laws that are more "severe", for lack of a better word, than their federal counterparts. Again drugs are a good example. Someone accused of, say, cocaine possession or distribution would likely do better in federal court than in many state jurisdictions. See Clinton, Roger, who served less than two years for a crime often netting 20 plus years in the crusader Arkansas state courts of the 1980s.

But I'm not a lawyer so your mileage may vary...

I have put "effectively" above in bold, because that's really the crux of the issue. The law legalising medical marijuana in California is not an effective one, because the federal government still cracks down on the medical marijuana industry. People believe that they now have the right to grow quantities of marijuana to sell to the authorised sellers, and they regularly get raided and arrested on federal charges, and have property seized. Thus, I'd argue that the law is hardly "effective" at this time, since the federal government needs to alter its regulations as well to allow state governments to make the choice about what drugs are acceptable.

California.

A similar article in the San Francisco Chronicle brings light as to why this came out now. A 25 billion dollar project to link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento by high speed rail is close to becoming a reality. Expect lots of cool new train tech to come out in the next few weeks as train powers that be duke it out for this sizable contract.

If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

Especially now that no one has any money to spare on AOL pleasantries like half-assed chatroom censorship and 50% of bandwidth going to ads, AOL is dying. Expect A0L to lose more ground over the coming months... considering their future next to cable and DSL access, for all intents and purposes AOL is dead.

The AP already picked up this story, and tracked down the marketing company hired to create this fake ad. The woman, Valerie G. Mallinson of Shoreline, Wash works for a public relations firm, Wes Rataushk & Associates Inc. Microsoft hired Rataushk to produce fake testimonials when their own research turned up no usable customers. Yahoo peoplefinder lists: Steve and Valerie Mallinson, (206) 367-1953, 2203 N 106th St, Seattle, WA 98133, if you want to call and ask her about the ad in question.

At 5foot3 and 200 lbs, I'm sure Valerie is not the woman in the stock photo.

Here's another article about a $2 trillion class action lawsuit based on violation of the junk fax law, in effect since 1991. I suspect - but cannot confirm - that a true anti-spam federal law would prompt suits similar to this one. After all, one you ban something and create a statutory violation penalty, lawyers have an incentive to invest in the lawsuit based on the likelihood of success.

Can't the courts decide if a law follows the spirit of the constitution, so to speak? Yes, constitutionally Congress has the right to pass things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act... but do you think preserving the copyright for a cartoon mouse created by a man who is long since dead is what our founding fathers had in mind? Copyright laws were created both to give the author/artist incentive to create new works *and* to ensure at some point new works could be created based on older stuff.

This is exactly how disney became so popular, by using the work of authors that had gone into the public domain! Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid are just a few examples of older works that Disney has used.

Now Disney, and other huge corporations like Sony etc. are trying to make sure that no one else can do what they have done. This, to me at least (I am not a Supreme Court Justice) goes against the spirit of the constitution. From the SFGate Story:The original decision made more than 200 years ago to limit the length of copyrights was deliberate and carefully considered. The goal, which was expressed at the time in letters written by Thomas Jefferson and others, was to allow newcomers to build on and improve works produced by others, but only after the original creators of those works were compensated fairly for their efforts. The reason: Human progress builds upon itself."

These companies are trying to stop progress, and trying to stop other from doing to them what they did to the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Victor Hugo.

But thank goodness they rescued the pussy

" Unlike with e-mail spam, however, consumers end up paying to read unsolicited ads sent to fax machines, cell phone and pagers, since many people pay per-message fees,and fax owners must buy paper, toner and phone lines."

BTW, mobile spam may be rare right now where mobile messaging has just been introduced only recently, but figures from Japan where the e-mail address has been enabled on most mobile phones for a while already show to what heights that tide would rise:

"Of the 900 million messages that go through DoCoMo's servers each day, 880 million (98%) are spam, according to the company."

"The measure banning unsolicited text messages to cell phones and pagers emerged after Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City, read about the case of Rodney Joffe, who had been interrupted during a performance of "Riverdance" by a text message advertising new mortgage rates."

SB 1560 - This bill creates a statewide "Do Not Call" list to be maintained by the attorney general.
AB 1769 - Here is the bill making it a crime to send unsolicited text messages to cell phones or pagers.
AB 2944 - Here is the bill closing a loophole in CA's junk fax law, and decreeing that all spam emails include "ADV:" at the beginning of the subject line or "ADV:ADLT" in the case of adult material.