Slashdot Mirror

AOL has been bundled with Windows since 1996 . Why is this news now? AOL 6.0 and XP are just upgrades.

I'd like to see the numbers on it, since you are interested. How much fuel is required to haul a tree to the paper mill? Produce the paper? Ship the paper to retail and the to the customer? Then what, is the above poster going to pay fedex to burn massive amounts of jet fuel to overnight the precious report somewhere?

This useless waste of energy has to stop. Check out today's SF Chronicle: Californians use 15 megawatts of power just to stir the water in their fucking swimming pools. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING WASTING SO MUCH ENERGY?!?!

I agree that they'll cave simply because it's in their best interests to, but they're not going to sue themselves. Internet users have fewer and fewer choices; the broadband market is dominated by AOL-TimeWarner and AT and as far as alternatives go, the big fish are eating the little fish. Most people connect to Napster to download music that is copyrighted by the music division of their own ISP's 'corporate-mothership'. AOL-TimeWarner will keep 'Road Runner' and @Home users on a short leash on behalf of 'Warner Bros Records', 'Walt Disney' will keep AT&T users on a short leash to protect 'Walt Disney Pictures' and 'Walt Disney Records'.

Of course, if people were a little more aware of ergonomics, maybe we could prevent the injuries in the first place.

Well, it's actually not as simple as that. What's "ergonomics"? There's a ton of definitions, but basically, it's the science that studies how people work. How does being aware of that science prevent injury?

I think what you're getting at is that more people need to go out and buy "ergonomic furniture," but really there is no such thing in the sense that you imply. That is, no one chair is going to be perfect for everybody to prevent injury. The real key to ergonomic furniture is to find furniture that will let you adjust its positioning in as many ways as possible. That's about it.

Yes folks, what I'm saying is that you can buy a Herman Miller chair and still end up with RSI. Awareness of ergonomics is not so much the issue. Awareness of the potential for injury is. Far and away the #1 factor in preventing RSI, and even in reversing some level of RSI, is not new furniture -- it's change in work habits.

And, in the event you feel like reading about some folks who probably aren't much older than you (and may be younger) who have indeed already developed what may be permanent injuries, read on.
--

802.11b is what a lot of folks are using for community wireless projects. See this link for an article with a decidedly different perspective on these networks. I really like Clay Shirky's comment:

"In New York, we have laws that give zoning variances for skyscrapers in return for creating public spaces. These public spaces could easily include 802.11b networks."

The notion that all things digital are shiny new miracles is quickly becoming a tarnished idea of the past. Certainly this applies to the economic and social ennui generated by each new announcement of a yet another crashed dot-com. With every passing day, the sleek, glowing promise of high-tech is starting to seem like history.

Why? Businesses come and go all the time. Most startups fail. It has always been this way. The only difference is that many more dumb startups got funding (and huge PR) in 1999-2000, and now more of them are toast now.

Here in SF everyone wants to dump on the dot-coms, because they brought too many of the "wrong" (smart, educated, young) people into a city that the locals think is exclusively theirs. Certainly many of the stupid startups were a waste of time, money, and office space. But you have to put up with a lot of failures to get the diamonds in the rough.

So while I think it's fun to make fun of the bad ideas, we shouldn't forget the good stuff. Think of the auto industry: 100s (maybe 1000s) of companies have failed between the invention of the auto and today, but autos got vastly more reliable by 1950 than they were in the 1920s - in no small part because of this innovation.

Tech is no different.

This one is about the challenge which KQED (San Francisco PBS affiliate) is facing with the conversion to digital broadcasts and digital studio equipment. They have raised (through private donations) $48M of the $70M required for the conversion.

Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.

Department of Energy is responsible for a massive failure to serve the public interest. Rather than budget the funds needed to explore this new, emerging science, our top national energy science officials have adopted what might be called, at best, a policy of benign neglect. At worst, it's a policy of fraud and deceit.

How could this be happening?

The stakes in the debate about cold fusion are enormous. In this case, an unholy alliance seems to have come together. The principle players are the fossil fuel industry, which has no interest in seeing itself eclipsed by a new, non-polluting source of energy, and the mainstream physics community, which wants to protect, seemingly at all costs, the federal funding it relies on to continue its massively expensive hot fusion experiments.

Damn html tags. The article is here-- Link

This case is also discussed in today's SF Chronicle. Article Here. Also mentioned is an older case where "anonymous Web pages linked the town's weekly newspaper to lesbian pornography sites and called a columnist a child molester, the paper's editors traced the site to a former city councilman by using a subpoena to obtain records from Santa-Clara based Yahoo."

Even the SF Chronicle did a story before /. posted the damn article! (But there was much less useful info in the SF Gate article, other than the old bugaboo "Can bring down web sites! And whole sections of the Internet!!")

Under the screwed up scheme that is currently in place, the HIGHEST bidder sets the energy price for everyone. For instance, if The PG&E Company buys power from provider A at $7, from provider B at $8, and provider C at $23, at the end of the day, the price for everyone is $23. It's a screwed up system that lends itself to abuse.

Now look for the abuse: PG&E Corporation owns The PG&E Company AND provider C (PG&E Corporation still owns most of the providers). It's not hard to see why PG&E Corporation just posted their highest earnings ever.

Oh yeah, by the way, when The PG&E Company was making money, that money went to PG&E Corporate, now that their losing money, PG&E Corporate has cut them off.

The crisis is clearly a manufactured one. The tool that PG&E used to make this crisis was (so-called) deregulation.

PG&E Corp makes money coming and going. They can't lose and they know it.

From SF Gate:

PG&E IN DEBT TO ITSELF Critics say that PG&E is its own biggest debtor, with money flying out of one pocket and into the other and that nearly half of its debt is owed to itself. In the third quarter of 2000, the company reported a 22 percent increase in profits, with a net income of $225 million, while saying it expected California consumers to eventually pick up the tab for its debt.

Also from the article:

In addition to proceeds from the sale of power plants and other revenues that PG&E has forwarded on to its corporate parent, the utility has reaped windfall profits during the crisis from the generation and sale of electricity and has not applied those profits to its own debt. To do so would require an accounting rule change by the California Public Utilities Commission, but company officials have maintained that should not be done.

So, basically when The PG&E COMPANY makes money, that money goes back to PG&E CORPERATION, but when The PG&E COMPANY needs money, well I guess the state pays for it!

California Power utilities are not able to pass on the cost of wholesale electricity due to a rate freeze from deregulation. Apparantly though, the utility's parent company restructured, and can thus keep it's profits, and let the utility die.

In the linked article:

UPDATE: The California Independent System Operator has downgraded Thursday's Stage Three power emergency to a Stage Two emergency, ending the threat of rolling blackouts across the Bay Area.

Cal ISO spokesman Patrick Dorinson said that the combination of conservation and added power buys during the day has enabled the ISO, which oversees California's power grid, to avoid proceeding from a Stage Three Electrical Emergency issued at 9:30 a.m. today to the more drastic step of a rolling blackout order.

--

I was working from home that day and discovered that my ISDN line didn't work (used that at the time for telecommuting); but this happened frequently on my block (unreliable power) so I figured I'd just go to the office. I went out to the car, and when I discovered that the electric buses didn't work, and the streetlights were out, it became obvious that nobody was going anywhere. My neighborhood coffee shop ran out of hot coffee very quickly, as EVERYONE needed some, and so I distinctly remember carrying home pre-ground french roast to make with my stovetop espresso maker.

It turned out that PG&E (that poor, suffering company in the news these days) had massively fucked up a maintenance job:

The problem, utility officials said, originated with a PG&E construction crew error during the installation of a new transformer at the San Mateo substation. The crew violated procedures and neglected to remove a safety ground wire before re-energizing that portion of the substation.

When the switch was thrown, electricity bypassed four 115,000-volt lines that supply power to the Peninsula and San Francisco and instead plowed into the ground.

Fortunately the circuit breakers did their thing and prevented all sorts of chaos (other than power loss) on the power grid. But PG&E certainly did not make a good impression that day!

I was working from home that day and discovered that my ISDN line didn't work (used that at the time for telecommuting); but this happened frequently on my block (unreliable power) so I figured I'd just go to the office. I went out to the car, and when I discovered that the electric buses didn't work, and the streetlights were out, it became obvious that nobody was going anywhere. My neighborhood coffee shop ran out of hot coffee very quickly, as EVERYONE needed some, and so I distinctly remember carrying home pre-ground french roast to make with my stovetop espresso maker.

It turned out that PG&E (that poor, suffering company in the news these days) had massively fucked up a maintenance job:

The problem, utility officials said, originated with a PG&E construction crew error during the installation of a new transformer at the San Mateo substation. The crew violated procedures and neglected to remove a safety ground wire before re-energizing that portion of the substation.

When the switch was thrown, electricity bypassed four 115,000-volt lines that supply power to the Peninsula and San Francisco and instead plowed into the ground.

Fortunately the circuit breakers did their thing and prevented all sorts of chaos (other than power loss) on the power grid. But PG&E certainly did not make a good impression that day!

I was working from home that day and discovered that my ISDN line didn't work (used that at the time for telecommuting); but this happened frequently on my block (unreliable power) so I figured I'd just go to the office. I went out to the car, and when I discovered that the electric buses didn't work, and the streetlights were out, it became obvious that nobody was going anywhere. My neighborhood coffee shop ran out of hot coffee very quickly, as EVERYONE needed some, and so I distinctly remember carrying home pre-ground french roast to make with my stovetop espresso maker.

It turned out that PG&E (that poor, suffering company in the news these days) had massively fucked up a maintenance job:

The problem, utility officials said, originated with a PG&E construction crew error during the installation of a new transformer at the San Mateo substation. The crew violated procedures and neglected to remove a safety ground wire before re-energizing that portion of the substation.

When the switch was thrown, electricity bypassed four 115,000-volt lines that supply power to the Peninsula and San Francisco and instead plowed into the ground.

Fortunately the circuit breakers did their thing and prevented all sorts of chaos (other than power loss) on the power grid. But PG&E certainly did not make a good impression that day!

I was working from home that day and discovered that my ISDN line didn't work (used that at the time for telecommuting); but this happened frequently on my block (unreliable power) so I figured I'd just go to the office. I went out to the car, and when I discovered that the electric buses didn't work, and the streetlights were out, it became obvious that nobody was going anywhere. My neighborhood coffee shop ran out of hot coffee very quickly, as EVERYONE needed some, and so I distinctly remember carrying home pre-ground french roast to make with my stovetop espresso maker.

It turned out that PG&E (that poor, suffering company in the news these days) had massively fucked up a maintenance job:

The problem, utility officials said, originated with a PG&E construction crew error during the installation of a new transformer at the San Mateo substation. The crew violated procedures and neglected to remove a safety ground wire before re-energizing that portion of the substation.

When the switch was thrown, electricity bypassed four 115,000-volt lines that supply power to the Peninsula and San Francisco and instead plowed into the ground.

Fortunately the circuit breakers did their thing and prevented all sorts of chaos (other than power loss) on the power grid. But PG&E certainly did not make a good impression that day!

As a personal note, I'm glad to hear this. I have to leave work at midnight. My building is on 17th and Mission. I'm sure anyone familiar with SF can understand why I'm not eager to walk thru this neighborhood in the dark.

As a personal note, I'm glad to hear this. I have to leave work at midnight. My building is on 17th and Mission. I'm sure anyone familiar with SF can understand why I'm not eager to walk thru this neighborhood in the dark.

The "situation" was fixed by an emergency purchase of some large number of megawatts from out of state.
Here's an article from the local rag. It'll be interesting to see what happens next time. I'd love the city to go dark, even if it meant a spendy cab ride (I normally take the local LRT home.)

Nice bonus: paranoia at work lead to all of the development servers being shut down. Counter-Strike all afternoon!

jfb

Those would be the same organizations who employ millions of people, fund the machinery of state through corporate/employment/windfall taxes, and that your pension fund is invested in?

Large corporations pay little, if any tax. For example, Cisco and Microsoft pay no federal income taxes. Cities and states fall all over themselves to give tax breaks to megacorps in the name of attracting jobs - instead of more sensibly and justly helping smaller locally-owned businesses to grow.

(And I try to make my own investing socially responsible, as best I can.)

And your point does not justify the way megacorps buy legislators like baseball cards.

It's not just about globalization - the removal of environmental, health, and justice considerations from international trade policy is a symptom of too much corporate power, not a cause.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Full story here

Infinite Energy magazine seems to keep up to date on cold fusion research. It's not exactly a main-stream scientific journal, so take it with a grain of salt.

There's couple of older articles on research at SRI here and here.

Allegedly there are reports of fusion byproducts from cold fusion experiments. Dr. McKubre from SRI has reported elevated levels of helium-4 in cold fusion cells, for example. Of course, he's merely an electrochemist and not a *ahem* real physicist, so his experiments can be discounted.

Infinite Energy magazine seems to keep up to date on cold fusion research. It's not exactly a main-stream scientific journal, so take it with a grain of salt.

There's couple of older articles on research at SRI here and here.

Allegedly there are reports of fusion byproducts from cold fusion experiments. Dr. McKubre from SRI has reported elevated levels of helium-4 in cold fusion cells, for example. Of course, he's merely an electrochemist and not a *ahem* real physicist, so his experiments can be discounted.

are available at SF Gate (the San Francisco Chronicle) along with this AP story.

The SFGate says: But that's peanuts compared with Seattle, where the average annual income of $129,330 gave tech workers far more money to spend than their counterparts in San Jose, who made $85,100, according to the study by the American Electronics Association.

Explanations?

Thalia

Thalia

My take on this is that CA massively fucked up deregulation, by establishing perverse incentives to reduce capacity and/or manipulate pricing, combined with strong disincentives to establish new capacity. The ISO is trying mightily to keep the network running, but customers are getting crappy service.

I'm a pretty serious capitalist, but I must say that the LA Dept. of Water and Power is looking pretty good right now (their role in Tank Girl notwithstanding!)

My take on this is that CA massively fucked up deregulation, by establishing perverse incentives to reduce capacity and/or manipulate pricing, combined with strong disincentives to establish new capacity. The ISO is trying mightily to keep the network running, but customers are getting crappy service.

I'm a pretty serious capitalist, but I must say that the LA Dept. of Water and Power is looking pretty good right now (their role in Tank Girl notwithstanding!)

Yes, California doesn't need to tally the absentee ballots in their race, since Gore won by over a million, but those ballots could put Bush into the lead in the POPULAR vote!

California only has 110,000 absentee ballots left to count and Gore is now ahead by 330,000 votes in the national popular vote, according to AP.

However: it all depends on the human factor! In my polling place, the machine didn't show up on time - so they had to stack the ballots in a big pile in the back of the room until it did arrive. I actually never saw my ballot go into the machine. Presumably my ballot counted. But there was a very contentious proposition on the ballot this year, Proposition L, which I opposed - and which is trailing at this count by seven votes. Is there a chance that the poll workers at my precinct screwed up one or more ballots, and that this may have made a difference, despite the fancy-pants new voting machines? I think so!

So the key to any new system is that it be idiot-proof and secure by design, of course, so the poll workers don't accidentally make a mistake that could compromise the election. Given the ICANN experience of lost passwords and so on, I definitely think that we have some work to do on the non-technological side of voting to make sure that any new system works.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/document.cgi?file=/k ron/archive/2000/11/02/dubyaco nfe ss.DTL

Posted for your viewing pleasure: The Clause of the CueCat Legal Language Could Shut Down Hardware Tinkerers .

The URL in article was wrong. Here's the right URL: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle /archive/2000/09/14/BU108292.DTL. Enjoy it, and don't think there's a conspiracy everywhere.

Annoy.com Claims Victory for Free Speech

Pope Felix the Scurrilous.

...is this

--meredith

Intertwined Quickies, Aussie Style
[ Sex ] Posted by quux26 on 12:35 PM September 14th, 2000
dagget purchases a DNA-tagged USO shirt, rufDEV ports CueCat to that $35,000 Cray up for sale on eBay, some people over at CERN started watching way too many episodes of Weird Science and a Norwegian kid is busted for owning his very own Mia Hamm clone. Coincidence? Can you blame him?? We think not.

My .02
Quux26

Director Andrew Nichol (The Truman Show) was unable to find a suitable lead actress for the title role of his new movie "Simone", and impressed by the latest CGI, he has decided to use a CGI "woman" opposite Al Pacino in the film.

See this SF Gate article. I had read about it in the SF Chronicle or Examiner, and this is the first reference I could find online -- I am sure there are others.

-- Chris Goldman

Sigh.

sulli

p.s. The theater where (I think) Star Wars opened, the Coronet, is about to be smashed to bits. I guess nothing is sacred, but who expected it to be?

(1) Political demonstrations are certainly interesting to me, but why is this "news for nerds", as opposed to just news?

(2) There are stories leaking about some *serious* abuses of police authority going down in Philadelphia, like severe beatings before and after arrest, protestors held for several days without a charge, and so on:
http://www.phillyimc.org/
http://www.indymedia.org/

(3) As far as I can tell, these stories are not making it into the print media. If you're not on the net, you don't even know that there are thousands of people protesting, and over 300 people arrested. Oh, wait a minute, I guess there was this *one* story in a local SF paper, I just missed it:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ex aminer/archive/2000/08/08/NEWS114 31.dtl

(4) If it makes you all feel any better, a bunch of the lefty activists I know are running down to Los Angeles to protest at the Democratic convention (anyone who's paying any attention realizes that the Democrats aren't all that much different from the Republicans these days):
http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/45/45nfdnc. html

Downloading copyrighted music via Napster isn't any different than stealing it from the music store.

Incorrect. But don't feel bad; Lars made the same error in reasoning in a new interview in the San Francisco Examiner.

Digital artifacts are not being transferred away from one party toward another. They are being duplicated, such that both parties now have the artifact.

I wish people would think about these facts more clearly and face the realities of digital media. Otherwise, we're not going to make any meaningful progress on the issue.

Schwab

There's an article on this at sfgate. Your case sounds like Jane Hitchcock's--she was spammed and signed up for magazine and CD subscriptions by a phony literary agency that she had had a dispute with.

There's a watchdog group called Cyberangels that has a division devoted to fighting this sort of childish crap.

According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, their innovation sounds highly dubious. Some examples:

• In addition to voice control -- a staple of Microsoft videos for almost a decade -- the new software would offer users new ways to control use of their personal information and a new ``type-in bar,'' a sort of natural- language command line where users could issue instructions to their machines. If the computer needed clarification or additional information, it would talk back, out loud, in a synthesized human voice.

  A command line. Wow. With a screen reader! Funny, a friend of mine (who happens to be blind) had something like this years ago...it's called using a DOS app with a screen reader.

• Another feature, called Smart Tags, would enable the PC to recognize specific types of information, such as dates and personal and company names, and give them appropriate special treatment.

  News flash: Microsoft invents metadata!

• .NET programs would also make it easier for users to combine different types of data, including video, into their documents -- another long-promised capability that Microsoft has now dubbed Universal Canvas.

  Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents? This will fall flat on its @$$.

Frankly, the only new part of this whole thing is the fact that they'll be cramming all of this into a few XML formats. Can you imagine the complexity required of the DTDs for this? Yikes!

Looks like there's some infighting going on in the free-MP3-distribution ranks. MP3.com is getting in on the action by suing Napster.

Something like what you ask already exists. Just Ask This Guy

• Luke Thompson, New Times LA
  Bob Graham, SF Chronicle