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From http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2002/santaring.html

(Don't bother hitting the link, here's the text from the page - the author who collected and organized the posts is Richard Harter, and everything from here on down is his effort, with some minor edits to make it past the filter on Slashdot):

Santa Claus: Lord of the Rings

In the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup there was a disturbingly plausible thread connecting Santa Claus and the Lord of the Rings. Learn about fruitcake as mathoms, the sinister Tom Bombadil, Silmarils on the Christmas tree, reindeer as ringwraiths, and other horrors. The gruesome details follow:

Chad Irby
How do you think Santa got all of his workers?

He ended up with all of the Elven rings, and centuries of malnourishment and mistreatment has resulted in a flock of miniscule elf-slaves.

George Williams
"One ring to rule them all, and unto Christmas bind them."

Sea Wasp
The One wasn't destroyed... Santa got a hold of it.

Makes sense. All those paranoia-inducing lyrics ... "He sees you when you're sleeping... he knows when you're awake... he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!"

Kyle Haight
Wonderful. Now I'm going to dream about Santa's terrible jolly red eye.

aRJay
I've just realised, it's worse than that, the books lied. Santa didn't get the ring. The ability to see everything he has an all seeing eye.

Santa is Saur...

*NO CARRIER*

Mark Atwood
"There is, in a tower, far to the north, an Eye, unblinking."

Niall McAuley
As to who Santa really is, which jolly character in LOTR actually gets to *hold the ring in his hand* at one point?

So, old Tom Bombadil does a little ring-palming and sends Frodo off with a lesser ring, then clears off to the ruins of Angband beneath the North Polar ice cap, there to use the power of the One Ring to draw the surviving Orcs to him, to toil beneath the ice in his grim, satanic toy mills.

Sea Wasp
Now THAT is a stroke of genius. And with Bombadil's power PLUS the One's, BombaSauron is able to cause Barad-Dur to topple, etc., at the appropriate time. This implies that Sauron himself WILL come back one day, since his Ring is still intact, though.

Michael S. Schiffer
Of course. "[T]he children know he'll be back again someday." Though that song reflects the conflation of multiple Dark Lords. The magic hat is, of course, the Iron Crown ("he began to dance around" is a memory of when Luthien sang for him in Thangorodrim), and the association with cold and snow is similarly obvious. But the "eye[s] made out of coal" are, of course, Sauron's, which glowed red and fiery like a live coal. And the pipe is, as you'd guess, from Saruman.

Andrew Plotkin
But there were only nine Nazgul -- oh, no, wait, Sauron also brought three of the dwarven rings to himself during the Third Age. Total: twelve tiny reindeer. (Three smaller than the others.)

The Christmas Tree is the sign of Bombadil's power, of course, but... um, why do we traditionally put a Silmaril at the top?

Sea Wasp
Morgoth's Crown, you fool.

Liz Broadwell
Specifically, it's a propitiation ritual -- we act out returning the one that Beren and Luthien stole, in the hope that nobody will blame *us* for the deed of some idiot hero. What'd they want it for, anyway? Not like they did anything useful with it once they'd got it ...

Jouni Karhu
No. Instead, when the Christmas Tree dies and we carry it outside, it symbolizes the felling of the Trees of Valinor.

John David Galt
Does that mean the Christmas feast celebrates the Kinslaying? As a sort of evil Miracle of Transsubstantiation?

Michael S. Schiffer
Swords and swan-ships, carving knives and turkeys (or geese)... the correspondences aren't exactly subtle. (And we probably shouldn't even get started on the fruitcake-- but think the Haudh-en-Ndengin.)

My only problem with radiocarbon dating is not reading something like this sooner. It's just a bit annoying that in the many different courses that I've had radiocarbon dating discussed, I've never heard an actual explanation on why exactly it is believed that C-14 concentrations in the atmosphere have been relatively constant. Radioactive elements within rocks don't move around a whole lot, even in the course of millions of years, so it's a lot harder for them to become contaminated somehow or somehow leak off their daughter products. But CO2, the means by which C-14 enters living tissue, is a fluid gas, and without some concrete evidence behind which production is established it becomes unclear how one can be assured of much of anything regarding consistent concentration and hence a metric by which to establish age.

At least, that's my viewpoint.

Earthlink Spaminator(TM)

Seems like they're kind of wasting a name that would work pretty well in the market.

There's info on the Jakks 10-in-1 stick here; the short version of it is that it seems to be a port to some kind of mystery chip rather than emulation.

The GBA version of SMB3 is a port using native ARM code instead of emulation.

> Do you think it would be better or worse for communications if ATT and Verizon each designed and developed phone technology independently of each other, meaning interoperation didn't happen?

You mean like the competition between RSS and Atom news reader formats?

though ye may be trolling, i must say thats the second worst comparison i have ever heard, besides the apples and oranges one.

count how many people on this planet use/care about phones vs. news readers.

btw, the width of railroads was determined by the width of a horses arse.

we have all manner of companies and countries going for it.

I don't even know what you're talking about. Who needs different countries when we've got this guy!

Just put this innovative mind on the cause... problem solved!

Earth's escape velocity is about 11km/sec, while the velocity required to go from the surface of the moon to the earth is only about 2.3km/sec. Energy is proportional to velocity squared, so it works out to take only about 1/21 of the energy. (leaving the Earth/moon system entirely from the surface of the moon is somewhat more expensive, but still only about 1/16 of the energy cost as that needed from the Earth's surface.)

Can you say "Piltdown Man?" No? Perhaps "Nebraska Man?" I'd stake my nonexistent fortune on the bet that this turns out to be another fake.

But specifically, in reference to your listing of Piltdown, Nebraska man, and Java man, read the extensive talk.origins FAQs on these very items: (emphasis added by me)

• Nebraska man: "as creationists tell the story, evolutionists used one tooth to build an entire species of primitive man... before further excavations revealed the tooth to belong to a peccary... The true story is much more complex... The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer... was done for a British popular magazine... ...Most other scientists were skeptical even of the modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate... It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible."
• Java man: "Many creationists have claimed that Java Man, discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1893, was "bad science". Gish (1985) says that Dubois found two human skulls at nearby Wadjak at the same level and had kept them secret; that Dubois later decided Java Man was a giant gibbon; and that the bones do not come from the same individual. Most people would find Gish's meaning of "nearby" surprising: the Wadjak skulls were found 65 miles (104 km) of mountainous countryside away from Java Man. Similarly for "at the same level": the Wadjak skulls were found in cave deposits in the mountains, while Java Man was found in river deposits in a flood plain (Fezer 1993).

  Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993)."

• Piltdown: It took *less* than 50 years and suspicions that they were a hoax existed by 1914. Even so, Piltdown represents a bad episode in science: "...the hoax points to common and dangerous faults. The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately revealed the hoax."

  In the 90 years since then have we developed better and more rigorous testing methods? Yes. But even during those 40 years it took for the full hoax to be revealed, faults with Piltdown were found, long before testing showed that they were recent skulls: "...It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man ... Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor.

  This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopith

But specifically, in reference to your listing of Piltdown, Nebraska man, and Java man, read the extensive talk.origins FAQs on these very items: (emphasis added by me)

• Nebraska man: "as creationists tell the story, evolutionists used one tooth to build an entire species of primitive man... before further excavations revealed the tooth to belong to a peccary... The true story is much more complex... The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer... was done for a British popular magazine... ...Most other scientists were skeptical even of the modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate... It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible."
• Java man: "Many creationists have claimed that Java Man, discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1893, was "bad science". Gish (1985) says that Dubois found two human skulls at nearby Wadjak at the same level and had kept them secret; that Dubois later decided Java Man was a giant gibbon; and that the bones do not come from the same individual. Most people would find Gish's meaning of "nearby" surprising: the Wadjak skulls were found 65 miles (104 km) of mountainous countryside away from Java Man. Similarly for "at the same level": the Wadjak skulls were found in cave deposits in the mountains, while Java Man was found in river deposits in a flood plain (Fezer 1993).

  Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993)."

• Piltdown: It took *less* than 50 years and suspicions that they were a hoax existed by 1914. Even so, Piltdown represents a bad episode in science: "...the hoax points to common and dangerous faults. The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately revealed the hoax."

  In the 90 years since then have we developed better and more rigorous testing methods? Yes. But even during those 40 years it took for the full hoax to be revealed, faults with Piltdown were found, long before testing showed that they were recent skulls: "...It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man ... Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor.

  This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopith

Once you've set up a base on the Moon, moving minerals from the Moon to Earth or Earth orbit is no problem at all.

All you need is a big railgun, see The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. Powered by solar energy (which will give a hell of a lot of power on the moon, no atmosphere) or a nuclear plant (no pollution problems... you don't even need water, the Soviets made liquid metal cooled reactors). The Moon is a different environment with abundant energy solutions. The energy available is greater than that on Earth because it is not binded with life or affected (which always means degraded) by an environment.

If you're moving rocks or refined metals to Earth all you have to do is aim them at a desert and then collect them when they crash. Damage to goods during freight is not an issue. The trajectories are repeatable and not subject to unforeseeable variables (as is the case with the Space Shuttle - no moving parts, no human element, no rocket fuel, no insulation). Once a railgun is built, moving the materials is simplicity itself and a scientific calculator could control the process.

You might not even need miners on the Moon. Mines on Earth itself are becoming increasingly automated and the variables here are are a lot more complex (active geology, weather, deep mining rather than strip mining which wouldn't be a problem on the Moon, etc).

Cargo containers? Build them out of materials available on the Moon. Hell the containers themselves could be made out valuable metals and be used on Earth afterwards (it would be insane to send them back).

As for how much energy you need to launch a container, see the escape energy calculations here and multiply by mass.

But then again if a few nations might object if somebody built a railgun on the Moon. It would be pretty much an ultimate weapon mass destruction. The devastation it could sow would be comparable to nukes (without the radioactive fallout but with the dust).

The kimchi, as you might guess, glowed a pleasant yellow as it gave off a rather unpleasant vapor. (The Dustbuster and carbon filter system was not sufficient to keep up with the smell.) Then Dan Jackson noticed the oscilloscope trace. The lower trace showed the voltage across the kimchi. It was running at about 140 V RMS. Then he saw the upper trace. The upper trace showed current pulses of about 4 amperes in amplitude. Dan called out "Hey! The kimchi is acting as a rectifier!"

Last week I hacked up a microwave

I kid you not: last saturday I wrapped some Al foil around an old radio vacuum tube, wired it to a Tesla coil and got enough X-Rays to make a few smudges on photo paper. After I get the lead shielding up and a geiger counter to make sure I'm not getting dosed I hope to use more sensitive film and get some real see-thru-stuff pictures,
Like this guy here. Unfortunately, no time travel occured.

There is a high voltage transformer in a microwaver, a couple of kilovolts. Just run that thru a tripler scavanged from an old color tv and get bodacious arcs and sparks. Just try not to kill yourself ;))

Since I started this thread (so, about thirty minutes) I've been surfing around reading about capsella and zoids. This page will tell you all about ZOIDS!, as will This One.
And, because you care, these are all the zoids I ever owned (sadly..):

Garius!
Elephantus!
Glidolier!
Garantulas!
Aquadon!

The most simple method to store data is to store them in the low order bits of an picture, but
the low order bits in an original picture are anything but random.

If you have a random distribution in the lower bits then you surely have hidden information in that picture.

There some are more sophisticated means to hide information in other information (steganography), like JSTEG.
But most steganographical systems are suspectible against statistical analysis.

AFAIK, there is currently no provable secure steganographical system.

Wups, sorry, I didn't mean to link to an anti-Semite webpage... eeesh...

Try this one instead

Bluesee

Try Bob Supnik's simh.

Actually, the players did have dynamic variation. As before, reproduction tech influenced the character of the music. Could a player piano reproduce a slow, soft Beethoven movement? It could try, but because the paper rolls allowed for no dynamic subtlety, every key would have been banged out exactly as loud as the next. If anyone tried selling a Beethoven piano roll, they lost their shirts -- evolution in action.

Actually, player pianos did have dynamic variation.

Originally, rolls came from player organs. These were simple to make, the air was blown at the roll, and where a hole occured, the air blew through, and into the pipes to make the sound. This mechanism was carried into the player pianos, so that the width of the hole indicated how hard the hammers should strike, while the length indicated the sustain. Here is a good article on how it all works, and if you want to order some Beethoven for your player piano, here are some, including the Moonlight sonata, my personal favourite Beethoven piece.

If you look at the history of writing you will see that at different times and in different periods different letter sets were used at different times by different people: consider this rendering of a simple text in a 'roman' hand (400 BC to 400AD ish) and the same one in a carolingian hand (Carolingian referring to Charlemagne, Charles The Great circa the 750 AD onwards).

Well one looks like it is all written in upper case and one in all lower case.

A general overview can be found here.

Mixed case (dual alphabet) stuff only took off with the invention of printing. The issue of whether the lower and upper case character sets are different alphabets is simply one of degree, how different are they from each other and from other alphabets (like the greek one. This article makes the point that in ancient greece there were also no "lower case" letters only "upper case" ones - modern greek developed a dual alphabet in emulation of the modern latin one.

Would you consider this to be a different alphabet? - I can barely read it, and certainly not in blocks - and it was used all over Germany until 1941 when it was banned by Hitler.

Cyrillic also only gets dual case in the time of Peter the Great, having been "upper case" only before. Lots of languages only have one case.

If you look at the history of writing you will see that at different times and in different periods different letter sets were used at different times by different people: consider this rendering of a simple text in a 'roman' hand (400 BC to 400AD ish) and the same one in a carolingian hand (Carolingian referring to Charlemagne, Charles The Great circa the 750 AD onwards).

Well one looks like it is all written in upper case and one in all lower case.

A general overview can be found here.

Mixed case (dual alphabet) stuff only took off with the invention of printing. The issue of whether the lower and upper case character sets are different alphabets is simply one of degree, how different are they from each other and from other alphabets (like the greek one. This article makes the point that in ancient greece there were also no "lower case" letters only "upper case" ones - modern greek developed a dual alphabet in emulation of the modern latin one.

Would you consider this to be a different alphabet? - I can barely read it, and certainly not in blocks - and it was used all over Germany until 1941 when it was banned by Hitler.

Cyrillic also only gets dual case in the time of Peter the Great, having been "upper case" only before. Lots of languages only have one case.

P. J. Plauger reported in (IIRC) Dr. Dobb's Journal on using buddy-system programming at Whitesmith's. The original reason was lack of seats, but the surprising result was better productivity than when both bodies had access to keyboards and screens.

Seems to be a matter of enforced peer review, which any CS (self included) will tell you is both very hard to get in a corporate environment and essential to good software development.

First off, don't neglect the British --- Williams tubes (early CRT memories), index registers, and demand paging from Manchester alone; the first well documented subroutine library, first commercial use of a computer in business (Lyons LEO), and a very influential textbook from the EDSAC group at Cambridge. (It's interesting to note that the word "page" was already used at Manchester for a unit of physical memory block-transferred to backing storage --- magnetic drum --- in Alan Turing's manual for the commercialized Manchester Mk. I).

Second, emulators are available for a lot of historical systems --- Bob Supnik has his SIMH suite of emulators for most of the PDP computers, and a few other early minis from IBM, DG, and so forth. Historical Unix (v5, v6, v7) is generally available and does boot on the PDP-11 emulator. He's still working on the PDP-10, for which see also Tim Stark's ts10, also in alpha, but already booting TOPS-10; TOPS-20 and ITS are on the todo list. (The annoying thing is that working PDP-10 emulators do exist, but are not available to the public).

There's a limit to the versimilitude here --- virtual tape never kinks up, the virtual card readers never jam, and the emulators often run an order of magnitude faster than the real machines on modern hardware. But they can still help give student a feel of the environments that people had to deal with thirty and forty years ago.

I used a SkyTel pager for a few years. The technology was fine, but the customer service sucked so hard that you could just call their 800 number, put the phone handset in a bell jar, and create a laboratory-grade vacuum in under a minute. I may have received a bill that was correct once, but if so, it was by accident.

I eventually just got a PCS cellphone, and pretty much ignore the cellphone part. It's cheaper and it seems to work just as well.

I also hear good things about the blackberry but I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.

The directory on the DEC FTP site is no longer maintained; the current simulator web page is here.

Yes..there are actually several rebuttals. The major one that I have would be that the reason santa lives in the north pole is that he needs to precool all of the reindeer so that they can withstand the extreme temperatures. Another rebuttal is located at tiac.net and there are some more besides that as well. Another good rebuttal is located Here. Some other points that these articles look over is that many Christian households do not believe in Santa, thus he would skip them. In fact, a huge quantity of people do not believe in him, therefore the parents buy the gifts. This causes santa to have MANY less stops.

Some more info on santa claus is located Here and some radar and video coverage of last night's trip is located noradsanta.com I think that after looking over all of this evidence, it proves that these people have absolutely no lives, and I am going to look pretty silly posting a defense for santa. :)

• forget computers
• a social life is necessary

You should read this book, it tells what actually happened, from a non-imperialist viewpoint:

Another View of Stalin

Wireless Electricity has been around, in theory, or a while.

Of course, Nikola Tesla was way before his time.

Wireless Electricity Has Been Done. And A long time ago by Tesla in 1899.
Here's The Link
"Tesla spent his remaining funds on his other inventions and culminated his efforts in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs by transmitting 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles "

Sorry dude, that one's already been done. Check this page for more info.

At least you can launch stuff liquid nitrogen... Cool page.

Please note that all these images come from slashdot's own servers. They're pagecounter images. I'll just forward along the email I got from Richard M. Smith, the guy who coined the term "web bug", when I asked him about it:

Date: 7/2/00 3:00 PM
Received: 7/2/00 11:59 AM
From: rms2000@bellatlantic.net (Richard M. Smith)
To: jamie@mccarthy.org (Jamie McCarthy)

Yep, to really be a Web Bug, the IMG tag must come from
another domain. I'll need to make this clearer in the
next revision of the FAQ. Now, if I can just find the time to
keep my Web site up to date...... ;-)

Jamie McCarthy

Date: 7/2/00 3:00 PM
Received: 7/2/00 11:59 AM
From: rms2000@bellatlantic.net (Richard M. Smith)
To: jamie@mccarthy.org (Jamie McCarthy)

Yep, to really be a Web Bug, the IMG tag must come from
another domain. I'll need to make this clearer in the
next revision of the FAQ. Now, if I can just find the time to
keep my Web site up to date...... ;-)

Jamie McCarthy

If companies want to spy on this, that's their right; if we don't like them doing this, we simply don't have to give them any of our money.

Besides the fact that nobody has a right to spy on another, there are several problems with expecting industry self-regulation of privacy issues.

Technical Reasons:
Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about privacy too, which is why I have doubleclick.net cookies blocked.

Besides the fact that it is impractical to expect every websurfer to memorize the privacy policy of every website they visit (even though this policies aren't worth the HTML their written in), many people do not have the technical savvy to block cookies and do selective filtering while others while find it too onerous.
Why should people have to jump through technical hoops to stopping people from spying on them...are we at war?

Also Web Bugs can be used to track you without setting off cookie alarms. If you don't believe me see if this page sets off any cookie alarms in your browser. What is your technical response to this? Require everyone use Junkbuster to block all offsite images just so as to browse the web?
Seems like that would make the average person go through a lot of trouble just so that companies doen't spy on them.

Criminal Reasons:
But I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea of the government regulating what websites can and can't do.

But you are comfortable with anyone with forty bucks being able to track other people's addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, social security number, criminal record, credit history and more without regulation? Identity theft is already rather commonplace and it is now possible to get very detailed information about people with the scantiest information (phone number and name) and ruin them for life. I can do a reverse number lookup and get your address, do a lookup and find your birthday, look up your mortgage history, get your social security number and in essence become you. How many places identify people with a social security number and address/phone number combo?

Logical Reasons:
It's no longer news that the dotcomm crash has occured and NASDAQ is now facing a bear market. Off course what this means is that several dotcomms that have spent million$ of VC dollars giving away free or reduced price products are now stuck between a rock and a hard place. Suddenly we have all these companies that have nothing of value to show investors except customer demographic information and eyeballs. Expecting these companies to respect the privacy of these eyeballs is asking the chicken to watch the henhouse. Sites that sell customer information or violate customers privacy in other ways (spam, spam, spam) are no longer the exception but the rule.

PS: You block doubleclick cookies but how many other companies have similar policies that you don't know about? How do you plan to deal with the fact that Netscape's browser tracks all your downloads or the Real fiasco? As long as it is not illegal companies will do everything and anything to violate our privacy. You cannot relying on the fact that some enterprising hacker finds some software spy because for every piece of spyware that is found there are many more undiscovered.

I'm not sure I want to admit to this, but...

I have written an auto-indexing tool (sitemgr) for websites. The catch is, it doesn't index existing websites. It parses textfiles that I have written, converts them to HTML, and indexes them. I've released it under the GPL.

You can download it from http://www.tiac.net/users/way nem/downloads/index.html, and you can see examples of the output at http://www.tiac.net/users/waynem/ and sometimes http://white-fang.ne.mediaone.net/. It may not be what you're looking for but... there it is, I guess.

I'm not sure I want to admit to this, but...

I have written an auto-indexing tool (sitemgr) for websites. The catch is, it doesn't index existing websites. It parses textfiles that I have written, converts them to HTML, and indexes them. I've released it under the GPL.

You can download it from http://www.tiac.net/users/way nem/downloads/index.html, and you can see examples of the output at http://www.tiac.net/users/waynem/ and sometimes http://white-fang.ne.mediaone.net/. It may not be what you're looking for but... there it is, I guess.

As I understand it, the Office participated in an ad network to market its site. If you searched Altavista for "grow pot" , a Doubleclick banner would be served for the Drug Control office Web site and, of course, you'd be cookied (unless you filter). The paranoia is that the cookie potentially represents a personally identifiable piece of information that is understandable disconcerting if you believe the government is using the cookie to surreptitiously track you personally and determine what other sites you are visiting.

But "cookie" does not automatically equal "privacy invasion". I consider it to be a disservice to the education of the Web public for Jason Catlett (Junkbusters.Com), Mark Rotenberg (EPIC, and even Richard Smith (his expose' here) to contribute to this hysteria. I think it makes for good sensationalism to further the advocacy for electronic privacy. The Whitehouse's withering before the criticism is disappointing but understandable considering that any defense would have only powered the conspiracy theory. But in terms of the threat to privacy this represents, I think it only extends the broad and irrational fear of an incredibly useful and pervasive Web technology.

If you think I'm wrong, email me or post here so I can exercise the debate. I consider myself a pragmatic privacy advocate and am willing to listen to logic.

We should beware our personal info being tracked electronically--or so says the article (until someone found a nologin URL) on the website that requires you to log in to read most of their stories. So we're getting a future where in order to learn about privacy, you can compromise your privacy in the process. Hmmm...

I hope everyone got a good chuckle out the bit on crypto products, particularly the quote about, "You can trust us, because we don't expect you to trust us." Thanks, but I'll trust you as soon as you open your source code to peer review. Curiously, programs like PGP and GPG, which meet this critera, go unmentioned.

BTW, I'll re-post a URL that somebody posted in regards to a banner ad privacy article several weeks ago, because I think it's relevant to this and worth reading.

http://www.tiac.net/users/smiths/privacy/banads.ht m

Was the Microsoft 1999 Annual report produced on a Macintosh? Check this out. "Hey Judge Jackson, we aren't a monopoly, we have to use a Mac OS just to communicate with our shareholders."

The Iridium Flash effect occurs when a great idea for a worldwide product flashes onto the scene, allowing people who want to have the best of everything spend more money. In a flash of bright light, the idea burns out leaving behind an armada of outrageously expensive technology orbiting the earth.

Seriously, though, check out Observing Iridium Flashes and Heavens Above (as someone already mentioned).

According to this article in Sailing Source, the last link: tells you where and when to look for IRIDIUM satellite "flashes" as the sun reflects light off the satellites passing overhead. You plug in your lat/long position and it will tell you where and when in the night or predawn sky to look to see an Iridium "flash."

Some people call them flares apparently to differentiate from meteor flashes.

The reason satellites are made of highly reflective materials is so they reflect the sunlight and not gather heat, sort of like a car baking in the hot sun. I imagine there *are* some coating materials which would reduce the glare and imagine that so far, there has been little reason to use them.

But remember that the Iridium "flare" is the reflection from the solar panels, which cannot be covered so easily as with some kind of paint.

... [read page to get context] ...

That's an attractive but malicious thought, Lew! While we can think and talk of that amongst ourselves, I shudder to think of the child wanting to take his telescope into the back yard some night and Mom objects, saying that watching the sky is "evil" because she has no idea of the difference between a meteor flash and an Iridium flare!

Doubleclick has gone back on it's promise not only not to collect personal information such as real names, ss# etc, but also on the promise not to sell the info they collected to third parties. That means if you searched for something on deja news or other search engines, browsed any sites with doubleclick banners etc., all that info is being collected(including keywords you searched for), matched with your real name and real address which doubleclick gets (I assume) from sites where you registered, and then all that is being sold to third parties.

I bet e-truste, or whatever they're called, doesn't mind, doubleclick did change their privacy statement after all (in case it didn't occur to you to check recently).

Good bye privacy, hello big broth...ahem, doubleclick.

It is true - certain TV sets used to give out quite a bit of X-Ray radiation. Modern TVs + computer VDUs are built to minimise leakage.

www.tiac.net/users/shansen/belljar/xray.htm
The paragraph towards the end is the relevant bit

Although I dont't think he deserves 2k over all the other worthy entries, rlk certainly deserves the new printer to go in new directions with his code. That's one type of awards I'd like to seen given out: Hardware for those that want to code but don't get the hardware. I've donated hardware to a kernel hacker (albeit only 60 bucks worth), have you?

Both the Email address and cookie value is included in the Outlook and Messenger GET requests. When the GET request is processed by the MyBannerAds server. It first extracts the customer id number from the cookie and looks it up its database of "anonymous" profiles of Web surfers. Once it has located the profile, it then extracts the Email address from the URL query string, turning a once "anonymous" profile into an "identified" profile.

So where does MyBannerAds get the Email addresses in first place to send out a message which includes the SYNC.GIF file? The answer is quite simple, they "rent" the Email addresses. Or more specifically, the rent space in junk Email messages that are already being sent out. The IMG tags typically take less than 100 bytes, so they can easily be embedded in messages that are part of any Email ad campaign that is using HTML Email messages.
Another interesting discusion about HTML Email and cookies can be found @: http://www.tiac.net/users/smiths /privacy/wbfaq.htm

The above ZDNN article quotes Richard Smith. Here's a link to his complete article (more informative): "The Cookie Leak Security Hole in HTML Email messages"

Well, here's another one.

yes,

goto http://tsikora.tiac.net/xfce/

Steven Rostedt

Note that the ZHR is a /theoretical/ maximum that would be seen by an observer if the radiant (the line of comet's orbit, ie the place in the sky where the meteors appear to radiate away from) were directly overhead. Actual observed rates are always lower.

Hints and tips for observing :

• No smoking ! It ruins night vision.
• Get as far away from light pollution as possible.
• The radiant rises at about midnight local time in the northern hemisphere, in the east (of course ;) )
• Use a deckchair or lawn chair to prevent a permanent crick in the neck.
• wrap up WARMLY -- good skies == clear skies == very cold !
• Hot drinks (counter-intuitively) do NOT warm you up if you're outdoors.
• If your location is clouded in, set an alarm clock for 60-90 mins and check again. If they storm, and you miss them, you'll kick yourself !

Finally, don't be too disappointed if you "only" get a ZHR of a few hundred. Last year's observations allowed significantly better understanding of the separate streams of debris coming off the parent comet. Predictions are for a relatively quiet year next year, but much higher ZHRs in 2001 and 2002.

Clear skies, all !

North American Meteor Network
Meteorobs mailing list -- NB /VERY/ high traffic at the moment !
--

I just talked with Betty Harvy of the DC area SGML User's Group and she said that she will borrow the tape from the presenter and will post a MP3 version on the web site in the next few weeks. In the talk a government site was visited (it looks boring.. but sounded great) and a few commercial sites were visited (look great .. but sound awful). I hope this will help.
Also, Harvey Binggam presented last year, his web site is: http://ww.tiac.net/users/bingham/access bl/
Best of luck!

While opening the source to windows makes some interesitng things possible, I doubt it would change much. Microsoft's obsessivly controlling nature is more a symptom than the real problem.

The real problem is that they are so effective at maximizing their investments that the needs of their customers are no longer a factor in their decision-making process. They extract the most money from the rest of the world with the least effort. That's why their products are pathologically unstable and otherwise broken. The less effort they can put into their products and still get people to buy them, the better for their bottom line. As long as the product sufficiently gives the illusion of value and gets you to open your wallet, the actual quality doesn't matter to them.

Unless they can change the nature of the way they operate at a fundamental level, opening the source up won't do anything. They'll still want be the central point of control for the source, so they will have veto power over any bug fixes submitted and almost zero incentive to implement them.

Ken Schalk ( xorian@tiac.net)