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This is a great program. Unfortunately, the article fails to mention Bernie Krisher, who started the program.

here are some links that have to do with my post. First, the TIME DIGITAL article That is the article about this keyboard.

The second article: The keyboard I was talking about...it is a kinesis keyboard. SUper cool. I want one. Check out the kinesis thing though..it is really cool. They should have name this the keybowl..it would have made sense.

• Air National Guard anyone? Makes Clinton's military record seem downight patriotic!
  Not more than a word about it through the whole election.
  
  
• Arbusto Energy? The information is out there.
  Not more than a word about it through the whole election.
  
  
• He's a born again Christian. Wasn't there a lot of hubbub over the fact that Jack Kennedy was a Catholic?
  Not more than a word about it through the whole election.
  
  
• Texas Rangers Baseball team. Is there anyone in television or print media who knows the details behind that whole affair? Cheating taxpayers for a new stadium?
  Not more than a word about it through the whole election.
  
  
• Harken Energy. Look them up in the SEC history and see how they went out of business. This was a CRIME.
  Not more than a word about it through the whole election.
  

(See here for a nice summary of what those millions of research and investigation dollars were an attempt to substantiate.)

Please, SOMEBODY, show me the liberal press.
There's a story here they're gonna LOVE!!!!


(For crissakes Time (!!) just named G. W. Bush as Person of the Year!)

Heheh... Positive control coefficient, and a moderator that doesn't boil away.

It was an *insane* design, bordering almost on the criminal.

And yeah, there are still more than a dozen of the damned things running.

<sigh> I know that the RBMK reactor was designed for three goals: price, efficiency, and plutonium production (for weapons). And since that didn't include safety, I guess the engineers got what they wanted.

I'm all for nuclear power. You can't burn fossil fuels because of price per MWh and emissions. You can't build damns everywhere, because there are great environmental consequences to those - and they're only practical where there's a large river. (ie. Hoover Damn powers a lot of L.A., but how far from L.A. is it, with resulting efficiency losses in the lines?) You can't build tidal, wind or solar plants yet, because the technology still isn't practical even in the parts of the world that energy is abundant enough to effectively harness.

Western Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and increasing its reliance on natural gas. Fine, gas is easy to manage and it's clean as far as fossil fuels go. It's also abundant in neighboring Russia.

Ironically, as Western Europe shuts down its reactors, Russia keeps on commissioning and retrofitting their pressurized water and dangerous RBMK reactors so that they don't have to divert any natural gas that would otherwise be sold to Europe.

As is usual with the policies enforced by environmental lobby groups, it backfired. Fine, the reactors in Western Europe are being shut down. And replaced with far more dangerous Russian reactors. Good work, you stupid long-haired hippie tree-huggers. (Ooops. I have long hair and I like Five Man Electrical Band, I guess I can't insult hippies.)

Before you moderate me down for saying that environmentalists are idiots, check out this link, which has to do very specifically with the Russian reactors vs. Western Europe natural gas fiasco. While environmentalists are full of great intentions, they're generally ignorant of science or the basic fundamentals of how a marketplace economy works.

Like it or not, nuclear power is going to be here for a while.

Let's encourage safe and responsible use of nuclear power, at least until something more practical comes along. Let's try to not ban nuclear power, but to ban RBMK reactors.

Let's see a day when all the running nuclear reactors in the world have *negative* control coefficients (ie. won't run without a moderator) and use a moderator that will boil off and shut down the reactor in the case of an overheat.

Back when I was in high school, I got a summer internship down the road from Ottawa at a place called Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This was the home of Canada's nuclear program, and is one of those rare things that makes me proud to be a Canadian. Canada still leads the world in civilian nuclear technology.

At the time, they had three big research reactors there - the decommissionned "ZEEP" (Zero Energy Experimental Pile, put out *one watt* of heat, built in 1944 for the war effort and has a colorful history), the vertical-loading National Research eXperimental "NRX" (since decommissionned) and the horizontal-loading NRU. All three were of the CANDU design, though the ZEEP and NRX were very primitive.

I was assigned to the NRX. Every day, I'd travel from Deep River to Chalf River, don my dosimeter, walk through the checkpoints and head to the reactor. It was great fun, helping out with experiments. And irradiating golf balls for increased driving distance.

There was a Commodore PET on top of the reactor, and it used to record and monitor the temperature throughout different parts of the reactor vessel. Then, there were the tube computers (no kidding!) with ferrite core memories which were used to provide more critical functions. (Semiconductors don't like ionizing radiation if the reactor leaked, tubes are a lot more forgiving.)

And, let me tell you, there's no feeling in the world quite like standing there, on top of the reactor, looking down 30 feet or so to the people below you, feeling the slight vibration of the pumps running all around, and the sheer sense of power in the room as the reactor below you runs.

Food was forbidden in the reactor buildings, because ingestion of bits of radioactive dust was an (unlikely) possibility. Even so, people did eat there occasionally, and I was no exception, though you become very careful with the geiger counters before you put it in your mouth. Because there was (officially) no food allowed in the building, there was no kitchen, so hot snacks were a rarity. Canned stew was a special favorite: the cans fit right into the (sealed) sample tubes. Drop them in at the top, lower them slowly through the reactor, and then retrieve them at the bottom. If you timed it just right, the can was nice and warm. If you got distracted, the can burst and you'd have to clean out the sample tube. (And no, this was not a good idea, but it didn't put anyone at risk besides those of us who ate the food, and we all knew perfectly well how the food had been cooked.)

I'd have gone into nuclear physics as a career if I could have handled the math. <grin>

My favorite reactor design is the CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's an elegant design. Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors. U-235 requires the added steps of processing and is also vulnerable for use in weapons.

The moderator in a CANDU reactor is heavy water; deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen. Deuterium is a rare but naturally-occurring isotope of hydrogen. It's ordinary hydrogen in every respect, except for the fact that there's a neutron in the nucleus. It's not radiactive (unlike hydrogen with two neutrons, called "tritium", which *is* radioactive). Deuterium water is heavier than regular water, simply because of that neutron in the hydrogen.

The heavy water serves as the moderator. It slows down the fast-moving neutrons coming off the U-238 so that they can sustain the fission chain reaction. Light (ordinary) water will not sustain this reaction - nor will no water.

Let's say everything fails. The computers go down, the control rods are all jammed out of the core, and the operators are idiots. A Chernobyl accident still cannot occur. It's physically impossible.

If a CANDU reactor gets out of control and overheats, the moderator (heavy water) can be drained away, shutting down the reactor. You can't do that with blocks of graphite like an RBMK reactor. With a CANDU, if there's a problem and the operator doesn't drain the moderator away, eventually a pressurized pipe will burst and the moderator will boil away. With no moderator, the reactor will cease to work. Since the fuel is uranium in non-water-soluble ceramic pellets, there will be minimal decay daughters in the resulting steam cloud. Which will be contained anyway in the concrete reactor house, which is held under a vacuum to prevent release.

Unlike Chernobyl, which drastically overheated. The solid graphite moderator began to burn. And still the chain reaction continued to produce heat, because the graphite moderator was still there... it burned for 9 days.

Let's take all those unemployed Chernobyl workers to see a CANDU or similar reactor in operation, train them extensively on it, and then help them build them to replace their aging and rickety designs.

It deals mostly with logical inconsistencies in the Florida Supreme Court's arguments. I think my favorite argument is this:

The justices then denounce Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris for "imposing an arbirtrary seven-day deadline." They then proceed, without irony, to impose their own arbirtrary five-day deadline. (Hers, unlike theirs, was not arbitrary but statutory.)

Note: For those of you too lazy to read the whole thing, the part I am talking about is on the second page of the aforementioned article.

Note: For those of you too lazy to read the whole thing, the part I am talking about is on the second page of the aforementioned article.

Here (provided Time hasn't moved things around in the meantime) you can find a picture of the ballot in question actually "in use". I can see where it'd be _very_ confusing, especially for someone who isn't forewarned that it's a "weird" ballot. First, the arrows do _not_ line up right, second, it's highly possible that someone could read the left side and not _notice_ the right side.
--
"HORSE."

These answers show a strange contrast. Hagelin appears to have actually read the questions and is answering them as written. Certainly he has his own spin on the issues, but he is willing to engage in a dialogue with us. Bush's answers appear to be excerpts from speeches and press releases. I wonder if he is even aware that his campaign staff sent this reply to us. His answer to the question concerning protection of minority religions and atheists is clearly intended to express tolerance, but in answer to that question as it was worded it expresses profound intolerance.

George W. Bush has publicly expressed a more tolerant attitude towards minority religions. Take a look at this page for quotes on that and many other issues. His campaign staff should be ashamed of this screw up.

Consider throwing your vote away on a candidate who really stands for something. Time Magazine recommends it.

Yes, RMS is a fanatic. Also Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

When Hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, the Prime Minister of Great Britain (Neville Chamberlain) tried to be "rational" and to avoid a new World War. So he sat down to negotiate with Hitler. He succeded to keep the peace. Hitler would rule Austria and Checoslovaquia.

Churchill was very critic about that. He always said that the Nazis were dangerous and that Hitler and the Nazis should be stop as soon as possible.

When Hitler invaded Poland it was clear he was right.

Only fanatics can lead a revolution. If RMS was rational, the Free Software movement would be lost.

I know that also Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung were fanatics. But is our responsibility to decide what is the wise solution. To follow a fanatic or to surrender to the current situation.

I follow RMS

Yes, RMS is a fanatic. Also Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

When Hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, the Prime Minister of Great Britain (Neville Chamberlain) tried to be "rational" and to avoid a new World War. So he sat down to negotiate with Hitler. He succeded to keep the peace. Hitler would rule Austria and Checoslovaquia.

Churchill was very critic about that. He always said that the Nazis were dangerous and that Hitler and the Nazis should be stop as soon as possible.

When Hitler invaded Poland it was clear he was right.

Only fanatics can lead a revolution. If RMS was rational, the Free Software movement would be lost.

I know that also Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung were fanatics. But is our responsibility to decide what is the wise solution. To follow a fanatic or to surrender to the current situation.

I follow RMS

Software that was used to rate the candidates truthfulness during the debate. Cool stuff. I would have loved to just sit there during the debates with this thing running flagging everything they said.

http://www.time .co m/time/campaign2000/story/0,7243,58092,00.html

http://www.sonymusic.com/sacd/

http://www.superaudio-cd.com/

Something that doesn't gush like a press release

Another more objective link

It appears they're using a dual layer method for backwards compatibility. The details about copy protection methods are vague, but they do mention visible and invisible watermarks aimed against both pirates and counterfeiters. But I can't seem to find a decent explanation of how the encoding DSD encoding scheme works.

Here is another good article of Shawn Fanning in Time Magazine. -----------

Different societies tolerate different levels of intrusion. This means not just privacy, but any kind of intrusion against the individual.

The problem is that it's not just a matter of corporation vs. individual. It's also the govt. vs individual. Individual privacy is against attack from all kinds of organized powerful entities, including BOTH the govt. and the corporation.

For instance, in Australia, mass DNA screening of an entire town was carried out to catch a criminal. This was viewed as generally acceptable (there is no bill of rights in australia). On the other hand, when Australian companies gather data, there is widespread media scrutiny and suspicion. In Australia, govt. regulation of public lives is considered acceptable (they have censors to control what people watch or read) but there's a very high level of caution regarding companies.

In the UK, there is generally a much higher rate of govt. intrusion in electronic communication, a level that would be unacceptable in the US. ISPs are also held responsible for content, even in newsgroups, after the Godfrey vs. Demon case. This means more monitoring of content, since the ISP is liable, and in general, a greater intrusion into individual communication.

In the US, govt. intrusion is generally viewed with great suspicion. The one exception is police attacks on certain sections of society (because the anti-crime sentiment is strong, so people are willing to tolerate the cops busting a few doors and shooting a few people if it's to reduce the crime rate). OTOH, corporate abuse of individual lives is considered acceptable, because people have been indoctrinated since birth that if companies do something, they should be allowed to do so since the market will regulate itself. In days past, this meant that US companies could use DDT (now banned), operate nuclear power plants more freely (now regulated), use asbestos (now banned), or sell banned chemicals like DDT to third world countries (still allowed - it's good for exports).

Generally, these things all depend on how much a society permits its individuals to be powerless against the govt. or companies. In the US, it's a difficult proposition, since companies have bought out both major candidates. But there's still a high rate of suspicion of intervention in individual privacy, which results in some degree of regulation. Contrary to what people think, even though corporations influence politicians, the vote still counts (because that's how the prez gets elected, go figure), so they still pay a lot of attention to what the public considers acceptable.

What the public considers acceptable is just a matter of indoctrination, culture, and trends. Guns are acceptable and a hot topic in the US, not even an issue in most of Europe or Australia. Police abuse is common in the US while technically illegal, whereas in EU/aust/NZ, the cops have more powers but the level of abuse is less (except against native tribes).

Communication, well...it's a whole new game, and the rules are being written. Who knows what will happen?

w/m

Time

-------

Bullshit. The costs of marketing these steaming piles of crap are what is making the execs go insane over the bottom line.

"The studios better stop chasing an opening weekend where they're spending 80' to make a dollar," says Jeff Berg of International Creative Management. Studio executives agree that marketing costs are crippling the business, but that doesn't mean star salaries don't take their toll."

- from Time

So I'm not allowed to download a couple of MP3s or stream a movie over the net b/c I might stiffle the profits that pay for the insane marketing machine that bombards me 24/7 with the most shallow and regurgitated media which makes me want to run to Siberia, just to escape it all?

Fuck. Let's all start downloading and stop paying for CDs and movies. Maybe the industries would collapse, like the Valentis and Rosens predict. But people were making movies and music before it was ever billion dollar profitable to do so - and they will do so again. Maybe the entities that rise up in place of the MPAAs and RIAAs will be more humane to the people who support them.

-------

No accounting for taste!

I had a 45-year old friend of mine express a similar sentiment to yours, in about 1995: "I really don't see the point of shopping on the web, I've never bought anything that way." Of course, in '95, options were more limited and perhaps he couldn't anticipate how things were going to change. (I noticed he still invested in tech stocks and made some money on the ride up, though.)

But it's 2000 now, and he buys all sorts of stuff online. When I reminded him of what he had said, he laughed. The web and e-commerce is a fait accompli. In 2000, a Slashdot post saying "I hate shopping online" and "I've only bought two things online" is a troll, almost by definition.

We all know you can't feel stuff online (well, not without a Vivid Video bodysuit, anyway.) You're not telling anybody anything new. Perhaps you don't buy things like software, CDs, CD-R disks, books, videos, electronics, and perhaps you don't book flights, hotels, or rental cars, and perhaps you don't purchase information in any form online. I, and millions of others, including many here on Slashdot, do. (Lately I've been renting DVDs online at netflix.com: it rocks! No late fees or time limits; beats Blockbuster senseless.)

So if you have something to say about why this all isn't good, or doesn't make sense, by all means, say it. But "I'm sick of this stupid "e-commerce"" isn't particularly constructive or interesting, and might just as easily be posted by a clever troll as by someone who really feels that way.

If a distro installed with external ports closed it would mean that in order to access the system remotely you had to explicitly open that port. What's so bad about that? If you don't know how to open ports, it's a good bet that you probably should not be opening the port. Not everyone knows how to manage system security, not everyone want's to be able to ssh into their home machine from work, and if you can't enable the services you should probably learn more about system administration first.

I see it as a much more logical process to say:

Well this system is going to be an intranet server for the development team projects. I'll enable the ftp, http and ssh services.

Rather than:

Well this is a graphical workstation, now what services are running that I should disable?

By making people explicitly enable their services, you force them to think about what the system is to be used for, and they're less likely to leave a port open accidently (usually because they didn't realise it was open in the first place, or even existed).

Anyway, it's just my philosophy on setting up systems.

Thanks for listening.
Damien Byrne

P.S. Did everyone see CmdrTaco on the Time.com 100 most influential people of the 21st century?? They mention "the Linux programming language", and I thought it was an Operating System!

If a distro installed with external ports closed it would mean that in order to access the system remotely you had to explicitly open that port. What's so bad about that? If you don't know how to open ports, it's a good bet that you probably should not be opening the port. Not everyone knows how to manage system security, not everyone want's to be able to ssh into their home machine from work, and if you can't enable the services you should probably learn more about system administration first.

I see it as a much more logical process to say:

Well this system is going to be an intranet server for the development team projects. I'll enable the ftp, http and ssh services.

Rather than:

Well this is a graphical workstation, now what services are running that I should disable?

By making people explicitly enable their services, you force them to think about what the system is to be used for, and they're less likely to leave a port open accidently (usually because they didn't realise it was open in the first place, or even existed).

Anyway, it's just my philosophy on setting up systems.

Thanks for listening.
Damien Byrne

P.S. Did everyone see CmdrTaco on the Time.com 100 most influential people of the 21st century?? They mention "the Linux programming language", and I thought it was an Operating System!

Thanks for the info. I went to the time site and found a picture, tho it may not be the one you're referring to, since they definitely didn't make his face white. Odd pose and facial expression too. They ended up making him look like an alien skinhead contemplating his next Paki-bashing.

with the two guys that founded Google? There's a rather interesting Time article about them.

Dear my! What are those things coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs!

From last week's dead tree edition of Time, now available online here.

Ultimately, this is a controversial topic. Perhaps the strongest contender would be Konrad Zuse , who developed a programmable computer in the 1940s. Interesting first person notes from an inventor in Nazi germany.

In the ACM archives , there is a paper on "Monitors, an operating system structuring concept" by C.A.R Hoare. Since this is from 1974, I guess it's not too old, but still an interesting paper.

Many have been posting about OS/360 (or 390) but while MVS was a major step in OS history, it wasn't the first. It was released in 1964, too late for the first OS.

Also interesting is a time article on the first computer

All the old stuff is fun to read.

w/m

You are not wrong about that people should understand the legalities first. But the fact remains, most people going into a situation where they lose their rights to their own creations are not expecting it, would have no reason to expect it, aren't even thinking about it, and haven't even been informed about it.

We need to inform people. And the justice, oops I meant legal system, needs to be more fair, both in severity of punishment, and in deciding what is legal and illegal. Also it seemed he got much worse treatment than many IP violators would. A felony? Heck, even a misdemeanor trial would be highly unusual. In almost every case it wouldn't even by tried criminally at all. It would be a civil case.

IP law handles infringement, etc and is mostly civil. It seems that he was charged with grand theft by taking his own lab notes since they were property of the university.

See http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1997/dom/970210/ science.intellectual.html

That sounds wrong as a matter of law (lawyers care to comment?). The IP of the notes themselves could be corporate/university property and could be considered "stolen" (infringed), but the physical property wouldn't be. So grand theft, which is a crime involving physical property, wouldn't even come into play.

In closing, he wasn't blameless, but he isn't a monster, thus he was a victim of severe injustice for being so throughly hosed, being put on a chain gang (see the above article) and in with hardened criminals is brutal treatment (especially for a "geek") and put him at risk of being beat up, or raped, it constituted a violation of the 8th Amendment ("cruel and unusual punishment"), people are woefully uninformed about legal issues which can affect them severely, and we need to let people know how to avoid injustice and how to fight injustices such as the above. The governor of Florida wanted to pardon him because of the injustice of the whole situation.

P.S. Almost all of us were naive to legal issues at some time in our lives. Even after we started getting into technology and potentially being at risk. Remember that. Remember that with bad luck, we could have been one of the ones suffering a bad fate, potentially for the rest of our lives. He may be have been very different than us the way we are now when it comes to legal street smarts, but he is not different than the way most of us were.

Heck, at one time even I trusted the government!

It's a commonly made mistake. The Internet is an evolution of various standards/protocols.

The world wide web, OTOH, is a specific protocol specifically invented by one person.

Read this Time magazine article which describes this in greater detail, and explains why he made their top 20 inventors of the century list.

"Unlike so many of the inventions that have
moved the world, this one truly was the work
of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the
light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his
lab working on it. William Shockley may have
fathered the transistor, but two of his
research scientists actually built it. And if
there ever was a thing that was made by
committee, the Internet--with its protocols
and packet switching--is it. But the World
Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He
designed it. He loosed it on the world. And
he more than anyone else has fought to keep
it open, nonproprietary and free. "

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the FBI's pattern of behavior indicates that it is indeed a threat to law-abiding citizens. For an FBI official to propose to install some black box into the Internet takes as much cheek as a repeatedly-convicted embezzler applying for the position of chief accountant.
/.

This is not at all "given", in view of the FBI's disgraceful record and its refusal to disclose what's actually inside the little black boxes. With the security-through-obscurity baloney they offer as an excuse for the latter, I can only assume that they're trying to pull another fast shuffle.
/.

I happen to agree with the original poster. The ISS is largely a waste of time and money. Here's an article that points out some of the gross mis-management of this project. I'm all for scientific research and expandning our knowledge of the universe but I would like to see it done more responsibly than NASA and it's contractors have done.

There wouldn't be any huge parent companies anymore (at least temporarily). We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets.

We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets. That in and of itself is a scary thought, we would have to make an important decision with information that we would have to go out and gather ourselves.

The foundation of today's news media is organizations like United Press International, BBC News, National Public Radio News, the Associated Press, the New York Times. These are all outstanding news organizations.

The Washington Post (a pretty good paper) owns Newsweek, an alright magazine, though its website is now hosted by MSNBC.

US News and World Report is also pretty good.

Skipping the rest of the good newspapers and the plethora of great magazines around the country (as well as the really bad ones) we get to Corporate Media. Time isn't really bad per se, but knowing what we know about Time Warner (I am an employee of the company) I personally stay away.

I stay away from all U.S. television news sources for reliable information, except for the excellent Newshour with Jim Lehrer and C-SPAN, both independent media. The former rocks, and I live in the neighborhood where Lehrer grew up; the latter isn't really news but has very informative content on current issues.

Okay! I hope I have convinced everyone that you don't have to worry about your news source if you know where to go. Even if Time Warner bought up half of these news souces somehow, it could never get them all. Also remember that if good journalists realize they are working for a company with a deteriorating reputation, they jump ship.

so it's probably easy enough for the government to monitor all communications and hone in on key words that are spoken!

It's called Echelon, and it is very real.

Echelon is "sigint." Or signal intelligence. I remember reading an article in Time Magazine shortly after Australia first announced that it was taking part in the project to monitor the worlds private and public communications. Time reported that all email, land-line phone, cell phone, newsgroup, message board, pager, etc was open to interception by this singal monitoring project.

They originally reported that it looks for key words (ie presidential threats). The monitoring has been done by computer which flags suspected transmissions and sends them off for further investigation.

Conclusion: It has long sinc been possible to monitor you phone calls. Big Brother is watching.

Here is a Time magazine article from a year ago about how most of the world (except the U.S.) use cell phones for buying a soda from vending machines, running a car wash, zapping a digital picture to a friend and video conferencing. From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.

John, this was one of your worst articles.

Who is José Bové, and is he admirable?

He is a Frenchman who was born in Bordeaux in 1953, and grew up at Berkeley, as his parents studied Biochem. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement (Confédération paysanne), which he terms 'a trade union', though I do not understand in what sense he means this) against a plan to extend an army base in southern France. He was arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, and he spent three weeks in prison. (The military project was canceled five years later, more due to the economy than nanything else

In 1998, he blew up up a silo (which belonged to the pharmaceutical firm Novartis) because it contained genetically modified corn. Here's Mssr. Bove's own statement about his actions and motives. It appears to have been written in English, or at least be an authorized translation. I haven't found a French original or variant translations.

In 1999, he became a 'national hero' (according to his supporters -- he's certainly a cult figure) for damaging an unfinished McDonalds with a bulldozer, and later organizing a massive giveaway of Roquefort cheese to protest US import restrictions. He also is known for staging 'illegal' free Roquefort and French bread picnics in front to McDonald's during the WTO protests in Seattle. Distributing the cheese was 'illegal' because it was unpasteurized. Time magazine did a piece on him

But he's not in jail for the bulldozer attack. he spent 20 days in jail for that in 1999. He calls that the greatest favor the judge could have done, due to the publicity it gave him.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack. He has always proclaimmed his movement (Confédération paysanne) to be nonviolent, but admits that violent means have been used, and often refers to the groups actions as 'combat' (same in French as English) I found a French account of the attack that you can babelfish, if necessary

I also found an 12/99 interview where he outlines his current views. He is not an ultra-liberal (in fact he denounced ultraliberalism as 'suicidal'), his personal views are a patchwork of conflicting insistence on individualism and collectivism, (which becomes harder for me to render coherently, the more I read) Politically, he opposes 'internationalization' and insists that 'each nation has a right to choose what it wants to eat' (he supports French Bans on US food, while protesting US bans on French foods)

I leave an analysis of his ideology to others -- anyone but Katz.

Here's an article about the whole thing.

Person of the Year has nothing to do with which person did the greatest thing, but which person had the greatest effect over the year.

From Time's web site...
*SNIP*
For each of the last 70 years, TIME has presented a Man of the Year--the single person (man, woman, or even idea) who, for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.
*/SNIP*

Read the article on Hitler as man of the year here to understand we did not approve of what he was doing.

lalas

A fair amount of programmers smoke pot. Probably not the majority, but still a large enough amount that it ought to be into consideration. Now, BC has been producing some very high quality bud lately. I am in no way condoning the use of illegal drugs, just stating a correlation that programmers code better when content, and are often content when smoking it up.

Maybe it'd get Gates to relax enough that the coders could actually do their jobs and turn out some decent products.

Disclaimer: I in no way support Microsoft and generally view them as an evil, corrupt organization.

You can find the CNN article here. An amusing point is that there is also a link to a Time article on the point brought up here about whether opening trade with China means trade should be opened up with Cuba. You can find that here.

Major point: The Senate will consider the issue after Memorial Day. The vote will probably come in early June and the normalized trade is expected to pass. It hasn't completely passed yet, but the chances of it failing are miniscule.

B. Elgin

I assume you are referring to The Time Magazine Web Site, and not any of those naughty, naughty pr0n sites?

Another thought--what's the worst that will happen to Gates and Ballmer if the DOJ comes down as hard as they can on Microsoft? Will they go bankrupt? Will they go to jail? Or will they still have more money than they can possibly spend? They've got nothing to fear.

numb

ROTFLMAO. OMG. I just can't help thinking 'This is the value of M$'s integration with the OS'.

If you really want to die of laughter, check out Time's latest piece, which includes a "viewpoint" by Mr. Gates, defending the very integration you speak of.

My personal favorite from Gates: "Updates to Windows and Office technologies that could, for example, protect against attacks such as the Love Bug virus would also be much harder for computer users to obtain."


43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr

Here is the Actual Time Article by Gates

http://www.time.com /time/magazine/articles/0,3266,44557,00.html

It's in Time But it belongs on Segfault

Here is the Actual Time Article by Gates

http://www.time.com /time/magazine/articles/0,3266,44557,00.html

It's in Time But it belongs on Segfault

TIME has an essay from Bill Gates this week.

Here's an AP Article on the essay. It contains this passage (which seems to be broadly paraphrased) regarding preventing future outbreaks of ILOVEYOU type viruses where Gates sounds like an an open source evangelist:

"The front line of defense against such sophisticated viruses is a continually evolving computer operating system that attracts the efforts of eager software developers, Gates said."

GeekPress: Today's Technical News, Sifted and Summarized

When combined with a broadband cellular connection, the only thing missing from the wearable computing experience is a good output device. Most display devices I've seen are either confusing or blinding.

Voice recognition can be done by server-side DSPs on the other end of the "phone". In the U.S., the real problem is that broadband phones aren't here, while the infrastructure's already in place in Europe and Asia. Sure, you can get the occasional high-speed wireless solution, but you can't roam the countryside with it. Why? Because.

The NY Times, while sometimes better than other papers, is still a creation of the corporate media. Their coverage of the IMF/WB protests in DC, for example, was totally biased against the demonstrators. Even Time magazine (part of the AOL-Time-Warner ultraConglomerate) had decent coverage.

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I have fired such weapons as well. Did anyone teach you what you were doing, or were you fucking around with a cannon like that for fun?

View again the picture of Elian and the Federal Agent.

Note that the agent's finger is OUTSIDE THE TRIGGER HOUSING!!! In other words, there is NO WAY that he will accidentally shoot ANYONE!!!! This is part of weapons training for people who's jobs require the use of such force. Oh, and a side effect of such training means that odds are good that, unlike YOU, the agent will NOT spray bullets randomly upon pulling the trigger. Ordinarily I'm all for gun rights, but people like you scare the crap out of me. Please learn what you're doing with guns before you hurt someone you care about.

...like gunning down street kids for fun and profit.

The main school in this article [Permian High]is the school I went to. Imagine how much worse this Nazi-like youth 'movement' can be when it happens in a school where:
1. There's ARMED guards
2. There's Metal Detectors
3. Students are required to wear BARCODED ID BADGES!
"Student identification badges will not only immediately show who belongs and who doesn't but also contain bar codes school administrators can instantly scan to show everything from previous tardiness and truancies to medical records. "
4. There are security cameras IN THE CLASSROOMS!
5. Random Searches!
"Permian High administrators, for example, periodically seal off hallways, order students to drop what they are carrying, then run the purses and backpacks through metal detectors."

I was outraged when I heard this was happening at my old high-school. When I was there [grad '92] It was a pretty good school [if you could ignore the football fetish]. We had open campus for lunch and there really weren't any violence problems [a usual amount of fights I guess].
I'd like to think that the students at the school in my day would have fought this. But my mother and step-dad are both teachers in that district [not at this school] and say that the students don't mind it at all...

I think that these 'security' measures, plus this quite Orwellian peer-servailence[sp?] is a VERY dangerous thing.

Ender