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Think less like "headphones and microphone at a pc" and more like "normal-looking phone on a desk".

If and when these become commonplace in the home, you're going to expect it to work in a similar fashion to how your current phone works. Particularly, when you dial 911, you'd like the call routed to a local, nearby 911 service dispatcher, so they can get help to you quickly.

What did you expect from mi2g

These guys are media whores of the hightest degree. Add them to the fucktard list and let's carry on as before.

I'd rather have a pack of thieves then a bunch of Bible-thumping, warmongering, healthcare-destroying, corporatist maniacs running the show.

How about gassing kurds? Saddam killed far more of his own people than this war ever will, and in far more brutal ways.

Says Bush.

CIA analysts thought otherwise. Who is telling the truth and who is doing a snow job? Can you tell? I know you can, I am sure God speaks to you at night telling you what is fact and what is vicious propaganda. Your self-richeous and, oh soooo informed, attitude is a dead giveway.

Pull your head out of your rectum please.

7. Kim Polese, cofounder and former chairman of Marimba

Then: To put it crudely, Polese was one hot chick in a room full of nerds. ...

Really? Judge for yourself...

From my experience, no. I have no idea why he is quoted so often when he (quite obviously in many cases) has doen not offer many quotes of value - it must be that he's seen to it that more journalists get his business card that most other "analysts". Since you mentioned Apple, just months ago he predicted Apple would ditch their own hardware development roadmap and migrate to x86 by the end of 2003, adding "When you are down to 2 percent share and the trend is still in the wrong direction you need to do something before someone asks you to turn out the lights," OK Rob, Apple will get right on that. Even people who work for Microsoft know he's full of it. Seeing a quote from him in an article just warns the reader of lazy journalism.

The w3c also has a list of projects that use RDF. Some of them seem a bit academic, but one that looks particularly cool is eventSherpa - a semantic calendaring application that lets you publish and subscribe to RDF calendars. The FOAF project has also been gaining steam as Typepad and others join the movement.

A few weeks ago there were some news reports about Natasha Demkina, a Russian girl who seems to have x-ray eyesight. Some coverage here and here, or just google for the name.

He sure went on, and 9/11 were just too good an opportunity not to take advantage off. As the former US minister of finance (or what you call that position in USA) wrote : Getting rid of Saddam was top of the agenda right just after the election of Bush. But according to you he's just a leftist loonie?

O'NEILL: "Terry, this is a guess on my part, but I believe that this document had its roots in the Clinton administration. There was no way that a new administration could create this kind of document in the short period of time before this meeting."

SUSKIND: "Well, but to be fair, let's make sure we're clear here. This is a document that's dated March 1 or 2 [2001]. So there probably was enough time, just based on the dating of the document. But..."

O'NEILL: "Knowing how government works, I've got to tell you, I don't believe it was done in six weeks. I just don't believe that."

Erh, it showed that Bush & administration was lying quite heaviliy. Not wrong : Lying.

Don't forget that the original Walkman cost more than $400 in 1979 Dollars.


A bit of Walkman history

It was also derided as an unecessary gadget, but you know how history turned out.

Joe

"Given that IQ would be consistent across all nations"

Japan has a average IQ 5-10 points above the U.S. In fact, within the U.S., group crime rates vary by group average IQ as well -- showing a spectrum from black to Asian populations with whites in between (though closer to Asians).

For data on how nations differ, you may wish to check out "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" by Lynn. IQ ranges a great deal by country. My weblog actually has a table with Lynn's data on the subject here: http://thrasymachus.typepad.com/thras/2003/10/the_ iraq_war.html Scroll down to the bottom. You will see that average IQ ranges from a low of 59 in Equatorial Guinea, to a high of 107 in Hong Kong. The numbers should not be taken as exact quantities however.

There was a story awhile back about an exploding jawbreaker I wonder if you could make some kind of candy powered musket...

Jason Schultz (staff attorney the EFF) has some figures in his blog. He reckons the figure is just over 15% of students using the (crippled) service. ISTR you can't play the music anymore once you leave Penn State. A ringing endorsement for sure!

Shortly after your post, Jason Schultz posted a reply (it's a few threads back) in which he says that he was misquoted, and also mislead as to exactly what he was giving an opinion on.. This is not to disparage your post (especially since it predates Jason's) -- but just to additional clarification here.

Hi folks. Jason Schultz from EFF here. Saw these comments and yes, I was misquoted and honestly, somewhat mislead about what I was commenting on. I've posted the details about what I said and what I meant on my blog.

[FatBastard temporarily removes tinfoil hat...]

1.
a) Jose Padilla still being held. This was the first one that came up with a Google of "Padilla held". Then there are the US, British and Australian citizens still being held at Guantanamo Bay.

b) State department death: John Kokal
There was also one about a state deparment intelligence agent found shot, that looked like a suicide, but I have not been able to relocate it, sorry. I think it was on cursor.org.

2. The vote recount was stopped by the Supreme Court. I just find that astonishing.

3. The context of the thread got lost. I was using European units because a European commented about the price of petrol there already being $5/gal. I was trying to illustrate why $5/gal gasoline here in the states would be devastating to the economy. I also consider myself a Libertarian but, at the moment, there is no Libertarian party, so I'll vote for the lesser of the two evils.

4. I have been paying attention. Coal plants today can be very clean, but they still spew thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. And Bush just repealed parts of the clean air act so they don't even have to scrub for mercury.
Nuclear is very clean, and I'd be happy to have far more Nuclear plants then we currently do. But this just supports my contention that the Oil Patch Gang would much rather keep making loads of money on oil and using oil as a pretext for empire building.
Case in point: a Sea Wolf class submarine has a 50 Megawatt nuclear power plant (enough to power 25,000 homes) and doesn't need to be refueled for the life of the vessel (20-30 years depending on who you believe).
A renewable-energy/hydrogen transport economy can provide us with all the energy we need.
Being less idealistic and more pragmatic - The United States could provide all it's energy needs domestically - if it really WANTED to - build more nuclear, build/retrofit more clean burning coal, build a few Boeing solar power towers in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. Migrate transportation to hybrid gas/electri, turbo diesel/electric and then to hydrogen over the next 15 years.
That's my point. That's what we should be doing now. The Clinton administration at least left us more or less pointing in the direction.

This just in: U.S. Oil Imports Set Record in 2003: 63%, Trend Seen Up

5. The American system of government is one of the best, if not the best in the world. At least it was four years ago. Again, just because we lean Libertarian doesn't mean we should sit on our colective thumbs waiting for the Libertarian party to spring out of the Ether or Dark Matter or whatever we're calling it today. :-)
This administration is the absolute _worst_ administration the United States has ever had. Period. We need somebody else, anybody else, come November. If things remain the same after that, well then I may seriously begin to despair and have to move to Costa Rica.

Regards,
johnny selfish-meme seed

Instead, I get to deal with neoconservative, religious-right, narrowminded dittoheads. Unthinking sheep that feed for 8 hours a day on talk radio and use the resultant knee-jerk babble to shout down anyone that disagrees. And by shout, I mean literally foam-in-the-corners-of-your-mouth all spitting and loud *shout*.

Being ignored would be a blessing, by comparison.

The state's Democratic party is in disarray, and libertarians regularly field candidates that are about as socially-inept sounding as you (they seem stunned that stumping on drug legalization gets them marginalized by the conservative people here... duh!). I get to watch while school budgets are vivisected, while gay rights get trampled, and as countless people hold forth on the belief that a christian god created this country and anyone that ain't christian is free to leave if they don't like it. The epithet changes to something that sounds like "hunh-Liberal Democrat"... there's this wierd almost-glottal sound to the leading L.

As for your rants:

• Perhaps the person that hates Mel Gibson really does hate Mel's arch-conservative ways. They may mean no insult... just a fact. He is, after all, a public figure with views that are controversial (on contraception, religion, etc). I know there are several people that I despise here, because they're powerful and conservative and the combination allows them to do spiteful, hurtful things to anyone different than them. On my less-medicated days, I pity the fsckers for not realizing the harm they do.
• The friend wasn't surprised you *owned* a bible... they were surprised you thought it was an innocent coffee-table book. If it were me, I'd comment, too. In fact, I'd never stop cracking jokes about you putting out a bible before a party! That's as incongruous a conversation-starter as 'Mein Kampf' (trolls: I said as incongruous, not as wrong... just OWNING Mein Kampf would probably make me reevaluate my friendship with someone). Next time, find COMMON ground with your guests. Try an art book. Buy some poetry from a Berkley cabdriver or the likes. Or, if you're nearer to Palo Alto, stick with Stevens' 'TCP/IP Illustrated' or schematics to NCC-1701, or some glossy Architecture book.
• Back to bibles on coffee tables: I don't discuss religion with strangers, or with most friends. This is because I've had *all* those conversations and they're dead ends. I'll never convert a bible-thumper to my own beliefs and they'll never in a zillion years convince me. I can delve into metaphysics with people that are LESS religious than I am, but I have a shields/warning system with a hair trigger for anyone coming from a position of deep faith: change courses politely and warp-six out of there. Otherwise, the hours spent are ones I never get back and NOTHING is likely to change.
• Could you maybe be doing just a teensy bit of proselytizing or missionarying or evangelizing or whatever your religion calls it? I tend to avoid people that strike up religious conversations whenever we talk... see the above remark for why. That'd mean that, if I a coworker were in the cube next to you, I'd gradually increase the chill-factor to you each time you stepped over the line and insisted on some small chat about church, god, or whatever. I also don't want to talk about sausage-making just before lunch, daily rants about hating the job/boss, and a dozen other 'ick' or 'why bother' topics. Getting dissed because you're a libertarian? Well, maybe that's an excuse. If not, maybe she: has seen firsthand the damage done by a lasse-faire polluter, lost a friend to drugs, had an unregulated corporation damage something she loves, lost out to big business on something, or (horrors) actually read more than one of Whazzername's libertarian tirades (Whazzisname Shrugged, et al). Like being a communist after you'

apparently some of the online stores aren't exactly doing well

http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2003/12/on line_musicsto.html

the "legitimate" market is tiny compared with the real CD or pirated market

I have "Norton Internet Security" installed on this machine. It is impossible to unintstall. If you unintstall it, your internet connection will be irrepairably harmed, especially when it comes to secure pages. However, with Internet Security enabled, the internet is freeking useless.

The only solution is to load internet security and then disable it after it's running. That, or clean install the operating system.

You might think that this is an isolated problem. It's not. We routinely get support requests on our secure ecommerce sites saying "when I click on (secure link), i get a page error". Our #1 response to this is "have you recently unintstalled norton internet security?" Answer: "yes, by coiincidence i just did that this morning!"

This '12 year technology strategy consultant' wants to know what you think of her view of e-mail list buying. why don't you tell her what you think?

This Woman, a '12-year experienced technology strategy expert' wants feedback on her views on spam. why don't you give her some? her email address is listed on her site. read her other post about the effects of california's spam law as well.

From the article:

On the CD I donated, I also included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states, in Article 26, "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free at least in the elementary and fundamental stages ..."

I'm a libertarian, so I don't agree with this, at least as worded.

A "right" is something that you must always be granted, no matter what. If you look at the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution, you will find they are rights to be left alone: the right to free speech (no one can silence you), the right to not have to testify against yourself, etc. These are "negative" rights, your right to be left alone. (You will notice a right to own and carry weapons, but no mention of where you will get them; no one has any obligation to provide them to you.)

If you have a "right" to education, where does it come from? Do you have a right to grab a teacher and make that teacher teach you? How does your "right" to education compare with a teacher's right to decide what he or she wants to do? What happens if not enough people choose to be teachers -- do we need to force some people to be teachers to guarantee that there are enough teachers for everyone?

I would agree with wording that says "Education is important, and society should make education a priority." I'd even agree with a right to own educational materials. But I don't see how you can make a "right" to education really work, unless the word "right" doesn't mean what I think it does.

Here's a good essay about this:

http://libertarian.typepad.com/independent/2003/11 /rights_and_enti.html

steveha

Have you heard of Vessenes' Rule of Pornography? You might be more right than you think.

Pregnant??? Wife??

Excuse me, we all know all you slashdotters are queer male homersexual-type twinks. You are severely in the closet of denial.

Better luck next time

• Publish a weblog
• Publish a photo album
• Maintain lists of your favorite books, music, weblogs, and links
• Personalize your site's colors, layout, and design
• Connect with others who share your interests
• Limit who reads your weblog through password protection

opensourceCMS.com has working installations of many php/mysql content management systems, so you can try before you install.

I'd also like to echo others' recommendations of Six Apart's TypePad and Apple's .Mac for beginners. They're not cheap, but they're (nearly) idiot-proof.

When Google bought Blogger, I expected to see a .Mac-like service develop, but it hasn't happened yet (and may never happen -- at least not until after their IPO).

- opensourceCMS.com
- TypePad
- .Mac

Looking at the moveabletype website, I just noticed they saying:

If you just want to get started with a full-featured weblog, we recommend TypePad, our simple weblog service, which is based on the Movable Type engine and requires no installation. TypePad weblogs are easy to customize and offer features like photo albums without requiring you to have a web server or any technical knowledge.

Haven't tried it, but looks like just what you want.

Link

Moveable Type is an excellent solution. Very user friendly with excellent online documentation. It's also easy to set up! I'd totally recommend it, I too have set it up for a few folks that aren't all that computer savvy, and they've had no problem using it to blog. There's also their pay service Typepad that is even more newbie friendly and requires no setup at all! Either of these solutions will do what you need.

The whole story smacks of dubiousness (OW!). They quote this one guy, Crandall, about 15 times. They reference his blog. The publisher of some ipod web thingy has heard of it... from the same guy. There's an unnamed Pixar spokeswoman who's never heard of it... but she's too busy to look into it? What the heck?

Wired reporter: I need one source that doesn't flow directly from this Crandall joker. I think I'll phone up Pixar.

*ring* *ring*

Pixar: Hello?

Wired reporter: Hello! Ipod jacking, blah, blah, blah...

Pixar: Uh... look... I'm really busy with... umm, the Finding Nemo DVD release! Yeah!

*click*

--

OK, why on earth should I believe even one word from this story?

The guy's blog, says that they thank each other:

We then stand and listen to each other's music for a minute or so, unjack, thank the other person and move on... (from: http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2003/09/ip od_greeting.html)

The Wired article says they don't speak at all:

"We listened for about 30 seconds," Crandall said. "No words were exchanged. We nodded and walked off."

OK, so some people say thanks and others don't. Fine.

But here's the clincher: He listens to indigenous music from northern Europe all the time, and has never heard trance. Yeah, right! Indigenous music from northern Europe?! :-) Nothing against the sub-sub-genre of indigenous music from northern Europe, ok, but I doubt he's really into it... all the time... and has been for the last ten years.

This monkey Crandall desperately wants attention. He desperately wants people to let him listen to their iPods. So he decides to start a trend. So he calls up Wired and plants a story, and the reporter doesn't think to question the fact that noone else has heard of this...

(Tinfoil hat time: And maybe he's traveling to Cambridge soon, so he nudges them a bit, saying he's heard it's starting there, too, so they'll be ready when he gets there!?)

OK, I'm done ranting now.

zach

State of Play Blog and New IP Rules for Second Life

State of Play Blog and New IP Rules for Second Life

I did not test Napster's answer to the iPod, the Samsung Napster player. I only checked out the music service.

Here are a few:
click
click
click

Unfortunately, Swarthmore is now taking down student websites that link to Why War? http://importance.typepad.com/the_importance_of/20 03/10/swarthmore_crac.html

Oldest according to the Out of Africa theory. The Multiregional theory claims that Neanderthals are part of the human race. (Check out the second linked pdf for a good paper on the DNA evidence: "Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution")

Metafilter
Les Jones
Bruce Landon - landonline
City Comforts Blog
Marginal Revolution
Long story; short pier
Tom Maszerowski on Livejournal
bbCity.co.uk

Based on my reading of European press, Europeans are very badly informed about what happens in the United States. There is a large amount of selective editing that takes place, and frankly, quite a bit of anti-American propaganda.

For example, yesterday's Associated Press article about reaction to Bush's speech was significantly different [in German] / [in English] in the version sent to Germany than that distributed in the US.

This is normal. Europeans, who so proudly tell us about the undersophistication of the average american in his sources of information, have far fewer sources available than we do, and the sources are more biased.

In the US, the broadcast news networks are all anti-Bush and pro-internationalism in their coverage. The same is true of CNN. Only Fox and conservative talk radio present the other side.

Certainly the average america is less "international" in that he pays less attention to European issues, but Europe is far less important to world affairs than it used to be. Thus the average American is tuned in to events in Iraq more than, say, France.

The NYTimes has become more of a shill for the RIAA and conservatives in the government. In the article they actually printed this as credible information:

A study in March by the General Accounting Office found that KaZaA would be effective for someone looking for child pornography. The agency searched for 12 terms associated with child pornography, such as "incest" and "underage." It did not actually download the files it found, but it determined that 42 percent of them had titles or descriptions associated with pornographic images of children.

The GAO study vastly overstates the likelihood that children searching for popular music will in fact find pornography, according to studies by Public Knowledge, an advocacy group on intellectual property issues.

By even lending any credence to a study that did not actually download the files the NYTimes is showing how easily they can be used.

A little clue here folks, these descriptions are what's commonly referred to as false advertising. 99% of that "42 percent" will not contain child porn. At most you'll get some badly dubbed European movie from the 80's where some 30 year old woman is wearing pony tails and trying to act coy. Those sorts of mile-long filenames with every sex search term you could think of are leftovers from files that have been passed around for years on services like Hotline where you either pay or upload other files in trade to download pirated porn or software.

These file names are just like the stupid search engine spamming where porn sites used to put as many porn words in their meta tags and white-on-white body text to get to the top of the results. Someone sharing on Hotline wanted to generate as much traffic as possible to their server. Then in order to download this forbidden fruit, you had to upload more warez or pr0n or pay them, thus increasing the size of the server owners collection and/or wallet.

Later in the article they (correctly) pick up on another reality of P2P porn: a lot of it is now just advertising for pay sites. Now let's see... do you think that the porn site operators name the files that they share in a way that clearly shows that you're going to download an ad? Well, no they also use the same sorts of filenames with every graphic description that you could imagine - which often doesn't have much to do with the actual contents.

If the RIAA members had half a brain, they'd stop pouring money into getting songs on the radio and MTV and just load up all the good singles and videos onto KaZaA. Then they'd all take a few clues from Apple and UMG and make it easier and cheaper to get the albums electronically or on CD. Oh, but wait, they've stopped making good albums.

Maybe this is a bad example, but I really can't comprehend the school of thought in journalism where you just report the statements of opposing sides of an issue with equal weight and little personal analysis. In this particular case it would be very dangerous for a reporter themselves to download potential child porn. If they actually found some they would be committing a serious crime.

The real problem here is that I read far to many articles by journalists who are generalists. They are taught that there is this universal approach to researching and writing stories and they can apply it to any subject - which is complete bullshit. Sure you can start learning from a general standpoint, but journalism should be about trying to present the facts as they are. That requires an understanding of the subject matter, which requires some expertise and experience.

Unless this particular article was completely watered down and edited to death, I get the impression that the reporter has never actually downloaded porn through a P2P service.

People need to be pointing out that the cost/benefit ratio for monocultures vs heterocultures is changing. The Irish developed an appreciation for the risk of monocultures in 1845-1847 ...

http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2003/08/mo nocultures.html

Thanks for that link, it's currently off doing the rounds. (-: