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The way to show that he is, as you say, "full of shit" is not to ridicule him and compare him to the Unabomber (thank you for not bringing Hitler into this). The way to expose crackpots for what they are is to refute their theory. Show that the theory predicts that molecules can't exist, show that this "energy source" cannot actually be built, show that there is absolutely no empirical evidence for anything they have done. Until you do that, they are entitled to claim that they are not crackpots. At the moment, NASA is doing just this - they are testing the theory to see if these so-called hydrinos can actually be used as an energy source. Instead of calling this guy names, let people get on with testing his theories, and base your conclusions on them. After he is shown to be wrong, call him a crackpot, but if, by some outside chance, he turns out to be right, just accept that he was onto something big.

While it doesn't specifically backup your argument, it definitely alludes to it. You can read the article here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/xbox.html

Why has nobody else picked up on this yet? It's obvious what Yahoo is doing. They're marketing to a demographic(maddox.xmission.com). It's trying to build an image for itself. Companies do this all the time. They figure out what their target demographic is (in this case, they think their desired audience is a bunch of fun-loving technically-inclined computer users) and they market to that demographic. In this case they're trying to hook on the kind of people which work hard to spread gmail and firefox just out of loyalty. They're just pathetically posturing and pandering to this audience, but they don't even know how to do it. All they can do is just jump around like an annoying 5 year old trying to get attention. And when I say jumping around trying to get attention, I mean something like this: "Hey check out cool we are! We're so hip and funny(slashdot) and in touch with today's teechnology and cool stuff(slashdot), forget gmail, look at us! Look how cool and funny and hip and fresh we are, and how we put a cool, fun spin on technology! Google's just a bunch of old fogeys. But everyone here is just a bunch of cool and smart dudez having a good time!" It's pathetic. They don't even have attention, because they've been so stagnant and moronic and lazy for the past, oh, I dunno, 4 years, that they've lost all loyalty form anyone who's even slightly technically inclined to bigger and better services (and remember, those are the people who really help a website get attention). But Yahoo is finally feeling that it can't just act like a lazy monopolistic conglomerate anymore, because it's realizing that its shares are slipping to the cooler, fresher, more in touch, and much more useful google. Yahoo realizes that if it doesn't get its ass in gear, its going to be losing its members to google soon. So, like the stupid, slow, lazy, and out of touch corporate conglomerate it is, it tries to get the attention that google has from being cool, fresh, and in touch. Yahoo tries to get this attention by making itself out to be cool, fresh, and in touch. By jumping up and down and saying "look how cool I am! I'm so cool!" The difference is, google looks cool without even trying. Google is cool not because it spends time trying to bolster its personal image (although it does focus on image some) of being a relaxed, good natured company. Google is cool because it is a relaxed, good natured company. It doesn't just pretend to have those plastic balls all around, or have that big, open, cafeteria. That 20% of all employees time which must go to projects of their liking isn't all just a hoax. Google is actually a company based on relaxed, good natured principles. But yahoo, which I'm sure is still based around a traditional business model, with CEOs and departments, and 8 levels of management and corporate beauracracy, a company whose goals are mostly sluggish and monopolistic paradigms (such as being the king of online TV(wired.com), which it has now failed miserably at due to iTunes jumping out of nowhere and kicking its ass.), is most obviously not cool and fresh and funny and funky. This is all just showy propaganda. Yahoo's upper management have just given the OK for the marketing department to play up this major 100+ employee corporation as being this cool, fresh, hip group of fun tech guys just cooperating for the heck of it to create good stuff. That is everything yahoo is not. I imagine we'll see more bullshit like this as yahoo makes more and more desperate attempts to get a hold on its slipping popularity, perhaps some of them may work. But all the make-up in the world won't hide the fact that yahoo is an ugly, decrepit, slow moving and out-of-shape hag of a corporation. Unless yahoo chan

On the one hand, we desperately need more clean fuel supplies. You don't want to ruin your home, especially if it is the only home your entire species has.

That having been said, he's making trend estimations to 2050. 2050. That's 45 years off. People aren't particularly good at figuring out what will happen in 10 years, let alone in 45. By 2050 the world will look as different as it did in 1950, arguably moreso. Will we have simple, efficient hydrogen for power storage? Will we finally have cracked the nuclear fusion code? Will meltdown-proof nuclear fission reactors come to power the world? Will many completely unexpected things come to pass?

I live next to an experiment in solar panels. It's an array on top of a local strip mall, running it's entire length. It is also invisible from the ground, and rather robust considering the winters here. It has also produced enough power that it would have paid for itself repeatedly.

Right now an average citizen can make an investment in solar technology, and can buy something which costs them the same as buying power over the wires, but which is also completely clean. But they don't. Businesses with large surface areas can buy something which costs them significantly LESS than buying power over the wires, and which is completly clean, but they don't. This sounds like a failure of advertising rather than a failure of technology. At this point, we really just need to get the word out.

And who knows. Maybe Solar won't be the breakthrough that gets us a few more pollution-free years, in the same way that the gas-driven car saved us from the massive crisis of horse poo which was coating every major city in the world. Maybe it will be something unexpected. Thermal? Kinetic? Something that runs by consuming greenhouse gasses?

We definitely need more research dollars. But I'm not convinced that focusing them all down on Solar is the right way to go.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/cra ven.html/

Or you could just dump some iron into the ocean to supercharge plankton growth. Probably cheaper, easier and a tad more of a natural way to do it.

1. Lame dick grammar/spelling nazis on /.
2. The "this is all FUD" crowd.

For starters, spelling and grammar are important, but not that important, especially here...
And another thing, get over it, because it's ALL FUD

And we all know what happened to them.

Acutally, all the tasks that I saw involved processing data for A9's block-level search and "tour". Seems like a clever, cheap way to organize the insane amount of data they have mapped for this project.

I wrote an article for today's Wired News on IBM's discovery (along with another recent photonics discovery from Stanford) and asked a number of scientists whether this "slow light" chip might have applications for quantum computing. The sense I got was that, generally, slow light may indeed come in handy for a photon-based quantum computing system. But since it's a room-temperature, silicon-based chip (read: LOTS of quantum noise), it doesn't seem likely that this particular slow light environment would be qubit-friendly.

Indexing actually increases the value of a work because it allows people to find it - and therefore increases the pool of potential purchasers by an enormous factor.

But in the process indexing may reduce the value of other works. The publishing industry doesn't want to support a long tail of books with niche appeal. They want books that they sell by the truckload. They want the newest books to not have to compete against books that went out of print ten years ago.

Google's index will benefit humanity as a whole, but may harm publishers. Of course, the publishers can suck it; they're perverting copyright into the opposite of its intended goal (to spread information).

Google search for 33Hz + orgasm
I put the link first so y'all don't try to call bullshit on me. I read it in an audio magazine (correction: wired magazine)a while back. The writer went for a ride along with some bassists who drove around town pushing a button and juicing girls. The driver was saying that part of the reason girls give 'im dirty looks is because they can feel the bass pushing their button.

As an aside, you may or may not know that serious car bass systems aren't set up to play music per se. They're setup to produce massive SPL, and because of that, they usually wire up a button (which they can press to unleash their thunder (and set off car alarms) while driving around town. For contests they use a remote control and replace windshields/windows/etc with inches of lexan which you can watch flex while the tones are being played.

All that said, high SPL's in the lower frequencies can cause your lung to spontaneously collapse.

Interesting thought, I've felt the effects before but never done any research...

According to this article, lung collapse can be a effect of freqencies in this range, and that " The lungs may essentially start to vibrate in the same frequency as the bass, which could cause a lung to rupture."

I vaguly remember hearing about experimentation into using this as a weapon (No, not the Brown note), but more of a lung-collapsing, vomit inducing weapon.

enables them to take the turbines to where the wind blows and birds are few

See this Wired article: Unexpected Downside of Wind Power

My colleague Jamie wrote the following letter to Wired yesterday regarding Lawrence Lessig's column supporting Google Print.

I think she makes some compelling points about the problems with Google's plan...

-------------

Lessig's Tough Call

In defending Google Print ("Google's Tough Call," issue 13.11), Lawrence Lessig and others overlook one thing. If the publishers and authors have no rights to prevent this, what rights does Google have to protect its own extensive efforts in creating this database? By their own arguments, the answer must be: none. Google does not own the raw data. In almost talking point fashion, Google, Lessig and others describe this as nothing more than a "card catalog." This description could come back to haunt Google, as the only thing they own is their original presentation of the data itself. And the image of a card catalog does not bring to mind "originality."

If the Google DRM is broken and I create my own "Jamie Print" index on the web... without Google's ads... what basis would Google have to argue? Google can scan a million books and by Lessig's arguments, that investment is irrelevant. If I find a way to download those million books from Google, store the data and use my own search engine, Google's supposed benevolence in creating this project will be hard to swallow amidst a flurry of lawsuits against my superior ad-free index. Google would have little basis to sue except under the DMCA, a statute whose very existence is vilified by Lessig and the very people defending Google Print as progress (and I don't care for it either).

If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects. Isn't this much the same for the publishers and authors seeking protection for the right to control their work? Lessig defends Google Print in the name of progress, but progress is a careful balance of reward and public benefit. Google might not create Google Print if it cannot profit from the ads it inserts and publishers may lose out if they cannot choose how to profit from their properties.

It is almost inevitable that Google Print will be subverted and Google will seek the very same protections that it claims the publishers should not have.

Jamie Cole
New York, NY

The federal government has been twice told they cannot use cell phones to track individuals without showing probable cause...I would think this would apply to state governments equally as well. Wonder how it might affect commercial applications?

Phil Wiser - CTO at Sony and in charge of DRM.

He said this in 2003:

"All copy-protections can be hacked," Wiser said. "But if give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer."

I guess he is no longer trusting YOU - buy some other product then.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61161,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7/

In case this link melts down what follows is the whole article on Wired. Reuters 08:55 AM Nov. 10, 2003 PT Sony Music, home to such artists as Beyonce Knowles and Bruce Springsteen, said Monday it plans to introduce new CD technology in Germany that prevents users from copying songs to file-sharing sites, but allows them to make copies for their personal use.

The record industry blames its recent sales slump on file-sharing services like Kazaa, which it says are havens for piracy. Last year, major labels issued "copy-protected" CDs that prevent them from being played on computers.

The copy-protected discs faced a backlash from customers and music fans, and several lawsuits emerged from some customers that complained these CDs caused their computers and other devices to malfunction.

But Sony thinks it has an appealing approach: Give customers added incentives to buy copy-protected CDs.

On Monday, Sony will release R&B group Naturally Seven's new CD in Germany with a so-called "second session." The disc can be played on almost any device conventionally, said Phil Wiser, Sony Music's chief technology officer.

It also contains a compressed digital copy of the music that can be quickly copied onto any computer. From the computer, users can copy that music onto Sony portable digital music players.

The CDs also allow users to connect to websites with exclusive features such as bonus songs and concert tickets. The features are only available if you have the original CD.

Such features are already available with Sony artists like Tori Amos and AC/DC. But the new discs combine the "second session" copy protection with the bonus features, which Sony is calling "ConnecteD."

Sony plans to evaluate customers' reaction to the new technology before introducing it in other countries. Wiser declined to specify a timetable for which the technology will be available in the United States.

A label on the disc will say it includes the new copy protection software features.

There are several limitations. The digital files will only play on Sony-licensed digital music players. Wiser said Sony is working on plug-ins that allow the files to be played on more popular players like Microsoft's Windows Media. He expects the plug-ins to be available early next year.

To copy the music to the Sony portable player, the technology requires an extra step to copy the files to a separate program to transfer the music to the portable player.

At this point, music can be transferred only to Sony portable players, although Sony executives note that Apple Computer's popular iTunes service works the same way with the Apple-branded iPod.

Earlier this year, BMG introduced similar technology with its hip-hop performer Anthony Hamilton.

BMG, which announced plans to merge with Sony Music last week, is using software from SunnComm Technologies to restrict the amount of copies that could be made of Hamilton's music. The software, however, did not work on some operating systems and was quickly hacked.

"All copy-protections can be hacked," Wiser said. "But if give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer."

This wired article mentions a Nokia phone running a Symbian Gnutella client.

It took me a while to find what he actually ended up buying. It was a Miele washer. Premium German engineering of course.

In another more detailed interview ,


Steve went on, "It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.... Most people don't take the time to do that." He then proceeded to tell a story that both sheds light on his private life and gives some insight into the decision-making process that often turns life into a hell for people who work with him. Making the point that design isn't just an issue for "fancy new gadgets," he described how his whole family became involved in, of all things, the selection of a new washing machine and dryer. This is a little hard to picture: The billionaire Jobs family didn't have very good machines. Selecting new ones became a project for the whole family. The big decision came down to whether to purchase a European machine or an American-made one. The European machine, according to Steve, does a much better job, uses about one-quarter as much water, and treats the clothes more gently so that they last longer. But the American machines take about half as long to wash the clothes.

"We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We spent about two weeks talking about this. Every night at the dinner table" -- imagine dinner-table conversation about washing machines every night! -- "we'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design." In the end, they opted for European machines, which Steve described as "too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country."

Of course, this wasn't really about washing machines; it was about passing along the concern for design to his children and perhaps to (his wife) Laurene. The decision clearly gave him more pleasure than you would expect. He called the new machines "one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys (had) really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers."

Steve's surprising tag line on the story says a great deal about how much design really means to him: "I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years."

Some people might think it a bit weird that there was so much thought going into buying a washing machine, but i think that if you get to see some of the lovely stuff Miele make you might not think it so weird. It's obvious the engineers at Miele are as obsessive over their machines as Jobs is over his. And it's clear he noticed and appreciated that.

Not to mention how nice it is to know that despite his billions he still does his own laundry.

If you can find what your are looking for. Apple are not stupid, they recognise what Amazon and others have already discovered; there is more business in the long tail. (For those that can't be bothered reading the article - there are limts to traditional stores which has lead to "top 100" lists, there is much more business outside of the top 100).

PowerPoint(TM) is an essential thought-prevention tool. Nothing else can extend a vapid piece of generalising self-important blather into 45 minutes of a dynamic + snappy prevarocation. PowerPoint helps our management to feel better about their mission, about their goals and comitment to the cutting-edge innovation. It helps them to highlight the synergies. It facilitates indentification of the go/no-go checkpoints on their flowcharts.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

I just had to go search for more info on RFID implants because sooner or later bills will be proposed by somebody that they be introduced, initially on a voluntary basis....

Back in July silicon.com reported the following: "Tommy Thompson, the Health and Human Services Secretary in President Bush's first term and a former Governor of Wisconsin, is going to get tagged. Thompson has joined the board of Applied Digital, which owns VeriChip, the company that specialises in subcutaneous RFID tags for humans and pets. To help promote the concepts behind the technology, Thompson himself will get an RFID tag implanted under his skin." http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,39024663,391505 25,00.htm/

December 2003 - Subdermal RFID chip provokes furore http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/04/subdermal_ rfid_chip_provokes_furore/

October 2004 - FDA approves computer chip for humans - nice pic of an implant next to George Washington... http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6237364/

This article was followed up in November 2004 http://slate.msn.com/id/2109477/
Verisign thoughtfully provide a method to save you getting your child swapped in the hospital. "The number of total switching incidents is as high as 20,000 per year in the U.S." But don't worry. In this case the tag is not implanted... http://www.verichipcorp.com/

...unlike the VeriKid service provided by the Mexican distributors of verisign technology: http://www.solusat.com.mx/index1.html http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60771, 00.html

Although RFID implants have their detractors...

http://www.spychips.com/
http://www.notags.co.uk/page26.html
http://www.rfidconcerns.com/
http://www.shire.net/big.brother/digitalangel.htm
http://whiterose.samizdata.net/archives/cat_identi ty_cards.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/impl anting_chip.html

...they seem to be popular with body piercing fans: Amal Graafstra Gets an RFID Implant http://www.bmezine.com/news/presenttense/20050330. html
And the odd geek or two: http://www.x11.net/wiki/index.php/My_RFID_Implant He has mp4 video footage of the implanting procedure. It doesn't sound like he will want to remove this implant anytime soon - OUCH!

The Mexican Government - "Mexico's Attorney General required the Mark of the Beast in a 160 people. Thousands more are now planned..." http://www.tldm.org/News4/MarkoftheBeast.htm

And the European Parliament! "Brussels: 'Implants to track people are OK'". http://management.silicon.com/government/0,3902467 7,39128836,00.htm/

"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" Lord Acton (1834-1902)

I read a Wired News article http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69115,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_5 a while back about this. It seems that the copyright office has rejected requests to circumvent copy protection technology on CD's, DVD's, and video games. I do not hold out much hope this time around.

I read a Wired News article http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69115,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_5 a while back about this. It seems that the copyright office has rejected requests to circumvent copy protection technology on CD's, DVD's, and video games. I do not hold out much hope this time around.

Not really correct especially is you want to make money out of your patent. See http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68894, 00.html

From the article, it seems even private patents can be claimed under national security. I would assume with anything so claimed the inventor is basically screwed

It has happened

Sounds like good questions. I would point out, when you answer them, that the other methods you have above are not mutually exclusive. Biodiesel can only be expanded as far as the biomass producing farmland will go. A backup is needed, be it some form of battery or reserve generation capacity in the instances of a cloudy day.

WARNING: Linked PDF
http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/Economics.pdf
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/fuelfactsheets
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodiese l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_fuel

The battery is the real kicker. I've wanted to see for some time where the grid was only tapped for part of the energy needed for a home (or car, given Honda's home refueling idea) where the rest came from built in power generation and utilization ability. But without a battery solution to store excess energy, the grid must be overbuilt to handle a day when little ambient energy is available and more energy is required from remote generation.

Put available farmland to use generating biomass for Biodiesel and Ethanol, put solar panels on roofs and solar windows in standard. Converting good, arable farmland into fields full of solar panels ... well, I'll have to keep looking for numbers that would support that decision.

My Office gripes:

Word: Where do I start? So many quirks that can literally suck hours out of the day, especially when editing a large, complex, structured document (and yes, I do use styles correctly). Change tracking works well, except when it totally fails. I *hate* Word.
Powerpoint: Aside from the fundamental shortcomings, Powerpoint is OK, unless, say, you want more than 2 basic layouts (masters) per presentation. Or what any sort of structure beyond a basic outline. All that said, PowerPoint is better at what is does than Word.
Excel: Not too many complaints, other than it's used for lots of things it probably isn't the best tool for (e.g. statistical analysis of huge datasets). Actally a pretty good RAD tool. Overall, I like Excel a lot.
Access: Great front-end for query and report building (though formatting reports has some strange bugs), horrible, horrible, horrible built-in DB engine (that, e.g., silently truncates any data over 2GB or so, and tend to hang indefinately on moderately complex queries).
Outlook: Great for groupware features and online/offline syncing (some bugs, not terrible); terrible security and span control (even with the latest stuff).
Integration between components: Sometimes fine, sometimes horribly lame (e.g. occasional truncation of text strings after 256 characters, pasting tables between apps is rarely clean).
Scripting: Apart from the broken security model and the horrible nature of VB, the scripting capabilities of Office are pretty great.

I'm not claiming that other office suites are better, but I would say that for each task, there are generally better tools for the job. And integrating data from disparate tools isn't necessarily a big problem (I can pretty easily pipe stat. charts from R to Powerpoint, for example).

In sum, Office is not bad, but I would hardly say it is the pinnacle of what an office suite could be. We can do better, I'm just not sure that OO.o is it (I'd say it'll take 'til OO.o 5.x or so).

MS's greatest product? I'd have to vote for SQL Server. MapPoint also was an advance when it first came out.

It doesn't have to be electricity...

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68306, 00.html
wired has a good article on an open source project for an encrypted voip application.
let's see them wiretap that ;)

Everyone knows it's not gamers that set the priorities.

Eric
See your HTTP headers

Apparently the free speech which is the bandwagon of US is not really applicable to US citizens. Look at this Article as well. It's like the whole big bad world of child molestors, school kids beaters, abusive employers, abusive employees is breaking down. Hey wait a minute, is this the world my mom sent me to?

Your assuming everyone is from the USA or EU no?

India
GDP per capita $480
Unemployment rate 8.8%
Labor force 406 million
Population below the poverty line 25%
Typical salary for a programmer $8,000 year = $4.16 an hour

source http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india_pr. html

If I lived and was a programmer in India Google would be a good choice considering only two months of work!!!!

I mean... they could find somebody dull enough to believe the Onion was actually a real presidential announcement.

It wouldn't be the first time The Onion's been taken seriously...

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,53048,00.ht ml

Not that I've got a problem with it; I think it's funny as hell.

The detective in the linked story said it best:

To Nichols, the punch was in the gut. "It felt like I'd been had," he remembers. "I was just kind of ticked off at myself for not verifying it before I passed it along, and not making sure it was satire. I have no problem with satire. I enjoy a good joke. I just hate it when it's on me."

Anyway, I've lost count of the number of movies and TV shows I've seen where the presidential seal figures prominently in a scene or two. I wonder if they're planning on sending C&D's to the studios; after all, some idiot might think that Martin Sheen is really the President.

This 100% true story from a couple of years ago seems especially apropos.

Well they're hardly using it to promote a commercial venture,

If that's true, they should drop the banner ads, and they should definitely stop intercepting hits to their home page to display interstitial commercials. Today the Onion is trying to get me to buy shoes, watch TV shows, eat fast food, report software pirates, wear jeans, buy belts, buy The Onion books, and go to the theater. I certainly hope they're getting paid for all that.

and if you can find someone who reads one of these Onion pieces and believes it suggests presidential support,

Okay, here you go:

http://www.weeklyradioaddress.com/

This is the page that made me think they may have a case. I too thought that this was just another attempt by the Whitehouse to bitchslap dissent, because I thought that they were just talking about the presidential seal graphics that might be in photos used in obvious parody articles about the President.

But look at this page. There's no info about the Onion (you'd have to have started from an Onion page to find out the connection), all the links go to official whitehouse.gov pages, the style is that of the official whitehouse.gov page, the server uses local copies of their potentially copyrighted graphics, and they've got a nearly identical (it says "Resident of the United States" now) copy of the Presidential Seal in the upper left corner: large enough to recognize, but small enough that the modification (even assuming it's always been modified) isn't obvious.

Could someone listen to one of these addresses and not realize they were listening to a parody? I doubt it, but then again I knew they were an Onion parody before I ever went to the site, and I've only listened to one address so far. Since the Onion's humor is sometimes of the prescient "it's funny cause it's true" variety, I could definitely imagine there being addresses in there capable of fooling people.

could you point them in my direction, as i've got this bridge i'd like to sell them.

Well, I'm not buying, but there's no story so ridiculous you won't find someone to buy it. Even the Onion's regular articles have fooled the Bejing Evening News, MSNBC, and some fundamentalist Christian groups in the past.

www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53048,00.html

And yes, solar electrolysis of hydrogen is incredibly inefficient, but you can probably help it become cost effective with tax breaks due to the fact that it's an entirely local production.
Actually, an interesting solution for hydrogen generation is being experimented with by a number of different groups.
AFRL is one of many attempting to use bacteria to breakdown liquid/semi-solid waste into hydrogen.
Berkeley amongst others are working on ways to generate hydrogen via algae.
I think these experiments have the potential to do some serious damage to our energy needs.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.htm l?topic=&topic_set= More than you ever need to know about Ted Nelson and Xanadu

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,20 705,00.html

Spot the ignoramus.

bah - the Link dropped out, sorry...

Nobody's freedom of speech is being abridged, it's just their anonymity in doing it.

And anonymity is part of free speech. As early as the early 1800s the USSC, US Supreme Court, has ruled that part of free speech is anonymity. A more recent case is from 2002 when Supremes OK Anonymous Free Speech. Here's EPIC's webpage on Anonymity. I found this page from MIT also on USSC upholding anonymity in political speech. And this is EFF's page. Fact is is that the "Federalist Papers" written under the pseudonym "Publius" was written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John James, all Founding Fathers of the USA. They knew how important anonymous political speech was. You enjoy your freedom because they fought for those rights. If you live in the USA that is, but I don't know this. Thomas Jefferson, who did write the DOI, Declaration of Independence, also write pseudonymously

Here's a search of Findlaw on court ruling on privacy anonymous "free speech" "supreme court". Fact is is there's a long history of anonymous political speech in the USA with some of the Founding Fathers exercising it.

Because of humanities tendancy to become arrogant I have always been against nuclear energy. But science is science and progress has been made. The PEBBLE BED REACTORS are THE solution if they work. And apparently they do... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l They do not go nuclear. Not because people have figured out a better 'machine'. It is because the laws of physics do not allow it. And on top of that their waste is not liquid, but are actually just little balls. Which could be shot into space towards the sun. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/ 0,9565,218839,00.html What about safety? The new RTGs, like their predecessors, will have their plutonium encased in layers of protective material that can withstand explosions and impacts. Indeed, in one earlier NASA failed launch, after the unmanned craft crashed back to Earth, its RTG was recovered intact and used on a later mission. And craft with reactors aboard will be launched by conventional chemical rockets, their reactors remaining inactive, or "cold" until they are a safe distance from Earth.

a diamond sheet big enough to cover an iPod screen would still cost more than the unit.

Right now they may be expensive, but with technology to manufacture them being what it is, they may not be much longer.

I'm sorry ... but MS has burned us all so many times that no matter what they say, I will never trust them again. I also don't like their attitude and the attitude of their staff (one of their reps described a tech support policy I find abominable, I said I'd never do business with their employer, the rep snottily said 'okay, remove all MS software from your computer', I responded that I long since quit using their crap and that I'm a Mac user... never got a reply. How predictable).

They ignore antitrust rules (most recently, Microsoft Pulls Its Head Out), they make software that ignores standards (IE), they assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that, and they are a convicted abusive monopolist and should have been broken up but are still operating.

Sorry, Ballmer. Sorry, Bill. You lost me a long time ago. You had lots of chances, and that time is way past over. You dug your own hole. Rot in it.

This is the real article by Bruce Schneier: Sue Companies, Not Coders

An excerpt at Bruce Schneier's web site is titled Liabilities and Software Vulnerabilities. (Scroll down to see it.)

Bruce Schneier is a very smart guy. This statement from his web log is foolish, and not typical: "Somewhere in the middle there is a reasonable amount of liablity, and that's what I want the courts to figure out."

If Bruce Schneier doesn't have a detailed plan, that shows how difficult it is to resolve the matter. "The courts" have very little knowledge or willingness to think carefully about this. In the U.S., court judges are often backed by those who want a weak judicial system, and other people, like U.S. President George W. Bush, who are corrupt and incompetent. For a list of books discussing the corruption, see: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

But the real source of the problem here isn't with the programmers or vendors of software. The real problem is the protected nature of the insurance industry. The insurance industry is structured to prevent competition from technically savvy upstarts that would be capable of underwriting warranties. Consumers aren't averse to signing end user license agreements with strong warranties. Nor are vendors averse to consulting contracts where the consultant's code quality is underwritten and guaranteed. The problem is basically the way capital is concentrated by the laws of the society. Those laws determine what kind of people have decision-making authority. Right now those laws are biased toward subsidizing wealth concentration which means we're systematically taking wealth out of the hands of the technically savvy and giving it to those who are wealthy.

The result is all manner of market failures impacting the high tech industry, including a failure of insurance underwriting for software.

The link in the post goes to a LA Times summary of the article. The real article is at Wired.

The real article by Bruce Schnier is in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69247,00. html

Its more interesting than the sound-bite-full ZD-Net summary.

      -dZ.

Two more articles that mention the "100% Pure Java" version of Navigator:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/1762 1/17621.html
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282, 9310,00.html