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Hearing Aids for the Unimpaired http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68419,00. html

Actually Gates never said that. It's just an internet legend. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00. html

Wired News quoting the VP for Engineering:

"The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around," said Rosing, a former executive vice president of engineering at Sun Microsystems.

yep, with programs such as WinHoldem, it makes cheating a lot easier!

it even has a link for Detection Avoidance advice.

from this article: , one poker bot feature is Team Mode: Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table.

How many people need to tell you what is happening before you catch on? Unlike the poor, uneducated masses that line the slot machines at many casinos, once a rat is seen online - people leave in droves. Information moves at the speed of light, and online casinos can turn from full to empty in minutes, not days. Nobody goes on benders or tilt online.

Wired splits the fucking scam right down the middle in their expose.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Bot

(Posting anonymously for career protection.)

The problem has been posited as researchers v. software companies. The problem is, there are some researchers who work for software companies, some very dirty software companies, and their management would very much like to take market share from their competitors.

Someone else gets hurt? That's Cisco's problem.

-----------

        WN: So ISS knew the seriousness of the bug.

        Lynn: Yes, they did. In fact, at one point ... they apparently didn't get it, and they actually wanted to distribute the full working exploit very widely inside the company.... I was told ... "Give this to all the sales engineers and to all the pen testers."

        WN: Why would they want you to do that?

        Lynn: Well, because it bruises Cisco, remember? Mind you, this was something that Cisco hadn't gone public with yet and that's not useful to pen testers because what do they advise their customers to do (to protect themselves if no information about the vulnerability has been released yet)?

        I told them, "You do realize if you do that, it's going to leak?" And (one of the ISS guys) says, "That's Cisco's problem." And then (another ISS guy) turns to me and says that they need to understand this could be their Witty worm. I was like, Whoa, what meeting did I walk into?

        (The Witty worm was a particularly aggressive and destructive code released by someone last year that targeted computer systems running a security program made by Internet Security Systems and even more specifically targeted military bases using the software. It infected more than 12,000 servers and computer systems in about an hour. Because of the worm's speed in spreading and its creators' apparent knowledge of who ISS' customers were, some security experts speculated that someone working for or connected to ISS might have been responsible for writing and releasing it.)

        At that point, I told them all no, and they fought it and I resigned right there on the spot. And this was about a month ago.

        I thought they were handling this in a non-ethical manner. Because it was just way too fast and loose with who can see this.... I mean, I don't even want people to see it now. (ISS talked him out of the resignation by agreeing to give him control over who could see or have the exploit.)

---------

Solar is too inefficient with current technologies.

Although, depending on how you think of it, we've been using stored solar energy all alone. AFAIK, the best solar cells available are plant cells. Using solar energy and storing it in hydrocarbons. When the plants are fossilized, we get fossil fuels.

The question in my mind is, can we simply bypass the 'fossilization" requirement. Wired had an article about one possibility a while back.

The Amminex guys in TFA are light on details so it's hard to tell what exactly they're doing differently or better.

Cohen collected a batch of free porn and used it to lure beta testers.

You might like how I found this.

There's a really neat website called "google.com". I just found out about it a few years ago.

You can type in queries like "bram porn bittorrent" and somehow you'll get a bunch of links to things related to what you've typed. It is really neat, and I recommend you try it out.

I couldn't have said it any better myself. I agree with every single point you've made.

Do you know where I buy most of my games now? Half-Price Books and eBay. I mostly shop for games that were hugely popular back when I was younger, but didn't have the money to buy. I finally got to play Myst and I'm working on Riven, for example. I look for games that will work with ScummVM. Today's hit games look completely boring to me.

That last console I owned was a Playstation. I've considered buying an Xbox or PS2 or GameCube, But every time I start thinking about it, I look through the respective consoles' libraries and realize that only 2-3 titles spark my interest. You're completely on the mark -- every title looks the same. I would say that Nintendo has a slight edge with gaming innovation, but even they only have a few games I would consider purchasing.

I remember when the Sims came out and being blown away by the concept. But here we are six years later, and the Sims have hardly changed at all. Ditto for the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

I would add that there may be some hope out there... There many games being being produced by small developers (like PopCap, and the people writing Flash games) that are truly excellent. Engaging, fun, simple, and they don't require a 100+ hour time commitment. When this whole industry finally implodes, the small, independent developers may be the only ones left standing.

In case you haven't seen it before, there is an excellent article in Wired which discusses the rise of indepenent game developers.

where this type of extremely anti-consumer idea was ORigINally HATCHed
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59298,00 .html

(yes, i know. missing an R)

The animators you mentioned may be not be able to use Mickey Mouse, but that just means that they have to create their own character. That's actually forcing innovation.

That's forcing invention, and invention is not required for innovation. For a technical example, Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they innovated it by using a hard drive and a much faster connection interface.

First of all, characters like Cinderella are public domain, and have been used in productions such as "Into the Woods" without reprecussions as far as I know.

Yes, you can do stories based off the old fabels, but you can't do stories based off additions to the fabels. For example, you could write your own book or make your own movie on Dorothy Gale and her adventures in OZ, because the copyrights on the books have expired. But if you want to use the Ruby Slippers, which MGM added to the 1939 movie to show off the new technicolor process, you have to walk over to MGM's office to get permission, and you better be carrying a fat checkbook.

Another reason to be concerned about perpetual copyrights is because one already exists: Peter Pan. The profits go to a children's hospital, and there isn't a politician in the world who would go against funding it. It looks like the only thing that's going to stop Disney, a purely commercial interest, from having copyrights as long as the GOSH hospital is a ruling by the Supreme Court. But the current court has already ruled in favor of extentions, and with two business friendly nominees on the way, I wouldn't count on these ludicrous extentions to end for a few decades.

there are quite a few cases where foreign copyrights were not respected across the international border, particularly in the United States up to about 1960

What's funny is that the major "intellectual property" industries were themselves founded on ripping people off. Aside from the nice weather, Hollywood ended up in California to get away from Thomas Edison's patents on cameras. The radio and recording industries used loopholes to avoid paying royalties to musicians and song writers. The real problem with P2P isn't that it fails to pay out royalties, it's that it puts control in the hand of the end user, rather than a giant corporation out to make insane amounts of money.

I once saw a sensible suggestion from a Slashdot poster. Go ahead and have endless copyrights, but start charging the copyright holder fees after a certain period, let's say 50 years for an individual, and 25 for a corporation. The fee would probably have to start off flat to avoid Hollywood accounting, and it would increase by a percentage every year. Say the fee starts at $500, and increases by 5% a year, all the way up to 100%. After 5 years you'd be paying $800, in 20 it would be $80,000 a year, and at 30 years, $80 million. This would give the public something back for having to put up with long copyrights, while the holder could maintain his monopoly, though it would be unfeasible to do it forever.

The Gemesis process does have inclusions that tend to produce defects and coloring. However, diamond made by Chemical Vapor Deposition is better than what you dig up - the only way to tell it apart is because it's too perfect.

Here's more info on Apollo and Gemesis.

I would be quite impressed if you built your own - it was my understanding that getting small enough components was a pain in the ass unless you're buying in bulk. I could be wrong - if so, kudos :)

As I don't have the skills, knowledge, to do it myself I can't but a friend does. I don't know about the availability of parts though.

Senate bill would ban P2P networks

Because P2P has legitimate uses I don't see how the USSC wouldn't strike any law that outlaws them as an abridgement of freedom of speech. It'd be like outlawing printing presses or copy machines. But if they did I'd be joining those saying "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", Thomas Jefferson. As for a broadcast flag, Court yanks down FCC's broadcast flag. On taxing of storage media the US has had that at least since cassette tapes came out. I notice the article theregister.co.uk which you find particularly bothersome, much as I do, is more than 3 years old. If I recall right the bill went down in flames.

# The inability [papersplease.org] to travel by air in the US if you're not willing to obey laws you're not even allowed to see

Yea, "Wired magazine" had an article about John Gilmore two or three years ago. To see if it was online I did the search above and see they have a bunch of others. I'll want to go through and read them, and save them on my hd along with other articles about it. I will after I post this.

trouble [wm3.org] you can get into if you behave counterculturally in redneck America

It's not like I don't know that, I've following the case of political prisoner Leonard Peltier who was falsely conficted of murdering two FBI agents and has been in prison for more than 25 years, as well as Mumia Ab Jamal another person falsely conficted of killings, in this case of police officers. Oh, and I wouldn't call it redneck America as there are many flavors of redneck, me for instance. I've been called a long haired or hippy redneck.

Actually because of my speaking out on different issues and policies of the US government I've been called a traitor or hater of the USA, or in the case of Israel an antisemite but I'm not, it's the policies and deeds I disagree with. While I hate politics I'm passionate about liberty.

As for restrictive DRM policies, in part because these policies are getting so restrictive the Creative Commons are getting stronger. And I see this as continuing.

While I'll do what I can, I find the fact that the scenario had been modeled disturbing in light of the disorganized response. The more so since President Bush has said no one predicted the levees being breached.

What part of my argument specifically is it that makes you 'see red'?

Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation. Just one. In fact, I'll settle for a conceptual model. You see, I've heard this argument again and again, and I've never seen anybody actually manage to justify that statement about copyright stifling innovation.

You must be new here. I'll be happy to provide more than one. Music? Remixing has been affected. Internet radio has certainly been stifled by copyright law too. Of course, you can't mention copyright infringement without mentioning P2P. Here, the law puts Bram Cohen's BitTorrent in possible legal jeopardy because of what he said, not how his software works. That's tantamount to thought crime. Why is there no iTunes-like software for my DVD collection? Probably because circumventing CSS, or distributing software that does the same, is a felony in the US. Being an author, you'll find this interesting: Encryption researchers are afraid to publish their findings thanks to copyright law.

But it's not just music, software, movies, and books being affected, it's everything. A frickin' universal garage door opener manufacture got hit with a DMCA lawsuit. If you don't have bags of money sitting around, one lawsuit, regardless of whether or not you are victorious, can put you out of business. I could go on, but I think I've more than adequately met your requirements. Copyright in the USA has gotten way out of hand and is damaging innovation and invention in practically every industry.

In fact, it's COPYRIGHT that protects the open source movement from being downright raped by corporations like Microsoft!

I assume you are referring to the GPL. You do realize that the GPL was designed to be the anti-copyright, right? Allow me to quote the pertinent part:

The GPL, on the other hand, subtracts from copyright rather than adding to it. The license doesn't have to be complicated, because we try to control users as little as possible. Copyright grants publishers power to forbid users to exercise rights to copy, modify, and distribute that we believe all users should have; the GPL thus relaxes almost all the restrictions of the copyright system. The only thing we absolutely require is that anyone distributing GPL'd works or works made from GPL'd works distribute in turn under GPL. That condition is a very minor restriction, from the copyright point of view. Much more restrictive licenses are routinely held enforceable: every license involved in every single copyright lawsuit is more restrictive than the GPL.

In other words, if it weren't for copyright, there would be no need for the GPL. It exists because of copyright.

What part of my argument specifically is it that makes you 'see red'?

Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation. Just one. In fact, I'll settle for a conceptual model. You see, I've heard this argument again and again, and I've never seen anybody actually manage to justify that statement about copyright stifling innovation.

You must be new here. I'll be happy to provide more than one. Music? Remixing has been affected. Internet radio has certainly been stifled by copyright law too. Of course, you can't mention copyright infringement without mentioning P2P. Here, the law puts Bram Cohen's BitTorrent in possible legal jeopardy because of what he said, not how his software works. That's tantamount to thought crime. Why is there no iTunes-like software for my DVD collection? Probably because circumventing CSS, or distributing software that does the same, is a felony in the US. Being an author, you'll find this interesting: Encryption researchers are afraid to publish their findings thanks to copyright law.

But it's not just music, software, movies, and books being affected, it's everything. A frickin' universal garage door opener manufacture got hit with a DMCA lawsuit. If you don't have bags of money sitting around, one lawsuit, regardless of whether or not you are victorious, can put you out of business. I could go on, but I think I've more than adequately met your requirements. Copyright in the USA has gotten way out of hand and is damaging innovation and invention in practically every industry.

In fact, it's COPYRIGHT that protects the open source movement from being downright raped by corporations like Microsoft!

I assume you are referring to the GPL. You do realize that the GPL was designed to be the anti-copyright, right? Allow me to quote the pertinent part:

The GPL, on the other hand, subtracts from copyright rather than adding to it. The license doesn't have to be complicated, because we try to control users as little as possible. Copyright grants publishers power to forbid users to exercise rights to copy, modify, and distribute that we believe all users should have; the GPL thus relaxes almost all the restrictions of the copyright system. The only thing we absolutely require is that anyone distributing GPL'd works or works made from GPL'd works distribute in turn under GPL. That condition is a very minor restriction, from the copyright point of view. Much more restrictive licenses are routinely held enforceable: every license involved in every single copyright lawsuit is more restrictive than the GPL.

In other words, if it weren't for copyright, there would be no need for the GPL. It exists because of copyright.

What part of my argument specifically is it that makes you 'see red'?

Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation. Just one. In fact, I'll settle for a conceptual model. You see, I've heard this argument again and again, and I've never seen anybody actually manage to justify that statement about copyright stifling innovation.

You must be new here. I'll be happy to provide more than one. Music? Remixing has been affected. Internet radio has certainly been stifled by copyright law too. Of course, you can't mention copyright infringement without mentioning P2P. Here, the law puts Bram Cohen's BitTorrent in possible legal jeopardy because of what he said, not how his software works. That's tantamount to thought crime. Why is there no iTunes-like software for my DVD collection? Probably because circumventing CSS, or distributing software that does the same, is a felony in the US. Being an author, you'll find this interesting: Encryption researchers are afraid to publish their findings thanks to copyright law.

But it's not just music, software, movies, and books being affected, it's everything. A frickin' universal garage door opener manufacture got hit with a DMCA lawsuit. If you don't have bags of money sitting around, one lawsuit, regardless of whether or not you are victorious, can put you out of business. I could go on, but I think I've more than adequately met your requirements. Copyright in the USA has gotten way out of hand and is damaging innovation and invention in practically every industry.

In fact, it's COPYRIGHT that protects the open source movement from being downright raped by corporations like Microsoft!

I assume you are referring to the GPL. You do realize that the GPL was designed to be the anti-copyright, right? Allow me to quote the pertinent part:

The GPL, on the other hand, subtracts from copyright rather than adding to it. The license doesn't have to be complicated, because we try to control users as little as possible. Copyright grants publishers power to forbid users to exercise rights to copy, modify, and distribute that we believe all users should have; the GPL thus relaxes almost all the restrictions of the copyright system. The only thing we absolutely require is that anyone distributing GPL'd works or works made from GPL'd works distribute in turn under GPL. That condition is a very minor restriction, from the copyright point of view. Much more restrictive licenses are routinely held enforceable: every license involved in every single copyright lawsuit is more restrictive than the GPL.

In other words, if it weren't for copyright, there would be no need for the GPL. It exists because of copyright.

Wired has an article about DirectNIC and their sister company here:
http://wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,68725,00.html? tw=wn_tophead_1

It's been done. It would be FAR more useful to help out an existing site.

http://wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,68720,00.html? tw=wn_tophead_2

That Wired article lists Craig's List and a few other sites offering matching services.

I think the answer is that the games industry needs a better way to market the "Long Tail". There ought to be more money made in the 90% least popular titles than in the 10% most popular.

Retail don't cut it: the industry needs an iTunes/Amazon-like way of connecting to the consumer.

This is what we're trying to do in the mobile gaming space: http://mpowerplayer.com/. Check it out.

Here's the Wired article on Long Tail: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

I'll not start on Microsoft and their sponsorship of groups like the Alexis de Tocqueville institute or I'll e here all night.

This is the first I've heard of this, and it's rather ironic. Much as Thomas Jefferson believed the corporate aristocracy could be the downfall of the US so did Alexis de Tocqueville. In his "Democracy in America" he was awed by the freedom from government and corporations he saw Americans enjoying during his tour in the 1820s. Basically Americans ruled themselves. He probably would of loved open source.

Oh, I see where it may of come from, Did MS Pay for Open-Source Scare?

The New Diamond Age

Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.

Next up: the computing industry.

By Joshua Davis

Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless steel jeweler's loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten's marbled and gilded living room on the edge of the city's gem district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80 percent of the world's rough and polished diamonds move through the hands of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten, a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit of the Hasidim.

"This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars."

"I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him.

He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.

"These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope.

"No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars."

Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says, "these stones will bankrupt the industry."

Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure - say, 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres - and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in Earth's mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab isn't easy, but that hasn't kept dreamers from trying. Since the mid-19th century, dozens of these modern alchemists have been injured in accidents and explosions while attempting to manufacture diamonds.

Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by year's end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the public's perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors.

Diamond, it turns out, is a geek's best friend. Not only is it the hardest substance known, it also has the highest thermal conductivity - tremendous heat can pass through it without causing damage. Today's speedy microprocessors run hot - at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon. But manufacturers have been loath even to consider using the precious material, because it has never been possible to produce large diamond wafers affordably. With the arrival of Gemesis, the Florida-based company, and Apollo Diamond, in Boston, that is changing. Both startups plan to use the diamond jewelry business to fina

Maybe you should be concerned. 4 people were recently indicted for installing spy ware on their lovers computers

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68674,00. html?tw=rss.POL

While this makes horse-sense to me, I'd still like to see some numbers. There have to be some examples out there. I wonder if ringtone sales work the same way?

The manufacturing process to refine and synthesis and transform all those raw materials into a computer has the environmental impact of an SUV. The average desktop computer and 17-inch CRT takes 1.8 tons of water, fossil fuels and chemicals to make. Refinement and manufacturing are resource intensive, especially when high levels of purity are required. For example from the article, "Making a 2-gram memory chip requires 1.3 kilograms (1,300 grams) of fossil fuels and materials." The most effective way to reduce the environmental impact of the manufacture of the unit is to extend the life of the unit.

I realize that suburban utility vehicles (SUVs) are sacred cows, but they are currently the most prominent symbol for waste of resources. The energy used to operate the computer puts it more in the same class as a refrigerator.

The only thing that is keeping the new 2.0 version of Impress from matching PowerPoint is the lack of slide backgrounds and clip art that really are essential to making a good presentation.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

I can promise you that if you're expecting a cool background and some clip art to push your presentation into "good" territory, you're doomed. An eloquent speaker presenting interesting information can present a great talk with minimal or no slides. But if you're not a good speaker (you can learn) or the information you're presenting isn't interesting (depressingly common for business talks), no amount of clip arts, backgrounds, or even animations will rescue you from giving a crappy presentation. Indeed, that's Tufte's point when he rails against PowerPoint: people have the confused idea that PowerPoint is the key to a good talk. They emphasis is entirely on the wrong part of the presentation development process and the result is a seemingly endless stream of bad presentations. Gah.

The current forecasts of several serious astrophysics forecasters, based on several current solar and astrophysical phenomena, is that substantial cooling is likely over the next 10-40 years, over the log(CO2) forcing. The Irkutsk crowd http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/981669/po sts, Corbyn http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/weather_pr .htmland Landscheidt http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Calen/Landscheidt-1.ht mlstate this quite emphatically in different ways. Stay tuned.

Maybe back to 70s (worried about global cooling and bell bottoms again). Guess the warming was nice while it lasted...

The idea of a distributed search engine is really nothing at all new. I had the same idea last year when building my own small test search engine (it sucked), only to find out that it already existed. All told, I still like the idea...

$1.49 might be too much for the top end, but a price substantially lower than 99 cents could indeed be a step in the right direction. Since plenty of the merchandise sold online is already in 'the long tail', an increase of sales in that segment, might show more clearly to the record companies two things: 1) Hits don't necessarily have the same pulling power in online stores as in the local store with a limited selection of 300 albums 2) Maybe selling three copies of a song at 75 cents is better than one at $1.49?

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

Of course, this could be their goal: to make iTunes less profitable and drive them out of business, then swoop in and offer a different service... Or maybe they want to make iTunes less profitible in order to drive music consumers back to purcashing CDs... ??? </conspiracy_theory>

To further ammend that, the problem is not code reviews, it's the MS design (or lack thereof). Alot of MS exploits are not issues where the code was defective as much as where the design was defective. Take, for example, the Slammer worm. You would ask the SQlServer instance for a database (directory service over UDP), then get a good old buffer overflow by making a bad request (not formatted properly). (My memory is a bit rusty on the details, check out wired for a slightly closer look.)

Code reviews, usually find the "duh" type of bugs. As in, poor control structures, misuse of class/methods. The security type flaws can only be fixed by: better design (what could someone do to this) or having people hack at your solution as part of testing (aha, look what I can do). Now the slammer fix could (and probably was) as simple as a check on the length of the request.

Now (knowing that), if I worked at Microsoft, I would be checking for that in code reviews... I mean they have been bitten by this numerous times and a buffer overflow attack is one of the oldest tricks in the book. And yet this is also a process thing: the guys who wrote the code that performs the search probably don't know alot about low level details, and those guys didn't know the restrictions, which points back to design.

Wired is running a very similar article:

Today, CacheLogic estimates that P2P applications consume between 60 percent and 80 percent of capacity on consumer ISP networks. The fastest growth in P2P usage is coming in Asian nations with high broadband penetration rates, Parker said.

The average size of traded files is growing, too, Parker said, and today exceeds 100 MB.

There is NO WAY IN HELL NeoOffice/J or OpenOffice replace the MS office suite. No matter what people claim, they still break plenty of office docs that get emailed to me, and forget about replacing powerpoint.

That's interesting...I've been MS Office-free over the past year in a workplace which literally thrives on MS Office. NeoOffice/J has, in fact, replaced MS Office, so generalities obviously aren't valid here.

BTW, what exactly do you need in PP that isn't supported by OpenOffice? Maybe a quick review of the evils of PP are in order (if not for you, then the morons who believe PP is their own personal playground).

I saw this and it made me reminisce about Bill Joy's essay http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." This is the kind of tech that makes me think the future might not only not need us but might want to tidily get us out of the way while it's at it.

This is cool stuff but every instance of this stuff should be registered like a lethal weapon and accounted for and contained in class-4 biocontainment before we figure out how we can learn how to safely get rid of this stuff after we are done with it.

In the article, they concerned themselves with the problems of degraded nano particulate floating around and causing problems. Sure, nano dust could cause people to have more asthma or worse, but on the macro scale the potential for problems are apparant too...

One of the things that concerns me is huge almost invisible ribbons or sails of this stuff floating around in our oceans or in our atmosphere trapping and killing fish, whales, birds, and 747's.

Have you walked along the coast of an ocean beach lately? You cannot walk for 2 meters near the high tide line on just about any beech (u.s. mainland) without finding near-indistructable plastic fishing nets or some other human waste. We make our bed we sleep in it.

Robin Hansen has been trying to set up markets in this sort of thing for a while, but with little success. It seems that, for the most part, people get more than a little conservative*, and not only don't want to bet, but also don't want to see the odds.

*I'm using that in the general sense, not the current flame-fest sense.

What an obscure and insightful reference. Great post.

An interesting quote from the wikipedia article you cited:

"[Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker." [4]

As far as a simulation goes, I don't know of any off hand, but I'm sure at some point they've existed. The mathematical models put together in "The Theory of Blackjack" do a pretty darned good job showing it (which, incidentally, are not that simple). If you're looking for a real world example, you only need to take a look at the MIT Blackjack team who was able to win quite a bit in a multi-deck environment.

I just don't think that frequency of variations that are large enough to matter is high enough to make a decent profit at it especially given limited budgets relative to the casino and limits on the bet sizes.

Perfect play is only going to give you a tiny statistical advantage, sometimes in the 1 to 2% range. If you expect to win a large amount of money, you're going to have to spend a lot of time in casinos and start with a massive bankroll. When you do that, you attract attention, and chances are the casino is going to kick you out before you have the chance to do any real damage. Thorpe's book briefly mentions that even in the old days, when casinos all still had single decks, a $200 bankroll at a low limit table would only net you a few bucks an hour, assuming you were playing perfectly. But increase that starting bankroll to $60,000, and the payoff seems more worthwhile.

But I also find it hard to believe that the billion dollar casinos are stupid enough not to do the (very easy) math and implement easy solutions (bigger deck - slightly modified odds) if it really did cost them money.

They have, with mixed results. Pretty much all the casinos now use multiple decks. I've seen a number of rule variations in different casinos, everything from only an even money payout on blackjacks, changes on when the dealer can hit, and even the "infinite shuffle", which is constantly shuffling cards while not in play, so deriving any statistical "memory" of the cards is truly impossible.

The problem is, when casinos try to do this they loose business. You'll have to remember that for every "good" card counter, there are dozens of bad ones; players who understand how to count cards, but either lose track (which is easy to do), start drinking (which is really easy to do), or simply don't play right. The bad counter, or even the person who doesn't know how to count cards but has received advice from others on what to look for in a table, will generally only sit down at tables with favorable odds. That's why you'll often see a casino with two tables right next to each other, one with rules that crush the odds, and one normal. Remember, a casino can make money off somebody who only thinks he knows what he's doing just like they can take money away from someone who doesn't know any better.

Finally, if card counting can't be banned in Canada - then why do those casinos keep having BJ tables and where are all the Canadian BJ millionaires

I have no idea what the rules are in Canada, but it's likely similar to what they've got in New Jersey. In Atlantic City, they can't bar a player for counting cards, due to screwy wording of the gambling laws (casinos can only offer games of chance, not games of skill. If they kicked people out for card counting, they'd be admitting black jack was a skill game). But that doesn't mean they don't kick out counters, they just use another reason, or no reason at all.

I was thinking back to the old days when hole cards were dealt face down. To discourage cheating - I forgot that a lot of casinos deal all cards face up now.

In conventional blackjack, the dealer always shows one card up, and his hole card is face down. Some tables deal all players cards up (to speed up play), while others deal them face down. For the purpose of card counting, it doesn't matter: At the end of the hand the dealer always turns his hole card over, and all players' cards are exposed. The advantages of card counting are felt at the start of the next hand,

It's looking like there should be quite a bit of competition soon in human orbital spaceflight. Here are the various competitors I can think of off-hand:

* USA: Shuttle-derived system, probably with a CEV capsule on top. There's several downsides to a shuttle-derived system, but it keeps the constituencies happy and should have enough government momentum to keep on going.

* Russia and Europe: Kliper's been searching around for financial support for a while, and it looks like they finally got at least -some- funding from Europe.

* China: various iterations of Shenzhou spacecraft

In the private sector:

* t/Space: The (Rutan-affiliated?) company just completed a parachute drop test and water landing of a full-scale model of their proposed CXV space capsule. It's uncertain if they'll get more funding from NASA, but their concept seems sound and may get private investment. Oh, and their web page has some really spiffy videos.

* SpaceX: They've already announced their intent to compete for Bigelow's orbital prize, and their upcoming man-rated Falcon V will be large enough to carry a Gemini-style capsule.

Now what about destinations? Besides the ISS, we've got Robert Bigelow's inflatable space station modules, which should be up and operational by 2010, with several prototype launches before then. He's planning on selling these modules to various groups and countries, so hopefully we'll have several different space stations up there.

Between Shenzhou 8 and 9 China is planning on launching a small orbital laboratory, which Shenzhou 9 will be docking with. Various members of the Chinese space program have also been visiting Bigelow's facility, so perhaps we'll see them doing something with his modules.

The future should be interesting.

Agility, Service-Orientation, Enterprise Architecture, and Software Development

State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs

A lot of bits have been pushed around the blogosphere on the topic of Ajax over the last few months. This includes my own post back in March, which gave a general overview of what Ajax was and what it does. A lot of exciting stuff has happened since then, and Ajax has rapidy matured into a development of major significance. Coverage has been all over the map and runs the gamut from Rasmus' been-there-done-that 30 second Ajax tutorial to Alex Bosworth's list of Ajax Mistakes to the uber-repository of Ajax knowedge, Ajax Matters.

Many of you already know that Ajax is a web client programming style which eschews traditional HTML web pages, which are only sprinkled lightly with JavaScript and reload pretty much every time they are updated or clicked on. Instead, an Ajax web client receives an Ajax JavaScript library into a hidden frame which provides run-time visuals on the main browser window that look and feel very much like a native application. Ajax web clients, once loaded, communicate with XML services on the back end (via a browser's built-in powerful XMLHttpRequest API), and then use JavaScript to manipulate what the users sees programmatically via DHTML.

All of this allows Ajax to provide a compelling user experience because 1) it doesn't reload the web page, and 2) it runs asynchronously allowing background server-side requests for information to be issued, all while the users clicks, types, and otherwise interacts with the application in the foreground. Google Maps is the pre-eminent example of a modern Ajax application: rich, interactive, easy-to-use, and predictive in that it loads the map tiles that are just offscreen in case you need them. This is all very good for web client client development, but why all the attention across the board?

Figure 1: Ajax: The first compelling new client application model since the modern web browser

Because Ajax is a sincerely compelling synthesis of the ubiquitous features found in the most popular Internet browsers is why. Practitioners of Ajax get high-intensity user interaction (end-user productivity), asynchronicity (efficient backround processing), web browser access to web services (web service access, reuse, and interoperability, as well as SOA integration), platform neutrality (browser and operating system agnosticity), and the Ajax feature set can be delivered as a framework you don't have to create yourself (developer productivity).

Individually, these items are very nice, but taken as a whole, working solution and you have something extremely special. While many folks thought the web browser story had stopped around the year 2000, Ajax takes us to a whole new place. Slashdot recently highlighted a notable new article in Wired that claims that the industry, mostly on the basis of Ajax, "has affirmed the viability of the web as a standalone software development platform."

This is no small thing, and has the potential to repave the modern application development landscape. Why? Because Ajax creates a rich and fertile new space for developing software solutions that can reach almost anyone, anywhere whatev

Here's an older article from Wired on just the opposite; a group of students who sucessfully hacked vegas;

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas_pr. html

It's an older article, but it's a good read.

tomacco not sure what the other one is

Well, if you're hiring the psychopaths, it's not a surefire formula... At least, for you.

But they didn't get Heather Robinson, the former AOL staffer who stole celebrities' screen names and worked those "newly found contacts" into various movie deals.

One is a criminal; the other is an "up and coming screenwriter". Obviously there is no consistency in how AOL deals with employee violations.

CRX is essentially Burt Rutan's LEO successor to SpaceShipOne in partnership with Transformational space and under a small contract from NASA.

Don't you mean the CXV?

By the way, there's a rather good article over at Wired which talks about the CXV a little. It includes photos and video of their recent full-scale capsule drop test and water landing:

http://wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68528,00.html?t w=wn_tophead_1

There are some additional photos and videos here.

Yeah that rings a bell. But not from history.

The quote you are thinking of referred to the Xbox launch, not the Playstation 2 launch. Billy G himself said it:

Gates said the 3-D chips in the Xbox would be three times faster than anything on the market and offer nearly unlimited graphical visuals. "We're approaching the level of detail seen in Toy Story 2," he said, referring to the computer-generated kids film from Disney/Pixar.

The original Wired article.

Somehow people keep repeating this quote as a Sony quote. I don't know why. I don't blame you - its very common.

Oh my, I guess no one thought to look anything up for themselves before moderating:

http://www.lamlaw.com/DOJvsMicrosoft/WrapAndFlowWe ek21.html
http://www.chguy.net/news/feb99/demoMS.html
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17 689,00.html

Microsoft made a video showing how IE could be removed, which looked like it had been edited and was false. It would be just as easy for them to make up some 'prior art' for this case.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/1851 2/18512.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/11/ms_legal_m ail_autodestruct/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/24/allchin_de stroy_email_claim/
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/4455 5/44555.html

They may have also destroyed important e-mails. This is not the same as the current case but is worth noting anyway.

Microsoft's past actions shouldn't make it any more believable, in any case.

"because by delegating porn to a particular TLD you can more easily shut it down."

Nope, by supporting a .xxx domain you admit that some porn is allowable. It's the same reason the religious right is opposed to a "sin" tax
V0

That's what things like Secure Audio Path is all about. Microsoft and Intel and the hardware vendors are working hard to keep our computers from BEING "general purpose computers".