Slashdot Mirror

Back at the Diamond High Council, I open the film canister and shake the Apollo stones onto the table. Van Royen tentatively picks one up with a pair of elongated tweezers and takes it to a microscope. "Unbelievable," he says slowly as he peers through the lens. "May I study it?" I agree to let him keep the gems overnight. When we meet the next morning in the lobby of the High Council, Van Royen looks tired. He admits to staying up almost all night scrutinizing the stones. "I think I can identify it," he says hopefully. "It's too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless."

Wired had this story on artificial diamonds a while back - The New Diamond Age.

Here is a wired article, with some comments from the owner of the tactics of the diamond cartel: Wired Link

I rarely pick up a copy of Wired magazine nowadays but the Diamond cover was just too enticing. Lots more detail for the geeks in this article including a few choice ones I picked out in response to the parent.

Read the Article Here

In response to your comments:

(1) The artificial diamonds from some techniques were too perfect compared to regular diamonds and could be identified.

(2) DeBeers did launch a campaign called the "Gem Defensive Programme." From the Wired article:

But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gem-quality synthetics has sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem Defensive Programme - a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help distinguish man-made from mined stones.

(3) Diamonds grown with another technique called Chemical Vapor Disposition are indistinguishable from naturally formed diamonds. From the wired article:

To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones.

This was a very interesting article and has made me afraid of buying diamonds. It's like buying a car and having it depreciate faster than the stock market crash.

Not if our buddy Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has his way. He has publicly suggested punishing downloaders with malicious programs that "destroy their computer."

I think I saw a documentary at Discovery Channel about some Russian company that already produces the machines for some years (could be this company). According to the show the traditional diamond industry was so worried that they developed an expensive laser system to discriminate the artificial ones from the natural ones. They could then issue a certificate of 'garanteed blood money' (TM). As a hollywood star/gangsta rapper you of course want to make sure that your hard earned money is well spent on some evil warlord somewhere in Africa.

Hmm... Maybe this letter to Bill is a reality

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/microsoft .html

Just a thought.

Hey - Maybe it was brought back at the time traveler convention.

http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

I know the dates don't match up, but if you can travel in time...

Sadly, they went under. See this Wired Article for more details.

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?

By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.

I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall

Considering how rich George Lucas is, it's interesting to keep hearing him talk about his future projects, how he wants to make smaller movies etc.

"I've earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way," he's quoted as saying. "I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."

I always wonder what the hell that means? Earned the right to fail? Like he wasn't allowed to fail before? Exactly how much money was he supposed to make before he could buy his way into the club of mere mortals who are allowed to fail? Kind of a strange way to approach a creative ambition, I think. What mental process must go on in Lucas's head that he has to actually give himself permission to be creative, and justify it by pointing to his past commercial successes?

In general, I'd love to see a psychological profile of George Lucas sometime. Especially considering some of the truly bizarre moral commandments he's put into his recent films (missing your mom is wrong, getting angry at things is bad and makes you a bad person, if you want to be a hero then relationships are forbidden, etc.) ... don't get me wrong, I like [some of] his movies and all, but I can't help but suspect that despite all his success, Lucas is just sort of a sad, isolated, lonely, messed-up old fucker.

I just Googled to see what I could come up with:

http://www.eschoolnews.org/news/showStory.cfm?Arti cleID=3028
http://www.eschoolnews.org/news/showStory.cfm?Arti cleID=1050
http://www.wmich.edu/facultysenate/FSminutes2002/a pril.htm
http://www.it.utah.edu/leadership/committees/uWebA dvisory/minutes/uWeb_minutes_2002_05.pdf

Interesting:

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/08/24/sto ry101270136.asp
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/slicense.html

But:

http://www.wired.com/news/story/0,1240,10654,00.ht ml

Which does not put the problem in a good light.

I also see references to SPA audits, which does not Google well. :) It also looks like the SPA might now be the SIIA (Si-I-A?).

I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.

Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.

I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).

Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.

Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball ;-)

Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a

"But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well - in general discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope)."

Incorrectly put --> " No it doesn't, the Godwin Point is only reached when comparing to nazis ... your oponents in a discussion."

In the tradition of /. you didn't even read Godwin's law nor Mike Godwin's discussion on his own law did you http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_ pr.html/
?

Here's some enlightenment:
"I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

AND

"I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference."

Hiel Herr!

While indeed DVDs often have additional features (like deleted scenes and director commentary like you said), they most often had to replace the original soundtrack by something cheaper.

It's crazy. The license they need to pay for the soundtrack when broadcasting is apparently much cheaper than the one when selling DVDs.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66696,00 .html
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60 890,00.html

And that kind of sucks too.

Tristan.

While indeed DVDs often have additional features (like deleted scenes and director commentary like you said), they most often had to replace the original soundtrack by something cheaper.

It's crazy. The license they need to pay for the soundtrack when broadcasting is apparently much cheaper than the one when selling DVDs.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66696,00 .html
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60 890,00.html

And that kind of sucks too.

Tristan.

``As of now.'' Something about your proposal is worrying me, but as of now I can't put my finger on it.

Yes, it's a good, sensible plan for today, but there's this terrible little flaw which keeps it from being a long term solution.

Actually , there are a heap load of conflicting storys . Some say he definantly did , some say he didn't others say he didn't with some comments saying oh yes he did and vice versa ..
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,1484,00.htm l
wired says he says he didn't
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates
another one here , its possible it was a slight misquote of something someone said
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BillGatesSixFortyKbytesQuot e
Although we only have his word to deny he ever said it ;) maybe i will cut him this slack , i can only find confirmation from bill gates denying he ever said it ... if i had said it i may deny it too ;)

Although i probably could of used his quotes that are definantly known , such as the internet being a fad or "Probably the fastest conventional telephone dial-up modem you'll ever have is 28.8."

So i withdraw the origional quote having been unable to find any concrete confirmation of him having said it.
But he dosn't have the best record of predictions which was my point

Who said that?

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,1484,00.htm l

~S

You are so wrong.

Terrorism happened mere months after Clinton was elected. In the same place!

And we ignored it and went on with our happy little lives.

It has been shown that the Patriot Act was a wish list from Ashcrofts Justice Department, that was pushed shortly after 9/11 when the nation was still fearfull.

Yes, the nation was fearful. You're beginning to catch on. We're not fearful now, and we can scale the Patriot Hacked back a bit.

Some Congressmen logged complaints about having to vote on a bill that was printed the same morning as the vote. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/gov.us.fed.con gress.record.extensions/browse_thread/thread/b3f12 7369d4139e7/45b17e93fcb2648b? As a point of fact the bill presented to the House that morning was not even the same bill that was discussed and passed earlier by the Judicary committee. Instead of mounting criticism on the House leadership, Republicans spun rhetoric and fear.http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,475 49,00.html

Whoop-tee-do. The Patriot Hacked was rushed through, so what? We know that.

There will always be partisan nay-sayers, people who will argue that black is white and apples are really seven. There was a minority view at the time that said we deserved the 9/11 attacks, because America is just bad.

In 2004 when other parts of the bill were set to expire, the Republicans saw that they may not get the votes that they wanted in time. What did our leaders do? They extended the vote by 23 minutes to give the Republican leadership enough time to strongarm other Republicans who had all ready voted against the renewal to change the vote that was all ready cast. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/07/09/MNGQC7IV231.DTL

Now you're telling me that the mechanism of Congress is messy? Heavens to Betsy! That's not a convincing argument of anything in particular.

Republicans openly manipulate the system, bending and breaking the rules as they see fit. You may call it politics, I call it criminal.

"Criminal"? How naive can you be? It's the way things happen in Washington, or in business, or in baseball, or in soup kitchens. The rules are bent everywhere, because the rules can't possibly fit every situation.

Besides that, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. You've decided you don't like the Republicans, or at least the current crop, and so you find the slightest irregularity and call it "criminal". That's the kind of thing that makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of Chicken Littles, crying about the sky falling.

Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. There are no excuses for their actions. All of them were placed into office with the expectation that they would not put their heads up their collective butts in case of a national emergency.

I don't know of a single case of craniorectal inversion (CRI, TM) in governement after 9/11.

I could compare it to the rise of the Nazi party in the 30's by playing on the fear of the citizens, instead I will leave that exercise up to you.

Oh, now you've played the Nazi card. Get real.

cheers

You are so wrong.
Terrorism happened mere months after Clinton was elected. In the same place!

It has been shown that the Patriot Act was a wish list from Ashcrofts Justice Department, that was pushed shortly after 9/11 when the nation was still fearfull.

Some Congressmen logged complaints about having to vote on a bill that was printed the same morning as the vote. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/gov.us.fed.con gress.record.extensions/browse_thread/thread/b3f12 7369d4139e7/45b17e93fcb2648b?
As a point of fact the bill presented to the House that morning was not even the same bill that was discussed and passed earlier by the Judicary committee. Instead of mounting criticism on the House leadership, Republicans spun rhetoric and fear.http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,475 49,00.html

In 2004 when other parts of the bill were set to expire, the Republicans saw that they may not get the votes that they wanted in time. What did our leaders do? They extended the vote by 23 minutes to give the Republican leadership enough time to strongarm other Republicans who had all ready voted against the renewal to change the vote that was all ready cast. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/07/09/MNGQC7IV231.DTL

Republicans openly manipulate the system, bending and breaking the rules as they see fit. You may call it politics, I call it criminal.

Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. There are no excuses for their actions. All of them were placed into office with the expectation that they would not put their heads up their collective butts in case of a national emergency.

I could compare it to the rise of the Nazi party in the 30's by playing on the fear of the citizens, instead I will leave that exercise up to you.

That explains how a bunch of poor, illegal immigrant high school students beat the best and brightest from MIT in a robotics competition.

Does prior art trump a design patent like it would an idea patent?

2002 - Ok, design doesn't match, but it's a nice effort:
http://www.wired.com/news/images/0,2334,56086-5302 ,00.html

2004 - Hrmmm... make it slightly thinner, and viola, it's the same damn thing.
http://www.macmod.com/content/view/166/2/

Actually, he's now an editor at Wired News.

Voodoo Killer? 3Dfx's Voodoo cards were the first products I can remember being targeted for "killing." Graphics history buffs know Voodoo got eaten by NVIDIA.

Unless the market leader makes it very difficult and/or inconvenient to switch, they can get killed. What makes the Blackberry so un-killable?

... Leander Kahney (of 'Cult of Mac' book fame) received much heat in February over his "Hide Your iPod; Here Comes Bill" story for Wired describing Micro$oft employees being admonished for using iPods at work. I think /. might have even linked that story. Well, it later turned out (according to other journalists and MS employees) that many of his quotes and sources were possibly somewhat nonsensical and not representative of the entire M$ campus culture.

Now, I, being a big fan of Leander, have noticed that it's been nearly two months since a posting has appeared on his once daily blog, and he hasn't published a story for Wired in nearly three months either.

So it looks like Wired might be doing a lot of house cleaning lately....

... Leander Kahney (of 'Cult of Mac' book fame) received much heat in February over his "Hide Your iPod; Here Comes Bill" story for Wired describing Micro$oft employees being admonished for using iPods at work. I think /. might have even linked that story. Well, it later turned out (according to other journalists and MS employees) that many of his quotes and sources were possibly somewhat nonsensical and not representative of the entire M$ campus culture.

Now, I, being a big fan of Leander, have noticed that it's been nearly two months since a posting has appeared on his once daily blog, and he hasn't published a story for Wired in nearly three months either.

So it looks like Wired might be doing a lot of house cleaning lately....

When you write such riveting articles with titles like "Read The F***ing Story, Then RTFM" we know that you must be a gem of a freelancer! I wouldn't know for sure though, I couldn't RTFS or the FM. I'm a Slashdotter afterall.

What I found funny about the quotes given by "Carmella" is that they were mirrored on several other sites with the citation leading back to the Wired article.

From this article entitled "Spyware on My Machine? So What?":

I had a good idea what the Marketscore software does, though I didn't read the entire user agreement," said 19-year-old New York University student Keith Caron. "In general when any application asks to install another application, I assume the other application is spyware. But you have to support spyware if you're going to have free file-sharing applications. Fair's fair.

I had a good idea what Delio was doing when she wrote these articles, though I didn't read the entire thing," said 26-year-old Slashdotter Bill Roehl. "In general when any story is posted to the main page, I assume it's full of worthless bullshit that no one cares about. But you have to support Slashdot if you're going to be a Slashbotter. Fair's fair in addiction."

I know that I was asked many times to answer simple questions on campus. I usually would give some valid reply and list a fake name and address. They can have my thoughts but why would I ever give them my personal information.

"Keith" seems like a typical college student from 2004, IMHO, most of them don't give a shit as long as they can get their music free and fast.

In this article, Lawrence Lessig explains why broadband sucks in the US - but he draws almost the opposite conclusion to the author of this piece...."Let the markets, both private and public, compete to provide the service that telecom and cable has not."

For some more about Bram read the article in Wired a few months ago. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorren t.html?pg=1&topic=bittorrent&topic_set=/

Wired did an article about Cohen in January.

It was a hoax.

But there is so much disinformation out there, it's hard to know who to believe sometimes.

Oh, and check out this quote from the article (on page 3):

"Hilary Rosen would prefer it if the world's youth didn't think she was hopelessly uncool. She has an iPod."

Interesting to note the article where she has an iPod is from February 2003, but her recent article (from TODAY) says she just got an iPod!!!!:

"The new iPod my girlfriend gave me is a trap."

Hillary, you have been dismissed as a non-credible witness. and a moron.

Hillary using an iPod

haha. what a lameass.

Bill Scannell, the webmaster behind unrealID.com, is also the webmaster behind papersplease.org
link.
I think he was profiled in wired awhile back.
He is a publicist/lobbyist who works closely with john gilmore on privacy issues.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,57909,00. html
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64249,00. html

Bill Scannell, the webmaster behind unrealID.com, is also the webmaster behind papersplease.org
link.
I think he was profiled in wired awhile back.
He is a publicist/lobbyist who works closely with john gilmore on privacy issues.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,57909,00. html
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64249,00. html

Of course this is slashdot and we are supposed to think alike and reflexively be against anything the government does in the security arena.

Not like there are good reasons or anything.

The people in Washington are the most crooked bunch I've seen since Nixon.
And they can be quite nosy when they want to.

They've just learned to hide better now; the Patriot Act
makes hiding that stuff completely legal. Quite convenient, that.

• Some nasty Samsung phone back in the mid-90s
• A Nokia 5190 (for which I had a faceplate that matched my indigo iBook G3, the toilet seat edition)
• A Nokia 8290, still one of my favorite phones ever
• A Nokia 3390, which I never really liked (too big)
• Another 8290...
• An Ericsson T28 Worldphone (hands-down worst UI I've ever seen on a phone, but at least I could make calls from Italy on it)
• A 1st gen Danger Sidekick (actually, I had four of them... They kept dying on me)
• A Motorola Mpx200 running Smartphone 2002
• An Audiovox SMT 5600 (aka Typhoon) running Windows Mobile 2003

That said, I am pretty envious of the visual styling on the Moto Razr; those things are incredibly cool. But being able to sync to an Exchange server, and write C#-based managed applications in Visual Studio 2005 for my phone are totally killer features in my book.

I'm really looking forward to the day when I can just keep my music on my phone, or stream it over the network via gprs, instead of having to keep my iPod on me at all times.

And yes, I do work for Microsoft. And I do work on Visual Studio, so take my words with whatever grain (or grains) of salt you feel necessary. That said, I really do feel like the products we have in the marketplace today in this space are really cool, and well-worth looking into, especially since Cingular decided to keep carrying the SMT 5600 after their ATT merger.

See this piece from Wired:

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,576 13,00.html

Spam is one big pyramid scheme.

Except, its market share is only 35%.. which is far from a monopoly. (For comparison, yahoo is at 32%)

Only here on slashdot does everyone think google completely controls the web search market.

Europeans takes their noise pollution very serious. There's even a research institute dedicated to Accoustic Ecology.

Although many of the articles also cover both cites in Canada and the USA.

European cities with more than 250,000 residents are being required to install noise pollution monitors

Europoean Union Says "Quiet" - The European Union is requiring all cities with populations over 250,000 to develop noise maps in an effort to reduce exposure to bothersome and harmful noise levels. Paris leads the way, with maps available online, allowing residents to zoom in and explore sound levels in their own neighborhoods. "It's been an exceptional success," said Paris Deputy Mayor Contassot. "We could doubtless halve the amount of noise. That, to me, seems to be an entirely realistic goal." A WHO report estimated that 40 percent of EU residents -- 150 million people -- are exposed to road traffic noise exceeding 55 decibels (the level that the WHO deems a "serious annoyance") and that over 30 percent suffer noise levels at night that disturb sleep. Brussels has already used its maps to identify people eligible for soundproofing subsidies because of excess traffic noise.

Microsoft will now announce that Microsoft will announce security alerts within one business day of their reporting to Microsoft. Microsoft announces that any security holes not announced by Microsoft must therefore not exist. It's the industry standard: "We have a policy that we are not being hacked."

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67447,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_1

After reading that story and seeing some quotes, such as:

1) On Friday, broadcasters vowed to take their fight to Congress and push for broadcast-flag legislation that "preserves the uniquely American system of free, local television," said Edward Fritts, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters.

2) "Without a broadcast flag, consumers may lose access to the very best programming offered on local television," Fritts said. "This remedy is designed to protect against unauthorized, indiscriminate redistribution of programming over the internet."

makes me think... What on earth is this Fritts talking about?

Free local television is not uniquely American first of all... and secondly, in American and Canada... how many people out of the whole are actually only getting "rabbit ear" television where cable is offered also?

I think this guy is talking nonsense.

WAKE UP!

Your in/from europe? Then just go back to sleep (you must have been for two years now). The US didn`t start forcing this on its own population *it started forcing this upon europe* assuming the EU would be slow, inneficient and all "democratic" like. (Slow? yes, democratic? no. don`t they remember the patent and traffic data stories?)

I guess this is just a "eating ones own dogfood" situation. Good news for USians though, on the passport front the US is reconsidering trading the security of the passports (mainly unauthorized reading) against ease of implementation and a slightly sooner rollout date. After thousands of people told them so they think that the Basic Access Control part of the spec they are paying and shoving down others throat may actually be there for a reason... A TSA official was quoted as saying: "Engineers designing security features for a reason? gee what an idea, Imagene what would heapon if we would think things through like that all beforehand and stuff. Wanna build a monorail?... everyone! monorail, monorail monorail".

Think I am cynical? read the EU`s research center`s arguments for these things:
"The large-scale introduction of biometric passports in Europe provides Member States with a unique opportunity to ensure that these have a positive impact, and that they enable the creation a vibrant European industry sector. Two conditions would appear to be necessary for this to happen. Firstly, the creation of a demand market based on wide user acceptance, by clearly setting out the purpose and providing appropriate safeguards for privacy and data protection. Secondly, the fostering of a competitive supply market for biometrics. This is unlikely to emerge by itself and will need kick-starting by governments - in their role as launch customers, not as regulators."

An opportunity to ensure things don`t get f@#$ed up? yeah I want one of those, hell give me two! What, they can cost money? lets give everyone one then!

Some of thoses changes where not ask for by the US.

And I was personally had hoped Lucas and Spielberg knew the significance of that (and maybe artistically and personally had been doing some of the same).

Lucas himself claims in latest Wired "to have a stack of ideas piling up on his desk for "highly abstract, esoteric" films even more daring than his 1971 debut, THX 1138".

Revisiting a classic set of movies a few decades after the original should have been a opportunity to showcase their sophistication and growth, but they turned out more fizzle then a bang. I guess success can be creative failure.

I'll be curious to see if Lucas can climb out from under the machine he's built and make the kinds of films he claims to have intended to. Spielberg I have no hope for.

PDF Usability Crimes
http://www.g4tv.com/screensavers/features/45796/PD F_Usability_Crimes.html

"I hate PDF..."
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64 346,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

PDFs suck, people!
http://www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/pc/computer/pdf- suckweb.txt

WHY PDFS SUCK
http://jessey.net/archive/2005/02/16/pdfs-suck/

I guess I'm really not to surprised that so many people can't or won't get the whole "PDF" issue. PDFs are not web pages, plain and simple. The use of PDFs for other than for their intended purpose is, yes, less than professional. Of course, I never expected to see so many adobe fan boys here at /., either.

Oh, and of course, the fact that it's a proprietary file format is just so totally irrelevant ... sure.

As well, what happened to your sense of humor? Perhaps that cubicle is really starting to get to you?

If the quetion lies within the definition of vaporwear:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&oi=defmore&q =define:vaporware
"description of software/features that is/are not currently available but may never be available"

In other words: When a company claims to be working on or completing software that is unlikely to exist or to ever be completed. Prime examples: Duke Nukem Forever

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61935, 00.html
"The company's perennial absentee title, Duke Nukem Forever, is still vaporware. The first-person shooter, now in its sixth year of development, earned almost as many votes as all the other nominations combined."

It refers to the efforts encouraging expansion of nuclear power facilities, as from site: http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/chi na.html The "To meet that growing demand..." paragraph specifically refers to official support and advocation of the traditional designs, and the Tsinghua design based on the HTR-10 type nuclear reactors; it also inferred the later use of hydrogen to store a quantity of energy produced by for instance electrolyzing water on a massive scale, pressurizing the hydrogen into tanks and using them with hydrogen fuel cells to recombine hydrogen with oxygen and recover a significant percentage of the energy used to electrolyze the water originally. These efforts are what was referred to.