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Wired News: Attention Editors: Deep Link Away

Or maybe, Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated

BTW, anyone who reads this post owes me $20, that's my TOS.

I asked a rabbi about that once. I was working for a catering company in Cleveland that does a lot of Jewish events (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on), and the catering company worked with a rabbi who oversaw things to make sure we followed the food laws. So I thought he'd be well qualified to tell me whether a pig-based animal, genetically modified to comply with the Levitical food laws, could be kosher.

I didn't get an answer, though. I couldn't get him to take the question seriously - he seemed to think that no one would go to the trouble of genetically engineering pigs, just to let Jews eat real bacon - which seems oddly naive, given the lengths people have gone to to get around the commandment against working on the Sabbath.

There are lots of questions like this, where advances in science have possibilities that aren't clearly covered under millenia-old religious laws - like how a Muslim on the moon (or worse, a rotating space station) would figure out which way to face to pray.

My first summer job in high school was at the Warren AT&T archives. I wound up staying on for 4 years

The archive is a treasure trove of hardware for sure, but there are an incredible number of technical papers and photographs as well; Bell and Watson's lab notes while developing the phone, research notes on the development of the transistor and the Lab's UNIX flavor and more. David Korn's research notes on Ksh development or Arno Penzias' reports of his accidential verification of cosmic background radiation might be of interest to some /. collectors should the whole lot end up on the auction block.

The place is crazy. It's not just the History of AT&T, it's the Great Library of information technology. Hopefully SBC will see it that way too. Last I heard, they had completed indexing and uncrating over 9 miles of paper case files (researcher's project notes) from the 1890's to 1980's. The number of talented scientists who spent their lives at the Labs helping create the IT infrastructure you're soaking in is astounding. As a research lab supported by a monopoly utility, they had unprecedented resources to explore all kinds of ideas. It's all there. Neat stuff.

One of my favourite pieces was a 1960's prototype for an operator's uniform. Very Star Trek:TOS. Ohura's uniform in gold lamee. Some Suit thought it might be a good idea to have all the operators (almost entirely female at the time) wear uniforms, and this is what they came up with.

But I'm waxing philosophic. SBC will save the tech documents at least, to protect the intellectual property they're buying with the hard assets. As for the old phone booths, recording equipment and videophone prototypes, maybe they'll end up in private collections or museums. Either way, hopefully more people will get to see and appreciate them.

Wake me onces TV companies begin to distribute shows (either paid or free w/ commercials) over something like BitTorrent. If they release an "offical" video file onto the web and then attack anyone who distributes a version without commercials, then there won't be that big of a problem with P2P sites since everyone who watches the show will also see the commercials. The only people who would object would be cable TV providers since they no longer have a purpose. This would also get around any FCC problems.

To make sure people watch the commercials, you can use a custom player/P2P app that disable fast forwarding during commercials the first time it is downloaded or some other method to make sure they watch X seconds commercials for every Y minutes of the show.
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Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof

The only reason the music industry has rights to a monopoly on 'their' music is because Congress is allowed to legislate one for limited times. We the People have the power to take those 'rights' away, especially if it stands in the way of the true intent of copyright: To promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. Given the power of computerized distribution, collaborative filtering, and content creation tools, WE DO NOT NEED to grant the music industry those rights any longer. Copyright is no longer a tool of musicians, but a weapon wielded by corporations against musicians.

The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.

Under these circumstances, I don't mind a beta - but arguably, that doesn't justify many of the other betas mentioned in the article.

This goes way beyond typos. There is a whole cottage industry of people registering domain names that unwary site owners allow to expire. I've heard several stories of church groups who accidentally let their domain expire and within a matter of days it had teen porn on it.

Take a hint from the recording industry who tried to quash mp3 trading by killing Napster.

Doesn't work.

Who needs Suprnova and LokiTorrent anyway? There are so many other websites, IRC channels, and other sources to choose from.

Giants are falling and the gravy train is coming to a halt. No more ivory towers for overpaid script readers and their studio pimps to hide in.

BitTorrent spells the end to bloated, oversexed and overpowered entertainment conglomerations. Distribution will become more and more atomized and people will drink deep from a very broad body of work that is produced by anyone with a creative impulse, not just the "lucky ones" whom a handful of ignorant fools deem worthy of distribution to a mass market.

It's the end of the world as we know it...and I feel fine!!

Take a hint from the recording industry who tried to quash mp3 trading by killing Napster.

Doesn't work.

Who needs Suprnova and LokiTorrent anyway? There are so many other websites, IRC channels, and other sources to choose from.

Giants are falling and the gravy train is coming to a halt. No more ivory towers for overpaid script readers and their studio pimps to hide in.

BitTorrent spells the end to bloated, oversexed and overpowered entertainment conglomerations. Distribution will become more and more atomized and people will drink deep from a very broad body of work that is produced by anyone with a creative impulse, not just the "lucky ones" whom a handful of ignorant fools deem worthy of distribution to a mass market.

It's the end of the world as we know it...and I feel fine!!

I'm about ready to keep a running list of links on breeder reactors since it keeps coming up so much. Wired has a story I'll link to below on them (and nuclear in general). Breeder reactors tend to cost a bit more to operate than traditional reactors, but the allow you to create and recycle the old fuel. Thus eliminating the need for storage sites. France (among others) has 77% of their electricity generated through nuclear power. Recycling the control rods dramatically reduces waste and the resulting waste is much less radioactive.

http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html

Another link to google for is "nuclear waste recycle" (leave out the quotes) There are some links on a different form of recycling as well that I am not talking about. A better search might be "nuclear waste reprocessing" (again, don't use the quotes when searching google).

If they go down this path, it is obvious that Marvel Comics' world domination plans will be complete! They will simply use intellectual property lawsuits based on the Doctor Octopus character... oh Stan Lee, what evil hast thou wrought?

The only time quantity of punishment will affect the behavior of somebody breaking the law is when it is accompanied by certainty of punishment.

Not at all: that's the very reason people play the lottery: their chances of winning are nearly naught, but millions play everyday because they reckon the enormous bounty is worth the ridicule odds.

Likewise, that's the reason a big drop was observed at the height of **AA-instigated lawsuits last year: chances of losing at the P2P game (not winning this time :-) are very small indeed, but the stiff penalty puts many people off, just in case they end up losing.

I particularly like the final sentence:

"In this war, it's hard to beat technology developed 10,000 years ago."

After all Cocaine wants to be free too.

It already is reality

• release a Windows-like, MS-managed window manager for Linux,
• release Office for Linux,
• create a Linux compatibility layer for Windows, and/or
• create a Microsoft-managed Linux distribution?

• release a Windows-like, MS-managed window manager for Linux,
• release Office for Linux,
• create a Linux compatibility layer for Windows, and/or
• create a Microsoft-managed Linux distribution?

I saw the Memo

Did anyone else notice that the following sentence is right out of a Wired News article on the same topic?

"The first-of-its-kind finding not only confirms an earlier theory about the existence of such speeding stars, but also reinforces the notion that the Milky Way spins around a black hole."

Nice plagiarism, fenimor.

Second, this is still only BETA. It is GOOD, but it is only BETA.

Google labels products 'Beta' if the project is not generating revenue yet.

Many examples, Froogle comes to mind apart from Google News: you can list your business in Froogle for free for now.

And what's up with Google maps?? Do you people all ride bicycles on the sidewalk or what?? No one noticed that there is a serious problem with them?

When I drive and print out the map (with a few adjacent streets just in case I get caught up in traffic or miss a turn), I need to know which streets are one-ways. Google maps don't provide that!

Obviously, when working out turn-by-turn directions, that information is hopefully there for Google to take into consideration, but it certainly makes it a less valuable product against competitors if they don't display the one-ways.

This article, dated 17 Jan 2002, says that the system is off. This one, dated 30 june 2002. says its on, ready to be deployed in 2005.

Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement.

Wired had a fairly good article on this recently.
Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can't afford. There's only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.

Here is the better article from Wired all about these types of reactors.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.h tml?pg=4Wired had a story on this some months back.

This has obvious implications.

Well, that would make you uneducated on the issue, and someone who believes a little too much in propaganda.

Stem cells are harvested from embryos used in Invetro fertilization, or they are cloned:

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66533,00. html?tw=wn_tophead_3

Aborted fetuses? Okay...

I sincerely hope the plan is not to outfit each student with one of these ridiculous things. Certainly I learned how to do everything without a computer, and had the honor of seeing computers/internet introduced into the classroom gradually through my education and can tell you that for the most part, they didn't do much.

Most of the uses were for Power Point slides and other useless replacements of existing technology: a blackboard, an eraser, chalk, paper, pencil, etc. It has made research a lot easier, but not necessarily better. You can find stuff faster but is the time savings used to put together more convincing arguments or properly written materials?

I think the $100 laptop is a good idea for schools to have in small numbers, say 1 per classroom at most. If it were up to me I wouldn't have any computers in school outside of a designated "computer lab" as I think they interfere with learning. They are a tool, but they are mostly applied the incorrect way.

I would hope that for the severely impoverished we would worry about other things first, then the laptop. Although certainly it is worthwhile* $100 can buy a lot of books and learning materials.

Negroponte says: "In China they spend $17 per child per year on textbooks. That's for five or six years, so if we can distribute and sell laptops in quantities of one million or more to ministries of education that's cheaper and the marketing overheads go away."

Laptops certainly will have information more current, but laptops also need to be replaced every five or six years, or even less. A broken laptop is more expensive to fix than a broken book.

I would say a better solution is to give each classroom a laptop, say, for every five kids. Then one kid can take it home each night and use it if they wish. But back to my original point, the teacher is the best tool, not the laptop.

* I say worthwhile because the developing world can use more cheap tech. Read "Africa Rising" or look at Ubuntu for example.

The combined cost of Spirit and Opportunity was $820 million dollars. The potential cost of a manned mission to Mars, using off the shelf technology and launching today: $20 billion dollars.

Probes would be cheaper by the dozen. Mass-produce and amortize the R & D and other common costs over 1,000 units.

Zubrin's plan is, shall we say, highly optimistic. (The article you link gives a contrasting figure of $450 billion - at $420 million each for Spirit and Opportunity, I'm amazed to find a number that matches the "thousand times" I pulled out of my butt. :-) )

Humans would be forced to stay on the surface of Mars for roughly 2 (Earth) years, until conditions to launch are optimal again.

Not if - as some plans call for - they only stay a few weeks before launching for home.

Other than the different managers setting the prices for their groups, does Dell use an automated pricing system that sets the final price based on past sales of an item at a given price and a customer group's willingness to pay a certain price? I'm sure they spend a lot of money researching the price points that result in maximum profits for a given customer and I wouldn't be suprised if their website set an "optimally profitable" price point based on the latest market data.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof

Even on systems with limited resources, the lack of proper thread priorities makes the system seem slower than it should be. When MS Word does it's automatic spell check, there shouldn't be a noticeable drop in UI performance (lag between hitting a key and a seeing letter appear) if the CPU intensive tasks ran in the background. The same applies to how FF lags badly when I open a PDF inline or how Explorer's interface locks and doesn't refresh properly when it's previewing a video file or reading from a slow CD drive. The same should apply to background tasks like virus scanners, but they tend to have the added overhead of using IO which is harder to multitask smoothly.

If the program was designed so that the functional part of the application had the highest priority and the eye candy and fluff ran in the background, the user wouldn't be as annoyed with the high peak performance requirements of certain programs.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof

This article is reporting about a paper published in the "Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets". That means it's just an academic paper, not a proposal for NASA funding. These are two totally different things.

Whenever people publish papers about new drilling technology, you don't see people getting all "Drilling Mars is a BAD idea!"

Margarita Marinova (who is apparently a recent MIT graduate) is simply discussing this as an academic paper.

related googled stuff.

Most of the collected data nowadays (and again I don't only mean Kazaa) is plain useless for anything even resembling an aggregate statistic.

Sorry for not posting the original link. But you can read the Wired article. Also, I've read this issue in auto magazines too.

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,63413,00 .html?tw=wn_story_related

So mozilla should drop JPEG too?

Aycock acknowledges there is a potential for viruses and other malicious software to spread outside the classroom.

He says that's why there are precautions, such as security cameras and a ban on all outside electronic equipment in the classroom.

Each student signs a legal form that says a breach of the security means an automatic "F" and a potential criminal investigation.

I guess they think that there is a high risk that a person will intentionally wreak havoc with the knowledge he learns in that class. Then again, this might just be a publicity thing for the class. I doubt that it's more dangerous than a class on computer security and virus/malware prevention in terms of the risk of damage being done.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof

If their customers don't get any spam because they have good filtering, then they have nothing to lose (as long as outgoing bandwidth is properly paid for) from hosting spam. As long as MCI can tell their customers that they're fighting spam, they'll keep their customers. At least, until some other ISPs block them out completely.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof

The counterargument is probably that because google is ubiquitous in search, they have an unfair position in the market from which to do things like this. However, they are anything but a monopoly, so that argument really doesn't wash - especially since it's not illegal to sell LV and a competing product in the same store (unless the competing product is illegal anyway) so it makes no sense to make it illegal to mention them together on the same web page. For reasons intentional or otherwise, MSN Search doesn't show competitor's ads when Searching for LV or GEICO. If it's intentional, then the customer is getting screwed since restricting information like that castrates the power of the search engine.

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Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

Here, I have to disagree. Putting up billboards across the street is not the same thing. This is more like putting a phone tap on the line, and setting it up so that each time someone calls Geico, they get an intercept telling them how wonderful State Farm is.

Except that a phone intercept prevents the person from talking to Geico. This would be more like the Time magazine have an ad in Newsweek or cable providers carries ads for satellite TV. Neither interferes with the customer's ability to achieve their original goal.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

You probably won't get any magic behavior such as your house suddenly turing sentient while you take a nap, but you will definitely see tons of bugs due to the interconnections. Imagine all the problems that occur in companies because software A won't work with software B and extend that to include your room sensors, thermostat, and lights when your sensor system decides to download an upgrade to its firmware but the other systems don't notice.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

Hmm...since Cairo is out and Avalon isn't, the Penguin now has a step up on Redmond in terms of graphics. Granted, Avalon includes some other spiffy 3d eye candy, but this is a first where the Linux GUI beats out the Windows one.

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Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

I don't believe that Microsoft ever intended to push OS/2 even if apps couldn't run in protected mode. Microsoft was going to push Windows no matter how crappie or inferior it was to OS/2. Their flirtation with OS/2 (telling people that it was the future and that they should support it) only made other large developers of the time, namely Wordperfect, spend their time on creating OS/2 versions of their software instead of Windows versions.

When Microsoft put their full push into Windows they were able to put MS Word (along with their other apps) out ahead of everyone else and drive Wordperfect into obscurity. That's not to say that Wordperfect didn't expect this. I used to work with a former Wordperfect executive and they knew full well what Microsoft was up to but they thought that the combination of Wordperfect and IBM would be able to beat Microsoft and so they put pretty much everything into OS/2. By the time they realized that OS/2 wasn't going to catch on it was too late, and the rest is history.

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It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Macs

I wholly agree, this is an ad for google and SEOs posing as news. to quote:
"Conventional wisdom says 97 percent of Google..."
"To find out, I contacted Oneupweb..."
Wired magazine and Adam L. Penenberg should be ashamed of themselves.

if you're looking to control your desktop with your PDA, you can, as this guy did.

also, just to clarify, i think you meant your device does a hard reset when the battery dies (the backup too!)
normally the backup battery is a safeguard to protect your data until you can recharge (you can't turn on your PDA while running on the backup). so unless your backup battery was dead, or you left a long time between battery dying and getting a recharge, you shouldn't have lost anything.

There was an article a while back about a venture to use a giant mirror to project sunlight back at the moon through a filter, thus allowing a logo such as the Internet Explorer E to be projected onto the moon.

This never came to light, nor will this current idea. At least not within the next 10 years. Maybe when technology advances.

After all, why pay that much when I can spam you for free?

Buy my product: here

Most teachers (5 years ago when I was in HS) don't have any idea what the parts of a computer do. Unless they know what the ports do, they would never care if they saw a little extra adapter between the keyboard and the computer's PS2 port. This is why they need to be educated on what their machines do. There is also the chance that the keyboard port was well hidden in the desk so the teacher wouldn't have noticed unless she took the time to explicitly check. This is bad physical security on the part of the school's IT dept.

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Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

She said the scheme was uncovered after authorities learned that the boy had attempted to sell the answers.He seems to have gotten caught because he was greedy. This brings up the question of how many kids have done this (use physical keystroke loggers) and have managed to get away with it. Do IT companies have any scheme to check for this sort of thing other than just locking up the physical case in the desk so the ports aren't reachable?

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

>"The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player."
>No, that's what you say it says. What it says is
>About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod
>note the "who have" in that sentence?

Jesus holy christ. This is the last time I am going to rely to this. Posted below, on three separate lines, are three consecutive sentences from TFA. Draw your own conclusions. The math might be off, everything else might be wrong, but THIS IS WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS. Watch closely. Yes, he says "who have" in the first sentence, but he says "80 percent" twice and the one I'm referring to is the second instance of that. It's kind of tricky, but try to keep up. The part I'm referring to is between a bunch of !!!s. Ready? Here it comes.

1) "About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous.
2) "It's pretty staggering."
3) !!!The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player!!! -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus.

Toy Story, IIRC, was 10^16 flops.

Crandall claims that A Bug's Life was about ten times that.

It's nice that there might be a unidirectional market for this, but what about a shared system where you trade your idle time for the right to use someone else's computer during your peak time? End users tend to want a lot of peak power but little average power. Grid computing would let you spread the peak out like a capacitor. If the average user needs N times their CPU to run an application at realtime speeds and they only use this peak for 1/N parts of the day and are idle the rest of the time, you can have N users from around the world distribute their load onto each other's machine.

This would work for applications that don't have low latency (e.g. FPS games would be out) and applications that don't have high bandwith (e.g. compressing movie files) but it would work for things like semi-professional graphic artists who can't afford renderfarms. By letting other people use their machine for 1-1/N of the day, they get a near N increase in computing power at peak times.

You could have every machine in a company run a VM at the lowest priority and share the cycles for this VM with other companies around the world. You would get some use out of all that idle time on modern machines. You could also have a company's engineering department run their simulation on the company's accounting department's machines since those machines are probably idle all the time and the simulation machines have a high peak CPU requirement.

This would even work well locally if IBM's Cell technology delivers. Your TiVo can offload the processing for digital compression into the chips in your PC, DVD, and other high end processing systems as needed or vice-versa the next time your PC needs to compress a bunch of files.

Given all the idle time on home machines, this might be a bigger market than supercomputer grid clusters.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof