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First of all
Talking on a cell phone != driving drunk

These article uses simulators to study reaction time. Simulators != real world situations. In real world cases, talking on a cell phone only accounts for 1.5% of distracted driving accidents.

I heard an interview with the designers of the orignal cell phone/alchol study, and they were frustrated that their results had been interpreted in such a way. Most people talking on a cell phone are generally in traffic situations, with surrounding cars and reduced time to react if something happens. Drunk drivers on the other had generally cause accidents with eratic driving caused by reduced motor and cognitive functioning with many fewer drivers around. Remember that most drunk driving occurs at night with much less traffic.

Similators can show the similar results of reduced response time through impairment, but the not the source or real world effect of that impairment

"Guys" is the weak link in your solution. You need something more reliable than your typical grunt who goes into a career that involves playing with guns.

The headline seems a bit misleading to me since there's only a few quotes from Linus in there:

"Software patents are clearly a problem, and I think it's a problem that the open source community has been pretty aware of for the last five years," said Torvalds. "The good news is that a lot of proprietary vendors are starting to see it as a problem as well."

The last one is pretty good though:

Torvalds was reluctant to make predictions though. "I'm the anti-visionary. I distrust people with visions," he said. "You don't see what's right in front of your face and you don't see the technical issues that face everyday users."

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It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Macs

sigh... this was in Wired two months ago.

more info can be found at the current owner's site.

This might not be the best solution - I've never used it over an internal network - but its worth a shot. Shoutcast... its a Winamp-based streaming audio system. You can learn more about it at Shoutcast.com Here is a tutorial on setting it up and everything. Tutorial And the Formal Documentation? Here it is Hope this was helpful.

Fresh on the heels of the Wired sex columnist who recommends MMORPGs as the place to cyber, we now have a pirate-themed MMORPG.

sweet17: What do you need me to do?
Bloodninja: I need you talk like a pirate.
sweet17: ???
Bloodninja: When I start to go limp... you say "HARRRR!!!"
Bloodninja: ok?
Bloodninja: Hello?
sweet17: You can't be serious
Bloodninja: Oh yes I am!

I guess it's time to put on my robe and wizard hat and, umm... HARRRRRRRRRR!

As I've previously discussed on slashdot, you do not need to be moving outward from your energy source in a solar sail, you can achieve thrust vectors in any direction from full away to orthogonal (perpendicular for the 2D vector peeps) And orbital mechanics isn't of the form of "thrust straight at where you want to go" it's more like "thrust in the direction of orbit to move away from primary, thrust against the direction of orbit to move towards primary"
Good point.

People don't realize orbital mechanics is an arcane science completely unlike the common perception of strapping a rocket booster to yourself and pointing yourself in the right direction. For example, look at the "Interplanetary Superhighway" for normal spacecraft. It's the path of least resistence for spacecraft and it looks nothing like a straight line since it's based on Lagrange points and other strange artifacts of three+ body orbital systems. I'm guessing there is another similar path possible for this solar sail system that invovles it flying in a curve where it's never directly between us an Mars. I.e. it's thrust vector isn't the same as its position vector with respect to Earth. Thus it would be quite possible to steer and stop with this system if you know the right math.

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

This seems like it was created by someone who cared too much about creating an interface that Hollywood would love even if it has crappy usability. As long as monitors are flat, there is no point in trying to fit a 3d-ish UI onto the OS. You can do pseudo-3D where the 3D aspect is just eye candy like OSX's virtual desktop switcher or Longhorn's system to alt-tab through programs in 3d, but there is little point to adding 3d functionality...for now. Once we figure out how to get 3d glasses (or maybe just 2d HUD glasses) with enough resolution to act as a decent monitor, then it would be worthwhile to have an interface where your workspace was represented as the inside of a sphere with you in it. Each window would be flat (a plane tangent to the virtual sphere) but this would act as if you were surrounded by movable monitors. The entire system could react to head and eye movements to rotate the sphere. Now if technology could just catch up to my dreams.

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

Why? Only he can say for sure, but possible reasons could be:

• distract the public from trying Linux or other Free or Open Source Software, or at least delay them.
• distract the public from real open document standards
• distract policy makers from the fact that WordML is still closed
• distract home users and businesses from OpenOffice.org
• distract everybody from FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
• distract the public from ongoing Windows security failures
• distract investors from the fact that MS has halved research and development
• distract pundits from Longhorn's list of features getting shorter and release getting later
• distract home users from the Mac mini
• distract investors from the EU anti-trust case
• distract businesses and lawmakers from the VC-1 codec
• distract European businesses from the software patent threat
• ... etc.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/brands.ht ml

I forgot to add that the Mac platform is probably the best place to have a dual core CPU or even a dual CPU machine. Mac OS X already has excellent dual CPU support and already balances the workload very well among available CPUs. And since Apple has been shipping Dual CPU machines for years application developers have already done a lot to take advantage of Dual CPUs. As a result we, the users, benefit.

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It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Mac

Since the dual core freescale supposedly outperforms a G5 at same clock speed, I really would have liked to see the freescale in the new specs.

Not to flame, but I'm interested in where you're getting your information from (benchmarks, reviews, etc). I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a Dual Core G4 outperform a single core/CPU G5 when it comes to apps that are fully MP-aware (threaded properly). But I would be surprised to see a Dual Core G4 outperform a single core G5 on apps that are not threaded. I'd love to see some real world comparisons.

Remember just because it has 2 cores doesn't mean that it's twice as fast. It only means that there's the potential to do more at once if the software can take advantage of it through threading. Here's a great article that explains the problems/challenges software developers are going to face with multi-core CPUs.

Now I'd love to have a dual core CPU in my laptop and I'd love to program for it, but I image Apple would face some of the same challenges trying to get the dual core Freescale CPU into a laptop as they would in getting a G5 into a laptop, namely heat. A dual core G4 is going to be hotter and more power hungry than what they've got now. I'd love to see either the dual core G4 or a G5 in a laptop.

It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Mac

An earlier post proved the following link:

Best Resolution for Images and Words

The quality of the pixels you see impacts how you use your computer. After years of experience, Apple engineers have discovered the ideal resolution to display both sharp text and graphics -- a pixel density of about 100 pixels per inch (ppi). Other vendors may offer a larger monitor, but with less resolution, so you end up with fewer pixels, or a smaller monitor with a high resolution that causes eyestrain and headaches. Apple's balanced 100 pixels per inch format is optimized for images, yet allows you to easily work with text in email, Safari and sophisticated type treatments in layouts.

So that would be the reason why they don't make higher resolution displays.

--
It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Mac

Another advantage that Time Warner's DVRs have over Tivo is the option of viewing/recording HDTV. Tivo's current plans for HDTV are to get something out by 2006! Now, you probably can't record very much HDTV content (20 hours is what they say) but at least they give you the option of having it.

We just got a projector to serve as part of our home theater and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to live with Tivo and standard television when I know that HDTV content is available.

--
It works.
Free Flat Screens | Free Mini Mac

Can anyone provide the numbers to back this up? Also, I would like to see about what the ratio is between the two.

I don't think this is information is true. Brazil has the largest program to adopt open source in world. Wired run an interesting story about this last November.

Click here.

Yeah, so would Commodore if they had gotten a big fat blow job from Bill Gates.

"Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea..."

Furthermore, from one of my favorite wired articles ever, comes one of the best quotes ever...

W: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?

TBL: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.

cool--what this guy has built is similar in nature to the 'bombardier embrio' concept motorbike.

articles with pics here and here

Isn't that exactly what was implied on the Wired article that was featured on Slashdot just a few days ago (The Shadow Internet)?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite_p r.html

Bill Gates files charges against Firefox's Blake Ross and Ben Goodger for allegedly making threats against Mr. Gates' life.

The two deny all charges, and intend to plea not guilty if the case goes to trial, however a report from a recent "Wired" magazine article alleges that Mr. Gates should 'Watch his back'

In completely unreleated news, Microsoft has filed to pattent the phrase "Watch your back", and will be suing the Firefox developers as well as Wired magazine for royalties and copyright infringement.

I might just add that I appreciate the fact that you didn't deny the bit about being a wanker :P

Incidentally, plastic surgeons like all the rest of us... "specialise". Thus this division of the Transform medical group. I would guess that those working within this division are making a living off "men who care how they look". So: idiot! :P

As for penile implants: the majority of men are not satisfied with their equipment. 53.5% of men want longer penises. 11.1% of men claim to have been denied sex due to penis size. More than 10,000 men have had penis enlargement surgery, which unfortunately for the 10,000 men in question tends to have side-effects to the extent that in the Journal of Urology, physicians stated that enlargement surgery carries such risks that it should not even be considered unless a man's erection was less than 3 inches... but that's the power of body dysmorphia for you. Spammers know this; there aren't that many other topics that 53% of men feel that strongly about.

It works for the spammers. Wired magazine note for example that one such spammer got 6,000 people per month to order $50 bottles of penis enlargement pills. I think it isn't advertising that you so quaintly feel is driving the increase in advertising (you circular-logician) - it's the idea of making a total of about half a million dollars out of this total insecurity that you believe doesn't exist.

In essence, you know nothing about the topic: it's actual, it's increasing, and you're still a wanker... :)

While I agree with most of your comments, it seems that some of the major problems with DIY home automation could be a non-issue pretty soon. ZigBee looks to be but on solution and while I haven't read much about it being used as such UltraWideband could also conceivably be used for HA. That being said Wired currently has a nice article about a company that is using ZigBee devices in an attempt to bring HA to the masses, and, I must say, I am pretty impressed. It appears to be one of the first systems that, while prices are not readily available, may make the extra cost of implementation worth it. I know there are a ton of lower cost solutions that just fail in the easy to implement department. Anyway here's the article at wired and here's the company's website.

Yeah it's nice, buts its a PR stunt to improve his image none the less. How many donations to the needy did MS do when it was the darling of the press and loved by all as a shining example of American capitalism?

The more negative the image, the more he donates. It's standard operating procedure for any large company.

Check for yourself US vs MS timeline, MS vs Bad PR

I am glad he did it. But it does not change my opinion of him, because I know WHY he did it.

Copyright is a law of property. Creators of works --writings, paintings, whatever --have natural property rights over their creations. Copyright law is the legal recognition and protection of those rights by the government.

Bullshit. Copyright law is the legal creation of monopoly rights for ideas. It is entirely an artificial construct. Under copyright law, ideas indeed are property -- but that doesn't make them natural property. And how could they be? With real property, only one person can possess it at any given time. The idea that I can say "this is mine" stems from the fact that if I'm holding it, you physically can't be. Ideas aren't like that -- it's not possible for me to give you an idea without keeping it for myself at the same time, and I don't lose anything by doing so. How can something be called "property" if you can give it away without losing it?! Here's further justification of that, in the form of a quote:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." Wow, what a great line! Wanna guess who said that? It was Thomas Jefferson! And who better to define copyright than the guy who wrote the Constitution in the first place?

Speaking of Jefferson, he didn't want legal monopolies (i.e., "intellectual property") in the Constitution at all:

The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression.

James Madison had to persuade him to put them in:

With regard to monopolies they are justly classed among the greatest nuisances in government. But is it clear that as encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified in the gra

Alright...I said, I was done arguing. But letting you have the last word would be too mature. I'll join in the muck-tossing festival...but at this point, I think I'm done discussing anything for better understanding.

"It's what people want" is not an acceptable excuse. If people wanted to discriminate against black people again (in some places they probably still do), that's OK?

Yeah, legally, I don't have a problem with people discriminating against black people...as long as it doesn't prevent them from getting a job, opening a bank account, getting a loan, or anything that gets in the way of anyone's day-to-day life...it's fine. If Joe Blow wants to be an asshole, that's his business. If Jane Blow wants to get crappy news from Fox, that's her business. If you want to blab your version of the news down anyone's throat, that's your business. The minute you try and force me to do something that I don't want to do, or harm me in any way is the moment I begin to have a problem with your actions.

Say you were a politician faced with that scenario, or a judge. Do you, representing the government, have a duty, in that case?

Uhh...if some redneck is sitting on his porch with a shotgun and a sign on his front porch that says "no niggers allowed" -- no. If Jack McKracken's place of business has a sign on the front that says "Help Wanted: niggers need not apply". Yah, I'd feel as if I had a duty to act. It's clear that you, on the other hand, want to have a thought-police regime. Civil rights are not the same as your advocating a "fairness doctrine". Not in the same ballpark, and carely even the same game. You're welcome to your opinions of a thought-police regine, but I think that you're totally full of shit, man.

It hasn't. The FCC has a censorship regime - a legal policy about what can and can't be broadcast. You lied and said I was "going crazy" about "'decency' laws", but pointing to the truth doesn't make your "exaggeration" look any better.

Actually, it was an assumption that I admitted to. Here, you try to make the same assumpton.

If you, or any conservative really believed any of this "TV is free speech" nonsense you would actually act that way, instead of acting the opposite way and censoring it all the time.

I did not advocate censorship at all. If you did your homework, you could have read my previous posts in /. and seen me arguing against it. Free speech, and free market. I am also not a conservative. By your yardstick, you are guilty of the same "lying" that you accuse myself, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Riley of. You're now on the same playing field of the people whose views you despise so much. Maybe you are like them. Well, maybe not politically, but morally, you seem to stand on the same ground (unless you think it's OK to engage in the same behavior as them just because /. has less coverage than they do). Anyway, now I understand what you consider "lies"...it's not a problem that this has been allowed to degrade into much-tossing. You're a total hypocrite, and I have very little to learn from you.

I answered this in advance, and you did not appear to notice. Let me repeat myself, quoting from the previous post. Do you have a response for this?

...Are you ignorant about the way the media works?...

I did notice it...thanks. I still dispute it. You have a voice on the Internet are are using it now. It is supercheap, and I can show you an article that says that Internet can be receive far more viewers than cable news, for a fraction of the cost. Now, this doesn't account for advertising, like you are conviently t

No, but they can.

How did you get access to Senator Orrin Hatch's beta Windows PiracySolution (Win PS) operating system?

And they are not harvesting email adresses for spam purposes? :P

They probably are. Just use a spamhole address like I did.

Also, you might want to read up on the company like I did before signing up.

Wired Magazine prominently features Blake Ross on the cover of their Feb '05 issue for their lead story, "The Firefox Explosion."

Wired Mag doesn't have the cover online yet, meaning I probably got it from a newstand that put it out early (the 34th St PATH Station newstand in NYC, for those interested).

The issue also features an "interesting" piece: a fake memo from the future...written to one Bill Gates from newly-hired employee Linus Torvalds - concerning Winux, Microsoft's next-generation OS.

[Apparently, Bill's "pitch" to Linus in this post-apocalyptic future was "come on Linus...infect the Mothership ;^)" ]

Anyway, I hate to sound like a pitchman for Wired, but it's worth the look.

I think Google and the folks that showed up stand to do well.

Only one in six users of internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds.

Article here.

I would think that with the recent scandals of NYT reporters bending, molding and completely making up the "truth", that people on /. would not actually use them as a source anymore. I know they are a lot less credible then CBS. At least CBS fired and reprimanded the people responsible for memogate. When's the last time the NYT fired someone for making up a story?

You can even go further back than the most recent scandals. In this Wired editorial from 1997, the magazine's editors criticized the Times's repeated attempts to demonize the Internet in its reporting.

This decision has already been made, in the first week of December.

Not only that, the already-made decision has been covered by slashdot, not once, but twice! (If a duplicate story is "dupe", perhaps an incorrect triplicate story should be referred to, appropriately, as "tripe".)

And the answer is a resounding no, taxpayers will NOT have to "pay twice" for access to weather data.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open-access XML format, alleviating concerns that commercial providers would continue to play a dominant role in how weather data gets to the public.

"The public should not have to pay twice for access to basic government information that has been created at taxpayer expense," wrote Ari Schwartz, an associate director of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, in a July 28, 2004, essay.

Earlier this year, NOAA made the data available in XML as a test, called the National Digital Forecast Database. After receiving comments from the public and commercial providers, the agency made the decision permanent this week. Now anyone can get information in an XML format directly from the National Digital Forecast Database website.

Full story
slashdot coverage #1
slashdot coverage #2

Of course, this information has always been publicly accessible: it's just a matter of ease. The National Weather Service now makes its weather feeds accessible to anyone in open formats, like XML and RSS. Of course the commercial weather reporting industry is against it: surprise, surprise.

But reading the wired interview gave me the impression of the two mice pontificating about the answer...

I thikn that perhaps he (as an artist) has 'encrypted something' in a manner of:

what I want encrypted -> process -> result = somethign completely different, is this encryption?

I.e. perhaps he has done this type of encryption:

"apple" = "orange" which is impossible to crack... looking at the points where he makes too many clues, and builds something out of it, seems too vain, now I think he is worried about contradicting himself...

Perhaps he never wants it cracked, perhaps there is no solution...

Another reader idea of reading backwars, and the idea of CANDLE seem good, but again read wired interview and tell me it doesn't seem like he is a little too guarded... and 'deliberate mistakes' come on, you expect me to believe that! :-)

Well... lets give it a go...

John Pike of GlobalSecurity had an apt quote in a related Wired article:

"We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."

$200k remote-control weapons are a great way of keeping American kids out of harm's way in Iraq, but once it's a video game, who is going to be sickened by the fact that they just took a life over a megalomaniac's flawed foreign policy? How are young American soldiers going to learn that destroying life for oil is wrong?

With such bots, what's to stop Uncle Sam from sending soldiers to posh hotels in Dubai, bringing them down to the basement for four-hour stints with the VR glasses on to knock off a couple more Iraqis? (Afghans? Pakistanis? Iranians?) All you'll need in the theater is a comms group and some logistics to keep the robots in fresh batteries.

Sick, wrong, and I'll have no part of it.

I dug up an old article on the PS2.

The most blatant quantifiable lie is the 75 million polygon-remark. This is an highly idealized number of flat-shaded non-lighted polygons which the PS2 could possibly push if it had the cpu-power to actually supply enough meaningfull vertex data, or the memory to hold it.

My favorite part however is:
And while today's games possess limited intelligence, future games will feature characters having not only brains, but simulated senses like sight and hearing, leading to an unprecedented level of realism.

For example, the system could run interactive movies that blend Hollywood's expensive production systems with intricate story lines and characters who interact realistically with the user.

Ooooh. I gotta get me some of that!

It seems like Marvel is the SCO of the comic book industry. Let's hope their lawsuit against NCSoft and Cryptic Studios, makers of City of Heroes, goes just as poorly.

I just love some of the quotes by Marvel.

Considering that defendants own no comic characters themselves, it stands to reason that the comic books to which they refer are those that depict the characters of Marvel and others," wrote Marvel's attorneys in the complaint.

I'm sorry, but they do, in fact, publish their own comic. In fact, due to the bundling with the game, I believe I read it had the 3rd highest circulation of any comic in print.

The complaint says that the "defendants have created, marketed, distributed and provided a host environment for a game that 'brings the world of comic books alive,' not by the creation of new or original characters but, instead, by directly, contributorily and vicariously infringing upon Marvel copyrights and trademarks."

There are typically around 1500-2500 players on Virtue every night, it seems. I almost never see a copycat.

A great quote from Cory Doctorow:

"Asking City of Heroes to police their users to ensure that they don't replicate Marvel characters is like asking a school to police its students to make sure none of them show up for Halloween in a homemade Spider-Man costume," said Cory Doctorow, a renowned writer and advocate for free speech and fair use. "It's unreasonable bullying, and it is bad corporate citizenship."

And of course, it's a click away to report a copycat character, and NCSoft removes them rapidly.

I don't recall how I came across Ted Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines mentioned earlier, but it was some time in the early 90's. I believe he has been credited with inventing the phrase "Hypertext". Just the title "Computer Lib" seems to connote a feeling of some kind of 60's movement like Women's Lib, Woodstock, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with Ted Nelson as the Timothy Leary of computers. In my opinion, he is possibly a visionary who's contributions may not be given the proper recognition in his lifetime, like those whose names are cluttered throughout history. I'm surprised that he hasn't received more recognition, especially from computer enthusiasts like slashdotters (you!). I think his name should be as recognisable as Linus Trovalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. And his work deserves a slashdotting if only to get the word out there into the collective consciousness for a brief moment.

Some earlier comments have already brought up information about how his proposed concepts involve a royalty payment system. Given the controversy of displaying contents from other sites in frames, the proposed micropayment system, and digital rights management, it seems his ideas were decades before their time. As much as the term "DRM" causes people to cringe, the missing integration of a royalty payment system with the internet is what has prevented it from being a replacement for print publishing, as well as other forms of media. The web seemed to hold a promise of becoming a repository for literature and information when it first became popular, like a library, but more easily accessible worldwide. However it has yet to fulfill that promise with the available content.

I can recall from what I've read about him that Nelson veered from hierarchical structures of data, choosing instead to have information interconnected in a more free-form fashion, much like the hyperlink interconnections of the web. However, the evolution of the web involving inherently hierarchical data such as SGML and now XML seems to contradict his elusive vision of what the internet should be. He came up with a basic data structure which he called the "enfilade" which would accomplish it, but kept the specifics of the enfilade private. I'm sure it has been implemented in his derivative work, ZigZag, and is now more accessible.

An allegedly less than flattering article published in Wired magazine, also mentioned earlier, gives an inkling of Nelson's possible contributions (I say allegedly because when I read it I actually thought it cast Nelson in a positive light). Xanadu is just the beginning. It is what is needed to organise the cumulative archive of brainstorming work he has done over his lifetime, to make it accessible and usable. Only when technology catches up with his amassed information and allows it to become applicable will his true body of work be recognised. Leonardo da Vinci accumulated 13,000 p

I don't recall how I came across Ted Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines mentioned earlier, but it was some time in the early 90's. I believe he has been credited with inventing the phrase "Hypertext". Just the title "Computer Lib" seems to connote a feeling of some kind of 60's movement like Women's Lib, Woodstock, or the Civil Rights Movement in the US, with Ted Nelson as the Timothy Leary of computers. In my opinion, he is possibly a visionary who's contributions may not be given the proper recognition in his lifetime, like those whose names are cluttered throughout history. I'm surprised that he hasn't received more recognition, especially from computer enthusiasts like slashdotters (you!). I think his name should be as recognisable as Linus Trovalds, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. And his work deserves a slashdotting if only to get the word out there into the collective consciousness for a brief moment.

Some earlier comments have already brought up information about how his proposed concepts involve a royalty payment system. Given the controversy of displaying contents from other sites in frames, the proposed micropayment system, and digital rights management, it seems his ideas were decades before their time. As much as the term "DRM" causes people to cringe, the missing integration of a royalty payment system with the internet is what has prevented it from being a replacement for print publishing, as well as other forms of media. The web seemed to hold a promise of becoming a repository for literature and information when it first became popular, like a library, but more easily accessible worldwide. However it has yet to fulfill that promise with the available content.

I can recall from what I've read about him that Nelson veered from hierarchical structures of data, choosing instead to have information interconnected in a more free-form fashion, much like the hyperlink interconnections of the web. However, the evolution of the web involving inherently hierarchical data such as SGML and now XML seems to contradict his elusive vision of what the internet should be. He came up with a basic data structure which he called the "enfilade" which would accomplish it, but kept the specifics of the enfilade private. I'm sure it has been implemented in his derivative work, ZigZag, and is now more accessible.

An allegedly less than flattering article published in Wired magazine, also mentioned earlier, gives an inkling of Nelson's possible contributions (I say allegedly because when I read it I actually thought it cast Nelson in a positive light). Xanadu is just the beginning. It is what is needed to organise the cumulative archive of brainstorming work he has done over his lifetime, to make it accessible and usable. Only when technology catches up with his amassed information and allows it to become applicable will his true body of work be recognised. Leonardo da Vinci accumulated 13,000 p

Here's a link to the Wired article.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/perimeter .html/

I dunno, but try this link.

Wired had an excellent long article about the Xanadu project in 1995---great storytelling. Seen here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr. html.

While they're putting out the fire in whatever server they were running, you can read this,a 27-page Wired article from 1995.

Also check this, that, and the other.

For those who weren't around at the time and want a hint of what the machines could do, Wired ran this story a while ago about people who continue to use old computers, including Amigas.

Lets compare the ratio of copyright breaking activities VS non copyright breaking activities those protocols have and compare them with p2p's ratio. I think you may find p2p to have a significantly higher ratio

Well, seeing as FTP is the Protocol of choice on much of the back end for piracy groups, FTP probably has a really high ratio of illegal MB/legal MB transfered, probably similar to the ratio seen through Bittorrent. IRC most definatly has more illegal traffic (MB/MB) than legal traffic, but it's also used quite a bit for legal discussions which don't use quite so much bandwidth...

The fact is that the bill in question defines P2P as:
software that once installed and launched, enables the user to connect his or her computer to a network of other computers on which the users of these computers have made available recording or audiovisual works for electronic dissemination to other users who are connected to the network. When a transaction is complete, the user has an identical copy of the file on his or her computer and may also then disseminate the file to other users connected to the network.

Under this definition, IRC, HTTP, and FTP all clearly fall into this category since they can allow you to get a full copy of the file. Technically speaking, a combination of Google, HTTP/FTP and my webbrowser constitutes a P2P network. We may as well just ban the internet, and in this case it's not a straw-man argument but based off of the language of the bill.

the operating system is very close to a final release.

While a new Amiga OS is just as intriguing to me as the next guy, this operating system has been vaporware for quite some time now, and I question when it will actually arrive.
This Amiga OS began winning Wired's Vaporware award back in 1999.

Ah. I'd missed that bit of history. It looks like that one really can be blamed on Microsoft - they absorbed Firefly to use the underlying technology in Passport, and then let the original site die.

Jeff Boulter was the ex-Firefly employee who built LAUNCHCast from the ashes of Firefly. Microsoft might not have given him the opportunity to preserve the original data.

I lost a couple months of productivity plugging my music collection into FireFly, only to have LaunchCast trash all the data when they took over

I share your pain. I had rated many thousands of songs on LAUNCHCast, was subscibed to a dozen other stations, and had quite a few subscribers myself when Yahoo! absorbed them and sucked the life out of it. I would be even more bitter if I had been part of the Firefly community.

I'll be checking out AudioScrobbler - I had pretty much given up on collaborative music rating systems. We'll see whether this one becomes a victim of its own success, too.

Hey, I know wired wrote back in August that free ipod was "legit"... anyone know if they still are?

Since the same company is now doing: free minimac...

Any followups on this?

But what will happen then with the miserable failure and weapons of mass destruction? Can't anyone efficiently bomb google anymore?

However, those are not the result of spamming or spoofing, merely of a zeitgeist.