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Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"

"The tactic drove Redmond into a rage. The day after Andreessen's quote appeared in the press, John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist and Netscape board member, received a chilling email from Jon Lazarus, one of Gates' key advisers. In its entirety, it read: "Boy waves large red flag in front of herd of charging bulls and is then surprised to wake up gored."

from Wired

Well, this is about Blackjack not Poker I know, but interesting none the less in that if you have a good mathematically sound system (ie. card counting), you can turn the odds in BlackJack in your favor. Wired had a great article "Hacking Las Vegas" awhile back about a team of BlackJack players from MIT that really worked the Casinos over for a goodly amount of time before the Casino's finally caught on. Apparently it was quite an innovative method that was harder to detect as the roles were spread out between several players in a team. DaveC

Unfortunately, 'spreading the message' of the Boulder Pledge via email could be construed as 'mass mailings' even though it is not commercial in nature.

Perhaps it is best to post the Boulder Pledge to your website or as the signature to your emails.

This is why I cannot use unsolicited spam emails to 'spread the word' about my antispam software---the ends wouldn't justify the means.

So my simple, effective approach languishes in obscurity while bigger, more complicated, CPU-intensive approaches are featured on Slashdot.

My approach lets *YOU* decide what kinds of content you want in your email while the other approaches I've seen here use complicated rules to try to flag an email as spam or not.

In an earlier post, I describe the merits of my software in an enthusiastic, factual manner.

For that, this was the result:

[block quoted section below]
MOD SPAMMING PARENT DOWN (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 23, @11:06PM (#10612183)
Your solution is to spam slashdot with adds for your overly-restrictive, simplistic mail filter?

Go home.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Spam is a social problem--my solution (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 23, @11:35PM (#10612297)
I hope you don't write your emails in the same way as you write your posts, because this one surely looks like spam.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
[block quoted section above]

Why then was the following news item posted to Slashdot in the first place?...

[block quoted section below]
The Long Tail

Posted by michael on Tue Oct 05, '04 04:25 PM
from the something-for-everyone dept.
Chris Anderson writes "I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."
[block quoted section above]

Why is it all right for Chris Anderson to talk about his ideas for free on Slashdot in the form of a news story and not I?

Some selected posts from that thread that address this issue:

[block quoted section below]
Re:autohornblowing (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05, @04:36PM (#10444135)
if the Slashdot invoice for this publicity is 0$, then I'm even more impressed by the autohornblowing.
[ Parent ]

Why? (Score:0, Flamebait)
by jmays (450770) on Tuesday October 05, @04:29PM (#10444034)
Why does /. succumb to these blatant types of advertising. If the article was submitted by a non-Wired affiliated person ... I might have read it. At least some other Slash-Advertisers post anonymously. pfft.

Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
by halfelven (207781) on Tuesday October 05, @04:59PM (#10444377)
(http://florin.myip

I remember reading a while back about how Sanford Wallace gave up spamming and bought a nightclub in New Hampshire. Here's a wired story that takes about that:

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60714,00 .html

When I go to the homepage for Club Plum Crazy at http://www.clubplumcrazy.com/ -- I see that it is closed until further notice.

I guess DJ MasterWeb couldn't give up his old spamalicious ways, and has gone back to the crooked lifestyle, this time with spyware. What a shame.

The product in question was the Clarion AutoPC, a joint venture where Clarion made the hardware, MS made the software (WinCE 1.0) and nobody bought it.

Here's an article on Wired about it.

The data seem to indicate otherwise. Wired has this story about a recently published study indicating that the poor don't use the emergency room at any different rate from anyone else. When I was a paramedic, I tended to see more poor patients, but then again, the areas I worked with tended to have more poor people. Looking back on it, our patients probably represented a fairly accurate cross-section of the community. Another "urban" myth bites the dust.

Regarding your sig:
From Wired: ...in MacIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech. Anonymity, the court reasoned, helps speech stay free.
Earlier cases had already guaranteed that the right to anonymity reaches beyond political speech. In Talley v. California, the Supreme Court shot down a Los Angeles ordinance banning all types of anonymous pamphlets - political, commercial, or otherwise. The court explained that the "identification requirement would tend to restrict freedom to distribute information and thereby freedom of expression."

Who benefits from digital anonymity? Whistle-blowers, victims of abuse, and troubled people seeking counseling. Political insiders, the politically incorrect, and insurrectionists. Gays, lesbians, and bored straights. Bad poets. People trying the fit of another skin. Virtually everyone. You.You deserve at least as much anonymity on the Net as you have when you cast a vote, post an anonymous tract, or buy a newspaper from a coin-operated rack.

In other words, fight trolls or flamebaiters. Not anonymous people.

PS: Your sig is also incredibly sexist. But I'll let that as an exercise to the reader.

Damn straight!

And guess what? This is exactly what Australia has done. If you want an example for when you write to your representative, use the Aussies.

-- james

FDA appreoves chips for patients.

Wrapping a tag in aluminum foil blocks the radio waves and prevents a tag from being identified. -
RFID Hack Could Allow Retail Fraud

Most of the concern seems to be around unauthorized person reading the RFID chip. According to this article blocking RFID chips is very easy to do if you have physical posession of the chip. Just wrap it in tinfoil. It would seem that someone would make a bag/box/pouch that would store your passport and protect it from being read w/o authorization. When you were in an area that required that you show your passport, the airport for example, you would just take the passport out of the bag. Sounds like a $19.95 solution to me.

I guess if you took your passport out at the hotel or some other place like that you could be "vulnerable". Maybe this solution from RSA woul help?

It does seem like the solution here is not to say "no RFIDs in the passports", but actually to ensure that there is a way to easily control when the tag is read. And there seem to be several solutions available.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65297, 00.html/

That link there is a great article more about it, its also in the latest Wired.com magazine.

Random bugs

iDrive locks guy in car (Thai minister of finance)

Running Windows in a car is nothing new to aftermarket car audio/multimedia enthusiasts. Clarion had the AutoPC out in 1998 and it ran WinCE. The AutoPC had decent voice recognition, navigation capabilities, the ability to load programs and even integrate with a cellphone. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,16635, 00.html

650K? I thought Ballmer's salary was higher than that. Or perhaps you were referring to the line, "640K should be enough for anybody," which is commonly attributed to Bill Gates. Though word is that he never actually said that.

this article on Wired News

Mother Earth Mother Board is an interesting read too.

This new collapse will probably look much like the last one that was predicted...

Maybe they're competing for the Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award!

Is there any specific "button" for any behavior in the brain? Or is this science as doomed as the "pseudoscience of cool" they debunk in Wired?

Echelon is used to spy on Americans. This entire subthread is about the closed, secret nature of the system that protects its operations as well as its budget. After the Europeans blew Echelon's cover, they merely denied its scope. Once that's blown, they'll merely deny its functions. Once that's blown, they'll hope that Congress has passed enough Patriot Acts and "National Intelligence Reform" acts to cover their domestic spying. If not, they'll rely on Echelon's global scope to exempt it from definitions of "domestic" spying, by either jurisdictional arguments about overseas operations or the traditional mutual backscratching between CIA and, for example, MI5 and the RCMP.

That "knowingly deceptive" argument is too tired to get up for a political debate in America anymore. Corporations and governments don't "know" anything, they just do things. All that matters is whether the things they do cost us too much, in money or freedom. And whether these organizations are accountable for what they do. Echelon, its government oversight whose power it feeds and the vendor corporations whose profits it represents, is too secret for accountability, so it's bloated. Transparent government programs can operate more cheaply than these, because the profit is removed and the terms can be set firmly, without depending on the supply/revenue feedback for surviving transient pressures.

We agree that some societal operations are better suited to government than corporations. By keeping Echelon closed, it's exploitable by its supplier corporations. Keeping its algorithms secret prevents the larger community of "good guys" from improving it, as well as keeping its improvements from feeding back into the American tech edge. It's a backwards combination of secrecy and corporate development that makes it both more expensive and less safe. And that's not very funny.

To give Wired a bit of credit, they actually continued to follow the story (including trying out a copy of CherryOS and then investigating and assisting in proving the fraud claims). See the article posted today.

Too bad the mass media did not think of that when given the press release. No, instead, they just blindly passed it on to news consumers. This is a real problem with our media sources. Journalists do not do their jobs. Do you think any of them will learn from this? Nah, me neither.

This is a descriptive a article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article....

Sal has done this before on 9/29/04. Heck, he got a mention for it with regards to slashdotting in this Wired article. This article was submitted by SpaceCanary but with the salcan@gmail.com email address. This /. article is also worded oddly, as if he was just some random surfer who stumbled upon the article:

I recently read this open letter to Windows and I think it's pretty funny. The guy writes a letter...

A search through Slashdot revealed only these two articles containing xyzcomputing but I have no doubt he'll strike again. I wonder if this is an example of slashvertising.

I call shenanigans!

He outta know better... After all, Wired Magazine wrote a freaking ARTICLE two weeks ago about how his site got slashdotted on a prior stunt. Sounds fishy to me.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65165, 00.html?tw=wn_story_top5

I'm sure Sal wished he was "mirrordotted" right now.

He's been /.ed before. So Sal gets around.

One provocative hypothesis that might account for the rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists speculate, is an increase in assortative mating. Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room. There are additional pressures and incentives for autistic people to find companionship - if they wish to do so - with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or eccentric spouse.... They are attracted because their intellects work on a similar wavelength."

That's not to say that geeks, even autistic ones, are attracted only to other geeks. Compensatory unions of opposites also thrive along the continuum, and in the last 10 years, geekitude has become sexy and associated with financial success. The lone-wolf programmer may be the research director of a major company, managing the back end of an IT empire at a comfortable remove from the actual clients. Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have become monks, developing new ink for early printing presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher rate."

So, let's go with that in the context of "the extinction of the American programmer" and ask ourselves what the real cost of reproduction is for American programmers vs programmers from societies where programmers have marriages arranged with women of comparable educational and socioeconomic background with extended family support (frequently with someone in the extended family providing food direct from the clan's farm) for children.

Societies like India.

You can rest assured that the more an American excells at programming the lower his odds of reproducing are for the simple reason that no matter where he works he is in a male saturated environment with a high cost of living. A very very few make it really really rich and have a couple of kids, yes. Maybe there are a few Orthodox Jews, Mormons or traditionalist Catholics and have some cultural protections of their fertility.

But on the whole, the last cohort of engineers to have any sort of reproductive success were those that were born before 1950 and were therefore in a position to enjoy affordable real estate in combination with being in a position to ride the shockwave of the baby boom which came just after they were positioned to avail themselves of all that cheap labor (and nice nubile female fertility).

If you go to a typical office on Wall Street or Madison Avenue or some law firm in Washington D.C. you will find professional men who are just as dedicated as the most dedicated programmer -- with a huge difference: They are surrounded by young fertile women. New York City has one of the highest female to male ratios in the world.

There's a eugenics program going on in the US alright -- or should I say pogrom.

Quoting my post I forgot the link. It's The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff, Wired, November 2001. Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article. I quoted only few very short fragments.

The most important point about Broadband Over Power Lines is why anyone started to even think about building it. We have to ask that question before we start to talk about interference and other obvious details. Was it because most of potential Internet users don't have telephone lines? No. It was because we cannot have billion gigabits per second using copper, while according to Luke Stewart with power lines we somehow can.

Quoting my post I forgot the link. It's The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff, Wired, November 2001. Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article. I quoted only few very short fragments.

The most important point about Broadband Over Power Lines is why anyone started to even think about building it. We have to ask that question before we start to talk about interference and other obvious details. Was it because most of potential Internet users don't have telephone lines? No. It was because we cannot have billion gigabits per second using copper, while according to Luke Stewart with power lines we somehow can.

"We consider downloading this code, or making it available for others to download, as theft," the company says in a statement.

There was a Wired Magazine Article about natural and man-made diamonds. While talking about distinguishing between the two, the article says one way to tell them about is the "fake" diamonds are actually too perfect to be real. (The scientific way is to look at the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer signal - the man-made and fake diamonds have unique signitures.)

Hopefully Diamond Manufacturing (instead of mining) will alleviate the cost

.... Maybe a huge chunk of Strange matter (ie. a strange-nugget) wiped them all out.

Instead of playing find the big crater, maybe we should be playing find the big tunnel in the Earth...

Linus has written that if the BSD effort had been ready a year sooner he probably wouldn't have developed Linux.

I suspect he chose the GPL because he needed something and it was already worked out and he was smart enough to realise that a working license in the hand beats wasting time trying to be a lawyer.

I think this paints a complete picture of the future of transportation: a plug-in diesel/electric hybrid running on biodiesel. The batteries are charged from zero-polution electric plants which feed the carbon dioxide to algae farms which create the oil for biodiesel. The car runs most of the day on the electricity, but switches to diesel when the battery gets low. IMHO this is a far more realistic scenario than the fuel-cell which is getting a good deal more political attention than it deserves at thsi stage.

These are the same people who managed to link Iraq to 9/11, at it again.

Note this quote from a Wired article today:

The report-- which covers copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks and patents -- also says that those who benefit most from this theft "are criminals, and alarmingly, criminal organizations with possible ties to terrorism."

That's right, now when you buy that higher-than-average-quality bootlegged movie from that guy on the street, you're possibly funding *GASP* terrorism!

Jesus H. Fucking Christ, we need to vote this God damned Bush administration out of office-- it's clear that anything they don't like gets linked to terrorism to justify going after it. If he gets re-elected, Bush's jackbooted thugs will probably start searching for Osama in stateside abortion clinics.

I know this isn't a popular option, but there is only one way left to combat CO2 emissions without winding the planet back to the stone age.

It's nuclear power. There is no other technology available that has sufficient output, whilst not outputting CO2 that will put the Florida Quays any further underwater.

The common argument in return is saving CO2 isn't much use if you make the planet uninhabitable due to reactors melting down. Well, the Chinese, with some help from the Germans, have very kindly solved this problem for us. Go check the link out - it's to wired.com - they have developed a nuclear reactor that doesn't go critical when the coolant system is switched off.

We can save the planet, if we're willing to get over the Cold War era stereotypes.

The cheap CDs come with some hidden prices; secret censorshipand coercive censorship. Wired article here

This is a clear example of getting taxpayers to fund the RIAA's private war, Schultz said. (Wired)

Operation Digital Gridlock has resulted in the seizure of more than 40 terabytes of intellectual property being exchanged illegally over peer-to-peer networks since the effort began in August. (Information Week)

Intellectual property industries account for 6 per cent of the US gross domestic product, employ more than five million people, and contribute US$626 billion to the US economy, Mr Ashcroft said. (SMH)

Such theft costs American companies $250 billion per year, the report estimated. Sales of copyrighted materials alone accounted for 6 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product in 2002. Companies that produce films, music, books, software and other copyrighted material employed 4 percent of the nation's work force in 2002, the report said. (The Mercury Times)

Specifically, the report asks Congress to introduce legislation that would permit wiretaps to be used in investigating serious intellectual property offences and that would create a new crime of the importation of pirated products. (SMH)

The report also endorsed the rights of companies to compel Internet service providers to turn over the names of people who have traded copyright-protected items online. That power is included in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but has been challenged by companies that want to protect the identity of their subscribers. (Boston.com)

US Attorney Debra Yang said that intellectual property is lifeblood of south California region. This is an issue that has been of utter and utmost importance to our community here in Los Angeles, she said. (China View)

The task force proposed a dozen changes to rules governing criminal enforcement of intellectual property law and also called for the opening of five new anti-piracy offices across the United States. (news.com.au)

Dan Glickman, the new president of the Hollywood studios' influential lobbying body, the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the aggressive initiatives aimed at protecting his industry. Piracy of intellectual property is a massive, global problem with far-reaching implications on the US economy, he said. In addition to hard goods piracy, which is rampant throughout the world, peer-to-peer networks that facilitate illegal file sharing are some of the most dangerous threats to copyright ownership today, he said. (news.com.au)

Ashcroft declined to comment on the Supreme Court's action, saying that his department might have to be involved in future, similar cases. But he defended the task force's recommendations. We believe people in the private sector have a responsibility to address these threats in the civil dimension as the law allows them and we have a responsibility to address these matters criminally, Ashcroft told The Associated Press in an interview. (The Mercury Times/AP)

The report also suggested expanding educational efforts in schools to prevent illegal file sharing. It also included principles to be adopted when evaluating pen

If it exists it's amazing - if it's a hoax it has certainly sucked a lot olf you guys in. So which is it ?

If it exists it's amazing - if it's a hoax it has certainly sucked a lot olf you guys in. So which is it ?

These techniques allow improving species with lower cost than gene modification methods. And because it avoids those methods, which are patented, they have less restrictive IP issues; and it has been developed in a collaborative environment. As a result, the Wired Article calls this "the agriculture version of open source"

Actually China is doing this right now. New Nukes for China

need to check those dang links... Sorry about that. Here.

Mother Earth, Mother Board -- i thought the same when i was reading cryptonomicon. I too would look to read an expanded version. It'd also make for a really good several-part doc (as long as it's not done like some of the latest Nova shows))

With P2P services, those who produce the software are not able to effectively control the content upon the services. The original Napster service was in a position to exert control because all communications relied on its central location. A P2P service could have a license agreement prohibiting illegal uses, but there would be no way for the makers of the software to enforce that agreement except by tracking down individual users. Should they be required to do that? The P2P manufacturer could add copy protection technologies (which might become outdated quickly) but there would be the same problem with people defeating them. In any case, copy protection would likely not be compatible with FOSS P2P software. If there was a P2P feature with absolutely no significant non-infringing purpose, then liability just might be considered. However, it should be noted that the fact P2P is decentralized has legitimate reasons: privacy (consider leaked documents about wrongdoing), efficiency (sharing the load), and reliability (no central control that can fail or be attacked.)

Consider the Freenet service which is said to be difficult to use but extremely resistant to being censored. It is said the service cannot enforce copyright and protect free speech at the same time. The emphasis of the project is to protect free speech although the service is likely used for illegal activities by some (not all) as well. The issue of illegal P2P usage i.e. illegal porn is mentioned, but it is said that people should not be denied certain freedoms because a few individuals might misuse those freedoms. Incidentally, some of the uses of Freenet (and its likely goal) are much more serious than enjoying the latest music. It is said that the Freenet software is used in China to evade official censorship, for instance.

It is interesting that there was a case with the Madster (formerly called Aimster) service. That service appeared to be centralized, but encryption was used for the communications. This meant that the communications could not be monitored for wrongdoing. However, individuals using the service might well have wanted privacy when communicating. In the end, the service came under fire. There was no evidence of significant non-infringing use. Of course, with the communications encrypted, there was no way for the service to accurately determine how much use was or was not infringing.

I don't know if you've seen this yet, but its another essay that's similar in feeling. Stephenson follows the story of building a trans-oceanic fiber link (with many interesting digressions). It first appeared in Wired in December 1996:

Mother Earth Mother Board.

Hopefully, the Olympics will bring some positive changes to China. One of the conditions of winning the Olympic bid was to make the Olympics 'green.' I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean, but there have been fairly incredible improvements in the various levels of pollution in and around Beijing.

Also, China has undertaken construction of a 400 Megawatt wind plant that will be completed in time for the games. Apparantly, (according to Wired, at least) it will be the world's largest wind project.

So, for now at least, China is the polluted nightmare of the world, but it looks like they're trying to make some efforts to get pollution under control. //

The Wrinkled Future of Online Gaming

Wired recently ran an interesting piece on the latest round in the wars over evolution in the schools. If this continues, what are the long-term consequences for biological research in the U.S.?

I was just browsing through some old issues of Wired and came across that article you wrote about laying cable in the pacific. ITBWT Command Line is also noteworthy nonfiction; do you have any other exercies in journalism or nonfiction in mind?