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Kind of assinine. Now instead of the criminals trying to track him physically so they can assassinate him - they give the criminals the ability hack the Tracking System and follow him in that fashion and find out his patterns...

Pretty stupid... Gonna suck if someone designs a killer robot that homes in on someone's implanted chip

Also, the article specifically mentions Dell's recycling efforts:
"Computer makers such as Round Rock-based Dell Inc. have stepped up programs to take back old PCs"
No mention of HP, though, so maybe HP is just doing a better job of publicizing their program, despite being about half a year later than Dell.

more extensions for mozilla

This issue is usually called the "abandonware debate". Here's some more reading:

Wired News: Nostalgia Keeps Games Afloat

Home of the Underdogs

Abandonware from back before 1986

Abandonware - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brass Lantern Warez Abandonware and the Software Industry

When you finish reading some of this stuff, you really start thinking the current length of copyright is really, really out of hand (as if there wasn't enough evidence of that already.)

I don't have the transcript handy, but he spoke of using PGP, being asked for his passphrase to access his private key, and telling them to get bent. As the US has no analogue to the UK's RIP act which compels people to hand over encryption keys or face jail time, he (rightfully) invoked his fiftn amenement powers.

Assuming you use a strong passphrase, PGP is fantastically secure. Make sure there's no hardware/software keystroke loggers though, or you may end up like Nicky Scarfo.

Yep, Amazon has it. I had a good experience buying used CD's before on Amazon. I think you're out of luck as far as buying it new - it's probably gone out of print.

There is a huge amount of out of print recordings that aren't carried by online music stores. Most of the orignal tapes are still around. You would think that digitizing those recordings would be an easy way for the labels to make money. According to this article from back in May, Steve Jobs wants iTunes to have access to back-catalog material. However, it seems like he has a hard time getting the major labels to "think different".

Does this mean I won't be able to play with my cat anymore?

Also, from page 2 of the article

Also interesting is that Cringley has often written about Microsoft's technology making "full employement" for msft technicians. Interestingly, though, he thinks Apples kill more IT jobs than Linux.

Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staffs. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly.

Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job.
...
Again, it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase ITS efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged.

Also, Microsoft has started paying out (small) dividends, since the tax situation changed in favour of dividend recipients.

I've already graduated (B.Sc. in computer science from Rose-Hulman, not like that'll help me find a job in northeast Indiana), and I'm too deep in loan debt to go back for my master's. Is there anything else interesting that I don't have to pay my entire allowance for?

You can probably access library computers with your alumni card, I imagine?

Much of the most recent IEEE Spectrum (like Wired, The Globe and Mail, and any number of good print pulications) post their stuff online. I still haven't gotten around to finishing Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board article yet. In typical Stephenson fashion it's huge. And in this case, free.

are you sure you don't mean Iridium?

There *is* a market for a headless iMac - witness the prior iBox. The issue with power macs are processor overkill (vs. eMac / iMac), and size (not all mac users need dual-cpu options ...).

This article isn't the only hue & cry for a headless iMac - many others have called for this prior ...

You cannot argue that the mac price point is too high, and then provide the masses with 2 options - cpu overkill or integrated monitor ... having said all this look how well the cube fared (-;

I bought AAPL at 21, it's at 30 today. Get this dumb-ass away from my portfolio.

Seriously, every couple of months we get another MBA-bot posting his (never her) Grand Unified Plan for "saving" Apple, usually based on dumb ideas that have already failed (competing against Dell on price - look how well that went for eMachines and Gateway), are failing (tablet PC's do everything users want... really shittily), or are obviously going to fail (taunt virus/worm writers and script kiddies with boasts of Mac's invulerability).

Enough of the madness. Seven years ago, Wired ran a piece called 100 Ways to Save Apple, most of which were stupid (#76, "Make damn sure Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip"), fucking stupid (#81, "Merge with Sega"), or so fucking stupid it blocks out the sun (#61, "Ink a promotion/development deal with Shaquille O'Neal"). The item that looks best in retrospect is #101: "Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about."

Slashdot and other sites with a collective IQ greater than that of a turnip should pass on these articles in the future. They're utterly garbage, have been for 20 years, and probably will be in another 20.

--realinvalidname

This explains a little bit. You can build into the design an inabillity to interact with our biology by simply using the "mirror-image" of our base molecular structure. Feynman was one of the first to recognize the potential for a parallel biology, and that it was just by chance that earth biology evolved from a "right-handed" structure. If we limit these expariments to "left-handed" structures, we significantly reduce the threat of unintentional hazards.

... that there are no useful reasons to use animations in a presentation, unless you're desperate to distract people from concentrating on what you're saying, in which case you shouldn't be giving a presentation in the first place.

Thinking that some if not many presentations give an overall impression of an animation what do we infer?

See also this (Tufte).

CC.

Trees, on Earth at least, can get to be 427 feet. After that gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant's circulatory system.

And if any are scratching their heads trying to remember where the quote came from, it is this month's Wired

...but not much longer, given their artificial competitors.

I remember reading an article about the US Army using classic Mac for their webservers for just that reason. Hey, an URL: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,21725,00 .html

Orrin Hatch, Software Pirate?

Orrin Hatch, Software Pirate?

Your sarcastic situation was closer to the truth.

This Wired article tells about it.

Although Linux has yet to achieve wide popularity in the computer game world ("Will Linux Be Computer Games' Dark Horse OS?" Computer, Dec. 2001, pp. 161-162), it is making rapid progress toward becoming the dominant operating system in the other major entertainment arena: motion pictures. Name a motion picture from the past year or two that featured stunning animation or dazzling special effects, and chances are the film's producers used Linux-based computers to splash those graphics on the big screen.

"In short, the big news in Hollywood about Linux is it is no longer big news. Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top studios. It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have adopted Linux, too...

"You hear a lot about Linux not being ready to work on desktops," said HP's Jeff Wood, director of product marketing for personal workstations. "Well, here we have the perfect example of how Linux is more than ready for the desktop -- hundreds of animators successfully used Linux to create a film right from their desktops."

• Linux in Hollywood: A Star Is Born
• Computer and Graphics World
• Sinbad Hears Linux's Siren Song
• TechNewsWorld: Linux in Hollywood

1. NVidia Gelato (available FIRST for Linux - Windows XP coming soon)
2. Maya
3. Tremor
4. Shake
5. Houdini
6. Renderman
7. Cinepaint

1. Pixar (although Steve Jobs is moving them to Macs)
2. ILM
3. Weta Digital
4. Dreamworks

Linux is the pre-eminent renderfarm for Hollywood and is the dominant workstation for artists. But don't trust me - there are plenty of links out there on the web.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Here in California... the Democrat party and the ACLU FOISTED this up our collective asses. There was not a single Republican in charge of even the smallest dog pound out here when not 5 minutes after the 2000 vote, every Democrat went screaming into the streets - "We must have e-voting or else the poor minorities will get disenfranchised!"

actually implementing a doubt-free system is, of course, a completely different matter.

and thus it happened - and they bought Diebold.

It is NOT a Republican conspiracy - as much as some would like to believe it.

Actually, "The Burly Man" was the name the Reloaded+Revolutions production had while they were filming it. The reasons for this fact are beyond me, since the sequels had already been announced and everyone [who cared about it] knew where it was going on. And it's not as if you could keep a secret on a movie with 10 mins of credits anyway.

Want proof? It's mentioned in this article from Wired, appears on this crew-exclusive T-shirt and you can see it in a surprising amount of footage on all those behind-the-stages documentaries this boxset seems to be so prolific on.

Ew, I feel like a geek. In the bad sense of the word.

Just look at all the bad stuff you can do with an iPod... people really shouldn't be let out of the house with one of these things!

Have iPod, Will Secretly Bootleg

Using this method you can store surprisingly large amounts of data very cheaply. It's also protected from MS Windows viruses, but perhaps not all viruses.

I hate anything linking to CNN.. so here's the Wired article : Paranoia Goes Better With Coke

Just return from Kevin Warwick's (the cyborg guy from University of Reading) public lecture a few hours ago...

In his 1998 experiment, a 100-element probe was attached to the medial nerve (??) of his left hand (sorry, biologist/ MDs, I don't know the correct terms. I am an engineer who research on the mechantronic side of robot...), which has about ten thousand cell axons. The connection is kind of random. A learning process was involved so that Kevin can sensor and control using the new connections...

In a nutshell, connecting the one million retinal ganglion cell axon in optic nerve is a bit beyond the current state of art, as stated in the parent article....

It is interesting to note that one of the founders of greenpeace has turned against them.


-Colin

Though my understanding of the human eye is far from perfect, I believe this technique will work for patients who are born blind as well as those that become blind through trauma or degenerative disease. That is, this technique can, I suspect, be used on *anyone*. I am particularly fascinated by this approach. While it certainly has some drawbacks (e.g., imperfect donor eyes, organ rejection), it definitely gets around the technical issues that one reads about in the U.S. Most of the research I've read about in the past couple years (see, e.g., article 1 and article 2) involves the use of electronic fixtures of some sort with electrodes connected to the optic nerve or onto the brain itself. It's interesting--though perhaps not entirely surprising--that the low-tech approach might, at present, be more successful than the high-tech one.

Which would you rather have? A human replacement eye, or a pinhole camera mounted behind a pair of sunglasses?

The change of the "work for hire" definition was snuck in via a technical amendment to The Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999.

AFAIK, it has not been struck down.

The work-for-hire issue has been a sore point between artists and the recording industry for the past year.

Last year the music labels successfully lobbied to insert into unrelated legislation a clause that prevents copyrights from reverting to their authors. Now, they've agreed with artists to recommend rescinding the change in copyright law.

By adding four words -- "as a sound recording" -- deep within the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, Congress essentially changed the work-for-hire section of the copyright code.

Artists were enraged by what they considered to be back room dealing between the recording industry and Congress. Led by Sheryl Crow and Don Henley, musicians formed a coalition to begin negotiating with the Recording Industry Association of America and the government to repeal the additions.

In October, President Clinton signed into law a bill that removed those four words.

This article can be summed up as: I like Linux. It's better.

What utter crap! That's not an article. That's not a discussion topic. That's a typical Slashdot post. And all it does is rehash the same old tired arguments. Why didn't the /. editors instead post this interesting story that came out today? I'll give ya' one guess.

In some cases, it's the same thing. Paranoia Goes Better With Coke

This browser warning page thoroughly trashes MSIE, but every phrase is linked to a news article that uses the exact same verbiage in order to demonstrate that it isn't just anti MS FUD - It's the honest truth. It's designed and maintained for webmasters to deliver to the IE-using visitors to their webpages. You can read the source code for some more information about that. In case you're curious, here's a paste of the text and links that it has - This should prove quite effective with anyone you're trying to convince to stop using IE:

Your web browser - a version of Microsoft Internet Explorer - may not function properly on this website, and could have a large number of problems that allow hackers to hijack it with viruses. These viruses could be used by criminals to secretly take over your computer, download child-pornography, or to commit acts of terrorism and fraud. You may automatically update it now with Microsoft's available patches, however, there is a possibility that a necessary patch will not be available due to Microsoft's somewhat sluggish development schedule.

The US Department of Homeland Security strongly suggests that you stop using Internet Explorer immediately.

There are several standards-compliant web browsers that you may use instead of Internet Explorer. Please install one of them as a replacement.

• Opera [Download Now]
• Mozilla [Download Now]
• Netscape [Download Now]
• K-Meleon [Download Now]

If you suspect that your computer is already being used for criminal activity, it is critical that you seek help from a computer professional in your local area. You may also try one of the free web-based virus scanners that are available.

Vaporware is software that has been announced or marketed but is not yet available. I fail to see how the number of years of development changes this. By your logic, Duke Nukem Forever is not vaporware.

And, just to add a voice to the fugue, there is no way in hell I would consider buying this product. First off, their press release is filled with marketspeak lies: "price undercuts a 40GB iPod!!" (er, actually their unit only has half the storage but they encoded the songs at 48Kb/s and compared it against Apple's standard bitrate of 128Kb/s so they could claim that it fits more songs and hope idiot consumers won't figure that out.) "will play MP3, WMA and WAV!!" (actually, it only plays ATRAC3 and you have to use their proprietary, buggy software to make a copy of your entire collection using ATRAC3 before loading it onto the device. BTW, this process could take hours.) "ATRAC3 sounds better than MP3!!" (according to their VP of Marketing's 5 year old nephew, at least, though there are a lot nuts out there doing double-blind listening tests which show that ATRAC3 is the worst audio CODEC out there, even at 128Kb/s never mind the fact that Sony assumed 48Kb/s encoding in order to make their ridiculous capacity comparison to the 40GB iPod.)

So. To sum up: decent ergonomics, no real price advantage in an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended), only supports a crappy DRM'd Sony format. Read this Wired article on why Sony sucks, and why you shouldn't buy anything from them until they get their head out of their asses and start making things their customers actually want.

hmm my link didn't show up. I'm sure I typed it in. Here it is again:

the civil war inside sony

This practice is nothing new....these particular rockets have been used for commercial launches for a few years now, as can bee seen in this wired article from 1999.

Just like Kim Pedersen. Wired did a nice story on him a few months ago and now he's started the Monorail Society.

Cool!

But the court found that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the intended recipients read them. The court ruled that the messages were in storage rather than transit.

American Scientist is a great magazine for general science articles. Past articles include work on Non-determinstic polynomials, neutrino oscillations, and sustainable yield models for fisheries management. It's a great survey magazine. Unfortunately, it's hit or miss sometimes. Some of the articles are boring, even from a scientific perspective.

I also read Scientific American but it's kind of sensationalistic. I have a guilty pleasure of reading Wired, "Linus Torvalds, Leader of the Free World - His open source software is making Bill Gates sweat. What's next: Open Source science, law, and design". After reading that article , it's hard not to imagine him laughing after reading it.

I'd probably subscribe to an dead tree tech Linux journal but what's online seems sufficient.

I subscribe and read Better Software Magazine. Yes, it is expensive but it is worth it since it fits my job. :)

Other magazines include Wired. Other computer magazines but I get those for free from friends, family members, and relatives.

I can't really comment on the informative and technical accuracy of what I read because well... I don't read them :)

Oh my God, I know what you're talking about. There's nothing like pictures of hot girls.

Along those lines, my favorite magazine is Governing, "the magazine of states and localities." This magazine is HOTTT!!!

If you don't believe me, or think I'm a shill for those sensationalist bastards at Congressional Quarterly Inc. (publisher), check out these scorching excerpts on some SERIOUS SEDUCTRESSES!:

*On Wisconsin tax administrator Dia-ne Hardt: "sA state tax officials from around the country niggled over hundreds of tiny details, Hardt, administrator of the Division of Income, Sales and Excise Tax in Wisconsin, kept them constantly focused on the big picture ... In a cross-country blitz fueled by gallons of Diet Coke, Hardt has spoken at dozens of conferences and pressed her case before numerous state legislatures. She reminds people that sales taxes help pay for important services such as schools and police, and that taxing Internet sales is a simple matter of fairness to Main Street retailers who have always had to collect sales taxes."

*California Assemblymember Fran Pavle-y: "A former junior high school civics teacher who went on to serve as the first mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills, Pavley debuted as a legislator by pressing a measure even her own staff advised her to avoid ... In fact, the state just acted on one of her longtime priorities, announcing in October it would purchase the 3,000-acre Ahmanson Ranch as open space rather than let it be developed. Other issues garnering Pavley's attention: that one out of every seven schoolchildren in Fresno uses an asthma inhaler, that Los Angeles suffered through its worst smog in five years this past summer, and that air pollution now tops the list of citizens' concerns in the state's Central Valley."

*Former Texas chief information officer Carolyn Purce ll: "During her nine years as the state's top technology official, Purcell improved the state's record for delivering projects on time and on budget, connected state services to citizens through a user-friendly Web portal, focused on security before it popped up on the national agenda, and developed a money-saving procurement program."

I know, I know -- that's all a little too racy to be reading at work. But if you subscribe, you'll be getting the magazine at home, and you won't be able to *help* but tear into stories on "expanding privatization beyond service delivery," "brownfields and urban land recycling," and "the tax-avoidance games corporations play."

Just remember to hide all your copies before you bring your dates home!!

(Seriously, though, Governing really does rock, and I really am a paid subscriber. If you don't trust me, trust your favorite ex-Slashdot pundit!)

Around the early 90's, Apple developed a prototype operating system called Pink, which they later spun off into a company called Taligent, with the help of IBM and Hewlett Packard. Here is an old article about it and why it was canned. I remember reading something about how former Apple CEO John Scully gave a demonstration to some people of what looked like the Macintosh operating system running on a PC. As I recall it could run on both Mac and PC hardware platforms, and was designed in such a way that programmers could create programs that ran on both platforms through object-oriented programming. I purchased a book on it ages ago in which it was described as an "application system". It was meant to be a true cross-platform operating system.

the magazines i read regulary in austria (schwarzenegger) are c't, iX and the online-mag telepolis. on telepolis there're english articles too and an interessting column named WTC Conspiracy, with the first article about 9/11 posted on 9/13! other good literature is: linux magazine, freeX and of course SPIEGEL. on the web good places are golem, ORF, n-tv. unfortunately are the english magazines quite expensive (wired or hustler, both over EUR 10|-!). grtngs

Toyota has already done this, at least according to Wired. In August 2003, they said a Prius hybrid would be released in Japan in a month that did this. I heard Honda was doing something similar, but haven't heard any details.

Still, it's a cool project. Lots of drivers need all the help they can get. :)

This Wired article talks about how hybrids MPG stats are somewhat skewered because of the way the EPA performs the test partially based on emissions, which hybrids don't produce.

I personally would hope this is not the case, as I am excited about getting the new 2005 Lexus RX 400 H hybrid which comes our next year.

Hmm.. this sounds an awful like a hoax I read about on Wired today, it was linked from slashdot.

Well, okay, I didn't actually read the article, but I did read the news post about the article.

Well, okay, I never read all of that either, but I did read enough to to feel I am fully capable of making a decent reply. Anyway, here's the link to the article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/hoax.html

Agree. Remember Microsoft's Venus plan in China? Microsoft has a big ambition in TV boxes long ago. I would guess this time it's towards the Xbox, too.