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Wired article on attempts to get this listed on census forms in some countries. I wanted to write this in after "other" on mine, and got in a bit of hot water with the Mrs.

I hope using NT works out better for them than it did for the U.S. Navy

You joke, but the USS Yorktown didn't think it was so funny. :-P

See the video. Check out Wired.

The video looks pretty convincing, and according to AP and Reuters, the Mexican military is standing behind the story.

The detailed information is at Rense.

The interesting thing is that the Mexican plane was a drug interdiction aircraft with advanced radar and forward-looking infrared. It was designed precisely for the task of finding, intercepting and identifying unidentified aircraft, and it sounds like the data was handled in a way that would meet legal evidentiary standards (for obvious reasons: it was designed to convict drug smugglers).

Maybe the Vatican missed a fourth option: they're already here.

Check out Wired New's coverage of diploma mills:
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54596,00.h tml

They note that US colleges should be accredited by either the Department of Education or the Council on Higher Education Accreditation.

Every kid in the whole goddamned state. ...in middle school.

Linger at 62 miles up where there nearly no air? More like falling to earth at over the speed of sound

Simon

This implant, like the first, will be encased in a glass tube. We chose glass because it's fairly inert and won't become toxic or block radio signals. There is an outside chance that the glass will break, which could cause serious internal injuries or prove fatal, but our previous experiment showed glass to be pretty rugged, even when it's frequently jolted or struck.

See Did MS Pay for Open-Source Scare?

> A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that Microsoft provides funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

"Remember who funded the same group's report on open source security?"

No, I don't. I remember that Microsoft provided some level of funding to the group (and were quite open about it). Guess what? Microsoft fund a lot of people, doesn't mean they become Microsofts lackies. Microsoft owns 7% of comcast who made TechTV (RIP) which could hardly be called Microsoft friendly. There is no evidence at all that Microsoft funded this report, merely speculation.

So, basically, the /. editors report rumours as facts, and then misquote themselves to build further "facts" on top of that. Please try and get some crediblity.

I had some malware on my machine, I think it was sms-universe and coolwebsearch was the other. One I got from the underdogs website and

I had adaware on my system, avg, regularly check my start up registry for unusual programs appearing in there.

Sms-universe was some kind of online dialer, thankfully there is no modem in the machine so that didn't work (I clicked no a few times and it opened lots of ads some for big respectable companies i believe, then it automatically downloaded somehow. Dunno how that happened since I clicked No.

CoolWebSearch changed my homepage to some kind of search site, but with porn images emblazoned on the bottom. Also I found other files and malware on my machine after tracking down those. It seemed like one loaded another, which loaded another. Meanwhile, no browser pages were opening automatically but a few strange programs were showing in the task manager.

I managed to finally get rid of it by running ad aware, avg a few times and also changing the search and start pages in Internet Explorer's registry. The Internet Options-> Tools, Homepage apply button didn't seem to work when I closed down the browser and re-opened it which was strange.

Also, I found various files and programs in my C:\Local Settings\Administrator\Temp directory (which I don't believe existed before), also additions to C:\WINNT\System, C:\WINNT\ and C:\

So I think its fairly easy to say that a browser hijacking can result in files being placed into a place outside the cache dir (which is what i really means when he says unallocated).

I couldn't tell by the timestamps that these files were dodgy. Only one of them had a recent date, which was start.chm. The others in the temp dir (one of them was a program running in memory, which wasn't there before).

Also, although the homepage changed, even though I check my system pretty often and know my way around the registry a bit, some of the stuff was difficult to find. If I had no clue about computers, I'd have been stuck.

Admittedly, there were no pictures hidden away (other than the cached homepages ones), but I'm sure it could haved happened and since bandwidth costs money, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens.

Anyway blah blah blah. I think it just means be more vigilant. Be more paranoid about websites. If people can create viruses or steal on the internet, they can certainly take advantage of a way to put you on a sex offenders list. Maybe if you're computer illiterate, you might have some of defence if your lawyer isn't a dumbass and you do have a virus or malware on your system.

• Illegal price fixing (RIAA)?

• They were found guilty and supposedly paid the price they deserved. The open debate about the severity of the fine is irrelevant.

And shortly thereafter, they had the law changed to legalize price fixing for online music distribution.

• The record industry already has an antitrust exemption that allows record companies to jointly negotiate royalty rates for digital distribution. Late last year, the music industry convinced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to insert language into the EnFORCE Act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003) that would extend that exemption to "physical product configurations" such as CDs. That bill is still in committee.

Surprise! There's a name I'm always hearing good news about: Orrin Hatch. You know, the DMCA's author. The 'nuke your hardware with a file sharing virus' guy. The infamous software pirate himself?

After finding HatchMusic, I think I understand him now. It's not just the lobbyist bribes that motivate him. He must actually think that if he spreads enough KY Jelly on the American public's rectum for the RIAA, they'll give him "money for nothin' and chicks for free".

As a final note, if you find the KY Jelly comment a bit graphic, you'll be glad to know Orrin Hatch handed the pornography industry a blank check recently. What's not to like about the man?

• Illegal price fixing (RIAA)?

• They were found guilty and supposedly paid the price they deserved. The open debate about the severity of the fine is irrelevant.

And shortly thereafter, they had the law changed to legalize price fixing for online music distribution.

• The record industry already has an antitrust exemption that allows record companies to jointly negotiate royalty rates for digital distribution. Late last year, the music industry convinced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to insert language into the EnFORCE Act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003) that would extend that exemption to "physical product configurations" such as CDs. That bill is still in committee.

Surprise! There's a name I'm always hearing good news about: Orrin Hatch. You know, the DMCA's author. The 'nuke your hardware with a file sharing virus' guy. The infamous software pirate himself?

After finding HatchMusic, I think I understand him now. It's not just the lobbyist bribes that motivate him. He must actually think that if he spreads enough KY Jelly on the American public's rectum for the RIAA, they'll give him "money for nothin' and chicks for free".

As a final note, if you find the KY Jelly comment a bit graphic, you'll be glad to know Orrin Hatch handed the pornography industry a blank check recently. What's not to like about the man?

A rummage of Slashdot shows that they did an earlier FUD article on associating Terrorism with the GPL. It was suspected that it the institute was inflenced or funded by Microsoft

Do you mean this very non-partisan intitute?

FUD, plain and simple.

Cooper
--
I don't need a pass to pass this pass!
- Groo The Wanderer -

Non-partisan, you say? I think not.

It's a little like the Sims - you create a virtual world that has real addresses, real airports, but is populated with imaginary people. We built them by taking a list of all the last names in the country and then adding first names at random. Then we had them take trips. We had a team of a dozen people who came up with scenarios. You introduce terrorists into your world, and then you start looking for ways to pick them out from the data.

This reminds me of the guy who put up an Adobe Golive PDF book for download. Wired article here. Since nobody reads links, the short story is that it was downloaded 10,000 times in 36 hours and faced a possible $15,000 bandwidth bill (which was later rescinded by Level 3, his hosting company).

Earthlink wasn't so charitable to a Halo fan who put up a movie previewing Halo and saw it downloaded 100,000 times. Earthlink charged him $30,000 for the 4500 gigabytes downloaded.

The moral here is that if you're going to put up anything which might be downloaded quite a lot (or if you're expecting a slashdotting), make sure your host doesn't charge through the nose for extra bandwidth. Or, if the file is over 5MB in size (and under 1GB), make a freecache.org link and let others mirror it for you automatically.

• Monte Davidoff - co-author (along with Gates and Allen) of Microsoft/Altair BASIC
  
  
• Richard Stallman - Pioneer of open software movement/GNU
  
  
• Niklaus Wirth - PARC researcher responsible for Algol, Pascal, Modula-2, Laser Printers, and more
  
  
• Marvin Minsky - Built the first neural net AI in 1951
  
  
• Seymour Papert - Developer of LOGO and another AI pioneer
  
  
• Tommy Flowers - Built one of the earliest electronic computers, with the practical application of codebreaking during WWII
  
  
• Donald Knuth - Regarded by many as the "Father of Computer Science".
  
  
• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra - The guy leading the way to abolish the GOTO statement is surely a hall-of-famer!
  
  
• Konrad Zuse - Another early computer pioneer that due to politics and circumstances beyond his control was never able to be fully-recognized.
  
  
• Jeff Raskin - Creator of the Macintosh and pioneer in computer-human interfaces.
  

Would you rather the wastes and radiation be dispersed through the atmosphere, like we have with our other fuel sources? Personally, I prefer having waste concentrated in a small container.

Can you guarantee that the waste will stay in that "small container" for the thousands of years that it will pose a danger? There are thousands of nuclear waste sites globally, and none of them can guarantee that. The closest would be Yucca Mountain, and there are arguments that Yucca Mountain may not be a safe place, either.

Reactor facilities are strongly reinforced, making them awfully hard to blow up.

Read my sentence carefully: "Nuclear power makes a tempting terrorist target: blowing up a power station or waste transportation vehicle can easily irradiate millions of people."

Nuclear waste is often transported to be stored or processed. In many places the transportation goes through urban areas. It is very possible that something could go wrong (a crash, a terrorist attack, etc.), in which case the waste would lose its containment and be spread, posing a significant risk to life.

Could you point out some of these dangerous reactors you mentioned?

You might really want to worry about the legislated end to P2P sharing ---

In regard to the record companies wanting a price hike, here's my theory. Raise prices, kill all the online stores and hire a few developers to replicate what has been done already. When you're a monopolist, you think like one.

• The record industry already has an antitrust exemption that allows record companies to jointly negotiate royalty rates for digital distribution. Late last year, the music industry convinced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to insert language into the EnFORCE Act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003) that would extend that exemption to "physical product configurations" such as CDs. That bill is still in committee.

From

CNN:
"A draft of the new domestic security bill Ashcroft is seeking, published by a nonprofit government watchdog group in February, indicates that among other things, it would prohibit disclosure of information regarding people detained as terrorist suspects and prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from distributing "worst-case scenario" information to the public about a nearby private company's use of chemicals.
In addition, the measure would create a DNA database of "suspected terrorists;" force suspects to prove why they should be released on bail, rather than have the prosecution prove why they should be held; and allow the deportation of U.S. citizens who become members of or help terrorist groups."

The Patriot act, linked with the Homeland Security Act, has gutted the Freedom of Information Act.

From

Wired News Dec. 02, 2002
"One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act's creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act. Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior -- even totally unclassified activities -- to the federal government, and claim it's related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be "CII," or Critical Infrastructure Information."

In other News from the press: everything is classified now, and won't be released anytime soon. (See "Amendment To Executive Order No. 12958")
How much is this being used now?

Local News
"Federal agents sought 1,727 warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for electronic eavesdropping and physical searches last year, according to a Justice Department filing with Congress. Just four applications were rejected, and two of those were later revised and approved. The number of so-called FISA warrants jumped by 500 from 2002 and has almost doubled since 2001, when 934 applications were approved."
"By comparison, there were 1,442 wiretap petitions in federal and state courts for crimes like drugs and racketeering, according to a separate report from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts."

How much abuse has been identified?

Inspector general's report on Patriot act abuses:
( They *only* found 34 *credible* cases in the 272 complaints. But please remember, it's all secret and there is no public oversight.)
The ACLU issued a report on how the Patriot Act is actually being used. Link Here.
The Migration Policy Institute says:
'Moreover, among those detained (and of the 1,200, the MPI could only identify a third) were "persistent violations of due p

"I was annoyed by these pop-ups," [Portal of Evil's webmaster] Faliszek said. He started digging, but ran into a wall of shadows, denials and false trails. He thinks the problem of sneaky programs like VX2 is growing, and something needs to be done. "Self-policing isn't working," he said. "I hate to say we need government intervention, but something needs to be done."

So let me get this straight: This guy is quoted by a sympathetic journalist and clamors for new regulations, laws, an army of civil servants to enforce them, and the matching tax levying, all of that for his God-given right to use IE under Windows instead of, Heaven forbid, using Mozilla or a non-Windows machine.

At this degree of cluelessness, the words "dribbling idiots" are pitifully unadequate. May I suggest "drooling fuzzbrain"?

Racism Holds South Africa Back
South Africa Struggles to Rebuild

Racism Holds South Africa Back
South Africa Struggles to Rebuild

Though it may take years for any software platform in a Third World continent -- whether open source or proprietary -- to become commercially viable on the same scale as in the United States and European markets, some of the factors that have impeded the fast adoption of Linux will make Africa an interesting battleground for the open-source movement.

When are the processor companies goign to invest in the diamond wafers? - Diamond Age
Now that will be a great way to get that processor speed up, and not worry about the silicon melting.
[Yes I expect this to be modded down for redundency] ;)

Article on the Talking Moose at Wired.

And (you can gasp in anticipation here if you like) there is an update for Mac OS X, called "Uli's Talking Moose" by Uli Kusterer. Unfortunately, the web site mentioned in the article does not seem to be fully functional, and redirects to a domain that does not resolve. I'm not sure what environment the Moose is currently inhabiting, but it's probably lurking somewhere.

Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.

Sounds like an improved form of this

I know I'm still waiting for my Tomacco patent to pull through..

(Especially since Apple has unusually large patches sometimes.)

Huh? This was debunked a long time ago.

here ya go. I was off a bit, the number is actually $3.5 billion a year. The article notes that this is "good news for the music industry". People spend $40 billion on SMS a year.

Maybe this is what they want

Did Bill Gates Really Say That?

Someone just did this joke a couple of articles ago. False memes that never die just make people look ignorant.

Yeah, famous made up quote.

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

Still, your point about storage stands.

--

QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"

ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.

"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Silly quotations do have a way of floating like rumors.

Well, the truth starts here.

He never said it. No free software.

--

Based on this it seemed to be pretty far advanced (and that was two years ago). Granted I've yet to see it being used commercially.

But what about the monkeys whose heads were transplanted onto the bodies of other monkeys? yes, they were partially paralyzed, but they were able to communicate using their heads in such ways that the researchers were able to confirm that the knowledge they had before transplantation, were still there after transplant. Thus, unless you stipulate that a human has a soul, or something else a monkey does not have, then YOU ARE YOUR BRAIN.

And if you think we have souls, then, well, you have "issues" that make this discussion moot....

Hey, remember the Canadian startup icravetv.com (archive link) and the fuss it stirred up. It was a good little service for its time, before getting squashed by legalities. Maybe it would be a good time for them to consider starting it up again.

Jithead: An international transportation term used to describe people who order goods on a "just in time" basis and then freak out when told that they didn't order early enough.
"That jithead should have placed his order a month ago."

But some who have used the program advise caution.

"I went on vacation, and forgot all about the switch," said Kenny LaGuardia, a Web designer from Los Angeles. "When I returned home, the program had posted, 'So I guess I'm dead' messages to all the newslists I subscribe to, and destroyed all my adult entertainment files."

Same with Wired (except for a few places where tables are used canonically, to show data in a grid-like format).

Here's two

ESPN.com
Wired.com

Wired News

PGA.com

ESPN.com

A quick browsing of Web Standards Awards should also show you that it's possible to have nice looking and comptatible CSS designs.

That's why the bill is co-sponsored by Orrin "Hypocrite" Hatch, (R-UT).

This is right on. Of course we should expect computing power to grow according to Moore's Law (although there was a recent article indicating this may fail soon for laptops: Wired).

But if one looks into Moore's Law for Software (Googled) you find a different analysis. In short it looks like algorithm development has lagged sufficiently behind the computational power.

So what does this mean for gaming? It seems developers are hanging onto old ideas and relying on the growth in proc speeds (and bus speed and etc. etc.) to enhance their graphics/rendering. Thus the improved visualization comes to the cost of the consumer by forcing them to purchase faster and faster computers. Now we can run the newest games on the tricked out settings only on the fastest/cutting edge computers. This trends seems to be getting worse recently indicating that Moore's Law for Gaming Software is indeed lagging Moore's Law for computing power. IMO...