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You've got it all wrong. Who cares what she says, what she thinks. She rates up there as Very Doable

A bunch of dumb motherfuckers on Google does not a correct answer make.

You leave George W. Bush out of this.

Like all technology, this will surely improve. And, as it does, those digital pictures can be "replayed" again and again - even after the original source has decayed to a puddle of jelly.

But for those who haven't, here is a thought-provoking article on some of the basic issues posed by outsourcing. The article focuses on IT offshoring, but it may be a useful appetizer for /.ers delving into the biotech offshoring discussion.

The Apple World:
The Cathedral. The Holy Steve Jobs (ever wonder why it's called the Cult of Mac. Systems running tightly integrated software officially sanctioned by the Apple. Little output for customization, creativity or diversity. All Macs have one of a few appearances, with extremely rare exceptions. Apple progress is often characterized by usually large but infrequent bounds, often coupled with impressive corporate acquisitions (e.g. NothingReal) and ruthless business tact (terminating PC support for Shake and FCP). Highly elitist users and developers, often very willing to "preach" to the unfaithful.

The PC World:
The Bazaar. All sorts of manufacturers running about trying to sell competing products through a myriad of resellers. A much more complex market that gives rise to fierce, often chaotic competition, with more incremental but far more rapid advances. All manner of users, from the clueless newbie, the hardcore gamer, the unix guru, the graphics artist and the scientist and engineers. Among the more high-end users, risque hardware customization and minute hardware analysis reign supreme. Software and hardware integration is less integrated than in the Apple World, but needless to say, that does not seem to be much of an impediment. The PC World is far less united, but also amazingly adaptive and incredibly diverse.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Which is better? You decide...

"Great Taste, Less Privacy.", Kim Zetter, Wired News. 6 February 2004. 7 April 2004.

It's very difficult to think of where a technology is going that we can't understand. And if you believe we understand it, you really don't. Why the future doesn't need us. - Bill Joy gives an excellent and disturbing look at nano.

A relevant (a bit old though) article that I read by bill joy . He calls the threat by self-multiplying nano-tech etc Knowledge of Mass Destruction :). But still the bottom line about looking before we leap still holds pretty damn true.
"It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was out of the bottle - roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies - the prevention of knowledge-enabled mass destruction - and further delay seems unacceptable."

Here's the link to the Wired article about it

I think it's a valid concern, because you know they will keep developing these things all the way, I have expected it.

There's already enough trouble dealing with human guards and police in the civilian sector if they get incensed or follow illegal orders and go mad dog on you. In strict military terms it's alwas been thus because the objective is to "kill the other guys" basically and any accidents are classed off as "collateral damage". We barely have any sort of reasonable expectation anymore of arguing a differing point of view in the civilian world, exploring what might be a mistake in intent or circumstances, before getting maced, beat or shot, but not with a robot, you won't get that. Binary. Won't really matter which OS it's running because even when it's running "well" it will still be dumb as a rock, they aren't even close to having the intelligence a good guard dog has, let alone a human. But, they are well past "close enough" to make them mobile and armed, a pretty dangerous situation, IMO. They won't wait for AI to equal just the mundane functionality, not when "collateral damage is almost always acceptable" is their over all mindset on achieving objectives. These sorts of robots won't be able to do the critical reasoning necessary to be effective in all cases, and you can bet that there will be a lot of cases of "collateral damage" with them once they are armed and programmed for aggression.

In the military it's a no brainer for them,of course, it's just a smart tank sort of logical progression, various sizes. And predator is getting closer to the concept on the aerial platform, and cruise missiles I think could be classed as almost fully robotic in nature, and are in widespread use now, as are all the other complex "fire and forget" type munitions.

His name is Robert "Robby" Todino.
Wired did an article about him, available here.
A followup here.

His name is Robert "Robby" Todino.
Wired did an article about him, available here.
A followup here.

Bluetooth mood ring...bah...that's so last week. You need something new and improved.

I know they're a big cash cow for the state and all (why do you think they're so high) but now they're getting in the way of communication. Screw the state governments, they'll have to deal with the loss of revenue some other less sneaky way. Even the much-ballyhooed rural service fee is no longer justified. There are cheaper ways of communicating from the middle of nowhere than stringing copper out there. They pay less to live out in the middle of nowhere, why should the rest of us pay more to support their choice?

Viva la VOIP!

Not to be picky, but please.. for the love of jebus. It's some word Here is the above link

July 2003
"It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all-you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac."

September 2001
"One of [the] surest ways you could drive Bill nuts was to say that Apple is the company that innovates, and Microsoft is the company that iterates. But I think it's basically true. My goal was to create a company culture that has the same pioneering, innovative spirit that one associates with Apple and that has the persistence, a willingness to go nose to the grindstone, that one associates classically [with] Japanese manufacturing companies, like Matsushita, and with Microsoft."

Now, to put the current Real/Apple relationship in perspective, take a look at this May, 2001 tidbit:

"Today, Glaser's RealNetworks, with 26 million users, beats out both Microsoft's and Apple's offerings. Apple, which has slipped to No. 3 behind Microsoft, continues to lose ground. In January, the number of QuickTime users fell to 7.29 million, down 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by market researcher Jupiter Media Matrix. Windows Media Player had 21.5 million users, according to the same study."

Sounds like Glaser is trying really hard to make his position look solid, but he sees the writing on the wall. Consumers are fed up with Real's "hunt for the free download" tactics, and aren't taking to Real 10 the way he'd hoped.

Glaser used to work for MS, before he left to form "Progressive Networks" (it's on p2). I thought it interesting that either his politics changed, or he needed to not alienate investors, thus the change of name to "Real Networks".

Of course, he must have burnt a few bridges during the anti-trust trial... but these people are businessmen, if there's money to be made by kissing and making up then they'll do it (vide McNealy and Ballmer).

"Braden Bournival, vice-president of the New Hampshire Chess Association and his business partner, the former neo-Nazi leader Davis Wolfgang Hawke."

Wired Story

Talk About Spam

Sony lost their exlusive use of walkman trademark in Austria in 2002.
Read about it here and here.
Or search google for sony walkman trademark case austria

• commercial advert
• fully automated spam engine
• forged headers (in this case, moderation approval)
• three-rules compliant

Yes, there were previous incidents. The Arpanet DEC spam was much earlier, but it was manually typed by a secretary. Zumabot was an earlier robospammer, but he was noncommercial. April 12 1994 is the true Pearl Harbor (or 9-11, for the historically challenged) of spam. The day that convinced us it was time to fight back hard.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has repeatedly issued false statements about CAPPS II and stonewalls on release of Freedom of Information Act requests, Wired News is reporting.

An excerpt from the article -

"Department representatives have said many times in the past that their contractors never received data."

"In September 2003, Wired News asked TSA spokesman Nico Melendez whether those four contractors had used real passenger records to test and develop their systems. Melendez denied it, saying, 'We have only used dummy data to this point.'"

On Monday the TSA did release a non-statement, saying nothing.

They already track you with GPS without your permission (Cops Challenged on GPS Use), why should they stop there?

I'm confused to... I thought Stevenson was too busy working at this spaceship company to write books.

Wired 10.09: Vision Quest

"A half century of artificial-sight research has succeeded. And now this blind man can see."
The patient lost his sight to accidents. By inserting brain implants and connecting them to cameras he can 'see' well enough to drive again. The dataflow direction is reversed but the implementation is the same.

Why therefore do people submit science stories with a link to NYT when they could just link to the source material? This is the frigging internet. You can do just as much research as the press-release-editing typewriter monkey at NYT can.

For instance, the facts in this story were reported six months ago on ScienceDaily , three months ago on Wired and dozens of other places that could be found in 20-30 seconds on googlage.

In summary, if you don't like NYT's registration, don't link to it. You are advertising for them.
</rant>

If you have concerns about a service you're not even required to use, don't use it. Simple as that.

Anyhow, EFF addressed the same concerns to Google and concluded that " No Log [are] Made of 'Concepts' Data ".

Also, Wired presented some reassuring information too in this article. For instance, you can read the VP of engeneering at Google affirming that " [...] Google will not keep a log of which ads went to which users, nor will it keep a record of keywords that appear often in an individual's e-mail. ".

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

McNealy? I thought it was Bill Joy who wrote the Why the future doesn't need us.

Frankly, I never get tired of pointing out Sen. Hatch's hypocrisy.

The problem comes if those employees decide to start exercising those options - say if MSFT starts dropping in value. This might create a chain reaction: other option-holders start panicking and exercising their options as well - and all this would create yet more downward pressure on the price of MSFT. To keep this from happening, the only option will be for Microsoft to start buying its stock back - this $50 billion might not be enough if the pressure gets too great...

Yeah, that would mean MSFT would have to do something drastic, and self-defeating, like saying the tech sector is "overvalued" or something, and then just watch those options expire, underwater, and worthless.

But that would be pretty twisted and Machiavellian, wouldn't it?

From Wired's interview:

Although the Times doesn't pay retail for the service, the FBI calculated Lamo's damages using the full Lexis-Nexis rate, which added up to a shocking $300,000. It was clearly a punitive figure. Had Lamo simply bought an unlimited three-month account with Lexis-Nexis rather than piggybacking off the Times, it would have cost him just $1,500.

That's putting their foot in their mouth too. Though I'm not sure if that's Apple's fault or not.

"Maybe you can explain that, as I don't understand.

Certainly.

It iss an assault on freedom. I support good access control - access control that is strong enough to prevent reverse engineering. This is how security works. What I cannot support is organizations like the MPAA, RIAA and Apple using a bad law to suppress the speech of programmers. Source code is free speech! Where have you been all these years?

I am very sorry for the MPAA and Apple that they hired incompetents to write their access control mechanisms. However when you start banning speech, where does one draw the line? I'm sure we will soon have a PlayFair T-shirt at ThinkGeek, and Apple will have to start having wearers of the T-shirt arrested, much like the MPAA.

It is a very simple assault on freedom that fortuneately is illegal in the countries like Germany where reverse engineering is legal - and where this software will eventually find a home.

This "playfair" project is just going to have the recording industry folks who reluctantly agreed to go in with Apple and distribute their music get scared and pissed off. They're going to pull their music and/or the prices are going to go up in fear of piracy.

The labels are already raising the prices. Apparently fear of the nasty customers pirating their wares wasn't a factor for them. Just lots of money.

So who cares. They had a nice model, and now they're even more greedy than ever.

This Article?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker_pr .html

wired also has an article about him. Pretty informative about his history and current conditions. Read away...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker.ht ml

If a human being went through each movie and personally selected each "offensive scene", then the problem is that one person's idea of offensive may not be another person's. If it's an automated thing that searches for certain elements & automatically labels them obscene, then there's a whole new can of worms. Software does a crappy job of understanding nuance. Hence, Dick Van Dyke becomes Jerk Van Gay. I mean, what's it going to do with a "How to Breastfeed" instructional video?

In 1988 The name Echelon is defined : "Eavesdropping on Europe" :

October 1998 : "In October, Europe's governing body will commission a full report into the workings of Echelon, a global network of highly sensitive listening posts operated in part by America's most clandestine intelligence organization, the National Security Agency."

"British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell was the first to report about Echelon in a 1988 article in The New Statesman. He believes that there is a very thin line between intelligence gathering and commercial espionage."

Wasn't that the guy who was put behind bars by the British Queen?

Some time ago Cisco announced IOS was highly vulnerable to hack attacks, so they said : "download new fixed IOS version today!" But didn't they announce a press release that future IOS releases would contain FBI Fed hookups?

The story on that is here : "More on Cisco Building Surveillance into Routers" They talk about Eavesdropping 'must be undetectable, and such. Well now! Not so long ago a customer wanted a more powerfull cisco router, basilcy going from a 1603 to a 2600 series router.

We already had a cisco 2610 running which has 64 MB RAM in its default configuration. I checked but only the cisco 2610XM was avaliable (now 6 months ago), which highly interesting has 128 MB in its default configuration. The best part was, that a brand new cisco 2610XM at cisco's was even cheaper in price as the older cisco 2610, which cisco didn't sell anymore, but was only available on ePAy or refurbished cisco resellers.

Robert

Depends on where you live. In the U.S. and U.K., the answer is yes. There have even been cases in the U.K. of people using jammers that have been charged. Doesn't seem to stop people from continuing to sell them quietly though.

I thought I had read an article in Wired about this topic. Edward Castronova (an associate professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton) wrote a study about online economics and its possible effects.

Wired Article

The biggest issue of debate was wether or not the ability to get real money off of assets from these games could possibly grant your avatar certain Government protected rights. Silly, I know but what if you made your living off of online brothels and then your character gets kicked from the server? Where is your income now?

Though currently developers/publishers are protected from any recourse it'll be difficult to make sense of it all when these virtual economies become real and a corporation is the regulatory body of a contrived economic structure that effects the real world.

Personally, I think the biggest problem is 13 year old prostitues spamming you for DP or AM.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

Actually, intel is moving away from measuring chip speed by GHZ. Wired just had this article about it.

Basically, Intel is a couple years behind AMD who is now using numbers like 2300+ to describe chip speed.

Mobile phone ringtones sold $3.5B in the past year, that's over 10% that of the global music market (about $32B.)

wired article (Reuters source)

Where do they expect all this extra money to come from if not drops in sales of similar market items such as music CDs? The pie does grow a little over the years, but these are 10% changes in market tastes and that's just one seemingly minor item!

That's good news. Someone should make sure they stop running Windows too.

...although, as the announcement says, "Most things seem to be working but there are still some problems with IDE & the framebuffer."

Wired has an article on this, too.

To be fair, I already put up another post similar to this, but you ought to note that Microsoft has used BSD software in its own products since (at least) Windows NT.
Microsoft has taken its stance on the GPL before. I direct you to this article. Here MS is stating that it doesn't think open source software is "cancerous" or dangerous, but that GPL'd software is.
To be fair, there is some truth to what they say about the GPL forcing everyone to release the source code to their product. Of course, that is exactly why I use it on my own software.

And on the other side you had Microsoft Vice President Craig Mundie straining credulity by insisting that the company's execs really didn't mean it when they said they hated open source.

"It has been reported that Microsoft doesn't like open source," he said at the start of his speech. "But let me be clear: Microsoft has no beef with open source."

What about the time that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called open-source software a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," or the time that Jim Allchin, Microsoft's VP for Windows, suggested that open-source software was un-American?

Mundie said those comments were all a big mistake, and furthermore taken out of context by the media. He elaborated on the point in a media Q&A session after the debate: "I know Steve (Ballmer)," Mundie said. "That was an unfortunate choice of words. I don't think he'd use them today."

Ballmer is a very busy man, Mundie added, and sometimes he gives "terse" responses because he's pressed for time. "When he talked about the cancer, he was trying to express the company's concern about the GPL."

Considering the U.S. government is prone to pulling dirty tricks via deliberate sabotage of software code, I don't blame any of these countries to want to use open-source software. At least there they can audit the code.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62806,00. html

The author of a new book detailing a plan to use a Trojan horse embedded in stolen software to wage economic war against the Soviet Union fired back Thursday at charges the book's revelations are "rubbish."

Thomas C. Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force and special assistant to President Reagan, detailed the stunning story in At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War.

According to Reed, the Reagan administration faced a choice in 1981 when it "gained access to a KGB agent in their technical intelligence directorate" and discovered that Soviet theft of American technology had been "massive."

"In essence, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself," Reed said in a phone interview.

Rather than arrest everyone they could to try to close the operation down and halt further espionage, CIA director William Casey and National Security Council staffer Gus Weiss cooked up a better plan: They turned into hackers.

"(Soviet agents) stole stuff, and we knew what they were going to steal," Reed said. "Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn't break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic."

The most spectacular result of this hacking, according to Reed, was a massive explosion during the summer of 1982 in the controversial pipeline delivering Siberian natural gas to Western Europe.

Soviet spies stole software needed to operate the pipeline, not knowing that "it had a few lines of software added that constituted a Trojan horse," said Reed. "They checked it out, it looked fine, and ran just fine for a few months. But the Trojan horse was programmed to let it run for four or five months and then the pumps and compressors are told, 'Today is the day we are going to run a pressure test at some significantly increased pressure.'"

He continued: "We expected that the pipeline would spring leaks all the way from Siberia to Germany, but that wasn't what happened. Instead the welds all blew apart. It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."

Former KGB agent Vasily Pchelintsev, who was reportedly head of the KGB office in the area of the 1982 blast, told the English-language Moscow Times in a recent interview that Reed's account was inaccurate. "What the Americans have written is rubbish," the former agent said.

Pchelintsev said the only explosion that occurred in Siberia that year came in April, not during the summer, and was near the city of Tobolsk in the Tyumen region. A government investigation blamed the explosion -- which was not disclosed in public until after Reed's book -- on construction violations, Pchelintsev said.

The former KGB agent added that no one was killed in the explosion, the damage was repaired within one day and the pipeline in question supplied gas locally, to the city of Chelyabinsk, not to Western Europe along the Urengoi-Uzhgorod pipeline.

Hopefully once this process gets cheaper and more refined, we'll have optical processors and buses.

A snip from the article:

But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5

I don't know what we can look forward to after that =P

I'm afraid that if all they focus on is ridiculous shit like 419s, people will just dismiss the problem as something only fools will fall for.

You're echoing in microcosm a common concern in the anti-spam world. If legislative or technical efforts against spam target only the most egregious types -- 419-scammers, barnyard porn peddlers, password phishers -- then they may be, inadvertently, making the world safer for spammers who are less blatantly evil. So-called "mainsleaze" spam -- unsolicited bulk email from "legitimate" companies -- is also on the rise, and has just as much potential to destroy the email facility as "scams & porn" spam does.

There are millions of legitimate, aboveboard companies in the world. Spamming is cheap, so spammers rarely have an incentive to spam a targeted list of likely customers rather than the largest group they can. So imagine the result if just 1% of all legitimate companies sent you a spam once per year -- it would amount to thousands of spams a day. This would destroy email just as thoroughly as all the sUUp3r v14'6rA C14Li$ and h0+ T33,N L3$b1An spam could.

And quite a few "legitimate" companies have already dirtied their legitimacy by sending spam. E-pending, or searching out the email addresses of offline customers and spamming them, has become a fad among a certain class of marketers. Others contract out the job of spamming past customers to large operations like MessageReach and DigitalImpact (m0.net).

(Some claim that if you do business with a company, they should have the right to send "offers" to you by email without being considered to be spamming. But think about the number of companies you do business with in the course of a year, directly or indirectly. Suppose you buy a "Harry Potter" bath towel at Sears for your young cousin's birthday present. Should that give three companies -- Sears, the towel manufacturer, and Scholastic (publisher of Harry Potter) -- the right to "e-pend" your email address and send you ads?)

If email is to be protected from the potential onslaught of thousands of spams a day per person, it needs to be defended not only against blatant scammers, but also against anyone else who is tempted to scratch up a few more bucks by spamming.

from the dead tree edition a few months ago

open source in other arenas (than software) scroll to bottom to see beginning paragraph on the section about 'open source' scientific journals.

*shrug*

e.

Oh, and allowing it in standard players worked much better?