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Notice that "real" news services like Wired are presenting it that way as well.

There's a nice commentary on how it is difficult to separate social from technical concerns. [link]. Perhaps that should be extended to the economic space as well.

What Verisign is trying to do is simple, enclose the entire DNS space. One solution in rejecting their governance is to support alternative domains ([AlterNIC]) but in some ways this is akin to a poison pill defense in that you're likely to get instability until an oliopoly forms.

Practically I doubt whether profit-oriented entity is willing to give up their fee from the assignment of names. I just hope an enlightened successor to Postel steps forward.

LL

Then you're incapable of reading and reasoning, then. Let me describe in the most simplisitc, most childishly plain terms that I can, and perhaps it will register in the dark recessess of your underused cranium: Iraq had the ability to manufacturer chemical, biological, and nuclear arms.

Ah, good. Opening with an insult. That's the best way to present your argument as grounded in firm logic instead of emotion and supposition, isn't it?

I should point out that the experts -- by which I mean David Kay, the man Bush hired to look for weapons programs and not Fox News pundits -- would disagree with you. Saddam seems to have had R&D on chemical and biological weapons, but he had no actual weapons produced, he had no plants ready to produce them, and his nuclear program was a complete shambles with no capacity to manufacture weapons.

Now, if you said that he was clearly deceiving the international community, that he was in violation of UN resolutions to show inspectors around properly, or that he actually had conventional weapons that were in violation of the UN resolutions, then I'd agree with you. I might even agree now that that justified the war. However, if you want to nod your head along with the ludicrous statement that he the capacity to produce "over 25,000 liters of anthrax," "more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," or "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," then I'm going to have to laugh in your face. Saddam's programs were mostly dead by the time the second war started.

[H]is very possession of them could put him in a position of blackmailing the entire world. It doesn't help that, as the formerly most powerful Arabic nation, he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so.

Not without retribution. The entire lesson learned by the war on Kuwait was that he could not do so without terrible retribution. Saddam has bargaining power only because there was international pressure against the US moving. An actual attack with WMDs in the current environment would've seen France, Russia, Germany, and China's (paid-for) political position crumble and support given to walk all over the country. Saddam wasn't a fanatic. He was a cold-blooded, rational dictator who played the game of brinksmanship and lost hard.

Such an action would've caused grave economic damage to this nation ...

Didn't do that much the first time, did it? It actually helped pick up the economy quite a bit when we stepped on his little army the last time.

Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here.

Again, you miss the fact that Saddam didn't like jihadists like al-Qai'da. (Furthermore, according to the linked article, Osama didn't like Saddam either.) He was more than willing to fund money into Palestinian terrorism because it was a good PR move with other Arabic nations and Palestinian terrorists had a defined goal that wouldn't come back to bite him, but al-Qai'da has made its mission to see Sharia implemented worldwide. That would mean toppling his own secularist government, too. Remember, the reason we allied with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war was that we saw Iraq as one of the few non-fanatical governments in the Middle East. The Baathists were secularists who oppressed a lot of the more religious minorities in Iraq. This and the flood of foreign fighters is why Iraq is seeing its first waves of suicide bombings. Iraqis were too scared to do this before.

Also, Hussein didn't have to want political gains here. Haven't you noticed that these terrorists aren't trying to make political points?

Once again, Hussein was a ruthless dictator, not a terrorist -- just as evil, but completely different g

And 'windows' was definately a generic computing term before MS took it for the name of their product.

Is this a veiled attempted at trying to suggest that IPv4 is perfect, and that DNS is perfect, and that technologists, researchers, and (oh, evil) companies should not bother trying to fix or improve things? It pretty much reads that anything any company tries to do is stupid, and evil.

It sounds so 1997, like it should of been written when people still read Wired.

Did you know the first spam was created by lawyers? There ya go.

The link in the blurb is to the second part of the article. Here is the actual link.

I've been noticing boing boing feeding a lot of stories recently. And you shouldn't overlook the monthly "new stories on wired" karma whore feeding frenzy...

I work in a professional industry that was affected by offshoring years ago (animation). The grunt work (animation, inbetweening, coloring, etc.) went to places like South Korea (and now India) and the more creative work (character design, background painting, layout) stayed in the U.S. It used to be that this was the case just for television animation, but some feature work has gone overseas as well.

When computer animation came along, it was a boon to studios in the U.S. and Canada-- many in-house jobs were created where one could animate. Studios could keep the work in the country; the only downside for workers is that there's less of them needed, so the competition's a bit fiercer. Until recently I held one of these jobs. Now, I didn't get laid off because my job was going elsewhere-- the project just ended. That's what the business is like. Now I'm looking for something else, but of course I can't limit myself to just animation. Still, I'm confident I'll find something, as some of my former coworkers already have, and considering that I have some experience in the preproduction (more creative) side of the business. Still, I love to animate... so what are you gonna do? Me, I'm working on an indie thing on the side.

The only downside of this lack of work is that there's a lot of animators-- many fresh out of school-- that can't find a job for months... or years. Considering the past few years, though, one can't really blame outsourcing; it was the bust after the animation boom of the mid-nineties. All these Disney and Fox people out of work are going elsewhere and starting their own studios. And, to be fair, in the late 90s there were lots of stories of people getting into animation strictly for the money. As any serious animation professional can tell you, LOVE and DEDICATION to the medium comes first.

It's all economics, I guess. What worries me about the tech thing is that my future husband is a computer science major, and he's graduating soon-- graduating to this volatile market. He's already gotten some good advice about the sorts of jobs he might want to take (and from what he's told me, they do sound like "higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs"), and I know that he has the talent to get such work, just as I believe I have the talent to continue on in this demanding field (demanding both when working, and when not). I even suggested the other night that we should go into business together; he's been really helpful in assisting me with the backend code for a webspace I have, while I like to design the pages themselves. We could be the ultimate creative team...

This country is a demanding place; it only demands the best out of its people. I think that's the hard lesson of outsourcing.

I'm sure if the file you sent out was called "thisvirusisnamedJim.vbs", it would be called Jim.

Tell that to the author of Nimda, the first major worm to spread multiple ways. He clearly named his worm "Concept Virus(CV) V.5, Copyright(C)2001 R.P.China" in a string in the binary, but the antivirus people called it "Nimda" anyway. Nimda 0.6 contained the string "Concept Virus(CV) V.6, Copyright(C)2001, (This's CV, No Nimda)" but it was still called Nimda.

Agreed. On a similar note, I am more concerned with outsourcing because it is making the corporations even richer (and hence even more powerful). For instance, this info. is from the wired article mentioned in the header:

Typical salary for a programmer in the US: $70,000
Typical salary for a programmer in India: $8,000

True, $70,000 is way too high and $8,000 is way too low. But my point is: where is the missing $62,000/person? What about $620,000 for 10 persons or $6.2 million for 100 persons...? You get the idea...

On a concluding note, it is not only the corporations who are becoming richer. But, as an Indian American - I know of the consequences this has on a MAJORITY of the Indian population - make them even poorer.

Bharath (aka cobra1729)

While your asking programmers you may actually run into a business savvy person.
Can you ask if the contract process between in-country versus international is percieved as a potential problem or benefit of Indian based shops.

Currently the ability for corporations/persons inside Europe and North America to effectively sue under both tort , contract breach, and ethics breach is breaking down. Internationalizing commercial software exacerbates the prosecution situation.

Do the programmers/managers/entrepreneurs you meet feel that India has an effective legislative and justice body to protect their personal and corporate rights? Does India has an effective system to adequately respond to international requests for justice?

Given the fact that International lawsuits are very expensive and hard to enforce judgements across boarders for big crimes (humanity, slavery, trafficing, fraud, etc) how are small companies everywhere going to CYA [cover your arse] their hard cash currancy investments in India development shops?

What is the India's stance on Copywrite enforcment?
It it foreseeable that a SCO like travisty would happen cross boarders. It is also foreseeable that a "legitamate" accusation as in the Racecad/alibre situation.

I also would like to see what would happen in cases like the IBM S.K. bribery case. How effectively are Indian companies and government actually enforcing fraud laws?

Have Indian shops ever been stiffed for non-payment, late payment, under payment by a non regional company [Europe, US]? What was the costs and outcome of legal recourse?

>How do you feel about the American programmers that are angry they lost their jobs to outsourcing? Do you think they have a right to be angry?

As long as welfare in the US remains dozens of times higher than the average wage in India, I don't think they'll shed any tears. Neither should you.

Jobs versus Eisner & Gates. Hmmm. Eisner is under attack by the Disney family (having kicked the Son off the board, effectively) and has had a high profile contract loss (Pixar itself). Gates is reviled and ridiculed by roughly the same people since Greenspun made his Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock; this hasn't hurt him much at all. Jobs is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (without the genocide). Pixar had a disappointing earnings report

Will Time Warner choose sides?

Speaking of which, will this Internet/Media marriage have as much impact as TimeWarner/AOL? if so, this is non-news.

Stop the Cash Flow, Kill the Spam

All spammers selling something are processing the transactions through credit cards. Put pressure on Visa to cancel the transaction and spammers would be stopped cold, [Paul] Graham said. So what if it's a Taiwanese Internet pharmacy? Reach them through their Visa merchant account.

The response rate is already at .25%, I don't think we can expect it to go any lower. But we can go after the money from a different direction, go after the vendor.

1. Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies was: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Nothing about losing the discussions or that the discussion has to end when Nazis or Hitler are mentioned.
2. Godwin's Law was just an experiment.

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59565,00. html

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59565,00. html

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59565,00. html

Hope it isn't this guy doing the installing.

Cash won't help.

No..buy her a diamond made with new technology.
The New Diamond Age Then you can be a geek and keep your wife. They cost less too, much less!!

It's a quick, interesting read, and very apropos to the current IP debate.

But the spirit of the watch still flows with fashion, and I think that the personal timepiece is one of those magical places in which technology and fashion can merge to produce absolutely wonderful things.

I should get my wife cubic zirconium because it looks the same as a diamond but is much cheaper because it was made with "technology".

A cubic zirconium no, because you can tell the difference. So maybe you should buy her one of these.

I should get my wife cubic zirconium because it looks the same as a diamond but is much cheaper because it was made with "technology".

No, you can go ahead and get her a real diamond. They can manufacture them for about $5 per carat. And yes, they are chemically identical.

Yet people will still pay for "The Real Thing" simply because they are suckers of marketing and social status.

One of the problems with VoIP has been choppy communications when users are making heavy use of their broadband connection.

Tha t's abs olutel y n ot true.

-- Reg ards
Sanf ord Wall ace

Always register for customer loyalty cards under phony names: Ted Nugent, Harry Truman, and John Cocktosen are favorites.

Need a fake SSN for your long distance service? (Really they don't need this) use 078-05-1120. It's an Eisenhower era specimen number that works 99% of the time.

Wired has a great story that these are pulled from. See it here

Here's a link for all who shoot first.

Investor's Business Daily (body-cavity search required) said on Jan 15, 2004 that "... Nielsen has been tracking TiVo use since August 2002, but it hasn't released any findings publicly."

USAToday is featuring TiVo popularity information in their television listings: "On Wednesday January 28 USA TODAY unveils an enhanced package of television ratings coverage in the LIFE section, including a monthly listing of the Top 10 most rated programs based on an analysis of anonymous, aggregate data from 20,000 TiVo households."

And you can read more about Nielsen partnering with TiVo from a while back.

TiVo reporting aggregate TV viewing habits is no different from cable companies being able to tell what channels you're choosing to watch on your digital cable box, from websites gathering referrer and browser information from visitors, or movie studios talking about what the largest grossing movies were over the weekend.

I welcome TiVo's use of aggregate (*not personalized*) gathering of data for reporting to the networks. With luck, this could result in the networks deciding to keep certain shows that have high record/replay/time-shift value instead of cancelling them because nobody wants to watch those shows exactly when the networks choose to air them. If my TiVo usage can help dictate the types of shows that the networks will (or won't) air, then this is a win for all of us.

It's amazing how many times this game has been delayed. Vague promises of 2002, then summer 2003, then Xmas 2003, most recently mid-April 2004, and now summer 2004. It's so bad that HL2 was Wired magazine's #1 vaporware product of 2003.

Because all systems in space research become so complex, you can not have error, and you only have one chance of running the program (or system), NASA started using special techniques, that allow them to formally verify every state of device in advance.

I remember reading article about that around Pathfinder time, when Polar Lander crashed because of software error.
Here is that article from Wired. 50 man-years to verify the system, eh?

There is formal verification of algorithms in CS.
However, in case of spacecraft it's more than software, it's hardware too, as we can see. And hardware does get included in verification too!

As a business software programmer, I find that fascinating. I can only imagine what the life would be if we used verification. Of course, the reality is that it will never happen, we are not rocket scientists :)

Here's something for you to consider. Who the heck died and made you the tax collector for the world? That's exactly what they'll be saying to Microsoft and Yahoo. This approach would be excedingly painful to negotiate, worse, most of the open relays aren't great big machines, but zombies and small servers with lax security.

A couple years back some sh!t hit the fan regarding Bill Jones run for office in California. Seems some Campaign email was routed through a elementary school computer in Korea. What are you going to do? Send them a bill and have Microsoft or Yahoo goons shut down the school when they don't pay it?

What's needed is cooperation, not this loopy strategy.

Blacklist/Whitelist or roll out a new standard and have major ISP's switch over and at some point block old SMTP Problem solved.

Story also posted on C-Net (no account required, yada yada).

What hapened to Yahoo's (as yet unveiled) scheme-to-end-all-schemes for authenticating mail? IMHO, I think that SPF:Sender will make great strides towards combatting spam, combined with new laws that make spoofing illegal. And AOL is backing it, so I think there is a good chance for success, as they are both one of the largest sources of e-mail as well as one of the most commonly spoofed domains.

MATRIX is the product of the drug-running covert actors who brought us the Iran-Contra connection. Seisint is the data warehouse in Florida for these Matrix apps, started by Hank Asher. He also founded DataBase Technologies, which purged the 2000 Presidential election rolls of 57,000 voters, 95% in error, the majority of them Democrats. Prior to that, Asher flew drugs off Florida through the Bahamas for Iran-Contra. His boss was John Poindexter, director of the "doomed" federal TIA, the mother of all Matrices. A French webpage has the Seisint/DBT (translated to English) connection: Hank Asher. For extra points, Diebold's eVoting division has been run by another convicted Iran-Contra cocaine dealer.

Now the Matrix, after being rejected by Georgia for its unwarranted invasions of privacy, is making the rounds of the rest of the states which owe Bush Jr favors. Idaho governor Leavitt succeeds Governor Kempthorne, just named the previous Idaho governor, to head the EPA, as it abandons the penalty financing of SuperFund. Check your own state government for the favors it owes Bush Corp., before they sell you to the Bush cronies. Drug dealers, vote fixers, Big Brothers: these are the people we have given the power of the US government. Take a stand now, before you have nothing left to defend.

WiFi at campgrounds is already happening. Cool stuff, too.... :)

SB

Which, of course, is an exaggeration. Any such requirements come from the deal your shop has signed with Microsoft. If the contract stipulates that in order to get OEM discounts you must sell MS Windows with every piece of complete hardware you sell, that's a perfectly reasonable clause.

Except for those pesky antitrust laws, sure.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and DOJ (Department of Justice) got Microsoft into trouble for exclusive OEM deals back in 1994.

The OEM exclusive licensing was part of the FTC investigation. From that link

The major illegal practice cited in the complaint was that Microsoft imposes a per processor license fee on OEMs, which means the manufacturers would have to pay Microsoft a royalty for each PC they sold, even if it did not include a Microsoft operating system. See the section on OEM Licensing Issues for details.

The FTC and DOJ didn't consider per-processor licensing to be "perfectly reasonable". Microsoft settled out of court rather than go to trial; they knew they would lose.

That settlement led to the Microsoft Consent Decree. Basically Microsoft promised never to do it again. This attracted criticism from Judge Sporkin who said:

Simply telling a defendant to go forth and sin no more does little or nothing to address the unfair advantage it has already gained

Of course, Microsoft violated the Consent Decree in 1997 in order to destroy a new company called Netscape. The Consent Decree was worthless (as many people said it was).

there are good things to come out of Utah, such as ...

and remember cold fusion.

Why do people insist on inventing their own scripting languages instead of picking one of the handful of fine existing languages?

Actually, AppleScript's roots harken back to HyperTalk, the inner scripting language of HyperCard. (With minor changes, such as "it" now being called "(the) result").

They wanted to make "system interaction and direction" as easy as making usable stacks was in HyperCard. With AppleScript Studio, it seems like they've finally succeeded.

I wish they'd do something with HyperCard though...

And here's a general OSA link... blah

You don't even have to go that far. A Mr.Uzi Nissan owns a computer company, and has been prevented from using his web site and registered domain name for commercial purposes. Article at Wired.com.

You don't even have to go that far. A Mr.Uzi Nissan owns a computer company, and has been prevented from using his web site and registered domain name for commercial purposes. Article at Wired.com.

NASA was planning only Space Station compatible orbits as one of the safety mechanisms

Note, this suggestion isn't original; I think Bob Parks made it somewhere in What's New.

Tooting my own horn dept: as I said here, Bush's Mars plan is wildly underfunded, and that unless there's serious funding the Mars plan is at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a president micro-managing NASA in a way that will get rid of the few remaining actual science programs. Decomissioning Hubble is exhibit A for that argument.

In answer to the original question, "Is repairing the Hubble worth 5 astronaut's lives?" I'd just like to say that I'll go. I'll risk my life for science (and maybe the adventure of a lifetime in LEO).

I can see Microsoft telling British Telecom:
"We're not paying you any license fees, we'll just have our users MANUALLY TYPE THE URLS"

Since the X-Box is going to be based on the PowerPC, backwards-compatibility might be out of the question.

Unless you know of an x86-to-PPC compatibility layer that can be plunked into a $300 console...

Read the article.

The three winning entries:
1. Octopus garden

2. Two men cutting a log

3. Master builder playing with kids

Read the article.

The three winning entries:
1. Octopus garden

2. Two men cutting a log

3. Master builder playing with kids

Read the article.

The three winning entries:
1. Octopus garden

2. Two men cutting a log

3. Master builder playing with kids

After burning the thighs of some users they are now referred to as notebook computers.

Yeah, your thighs if you're lucky. This man actually burned his penis.

Combine this device (with a few upgrades) with Wearable displays + This Jacket (maybe an upgrade or two + a computer that speaks sign language + Pervasive wireless broadband and I am starting to get to my "comfort level" for internet access. No longer will I have to wait during my whole commute of 5 minutes to check for the next Slashdot story. No more shaking internet withdrawl on the bus!!