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More candidates should do this. Frankly, I'd be interesting in hearing more about General Clarke's ideas on time travel. (Follow the link... he actually talks about this. I kid you not).

Instead of lines, a few boosted solar panels should help.

Distributing biomass power plants is no bad idea either.

That will get very interesting since there is a goverment mandate to allow land line phone numbers to be switched to a cell phone.

When such a number is changed to a cell phone, does it automatically get added to a do-not-call database too?

It sucks to be a telemarketer these days :)

Here you go

As geeks, we are probably not able to act as a united block and get the US Congress to repell the PATRIOT Act. I mean, c'mon, what are *you* gonna do? Vote for the Democrat candidate at the next election? Suuure, dude, like it's going to change things. Remember, the thrice accursed DMCA is a parting gift from a Democrat president. Or ask the orphans in Waco how good it is to enjoy freedom under a Democrat administration.

But on another hand, who started this mess in the first place? That's right, the New York Times. This paragon of virtuous indignation and dignified moral authority has thrown the book on Adrian Lamo after a harmless whistle blowing. After all, the idiots had an open proxy making their editorial contributor's SSN and personal data world-readable. It's not like Lamo did a Watergate on them. But the people who pose as the intelligentsia's moral authority (albeit slightly decrepit) cannot be caught with their pants down, now, can they?

So punish the morons who pretend to oppose Bush's policies and then yell "Terrorist!" at a harmless guy. Punish the bloody hypocrits who kill trees to pretend they oppose excessive freedom-smothering laws and then file lawsuits that make use of these very laws.

Boycott the New York Times.

-- SysKoll

> That's why you're reading about the letters for the first time here

I read this article last week.

Rasch didn't even add anything new.

that aren't entirely 'legit'?
That's unpossible!

I'm by no means any sort of MS apologist...but Robertson has made some other rather lofty claims in the past that have never been lived up to...

RFID tags for tracking things? Sure. Why not RFID for tracking people? As any good paranoid would point out, this is not a new idea!

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark... " (Revelation 13:16-17)

The coercion isn't there yet. The technology is shipping today though. In some countries today (Jordan for example), everyone must carry their national ID card with them at all times. How long till we have to in the US? It's certainly a matter of current policy debate. And how long until they decide that's too insecure because we might lose our national ID card or it might get stolen?

Why bother translating it? Getting all technical is the best way to ruin perfectly good music.

Everyone has their own favorite story about an interaction with a real live spammer, this is my personal favorite from the archives of Hot Wired's defunct Packet column, called "My Spammer Dream Date"

It doesn't matter if you create the best mousetrap, as long as Micro$traps controls the market you will get nowhere. You can't even advertise your new trap, since Micro$traps will threaten the magazines to stop advertising in their paper if yours will get printed.

RMS Interview in Wired

Here is a link to RMS when he appeared on The ScreenSavers

If you thought Microsoft licensing was prohibitively expensive, try it with a 300 % devaluation of your currency. Peru, Argentina, Brazil

Please provide proof of this. I know that MS wanted the Dell site to run on IIS rather than Apache but that had nothing to do with NeXT.

It's common knowledge. Google for "Dell site WebObjects" and you'll get a lot of stuff like this:

"Hancock paraded the successes of The Sharper Image and Dell, two companies using WebObjects for HTML and database management. The Dell site may be proof of WebObjects success - CEO Michael Dell said earlier in the day that the site is pulling in US$500 million in online sales. "

I guess the fact that you don't believe me means Microsoft did a pretty good job of erasing history. :)

- Scott

According to Wired, Kamen had predicted he'd be "stamping out 10,000 machines a week" by the end of 2002.

Looks like congress didn't forget. They popped a cap in CAPPS..

The future of copy protection is in new formats, such as DVD-A and SACD. The big question is how the RIAA is going to get people to buy these discs which offer very little over the CD and significantly less freedom.

10 years from now the CD will no longer be the prefered media, if only for the reason of forcing people to replace their old collections again.

Anyway the program is out in pdf files now; It's two files:
Xcellent Xtreme Challenge Parent Newsletter
and
What's the Diff? A Guide to Digital Citizenship - Activity Guide.

The first one is a take-home newsletter that students and parents are supposed to fill out together. The letter contains a "Dear Parent" arnt about filesharing from MPAA; with quotes like:

We hope you will use this opportunity to talk with your children about "digital citizenship" and how they use the Internet. It's important for you to be aware of their behavior online. "File-swapping," which is just another form of stealing, is morally and ethically wrong. It causes great economic harm to the creative artist who does not get paid for his or her efforts and to the thousands of others who depend on these industries for employment. "Fileswapping" can have very practical ramifications for you as well.

6. Stealing is stealing, whether from a store or from the Internet.

The second pdf is a big file with instructions to the teacher, two "introductions"; What's fair? and Patents and Progress. The students are supposed to discuss the material and learn that "file swapping" is wrong, illegal and hurts the economy.
There is a lot of ranting about P2P and copyrights. There is a introduction to why copyrights exist with some mumbling about the founding fathers. And oops they accidentaly forgot to mention that copyrights originaly expired after a time.

The rest of the pdf is devoted to two "classroom activities"; Living in a fishbowl and The starving artist (I'm not joking the rumors are true)
The fishbowl play is a discussion based role play game where the students gets to play actors, singers, directot, carpenters, producer and computer user.
I'm not that paranoid, but I observe that there is a factor of 5 to 1 in the "good guys" vs computer user. And they forgot to include some vital players like "the lawyer", "the executive" and "the stockholder".

The Starving Artist is a discussion based game where students are divided in group and shall produce a CD but then they are ripped off by "file swapping". "how does this makes you feel?"
Quote

Share the following statements with the students to summarize the lesson with the class. These statements help summarize the lesson and connect the concepts to the students personally.
- To legally own it, legally buy it.
- If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it.
- Copying a movie or CD for a friend is illegal.
- If you wouldn't take a movie or CD from the shelves of a store without paying for it, then why do it online?

I must say that MPAA got a killer program here.
The smart thing is the "winning of the teacher". Teachers are authority persons to children and getting them to explain why "stealing is wrong" is of course more effective than doing commercials.

There is some old industry saying that says: "get them when they are young" and I think thats the thinking behind this.
The whole project says a lot about MPAA but also about what kind of corporate sponsored projects that are allowed into american schools.
If I had children in USA I would have taken them out of this part of the education whitout hesitation.

Sunk by Windows NT

Article mentioned, it is kinda old though Jul. 24, 1998.

This is still true, for the time being.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and the music industry are already taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

not because of this , but that we are voted out by machines. yeah, how machorcratic.

Remember diamond semiconductors that were going to revolutionise processors, from around 1990?

Even if the pollution our industries create isn't causing this, plenty of reasons to not dump pollution into our environment exist. It's obvious, really. The debate over global warming can be a sort of smoke-screen obscuring the simple truth: don't sh*t in your own backyard. And when you think about it, it's all our backyard.

Here's another good one: EPA definitely full of sh*t

I think China has good reasons for being wary towards foreign software. Remember the NSA backdoor that the Swedes found in Lotus Notes software used by the Swedish government?
If the NSA plants backdoors in software even if it is used by a US-friendly, peace-friendly country, why would China trust any US software? And if that happened in pre-9/11 days, after 9/11 things could only get worse.
And it isn't just national security. There are rumours that NSA gave critical info intercepted by Echelon to Boeing to help the company win a contract over european Airbus.

Just conspiracy theories?
Maybe, but China wisely covers its backs just to make sure...

Intel just invested 10 mil in china! here

MS/SCO are trying to paint users of other OS's - as "IP" pirates.

Q: Where do you put your iP?

A: In your iLoo.

There's more info on LifeLog here and here.

nms

"In recent months, online trading company ETrade and retailer Amazon have announced a shift from Sun servers to Linux as money-saving measures to run their websites. Amazon said it saved $17 million in one quarter alone by using Intel/Linux systems."

"Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley is moving its Solaris applications to Intel computers running Linux."

According to market research firm International Data Corp., Linux will account for 32 percent of server installations this year, up from 27 percent in 2001. Windows will jump from 41 percent in 2001 to 47 percent in 2002. Unix, on the other hand, is expected to drop from 14 percent of new installations in 2001 to 10 percent in 2002.

Just about every crime you can imagine now has a codified "conspiracy to commit $CRIME" law. No longer do you have to actually rob a bank, or murder someone, or kidnap someone; you just have to plan it, and that's enough to toss you in the clink.

I don't see a problem there, provided the laws are applied justly. "Conspire" doesn't mean 'to plan,' it means 'to secretly agree to commit a crime.' Say you're standing in line at the bank and idly notice some vulnerabilities that might allow a successful heist. If you keep those thoughts to yourself, or if you quietly point them out to the bank's president, you haven't committed a crime. If, on the other hand, you pass the information along to some thug pals of yours knowing that there's a good chance they'd take a crack at carrying out your plan, you're just as guilty as they are even if a) you're nowhere near the bank at the time, or b) the cops get wise and pick up your pals before they ever get to the bank.

Soon enough, we'll have people being arrested for crimes they might have eventually committed someday, even if there is no proof of any plan to commit such crimes.

This doesn't follow. We've had laws against conspiracy for a very long time. Four people were hanged and several more sent to prison for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln, for example, despite the fact that Booth, who pulled the trigger, had been shot to death. Still, thoughtcrime really hasn't come to pass.

Interestingly, crime prediction technology does exist, but it mostly just tells us stuff like "since the unemployment rate is up, Christmas is coming, and there are a lot of banks downtown, there's a greater than usual chance of bank robberies downtown next month."

I'm sure all of you have read the article about how Sun "lost the Linux Wars" in Wired Magazine, and for me it just seems like another desperate attempt by them to not go under. Now, don't get me wrong, If I had a company I thought was going under, I'd be desperate, as well. But why pick this when there are better OS's, and better (open source, even) Office Suites?

• Bill Gates donates $100m to UN fund to fight Aids
  
• Bill Gates Donates $37 Million to Combat Hepatitis B in China
  
• Donates $25m to help fight AIDS in Nigeria
  
• Gates Donates Millions to Schools
  
• Gates donates $70 million to develop meningitis vaccine
  

Check out the wired article here

...and on Don't Spy On Us:

"In September of 2002, JetBlue Airways secretly gave the Transportation Security Administration the full travel records of 5 million JetBlue customers. This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet. Anyone who flew JetBlue on or before September of 2002 should assume that all information given by them to JetBlue, including credit card numbers, is in the possession of both the TSA and Torch Concepts. Furthermore, Torch Concepts (now doing business as Torch Technologies obtained the Social Security number, date of birth, and associated credit histories of many of the 5 million passengers in the JetBlue database. Some of this information, including SSNs, was posted by Torch Concepts to the Internet. The document was freely available for download on the Internet for over six months and was taken down on the 17th of September, 2003. The full document is available for download here. The 5 million JetBlue records handed over to TSA appear to have been used to test off-the-shelf technologies to improve aviation security. These tests occurred prior to the formal announcement of CAPPS II, but it is obvious from the Torch Concepts presentation that a CAPPS II-like system was the goal...."

Quoting:

JetBlue Airways confirmed on Thursday that in September 2002, it provided 5 million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor for proof-of-concept testing of a Pentagon project unrelated to airline security -- with help from the Transportation Security Administration.

The contractor, Torch Concepts, then augmented that data with Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information, including income level, to develop what looks to be a study of whether passenger-profiling systems such as CAPPS II are feasible.

Note that JetBlue has a privacy policy on their website that includes this statement:

The financial and personal information collected on this site is not shared with any third parties, and is protected by secure servers.

JetBlue has admitted it according to this article.

Quoting:

JetBlue Airways confirmed on Thursday that in September 2002, it provided 5 million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor for proof-of-concept testing of a Pentagon project unrelated to airline security -- with help from the Transportation Security Administration.

The contractor, Torch Concepts, then augmented that data with Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information, including income level, to develop what looks to be a study of whether passenger-profiling systems such as CAPPS II are feasible.

One time I had to slice open a moose with my lightsaber and sleep in it's entrails to survive the cold, bitter night.

Speaking of which, quit making fun of us, or we'll send one of our Jedi Master after you!

They are probably talking about Marine DooM. This is a mod of DooM II once used by the USMC for training.

But of course the press never talks about the details in these situations, and just tries to sensationalize any video-game related death.

FWIW, that's not how I remember it -- the original DeCSS was (I assume) a C program, and there was a trend of re-implementing it in different languages to keep it from being eradicated. The Perl example you cite was the shortest implementation, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the original.

I can't find direct citations for this, but the "remove cascading stylesheets" DeCSS -- which came out as a protest to the original DeCSS decoder -- is talked about in this page, which is dated 16 Feb 2000. There's a reference to the 7 line Perl version from this article, dated 8 Mar 2001, and in this Wired article from Jun 2001.

This is enough to convince me that the original DeCSS wasn't as you describe here. I'm still not sure if it was Perl or not, but it wasn't the 7 liner that came out over a year later than the original.

----

REPOST: the original version of this comment had a broken anchor tag, which is corrected here. Feel free to mod the other version into oblivion...

FWIW, that's not how I remember it -- the original DeCSS was (I assume) a C program, and there was a trend of re-implementing it in different languages to keep it from being eradicated. The Perl example you cite was the shortest implementation, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the original.

I can't find direct citations for this, but the "remove cascading stylesheets" DeCSS -- which came out as a protest to the original DeCSS decoder -- is talked about in this page, which is dated 16 Feb 2000. There's a reference to the 7 line Perl version from this article, dated 8 Mar 2001, and in this Wired article from Jun 2001.

This is enough to convince me that the original DeCSS wasn't as you describe here. I'm still not sure if it was Perl or not, but it wasn't the 7 liner that came out over a year later than the original.

Wow! If you'd ever thought about doing IT work in the military, these comments have to have put you off by now.

If not, maybe the possibility of getting shot/bombed will be a further dis-incentive?

Wired did a great article on IT on the frontline a short while back.

maybe because you refuse to look? yes, cold fusion got a bad rap and may very well be a crock of... non-fusing stuff. but there are smart people who disagree:

• "There's very strong evidence that low-energy nuclear reactions do occur. Numerous experiments have shown definitive results" -George Miley, who received the Edward Teller medal for innovative research in hot fusion and has edited Fusion Technology magazine for the American Nuclear Society

• "Nuclear reactions can occur without high temperatures. Low-energy nuclear transformations can - and do - exist." - John Bockris, formerly a distinguished professor in physical chemistry at Texas A&M University and a cofounder of the International Society for Electrochemistry

• "I am absolutely certain there is unexplained heat, and the most likely explanation is that its origin is nuclear." - Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International

quotes cribbed (using Copy-n-Paste[TM]) from the wired magazine article on cold fusion

give it a read.

Take a walk down Osaka, say, and you'll inevitably see Yahoo! BB ADSL sales reps vigourously peddling their broadband service exactly because adoption has been so slow. For the most part, the average Japanese person connects to the internet either in the workplace or through their cell phones. Yeah, I remember seeing Yahoo! ppl handing out their broadband kits in Tokyo, too. I also remember reading about them in a wired magazine article too.

In Japan they pass out Broadband modems on the street for free.

You must be talking about Yahoo! BB. They're operating at a loss right now. big gamble that Yahoo! is doing over there. Wired has a recent article on it. I am getting my Yahoo! DSL Broadband this week, btw (even tho I'm in Illinois, US). Pretty excited!

They're protecting an archaic industry," said the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. "They should turn their attention to new models." The Dead always got it - they made far more money touring than by selling records. Letting fans record concerts and swap tapes created a lot of good will and good publicity.

...and now have an enormous variety of "tracks" to select from when releasing "official bootlegs" of portions of live shows, Dick's Picks. Which is a real boon to those of us who were too busy studying and working to go on tour in the 70's, 80's and early 90's. (The best show I went to was Holleder Stadium, Rochester, NY, 1979. Best Fire on the Mountain ever. Second best was a Red Rocks show I went to while on a supercomputing assignment at NCAR in 84. My code was running in the batch queue, and fresh results waiting the next morning....aaaah. Gone are the days... Not to mention the legendary Barton Hall shows at Cornell...)

One of the quirks of the RIAA/ASCAP/BMI "system" however, is that while swapping tapes is considered fair use by the Dead-- swapping MP3's of the same music will get you busted by the RIAA even if the artists themselves would prefer to "look the other way" -- the Dead were able to "look the other way" at their own concerts, but, basically, the RIAA has a chance to stick their big ugly noses into it when it's online.

So, it would be really neat to see at least a portion of the Dead's catalogue released under a Creative Commons license, so those of us who play music on actual musical instruments might have the chance to release our interpretations-- "Sugaree" deadicated to Mr. Darl McBride, for example, or a version of "Ship of Fools" deadicated to the Microsoft Corporation.

For a more positive example which has a more realistic chance of being released under a Creative Commons license, John Perry Barlow could CC "The Music Never Stopped" to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his publication of The Economy of Ideas and the inception of the the EFF .

John? Bobby? Put your gooo--old records where your love is, baby--before that record deal goes down....goes down.

I have no idea of the political leanings of the supporters of the proposed taxes being discussed in this thread, but my bet is they are less likely to be Republicans. As a tax, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. As a means of supporting artists that may have non-family values, I would suspect that Republicans would generally be against it. And given the entertainment industry's general love of Clinton & Democrats, I would suspect that Republicans would generaly be against it.

Too quote a short Wired article on donations: "Artists and execs in the movie and music businesses tend to lean Democratic when it comes time to donate to political parties." A longer article also seems to confirm the Democrat's greater penchant for anti-piracy legislation. Otherwise, I agree that Republican's often stick up for business and are not the best privacy advocates in the world.

What I do know is that businesses put up with a lot of crap in the form of well-intentioned, but deleterious regulations that destroy jobs and drive up prices. An artist's subsidy tax on computer equipment and services for businesses would be an example. Having been through the startup process myself and had friends who started businesses I have seen or experienced a range of dumb regulations that only serve to make it hard to start and run a new business. Most of the crap targets businesses only, so consumers, employees, and the average voter seldom see all the fees, forms, and bureaucratic B.S. perpetrated by Federal, state, and local authorities.

Consumers think that businesses should pay their "fair share of taxes" and that is a understandable, if shortsighted view. In reality, no business pays any taxes, they simply pass them on to the customer or to the shareholder. Yet the taxes are frustrating because they make a business less competative and dealing with the paperwork serves no business purpose.

But, I could be wrong on all this. After all, I am a moron.

"the idea for our compulsory licensing system is this: we tax Internet connections and CD/DVD burners a small amount and send the money to the artists. In exchange, they let us download their songs and movies off the Internet. The problem is how to decide which artists should get the money without losing privacy, accuracy, or security."

For this to work, you'd be sending your money to the RIAA/MPAA member companies, not the artists (since artists certainly don't hold any copyrights anymore).

This scheme is essentially another take on the Canadian CD Levy process (presume guilt, put a levy on blank CDs, give levy money to copyright holders). Given that the $70+ million collected so far for the Canadian CD Levy has yet to be distributed because distribution isn't clear cut, I can't imagine an even more complex system working.

There is a Wired article: Look Ma, No Projection Screen with some details about two companies and an interesting photo.

also running an article: Look Ma' No Projection Screen

• Did you notice that, by mis-typing some URL, you implicitly agreed with their Terms of Service agreement?
  
• How long would you trust a fine, upstanding monopoly company like Verisign to continue to provide this useful service pro bono? Did you read that TOS after all? Notice where they explicitly state "The information ... may be supplied by VeriSign's commericial licensors, advertisers or others" Hmm... what *could* they possibly be planning here?
  
• Would you mind if every domain-spoofing spam email that you bounced from your email went directly to Verisign, who would be free to do with it what they wish? Legally, you would have just sent them an email, and they'd be more than happy to harvest as much info from it as possible. And, by the way, Verisign has plenty of experience selling people's personal data for profit.
  
• How is the end result any different from the recent cases of "typo-squatting" that have been found illegal in various courts?
  

[The VICTORY Act] seems to be an attempt to merge the war on terrorism and the war on drugs into a single campaign. It includes a raft of provisions increasing the government's ability to investigate, wiretap, prosecute and incarcerate money launderers, fugitives, "narco-terrorists" and nonviolent drug dealers. The bill also outlaws hawalas, the informal and documentless money transferring systems widely used in the Middle East, India and parts of Asia.

I can not quote sources, *but i seem to remember* that the Amish and Menonites (sp), were quite into cell phones.
They actually fit into the whole idealogy of technology that these two groups have, in that technology should be the slave of community. In this mode of thought it is a distinct advantage that cell phones are able to be turned off, they do not needlessly interupt personal life, as a 'normal' telephone does, and such like.

Okay, heres that source I was talking about