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> However resting on their laurels all these years...
Are you kidding ? They are working hard on TF2.

Both. Take a look at the pictures that go with the article. It looks like each 'solar chip' has a largish fresnel lens that focuses sunlight onto the chip. The lens/chip assemblies appear to track the sun, and you can look past these and still have a relatively clear view as long as you're not looking in the general direction of the sun (which you're not supposed to do anyway). The lenses provide shade by focusing sunlight onto the chips, but they also allow ambient light to enter, so a room fitted with these solar windows would still get plenty of light.

Cool.

Check out the pictures to the left of the main story. There's a noticeable difference in light intensity between parts of the window with clear glass and those with the embedded miniature solar panel, leading to a mosaic light pattern. This sort of thing is fine (and maybe even artsy) for an office foyer, but won't be widely adopted in office windows (which make up the majority of downtown buildings) because it's horrible for reading or working in. Your eyes can't tell if they should adjust for the bright or dark spots.

To start, consider the first quote.

Some of the estimated 550,000 foreign graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who help staff the nation's laboratories may take their brainpower to countries where visa hurdles are less rigorous. "They're now better off looking for jobs outside the United States," said William Greenough, a professor of international medicine at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. "This will set us back 20 years."

These particular foreign students are identified with a group of immigrants who are relatively wealthy (compared to their peers overseas), relatively well educated (compared to their peers overseas), and extremely opposed to assimilating into Western culture. If they do not come to the United States of America (USA), their absence is no loss for the USA. It is better off without them. (reference: "Immigrants: Traitors Among Us")

One characteristic of these foreign students is their strong pride in their own capabilities. They believe that the American hi-tech industry -- indeed, the entire American economy -- would grind to a halt if the American government did not allow them to come en masse into the USA. Their attitude and behavior have brainwashed respected professors (at, for example, John Hopkins University) into believing the same rubbish.

The USA will work fine without these foreign students. If there is a demand for new technologies, then the capitalistic economy of the USA will produce those technologies without those foreign students. "It" really is that simple. Salaries will rise, and the high salaries will attract more people into science and engineering.

One distinction between the West and the non-Western countries like China is the following. In the West, people discover the truth. In non-Western countries, people manufacture the truth (via deception). The foreign students want Americans to believe that the USA needs the immigrants much more than the immigrants need the USA. The foreign students deliberately manufacture this lie, and it has become an accepted "truth" among academicians. Yet, what is the truth? The truth is that foreign students desperately want to escape the ignorant, barbaric overseas societies in which they were born. They all want to flee to the West -- usually, the USA. In order to guarantee that the USA will always accept them, they trick Americans into believing that the USA actually needs them. Baloney.

Americans owe nothing to foreign students and certainly do not depend on them. Americans simply, out of their own generosity and compassion, allow foreign students to enter the USA to study to improve themselves. Of course, Americans allow immigrants to enter the USA to enjoy the economic and social freedoms that do not exist in ignorant, barbaric overseas countries.

Americans are fully entitled to deny entry to foreign students who come from hostile states. Those states are listed in the second quote.

Researchers from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Sudan -- countries considered terrorism supporters -- are forbidden by law from working with any of 82 "select agents" classified as potential bioweapon agents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agents include human killers like anthrax and the plague as well as things that harm animals, like the agent that causes mad cow disease.

This list of hostile states omits 3 important political states: Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan province. The Chinese support

How making a bong out of an old Mac - apparently someone did it already - http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50820,00.html

nobody ever caught a virus from a telephone

Are you sure?

This month's issue has several images from the movie, along with a photo of Dali and Disney together during the collaboration.

• "It's a kick. I cover the first 60 feet in 1.3 seconds. You feel the acceleration pull your face back. I do one-eighth of a mile in 6 seconds, reaching 105 mph. The last eighth, the performance falls off because I have no transmission. There's so much torque from the motor, it cracks gears."

here's a link to that Wired article. Pretty interesting reading, I hadn't known that the Infoworld Cringely was fake.

To this day, I can't see Logitech mouse packaging without thinking of the infamous 1992 Logitech ad with the pissing baby and "feels better" - making the point that the Logitech mouse fit the hand better than the competition's, or something. Story at Wired .

And for further reading...

Wired: Study Makes Less of Hack Threat

Vmyths: Hysteria roll call: mi2g

These people don't seem all that well-respected by those who know what they're about.

" But as the article showed, it is *illegal* to hire Americans in India."

The article showed no such thing. I doubt that it's illegal.

RTFA.

He still gets occasional interviews, but he feels that they are just for show and that the companies will send the job overseas. Soong recently decided to send his rZsumZ to India, to see if he could get work there.

"It would be really interesting to work in Bangalore," he says. "But I was told, 'Daniel, it is against the law for you to work here. You can come here on vacation, but you can't work here.'"

Now, it may not be true. Just to be sure, I looked into the official websites. Unfortunately India's visa website is far less informative than many others. It is not clear whether an American can get an employment visa for hire in an Indian firm, or if s/he must be working for a company that happens to base its operations in India and is transferring him/her there. However, if they follow what most countries do, the Business Visa would be for transfers and the employment visa would be for employment.

Of course, even if that is true there is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting the job before getting the visa. Notice the only statement of requirements:

# EMPLOYMENT VISA
Are issued to skilled and qualified professionals or persons who are engaged or appointed by companies, organisations, economic undertakings as technicians, technical experts, senior executives etc. Applicants are required to submit proof of contract/employment/engagement of of foreign nationals by the company or organisation.

I would be surprised if this were all there is to it. To be fair, the US requirements are similar, but in the case of the H1Bs people are worried about they are being sponsored by US companies who pay the visa fees and do all the paperwork for them. I would doubt there are a lot of Indian firms doing this for US workers as there is not much in it fo rthem, but there might be.

Anyway, you might find the following article interesting; it is prophetic, don't you think? Check the date.

Lion
Slapper
List of other Linux Viruses

Why bash MS when other OS's have vulnerabilities as well?

From another Wired article:

Hatch, well-known as an outspoken critic of peer-to-peer trading of copyright music, warned that if file-swapping networks do not rein in illicit porn trafficking, lawmakers "might have to do something detrimental."

and

Lawmakers said they intend to use information gleaned from the hearing to help gauge the need for new regulations to restrict file-trading activities or to increase liability of network operators to help eradicate downloading of illegal porn.

If you follow this counsel, make sure you erase the ID3 tags at the very least. The RIAA is now establishing provenance by file hash.

This puzzled me a bit. I thought if the CD was ripped digitally, and then encoded with a given mp3 encoder, it should be bit for bit identical with other rips of the same cd with the same encoder and encoder settings? Doesn't seem like this technique would scale to modern, "standardised" ripping packages like WMP9 and iTunes.

Case in point, WMP9 sometimes pulls up album art for Mp3s that have arrived from "outside" its ripping space. Not sure if it's doing it via hash or metadata though.

YLFI

Wired: Sept 2003 page 80 bottom half article titled "Will This Man Kill Linux"

Link to (very short) interview Umm, nice Ryder reference, maybe. Umm, not really...
Ryder was convicted of a crime, SCO has proven nothing yet. The state brought something we around here like to call "evidence" into court to get the conviction, while McBride shows nothing but some obscure code references that he so far hasn't proven ownership of.

Nice of him to save Open Source tho. He must be smart; silly me, I was unaware it needed saving.

Bill wrote a pessimistic piece abut computing taking control of our lives. Sounds a little like Ellison's "I have no mouth and must scream" story that became the Terminator movies.

Is it just me, or does Australia simply rule? It seems that they make a sensible thing after a sensible thing, seem to be enthusiastic on the Linux front, and generally kick ass? Will Australia be a leading ICT power after a while? US is, well, US and EU seems to be very slow in it's movement.

And as far as spammers go, I wouldn't blink an eye if they were thrown into a pound-me-in-the-ass prison in Siberia. They abuse the "freedom of speech" to make soem easy profit while harrassing general populace, while the freedom of speech that matters is generally not a problem unless you search for such information.

Probably because litigation is the only action the RIAA seems to be willing to take. They have can't seem to protect their stuff; as soon as some new "protection" device is established, someone inevitably finds a way to defeat or circumvent it (I found the black marker trick the most amusing of these circumventions). They obviously won't just let everyone get away with file sharing. In my opinion, the sensible and probably inevitable option will have to be a reworking of the entire business model of music retailing, an idea that large corporations like record companies and organizations like the RIAA have been slow to embrace.

So let's see.. This is an article about an article about an article that hasn't been published yet? Awesome..

No kidding. After checking all the links, all I came up with was SCO news and Darl (Rawhide) McBride practicing horticulture and his Dirty Harry imitation at the same time. Shooting penguins indeed. Feeling lucky Darl?

More likely it has something to do with electromagnetic fields, actually. They might also cause mass religious conversions, UFO sightings, etc. A very interesting article, it really changed my view of the world when I first read it several years ago.

Have you guys read the EULA you have to agree when installing Mac OS X? It says that you can't use it in anyway in connection to flight controls or nuclear facilities, or any form of weapon of mass destruction. So much for putting Macs in to the coolest agencies...

Seems to me that the reason why the Navy used Linux on their newly acquired Xserves were because they couldn't use Mac OS X without violating the contract!

Oh, but maybe you think this maybe be the reason to all this?

Or maybe it's because the government wants to become "hip" again? :)

what, you mean this is not cool?
don't forget, we are only 3 and a bit years into the 21st century and already we have private astronauts (ok, for a few mill - but its a start!)

Apparently the kid is under psychiatric care and his parents are suing. I wonder if being in the star wars movie would help. Here's the story.

In short, your post simply confirms the original premise: the laptops are useless toys that do nothing education-wise. Sure, they might slightly improve students' understanding of computers. However, learning how to use Word and Powerpoint is something that can be done in just a few hours, and doesn't require students to have laptops.

Flame bait and ignorant.

Teachers like this one , and studies and newspapers back up my claim.

Do you work better on a good day or a bad day? Most work better when happy. I know this sounds amazing, but learning AND having fun is possible. Don't be a troll and don't try to deny the results. Attendance is up, kids are having fun, teachers are happy, test scores are good, etc. What more do you want?

This has nothing to do with the NY Times. All of the Times' articles in their database are copyrighted; you can't reproduce them without consent.

This bill is intended to protect compilations of non-copyrightable material such as, oh say, court opinions and statutes, like Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Interestingly enough, Thompson-West--though they can't copyright the opinions themselves--claims copyright on the page numbers of their bound volumes of the Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and other series of publications which all contain court opinions from various jurisdictions (they're typically the only place in which hard copies of opinions are actually published), thus stopping competitors from digitizing these books (with internal, citable page numbers in them) and creating their own databases. See Who owns the Law?

According to McBride, virtually every bit of code that allows Linux kernel 2.4 (or later) to function as an enterprise class, scalable operating system was derived directly or indirectly from Unix System V. SCO obtained rights to System V from Novell.

"Take away the code in question and you're left with Linux 2.2," McBride said.

SCO: Buy License, Avoid Suit

This is the most ridiculous statement most often repeated by McBride. 2.2 was pretty damn good and so is 2.6, which is most definitely enterprise class and free of SCO code. It's fairly obvious that whatever code was supposed to be directly or indirectly quote unquote "helping Linux become enterprise class" was unimportant enough to be dumped from 2.6 without hurting or degrading any of its enterprise capabilities.

This SGI action is now just SCO running desperately looking for a graceful exit that will also massage their ego's a reasonable bit. They just don't get it do they?

I guess it fits since they get cable and other amenities that a college student can only wish for (or steal).

It always interests me how people who've never spent time in a jail or penitentiary have such a firm idea of how easy life is there.

btw, it's impossible to "steal" cable. You can secure unauthorised access to the signal it carries, though.

This story would tend to indicate the opposite (i.e. that it may well be possible). While the disabled system in question (the monitoring system of the Davis-Besse nuke plant) was not directly related to control, it's fair to say that a worm that crashes process monitoring systems is a serious security problem. How are you supposed to control a system that you can't monitor? (sure, you can run to manual or analog backups, but that takes time, causes operator confusion, and is just not a great solution to the fundamental problem.)

In addition, a recent Wired story ( here) talks about how in the minutes before the power outage, engineers were having computer problems. At the very least it appears that these computer issues were preventing or slowing down operator responses to the developing problem.

As stated above our protection and control systems send data via leased phone lines and/or private fiber and do not have any connection to the Internet. Thus no possible way of receiving a virus.

As stated in the story about Davis-Besse, the work came in through a T1 line put in place by a contractor (between the plant and the home office), neatly circumventing the firewall. In other words, there was a connection to the internet. How could this be allowed to happen? Are these people stupid, lazy, or just incompetent? it also shows that you may think there is no internet connection, but you can't always be sure (unless you use a totally different protocol).

By the way, a leased phone line presumably goes through a phone switch; these tend to be computer controlled and sometimes open to compromise. A determined intruder could use this to hijack the leased line and inject spurious control commands.

And regarding viruses, a direct internet connection is not the only possible route of infection. A virus could also ride in on a disk (intentionally or unintentionally), or be injected in a microwave link (that's what we did to Serbian air defence networks a while back).

Part of my job is to study disturbances on the grid (ie why did the lights go out?). The studies take anywhere from a day to months to explain what happened. And remember the 1965 blackout study took over a year to finish.

The problem is that First Energy is publicly dissembling ("It's sooo complicated. Zillions of things going on all over the place. It can't all be our fault."), and this does not inspire confidence in them, or in the process of figuring out what happened. Basically, the public is going to get to watch as our power infrastructure is sold to a few private interests, while things like reliability go down the toilet. And we'll be mushroomed (kept in the dark and fed bullshit) when things go wrong. We were lucky that it was just a blackout, rather than, say, a nuke plant meltdown. (That would among other things finally kill nuke power, which would be a damned shame).

• 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
  

I'm surprised this genius wasn't smart enough to switch from OS X to Windows. After all, I don't remember seeing him in that ad.

Maybe he'll pop up everywhere like Bert did for a while.

You might want to wait until all the facts are out before jumping to conclusions.
The cause might not be as simple as you think.

Diebold has already fixed that. Everybody wins! Money or not.

Only a fool would be short-sighted enough to not to see the danger of using (supporting) Microsoft protocols, especially over the Internet.

In the Halloween Document, a Microsoft strategist wrote:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

Or consider this evidence in the Java case:

> Microsoft's Executive Vice President, Paul Maritz, outlined Microsoft's strategy to win the browser war with Netscape and simultaneously "neutralize Java" by "tying" the "user interface" and "APIs" "back to Windows,"

This quote also shows us how Microsoft operates:

> at this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

And then there's this little gem:

> "Subversion has always been our best tactic," John Ludwig, Microsoft's vice president in charge of Java development, wrote. "It leaves the competition confused, and they don't know what to shoot at anymore."

Perhaps this quote sums it up the best:

> "This is really the core of Microsoft's business," Gartner Research Director Chris LeTocq said. "Microsoft is in business to leverage APIs. That's a key element of the successful market share it has."

If you haven't understood the point, then here it is...

If you continue to accept the ASF format, then you are encouraging websites to use it.

But it's still a protocol that is controlled by Microsoft.

In the future, Microsoft will:

1. Upgrade ASF to an incompatible format.

2. Start enforcing their ownership of ASF by restricting its use to Microsoft platforms (as GIFs started to be enforced).

3. Lock up ASF using Microsoft .Net and DRM protocols.

And the websites that are using ASF will go along blindly. Why? Because no one has been complaining to them about their use of ASF, so they have no reason to avoid Microsoft's "improvements."

And at that point, the content of those websites will become unavailable to you unless you are running Windows XP.

It really annoys me when people fail to protect themselves, and everyone else, because they are too lazy or short-sighted to put up with a little temporary inconvenience. Are you hoping that someone else will do the work of protecting your freedom? Well, don't.

It's up to you. If you want the Internet to remain free, then stop supporting Microsoft protocols.

Sure, eBay will bow to them. I remember a while back eBay torpedoed the auctions of a guy who was selling CDs of his own band's original music for nebulous copyright issues. They also would not listen to him no matter how many times he tried to straighten the matter out.

~Philly

Darth Bainwol under order from Darth Rosen

The Good, Easy system worked for me back when I used it. The premise is to get everything into plain text, and use simple tools to manage it. There's a Wired article on it, and the source documents to the Good, Easy Desktop and Good, Easy email are at Winterspeak.

Second, some TSA lackey is going to get in the habit of passing IDs and passports under a scanner and looking for a result. They will think even less about comparing the face with the image for themselves. They will simply trust the computer. There's a great TSA article at Wired (Confessions of a Baggage Screener - Wired 11.09) that lays a lot of their habits bare.

Lastly, as someone already mentioned, the 9/11 attackers used their real names and real passports. Just because we are looking for terrorists, it doesn't mean we actually know who they are or what they look like.

I don't think that face recognition will help much but some department's budget and some politician's "knee-jerk" contribution efforts. Ok, this may prevent Osama from flying, but I don't think he'd assign himself to a suicide mission. It will always be some "volunteer" that we have very little record of.

Making money on micropayments isn't easy, by definition. Here's an article from Wired about them.

Apparently, Bitpass merchants pay a transaction fee of 15 percent for items under $5 and 5 percent plus 50 cents for more expensive things. e-gold fees are a 1%/year storage fee and up to 1% of the transaction amount, with a maximum of 50 cents (US$) worth of metal for their fee, no matter how large the transaction.

Of course, the ability to do micropayments (or macropayments, for that matter) is hardly new -- e-gold has been around since 1996 and the e-gold shopping cart has been relatively-easy since http://sci.e-gold.com came along in mid-2000. I just wish more folks would try/use it. (Want to play with a bit? Ask me!)
JMR

the fact is that you're completely wrong about holding people without charging them

Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.

But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.

All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.

But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.

TomV

When the air is thin, you can go 700mph. The 120mph terminal velocity applies to more dense air. Wired had covered this before.

> Every MS virus, worm, and what not does not cause BILLIONS in lost dollars. There are I am sure some cases of actual lost real money, but if they totalled billions I'd be surprised.

So be surprised.

Here are some virus costs from Wired:

Nimda -- $635 million
Code Red -- $2.62 billion
SirCam -- $1.15 billion
Love Bug -- $8.75 billion

While we're looking at statistics, here's another...

According to CERT, the number of reported security incidents grew, starting in 1988, until they hovered at just over two thousand incidents per year from 1994 to 1997.

But then in 1998, the number of incidents started to explode:

1998 -- 3,734
1999 -- 9,859
2000 -- 21,756
2001 -- 52,658
2002 -- 82,094
2003 -- 76,404 (so far)

So what happened in 1998?

Microsoft introduced embedded e-mail scripting in Outlook Express!

Even an idiot could have predicted the consequences.

But why would Microsoft do something that was so clearly incompetent and irresponsible?

The answer can be found in another event that occurred in 1998, namely, the leaked release of the Halloween document. That internal Microsoft document described a strategy for fighting Open Source, as follows:

> OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

So there you have it. The embedded scripting in Outlook Express is just one part of a general Microsoft strategy to decommoditize (i.e. break) Internet protocols.

In other words, these viruses and worms, which are costing us $billions, are just a side effect of MICROSOFT'S EXTENDED DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACK ON OPEN SOURCE USERS.

If Jeffrey Parson might be going to jail for his denial of service attack (modifying the DDOS Blaster worm), then why not the president of Microsoft?

It is "fashionable" to forget Clinton's little email thing? Which one - the fact that an IT contractor lost some emails (like that's never happened before), or that Clinton never actually used email when he was in office?

Like most psychotic right wing morons, I'm sure you think it's big deal that a few random thousand out of hundreds of thousands of Whitehouse emails were lost (and then later recovered - thanks to wasting $12,066,346 on the task). No one thinking it worthy of any special attention outside the tinfoil hat crowd.

Clinton went through the audit from hell, and the only thing hundreds of millions of dollars (some private, some public) ever determined about the man was that he has a weakness for hummers.

No shit sherlock.

Meanwhile, our current president is claiming "executive privilege" over so many things (that just a few years ago would have been front page news -- thanks to the "liberal" media) even tinfoil hat Republican Congressman Dan Burton has become uneasy.

The truth is, all games were once like this. And I don't mean checkers and badminton. I mean hockey and basketball. What changed? Marketing through TV and merchandice. This could very well happen to gaming, and in fact it already has in other countries like Korea. Check out this interesting article that mentions a dedicated channel for video gaming from Wired.

I do think this is a big part of the problem with MS-ware. But really the threat is a synergistic effect - the closed-sourceness, the newb users, the overall expectation of weirdness, instability and frustration in using Windows.

A Wired article today notes that many people have the Blaster worm and don't recognise it as a new problem - they just think the OS has become a little bit more unstable and annoying to use than usual. A Linux user would be too savvy, and would immediately know something was up and have an idea what it might be. A Mac user might or might not have that knowledge, but would have an expectation of consistency, so again something must be up. Years of being remotely abused by Microsoft has made Windows users into weary users. They don't react to this sort of thing because they basically expect it and don't know of an alternative. If simplifying the equation for those people - "Yes, Microsoft's software IS that much worse" - will help them understand that victimisation, I'm all for it.

Microsoft chose to treat users like idiots - think Clippy, wizards up the yin-yang, reams of obtuse dialogs and unpredictable interface behaviour. They helped created that unknowledgeable user population, and they thus have a responsibility to provide absolutely 100% bulletproof software right out the gate - but we all know that's impossible regardless of resources. This is a real bind for them and the backlash will grow - but only when "computer" is no longer synonymous with "Windows" in mot people's mind.

So yes, licencing and restriction is a big part of the problem - but it's at a layer that most people haven't even gotten close to yet, because they're blinded by the day-to-day cumulative inconvenience of dealing with Windows. Even seasoned IT professionals believe it's an "easy to use" OS, when every shred of evidence demonstrates that it's not easy at all, and in fact a huge cash drain. Until we can convince laypeople of the latter, I hold little hope of them understanding the more abstract importance of the former.

my fav quote: "The world is moving to a Unix operating environment, and SCO owns the intellectual property rights to it"

SCO to rule the world then? heh!

There is a Wired article quoting Darl McBride. Notably, "We're trying to work through issues in such a way that we get justice without putting a hole in the head of the penguin."

I think maybe he overestimates the size of his gun