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Hi,
Hybrids really don't count IMHO as 'alternative fuel' vehicles, since they use two fuels that are exceedingly ordinary: gasoline and electricity. They should qualify for partial EV credit, and they're great for reducing fuel consumption, but without E85 they just aren't 'alternative fuel'.

I would recommend a late-model Volkswagen diesel and biodiesel as a true 'alternative fuel' vehicle. Diesels are more efficient, create less CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and last FOREVER. I just recently purchased a Mercedes diesel with 362000 miles on it, and I expect to get at least another 130000 miles on it with proper care and feeding. My car can't take 100% biodiesel without some fuel-line upgrades (bio eats rubber away since it's more oxygenated than petro) but any diesel since 1994 can take 100%. Another option, particularly in colder climes or with older cars, is B20, which is 20%bio/80%petro. Biodiesel doesn't contain sulfur, and is naturally oxygenated enough to prevent smelly particulate exhaust. In fact, tailpipe exhaust smells like french fries ;) Biodiesel is actually technically non-toxic and very hard to burn, and IIRC can be drop-shipped anywhere, so I _THINK_ you could even have it delivered to your house in large drums.. It's expensive (~$3/gal) but it may be worth it to you if you want to contribute to (a)saving the ozone layer and/or (b)keeping US$ out of the hands of despotic Arab states (and their terrorist pawns)..

Couple interesting Wired links on biodiesel:
here and
here

Even non-biodiesel is a better global environmental choice than gasoline/petrol since it's less intensive to refine. Diesel creates more NOx, large-particulate exhaust and sulfur (which lead to smog and acid rain), but the balance of impact is in its favor overall due to the efficiency of diesel engines. Also, if we could press for low-sulfur diesel, NOx could be handled with catalytic converters.

Oh, did I mention that biodiesel can be made from any biological substance that contains triglycerides? Hempseed, soybean, even used cooking fats can be 'cracked' into biodiesel, leaving glycerin. What to do with the glycerin though, that's the main Q...

Its Been Done If you can deal with the ancient hardware that is

The Space Shuttle has had to have its cockpit windows replaced because of impacts with tiny objects - such as particles of paint, which are capable of gouging visible craters in the surface.

Whilst we have only intentionally put a few thousand pieces into orbit, we have put much more debris up there. Pieces of paint from the booster, particles ejected by explosive bolts, nuts, bolts screws... Sometimes old rocket stages disintegrate or explode. A Pegasus booster exploded in 1996 putting an estimated 300 000 particles larger than 4mm into orbit, over 500 of those particles were large enough to be tracked by ground radar.

I'm not sure if Ed White's glove is still up there after he lost it on Gemini 4 :)

Some spacecraft (such as the Soviet nuclear-powered radar satellites) have ejected their coolant as a stream of droplets...

The US had a program called West Ford that ejected 400 million copper dipoles from the Midas satellites - no idea if they are up there.

The Soviets constructed anti-satellite satellites that exploded in close proximity to other spacecraft - a number of those were tested...

Fortunately most objects will either re-enter after a short period or are safely sitting in unused orbits, but a good number are in the popular orbits where they could cause havoc to a delicate mirror.

In fact some people have even gone so far as to suggest that the sheer number of things up there could cause a catastrophe... if one object hits another, it could eject more particles which impact on other objects releasing further particles in a cascade of debris that would clutter up low-orbit space and make it unusable.

Not sure if I believe them, but its a scary prospect and probably not one we should test.

Best wishes,
Mike.

In that spirit, I offer 10 to 1 odds on 10,000 that by 2050, we will not have more than 1,000 people living on two planets other than earth. Someone else puts up $1000, I put up $10,000. If we have two planets colonised by the definition above, they win, if we don't, I win.

The first paragraph exposes the falacy of this article.

1. Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years
2. if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week.

Environmentalists have been predicting imminent doom for over 50 years. The Skeptical Environmentalist

In that spirit, I offer 10 to 1 odds on 10,000 that by 2050, we will not have more than 1,000 people living on two planets other than earth. Someone else puts up $1000, I put up $10,000. If we have two planets colonised by the definition above, they win, if we don't, I win.

The first paragraph exposes the falacy of this article.

1. Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years
2. if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week.

Environmentalists have been predicting imminent doom for over 50 years. The Skeptical Environmentalist

VersionTracker Pro provides essentially this feature already...

I haven't used it since it went out of free beta but it is a pretty neat tool for folks who are truly addicted to having the latest version of any software.

I mean, that the whole going through your contacts/sent items list and mailing them is all very well, but I can write some perl that does that with your Pine folders easily enough.

I posted an article a while ago on this but it was rejected. It's a Wired article entitled "The Great MS Patch Nobody Uses". Granted it is Microsoft's fault this stupid stupid exploit happened in the first place, but it's also interesting to note that the fix for 80% of these problems have been available for over a year virtually unnoticed.

And finally, if you're running procmail then:

:0 B
* Content-Disposition: attachment
* name=.*\.(com|exe|pif|scr|bat|lnk|shf|vbs)
{
# Stick it somewhere
:0 B:
/home/accountname/mail/viruses
}

does a pretty good job of filtering out that sort of junk.

There was a guy in the '70s named Paul Ehrlich who became quite popular making these sames claims: the Earth would be destroyed by pollution and overconsumption before the next century. Ehrlich relied on the same Malthusian theory: that a population growing at a geometric rate would outstrip its resources growing at an arithmetic rate. The thing Ehrlich (and Malthus) didn't consider was human ingenuity. Ehrlich thought we'd all be starved by now; instead we're all too fat for our own good. Sure environmental problems can be devastating and tricky to solve, but the sky is not falling. Humanity enjoys better material conditions now than ever before.

The best resource for countering doomsayers is the writings of Julian Simon. People who get a perverse pleasure from proclaiming doom hate him. A good introduction to "doomslaying" is Wired Magazine's interview with Julian Simon.

read about it here.

The haven't made a story about the ruling yet, but they have written 3 articles about the story: http://search.wired.com/news/default.asp?query=new sbooster

This is a bit rich seeing as how Wired themselves deep link to other sites. Checkout Wired news and see for yourselves.

Wired News has a similar interesting article about a cease and desist letter sent to an independant news site by Belo, corporate parent of The Dallas Morning News, forbidding them from linking to individual stories within the site. They claim that the author can only link to the site's homepage, and attempting to link to stories within the site violates their copyright.

Wired News has a similar interesting article about a cease and desist letter sent to an independant news site by Belo, corporate parent of The Dallas Morning News, forbidding them from linking to individual stories within the site. They claim that the author can only link to the site's homepage, and attempting to link to stories within the site violates their copyright.

I always thought Bert was there just because Bert always looked like he had a lot of anger inside him. Kind of like Osama.

A story about how they use their independence to test-drive thouse canopy units.
I really like this guy, makes me want to do similar stuff at motherland :)

I read about Wolfram's book in Wired. I got the impression he's gone a bit over the top however. The article talked about a lot of things that supposedly were "new inventions" but mostly seemed to be old news (e.g. complex things arise from simple dynamical systems etc.) and then proceeded to Wolfram admitting that he could deduce the "rule of the universe" in the near future...

• The EU still has a pending monopoly investigation on MS
• Some EU institutions may not appreciate Palladium. For instance: would you trust Microsoft with the security of your armed forces if you were, say, the Swedish (neutral country) governement?

this is the same government agency that was too busy trying to shut down bonsaikitten.com to pay attention to terrorist threats to destroy multiple buildings just seven months later...

Show me a list of people who've been put in jail for copyright violations - I am going to bet that the list for people who trade MP3s and have gotten jail sentences is either very short or non-existent.

Actually, copyright violations are treated very seriously. Here is a link for you: Wired

Q. Who would fly on it?

A1. Anyone looking to pay 25-50% less to fly.

A2. You won't have much choice, the economics will have airlines snapping them up for certain routes.

(At least if the design can achieve the efficiencies and cost reductions they're talking about - plus whatever improvements are made between now and actual construction.)

Of course, for cheap, point-to-point travel, I'm still waiting for my $837,500 Eclipse Jet!

some kid in fuckwad Arizona calling himself "Mafiaboy"

I'm pretty sure that Mafiaboy was from Canada, not Arizona. Not that we're proud of him... but if you're going to rant, then get your facts straight.

(And guys - if you're looking to improve the quality of submissions Slashdot gets, it would probably be a really good idea to allow a limited form of feedback for rejections - even if it was just a choice from a drop-down menu ("This story was rejected because we have a writer working on the same story right now", for example.)

Oh - and in response to one user's post - go see it, but with lowered expectations.

Review: Minority Report

Reviewers of Spielberg's latest film are falling over each other to laud his new, gritty noir vision of the future, "Minority Report", based on the Phillip K Dick short story of the same name. Roger Ebert loves it; the movie is currently standing at 93% at Rotten Tomatoes, and Salon gives it a thumbs-up. But what's the reaction of your average geek?

(Full disclosure - while I am familiar with his work, I have not read the Phillip K. Dick story - so you're not going to read any comments about how the movie did or did not live up to the book. It stands and falls here on its own merits. Plot of the movie is discussed, but the ending is not given away. Plot of other Spielberg movies is also referenced.)

For those of you who have not yet been saturated by press releases or the trailer - Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, an investigator in the "pre-crime" police division of Washington D.C. in 2054. The department's work is facilitated by "pre-cogs", beings with the power to see the future - in particular, future murders. Alerted to crimes before they happen, the pre-crime unit can interpret the waking dreams of the pre-cogs and intercept the perpetrators before the event. This program has been such a success that murders in the D.C. area have been practically eliminated, and the government is considering taking the pre-crime unit national. Pre-cogs, it is claimed, are never wrong.

As a final safety check, federal investigator Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) is sent to inspect the pre-crime facility. Anderson and his boss, Director Burgess (Max von Sydow) fear that the program is going to be taken away from them. However, things quickly get far more complex than mere power games over jurisdiction.

Another alert from the pre-cog pops up. This time, Anderson sees himself killing a man - a man he does not know. Convicted by the infallibility of his own system and convinced he has been set-up, Anderson runs, determined to escape his own destiny by finding out who framed him.

The Washington DC that he runs to is a computerized Paniopticon, biometric readers omnipresent and blithely accepted by the populace. However the street (to paraphrase William Gibson) always finds a means to subvert every technological innovation - and to continue to run, Cruise must sink into the underbelly of the world he knows and confront his own past.

As a geek, your acceptance of Minority Report's plot will depend a great deal upon your stance on temporal paradoxes. The effectiveness of the pre-crime unit rests in the belief that once the future is "seen" it must occur, and Anderton's unit is therefore justified in taking pre-emptive action. However, as Witwer points out, by intervening you have forestalled the event - is it therefore right to incarcerate someone who has not committed an offense? Determinism is assumed to be a fact, but it turns into a question central to the film.

Spielberg has received a lot of recent press claiming how much "darker" and dystopian this movie is than much of his early work. I've seen comments that extrapolate from "Saving Private Ryan" through "A.I." to this movie that suggest the man is on a trip that rivals Poe in bleakness. Suffice it to say that anyone who believes this has "E.T" burned into their minds but has forgotten "Empire of the Sun" or even "The Color Purple", films as equally as grim as "Minority Report".

In fact there comes a point about fifteen minutes before the end of the film where Spielberg could have wrapped it up, leaving every plot thread neatly tied, and delivered a much darker ending. However Hollywood, or his own essential optimism, has driven him to deliver a brighter alternative, much like "A.I." It is not a completely unsatisfactory conclusion - the climax involves a very nice moral conflict - but it is not the bleak outlook I expected from reading the pieces on Spielberg's new "dark vision".

Spielberg does not fail to hit upon themes that are central to his work - the breathtaking innocence of childhood; the loss of humanity and its possible redemption; and the two-edged sword of technology. (Spielberg is no starry-eyed technologist - the potential misuse of man's tools has been an ongoing thesis since "Duel". In "Minority Report" there is an interesting sub-theme of technology as a new religion, with Anderton, the tool user, set against Witwer, a traditionally trained Jesuit seminarian before he became a cop.

Spielberg's visualization of the near-future of 2054 is complete and compelling. Animated advertising crawls over every surface; enhanced personalization of every experience has come at the price of a sharp loss in privacy; the gap between the well-to-do and the drug-addled poor has grown massively. One wonders, however, if the appearance in the film of companies we have today is there for verisimilitude or is merely clever product placement - how many corporations do you expect to survive another 50 years with the same logo? And while the technology shown is (for the most part) very believable, it is ironic that the cause behind the pre-cogs ability is somewhat glossed over.

In his directing Spielberg has taken note of his younger, hungrier competitors, such as David Fincher.. Part of this change was to hire Alex McDowell (the production designer of "Fight Club" and "The Crow"). In addition, his camerawork, in cooperation with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who worked with him on "Schindler's List") is more fluid than ever, using juxtaposition and video techniques to sometimes dazzling effect. And unlike his peer Lucas, who seems happy to place ultra-mirrored spacecraft in pristine environments and shiny robots on rich green grass, Spielberg's use of CGI is more subtle, "dirtier" and almost invisibly integrated in the scenes.

In terms of the cast, Tom Cruise is, well, Cruise. He's been chosen for roles for twenty years because he is an effective actor who is also cute, charming and bankable. His role as Anderton doesn't tax those abilities in any way. Max Von Sydow is the slightly scary Old Testament father figure he established himself in even before "The Exorcist". To me, the most effective player in the cast is Colin Farrell. Given a smaller role with far less screen time than Cruise he still succeeds in making his character deep, complex, and far more dynamic than the leading man's, with better lines and sharper delivery.

The plot is certainly enough to keep you guessing, with enough twists and turns to throw most. The movie has one "discovery" and an attendant chase scene that does stretch credibility somewhat, but otherwise the plotting is coherent and relatively bulletproof. There are holes, but none large enough to spoil the movie.

As a vision of the future, "Minority Report" is chock-full of ideas. As a movie, or even as a cyberpunk thriller, it leaves a little to be desired. After the film you won't want to tear your eyes out, but you may feel a sense of disappointment that Spielberg, who has demonstrated time and again that he can be deeply insightful into the human condition, warn of the dangers of technology while showcasing its attractions, and deliver a wild ride, could not quite succeed in delivering all three at once in this movie.

Most console companies routinely lose money on the actual hardware. To wit: Microsoft loses at least $100 on each console it sells .

Also, the actual games themselves don't cost more than a couple dollars each to manufacture (even on DVD), and that's including the box, instructions, etc. So let's see, MS makes $40~ on each game, so it must sell at least 2-3 games to make the X-Box profitable. And selling a remote for $30 (to play DVDs) doesn't hurt either.

www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/business/27DIES.html
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle / rchive/2001/05/23/MN110637.DTL
journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html
www.greasecar.com
www.lupo80days.com/route_en.html
www.a-car.com/index.html
www.biodiesel.org/
lowtech.bigstep.com/
www.veggievan.com
www.americanbiodiesel.com/
www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm
news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1309000/ 1309201.stm
www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282,31920,00.html

These problems we see with enron, worldcom, etc.. are the natural shakeout of this new economy BS.. Like when CmdrTaco made $7 million from selling slashdot and god knows how much more from the lnux merger. I'm guessing the market will slide even more after all these frauds are exposed but the economy is still growing and you would have to be a fool not to include some stocks in your long term savings plan.

And here's the link: How to disappear

"I'll give you the philosophy: Everything is just a document, whether it be music or video or e-mail or whatever. Each will have a name and a history, and every user will have his or her favorites."

Okay, anyone around here rememeber OpenDoc? That lovely technology that was developed by Apple, adopted by IBM for OS/2, languished in Novell's "we'll port it to Windows" black hole, then got dropped by everyone in 1997? Same deal: the document is just a container. There's a quick article here on what OpenDoc was and what developers thought when Apple killed it. Apple still has some developer docs available online here, which I'm guessing Bill has been reading up on recently.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever come up with an original idea that doesn't suck.

Simple

You have no privacy, get over it.

Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have become monks, developing new ink for early printing presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher rate."

But, the question is, how does one get them to be considered pseudo-employee's, opposed to customers of a service?

Give them free Internet access.

Now, what helps you most in the long run? Market share.

You mean that MS finally read those business books from 1997? If market share is what really helps you in the long run, explain to me what happened to companies like egghead, and bigstar, and DrKoop, and (Insert your favorite failed .com here)...

The platform that sells software wins. Period.

(Console software sales statisitcs for Q1 2002)

Dear Senor Moby,

Please fall off the face of the earth.

Sincerely, Everyone on the face of the earth with a shred of integrity.

Then how do you explain Emineim's recent sales? His album was being bootlegged before it was even released. By your logic the number one selling album should be Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies.

From a recent Wired article: That was the masterstroke in marketing Play - the licensing of all 18 of its tracks, from the technofied down-home blues "Honey" to the muted rock anthem "South Side," for use in advertisements, TV programs, and movies. Moby offers a soft-focus view of how this all happened. "That was just, like, taking advantage of an opportunity," he says. "There was no strategy involved. They called us up and said, 'Can we use your song in this commercial?'"

Moby's managers, Marci Weber and Barry Taylor, offer a decidedly different account. Even before the release of Play, with its record-setting run of commercially licensed songs, Weber says the strategy was core to the Organization. In 1996, for instance, they received reports that Moby's atmospheric "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," which sustained the climactic scene in Michael Mann's Heat, had made an enormous impression on the film-music community. So during that year's Slamdance film festival, Weber and Taylor "invited every music supervisor in Hollywood" to a party to increase their client's visibility. "We put on this free show, big dinner, all that."

You didn't sell because:

a) your machine wasn't working as hard. and...

From the same article: There's no getting around it: 18 sounds, almost track for track, like Play. It even has the sampled gospel vocals - though in place of the earlier disc's rusticated "Ooh, Lawdys," 18 features more urbane, sexy-sounding shout-outs to the Almighty. Moby insists the echoes are essentially coincidence. "I want to make a good record," he says. "And if it means it has songs similar to things on Play, fine."

b) people already bought your album the first time.

Some could say the reverse. That free promotion and distribution across the net benefits upcoming artists. In fact this article from Wired makes a case.

Some could say the reverse. That free promotion and distribution across the net benefits upcoming artists. In fact this article from Wired makes a case.

There's no getting around it: 18 sounds, almost track for track, like Play. It even has the sampled gospel vocals - though in place of the earlier disc's rusticated "Ooh, Lawdys," 18 features more urbane, sexy-sounding shout-outs to the Almighty. Moby insists the echoes are essentially coincidence. "I want to make a good record," he says. "And if it means it has songs similar to things on Play, fine." It is a good record - and if Play hadn't existed, it would be a great record.

I understand your point. A good one, but also a very naïve one...
You must recall that governments usually are closely tied to it's land's industry and in my mind, this has become the true purpose of Echelon in the post-cold war aera: Industrial Espionage.
May I quote: "France, deeply suspicious of Britain's uniquely close intelligence links with the US, seized on reports that Echelon cost Airbus Industrie an 8bn contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994, after the US intercepted communications between Riyadh and the Toulouse headquarters of Airbus"

Some more links:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shuttle/5604/data. html
http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/highlights.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34932,00 . tml

And, yes, don't believe in a conspiracy unless it has been denied... ;-)

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

For a bunch of technophiles we sure are afraid of new technologies...

These technologies are dangerous to us whether they work or they fail.

We are afraid of being attacked by uniformed thugs at airports and soon, bus stations and shopping malls because the biometric system came up with yet another false positive. Like to be mistaken for bin Laden and have your shopping trip be interrupted by a SWAT team?

We are concerned about our privacy being invaded (ever been stalked?) for personal or political reasons. America is now a land where the government can take anyone, declare that person a "terrorist", and detain that person indefinitely without a trial or even an attorney. Should we want that government to know where we are at all times?

We are concerned because we know that this stuff is NOT ready for prime time but is being sold to PHB types who can easily be scammed and to journalists who don't have the tech skills or knowledge to be know when they're being snowed as a "solution" to protect us from terrorists and criminals. The biometrics companies aren't doing this out of interest in public safety, they are doing this in hopes of an IPO and a quick cash-out..

Which category do you fall into? PHB? Tech-illiterate journalist? Or are you a shill for a biometrics company?

Easy ways to defeat biometrics

Face/iris scanner failures.

NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.

The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.

• The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.

  This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.

• We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.

  Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.

• We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.

  You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.

• This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

  No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.

• NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.

  How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.

• Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

  In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."

I'm not writing this essay as a Dvorak basher to get attention, although plenty of people will accuse me of doing that. I recently noticed a lull in the Dvorak buzz, however, and I'm now beginning to see Dvorak as an old commentator that needs to retire.

Let's look at the recent Dvorak offerings. The columnist's rant against the DMCA, usually a "gimme" topic for tech-industry pundits, garnered and underwhelming 59 posts. He also attempted to lambaste Microsoft's mistakes, and predictably cited opinions that many agree with but no one seems to be able to do anything about. The obvious next iteration of his ratings grab was to smear Apple for no good reason in particular. After that, what is Dvorak going to do?

Remember that in 1999, Dvorak drew eyeballs the Internet over by accusing the iBook of being too "girly" a computer to survive. This rant was an improvement, but there hasn't been a new idea since.

There was a moment early in the new millennium when it looked like Dvorak was going to stop taking unfounded pot shots at Apple. This was actually a good idea, but eventually it fell apart, leaving PC Magazine with a neutered opinion column from which it never fully recovered.

The most interesting aspect with Dvorak is the way he's able to consistently attack everything under the sun with little support beyond his own worldview and not only get away with it, but receive attention and praise for his efforts. Curiously, no other columnist has been able to manage anything like this. Hiawatha Bray is said to have legions of anti-Mac fans in his pockets, but after playing with an iMac DV in late 1999 he changed his mind. Apparently Apple has done the impossible.

Having said that, why can't Dvorak take his griping to the next level and bring out a completely valid complaint against the Macintosh? Here's the problem. This supposedly creative business of technology journalism has been completely co-opted by Microsoft for over 10 years. All the alternative approaches to computing have been sabotaged, absorbed by Microsoft, or simply wasted, withered, and died in the anticompetitive marketplace. Most of the big alternative computing publications have been closed or cut back. In that environment, unfounded accusations against all things non-Microsoft are the easiest way to collect a paycheck.

So perhaps I have answered my own question regarding putting down the old dog called Dvorak. PC Magazine has no one it could possibly replace him with. There is no new idea out there short of a Linux desktop for grandma. And the technology for a Linux desktop for grandma is decades away.

In fact, the old dog will not be shot, but propped up with ads, and patched with reconstructive PR, instead. Dvorak will go in the only direction possible: increased cynicism. In fact this is the only direction for tech industry commentary in general.

Now, after I read that I talked with two relatives who had both worked in Africa (the Gambia and South Africa respectively) and they thought most of it was a bit hopeful. I guess all the problems created by colonization still exist and trouble the continent.

That brings up another point ... can Philips sneak this by 'under the radar' so that it can/will be released without DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) ?

If anyone can do it, it's philips, considering their position on DRM'd fake CDs.

With no microphone plugged into the tape deck, it was accidentally recorded over over five times???

(See the paragraph that reads as follows: "Tape 342, as it's known by archivists, was last tested in 1974 by a panel of audio experts, who concluded that the erasures were done in separate segments. Whoever erased the tape pressed Record, stopped the tape, and hit Record again, between five and nine times")

IANAL, but their claim seems legit.

You may not be a lawyer, and you're void of common sense.. there is nothing "legit" about this.

IIRC, other recent so-called "deep linking" suits have been resolved in a similar manner.

YDRC - US District Judge Harry Huppruled that there's nothing wrong with deep linking

Plenty of suits have been settled, but I can't recall ever hearing a court actually rule on this

How about Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com.

The judge in this case ruled "Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.

Ooh, I want to be the first to release the deleted parts as lowercase? Do I have to pay royalties to the Nixon estate?

Would they have to make clear what the sounds constituted, then, to prove they deserved royalties?

I dissagree with you. I am by no means against technology (after all why would I read slashdot all of the time?) but that doesn't mean that I believe that we humans should dive into every technology that we develop.

The problem with technology and humans is that humans have a knack for doing more harm with a technology than good. To say that genetic engineering is only good is being very ignorant of humans' knack for doing harm. Don't get me wrong, not everybody is going to use these technologies for evil, but all it takes is another Hitler (who did plenty of expirements with genetics himself) to come along and figure out how to use genetic engineering to control many people.

Bill Joy (the chief computer scientist at Sun Microsystems) wrote an article in Wired Magazine that opened my eyes to the dangers of tecnology. I believe that every person who believes that genetic engineering is good (which it is in some cases, such as saving lives) should read this article. It can be found here.

have you tried the Marker pen tool? Hmm, damn, guess I can be sued now?!

A lot of people have been talking about this in terms of matter transportation a-la Star Trek.

An article I read recently on Wired mentioned a theory that "conciousness" may be the electromagnetic field of our brain interacting with neurons.

A device like this wouldn't copy the field, would it? Or can these things be expressed in terms of quantum "particles" as well?

Some people mentioned it already, but here's information about a case in Germany that is similar, dealing with Nazi propaganda.