Just wait until the new Lincoln Navigator comes with a Dish on the roof and a wireless basestation providing a net link within a 1000 ft radius.
OTOH "I'll give my presentation in just a minute, I have to move my vehicle to the front parking lot."
This sort of service could be really useful for the travelling salesman types who need full net access. Then again it could really ruin your back to nature vacation when you are in the remotest part of Glacier Natl Park and some Net Phreak comes walking by with one of those friggin Satelite Backpacks and you can help yourself from asking him if you can check your e-mail/stocks etc.
Allright, we've let the computers control the ignition (and all the stuff inside the car) but fuck me I don't need no virtual cam shaft. Future quote "I'm sorry sir but it looks like your autocam chip fffft-up and your engine is now toast. That will be $200 for the pistons, $600 for the new cam and rods, $300 for the port and polish, $100 for the new cam chip and $2000 for the Microsoft Virtual Cam package. Will that be credit or your first born?
Cha...ching!!!!!!
I'll take a 68 mustang fastback any day over any of these new cars!
Ahhh, you have reached enlightenment and graduated to trolldom. What has actually happened is that you have shut youself off from real (verbal) intercourse and created a little playground for yourself. You are recreating your childhood experiences only now you are playing the role of the playground bully. I wouldn't be surprised if you were one of the people complaining about how bad it was when you were a kid.
Cycle of abuse!
Just wait till your kids are reported to the pinkertons.
I think the reason there are less female computer geeks has to do with the responses the of the other male teenagers to your post. Clearly young males are threatened by smart geeky women. They somehow find people such as yourself as threatening to them such that they resort to recess taunting tactics (we don't stop for girls!, repeat). I can't imagine how I would feel if I posted a message on a largely female occupied message board and started receiving replys asking how much sperm I can produce in a day or asking me if I eat pussy....unbelievable.
I hope you continue to post here and ignore these little boys.
To the childish AC's posting here...grow the fuck up and try to say something usefull for once you fucking cowards!!! Yes COWARDS!!
When (not if) the Pinkertons make a mistake and falsely alienate the child of a newspaper reporter this will be front page stuff. The Pinkertons will shut down the program and wish like hell that they had listened to Jon and the Slashdotters after they find their clients moving to other security companies.
A bit like when the Dana-Farber Cancer Center accidentally killed the Boston Globe health reporter with an accidental overdose of a chemotherapy drug a few years ago. Didn't take long for heads to roll and a complete review of the Center.
Whoever marked this as flaimbait needs to think a little. HIV is much scarier than cancer as it is contagious. It is quite concievable that a new lethal virus could emerge that is transmitted (like the common cold) by hand contact. In fact this virus thrives in computer keyboards. Nerds all over the world are the group that is spreading the virus. They soon are treated with all the respect that gay men currently get.
Bottom line...infectious lethal virus currently spread by exchange of body fluids could be the source of the next spanish flu. By funding this area of research we are investing generally in viral research and laying the groundwork to be able to prevent future epidemics of nastier versions of these viruses.
Cancer is a very serious problem and needs big time funding too, but the threat to national (international) well being of lethal viruses is much greater than cancer.
Agreed! This man can communicate tough ideas in a short sentence. In this little exchange Doc Pollack has touched on a great many extremely huge and difficult topics with grace, coherence and insight. No doubt one of the most thought provoking interviews I have ever read!
I wish the slashdot editors would post each one of these question/answers as individual stories for discussion each night for a fortnight. Doc Pollack week!
This would give us the time required to digest each piece and play with it rather than scramble the heads of every high-minded slashdotter with this barrage of thoughtfulness he has unleashed on us. Have you noticed the scrambled nature of the responses to this interview. Heads are reeling with big unexpressable thoughts.
There is enough fodder here for weeks of great articles. At the very least it would be nice to release one of these gems each evening around 10pm when the typical stories are getting tired.
Come on now. The question was "is it ethical to try and create artificial intelligence?" This question could easily be the subject of 20 slashdot stories with no resolution, there is no answer! He tried to give a funny/half serious answer which raised ethical questions rather than write a friggin book on the topic in his answer.
Chicken: Would it be ethical for me to cross the road?
Answer: there is no definite answer, it depends on whether you like chicken crossing the road jokes.
I think he decided to spend his time answering the questions that he could say something useful or funny about. Nothing more/nothing less.
I must agree with you however that the question is a very interesting and important one. A good topic for a book.
I'd have to agree with you. Nothing beats a regular healthy diet. Remember when we were all told to eat margarine instead of butter? Guess what, margarine is worse for you than butter. Margarine has trans-fatty acids that your body can't deal with. I bet in a few hundred years, health conscious people will be eating relatively low fat all natural diets consisting of all the regular foods of the last few centuries.
One prediction for the future.....chicken will rule!!!! (as a protein source)
Sorry but this is no solution to hunger or nourishment. It is a method to deliver small amounts of vitamins, hormones and other regulatory substances into the body (at an outrageous price). For the starving person nothing, short of food will help in the long run.
The bottom line is delivering caloric intake and this as yet hypothetical delivery device cannot possibly deliver calories unless it weighed 10 pounds, covered a substantial portion of your body and was changed every couple of days.
A few years ago, researchers discovered a protein hormone called leptin that is critically involved in regulating the response of the brain to hunger in the body. Essentially the fat storage cells in your body (adipose tissue) produce leptin when they are satiated (have enough fat stored), leptin travels to your brain and induces a feeling of satiety, shutting off hunger signals. The drug companies got really excited by this as it first appeared to be the key to controlling obesity. As it turned out very few extremely fat people respond to additional leptin as their problem lies in the responce of the brain cell to leptin, not the lack of the messenger.
I wonder though, what percentage of normal, soldier types would respond to a quick shot of leptin in not feeling the need to eat for a few days? This could be very useful in war situations where you want to send troops into territories for a few days where you have not set up supply lines yet (can you say covert operations).
Anyway, I can see this sort of technology being useful in special situations ie. military, athletic events, new product rollouts, yuppie camping, Quake marathons etc.
Many great points in your post but I must disagree with you on the App vs OS. MSFT has maintained dominance through their ability to link their OS to the business productivity apps such as MS Office.
On the hardware point you are very correct, no Mac based production houses will switch to Linux in the near future, OS X will be tough enough for the time being. All the same Corel will need to make a PPC compliant version of linux if they want to get into current Mac markets.
For the market we are talking about (graphic design/desktop publishing) what it would take to get Linux moving in this market is the full support of Adobe with all their apps/fonts etc being ported to Linux......crazy you say? They will be porting them to OS X and thus are probably making the code switch to a unix compatible codebase (surely they wouldn't be dumb enough to tie themselves to just the Mac platform in that switch) and thus I think that you will see an Adobe apps on linux/unix not too long after they make the OS X switch. Apple may be unwittingly setting themselves up for a future switch to Linux. The only way they can prevent this is to provide things that are not available in the linux community like drivers for most of the common devices, much as they have done for USB and firewire.
So my question is does anybody know if Corel is making a PPC version and is Adobe writing OS X native versions of their apps that will be generally unix compliant..or will they just be OS X compliant.
OK so the article says that there is no way to bring down a distributed system but there is.
First, catch one of the pirates (preferably an 18+ YO pirate) by tracking his IP address through the IP service provider and then sue him for all he's got, make a poster child of the poor sap. Keep doing this and sue everyone you can. Sure you can't completely shut the thing down but you can knock the breath out of it.
Another approach would be to send that e-mail visur that causes your system to explode to every server you can find.
I think the former solution is the one that the media companies will do but they'd probably attempt the latter if they thought it would work.
I'm surprised that I havent heard of lawsuits against people running gnutella and napster yet. Why is that? Is there a legal loophole here?
What do you think the solutions are?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
Perhaps we need a goverment watchdog agency that can be requested to bug business meetings by one of the parties and act rapidly as mediators between the parties based on potential illegalities as discussed (this should get a flame or two)
"Bill, I think you should know that if you insist on strongarming this company, as you presented yesterday, we will break MSFT up! We have the evidence right here on tape....would you like to see it before you answer?"
from the ruling text:
Finally, Microsoft's willingness to make the sacrifices involved in cancelling Mac Office, and the concessions relating to browsing software that it demanded from Apple, can only be explained by Microsoft's desire to protect the applications barrier to entry from the threat posed by Navigator.
Sounds like Apple testified loud and clear on MSFT's tactics. I was wondering why apple "decided" not to release OS X for x86 and allowed MSFT to own 25% of Apple after MSFT agreed to release Office98 for Mac.
If those meetings had been bugged (by the GVMT as nobody else can legally do so without the consent of the other party) we would of had a much faster and better resolution to MSFT's monopoly abuse and we might have MacOS on x86 hardware by now. We also would have companies paying a lot more for (netscape browsers) but that may have been a good thing...Netscape may have become much better with a large infusion of cash, or mabey not but things would be more fair
I don't much like the idea of further GVMT regulation/oversight but whats to prevent a baby Bill from continuing these practices. We need a mechanism to react fast to tech related issues (with appeals later). Tech changes so fast that by the time the DOJ actually makes a move on this the damage is already done. It will be the same in the future unless a new fast acting mechanism is implemented.
Any good ideas of how to make the legal system run as fast as technology? A percentage TAX on e-commerce used to fund a "tech business court" that can rapidly deal with issues?
OK, Apple owns the exclusive rights to Sorenson codec. Why should they support a Linux version? It would cost them big to support it (if they just released a crud filled binary to the community they would be shat upon). Open source it you ask?? They don't own the codec! Third note, Apple is about to release their own version of unix in OSX and they are busting their butts to debug QT for that. Hopefully once they have a solution to the former problem (OSX compatibility) the linux port will soon follow. Before that I see no chance of QT for linux/unix.
There's probably a Sony engineer laughing to herself quietly right now. But the question is how could Sony allow the Playstation to be released without regional encoding if they were serious about it??? Could this be a quiet way for Sony to begin protesting the union they are a part of without blatently violating the rules (oops...recall!!!!). Sure Japan's a big market but it's not like they are going to lose revenue over this. Let's hope a similar bug is in the US release. Sony has probably lost DVD sales over this this issue to other companies. But face it, pirating will occur regardless of the restrictions they try and put on regular joes like me. So why punish Joe/Jane??? I think the real issue they face is high bandwidth internet and compressed video. Just wait till you can download and watch the Matrix in real time 1024/768 30fps compressed video. Thats when they will start to shit. Until then it no big problem...........
Waiting in Wisconsin
Re:Microsoft Announces Adoption of Gecko!
on
Netscape 6
·
· Score: 2
Actually, you post could be closer to the truth than you think. The other day, MSFT finaly released IE 5 for Mac. At the heart of this release is the Tasman rendering engine. I am currently posting from MacIE 5 as it is a far better browser than Netscape 4.7 (I sure hope mozilla is as good). As far as I can tell tasman is a lot like gecko in rendering. According to MSFT's web page this is an entirely new rendering engine over 1.5 years in the making and released first for Mac. I don't know what to believe but this could be possible, test it out on the Mac and then release IE 6 with the full blown less buggy version.
I wouldn't doubt it if MS has copied gecko and are about to incorporate it into IE 5.5/6.
This is a big issue for OSS projects. If you get a good one going. MS (insert evil closed source company) can copy the fruits of your labor and incorporate it into their monopoly continuing software. And you can't stop them or prove that they did it (without some new laws).
Warning, Annual Internet Cleaning Occurs Tonight
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 2
PLEASE PASS THIS NOTICE TO OTHER USERS WHO MAY NOT SEE IT!
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead e-mail and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2. During that 24-hour period, five very powerful Japanese built multi-lingual Internet-crawling robots (Toshiba ML-2274) situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet
3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconvenience will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
Sysadmins and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on to other sysadmins and Internet users as well.
Not on in my area (WI) tonight or this weekend. This is exactly the sort of show that would do well on iCrave if only they were still in existance and assuming it would be broadcast in Toronto (is it on in TO?). Perhaps if iCrave handled broadcasting of select shows from many different markets where it paid the people with the rights to the programming for a liscence to re-broadcast they might have a business model that works (as in legal in the states). They could start by collecting old technology centric shows and make them available in streaming format on demand (I would pay to see Triumph of the Nerds again). Many of these would be from PBS and I assume they would be resonable in their rates as it would only add to current revenues for shows that have already aired.
Anyway, I'm bummed not to be able to even findout for myself if it was a good show or not.
The whole Microsoft antitrust trial began over IE and Netscape.
Let them de-integrate IE from windows entirely and open source it under GPL. Everyone who's been bitching for a good Linux web browser would have it. Busting MSFT into pieces will not help the computer industry. Also it would be nice to ask^H^H^H force MSFT to allow competitors in the office arena to be able to include a save as Office9X format for their word files.
You have identified a better story than the one we are all replying to since this one actually gives some info (not much tho) as to what they consider bionanotechnology to be:
From the NIH web site
General topics to be covered during the symposium include: * synthesis of biomimetically-derived and bioactive nanostructures for applications in therapeutics and diagnostics; * devices for early detection of disease and for single cell and molecule measurements; * electronic/biology interfaces; * biological nanostructures; and * nanotechnology in tissue repair.
Seems to me they are just renaming areas within biology as bionanotech. I guess it helps to keep the federal monies flowing.
What would make a really good story is a link to a conference proceedings to people could actually get a glimpse of the science being presented and find out what really is bionanotech.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait until the new Lincoln Navigator comes with a Dish on the roof and a wireless basestation providing a net link within a 1000 ft radius.
OTOH "I'll give my presentation in just a minute, I have to move my vehicle to the front parking lot."
This sort of service could be really useful for the travelling salesman types who need full net access.
Then again it could really ruin your back to nature vacation when you are in the remotest part of Glacier Natl Park and some Net Phreak comes walking by with one of those friggin Satelite Backpacks and you can help yourself from asking him if you can check your e-mail/stocks etc.
Ahhh technology
I take it you lost some cash buying their stock??
Allright, we've let the computers control the ignition (and all the stuff inside the car) but fuck me I don't need no virtual cam shaft. Future quote "I'm sorry sir but it looks like your autocam chip fffft-up and your engine is now toast. That will be $200 for the pistons, $600 for the new cam and rods, $300 for the port and polish, $100 for the new cam chip and $2000 for the Microsoft Virtual Cam package. Will that be credit or your first born?
Cha...ching!!!!!!
I'll take a 68 mustang fastback any day over any of these new cars!
Ahhh, you have reached enlightenment and graduated to trolldom. What has actually happened is that you have shut youself off from real (verbal) intercourse and created a little playground for yourself. You are recreating your childhood experiences only now you are playing the role of the playground bully. I wouldn't be surprised if you were one of the people complaining about how bad it was when you were a kid.
Cycle of abuse!
Just wait till your kids are reported to the pinkertons.
You are such a cowardly little child. I hope puberty isn't too bad for you (zit wise that is)
Grow up!
I think the reason there are less female computer geeks has to do with the responses the of the other male teenagers to your post. Clearly young males are threatened by smart geeky women. They somehow find people such as yourself as threatening to them such that they resort to recess taunting tactics (we don't stop for girls!, repeat). I can't imagine how I would feel if I posted a message on a largely female occupied message board and started receiving replys asking how much sperm I can produce in a day or asking me if I eat pussy....unbelievable.
I hope you continue to post here and ignore these little boys.
To the childish AC's posting here...grow the fuck up and try to say something usefull for once you fucking cowards!!! Yes COWARDS!!
When (not if) the Pinkertons make a mistake and falsely alienate the child of a newspaper reporter this will be front page stuff. The Pinkertons will shut down the program and wish like hell that they had listened to Jon and the Slashdotters after they find their clients moving to other security companies.
A bit like when the Dana-Farber Cancer Center accidentally killed the Boston Globe health reporter with an accidental overdose of a chemotherapy drug a few years ago. Didn't take long for heads to roll and a complete review of the Center.
This WILL have a similar outcome.
Whoever marked this as flaimbait needs to think a little. HIV is much scarier than cancer as it is contagious. It is quite concievable that a new lethal virus could emerge that is transmitted (like the common cold) by hand contact. In fact this virus thrives in computer keyboards. Nerds all over the world are the group that is spreading the virus. They soon are treated with all the respect that gay men currently get.
Bottom line...infectious lethal virus currently spread by exchange of body fluids could be the source of the next spanish flu. By funding this area of research we are investing generally in viral research and laying the groundwork to be able to prevent future epidemics of nastier versions of these viruses.
Cancer is a very serious problem and needs big time funding too, but the threat to national (international) well being of lethal viruses is much greater than cancer.
Humans are destroying the world that we live on through pollution/war etc.
Humans create artificial intelligence.
Humans die out due to above problems without having populated outer space.
After many eons, AI's get bored and decide to correct atmospheric problems and resurect humans for entertainment.
Humans live once again!
Was this outcome ethical?
Moot!
Agreed! This man can communicate tough ideas in a short sentence. In this little exchange Doc Pollack has touched on a great many extremely huge and difficult topics with grace, coherence and insight. No doubt one of the most thought provoking interviews I have ever read!
I wish the slashdot editors would post each one of these question/answers as individual stories for discussion each night for a fortnight. Doc Pollack week!
This would give us the time required to digest each piece and play with it rather than scramble the heads of every high-minded slashdotter with this barrage of thoughtfulness he has unleashed on us. Have you noticed the scrambled nature of the responses to this interview. Heads are reeling with big unexpressable thoughts.
There is enough fodder here for weeks of great articles. At the very least it would be nice to release one of these gems each evening around 10pm when the typical stories are getting tired.
Come on now. The question was "is it ethical to try and create artificial intelligence?" This question could easily be the subject of 20 slashdot stories with no resolution, there is no answer! He tried to give a funny/half serious answer which raised ethical questions rather than write a friggin book on the topic in his answer.
Chicken: Would it be ethical for me to cross the road?
Answer: there is no definite answer, it depends on whether you like chicken crossing the road jokes.
I think he decided to spend his time answering the questions that he could say something useful or funny about. Nothing more/nothing less.
I must agree with you however that the question is a very interesting and important one. A good topic for a book.
I'd have to agree with you. Nothing beats a regular healthy diet. Remember when we were all told to eat margarine instead of butter? Guess what, margarine is worse for you than butter. Margarine has trans-fatty acids that your body can't deal with. I bet in a few hundred years, health conscious people will be eating relatively low fat all natural diets consisting of all the regular foods of the last few centuries.
One prediction for the future.....chicken will rule!!!! (as a protein source)
Sorry but this is no solution to hunger or nourishment. It is a method to deliver small amounts of vitamins, hormones and other regulatory substances into the body (at an outrageous price). For the starving person nothing, short of food will help in the long run.
The bottom line is delivering caloric intake and this as yet hypothetical delivery device cannot possibly deliver calories unless it weighed 10 pounds, covered a substantial portion of your body and was changed every couple of days.
Powdered milk however is usefull in this regard.
A few years ago, researchers discovered a protein hormone called leptin that is critically involved in regulating the response of the brain to hunger in the body. Essentially the fat storage cells in your body (adipose tissue) produce leptin when they are satiated (have enough fat stored), leptin travels to your brain and induces a feeling of satiety, shutting off hunger signals. The drug companies got really excited by this as it first appeared to be the key to controlling obesity. As it turned out very few extremely fat people respond to additional leptin as their problem lies in the responce of the brain cell to leptin, not the lack of the messenger.
I wonder though, what percentage of normal, soldier types would respond to a quick shot of leptin in not feeling the need to eat for a few days? This could be very useful in war situations where you want to send troops into territories for a few days where you have not set up supply lines yet (can you say covert operations).
Anyway, I can see this sort of technology being useful in special situations ie. military, athletic events, new product rollouts, yuppie camping, Quake marathons etc.
But at the end of the day you just gotta EAT!
Many great points in your post but I must disagree with you on the App vs OS. MSFT has maintained dominance through their ability to link their OS to the business productivity apps such as MS Office.
On the hardware point you are very correct, no Mac based production houses will switch to Linux in the near future, OS X will be tough enough for the time being. All the same Corel will need to make a PPC compliant version of linux if they want to get into current Mac markets.
For the market we are talking about (graphic design/desktop publishing) what it would take to get Linux moving in this market is the full support of Adobe with all their apps/fonts etc being ported to Linux......crazy you say? They will be porting them to OS X and thus are probably making the code switch to a unix compatible codebase (surely they wouldn't be dumb enough to tie themselves to just the Mac platform in that switch) and thus I think that you will see an Adobe apps on linux/unix not too long after they make the OS X switch. Apple may be unwittingly setting themselves up for a future switch to Linux. The only way they can prevent this is to provide things that are not available in the linux community like drivers for most of the common devices, much as they have done for USB and firewire.
So my question is does anybody know if Corel is making a PPC version and is Adobe writing OS X native versions of their apps that will be generally unix compliant..or will they just be OS X compliant.
OK so the article says that there is no way to bring down a distributed system but there is.
First, catch one of the pirates (preferably an 18+ YO pirate) by tracking his IP address through the IP service provider and then sue him for all he's got, make a poster child of the poor sap. Keep doing this and sue everyone you can. Sure you can't completely shut the thing down but you can knock the breath out of it.
Another approach would be to send that e-mail visur that causes your system to explode to every server you can find.
I think the former solution is the one that the media companies will do but they'd probably attempt the latter if they thought it would work.
I'm surprised that I havent heard of lawsuits against people running gnutella and napster yet. Why is that? Is there a legal loophole here?
"Bill, I think you should know that if you insist on strongarming this company, as you presented yesterday, we will break MSFT up! We have the evidence right here on tape....would you like to see it before you answer?"
from the ruling text:
Finally, Microsoft's willingness to make the sacrifices involved in cancelling Mac Office, and the concessions relating to browsing software that it demanded from Apple, can only be explained by Microsoft's desire to protect the applications barrier to entry from the threat posed by Navigator.
Sounds like Apple testified loud and clear on MSFT's tactics. I was wondering why apple "decided" not to release OS X for x86 and allowed MSFT to own 25% of Apple after MSFT agreed to release Office98 for Mac.
If those meetings had been bugged (by the GVMT as nobody else can legally do so without the consent of the other party) we would of had a much faster and better resolution to MSFT's monopoly abuse and we might have MacOS on x86 hardware by now. We also would have companies paying a lot more for (netscape browsers) but that may have been a good thing...Netscape may have become much better with a large infusion of cash, or mabey not but things would be more fair
I don't much like the idea of further GVMT regulation/oversight but whats to prevent a baby Bill from continuing these practices. We need a mechanism to react fast to tech related issues (with appeals later). Tech changes so fast that by the time the DOJ actually makes a move on this the damage is already done. It will be the same in the future unless a new fast acting mechanism is implemented.
Any good ideas of how to make the legal system run as fast as technology? A percentage TAX on e-commerce used to fund a "tech business court" that can rapidly deal with issues?
OK, Apple owns the exclusive rights to Sorenson codec. Why should they support a Linux version? It would cost them big to support it (if they just released a crud filled binary to the community they would be shat upon). Open source it you ask?? They don't own the codec! Third note, Apple is about to release their own version of unix in OSX and they are busting their butts to debug QT for that. Hopefully once they have a solution to the former problem (OSX compatibility) the linux port will soon follow. Before that I see no chance of QT for linux/unix.
There's probably a Sony engineer laughing to herself quietly right now. But the question is how could Sony allow the Playstation to be released without regional encoding if they were serious about it??? Could this be a quiet way for Sony to begin protesting the union they are a part of without blatently violating the rules (oops...recall!!!!). Sure Japan's a big market but it's not like they are going to lose revenue over this. Let's hope a similar bug is in the US release. Sony has probably lost DVD sales over this this issue to other companies. But face it, pirating will occur regardless of the restrictions they try and put on regular joes like me. So why punish Joe/Jane??? I think the real issue they face is high bandwidth internet and compressed video. Just wait till you can download and watch the Matrix in real time 1024/768 30fps compressed video. Thats when they will start to shit. Until then it no big problem...........
Waiting in Wisconsin
Actually, you post could be closer to the truth than you think. The other day, MSFT finaly released IE 5 for Mac. At the heart of this release is the Tasman rendering engine. I am currently posting from MacIE 5 as it is a far better browser than Netscape 4.7 (I sure hope mozilla is as good). As far as I can tell tasman is a lot like gecko in rendering. According to MSFT's web page this is an entirely new rendering engine over 1.5 years in the making and released first for Mac. I don't know what to believe but this could be possible, test it out on the Mac and then release IE 6 with the full blown less buggy version.
I wouldn't doubt it if MS has copied gecko and are about to incorporate it into IE 5.5/6.
This is a big issue for OSS projects. If you get a good one going. MS (insert evil closed source company) can copy the fruits of your labor and incorporate it into their monopoly continuing software. And you can't stop them or prove that they did it (without some new laws).
PLEASE PASS THIS NOTICE TO OTHER USERS WHO MAY NOT SEE IT!
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead e-mail and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2. During that 24-hour period, five very powerful Japanese built multi-lingual Internet-crawling robots (Toshiba ML-2274) situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet
3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconvenience will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
Sysadmins and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on to other sysadmins and Internet users as well.
Not on in my area (WI) tonight or this weekend. This is exactly the sort of show that would do well on iCrave if only they were still in existance and assuming it would be broadcast in Toronto (is it on in TO?). Perhaps if iCrave handled broadcasting of select shows from many different markets where it paid the people with the rights to the programming for a liscence to re-broadcast they might have a business model that works (as in legal in the states). They could start by collecting old technology centric shows and make them available in streaming format on demand (I would pay to see Triumph of the Nerds again). Many of these would be from PBS and I assume they would be resonable in their rates as it would only add to current revenues for shows that have already aired.
Anyway, I'm bummed not to be able to even findout for myself if it was a good show or not.
The whole Microsoft antitrust trial began over IE and Netscape.
Let them de-integrate IE from windows entirely and open source it under GPL. Everyone who's been bitching for a good Linux web browser would have it. Busting MSFT into pieces will not help the computer industry. Also it would be nice to ask^H^H^H force MSFT to allow competitors in the office arena to be able to include a save as Office9X format for their word files.
Let's see what actually happens
Can you tell us more or give us a link to the labs website?
From the NIH web site
General topics to be covered during the symposium include: * synthesis of biomimetically-derived and bioactive nanostructures for applications in therapeutics and diagnostics; * devices for early detection of disease and for single cell and molecule measurements; * electronic/biology interfaces; * biological nanostructures; and * nanotechnology in tissue repair.
Seems to me they are just renaming areas within biology as bionanotech. I guess it helps to keep the federal monies flowing.
What would make a really good story is a link to a conference proceedings to people could actually get a glimpse of the science being presented and find out what really is bionanotech.