There's a story floating around that Mossad built a touch-tone activated bomb into a cell phone and made sure it was delivered with the next batch of deliveries going to a high-ranking terrorist.
The last thing the guy ever heard was "Hello, I'm Avi {can't remember the name), head of Israeli Intelligence." followed by the touch-tone sequence.
Not as funny as "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" would have been in this context, but this was before The Princess Bride hit video.
I've been Googling. "Copyright Law of 1996" is the correct designation for the current Mexican copyright law. Feed it to Google and one gets 82 hits.
The hits disappear as soon as one adds amendment, proposed, proposal to the search terms.
Those should have turned up hits even in Spanish, I think. While my Spanish sucks rocks, that's one of the languages for which machine translation sort of works.
It would be a suicidally stupid thing for a national government to do. Imagine a 6 year old having to do an intellectual property search on the Net every time she was assigned to write a story for school and then try to find the intellectual property owners... if they can be found after 100 years.
While it's hard to quantify or model the economic loss due to the inability to use public domain work as a basis for further creativity, if I wrote fiction for a living, I'd be packing if this passed where I lived. Or if I were a parent.
However, we have no credible evidence of such. What we have is a blog posting that doesn't cite a verifiable URL from a government source. This is a credibility killer given that the subject is a proposed act of public law.
The article shouldn't have been accepted without one from either the author of the original article or the poster.
Will chess be banned next? After all, checkmate comes from the Persian "shah mat", i.e. "The shah is dead". Will they be banning the books of von Clauswitz? Sun Tzu?
Of course combat games don't present peaceful solutions to conflict. Would you buy them if they did?
Being against war is one thing. Thinking that a video game will turn a user into a terrorist or Rambo is just plain stupid. Does anyone think that video games made Bush, Saddam Hussein, or bin Laden what they are today?
Besides, C&C is more about learning how to collect and organize resources than anything else, new armies have to be built from local materials. Make or buy decisions. Those are lessons equally applicable to the military, business, or government. That gives it a certain redeeming value.
The real world is becoming more warlike and shielding people from "warlike" ideas is not exactly positive for their survival.
Of course, Germany also bans Nazi and other kinds of sites as well, practicing information control with the kind of enthusiasm and efficiency Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of.
It's difficult to believe that this makes Germany as a country or Germans as a people any safer.
The VCs aren't interested unless the rest of the herd is stampeding that way. How do you think the 8th or 10th optical networking startup got funded?
If what you do doesn't match the current "what's hot" buzzwords, you don't get funded. Unless it's a project small enough to do in your spare time while you do your day job and all you need to work on it is some disk space and Open Source software, without funding, you go nowhere. If you managed to make it in the dot.com boom and you cashed out via successful IPO, you have a chance to do real innovation, you don't have to worry about paying the bills. The people in that position are a vanishingly small minority.
This is also probably why the majority of VC-funded projects go belly-up, this was true even before the dot.com boom.
I was metamoderating and saw your remark. BTW, I confirmed "Flamebait" because the option of remodding it as "Tard" wasn't available.
The War in Iraq is most likely to reduce America's security, not increase it. The Arab world is getting the point that for the next few years, it can't hope to oppose the US in open combat. That leaves "Low Intensity Warfare", a game anybody can play.
There are kids all over the Arab world carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein. Making that scumbag into a hero is a remarkable accomplishment, but Bush has accomplished many remarkable things. Most of which no patriotic and clued American could possibly want. Only a Bush supporter could believe that making more terrorists increases American security.
If the goal of the US is to create another generation of Arab terrorists, Bush is performing well for us.
Your best possible contribution to the security of the USA would be to go to Iraq and join Saddam yourself or join al-Queda. I feel safer as an American with you on the other side. The idea of you doing your best to make a terrorist op work and fucking it up beyond all recognition amuses me.
The time to deal with bin Laden permanently was while he was still on the US payroll.
On one hand, I don't see any other way to collect the information and
regard it of value. I think finding out how network-based censorship is a
good idea, especially if the responsible parties are lying about who it is
applied to and how it is applied, which IMHO, is the *usual* situation. I
believe that censorship is rarely, if ever applied for the benefit of the
targets. The truth about this *should* be out there and available for the
people clever enough to get past the censorship.
On the other hand, it is taking network resources without asking permission
and could conceivably even cause trouble for the network administrator or
business or its customers.
However, if the netadmin is competent, there's no problem because there
won't be any open ports available to the outside for proxy use anyway.
Moreover, it's exactly the incompetent sysadmin who leaves ports open who
is responsible for the open relays that are used for the bulk of the spam
that clogs our email boxes. If a sysadmin gets grilled for a week or two
over his system's attempt to access "forbidden sites", perhaps this will
teach him that it's time to lock down his system and if he doesn't know how
to, find out NOW.
This makes the program a good idea in any case. Anything that
disproportionately hammers stupid sysadmins is a good thing, even if the
sysadmin is the owner of a single box with a broadband connect that due to
the usual end-user cluelessness, is 0wN3d by every script kiddie on the Net
and whose bandwidth is mainly used to spread either trojans or spam.
I think this is what the new investors at google and the "professional management" is depending on, but... as I said, remember how google made it to begin with.
The geeks made google. We can unmake it if we find something more usable.
My point is that google is on the edge of compromising its usability even for the mass market. Remember how easy it was for that community group to get a site pulled off google. We've already seen google cooperate in filtering entire categories of sites at the orders of various governments. Imagine being given a school assignment on Nazism in France and not knowing there are alternatives to google.
Sooner or later, political pressure groups are going to figure out how easy it is to pressure google, and these groups do not have to be part of the mainstream.
In the meantime... alltheweb is improving, and I suspect that the technological possibilties of the webcrawler have hardly been exhausted.
Google is in the process of proving again that there is money in the Websearch business space.
This may be a very good time for anyone who thinks he has a better idea to start coding.
If it's important and likely to upset anyone's applecart, (just about anything important, in other words) using multiple search engines at a time would be in order.
While they (any "they) probably can probably get most of them, they probably can't get them all.
On Windows, there's Copernic 2000 What's good for Windows and on the Web?
From a business standpoint, remember that what sold us on google to begin with and why we spread the word about it was that it was unbiased and effective, i.e. likely to come up with what we are looking for whether the subjects liked it or not and regardless of anyone's value judgement on the content. We trusted that this was all automated and done by machines incapable of evaluating whether we should have access to it or not.
This gave it major "cool" factor... and we are part of the group who each told a few of our friends.
While Google's technology is continously improving, it's "cool" factor is vanishing rapidly.
While altavista went into the dumper for other reasons (google was "cooler"), the speed with which google replaced altavista speaks to how our perceptions get translated to public action. Not surprising, we're usually the people our non-cyberliterate family / friends / employers ask "How do I find things on the Web?"
While I think we all respect their technology, our concern is with human agencies playing games with the search results we depend on.
If we can't depend on Google for honest results, most of us will go on to something else, and we will probably be taking a large chunk of the user community as a whole with us.
The romantic side of exploration is a contrivance to compensate for the fact that most returns are so long term as to be uneconomical and so dangerous as to beyond a sane person's capability.
And this is news because?
And in all other places humans have gone so far, right after the romantic exploration came economic exploitation based on the fact that we learned enough from the tragedies of the explorers to by and large, avoid them. After that, we got enough people into these domains to figure out how to use them profitably.
What's the difference between then and now? I'm not the only one who wonders if this is due to end-to-end goverment control, and your post has made me start thinking about this again.
We've been going to space since the 1960s. You're telling us that we still haven't learned enough to build a near-Earth vehicle with safety comparable to that of a DC-3?
You are also telling us that it's time to close down NASA as a space transportation organization, make the expertise it's got locked up that we've paid for available to the private sector, and see if the private sector can do a better job.
Sounds to me like you're speaking for an institutional culture that prefers to promote the "romance" of falling out of the sky in barbecued chunks (with one interesting exception) to saying "We've got a fleet of vehicles that belong in museums and we will not fly anyone else in them, if you don't like this, fire us."
Travel at the bleeding edge of the human envelope is supposed to be dangerous. Anybody who tells his insurance company "My employer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is sending me to Mars" is going to get his policy cancelled, and this is reasonable. Nobody has ever done it before. The moon isn't routine yet.
The information on atmospheric and reentry dynamics relevant to transportation in the domain the Space Shuttle uses exists by the terabyte. You're saying that nobody associated with NASA or the traditional aerospace establishment knows how to turn that info into designs for vehicles comparable to in safety to say, the DC-3, that don't cost 500 megabucks per trip?
After 40 years of trips into near-earth orbit, either near-earth orbit is not bleeding-edge or NASA and it's contractors have wasted one fuck of a lot of our money. If it isn't bleeding edge, why are we still sending people up in experimental vehicles which have to be virtually rebuilt between trips?
Plenty of people have already gone into the other management problems with the Shuttle, building flying machines that carry people is not supposed to be done in a way that parcels jobs out to as many Congressional districts as possible. Not if the intention is to build safe, reliable, cost-effective vehicles. Why hasn't anyone tried to do anything about this?
Personally, I'm not interested in helping pay the salaries of a culture whose employees believe that having us pay for their home mortgages is more important than human life.
You want real life? Why don't you look at some real corpses?
I'm really amazed at the number of people on all sides of the political spectrum who can't figure out what's going on around them.
Foriegn outsourcing is not about corporate survival except in companies with a historic record of mismanagement.
Let's say you're making millions of units of almost any mass market item a year. The difference between the cost of doing R&D here and in India spread over X-million units is fairly trivial. A recent article quotes a CEO as saying that he expects a problem with Indian competition 10 years from now, but this is saving him money now... what's implied is that 10 years from now will be someone else's problem.
This is about notching up earnings in a down economy so CEOs can make the profit targets which will enable their next batch of stock options. It's the same sort of thing that has produced Enron-style shell games to inflate reported profits.
Like just about everything else that's been going on in the last few years at the large corporate level, it's about short-term maximation of profits. Not for the stockholders, for the CEOs themselves. The stockholders aren't going to know when to dump their stock to get maximum value for it. The CEOs don't have the slightest interest in their employeess, the health of the nation or the communities in which they're doing business, profit for the stockholders or building good companies anymore. "The commons" is just something to privatise a chunk of and strip-mine that chunk until it's worthless.
This is hardly surprising. When one's main form of compensation is based on meeting quarterly profit or stock price targets, one doesn't want to invest in long-term R&D or employees or anything that might conceivably interfere with making the next batch of stock options kick in. Doing anything interesting and creative that doesn't show an immediate return is the sort of thing that makes investment analysts who generally don't understand what the companies that they advise about do real unhappy. Make them unhappy and the stock price drops. The stock one previously got in compensation drops in value... along with the CEO's personal net worth.
Why hasn't private industry built a space infrastructure capable of supporting things like a powersat network supplying enough energy to make Middle East oil permanently obsolete? In general, the present corporate business model can't support major projects that would take 10 years to provide a return on investment. A typical Fortune 500 CEO isn't going to start a project that's going to do nothing for him but make a successor look real good.
The funniest part about this is that the CEOs doing this appear to be under the impression that India is just another bunch of burbs whose residents talk funny, have an interesting ethnic cuisine and work real cheap.
[Note 1] They are normally on the edge of nuclear war with their Muslim neighbor, Pakistan, mainly over religious hostility. The dominant religious grouping (Hindus) is calling for the expulsion of Muslims. Poor Muslims are being physically pushed into Bangladesh.
Ten people were killed and 75 hurt yesterday when a bomb blew up
on a train packed with homebound commuters in Bombay, the
deadliest in a spate of blasts in India's financial capital in
recent months.
Note 1 - to read this kind of happy fun news yourself, subscribe to OSINT-L, the Open Sources Intelligence mailing list.
What I describe is business as usual.
Third World generally translates as "powder keg".
However, the CEOs who are doing this know that if they lose their bet and one of their call centers disappears in a conve
However, people get caught up in the idea of adventure and danger, which NASA is not do good at providing, nor should it be their job.
How many astronauts raining from the sky in chunks in a 30 year old Shuttle will it take for you to get the point that NASA is providing danger and adventure?
Unnecessarily, unless the money we as taxpayers have spent on NASA and its contractors has been totally wasted and we don't know how to build better, cheaper and safer aerospace vehicles than we did in the 1970s.
We've been putting people into near-Earth orbit for about 40 years. Getting into orbit isn't supposed to be a dangerous adventure anymore any more than a trip around the world by jet is supposed to be.
I'm not interested in getting drama out of NASA. Reliable, inexpensive transportation all over the Solar System and interesting research would suit me fine.
There are people who still say "The South Will Rise Again"... believe what you want to believe... stay in the past if that's what you're comfortable with. The rest of us who are committed to progress will be making it somewhere else.
There are industries that need a defined infrastructure. Biotech has a pretty specific set of needs. Locating among other biotech companies makes sense.
Most electronic / computer / software situations need good, cheap bandwidth and hardware you can buy off the shelf or can order conveniently from anywhere in the industrialized world.
If you aren't a member of the Silicon Valley VC "insider" scene and therefore have zero chance of being funded out of there regardless of the merit of your idea, just what is it can you get from the Valley you can't get as conveniently or better somewhere else?
You want chip specs? You download them as.PDFs whether the company is in Sunnyvale or Moscow. You need to ask a development engineer something? You email or phone her whether she's in Santa Clara or Austin, TX. You want programmers? Start here or anywhere.
You want industrial capability near a major university campuses? Lots of that going around these days.
What's left in the Valley for us other than overcrowding and expensive real estate? A chance to hang with over-the-hill high-tech zillionaires? A chance to see industrial parks that look like ghost towns? (no URL, this is based on a friend's e-mail from 2 days ago) All I can really think of is tradition, and that's not something that will help anyone crank out code or improve ROI.
It has some cool high-tech museums. Perhaps the whole area should be declared a "historical monument" to make it official that progress will be coming from somewhere else from now on.
The place for a startup (unless you really are doing nanotech, in which case, why are you here?) is where there's cheap high-quality bandwidth available. The way that gets delivered these days is via CitiLEC... the window on this was closed by the state legislature in exchange for campaign cash from cable companies and telcos, the local power company had their chance to do it themselves and blew it. If I wanted to do a startup in California, I'd look at the City of Alameda (next to Berkeley and across from SF), whose muni power company has rolled out fiber to the home/business... or even the part of LA served by Los Angeles Water and Power.
I'm an ex-resident, I left after the high-tech boom led by the Commie 64 and Apple II... and I can't think of any reason why I'd ever start a company there.
Firstly, The Register, as a work of literature, is about on par with supermarket tabloids that write about Madonna consulting with alien lifeforms and Elvis' 400th citing outside a Taco Bell in Modesta, California. It's generally 50% drivel and 50% wrong.
And which of your dollies did The Reg step on? Offhand, my guess is that it was deserved.
I prefer them to various US news media outlets that still finds Bill Gates a figure of reverence.
ZDnet.
Indeed, we should scour the universe for more exploitive possibilities and waste and spoil and mistreat just like we do here. I seriously hope you were being sarcastic. The earth is a finite resource which means we should treat it carefully and ration it and not overuse it... NOT that we should look elsewhere so we can continue to be wasteful. The only reason there are food and water and oil and etc shortages is because people ARE shortsighted. When people stop building swimming pools in their backyards and start riding their bike or taking public transit to work and and and.... we will not have shortages. We have enough to support us here, we just are lazy, greedy, short-sighted creatures.
Third World economies are getting to the point where they are beginning to get their own substantial-sized middle classes. While outsourcing is bad for the USA, there are millions of Indians who can suddenly afford cars. What happens when we're getting new people who can afford middle-class lifestyles online by the billions?
If you think that this ecosystem can take another billion or three people living even at European standards of resource consumption without going offplanet for resources, don't bother posting on environmental topics, do some study in something othter than green-fringe propaganda before you waste the time of grownups again.
If your solution is eternal poverty shared by everyone except a handful of rich people, you're contemptible as well as stupid.
What is the going rate for a judge? I wonder who at Lexmark knows the answer to this question?
Alternately, this was an honest decision made by a judge so technologically illiterate that he can't understand the issues and came to his decision by counting the lawyers at the defendants and plaintiff's tables.
IIRC, there are court precedents that say that if a company is a franchise vendor, selling franchises does NOT mean you can force the franchisees to buy only from the franchise vendors, and I think there are other examples of situations similar to that one where the courts turned thumbs down on the kind of restraint of trade Lexmark is trying to pull using the DMCA.
- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place.' Good grief!"
Personally, I prefer to find my happy place after a drive crash in a backup mirror drive in a mobile rack which doesn't get plugged in until I find that the rest of the computer is OK. Though the counselor actually is hot.
I don't think that when Columbia blew up, the citizens of countries whose opinion I care about were thinking, "Ah, stupid Americans..." You think that suddenly because of Columbia, we can longer have pride in our space program? But, we've
You take pride in sending people into orbit in 30 year old spaceships whose proper place is the National Air and Space Museum?
If the public and politicians don't want to spend what it takes to build a Shuttle that gives astronauts the best chance we can give them in getting back alive, that contains the best in today's technology, not the best of 1970s, we have no business asking people, no matter how brave or willing, to pay with their lives what we are not willing to pay with dollars.
It's time for a new Shuttle.
The price of not getting one?
More Shuttles coming down in pieces and raining chunks of barbecued astronauts.
The public ultimately calling for a program shutdown.
And another step along the road of ceding whatever is left of US technological leadership to the rest of the world.
When our children go to space factories to work they may be going via Chinese or Indian spaceships. They may be doing this to escape the permanently depressed economy of a Third World nation.
Of course, if a doomsday asteroid is discovered, the current policy is not to say a word: 'If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all', says Dr. Geoffery Sommer.
No, that's a recommendation from an "an adviser on terrorists" from the good old RAND think tank. Judging from this, I think RAND's running out of gas and we can hope that nobody among the Feds is taking Dr. Sommers' advice on terrorism seriously, no matter what hourly rate RAND is burning clients for to get the "benefit" of his services.
Short of an asteroid big enough to smash Earth like an egg, there are always things that people can do that'll improve the odds for survival. Not being at ground zero. If a tidal wave is likely, move inland or uphill. Lots of possible scenarios.
But to prepare, one needs as much information as possible as far in advance is possible.
It appears that the scenario Geoffrey Sommer really has in mind is one where the only people who have a clue are a few scientists, top government officials, and political friends of government officials, and the only people who have a chance at survival are... the wealthy and powerful clients of RAND Corporation, who will end up ruling a scattered population of survivors utterly dependent on the generosity of those who prepared.
He has a right to his opinions, but why are we paying for this bullshit? If I want bad SF, I can rent it at Netflix. This guy apparently hasn't figured out that bad movie science fiction is NOT a sound basis of public policy planning.
For the ELE (it really IS that big and can't be diverted)... I'd prefer to face the end in my own way with my loved ones.
Apparently the RANDite got the "ignorance is bliss" idea by looking in the mirror.
Make it enough of a hassle to publish in traditional deadtree journals as well as adding the "honorariums" paid by universities and the high prices academic institutions pay to be published there and perhaps researchers will go with peer-reviewed free online journals instead.
Interesting to see this "security by obscurity" crap spreading into the academic publishing community, but that's a negative value-add from the POV of everyone outside of the US DOJ and the White House.
The bad guys already know how to make BAD THINGS with science, they can pay "respectable" researchers or kidnap them.
The problem from our side of the fence is to keep scientific and technological progress going so that we have something better to offer than the theocratic 13th century world the terrorists seem to want for all of us. Suppressing scientific progress isn't the way to do this.
Perhaps the AAAS mags and the other high-priced, low value add scientific journals will become... irrelevant to science. Self-censorship is a great start towards this.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think this is a new approach?
The last thing the guy ever heard was "Hello, I'm Avi {can't remember the name), head of Israeli Intelligence." followed by the touch-tone sequence.
Not as funny as "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" would have been in this context, but this was before The Princess Bride hit video.
The hits disappear as soon as one adds amendment, proposed, proposal to the search terms.
Those should have turned up hits even in Spanish, I think. While my Spanish sucks rocks, that's one of the languages for which machine translation sort of works.
As far as I'm concerned, given that someone else checked Mexican government sites and didn't find it, the burden of proof that this isn't a troll is on the original author.
It would be a suicidally stupid thing for a national government to do. Imagine a 6 year old having to do an intellectual property search on the Net every time she was assigned to write a story for school and then try to find the intellectual property owners... if they can be found after 100 years.
While it's hard to quantify or model the economic loss due to the inability to use public domain work as a basis for further creativity, if I wrote fiction for a living, I'd be packing if this passed where I lived. Or if I were a parent.
However, we have no credible evidence of such. What we have is a blog posting that doesn't cite a verifiable URL from a government source. This is a credibility killer given that the subject is a proposed act of public law.
The article shouldn't have been accepted without one from either the author of the original article or the poster.
Of course combat games don't present peaceful solutions to conflict. Would you buy them if they did?
Being against war is one thing. Thinking that a video game will turn a user into a terrorist or Rambo is just plain stupid. Does anyone think that video games made Bush, Saddam Hussein, or bin Laden what they are today?
Besides, C&C is more about learning how to collect and organize resources than anything else, new armies have to be built from local materials. Make or buy decisions. Those are lessons equally applicable to the military, business, or government. That gives it a certain redeeming value.
The real world is becoming more warlike and shielding people from "warlike" ideas is not exactly positive for their survival.
Of course, Germany also bans Nazi and other kinds of sites as well, practicing information control with the kind of enthusiasm and efficiency Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of.
It's difficult to believe that this makes Germany as a country or Germans as a people any safer.
The VCs aren't interested unless the rest of the herd is stampeding that way. How do you think the 8th or 10th optical networking startup got funded?
If what you do doesn't match the current "what's hot" buzzwords, you don't get funded. Unless it's a project small enough to do in your spare time while you do your day job and all you need to work on it is some disk space and Open Source software, without funding, you go nowhere. If you managed to make it in the dot.com boom and you cashed out via successful IPO, you have a chance to do real innovation, you don't have to worry about paying the bills. The people in that position are a vanishingly small minority.
This is also probably why the majority of VC-funded projects go belly-up, this was true even before the dot.com boom.
The War in Iraq is most likely to reduce America's security, not increase it. The Arab world is getting the point that for the next few years, it can't hope to oppose the US in open combat. That leaves "Low Intensity Warfare", a game anybody can play.
There are kids all over the Arab world carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein. Making that scumbag into a hero is a remarkable accomplishment, but Bush has accomplished many remarkable things. Most of which no patriotic and clued American could possibly want. Only a Bush supporter could believe that making more terrorists increases American security.
If the goal of the US is to create another generation of Arab terrorists, Bush is performing well for us.
Your best possible contribution to the security of the USA would be to go to Iraq and join Saddam yourself or join al-Queda. I feel safer as an American with you on the other side. The idea of you doing your best to make a terrorist op work and fucking it up beyond all recognition amuses me.
The time to deal with bin Laden permanently was while he was still on the US payroll.
On the other hand, it is taking network resources without asking permission and could conceivably even cause trouble for the network administrator or business or its customers.
However, if the netadmin is competent, there's no problem because there won't be any open ports available to the outside for proxy use anyway. Moreover, it's exactly the incompetent sysadmin who leaves ports open who is responsible for the open relays that are used for the bulk of the spam that clogs our email boxes. If a sysadmin gets grilled for a week or two over his system's attempt to access "forbidden sites", perhaps this will teach him that it's time to lock down his system and if he doesn't know how to, find out NOW.
This makes the program a good idea in any case. Anything that disproportionately hammers stupid sysadmins is a good thing, even if the sysadmin is the owner of a single box with a broadband connect that due to the usual end-user cluelessness, is 0wN3d by every script kiddie on the Net and whose bandwidth is mainly used to spread either trojans or spam.
The geeks made google. We can unmake it if we find something more usable.
My point is that google is on the edge of compromising its usability even for the mass market. Remember how easy it was for that community group to get a site pulled off google. We've already seen google cooperate in filtering entire categories of sites at the orders of various governments. Imagine being given a school assignment on Nazism in France and not knowing there are alternatives to google.
Sooner or later, political pressure groups are going to figure out how easy it is to pressure google, and these groups do not have to be part of the mainstream.
In the meantime... alltheweb is improving, and I suspect that the technological possibilties of the webcrawler have hardly been exhausted.
Google is in the process of proving again that there is money in the Websearch business space.
This may be a very good time for anyone who thinks he has a better idea to start coding.
While they (any "they) probably can probably get most of them, they probably can't get them all.
On Windows, there's Copernic 2000 What's good for Windows and on the Web?
From a business standpoint, remember that what sold us on google to begin with and why we spread the word about it was that it was unbiased and effective, i.e. likely to come up with what we are looking for whether the subjects liked it or not and regardless of anyone's value judgement on the content. We trusted that this was all automated and done by machines incapable of evaluating whether we should have access to it or not. This gave it major "cool" factor... and we are part of the group who each told a few of our friends.
While Google's technology is continously improving, it's "cool" factor is vanishing rapidly.
While altavista went into the dumper for other reasons (google was "cooler"), the speed with which google replaced altavista speaks to how our perceptions get translated to public action. Not surprising, we're usually the people our non-cyberliterate family / friends / employers ask "How do I find things on the Web?"
While I think we all respect their technology, our concern is with human agencies playing games with the search results we depend on.
If we can't depend on Google for honest results, most of us will go on to something else, and we will probably be taking a large chunk of the user community as a whole with us.
And this is news because?
And in all other places humans have gone so far, right after the romantic exploration came economic exploitation based on the fact that we learned enough from the tragedies of the explorers to by and large, avoid them. After that, we got enough people into these domains to figure out how to use them profitably.
What's the difference between then and now? I'm not the only one who wonders if this is due to end-to-end goverment control, and your post has made me start thinking about this again.
We've been going to space since the 1960s. You're telling us that we still haven't learned enough to build a near-Earth vehicle with safety comparable to that of a DC-3?
You are also telling us that it's time to close down NASA as a space transportation organization, make the expertise it's got locked up that we've paid for available to the private sector, and see if the private sector can do a better job.
Sounds to me like you're speaking for an institutional culture that prefers to promote the "romance" of falling out of the sky in barbecued chunks (with one interesting exception) to saying "We've got a fleet of vehicles that belong in museums and we will not fly anyone else in them, if you don't like this, fire us."
Travel at the bleeding edge of the human envelope is supposed to be dangerous. Anybody who tells his insurance company "My employer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is sending me to Mars" is going to get his policy cancelled, and this is reasonable. Nobody has ever done it before. The moon isn't routine yet.
The information on atmospheric and reentry dynamics relevant to transportation in the domain the Space Shuttle uses exists by the terabyte. You're saying that nobody associated with NASA or the traditional aerospace establishment knows how to turn that info into designs for vehicles comparable to in safety to say, the DC-3, that don't cost 500 megabucks per trip?
After 40 years of trips into near-earth orbit, either near-earth orbit is not bleeding-edge or NASA and it's contractors have wasted one fuck of a lot of our money. If it isn't bleeding edge, why are we still sending people up in experimental vehicles which have to be virtually rebuilt between trips?
Plenty of people have already gone into the other management problems with the Shuttle, building flying machines that carry people is not supposed to be done in a way that parcels jobs out to as many Congressional districts as possible. Not if the intention is to build safe, reliable, cost-effective vehicles. Why hasn't anyone tried to do anything about this?
Personally, I'm not interested in helping pay the salaries of a culture whose employees believe that having us pay for their home mortgages is more important than human life.
You want real life? Why don't you look at some real corpses?
I'm really amazed at the number of people on all sides of the political spectrum who can't figure out what's going on around them. Foriegn outsourcing is not about corporate survival except in companies with a historic record of mismanagement. Let's say you're making millions of units of almost any mass market item a year. The difference between the cost of doing R&D here and in India spread over X-million units is fairly trivial. A recent article quotes a CEO as saying that he expects a problem with Indian competition 10 years from now, but this is saving him money now... what's implied is that 10 years from now will be someone else's problem.
This is about notching up earnings in a down economy so CEOs can make the profit targets which will enable their next batch of stock options. It's the same sort of thing that has produced Enron-style shell games to inflate reported profits.
Like just about everything else that's been going on in the last few years at the large corporate level, it's about short-term maximation of profits. Not for the stockholders, for the CEOs themselves. The stockholders aren't going to know when to dump their stock to get maximum value for it. The CEOs don't have the slightest interest in their employeess, the health of the nation or the communities in which they're doing business, profit for the stockholders or building good companies anymore. "The commons" is just something to privatise a chunk of and strip-mine that chunk until it's worthless.
This is hardly surprising. When one's main form of compensation is based on meeting quarterly profit or stock price targets, one doesn't want to invest in long-term R&D or employees or anything that might conceivably interfere with making the next batch of stock options kick in. Doing anything interesting and creative that doesn't show an immediate return is the sort of thing that makes investment analysts who generally don't understand what the companies that they advise about do real unhappy. Make them unhappy and the stock price drops. The stock one previously got in compensation drops in value... along with the CEO's personal net worth.
Why hasn't private industry built a space infrastructure capable of supporting things like a powersat network supplying enough energy to make Middle East oil permanently obsolete? In general, the present corporate business model can't support major projects that would take 10 years to provide a return on investment. A typical Fortune 500 CEO isn't going to start a project that's going to do nothing for him but make a successor look real good.
The funniest part about this is that the CEOs doing this appear to be under the impression that India is just another bunch of burbs whose residents talk funny, have an interesting ethnic cuisine and work real cheap.
[Note 1] They are normally on the edge of nuclear war with their Muslim neighbor, Pakistan, mainly over religious hostility. The dominant religious grouping (Hindus) is calling for the expulsion of Muslims. Poor Muslims are being physically pushed into Bangladesh.
Message: 10
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 11:08:10 -0500 (EST)
From: "IntellNet"
Subject: News Flash: Ten killed as bomb rips rail coach in Bombay
Ten people were killed and 75 hurt yesterday when a bomb blew up on a train packed with homebound commuters in Bombay, the deadliest in a spate of blasts in India's financial capital in recent months.
Note 1 - to read this kind of happy fun news yourself, subscribe to OSINT-L, the Open Sources Intelligence mailing list.
What I describe is business as usual.
Third World generally translates as "powder keg".
However, the CEOs who are doing this know that if they lose their bet and one of their call centers disappears in a conve
How many astronauts raining from the sky in chunks in a 30 year old Shuttle will it take for you to get the point that NASA is providing danger and adventure?
Unnecessarily, unless the money we as taxpayers have spent on NASA and its contractors has been totally wasted and we don't know how to build better, cheaper and safer aerospace vehicles than we did in the 1970s.
We've been putting people into near-Earth orbit for about 40 years. Getting into orbit isn't supposed to be a dangerous adventure anymore any more than a trip around the world by jet is supposed to be.
I'm not interested in getting drama out of NASA. Reliable, inexpensive transportation all over the Solar System and interesting research would suit me fine.
There are industries that need a defined infrastructure. Biotech has a pretty specific set of needs. Locating among other biotech companies makes sense.
Most electronic / computer / software situations need good, cheap bandwidth and hardware you can buy off the shelf or can order conveniently from anywhere in the industrialized world.
You want chip specs? You download them as .PDFs whether the company is in Sunnyvale or Moscow. You need to ask a development engineer something? You email or phone her whether she's in Santa Clara or Austin, TX. You want programmers? Start here or anywhere.
You want industrial capability near a major university campuses? Lots of that going around these days.
What's left in the Valley for us other than overcrowding and expensive real estate? A chance to hang with over-the-hill high-tech zillionaires? A chance to see industrial parks that look like ghost towns? (no URL, this is based on a friend's e-mail from 2 days ago) All I can really think of is tradition, and that's not something that will help anyone crank out code or improve ROI.
It has some cool high-tech museums. Perhaps the whole area should be declared a "historical monument" to make it official that progress will be coming from somewhere else from now on.
The place for a startup (unless you really are doing nanotech, in which case, why are you here?) is where there's cheap high-quality bandwidth available. The way that gets delivered these days is via CitiLEC... the window on this was closed by the state legislature in exchange for campaign cash from cable companies and telcos, the local power company had their chance to do it themselves and blew it. If I wanted to do a startup in California, I'd look at the City of Alameda (next to Berkeley and across from SF), whose muni power company has rolled out fiber to the home/business... or even the part of LA served by Los Angeles Water and Power.
I'm an ex-resident, I left after the high-tech boom led by the Commie 64 and Apple II... and I can't think of any reason why I'd ever start a company there.
And which of your dollies did The Reg step on? Offhand, my guess is that it was deserved.
I prefer them to various US news media outlets that still finds Bill Gates a figure of reverence. ZDnet.
Indeed, we should scour the universe for more exploitive possibilities and waste and spoil and mistreat just like we do here. I seriously hope you were being sarcastic. The earth is a finite resource which means we should treat it carefully and ration it and not overuse it... NOT that we should look elsewhere so we can continue to be wasteful. The only reason there are food and water and oil and etc shortages is because people ARE shortsighted. When people stop building swimming pools in their backyards and start riding their bike or taking public transit to work and and and .... we will not have shortages. We have enough to support us here, we just are lazy, greedy, short-sighted creatures.
Third World economies are getting to the point where they are beginning to get their own substantial-sized middle classes. While outsourcing is bad for the USA, there are millions of Indians who can suddenly afford cars. What happens when we're getting new people who can afford middle-class lifestyles online by the billions?
If you think that this ecosystem can take another billion or three people living even at European standards of resource consumption without going offplanet for resources, don't bother posting on environmental topics, do some study in something othter than green-fringe propaganda before you waste the time of grownups again.
If your solution is eternal poverty shared by everyone except a handful of rich people, you're contemptible as well as stupid.
LUGs, etc. would be of interest as well. thanks
Alternately, this was an honest decision made by a judge so technologically illiterate that he can't understand the issues and came to his decision by counting the lawyers at the defendants and plaintiff's tables.
IIRC, there are court precedents that say that if a company is a franchise vendor, selling franchises does NOT mean you can force the franchisees to buy only from the franchise vendors, and I think there are other examples of situations similar to that one where the courts turned thumbs down on the kind of restraint of trade Lexmark is trying to pull using the DMCA.
Personally, I prefer to find my happy place after a drive crash in a backup mirror drive in a mobile rack which doesn't get plugged in until I find that the rest of the computer is OK. Though the counselor actually is hot.
You take pride in sending people into orbit in 30 year old spaceships whose proper place is the National Air and Space Museum?
Maybe you really are related to Spiro Agnew.
It's time for a new Shuttle.
The price of not getting one?
More Shuttles coming down in pieces and raining chunks of barbecued astronauts.
The public ultimately calling for a program shutdown.
And another step along the road of ceding whatever is left of US technological leadership to the rest of the world.
When our children go to space factories to work they may be going via Chinese or Indian spaceships. They may be doing this to escape the permanently depressed economy of a Third World nation.
Of course, if a doomsday asteroid is discovered, the current policy is not to say a word: 'If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all', says Dr. Geoffery Sommer.
No, that's a recommendation from an "an adviser on terrorists" from the good old RAND think tank. Judging from this, I think RAND's running out of gas and we can hope that nobody among the Feds is taking Dr. Sommers' advice on terrorism seriously, no matter what hourly rate RAND is burning clients for to get the "benefit" of his services.
Short of an asteroid big enough to smash Earth like an egg, there are always things that people can do that'll improve the odds for survival. Not being at ground zero. If a tidal wave is likely, move inland or uphill. Lots of possible scenarios.
But to prepare, one needs as much information as possible as far in advance is possible.
It appears that the scenario Geoffrey Sommer really has in mind is one where the only people who have a clue are a few scientists, top government officials, and political friends of government officials, and the only people who have a chance at survival are... the wealthy and powerful clients of RAND Corporation, who will end up ruling a scattered population of survivors utterly dependent on the generosity of those who prepared.
He has a right to his opinions, but why are we paying for this bullshit? If I want bad SF, I can rent it at Netflix. This guy apparently hasn't figured out that bad movie science fiction is NOT a sound basis of public policy planning.
For the ELE (it really IS that big and can't be diverted)... I'd prefer to face the end in my own way with my loved ones.
Apparently the RANDite got the "ignorance is bliss" idea by looking in the mirror.
Interesting to see this "security by obscurity" crap spreading into the academic publishing community, but that's a negative value-add from the POV of everyone outside of the US DOJ and the White House.
The bad guys already know how to make BAD THINGS with science, they can pay "respectable" researchers or kidnap them.
The problem from our side of the fence is to keep scientific and technological progress going so that we have something better to offer than the theocratic 13th century world the terrorists seem to want for all of us. Suppressing scientific progress isn't the way to do this.
Perhaps the AAAS mags and the other high-priced, low value add scientific journals will become... irrelevant to science. Self-censorship is a great start towards this.
Because it's something we can do something about it, and sooner or later there will be a real threat.
I look forward to see the alpha release of this.
On somebody else's wetware