1) My advisor from grad school days had an AOL account from home that he used a lot, but also had a school-provided email account. He was out alot on trips so it was easier to point people to use the AOL account and access it anywhere than pay the long distance for the dial-up into the school's email. However, because of the large amount of email, he used the AOL client for Mac at work to check on this periodically through the day, and then forwarded any work related messages to the school inbox. I can see a similar situation where if you are on the road significantly to use a anywhere-accessible mailbox that's more secure than Hotmail, and still have access to it from your all-linux shop.
2) As GNOME Linux is visionized, and we move towards having a true out of the box install of Linux that is geared towards home users, those home users with AOL accounts are probably going to want to keep them, and the AOL/Linux client is a necessity for this given some of the protocols AOL uses.
3) AOL still offers unique content to members only. Some linux people may really want to access this (I don't see *why* myself:D).
4) This could be related to the lawsuit on AOL regarding blind and vision-impared people unable to use AOL. Many of the web-to-speech programs exist for Linux or such, and maybe this is AOL's way to try to accommodate that.
5) Maybe they want to see how cross-platform compatible their software is. Of course, considering how fast AOL 5 was out for the Mac compared to the PC version, this is very doubtful:D
All recent articles on the upcoming ICANN elections mention that ICANN was expecting only about 5000 people to sign up to vote but they got over 50,000 submissions if not more; only about 15,000 actually got processed before the server blew, well before the member sign up deadline.
Oddly, ICANN and the press appear to just shrug and let the matter drop. I'm sure that the same would happen if, say, my and 10,000 others' voting registrations placed in July wasn't processed in time for the November election due to load. </sarcasm> ICANN should really have extended the process to allow all people interested to register prior to this vote; maybe make sure the server is running smoothly, and allow 2 weeks for people to reregister their information making sure that everyone gets to make their voice heard.
It's well known that two parties can take the same set of statistical data, and derive two vague but conflicting statements from it, depending on the type of spin they want. This is a perfect example: Moody says one thing, Bugtraq says another. Only with full disclosure of the raw data (as done here with Bugtraq) and experience can one make a truly informed decision on the reliability of statistics. (And of course in this case, it's weighted heavily in Bugtraq's favor).
This is similar to the ad going around from MS about W2k increasing sales from a company by 13% or 5% -- because we can't see all the raw data, there might be something they didn't want to include, or the like, and would make these numbers go the opposite way.
While a pain in the butt, peer-review in scientific journals is a very good thing:D
I asked this about 2 weeks ago when it was apparent that the older stuff was shelved. Here's my Deja response (on Jul 5):
----
Greetings, Recently we moved the Deja.com servers to a new facility in order to provide greater reliability and performance. The move is now complete and we thank you for your patience.
Please note that currently our Usenet Discussion Service only retrieves messages from the past year (back through June 1999). As announced, we are reconfiguring the service that provides messages posted more than 1 year ago in order to provide greater reliability and performance. This will take some time though, possibly a few months. Have no fear: We're committed to bringing these messages back online as soon as possible.
-----
So I would wait for a few more weeks, and see if the situation improves.
It's one thing to simply look at the CGI and say "Oh, that sucks" or something like that and dismiss the *whole* show. As an animation (not just anime) fan, there's more to any animated work besides the animation, though the animation can contribute to the overall quality of the show.
With that in mind, yes, the first 2 seasons of Reboot were probably decent with CGI (given the timeframe), but they had great storylines. As pointed in the article blurb above, "Talent Night" is probably the best one of the first 2 seasons to start with. Without spoiling, there's references to "Spinal Tap", music videos, William Shatner, and a bunch of others. Season 3, on the other hand, starts a season-long saga that has a really good thought out plot, and the cgi is much improved (more organic looking scenes at various points). Throughout the series, the main characters (Bob, Dot, Enzo, and Megabyte) are well-defined, and don't vary that strongly over the series.
Again, remember that the time frame of the show (mid-1990's, almost predating Netscape 1.0). For it's time, it was technologically great.
Caffine goes through the body rather quickly, so it's hard to maintain the caffine level save by intravenious feeding. I've heard that in order to exceed the LD50 level of caffeine you need to drink 60 cups of coffee within 60 minutes, even though only 10 cups will have enough to kill you.
I met Robert Patrick just before the release of T2. His father was a member at the country club which I caddied for during high school. He had brought his son around after the filming was done, and film editing still to be done. I was fortunate enough to be the caddy for that group. At that time, not having seening the movie, the one thing I remember was his ears -- but he didn't have the snear that helped him realize the T1000 character. After seeing the movie, I realized how well he acted that role. He also plays a mean game of golf:-) (I believe he ended up 4 over for 18 holes)).
I personally would have liked to see Bruce Campbell there, only because he's completely loose to how tight Scull is, but I think Robert can play the part well, especially if he's lighthearted like I saw him on the golf course, as opposed to hard nosed T2/"The Falucty" character, though he can play both decently.
It seems like 90% of all recent (within last 3 years) exploits that are not related to the activeX/scripting model are due to buffer overloads. Using C as the example, even if you specify the length of a char*, you can easily go past that with bad buffer copy mechanisms - even sprintf, I believe, can overflow a buffer. The large number of buffer exploits of late probably came initially from a few small but notable cases, but then suddently anything with variable string input or arguements could become a problem, rising to the number of buffer exploits we see today.
Not checking inputs before the buffer is copied into is a bad programming flaw, but only recently realized as being potentally hazardous. Thus, take all programmers that were in the workforce in 1990, and they would probably have missed adding the buffer checks, but now with buffer overflows a problem nearly every day, programmers in 2000 are much more conscience about it, but there is still legacy code that probably does this buried in code. Especially when the field itself is not thought of in a textual sense (a date field), these things tend to get overlooked in the general design of the program. However, this should only reinforce the use of a lint-like system after various compiles in order to find potental buffer overflows. Languages like C++ and Java provide some protection here assuming you use the typed Strings, but you can still create a buffer overflow without thinking about it.
Deja's quality as a USENET search service, once they became a consumer 'review' site, has gone downhill terribly. Recently, they claimed they moved servers and because of that, posts before May 1999 were not available (and last I checked, there still seemed to be problems), though they said they will be available soon. Other incidents in the past have been just as bad.
Remarq is the only other usenet catagorizer, but it's rather poor in terms of the depth that deja got.
Is it time for an 'open' usenet search engine, one that realizes exactly what usenet is and doesn't hide behind called newsgroups "discussions" or "chat rooms"? Unfortunately, such an effort would require tons of diskspace, and a fast text search engine to be effective. Additionally, we lose much of the history that deja has *somewhere* on their servers: we'd most likely have to start with posts in 2000 and can only archive from then on. It may have to be ad driven to pay for said power, but as long as the ads were just for page impressions and not tied to the search or articles.
I know that when I am looking for a solution to technical problems on the net, I turned to deja first, followed by google. Usenet posts tend to be more focused, so getting a specific answer is easier there.
Unfortunately, requiring proper user-agent identification 'conflicts' with writing non-agent-specific HTML, in that in this day and age of computer stupidity, neither will happen at the same time. (In regards to the latter, there are sites out there that prevent you from content if you don't have the latest of the big two, so Opera and lynx and whomever else is screwed, because a cgi script does check the referrer field. You can get around this in nearly all of them by modifying it, and 90% of the time, there was no reason for it save for the idiom of forcing the latest browser).
One article states that there will be limitations on who may get domains in one of the new TLDs, similar to current.gov or.edu uses. The.com,.net, and.org TLDs will be left for free-for-all, based on the snippets I've read.
While not truely objective, I at least know what MS is trying to do.
.NET will allow you to use apps anywhere, not just at one box, but any net-accessible machine, including potentally devices et al. Your working state is persistant when you logoff because everything's saved mostly at a central server rather than your local HD. Updates and upgrades can be easily installed at only one point, as opposed to every computer on a network. Overall, it's an interesting idea on convience.
However, there are more pitfalls than potental good things. It allows easily for pay-per-use pricing since every use can be logged centrally as well. Privacy and security would be a high risk factor since basic network transactions are at the heart of this. And of course, these apps become dependant on decent bandwidth connections to work; no problem in corporate world, but not at 40,000 ft. Finally, MS has suggested that they'll have the.NET specifications all open for third-party developers to write for it, but most will appear to work only under MS OS's (which is why they need the proprietary C# and SOAP).
Some of these are MS-isms. However, more importanty, privacy, security, and bandwidth are going to be problems in any distributed app network whether created by MS or Linus. MO
IIRC the text of the original bill correctly, sites that *specifically* include drug info or links to drug info sites are suspectable. However sites like Yahoo or other search engines, or Amazon or other retailers (basically, where said site is acting as some index proficience) are immune to the aim of this bill. And of course this is only in the states. Which makes the point of the bill (the drug part, at least) null and void.
In any case, I'm expecting the ACLU to pounce on a challenge to the bill as soon as the ink dries from Clinton's signature. Additionally, this type of bill may strongly reform the concent of riders; two completely different concepts should not be allowed on the same bill.
Ok, it's not encryption (mp3 is not encryption, just compression), but if you took the ad-fronted mp3 and stripped the ad, would you be in voilation of the DMCA, in the sense that you are changing a copyrighted work?
Of course, as someone pointed out, it appears said ads would be on top of the 5 -10 sec intros most songs have nowadays, which makes stripping useless.
Re:Pokemon weirdness isn't exactly subliminal...
on
Anime Moves To DVD
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· Score: 2
Actually, this episode aired for the first time dubbed on Kids WB a few weeks back. Except they completely removed the indicated scene which made for some odd jumps (Ash shouts 'That's Team Rocket', followed by TR's two pokemon in drag).
Double standards for /. readers, yet again
on
Anime Moves To DVD
·
· Score: 2
First, we've got the RIAA/MP3 mess vs the GNU license (yes, I understand there's subtle differences between the two, but it's still comes down to rewarding the creator for creating.).
And now here's another: the MPAA/deCSS on one side, and promoting DVDs on the other. I agree that DVD is a superior format espcially for anime as others have suggested here, and if the MPAA wasn't putting the smack down on deCSS, I'd have my DVD player already. But yet when a deCSS story comes along, people shout "boycott the MPAA!". You can't have it both ways, people.
Sure, that's the general impression that I get from these threads and reflects no way on a single user (unless I really wanted to find one specific double-talker). However, the fact that such double standards exists might reflect on the bias that/. editors give to their stories (and then again, there are multiple editors for/., so another problem there).
I think the solution here is for the editors to refrain for adding additoinal comments on the story message as to introduce such biases. Put a DeCSS case story and a new DVD release story as the plain submissions from readership without comment from the editors, and/. would not appear to have said double standard.
NSI has recently implemented a plan where expired domains are put into an auction such that they can get even more money for said domains. The slashdot discussion is here.
However this does not fully explain the results from this question. This policy above has only happened within the last month, but as others have pointed out on the thread, there are domains expired as far back as Feb.
IANAL, but there's an interesting case here to watch for that could bring contract violation charges onto NSI. If, as suggested, they take those domains into their public auction but AFTER they changed the contract, would this not be violating that? It's understandable if you fall a day or two behind, but NSI is claiming they're months behind. If they are that far behind then they are being inefficient adn should lose their gov't contract by the same point. (And from my recent experience with other registers, the case appears isolated at NSI).
As someone that has been researching closely in these areas for 5+ yrs, let me just comment on this and the articles that came off it.
Hydrogen is a very good and abundant fuel. When you combine hydrogen and fuel cell technology, you have the largest area of energy research that is going on across the global. The biggest problem is hydrogen's flammability. At stationary plants you could store it but anything mobile would be a bigger hazard than buring fossil fuels alone.
So now people are working on the next step, generating hydrogen 'in situ' (inside), so that you don't have to store it, and it only 'exists' for a short time. SOmeone suggested electrolysis, but you gain no energy after you break down water to get H2, then use that to get back to water. There is currently a big push to use methanol and ethanol from natural sources for the generation of hydrogen, as they are easy to burn and give a good hydrogen amount for cost and volume. However, when you burn hydrocarbons, including these two, you'll get CO2 (which isn't too bad) and CO (which is the killer). CO can damage the catalytic material of fuel cells and reduce their performance, therefore there is additionally research in trying to reduce CO via more reactions. In addition, which not in large numbers from natural sources, there is still the possibility of sulfur present, which does worse things than CO to the fuel cell materials, and the sulfur needs to be reduced to very small levels as well.
Thus, there's about 5 pieces of equipment that are being looked at for the automotive use: current estimates have these sized at about 200 L, but to fit them into a car, the best size is about 20L, so size reduction is a big issue as well. There's other issues as safety and cold starts that are being investigated right now. And these investigations go on across industry, academia, and government labs around the world, so there is certain a lot of research being done here - it just takes time, money, and typcially a passing brainstorm to make the next jump.
Solar power, on the other hand, has really only been shown to be effective in the long run for stationary sources; solar-powered cars still appear to be a long way off, due to collector size limitations on currect vehical design. Even with that, large solar installations cannot collect during cloudy days with the same efficiency as sunny days, and without a large number of panel and energy storage devices, the solar arrays only work well in places where the weather is cooperative (Southwest US). To the best I've seen, individual homeowners can benefit from solar panels to help heat water, but unless they grab an acre of panels, aren't going to be running their house off solar power for some time. Unlike fuel cells or other technology, there is only so much energy at maximum output that we can collect per sq ft of solar cell, and thus there's a fixed limitation there.
Ok, but that sort of introduces a new type of bias - audience based. Yes, that will generally work well, but what if you had a piece of linux news (say, 'I got Linux to work on a Packard-Bell machine!') which only has maybe a 1% audience but to that 1%, it's rather important. If you do audience polling, such articles will never be posted.
Actually, that would probably describe nearly anything dealing with BSD quite well (assuming the site was not limited in scope to just Linux).
Yes, I agree that the method has less bias than Slashdot, but there is still a bias.
First, there's parallels between this story and Slashdot. Many 'high level' magazines (those that are not computer magazines but have a wide appeal, such as Newsweek, etc) have connected Slashdot as being a news/discussion site for Linux and Open Source, although this is not the goal of Slashdot; linux IS covered but it's not it's only news area it discusses. However, Slashdot does fall prey to the biasing by it's moderators, in a similar vein that the story here is about. (Of course it's infinitely worse in PC trade magazines, but let's not go there).
A few weeks ago, Katz put up an essay on Open Media, which got promptly dissed. However, in situations like this, there is something to be said for an "open" media area where control of the stories posted is only done by the users, with minor content checking by moderators (so that we don't get fake news stories, etc). Freshmeat is a great example of this, though this is not 'news' as most think.
Could a similar site be done in the vien of Freshmeat, but with news? Maybe. Obviously, you would need a select few moderators that nix stories that don't belong there ("Look at my hot new pr0n site!"). Since it would be real-time, it would be necessary to have some language-check program on submissions to see if a similar article had not already been posted. It could be done, but would take some good behind-the-scenes programming.
Then comes the matter of associating it with being a "linux news" site. Slashdot did not force it's reputation on high level magazines, but itstead it was earned that by word-of-mouth. A site described above could also earn it's way by the same approach: if the site people create it well and make it work, then it too will become a linux news site by word of mouth. And then we won't have to worry about large corporate news sites failing to work for us.
Obviously, because the case was not issued a court ruling, there's no precident set by this case. But it can be used as an example. However, more importantly, the effects of this case will only be felt if the judge goes the way of interoperability instead of the encryption breaking/DCMA route that the MPAA is trying to go down.
Actually, I forget the story, but it was about a small group of humans making the journey to Alpha Centauri at just under sub-light speeds (estimated time was about 6 years, IIRC). Their ship was equipped with lots of scientific equipment, and because of the members of the crew, they were making lots of scientific discoveries and sending them back to earth. Of course, as the distance between earth and them increased, the chance for error became large, so they found a way to compress their data. They wrote it all out, then applied a simple A->1, B-2, etc scheme to it. They then calculated 2^(first letter code)*3^(second letter code)*5^(third letter code) etc.. to make a large composite number. Then they looked in the near range of numbers around the one they calculated to find some number which had a minimal number of prime factors, and then transmitted the prime factorization and how far off that was from the large composite numbers. This can probably be within a few hundred bytes for messages of a million bytes or more. To decompress, all one had to do was to work out the number from the minimal prime number and offset, then find the prime factorization, and then decode from the exponents.
Of course, in the story, by the time that the crew was only sending messages in this type, the earth was in war, and by the time the last message was sent when the crew reached AC, the intellicual ability of earth was very reduced; the last message could not be decoded because they had no way to calculate the first billion or so primes.
My impression is that not only will there be a pay per use, but you'll probably have to buy at a flat fee (though highly reduced from the current software price) some license, then get the per use charge on top of that. I can't see them not having some 'barrier' to every app, as those apps that have limited use (visio, for example, I've only used twice ever, and most of what I can do in that can be done in Word art, abet not as easily) will not earn them the same fees as those that are ubiquitious in most places.
Maybe, maaaaybe sometime in the future, when T1 lines are standard and cheaply available in all homes and businesses, will networked apps be reality. There's also matters of security and convinence (can you get to the networked Word if you are at 32000 ft from LA to Tokyo?)
IMO, the primary reason MS wants to go this way is that with net connections, you *can* count the number of times certain apps have been open, send that info securely back to MS, and MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart. Pay-per-use has been in the works for a good year or so by more than just Microsoft (RIAA wants that too), and anything that depends on a net connection to work is going to be frowned upon until realistic pricing models and cheap fast net connections are in place.
Slashdot Mirror
2) As GNOME Linux is visionized, and we move towards having a true out of the box install of Linux that is geared towards home users, those home users with AOL accounts are probably going to want to keep them, and the AOL/Linux client is a necessity for this given some of the protocols AOL uses.
3) AOL still offers unique content to members only. Some linux people may really want to access this (I don't see *why* myself :D).
4) This could be related to the lawsuit on AOL regarding blind and vision-impared people unable to use AOL. Many of the web-to-speech programs exist for Linux or such, and maybe this is AOL's way to try to accommodate that.
5) Maybe they want to see how cross-platform compatible their software is. Of course, considering how fast AOL 5 was out for the Mac compared to the PC version, this is very doubtful :D
Oddly, ICANN and the press appear to just shrug and let the matter drop. I'm sure that the same would happen if, say, my and 10,000 others' voting registrations placed in July wasn't processed in time for the November election due to load. </sarcasm> ICANN should really have extended the process to allow all people interested to register prior to this vote; maybe make sure the server is running smoothly, and allow 2 weeks for people to reregister their information making sure that everyone gets to make their voice heard.
This is similar to the ad going around from MS about W2k increasing sales from a company by 13% or 5% -- because we can't see all the raw data, there might be something they didn't want to include, or the like, and would make these numbers go the opposite way.
While a pain in the butt, peer-review in scientific journals is a very good thing :D
----
Greetings, Recently we moved the Deja.com servers to a new facility in order to provide greater reliability and performance. The move is now complete and we thank you for your patience.
Please note that currently our Usenet Discussion Service only retrieves messages from the past year (back through June 1999). As announced, we are reconfiguring the service that provides messages posted more than 1 year ago in order to provide greater reliability and performance. This will take some time though, possibly a few months. Have no fear: We're committed to bringing these messages back online as soon as possible.
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So I would wait for a few more weeks, and see if the situation improves.
With that in mind, yes, the first 2 seasons of Reboot were probably decent with CGI (given the timeframe), but they had great storylines. As pointed in the article blurb above, "Talent Night" is probably the best one of the first 2 seasons to start with. Without spoiling, there's references to "Spinal Tap", music videos, William Shatner, and a bunch of others. Season 3, on the other hand, starts a season-long saga that has a really good thought out plot, and the cgi is much improved (more organic looking scenes at various points). Throughout the series, the main characters (Bob, Dot, Enzo, and Megabyte) are well-defined, and don't vary that strongly over the series.
Again, remember that the time frame of the show (mid-1990's, almost predating Netscape 1.0). For it's time, it was technologically great.
Caffine goes through the body rather quickly, so it's hard to maintain the caffine level save by intravenious feeding. I've heard that in order to exceed the LD50 level of caffeine you need to drink 60 cups of coffee within 60 minutes, even though only 10 cups will have enough to kill you.
I personally would have liked to see Bruce Campbell there, only because he's completely loose to how tight Scull is, but I think Robert can play the part well, especially if he's lighthearted like I saw him on the golf course, as opposed to hard nosed T2/"The Falucty" character, though he can play both decently.
Not checking inputs before the buffer is copied into is a bad programming flaw, but only recently realized as being potentally hazardous. Thus, take all programmers that were in the workforce in 1990, and they would probably have missed adding the buffer checks, but now with buffer overflows a problem nearly every day, programmers in 2000 are much more conscience about it, but there is still legacy code that probably does this buried in code. Especially when the field itself is not thought of in a textual sense (a date field), these things tend to get overlooked in the general design of the program. However, this should only reinforce the use of a lint-like system after various compiles in order to find potental buffer overflows. Languages like C++ and Java provide some protection here assuming you use the typed Strings, but you can still create a buffer overflow without thinking about it.
Remarq is the only other usenet catagorizer, but it's rather poor in terms of the depth that deja got.
Is it time for an 'open' usenet search engine, one that realizes exactly what usenet is and doesn't hide behind called newsgroups "discussions" or "chat rooms"? Unfortunately, such an effort would require tons of diskspace, and a fast text search engine to be effective. Additionally, we lose much of the history that deja has *somewhere* on their servers: we'd most likely have to start with posts in 2000 and can only archive from then on. It may have to be ad driven to pay for said power, but as long as the ads were just for page impressions and not tied to the search or articles.
I know that when I am looking for a solution to technical problems on the net, I turned to deja first, followed by google. Usenet posts tend to be more focused, so getting a specific answer is easier there.
Unfortunately, requiring proper user-agent identification 'conflicts' with writing non-agent-specific HTML, in that in this day and age of computer stupidity, neither will happen at the same time. (In regards to the latter, there are sites out there that prevent you from content if you don't have the latest of the big two, so Opera and lynx and whomever else is screwed, because a cgi script does check the referrer field. You can get around this in nearly all of them by modifying it, and 90% of the time, there was no reason for it save for the idiom of forcing the latest browser).
One article states that there will be limitations on who may get domains in one of the new TLDs, similar to current .gov or .edu uses. The .com, .net, and .org TLDs will be left for free-for-all, based on the snippets I've read.
However, there are more pitfalls than potental good things. It allows easily for pay-per-use pricing since every use can be logged centrally as well. Privacy and security would be a high risk factor since basic network transactions are at the heart of this. And of course, these apps become dependant on decent bandwidth connections to work; no problem in corporate world, but not at 40,000 ft. Finally, MS has suggested that they'll have the .NET specifications all open for third-party developers to write for it, but most will appear to work only under MS OS's (which is why they need the proprietary C# and SOAP).
Some of these are MS-isms. However, more importanty, privacy, security, and bandwidth are going to be problems in any distributed app network whether created by MS or Linus. MO
In any case, I'm expecting the ACLU to pounce on a challenge to the bill as soon as the ink dries from Clinton's signature. Additionally, this type of bill may strongly reform the concent of riders; two completely different concepts should not be allowed on the same bill.
Of course, as someone pointed out, it appears said ads would be on top of the 5 -10 sec intros most songs have nowadays, which makes stripping useless.
Actually, this episode aired for the first time dubbed on Kids WB a few weeks back. Except they completely removed the indicated scene which made for some odd jumps (Ash shouts 'That's Team Rocket', followed by TR's two pokemon in drag).
And now here's another: the MPAA/deCSS on one side, and promoting DVDs on the other. I agree that DVD is a superior format espcially for anime as others have suggested here, and if the MPAA wasn't putting the smack down on deCSS, I'd have my DVD player already. But yet when a deCSS story comes along, people shout "boycott the MPAA!". You can't have it both ways, people.
Sure, that's the general impression that I get from these threads and reflects no way on a single user (unless I really wanted to find one specific double-talker). However, the fact that such double standards exists might reflect on the bias that /. editors give to their stories (and then again, there are multiple editors for /., so another problem there).
I think the solution here is for the editors to refrain for adding additoinal comments on the story message as to introduce such biases. Put a DeCSS case story and a new DVD release story as the plain submissions from readership without comment from the editors, and /. would not appear to have said double standard.
However this does not fully explain the results from this question. This policy above has only happened within the last month, but as others have pointed out on the thread, there are domains expired as far back as Feb.
IANAL, but there's an interesting case here to watch for that could bring contract violation charges onto NSI. If, as suggested, they take those domains into their public auction but AFTER they changed the contract, would this not be violating that? It's understandable if you fall a day or two behind, but NSI is claiming they're months behind. If they are that far behind then they are being inefficient adn should lose their gov't contract by the same point. (And from my recent experience with other registers, the case appears isolated at NSI).
Hydrogen is a very good and abundant fuel. When you combine hydrogen and fuel cell technology, you have the largest area of energy research that is going on across the global. The biggest problem is hydrogen's flammability. At stationary plants you could store it but anything mobile would be a bigger hazard than buring fossil fuels alone.
So now people are working on the next step, generating hydrogen 'in situ' (inside), so that you don't have to store it, and it only 'exists' for a short time. SOmeone suggested electrolysis, but you gain no energy after you break down water to get H2, then use that to get back to water. There is currently a big push to use methanol and ethanol from natural sources for the generation of hydrogen, as they are easy to burn and give a good hydrogen amount for cost and volume. However, when you burn hydrocarbons, including these two, you'll get CO2 (which isn't too bad) and CO (which is the killer). CO can damage the catalytic material of fuel cells and reduce their performance, therefore there is additionally research in trying to reduce CO via more reactions. In addition, which not in large numbers from natural sources, there is still the possibility of sulfur present, which does worse things than CO to the fuel cell materials, and the sulfur needs to be reduced to very small levels as well.
Thus, there's about 5 pieces of equipment that are being looked at for the automotive use: current estimates have these sized at about 200 L, but to fit them into a car, the best size is about 20L, so size reduction is a big issue as well. There's other issues as safety and cold starts that are being investigated right now. And these investigations go on across industry, academia, and government labs around the world, so there is certain a lot of research being done here - it just takes time, money, and typcially a passing brainstorm to make the next jump.
Solar power, on the other hand, has really only been shown to be effective in the long run for stationary sources; solar-powered cars still appear to be a long way off, due to collector size limitations on currect vehical design. Even with that, large solar installations cannot collect during cloudy days with the same efficiency as sunny days, and without a large number of panel and energy storage devices, the solar arrays only work well in places where the weather is cooperative (Southwest US). To the best I've seen, individual homeowners can benefit from solar panels to help heat water, but unless they grab an acre of panels, aren't going to be running their house off solar power for some time. Unlike fuel cells or other technology, there is only so much energy at maximum output that we can collect per sq ft of solar cell, and thus there's a fixed limitation there.
Actually, that would probably describe nearly anything dealing with BSD quite well (assuming the site was not limited in scope to just Linux).
Yes, I agree that the method has less bias than Slashdot, but there is still a bias.
As I mentioned before, freshmeat is the closest to the ideal news site that I can think of easily.
A few weeks ago, Katz put up an essay on Open Media, which got promptly dissed. However, in situations like this, there is something to be said for an "open" media area where control of the stories posted is only done by the users, with minor content checking by moderators (so that we don't get fake news stories, etc). Freshmeat is a great example of this, though this is not 'news' as most think.
Could a similar site be done in the vien of Freshmeat, but with news? Maybe. Obviously, you would need a select few moderators that nix stories that don't belong there ("Look at my hot new pr0n site!"). Since it would be real-time, it would be necessary to have some language-check program on submissions to see if a similar article had not already been posted. It could be done, but would take some good behind-the-scenes programming.
Then comes the matter of associating it with being a "linux news" site. Slashdot did not force it's reputation on high level magazines, but itstead it was earned that by word-of-mouth. A site described above could also earn it's way by the same approach: if the site people create it well and make it work, then it too will become a linux news site by word of mouth. And then we won't have to worry about large corporate news sites failing to work for us.
Obviously, because the case was not issued a court ruling, there's no precident set by this case. But it can be used as an example. However, more importantly, the effects of this case will only be felt if the judge goes the way of interoperability instead of the encryption breaking/DCMA route that the MPAA is trying to go down.
Actually, I forget the story, but it was about a small group of humans making the journey to Alpha Centauri at just under sub-light speeds (estimated time was about 6 years, IIRC). Their ship was equipped with lots of scientific equipment, and because of the members of the crew, they were making lots of scientific discoveries and sending them back to earth. Of course, as the distance between earth and them increased, the chance for error became large, so they found a way to compress their data. They wrote it all out, then applied a simple A->1, B-2, etc scheme to it. They then calculated 2^(first letter code)*3^(second letter code)*5^(third letter code) etc.. to make a large composite number. Then they looked in the near range of numbers around the one they calculated to find some number which had a minimal number of prime factors, and then transmitted the prime factorization and how far off that was from the large composite numbers. This can probably be within a few hundred bytes for messages of a million bytes or more. To decompress, all one had to do was to work out the number from the minimal prime number and offset, then find the prime factorization, and then decode from the exponents.
Of course, in the story, by the time that the crew was only sending messages in this type, the earth was in war, and by the time the last message was sent when the crew reached AC, the intellicual ability of earth was very reduced; the last message could not be decoded because they had no way to calculate the first billion or so primes.
My impression is that not only will there be a pay per use, but you'll probably have to buy at a flat fee (though highly reduced from the current software price) some license, then get the per use charge on top of that. I can't see them not having some 'barrier' to every app, as those apps that have limited use (visio, for example, I've only used twice ever, and most of what I can do in that can be done in Word art, abet not as easily) will not earn them the same fees as those that are ubiquitious in most places.
IMO, the primary reason MS wants to go this way is that with net connections, you *can* count the number of times certain apps have been open, send that info securely back to MS, and MS can then send you the bill for $1.00 per Word doc you opened, or $10 per Windows restart. Pay-per-use has been in the works for a good year or so by more than just Microsoft (RIAA wants that too), and anything that depends on a net connection to work is going to be frowned upon until realistic pricing models and cheap fast net connections are in place.