The "edit count" fanaticism is indeed a problem for Wikipedia. The edit histories of some of the editors with the highest edit counts are disappointing. Some of them never actually write anything; they just make administrative edits. Others make vast numbers of very minor edits.
Better metrics are possible. A metric like "number of words added which stayed in an article for at least 30 days" would measure useful contributions.
But this isn't the real problem with Wikipedia. The real problem is "churn". Articles do not steadily improve over time. They typically reach about 80% of the "good article" level, and then slowly change over time, with edits of varying quality.
For a striking example of this, see Horse. Take a look at the article at three month intervals. The article is so heavily edited that it changes almost completely every few months. Yet today's version is really no better than the versions from three and six months ago. That's churn.
Looks like this is coming from a known source of spyware in Ukraine, "Inhoster.com".
"zcodec.com" is actually "85.255.117.106-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com", a dedicated server at a "nlayer.net" colocation site in San Francisco. The dedicated server appears to be associated with "atrivo".
Both "inhoster.com" and "atrivo" appear to be "psuedo-ISPs"; they have web sites that look like those of an ISP, but they don't really offer services for sale. Both have bad reputations: see "Spywarequake Scam on the Run. The previous attacks were based on phony anti-spyware programs. Now that people are wise to that one, the new frontier is apparently phony codecs.
The WHOIS information for "zcodec.net" appears to be bogus. It's given as "Abrahamen Biderman" at "5624 17th Ave, Brooklyn, New York" There is an "Abraham Biderman" with an office at 5624 17th Ave, Brooklyn, New York, and he's a political figure and investment banker, with a career running major financial institutions. Probably not behind some two-bit spyware scam.
Urbanesq.com Inc. ("Urbanesq") was incorporated August 25, 2000 under the laws of the Province of Canada. Effective October 18, 2001, Urbanesq completed a merger with Koala International Wireless Inc. ("Koala"), a public company incorporated in the State of Nevada...changed the name of the Company to Trimax Corporation...
On July 29, 2005, the Company entered into an Exclusive Supply agreement... provided the Company with the exclusive right to sell Switzerland based Ascom broadband over power line communication access products ("Products") in Canada and non-exclusive rights world wide, which the "Partner" represented that it had secured itself from Ascom....
Subsequent to the signing and the advancement of funds for the "Exclusive Supply Agreement" the company was made aware that the product supplier had no right to grant a sub-license from Ascom. Furthermore, the supplier was previously in default and was never in any position to grant any sub-license on its own license.
The Company has not earned any revenues from limited principal operations...
Total Current Assets: $105,115. Total current liabilities: $536,870.
So, after six years, the company has zero revenue and couldn't even get set up as a second-tier reseller of broadband over powerline products. Which is probably why the stock is at $0.38 and headed down.
If you go back to older related SEC filings, you can find the story of the "Hipster portable Internet access device" (didn't happen), and the previous history of Koala International Wireless as a vitamin company under the name "Kettle River Group" (also a flop).
This stock is not "poised for a breakthrough". Except maybe in the down direction.
If this is "badware", please fill out a Badware Report at StopBadware.org.
That organization has real promise for putting a dent into adware and spyware. With legal support from Harvard University and Oxford University, financial support from Google, Lenovo, and Sun, and assistance from Consumer's Union, they're in a very strong position to fight back. They're not going to cave in because some business complains.
The better systems have "tailgating detection", so that only one person can enter at a time. Some systems use machine vision, some use stereo camera pairs, and some use multiple infrared beams.
If you install an anti-tailgating system, employees take security much more seriously. You don't have to go all the way to a double door/mantrap system. The usual setup is that you can't open the door if there are two people close to it, and if, once the door is opened, two people go through, that's an exception condition.
A big question is how exception conditions are monitored. You need someone, somewhere, to evaluate them. Usually with a video link, which is becoming standard in security systems. Someone in security control has to decide if someone pushing a cart or carrying a big box is OK, because the tailgating systems will detect that. You can buy such monitoring as a service from central station security services. You want to detect a few exception conditions a day. More than that, and they're treated as false alarms. Less than that, and you're missing stuff.
Don't overcentralize. Everything should be monitored centrally, but locks should be capable of standalone operation.
There's been some interest in using cell sites as bistatic radars. Stealth aircraft work by having very low reflectance on a direct line back to the source, so if the radar transmitter and receiver are in the same location, there's almost no reflection. But if the transmitter and receiver are in different locations, stealth geometry has little effect. A "bistatic radar" is such a radar.
So the concept is to have multiple emitters and receivers, all tightly coordinated. That's to some extent what a cell phone network is. If you have a few big radar transmitters around, and use multiple cell sites as receivers, you can in theory detect stealthed aircraft. If the cell sites have phased array receivers, they can steer the antenna, which makes this work better.
There was some worry before Oil War II that Iraq had that capability, but it didn't.
Roland the Plogger posts a press release
on
Life Inside a Cell
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is just a press release. How did this get in? Oh, right.
As usual, Roland the Plogger posts the link he's paid to post. Here's a better story about the animation.
The animation itself is nice (and you can see it from the link above), but it has that MTV/Discovery Channel style of too many short segments. There's a musical background, but no explaination of what you're looking at.
It also gives the incorrect impression that some of the self-assembly processes shown are much more organized than they really are. Watching those tubes self-assemble makes it look as if all the molecules have active guidance and propulsion. In reality, self-assembly just means that when the right molecules in the right orientation happen to bump, they stick.
One big problem with HDTV is now becoming apparent - the frame rate of movies is too low. 24FPS at 1080p with the screen in front of your face looks awful when the camera is panning.
Sports, especially football, compress badly. Football is almost the worst case for motion compression - the camera is moving relative to the background, the players are all moving in different directions, their body parts are all in motion, there's lots of detail that's important to the viewer, and there's no central character that dominates the scene. Viewers are likely to rerun parts of the game in slow motion, which brings out all the compression artifacts. When you have a 50-inch screen in front of you, all those problems really stand out.
That's right. There's a "Wikipedia stable versions" proposal, in fact there are several, but none of them are likely to be accepted soon.
The trial "stable versions" proposal is mostly manual and generates a big administrative load. It's just a scheme where the main page for an article is locked, and regular editors can only edit a working copy. Every once in a while, some authorized "approver" copies the working copy to the main page. This requires a huge group of "approvers". This scheme has the advantage of being possible with the current Wikimedia implementation, but isn't really workable for all of Wikipedia. It's too labor-intensive.
Better, more automated schemes have been discussed, but they need a substantial programming effort, and Wikipedia is weak in that area.
"Semi-protection" is a useful addition, but under current policies, isn't used much. Most requests for semi-protection are turned down. Unless a page is being vandalized many times per day, semi-protection is seldom used.
So less is happening in this area than the article suggests.
Actually, the most striking feature of Wikipedia today is that it's done. Very few new articles are on substantative subjects. All the important subjects already have articles. Most new articles are spam, self-promotion, or fancruft. The fancruft is now for items so obscure (a character appearing once in one Star Wars comic book is typical) that it's total junk. Articles come in daily for non-notable buildings, atlas info ("State Route 93"), bands nobody ever heard of, and for every album of any band that ever managed to sell a CD. Most of that info is unsuited for a wiki; IMDB, Gracenote, and Google Maps do a better job in those categories, because they need proper databases.
The problem is that programming games on the Cell is hard. Remember when Sony dropped the Aibo and dropped out of robotics and AI research? That was partially because all the bright people were needed to make the PS3 work. Non-shared memory multiprocessors with modest per-CPU memory are very hard to program. Their history, from the ILLIAC IV to the BBN Butterfly to the Ncube, has not been impressive. Whole new approaches are needed. In time for the game developers to be ready for the Xmas shopping season.
That's the problem. Sony needs a miracle of programming on a very short timetable.
Microsoft, however, does not. The XBox 360 is just a 3-CPU shared memory computer. It's quite conventional.
Progress is being made, but realistically, the games available for the PS3 at launch will probably be doing too much in the main CPU and the Cell processors will be underutilized.
On the hardware front, if Sony is making changes to the hardware spec this late, there's a good chance they will miss the holiday season. It's September already. As of late August, PS3 manufacturing hadn't even started. For the holiday season, merchandise has to be in the stores by November 1. And that's after shipping and warehousing. Realistically, Sony has about six weeks to freeze the product, get manufacturing running, and get product out in volume.
It's probably too late for this year. They might manage a small-volume prelaunch, like Microsoft did last year.
Sony's moneymaker for this holiday season will be the PS2, which, at $129, is going to look very attractive to parents.
Some years ago, I stopped submitting papers to SIGGRAPH and started filing patents. It's been much more profitable.
Anyway, SIGGRAPH seems to have shrunk. I think the show floor peaked in size around 1997. Today, the Game Developer's Conference is where the real technical action is.
SIGGRAPH is mostly a rendering convention now; there's a little animation, a little behavior, and a tiny bit of physics in the papers this year, but other than that, it's rendering and compression. Which are relatively mature technologies.
Kai Krause tried this once
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Kai Krause tried something like that once, in "Kai's Power Tools". The interface started out simple, and as you used it, when the software decided you were good enough, you advanced to the next level and more tools appeared. This was one of the first programs to have really cool functional widgets, like draggable on-screen trackballs and joysticks.
Users hated it. The cool user interface just got in the way of getting work done. At one point, a rumor started that Kai was going to redesign Photoshop's interface, and there were organized protests to Adobe.
But his programs looked so cool.
Part of the problem was that Kai was addressing a very hard problem - the user interface for a drawing program. The MacOS X toolbar looks like a Kai interface. But that tool bar is really just a menu. Serious drawing programs, from AutoCAD to Maya, have to offer so many different yet interacting capabilities to the user that they're terrifyingly hard.
A full-scale 3D animation program is about as hard as an interface gets. There before you is the ability to create a synthetic world. Animation programs struggle to provide all the needed tools without overwhelming the user.
There's also the issue in that world that working artists want quite a different set of capabilities than amateurs do. Artists seldom edit freehand-drawn lines. They delete
them and sketch new ones; they don't drag spline control points. An experienced animator creating a human head in a 3D animation system won't build it up one polygon at a time,
or start pulling on an ellipsoid. They may draw a series of cross-sections and skin them. I've seen this done in less than a minute. So the needed tools may be quire different from what a programmer would imagine.
StopBadware has standards that are tougher than the usual "it's OK if the EULA says it is". That's been the problem with TrustE's Trusted Download Program, which is a whitelist for supposedly "good" badware.
Then there was the Microsoft/Claria debacle.
Unfortunately, StopBadware thus far has a very short list of "badware". They need to be listing perhaps a few hundred items. So start sending in those reports. They need technical info on "badware".
What StopBadware has is legal support. They're backed by the law schools of Harvard University and Oxford University, and by Consumer's Union. They're not likely to cave just because some company sends they a threatening letter. In fact, for a company to sue StopBadware when they have a weak case could be disasterous for the company. It would open the company to discovery to determine exactly what their "badware" did, with executives and programmers forced to testify under oath.
Some people will download anything. I used to have a program on one of my web sites that was a plug-in to a high-end animation package. It was totally useless unless you had that package, and knew how to run it, which few people did. Thousands of people downloaded the plug-in, despite clear statements that it was useless without the main package. They'd even fill out the registration form.
Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.
Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos.
(Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!
Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization".
There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?
Yeah, that's wierd. Especially since "SKU" implies that all products with the same SKU are identical; the blue ones and the purple ones will have a different SKU. The reviewers usually don't review one of each color. That's the whole point of Stock Keeping Units; they're used for inventory management. For a semicustom product like the Alienware machines, or for a review, it's not really the right term.
In manufacturing, the terms "part" and "part number" are used. A "part" is an instance of a "part number". All parts with the same part number must be effectively identical. Manufacturing people say things like "That product has 154 parts but only 24 part numbers", meaning that only 24 different kinds of part are needed to make it.
Used to see gear like that at raves back in the 1990s. "E-shirts" (t-shirts with electroluminescent panels displaying changing patterns) are still available. And who could forget the LCD belt buckle. Nobody wears that stuff any more, of course.
That's just a link to a Roland the Plogger blog, who doesn't understand the problem. Read the New York Times story, which has important facts the Plogger missed, like the fact that this has been happening for the past five years. The local paper, the Register-Guard, has a good story. "On the way down, the camera lens illuminates a nighttime blizzard, a flurry of broken chunks of plankton called "marine snow." This is evidence of what caused this year's hypoxia - an onslaught of nutrients brought to shallow coastal waters by wind-driven currents, whose decomposing structures suck up available oxygen."
This is no mysterious dramatic event. It happens every year, but this year, it's worse than usual, possibly because ocean currents have shifted due to weather.
Does Slashdot pay Roland the Plogger, or does Roland the Plogger pay Slashdot and then get paid by click-through to his website? Inquiring minds want to know.
A heavy water plant is not a nuclear reactor. Nothing in a heavy water plant is radioactive. Or, for most processes, even toxic. Here's a tutorial on heavy water plants. They're not very complicated or especially large. This is the easy step in the process.
The next step is a nuclear reactor fueled with natural uranium and moderated with heavy water, which can be used, with difficulty, to produce plutonium. This is the route Pakistan took. Here's Pakistan's heavy water plant and its companion nuclear reactor. Israel's Dimona reactor is also of this type. So this is the standard route to nuclear weapons for small countries. This step is much harder and riskier, but the technology is half a century old.
There are other approaches. The United States initially used water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors fueled with natural uranium for plutonium production, as did Russia. Britain used air-cooled graphite-moderated reactors. (Bad idea. The Windscale reactor had a fire in 1957, releasing a considerable amount of radioactive material.) Once both countries had uranium-enrichment capability, newer reactors mostly used low-grade enriched uranium.
Both the US and the USSR got so good at plutonium production that both now have tons (literally) of the stuff in storage, in addition to the weapons using it. A nuclear weapon requires about 5Kg.
Slashdot Mirror
The "edit count" fanaticism is indeed a problem for Wikipedia. The edit histories of some of the editors with the highest edit counts are disappointing. Some of them never actually write anything; they just make administrative edits. Others make vast numbers of very minor edits.
Better metrics are possible. A metric like "number of words added which stayed in an article for at least 30 days" would measure useful contributions.
But this isn't the real problem with Wikipedia. The real problem is "churn". Articles do not steadily improve over time. They typically reach about 80% of the "good article" level, and then slowly change over time, with edits of varying quality.
For a striking example of this, see Horse. Take a look at the article at three month intervals. The article is so heavily edited that it changes almost completely every few months. Yet today's version is really no better than the versions from three and six months ago. That's churn.
Looks like this is coming from a known source of spyware in Ukraine, "Inhoster.com".
"zcodec.com" is actually "85.255.117.106-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com", a dedicated server at a "nlayer.net" colocation site in San Francisco. The dedicated server appears to be associated with "atrivo".
Both "inhoster.com" and "atrivo" appear to be "psuedo-ISPs"; they have web sites that look like those of an ISP, but they don't really offer services for sale. Both have bad reputations: see "Spywarequake Scam on the Run. The previous attacks were based on phony anti-spyware programs. Now that people are wise to that one, the new frontier is apparently phony codecs.
The WHOIS information for "zcodec.net" appears to be bogus. It's given as "Abrahamen Biderman" at "5624 17th Ave, Brooklyn, New York" There is an "Abraham Biderman" with an office at 5624 17th Ave, Brooklyn, New York, and he's a political figure and investment banker, with a career running major financial institutions. Probably not behind some two-bit spyware scam.
Fun highlights:
So, after six years, the company has zero revenue and couldn't even get set up as a second-tier reseller of broadband over powerline products. Which is probably why the stock is at $0.38 and headed down.
If you go back to older related SEC filings, you can find the story of the "Hipster portable Internet access device" (didn't happen), and the previous history of Koala International Wireless as a vitamin company under the name "Kettle River Group" (also a flop).
This stock is not "poised for a breakthrough". Except maybe in the down direction.
If this is "badware", please fill out a Badware Report at StopBadware.org.
That organization has real promise for putting a dent into adware and spyware. With legal support from Harvard University and Oxford University, financial support from Google, Lenovo, and Sun, and assistance from Consumer's Union, they're in a very strong position to fight back. They're not going to cave in because some business complains.
The better systems have "tailgating detection", so that only one person can enter at a time. Some systems use machine vision, some use stereo camera pairs, and some use multiple infrared beams.
If you install an anti-tailgating system, employees take security much more seriously. You don't have to go all the way to a double door/mantrap system. The usual setup is that you can't open the door if there are two people close to it, and if, once the door is opened, two people go through, that's an exception condition.
A big question is how exception conditions are monitored. You need someone, somewhere, to evaluate them. Usually with a video link, which is becoming standard in security systems. Someone in security control has to decide if someone pushing a cart or carrying a big box is OK, because the tailgating systems will detect that. You can buy such monitoring as a service from central station security services. You want to detect a few exception conditions a day. More than that, and they're treated as false alarms. Less than that, and you're missing stuff.
Don't overcentralize. Everything should be monitored centrally, but locks should be capable of standalone operation.
There's been some interest in using cell sites as bistatic radars. Stealth aircraft work by having very low reflectance on a direct line back to the source, so if the radar transmitter and receiver are in the same location, there's almost no reflection. But if the transmitter and receiver are in different locations, stealth geometry has little effect. A "bistatic radar" is such a radar.
So the concept is to have multiple emitters and receivers, all tightly coordinated. That's to some extent what a cell phone network is. If you have a few big radar transmitters around, and use multiple cell sites as receivers, you can in theory detect stealthed aircraft. If the cell sites have phased array receivers, they can steer the antenna, which makes this work better.
There was some worry before Oil War II that Iraq had that capability, but it didn't.
This is just a press release. How did this get in? Oh, right.
As usual, Roland the Plogger posts the link he's paid to post. Here's a better story about the animation.
The animation itself is nice (and you can see it from the link above), but it has that MTV/Discovery Channel style of too many short segments. There's a musical background, but no explaination of what you're looking at.
It also gives the incorrect impression that some of the self-assembly processes shown are much more organized than they really are. Watching those tubes self-assemble makes it look as if all the molecules have active guidance and propulsion. In reality, self-assembly just means that when the right molecules in the right orientation happen to bump, they stick.
Plus, with some extra software upgrades, you can detect and track stealthed aircraft.
One big problem with HDTV is now becoming apparent - the frame rate of movies is too low. 24FPS at 1080p with the screen in front of your face looks awful when the camera is panning.
Sports, especially football, compress badly. Football is almost the worst case for motion compression - the camera is moving relative to the background, the players are all moving in different directions, their body parts are all in motion, there's lots of detail that's important to the viewer, and there's no central character that dominates the scene. Viewers are likely to rerun parts of the game in slow motion, which brings out all the compression artifacts. When you have a 50-inch screen in front of you, all those problems really stand out.
DRM isn't about copy protection any more. Now it's more about renting, instead of buying.
"Sooner or later, you're going to have to buy all your music and videos again".
And, as hundreds of people in their cubicles turn on their computers, the startup sound is played again, and again, and again....
Somebody didn't think this through.
Now, from the people who brought you the Long Cut Scene - the Sarcastic Narrator.
This could get old really fast. Especially if you have to listen to the same narration every time.
That's right. There's a "Wikipedia stable versions" proposal, in fact there are several, but none of them are likely to be accepted soon.
The trial "stable versions" proposal is mostly manual and generates a big administrative load. It's just a scheme where the main page for an article is locked, and regular editors can only edit a working copy. Every once in a while, some authorized "approver" copies the working copy to the main page. This requires a huge group of "approvers". This scheme has the advantage of being possible with the current Wikimedia implementation, but isn't really workable for all of Wikipedia. It's too labor-intensive.
Better, more automated schemes have been discussed, but they need a substantial programming effort, and Wikipedia is weak in that area.
"Semi-protection" is a useful addition, but under current policies, isn't used much. Most requests for semi-protection are turned down. Unless a page is being vandalized many times per day, semi-protection is seldom used.
So less is happening in this area than the article suggests.
Actually, the most striking feature of Wikipedia today is that it's done. Very few new articles are on substantative subjects. All the important subjects already have articles. Most new articles are spam, self-promotion, or fancruft. The fancruft is now for items so obscure (a character appearing once in one Star Wars comic book is typical) that it's total junk. Articles come in daily for non-notable buildings, atlas info ("State Route 93"), bands nobody ever heard of, and for every album of any band that ever managed to sell a CD. Most of that info is unsuited for a wiki; IMDB, Gracenote, and Google Maps do a better job in those categories, because they need proper databases.
This is what Wikipedia looks like at maturity.
The first Google result is now this Slashdot story.
The problem is that programming games on the Cell is hard. Remember when Sony dropped the Aibo and dropped out of robotics and AI research? That was partially because all the bright people were needed to make the PS3 work. Non-shared memory multiprocessors with modest per-CPU memory are very hard to program. Their history, from the ILLIAC IV to the BBN Butterfly to the Ncube, has not been impressive. Whole new approaches are needed. In time for the game developers to be ready for the Xmas shopping season.
That's the problem. Sony needs a miracle of programming on a very short timetable.
Microsoft, however, does not. The XBox 360 is just a 3-CPU shared memory computer. It's quite conventional.
Progress is being made, but realistically, the games available for the PS3 at launch will probably be doing too much in the main CPU and the Cell processors will be underutilized.
On the hardware front, if Sony is making changes to the hardware spec this late, there's a good chance they will miss the holiday season. It's September already. As of late August, PS3 manufacturing hadn't even started. For the holiday season, merchandise has to be in the stores by November 1. And that's after shipping and warehousing. Realistically, Sony has about six weeks to freeze the product, get manufacturing running, and get product out in volume.
It's probably too late for this year. They might manage a small-volume prelaunch, like Microsoft did last year.
Sony's moneymaker for this holiday season will be the PS2, which, at $129, is going to look very attractive to parents.
This has been recognized for years. See "How to get your SIGGRAPH paper rejected, from 1993.
Some years ago, I stopped submitting papers to SIGGRAPH and started filing patents. It's been much more profitable.
Anyway, SIGGRAPH seems to have shrunk. I think the show floor peaked in size around 1997. Today, the Game Developer's Conference is where the real technical action is.
SIGGRAPH is mostly a rendering convention now; there's a little animation, a little behavior, and a tiny bit of physics in the papers this year, but other than that, it's rendering and compression. Which are relatively mature technologies.
Kai Krause tried something like that once, in "Kai's Power Tools". The interface started out simple, and as you used it, when the software decided you were good enough, you advanced to the next level and more tools appeared. This was one of the first programs to have really cool functional widgets, like draggable on-screen trackballs and joysticks.
Users hated it. The cool user interface just got in the way of getting work done. At one point, a rumor started that Kai was going to redesign Photoshop's interface, and there were organized protests to Adobe.
But his programs looked so cool.
Part of the problem was that Kai was addressing a very hard problem - the user interface for a drawing program. The MacOS X toolbar looks like a Kai interface. But that tool bar is really just a menu. Serious drawing programs, from AutoCAD to Maya, have to offer so many different yet interacting capabilities to the user that they're terrifyingly hard. A full-scale 3D animation program is about as hard as an interface gets. There before you is the ability to create a synthetic world. Animation programs struggle to provide all the needed tools without overwhelming the user.
There's also the issue in that world that working artists want quite a different set of capabilities than amateurs do. Artists seldom edit freehand-drawn lines. They delete them and sketch new ones; they don't drag spline control points. An experienced animator creating a human head in a 3D animation system won't build it up one polygon at a time, or start pulling on an ellipsoid. They may draw a series of cross-sections and skin them. I've seen this done in less than a minute. So the needed tools may be quire different from what a programmer would imagine.
StopBadware has standards that are tougher than the usual "it's OK if the EULA says it is". That's been the problem with TrustE's Trusted Download Program, which is a whitelist for supposedly "good" badware. Then there was the Microsoft/Claria debacle.
Unfortunately, StopBadware thus far has a very short list of "badware". They need to be listing perhaps a few hundred items. So start sending in those reports. They need technical info on "badware".
What StopBadware has is legal support. They're backed by the law schools of Harvard University and Oxford University, and by Consumer's Union. They're not likely to cave just because some company sends they a threatening letter. In fact, for a company to sue StopBadware when they have a weak case could be disasterous for the company. It would open the company to discovery to determine exactly what their "badware" did, with executives and programmers forced to testify under oath.
Some people will download anything. I used to have a program on one of my web sites that was a plug-in to a high-end animation package. It was totally useless unless you had that package, and knew how to run it, which few people did. Thousands of people downloaded the plug-in, despite clear statements that it was useless without the main package. They'd even fill out the registration form.
Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.
Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos. (Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!
Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization". There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?
What went wrong?
Yeah, that's wierd. Especially since "SKU" implies that all products with the same SKU are identical; the blue ones and the purple ones will have a different SKU. The reviewers usually don't review one of each color. That's the whole point of Stock Keeping Units; they're used for inventory management. For a semicustom product like the Alienware machines, or for a review, it's not really the right term.
In manufacturing, the terms "part" and "part number" are used. A "part" is an instance of a "part number". All parts with the same part number must be effectively identical. Manufacturing people say things like "That product has 154 parts but only 24 part numbers", meaning that only 24 different kinds of part are needed to make it.
Used to see gear like that at raves back in the 1990s. "E-shirts" (t-shirts with electroluminescent panels displaying changing patterns) are still available. And who could forget the LCD belt buckle. Nobody wears that stuff any more, of course.
That's just a link to a Roland the Plogger blog, who doesn't understand the problem. Read the New York Times story, which has important facts the Plogger missed, like the fact that this has been happening for the past five years. The local paper, the Register-Guard, has a good story. "On the way down, the camera lens illuminates a nighttime blizzard, a flurry of broken chunks of plankton called "marine snow." This is evidence of what caused this year's hypoxia - an onslaught of nutrients brought to shallow coastal waters by wind-driven currents, whose decomposing structures suck up available oxygen."
This is no mysterious dramatic event. It happens every year, but this year, it's worse than usual, possibly because ocean currents have shifted due to weather.
Does Slashdot pay Roland the Plogger, or does Roland the Plogger pay Slashdot and then get paid by click-through to his website? Inquiring minds want to know.
A heavy water plant is not a nuclear reactor. Nothing in a heavy water plant is radioactive. Or, for most processes, even toxic. Here's a tutorial on heavy water plants. They're not very complicated or especially large. This is the easy step in the process.
The next step is a nuclear reactor fueled with natural uranium and moderated with heavy water, which can be used, with difficulty, to produce plutonium. This is the route Pakistan took. Here's Pakistan's heavy water plant and its companion nuclear reactor. Israel's Dimona reactor is also of this type. So this is the standard route to nuclear weapons for small countries. This step is much harder and riskier, but the technology is half a century old.
There are other approaches. The United States initially used water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors fueled with natural uranium for plutonium production, as did Russia. Britain used air-cooled graphite-moderated reactors. (Bad idea. The Windscale reactor had a fire in 1957, releasing a considerable amount of radioactive material.) Once both countries had uranium-enrichment capability, newer reactors mostly used low-grade enriched uranium. Both the US and the USSR got so good at plutonium production that both now have tons (literally) of the stuff in storage, in addition to the weapons using it. A nuclear weapon requires about 5Kg.