All I want is something that will stop command-F from always popping up with the idiotic search "Kind = Any," "Last Opened = Any Date."
How about letting me set a preference for the default search? Or...
How about repeating whatever it is I did on the last search?
(To all those who are going to flame me by saying there is some way of changing it by rewriting some XML code in hidden directory somewhere... oh, go away and edit a Registry, why don't you?)
L. Chiariglione got my back up immediately when he defined DRM as "a means to manage rights with digital technologies." Well, no.
The most obnoxious thing about so-called DRM is that it allows content owners to manage any arbitrary restrictions. There is absolutely nothing about DRM to ensure that those restrictions are, in any way, aligned with rights the manager actually holds, and in practice DRM users invariably overreach.
A famous example was Adobe releasing an eBook version of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which is well and truly in the public domain, with restrictions prohibiting its use with text-to-speech converters... and compounding the error by presenting this with unfortunate wording, which said, not that they were preventing the electronic conversion to speech, but that the user could not "read it aloud."
Adobe has insisted that it was all a mistake, as it may well have been, but nevertheless DRM allowed them to exercise "rights" they did not possess.
Now, since nothing about intellectual property is obvious, and most likely not even a lawyer knows what the law is until there is a court case, there probably is no way at all to implement a technology that actually manages "rights." In practice, DRM manages whatever the content vendor believes or wishes its rights were, not what those right may actually be.
In practice, content rights owners opinions of the extent of their own rights are, at the very least, expansive and optimistic. The RIAA believes, for example, that when I copied my collection of vinyl LP's to CD-Rs, and the moment when I threw away the LPs I lost my right to listen to those CR-R's. Without DRM, such beliefs are no more than a curiosity. With DRM, the content owner becomes judge and jury, and the DRM techology becomes the executioner.
...the Hall of Fame for Great Americans... is a huge colonnade (630 feet long) with actual bronze busts, located at Bronx Community College (formerly NYU).
I found this out on the umpteenth watching of "The Wizard of Oz" when I suddenly wondered what the Munchkins were singing about when they sang "You will have a bust, have a bust, have a bust/In the Hall of Fame." I had to look it up because nobody I knew had any idea what the heck the "Hall of Fame" was, apart from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, of course.
By the way, it has a number of open slots. #19, #47, #49. I think someone should propose putting Metcalfe's bust in one of them. So he will be as well remembered as Rufus Choate, Charlotte Saunders Cushman, and John Lothrop Motley.
It really says something when an entire Hall of Fame can be forgotten, doesn't it? If a brick-and-mortar Hall of Fame is forgotten in less than one short century, I don't think the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which apparently has no physical existence, will be much more durable.
Ozymandias, anyone?
The original "Colossal Cave" adventure...
on
Hotel Dusk Review
·
· Score: 1
...was as much about reading as it was about playing. The authors had a quirky sense of humor, and the prose managed the trick of being just slightly tongue-in-cheek, humorously overwrought "purple prose," yet being genuinely evocative. It was a graphic novel without the graphics.
Infocom tried to master this as a kind of "house style," but I still think Crowther and Woods did it best.
...not that I have any idea for a new one, but the OS as we know it is one of the prime examples of a system whose rationale is "we've always done it that way."
People have forgotten that the original goal of the "operating system" was nothing other than to automate the function of the "operator," reducing personnel costs and making sure that the computer wasn't sitting around at $200 an hour waiting for someone to square up the next deck of cards and load them into the hopper.
The only people who think they can tell you what an OS really is are the students who have recently memorized some textbook definition. An OS is an intertwingled hairball of utterly arbitrary functionality. It has evolved from competitors copying whatever it is that another competitor did, messing some things up, adding some cool stuff, and doing random things dictated by marketing strategy.
Want to bundle HyperCard, but you promised the database vendors you wouldn't compete with them? Easy, don't call HyperCard a database, call it part of the "system software." Want to hide the fact that your graphical shell could run on a competitor's operating system? Easy, just say Windows is part of--no, wait, IS--the operating system. And so it goes.
It is quite possible to use a computer without an operating system. I'm not saying any of these are viable paradigms for today, but none of the original versions of BASIC required an operating system. MUMPS is largely self-contained, no OS needed.
There is an opportunity for some kind of brand-new conceptualization. No, I don't know what it is. If I did, I'd promoting on it. But, yes, I think it's very likely that twenty years from now the idea of an operating system will seem as quaint as the idea of a front panel with lights and switches on it. There was a time when nobody believed you could run a computer without _that_, either.
The article says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion."
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
Contact lenses that alter eye color are already in popular, widespread use.
How hard would it be to construct a contact lens with a unique, fake, computer-generated iris image (no idea how you'd do that, but "fractals" sounds like a good buzzword to insert here)? Sound like it would be a lot easier than fake fingerprints.
In a situation where you knew you were being scanned, the officials might say "I see you're wearing contacts, remove them please," but I don't quite see an airport saying "no contact lenses allowed in this airport..." particular if the idea is that the scanning is supposed to be surreptitious.
Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology. What they are good at is business deals that look good to their suppliers but turn out to benefit Wal*Mart in the long run... and in ratcheting down their suppliers' prices.
How is Wal*Mart going to make their downloadable movies so much cheaper than the competition that they'll be able to drive the competition out of business? Force their IT department to outsource their movie download servers overseas?
And on the Internet everything is nearby. When a brick-and-mortar Wal*Mart succeeds in killing off the local small-town businesses, the local residents are faced with the choice of shopping at the local Wal*Mart or driving a long distance. On the Internet, even supposing that (say) Wal*Mart drives Amazon UnBox out of business, you're not going to have to drive ten miles to shop at the iTunes store.
The only way I can see Wal*Mart winning is if they use their famous muscle to pressure the MPAA into allowing their products to being delivered without DRM, and with the capability of burning a DVD. At the moment, the Wal*Mart video download website seems to be showing me such badly scrambled pages that I can't read how it works, but I don't think that's the way it works now.
I don't know what made you think that I think farmers are ignorant. They are everything you say... and according to Wendell Berry, every study that has ever been done has shown that small family farms are more efficient producers than large agribusiness enterprises.
The size of the investments that even a small farmer needs to make, and the relative thinness and unpredictability of the profit margin, are daunting.
"it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." (etext)
It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?
Music just has the right characteristics to be a good conversation topic.
Unless your a farmer or a meteorologist, you can't talk for more than a few seconds about the weather.
Sex, politics, and religion are way too dangerous.
But there is a lot of music, there is a lot to talk about, the chances are that two people selected at random know a lot more of the same music than the same books, the same movies, etc.
You can care enough about music to have a spirited, passionate discussion about it, but few people care so much about it that disagreements could lead to violence, or even to the breakup of a budding friendship.
If you take someone home to meet your parents, you don't need to worry about whether that person's taste in music will match your parents or not.
All religions look like they are "made up" when they are getting started, are small, and the core tenets are associated to a single leader, who claims to have received them by divine revelation.
The LDS Church (Mormons) have been around for a century and a half... old enough for some people consider it a "religion," but young enough for some people to feel that Joseph Smith just "made it up." Don't expect to see the golden plates in a museum the next time you visit Salt Lake City: Smith gave them back to the Angel Moroni.
How do you support Christianity looked during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth? Do you think the Roman authorities saw it as a religion? Or as something that Jesus just made up?
Deciding what counts as a religion and what doesn't is a very tricky business.
The animations are impressive, but so was the animated water in Titanic and A Perfect Storm. I wish they had featured a comparison of the same animation, performed with the same computer resources, using the traditional and new methods.
"you may not work around any technical limitations in the software."
That's absolutely stunning. I wonder exactly how broadly that could be interpreted?
If I buy any kind of third-party utility... antivirus software, backup software, a defragmenter... isn't that "working around" technical limiations in the software Microsoft provides? Isn't Firefox arguable a "workaround" for technical limitations in Internet Explorer?
It's about time to stop calling it a "personal computer" and start calling it a "Microsoft corporate computer."
Yes, it does matter, because dishonesty is dishonesty and fraud is fraud, but it seems to me that there is a perfectly simply buyers' algorithm:
a) Look at the item. b) Ignore any minimum bids, reserves, "buy it now" prices, current bid, history, etc; look only at the item itself. c) Decide how much you are willing to pay for it, shipped; d) determine the shipping cost; e) bid your maximum less shipping; f) take no further action whatsoever. Do not change your bid in response to any other ongoing bidding. If you are willing to raise it later, you weren't being honest with yourself when you determined your maximum earlier.
It seems to me that this makes you completely immune to sniping, shill bidding, etc. The only issues that remain are: a) the possibility of frequently being disappointed by not winning the auction; b) the unfairness of being unable to distinguish in advance between honest sellers, with which you may have a chance of getting a bargain if there are few other interested bidders, and dishonest ones, where there are always other interested bidders (i.e. shills).
...mentions the possibility of inexpensively turning the Moon into a billboard, by using rockets which scatters carbon black on the surface of the moon in patterns.
It certainly sounds broken to _me_. Why wouldn't all apps handle symlinks correctly?
In Mac OS 9, and in 8, and 7... when did they add aliases (the Mac OS equivalent to symlinks) anyway, I think it was 7... all the standard file routines, including the "open file" and "save file" dialogs, automatically resolved aliases.
A Mac application doesn't need to know anything about aliases to handle them "correctly." It is only a Mac application that needs to open an alias file directly as a file that needs to do something special.
Proper engineering means the "proper" default behavior is built into the API and requires no application modifications. It's half-assed engineering to add something new that requires all applications to be rewritten, by someone who understands the new feature, to work properly with the new feature. You shouldn't have to do anything special to open a file just because it happens to be a symlink, or on removable media, or across the network... and it doesn't, on most operating systems.
The Hindenburg did not catch fire, it was merely the hydrogen in the Hindenburg that caught fire.
The Titanic did not sink, it was just that Captain Smith did not adhere to the specifications as to how the Titanic should be operated (it says clearly on page 216, "Do not allow icebergs to rip open more than four of the water-tight compartments.")
And talk of "blunders" in the Battle of Balaclava are hogwash.
The current system essentially amounts to anticompetitive bundling. It frosts me that I cannot take "my" phone with me if I change carriers.
It also makes the overall package so complicated that it's fairly hard to make a cost comparison between competitive carriers.
It also creates an incentive for bloated, overly complex phones since it is in the carrier's interest to be certain that you are capable of using any cost-added services they provide.
Just as Consumer Reports advises that you should always negotiate car price, car financing terms, and tradein as separate deals, what I want to do, and what I think is best for the consumer, is simply buy my phone as a separate transaction from buying service... and be able to change carriers whenever I feel like it, while continuing to use the same instrument.
...and of course, I can't find it... a scientist published a picture of two identical snowflakes in, I'm almost sure, Science or Nature. And, no, I'm not talking about Snowflake Bentley. It was a byproduct of some kind of meteorological research, they were flying a plane through clouds where snow was being formed, and, as you'd expect, if two flakes of snow form under virtually identical conditions you end up with two virtually identical flakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Shelly Winters or Shelley Berman?
I don't care about all of that stuff.
All I want is something that will stop command-F from always popping up with the idiotic search "Kind = Any," "Last Opened = Any Date."
How about letting me set a preference for the default search? Or...
How about repeating whatever it is I did on the last search?
(To all those who are going to flame me by saying there is some way of changing it by rewriting some XML code in hidden directory somewhere... oh, go away and edit a Registry, why don't you?)
L. Chiariglione got my back up immediately when he defined DRM as "a means to manage rights with digital technologies." Well, no.
The most obnoxious thing about so-called DRM is that it allows content owners to manage any arbitrary restrictions. There is absolutely nothing about DRM to ensure that those restrictions are, in any way, aligned with rights the manager actually holds, and in practice DRM users invariably overreach.
A famous example was Adobe releasing an eBook version of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which is well and truly in the public domain, with restrictions prohibiting its use with text-to-speech converters... and compounding the error by presenting this with unfortunate wording, which said, not that they were preventing the electronic conversion to speech, but that the user could not "read it aloud."
Adobe has insisted that it was all a mistake, as it may well have been, but nevertheless DRM allowed them to exercise "rights" they did not possess.
Now, since nothing about intellectual property is obvious, and most likely not even a lawyer knows what the law is until there is a court case, there probably is no way at all to implement a technology that actually manages "rights." In practice, DRM manages whatever the content vendor believes or wishes its rights were, not what those right may actually be.
In practice, content rights owners opinions of the extent of their own rights are, at the very least, expansive and optimistic. The RIAA believes, for example, that when I copied my collection of vinyl LP's to CD-Rs, and the moment when I threw away the LPs I lost my right to listen to those CR-R's. Without DRM, such beliefs are no more than a curiosity. With DRM, the content owner becomes judge and jury, and the DRM techology becomes the executioner.
Cool! I'm trying to think of how one would do an exhibit on Ethernet... little talking mannequins that stop whenever they interrupt each other...
...the Hall of Fame for Great Americans... is a huge colonnade (630 feet long) with actual bronze busts, located at Bronx Community College (formerly NYU).
I found this out on the umpteenth watching of "The Wizard of Oz" when I suddenly wondered what the Munchkins were singing about when they sang "You will have a bust, have a bust, have a bust/In the Hall of Fame." I had to look it up because nobody I knew had any idea what the heck the "Hall of Fame" was, apart from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, of course.
By the way, it has a number of open slots. #19, #47, #49. I think someone should propose putting Metcalfe's bust in one of them. So he will be as well remembered as Rufus Choate, Charlotte Saunders Cushman, and John Lothrop Motley.
It really says something when an entire Hall of Fame can be forgotten, doesn't it? If a brick-and-mortar Hall of Fame is forgotten in less than one short century, I don't think the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which apparently has no physical existence, will be much more durable.
Ozymandias, anyone?
...was as much about reading as it was about playing. The authors had a quirky sense of humor, and the prose managed the trick of being just slightly tongue-in-cheek, humorously overwrought "purple prose," yet being genuinely evocative. It was a graphic novel without the graphics.
Infocom tried to master this as a kind of "house style," but I still think Crowther and Woods did it best.
...not that I have any idea for a new one, but the OS as we know it is one of the prime examples of a system whose rationale is "we've always done it that way."
People have forgotten that the original goal of the "operating system" was nothing other than to automate the function of the "operator," reducing personnel costs and making sure that the computer wasn't sitting around at $200 an hour waiting for someone to square up the next deck of cards and load them into the hopper.
The only people who think they can tell you what an OS really is are the students who have recently memorized some textbook definition. An OS is an intertwingled hairball of utterly arbitrary functionality. It has evolved from competitors copying whatever it is that another competitor did, messing some things up, adding some cool stuff, and doing random things dictated by marketing strategy.
Want to bundle HyperCard, but you promised the database vendors you wouldn't compete with them? Easy, don't call HyperCard a database, call it part of the "system software." Want to hide the fact that your graphical shell could run on a competitor's operating system? Easy, just say Windows is part of--no, wait, IS--the operating system. And so it goes.
It is quite possible to use a computer without an operating system. I'm not saying any of these are viable paradigms for today, but none of the original versions of BASIC required an operating system. MUMPS is largely self-contained, no OS needed.
There is an opportunity for some kind of brand-new conceptualization. No, I don't know what it is. If I did, I'd promoting on it. But, yes, I think it's very likely that twenty years from now the idea of an operating system will seem as quaint as the idea of a front panel with lights and switches on it. There was a time when nobody believed you could run a computer without _that_, either.
Don't tell me, let me guess... Windows only? Let's take a look.
Yep, Windows only..
Bastards.
The article says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion."
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
Contact lenses that alter eye color are already in popular, widespread use.
How hard would it be to construct a contact lens with a unique, fake, computer-generated iris image (no idea how you'd do that, but "fractals" sounds like a good buzzword to insert here)? Sound like it would be a lot easier than fake fingerprints.
In a situation where you knew you were being scanned, the officials might say "I see you're wearing contacts, remove them please," but I don't quite see an airport saying "no contact lenses allowed in this airport..." particular if the idea is that the scanning is supposed to be surreptitious.
Wal*Mart is unlikely to make this work, because (whatever you think of them) their excellences are not in innovative use of technology. What they are good at is business deals that look good to their suppliers but turn out to benefit Wal*Mart in the long run... and in ratcheting down their suppliers' prices.
How is Wal*Mart going to make their downloadable movies so much cheaper than the competition that they'll be able to drive the competition out of business? Force their IT department to outsource their movie download servers overseas?
And on the Internet everything is nearby. When a brick-and-mortar Wal*Mart succeeds in killing off the local small-town businesses, the local residents are faced with the choice of shopping at the local Wal*Mart or driving a long distance. On the Internet, even supposing that (say) Wal*Mart drives Amazon UnBox out of business, you're not going to have to drive ten miles to shop at the iTunes store.
The only way I can see Wal*Mart winning is if they use their famous muscle to pressure the MPAA into allowing their products to being delivered without DRM, and with the capability of burning a DVD. At the moment, the Wal*Mart video download website seems to be showing me such badly scrambled pages that I can't read how it works, but I don't think that's the way it works now.
I don't know what made you think that I think farmers are ignorant. They are everything you say... and according to Wendell Berry, every study that has ever been done has shown that small family farms are more efficient producers than large agribusiness enterprises.
The size of the investments that even a small farmer needs to make, and the relative thinness and unpredictability of the profit margin, are daunting.
"it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." (etext)
It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?
Music just has the right characteristics to be a good conversation topic.
Unless your a farmer or a meteorologist, you can't talk for more than a few seconds about the weather.
Sex, politics, and religion are way too dangerous.
But there is a lot of music, there is a lot to talk about, the chances are that two people selected at random know a lot more of the same music than the same books, the same movies, etc.
You can care enough about music to have a spirited, passionate discussion about it, but few people care so much about it that disagreements could lead to violence, or even to the breakup of a budding friendship.
If you take someone home to meet your parents, you don't need to worry about whether that person's taste in music will match your parents or not.
All religions look like they are "made up" when they are getting started, are small, and the core tenets are associated to a single leader, who claims to have received them by divine revelation.
The LDS Church (Mormons) have been around for a century and a half... old enough for some people consider it a "religion," but young enough for some people to feel that Joseph Smith just "made it up." Don't expect to see the golden plates in a museum the next time you visit Salt Lake City: Smith gave them back to the Angel Moroni.
How do you support Christianity looked during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth? Do you think the Roman authorities saw it as a religion? Or as something that Jesus just made up?
Deciding what counts as a religion and what doesn't is a very tricky business.
"A personal decision unrelated to Zune's performance..." Why, of course it was.
It was just a few weeks ago Bill Gates patted him on the back and said "Bry, you're doing a heckuva job." A
And Brian Valentine Jim Allchin Ray Ozzie said he was "behind him 1000%."
And the chair Ballmer threw at him was a top-of-the-line Aeron chair, the kind Ballmer throws only at people for whom he has the highest esteem.
The animations are impressive, but so was the animated water in Titanic and A Perfect Storm. I wish they had featured a comparison of the same animation, performed with the same computer resources, using the traditional and new methods.
"you may not work around any technical limitations in the software."
That's absolutely stunning. I wonder exactly how broadly that could be interpreted?
If I buy any kind of third-party utility... antivirus software, backup software, a defragmenter... isn't that "working around" technical limiations in the software Microsoft provides? Isn't Firefox arguable a "workaround" for technical limitations in Internet Explorer?
It's about time to stop calling it a "personal computer" and start calling it a "Microsoft corporate computer."
Yes, it does matter, because dishonesty is dishonesty and fraud is fraud, but it seems to me that there is a perfectly simply buyers' algorithm:
a) Look at the item. b) Ignore any minimum bids, reserves, "buy it now" prices, current bid, history, etc; look only at the item itself. c) Decide how much you are willing to pay for it, shipped; d) determine the shipping cost; e) bid your maximum less shipping; f) take no further action whatsoever. Do not change your bid in response to any other ongoing bidding. If you are willing to raise it later, you weren't being honest with yourself when you determined your maximum earlier.
It seems to me that this makes you completely immune to sniping, shill bidding, etc. The only issues that remain are: a) the possibility of frequently being disappointed by not winning the auction; b) the unfairness of being unable to distinguish in advance between honest sellers, with which you may have a chance of getting a bargain if there are few other interested bidders, and dishonest ones, where there are always other interested bidders (i.e. shills).
...mentions the possibility of inexpensively turning the Moon into a billboard, by using rockets which scatters carbon black on the surface of the moon in patterns.
It's only a matter of time.
It certainly sounds broken to _me_. Why wouldn't all apps handle symlinks correctly?
In Mac OS 9, and in 8, and 7... when did they add aliases (the Mac OS equivalent to symlinks) anyway, I think it was 7... all the standard file routines, including the "open file" and "save file" dialogs, automatically resolved aliases.
A Mac application doesn't need to know anything about aliases to handle them "correctly." It is only a Mac application that needs to open an alias file directly as a file that needs to do something special.
Proper engineering means the "proper" default behavior is built into the API and requires no application modifications. It's half-assed engineering to add something new that requires all applications to be rewritten, by someone who understands the new feature, to work properly with the new feature. You shouldn't have to do anything special to open a file just because it happens to be a symlink, or on removable media, or across the network... and it doesn't, on most operating systems.
The Hindenburg did not catch fire, it was merely the hydrogen in the Hindenburg that caught fire.
The Titanic did not sink, it was just that Captain Smith did not adhere to the specifications as to how the Titanic should be operated (it says clearly on page 216, "Do not allow icebergs to rip open more than four of the water-tight compartments.")
And talk of "blunders" in the Battle of Balaclava are hogwash.
The current system essentially amounts to anticompetitive bundling. It frosts me that I cannot take "my" phone with me if I change carriers.
It also makes the overall package so complicated that it's fairly hard to make a cost comparison between competitive carriers.
It also creates an incentive for bloated, overly complex phones since it is in the carrier's interest to be certain that you are capable of using any cost-added services they provide.
Just as Consumer Reports advises that you should always negotiate car price, car financing terms, and tradein as separate deals, what I want to do, and what I think is best for the consumer, is simply buy my phone as a separate transaction from buying service... and be able to change carriers whenever I feel like it, while continuing to use the same instrument.
If the iPhone moves us toward that model, good.
That was it. Thank you for finding it.
...and of course, I can't find it... a scientist published a picture of two identical snowflakes in, I'm almost sure, Science or Nature. And, no, I'm not talking about Snowflake Bentley. It was a byproduct of some kind of meteorological research, they were flying a plane through clouds where snow was being formed, and, as you'd expect, if two flakes of snow form under virtually identical conditions you end up with two virtually identical flakes.
I think this was in the 1990s.
It made the mainstream news at the time.