I wonder why the media is not covering the news of Iraqi deaths. Is it some sort of a PG-13[*] coverage of the war?
CNN has no way of really covering the Iraqi casualty situation. The CNN crew was thrown out of Baghdad, and Iraqi military units are off limits to them. It's not self-censorship; CNN would cover any garbage that gets ratings; they are bloodthirsty as the ratings support.
Wasn't it John W. Campbell that made all of the early advances with Campbellian Science Fiction? Granted, I'm not done reading Invaders from the Infinite yet, but he was the lead editor for Analog and it's predecessor...
A lot of people think journaling is a really difficult, complicated thing. But that was actually the easiest part by far. BFS journaling is maybe a thousand, maybe twelve hundred lines of code it was really not difficult. And people make it into this monstrous complicated thing. But again, we do things like change the disk buffer cache so the 64bit features that were needed to do journaling were supported.
In SGI's XFS, their journaling is bigger than all of BFS!
If its so easy, why don't all file systems implement such goodness? Personally, I'd love to see this everywhere.
Engelbart's early word processor had some features that haven't yet caught on. Using the NLS system, a simple text file could be presented in many different ways. The user could move quickly through a long document by viewing just the first sentence of each paragraph, or the first word of every sentence.
Now this is the sort of creative thinking Linux aps need to sink the MSS Office. To think these ideas are decades old.
I had RMS come to me on this product to make sure we weren't violating the GPL, and he admitted that we were not, but in the course of the conversation he proceeded to project onto the KDE project aspects of theKompany in a totally inappropriate fashion and was very negative about KDE in this regard.
He talked to RMS; always best avoided, at least without shielding. That's enough to throw anyone off their game.
The GNU Project launched in 1984 to develop a Unix-like operating system to be offered as free software. By 1991, the Linux kernel was available, ahead of the GNU kernel, called the Hurd.
Oh yeah, the the Linux kernel was available in 1991, ahead of the Hurd kernel. I'd say eleven years and counting is "ahead". It's already been through dozens of revisions, spawned countless companies, aided a massive market bubble, and caused a giant, mutant penguin to terrorized Redmond, WA. I'd say it's "ahead".
Pretty much what happened. Here is a little of the THE WALL STREET JOURNAL version:
WHITE LAKE, Mich. -- Stewart Richardson seemed to be the model of a
successful eBay entrepreneur, and January promised to be one of his best
months yet. For five years he had built up a business on eBay as an online
dealer in collectible figurines. In some cases, he was able to auction off
whimsical ceramic creatures from the Wee Forest Folk line for hundreds of
dollars apiece.
On the feedback bulletin board on eBay
Inc.'s auction Web site, customers posted rave reviews of their experiences
with Mr. Richardson and his business. A few days into the new year, he
completed his biggest series of online auctions ever, collecting hundreds
of thousands of dollars within a matter of weeks.
Then, on Jan. 17, Mr. Richardson told the handful of employees at his
figurine shop here in this blue-collar Detroit suburb that he was going out to lunch.
He hasn't been heard from since.
Thursday, Mr. Richardson's store was locked and appeared to be in
disarray. A woman inside refused a reporter's request to unlock the door,
and a sign told UPS delivery personnel to go away.
Scores of online bidders who bought the little porcelain mice, moles,
angels and other figures in Mr. Richardson's last auctions say they never
received the items they paid for. The Oakland County, Mich., Sheriff's
Department says it has handed the case over to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. A person familiar with the investigation says authorities
don't know where Mr. Richardson is but that the FBI is treating the case as
a fraud investigation.
Mr. Clark's Conclusion
There seems to be little doubt among his would-be customers that Mr.
Richardson pulled off one of the most remarkable con jobs in the almost
seven-year history of the eBay auction site, the Internet's most successful
commercial outpost. "The guy ran off with the money," says Gene Clark, a
computer consultant in East Brunswick, N.J., who says he paid Mr.
Richardson $700 for four porcelain mice that never arrived.
A person familiar with the law-enforcement investigation estimates that
Mr. Richardson reaped about $225,000 from the recent series of auctions,
which ended Jan. 4, but some of the bidders say that figure is too low.
According to his wife, Mr. Richardson withdrew a total of $220,000 from
various business bank accounts in the days before his disappearance.
EBay says it shut down Mr. Richardson's account with the company on Jan.
23 after it received a flurry of complaints from users and concluded that
his recent auctions amounted to a major case of fraud. "This is a pretty
extraordinary situation," says Rob Chestnut, the ex-federal prosecutor who
leads eBay's fraud-prevention team.
February 21, 2002
Toyland Is Tough, Even for Robots
By BARNABY J. FEDER
But if Mr. Tilden has become widely known, even admired, among robotics experts, his views have not won him a large following. Nor has his recent plunge into the toy business played out as he hoped. Simpler is not always better for toy makers looking for unique products, he learned, and unexpected events, like domestic terrorism, can change perceptions of even a toy.
Mr. Tilden has been arguing with little success for well over a decade that progress in robotics would be much more rapid if researchers concentrated on designing relatively dumb robots rather than devices stuffed with increasingly powerful programmable electronic brains. The trick, in Mr. Tilden's view, is to equip simple-minded but physically robust robots with mechanical variations on animal nervous systems.
Nervous networks do not organize and process information digitally as computers do. Nonetheless, he points out, every second of life on earth is filled with millions of types of dim-witted creatures using nervous systems to respond instantly to environmental challenges that stump the powerful digital brains of today's computer-driven robots.
"All life is analog," Mr. Tilden said.
Many other robotics experts are also interested in nervous networks. And many are just as convinced as Mr. Tilden of the value of designing robots from simple building blocks. But most believe that without digital brainpower - lots of it - machines will have little potential to learn from experience and be far too limited in their ability to interact usefully with humans or other machines.
The robotic design wars that have preoccupied Mr. Tilden since the late 1980's have largely been waged in university laboratories, obscure journals and government-financed research projects. Mr. Tilden's main livelihood since 1993, for instance, has come from research at the federal government's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In recent years, though, the toy industry has emerged as a new playground for the robotics theorists. In this sector, as in the others, the advocates of programmable robotics clearly have the lead and the upper hand. Products like the Sony Aibo (which cost $2,500 when it was introduced in 1999), Furby and Lego Mindstorms have been huge hits. Robotics and virtual pets accounted for only $160 million of the $2.3 billion toy industry's revenues in 2000, but Poochi and Tekno, both robotic toys, were individual best sellers.
The novelty of Mr. Tilden's approach and some of his inventions caught the eye of executives at WowWee just over a year ago, shortly before the company was acquired by Hasbro, the second-largest toy company after Mattel. Mr. Tilden said he was thrilled by the invitation to become a consultant.
"You build something for NASA and you only build two of them," Mr. Tilden said. "You build for the military and they might want 50. But here it could be millions."
Mr. Tilden's fondest dreams were battered a bit by his first year in the toy business, though. B.I.O.-Bugs, priced at $39.95, reached toy stores last September. There were four bugs in the line, each with slightly different behavioral tendencies. The red Predator was the most aggressive, the blue Stomper the noisiest, the green Destroyer slightly more suited to moving in rough terrain and the yellow Acceleraider the speediest. The battery-driven bugs operate on their own or under remote control.
Mr. Tilden had originally hoped for a broader line including some bugs intended to appeal to girls rather than the 4- to 9- year-old boys Hasbro had in mind. Mr. Tilden also wanted to make B.I.O.-Bugs easy to dissect and alter, a starkly different attitude from that of Sony, which has threatened to sue customers who publish information about how to alter its Aibo dogs or the software that runs them.
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else," Mr. Tilden said. "They are my colleagues of the future."
Hasbro had a more commercial and conservative perspective than Mr. Tilden's, of course. Before mass production began last year in Hong Kong, he said, Hasbro told him that a chunk of the "neural network" engineering needed to be converted into digital functions executed by a microprocessor so that B.I.O.-Bugs would be harder for competitors to reverse-engineer and duplicate.
"It ended up with about 80 percent of what I wanted," Mr. Tilden said.
Hasbro ended up feeling similarly unfulfilled. B.I.O. - Bugs sold well - they were, for example, the best-selling robotic toy at F.A.O. Schwarz during the Christmas season, said Steven Benoff, the toy retailer's chief buyer for electronics, action figures, video games and vehicles. But overall sales added up to "a double or a triple" rather than a home run, according to Loren T. Taylor, the Hasbro executive who oversees WowWee. In the toy industry, only a smash hit guarantees a line's survival beyond its first year.
Mr. Tilden and some independent experts are convinced that B.I.O.-Bugs would have done much better had Hasbro not been forced to abandon a portion of its advertising campaign in October. The television ads, which were geared primarily toward children and fans of science fiction shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation," began attracting angry letters from viewers who said the landscape that the bugs were crawling over looked like the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Then came the anthrax attacks. "We had the worst name you could come up with for selling toys during an anthrax scare," Mr. Tilden said.
Whatever the reasons, Hasbro decided that expanding the line this year was too risky. B.I.O.-Bugs shipped last year will remain on the shelves in this country, and B.I.O.-Bugs will be introduced in overseas markets that did not get them last year. But Mr. Tilden was told late last year to put aside plans for new B.I.O.-Bugs and focus instead on enhancing dragons, hovercraft and several other toys that WowWee introduced last week at the Toy Fair.
"They would have been like Ferraris compared to Model T's," Mr. Tilden said, sighing over the B.I.O.-Bug enhancements he was told to shelve.
If the B.I.O.-Bug experience has done less than Mr. Tilden had hoped to highlight the commercial value of his robotics concepts, it certainly has not shaken his faith in them. He still believes that large numbers of such simple devices are more likely to be able to execute many tasks without human supervision than the brainy robots most researchers have been trying to build. As evidence, he often points to the tiny, slow-moving devices he has built to clean the floors and windows in his condominium apartment.
Meanwhile, he is still having fun working for Hasbro and is constantly on the prowl for chances to demonstrate his concepts, both inside the toy business and beyond. On the whole, he said, the experience with B.I.O.-Bugs has been good. That has not always been the case with his inventions, he said.
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
But life - robotic as well as human - goes on. Some of the same technology is embedded in a fantasy snake that Mr. Tilden recently designed for Hasbro.
Just what exactly is the soul going for these days, Mr. Icaza?
From the looks of the statement below, a pretty nice amount.
Miguel of course is leading development on Mono, the project to create an open source version of Microsoft's.NET framework - the C# compiler, run-time and class libraries. Which he says is a lot of fun. It's sponsored by Ximian, the company he founded, but most of the hundreds of contributors are not Ximian employees.
. . . to reduce the size of the phone will reduce the size of the battery . ..
"Luckily," he says dryly, "the article answers this very issue."
Indirectly, better filtering helps reduce the size of a cellphone because lower-quality filtering results in a signal loss that is corrected by more amplification, which drains power. More power means bigger batteries and extra electronics within the phone.
"The ultimate benefit," Mr. Mueller said, "is a smaller, lighter phone that works well and works longer between charges."
"People can rant and rave on the Internet all they want, but when they cross the line of calling people to action to violently overthrow the Constitution of the United States, they have a problem," said McLaughlin.
So when just another lone hacker kid defaces five Web sites, it justifies "surrounding and raiding [the] house with machine guns, shotguns, bullet-proof vests." Being labeled a hacker (correctly, this time) is really getting to be as dangerous as being called a child molester.
Its legions of techies have eagerly spent money donated by corporate sponsors since the lab opened its doors in 1985. The money--an annual budget of about $40 million--went not only to sometimes wild ideas like "smart" potholders, dice, chairs and animal building blocks, but also apparently to fund some dot-com-style largesse. . . . won't be paid for out of the laboratory till: cell phones, limos, first-class flights and furniture. (It's not clear whether this applies to new chairs and couches that "think.")
Oh such brutal cuts. And less than two years after the private sector had to cut such frivolities as . . . everything. I know my company sympathizes with them.
Alert! The country's major loonie collection centers on Mendocino. Seriously, if this guy wasn't just a flaming asshole, he'd move to Amish country or one of many foreign nations where this isn't an issue.
Sales growth was strongest in Amazon's international segment -- its United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan Web sites -- rising 81% to $262.4 million.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times must slashdotters tell these people how the World works ?
And here I was using the arc welder.
The Gardener
I wonder why the media is not covering the news of Iraqi deaths. Is it some sort of a PG-13[*] coverage of the war?
CNN has no way of really covering the Iraqi casualty situation. The CNN crew was thrown out of Baghdad, and Iraqi military units are off limits to them. It's not self-censorship; CNN would cover any garbage that gets ratings; they are bloodthirsty as the ratings support.
The Gardener
know of any kewl linux user groups down here?
The local Linux user's group is the Suncoast Linux User's Group or SLUG. The Web site is suncoastlug.org
The Gardener
I'm getting a blank page on the site listed in the article.
I'm getting it just fine; keep reloading it until you get it. Or singlehandedly slashdot it.
The Gardener
Wasn't Michael's posting yesterday enough?. Its still on the front page.
The Gardener
Wasn't it John W. Campbell that made all of the early advances with Campbellian Science Fiction? Granted, I'm not done reading Invaders from the Infinite yet, but he was the lead editor for Analog and it's predecessor...
Not that Campbell. This Campbell with The Joseph Campbell Foundation Web site. He is (was) the leading name in comparative mythology.
The Gardener
Yeah, Red Herring carried the story, and with a little lower "fluff factor". At least, it seemed to me . . .
The Gardener
A lot of people think journaling is a really difficult, complicated thing. But that was actually the easiest part by far. BFS journaling is maybe a thousand, maybe twelve hundred lines of code it was really not difficult. And people make it into this monstrous complicated thing. But again, we do things like change the disk buffer cache so the 64bit features that were needed to do journaling were supported.
In SGI's XFS, their journaling is bigger than all of BFS!
If its so easy, why don't all file systems implement such goodness? Personally, I'd love to see this everywhere.
The Gardener
Engelbart's early word processor had some features that haven't yet caught on. Using the NLS system, a simple text file could be presented in many different ways. The user could move quickly through a long document by viewing just the first sentence of each paragraph, or the first word of every sentence.
Now this is the sort of creative thinking Linux aps need to sink the MSS Office. To think these ideas are decades old.
The Gardener
I had RMS come to me on this product to make sure we weren't violating the GPL, and he admitted that we were not, but in the course of the conversation he proceeded to project onto the KDE project aspects of theKompany in a totally inappropriate fashion and was very negative about KDE in this regard.
He talked to RMS; always best avoided, at least without shielding. That's enough to throw anyone off their game.
THe Gardener
There are Web sites devoted to following the criminal antics of the ICANN thievery, such as ICANN Blog and ICANN Watch.
The Gardener
The GNU Project launched in 1984 to develop a Unix-like operating system to be offered as free software. By 1991, the Linux kernel was available, ahead of the GNU kernel, called the Hurd.
Oh yeah, the the Linux kernel was available in 1991, ahead of the Hurd kernel. I'd say eleven years and counting is "ahead". It's already been through dozens of revisions, spawned countless companies, aided a massive market bubble, and caused a giant, mutant penguin to terrorized Redmond, WA. I'd say it's "ahead".
The Gardener
a large number of issues raised by comments from W3C Members and the general public.
That is so much more polite than "We got caught and got our ass reamed.
The Gardener
Pretty much what happened. Here is a little of the THE WALL STREET JOURNAL version:
WHITE LAKE, Mich. -- Stewart Richardson seemed to be the model of a successful eBay entrepreneur, and January promised to be one of his best months yet. For five years he had built up a business on eBay as an online dealer in collectible figurines. In some cases, he was able to auction off whimsical ceramic creatures from the Wee Forest Folk line for hundreds of dollars apiece.
On the feedback bulletin board on eBay Inc.'s auction Web site, customers posted rave reviews of their experiences with Mr. Richardson and his business. A few days into the new year, he completed his biggest series of online auctions ever, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars within a matter of weeks.
Then, on Jan. 17, Mr. Richardson told the handful of employees at his figurine shop here in this blue-collar Detroit suburb that he was going out to lunch.
He hasn't been heard from since.
Thursday, Mr. Richardson's store was locked and appeared to be in disarray. A woman inside refused a reporter's request to unlock the door, and a sign told UPS delivery personnel to go away.
Scores of online bidders who bought the little porcelain mice, moles, angels and other figures in Mr. Richardson's last auctions say they never received the items they paid for. The Oakland County, Mich., Sheriff's Department says it has handed the case over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A person familiar with the investigation says authorities don't know where Mr. Richardson is but that the FBI is treating the case as a fraud investigation.
Mr. Clark's Conclusion
There seems to be little doubt among his would-be customers that Mr. Richardson pulled off one of the most remarkable con jobs in the almost seven-year history of the eBay auction site, the Internet's most successful commercial outpost. "The guy ran off with the money," says Gene Clark, a computer consultant in East Brunswick, N.J., who says he paid Mr. Richardson $700 for four porcelain mice that never arrived.
A person familiar with the law-enforcement investigation estimates that Mr. Richardson reaped about $225,000 from the recent series of auctions, which ended Jan. 4, but some of the bidders say that figure is too low. According to his wife, Mr. Richardson withdrew a total of $220,000 from various business bank accounts in the days before his disappearance.
EBay says it shut down Mr. Richardson's account with the company on Jan. 23 after it received a flurry of complaints from users and concluded that his recent auctions amounted to a major case of fraud. "This is a pretty extraordinary situation," says Rob Chestnut, the ex-federal prosecutor who leads eBay's fraud-prevention team.
February 21, 2002
Toyland Is Tough, Even for Robots
By BARNABY J. FEDER
But if Mr. Tilden has become widely known, even admired, among robotics experts, his views have not won him a large following. Nor has his recent plunge into the toy business played out as he hoped. Simpler is not always better for toy makers looking for unique products, he learned, and unexpected events, like domestic terrorism, can change perceptions of even a toy.
Mr. Tilden has been arguing with little success for well over a decade that progress in robotics would be much more rapid if researchers concentrated on designing relatively dumb robots rather than devices stuffed with increasingly powerful programmable electronic brains. The trick, in Mr. Tilden's view, is to equip simple-minded but physically robust robots with mechanical variations on animal nervous systems.
Nervous networks do not organize and process information digitally as computers do. Nonetheless, he points out, every second of life on earth is filled with millions of types of dim-witted creatures using nervous systems to respond instantly to environmental challenges that stump the powerful digital brains of today's computer-driven robots.
"All life is analog," Mr. Tilden said.
Many other robotics experts are also interested in nervous networks. And many are just as convinced as Mr. Tilden of the value of designing robots from simple building blocks. But most believe that without digital brainpower - lots of it - machines will have little potential to learn from experience and be far too limited in their ability to interact usefully with humans or other machines.
The robotic design wars that have preoccupied Mr. Tilden since the late 1980's have largely been waged in university laboratories, obscure journals and government-financed research projects. Mr. Tilden's main livelihood since 1993, for instance, has come from research at the federal government's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In recent years, though, the toy industry has emerged as a new playground for the robotics theorists. In this sector, as in the others, the advocates of programmable robotics clearly have the lead and the upper hand. Products like the Sony Aibo (which cost $2,500 when it was introduced in 1999), Furby and Lego Mindstorms have been huge hits. Robotics and virtual pets accounted for only $160 million of the $2.3 billion toy industry's revenues in 2000, but Poochi and Tekno, both robotic toys, were individual best sellers.
The novelty of Mr. Tilden's approach and some of his inventions caught the eye of executives at WowWee just over a year ago, shortly before the company was acquired by Hasbro, the second-largest toy company after Mattel. Mr. Tilden said he was thrilled by the invitation to become a consultant.
"You build something for NASA and you only build two of them," Mr. Tilden said. "You build for the military and they might want 50. But here it could be millions."
Mr. Tilden's fondest dreams were battered a bit by his first year in the toy business, though. B.I.O.-Bugs, priced at $39.95, reached toy stores last September. There were four bugs in the line, each with slightly different behavioral tendencies. The red Predator was the most aggressive, the blue Stomper the noisiest, the green Destroyer slightly more suited to moving in rough terrain and the yellow Acceleraider the speediest. The battery-driven bugs operate on their own or under remote control.
Mr. Tilden had originally hoped for a broader line including some bugs intended to appeal to girls rather than the 4- to 9- year-old boys Hasbro had in mind. Mr. Tilden also wanted to make B.I.O.-Bugs easy to dissect and alter, a starkly different attitude from that of Sony, which has threatened to sue customers who publish information about how to alter its Aibo dogs or the software that runs them.
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else," Mr. Tilden said. "They are my colleagues of the future."
Hasbro had a more commercial and conservative perspective than Mr. Tilden's, of course. Before mass production began last year in Hong Kong, he said, Hasbro told him that a chunk of the "neural network" engineering needed to be converted into digital functions executed by a microprocessor so that B.I.O.-Bugs would be harder for competitors to reverse-engineer and duplicate.
"It ended up with about 80 percent of what I wanted," Mr. Tilden said.
Hasbro ended up feeling similarly unfulfilled. B.I.O. - Bugs sold well - they were, for example, the best-selling robotic toy at F.A.O. Schwarz during the Christmas season, said Steven Benoff, the toy retailer's chief buyer for electronics, action figures, video games and vehicles. But overall sales added up to "a double or a triple" rather than a home run, according to Loren T. Taylor, the Hasbro executive who oversees WowWee. In the toy industry, only a smash hit guarantees a line's survival beyond its first year.
Mr. Tilden and some independent experts are convinced that B.I.O.-Bugs would have done much better had Hasbro not been forced to abandon a portion of its advertising campaign in October. The television ads, which were geared primarily toward children and fans of science fiction shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation," began attracting angry letters from viewers who said the landscape that the bugs were crawling over looked like the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Then came the anthrax attacks. "We had the worst name you could come up with for selling toys during an anthrax scare," Mr. Tilden said.
Whatever the reasons, Hasbro decided that expanding the line this year was too risky. B.I.O.-Bugs shipped last year will remain on the shelves in this country, and B.I.O.-Bugs will be introduced in overseas markets that did not get them last year. But Mr. Tilden was told late last year to put aside plans for new B.I.O.-Bugs and focus instead on enhancing dragons, hovercraft and several other toys that WowWee introduced last week at the Toy Fair.
"They would have been like Ferraris compared to Model T's," Mr. Tilden said, sighing over the B.I.O.-Bug enhancements he was told to shelve.
If the B.I.O.-Bug experience has done less than Mr. Tilden had hoped to highlight the commercial value of his robotics concepts, it certainly has not shaken his faith in them. He still believes that large numbers of such simple devices are more likely to be able to execute many tasks without human supervision than the brainy robots most researchers have been trying to build. As evidence, he often points to the tiny, slow-moving devices he has built to clean the floors and windows in his condominium apartment.
Meanwhile, he is still having fun working for Hasbro and is constantly on the prowl for chances to demonstrate his concepts, both inside the toy business and beyond. On the whole, he said, the experience with B.I.O.-Bugs has been good. That has not always been the case with his inventions, he said.
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
But life - robotic as well as human - goes on. Some of the same technology is embedded in a fantasy snake that Mr. Tilden recently designed for Hasbro.
I'm going to take your post apart and build a killer robot, colleague
The Gardener
Just what exactly is the soul going for these days, Mr. Icaza?
From the looks of the statement below, a pretty nice amount.
Miguel of course is leading development on Mono, the project to create an open source version of Microsoft's .NET framework - the C# compiler, run-time and class libraries. Which he says is a lot of fun. It's sponsored by Ximian, the company he founded, but most of the hundreds of contributors are not Ximian employees.
The Gardener
. . . to reduce the size of the phone will reduce the size of the battery . . .
"Luckily," he says dryly, "the article answers this very issue."
Indirectly, better filtering helps reduce the size of a cellphone because lower-quality filtering results in a signal loss that is corrected by more amplification, which drains power. More power means bigger batteries and extra electronics within the phone.
"The ultimate benefit," Mr. Mueller said, "is a smaller, lighter phone that works well and works longer between charges."
The Gardener
Now if they just had some kind of thought-based dialing system...
So, if I'm with my wife, but start thinking about my girlfriend, suddenly I'm dialing her? I can see a downside here . . .
The Gardener
"People can rant and rave on the Internet all they want, but when they cross the line of calling people to action to violently overthrow the Constitution of the United States, they have a problem," said McLaughlin.
So when just another lone hacker kid defaces five Web sites, it justifies "surrounding and raiding [the] house with machine guns, shotguns, bullet-proof vests." Being labeled a hacker (correctly, this time) is really getting to be as dangerous as being called a child molester.
The Gardener
Here, at JPL. .
For reasons that escape me, the bicycling site bikindex has some nice shots, here
The European Space Agency here.
The Gardener
Its legions of techies have eagerly spent money donated by corporate sponsors since the lab opened its doors in 1985. The money--an annual budget of about $40 million--went not only to sometimes wild ideas like "smart" potholders, dice, chairs and animal building blocks, but also apparently to fund some dot-com-style largesse. . . . won't be paid for out of the laboratory till: cell phones, limos, first-class flights and furniture. (It's not clear whether this applies to new chairs and couches that "think.")
Oh such brutal cuts. And less than two years after the private sector had to cut such frivolities as . . . everything. I know my company sympathizes with them.
The Gardener
Alert! The country's major loonie collection centers on Mendocino. Seriously, if this guy wasn't just a flaming asshole, he'd move to Amish country or one of many foreign nations where this isn't an issue.
The Gardener
No, they got it from Europe
Sales growth was strongest in Amazon's international segment -- its United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan Web sites -- rising 81% to $262.4 million.
The Gardener