So what we need is a largely automatic system for generating direct, explicit, licenses between artists and broadcasters (aka Internet radio stations) so that a single artist can form hundreds or thousands of unique relationships with stations without spending years drafting contracts, and vice versa. It can't be an aggregation service in the SoundExchange sense because SoundExchange bans that, so it would have to instead create the documents to generate a direct contract and then facilitate the signing and exchange of those contract documents.
Maybe it would work by allowing a broadcaster to search the site for artists that are willing to offer their music under certain terms, select those of interest, copy the broadcaster's specific information in to a form pre-filled with the terms, have the broadcaster digitally sign the contract (if I recall correctly Clinton signed a bill making a digital signature legally binding the same way as an old fashioned analog signature is binding) and then submit the contract to the artists who could log in and review the contract and sign it or not...or perhaps digitally sign all of them at once, or all of them with particular terms at once. Then once the contracts were signed a PDF would be generated and given to each party to print out and file.
There would, of course, also be a mechanism for either party to amend the terms of the boiler plate contract, although doing so would flag the contract as one needing special attention.
A clever extension of this would allow the artist to upload his/her music to the contract generation site so that as soon as the broadcaster signed the contract it could buy copies of the artists tracks and download them immediately.
Creative Commons licenses sound good at first, but no actual signed contract explicitly changes hands. The above system would solve that problem without being an aggregator itself; it merely facilitates the two parties reaching an explicit signed agreement.
Finally the good part: SoundExchange would have to keep track of all of these exceptions to the statutory licensing.
A simpler solution that might have a similar or greater effect, and that is already practiced by some ISPs, is to block port 25 traffic from leaving an ISP's subnet unless a particular customer requested that privilege. This would not be an issue to most casual Internet users who only use their ISPs mail servers to start with -- the kind of people perhaps most susceptible to becoming nodes in botnets. Other people could simply ask for the privilege and the ISPs would have a much smaller pool of potential abusers to police.
This would be the Internet service analog of a secure default setting -- it would only limit how you could use your Internet connection until you request the additional privileges.
There are technical problems to doing this, but those vary based on how the system is implemented. A simple way to accomplish this would is to have two pools of IPs, one with port 25 privileges and the other without.
This might also be an inconvenience for people trying to connect to their mail servers directly from on the road (through an ISP implementing such a policy), or a mobile user relying on their own local computer as their mail server, but given the extent of various kinds of filtering of both port 25 and based on all sorts of fuzzier characteristics at the receiving MXs, there really shouldn't be many people doing this anyway. Plus, we have authenticated SMTP and port 587 to solve such problems.
Many ISPs do something similar already, and include the port 25 privileges as a package with a static IP address.
The other problems are more social: 1) How do you convince an ISP to do this? and, 2) How can you convince ISPs not to charge more to not artificially limit service?
I don't have the answer to those questions, but number two is similar to the network neutrality issue: philosophically I don't approve of companies charging more for a service that hasn't been artificially constrained in the first place.
And granted, there are many other things besides spam that botnets can be used for, but I have to welcome any simple practical solutions to reduce spam even if that solution isn't complete or perfect.
Microsoft cannot succeed with a strategy built around the idea of "it just works" because, fundamentally, Microsoft doesn't know what it means for something to "just work." Microsoft has, time and again, failed to produce highly usuable software for the same reason: it doesn't understand how the system should behave*.
To make up for this lack of understanding (I doubt MS even realizes it doesn't understand how systems should behave) the company builds scripted interactions (unlovingly known to all of us as those irritating "wizards" that keep you from successfully creating the graph you want in Excel, etc...). In short, MS papers over bad behavior with bad interfaces that obstruct, obfuscate, and harass the poor souls who have to suffer through them. Microsoft has even named this philosophy: recall "Task Based Interfaces."
And may the Lord have mercy if you don't want to perform a task Microsoft hasn't already thought up.
Apple, on the other hand, approaches the problem differently. Rather than asking "how can we make it easy for someone to do XYZ," Apple asks "what should the tool XYZ do," and then if necessary builds an interface that allows people to modify that behavior through understandable, easy-to-find, commands/menus/buttons, etc.**
Apple's strategy, starkly 180 degrees from Microsoft's "task based" strategy, is a human based system. Apple doesn't guess what you're trying to do, but instead makes tools that do what you expect. Thus people, not magical condescending wizards, can apply the tools to whatever variety of tasks may be at hand. So things "just work" because the tools do what we expect from them. Then the computer becomes transparent to the task, rather than the focus of the task itself.
You probably won't encounter a single "wizard" included by Apple in OS X, aside from the intial setup assistant that isn't so much a "wizard" -- there's nothing "guiding" you through the setup screens -- as just a few screens full of fields of information the computer collects to get OS X configured appropriately.
As long as Microsoft doesn't understand that for something to "just work," a tool needs to do what people expect, and that people should be able to directly interact with the tool's interface in a manner that allows even a relatively uninformed person to make the tool do what they want, then Microsoft won't succeed in building highly usable human interfaces.
Since I'm confident that Microsoft hasn't turned a new leaf in this respect, I'm also confident the "it just works" campaign will amount to nothing more than saturation marketing and a lot of grumbling*** about cute animated puppy dogs pissing on our files.
--
* You could probably make a pretty good case for this problem being a fundamental problem in other aspects of Microsoft's design philosophy: bloat, poor security, inconsistency, and generally quirky, hard to predict behavior, could all spring from the same fertile root.
** This is a recursive strategy. It's not enough to make aprogram that does what a person expects, but every sub-piece of that program also needs to also do what a functionally experienced, but non-expert, user interacting with the tool for the first time might think it should do. Each button should be intuitively named. Menu items should be logically organized. The interface should be sufficiently uncluttered that interface elements are readily seen. It's OK for a system to have an unfamiliar way of interacting with the user (for example, drag-and-drop) if that method of interaction is widely applicable across the entire system so that once someone is familiar with the technique they can use it elsewhere. And so on.
*** Here's an amusing, and very telling, anecdote about MS human interfaces: I was once talking to a Microsoft programmer about user interface issues, and brought up Clippy as one of the most glaring examples of Microsoft's human interface failures...but the programmer refused to believe me that most people actual
The linked article notes that "16 of a total of 31 RORSAT nuclear reactors orbited lost coolant following core ejection into disposal orbits."
The biggest short term problem seems to be the loss of NaK coolant, with the number of these drops "estimated to be 110,000 to over 115,000." Wih the possibility for more of them to leak if other space junk punctures the radiators of the satellites. In the most immediate future these droplets are mostly just navigation hazards, but the amount of radiation that might remain in them is unknown, and it's not known if they're further contaminated. I'm guessing the radioactive argon in the droplets, of which there is a presently unknown quantity, is a relatively small hazard...but please correct me if this suspicion is wrong.
I'm not sure how radioactive the reactors themselves might be; the article didn't give much information on this side of the problem. If anyone is familiar with Soviet spaceborne reactor design, please speak up! My strong suspicion is, however, that even in the likelihood they are thermoelectric reactors with short-lived isotopes, there would still be enough residual radiation to make them unpleasant devices to have land on you patio. And since there are so many of them, it seems a little too optimistic that they'll all land in the ocean.
Finally, I found it interesting that the article notes "we are on the threshold, if we have not already exceeded it, of reaching a critical density' of objects in low Earth orbit, where collisional fragmentation will cause the debris environment to slowly grow even if all other sources are eliminated." How will we respond if low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous for reliable operation of satellites or manned spaceflight? How dangerous is it right now, or does anyone know how many satellites are believed to have been lost due to space collisions?
A lot of people seem to be forgetting that as of the mid-1970s we knew there was once liquid water on Mars thanks to pictures beamed back by the Viking probes. These images very clearly show channels and streamlined features that would have only been created by liquid water moving on the surface of Mars. (There was also more ambiguous evidence of flowing groundwater, but that doesn't detract from the strength of evidence for other observed features being created by moving surface water.)
The interesting questions were how long the water had water existed on the surface (was the flooding episodic, or was mars generally damp for a long time), when did the climate cease to be able to support widespread liquid water, where did the water go, and was there ever life?
The current probes confirm our earlier analysis: there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars, but this is scarcely news. (It would have been much more surprising if they showed water didn't once exist on Mars.) The probes presently exploring Mars have, however, gone much further than simply confirming the presence of liquid water in the Martian past; they have shown that the water that once flowed there wasn't just temporarily liberated by catastrophic events like meteorite impacts, but had to have remained liquid on the surface for quite some time. Standing bodies of water formed the intruiging geologic formations observed by the Opportunity rover, and have important implications for understanding the ancient Martian climate...in addition to increasing the likelihood that life could have once thrived there.
So if scientists are speaking up more about the possibility that Mars might have harbored, or might still harbor, life, it's probably because we're slowly accumulating a more interesting body of evidence. I don't perceive any big coverup, just many new discoveries.
As for detecting methane in the atmosphere, we've probably never previously detected it because the instrumentation with the resolution needed to detect it hasn't previously been flown to Mars, and it's difficult (but clearly not impossible) to make similar measurements from Earth. The tone of the article suggests that people have been trying to detect methane before this, but have only recently succeeded, which isn't too surprising given the thing that we were trying to detect exists at only about 10.5 parts per billion.
I don't see that it's necessarily true that large scale fraud would not be successful. Limited fraud might be easier to get away with, but what are the chances that large scale fraud would succeed?
With the current electronic voting systems, since there's no way to recount, and no way verify your vote was cast the way you intended, the only likely way to "fix" the fraud would be to re-vote the election. Elections offices really don't like to do that, and even the simple fact of doing so would very likely influence the outcome of the vote when it is finally accepted: if one candidate would prosper by reduced turnout, it's possible that forcing a new vote would be enough of a change to push them to a "legitimate" victory, even if they wouldn't have won an untainted original vote. On the other hand, if the fraud were perpetrated again and the results were the same as the first vote, the pressure to accept the fraudulent results might push the wrong person to victory, i.e. "well, the people have spoken, and what they say in the exit polls isn't how they are voting." Or, "how many times can we keep re-voting?" Eventually "the clock runs out."
We aren't going to be quick invalidate a vote just because the "wrong" candidate won. Afterall, exit polls aren't the official count, and even if we "know" the official count was fraudulent, the exit polls still don't have any legal weight to decide the election -- if they did, we could avoid this whole e-voting machines mess from the outset by placing a few reporters on street corners to decide who should be county commisioner or President of The United States.
That said, yes, it might still be better (for the people rigging the election) to perpetrate the fraud subtly, but as we already know, e-voting comes to the rescue for small scale fraud too!
I know the "Ask Slashdot" question was in regards to Windows, but since VersionTracker came up I thought it might be helpful for Mac users to remember MacUpdate as well. Its pretty similar to version tracker, but the site seems faster, less buggy, less spammy, and is altogether a bit more pleasant to use. When I've gone looking for Mac freeware and shareware it seems easier to find it on MacUpdate.
NOTE: I'm not affiliated with either site, although I am wearing a VersionTracker t-shirt.
You, unlike many people, may have been able to benefit from this sort of thing. A lot of other people would just get slapped and a door slammed in their face about 15 seconds in to the first date!
Breakthrough? Yes.
Universally positive breakthrough, or breakthrough conducive to growing healthy relationships? Not always.
The whole unfiltered truth can be dangerous. Manners and formality exist as a social constructs to, at least in part, suppress words and actions that might otherwise interfere with the smooth functioning of society; they're filters against our animal instincts and raw feelings. Admittedly sometimes people bite their tongues when it would be a lot better to come out and say something, even if it is dangerous, controversial, or "improper." But there are a also whole lot of times when things are better left unsaid. Either way, I'd like to make that decision myself rather than have every inaudible mumbling broadcast or recorded for posterity.
Of course, this technology doesn't mean all that would necessarily be broadcast or recorded, but if it weren't, then it also probably wouldn't be very applicable to dealing with girlfriends; it's usually a spontaneous moment when something should (or shouldn't) be said.
I think I gave up on Hotmail in early 1999. At that time it was sluggish and unreliable despite the ample internet connection at the university through which I was connecting. At least I didn't regularly experience slow performance on other Internet sites.
I'm not sure where the Spammers were getting my address; I've never received any appreciable volume of spam (more than one or two per week) in any other email account I've held. Apparently however, this sort of experience is all too common. Of course other spam problems have existed with Hotmail, such as this, and this, and this.
But what really finally pushed me over the edge to dump Hotmail was when the company (as far as I could tell) randomly disabled my account for a violation of the terms of service. Which struck me as odd, since I hadn't done anything with the account besides delete spam from it, read one or two messages a day, and even less frequently send someone a message. It took five futile days of emailing and aggravating telephone calls before I was finally able to talk to a human being (now it might be harder; I really don't know, but I'm also fortunately never going to have to find out). Hotmail never did tell me what I had done to violate the ToS, but nonetheless reinstated my account. Still, given the other debilitating problems with the service, and given that I had no idea what I had done or allegedly done to violate my user agreement (and thus had no way of knowing how not to violate it again) I decided it was time to dump Hotmail.
Broadly speaking, the Hotmail service left me with the impression that it was not being carefully managed and maintained, that Microsoft hadn't effectively managed the transition to a MS owned subsidiary, or that the service was growing faster than the systems serving it. There were also rumors that the transition from Sun to Windows servers wasn't too smooth and might have resulted in poor performance during the transition period, but I'm not sure how true those rumors were. Plus, by 1999 there were a lot of other free web-based email services opening up. I eventually settled on an australia.edu account. That service wasn't always really fast, but it was reliable, didn't fill my inbox with spam, I was never accused of violating the terms of service, and it gave me a more unique and memorable email address.
Today I suspect Hotmail works better -- otherwise its downtime wouldn't have made front page news on Slashdot -- but its improvements were too late for me. I was driven away from Hotmail long ago.
...those people should stick with their American Online CD disks for downloading on the interweb!
Fortunately I escaped from supporting the end-user general public several years ago, but it was many years earlier that Hotmail stopped working for me. As I recall, it was shortly after Hotmail was purchased by MS that my entire mail quota could be filled with spam in mere days, and it was then that the system got so sluggish and unreliable that it was never a surprise when I couldn't use it. (Microsoft is really good at some things, not least among them making people feel like pawns in billion dollar chess games.)
There really was a time when I both used and liked Hotmail. I think that time was 1997.
But as you point out in your post, the innocence of those simpler days is still alive, like a proverbial chest-burster from Alien, in the hearts of many Internet users.
Even when a volcano erupts next in Yellowstone it is unlikely to be of a massive scale like the rare caldera forming events of the past. Yellowstone is an exceptional geologic feature, and the spectacular geysers, hot springs, mud pots, etc... are all due to the presence of molten rock at unusually shallow levels beneath the park. If, however, you look at the size and frequency of past eruptions, then combine that with present observations, it's clear that the risk of another catastrophic caldera forming event in our lifetimes is very low.
Smaller eruptions are, however, much more common. There are various sorts of volcanic events that might qualify as "smaller eruptions," and it really wouldn't surprise me to see one in my lifetime.
Steam explosions seem like the most likely candidate for the next eruption. Small ones occur every few years. These can blast steam and scorching hot rock high in to the air, but don't result in the actual eruption of lava -- they occur far above any molten rock. These events occur when groundwater, heated from below, flashes catastrophically to steam. Doing so entails the liquid water rapidly increasing in volume, and in order to make room for itself, rock (as well as trees, people, bison, and anything that might get in the way) may be excavated from the vicinity of the explosion. There's a bulge underneath Yellowstone lake that some people speculate is caused by the accumulation of hydrothermal gases and that may possibly represent the future site of a steam explosion (although, again, that's just speculation at this point), and part of Norris Geyser Basin has been temporarily closed because of concern that it could be the site of a future steam explosion -- the ground there recently heated up to around 200 degrees F. Generally, however, steam explosions are hard to predict, and they're also usually fairly localized and fleeting events that present relatively little hazard.
There are also several dozen non-caldera forming volcanoes in the caldera and immediate vicinity. Most of these erupted shortly before or after the last giant eruption that occurred (roughly) 640,000 years ago. Keep in mind, however, that shortly is relative: most were spaced several thousand years apart. The last one erupted about 70,000 years ago.
The nice thing about volcanic eruptions is that they usually give some indication that they're coming before any eruption actually occurs. Warning signs can include: ground inflation over wide areas which can be detected by tiltmeters, GPS, and satellite inferometry; changes in groundwater chemistry; earthquake swarms that indicate magma moving a depth; volcanic tremors; and changes in volcanic gas discharge from the ground (this effect can be observed at Long Valley Caldera in California where CO2 escaping from magma has killed many trees, and is present in high enough concentration to be dangerous for humans in some situations). Yellowstone is, furthermore, very well monitored and to date there is no increase in bckground activity to indicate any volcanic eruption is imminent.
Human history has never recorded a giant caldera forming eruption like those that have occurred at Yellowstone and Long Valley Caldera, we know they are very infrequent events, and also know that much smaller events are much, much, more common. The largest eruptions should also give many of the same kinds of warning signs that other eruptions give, and probably many more. Again, it's also worth noting that past such eruptions at Yellowstone were prefaced for thousands of years by smaller eruptions.
Simple fix, at least on Macs...
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
Yes, this is really annoying. Fortunately there is a simple way around the problem...at least on Macs. I haven't ever tried it on Windows.
To prevent the "Upgrade to Pro" box from popping up for an arbitrarily long time, do the following: 1) Turn on your computer (this won't work if you've already launched the player since the last restart). 2) Set your computer's date to the next time when you'd like to see the "Upgrade to Pro" reminder. For example, 2015 would work well. 3) Launch the QuickTime player and regretfully decline Apple's generous offer to "Upgrade to Pro." 4) Set the computer's time back to the present. 5) Blissfully enjoy a QuickTime movie in an "Upgrade to Pro"-less world.
This is stupid and irritating, but it's far better than most of the stuff Real has pulled over the years, although things have improved recently with RealOne for OS X. As other's have noted, Real's player for OS X doesn't do anything overtly evil, and it's even stable (which is pretty astonishing, after Mac users, at least thos brave enough or ignorant enough to install it, suffered for so long with the crap that was RealPlayer under OS 9).
I doubt this technique is illegal under the DMCA, but IANAL. Be sure to run this by your legal department before you try it.;-)
Right. I'll take this a lot more seriously when the WTO starts throwing fits about the well documented abuses of Microsoft's own monopoly power in the marketplace. Until then, it seems a bit hypocritical of the WTO to be barking about -- fundamentally -- Microsoft being victimized by a the presence of an uneven playing field.
The Chinese appear to be acting unilaterally in what they perceive as their best interest. Maybe they're just following the U.S. lead.
I honestly believe the rule of international law is an important value, but also believe the U.S. could stand some introspection on this very same point. And as for Microsoft, I can't tell that the company has learned anything from its run-in with the Justice Department, except for how to be sneakier in extending its monopoly, a reinforced appreciation for the power of public perception, and perhaps a clearer understanding of why it's worthwhile to donate generously to politicians who don't believe that the power of large businesses should in any way be restrained.
Calcite lenses aren't new to sea creatures: nature came up with such devices in the Cambrian period (more than 500 million years ago) and installed them in trilobites. A typical problem with calcite is that it is exceptionally birefringent, so when a crystal is oriented such that you're not looking down the optic axis, the image seen through the crystal is doubled. Some trilobites apparently had excellent vision: trilobites would orient the calcite crystal so that they were looking down the optic axis in order to avoid doubled images, and would employ dual lenses to correct for spherical aberration. These days other sea creatures still use calcite lenses as well (not always nicely oriented lenses though).
I applaud nature for being so clever as to come up with advanced lenses roughly 500 million years before folks like Descartes figured out how to do the same thing, and I frequently stand in awe of what nature can accomplish. On the other hand, I'm often less impressed by newspaper reporting: why, for example, are the lenses on the critter in the article so revolutionary? What is so remarkable here? Why is this creature distinguished from all the other sea bugs that have calcite lenses in their eyes? Is it because there are more eyes? Do the lenses exploit some remarkable and previously unrecognized characteristic of calcite (very unlikely)?
Humanity will continue to mimic nature's innumerable innovations, but it's a lot easier for us to mimic and utilize them when we know what's special about them...
I mean, hell, for that much money we could have bought 20 B-2 stealth bombers!
Oh yeah, I guess they're cheaper now...Hmmmm, maybe we could have bought 40 of them!
I strongly suspect the unit price (per pound) for B-2 bombers would be vastly superior to that of the space station, and am outraged that Congress and the President could have squandered 40-billion of MY tax dollars on such a foolish enterprise! Just how much does the space station weigh anyway, huh? How stupid do they think we are!? I mean, I'm on a budget, and when I go to the grocery store I don't buy the 9-ounce TV dinner for $3.99; I buy the bargain brand 9-ounce TV dinner for $2.89 because it's the economical way to go. So I don't see why the government shouldn't have to balance its checkbook just like I do.
I once worked as a tech for an Apple Authorized Service Provider. One day we received a box from Apple containing a PowerBook we had sent in for service earlier in the week. Nothing unusual about that, we usually got one or two every other day.
Upon opening the box, however, we noticed something very unusual: something was moving...then another one, and another...the box had several huge worm like larvae crawling around in it! The buggers were a good inch-and-a-half long, a quarter inch in diameter, looked sort of shiny and soft, and they were just racing around the bottom of the box. Top speed looked to be around an inch per second... Fortunately they were too big to actually get inside the PowerBook. (How would we explain that to the customer?: Sir, your PowerBook is fixed, please come pick it up ASAP because it's full of huge shiny nasty worm-like larvae and we want it out of our shop...)
The closest we could figure out was that they came from Apple, unless they grew inside the PowerBook in less than three days (turn around time from Apple). Also, presumably someone at Apple would have noticed larvae while fixing the computer if the bugs had been living in the PB.
For the next few weeks we were kind of careful opening those boxes...
I don't have the stamina for staying up days at a time like I did when I was 16. Back then a 24-pack of Mountain Dew would keep my running at 100% for several nights.
I think I have funny blood sugar things going on -- like many other modern Americans -- and the sugar content of what I consume has a huge impact on my wakefulness. Specifically, if I consume too much sugar too quickly it puts me to sleep. Likewise, too much caffeine doesn't help much. Beyond a reasonable level of caffeine, typically one 8-ounce light brew coffee (light has more caffeine), I just get red irritated eyes and slightly jittery. (The volume of coffee that's right for you may depend on how much of it you usually drink.)
Thus to stay up all night I have to plan ahead. I try to have a coffee a few hours before I'm going to need it, then sip something low-sugar with moderate caffeine as the night progresses. It sounds kind of sissy, but iced black tea is:
a) refreshing
b) cheap (important!!!)
c) seems to have the right amount of caffeine
d) is low sugar
e) can be produced on demand in any desired quantity
Another pleasant side effect of iced tea is that, even after consuming large volumes, it doesn't leave me so rotund as other drinks might. This is also convenient for being a stealth geek: a narrow radar signature leaves most people clueless to the fact that I know anything about computers, which in turn means fewer "say, you look like you know computers: when I try to use my American Online..." queries.
Mountain Dew actually seems to have about the right amount of caffeine, but it also has so much sugar that the caffeine is, for me, effectively negated.
It's only 9:34 on the West Coast where I'm at, but maybe I'll report back around 5:00 AM...
I don't think the current political climate in the US would allow any such mission to take place. People are not interested in space exploration right now. I don't think it's beyond technical abilities, but as soon as you start talking about tens of billions of dollars, it turns people off.
A sensible approach to space exploration might be to set up a moon base near the south pole. It would be a fantastic research, mining, and launch platform for future space missions (actually, it might be better to launch from elsewhere on the Moon, but the availability of fuel could be a more important consideration than simple location). Fuel could be mined from water there, and it would be easier and less expensive than a jump straight to Mars. A permanent moon base would be the first step for humanity in to the rest of the solar system.
Of course, even this is would require more political capital than we'll be able to dig up in the US in the forseable future. There is an end to America's myopic vision!
As for the article, it is pointed out this isn't a formal proposal. The article takes a negative tone on the whole thing, going to great pains to gratuitously mention an ancient Soviet launch failure which resulted in "contamination." I suppose it's not safe to let preexisting negative sentiment work by itself -- better rub in past failures!
That's all aside to the ludicrous notion that Russia could provide 30% of the funding. Note to Russians: it'll be harder to get NASA to agree on a tourist package for a Mars mission...
I do, however, remain hopeful that someday we'll recognize that promise of opening a frontier in to space...but I doubt I'll ever get to see that day.
I couldn't view the site since my browser rejects Yahoo's cookies.
So without having read the article, I'll comment as best I can...
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is not the first time an Apple unauthorized computer has natively run the Mac OS. I can think of a few other examples.
In the early days of the Macintosh there were machines with Apple boards repackaged in to different form factors, but this was still arguably Apple hardware.
Later, Outbound notebook computers came out that used their own board designs, but were based off scavenged Apple ROMs -- usually from compact Macs. They were nice machines in their day: they had trackbars (which are hard to explain unless you've actually seen one), fast processors, and good B/W screens. Of course, these were still sort of using Apple parts thanks to the ROMs.
Around the time of Outbound's demise (BTW, Outbound's death boiled down to being priced out of the market by Apple's PowerBook line), an impressive effort was completed to reverse engineer the Mac's ROM from published APIs. The machine this ROM landed in was a Mac/PC hybrid that was theoretically untouchable by Apple's legal department. I don't know what ever happened to this thing, but the fact that it wouldn't run Pagemaker could well have doomed it -- even without help from Apple's lawyers!
After that machine faded and vanished in to nothing, Apple licensed cloning. Around the same time we started seeing demos of the PReP and CHRP boards. These could have run the Mac OS, along with several other operating systems, but to my knowledge no Mac compatible boxes were ever released (If someone else knows of some, please post!).
Now Apple's machines use open firmware in place of big ROMs, so any attempt to get the Mac OS running on other hardware might be simpler, but the OF could still be a tricky river for an intrepid cloner to navigate. I don't know much about OF myself, nor Apple's implementation and use of it on their machines, but if you would like to speculate on this subject please do!
In regards to the motherboard in question, there are a few things to consider:
a) To the extent the cost of equipment is dependent upon volume, this may not be a high enough volume product to make it as a "mass market" board.
b) The advance here might be that you can run PowerPC Mac OS apps on non-Apple hardware, which (as Slashdot story pointed out) could be a convenient extra feature for a few users of this board. It is of course fairly common to emulate a 68K Mac. Aqua and the rest of OS X would be bigger advance, but that doesn't sound like an advance that has happened yet...
c) To get OS X running, you may still have a decidedly different task (remember I didn't read the article; see above).
d) Unless you use ROMs, etc., that were illegally copied, Apple Legal probably doesn't have much to say against this. They may be annoyed, but probably not scared...up until OS X and Aqua will run on it.
e) This isn't a mass market solution for running OS 9: You still need to get one of these machines, get Linux up and running, get a Mac ROM, install the compatibility environment, and only then do you get to use OS 9. That's a pretty geeky sequence, but the geeks don't seem to be the ones who want to run OS 9! Of course, once Aqua hits this hardware...
f) It sounds like this is a G3 board (note: I still haven't read the article). This will limit its appeal; a lot of folks might be looking for a G4 based machine so this might not be the ideal option for them. Of course, the G3 and G4 perform comparably per MHz in non-Altivec operations. OS X, however, on G3 machines seems rather pokey.
In short, this is pretty cool but the advance to date doesn't by itself threaten Apple; loss of control of hardware that could run OS X's UI would threaten Apple. Also don't forget that there are Mac emulators for PCs and Apple hasn't successfully come down on them. And yes, I know that's different, they're only 68K emulators, and they can be slow, etc., but I still think this doesn't yet threaten Apple. For the time being it's simply another neat thing you can do with a neat 3rd party niche board. I'll keep an eye on developments.
Finally, I would like to see commodity G4 based boards that could be coaxed to run OS X. That would be killer. Doubtless Apple would agree...
The answer may lie in hooking up with Microsoft's Passport, or devising a user-protected keychain system on a hard drive or network that remembers all your passwords, or launching an online news industry initiative to simplify registration and subsequent site visits.
Cool.
I can have one of my dozen or so phony-info Passport accounts manage my dozen or so phony news site logins!
Lets see...a 10GB iPod costs $399 -- that's $39.90 per gigabyte. So extrapolating to 1000 gigabytes...yes...we'll have a $39,900 iPod!
I'll take two of them; just let me find my checkbook. Oh shoot, I must have left it in the McLaren...I just hope it isn't in the Bentley. Well, I'll just have my chauffeur bring it 'round in the helicopter. Do you have a pen I could borrow?
The real question is whether this technology will be better (and cheaper!) than any other high capacity memory when it's (maybe) released in 2008.
I have my hopes pegged on static random access technology that doesn't depend on disk technology. Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.
This proposal does more than empower a squad of vigilantes. Rather, I see this as the latest step in an expansions of corporate media control. Beyond legalising some tactics that are currently illegal for a good reason, this proposal would have the effect of enhancing the monopoly large corporations already have on the flow of information. The implications are very disturbing.
Considering that flooding a P2P network is easiest when you have the greatest resources to throw at the task, it's hard to imagine that this recourse would be viable for any but large corporate powers or those lucky enough to find themselves in the RIAAA's, etc, best graces. Thus this technique would have the effect of extending the monopolies of the most dominant players, and would choke off P2P distribution paths that could be used by any dangerous upstart rivals. Maintaining their distribution monopoly has, of course, long been the recording industry's primary concern.
It is also perfectly plausible that any organization with sufficient resources could squash any sort of offending content, beyond any specific type of media, rendering entirely useless existing P2P systems. Note, however, that by sufficient resources I don't mean just network resources. Rather, the most useful resource will be money. Since this is designed as a tool of harrasment, it's likely there would be lawsuits -- but small entities might not be able or willing to risk the cost of a lawsuit. That could work in favor of large entities in two ways: first to limit the ability of individual parties to sue those disrupting a network, and second to empower only the wealthiest entities to venture to disrupt that network. So once again the largest entities benefit at the expense of the little guy.
I don't see any mention of any special recourse unfairly targeted parties may have, but it's not far fetched to assume that by design any recourse wouldn't be very effective -- otherwse there wouldn't be any point having the law in the first place (It's hard to image much opportunity for recourse when the law is designed to inflict haphazard damage.) Without disincentives, why shouldn't companies spam & otherwise disrupt the P2P for any perceived or concocted reason?
Thus the system could be ripe for abuse, but without the opportunity for that inconvenient oversight afforded the wronged under our official legal system. But then again, that's why modern society doesn't tolerate vigalantes...
Of course these concerns are on top of the already harebrained notion that it would be a good idea to destroy the current implementations of an extremely popular emerging technology that can be (and is) used for legitimate purposes.
Finally, what's to prevent a broad interpretation of a law like this? At this point the details are too vague to comment on with certainty, but it's not far fetched to imagine that a few poorly worded lines could turn something like this in to another DMCA.
Fortunately for the 'net and the economy, it shouldn't be difficult to make someone -- even a typical luddite congressman -- understand that unleashing vigilante chaos on the Internet is a very bad idea. With only a small amount of luck this media industry power grab will be quickly defeated.
Finally, I would like you to consider that corporate censoship can be more dangerous than government censoship, since we do not have any direct individual control over corporate power as we do (theoretically) with our government. Plus, the more control corporate interests with agendas have over mass communication, the harder it is to democratically render grass roots changes. This self-reinforcing cycle of corporate media power is well evidenced by the proposed legislation.
This could be very relevant if remote hosting or remote computing is ever going to grow. Apple got some bad publicity a while back after they claimed ownership of all the content in people's iDisks (or whatever they're called) -- but in that case Apple backed down. What if they hadn't?
Here are some hypothetical situations that seem analagous to the situation with Mythic, that with this precedent all seem a little bit scary...
Consider a cellular phone company. Would my cell phone's voicemail, being hosted on the cellular provider's equipment, be reasonably considered the cellular provider's property? What if a piece of highly confidential data were left there, say an idea for a new invention. Can the cell phone company claim they own that data and then do with it what they like?
Ok, suppose I keep track of my finances with an online service and I enter the data directly in to their remote server -- the data never lives on my computer; it's remote only. Now if the company hosting that service decides to toss a boilerplate "we own everything" clause in to the click-through on the login screen, do they have a right to my financial data? So financial data is too inflammatory...how about an online database of all my books? I don't see that as significantly different from the Mythic case.
Or suppose that a large software company offered remote networked applications via a rental revenue model. The software saves its documents on the remote server. Later I want to retrieve my important documents, but in the meantime the software company has claimed that it owns my documents, based on a clause tucked away in the user license.
Later I want to create a web page. So I upload my web page to a remote hosting site, which of course claims ownership of anythying on its servers. (You'd start to think I'd learn by now!) Later I decide I want to change or remove some information on the site, but the hosting company refuses to give me access claiming I have no right to mess with their data...and then they start selling this content as their own!
If this kind of stuff is not illegal, would you necessarily trust a company not to abuse their rights in this way? Remember that in the last ten or fifteen years there has been a growing consensus in the American business world that anything that can be done to increase profits in the short term necessarily should be done. Glance towards Enron if you believe a company is always going to make the "good" forward thinking choice...
Perhaps we should start lobbying our state legislatures to enact laws to preemptively clear this sort of thing up. Even requiring companies to abide by their agreements as stated the first time a user signs up for a service -- irrespective of how those agreements are initially set up -- would be a positive move. That would make it harder to get blindsided by a change in the user agreement after a person has started using the service (in the syle of Yahoo's "you want Spam" change). And as long as I've got a wish list going, the agreements should be prefaced with a readable easy to understand synopsis of the actual agreement.
But I doubt the business lobby would ever let anything so simple and sensible sneak through a senate chamber someplace...
When I first glanced at this thread I figured this was just another crank story like the time machine or the previous anti-gravity superconductor, but then I saw it was in Scientific American I knew that if it wasn't crank science, it was at least probably being blown out of proportion, sensationalized, and/or taken out of context.
Perhaps that's a bit too harsh, but Scientific American has come down in the world quite a bit since the late eighties or early nineties. As I recall, they got a new editor many years ago and he was hell bent on dumbing the magazine down, fluffing it up with low-attention-theshold filler, and generally reducing it to a level of depth, insight, and relevance typical of USA Today or Omni Magazine. He suceeded, and many of the science professionals I knew cancelled their subscriptions shortly thereafter.
This subject strikes me as the researcher noting to himself "oh, hey...if I make some interesting assumptions, I get this cool effect popping out. And I might as well test it since it's so easy to test." Or an April Fools joke*. Which falls short of us dismissing the idea out of hand, but does suggest it doesn't deserve much media coverage -- at least until any positive results are verified. In other words, it was just sensationalist enough to get Scientific American's attention (they dig this kind of stuff), but not so far to the side of quackery that it has (yet) been featured in the Fortean Times.
* By the way, the paper missed April Fools day by four days; the date is stamped April 5, 2002. There's also a second date stamp of April 11, 2002. (A slightly earlier date stamp would have cleared things up pretty quickly!)
Slashdot Mirror
So what we need is a largely automatic system for generating direct, explicit, licenses between artists and broadcasters (aka Internet radio stations) so that a single artist can form hundreds or thousands of unique relationships with stations without spending years drafting contracts, and vice versa. It can't be an aggregation service in the SoundExchange sense because SoundExchange bans that, so it would have to instead create the documents to generate a direct contract and then facilitate the signing and exchange of those contract documents.
Maybe it would work by allowing a broadcaster to search the site for artists that are willing to offer their music under certain terms, select those of interest, copy the broadcaster's specific information in to a form pre-filled with the terms, have the broadcaster digitally sign the contract (if I recall correctly Clinton signed a bill making a digital signature legally binding the same way as an old fashioned analog signature is binding) and then submit the contract to the artists who could log in and review the contract and sign it or not...or perhaps digitally sign all of them at once, or all of them with particular terms at once. Then once the contracts were signed a PDF would be generated and given to each party to print out and file.
There would, of course, also be a mechanism for either party to amend the terms of the boiler plate contract, although doing so would flag the contract as one needing special attention.
A clever extension of this would allow the artist to upload his/her music to the contract generation site so that as soon as the broadcaster signed the contract it could buy copies of the artists tracks and download them immediately.
Creative Commons licenses sound good at first, but no actual signed contract explicitly changes hands. The above system would solve that problem without being an aggregator itself; it merely facilitates the two parties reaching an explicit signed agreement.
Finally the good part: SoundExchange would have to keep track of all of these exceptions to the statutory licensing.
A simpler solution that might have a similar or greater effect, and that is already practiced by some ISPs, is to block port 25 traffic from leaving an ISP's subnet unless a particular customer requested that privilege. This would not be an issue to most casual Internet users who only use their ISPs mail servers to start with -- the kind of people perhaps most susceptible to becoming nodes in botnets. Other people could simply ask for the privilege and the ISPs would have a much smaller pool of potential abusers to police.
This would be the Internet service analog of a secure default setting -- it would only limit how you could use your Internet connection until you request the additional privileges.
There are technical problems to doing this, but those vary based on how the system is implemented. A simple way to accomplish this would is to have two pools of IPs, one with port 25 privileges and the other without.
This might also be an inconvenience for people trying to connect to their mail servers directly from on the road (through an ISP implementing such a policy), or a mobile user relying on their own local computer as their mail server, but given the extent of various kinds of filtering of both port 25 and based on all sorts of fuzzier characteristics at the receiving MXs, there really shouldn't be many people doing this anyway. Plus, we have authenticated SMTP and port 587 to solve such problems.
Many ISPs do something similar already, and include the port 25 privileges as a package with a static IP address.
The other problems are more social:
1) How do you convince an ISP to do this? and,
2) How can you convince ISPs not to charge more to not artificially limit service?
I don't have the answer to those questions, but number two is similar to the network neutrality issue: philosophically I don't approve of companies charging more for a service that hasn't been artificially constrained in the first place.
And granted, there are many other things besides spam that botnets can be used for, but I have to welcome any simple practical solutions to reduce spam even if that solution isn't complete or perfect.
Microsoft cannot succeed with a strategy built around the idea of "it just works" because, fundamentally, Microsoft doesn't know what it means for something to "just work." Microsoft has, time and again, failed to produce highly usuable software for the same reason: it doesn't understand how the system should behave*.
To make up for this lack of understanding (I doubt MS even realizes it doesn't understand how systems should behave) the company builds scripted interactions (unlovingly known to all of us as those irritating "wizards" that keep you from successfully creating the graph you want in Excel, etc...). In short, MS papers over bad behavior with bad interfaces that obstruct, obfuscate, and harass the poor souls who have to suffer through them. Microsoft has even named this philosophy: recall "Task Based Interfaces."
And may the Lord have mercy if you don't want to perform a task Microsoft hasn't already thought up.
Apple, on the other hand, approaches the problem differently. Rather than asking "how can we make it easy for someone to do XYZ," Apple asks "what should the tool XYZ do," and then if necessary builds an interface that allows people to modify that behavior through understandable, easy-to-find, commands/menus/buttons, etc.**
Apple's strategy, starkly 180 degrees from Microsoft's "task based" strategy, is a human based system. Apple doesn't guess what you're trying to do, but instead makes tools that do what you expect. Thus people, not magical condescending wizards, can apply the tools to whatever variety of tasks may be at hand. So things "just work" because the tools do what we expect from them. Then the computer becomes transparent to the task, rather than the focus of the task itself.
You probably won't encounter a single "wizard" included by Apple in OS X, aside from the intial setup assistant that isn't so much a "wizard" -- there's nothing "guiding" you through the setup screens -- as just a few screens full of fields of information the computer collects to get OS X configured appropriately.
As long as Microsoft doesn't understand that for something to "just work," a tool needs to do what people expect, and that people should be able to directly interact with the tool's interface in a manner that allows even a relatively uninformed person to make the tool do what they want, then Microsoft won't succeed in building highly usable human interfaces.
Since I'm confident that Microsoft hasn't turned a new leaf in this respect, I'm also confident the "it just works" campaign will amount to nothing more than saturation marketing and a lot of grumbling*** about cute animated puppy dogs pissing on our files.
--
* You could probably make a pretty good case for this problem being a fundamental problem in other aspects of Microsoft's design philosophy: bloat, poor security, inconsistency, and generally quirky, hard to predict behavior, could all spring from the same fertile root.
** This is a recursive strategy. It's not enough to make aprogram that does what a person expects, but every sub-piece of that program also needs to also do what a functionally experienced, but non-expert, user interacting with the tool for the first time might think it should do. Each button should be intuitively named. Menu items should be logically organized. The interface should be sufficiently uncluttered that interface elements are readily seen. It's OK for a system to have an unfamiliar way of interacting with the user (for example, drag-and-drop) if that method of interaction is widely applicable across the entire system so that once someone is familiar with the technique they can use it elsewhere. And so on.
*** Here's an amusing, and very telling, anecdote about MS human interfaces: I was once talking to a Microsoft programmer about user interface issues, and brought up Clippy as one of the most glaring examples of Microsoft's human interface failures...but the programmer refused to believe me that most people actual
The linked article notes that "16 of a total of 31 RORSAT nuclear reactors orbited lost coolant following core ejection into disposal orbits."
The biggest short term problem seems to be the loss of NaK coolant, with the number of these drops "estimated to be 110,000 to over 115,000." Wih the possibility for more of them to leak if other space junk punctures the radiators of the satellites. In the most immediate future these droplets are mostly just navigation hazards, but the amount of radiation that might remain in them is unknown, and it's not known if they're further contaminated. I'm guessing the radioactive argon in the droplets, of which there is a presently unknown quantity, is a relatively small hazard...but please correct me if this suspicion is wrong.
I'm not sure how radioactive the reactors themselves might be; the article didn't give much information on this side of the problem. If anyone is familiar with Soviet spaceborne reactor design, please speak up! My strong suspicion is, however, that even in the likelihood they are thermoelectric reactors with short-lived isotopes, there would still be enough residual radiation to make them unpleasant devices to have land on you patio. And since there are so many of them, it seems a little too optimistic that they'll all land in the ocean.
Finally, I found it interesting that the article notes "we are on the threshold, if we have not already exceeded it, of reaching a critical density' of objects in low Earth orbit, where collisional fragmentation will cause the debris environment to slowly grow even if all other sources are eliminated." How will we respond if low Earth orbit becomes too dangerous for reliable operation of satellites or manned spaceflight? How dangerous is it right now, or does anyone know how many satellites are believed to have been lost due to space collisions?
A lot of people seem to be forgetting that as of the mid-1970s we knew there was once liquid water on Mars thanks to pictures beamed back by the Viking probes. These images very clearly show channels and streamlined features that would have only been created by liquid water moving on the surface of Mars. (There was also more ambiguous evidence of flowing groundwater, but that doesn't detract from the strength of evidence for other observed features being created by moving surface water.)
The interesting questions were how long the water had water existed on the surface (was the flooding episodic, or was mars generally damp for a long time), when did the climate cease to be able to support widespread liquid water, where did the water go, and was there ever life?
The current probes confirm our earlier analysis: there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars, but this is scarcely news. (It would have been much more surprising if they showed water didn't once exist on Mars.) The probes presently exploring Mars have, however, gone much further than simply confirming the presence of liquid water in the Martian past; they have shown that the water that once flowed there wasn't just temporarily liberated by catastrophic events like meteorite impacts, but had to have remained liquid on the surface for quite some time. Standing bodies of water formed the intruiging geologic formations observed by the Opportunity rover, and have important implications for understanding the ancient Martian climate...in addition to increasing the likelihood that life could have once thrived there.
So if scientists are speaking up more about the possibility that Mars might have harbored, or might still harbor, life, it's probably because we're slowly accumulating a more interesting body of evidence. I don't perceive any big coverup, just many new discoveries.
As for detecting methane in the atmosphere, we've probably never previously detected it because the instrumentation with the resolution needed to detect it hasn't previously been flown to Mars, and it's difficult (but clearly not impossible) to make similar measurements from Earth. The tone of the article suggests that people have been trying to detect methane before this, but have only recently succeeded, which isn't too surprising given the thing that we were trying to detect exists at only about 10.5 parts per billion.
I don't see that it's necessarily true that large scale fraud would not be successful. Limited fraud might be easier to get away with, but what are the chances that large scale fraud would succeed?
With the current electronic voting systems, since there's no way to recount, and no way verify your vote was cast the way you intended, the only likely way to "fix" the fraud would be to re-vote the election. Elections offices really don't like to do that, and even the simple fact of doing so would very likely influence the outcome of the vote when it is finally accepted: if one candidate would prosper by reduced turnout, it's possible that forcing a new vote would be enough of a change to push them to a "legitimate" victory, even if they wouldn't have won an untainted original vote. On the other hand, if the fraud were perpetrated again and the results were the same as the first vote, the pressure to accept the fraudulent results might push the wrong person to victory, i.e. "well, the people have spoken, and what they say in the exit polls isn't how they are voting." Or, "how many times can we keep re-voting?" Eventually "the clock runs out."
We aren't going to be quick invalidate a vote just because the "wrong" candidate won. Afterall, exit polls aren't the official count, and even if we "know" the official count was fraudulent, the exit polls still don't have any legal weight to decide the election -- if they did, we could avoid this whole e-voting machines mess from the outset by placing a few reporters on street corners to decide who should be county commisioner or President of The United States.
That said, yes, it might still be better (for the people rigging the election) to perpetrate the fraud subtly, but as we already know, e-voting comes to the rescue for small scale fraud too!
I know the "Ask Slashdot" question was in regards to Windows, but since VersionTracker came up I thought it might be helpful for Mac users to remember MacUpdate as well. Its pretty similar to version tracker, but the site seems faster, less buggy, less spammy, and is altogether a bit more pleasant to use. When I've gone looking for Mac freeware and shareware it seems easier to find it on MacUpdate.
NOTE: I'm not affiliated with either site, although I am wearing a VersionTracker t-shirt.
You, unlike many people, may have been able to benefit from this sort of thing. A lot of other people would just get slapped and a door slammed in their face about 15 seconds in to the first date!
Breakthrough? Yes.
Universally positive breakthrough, or breakthrough conducive to growing healthy relationships? Not always.
The whole unfiltered truth can be dangerous. Manners and formality exist as a social constructs to, at least in part, suppress words and actions that might otherwise interfere with the smooth functioning of society; they're filters against our animal instincts and raw feelings. Admittedly sometimes people bite their tongues when it would be a lot better to come out and say something, even if it is dangerous, controversial, or "improper." But there are a also whole lot of times when things are better left unsaid. Either way, I'd like to make that decision myself rather than have every inaudible mumbling broadcast or recorded for posterity.
Of course, this technology doesn't mean all that would necessarily be broadcast or recorded, but if it weren't, then it also probably wouldn't be very applicable to dealing with girlfriends; it's usually a spontaneous moment when something should (or shouldn't) be said.
I think I gave up on Hotmail in early 1999. At that time it was sluggish and unreliable despite the ample internet connection at the university through which I was connecting. At least I didn't regularly experience slow performance on other Internet sites.
I'm not sure where the Spammers were getting my address; I've never received any appreciable volume of spam (more than one or two per week) in any other email account I've held. Apparently however, this sort of experience is all too common. Of course other spam problems have existed with Hotmail, such as this, and this, and this.
But what really finally pushed me over the edge to dump Hotmail was when the company (as far as I could tell) randomly disabled my account for a violation of the terms of service. Which struck me as odd, since I hadn't done anything with the account besides delete spam from it, read one or two messages a day, and even less frequently send someone a message. It took five futile days of emailing and aggravating telephone calls before I was finally able to talk to a human being (now it might be harder; I really don't know, but I'm also fortunately never going to have to find out). Hotmail never did tell me what I had done to violate the ToS, but nonetheless reinstated my account. Still, given the other debilitating problems with the service, and given that I had no idea what I had done or allegedly done to violate my user agreement (and thus had no way of knowing how not to violate it again) I decided it was time to dump Hotmail.
Broadly speaking, the Hotmail service left me with the impression that it was not being carefully managed and maintained, that Microsoft hadn't effectively managed the transition to a MS owned subsidiary, or that the service was growing faster than the systems serving it. There were also rumors that the transition from Sun to Windows servers wasn't too smooth and might have resulted in poor performance during the transition period, but I'm not sure how true those rumors were. Plus, by 1999 there were a lot of other free web-based email services opening up. I eventually settled on an australia.edu account. That service wasn't always really fast, but it was reliable, didn't fill my inbox with spam, I was never accused of violating the terms of service, and it gave me a more unique and memorable email address.
Today I suspect Hotmail works better -- otherwise its downtime wouldn't have made front page news on Slashdot -- but its improvements were too late for me. I was driven away from Hotmail long ago.
...those people should stick with their American Online CD disks for downloading on the interweb!
Fortunately I escaped from supporting the end-user general public several years ago, but it was many years earlier that Hotmail stopped working for me. As I recall, it was shortly after Hotmail was purchased by MS that my entire mail quota could be filled with spam in mere days, and it was then that the system got so sluggish and unreliable that it was never a surprise when I couldn't use it. (Microsoft is really good at some things, not least among them making people feel like pawns in billion dollar chess games.)
There really was a time when I both used and liked Hotmail. I think that time was 1997.
But as you point out in your post, the innocence of those simpler days is still alive, like a proverbial chest-burster from Alien, in the hearts of many Internet users.
Even when a volcano erupts next in Yellowstone it is unlikely to be of a massive scale like the rare caldera forming events of the past. Yellowstone is an exceptional geologic feature, and the spectacular geysers, hot springs, mud pots, etc... are all due to the presence of molten rock at unusually shallow levels beneath the park. If, however, you look at the size and frequency of past eruptions, then combine that with present observations, it's clear that the risk of another catastrophic caldera forming event in our lifetimes is very low.
Smaller eruptions are, however, much more common. There are various sorts of volcanic events that might qualify as "smaller eruptions," and it really wouldn't surprise me to see one in my lifetime.
Steam explosions seem like the most likely candidate for the next eruption. Small ones occur every few years. These can blast steam and scorching hot rock high in to the air, but don't result in the actual eruption of lava -- they occur far above any molten rock. These events occur when groundwater, heated from below, flashes catastrophically to steam. Doing so entails the liquid water rapidly increasing in volume, and in order to make room for itself, rock (as well as trees, people, bison, and anything that might get in the way) may be excavated from the vicinity of the explosion. There's a bulge underneath Yellowstone lake that some people speculate is caused by the accumulation of hydrothermal gases and that may possibly represent the future site of a steam explosion (although, again, that's just speculation at this point), and part of Norris Geyser Basin has been temporarily closed because of concern that it could be the site of a future steam explosion -- the ground there recently heated up to around 200 degrees F. Generally, however, steam explosions are hard to predict, and they're also usually fairly localized and fleeting events that present relatively little hazard.
There are also several dozen non-caldera forming volcanoes in the caldera and immediate vicinity. Most of these erupted shortly before or after the last giant eruption that occurred (roughly) 640,000 years ago. Keep in mind, however, that shortly is relative: most were spaced several thousand years apart. The last one erupted about 70,000 years ago.
The nice thing about volcanic eruptions is that they usually give some indication that they're coming before any eruption actually occurs. Warning signs can include: ground inflation over wide areas which can be detected by tiltmeters, GPS, and satellite inferometry; changes in groundwater chemistry; earthquake swarms that indicate magma moving a depth; volcanic tremors; and changes in volcanic gas discharge from the ground (this effect can be observed at Long Valley Caldera in California where CO2 escaping from magma has killed many trees, and is present in high enough concentration to be dangerous for humans in some situations). Yellowstone is, furthermore, very well monitored and to date there is no increase in bckground activity to indicate any volcanic eruption is imminent.
Human history has never recorded a giant caldera forming eruption like those that have occurred at Yellowstone and Long Valley Caldera, we know they are very infrequent events, and also know that much smaller events are much, much, more common. The largest eruptions should also give many of the same kinds of warning signs that other eruptions give, and probably many more. Again, it's also worth noting that past such eruptions at Yellowstone were prefaced for thousands of years by smaller eruptions.
Yes, this is really annoying. Fortunately there is a simple way around the problem...at least on Macs. I haven't ever tried it on Windows.
;-)
To prevent the "Upgrade to Pro" box from popping up for an arbitrarily long time, do the following:
1) Turn on your computer (this won't work if you've already launched the player since the last restart).
2) Set your computer's date to the next time when you'd like to see the "Upgrade to Pro" reminder. For example, 2015 would work well.
3) Launch the QuickTime player and regretfully decline Apple's generous offer to "Upgrade to Pro."
4) Set the computer's time back to the present.
5) Blissfully enjoy a QuickTime movie in an "Upgrade to Pro"-less world.
This is stupid and irritating, but it's far better than most of the stuff Real has pulled over the years, although things have improved recently with RealOne for OS X. As other's have noted, Real's player for OS X doesn't do anything overtly evil, and it's even stable (which is pretty astonishing, after Mac users, at least thos brave enough or ignorant enough to install it, suffered for so long with the crap that was RealPlayer under OS 9).
I doubt this technique is illegal under the DMCA, but IANAL. Be sure to run this by your legal department before you try it.
Right. I'll take this a lot more seriously when the WTO starts throwing fits about the well documented abuses of Microsoft's own monopoly power in the marketplace. Until then, it seems a bit hypocritical of the WTO to be barking about -- fundamentally -- Microsoft being victimized by a the presence of an uneven playing field.
The Chinese appear to be acting unilaterally in what they perceive as their best interest. Maybe they're just following the U.S. lead.
I honestly believe the rule of international law is an important value, but also believe the U.S. could stand some introspection on this very same point. And as for Microsoft, I can't tell that the company has learned anything from its run-in with the Justice Department, except for how to be sneakier in extending its monopoly, a reinforced appreciation for the power of public perception, and perhaps a clearer understanding of why it's worthwhile to donate generously to politicians who don't believe that the power of large businesses should in any way be restrained.
Calcite lenses aren't new to sea creatures: nature came up with such devices in the Cambrian period (more than 500 million years ago) and installed them in trilobites. A typical problem with calcite is that it is exceptionally birefringent, so when a crystal is oriented such that you're not looking down the optic axis, the image seen through the crystal is doubled. Some trilobites apparently had excellent vision: trilobites would orient the calcite crystal so that they were looking down the optic axis in order to avoid doubled images, and would employ dual lenses to correct for spherical aberration. These days other sea creatures still use calcite lenses as well (not always nicely oriented lenses though).
I applaud nature for being so clever as to come up with advanced lenses roughly 500 million years before folks like Descartes figured out how to do the same thing, and I frequently stand in awe of what nature can accomplish. On the other hand, I'm often less impressed by newspaper reporting: why, for example, are the lenses on the critter in the article so revolutionary? What is so remarkable here? Why is this creature distinguished from all the other sea bugs that have calcite lenses in their eyes? Is it because there are more eyes? Do the lenses exploit some remarkable and previously unrecognized characteristic of calcite (very unlikely)?
Humanity will continue to mimic nature's innumerable innovations, but it's a lot easier for us to mimic and utilize them when we know what's special about them...
Oh yeah, I guess they're cheaper now...Hmmmm, maybe we could have bought 40 of them!
I strongly suspect the unit price (per pound) for B-2 bombers would be vastly superior to that of the space station, and am outraged that Congress and the President could have squandered 40-billion of MY tax dollars on such a foolish enterprise! Just how much does the space station weigh anyway, huh? How stupid do they think we are!? I mean, I'm on a budget, and when I go to the grocery store I don't buy the 9-ounce TV dinner for $3.99; I buy the bargain brand 9-ounce TV dinner for $2.89 because it's the economical way to go. So I don't see why the government shouldn't have to balance its checkbook just like I do.
I kid you not...
I once worked as a tech for an Apple Authorized Service Provider. One day we received a box from Apple containing a PowerBook we had sent in for service earlier in the week. Nothing unusual about that, we usually got one or two every other day.
Upon opening the box, however, we noticed something very unusual: something was moving...then another one, and another...the box had several huge worm like larvae crawling around in it! The buggers were a good inch-and-a-half long, a quarter inch in diameter, looked sort of shiny and soft, and they were just racing around the bottom of the box. Top speed looked to be around an inch per second... Fortunately they were too big to actually get inside the PowerBook. (How would we explain that to the customer?: Sir, your PowerBook is fixed, please come pick it up ASAP because it's full of huge shiny nasty worm-like larvae and we want it out of our shop...)
The closest we could figure out was that they came from Apple, unless they grew inside the PowerBook in less than three days (turn around time from Apple). Also, presumably someone at Apple would have noticed larvae while fixing the computer if the bugs had been living in the PB.
For the next few weeks we were kind of careful opening those boxes...
I don't have the stamina for staying up days at a time like I did when I was 16. Back then a 24-pack of Mountain Dew would keep my running at 100% for several nights.
I think I have funny blood sugar things going on -- like many other modern Americans -- and the sugar content of what I consume has a huge impact on my wakefulness. Specifically, if I consume too much sugar too quickly it puts me to sleep. Likewise, too much caffeine doesn't help much. Beyond a reasonable level of caffeine, typically one 8-ounce light brew coffee (light has more caffeine), I just get red irritated eyes and slightly jittery. (The volume of coffee that's right for you may depend on how much of it you usually drink.)
Thus to stay up all night I have to plan ahead. I try to have a coffee a few hours before I'm going to need it, then sip something low-sugar with moderate caffeine as the night progresses. It sounds kind of sissy, but iced black tea is:
a) refreshing
b) cheap (important!!!)
c) seems to have the right amount of caffeine
d) is low sugar
e) can be produced on demand in any desired quantity
Another pleasant side effect of iced tea is that, even after consuming large volumes, it doesn't leave me so rotund as other drinks might. This is also convenient for being a stealth geek: a narrow radar signature leaves most people clueless to the fact that I know anything about computers, which in turn means fewer "say, you look like you know computers: when I try to use my American Online..." queries.
Mountain Dew actually seems to have about the right amount of caffeine, but it also has so much sugar that the caffeine is, for me, effectively negated.
It's only 9:34 on the West Coast where I'm at, but maybe I'll report back around 5:00 AM...
A sensible approach to space exploration might be to set up a moon base near the south pole. It would be a fantastic research, mining, and launch platform for future space missions (actually, it might be better to launch from elsewhere on the Moon, but the availability of fuel could be a more important consideration than simple location). Fuel could be mined from water there, and it would be easier and less expensive than a jump straight to Mars. A permanent moon base would be the first step for humanity in to the rest of the solar system.
Of course, even this is would require more political capital than we'll be able to dig up in the US in the forseable future. There is an end to America's myopic vision!
As for the article, it is pointed out this isn't a formal proposal. The article takes a negative tone on the whole thing, going to great pains to gratuitously mention an ancient Soviet launch failure which resulted in "contamination." I suppose it's not safe to let preexisting negative sentiment work by itself -- better rub in past failures!
That's all aside to the ludicrous notion that Russia could provide 30% of the funding. Note to Russians: it'll be harder to get NASA to agree on a tourist package for a Mars mission...
I do, however, remain hopeful that someday we'll recognize that promise of opening a frontier in to space...but I doubt I'll ever get to see that day.
http://www.lowendmac.com/clones/index.shtml
Enjoy.
So without having read the article, I'll comment as best I can...
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is not the first time an Apple unauthorized computer has natively run the Mac OS. I can think of a few other examples.
In the early days of the Macintosh there were machines with Apple boards repackaged in to different form factors, but this was still arguably Apple hardware.
Later, Outbound notebook computers came out that used their own board designs, but were based off scavenged Apple ROMs -- usually from compact Macs. They were nice machines in their day: they had trackbars (which are hard to explain unless you've actually seen one), fast processors, and good B/W screens. Of course, these were still sort of using Apple parts thanks to the ROMs.
Around the time of Outbound's demise (BTW, Outbound's death boiled down to being priced out of the market by Apple's PowerBook line), an impressive effort was completed to reverse engineer the Mac's ROM from published APIs. The machine this ROM landed in was a Mac/PC hybrid that was theoretically untouchable by Apple's legal department. I don't know what ever happened to this thing, but the fact that it wouldn't run Pagemaker could well have doomed it -- even without help from Apple's lawyers!
After that machine faded and vanished in to nothing, Apple licensed cloning. Around the same time we started seeing demos of the PReP and CHRP boards. These could have run the Mac OS, along with several other operating systems, but to my knowledge no Mac compatible boxes were ever released (If someone else knows of some, please post!).
Now Apple's machines use open firmware in place of big ROMs, so any attempt to get the Mac OS running on other hardware might be simpler, but the OF could still be a tricky river for an intrepid cloner to navigate. I don't know much about OF myself, nor Apple's implementation and use of it on their machines, but if you would like to speculate on this subject please do!
In regards to the motherboard in question, there are a few things to consider:
a) To the extent the cost of equipment is dependent upon volume, this may not be a high enough volume product to make it as a "mass market" board.
b) The advance here might be that you can run PowerPC Mac OS apps on non-Apple hardware, which (as Slashdot story pointed out) could be a convenient extra feature for a few users of this board. It is of course fairly common to emulate a 68K Mac. Aqua and the rest of OS X would be bigger advance, but that doesn't sound like an advance that has happened yet...
c) To get OS X running, you may still have a decidedly different task (remember I didn't read the article; see above).
d) Unless you use ROMs, etc., that were illegally copied, Apple Legal probably doesn't have much to say against this. They may be annoyed, but probably not scared...up until OS X and Aqua will run on it.
e) This isn't a mass market solution for running OS 9: You still need to get one of these machines, get Linux up and running, get a Mac ROM, install the compatibility environment, and only then do you get to use OS 9. That's a pretty geeky sequence, but the geeks don't seem to be the ones who want to run OS 9! Of course, once Aqua hits this hardware...
f) It sounds like this is a G3 board (note: I still haven't read the article). This will limit its appeal; a lot of folks might be looking for a G4 based machine so this might not be the ideal option for them. Of course, the G3 and G4 perform comparably per MHz in non-Altivec operations. OS X, however, on G3 machines seems rather pokey.
In short, this is pretty cool but the advance to date doesn't by itself threaten Apple; loss of control of hardware that could run OS X's UI would threaten Apple. Also don't forget that there are Mac emulators for PCs and Apple hasn't successfully come down on them. And yes, I know that's different, they're only 68K emulators, and they can be slow, etc., but I still think this doesn't yet threaten Apple. For the time being it's simply another neat thing you can do with a neat 3rd party niche board. I'll keep an eye on developments.
Finally, I would like to see commodity G4 based boards that could be coaxed to run OS X. That would be killer. Doubtless Apple would agree...
Cool.
I can have one of my dozen or so phony-info Passport accounts manage my dozen or so phony news site logins!
Next Please...
Lets see...a 10GB iPod costs $399 -- that's $39.90 per gigabyte. So extrapolating to 1000 gigabytes...yes...we'll have a $39,900 iPod!
I'll take two of them; just let me find my checkbook. Oh shoot, I must have left it in the McLaren...I just hope it isn't in the Bentley. Well, I'll just have my chauffeur bring it 'round in the helicopter. Do you have a pen I could borrow?
The real question is whether this technology will be better (and cheaper!) than any other high capacity memory when it's (maybe) released in 2008.
I have my hopes pegged on static random access technology that doesn't depend on disk technology. Instant power on and no difference between storage and application memory are likely to be killer technologies.
Considering that flooding a P2P network is easiest when you have the greatest resources to throw at the task, it's hard to imagine that this recourse would be viable for any but large corporate powers or those lucky enough to find themselves in the RIAAA's, etc, best graces. Thus this technique would have the effect of extending the monopolies of the most dominant players, and would choke off P2P distribution paths that could be used by any dangerous upstart rivals. Maintaining their distribution monopoly has, of course, long been the recording industry's primary concern.
It is also perfectly plausible that any organization with sufficient resources could squash any sort of offending content, beyond any specific type of media, rendering entirely useless existing P2P systems. Note, however, that by sufficient resources I don't mean just network resources. Rather, the most useful resource will be money. Since this is designed as a tool of harrasment, it's likely there would be lawsuits -- but small entities might not be able or willing to risk the cost of a lawsuit. That could work in favor of large entities in two ways: first to limit the ability of individual parties to sue those disrupting a network, and second to empower only the wealthiest entities to venture to disrupt that network. So once again the largest entities benefit at the expense of the little guy.
I don't see any mention of any special recourse unfairly targeted parties may have, but it's not far fetched to assume that by design any recourse wouldn't be very effective -- otherwse there wouldn't be any point having the law in the first place (It's hard to image much opportunity for recourse when the law is designed to inflict haphazard damage.) Without disincentives, why shouldn't companies spam & otherwise disrupt the P2P for any perceived or concocted reason?
Thus the system could be ripe for abuse, but without the opportunity for that inconvenient oversight afforded the wronged under our official legal system. But then again, that's why modern society doesn't tolerate vigalantes...
Of course these concerns are on top of the already harebrained notion that it would be a good idea to destroy the current implementations of an extremely popular emerging technology that can be (and is) used for legitimate purposes.
Finally, what's to prevent a broad interpretation of a law like this? At this point the details are too vague to comment on with certainty, but it's not far fetched to imagine that a few poorly worded lines could turn something like this in to another DMCA.
Fortunately for the 'net and the economy, it shouldn't be difficult to make someone -- even a typical luddite congressman -- understand that unleashing vigilante chaos on the Internet is a very bad idea. With only a small amount of luck this media industry power grab will be quickly defeated.
Finally, I would like you to consider that corporate censoship can be more dangerous than government censoship, since we do not have any direct individual control over corporate power as we do (theoretically) with our government. Plus, the more control corporate interests with agendas have over mass communication, the harder it is to democratically render grass roots changes. This self-reinforcing cycle of corporate media power is well evidenced by the proposed legislation.
This could be very relevant if remote hosting or remote computing is ever going to grow. Apple got some bad publicity a while back after they claimed ownership of all the content in people's iDisks (or whatever they're called) -- but in that case Apple backed down. What if they hadn't?
Here are some hypothetical situations that seem analagous to the situation with Mythic, that with this precedent all seem a little bit scary...
Consider a cellular phone company. Would my cell phone's voicemail, being hosted on the cellular provider's equipment, be reasonably considered the cellular provider's property? What if a piece of highly confidential data were left there, say an idea for a new invention. Can the cell phone company claim they own that data and then do with it what they like?
Ok, suppose I keep track of my finances with an online service and I enter the data directly in to their remote server -- the data never lives on my computer; it's remote only. Now if the company hosting that service decides to toss a boilerplate "we own everything" clause in to the click-through on the login screen, do they have a right to my financial data? So financial data is too inflammatory...how about an online database of all my books? I don't see that as significantly different from the Mythic case.
Or suppose that a large software company offered remote networked applications via a rental revenue model. The software saves its documents on the remote server. Later I want to retrieve my important documents, but in the meantime the software company has claimed that it owns my documents, based on a clause tucked away in the user license.
Later I want to create a web page. So I upload my web page to a remote hosting site, which of course claims ownership of anythying on its servers. (You'd start to think I'd learn by now!) Later I decide I want to change or remove some information on the site, but the hosting company refuses to give me access claiming I have no right to mess with their data...and then they start selling this content as their own!
If this kind of stuff is not illegal, would you necessarily trust a company not to abuse their rights in this way? Remember that in the last ten or fifteen years there has been a growing consensus in the American business world that anything that can be done to increase profits in the short term necessarily should be done. Glance towards Enron if you believe a company is always going to make the "good" forward thinking choice...
Perhaps we should start lobbying our state legislatures to enact laws to preemptively clear this sort of thing up. Even requiring companies to abide by their agreements as stated the first time a user signs up for a service -- irrespective of how those agreements are initially set up -- would be a positive move. That would make it harder to get blindsided by a change in the user agreement after a person has started using the service (in the syle of Yahoo's "you want Spam" change). And as long as I've got a wish list going, the agreements should be prefaced with a readable easy to understand synopsis of the actual agreement.
But I doubt the business lobby would ever let anything so simple and sensible sneak through a senate chamber someplace...
Perhaps that's a bit too harsh, but Scientific American has come down in the world quite a bit since the late eighties or early nineties. As I recall, they got a new editor many years ago and he was hell bent on dumbing the magazine down, fluffing it up with low-attention-theshold filler, and generally reducing it to a level of depth, insight, and relevance typical of USA Today or Omni Magazine. He suceeded, and many of the science professionals I knew cancelled their subscriptions shortly thereafter.
This subject strikes me as the researcher noting to himself "oh, hey...if I make some interesting assumptions, I get this cool effect popping out. And I might as well test it since it's so easy to test." Or an April Fools joke*. Which falls short of us dismissing the idea out of hand, but does suggest it doesn't deserve much media coverage -- at least until any positive results are verified. In other words, it was just sensationalist enough to get Scientific American's attention (they dig this kind of stuff), but not so far to the side of quackery that it has (yet) been featured in the Fortean Times.
* By the way, the paper missed April Fools day by four days; the date is stamped April 5, 2002. There's also a second date stamp of April 11, 2002. (A slightly earlier date stamp would have cleared things up pretty quickly!)