There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time.
This kind of thinking gets people in loads of trouble. Sure, a sip a cream or a pat of butter or a piece of bacon once a month wouldn't do anybody any harm. But once these foods are included in the diet, it's easy for them to become habits. When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
The main problem is that when cookbook authors like Brown create recipes that emphasize these nasty foods, at least some people end up including tremendously unhealthy amounts of these foods in their diets. You want incredibly tasty food where none of the ingredients cause health problems? Check out this one by Lorna Sass.
Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to this book, and have refrained from embedding my Amazon Associates code in this link.
This past week on Vegan.com, we've run a "Don't Link to Huntington" article. Huntington prohibits linking to their site, which is reason enough in my eyes to link to them. They are one of the biggest vivisectors in the United States, and they want it both ways. They want to use a website to peddle their animal testing services to companies, while preventing animal rights groups from pointing to Huntingon.com in order to show the public what is done to animals for the sake of making a buck.
But here's where the story takes an interesting turn. As I said, we posted our link on Vegan.com a few days ago. I was expecting I might receive a nasty letter from their lawyers telling me to desist. Sheesh, in fact you could say I was hoping to get a notice from their lawyers, so I could tell them to go cram it. But nothing.
Instead, here's what they have apparently done. I just went to Vegan.com, and the links to Huntington's page now come up as refused if you click on them. Meanwhile, you can still manually type Huntington.com into your browser, and the site will come up. So I suspect they have put a block in place, refusing all links from Vegan.com. Try it and see for yourself
But of course, refusing links is not the worst thing these scumbags do, given the horrifying acts they perform every day on animals. But there's no point in starting a rant about that.
It seems there are at least four or five stories about the RIAA every week on Slashdot. Most deal with circumventing their legal lobbying, technical approaches for dealing with proposed DRM techniques, and whatnot.
Meanwhile, it seems the RIAA sinks to a new depth every week. With this latest story, I think it's time the tech community started asking a different question. What can the tech community do to damage the RIAA or render them irrelevant? And what are the best legal methods for kicking the RIAA where it hurts?
According to Microsoft's lead product manager of Windows Digital Media:
There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline.
It's morning and I'm still feeling pretty alert, but even the acronym PLMS is enough to make me think, "this is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass." Would it be possible to come up with a more intimidating bit of tech-speak for a product's name?
More to the point, can you picture an inexperienced user having to track down the Personal License Migration Service utility and get it working? Just the name of it alone makes it sound like an afternoon's project.
Looks like Windows users who want to maintain rights to their music libraries are going to have to regularly clear some rather intimidating hurdles every time they buy a new system or reformat their drive. I wonder how Apple will handle the same situation. Somehow, I can't picture Steve announcing iPLMS at an upcoming MacWorld;)
Here are four things that weren't mentioned in the Times article and haven't yet been mentioned in the comments here.
First, despite the huge length of the article, nearly everything mentioned to support the Atkins-type diets was anecdotal. Compare that to efforts like Dean Ornish's carefully controlled studies, where participants ate all they wanted of near-vegan foods and generally lost significant weight.
Second, this is anecdotal, but I've never met anyone who could stick with the Atkins plan for more than a year. And while I'm being anecdotal, take a look at the bookjack photos of Atkins and Sears. Do you really think they look healthy?
Third, and this is a huge concern for some and a trivial concern for others, consider the massive farm animal killing that meat-centered diets require. I've personally been healthy as can be for fifteen years, ever since I switched to a vegan diet. But the big attraction for me is that my food dollar no longer funds the slaughterhouse.
Finally, keep in mind that Ornish-type programs invariably contain loads of fruits and vegetables -- which have been shown to significantly reduce risks of many types of cancer. After all, there are other health matters to think about beyond obesity.
Sure, but what do you pay a minute (during business hours) for being able to use those full-featured cellphones? I think the groundbreaking part with Wi-Fi is that once you pay for the system, your hourly costs are zilch.
I'm the last person to feel sorry for the cable companies. It's a generally sleazy industry, IMHO. But it's also clear that the companies are losing their shirts given the current pricing schemes, and something's going to have to change.
I'd have no problem at all paying a reasonable market cost for my bandwidth, and then tacking on X dollars each month for my cable hookup charge. In fact, I'd prefer it that way. I don't want something for nothing, and I have no problem paying for what I use. I'd actually prefer to be able to access a webpage and see how many megabytes of data transfer I've done this month.
The one obvious pitfall to this pricing scheme is that it's likely to destroy the current concept of P2P filesharing. After all, few people would have problems paying, say, 3 bucks to download (steal) ten CD's worth of music. But how many people would enable their file sharing, thus paying significant money for sharing their files with other users? And once the number of uploaders online crashes to near zero, P2P as we know it will be dead.
But anyway, this problem will have to be dealt with, and I suppose people will come up with imaginitive solutions. I think paying for the bandwidth you use is both fair and inevitable. So this leads me to my question: does anyone have a clear idea what the cable companies pay for a gigabyte of bandwidth?
It seems to me that before you take the plunge and get one of these things, your first priority should be figuring out, not the feature set, but if either company is likely to survive. Both XM and Sirius are gushing money (both lost over five bucks per share last quarter.)
What a drag it would be to spend 500+ dollars to install a system into your car's dashboard, and then have to rip it out in a couple years if the company goes belly up. At their current burn rate, I'd be willing to bet that at least one of the two companies will fail.
Plus, keep in mind that once you install one of these systems, you are going to be held hostage to any rate increases down the road (pun not intended.)
I personally think these companies took off during the go-go optimism of two years ago. For the money you'd spend on one of these things, you could get one of those hundred-CD units that goes into your trunk, and never worry about the company going belly-up.
This piece shows the hazards of relying on journalism vs. engineering journals for assessing the potential of a company. I had to wonder, why was this company able to get the attention of the NY Times, when it seems as though there are better funded companies using comparable technology.
Details like Etherlinx's garage being a scant six blocks from Jobs' and Wozniak's first garage are cute, but they tell us less than nothing about the company's potential. I couldn't help wondering if Etherlinx hired some media-savvy marketing person, whose job it was to unearth cute little details like that in order to get journalists' attention.
Finishing that article, my main feeling wasn't "Gee...it sounds like these guys have some great technology that might overcome the last mile issue." Instead, I came away thinking, "How was it that these guys got the attention of the NY Times without demonstrating anything substantially new?"
I mostly use IE 5.1 on a Mac. And yes, I think the toolbar is gorgeous. However, the toolbar for IE on Windows XP is, in my opinion, only OK. If you read my post and were thinking about the Windows version, I could see how you would protest about it being called gorgeous. But it's still a lot nicer looking than the default Mozilla skin.
I suppose these were a couple good first-day reviews. I downloaded 1.0 yesterday and played around with it. My impressions were that for casual use, Mozilla's pretty indistinguishable from IE. But there was one thing that caught my attention that I think is of great importance, but wasn't mentioned in either review.
Not to troll, but the front end of Mozilla is ugly as sin. If this browser's going to catch on, what will matter to most mainstream users isn't pipelining, tabbed browsing, or HTML compliance, but the initial first impression of how good it looks. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they hired some standout designers to make IE look gorgeous.
Now I know that the whole point of Mozilla is the underlying technology. But for it to catch on as a browser, it needs to be every bit as pretty as IE. It'll be interesting to see if the Netscape version of 1.0 incorporates a glossy front end. For now, I know which browser I politically favor, but I also know which one I want to look at several times a day. They aren't the same.
About a year ago, I got my dad set up with @home. At the time, you could save about $10 a month off your @home bill by buying your own cable modem. Cable modems then cost about $170, so we figured buying one was a no-brainer, as it would pay for itself in less than two years.
Then @home went down the toilet and my dad's service was taken over by AT&T. Now it looks like our decision to buy wasn't so smart after all. My take-home lesson from this: never bet your own money on the assumption that your cable provider won't change the rules of the game.
Interesting. Now is this confined to hobbyists because the LCD companies are too slow-moving to have thought of it first? Or is the whole idea fundamentally flawed?
What I'd really want to see in the article is: Joe Blow built his own LCD projector for $350, and the image quality is better than what a good projection-screen television delivers.
Instead, there are lots of plans from hobbyists making their own, but no clear word about whether even the best of these designs produces an acceptable image.
One key thing: most of these designs call for a miniature 800x600 LCD monitor. Once projected onto a wall, how does that compare to the dots per inch of a regular projection TV? I bet it doesn't compare favorably at all.
The big question I came away with after reading this is: why aren't the big LCD companies developing this kind of product? Maybe it's an idea that, even with big-budget R&D, won't produce an acceptably good image.
1) The costs of copy protected systems aren't paid by the "content" holders -- they are paid for by consumers. Essentially, you will end up paying more for a less capable computer, while Disney laughs its way to the bank.
2) For a copy protected computer to work, every peripheral -- from monitors to speakers -- must have copy protection built in. Think you're having trouble getting your Wintel box to behave now? You ain't seen nothing yet.
3) This is all being decided by government, so that no rogue manufacturers can ship non-protected computers. If that weren't the case, Apple might skip imposing copy protection, and we'd see 75% of Wintel users buying Macs so that they could avoid copy protection.
Gilmore seems puzzled by the fact that Intel isn't telling the content companies to cram it. Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in their best interest to side with the content guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been answered.
It seems the pivotal question here is: will the Hollings bills require all manufacturers to build end-to-end protection throughout their computers and peripherals? If not, what degree of protection does the bill require?
A wrinkle in this that nobody has thought of. Suppose end-to-end encryption is required. Each company's protection would be a little different, as we're talking about hundreds of components from various vendors. It might turn out that Apple or AMD sort of messes up their encryption (oops!) -- and by that "mistake" captures 75% of the computer market. After all, would you rather own a machine with rock-solid protection, or one that has a huge chink in the armor?
I know I'd want to buy my computer from the supplier who was most competent at designing machines and least competent at providing 100% protection of content.
Want to start a successful computer company? Just hire designers who don't know or care about ensuring robust protection.
Let's see an electric use cost comparison between this RF lighting and fluorescents. It's pretty slipshod that the article didn't bother to address the question of whether this lighting offers significant savings.
Until it's clear that there are compelling cost advantages associated with microwave lighting, the issue of whether this technology could endanger communications doesn't merit discussion.
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the lead character's obsession with business cards in American Psycho. For professionals, a personal website today serves much of the role that business cards served in the 1980s.
Any website or businesscard will contain your contact information. But some people want more than that. They want to shell out extra money to make a statement. The extra $280 that they pay for a.Pro domain serves a purpose--it distinguishes them from the.Com rabble.
I hate to admite it, but what this company is doing with.Pro domains is innovative. If they market it well to people who want to make a statement, it'll sell. After all, we live in a world where loads of people spend $250 extra to get a gold plated nameplate on their Toyotas. Never underestimate the number of insecure people with money to spend.
If you haven't joined the EFF (or the equivalent in your country), now might be a good time.
It's definitely a good idea to join the EFF, and to be active against this kind of thing. But an even more effective action is to let mainstream folks know about this problem. The DMCA and whatnot is as grave a concern for clueless newbies as it is for hardcore geeks.
The best way to make your voice heard on this matter is to find a way to get the general population knowledgeable about what's going on. As long as this is seen as mainly an activism issue for nerds, we're in trouble.
A bunch of posters here have wondered "why build such a thing?" Having just had the misfortune of visiting Vegas, let me say why the city is uniquely suited to benefit from a monorail.
Like no other city, Las Vegas is made up a tremendously high percentage of people who visit just for a the weekend. Tens of thousands of people fly into Vegas every week, all of whom go directly to the casinos, where they sleep in the upstairs hotel rooms. Right now, they essentially have two viable choices: cab or rental car.
Nobody wants to go through the hassle of figuring out a bus system just after flying into town. And walking that mile or so to the casinos, with luggage, in the dessert heat won't work either. A monorail dedicated to connect the airport with the strip is an incredible idea, as much as I may personally detest gambling.
The first thing I noticed about the ad wasn't the contents of the dock or the advertising copy, it was the width of the page. I've never seen a commercial website require such a wide browser setting...and I'm sure that's because Apple knows that most Unix admins are using 21" CRTs.
Assuming this discovery is legitimate, I bet that it's old news to the oil companies.
From the article:
"In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth's crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen," said Professor Freund.
I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but come on. How could the huge oil producers not have encountered this vast store of hydrogen? I would imagine the oil companies do 10,000 times more drilling and exploration than NASA.
One big appeal of Mozilla is that, with this browser, non-Wintel users aren't second-class citizens.
IE 6.0 for Windows came out last August. Yet Mac users still aren't even at the 5.5 version -- the most current version for Macs is still 5.1.
The unstated message Microsoft sends to Mac users is, "You want the coolest, latest browser, then switch to Windows. If you want your browser to be two years obsolete, stick with your little toy Mac."
With the release of Mozilla 1.0, this browser will be giving IE some heavy competition -- particularly on non-Wintel platforms. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft suddenly starts offering Mac users a much more current and attractive version of IE. And if they do, the question will be: why weren't they doing this all along?
Slashdot Mirror
Excerpt from response to question 4:
There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time.
This kind of thinking gets people in loads of trouble. Sure, a sip a cream or a pat of butter or a piece of bacon once a month wouldn't do anybody any harm. But once these foods are included in the diet, it's easy for them to become habits. When I go to a Safeway or Wegman's and see every tenth person over 300 pounds and pushing a shopping cart loaded with milk, cheeses, beef, etc. it makes me wince when I hear this "no bad foods" kind of thinking.
The main problem is that when cookbook authors like Brown create recipes that emphasize these nasty foods, at least some people end up including tremendously unhealthy amounts of these foods in their diets. You want incredibly tasty food where none of the ingredients cause health problems? Check out this one by Lorna Sass.
Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to this book, and have refrained from embedding my Amazon Associates code in this link.An X1 class solar flare, huh? No wonder I've gotten so many popup ads of provocatively dressed women staring longingly into webcams today.
This past week on Vegan.com, we've run a "Don't Link to Huntington" article. Huntington prohibits linking to their site, which is reason enough in my eyes to link to them. They are one of the biggest vivisectors in the United States, and they want it both ways. They want to use a website to peddle their animal testing services to companies, while preventing animal rights groups from pointing to Huntingon.com in order to show the public what is done to animals for the sake of making a buck.
But here's where the story takes an interesting turn. As I said, we posted our link on Vegan.com a few days ago. I was expecting I might receive a nasty letter from their lawyers telling me to desist. Sheesh, in fact you could say I was hoping to get a notice from their lawyers, so I could tell them to go cram it. But nothing.
Instead, here's what they have apparently done. I just went to Vegan.com, and the links to Huntington's page now come up as refused if you click on them. Meanwhile, you can still manually type Huntington.com into your browser, and the site will come up. So I suspect they have put a block in place, refusing all links from Vegan.com. Try it and see for yourself
But of course, refusing links is not the worst thing these scumbags do, given the horrifying acts they perform every day on animals. But there's no point in starting a rant about that.
It seems there are at least four or five stories about the RIAA every week on Slashdot. Most deal with circumventing their legal lobbying, technical approaches for dealing with proposed DRM techniques, and whatnot.
Meanwhile, it seems the RIAA sinks to a new depth every week. With this latest story, I think it's time the tech community started asking a different question. What can the tech community do to damage the RIAA or render them irrelevant? And what are the best legal methods for kicking the RIAA where it hurts?
According to Microsoft's lead product manager of Windows Digital Media:
There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline.
It's morning and I'm still feeling pretty alert, but even the acronym PLMS is enough to make me think, "this is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass." Would it be possible to come up with a more intimidating bit of tech-speak for a product's name?
More to the point, can you picture an inexperienced user having to track down the Personal License Migration Service utility and get it working? Just the name of it alone makes it sound like an afternoon's project.
Looks like Windows users who want to maintain rights to their music libraries are going to have to regularly clear some rather intimidating hurdles every time they buy a new system or reformat their drive. I wonder how Apple will handle the same situation. Somehow, I can't picture Steve announcing iPLMS at an upcoming MacWorld ;)
The NASDAQ is up as I write this, an hour or so after Steve's keynote. But Apple stock is down 13%.
Here are four things that weren't mentioned in the Times article and haven't yet been mentioned in the comments here.
First, despite the huge length of the article, nearly everything mentioned to support the Atkins-type diets was anecdotal. Compare that to efforts like Dean Ornish's carefully controlled studies, where participants ate all they wanted of near-vegan foods and generally lost significant weight.
Second, this is anecdotal, but I've never met anyone who could stick with the Atkins plan for more than a year. And while I'm being anecdotal, take a look at the bookjack photos of Atkins and Sears. Do you really think they look healthy?
Third, and this is a huge concern for some and a trivial concern for others, consider the massive farm animal killing that meat-centered diets require. I've personally been healthy as can be for fifteen years, ever since I switched to a vegan diet. But the big attraction for me is that my food dollar no longer funds the slaughterhouse.
Finally, keep in mind that Ornish-type programs invariably contain loads of fruits and vegetables -- which have been shown to significantly reduce risks of many types of cancer. After all, there are other health matters to think about beyond obesity.
>>Not like we have cell phones with internet that work nearly anywhere or anything. This is so revolutionary.
>>/flamebait (but seriously....this isnt groundbreaking)
Sure, but what do you pay a minute (during business hours) for being able to use those full-featured cellphones? I think the groundbreaking part with Wi-Fi is that once you pay for the system, your hourly costs are zilch.
I'm the last person to feel sorry for the cable companies. It's a generally sleazy industry, IMHO. But it's also clear that the companies are losing their shirts given the current pricing schemes, and something's going to have to change.
I'd have no problem at all paying a reasonable market cost for my bandwidth, and then tacking on X dollars each month for my cable hookup charge. In fact, I'd prefer it that way. I don't want something for nothing, and I have no problem paying for what I use. I'd actually prefer to be able to access a webpage and see how many megabytes of data transfer I've done this month.
The one obvious pitfall to this pricing scheme is that it's likely to destroy the current concept of P2P filesharing. After all, few people would have problems paying, say, 3 bucks to download (steal) ten CD's worth of music. But how many people would enable their file sharing, thus paying significant money for sharing their files with other users? And once the number of uploaders online crashes to near zero, P2P as we know it will be dead.
But anyway, this problem will have to be dealt with, and I suppose people will come up with imaginitive solutions. I think paying for the bandwidth you use is both fair and inevitable. So this leads me to my question: does anyone have a clear idea what the cable companies pay for a gigabyte of bandwidth?It seems to me that before you take the plunge and get one of these things, your first priority should be figuring out, not the feature set, but if either company is likely to survive. Both XM and Sirius are gushing money (both lost over five bucks per share last quarter.)
What a drag it would be to spend 500+ dollars to install a system into your car's dashboard, and then have to rip it out in a couple years if the company goes belly up. At their current burn rate, I'd be willing to bet that at least one of the two companies will fail.
Plus, keep in mind that once you install one of these systems, you are going to be held hostage to any rate increases down the road (pun not intended.)
I personally think these companies took off during the go-go optimism of two years ago. For the money you'd spend on one of these things, you could get one of those hundred-CD units that goes into your trunk, and never worry about the company going belly-up.
This piece shows the hazards of relying on journalism vs. engineering journals for assessing the potential of a company. I had to wonder, why was this company able to get the attention of the NY Times, when it seems as though there are better funded companies using comparable technology.
Details like Etherlinx's garage being a scant six blocks from Jobs' and Wozniak's first garage are cute, but they tell us less than nothing about the company's potential. I couldn't help wondering if Etherlinx hired some media-savvy marketing person, whose job it was to unearth cute little details like that in order to get journalists' attention.
Finishing that article, my main feeling wasn't "Gee...it sounds like these guys have some great technology that might overcome the last mile issue." Instead, I came away thinking, "How was it that these guys got the attention of the NY Times without demonstrating anything substantially new?"
I mostly use IE 5.1 on a Mac. And yes, I think the toolbar is gorgeous. However, the toolbar for IE on Windows XP is, in my opinion, only OK. If you read my post and were thinking about the Windows version, I could see how you would protest about it being called gorgeous. But it's still a lot nicer looking than the default Mozilla skin.
I suppose these were a couple good first-day reviews. I downloaded 1.0 yesterday and played around with it. My impressions were that for casual use, Mozilla's pretty indistinguishable from IE. But there was one thing that caught my attention that I think is of great importance, but wasn't mentioned in either review.
Not to troll, but the front end of Mozilla is ugly as sin. If this browser's going to catch on, what will matter to most mainstream users isn't pipelining, tabbed browsing, or HTML compliance, but the initial first impression of how good it looks. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they hired some standout designers to make IE look gorgeous.
Now I know that the whole point of Mozilla is the underlying technology. But for it to catch on as a browser, it needs to be every bit as pretty as IE. It'll be interesting to see if the Netscape version of 1.0 incorporates a glossy front end. For now, I know which browser I politically favor, but I also know which one I want to look at several times a day. They aren't the same.
About a year ago, I got my dad set up with @home. At the time, you could save about $10 a month off your @home bill by buying your own cable modem. Cable modems then cost about $170, so we figured buying one was a no-brainer, as it would pay for itself in less than two years.
Then @home went down the toilet and my dad's service was taken over by AT&T. Now it looks like our decision to buy wasn't so smart after all. My take-home lesson from this: never bet your own money on the assumption that your cable provider won't change the rules of the game.
Interesting. Now is this confined to hobbyists because the LCD companies are too slow-moving to have thought of it first? Or is the whole idea fundamentally flawed?
What I'd really want to see in the article is: Joe Blow built his own LCD projector for $350, and the image quality is better than what a good projection-screen television delivers.
Instead, there are lots of plans from hobbyists making their own, but no clear word about whether even the best of these designs produces an acceptable image.
One key thing: most of these designs call for a miniature 800x600 LCD monitor. Once projected onto a wall, how does that compare to the dots per inch of a regular projection TV? I bet it doesn't compare favorably at all.
The big question I came away with after reading this is: why aren't the big LCD companies developing this kind of product? Maybe it's an idea that, even with big-budget R&D, won't produce an acceptably good image.
Gilmore's main points:
1) The costs of copy protected systems aren't paid by the "content" holders -- they are paid for by consumers. Essentially, you will end up paying more for a less capable computer, while Disney laughs its way to the bank.
2) For a copy protected computer to work, every peripheral -- from monitors to speakers -- must have copy protection built in. Think you're having trouble getting your Wintel box to behave now? You ain't seen nothing yet.
3) This is all being decided by government, so that no rogue manufacturers can ship non-protected computers. If that weren't the case, Apple might skip imposing copy protection, and we'd see 75% of Wintel users buying Macs so that they could avoid copy protection.
Gilmore seems puzzled by the fact that Intel isn't telling the content companies to cram it. Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in their best interest to side with the content guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been answered.
It seems the pivotal question here is: will the Hollings bills require all manufacturers to build end-to-end protection throughout their computers and peripherals? If not, what degree of protection does the bill require?
A wrinkle in this that nobody has thought of. Suppose end-to-end encryption is required. Each company's protection would be a little different, as we're talking about hundreds of components from various vendors. It might turn out that Apple or AMD sort of messes up their encryption (oops!) -- and by that "mistake" captures 75% of the computer market. After all, would you rather own a machine with rock-solid protection, or one that has a huge chink in the armor?
I know I'd want to buy my computer from the supplier who was most competent at designing machines and least competent at providing 100% protection of content.
Want to start a successful computer company? Just hire designers who don't know or care about ensuring robust protection.
Let's see an electric use cost comparison between this RF lighting and fluorescents. It's pretty slipshod that the article didn't bother to address the question of whether this lighting offers significant savings.
Until it's clear that there are compelling cost advantages associated with microwave lighting, the issue of whether this technology could endanger communications doesn't merit discussion.
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the lead character's obsession with business cards in American Psycho. For professionals, a personal website today serves much of the role that business cards served in the 1980s.
Any website or businesscard will contain your contact information. But some people want more than that. They want to shell out extra money to make a statement. The extra $280 that they pay for a .Pro domain serves a purpose--it distinguishes them from the .Com rabble.
I hate to admite it, but what this company is doing with .Pro domains is innovative. If they market it well to people who want to make a statement, it'll sell. After all, we live in a world where loads of people spend $250 extra to get a gold plated nameplate on their Toyotas. Never underestimate the number of insecure people with money to spend.
Note, there are probably a few naive engineers and rocket scientists.
Funny, I always thought the terms "naive" and "rocket scientists" were antithetical.
Oops...I meant to say "From the summary:" not "From the article:"
To quote Cher (and with luck, to never quote her again), "If I could turn back time..."
If you haven't joined the EFF (or the equivalent in your country), now might be a good time.
It's definitely a good idea to join the EFF, and to be active against this kind of thing. But an even more effective action is to let mainstream folks know about this problem. The DMCA and whatnot is as grave a concern for clueless newbies as it is for hardcore geeks.
The best way to make your voice heard on this matter is to find a way to get the general population knowledgeable about what's going on. As long as this is seen as mainly an activism issue for nerds, we're in trouble.
A bunch of posters here have wondered "why build such a thing?" Having just had the misfortune of visiting Vegas, let me say why the city is uniquely suited to benefit from a monorail.
Like no other city, Las Vegas is made up a tremendously high percentage of people who visit just for a the weekend. Tens of thousands of people fly into Vegas every week, all of whom go directly to the casinos, where they sleep in the upstairs hotel rooms. Right now, they essentially have two viable choices: cab or rental car.
Nobody wants to go through the hassle of figuring out a bus system just after flying into town. And walking that mile or so to the casinos, with luggage, in the dessert heat won't work either. A monorail dedicated to connect the airport with the strip is an incredible idea, as much as I may personally detest gambling.
The first thing I noticed about the ad wasn't the contents of the dock or the advertising copy, it was the width of the page. I've never seen a commercial website require such a wide browser setting...and I'm sure that's because Apple knows that most Unix admins are using 21" CRTs.
Assuming this discovery is legitimate, I bet that it's old news to the oil companies.
From the article:
"In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth's crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen," said Professor Freund.
I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but come on. How could the huge oil producers not have encountered this vast store of hydrogen? I would imagine the oil companies do 10,000 times more drilling and exploration than NASA.
One big appeal of Mozilla is that, with this browser, non-Wintel users aren't second-class citizens.
IE 6.0 for Windows came out last August. Yet Mac users still aren't even at the 5.5 version -- the most current version for Macs is still 5.1.
The unstated message Microsoft sends to Mac users is, "You want the coolest, latest browser, then switch to Windows. If you want your browser to be two years obsolete, stick with your little toy Mac."
With the release of Mozilla 1.0, this browser will be giving IE some heavy competition -- particularly on non-Wintel platforms. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft suddenly starts offering Mac users a much more current and attractive version of IE. And if they do, the question will be: why weren't they doing this all along?