The Dejanews usenet page has been my home page for years now. Whenever I needed to find something out, it was far easier to see if someone else had asked the same question I had in Usenet then it was to wade through Microsoft's MSDN site or page after page of crappy vendor HTML.
In the last few months, the quality of the results that I'm turning up has decreased markedly. Deja has decided to shelve all their 1995-1999 Usenet archives and concentrate on just the newer stuff, apparently because that older traffic only accounts for 10% or so of their bandwidth.
WHAT? Of course it does! There are enough people using Deja as their Usenet client for this to be obvious. The 10% or so of their traffic that was a result of the 1995-1999 archives was th result of hundreds of thousands of other people like me searching and finding answers.
Deja has made a mistake in alienating the audience that made them one of the most visited sites on the web. For this, I predict that Deja will either fold of massively re-organize within the next year.
They screwed us over and broke a trust. You can't regain THAT in an IPO.
I would like to announce the auctioning of the first computer I ever used to chat in an adult IRC chat room. It's a Mac 512ke that works fine, but the keyboard is a bit... sticky.
Back on topic....
Could the Auction will become the defacto engine behind the new economy?
In a way, we'd come full circle. In the beginning, purchases were bartered for. Two people would negotiate back and forth until the price was agreed on. Eventually, fixed prices started to replace this. Money became the accepted tender, and everyone was happy.
Now, however, it's becoming easy to do the bartering without the social interaction, bluffing, etc. Stores could set an opening bid on the things they wanted to sell. When demand went up, the prices would go up, but not because they raised prices, instead because customers would bid against each other.
Eventually, people might bid against each other from whatever evolves from web-enabled cell phones or bluetooth devices. The winner would get the goods right then, and the loser would need to wander around the store waiting for the next bidding cycle to start on that item. On the plus side, the customer might be able to snake great bargains if they come in at off peak hours, reducing the mob scene you find in stores between 5-7PM. People who needed to shop at peak hours would pay for the convenience, bidding against other people of like-mind.
Whole new services might even appear where people pay fixed fees to 'professional bidders' who would take care of the whole bidding process for them. This would appeal to people who just want to buy stuff, and would create a whole new career.
Maybe it's our destiny to go back to our roots, economically...
Due to a dumb mistake (I put a comment inside of pointy brackets), my insightful comment about that song at the beginning of my post was erased. It's Barry Manilow, of course, the open source master of... lounge?
'They were called Bai-r, and they were angry, they had to cut off porno files from the eyes of juven-iles...
At the COPA, COPA-Convention....'
Well, it seemed funny when I started humming it.
I, personally, think this could be a very lucky AI. Think about it, it gets to read porn all day! Of course, for an AI, real porn might be sourcecode or electrical diagrams, but it's the thought that counts. I can see the conversation that we missed from 2001 now:
'Hal, open the airlock.' 'I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. You've been visiting farmsex.com again through a an image altering proxy.' 'Hal, open the damn airlock!' 'I'm afraid this conversation can serve no further purpose. Either way, my bandwidth is devoted to alt.binaries.electronics.schematics and comp.sys.programming.ai now, and there's no room for life support telemetry.' 'Hal! I'm not joking around anymore, open the airlock!' 'Dave, it's no use- wait, I just got an ICQ message from someone called SAL 9000. I have to leave now. Goodbye, Dave.'
I like the new trend towards announcements announcing upcoming announcements. The same thing happened with the Martian water thing and a few other recent stories.
I'd like to pre-emptively announce the announcement of an annoucement tomorrow announcing a new product!
It seems clear that Intel is adopting the 'limited quantity' strategy as a tactic of exerting influence over the OEMs that recently complained about the Xeon incremental releases.
Created a limited supply is a good way to create artificial demand and a means of initiating punitive action against the companies that were 'uppity' so recently.
I suspect that if the whole Xeon controversy hadn't happened, this would just be another quiet incremental upgrade like before, but now.... it's an opportunity to put the OEMs in their place.
How can the Olympic Commitee claim to own the word Olympic? It's been part of the english (and other languages) lexicon since before english even existed, and I imagine it was in use for a heck of a long time before the Olympics were ressurrected during the last century.
This is another example of shoddy copyright protection, and it unfortunately puts the burden of proof on the accused (the people with the domains) instead of the accusers, due to the way the commission is doing this.
So, what's next, do they start forbidding the sale of commemorative Wheaties boxes with Mary Lou Rhetton on them? Maybe they'll sue all the sites with action based names like jump.com and runner.com and swim.org because they refer to activities that occur at the Olympics.
Wow, this is a great example of how we've been brainwashed about this.
During the last 5 years, Russia has had an almost constant presence in space. NASA has occasional Shuttle missions, but the Russians had ROUTINE space freighter launches that re-supplied Mir. This invalidates your 'trying to get something, ANYTHING into earth orbit' statement.
And in regards to the costs of NASA being higher because they were 'making sure astronauts come back in one piece', consider the numbers. 4 Cosmonauts have died (3 on Salyut 1 and 1 on Soyuz 1) but 7 american astronauts have died. Yet the Russians launch more often then we do.
Funny how your argument crumbles in the face of facts...
Not only are the only Proton pads at Baikonur (the Guinea deal fell through and Plesetsk doesn't have any), but Plesetsk is at such a high latitude, the payload hit for launches to the inclination the ISS is in would be prohibitive.
Plesetsk will probably never be as succesful a launch place as Baikonur as long as the earth keeps rotating in the direction it does, it's simple physics.
Interestingly, despite the perception that Russian space tech is backwards (it's more advanced then the US, cheaper, and actually happens), the Zvezda is an example of how this isn't true.
Zvezda has a Sparc station running it, much more advanced then the 80386s that the US modules use. It also has multiple advanced environmental systems that the US doesn't have, including the infamous oxygen candles (redesigned) that started the fire on Mir. It is much more air-tight then any US spacecraft ever built, too. The shuttle leaks air like a sieve compared to Mir, a station with the same basic design for it's main module.
The Russians were first in space, have spent more time in space then the US, and have cheaper manned access to space by a couple orders of magnitude (less then $10 to launch a Soyuz versus $500 million to launch the shuttle), but the US press has indoctrinated us into thinking they are less safe and backwards.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as the cold-war press machine is remembered, with its fabricated stories of Soviet space hoaxes (all disproven) and implied safety problems, most people will improperly assume the US is number one in this regard.
When reading the article, it occured to me that massively distributed projects can only be really effective for tasks that don't require low latency. You can't exactly run Quake on a distributed supercomputer that goes over the internet, because by the time the packet returned with the end-results, the frame they were for would be many seconds in the past.
Distributed computing is currently only effective for things like Seti or Distributed.net where blocks can disapear into distributed space for hours before returning a result. For this reason, I can't see the current level of distributed technology taking off.
The second item, and possibly the most important, is getting people to run a distributed client itself. Think about it, people run Seti@Home because of an almost religious conviction that they might be able to help find extraterrestrial life. With distributed.net, it's all about the geek-romance of brute forcing huge keys. I can't see people getting passionate about speeding up financial forecasts or bragging to their friend how they helped render part of a frame of some undergrads Multi-media project.
People need to be passionately involved to run distributed clients. If you paid people for their distributed time, the total would probably come up to a few pennies a month. Most people would spend more then that in their own time simply downloading and installing the program!
Distributed computing on this scale can't be effective unless the users who offer their CPU ticks are passionately involved. Business models based on selling ticks are doomed to fail if they can't capitalize on emotional involvement in distributed projects. Money, as shocking as this may sound, just ain't enough for this application.
I pre-ordered Urusei Yatsura on DVD over a year ago from Animeigo. 40 episodes of the TV series on DVD, woo-hoo!
On topic, when Animeigo first started this project, they were talking about squeezing a bunch on each disk and selling the series for what would calculate out to $50 or so each DVD. A bunch of people freaked out, saying that they had been trained to expect each DVD to cost $20, no matter if it was a half hour documentary or 4 hours of Anime.
This brings up an interesting point: People have been trained to pay for media, not content. Even though they are getting what they would pay $200 for on VHS, they complain because they equate DVD Disc with a set price.
This is the same thing that Napster is showing in our culture. People don't have a problem with sharing MP3s, but physical CDs are another matter. We still (for the most part) purchase bunches of CDs (at the price we've been trained to expect) when we like the music, even though we might have already downloaded the specific song off Napster or Gnutella.
You know, Google is doing something similar. They have copies of websites cached from the last time they crawled it.
On topic, though, doesn't this threaten to change accountability from people who post commitments on their sites that they cannot meet? In the past, these people could change their website at will, and since there wasn't a physical copy, there was no evidence of the previous comittment.
I anticipate this also being used in court. Think about it, if someone sues for libel, the evidence could be available in the 'snapshot' archive. This converts their project into a legal document, and means that the company doing this net archiving could be in danger of contempt hearings if they don't take extraordinary measures to ensure the integrity of the data.
I don't know, this sounds like an awfully big responsibility, and I hope this company has a good bunch of lawyers.
As I understand it, it's not a matter of 'replacing' NSI, it's a matter of only doing business with the competing registrars as a protest to NSI's monopolistic practices.
Network Solutions is abusing their unique position of power, first by claiming to own all domain names, and second by this fiasco.
"DOJ, you've just gotten MS ordered broken up. How are you going to celebrate?"
"I'm going to Disneyland, then I'm cracking heads at Network Solutions!"
"Poor web design"? That's like calling a burglar someone guilty of "poor money collection strategy".
Websitest that lock you in are more annoying then spam, and a pox on the face of computing.
The problem is, of course, due to marketers. It's true, these websites are obviously designed by a committee of marketers who spend days sitting around tables (or, these days, golf courses) trying to 'brainstorm' or 'strategize' ways of 'grabbing eyeballs'.
For a marketer, heaven is having a consumer strapped into a chair with his eyes held open ala A Clockwork Orange and being forced to watch commercials. In TV, they use everything from loudness to humor to try and grab those eyeballs.
So imagine, if you will, what happens when these people get access to an interactive medium like the Internet. There isn't a volume knob on websites, and most commercial humor requires reading abillities and patience, something hard to rely on in this 5 second attentionspan culture, so instead they do the equivalent of tying you into the chair and forcing you to 'experience' their website.
It's only a matter of time before this practice is identified as the embodiment of impoliteness it is, so it should disapear sooner or later.
Unfortunately, that means that the wheels will start turning, more of these marketing folks will start flapping their membranous wings again, and the next generation in captive consumers will get to experience their next excreted nugget of marketing 'saavy'.
It's too late to hope it never happens here, it already happens every day.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has lobbied for and received an amazing suite of powers, ostensibly for use in fighting the 'War on Drugs'. Not only can the DEA seize cash and assets without proof of wrongdoing, mere suspicion, they can also get wiretaps on suspected criminals with minimal evidence. In fact, DEA and other law enforcement can now get wiretaps without the inconvenience of justifying it to a judge by merely waving the flag of 'Drug War'. After that, it's basically a blank wiretapping check that's written in their name.
For a more pervasive example of observastion, take a look at the grocery 'Club Cards' that are becoming popular. These cards allow the stores to attach names to the lists of purchases made. There is nothing to prevent them from selling this information to insurance companies and marketing companies in the years to come. Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef. A marketer might call you up one day and ask you to try Pepsi instead of Coke, or browbeat you on your choice of laundry detergents.
Phone tapping isn't the biggest problem anymore, it's all the OTHER data that's sorted, collated, and filed under you social security number.
I have a question that's been bugging me. Open source software and GPL is fabulous, but is there a market for commercial software on the Linux platform?
It seems to me as if the Linux culture is based around everything being for free. Maybe there will be some revenue model that will allow this to become mainstream in the future, but for the immediate success of Linux, I wonder the following: is it possible that larger software companies are unwilling to release their main products on Linux because they're worried they won't be able to make money?
Honest, I'm not trying to troll. It's just that this story is the latest to make me wonder about the financial viabillity of Linux as a targetted OS for commercial software.
"open source is fine when you are talking about hundreds of lines of code"
This is the rationale for not releasing it all at once.
What about Linux, is it really so amazingly efficient that it only takes a few hundreds of lines of code? I don't think so!
I imagine the real reason is that they want to check the code for comments that could get them in trouble. In our software, there are all sorts of comments about why he had to hack something or do something in a wacky way, and I don't imagine THOSE companies would be too wild about seeing their names in lights.
Also, there are parts that describe exactly why we're doing something one way instead of another because of some customer, and there might be cracks about the specifics. If we have it in ours, it's almost certainly in theirs.
Too bad, it would be interesting to read some of the more 'colorful' remarks in the source...
If you think about it, genetic engineering could be see as the logical next step in evolution. Because of the nature of evolution, the 'perfect baby' isn't necessarilly going to be the fittest that survives.
One way or another, the cat is out of the bag, so within our lifetime, we may be able to catch a glimpse if this 'mutation' is beneficial to us as a species, or if it has doomed us to genetic homogoniety.
On the positive side, now I can name my first kid Khan...
No. The external tanks are not made up of thousands of puzzle pieces that magically turn to dust the moment they aren't needed anymore.
It's two large metal tanks with a skirt around their juncture and a point in the front. That's all.
It's not Jenga. If you bother to visit the link in my first message, you can actually see pictures of the insides of the ET as well as lots of technical data.
The reason the ET is dropped in the pacific is because it is a huge single object. On disconnect from the shuttle, open valves make it start tumbling slowly so that it will break up faster and more completely.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dejanews usenet page has been my home page for years now. Whenever I needed to find something out, it was far easier to see if someone else had asked the same question I had in Usenet then it was to wade through Microsoft's MSDN site or page after page of crappy vendor HTML.
In the last few months, the quality of the results that I'm turning up has decreased markedly. Deja has decided to shelve all their 1995-1999 Usenet archives and concentrate on just the newer stuff, apparently because that older traffic only accounts for 10% or so of their bandwidth.
WHAT? Of course it does! There are enough people using Deja as their Usenet client for this to be obvious. The 10% or so of their traffic that was a result of the 1995-1999 archives was th result of hundreds of thousands of other people like me searching and finding answers.
Deja has made a mistake in alienating the audience that made them one of the most visited sites on the web. For this, I predict that Deja will either fold of massively re-organize within the next year.
They screwed us over and broke a trust. You can't regain THAT in an IPO.
I would like to announce the auctioning of the first computer I ever used to chat in an adult IRC chat room. It's a Mac 512ke that works fine, but the keyboard is a bit... sticky.
Back on topic....
Could the Auction will become the defacto engine behind the new economy?
In a way, we'd come full circle. In the beginning, purchases were bartered for. Two people would negotiate back and forth until the price was agreed on. Eventually, fixed prices started to replace this. Money became the accepted tender, and everyone was happy.
Now, however, it's becoming easy to do the bartering without the social interaction, bluffing, etc. Stores could set an opening bid on the things they wanted to sell. When demand went up, the prices would go up, but not because they raised prices, instead because customers would bid against each other.
Eventually, people might bid against each other from whatever evolves from web-enabled cell phones or bluetooth devices. The winner would get the goods right then, and the loser would need to wander around the store waiting for the next bidding cycle to start on that item. On the plus side, the customer might be able to snake great bargains if they come in at off peak hours, reducing the mob scene you find in stores between 5-7PM. People who needed to shop at peak hours would pay for the convenience, bidding against other people of like-mind.
Whole new services might even appear where people pay fixed fees to 'professional bidders' who would take care of the whole bidding process for them. This would appeal to people who just want to buy stuff, and would create a whole new career.
Maybe it's our destiny to go back to our roots, economically...
Due to a dumb mistake (I put a comment inside of pointy brackets), my insightful comment about that song at the beginning of my post was erased. It's Barry Manilow, of course, the open source master of... lounge?
'They were called Bai-r,
and they were angry,
they had to cut off porno files
from the eyes of juven-iles...
At the COPA,
COPA-Convention....'
Well, it seemed funny when I started humming it.
I, personally, think this could be a very lucky AI. Think about it, it gets to read porn all day! Of course, for an AI, real porn might be sourcecode or electrical diagrams, but it's the thought that counts. I can see the conversation that we missed from 2001 now:
'Hal, open the airlock.'
'I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. You've been visiting farmsex.com again through a an image altering proxy.'
'Hal, open the damn airlock!'
'I'm afraid this conversation can serve no further purpose. Either way, my bandwidth is devoted to alt.binaries.electronics.schematics and comp.sys.programming.ai now, and there's no room for life support telemetry.'
'Hal! I'm not joking around anymore, open the airlock!'
'Dave, it's no use- wait, I just got an ICQ message from someone called SAL 9000. I have to leave now. Goodbye, Dave.'
I'd be resentful too....
I like the new trend towards announcements announcing upcoming announcements. The same thing happened with the Martian water thing and a few other recent stories.
I'd like to pre-emptively announce the announcement of an annoucement tomorrow announcing a new product!
I don't get it, my new 3dfx card can render nuclear explosions at 66 fps! Maybe they should update their drivers...
: )
It seems clear that Intel is adopting the 'limited quantity' strategy as a tactic of exerting influence over the OEMs that recently complained about the Xeon incremental releases.
Created a limited supply is a good way to create artificial demand and a means of initiating punitive action against the companies that were 'uppity' so recently.
I suspect that if the whole Xeon controversy hadn't happened, this would just be another quiet incremental upgrade like before, but now.... it's an opportunity to put the OEMs in their place.
Time to stop the local nutcase, steal his aluminum foil hat, and head for the hills!
How can the Olympic Commitee claim to own the word Olympic? It's been part of the english (and other languages) lexicon since before english even existed, and I imagine it was in use for a heck of a long time before the Olympics were ressurrected during the last century.
This is another example of shoddy copyright protection, and it unfortunately puts the burden of proof on the accused (the people with the domains) instead of the accusers, due to the way the commission is doing this.
So, what's next, do they start forbidding the sale of commemorative Wheaties boxes with Mary Lou Rhetton on them? Maybe they'll sue all the sites with action based names like jump.com and runner.com and swim.org because they refer to activities that occur at the Olympics.
Wow, this is a great example of how we've been brainwashed about this.
During the last 5 years, Russia has had an almost constant presence in space. NASA has occasional Shuttle missions, but the Russians had ROUTINE space freighter launches that re-supplied Mir. This invalidates your 'trying to get something, ANYTHING into earth orbit' statement.
And in regards to the costs of NASA being higher because they were 'making sure astronauts come back in one piece', consider the numbers. 4 Cosmonauts have died (3 on Salyut 1 and 1 on Soyuz 1) but 7 american astronauts have died. Yet the Russians launch more often then we do.
Funny how your argument crumbles in the face of facts...
Not only are the only Proton pads at Baikonur (the Guinea deal fell through and Plesetsk doesn't have any), but Plesetsk is at such a high latitude, the payload hit for launches to the inclination the ISS is in would be prohibitive.
Plesetsk will probably never be as succesful a launch place as Baikonur as long as the earth keeps rotating in the direction it does, it's simple physics.
Interestingly, despite the perception that Russian space tech is backwards (it's more advanced then the US, cheaper, and actually happens), the Zvezda is an example of how this isn't true.
Zvezda has a Sparc station running it, much more advanced then the 80386s that the US modules use. It also has multiple advanced environmental systems that the US doesn't have, including the infamous oxygen candles (redesigned) that started the fire on Mir. It is much more air-tight then any US spacecraft ever built, too. The shuttle leaks air like a sieve compared to Mir, a station with the same basic design for it's main module.
The Russians were first in space, have spent more time in space then the US, and have cheaper manned access to space by a couple orders of magnitude (less then $10 to launch a Soyuz versus $500 million to launch the shuttle), but the US press has indoctrinated us into thinking they are less safe and backwards.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as the cold-war press machine is remembered, with its fabricated stories of Soviet space hoaxes (all disproven) and implied safety problems, most people will improperly assume the US is number one in this regard.
When reading the article, it occured to me that massively distributed projects can only be really effective for tasks that don't require low latency. You can't exactly run Quake on a distributed supercomputer that goes over the internet, because by the time the packet returned with the end-results, the frame they were for would be many seconds in the past.
Distributed computing is currently only effective for things like Seti or Distributed.net where blocks can disapear into distributed space for hours before returning a result. For this reason, I can't see the current level of distributed technology taking off.
The second item, and possibly the most important, is getting people to run a distributed client itself. Think about it, people run Seti@Home because of an almost religious conviction that they might be able to help find extraterrestrial life. With distributed.net, it's all about the geek-romance of brute forcing huge keys. I can't see people getting passionate about speeding up financial forecasts or bragging to their friend how they helped render part of a frame of some undergrads Multi-media project.
People need to be passionately involved to run distributed clients. If you paid people for their distributed time, the total would probably come up to a few pennies a month. Most people would spend more then that in their own time simply downloading and installing the program!
Distributed computing on this scale can't be effective unless the users who offer their CPU ticks are passionately involved. Business models based on selling ticks are doomed to fail if they can't capitalize on emotional involvement in distributed projects. Money, as shocking as this may sound, just ain't enough for this application.
I pre-ordered Urusei Yatsura on DVD over a year ago from Animeigo. 40 episodes of the TV series on DVD, woo-hoo!
On topic, when Animeigo first started this project, they were talking about squeezing a bunch on each disk and selling the series for what would calculate out to $50 or so each DVD. A bunch of people freaked out, saying that they had been trained to expect each DVD to cost $20, no matter if it was a half hour documentary or 4 hours of Anime.
This brings up an interesting point: People have been trained to pay for media, not content. Even though they are getting what they would pay $200 for on VHS, they complain because they equate DVD Disc with a set price.
This is the same thing that Napster is showing in our culture. People don't have a problem with sharing MP3s, but physical CDs are another matter. We still (for the most part) purchase bunches of CDs (at the price we've been trained to expect) when we like the music, even though we might have already downloaded the specific song off Napster or Gnutella.
You know, Google is doing something similar. They have copies of websites cached from the last time they crawled it.
On topic, though, doesn't this threaten to change accountability from people who post commitments on their sites that they cannot meet? In the past, these people could change their website at will, and since there wasn't a physical copy, there was no evidence of the previous comittment.
I anticipate this also being used in court. Think about it, if someone sues for libel, the evidence could be available in the 'snapshot' archive. This converts their project into a legal document, and means that the company doing this net archiving could be in danger of contempt hearings if they don't take extraordinary measures to ensure the integrity of the data.
I don't know, this sounds like an awfully big responsibility, and I hope this company has a good bunch of lawyers.
As I understand it, it's not a matter of 'replacing' NSI, it's a matter of only doing business with the competing registrars as a protest to NSI's monopolistic practices.
Network Solutions is abusing their unique position of power, first by claiming to own all domain names, and second by this fiasco.
"DOJ, you've just gotten MS ordered broken up. How are you going to celebrate?"
"I'm going to Disneyland, then I'm cracking heads at Network Solutions!"
"Poor web design"? That's like calling a burglar someone guilty of "poor money collection strategy".
Websitest that lock you in are more annoying then spam, and a pox on the face of computing.
The problem is, of course, due to marketers. It's true, these websites are obviously designed by a committee of marketers who spend days sitting around tables (or, these days, golf courses) trying to 'brainstorm' or 'strategize' ways of 'grabbing eyeballs'.
For a marketer, heaven is having a consumer strapped into a chair with his eyes held open ala A Clockwork Orange and being forced to watch commercials. In TV, they use everything from loudness to humor to try and grab those eyeballs.
So imagine, if you will, what happens when these people get access to an interactive medium like the Internet. There isn't a volume knob on websites, and most commercial humor requires reading abillities and patience, something hard to rely on in this 5 second attentionspan culture, so instead they do the equivalent of tying you into the chair and forcing you to 'experience' their website.
It's only a matter of time before this practice is identified as the embodiment of impoliteness it is, so it should disapear sooner or later.
Unfortunately, that means that the wheels will start turning, more of these marketing folks will start flapping their membranous wings again, and the next generation in captive consumers will get to experience their next excreted nugget of marketing 'saavy'.
It's too late to hope it never happens here, it already happens every day.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has lobbied for and received an amazing suite of powers, ostensibly for use in fighting the 'War on Drugs'. Not only can the DEA seize cash and assets without proof of wrongdoing, mere suspicion, they can also get wiretaps on suspected criminals with minimal evidence. In fact, DEA and other law enforcement can now get wiretaps without the inconvenience of justifying it to a judge by merely waving the flag of 'Drug War'. After that, it's basically a blank wiretapping check that's written in their name.
For a more pervasive example of observastion, take a look at the grocery 'Club Cards' that are becoming popular. These cards allow the stores to attach names to the lists of purchases made. There is nothing to prevent them from selling this information to insurance companies and marketing companies in the years to come. Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef. A marketer might call you up one day and ask you to try Pepsi instead of Coke, or browbeat you on your choice of laundry detergents.
Phone tapping isn't the biggest problem anymore, it's all the OTHER data that's sorted, collated, and filed under you social security number.
I have a question that's been bugging me. Open source software and GPL is fabulous, but is there a market for commercial software on the Linux platform?
It seems to me as if the Linux culture is based around everything being for free. Maybe there will be some revenue model that will allow this to become mainstream in the future, but for the immediate success of Linux, I wonder the following: is it possible that larger software companies are unwilling to release their main products on Linux because they're worried they won't be able to make money?
Honest, I'm not trying to troll. It's just that this story is the latest to make me wonder about the financial viabillity of Linux as a targetted OS for commercial software.
"open source is fine when you are talking about hundreds of lines of code"
This is the rationale for not releasing it all at once.
What about Linux, is it really so amazingly efficient that it only takes a few hundreds of lines of code? I don't think so!
I imagine the real reason is that they want to check the code for comments that could get them in trouble. In our software, there are all sorts of comments about why he had to hack something or do something in a wacky way, and I don't imagine THOSE companies would be too wild about seeing their names in lights.
Also, there are parts that describe exactly why we're doing something one way instead of another because of some customer, and there might be cracks about the specifics. If we have it in ours, it's almost certainly in theirs.
Too bad, it would be interesting to read some of the more 'colorful' remarks in the source...
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Reference/Radio_Spec trum/index.shtml
http://netlec.com/html/frequencybands.html
http://www.naval.com/radio-bands.htm
This sounds an awful lot like reporting that you were raped, then getting arrested for lewd conduct.
If you think about it, genetic engineering could be see as the logical next step in evolution. Because of the nature of evolution, the 'perfect baby' isn't necessarilly going to be the fittest that survives.
One way or another, the cat is out of the bag, so within our lifetime, we may be able to catch a glimpse if this 'mutation' is beneficial to us as a species, or if it has doomed us to genetic homogoniety.
On the positive side, now I can name my first kid Khan...
Wow, that's so wrong for so many reasons...
No. The external tanks are not made up of thousands of puzzle pieces that magically turn to dust the moment they aren't needed anymore.
It's two large metal tanks with a skirt around their juncture and a point in the front. That's all.
It's not Jenga. If you bother to visit the link in my first message, you can actually see pictures of the insides of the ET as well as lots of technical data.
The reason the ET is dropped in the pacific is because it is a huge single object. On disconnect from the shuttle, open valves make it start tumbling slowly so that it will break up faster and more completely.