uLocate's platform takes advantage of cell phones that can establish and transmit latitude and longitude using the government's Global Positioning System (GPS). Currently, we support the Motorola i730, i88s and i58sr on the Nextel network and all models of the Benefon on the T-Mobile, AT&T, and Cingular networks. Additional phones and carriers will be supported as they become GPS compatible.
Israel approved a plan to spend at least $56 million to expand settlements on the occupied Golan Heights, prompting accusations from Syria on Wednesday that Israel was wrecking peace efforts.
Hard-line Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz, who initiated the expansion, said he aimed to make it more difficult for any Israeli government to return the strategic plateau to Syria -- Damascus' top demand for a peace deal.
At the age of 58, Alan Ralsky seems an incongruous character in an industry largely made up of men from the Nintendo generation.
peem: politically excoriating e-mail
a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information so boring.?
8 basic, universal emotions:Betsy Devine: The new law (US 108-177) extends the definition of a "financial institution" to include
Look, I'm in favor of fighting terrorism--but if this bill is needed then why is Bush working so hard to sneak it in under the radar? Why isn't he instead telling the world about how and why it's important?
(Consider that in the last 10 years alone, Apple has been issued 1,300 patents, almost one-and-a- half times as many as Dell and half as many as Microsoft--which earns 145 times as much money.)
Apple is creating a boutique environment, and they're doing it in a very expensive way," says Kay. "It doesn't seem very reliable as an approach for selling large quantities of goods."
Many people measure innovation by counting the number of patents a company has been "awarded".
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
I have heard economists claim that Silicon Valley could never be recreated in, say, France, because the French culture puts such a high penalty on failure that entrepreneurs are not willing to risk it.
David Brooks: Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.
Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. The world is an intricate place, he believed, filled with dense patterns stretching back into time. We have to be aware of how little we know and how little we can know.
But the fog didn't make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. But we should always guard against the sin of intellectual pride, which leads to ideological thinking. Oakeshott's doctrine was that no doctrine could properly describe the world.
ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
I saw that internet protocols (http & html) would change software
Bill Gates, at least at that time, owned his own email account and could respond. (implies that his current email account is ____ by PR).
Having a supporter who blogs is not the same as having a blogger who covers the campaign.
it was not until our first evening on the canyon's South Rim that I began to grasp the extent to which the Canon PowerShot S400 could alter the space-time continuum of our vacation.
"We're on vacation," I announced. "We should be being on vacation, not looking at pictures of ourselves on vacation."
The I.B.M. car also develops a profile for each driver and keeps him alert by starting conversation. A slow or incorrect response that suggests the driver is drowsy or distracted would, for example, trigger the car to open a window or even send a spray of cold water to get his attention.
Not everyone thinks that fighting distraction this way makes sense. "What strikes me about the IT and other high-tech cars is that they are predicated on the car having a whole lot of processing power that somehow needs to be made use of.."
..when it comes to his camera, Mr. Mishell remains firmly planted in the film age. He clings to his 35-millimeter Minolta because the system he has for shooting, developing, storing and sharing photographs works well for him.
If he had a digital camera, "I'd keep wishing I had the newer one," he said. "It would always be eating away at me.
Her principal objection, though, has to do with the experience of viewing photographs with friends and relatives. Ms. Bass cited a close friend who recently bought a digital camera.
Aaron SW: Now that Saddam has been captured, all the television networks are looking for a way to cash in.
In his State of the Union address, the president will announce measures to foster job creation. In the meantime, he is talking about what he calls the Ownership Society.
This is a bundle of proposals that treat workers as self-reliant pioneers who rise through several employers and careers. To thrive, these pioneers need survival tools. They need to own their own:
?You may not reproduce (except as noted above), publish, transmit, distribute, display, broadcast, re-broadcast, modify, create derivative works from, sell or participate in any sale of or exploit in any way, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, any of the Products, the Service or any related software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, modify or disable any copy protection or use limitation systems associated with the Products. You may not play and then re-digitize any Products, or upload those Products to the Internet. You may not use the Products in conjunction with any other third-party content (e.g, to provide sound for a film). You may not sell or offer to sell the Products, including but not limited to, posting any Product for auction, on any Internet auction site. All Products are sublicensed to you and not sold, notwithstanding the use of the terms ?sell,? ?purchase,? ?order,? or ?buy? on the Service or in this Agreement.?
So, the ?Rip,Mix,Burn? culture has now been cancelled. Want to sync a song with the home movie of your kid? You can?t. You?ve promised you won?t.
I don't read newspapers.
I've got a lot of smart people working for me that know everything.
We didn't elect you that much.
They drive the Toyata Prius, the car for the pious. (13 min)
RESUME George W. Bush The White House, USA EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available. MILITARY: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam. COLLEGE: I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader. PAST WORK EXPERIENCE: I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock. I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas. ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS: I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America. I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money. I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history. With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes. ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT: I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record. I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week. I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury. I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history. I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period. I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period. I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month. I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her. I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President. I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations. My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron. My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision. I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed. I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history. I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts. I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history. I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government. I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history. I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission. I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law. I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention. I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election). I set the record for fewest number of press conferences of any President since the advent of television. I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history. I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history. I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind. I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community. I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in war time. In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq, then blamed the lies on our British friends. I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security. I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD. I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to justice. RECORDS AND REFERENCES: All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view. All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review. I have only lost: Osama bin Ladin, Mullah Omar, Countless other members of Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, all his weapons of mass destruction, all the looted material in Iraq Millions of jobs in America, The entire U.S. government surplus AND..... The respect of the rest of the Free World PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004. ( PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERY VOTER YOU KNOW!!!!)
Steven Ambrose: Democracies generally do not make war
Vonnegut: except against Indians
Joseph Heller: I don't have an easy anwser for that. I ask myself, if I were an adult, would I have voted/supported FDR. I don't know what the rationale was for WWII, before Perl Harbor.
Vonnegut: I don't think WWII can be taught as a lesson. And to make sense of it is doing us a disserve.
Ambrose: the lesson is that democracies should not been underestimated. (They are enormously capabable of mobilization.)
Heller: but your only including 1 of the 3 democracies in your analysis. England would have failed and Germany did.
Heller: Why did Hitler declare war on the US (the US was only at war with Japan)?
Ambrose: It was completely inexplicable. FDR probably couldn't have gotten a declaration of war against Germany otherwise; and many GIs didn't know why they were in Germany.
...
Heller: nobody ever lost money underestimating the vulgarity of the American people.
Event: University of New Orleans, Eisenhower Center (05/07/1995), rebroadcast broadcast on CSPAN 3
Jennifer Fisher, author of "Nutcracker Nation": The Soviets didn't like the "Nutcracker" because:
It didn't catch on in Europe, either.
Fortunately, North Americans didn't have these prejudices.
Some "Nutcrackers" have made political statements by pasting the face of a dictator on the Mouse King, or announcing that the Waltz of the Flowers would be about a different endangered species each year. San Francisco has a "Dance-Along Nutcracker"; a jazz hip-hop version is done in Washington. Across the land, Americans customize "The Nutcracker," often telling a version of the original E. T. A. Hoffmann story, but even more often, telling a story about themselves.
traditional classical excellence.. and the responsibility of reflecting and disseminating values and beliefs
Car Talk Caller from Goshen Indiana: Should I replace my perfectly good Camry with a 04' Toyota Prius?
Barbara: I work for a Mennonite institution and attend a Mennonite Church. I'm corncerned about the moral and spirital dimensions of my consumption.
Tom and Ray: but is buying a "new" car now really better stewardship? Why not drive your Camry until it dies (never) and then buy the Prius (or equivalent)?
Or donate the Camry to charity and buy the Prius.
no permalink foundIt is possible to post delicate criticism on Chinese Interent Chat rooms if one uses "cabianqiu": a term for a Ping-Pong ball that just nicks the corner of the table: legal by a whisker.
The techique used in this example-- a compliment, followed by a hypothetical "but".
Original:"Why is Prime Minister Wen Jiabao off in America kowtowing to the imperialists when he should be solving more important problems at home!"Revised:
"Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's visit to America has been very successful, but I wonder if perhaps he is wasting too much time abroad instead of focusing on our own important problems like unemployment"
My guess is that [President] Hu and [Prime Minister] Wen would win a free election if it was offered.
China has always operated to some degree on fear, and that fear is now eroding.
"This Mr. Nice Guy approach won't work," a senior government official warned. "You can't govern by pretending to be nice to everybody. You've got to make hard choices. You've got to maintain control."
...when people get multiple choices in ordering a cup of coffee, it's only a matter of time before they demand choices in national politics
..the long calm that followed Tiananmen is ending. Exciting times are coming to China again.
David Brooks: Prior to Bush II, foreign policy had the pretense of principle without consistent action:
Bush's principled stand is regarded as:
Bush's decision to deny contracts to opponents of the war could have been handled with duplicity, but once again "principle" prevailed.
The administration's fundamental problem is that it is not very good at dealing with people it can't stand. When they come across someone they regard as insufferable, their instinct is to be blunt. Sometimes you've got to be slippery to accomplish real good.
Books lost me when he said: denying rewards to one's opponents is "principled".
"People who undermine US policy must pay a price."
Under what principle? "Deterrence", "Discipline", "Justice?", "Friendship?". Cynics will assume that the "principle" is "revenge".
What's more, it compounds the appearance of and incentive for corruption.
US Taxpayers and Iraqis would benefit from a competitive bidding process. The current policy subsidizes (potentially) more expensive, less effective actors.
For all his "candor", the administration's policy is not "openness". Opponents would say the Administration is:
Is this perception inaccurate, or is this tendancy always dictated by the nation's interests?
Brooks:
Kyoto: Up until that time, all decent governments had remained platonically in love with the treaty. They praised it, but gave no thought to actually enacting it.
Brooks may not have had room to support this claim. On the web, we would provide a link. Footnotes and endnotes might not work well on a print "Op-Ed" page, but are expected on the web.
A. O. Scott on Diane Keaton's 'unparalleled comic skill':
Nobody else working in movies today can make her own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.
"Something's Gotta Give" is built around the wonderful and entirely persuasive conceit that both Mr. Reeves and Jack Nicholson could find themselves hopelessly smitten with an intelligent and accomplished woman in her 50's.
Leslie Walker: Shah thinks we are witnessing the birth of data analytic services that will piggyback on eBay much the way Bloomberg News and other data providers piggybacked on the New York Stock Exchange. But we're just starting to set the kind of standards needed to allow smart retail data analysis, Shah said.
All are examples of how Web sites, relying on a new generation of Internet software, are licensing their databases to business partners and outside developers in an attempt to spark innovation and reach more customers.
Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself.
users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files.
chromatic : Making your source code available to the world doesn't make all of the problems of software development go away. You still need discipline, intelligence, and creativity
Myth: Warnings are just warnings. They're not errors and no one really cares about them.
Reality: Warnings can hide real problems, especially if you get used to them.
chromatic on slashdot: I don't believe that most open source projects deliberately believe that, for example, bundling up their code to make it easy to distribute and install is a bad thing. Too many projects fail to do just that, though.
The word "myth" was just more expressive than the phrase "things you'd think we believe based on our actions".
slashdot comment: If the warnings were ignorable, they wouldn't be there. My profs would take marks off if you got warnings in compilation, unless your documentation explained exactly why you let the warning stand
Coase's insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.
[Dean] is a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party
But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants is the Democratic brand name and legacy, its last remaining asset of value, as part of his marketing strategy.
They fabricated the image of Harrison as the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate, despite his more patrician roots, and used the party organization to enforce discipline around the fabrication -- to get everyone to say the same thing at the same time.
[The] U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is simply approving too many dubious and overly broad patents, especially in the software and Internet realms.
The potential result: a digital world carved up into so many pieces that it loses its power to easily link people, communities and ideas.
The country "needs to revamp.. the entire system of intellectual property law," said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. "It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age."
The Content Reference Forum aims to publish standards to allow consumers to easily play music or other digital content encoded in one format on any device and in any country, while also obeying contractual obligations, such as paying licensing fees and enforcing copyright protections.
The group has published its first set of standards that would use Internet-based references to identify content and the business agreements attached to them.
This sounds interesting. I wonder whether the "internet-based references" are URLs. Would it allow me to quote, and not just play?
The original "worse is better" examples didn't weight some of the factors that people found imporant. When taken into account, the examples cited are not actually "worse"
Lisp vs CVHS beat out beta not because worse is better, but better in some dimensions (cost, time to record) beat out better in other dimensions (picture quality).
better is a complicated notion, and can depend on a variety of different metrics. It may be disappointing to find out that what we geeks think of as better may not be what our customers think is better. But finding this out shouldn't surprise us too much.
The author isn't really arguing with the original article, but with its misinterpreters who use it to justify shody design.
Steve Jobs: We made predictions. And we were right. We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.
They didn't see it that way. There were people running around -- business-development people -- who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, "No, we want that -- we want a subscription business."
Krugman: The I.R.S. denies charges by Bill Henck, one of its own lawyers, that it buckled under political pressure. Coincidentally, according to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Henck has suddenly found himself among the tiny minority of taxpayers facing an I.R.S. audit.
Mr. Bush's people have given as little thought to running America after the election as they gave to running Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. And they will have no idea what to do when things fall apart.
Kevin Marks: The stupidest conceit of the software business is that commodities are bad.
If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food
Phase 1 of this program was the proliferation of miscellaneous fees - for "regulatory assessment," "handling," "restocking," and so on. According to Business Week, newly concocted fees will generate
after reviewing our records, we discovered at least seven cases in the last few years when a service company (including at least three phone companies ) overbilled us and didn't correct the mistake until we turned ourselves into human pit bulls.
IBM sees a parallel need for content protection in other industries. An aerospace manufacturer, for example, would want to distribute engineering plans to its partners electronically with strictly controlled access rights.
IBM will embed DRM capabilities across its software line. The company is now testing a system to add DRM controls to its DB2 Content Manager product
Yahoo and, most recently, Google have moved to restrict ads from unlicensed pharmacies in attempts to address concerns about illegal sales of drugs online. But those efforts to police drug advertisers do not carry over to restricting online sex ads.
Yesterday, Google said that it would also stop accepting advertising from unlicensed pharmacies. That change was first reported by The Washington Post yesterday.
The Times should give linking credit to the Post. Instead they link to a "marketwatch" profile.
Perhaps part of the problem has to do with:
This would also open up the issue of crediting non-newspaper sources, like blogs.
A mob of people was furiously accusing a man of butting in line and stealing gasoline. Prior established that the man was merely a government inspector checking the quality of the fuel. Frazzled and exhausted, Prior took the chance to teach the mob a broader lesson: "The problem is that you people accuse each other without proof! That's the problem!"
Another soldier writes of his dismay at seeing Iraqi parents give their kids toy guns as presents after Ramadan. He wonders, Haven't they had enough death? Don't they realize how dangerous it is for a kid to wander the street with a piece of plastic that looks like an AK-47?
"The idea is that consumers can download as many songs as they want," Mr. Ryan said, "and move them from one device to others, but at the end of 30 days, if you don't pay the subscription fee, the songs go away.
"And that's where this gets interesting," he added. "You've got a portable music player that can fit 10,000 songs on it? Come on. No one will spend $1 a track filling it.''
