Sunday, February 06, 2005
Friday, February 04, 2005
The Japan Times Online
The Japan Times Online: "PC, animation geeks a market 'maid' to order
By TOMOKO OTAKE
Staff writer
Ever since the term 'otaku' (geek) started gaining currency in Japan a few decades ago, it has always carried an unflattering image of bespectacled introverts combing the back streets of Akihabara for obscure PC parts or drooling over cartoon characters."
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Light continues to echo three years after stellar outburst
Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Light continues to echo three years after stellar outburst: "The Hubble Space Telescope's latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002."
Wi-Fi Networking News: Sock Puppets of Industry
Wi-Fi Networking News: Sock Puppets of Industry
Sock Puppets of Industry
By Glenn Fleishman
A continuation from the previous post about a Feb. 3 announcement of a report on why municipal networks are a terrible, anti-competitive idea: In the previous post, below, I dissected BusinessWeek’s blog entry on a new report that will be released on Feb. 3 from the New Millennium Research Council. In this post, I include the announcement’s text after the jump below, and provide some background on each of the people who will be part of the press event.
I’ve done this annotation not because I wholeheartedly oppose their point of view, but rather because a light needs to be shone on the connections between organizations that call themselves independent but have ties among each other and to the industries about which they are stating they have an objective opinion about. This is about transparency, and a pro-municipal telecom group that was similarly opaque would receive the same treatment. (Oddly, there only appear to be pro-individuals and municipalities, not groups that I’ve heard from or about.)
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Kerckhoffs' law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kerckhoffs' law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In cryptography, Kerckhoffs' law (also called Kerckhoffs'assumption, axiom or principle) was stated by Auguste Kerckhoffs in the 19th century: a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge. It was reformulated (perhaps independently) by Claude Shannon as "the enemy knows the system". In that form it is called Shannon's maxim. It is widely embraced by cryptographers, in opposition to security through obscurity
Illness and medical bills cause half of all bankruptcies | Science Blog
Illness and medical bills cause half of all bankruptcies | Science Blog: "Medical problems contributed to about half of all bankruptcies, involving 700,000 households in 2001, according to a story published today as a Web Exclusive by the journal Health Affairs. Families with children were especially hard hit-about 700,000 children lived in families that declared bankruptcy in the aftermath of serious medical problems. Another 600,000 spouses, elderly parents and other dependents brought the total number of people directly affected by medical bankruptcies to more than two million annually.
Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness. Among those with private insurance, however, one-third had lost coverage at least temporarily by the time they filed for bankruptcy. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance. Out-of-pocket medical costs (for co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services) averaged $13,460 for those with private insurance at the onset of their illness, vs. $10,893 for the uninsured. The highest costs - averaging $18,005 - were incurred by those who initially had private coverage but lost it in the course of their illness. Many families were bankrupted by medical expenses well below the catastrophic thresholds of high deductible plans that are increasingly popular with employers. The authors comment that even their own coverage from Harvard leaves them at risk for out-of-pocket costs above levels that often led to medical bankruptcy."
Lindows man to launch non-DRM online music store
Lindows man to launch non-DRM online music store: "Certainly there's a demand for this. While music companies would love people to buy the same album several times over on vinyl, on cassette, on CD, online and goodness knows in what future method, people would like to know that the digital music they've bought remains theirs, whatever the device they're using. ?"
The Space Review: Implementing the vision
The Space Review: Implementing the vision
Implementing the vision
by Sam Dinkin
Monday, October 25, 2004
NASA released a new feature associated with the Vision for Space Exploration earlier this month. Eleven companies have been selected “to conduct preliminary concept studies for human lunar exploration and the development of the crew exploration vehicle.” Each of these companies put forward a PDF file and a web site with a different take on the Vision. If we look at the interference pattern that develops contrasting the different approaches to the Vision, we can learn about the firms’ cultures and mentality.
NewsForge | The social structure of open source development
NewsForge | The social structure of open source development: "Andreas Brand is a sociologist researching ways of recruiting and organising teams of volunteers on the Internet. He has been studying KDE as an example of an open source project based upon collaboration without hierarchies. As part of his work he has conducted interviews with KDE developers, participated in several open source conferences, analysed the KDE home page, and distributed a questionnaire among volunteers. We asked him about his thoughts on the KDE development model."
MPAA anti-piracy software not as bad as reported, but still stupid
MPAA anti-piracy software not as bad as reported, but still stupid: "Of course, the program is still stupid, and it's still evidence that the MPAA would just rather we never used our PCs to view movies and that they wish that 'this whole Internet thing' (to borrow a quote from Lars Ulrich) would just go away. So I agree with the general consensus that nobody in their right mind would want the MPAA scanning their hard drive.
And on that note, I think a much more interesting question is whether or not the program really does not report back to the MPAA. I personally would be surprised if it really didn't send any information back to Tha Man, even if it's just some kind of general statistics. After all, these are the people who would like the government to grant them the authority to hijack suspected pirates' computers and format their hard drives. Kurt thinks I'm just being paranoid, so is there anybody out there with some time on their hands who'd like to find out and prove me wrong?"
• Key Players in the Plame Affair