April 2001

Monday, 30 April 2001

While a Utility May Be Failing, Its Owner Is Not: “In California, some creditors of Pacific Gas and Electric have signaled that they will want the bankruptcy court in San Francisco to review parent PG& E’s efforts to keep its unregulated businesses out of creditors’ reach. And the California Public Utilities Commission is investigating whether PG& E and Edison International, whose Southern California Edison utility unit is also near insolvency, have improperly transferred cash to their parents and to unregulated sister companies.”

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Pyramids in Peru as old as in Egypt “Because this was a pre-ceramic culture … this is not a rich site. There aren’t the goodies here, the ceramics, gold, tombs and magnificent textiles that attracted archeologists to other places in Peru. But the lack of riches also served not to draw looters and vandals, so we have something pristine to work with here.”

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Listen Closely: From Tiny Hum Came Big Bang: “the precise time the fluctuations took place remained to be determined by future measurements, but that the process was likely to have taken place in a fraction of a second comparable to a decimal point followed by 32 zeros and a 1”

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First Dinosaur Found With Its Body Covering Intact; Displays Primitive Feathers From Head To Tail

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Robot with living brain created in US

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What do so many software vendors have against a free-market economy?: “Why would software vendors want their customers to make a decision in a miasma of ignorance? I have been laboring under the impression that the whole basis of a ‘free-market economy’ is that informed consumers make choices and that those providing goods and services rise and fall on the quality of their products.? The key word in the previous sentence is ‘informed.’”

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Hollywood Threatens to Pull Ratings System: “Mr. Valenti, who personally crafted the rating system more than 30 years ago, said he could not, in good conscience, recommend that publicly held companies subject themselves to a voluntary ratings system that made them liable to civil punishment.”

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Space tourist reaches station: “He overcame American objections to his presence on the ISS by promising not to enter the American section of the station unaccompanied. He also pledged to pay for any damage he might cause.”

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Tuesday, 10 April 2001

I am travelling, and updates will be infrequent if not nonexistent until the beginning of May.

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Sunday, 8 April 2001

Quakin’ all over: “The evidence they have gathered suggests that something deep underground–something like a magnifying glass in the rock–focused the power of the Northridge quake onto the unsuspecting city of Santa Monica.”

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The Significance of dot-NET: “These disagreements notwithstanding, the object model’s power and versatility has enabled us, as well as the teams for numerous other languages, to port our compilers to dot-NET in just a few months.”

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Thursday, 5 April 2001

MPAA believes all Netizens are criminals: “And this is why, unique among all American enterprises, the entertainment industry alone must be made exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act, must be allowed to control not only the means of production but the means of distribution as well – must be permitted to operate as a monopoly.”

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Napster’s heinous crime: independence: “If intellectual property owners had the right to control copyrights years ago the way they propose to do now, there would be no used books, no lending your records to a friend, no video rentals, and no donations of recorded products, software or even books to libraries or schools”

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The Case Against Micropayments: “Not only did we not get the flying cars, we didn’t get micropayments either. What happened?”

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Monday, 2 April 2001

DMCA, like other copyright laws, provides no real protection for a small developer.: “The alternative is for the individual to pay for prosecution out of pocket, which can quickly exceed US$20,000, for an award that may not be even half that.”

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Computing, One Atom at a Time: “People had been doing quantum computing all along. They just didn’t know it.”

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