I'm not dead! I feel fine! I think I'll go for a walk! I'm getting better! ..

Honestly, its like the monster that will not die, nothing works - garlic, holy water, silver bullets, stake, decapitation, fire and even the BFG9000 could not finish it.

Just stay down, everybody will be much happier and we are all waiting for the party.

I wish them the very best of luck - thats a very powerful business lobby with a lot of politicians in pocket that they are going after.

Still, its very clear why he chose to represent her - the publicity on this high profile case could make him and give his career a hell of a head start.

Its sad that my first thought was this: the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it. of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.

Sadly not!

I was ~12 and I had just understood looking ahead - so in my naivety I made something that was capable of looking ahead for pretty much the entire game.

it annihilated me.

Still it amused my family who mocked my pain as much as they could. Still, I was heartened to see that none of them could defeat Frankenconnect4 either.

I'll ignore the shameless plug.

Ever since I wrote my first connect 4 game in the 80s - and was totally thrashed by it, I never beat it - its been clear to me that the trick is to degrade a computer player in most circumstances to the level that it appears to have human flaws and play in a more human fashion.

Of course this logic only goes so far and some games require a search space so vast or a completely different programming model that even now a computer cannot beat a competent real human (Go is an excellent example of this).

The point is that it is easy to program a computer to win, the hard part is to program is lose convincingly.

did we try holy water and a stake yet?

I used to loathe IE6 - I used Opera until FF rescued me with an ad free alternative.

Don't worry it says it only reports the installed .NET framework versions so websites can decide what version of garbage they can spew to your browser.

After all, we all know here on /. that we can trust that description implicitly given Microsoft's past history of 20 years of good karma, open and friendly practice and just nice old fashioned values.

Gah, I find the mere concept of this nauseating. It further illustrates that even now the idea of a standard web experience across operating systems and browsers is a pipe dream, because nobody codes to the lowest common denominator and the standards are too fragmented.

His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.

See "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

Whilst I congratulate the man for subsidising research and giving to worthy causes I have to wonder if he would do so much if he was not one of the worlds richest man.

oops, did I say 1989? I meant early 1990s - my bad.

Ok, I'm showing some age here.

Remember in 1989 the Stacker disk compression fiaso?

I think that was one of the original examples of this kind of behavior, in this case Stac electronics were able to get some money from MS - but it was a sour victory as MS has effectively removed them from the market place in the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair, and as a business trying to please their shareholders it is very naive to expect them to do so. they have a monopoly and will abuse it to their benefit as long as they can get away with it.

By strange coincidence I just finished reading it.

I would of summarized it as "to be amazingly successful you need to be in the right place at the right time and be prepared to put 10,000 hours of your time into learning your profession before you are in your mid 20s".

Which is kind of common sense.

But it is a genuinely engaging and interested point.

And it goes without saying that a complete idiot in the right place and the right time will probably still make a hash of it.

This was happening years ago, back in 2005 in my last trip for example.

What is really behind this is a business that is not shackled by the same leg irons that cripple development in the west - for example accountability, itellectual property, patenting, copyright, health and safety, quality management and so on.

The gist of the problem is that you can either have development that is ethical, safe, manageable, legal, and controlled.... or you can development that is rapid, fluid and prone to appropiate and adapt any idea that fits the bill.

It is impossible to have both.

In China you see an emphasis on the latter and in the west you have the former, this is a culture clash of epic proportions. At the end of the day we are all to blame, we all like the idea of promoting western businesses and industry - but we all have a greater desire for cheap DVD players and iPhone clones.

Yes I can appreciate the rapid, innovative engineering this trend shows in China - but behind it is a clash of cultures and ethical and moral decisions that have decimated industy and development in the western world.

the key satillite designed to monitor global warming and CO2 pollution and hence get scientific data that might affect global business and industrial nations has just nose dived into Antartica?

lets make sure nobody tells the conspiracy theorists, they could have a ball with this one.

Hmmm.

So how long before the **AA bury this is a mass of litigation?

Though the main advantage of this system is that you can limit the access to a selected list of identities so this to my mind becomes more like a private group.

But at some point you have to grant access to people or you will have no audience, and I have often thought that private groups are like encrypted networks - they only raise the suspicion you have something to hide.

we were discussing the debris problem at work over coffee the other day.

we were trying to find solutions to it in our non-expert fashion.

sadly the best we could come up with were:

(1) putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
(2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
(3) vastly improved tracking capabilities so we could avoid the worst areas and steer around them
(4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs

there were probably other ideas that we came up with that I cannot remember, but this might get some comments/advice/derision.

but we all agreed, this problem will only get worse. and choosing different orbit altitudes only delays confronting the issue - but might be cheaper in the short term.