Stopping money flow and financial services innovation is, like Internet censorship,
a symptom of the fundamental conflict between the traditional role the state has expanded
to cover (ie governments) and the transparent, open and global nature of the Internet.

When everyone on the planet can communicate directly and immediately, through
fully automated translators, to any other connected person or to large groups
- why exactly do we need massive percentages (10-50%) of our resources funneled
to maintain the state and state-run defense and services? To preserve the old lines
on maps and control the access to major geographic regions? In almost every single
case, Internet connected people and services will do a better job.

The necessary reasons for countries as they exist today mostly go away when the
Internet fully connects individuals.* Obsolescence is a terrible thing for
bureaucracy, but can be framed as the primary driver of most "issues" governments
have with the Internet.

* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.

I've tried it this afternoon too. Not really interested in sharing more with yet another invasive, free "service" that I don't own or control, but I can not find any way to "switch it off". It appears Buzz will be a new fixture in the gmail interface. After looking at the help links, it does not appear possible to remove it. If anyone has a way to remove it, disable it - please reply.

I'm not missing this argument. I disagree. Removing IE is not a panacea, nor is this what the announcement means.

Equating a logical, correct step for a more secure computer (removing IE) as a false panacea is the position in the PCWorld article only, and one that misses the more basic point. IE6,7 and 8, including on Win 7 all have this flaw, and there is no fix yet.

From the article referenced.

"Don't Kill the Messenger: Blaming IE for Attacks is Dangerous"

Actually, IE is not the messenger, its the source of at least one know security hole that participated in this problem.

The article fails to explain how blaming the software with a known exploit is dangerous.

They assert it will create a "false sense of security" because there exist other methods of attack (other software with security flaws). Even if they did have support for other security holes, this reasoning is an absurd logical fallacy. Amazingly, the author doesn't even have support for the premise of the illogic it's based on an *implication* from a quote by McAfee CTO George Kurtz.

  FTA:

This is completely absurd FUD. IE *was used*, it is insecure, and there is no fix (yet). These conclusions come right from this article and others.

Obvious conclusion: use different software. This conclusion is also supported by the long and consistent history of security issues with IE. I think, after reading this and other articles, it is more dangerous to continue to assert that IE is secure.

The article focuses on how this is a more "peaceful use" for the EMP. I disagree: when the robot apocalypse finally arrives, and a rogue T800 drives after you in into a steel mill, it will be damn useful to have an EMP device used for shaping steel rings handy to stop the cybernetic killing machine. As an added benefit, an EMP would destroy the cpu, meaning no Cyberdyne Systems, and I get my 5 hours back wasted on T3 and Terminator Salvation!

The mechanical press was, like, so 1984.

The pdf:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/why_i_dont_have_a_girlfriend.pdf

After getting Fox news coverage and front page Slashdotting N* is
now significantly higher than the paper estimate. Think 10-100x.

f(L) is fraction of people in London from N*. Why limit
yourself to London? You or your partner might move, travel,
visit friends, soon even if you're looking for love!
Even within London, the author doesn't count people movement -
those who come to London over time.

Further, the author forgets that most all people *like* to find
productive partnerships. Unlike SETI, where we have no evidence
that the other party is looking for us, we know that women like
to find great men just as much you want to find an "attractive,
age-appropriate woman with a University education".

Worst, the author spent time write why he "can't find" a partner
when he would be better served getting out there doing activities
he loves with other people and having a great time life. Then
other people will find him, and help find others.

Truly be yourself and it is uniquely attractive.

Many of those show I'd never heard of. Significantly disappointed Lexx made but not Farscape. I wanted Farscape to continue.

What I really want is a live action series out of Starblazers - does anyone else remember how awesome that story was, or I am just making a childhood memory better than it really was?

The paper posits that gravity is an entropic force, not a fundamental one. He does this by starting with the assumption of a reduced dimensionality universe with one emergent direction for space and shows that as a mass approaches the holographic boundary he can combine statistical mechanics equations and Einsteins equations for mass & energy (throw in a couple hand waves about average energy and degrees of freedom) and he derives Newton's laws and more.

This is fundamentally a different view of how gravity, inertia and space arise compared to the current "fundamental forces" understanding in physics. An accurate and testable understanding of gravity could potentially lead to areas impossible to predict: anti-gravity, energy production, warping and changing space, usable action at a distance for communication or transportation.

This is analogous to the shift in understanding when humans understood and then used the electrical force. Who could have dreamed before electric power of mobile phones, global Internet connectivity, HDTV, Twitter, Superbowl broadcasts, images from Mars, superconducting MRI coils, particle accelerators, etc. etc. A functional understanding of gravity could be even more revolutionary than the change in the human condition from understanding electricity.

If this is proven correct - that gravity and inertia are emergent from information entropy
and statistics, it would be very, very exciting if for no other reason than it would be yet
another support (probably the strongest yet) for the holographic universe description /
the 'reduced dimensionality' description. This could also resolve some of the impossibly
inconsistent problems in physics integrating gravity with microscopic forces and spooky
effects like action at a distance.

So far all we've had to support a holographic universe is black hole physics and string
theory conjectures.

It's mind warping to imagine that the whole of our existence necessarily depends
on encodings that are 2-dimensional in nature. If this is the case, what a world
it would be. Philosophers and religious folk will argue over what that might mean.

Okay, great. Exciting observations, but really, not that useful in the big scheme of where we are with physics today.

How about you physicists show us Higgs? How do quantum mechanics and gravity mesh into a coherent theory? Explain the disagreement of 107 orders of magnitude (yes, you read that right: 107 zeros) between the upper bound upon the vacuum energy density (from data obtained from Voyager, less than 10**14 GeV/m3) and the zero-point energy of 10**121 GeV/m3 - calculated using quantum field theory, or alternately: Why doesn't the zero-point energy of the vacuum cause a large cosmological constant? Why is there far more matter than antimatter? Are protons stable - if not, what's the half life? Is SUSY real or just implied? What governs the transition of quarks and gluons into pions (ie explain QCD)? What's the mass of a Neutrino? Explain why the fundamental physical constants have the exact and seemingly arbitrary yet interconnected values they have? Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past? What causes gamma ray bursts? and on and on and on...

But most of all, explain what causes the observed effects of hypothetical "dark matter" and "dark energy". My young children are smart enough to know that the dark matter story sounds like total and utter bull. The story goes like this: "We see something that looks like it causes things to move, but we don't know what it is, and we can't see it, or measure it, create it, or understand it at all. These unobservable matter blobs (and energy) may be 95% of everything we observe! We see something we can't explain, so we're calling it 'dark matter' and moving on with the old story that has worked for a while and still gets us grant funding." Why no one with a brain is calling out this story for its absurdity is astounding.

These issues are not subtle or small. The theories science (specifically physics) now promotes and teaches about the physical world, while highly accurate and highly reproducible in different areas, are *impossibly inconsistent* and *abundantly incomplete*. For science, inconsistency on this scale is a crisis requiring a revolution in thought.

The most dangerous hubris in science is the refusal to accept that we're far more ignorant about our physical environment than most would like to admit.

this is also happening on Ubuntu server, running Spamassassin 3.2.5

The linked article references a workaround:
add this line to the "local.cf" spamassassin config file, on this system is was /etc/spamassassin/local.cf

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

If you're running spamassassin as a daemon, you *may* also want to restart spamd
with something like:

sudo /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart

This solution simply removes the rule by setting the score for that rule to 0.
You'll want to undo this once a solution is deployed.

Note that access to information, education and entertainment, relationships, friendships and intimacy and many other basic human needs are not on that list. Travel, personal property, reproduction, and many other norms we accept as given are also not on that list. What I wrote was that basic human needs for safety and survival would be afforded as a right to all people in a "fair" and idealized world, and that people could work for a life more than that.

I stand by that assertion: such a place would be fair. Would it work? Who knows. European countries offer a reasonable safety net and seem to be doing OK. Compared to some countries, crime there is lower, people are smarter, incarceration is lower, people are happier and healthier, drug use is lower. An idealized world like this probably wouldn't be nearly as free as some people experience today, but it would be fair. Personally, I'd choose freedom over fairness when they conflict, but offering a real safety net for human survival and safety would eliminate the fear that drives many toward the ills we see in the world today, and it would make the world a much nicer place.

If you want to label it a "socialist utopia", fine, call it hoogamazoola for all I care, it doesn't change the essence of the point: life now, on earth, is not even close to fair in any sense, nor do people even give the idea of "fair" a reasonable hearing in social discourse. Marx was right about one thing in the mid 1800's: his premise was there is enough. It was true then, and still is today.

There is ridiculous dishonesty in this assertion.

Of course profiting off someone else's work is unfair. Nothing about what the litigant or the defendants have done or will do relates in any way with "fair". If the world were "fair" every single human would have as an inalienable right free access to decent food, housing, healthcare, and security and working beyond that would be an optional choice to better their life. Humanity is far, far from this ideal, and everything we do now in the business world is *nothing* about fair, it is about power and capital, and having long chains of other humans working for the profit of those few who have learned how to escape or work the system. Remember more than half of your planet's population still farms their food by hand, and dies in large numbers when there are droughts.

"Profiting from someone else's innovation" is at the very basic essence of working capitalism. It an the assumption driving nearly all investment. Using capital to buy a stock, and having that stock rise in value, has the effect of making a profit off the wealth creation and innovation in that company. I don't take a position for or against that system it is highly efficient, when it works, at allocating resources and creating significant development.

But even beyond the nature of business and profit, these folks have gone down into the depths of corporate IP litigation, where the idealistic light of "fair" shines like smelly dirt. Lawsuits rarely have much to do with a high notion of justice; they are what you can pay for, and what you can win. To assert that ones actions are about "fair" when filing a corporate IP litigation lawsuit is patently absurd and frankly laughable.