With resources turned to VOIP lines and infrastructure you will most likely see more redundancy for those services than are currently in place. It's not as if the phone company is just going to cut costs by dropping POTS and using whatever is currently in place for VOIP... they will beef up VOIP so it is a good replacement for POTS.

Ah, every time something like this comes up I keep hoping that we've found some auditory buffer that both memories and the ear feed into, in a format that would be easy to parse. I think we're seeing the first glimmers of doing that with the visual cortex? I'm not sure how similar 'remembered' music is to 'entirely imagined out of thin air on the spot' music, but I imagine that either way, it would be a great boon for composers...probably do for them what the Internet did for journalists. Whether that's good or bad for the art as a whole remains to be seen!

Planes dropping out of the sky might of been an exaggeration by rumour mongers, (I'm not sure, anyone care to correct me?), but serious global problems aren't such a dumb idea as a result of a few major systems crashing.

No planes would have literally dropped out of the sky; the actual aircraft control electronics weren't (hopefully still aren't) date dependent. However I'm not sure if any navigation or ATC systems would have failed had no one addressed the Y2K issue, and that could have been messy. Certainly Y2K issues in air traffic control systems _were_ corrected.

But closed systems are "opened" by hackers (think Jailbreak for the iPhone) in a very short time. Everyone can obtain illegally and for free any app in the appstore in less than 15 minutes. I'm not sure the locked system is the answer. Maybe the proportion of jailbroken iphones is insignificant and thus the model kinda works...

Good for you/her. My case was pretty extreme, but there are a lot of places where analog telephone service is the only means of 2 way communication short of ham radio or a nice long drive.

Most of the area where that house was had telephone service, but none of the area had reliable cell coverage, any cable or dsl, and heavy woods that make satellite completely unreliable.

How is this funny or even on topic? Codeplex already exists.. the foundation appears to be seeking a new director and thats about it. As far as answering the question regarding the 100 days why not email the existing board and ask them directly? The info is on the foundation website.

Somehow I don't think being a buffer between corporate interests of Microsoft and anarchistic open source community is a dream job of anyone.

This entire side conversation proves the merit of books - no one is arguing over the mechanics of figuring out how to turn pages on a 75 year old book. The format is lasting.

The real issue is that the book is still a great design and that ebooks are trying to sell electronic delivery devices, not information.

I know. What I want from you is a list of those distinct groups that where created by God without a chance of intermixing.

I already gave you an example, want more, just google a bit.

Thats the point, you need a sudden event that covers the body and protects it from regular decay. The processes that follow the covering can take a long time, the covering itself can't or the body would decompose before anything can get done. Thats why we find so few fossils of a given species, most of them aren't covered up and those never fossilize as already mentioned.

There is no evidence that a single big flood ever happened. In fact we have evidence for quite the opposite, its all gradualism buildup of geologic formations with a few mud slides, volcanic eruptions and all that other sudden stuff to give you the fossils.

Yeah, but if you want me to believe your claims you better should have good evidence to support it. Just claiming the flying spaggeti monster did it isn't evidence. A good explanation why the he did it or at least what the benefit of that way of doing it is would be a start, but the blind spot still just looks like a big fucking in the design of humans.

It is a theory, not absolute truth, yes, thats how the scientific method works. That doesn't change the fact that science has build up a pretty damn good and detailed explanation of how things work in nature, which can be used to predict things, explain things, engineer technologies, etc. Do you have an alternative theory that works on clock changing and earth being suddenly 6000 years old that is anywhere near as good as what science has? Or an experiment that shows that science got is wrong?

Even if you assume that science didn't get every detail right, which might very well be the case in some edge cases, that doesn't change the fact that science so far as provide us with by far the best explanation we have.

The point isn't how widespread Christianity is, which is easily explained by how information and people travel around the world, but that Christianity doesn't spontaneously arise in areas where it wasn't brought by mass indoctrination. If the Native American or African people believed in Jesus and God before missionaries came there and indoctrinated them, that would be a pretty solid point for the stories having some truth, but that has never happened. Scientific theories on the other side have often been form by multiple people completly independently in the past.

Of course they do, thats how culture spreads.

The point with spreading ideas is not the survival of the human carrier, but the "survival" of the ideas themselves. Flying planes into buildings has killed the pilots, it however had an enormous impact in spreading the ideas behind it.

You are missing the point the point of science. Science is about explaining stuff, its not a way of life, its just a way to look at the world and figuring out how things work. Fundamentalist biblical teaching on the other side is the opposite, instead of actually going out and figuring out how the world works, you just trust that your magic book got it right. Which is quite frankly pretty naive. That of course doesn't mean that everything the Bible teaches is wrong, there are plenty of benefits of being nice to each and all that stuff, but when it comes to how the world actually works nothing beats actual observation and that is what science is doing.

...but probably terrible in implementation.

Calibration for each individual person's body type? Tech support that involves actual physical human contact? (shudder) Epileptics would lose all of their work with regularity.

In my mind, this is one of those things where we've already made the intuitive leap to an input that makes sense and now people want to go back and think of something that takes more effort to replicate what we've already done in a more convoluted way.

Because that would be incredibly slow. Calculations involving time need to be quick and arbitrary precision integers are much slower than primitive integers. A 64-bit integer value will last for half a million years before overflowing if you use it to store microseconds. There's no reason to slow everything down for millennia to avoid some problems in the eventual future.

The one thing I found annoying about the Y2K coverage was most "journalists" going on about how the whole issues, was not an issue.

Did it ever occur to these news "professionals" that many problems were patched, *quietly* before they could break?

Many of the COBOL computer systems with the Y2K issue belonged to large, established, mainstream organizations.....many of them financial institutions. They probably wouldn't want a story in the new about how they bought a defective system that they are still using 30 years later and way past the point when they should have replaced it.

The point is that the big corporations could get their copyright as long as they want as long as they think the copyright is valuable enough. Right now we see Disney constantly getting copyright extended so they can keep Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain, but the only way to do that is to extend copyright on everything. With this new system they could decide the length of the copyright based on how important the work is to them. That means we can let them have 70 years of copyright on Mickey, but only 7 or 14 years copyright on most other things. Much better than today's system where we have to have ridiculously long copyrights on everything so Disney protect one important work.

This article is about brands, not technology or innovation. The fact that name napster was once synonymous with p2p makes it a pretty significant brand.

There is a limiting of the works for the benefit of the copyright holders, but the works still exist and are accessible. The works are even available at lending libraries.

Do you really think that every creative work produced since the 1920s or so is easily available today? And even if there is a copy in some library, that copy is still bound to physical limitations- just because the one copy exists doesn't mean anyone can access it. Not so online, and if these works were in the public domain, they could be legally and freely available online. But since some insanely low number (something like 6%) of works created in the 1920s era are commercially viable and therefore commercially available, a vast majority of that 94% of "non-viable" works are pretty much nonexistent.

Big Content opposes proposed laws that enrich the public domain, even if said laws have little to no effect on their own IP. What else could they be besides usurpers of the public domain and, by extension, our culture?