It turns out that Rock-Paper-Scissors has strategy! A programming contest demonstrates that there are optimal, non-random strategies that involve anticipating your opponents (provided that they, too are engaged in optimal, non-random strategies that etc...)

Dan has written an incredibly strong Rock-Paper-Scissors program, which simply dominated every aspect of the competition. Of the 25 independent tournaments run for the Open Competition, Iocaine Powder won ALL of them. In the six sets of 25 tournaments conducted for the "Best of the Best" competition, Iocaine Powder finished first every time.

In many ways, Dan's program is a generation ahead of it's time. I believe it would have been a worthy winner of the second RoShamBo competition, after all the lessons had been learned and ideas shared from the first set of tournaments. By co-operating with his fellow alumni from Caltech, he greatly improved on a previous version of the program which was already strong enough to win the competition!

Link Discuss (via Upe's Planet)

Michael Jackson slams the music industry as a racist conspiracy to screw artists.

"The recording companies really, really do conspire against the artists -- they steal, they cheat, they do everything they can," Jackson said in a rare public appearance. "(Especially) against the black artists."

The Germans have a word for everything, you know. The word for what I'm feeling now is schadenfreude. Link Discuss

Fantastic article on the process by which Apple used in-house and external contractors to design, build and manufacture the iPod.

The value is putting it all together and optimizing the design to eek out the best performance, get the best power utilization, the best audio performance," says Wolfson's Hayes. "That is not a trivial task by any means. Sometimes it's very difficult in a cost constrained [situation] and small form factor to get the performance." Factors that can influence the final sound can be the circuit board layout, the circuit design itself, the handling of the power supply and the overall implementation.

Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

The LA Times rounds up the weight-loss efforts of California lawmakers. The Distinguished Senator from Cucamonga lost 100lbs through surgery.

* Assemblyman Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside) has dropped 101 on a doctor-supervised program that requires him to eat what he ruefully calls "pseudo food."

* Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) is down 25 pounds with the help of a personal trainer and a determination to just say no to the mounds of sweets in the Senate lounge.

Link Discuss

Plastic takes on the rumored Calvin and Hobbes movie. Oh, I so want this rumor to be true.

The retired comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, written by Bill Watterson, may or may not be in movie production. It has been a widely spread rumor that Watterson has been working independently on an animated film, but besides rumors, no real evidence.

Link Discuss

Seth has posted further, in-depth notes about our meeting with Microsoft's Palladium team, going into great detail about the technical workings and intentions of the system -- and there's no Latin in sight this time! The closer you look at Palladium, the more civil liberties implications begin to surface. Again, Seth is the likely most technical person to have received a briefing like this without signing an NDA; his notes are lucid, accurate and well-informed.

When you want to start a Palladium PC in trusted mode (note that it doesn't have to start in trusted mode, and, from what Microsoft said, it sounds like you could even imagine booting the same OS in either trusted or untrusted mode, based on a user's choice at boot time), the system hardware performs what's called an "authenticated boot", in which the system is placed in a known state and a nub is loaded. A hash (I think it's SHA-1) is taken of the nub which was just loaded, and the 160-bit hash is stored unalterably in the PCR, and remains there for as long as the system continues to operate in trusted mode. Then the operating system kernel can boot, but the key to the trust in the system is the authentication of the nub. As long as the system is up, the SCP knows exactly which nub is currently running; because of the way the CPU works, it is not possible for any other software to modify the nub or its memory or subvert the nub's policies. The nub is in some sense in charge of the system at a low level, but it doesn't usually do things which other software would notice unless it's asked to.

Link Discuss

Using a genetic algorith feulled by the adjascent-letter-frequency in the Gutenberg Project texts, a hacker has evolved a highly optimized keyboard layout that minimizes finger-motions for English-language typists. Looks like it kicks Dvorak's ass, which means that Possum, the only Dvorak typist I've ever met, has a new hobby.

I ended up with a scheme in which a pool of 4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to "type" a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor. The mutations are made by permuting keys in the layout, with a 50% chance of swapping two keys, a 25% chance of swapping three, a 12.5% chance of four, and so on.

The evolutionary framework itself had to evolve. It was challenging to find a scheme with sufficient mutation possibilities that would allow a medium-quality layout enough time to improve itself with multiple mutations before getting eliminated. I also learned that it was important to track only distinct layouts, for otherwise a single good one would rapidly fill the pool with identical copies of itself.

When no new best layout has risen to the top of the pool in some number of generations, the round stops. The best layouts are stored away and the pool repopulated with random keyboards. This allows a fresh start after one layout has populated the pool with itself and its mutations...

k , u y p w l m f c
o a e i d r n t h s
q . ' ; z x v g b j

Link Discuss (via /.)

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has threatened promised to raise an army of Veddic terrorism-fighters who will stamp out terrorism through meditation, but first he needs a billion dollars.

"I have confidence that India will be the lighthouse for total knowledge. From there this total knowledge will radiate in the whole family of nations ... that would generate a powerful influence of peace that would spread throughout the whole world and neutralise the stress, the hatred and tensions that fuel terrorism and war today."

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder, which has gotten a terrific redesign!)

Here's a Hotwired column by Michael Schrage from 1997 that establishes the idea of JavaScript-based MIPsuckers, a prototype of the JavaScript parasitic computing app I blogged yesterday. The page includes an embedded JavaScript that uses your CPU to calculate Pi. Marc "Popular Power" Hedlund sez,

Using Java applets or JavaScript for these projects is good in the sense that it's trivial to have everyone loading/running the latest code revision, since they just downloaded it; but it's bad in the sense that the distributing computing consumer (like SETI) would need to write or rewrite their complex number-crunching code in Java{Script}. In many cases that seems to be an impassable barrier. As several researchers independently told me, "I don't know programming language we'll be using in twenty years, but I know it will be called Fortran."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

An enterprising hardware hacker has built a PC-driven interface to the Etch-a-Sketch. Link Discuss (Thanks, Allen!)

Boogah was kind enough to respond to my kvetching about Disneyland's removal of its live webcam. He lives a couple blocks from the Happiest Place on Earth and has a clear shot of its sky from his webcam. He's trained said cam on the Park's sky so that we can all enjoy its fireworks display this weeken! Woot! Link Discuss (Thanks, Boogah!)

Parasitic computing is the process of enlisting remote parties' computers to solve some computational task without their knowledge. An early proof of this involved malformed pings whose checksums were parts of the solution to some larger distributed computation problem. By sending the pings to thousands (or millions, or hundreds of millions) of computers, an attacker could cause them all to solve the problem (by calculating the checksum) and report back on the result (by sending back the error message with the checksum attached).

Here's a new proof of concept, this one using JavaScript in an inline frame. Once the frame is loaded, it keeps itself resident until you close the window. As long as it is resident, it fetches parts of a distributed computation problem (in this case, discovering 32-bit prime numbers), performs calculations and send the results back to a remote server run by the attacker.

This technology has a most assuredly good use as a legitimate JavaScript or Java applet distributed client. If a person has access to a web browser and an internet connection on a computer that is "locked down" to prevent the installation of software--such as at a job, in a library, or in a school computer lab--the person would still be able to run a distributed client. Imagine using a web browser on one of these machines. The browser would be split by frames. The majority of the left-hand frame could be your typical browsing experience. The right-hand frame could be very thin, maybe 10 or 20 pixels wide. Within this frame a client from a legitimate site (for example, Distributed.net or SETI@Home) could be running. This client could be written in JavaScript or as a Java Applet. Status information could be displayed as "colored blinkey lights" or text rotated 90 degrees. Alternately, this could be done with a frame across the bottom of the browser, although this tends to cut into usable screen space more than a column down the side of the screen.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Slate observes the phenomenon of theme-park VIP passes, premium admission packages from the likes of Busch Gardens and Universal that allow the bearer to jump all queues. The article contrasts these with the Disney parks' FastPass system, which requires you to go to each ride you want to queue-jump and use a machine to get a time-stamped pass that's good for a no-wait ride later in the day.

Disney's mechanism is egalatarian and has the added benefit of shaping the park's traffic so that individual rides don't bunch up -- this is something that the Disney parks lost when they migrated from the A-B-C-D-E ticket-books to flat-rate ride-all-you-want with admission in the early 80s. Because you got more A tickets than E tickets in each book, there was some friction that encouraged visitors to ride A-ticket attractions, like the horse-drawn carriage on Main Street, instead of just queueing and re-queueing for Space Mountain.

The FastPass has a similar -- and subtler -- traffic-shaping mechanism. Anyone attempting to ride an E-Ticket attraction without a FastPass is, broadly speaking, a sucker. The waits for "standby" admission are through the roof (except at the halt and abandoned California Adventure at Disneyland), but you can only hold one FastPass at a time, so you can't just ask the machine for 100 Space Mountain passes. If you want multiple turns at Space Mountain, you can get a FastPass, then queue up in the standby line while you wait for your pass to mature, then jump on again with your pass after your standby ride. Lather, rinse, repeat. Note how this balances the pleasure of Space Mountain coaster-fanatics with a less-obsessive visitor who just wants to get one ride in during her day at Disneyland. If you're in it to ride once or twice during your visit, there are no lines, and you spend the rest of your trip visiting less popular attractions, balancing crowds across the Park. If you want to ride again and again -- as is your perogative -- you don't get to pre-empt the pleasure of less-fanatical riders who still want to get one shot at the ride.

The Busch Gardens/Universal system, though, is all about the money. It's a maitre'd bribe: pay out some big bucks and the ride-operators will let you take the best table in the house, for as long as you want. If this program is successful, it will turn the de facto price of admission into the price of a VIP passes, since all the E-Ticket "weenies" (carny term for a landmark, signature ride that draws visitors through the midway) will be saturated from opening to closing by VIP passholders.

Disney has its own premium admission system, of course. If you're a guest at the resort hotels, you can enter a different park an hour early every day, beating the crowds on selected (usually E-ticket and kiddee) rides. And Walt Disney World throws a weekly "E-Ticket night", when people who pay an extra $15 get to stay after closing and ride half a dozen rides that are kept open. Finally, if you take one of the pricey -- but wicked-cool -- backstage tours, you'll get onto one or two rides without having to wait.

In my experience, early admission and backstage tours are utterly worth it, but E-Ticket nights are filled with hooting teenages, too-few rides, and queues that aren't noticably shorter than daytime lines.

My best-ever Disney queue experience was about five years ago, when I went to Disneyland with a bunch of friends from the WELL, including Evelyn, a woman who is blind and was travelling with her guide dog. Lines melted away from us and our group, Cast Members were delighted to dog-sit her pooch, and the whole gang of us were able to walk onto one ride after another. Evelyn and her dog got to ride the Submarine Ride for its last voyage.

Slightly offtopic: Has Disney taken its themepark webcams offline? I tried to watch the Disney World fireworks online last night, and the cameras appear to be gone (I found a set through Google that appeared to have archived images from May 2001, but nothing more recent). Link Discuss

Trashlog -- a daily scan/photo of trash found on the street. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nico!)

If you're running Mozilla -- my new bestest friend -- you should immediately install the Mozilla Gestures add-on. Gesture support works like this: hold the mouse down and zoom right to go forward, left to go back, up to open a link in a new tab and down to open it in a new window. Booyah! Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

The Rat Blaster is a sonic varmint repeller capable of "keeping Godzilla out of your garbage cans." Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)

Unwilling to wait for JK Rowling to overcome her writer's block and finish Harry Potter number five, a Chinese publisher has simply printed a fanfic sequel (under Rowling's name) as China's official next-book-in-the-canon.

DRENCHED by a mysterious rain, Harry Potter is transformed into a fat, hairy dwarf and stripped of his magic powers as he battles the forces of evil in the shape of a dragon.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

Lovecraftian chess rules:

The Basilisk

On each player's royal square is a Basilisk. It may retreat one square diagonally, or it may advance in the most forward manner of a Knight, always to an empty square; and the squares to which it may move are also the squares it can see.

Any piece which is seen by a Basilisk, be it friend or foe, is instantly thrown into a paroxysm of torment and petrified.

Petrified pieces continue to see and continue to suffer their torments, as evidenced by the dim glow of fire that can be discerned deep within their malachite forms.

Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

Many nice things in Seth's journal today, especially:

I've been having a debate with a friend about how to calculate the area of a moebius strip, where the moebius strip is constructed by taking a 1" by 10" area, twisting it, and joining the ends...

My observation was that if you did make the strip from paper, you would need 20 sq. in. of paint in order to paint the whole thing. If you used 10 sq. in. of paint, you would have 10 sq. in. of surface unpainted.

However, Jonathan argues that this is a misinterpretation if the Möbius strip is seen as having zero thickness, because then points on one "side" are actually identical with the corresponding points on the "other side". He suggests that, on a zero-thickness strip, you can go only 10" before you return to your starting point. (On a strip made of paper with non-zero thickness, you must go 20" before returning to your starting point.)

And don't miss:

Five people came from Microsoft to meet with us on Tuesday about Palladium. It was very interesting.

"Sealed storage" is a very technically clever idea. Some of the subtleties hit me only after the meeting. Basically, you have a hardware co-processor within a machine which contains some unique secret symmetric key (not known to anybody other than the co-processor). Call this s. Also assume that the co-processor is also to take a hash h of whatever kernel k is running on the ordinary CPU. (In Palladium this is actually something called a "nub" -- in their marketing materials a "Trusted Operating Root" or "TOR" -- but we can pretend it's the OS kernel instead.)

Seth is probably the most knowledgeable tech person to have been briefed on Palladium by MSFT without signing an NDA. Accordingly, Seth's notes on what Palladium does and doesn't do, as well as what it can be used for, are likely the very best on the Net right now. Palladium (and TCPA) are "security" initiatives that may well make workable copy-prevention practical, but the cost to civil liberties of doing so need to be carefully considered. Link Discuss

The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is a conspiracy to convince Congress to give Hollywood studios the power to decide what kind of digital video technologies are mandatory and which ones are forbidden. At the EFF, we rooted out the conspiracy and thoroughly documented in in hundreds of notes on a blog that detailed the participants, the proposals, and the way to join its mailing list.

One reason that this was so effective is that the MPAA -- who were calling the shots at the BPDG -- were trying to keep the BPDG an open secret. Theoretically, any interested party could attend its meetings and read its mailing-lists -- except journalists. However, the BPDG had no website, no public presence, no press-officer. The idea was to keep it a secret while still being able to tell Congress that they'd invited input from everyone with a stake.

The upshot was that since the EFF was the only group talking publically about the BPDG, all the public information orignated with us, with very little rebuttal from Hollywood's representatives.

The MPAA has finally put its FAQ about the effects of the BPDG mandate online. It is a work of sheerest FUD, and my colleague, Seth Schoen, has torn it to bits, exposing the truth underneath the propaganda:

Q: When the broadcast flag is implemented, can I record any TV program with my existing digital player/recorder and watch it later at more convenient time?

MPAA answer: Yes. If you own an early model digital player/recorder, you will be able to record and playback time-shifted digital recordings of flagged broadcasts. These digital recordings will also play on legacy DVD players. However, when Broadcast Flag-compliant DTV receivers are introduced in the marketplace, their recordings will only play on other compliant players and not on older (legacy) devices. Of course, you can still record and playback digital programs with any existing analog videocassettes recorders/players. The broadcast flag does not affect what you have been able to do in the analog world.

EFF comment: This answer confirms that "Compliant" devices produced under the BPDG-proposed rules are less capable than current-generation devices.

The MPAA suggests that use of analog recorders is unaffected by this proposal, which is correct, but not the whole story. The MPAA has proposed broad legal restrictions on analog recorders which would limit their ability to record copyrighted works. Those restrictions are not a part of the BPDG proposal, but they are certainly a part of the MPAA's agenda.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)

Got a copy of Duke Nukem PC? You can run this groovy 3D run-through of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Link Discuss

Business 2.0 reports on the IT infrastructure of international cocaine-smuggling rings.

Henao's cartel is a champion of decentralization, outsourcing, and pooled risk, along with technological innovations to enhance the secrecy of it all. For instance, to scrub his profits, he and fellow money launderers use a private, password-protected website that daily updates an inventory of U.S. currency available from cartel distributors across North America, says a veteran Treasury Department investigator. Kind of like a business-to-business exchange, the site allows black-market money brokers to bid on the dirty dollars, which cartel financial chiefs want to convert to Colombian pesos to use for their operations at home. "A trafficker can bid on different rates -- 'I'll sell $1 million in cash in Miami,'" says the agent. "And he'll take the equivalent of $800,000 in pesos for it in Colombia." The investigator estimates the online bazaar's annual turnover at as much as $3 billion.

Link Discuss

This is the funniest legal homepage I have ever seen. Hard to imagine that it was actually written by lawyers.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn't be caught dead in a courtroom.

Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can't complete a sentence without the words "I object" or "I demand another extension on that filing deadline." Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only four of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, Tamara Vincelette, and JoAnne Zboyan are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.

Lawyers who won't be caught dead in a courtroom are often referred to in the vernacular as "loophole lawyers," underhanded wimps who use their command of legal gobbledygook to scam money from the unsuspecting, usually widows and orphans. Many people believe that such "loophole lawyers" are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only four of its lawyers, Myra Lansky, Kathy Powers, Mary Phillips, and Jay Powers, are such "loophole lawyers" and one of them, Jay Powers, hardly does anything at all anyway so he doesn't really count.

Link Discuss (via Memepool)

Burning Man's organizers are suing a girls-gone-wild video maker for releasing a "Boobies of Burning Man" video of the playa's topless residents. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

Business Week takes notice of Warchalking and Clay lays a hurt on the telcos:

Part of what makes Wi-Fi so sexy is that it's decidedly low-tech. But that's also its power -- and the reason many telecom carriers make it illegal to share your broadband signal. Just as Napster changed the monopolistic music industry by making it easier and essentially free to obtain music, Wi-Fi could rip apart the burgeoning broadband industry, a duopoly of established cable and telecom companies, by replacing last-mile connectivity with last-acre connectivity.

"The telecom industries are addicted to the one-wire, one-customer philosophy, which means that growth in use directly equates with growth in direct user fees," warns Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and an expert in network economics. "If it suddenly becomes easy to share broadband with anyone within a [1,000 foot] range, then, as with Napster, you have quickly and easily lowered coordination costs. And it's only coordination costs that make it possible for the big guys to make money off each and every user."

Link Discuss (via Scripting News)

Gerard Vanderleun ("boswell' on The Well) is a noted wiseguy. Here's his look at a behind the scenes meeting among members of Hollywood's "gay mafia."

MIKEY OVITZI
When -- when did I ever refuse an accommodation? All of you know me here -- when did I ever refuse to send a buff personal trainer with a jar of olive oil over to the office? -- except one time. And why? Because -- I believe this Ecstasy-driven chicken hawking business -- is gonna destroy us in the years to come. I mean, it's not like gambling or liquor -- even the odd stealth lesbian kiss at a tennis tournament or golf classic -- which is something that most people want nowadays, and is forbidden to them by the pezzonovante of the people who cancelled Rosie, Ellen and Politically Correct (Hey, Bill Maher in drag, whatta you think. Should I sign her?) . Even the Clinton Administration that've helped us in the past with not asking and not telling and other things are gonna refuse to help us when in comes to chicken hawking. And I believed that -- then -- and I believe that now.

GEFFENDI
Times have changed. It's not like the Old Days -- when we can do anything we want. A refusal is not the act of a friend. If Don Ovitzi had all the child stars, and the young assistant producers in the Valley, then he must share them, or let us others use them. He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly he can -- present a bill for such services; after all -- we are not Members of the Screen Actors Guild.

Link Discuss

Canopy is a $30,000 Motorola 802.11a product that can cover six two-mile-radius regions in a city with high-speed Internet service. At that cost, it's conceivable that a neighborhood coaltion of, say, 1,000 people might pitch in $30 each, connect the masts to Internet cables and put their region online. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

Rich sez, "A short computer generated film a la Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote, but far, far more violent. Defies description. Be warned some scenes not for children." Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

Kevin Mitnick has co-authored a book on computer security: "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security." If I recall correctly, his parole requires that he not use a computer, which begs the question -- did he write this on a typewriter or with a pen? Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Nice NYT story about the NYCWireless collective's latest hot-spot, in Bryant Park. I've never really gotten the value of hotspots in parks -- I can't see my laptop's screen in direct sunlight, so working in a park seems pretty impractical. I guess that sitting under a nice shady tree would be do it, though.

The wireless high-speed connection funnels into the park via a T-1 line, a high grade of Internet cable, and is sent through the park's airwaves by a radio transmitter.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Eckhaus was sitting near the carousel, reading an Israeli newspaper and downloading music.

Directly across the park, Loren Finkelstein, a computer network administrator, was exchanging instant messages in the sun.

On the east side of the park, Kingsley Rowe, a recent graduate of New York University, was sitting at a table, reading e-mail messages and checking for more tips in his job search.

Mr. Eckhaus said: "The first time you browse the Internet, it was wonderful. It's like that all over again."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

As I mentioned earlier this morning, it's been ten years (!) since I attended the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop (though it hardly seems it!). Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor, has just left for the MSU campus at East Lansing, MI, to be the guest editor there.

My year at Clarion was really the first wired year of the workshop. Nearly everyone had a computer -- those who didn't bring their own got brand-new loaner 486s from the college -- the sole exception being Nathan Ballingrud, who insisted on his beloved manual typewriter. I remember how expressive his manuscripts were, dark vivid keystrokes where he was on a roll, tentative, faint characters where he'd slowed down, faint hand-written corrections on the photocopies. We critiqued three or four stories a day, five days a week, for two to six hours, and I wrote a story every week. Our instructors varied from wonderful to ineffectual to out-and-out abusive. I had a modem and I spent a fair bit of time dialed up to GEnie, a primitive online service, keeping online track of what was going on at the workshop.

There was a fair bit of handwringing from the instructors over the idea that students were "wasting time online," gossiping and spilling the beans about the politics at the workshop. This theme continued in subsequent years as students continued to keep online Clarion journals, sometimes quite intimate ones that were critical of or wounded at the instructors. An interesting feedback loop developed one year, when instructor Lucius Shepard read a student's online journal and commented on it in person, prompting another journal entry and another conversation, which prompted another journal entry, and so on.

This year, a Clarion student has formalized the online journal process, putting up a portal with links to all the student journals. They're in their third week now, half way through, and the journal entries fill me with nostalgia. Taken as a body, the journal entries comprise a fascinating window into the hothouse of the legendary "sf writers' boot-camp." Six weeks at Clarion can change you forever. It took five years for me to overcome the writers' block that resulted from the amount of information I needed to assimilate after my year; Octavia Butler reports the same experience.

This year's instructor line-up is fantastic: Terry Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler, Tim Powers, Geoff Ryman, Leslie What, Patricia C. Wrede and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I'd love to teach Clarion some year myself, though God knows where I'd find the time.

A word of advice to this year's students: The MSU library has all of the previous Clarion students' stories on file. If you're ever feeling down about your work and worried that you'll never make it, swing by the library and have a peek at some of the work that has preceded you. Check out Bruce Sterling's submission story, or Lucius Shepard's, or hell, check out mine. Everyone starts somewhere.

The Clarion 35th anniversary party is at the end of July. I won't be able to make it, but it sound like it's going to be a lot of fun. I'll see you at the 40th. Link Discuss

Last nightmonth (thanks, cypherpunks!), Raymond "Spiritual Machines" Kurzweil and Vernor "True Names" Vinge met online and discussed the Singularity in a chat hosted by scifi.com. Here's the transcript.

Gardner: Seems unlikely to me that EVERYONE will have an equal capacity for keeping up with it. There are people today who have trouble keeping up even with the 20th Century, like the Amish.

RayKurzweil: The Amish seem to fit in well. I could think of other examples of people who would like to turn the clock back.

RayKurzweil: But in terms of opportunity, this is the have-have not issue. Keep in mind that because of what I call the "law of accelerating returns," technology starts out unaffordable, becomes merely expensive, then inexpensive, then free.

vv: True, but the better analogy is across the entire kingdom of life

vv: When dealing with "superhumans" it is not the same thing as comparing -- say -- our tech civ with a pretech human civ. The analogies should be with the animal kindgom and even more pershaps with things enve further away and more primitive

Link Discuss

Dale Bailey has a wonderful short story on scifiction.com, "In Green's Dominion." Dale was one of my classmates at the Clarion writers' workshop, ten years ago, and was one of the few writers at the workshop who sold stories to our editor-instructors. He's had a very promising career since.

"Horny," said Daphne the next day at lunch.

"Excuse me?" Sylvia placed her sandwich atop a stack of exam booklets and stared at the woman behind the desk.

Thirty-seven, unmarried, dressed in lime-green pants and a baggy cream sweater, Daphne wore her weight like armor, her beauty—which was genuine if unfashionable, the voluptuous generosity of a Renoir—sheathed in smooth protective fat. "Horny," she said once again. "Maybe that's the word you're looking for." She swallowed a spoonful of yogurt and grinned.

"I'm seventy-four years old."

Link Discuss

Aaron Swartz has written a fantastic utility that converts any html file and converts it to ASCII text, preserving style information and converting links to numbered footnotes. Link Discuss

Warchalking cartoons are spreading! Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

India has loosened regulations its 2.4GHz band, opening up the country to indoor 802.11b wireless networks.

Agrawal said the deregulation of indoor WLANs would speed development of new enterprise applications and open up deployment of 802.11b networks. "Outdoor use will still require a license and we hope that the ministry will de-license that too," Agrawal said.

The Indian wireless industry wants outdoor use of 802.11b deregulated soon. But doubts remain, and government notification of a change in policy is anxiously awaited. "I feel that the government should lift all restrictions on the use of 802.11b, except maybe in some sensitive restricted areas," said Uday Ramachandran, Wipro's head of connectivity solutions. "This will enable people to use WLAN on office or college campuses. Also, since preventing RF transmissions from escaping from within a building is not easy, people might end up using it outdoors in any case."

Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

Going to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention this month? I'm gonna be on holidays, but if you can make it, you should head to the blogger dinner. We did one of these at the Emerging Tech Conference in the spring and it was a hoot! Link Discuss (Thanks, Rael!)

Interesting research report on what sleep at different times of the day and night does to your cognitive abilities:

Overall, their studies suggest that the brain uses a night's sleep to consolidate the memories of habits, actions and skills learned during the day.

The bottom line: we should stop feeling guilty about taking that "power nap" at work or catching those extra winks the night before our piano recital...

"All such learning of new actions may require sleep before the maximum benefit of practice is expressed," note the researchers. Since a full night's sleep is a prerequisite to experiencing the critical final two hours of stage 2 NREM sleep, "life's modern erosion of sleep time could shortchange your brain of some learning potential," added Walker.

I average about 5h per night and get up between 5 and 6 every morning. Perhaps this is why I'm such a spaz. Link Discuss

The Monsturd site is a tribute to the greatest poop movie of the decade. Stills, the themesong, and trailers for your perusal. Even if you missed the San Francisco screening, you can still buy the video! Link Discuss

Welcome to our new guestblogger, Miss Tiffany Lee Brown, the editrix of the Signum Press webzine and the Magdalen Sez weblog. Her band Brainwarmer just released their debut CD, Elliott Smith's Guitar, and her solo/collaborative act Passiflora can also be seen playing around Portland and at Burning Man. Look for her writing in Bookforum, Venus, Bust, Wired, and in the new Oregon literary journal, Clear Cut. Discuss

Depending on your perspective, Janis Ian is either a struggling new science fiction writer or an established and well-respected recording artist with 17 albums to her credit. She's written a powerful debunking of the RIAA's claims about the effects of file-sharing on music-sales. Highly recommended reading from a music industry person who is far more articulate than, say, Courtney Love.

Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure?

We'll turn into Microsoft if we're not careful, insisting that any household wanting a copy for the car, or the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies.

As artists, we have the ear of the masses. We have the trust of the masses. By speaking out in our concerts and in the press, we can do a great deal to damp this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs - in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent inability to organize ourselves in order to better our own lives - and those of our fans. If we don't take the reins, no one will.

Link Discuss (via Yawl)

The Flag Identifier: identify a national flag visually, by following an expert-system-like heirarchy. Does it have vertical stripes? Three stripes? Green+White+Red? You're looking at Italy, Mexico or Madagascar. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

Apple's released a set of icons based on the people in its "Switch" campaign, including our very own Mark "Shlub" Frauenfelder! Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

Enterprising American sailor navigates Spain/Portugal river on a boat made from 160,000 wine-corks.

Pollock, a speechwriter for former President Clinton and free-lance writer, got the idea when at age 7 he saw reed boats in Peru and thought what buoyant material he might use to make his own boat in Michigan.

He began saving cork stoppers from bottles of wine drunk by his parents, then began collecting them from bars and restaurants in his home town.

"People used to shout to me in the street, 'Hey, cork guy!'" he recalled.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

Pat dug up this great DealMac thread discussing the best dumpster-diving/curbside trashcan finds of DealMac's craphound readers.

1996 when RAM was like gold, the company I used to work for upgraded our QMS Postscript network printers. The swapped out the main CPU boards and piled the old ones in boxes marked "Trash" in the empty hallway leading to my office, I picked one up just to take a look to see how they were made. I was looking at the board and I spied ZIP memory, a form of high speed SDRAM, I took down the number and called a memory recycler I saw in the back of MacWeek magazine. Well lo and behold they said they would give me $100 a piece for each one I sent them, there was 16 per board and I had 20 boards sitting in and around my office! They wanted the whole board so they could remove them without damage. I packed them up and used the company's own UPS account to ship them off, two weeks later I recieved a check for $35,000! There was also other types of memory on the boards I wasn't aware of! Bought some cool stuff and invested the rest! Yes, told the IRS and took the hit!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Donna Wentworth of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is also live-blogging the Internet and Law conference at Harvard, and doing a damned fine job of it, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Hylton!)

I remember the first four-port 10/100-BT switch I ever bought: I think it cost $500. Now you can buy one for $4.96 -- well, $24.96 before a $20 mail-in rebate. Link Discuss

Percy, a border-collie mix is running in the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary.

His official campaign bio describes Percy as a compassionate conservative who takes a hard-line with social parasites, particularly fleas and worms. His past is free of sex scandals, due to ``timely neutering.''

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

Roll your own caricatures with this interactive app. Link Discuss

Dan Gillmor is live-blogging the five day Harvard Law School Internet law seminar, starting with Larry Lessig's talk:

There are four constraints on our behavior and freedom, Lessig says. They are the law, norms (cultural and social influences), markets and -- crucially -- architecture. We understand the first three pretty well, but the last of those has not been well appreciated.

"If there are no ramps coming into the building, that's a way of saying people in wheelchairs may not enter," he notes. Similarly, if there were no ethernet connections at these desks, there'd be no way people could "send nasty e-mails about the professors" -- or, in my case, blog this event.

"Laws can affect how these other modalities regulate," he says. Law can interact with norms, the market and architecture, affecting each and influencing society.

Link Discuss

Today I was in a hurry, walking down to my local subway station, the 16th and Mission BART, and, as usual when I'm too late to take Valencia, this took me past the cluster of drug-dealers who hang out on my corner, in the north Mission. I was wearing the groovy MiG goggles I'd bought last month in London at the Camden Market and have been using as shades, and this big drug dealer cornered me and started harassing me to try them on. Then he started rambling about what he does for a living, just talking a load of really boring rounder horseshit that probably sounds good and Elmore Leonardy when you say it to yourself in your head but just sounds banal and incoherent when you're standing on a corner.

He's a big guy and so I "let" him try on my shades. Then it transpires that he wants me to buy drugs from him in exchange for my goggles. I explain that I'm not in the market for drugs, but he won't give back my shades and he's talking more bullshit. Finally I say, "So, you're robbing me, right?" and more bullshit ensues. I repeat the question a couple times, then walk off.

I'm really pissed. Really, really pissed. I really liked those goggles and clearly this guy decided he wanted to just fuck with me for the hell of it. Short of flying to London, I can't replace them, ever. (Update: an alert reader pointed out a mail-order site, so I've replaced them)

I could go to the cops, but here's the thing: if I do, he'll know who did it and he might shoot me.

If I don't go to the cops, though, I am going to walk past this guy twice a day for the rest of my tenure in this apartment and he's going to know that I'm a soft touch and I'm bound to be in for more harassment.

This corner is visible from a nearby police station -- cops who park their cars there can easily and continuously see the swarms of crack, heroin and grass dealers who congregate on my corner. It sure doesn't feel like reporting a petty robbery is going to make a difference.

I asked the advice of two transit cops whom I ran into on BART. They said that cops see busting the dealers in the north Mission as a futile exercise, since the system just dumps them back out on the street. They recommended writing to the SF District Attorney's office, just let him know that there's political will to do something about this.

This is the kind of thing that drives me completely nuts about San Francisco. There is visible corruption, felony crimes, and human degradation everywhere, far more so than any other city I've been to in North America or Europe (excluding Naples). There are people squatting and taking dumps, there are streets whose sidewalks are lined with tents and whose gutters are lined with sealed, fermenting 40 oz. malt liquor bottles filled with urine deposited by tent-dwellers who don't want to live in their own piss. Everywhere you go in the city, you step through drifts of discarded pipes, needles, condoms.

The taxes here are extraordinary -- comparable to Ontario, certainly -- but the evidence of government spending is nowhere to be seen, from the potholes to the prostitutes, from the limping transit to the visible and desperate pervasive poverty.

OK, I'm ranting here. Getting robbed -- even getting robbed in such a minor and meaningless way -- sucks, and it rattles you and makes you bitter and angry. This crap makes me want to move, if not back to Toronto then at least to some yuppies-and-dogs neighborhood like Noe Valley or Pacific Heights, where my rent will be even more extortionate (you would not believe how much money I pay for my tiny apartment in my filthy, dangerous, feces-strewn neighborhood).

OK. I'll stop now. Thanks for reading.

Update: a few hours later.

Let me clarify here that I'm not advocating any kind of round-em-up-and-ship-em-off policy. I am no great fan of the penal system, the war on some drugs, nor am I unaware of the social factors that give rise to the problems in my neighborhood.

But there are damned few places where these problems are this visible and dramatic. I don't have a solution, but I do know that other cities in this state, country and continent don't suffer to this degree. There must be a lesson in one of them.

There are many things to love about SF and about the Mission. First and foremost, there's the EFF, as good a reason to stay here as any I can imagine -- working for the EFF is a dream come true, and the benefits thereof far outweigh the problems of this neighborhood.

There's the concentration of amazing, witty, intelligent, thoughtful and technically literate people in the Bay Area. On a good day, SF is a geek's Shangri-La, with excellent nerd and art culture on every corner.

There's the vibrancy of the Mission, the vast majority of good people who are running small businesses, making merry and who greet me with a smile when I walk past.

Getting robbed makes you bitter. If I could have stepped around this guy, I would have, but I couldn't and I ended up getting robbed. I've written to the SF District Attorney's office to point out the drug-dealers on my corner and their seeming truce with law enforcement. There's a great sushi joint, Country Station Sushi, right on the corner where I was robbed. The family that runs it are world-champion taiko drummers, and I feel for them, feel for their struggling business that is effectively barricaded by the dealers on the corner. It's not fair.

I don't have a solution, but it doesn't seem like the city can go on like this. Link Discuss

Another swarming streamer, OPENdj, is also free and GPLed and runs under GNU/Linux. Grandiose prediction for a Sunday: swarming will standardize on a protocol in the next three-five years, abeit one with many implentations. Link Discuss (via /.)

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif has called for a bill that would create a "safe harbor" for rights-holders who want to attack P2P networks to "protect" their works. A safe harbor is a checklist of qualifications that will guarantee you immunity from prosecution. An ISP that does x, y and z can't be prosecuted for secondary infringement under the DMCA's safe harbor.

Berman is asking Congress for a safe harbor for RIAA and MPAA attacks on P2P systems. At first, this actually seemed slightly reasonable to me. Berman says that his bill won't allow rights-holders to damage individual or ISP computers, and he says the kind of thing they're planning is flooding the network with bad rips, spoofy meta-data (mislabelling tracks) and so on. Hey, that's already a problem in the wild in P2P networks, so what's the big deal, right?

There's something fishy here. Bad meta-data and bad rips are not criminal acts. There's no need for a safe harbor to protect the labels if they want to put up Gnutella hosts with 20,000,000 bad tracks (there're already Christian groups that put up inspirational/chiding images with names that suggest that the files contain porn, and so put their material directly into sinners' hands).

Why does Big Content need a safe harbor for something that's not a criminal act? Safe harbors only exist to protect people who are engaged in an activity that would otherwise be illegal. When Hollywood seeks a safe harbor for its attacks on the Internet, you know that what it's really asking for are Letters of Marque -- a license to engage in criminal vigilantism.

So either Berman's blowing smoke or he's not telling the whole story. You don't need a safe harbor to protect yourself from bad metadata. Watch out for the text of the bill when it gets introduced -- 90 percent of its social harm is lurking below the surface. Link Discuss

Rob "Community Wireless Networks" Flickenger has written an excellent primer on, well, community wireless networking for PC Magazine. He covers all the basics of technology and social phenomena, and imparts some of the vibrance of community networking, too.

The captive portal provides Web site redirection, which you may have encountered when surfing the Web from hotels that provide DSL access to rooms. When the Wi-Fi card in your laptop associates with the access point and you try to open a Web site, you are redirected to an introduction page that identifies the network and invites you to log on (sometimes after paying a nominal fee for access). Once cleared with the authentication service, you are redirected to the site requested.

The hot spot has its place in any community network project because it is relatively simple to set up and provides immediate benefits. For little more than the price of the hardware, homes and businesses can use the wireless network to access a high-speed DSL line (or other appropriate network connection), sharing its cost. Sponsors can charge competitive fees for Internet access to help offset the cost of operations.

The hot spot has one critical limitation: You can set it up only where high-speed Internet access is already available. What if you want to extend network access outside of DSL and cable range, or you want to bridge two networks together but can't afford a dedicated telco line?

Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)