This is fallout from the recent changes in trademark law, which created a new, ridiculous standard for "dilution of trademark." Nominally, this protects a company like Pepsi from, say, a shoe company that wants to create "Pepsi sneakers." The reform is spurred by a perceived failure in the old trademark standard, which made trademarks domain-specific: a trademark on "Acme Springs" doesn't stop someone from creating "Acme Anvils."

But the dilution standard goes further. It allows companies that own extremely famous marks built on regular, English words, to stop others from using that mark in any other context. Think of The Doors' music publisher suing the Acme Door Company from trading on their good name.

That's exactly what Visa is doing. They claim that the fame of Visa, the credit card, has so outstripped the fame of "visa," the English word, that anyone who names a company or product "visa" (even, presumably, a book called "How to Get an American H1B Work-Visa") is ripping off their intellectual property.

This is a stunningly bad law, and the lawmakers who wrote it need to be thoroughly spanked, but what's worse are the thieves at Visa who've decided that the anti-dilution standard is ready-made for expropriating small businesses of their domain-names. Bastards. Link Discuss

Cutting through the hyperbole: Box office revenues are up. They've gone up every year since 1984, when the VCR was legalized despite Hollywood's claim that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

Moreover, this claim of "the increasing ease with which high-quality films could be downloaded with P2P software" is just so much bullshit. You can download a movie from Gnutella or Kazaa, sure, given several hours' download time and much searching. Having downloaded it, what you end up with is a quarter-sized, scratchy-audio version that only a liar would describe as "high quality."

By contrast, you can head down to Broadway or the high street in most other major cities and buy commercially pirated versions of current releases on DVD, CD and VHS. This has been the case for years and years now -- bootleg VHS cassettes were available almost as soon as VHS decks were legal -- and still, the box office revenue increases, as does the proportion of total studio revenue derived from legit pre-recorded media sales and rentals.

So, where's the problem? Sure, copyright holders would like it if they had 100 percent control over their works -- just like grocery stores would like to eliminate 100 percent of spoilage, shoplifting, and package-damage -- but it's not a realistic goal. Meanwhile, the film industry is healthier than ever. It is not collapsing.

But the film industry clearly sees an opportunity to take another kick at the Betamax can here. By chicken-littling about the impending death of Hollywood, studio execs are able to appeal to lawmakers to regulate technology in unprecendented way -- to create what Fox Studios' Andy Setos calls a "well-mannered marketplace" where only those technologies that Hollywood approves are allowed into the market.

Remember, entertainment interests have sued to keep the player piano, the radio, the VCR and the MP3 off the market. Remember, these companies withheld their movies from television studios because they feared that TV would Napsterize the movie-business. Remember, these companies went to Congress during the National Information Infrastructure Hearings and asked for the Internet to be redesigned to that all packets could be monitored for infringement.

There is no new problem -- and Hollywood is not proposing a new solution. The "threat" and their reflexive answer to it are not "unprecedented" and the only real danger is that this time, they'll get their way. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

For Hickey, as for writers like Havel and Klíma, "the language of pleasure and the language of justice are inextricably intertwined." Thus, when he takes on the issue of multiculturalism in his essay "Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme," Hickey begins not with a discussion of individual rights and collective wrongs, but with a memory of pleasure. For several thousand words -- an eternity by American journalistic standards -- he summons up a 1940s childhood afternoon in which he watched his white jazzman father jam with two black beboppers and a refugee German pianist in suburban Texas. Bluntly reminding us not to read this scene as "an allegory of ethnic federalism," he then turns to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. In them, as in the jam session, Hickey identifies a quintessentially democratic leveling. If American high art -- and, by implication, the high academic theory of identity politics -- promote hierarchy and exclusiveness, then in Hickey's view, jazz and the paintings of Rockwell reveal the possibility of inclusion and equality. Moreover, as Hickey's afternoon with his father suggests, that possibility is not merely an ideal -- it can actually be lived.

Whether locals want to go to work, to the shop, out hunting, to visit relatives in the next village or simply go for a ride, the trolley is the easiest and often only means of transport...

A three-litre can of petrol can take you about 100 kilometres. The line, once used by trains laden with iron ore, was 700km long back in the 19th Century. Just 200km remain today...

Trouble is, the trolleys are not subject to traffic control. The line belongs to the local authorities, but there is just one safety inspector.

The House of Steel
This is one of the two most powerful clans, and it dominates the eastern seaboard around New York and environs. Alternatively, if I change my mind it could be outside America altogether and set in the Arctic Circle, based around a new Fortress of Solitude. This is because the House of Steel consists of the clan founded by Superman- We have Superman himself, a morally troubled figure who doesn't know what's best to do about the chaos he sees sounding him, but who has come to accept that the Houses provide the only real permanent structure in a Stabilizing world and are thus important to maintain. Superman has married and raised a couple of kids, and the person that he has married is Wonder Woman, who has had an identity change to Superwoman to accommodate her new stature- We see the genuine and powerful love between these two in the face of the perils of the world sounding them and the desire to do what's best They are also troubled by their two offspring- One of these is a new Superboy, and he's about eighteen when the story opens, and he's real bad news. The other child is a less delinquent Supergirl, and new one who, like Superboy, has been born of the union between Superman and Wonder Woman but who is much kinder and gentler, more her mother's child. Having three members in the Superman class and Wonder Woman (Superwoman) herself, they are obviously a clan to be reckoned with.

Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs! I knew this was bad. I took the computer out to the garage and completely disassembled the thing layer by layer . My stomach turned when I exposed the main circuit board and saw thousand of ant and eggs (and a queen or two), writhing across every inch! Argh! After several hours with a vacuum and a can of air I finally got the thing clean. I put it back together (only a few extra screws) and luckily it works fine. Any theories on why ants would decide to move an entire colony into an ibook? Warmth? Sweet circuit boards? I think they were attempting to colonize the ultimate frontier: cyberspace.

Cheapskate yuppies like me have already taken piracy to the next level. In the past, a stack of 20-cent CDs let me copy my friends’ favorite albums in 10 minutes. Now, for $499, I can dump their entire collections onto an iPod in an hour.

iPod is marketed as an MP3 player, but under the stylish skin it’s nothing more than spinning media. It’s a 20-gig disk drive with a firewire connection that can suck down an album’s worth of music in less than 15 seconds – with room for 400 more. The interface puts P2P freeware to shame, and it even talks to PCs. With an iPod in my pocket, I don’t bother asking for CD recommendations anymore. I drag and drop my friends’ entire jukeboxes. Rip ’em now, decide what to play later.

Location: electronic orphanage, 975 chung king road, los angeles, california 90012 (map)

The event is sort of a simulwebcast/simul-camp-in with a sister gallery in Utrecht, Holland. During the show, digital artists from San Francisco, LA, and New York will gather at the Orphanage space. The idea is that each artist will, for the weekend, become a little avatar that operates in the "virtual space" of the gallery. For the duration of the show, the galleries in Holland and LA each are transformed into Internet space.

Printable invitation here: (PDF) (JPG): The press kit is here. Photos I took of Miltos' analog work (large-scale paintings of technology still-lives) from August are here.

Link Discuss

It's Friday. Pour yourself a cup of something hot, crank up the headphones, and try to look super-productive and workerly while you burn valuable time on these urls. Some are oldies, all are goodies.

(1) Movie-a-Minute: using sekrit plot condensation technology (and probably a few lasers), this site provides ultra, ultra-short capsule summaries for films including "Speed" (Jan de Bont, 1994)

Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the elevator.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the elevator. (saves elevator)
Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the bus.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the bus. (saves bus)
Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the subway.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the subway. (saves subway)
- THE END -

(2) Design For Chunks: An airbag saved my life. In-flight barf-bags, reimagined. (image at left: Dude Studios)
(3) Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character.
(4) Yodeling horse-things: this site might just kick the ass of singing kittens.
(5) Tiny Bubbles: if you liked last week's Flash bubble-wrap popping site, hold on to your seat.

"I feel like I'm in a cutting mood tonight," the Rev. Douglas Taylor told 30 supporters before bringing out the scissors.

Why the downturn? Key3Media Chief Fred Rosen blames -- oh, you'll never guess -- the shrinking IT industry and travelers made wary by Sept. 11. But tech buyers are still attending conferences, a former Key3 executive told the Mercury News, only they're favoring more focused gatherings over Comdex' smorgasbord approach. BusinessWeek Online did the math: "Last year, average attendance at info-tech trade shows sank 14%. At Comdex, attendance was down 41%." As the crowds are drifting away, so are corporate booth-buyers. A few years ago, IBM made headlines for refusing to buy space. This year, Sony's opting out.

The episode, called Shada, was described as "the greatest Doctor Who story never shown" and began filming in 1979 but production was halted by industrial action.

Following several false starts in attempting to bring it back, the drama will finally be premièred in a webcast on BBCi in the spring.

I reviewed a draft of this last month, and it is a damned fine book. It starts with the premise that bad security is worse than no security -- a false sense of security puts you at more risk than eyes-open vulnerabilities. Then it discusses the idea that security is always contextual: you can't make something generally "more secure;" you can only make it more secure from some attack.

This is the setup for Bruce to tell us how to figure out if something is a risk, if some measure mitigates that risk, and points us at the ways our world has changed since 9-11, in order to make it more "secure."

This book presents a vital suite of critical thinking tools. It's a shame we won't see it on shelves until next September -- publishing being what it is -- but when it hits the stands, it will be required reading.

We are being told that we are in graver danger than ever, and that we must change our lives in drastic and inconvenient ways in order to be secure. We are being told that we must give up privacy or anonymity, or accept restrictions on our actions. We are being told that the police need new investigative powers, that domestic spying capabilities need to be instituted, and that our militaries must be brought to bear on countries that support terrorism. What we're being told is mostly untrue. Most of the changes we're being asked to endure don't result in good security. They don't make us safer. Some of the changes actually make things worse.

My new book, still untitled, is a book about security. Not computer security, but security in general. Its goal is to teach readers how to think differently, how to tell good security from bad security, and to be able to explain why. Its goal is to instill in readers a healthy skepticism about security, especially the technologies surrounding security. Its goal is to convince readers that good security is about people.

The book walks the reader, step by step, through security: what works, what doesn't, and why. It gives general principles that the reader can use to understand and evaluate security. It illustrates those principles with anecdotes from all over: crime, war, history, sports, natural science, myth, literature, and movies. And it gives the reader a simple process that he can use to understand the difference between good security and bad security.

Real-world security looks a whole lot like computer security. It's not just that computers are everywhere; the same concepts and methodologies that allow us to make sense of computer security also apply to the real world. In my previous book, "Secrets and Lies," I used real-world metaphors to explain computer and network security. In this book I am going to explain real-world security using the techniques, processes, and formalism from the computer world, without assuming any computer knowledge.

Ran into an interesting scam the other day. I got a call from someone claiming to be a producer for a television show, saying he wanted to interview me, in my capacity as a Web programmer and the owner of Seven Deadly Productions, for a show on the Bay Area business scene. He was interested in me "as an expert," he said. I'm not an expert on the Bay Area business scene, but I am an expert at bullshitting in interviews, so I called him back. ...

The spiel was odd from the beginning. For instance, he described his show as being "like Hard Copy or 20/20 except we only say good things." Hard Copy without the criticism is like World's Scariest Police Chases without the reckless driving. ...

Then he went into the details of what they're going to do for me. He pointed out that they were going to pay for a cameraman and lights and so forth, to the tune of something like ten thousand dollars. This is where my right eyebrow began to lift of its own accord. ...

... [T]hen he dropped the bomb. Well, more kind of sidled the bomb into place. Introduced the bomb. He told me that what with them paying for the videotaping and all, I'd be expected to pay the relatively small cost of "production and editing." Then he quickly moved onto something else which I don't remember because of the klaxon and flashing red lights that were going off in my head.

When: Nov 20th, 2002 - Jan 19th, 2003
Where: Wagner Rosenbaum Gallery, 169 King St E, Toronto

Roger's clocks are folk-art-cum-fine-art. Put one of Roger's clocks on your shelf and you will smile, every day. If you're in Toronto and you miss his show, you're missing out on a chance to have your mind blown. Say hi to him for me, OK? Link Discuss

UPDATE: Buy prints from Lalo, like the extremely chido "Never Forget Columbus" cartoon at left, at the cartoonista.com store or here on eBay.

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Healthy sex lives make happy workers, who will in turn create a more robust economy, said Emil Ng, sex therapist and founder of the Asian Federation of Sexology. "Sexual health is not just about absence of diseases or dysfunction...It is about the ability to enjoy sex...This will improve the whole nation's well-being and productivity. When your economy is down, sexual activity will be lower, not because of sexual problems, but financial problems. This is a vicious cycle."

David Talbot, celebrating Salon's 7th birthday, is nice enough to include a shout out to FEED (which I co-created many moons ago) and Suck (which I briefly helped run from 2000-2001) before thumbing his nose, rightfully, at the Salon doomsayers: "Salon has outlived many worthy Web colleagues -- let us observe a moment of silence for the likes of Suck, Hotwired, Feed, Word and APBNews.com, all of which got out the electric cables, yelled 'Clear' and zapped the flat-lining carcass of American journalism." I would have described it as more of a colonoscopy, but it's a nice gesture either way.

Nevertheless, these observers report that Apple has been serious enough about its ace in the hole to seed a few lucky civilians with prototype boxes – delivered heavily swaddled in layers of cloak-and-dagger security, natch. Specifically, recent testers report taking delivery of Athlon-powered boxes that Apple had assiduously welded shut to prevent prying eyes from ogling whatever other gremlins might be lurking inside these nondescript beige chassis.

No, it's not a scam ("Lunar Real Estate For Sale", "Give Someone a Star For Christmas"). This one is bona fide. From NASA. Names submitted via a web form will be burned to DVD, carried to Mars in a 2003 rover mission, and photographed on the surface.

"Nokia appears to be the first manufacturer to include a keyboard in an ordinary cell phone, setting the unit apart as a legitimate text messaging device. It also includes Instant Messaging; multimedia messaging service and Short Messaging Service; access to any POP3 or IMAP e-mail account; and an x-HTML Web browser. The handset, which will ship in the second quarter of next year, uses Nokia's own proprietary Series 40 OS and browser, not its newer Series 60 design. The Series 60 is the platform design that Nokia is selling to other handset manufacturers such as Sendo, which includes the Symbian OS plus an HTML browser from Opera."

Imagine walking through the city and triggering moments in time. Imagine wandering through a space inhabited with the sonic ghosts of another era. Like ether, the air around you pulses with spirits, voices, and sounds. Streets, buildings, and hidden fragments tell a story. The setting is the Freight Depot in downtown Los Angeles. At the turn of the century Railroads were synonymous with power, speed and modernization. Railroads were our first cross-country infrastructure, preceding the telegraph and the Internet. From the history and myth of the Railroad to the present day, sounds and voices drift in and out as you walk.

Things change.

Link Discuss (via Scripting News).

BBEdit 7.0 allows you to configure multiple Web sites in the preferences and then work with files from any of the defined sites. Syntax coloring support for ASP/VBScript has been added, as well as XHTML 1.1 support in the HTML Tools and syntax checker, and a "Close Current Tag" command which speeds and simplifies HTML tag creation and editing.

For text editing, BBEdit 7.0 adds support for selecting and operating on rectangular regions of text.

Bare Bones also added a few general improvements including a "Paste Previous Clipboard" command, Quartz text smoothing support in editing views, improved support for Mac OS X Services (on Mac OS X 10.2), plus palette-savvy window resizing and a new "atop" window stacking option. A new plug-in info window displays version information, online help, and web links for installed plug-ins. Plug-ins can also now be installed via drag-and-drop.

We should learn from the example of X.400. X.400 was (is?) a mail protocol approved and required by essentially all the telecommunication agencies throughout the world. It was designed over a period of ten years yet failed against SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) which could be implemented in an afternoon. Like x.400, the Bluetooth was designed and promulgated before anyone could learn from the first generation. Bluetooth is designed to work in the specific cases imagined by its designers and thus will perform very well in precisely those scenarios and these are the scenarios touted in press releases. It's not surprising that if you don't use Bluetooth precisely as envisioned it will not work very well. There is a tendency to view these problems as anomalies and those of us who point them out are considered spoilers and are thus discounted.

Low-carb dieters are eating enormous quantities of food, local restaurateurs, diners and dietitians agree. "Guys come in here and order one steak after another, boom, boom, boom," said Mr. Goldstein of Angelo & Maxie's. Jack Lamb, an owner of Jewel Bako, a popular sushi restaurant in the East Village, said, "You can always tell who the low-carb people are: they order miso soup and an awful lot of sashimi, more than you'd think a person would want."

Dieters say that if you're used to eating a lot of bagels, pasta, pizza and sandwiches, all staples of busy New York lives, you have to eat large amounts of protein- and fat-rich food to get the same feeling of fullness. A three-egg omelet for breakfast, bacon and a big lump of cheese for lunch, salad and pork chops for dinner, then a late-night snack of peanut butter is not an unusual day's menu.

Among his latest innovations is a Velcro leg-pocket containing a fold-up umbrella and a paint-brush.

"I use the brush a lot because I often end up sleeping in odd places and this is the best way I have found for removing dust," he says.

Elsewhere he carries a shaving kit, comprehensive first aid gear, a mini-saw, blow-up mattress, spare batteries, a change of clothes, a water-pouch, a water-filtering unit, soldering iron, tape-measure, digital camera ...

Eric says his aim is not self-publicity but simply to be prepared for all eventualities.

"It is like a doctor with his medicine bag. I always have my kit," he says.

We believe you are selling "The Head Trip" aka "Happy's Head Trip. That product infringes on our patent. We believe that you respect the Intellectual Property rights of others, and that you had no idea you were infringing.

We'd like to offer you THE TINGLERÆ at competitive prices. It is covered by our United States Patent 6,450,980. We also have additional patent applications pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office relative to this and other products. You can go to our website http://www.everythingforlove.com to check THE TINGLERÆ and our other products.

INFINEON, WHICH which has a large presence at the "Electronica" electronics fair which opened in Munich today, said it is demonstrating chips and sensors woven into "smart textiles", with connecting wires integrated into the weave and with miniscule power consumption.

The firm is showing a jacket with a voice controlled MP3 player, and the garment can even be washed.

It's also demonstrating further applications which could be of real use, including thermal generators which pick up body heat to power the microelectronics.

Throw out the First Waffle
One of the first things I noticed when I began getting my work published, was how often my introductory paragraphs were unceremoniously hacked into the trash by miserly editors. I once heard the phrase "throwing out the first waffle" used to describe divorce in a first marriage. I've come to think of these intro paragraphs as the first waffle(s) of writing. Writers, especially newbies, often waste this first graph (or two or three) setting up their subject, gobbling up precious column inches, awkwardly warming up to their subject. When you're done with your initial draft, take a hard, dispassionate look at the first few graphs. See if you can slice 'em off. Be harsh.

UPDATE: FOUND has plans to expand, according to this Chicago Trib story. Watch for an audio CD in '03, with found sound--think answering machine messages, discarded audio letters, and original songs inspired by found notes. (via Poynter.org).

"There are thousands of small communities that could access the wireless Internet using the unlicensed microwave spectrum, as does HPWREN," [said] UCSD researcher Kimberly Mann Bruch..."The use of solar panels to power wireless broadband equipment -- radios, antennas and the like -- is especially feasible and cost-effective in areas where traditional electricity is not available."

UPDATE: The HPWREN web site with photos, topography map, and other project background is here.

The prototype looks like what would happen if you mated an iMac with a gargoyle. Sort of a hip, futuristic reptile. Product is scheduled for consumer release in 2003.

Among recent design improvements, Banryu's speed has been increased from 3 meters/min. to 15meters/min. Pretty darn fast for a robot moving around inside, say, a small Tokyo residential apartment. The 'bot can also navigate over gaps exceeding 10 cm, and has the ability to sense height via sensors on its legs.

Pics on the Banryu-bot's home page, here (Japanese text only). From a news article today:

"The robot also [has] a completely new 'odor-sensor' developed jointly by tmsuk, Kanazawa Institute of Technology... and New Cosmos Electric Co., LTD. The developers believe that this is one of the first devices that can sense a particular odor with practical accuracy. With the sensor the robot will be able to detect 'burnt scent' which is known to occur in the atmosphere preceding a fire."

Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors. Sometimes the actors got drunk on the way and shaved their heads or got nasal tattoos, thus becoming too ugly to work in Hollywood, and frequently the actors arrived in a different order than they had set out, because they all took different routes. Now imagine a new service called Hollywood Express, which delivered actors to Hollywood, guaranteeing that they would (a) arrive (b) in order (c) in perfect condition. The magic part is that Hollywood Express doesn't have any method of delivering the actors, other than the unreliable method of putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Hollywood Express works by checking that each actor arrives in perfect condition, and, if he doesn't, calling up the home office and requesting that the actor's identical twin be sent instead. If the actors arrive in the wrong order Hollywood Express rearranges them. If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened. To them, it just looks like the actors are arriving a little bit more slowly than usual, and they never even hear about the UFO crash.

Need enough music for a week? Or two? The Neuros HD has the capacity to hold 5,000 songs, and superior functionality to provide the technology you demand in an MP3 audio computer. The Neuros can broadcast songs wirelessly to your stereo. It can record and identify songs from the FM radio. With automatic synchronization all your downloads, playlist changes, and requests from your PC library will be automatically executed.

Canada's money doesn't stink. US money, the green stuff, it stinks. I mean, literally, smells. I don't know what it is, it's like it's designed to absorb sweat.

My credit record? Wiped clean...

On many occassions, I've heard someone say, "If you don't love the United States of America, then get the hell out."

I did.

Social Software
We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of social software, software designed to support the interactions of groups of people. After nearly a decade of exploring the Web's uses as a one-to-many medium, there is a growing awareness and excitement about both the problems posed in writing social software, and the potential benefits...

Untethered
The history of networked computing from its very first days until the mid-1990s were all about balls and chains: computers and the wires that anchored them into useful aggregations of resources. As early as the 1970s, networks without wires have transformed the tethered user into a mobile swarm (having accelerating into a high-speed and widespread trend in the late 90s). Untethered users cluster like savannah beasts around a watering hole when they find high-speed wireless access; cellular telephone users disperse and gather dynamically as they transmit short notes billions of times a month.

Biological Models of Computing
Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced "machines of extreme perfection," to use Darwin's felicitous phrase. As our technological systems become more complex and planning for all cases becomes impossible, what can we learn from the biological world? In particular, what can we learn from the design of both organisms and systems that can adapt to a wide and unpredictable range of signals without collapsing?...

Digital Rights
Digital Rights Management, copy-restriction, and rights-expression tools are potentially dangerous but often-innovative technologies. Some claim to be tools for safeguarding the public's privacy; others maintain that they add functionality to general-purpose hardware. Congress, the FCC, the European Parliament, and WIPO are all considering pro- and anti-DRM initiatives...

Hardware
Moore's Law drives ease-of-hacks in hardware just as well as it does in software. Hardware hacks expand the machine in new and powerful ways, using cheap, off-the-shelf technology. At the tiniest end of the spectrum, miniaturization is showing the promise of a nano-world, where everything we take for granted about the physical universe is up for grabs.

Are carbon nanotubules the next asbestos? Will MEMS graduate into "utility fog?" Your talk-proposals for the hardware track should tell us how we can change the world today with Radio Shack parts and simple schematics or how the world of tomorrow will be upended by clouds of tiny sub-micro devices.

Business Models
We feature a range of technologies that are growing just below the horizon of commercial viability, and place a spotlight on projects and people who are likely to become very important to the future of Internet computing. Equally important is a careful study of what the new business models will look like. Will they be a return to the traditional, times being as they are? Or is there still room to innovate? Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture?

• Heinlein's Starship Troopers (Privates and Lance Corporals)
• Card's Ender's Game (Sergeants and Corporals)
• Constitution of the United States of America (Staff Sergeants through First Lieutenants)
• Guevara's On Guerrilla Warfare (Majors and Chief Warrant Officers)

By the year 2000, Mintel suggests that small pocketphones "will be as common as Walkmans... " People would have to develop a whole new social code... You could not, for example, take calls in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Indeed, the potential nuisance effect of pocketphones (which, of course, exist at the moment, but are clumsy and extremely expensive) is enormous, though perhaps no more so than the nuisance of the transistor radio. Besides, the social value of being able to make a phone call at any time will also be extremely large.

"I don't care who it is, mate, rules are rules." Pilot to Tony Blair when the prime minister protested about having to switch off his mobile as his plane was about to take off. He was taking a call from the Queen...

One morning I took an early flight from Moscow to St Petersburg for an interview at the Hermitage museum. In the final stages of our descent, the fog over Petersburg was so low and thick that all we could see were the tops of factory chimneys sticking out of it. The pilot announced that we would have to divert to Pskov, a run-down garrison town near the Estonian border, 100 miles to the south. We landed, disembarked and entered the terminal building, a dank shell of gnawed concrete. The few beaten-up, inter-city call booths in the airport were closed. There was no way I would make the interview, and no way to let the Hermitage know I was late; I had lost the story.

At this point, I saw about a dozen of my fellow passengers, Russian men and women, line up like a guard of honour, and with military synchronicity, lift dinky little mobiles to their faces and reveal to the world that we had been diverted to Pskov. I was amazed at how fast technology and human want had overtaken my understanding of the possible in Russia. I was impressed that so many of the people on the flight had mobiles, when I had thought that they were luxuries for the elite of Moscow; that here, in this obscure provincial town, pretty much the property of a hungry Russian airborne division, the infrastructure to support roaming was in place; and, most of all, that everyone around me took this for granted. I borrowed one of their phones. I got straight through to the Hermitage and told them I was running late. I had to get one of these things.

Through it all, Rove wore his war room on his belt'the postcard-size BlackBerry communicator that holds his unmatchable Rolodex as well as his e-mail system, through which he squirted orders and suggestions to campaign workers and lobbyists using only a few words. "It's like haiku, "says a political operative who has been on the receiving end. During meetings'even ones with the President'Rove would constantly spin the BlackBerry's dial and punch out text on its tiny keyboard. "Sometimes we're in a meeting talking to each other and BlackBerrying each other at the same time, "says a colleague. At times Rove's voltage got too hot even for all his outlets. He became known for breaking into song in midsentence. During games of gin rummy on Air Force One during Bush's campaign swings, Rove was always the loudest one yelling, "Feed the monkey! "when it was his turn to pick up a card. (Bush played once, Rove says, and "whipped me.')

The Tribute occupies the beautifully landscaped San Diego bay area. As you walk across the terazzo bridge into a circle filled with historical memories, you'll enter the realm of one of America's greatest entertainers. Five bronze full-size statues of Bob Hope stand on the points of a granite five-star platform. Let history come to life as you hear motion-activated recordings of Bob Hope telling jokes, while five full-size statues representing each military branch (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard) respond with the hearty laughter of those who so appreciated Bob Hopes efforts to improve their morale.

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. Microsoft Corporation
4. Adobe Systems Incorporated
5. AltaVista - The Search Company
6. My Excite
7. Amazon.com--Earth's Biggest Selection
8. CNN.com
9. Lycos Home Page
10. MapQuest: Home

Originally designed to curtail trust abuse by unscrupulous trustees, intelligent trusts have evolved complex and profitable investing strategies never imagined by their programmers. "I-trusts have really branched out in recent years," notes Pressupmanship. "Last year they got interested in real estate for the first time. Up until that point they'd only ever really been into traditional securities and some sophisticated derivatives trading, but it looks like they've got their eyes on the consumer goods sector now."...

Recognizing that intelligent trusts are responsible for the price spikes and prosecuting them legally may, however, prove to be two entirely different things. "The problem is showing that they intend to manipulate the markets in these goods," notes Waikman. "In most cases it's just a matter of pack behavior. With a few exceptions, no one trust does buying that really reaches an abusive level. It's just that when you put it all together, it amounts to a manipulation. They don't just get together and plan to corner a market. One of them just takes a position while the others hang back. But, once there's blood in the water, they all rush in, driving up the prices and putting a stranglehold on the market."

When you buy a book you can highlight portions or rearrange pages. A friend can recommend that you rip out the boring chapters and read only the climax, and neither the author nor the publisher has a right to stop you. Why should movies on DVD be any different?

When a DVD is legitimately purchased or rented, consumers should have the right to play it with software that enhances their personal viewing experience. Parents should have the right to skip a second or two of gratuitous nudity in an otherwise family-friendly film. Film buffs should have the right to watch a film with an alternative audio commentary by an expert such as Roger Ebert, without permanently altering the disc.

Ultimately, the issue is one of control. Technology has given consumers the ability to control how they watch movies in their homes, and the DGA wants to take that control away by banning the technology. Even if you don't have kids, aren't much of a film buff or love graphic movies, do you really want Hollywood dictating how you view DVDs in your own home?

The beetles were culled for Fabre by a team of entomologists who scoured the restaurants of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand where the creatures are regarded as a delicacy...

Birds' wings, giraffes' legs and salamanders' eyes can all be discerned in the creation as can the letter 'P' for Queen Paola who succumbed to years of lobbying and gave Fabre carte blanche .

"It looks like a kind of greenish, bluish, violet, yellow golden sea of light that moves around constantly, creating drawings using the light," Fabre, 44, told the Guardian yesterday.

"It will never go away, the colour will never fade and it will stay there for hundreds of years. I am quite satisfied."

A police ministers meeting in Darwin this week agreed it was "unacceptable websites advocating or facilitating violent protest action be accessible from Australia".

Internet regulator, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, only last week decided not to block access to websites organising protests for the World Trade Organisation meeting in Sydney.

UPDATE: More on Australia Net-censorship efforts from Electronic Frontiers Australia (via Declan McCullagh's Politech list). Link

"People find this action very cool and the ecology aspect is very loved in France," said Aziz Ridouan of Stop CD France, which has accumulated about 1,600 CDs for the men so far.

[International campaign organizers Jim] McKenna and [John] Lieberman say they have nothing against AOL, but see the discs as a waste of resources and have found a creative way to ask the Internet giant to stop making and sending them.

AOL is responding by offering to help.

"If they reach their goal ... I'd be happy to give them directions and greet them at the door," company spokesman Nicholas Graham said. "We would make a contribution ourselves to put them over the top."

"From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically — in all directions — to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space — a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms."

The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's.

Electrical engineer Birger Orten invented the simple stimulator. The contraption is comprised of a narrow, thin ring with advanced energy transferral that is placed at the root of the penis.

The machine has no side effects, needs no prescription and works immediately. It can also be mounted inside a condom.

# Stanford Bookstore, November 11th, 7:00 p.m.

# Commonwealth Club, November 12th, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. reception Reservations 415/597-6705/6705 or register online

# Borders (San Rafael), November 14th

# Booksmith (on Haight St.), November 19th, 7:00 p.m.

# Cody's (Telegraph Ave.), November 21st, 7:30 p.m.

In an ideal world, the FCC would treat the airwaves like a highway system nobody owns and enforce rules governing how people use its lanes without crashing into each other, the group says. And in cases where this isn't possible, the FCC would allow people to drive across other people's "property" as long as they keep a low profile and don't do any damage.

Given this freedom, inventors and entrepreneurs would invent new vehicles and new ways of using the highway, the thinking goes. Consumers would finance the development of the airwaves by buying the devices that suit them best and abiding by the rules of the road that prevent nasty accidents.

But to make this vision a reality, the devices need a slice of the spectrum that would form a virtual park or an airwaves commons where equipment makers and others could experiment. In addition, common protocols — industry standards that allow devices to understand each others' communications — and rules are needed to prevent accidents and to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.

This paper examines the successful evolution of a specific smart mob into a wireless community of practice. It begins with an examination of a popular wireless blogging website "Hiptop Nation" (http://hiptop.bedope.com). "Hiptop Nation" acts as a central blogging site for owners of the "Sidekick" device, a portable handheld data communications device recently introduced by Danger (http://danger.com). The Sidekick supports wireless AOL Instant Messaging, email, SMS text messages, and web access. Users of the Sidekick can post wireless public blogs on Hiptop Nation via their Sidekick device, as well as upload photographs from the Sidekick's digital camera.

On Halloween, October 31 2002, Hiptop Nation sponsored a photo-scavenger hunt competition across the US. Participants were users of the Hiptop Nation blog site who were placed into competing teams, and participants coordinated their actions as well as acquired and uploaded photographs across the US exclusively via their Sidekick wireless devices. The hunt lasted for 24 hours.

Except that Macrovision's technology stinks. It's trivial to circumvent (though the DMCA makes such circumvention illegal, even if the copy you make isn't), and it makes home-theater setups unnecessarily complex.

So Columbia-Tristar is forgoing paying for Macrovision licenses for its new Superbit titles and releasing without the copy-prevention technology. The discs are marked "Warning: This disc is copy protected," but this refers to CSS, the "content scrambling system" that ensures that viewers can't watch DVDs from other regions (i.e., watch American DVDs in Europe), and makes it impossible to ship legal open source DVD players.

Macrovision is reportedly upset with Columbia-Tristar, though, since it views this warning as a kind of protective coloration for the Superbit discs, using Macrovision's reputation to intimidate viewers without paying Macrovision's protection money.

The New Scientist article on this reads like a motion-picture-studio press-release. Consider this graf:

Like other DVDs, the disks do have tough digital copy protection, meaning only hackers can duplicate them with a PC. But Macrovision, a technology that prevents people copying by simply connecting the analogue output of a DVD player to the analogue input of a recorder, has not been used.

The new Home Copying report, from international market research company Understanding and Solutions (U&S), suggests that those who copy illegally make at least a dozen analogue copies of movie DVDs or VHS tapes every year.

The story doesn't call out the fact that the "protection" measures in DVD are in place to control what paying, law-abiding customers can do with their property -- format-shifting, time-shifting, backup -- but does not even slow down real "pirates" who make bootleg editions of DVDs and sell them for profit. In other words, the "protection" here is protection from you, not from criminals. Link Discuss (Thanks, Druidbros!)