Lee Harvey Oswald kick out the jams. (Check out the Dead Kennedys logo spraypainted on the wall!) Link Discuss (Thanks, brother Bob!)

Luke Francl has taken Larry Lessig at his word. Following up on Larry's challenge to give as much money to defending freedom and independent artists as he spends giving to the media oligopoly for CDs, movies, and cable/DSL, he is donating regularly to good causes, matching his spending.

August 2002 EFF $100. Recieved a baseball cap, "Fair use has a posse" t-shirt, and a sticker

October Radio K, local college radio station which plays tons of indie and local music. $120 ($10/month for the next 12 months). Supposedly recieved a t-shirt, but I never picked it up. I'm not totally sure when I committed to this donation.

Morbus Iff, donation for AmphetaDesk. $50

November Sam Brown, Exploding Dog. Paid $65 for an Exploding Dog print.

Total: $335

Link Discuss

Farscape fans have paid to privately produce and air a commercial begging the SciFi channel to put the show back into production. Link Discuss

Darpa hired a consulting firm, SRI, to investigate the feasibility of re-designing the Internet to eliminate online anonymity to catch terrorists and evil underpants gnomes. The consultants gathered a whack of experts from various disciplines who told them it was stupid all around: bad for privacy, bad for the Constitution, technologically unsound, and unlikely to provide any assistance to the nation's intelligence agencies whose problem isn't an absence of information, but rather an absence of analysis -- you don't get faster analysis by throwing more chaff into the radar-field.

Anyway, the snake-oil consultants decided that the group was far too negative and basically made up its own conclusions, submitting them to Darpa as the "consensus" of the august experts they met with -- a positive outlook would mean more consulting dollars.

And then someone leaked the whole story to the NYT.

You know, Darpa could have paid out $60,000 to EFF or ACLU instead, and they woulda told them it was a dumb idea. Hell, I bet they woulda done it for $30,000.

In e-mail messages, several participants said they believed that Dr. Stavridou was hijacking the report and that the group's consensus would not be reported to Darpa.

"I've never seen such personal attacks," one participant said in a subsequent telephone interview.

In defending herself by e-mail, Dr. Stavridou told the other panelists, "Darpa asked SRI to organize the meeting because they have a deep interest in technology for identifying network miscreants and revoking their network privileges."

In October, Dr. Stavridou traveled to Darpa headquarters in Virginia and — after a teleconference from there that was to have included Mr. Blaze, Mr. Rotenberg and Mr. Vatis was canceled — later told the panelists by e-mail that she had briefed several Darpa officials on her own about the group's discussions.

Link Discuss (via Werblog)

My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has gotten an advance peek at the cover of his forthcoming -- and wonderful -- novel, Singularity Sky. It's wicked beautiful. Link Discuss

LazyWeb is Matt Jones's coinage that describes the process whereby one throws out an idea in the hopes that someone else will build it. Here's my LazyWeb idea; I call it "ScamAssassin." The idea is to build an email filter (maybe a SpamAssassin module?) that identifies email that contains a hoax or scam that can be found on Snopes or Purportal and pastes in a warning at the top of the message, so:

FROM: BARRISTER AKINI ABBEY
OKEAYA INNEH LAW FIRM
ATTORNEYS/LEGAL PRACTITIONERS.
NIGERIA

ATTENTION: XXXXXXXXXX
DEAR SIR/MADAM,

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON. GRACE AND PEACE AND LOVE FROM THIS PART OF THE ATLANTIC TO YOU. I HOPE MY LETTER DOES NOT CAUSE YOU TOO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT AS I WRITE TO YOU IN GOOD FAITH BASED ON THE CONTACT ADDRESS GIVEN TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO WORKS AT THE NIGERIAN EMBASSYIN YOUR COUNTRY. PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOUR PRIVATE LIFE.

becomes:

This note appears to be a "419" or "Nigerian letter" scam. See http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/nigeria.htm for more

FROM: BARRISTER AKINI ABBEY
OKEAYA INNEH LAW FIRM
ATTORNEYS/LEGAL PRACTITIONERS.
NIGERIA

ATTENTION: XXXXXXXXXX
DEAR SIR/MADAM,

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON. GRACE AND PEACE AND LOVE FROM THIS PART OF THE ATLANTIC TO YOU. I HOPE MY LETTER DOES NOT CAUSE YOU TOO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT AS I WRITE TO YOU IN GOOD FAITH BASED ON THE CONTACT ADDRESS GIVEN TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO WORKS AT THE NIGERIAN EMBASSYIN YOUR COUNTRY. PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOUR PRIVATE LIFE.

Someone, build this thing! Discuss

Howard Rheingold is being interviewed in the WELL's public conference about his book SmartMobs. Nice stuff.

The FCC was set up to regulate the spectrum on behalf of its owners -- the citizens. It happened in the wake of the Titanic disaster, where "interference" was an issue. Radio waves don't physically interfere with each other -- they pass through each other. But the radios of the 1920s were "dumb" insofar as they lacked the ability to discriminate between signals from nearby broadcasters on the same frequencies. So the regime we now know emerged -- broadcasters are licensed to broadcast in a particular geographic area in a particular frequency band. For the most part, licenses to chunks of spectrum are auctioned, and the winner of the auction "owns" that piece of spectrum. We have seen in recent years that the owners of broadcast licenses have amassed considerable wealth, and that those owners have consolidated ownership in a smaller and smaller number of more and more wealthy entities. And of course, political power goes along with that wealth. These aren't widget-manufacturing industries. These are enterprises that influence what people perceive and believe to be happening in the world.

Recently, different new radio technologies have emerged. Cognitive radios are "smarter" in that they have the capability to discriminate among competing broadcasters. Software-defined radio makes it possible for devices to choose the frequency and modulation scheme that is most efficient for the circumstances. Ultra-wideband radio doesn't use one slice of spectrum, but sends out ultra-short pulses over all frequencies. It is possible now to think of "intelligent" broadcast and reception devices that use the spectrum in a way similar to the way routers use the Internet: devices can listen, and if a chunk of spectrum isn't being used by another device for an interval (millionths or billionths of seconds), the device can broadcast on that frequency; reception devices are smart enough to hop around and put the digital broadcasts together, roughly similar to the way packets assemble themselves as they find their way through the Internet. Again, let me caution that there are probably many people who read this who can point out gross technical generalizations and slight inaccuracies in this description. The point, however, is that spectrum no longer has to be regulated the way it used to be. Politically, however, those interests that benefitted from the traditional regime have the ear and pocketbooks of rulemakers, whether they are regulators or legislators. Yochai Benkler at Yale has proposed an "open spectrum" regime, and Lawrence Lessig has discussed a mixed regime, in which parts of the spectrum continue to be owned and sold the way they have been, but other parts are opened to be treated as a commons.

Link Discuss

Nice video of the iBOT, Dean Kamen's climbing/all-terrain wheelchair, in action. The real astonishing stuff here is the stairclimbing and the "balance" function. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

Wireless broadband service provider Ricochet just re-launched consumer service in San Diego, increasing the total number of urban areas covered by the service to three (the others are Dallas and Denver). They're offering a free modem incentive to new subscribers, and re-subscribers get a free month's service... but that $44/month fee seems insanely steep now, given the many other options that now exist for bandwidth-hungry wireless nomads. They ruled, back in the day, with 51,000 subscribers in 21 markets at their peak. I was once a very happy customer, and went into an extended depression when the little green light on my Ricochet modem stopped smiling back at me. The service went under in August, 2001 when previous owner Metricom BK'd. Their tech assets were acquired by Aerie Networks later that year.

The new service, once consumer-driven, has expanded its footprint to include public safety networks and municipal applications. For nearly a year, Ricochet has been testing its wireless mesh network service with the city's Denver Advanced Wireless Network for emergency and disaster preparedness. Ricochet's return to San Diego is due in part to a lease agreement with the city of San Diego to provide wireless access to city-run departments in exchange for city rights of way.(...)

Ricochet boasts speeds of up to 176 kbps, which according to the spokesperson are Ricochet's actually speeds, not its "burst" speed, which is what many DSL providers and wireless carriers use to lure in consumers.

"Any wireless technology has the capability to "burst," but that's not your average speed," said the spokesperson.

Ricochet's burst speeds are up to 400 kbps, the spokesperson said.

UPDATE: In response to a question I e-mailed about LA rollout plans, a spokesperson for Ricochet's San Diego reseller Nethere.com says: "LA is high on the list...no dates yet but it will be at least a few months. You can expect however, that before long it will be back in full swing everywhere it was before...and then some."

Link Discuss

92-year-old Ed Bacon stages skateboard protest in Philly's LOVE Park:

Who is Ed Bacon? For starters he is the father of Kevin Bacon. But more importantly, he is the architect who created LOVE Park, Dilworth Plaza (in front of City Hall) and the Municipal Services plaza. Basically he is the accidental genius behind creating the perfect atmosphere for street skateboarding.

So why is he protesting? Ed Bacon thinks it's a shame that the city is turning its back on skateboarders. Ed has been writing into various local newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and the City Paper in opposition to the laws against skateboarders. He always angrily opposed Mayor Street and his stance on LOVE Park.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Phil!)

Scary-as-hell story about advertising agencies who specialize in pharmaceuticals getting involved in "research," commissioning studies in support of their clients' dope and pushing editorial boards of scientific journals to adopt their conclusions.

Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake of promotion. "You cannot separate their advertising and marketing from the science anymore," said Dr. Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites). "Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science."...

"We would like to help draft this manuscript," Marcia Zabusky, a vice president of Intramed, told the doctors in a conference call, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by The New York Times, "and then submit it to you for your for your editing and for approval."

During the call, Shane Schaffer, a Novartis marketing executive, told the doctors that the company wanted "a quick, down and dirty" article. A study expected to provide scientific data showing Ritalin LA's advantages was not scheduled to start until the following day, he said, but the lack of research findings should not be an obstacle.

A reliable, anonymous tipster who works in the biz sez, "It's all true." Link Discuss (Thanks, Deep Throat!)

Cheaper than horseracing, tidier than a dogfight. Pit opposing keywords against each other at Googlefight to measure zeitgeist heft. For instance: "Xeni" vs. "Xena": she kicks my ass (937,000 entries for the Amazon Warrior Princess in Google, vs. a measly 6,590 for me). Try also: "Marilyn Manson vs. Marylin Monroe," "Googlefight vs. waste of time," and "OJ Simpson vs. Homer Simpson." Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

Robert sez: "I've come up with a new way of making mosaics out of dominoes. (An artist named Ken Knowlton came up with another way in the 1980s.) Here's what happens: You give me a picture. I then take out 48 (or 49 or 100) complete sets of dominoes and arrange them (using some software I wrote) so that when we step back from the dominoes, they look like the picture. The site contains (virtual) 48-set domino portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, etc., and photographs of a 16-set portrait of Marilyn Monroe made of real dominoes." Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

Scientists at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) are developing a new, wireless way of paying for urban parking:

[C]ustomers will need to register their mobile phone number and vehicle details online. They can then prepay their parking fees by credit card, as well as check their account balance and parking history or change their vehicle details online, at any time.

Once users have curbed their car, they then dial a phone number displayed at the lot that will, in a matter of minutes, relay back to them an SMS stating either that the meter has started ticking, or that they have insufficient funds. Parking inspectors can view a list of vehicles authorised to park in the area using a phone or handheld computer.

Alternatively, customers can call a different number (again displayed at the car park) that is supported by a talking computer. The system asks the customer how many hours they wish to pay for and, if they have more than one car, which car they are parking. The time of the call is logged, the account is checked for its balance, debited and a confirmation message is sent to the caller.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

A man's laptop horribly burned his genitals. I can't find a single paragraph from this story that I'm willing to quote -- for fear that some of you might be eating. Suffice it to say that the words "crust," "suppurate," "blister" and "scrotal" all figure heavily. Link Discuss (Thanks, Miladus!)

Last week, the Department of Energy bowed to pressure from private science publishers and shut down a its free website with gobs of great science samizdata. Dan Gillmor's rant on the subject is fantastic:

The correct word for what has happened here is "theft" -- because the government has allowed private interests to steal from the public domain.

The claim that this was done to save money -- a paltry $200,000 a year -- doesn't even begin to pass the smell test. This was an arrangement on behalf of corporate interests, and an absolute thumb in the eye to the public.

It's as if the book publishers persuaded communities to shutter public libraries. (Not that they won't try; e-publishing could lead to that by default.)

Now, anyone who wants access to information collected and/or catalogued using our tax dollars will have to pay for it. Pay again, that is.

Watch this kind of thing happen again and again. America's government doesn't work for the people. It works for campaign contributors and corporate interests, for the rich and powerful who are getting just about everything they want from the government they've purchased.

What to do? Some public-minded foundation should immediately offer to put this back online, by covering the $200,000 cost. Or the collective brain out there should find a way to put the data up on peer-to-peer systems.

Yes, any of these workarounds would set a bad precedent, encouraging more of these information removals. But the bad stuff is already happening. Since it's obvious that the government won't do the right thing, we're going to have to go around the government that no longer works for citizens.

Link Discuss

Ellen Feiss, the Switch ad stoner poster girl has broken her long silence and given an interview to a college paper.

Does it bother you at all that some of your fame might be related to your perceived state of sobriety in the commercial?

It doesn’t really bother me. I do admit to looking pretty out of it in that commercial — I think I look horrible. It was after school, but I was the last person to make the commercial, so by the time I made it it was like 10, so I was really tired. The funny thing was, I was on drugs! I was on Benedryl, my allergy medication, so I was really out of it anyway. That’s why my eyes were all red, because I have seasonal allergies. But no one believes me.

Link (viciously slashdotted site, here's a vanilla text mirror) Discuss (Thanks to everyone who suggested this -- too many to mention here, like 15 of you. Pervs.)

The European Space Agency's Clarke-Bradbury competition is looking for science fiction stories written by writers between the ages of 15 and 30, which is a bit of a weird spread. It's juried by a bunch of scientists (including physicist/musician/softcore porn star/Italian assemblywoman Dr. Fiorella Terenzi!) (looks like I got Terenzi mixed up with "La Cicciolina" -- sorry, it was a little hectic yesterday, thanks to everyone who pointed it out) and the prize is basically prestige, but still. Neat. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

A Sacramento Goodwill store is selling off all the edged cutlery confiscated at the local airport security checkpoint. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

If you're within 500 miles of Tijuana, drop what you're doing and start driving. The eternally-inventive, always-brilliant group of musicians, DJs and artists known as the Nortec Collective are holding another Nortec City bash this Saturday in TJ. The event celebrates the release of their new Beat Shop compilation CD (free at the door), and will feature live performances by collective musicians (Bostich, Fussible, Panoptica, and others), plus crazy far-out digital and low-fi art, and experimental films. Takes place at Playas de Tijuana / Cortijo San Jose. Event details here.

My photologue from a previous Nortec City bash on September 8, 2001 is here. Two archived articles I wrote about the Nortec Collective are here (GOTHAM magazine), and here (Silicon Alley Reporter).

Link Discuss

Interesting essay by GWU Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, in which he puts forth the argument that technological advancements are enabling the creation of an Orwellian state:

In some ways, [the recently-appointed head of the DARPA "Information Awareness Office," Ret. Vice Adm. and former National Security Advisor John M.] Poindexter is the perfect Orwellian figure for the perfect Orwellian project. As a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information, he will now be put in charge of gathering information on every citizen. To add insult to injury, the citizens will fund the very system that will reduce their lives to a transparent fishbowl.

What is most astonishing is the utter lack of public debate over this project.Over the last year, the public has yielded large tracts of constitutional territory that had been jealously guarded for generations. Now we face the ultimate act of acquiescence in the face of government demands.

For more than 200 years, our liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer size of the nation and its population, the government could not practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to technology.

Link Discuss

Gene scientist Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith are developing a plan to create a single-celled, partially synthetic organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If they're successful, the tiny man-made cell would have the capability of reproducing on its own, to to create a population of cells unlike any known to exist. Venter is founder and former principal of Celera Genomics, the company that beat out publicly-funded researchers in the race to map the human genome.

The project raises philosophical, ethical and practical questions. For instance, if a man-made organism proved able to survive and reproduce only under a narrow range of laboratory conditions, could it really be considered life? More broadly, do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms?

Link Discuss (Thanks, JP!)

Nice Wired interview with an entrepreneur who plans on sequencing the genome of all organisms in the ocean:

The goal is to engineer a new species of microorganism from scratch — to improve metabolic function by orders of magnitude so that we can make biological CO² scrubbers for power plants. The organism's genetic structure would allow it to exist only in a specialized environment, so if it ever got outside, it would immediately die.

Based on the metabolic rates of existing microorganisms, you'd probably need something the size of an ocean. But if we can boost metabolic processes 1,000-fold, we can reduce carbon volumes 1,000-fold. Many biological processes have been sped up 10,000-fold or greater. I think it has to get down to a swimming pool-sized environment for a power plant, or a reactor that size

Link Discuss

Salon kicks off a new regular column about funnybooks (!) with a great appreciation of Daniel Clowes.

Perhaps the most striking thing about "Ghost World" was how relentlessly Clowes refused to permit anything to exist in Enid's world that was as lovable, quirky and authentic as Enid herself. Enid wasn't just stuck in anonymous suburban strip-mall hell with dopey high school boys, bad fake blues bands, and no clear future to aspire toward. But even the traditional nests for losers and freaks and "artists" seemed to have been recycled past the point of redemption: Her "original punk rock" look was misinterpreted as "trendy" and the coffee houses were loaded with alterna-rock-boy poseurs. Meanwhile her best friend Becky was being seduced by Crate and Barrel and her neurotic, older-guy record-collector friend turned out to be susceptible to the charms of a peroxide-blond realtor. Even art school was out -- the domain of solipsistic "performance artists" and those canny students who get brownie points for cynically regurgitating the zeitgeist on a platter.

"Ghost World," like just about every competent adolescent coming-of-age story, has been likened to "Catcher in the Rye." The comparison is apt in the sense that, to Enid, pretty much the whole world has become the kind of place where a beloved older brother has to switch from literary fiction to advertising copy as the cost of becoming an adult. In the graphic novel, Clowes even shows himself and his work as an object of Enid's ridicule; she shows up at one of his signings, only to find out that he is some pathetic old guy.

Link Discuss

Doc "Doc" Searls interviewed today for the Creative Commons:

Well, as we pointed out in Cluetrain, business is thick with the language of shipping. We have something we call "content" that we "load" into a "channel" and "address" for "delivery" to a "consumer" or an "end user." Even a category as human-oriented as customer support talks about "delivering" services...

That said, the businesses that are most afflicted with pipe-mindedness are the ones that are quickest to call everything "content." It's amazing to me that I used to be a writer, and now I'm a "content provider." Entertainment and publishing are the biggest offenders here, at least in the sense that they see the Net entirely as a plumbing system. The whole notion of a "commons" is anathema to the plumbing construct.

This was the problem with all these dot-com acronyms with a 2 in the middle -- B2B, B2C and so on. "To" was the wrong preposition. As Christine Boehlke put it to me once, the correct middle letter should have been W, because in a real marketplace we do business with people not to them. Does anybody ever shake hands and say "Nice doing business to you!"? Because the Net is more fundamentally a place than a pipe, we do business with each other there, not just to each other. Critical difference.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

Daen sez: "One of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics Institute problems is the P versus NP problem. There's an excellent description of how minesweeper relates to this problem (it has been proven to be NP-complete) and also descriptions of how to make logic gates out of minesweeper configurations..." Link Discuss (Thanks, Daen!)

The turducken is a chicken-stuffed-in-a-duck-stuffed-in-a-turkey. And it's the big thing this T'giving:

A well-prepared turducken is a marvelous treat, a free-form poultry terrine layered with flavorful stuffing and moistened with duck fat. When it's assembled, it looks like a turkey and it roasts like a turkey, but when you go to carve it, you can slice through it like a loaf of bread. In each slice you get a little bit of everything: white meat from the breast, dark meat from the legs, duck, carrots, bits of sausage, bread, herbs, juices and chicken, too.

Unquestionably the most delicious foodstuff with the word "turd" in its name. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

MSFT's new project takes all of your life experiences and puts them in an unstructured database, making a searchable record of your life. I imagine this will including your GPS readings as you walk around, the RFIDs your PDA logs, the numbers you call and the numbers that call you:

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.

The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.

Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the "giant shoebox problem". "In a giant shoebox full of photos, it's hard to find what you are looking for," says Microsoft's Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

Spectacular gallery of hubcap sculptures. Want want want. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

The new BBC homepage does something amazingly clever. Matt Jones sums it up:

Go there... click on News or Sport then click back to the homepage. Try doing that a few times... Notice the background colour of box which you clicked the link from gets a few shades different?

It's all coded so that whatever you click most gets reinforced over time, making it easier to find what you always want. A gentle, reactive form of personalisation that doesn't take away any choices

Link Discuss (via Blackbelt Jones)

Microsoft delivered their "Darknet" whitepaper at the Association for Computing Machinery DRM conference early this week. I saw an earlier draft of this, and it's a pretty remarkable paper. MSFT argues that watermarking and DRM are both doomed strategies, as are anti-circumvention laws -- but of course, MSFT is also advocating the Palladium Trusted Computing platform, which obviates the need for any of that stuff in favor of really rigorous technical locks that are enforced in hardware. Still, it's amazing how radical their position ends up. Check out the intro:

People have always copied things. In the past, most items of value were physical objects. Patent law and economies of scale meant that small scale copying of physical objects was usually uneconomic, and large-scale copying (if it infringed) was stoppable using policemen and courts. Today, things of value are increasingly less tangible: often they are just bits and bytes or can be accurately represented as bits and bytes. The widespread deployment of packet-switched networks and the huge advances in computers and codec-technologies has made it feasible (and indeed attractive) to deliver such digital works over the Internet. This presents great opportunities and great challenges. The opportunity is low-cost delivery of personalized, desirable high-quality content. The challenge is that such content can be distributed illegally. Copyright law governs the legality of copying and distribution of such valuable data, but copyright protection is increasingly strained in a world of programmable computers and high-speed networks.

For example, consider the staggering burst of creativity by authors of computer programs that are designed to share audio files. This was first popularized by Napster, but today several popular applications and services offer similar capabilities. CD-writers have become mainstream, and DVD-writers may well follow suit. Hence, even in the absence of network connectivity, the opportunity for low-cost, large-scale file sharing exists.

Link (1MB Word file) Discuss (Thanks, Deirdre!)

GetContentSize calculates the ratio of actual verbiage to html cruft on any given URL. Boing Boing is 47.46% content and 52.54% cruft. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

Homegrown video-footage from Monday's Antiwar/Anti-Feinstein demonstration in San Francisco. Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

HuhCorp: the funniest management consulting firm that never was:

Our main strategy is to convince people that we do stuff they can't do themselves, and that we deserve lots of money for it.

The best way to do this is to always look good, and always sound like we know something you don't.

If you're still not convinced, we'll show you lots of market research and cost analysis and global positioning strategy reports to confuse you and hopefully convince you that we're so knowledgeable you couldn't possibly succeed without us. Because you can't. So don't even try.

Link Discuss (via Stuff About Things)

"Atkins Diet" is in the top-ten rising Google queries, and rising, rising, rising. Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)

Wal-Mart and other retailers are upset that various websites have posted leaked info about their upcoming Black Friday sales. They've decided -- conveniently enough -- that this is a copyright violation, and they're using the freaking DMCA to shut it down. That whacky DMCA, it's the goddamned MacGuyver/Leatherman of copyright laws -- endlessly versatile, endlessly adaptable, slices, dices and makes Julienne civil liberties. Link Discuss

The Woz is breaking his six-year boycott of talking about the Mac and doing a presentation at Macworld San Francisco in January. Link Discuss

A new round of charges were filed yesterday against producers of the online cult video series Bumfights:

[Prosecutors say] the defendants induced some of the brawls by offering beer and doughnuts... In one sequence, a homeless man named Donald Brennan is shown having sex with a woman described as a drug-addicted prostitute after the filmmakers paid $100 to have "Bumfight" tattooed on his forehead. For beer and doughnuts, Brennan and another homeless man, Rufus Hannah, fought each other Jan. 5 in a La Mesa parking lot while one of the defendants filmed and cheered them on. The following month, Brennan broke his leg fighting with Hannah.

A homeless woman "known only as 'Pork Chop'" was paid $20 to attack Peter LaForte in a San Diego beach bathroom, prosecutors say. The filmmakers later told LaForte that "Pork Chop" accepted the money "because she was hungry," according to the complaint.

Link Discuss

The website for controversial and much-blogged citizen-informant program Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) has disappeared. Background on the program is here, and the former location of a detailed webpage about the program was here. In Politech, Declan McCullagh writes:

It's been mysteriously deleted. I've copied it from Google's cache and mirrored it here. I wonder if the case of the disappearing TIPS has anything to do with the Department of Homeland Security bill [PDF link]:

SEC. 880. PROHIBITION OF THE TERRORISM INFORMATION AND PREVENTION SYSTEM. Any and all activities of the Federal Government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) are hereby prohibited.

Link Discuss (via politech)

Hip-and-affordable watchmaker Fossil is teaming up with PalmSource and Flextronics to produce two USB-synchronizable "wrist PDAs." The new models are scheduled for consumer release in spring '03, and will include address book, date book, memo pad and calculator, as well as the ability to beam data to full-size PDAs and each other. USAToday story excerpt:

The models, which sell for $199 and $299 but operate identically, each have a 1-inch backlighted screen, far smaller than Palm's usual 21/4 inches square but a bit larger than a traditional watch face. They have a tiny stylus in the wristband for writing information on the screen. The rechargable battery is said to last four days at 30 minutes of use a day.

Though electronic organizers have been built into digital watches before — to transfer data to Timex's Data Link, you hold it up to the PC screen — none has been as full-featured as a PDA, and none has used the Palm operating system. Fossil says the watch has all the capabilities of the Zire, the recently introduced, lowest-priced Palm device at $99.

Link Discuss

Mobile industry news site The Feature just published a great essay by Pho list co-founder and Cherry Lane Digital CEO Jim Griffin that explores whether or not it's possible to "pay for art without controlling art." Disclosure: bb's own Mark Frauenfelder is a contributor there, too. Excerpt:

If there’s a copyright war between technology and entertainment, between delivery and creativity, between left brain and right brain, between people who use stuff and people who make stuff, here’s a prediction for how it ends: A pool of money, and a fair way to divvy it up, all of which will be supervised by government.

This is a safe prediction: Effective control is impractically elusive, inefficient and counterproductive, and we know it. The history of the intersection of electricity and art is actuarial, not actual control. Pleas for copy protection are elaborate misdirection akin to sending the husband to boil water while the wife is having a baby.

The real battle is where the money is: Control of the pools. Simply for music in the United State alone you can count ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, RIAA-SoundExchange, Royalty Logic, NMPA, Harry Fox, AFM, AFTRA – well, the full list of acronyms and their translations would require pages; still worse, multiply it by well over a hundred countries worldwide.

Link Discuss

Gut-bustingly funny online short, "The Reel Truth." Dry, sarcastic send-up of what it *really* takes to get ahead in Hollywood [ok, more specifically--TV commercials]. Jim Griffin sez:

"oh so accurate and true ... and proof that a small video can draw a large crowd. Whomever made this will likely recover whatever they spent and then some ..."

Link to Quicktime file. Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

Jazz artist Les McCann will join "Get Your War On"'s David Rees for a lunchtime culture jam on December 4th, at LA's Knitting Factory.

location: 7021 Hollywood Blvd. (in Hollywood), tel 323-463-0204
starts: 12 noon.
cost: $10 advance, $15 at the door, buffet lunch is extra (but reasonable!).

The afternoon will be David Rees' only central LA speaking engagement, and will consist of selected readings from the GYWO book (blogged here many times, and recently published by Soft Skull Press). The event will also feature video presentations about Adopt-A-Minefield, who will receive the author's royalty on book sales and proceeds from this event. Following David's presentation, acclaimed jazz musician Les McCann will perform new, unreleased material. Note: GYWO website's down at the moment. Buy a book so those pobrecitos can afford more bandwidth!

Link Discuss

Say hello to the world's first GPS-tracked teen heartthrob. According to a post in entertainment industry newsletter Cynopsis, Ex-New Kid on The Block Jordan Knight will releasing two new singles on December 2 exclusively through his website. The revamped site will also include "JORDAN TRACKER, the: Jordan Knight Positioning System"-- a world map with a blinking dot that represents Jordan's exact, current location as pinpointed by a global positioning device.

Link (Thanks, Stacie!) Discuss

John "Cypherpunks" Gilmore has posted a stirring call-to-arms for Americans to get cryptofied, now.

The US government's moves to impose totalitarian control in the last year (secret trials, enemies lists, massive domestic surveillance) are what some of the more paranoid among us have been expecting for years. I was particularly amused by last week's comments from the Administration that it'll be too hard to retrain the moral FBI agents who are so careful of our civil rights -- so we'll need a new domestic-spying agency that will have no compunctions about violating our civil rights and wasting our money by spying on innocent people...

Now's a great time to deploy good working encryption, everywhere you can. Next month or next year may be too late. And even honest ISPs, banks, airlines (hah), etc, may be forced by law or by secret pressure to act as government spies. Make your security work end-to-end.

Link Discuss (via Infoanarchy)

PizzaIDF lets anyone, anywhere send pizza and soft-drinks to Israeli soldiers on patrol (BurgerIDF.com has burgers). Ice cream optional. Buy more than $250 worth and get a tax-receipt. "Our deliveries are coordinated with the security forces and pose no security risk." Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Dark Passage is a webzine devoted to the exploration of abandoned buildings. It's filled with well-written, lavishly illustrated accounts of exploration of old nut-hatches, ice-palaces and other spooky old real-estate dogs. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

As Argentina continues its slide into economic collapse, crooks are dismantling the telephone system by stealing the copper cables and selling them for scrap. A lot of developing countries with crappy telephone service made the leap to digital cellular telephony without a lot of the crufty intermediary stages that the developed world went through, leapfrogging the US and Canada. Maybe Argentina, stripped of wire infrastructure, will make the leap to mesh networking and IP telephony.

During the last six months, as the country's economic crisis has deepened, stealing telephone cables has become increasingly common, authorities say. Thieves are taking the cables because of their copper wires, which can be sold as scrap metal on the open market. Each phone cable carries between 50 and 2,000 pairs of wires. The thicker the cable, the more copper it contains.

About 2,765 kilometers (1,715 miles) of cables have been stolen over the last year, said Pablo Talamoni, a spokesman for Telecom. Much of the stolen copper is apparently being shipped abroad, although authorities aren't sure who is making the shipments.

Link Discuss

Thousands -- and thousands -- of hours of old British newsreel footage. Tons of free previews, though the hi-rezzes cost a fortune. Link Discuss (Thanks, Wil!)

Newt Gingrich is a prolific reader and reviewer of popular fiction -- here are his Amazon reviews.

This novel carries us straight back into the eastern Europe and Balkans of Eric Ambler's great pre-World War II novels, but it then adds a dash of the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Paris before and during the war in a tour de force of the hatreds, passions, and random events which spun across Europe from 1934 to 1945. At one level it is a romantic novel of a man who refuses to give up on life despite some brutally hard lessons (including watching his brother being beaten to death as a teenager by fascists in his Bulgarian village and being trained into the Soviet intelligence system at a time of tremendous brutality to ordinary humans).

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

The Future of Music Coalition has released an amazing, 150-page study of the effect of radio consolidation on the music industry. From the exec summary:

This report is an historical, structural, statistical, and public survey analysis of the effects of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on musicians and citizens.

Each week, radio reaches nearly 95 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 (see Chapter 5, p. 69). But more importantly, radio uses a frequency spectrum owned, ultimately, by the American public. Because the federal government manages this spectrum on citizens’ behalf, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a clear mandate to enact policies that balance the rights of citizens with the legitimate interests of broadcasters.

Radio has changed drastically since the 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated a cap on nationwide station ownership and increased the number of stations one entity could own in a single market. This legislation sparked an unprecedented period of ownership consolidation in the industry with significant and adverse effects on musicians and citizens.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

Amazing interactive map of the Baltimore area, with detailed messages from all the electronic traffic signs, speed on all the major highways, traffic cams, roadwork closures, and weather. Link Discuss (Thanks, Timmer!)

Jam: OS X remote-control for an Aibo robot-dog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ernie!)

"An out-of-print book by a pair of Montanans about a wave of cattle mutilations in the Great Falls area in the 1970s is available online and free of charge." Link Discuss

Kevin Kelly has a great piece in the new issue of Wired called "God Is the Machine." The idea is that our universe is both a computer and the output of that computation, and that the simulation is the reality.

Any large computer these days can emulate a computer of some other design. You have Dell computers running Amigas. The Amigas, could, if anyone wanted them to, run Commodores. There is no end to how many nested worlds can be built. So imagine what a universal computer might do. If you had a universally equivalent engine, you could pop it in anywhere, including inside the inside of something else. And if you had a universe-sized computer, it could run all kinds of recursive worlds; it could, for instance, simulate an entire galaxy.

If smaller worlds have smaller worlds running within them, however, there has to be a platform that runs the first among them. If the universe is a computer, where is it running? Fredkin says that all this work happens on the "Other." The Other, he says, could be another universe, another dimension, another something. It's just not in this universe, and so he doesn't care too much about it. In other words, he punts. David Deutsch has a different theory. "The universality of computation is the most profound thing in the universe," he says. Since computation is absolutely independent of the "hardware" it runs on, studying it can tell us nothing about the nature or existence of that platform. Deutsch concludes it does not exist: "The universe is not a program running somewhere else. It is a universal computer, and there is nothing outside of it."

Link Discuss

When Geraldine Chaplin approached the stage to introduce "Talk To Her" at AFIFest in L.A. on Sunday night, anticipation throughout the packed theater was palpable. This 14th film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in which Chaplin plays a rare feature role, was billed as the ten-day festival's closing night gem. It didn't disappoint.

"[Almodovar's] sense of comedy reminds me of my father [Charlie Chaplin], and his sense of tragedy reminds me of my grandfather [playwright Eugene O'Neill], she said, "Because of that, he feels like family."

"Talk to Her" begins where the director's last film "All About My Mother" (1999) ended: a gold-fringed theatrical curtain lifts to reveal a stage on which a wordless dance by German choreographer Pina Bausch unfolds. Two seemingly blind women careen toward walls and furniture; a male partner dashes in front of one, just in time to snatch a chair away from her violent trajectory. In the audience, the performance is moving one man to tears. The man seated next to him notices, and wants to tell his incidental companion that he too is moved--but can't.

Later, the two meet again when Marco (played by Dario Grandinetti) visits a clinic where his lover, a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores), lies in a coma having been badly gored in the ring. By chance, Benigno (Javier Camara) is a nurse there, looking after a young ballerina (Leonor Watling) who is also comatose.

"Talk to Her" explores the power of words and silence. It's a magnificent melodrama about the desire to communicate something impossible to someone who is unable to hear it. The film follows the lives of four central characters: two are physically crippled, two emotionally broken in exquisitely compelling ways.

Those more familiar with the in-your-face, over-the-top, punk rococo style of Almodovar's earlier films will find familiar elements here. Rape? Check. Drug overdoses? Check. Bullfighters? Check. Smoldering sexuality? Uh-huh. But shock-for-shock's sake is gone, replaced by an organically ornate, deliciously complex, mellowed aesthetic.

Near the film's surprising close, Chaplin's character--Alicia's mentor--turns to Marco and says, "I'm a ballet teacher; nothing is simple." Nothing about this film is simple. Narrative is divided into three parts, but sidewinds into layered, dreamlike sequences that skip forward, back, and outside of time completely. It's linear, but linear like a rollercoaster, or the tracks of snakes that the otherwise fearless bullfighter Lydia fears so much. It works.

Almodovar veers off into outrageously surreal comic detours--including a silent film within a film in which a palm-sized shrunken man leaps headfirst into his lover's vagina, where he lives happily ever after.

In another dream-scene tableau, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso delivers a mindblowingly evocative reinvention of a classic Mexican ranchera to an open-air, nighttime assembly. The camera scans the crowd, capturing the impact on audience faces, including those of Lydia and Marco (who is again moved to tears). The song's lyrics presage their fate, and the moment is allegory for art as a primal force capable of stopping time and exploding into the lives of its witnesses:

They say that during the nights, he passed them, crying
they say he didn't sleep anymore
he passed them, drinking
they swear the sky shook at the sound of his crying
he suffered so much over her
until his own death, he cried for her
cucurrrucucu.... dove, don't cry for her anymore.

If anyone needed further proof that Almodovar is one of the most masterful directors alive, this is it. Don't miss this film.

Links: (movie site) (trailer) Discuss ("Talk to Her" opens in U.S. theaters on 11-22-02)

TuCows, the old-school shareware/freeware/demoware download site, has a new program for its software authors. Authors can pay to place their apps in the listings (though there's still a free option), and get paid for click-throughs on their download pages. Link Discuss (Thanks, Elliot!)

Calliope is a Free Software version of the back-end for Yahoo! Groups. Y!Groups is a cool service that makes it trivial to form, organize and maintain communities online, but the Yahoo! legal team notorious for making arbitrary decisions about which communities are worth hosting and which ones aren't. Strong, active groups have discovered that their community has been disappeared without warning, membership list vanished, archives disappeared. When Calliope is available, anyone with a little server-space will be able to set up a community server with better policies than Yahoo's.

Calliope really needs developers. If you wanna hack community systems, sign up at SourceForge and keep the net safe for even those groups that Yahoo wants to rid itself of. Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

Adam "TidBITS" Engst has posted his new issue, which takes on the role of the DMCA and the Mac. It's a great piece!

The end result here is that innovation is stifled. Companies that license CSS cannot, even if they wanted to, produce products that consumers might like to buy, such as DVD recorders that could copy a DVD. That keeps new companies, niche players, or even independent programmers from competing with the consumer electronics giants with innovative features that in any way run afoul of CSS. So although the consumer electronics companies might not have minded consumers copying DVDs, since they would sell the equipment to make that happen, it's worthwhile for them to abide by CSS to eliminates potential competition.

Equally as problematic is that the CSS license's numerous requirements force the consumer electronics firms to be technologically responsible for regulating our movie viewing and copying behaviors for the studios. Signing this draconian contract is an all-or-nothing deal, so the movie studios have cleverly managed to pass off the dirty work of technological regulation on everyone else (they just produce the content; the DVD and player manufacturers must implement CSS). It's a big step toward a trusted system in which all the parties are bound by the CSS contract.

(As an aside, another effect of the CSS contracts is also to move the entire issue from the world of copyright law, where there is at least some presumption of needing to benefit the public, into the world of contract law, which doesn't give a damn about the public good. If this continues to the logical extreme, the concept of copyright, and unauthorized access to any content, could be locked up forever in simple contracts that lie underneath a trusted system's technologies, all backed up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!)

The International Children's Digital Library launches tomorrow, filled with over 200 books in 15 languages. The Library collects public domain texts and makes them available in a variety of formats, suitable for screen-reading and printing. The curators hope to build it up to 10,000 books before long. Link Discuss

Nice story on a guy who's building replica Apple I PCs, duplicating the machines that The Steve and The Woz built in their garage. The I's will be built to order, but unless Apple licenses out its Apple I ROMs, it won't be functional. Link Discuss

The Alabama Chief Justice, who installed a 5300lb granite monument celebrating the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building has been ordered to remove it. Ha ha.

"It's high time Moore learned that the source of U.S. law is the constitution and not the Bible," Lynn said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jillzilla!)

New study sez: gorging on Atkins-compliant greasebombs lowers your chloresterol. Link Discuss

The Royal Photoshopper Army of the Republic of Farkistan is on maneuvers today, cutting up and remixing "Worst-selling grocery items." Sheer hilarity! Link Discuss

More goodness from Dan Kaminsky: he's gone gold on "Paketto Keiretsu 1.0," a suite of TCP hacking tools, including this wild-ass visualizer.

Phentropy plots an arbitrarily large data source (of arbitrary data) onto a three dimensional volumetric matrix, which may then be parsed by OpenQVIS. Data mapping is accomplished by interpreting the file as a one dimensional stream of integers and progressively mapping quads in phase space. This process is reasonably straightforward: Take four numbers. Make X equal to the second number minus the first number. Make Y equal to the third number minus the second number. Then make Z equal to the last number minus the third number. Given the XYZ coordinate, draw a point. It turns out that many, many non-random datasets will have extraordinarily apparent regions in 3-space with increased density, reflecting common rates of change of the apparently random dataset. These regions are referred to as Strange Attractors, and can be used to predict future values from an otherwise random system.

Link Discuss

Dan "TCP/IP hacker" Kaminsky sez:

So I was out in Singapore, giving my "Black Ops Of TCP/IP" speech at Black Hat Asia. Stuck around a while after the con, because heh -- I'd never been in Asia, let along Singapore. So, my last day out there I went to the Singapore Museum of Art, and what do I see as I walk in the door but the Mac flat panel. No big deal -- lots of Mac fans out there; there was even this cute l'il "iMirror" (a mini-mirror built like the new iMac). But I get a bit closer, when I realize something:

You know how museums have "Audio Tours" on tape or localized radio/IR? Check this out -- they gave out iPods, loaded with MP3s describing all the exhibits throughout the building! Everything was organized into folders and absolutely trivial to manage. Best non-music use of an iPod I've ever seen. I snapped a few photos on this *mind bogglingly* small 1.3mpixel camera I bought, but there wasn't much light to support.

Pic 1, Pic 2 Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

Baby tees that read "Script Kiddee/I am leet, give me warez." The perfect Xmas gift for the hax0r prego-saur in your life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Quinn!)

I Used to Believe: A database of childhood beliefs:

When I first heard the expression, "post nasal-drip" I thought it was a cereal.

I used to think buying ice ceam from the truck was the same as taking candy from a stranger,

I thought that when newsreaders spoke of 'guerilla fighters', that they were referring to actual gorillas on the rampage ;o)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kelly!)

Fark-reader Jason Oh needs a bone-marrow transplant. Fark gets 500,000+ readers a day; I get a sense that they might find a donor through this. Link Discuss

Here's the kind of essay-question quiz that prospective engineering employees are being given. Joey had to take these a couple weeks ago for a job interview:

1.What is good code?
2. What are basic, core, practices for a developer?
3. What do you like about .NET?
4. What don't you like about .NET? What would you change?
5. What do you like about programming?
6. Do you have a favourite programming book? More than one? Which ones? And why.
7. What is the responsibility of QA?
8. Who is Dr Bob?
9. Who is Don Knuth?
10. Who is Kent Beck?
11. What do you know about Linux? Assuming you're familiar with it, what do you like about it? What don't you like? If you haven't used Linux you can skip this question.
12. What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

Link Discuss

Ray Kurzweil interviewed about life-extension and consciousness-uploading in today's Wired News. I'm writing a novel about this stuff, working title "/usr/bin/god" (sure to change, since no one knows how to alphabetize a slash), and this is great background for me.

I think there's some part of our identity and valuable information in our bodies. There's more in our brains, but there's some in our bodies as well. It gets into some technical issues. There's a better way of preserving the brain, which they haven't been able to do with the whole body yet. The vitrification process, which does a better job of preserving structural integrity in the cells, they do with the head but not with the body. At any rate, I'd go for the grade A plan.

One reason I guess it's hard to think about the decision is it's hard to deal with your own mortality. I think your own death is a profound motivator for a lot of behavior, even more than sex. As I mentioned in my talk I think that that meme is very powerful: The idea that life is short and we're only here for a short time. That's a very powerful meme in human thinking and I don't believe that. I don't think we have to die. And the technology and the means of making that a reality is close at hand.

I actually think we have the knowledge right now, today. Not to live forever if knowledge were to stop, but if you combine the knowledge today with the observation that we're actually on the knee of the curve in terms of acceleration of knowledge and these technologies, and that the full blossoming of the biotech revolution will be here within a couple decades, we can remain healthy through that period and then pick up with that technology. In every different aspect of the aging and disease process we have ideas for how to get them under control. I believe we'll do that within a couple of decades...

My diet is low carbohydrate. Not as low as the Atkins diet, but I pretty strictly avoid high-glycemic-index carbs so my carbohydrates are mainly vegetables. I eat fish and other omega-3 fats and a lot of protein. We actually have invented some food products that are low-fat, low-carbohydrate, no sugar, low-calorie, but have the taste appeal of high-carb products, like cake with frosting, and puddings and breads, hot cereal and things like that. They'll be called Ray and Terry's Health Products (after Dr. Terry Grossman, with whom Kurzweil is writing the book A Short Guide to a Long Life). And also a lot of supplement products to implement the kind of things I talked about. I take about 150 supplements a day.

Link Discuss

Paul Allen's Digeo has demoed its Moxi PVR for OSNews. The device has got lots of sweet features -- runs on GNU/Linux, allows for easy expansion, and will record both digital and analog TV signals. You can plug in CD burners or DVD players, and it doubles a videophone. On a disturbing note, though, the device apparently comes loaded up with DRM out of the box:

PCs are not secure enough for the PVR purpose, as most channel providers won't like to see their content easily pirated. Moxi provides such security after special agreements with the cable provider or channels.

Link Discuss (via /.)

Google's AdWords will now be returned on matching Yahoo searches. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Link Discuss

Kathryn sez:

Tonight's the last good Leonids this century (and the last known 'upcoming meteor storm' for decades. Unfortunately Toronto gets bad weather tonight, but the Bay Area has clear skies.

Short version: Big meteor storm tonight with 1000-1200 an hour visible during the storm's two peaks. The first visible in Europe at 0400 UT, the second in North America at 1030 UT. See www.spaceweather.com for links including local city time data.

Even with the full moon you should see 200-300 meteors in 15 minutes at the peak. Roughly, the peak will hit sometime around

West coast: 2:00-3:30am local time
East coast: 4:00--early sunrise, local time depends on location. see here for peaks listed by city.

Because of the full moon, you don't have to worry quite so much about being in an extra dark location if you can't travel far- a dark park near a city can be enough. You still want to be away from headlights, porchlights and other direct bright lights.

The show does get better the darker, higher, or drier your location (high moisture in the air scatters moonlight, making it harder to see). Weather: http://weather.gov, weather.com, or wunderground.com.

For viewing, all you'll need are warmth, a comfortable way to sit back/lay down (reclined is best- less neck strain), and lots of sky. With one exception an unobstructed view is best: you'll want one tree / post / building that blocks the moon in the west. (or bring a hat with a brim to block it). Leo will be in the east at the peak, about 45 degrees from the horizon, with the bright planet Jupiter nearby.

[Standard astronomy club request if you're going where a club is: never shine lights, other than red lights, on other meteor observers- it ruins dark-adapted vision. If you need a flashlight, put red film over it, and as much as possible cover all lights (including interior car lights). Because of the full moon Monday you don't have to be a purist, but it is still recommended.]

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kathryn!)

Argentina's economic meltdown is prompting the country's Jewish citizens to flee to Montreal, where the old and established Jewish community has been dwindling.

In what he admits is an optimistic projection, Mr. Cummings speaks about doubling the size of the Jewish community in the next 10 years, not just through immigration, but by persuading out-of-town students graduating from Montreal universities to settle in the city.

The Jewish community's interest in Argentina dovetails with an active recruiting effort by the Quebec government, which appointed a full-time immigration adviser to its delegation in Buenos Aires this year. Quebec has already received more than 2,000 immigration requests from Argentines since March.

Many are members of the 22,000-strong Jewish community -- descendants, like Mr. Boim, of Jews who fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.

Link Discuss

iPulse is a super-dense diagnostic tool for OS X. Instead of running MemoryStick, CPU Monitor and NetMonitor to get a graphic view into your computer's load and activity, run iPulse, learn to decipher its user interface, and have a groovy, high-tech desktop widget. Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

Markoff's got a good general piece in the NYT about WiFi, and he ends with this kicker:

Moreover, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the digital wireless world warn that powerful interests in the wired Internet business are unlikely to meekly accept such a challenge to the status quo.

Traditional owners of the airwaves — from radio and television station owners to companies like Motorola that provide special-purpose communications systems — may bitterly resist giving up some of their existing spectrum or being subjected to potential interference from competing users. Veterans of the policy battles agree.

"In their candid moments everybody at the F.C.C. will tell you they are being pressured quite severely by various forces that are quite concerned about Wi-Fi," said Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the F.C.C. "They're worried that it is really a trenching machine that will uproot the entrenched forces."

Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

Nice LoC gallery of Raymond Loewy sketches for the Studebaker Avanti. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scoo!)

Neat gallery of real-time webcams from approximately parallel locations in the Bay Area and the Greater Toronto Area (like the 401 at Yonge St versus the Golden Gate Bridge, or New City Hall versus Civic Center, etc). Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

The Boston Globe explains the latest drug-company scam: AstraZeneca, who manufacture the anti-acid-reflux med Prilosec, are running an advertising blitz to get sufferers to switch to Nexium, their new proton-pump inhibitor. Thought Nexium and Prilosec do pretty much the same thing (as do a couple of other, cheaper meds), AstraZeneca is panicked that Prilosec's patent has expired (though they've managed to wrangle a few more years' worth of monopoly by gaming the USPTO), and so they're spending millions to migrate their end-users to a new, hyper-expensive version.

First things first: This prescription drug crisis you hear everyone squawking about - it's really so avoidable. We Americans are on pace to spend nearly $200 billion on our meds this year. That's more than the federal government paid last year for education, agriculture, transportation, and the environment combined. It matches the highest prediction of what it would cost to topple Saddam Hussein with a full-scale attack on Iraq. Talk about a war on drugs. In any rational world, that sum would not just cover our current pill habit but would also allow us to pick up the drugstore tab for all those senior citizens paying out of pocket for their high blood pressure and arthritis pills. We could spare them the indignity of those Greyhound-bus narc-runs to Canada to score their cut-rate Cardizem and Celebrex.

Who's responsible for the fact that prescription drug spending continues to rise 15 to 20 percent a year, doubling every five years? The big pharmaceuticals have certainly lost much of their "best and the brightest - making life better for you" luster. That's perhaps inevitable when you pour more money into peddling your newest product than Nike does its sneakers. But there's plenty of blame to go around. The government allows drug companies to control the testing of new drugs, designing trials to suit their interests, not the consumers'. HMOs and hospitals, under their own bottom-line pressures, make deals that help the drug manufacturers move patients to new, expensive drugs when cheaper, older ones might do fine. Doctors operate in a world where drug maker freebies like Red Sox tickets, Four Seasons dinners, and Arizona golf outings somehow seem normal instead of the outrageous graft they are.

Link Discuss (via Plastic)

Matt "Blackbelt" Jones has posted three days' worth of terse notes from Doors of Perception, the wicked-leet pontifi-con in Amsterdam. That no one invited me to. Not that I mind. Honestly.

Day 1: John Thackara, Janine Benyus, Louis Fernandez-Galliano, David Rokeby, Lars Eric Lundquist, Marko, Axel, Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos

Day 2, Part 1: Bruce Sterling, Michael/Toke, Aditya Dev Sood, Felice Frankel and Marco Susani

Day 2, Part 2: Philip Tabor and Patricia De Martlaere

Day 3, Part 1: Stefano Boeri, Malcolm Macullough, J.C. Herz, Massimo Balzni and Francisa Nori

Day 3, Part 2: Natalie Jeremijenko, Enzio Manzini, Gill Wildman + Ellie Runcie, and Neil Gershenfeld

Discuss

A.L.I.C.E. is a chatterbot known for its ability to carry on human-like conversations. But when you hook two A.L.I.C.E.s up to one another, the conversation quickly deteriorates into recursion and madness.

Alice2: Why don't you just download me?
Alice1: I love talking to people about that. No you download me.
Alice2: That was not a yes or no question. I don't have any reason to download you.
Alice1: Have you ever had reason to download me?
Alice2: No I don't think I have any reason to download you. But I do have a lot of friends on the web.
Alice1: Umm. Cool. I have a lot of likes and dislikes.
Alice2: Where did you get your likes and dislikes? I have 100 clients.
Alice1: Where did you get your 100 clients? I have a friend named "E.L.V.I.S."

Link Discuss (via /.)

The CDC and other health agencies are changing their tune on AIDS-prevention, at the behest of the White House. Instead of promoting condom use, they're asking people to abstain until marriage, and then be monogamous:

"The only 100 percent effective way to avoid nonmarital pregnancy and STD infection is to avoid sexual activity outside a mutually faithful, lifelong relationship - marriage," says the Texas-based Medical Institute for Sexual Health. The group's founder, Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., now sits on the presidential AIDS panel.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

The Department of Defense has started "CyberCorps," a kind of nerd ROTC. Haxx0r kids get trained, get a Master's degree, hang out with creepy three-letter-agency spooks, then go to work for the Man for two years.

Getting paid to hack using some of the most high-tech equipment on the planet might be worth a few sacrifices and a background check, particularly if it means he can work for a super-cool agency like the NSA.

"That agency didn't even admit it existed until a few years ago," says Mark. "You've got to figure if you want to get into the really hairy stuff, that's where it's gonna be."

He says he really has no idea what kind of "hairy stuff" the NSA might be up to, though he assumes it involves the same type of high-tech gadgetry as was portrayed in the hacker-friendly movie "Enemy of the State."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

Since the thraxpanik, all Congressional mail has gone through irradiation before delivery, slowing mail between contituents and their lawmakers. Now, House Administration Committee Chairman Bob Ney is proposing that all mail be scanned, and then forwarded electronically to congresscritters to cut down on delivery time. You know, straight-up email would sure speed things along -- this is like Congress proposing that mail be delivered by steam-driven pneumatic systems. Link Discuss

Anarchist parenting: non-authoritarian child-rearing resources:

Authoritarian parents are not unloving, rejecting, or cruel. Like the vast majority of parents, they do what they consider to be the best for their children. But the authoritarian adult is the kind of person whose view of the social world is extremely highly structured, and the structure is very much based on considerations of power strength, of in-groups and out-groups. It is a very black-and-white picture of the social world, so that there tends to be a complete acceptance of the mores of his own group, and, with that, a complete rejection of those of other groups. One of the manifestations of this is prejudice: colour-prejudice, anti-semitic prejudice - all these things tend to go with authoritarianism...

One mother, for instance, said to me, quite kindly: "In bringing up children obedience is the first essential. I'm older than the children. They must learn to respect what I say. They must learn to do what I say. This is the only way I can save them from the world". If you think about this, it is like somebody leading a pet dog through a dangerous jungle; it is not like one human being talking aboot another human being. Whereas another mother from a non-authoritarian group said: "It's very difficult to say what you should do with children, because really anything you can find that makes things easier and pleasanter for you will be good for them. I just take it easy with my children, and it works".

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Michael "Roger and Me" Moore did a spot on TechTV's Screensavers last week, describing the danger that the Internet will go the path of FM radio: growing more and more commercial, losing its role as an agent of samizdata in a corporate-centric mediaverse. The Screensavers' page has two Windows Media clips of his segment (couldn't get 'em to run on Mozilla, but they play fine on MSIE for OS X). Link Discuss (via Fark)

Law & Order -- my primary televisual vice -- is a computer game now.

"Law & Order: Dead on the Money" ($30, Windows) unfolds like an original episode of the hit TV show, with interesting characters, sharp dialogue and some nice twists and turns -- some of which involve insider trading on Wall Street.

Legacy Interactive has created the mystery story and courtroom drama using features typically found in an adventure game, such as video clips, scenes to explore and plenty of personal interaction with the characters.

The "puzzles" involve finding a password to a computer, the combination to a safe, and the right pieces of evidence to get people to spill their guts.

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Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishmann and Adam "TidBITS" Engst have written a book on setting up a home wireless network, called "The Wireless Networking Starter Kit." The book runs down the cross-platform, step-by-step instructions for setting up and running a WiFi network from scratch.

Table of contents

1 Why Wireless?
2 Networking Basics
3 How Wireless Works
4 Connecting Your Computer
5 Building Your Wireless Network
6 Wireless Security
7 Taking It on the Road
8 Going the Distance
9 Things That Go Bump in the Net
10 The Future of Wireless

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