No, we're not moving! But we are expanding to include the space next door. It is now the newest addition to EFF Headquarters. Come celebrate our new digs and the spirit of the holiday season with us. We'll have great food, beer, musical madness from the Funkmonsters, and the latest news on EFF from the ever-compelling John Perry Barlow and Shari Steele.

This event is free and open to the general public. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. For more information, please see EFF's website.

"I'll never quit," said the 57-year-old master of spam. "I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world."

It's made him a millionaire, he said, seated in the wood-paneled first floor library of his new house. "In fact," he added, "this wing was probably paid for by an e-mail I sent out for a couple of years promoting a weight-loss plan."

Ralsky acknowledges that his success with spam arose out of a less-than-impressive business background. In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.

He lost his license to sell insurance and he declared personal bankruptcy. But in 1997, he sold a late model green Toyota and used the money to pay back taxes on his house and buy two computers.

(2) The "Birth of Christ" Guitar. "Gibson’s largest and most majestic guitar model, the ’39 Super 400 is the canvas upon which the story of the Savior’s birth is told through paintings, carvings, engravings, and inlay." Link

(3) "The Easy Expression Bustier, an essential Hands-Free Pumping Bra." Link

(4) Fifteen dangerous toys that the world needs back. Link

(5) Japanese Ice Cream. Link

(6) Geekmaids.com: hire a downsized techie to clean your floors and sort your underwear. Link

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

"Millimetres below the surface in the twilight, subterranean world of the earthworm and the nematode, tens of thousands of new species of tiny organisms including bacteria, fungi, insects, mites and worms await discovery," the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a press release.

Soil-living organisms play a vital role in land fertility. Land that is poor in these creatures often provides poor yields or is more prone to flood and drought.

They influence how much rainwater soils can absorb, help to eliminate pollutants and disease-causing germs from groundwater and influence soil's ability to absorb carbon from the air -- a vital factor in global warming.

Link Discuss

I'm not blogging today, but if I was, here are the links I'd post:

Notes on Iain M. Banks's Culture

Fox CEO's Comdex speech deconstructed

Short story in Salon, announcement that Salon will do reprints from Coppola's Zoetrope mag

Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book online

Discuss

"I made my first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of my magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. I was puzzled by this and immediately attracted to this underdog. Of course the reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material...

There doesn't seem to be any limit to the subject matter and of course they all have that lethal incendiary device capability. In fact you can describe three clear lives to these sculptures: the original head with colour; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the original. Not bad for a nothing material."

“Balling” shouldn’t be renting a mansion; it should be owning your own distribution company or starting a union. Bill Cosby’s bid to buy NBC was more threatening than any screwface, jewelry-clad MC in a video could ever be.

As a DJ, it’s hard. I pick up the instrumental version of records that people nod their head to... and mix it with the a cappella version of artists with something to say. It is expensive and frustrating. But I feel like the alternative is the musical equivalent to selling crack: spinning hits because it’s easy, ignoring the fact that it’s got us dancing to genocide.

The wink-wink, nudge-nudge culture of Wall Street in the late 1990s wouldn't have given this e-mail a second thought. After all, didn't everyone know that the investment bankers were in bed with their supposed "analysts" of companies paying them millions in fees?

No, not everyone knew. Only the in-crowd knew. And the way they acted was disgraceful -- not that people like this appear to have any fundamental notion of shame, of course.

The people who didn't know were the general public. Yes, the small investors got greedy, but they were led into it by the sharks who have pocketed billions.

Con artists say, "You can't cheat an honest man," because every mark believes that he is participating in a scam -- and he is, only it's not the scam he thinks he's participating in. An honest man, with no interest in ripping off a bank, or a betting parlor, or a rich, foolish stranger, or a small stock-exchange, will never be roped and never be suckered and never lose a nickle to the players.

This is the same specious rationalization used to describe the small investors who "got greedy." Analysts, bankers, VCs and snake-oil salesmen created an enormous con -- Enron even had show-rooms filled with fake traders that they staffed when the press came on tours -- that led millions to believe that there really was money to be had in playing the markets. And there was -- their money. They got had, and the grifters did the having. Link Discuss

Here's my guess: Enoch Root is an alchemist who carries the philosopher's stone around in a cigar box. He really did die in WWII but was re-vivified by the stone. Consider:

1. Enoch's age is difficult to discern, and he does not seem to get older.

2. The contents of the cigar box seem to have healing powers.

3. When Detachment 2702 is in Italy, Enoch Root says that he can speak Italian but would sound like a "16th century alchemist" or something similar (don't have the book in front of me). At first, I assumed that he learned scholarly Italian, but perhaps he was telling the literal truth.

4. The symbol on the cover of Cryptonomicon is one used by alchemists.

Based on this opening and by using bionics principles, the author designed and builded antigravitational platform, and also, practically, developed principles manned flight with the speed up to 25 km/min. Since 1991-92 years the device was used by the author as a means of fast movement.

Giant capital letters adorn hillsides near many cities and towns in the American West. These letters, typically constructed of whitewashed or painted stones or of concrete, are cultural signatures. They serve as conspicuous symbols of community and institutional identity, and they represent an idea, perhaps traceable to a single point of origin, that diffused quickly and widely early in this century...

Hillside symbols have a surprisingly respectable history dating back some eighty years. To a remarkable extent the letters can be traced to a single decade, 1905-1915. They have almost always been built and maintained by college or high-school student groups. The earliest letter-building projects were devices for defusing increasingly violent inter-class rivalries, which college administrators and faculty found difficult to control. It apparently worked. Making a letter was often a gala community event, an organized "men's workday" declared a formal school holiday, with picnic lunch and supper provided by campus women.

The producer of "2DTV," Giles Pilbrow, said requiring satirists to seek permission from their targets was "an idiotic request" that would mean asking Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein if it was all right to caricature them.

"I doubt we could get Bin Laden's permission – he's a bit tricky to track down at the moment," he said.

The offending ad shows Bush opening a copy of the video and saying, "My favorite – just pop it in the video player."

He then sticks it into a toaster and burns it.

"Most Realistic, Effective Gobbler Decoy Available and the ONLY BREEDING TOM. Designed to fit on top of Delta Hot Hen Decoy only (Hot Hens sold separately)... Simulated breeding pose lures gobblers in to investigate or fight. Can also be used alone to simulate a half-strutting or masturbating tom (you heard it here first)."

UPDATE: RCB just posted a hilarious, free response card. Suitable for framing, or e-mailing to your favorite Evangelical Antipornista.

Link Discuss (via the brilliant and very-porn-addict-friendly Reverse Cowgirl's Blog)

But his own survey of 120 people including nurses and doctors revealed that while some would be willing to receive a face transplant, none would be prepared to donate their own face. Butler hopes that if full details of the procedure and its medical need are made clear, potential donors might be able to overcome their initial revulsion.

The recipient would not look like the donor, Butler stresses. Martin Evison, an expert in forensic facial reconstruction at the University of Sheffield, UK, agrees. "The musculature of a face is particular to a skull as it develops. Muscles in the face of one person would have to be re-sculpted if they were to be transplanted onto another skull - and the face would not look the same," he says.

Auction here, more details on the seller's web site here Reuters story here.

Discuss

• Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland
• Daniel Pinkwater: 5 Novels
• Robert A. Heinlein: Have Space-Suit, Will Travel
• Kathe Koja: Straydog
• Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game
• Joan Aiken, Wolves of Willoughby Chase
• Roald Dahl: Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Susan Palwick: Flying in Place
• Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
• JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit
• Madeline L'Engle: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
• John Wyndham: The Chrysalids
• Sue Townsend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4
• Carl Hiassen: Hoot
• Norman Juster: The Phantom Tollbooth
• Steven Gould: Jumper
• JD Fitzgerald: The Great Brain
• Michael De Larabetti: The Borribles Trilogy

I'm on the road all week, in one of my favorite cities on earth, one of the last great urban walking environments, a vibrant, beautiful city where the people talk fast, dress well, and are better entertainment than any performer you could pay to see. I have dozens of friends in this city. And I have a laptop with WiFi and a Sidekick email pager. My days here, my walks here, my peoplewatching and shopping here is sliced up into tiny chunklets, interrupted by the need to check in on my mail and cope with it before it gets too backlogged.

I'm not just talking about work-related stuff -- hell, that stuff needs my attention and I'm glad to give it. I'm talking about the dross and the casual personal notes and the idle questions and the spam, of course, the 600+ daily bits of ping-and-pong, SYN-and-ACK that I exchange, just to keep all my plates a-spinning in my life. As Glenn says, "I believe that eternal work is as close to damnation as we're allowed to see on this material plane."

It's one of my pet peeves that productivity is required to increase every month to indicate a healthy economy. In fact, increased productivity often comes at the expense of the family life so beloved by pro-business politicians. In the blue-collar world, increased productivity means a faster pace (and thus more accidents or decreased quality) or illegal off-the-clock hours. It rarely means more money.

White-color workers of all stripes are expected to spend ever-more downtime hours working so their days start when they wake and check email, extend through the commute into the office, and follow them home and over weekends.

When my uncle worked at HP in the 80s and 90s as a manager, they tried to get him to take a very early personal computer home, and he refused. He knew they would demand that much more work from him on top of his long hours. (Ah, the days, when you could turn down a computer.)

To quote a popular phrase at Amazon.com after my time there: you can work long, hard, or smart; pick any three.

11/7/2002 Who "New"?
Went to visit Chelsea at the flea market today. The booth next to hers had some fab jewelry. I'm usually into buying "new" but this is the kind of stuff you just can't find in a store. Way cool.

According to Ireland Online, Antinori said the mother is in her 33rd week of pregnancy and the child weighs 5.5 pounds. He refused to say where the infant would be born, saying it would be only in "countries where this is permitted."

In September, in written testimony before a House of Representatives hearing, Mr. Felten criticized legislation drafted by Rep. Howard L. Berman, a California Dem-ocrat, that aims to thwart sharing of music through peer-to-peer networks. If it became law, Mr. Felten said, the measure could also interfere with legitimate Web activity because the Web itself is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. Researchers, for example, who post excerpts from copyrighted material to their Web sites without permission from the copyright holder could have their Internet service disrupted, even though such postings may be fair use.

Furthermore, he said, a provision in the bill that would allow copyright holders to launch denial-of-service attacks against peer-to-peer networks could prompt "an arms race" between the creators of the networks and copyright owners, with the network creators ultimately prevailing. Denial-of-service attacks attempt to overwhelm computers by sending them such huge amounts of information that they become incapable of responding to legitimate queries.

"The bill, as written, flatly authorizes 'self-help' attacks on the World Wide Web, and not just users of file-trading networks like KaZaA and Gnutella," Mr. Felten said.

Thanks to everyone's help in writing to congress and encouraging them to pass HR5469. About 10 days ago, it passed in both the House and Senate. (...)

This weekend, we're launching a new web site, and have now put most of our core stations back on the air: Groove Salad, Secret Agent, Drone Zone, Indie Pop Rocks! and Beat Blender. You can get to them from http://somafm.com. More channels will follow as we rebuild our infrastructure.

We'll still need to come up with about $6500 (hopefully less, the final rates are not agreed to, but we know that it shouldn't be more than $6500 for previous years, and $2000 or 12% of our revenues (donations) going forward. It's still a lot of money for what over the air radio broadcasters get for free, but we can work with this, and stay in the air.

Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)

Net Nanny strikes again. The Flesh Public Library in Ohio recently revamped its web sites -- only to find that it now fell afoul of the filtering software on its own computers. The library couldn't even view its *own* site, because Net Nanny didn't like the idea of the words "flesh" and "public" appearing next to one another.

Your rewriting of The Capital's story was a complete fabrication. I demand a retraction and I demand the story be taken down immediately.

Thank you.

Amy Weiss
Senior VP, Communications
Recording Industry Association of America

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Winter vomiting disease is currently spreading fast through Scotland and northern England. The disease, also known as 'small round structured virus' (SRSV), is very infectious and brings on a sudden onset of vomiting. The vomiting period can last from 24-36 hours.

"In order to guarantee that the United States meets the challenge of this new means of commerce, communication, and education, government must be careful not to interfere. We should not harness the Internet with a confusing array of intrusive regulations and controls. Yet, the Clinton administration is trying to do just that."

"There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?"

Tomorrowland has always been the most seamful piece of the Parks, starting with the 1955 Disneyland opening. They ran out of money long before completion and had to triage a lot of the park (workers ran around putting Latin plaques on all the weeds that hadn't been landscaped out of existence, turning them into instant botanical exhibits). Tomorrowland was essentially written out of the budget and given over to private corporate exhibitors, like the Dairy Farmers of Amercia (Cow of Tomorrow: a papier-mache cow with an IV in her hock who watched videos of pastures all day), Kaiser Alumninium (Aluminium Hall of Fame: a giant, walk-through aluminium telescope with exhibits on the was that aluminium makes for a better tomorrow), and a nonsenical exhibit that consisted of a tent containing a midget in the giant-squid costume from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, waving its tenticals.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to modernize -- and retro-fy -- Tomorrowland and nail the moving target of The Future.

The Imagineers will begin testing Mission: Space, first with Disney employees, later with park guests in Orlando. The goal with big attractions like Space is to move through as many as 2,500 guests an hour. If Space turns out to be a landmark attraction — the kind of ride people get in line for again as soon as they come — it'll help Epcot's attendance, which dropped 15 percent last year, more than any other Disney park. (The 20-year-old Epcot is still the third-most visited park in the US, after the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, according to Amusement Business, an industry publication.) And it would give Disney bragging rights if tourists consider Space to be even cooler than Universal's $100 million Spider-Man ride across town, which is widely regarded as the industry's most advanced attraction.

For the Imagineers, building a ride like Mission: Space is a reminder of the good old days, a visible indicator that everything is actually OK. "If there's a perception that the business guys have taken over, I would point out that the projects we're doing now have the same or higher budgets as we've had before," says Goodman.

The movie's accomplishment is to capture the way technology, including the Internet, has permeated contemporary culture. This is our youth's daily existence. The film's young people communicate through online messages, play computer games and record their pledge with a video camera instead of a quill dipped in blood. For them technology is an extension of life. So it is only logical that cyberspace would play a role in death.

This comfort with the Internet stands in contrast to how technology is typically depicted in Hollywood films, where it is glorified or, more often, demonized. Thus for every "You've Got Mail," in which Tom Hanks cutely woos Meg Ryan over the Internet, there are a dozen clones of "Birthday Girl," in which Nicole Kidman is a devious Net-order bride. The James Bond films take both approaches, so that a technological threat endangers the world until it can be defeated by 007 and his gadgetry.

And a web log is also a development way still more. I think that it is Japan where the cellular phone which the thing with a high possibility that a web log will increase rapidly from now on high-performance-ized spreads. Although it is the usage that news flash nature is also a very important element, summarizes its idea immediately and attaches notes to the phenomenon which has occurred now, in a web log, the optimal tool for this is a cellular phone.

The cellular phone is high-performance-ized at frightful speed. The data which mail, a browser, a camera, and a video function take lessons from a device, and goes back and forth in connection with it has changed from the text to video from an image and an image. The cellular phone with a camera added the function "cutting off a scene and appending high-density information as contents" to the feature of mail of telling feeling and a thought. By these highly efficient-ization, it can be said that the cellular phone evolved into 'the terminal which makes rich contents'.

The smart card is expected to store information such as the card holder's name, address, date of birth, blood type and other vital medical information. RAB Director Surachai Srisarakham said government agencies would be able to select the information that would be stored. The card might also be integrated with an e-signature, a driving licence, job title, membership of any organisations or be used as an e-purse or e-passport in the future, he added.

The RAB expects to set up a central server, separated from the central government database server, which would allow each government agency to select information to be stored in the card and update information.

Link Discuss

A weblog is a record of travels on the Web, so a mobile phone log (“moblog”?) should be a record of travels in the world. Weblogs reflect our lives at our desks, on our computers, referencing mostly other flat pages, links between blocks of text. But mobile blogs should be far richer, fueled by multimedia, more intimate data and far-flung friends. As we chatter and text away, our phones could record and share the parts we choose: a walking, talking, texting, seeing record of our time around town, corrected and augmented by other mobloggers.

If we can protect our privacy and trust data networks, then we might find that some of our daily activities would be enhanced by sharing them, both with our circle of friends around the Web, and the people nearby with like minds. Each of our moblogs, our mobile information profiles and archives, could search people in the area for compatible data. Think of it as a Web search on the real world. The results would be constant, part of conversation, tracked by your moblog.

All submissions should be accompanied by source code or an application. When possible, we would prefer that the application be available for interactive use during the workshop, either on a presenter-provided demonstration machine or one of the conference kiosks.

Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows, UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most desirable.

For purposes of my testing, I developed two collections of messages: spam and legitimate. Both collections were taken from mail I actually received in the last couple of months, but I added a significant subset of messages up to several years old to broaden the test. I cannot know exactly what will be contained in next month's e-mails, but the past provides the best clue to what the future holds. That sounds cryptic, but all I mean is that I do not want to limit the patterns to a few words, phrases, regular expressions, etc. that might characterize the very latest e-mails but fail to generalize to the two types.

In addition to the collections of e-mail, I developed training message sets for those tools that "learn" about spam and non-spam messages. The training sets are both larger and partially disjoint from the testing collections. The testing collections consist of slightly fewer than 2000 spam messages, and about the same number of good messages. The training sets are about twice as large.

A general comment on testing is worth emphasizing. False negatives in spam filters just mean that some unwanted messages make it to your inbox. Not a good thing, but not horrible in itself. False positives are cases where legitimate messages are misidentified as spam. This can potentially be very bad, as some legitimate messages are important, even urgent, in nature, and even those that are merely conversational are ones we do not want to lose. Most filtering software allows you to save rejected messages in temporary folders pending review -- but if you need to review a folder full of spam, the usefulness of the software is thereby reduced.