[A]s an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components — particles and subparticles — and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: "In biology, we've had great success stories — the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don't have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks."

Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes.

"Microsoft is adopting a new name to replace the code name Palladium. Effective today, we will use "next-generation secure computing base" to describe the technology and the related development efforts that have until now been done under the Palladium banner. This includes development of a nexus and nexus computing agents (NCAs), along with other enhancements to the Windows operating system.

"The adoption of the new name means that we will no longer use the term Palladium. There are several reasons for this. As a code name, Palladium was successful in gaining widespread attention. Unfortunately, it was also imprecise. "Next-generation secure computing base" more accurately describes what we are working toward -- to help build a more secure Microsoft Windows operating system. Moreover, the adoption of the new name reflects a new phase of maturity for the effort as it integrates with Microsoft's comprehensive security-related initiatives.

"I think what he [Mr. Znaimer] really needs to do is go west, take one step back and contemplate how he can be most productive in the period ahead. Whether that involves change or not is premature to say, but it is quite clear he wants perspective right now," the source said.

One option Mr. Znaimer might consider, the source suggested, is returning to manage CHUM's educational assets, including the Canadian Learning Channel.

Mr. Znaimer is CHUM's best-known personality and is widely considered a visionary in TV broadcasting. He launched community station CITY-TV in 1972, creating a blueprint for interactive TV that has spread across Canada and the world. He has been the on-air host of several series and specials, including The Originals on specialty channel Bravo and TVTV: The Television Revolution.

On Jan 17 2003, your-site.com pulled the plug on ISFDB cgi scripts. This means that database searches are no longer functional. Rationale was that there were too many daily database queries (which exceeded your-site's limit of roughly 3000 per day), and the ISFDB was generating a system load beyond their specified per-account limits.

I think that at this point the ISFDB has reached an awkward point for a non-profit site: it's too large (in size, bandwidth, processes, and system resources) to run at a typical ISP. Renting an allocated server would cost in the neighborhood of $200 a month (a considerable step up from the current $5). Buying a server and colocating it at an ISP is cheaper, but would still run in the neighborhood of $100 a month. In general, sites with low resource needs are very cheap, and sites with high resource needs are very expensive. There isn't a lot of middle ground. Even SFSite is feeling the pinch. They're being required to pay for the bandwidth used, and the ISFDB share for that would have been in the neighborhood of $80 a month. Hence our original move away from SFSite.

Anyway, this is a REALLY good reason to use the "suggest a link" link above, rather than email me directly. I beg of you. Discuss

Yahaoui's fiance and spokesperson Sophie Elwarda says he's suffering from chronic headaches and an abcess in his mouth, and that his condition is fast deteriorating. He's being held in a cell with about 100 other prisoners. After repeated pleas for medical attention, Elwarda says that all he has received is two aspirin. She says that Yahaoui initiated the hunger strike last week to protest the inhumane prison environment, and "because the pain is so bad that he cannot eat anyway."

Elwarda and other supporters from organizations including Amnesty International (AI) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) are protesting his continued detention, saying that he was arrested without just cause, not provided with due process, and tortured by Tunisian law enforcement agents. They are now concerned that the immediate conditions of his imprisonment may cost him his life.

More on his case here at tunezine.com, and at the RSF website (where you'll also find an online petition for Zouhair's release). BBC News link. Discuss

But in contrast to many climber services, this one does not stand to benefit foreign-run outfitters primarily. Although it is an obvious perk for the climbers, the residents of a nearby town may get Internet access because of it, and the mountain may get a bit cleaner.

The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training.

The company that gave us the Walkman has all-but-abandoned the personal stereo market, focuing on dead-end tech like CDs and MiniDiscs, instead of hard-disc players that offer more flexibility and utility. The personal stereo market has been taken over by niche players like Apple and Creative Labs (Creative was just a tiny little startup in Singapore when its products rocketed it to success, the kind of outfit Sony was accustomed to grinding into paste without even thinking -- today, it's sucking away tons of business from Sony's personal stereo market).

Sony's not pouring its R&D efforts into better products that offer more value. Instead, it's chasing a DRM scheme that makes every product it touches less useful.

Sony's betrayal of its customers is a big part of the crisis in the public's rights in copyright today. From 1976 to 1984, Sony fought tooth and nail for the right of Americans to record video off their televisions; today, Sony is part of the RIAA's efforts to stifle innovation and contract fair use to a sorry, mingy speck.

Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious "check-in/check-out" procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony's copy-protection mechanisms don't allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another - not an issue with the iPod. "We do not have any plans for such a product," says Kimura, the smile fading. "But we are studying it."

Really? No plans? When the world leader in consumer electronics takes a pass on the hottest portable music player out there, you have to wonder what gives. Sony became a global giant on the basis of innovative devices manufactured by the millions on nothing more than a hunch that people would buy them. Now Apple is delivering the innovation while Sony studies the matter.

Robin Gross thinks international copyright laws are out of step with the people. So much so that the former Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney is launching a new watchdog group called IP Justice.

Her goal is to "promote balance in global intellectual property law." Gross says she wants to make sure people won't become targets of legal action for doing things like making personal copies of CDs, DVDs and e-books they've purchased.

Gross, who's officially unveiling the project in the next couple of weeks, envisions uniting programmers and online activists across the globe to make sure consumers get a fair shake in the copyright debate. She talked with CNET News.com about how digital technology is changing copyright law, why technologists and consumers should be concerned, and why she thinks the United States is one of the most "restrictive regimes" in this area.

By a voice vote, the Senate voted to ban funding for the Total Information Awareness program, under former national security adviser John Poindexter, until the Pentagon explains the program and assesses its impact on civil liberties.

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

I was thinking about this the other day: there's a kind of ethic in blogging tools that makes them into the most minimal glue possible. For the most part, blogging tools don't have web-servers built in -- we have Apache for that. If you want your logs monitored, well, there's analog or WebFunnel. Want to create an entry? What better tool for it than BBEdit, vi, emacs or TextPad? Image editor? The GIMP and/or Photoshop are swell -- who wants to re-create them for a blogging tool? So now there's Blosxom, which dispenses with the database and just uses the filesystem. The point being that we all know how to use our OS's filesystem, and we have great tools like the Finder and so on for manipulating files in the filesystem. Want to back up your blog? Drag its folder onto a CD burner. Want to delete an entry? Drag it into the trash. You get the point. It's pretty gnarly.

Rael's one of the hardest-working men in showbusiness, and he's been pushing Blosxom up the hill in his non-copious non-spare time. 1.0 must feel like a million bucks.

Fundamental is its reliance upon the file system, folders and files as its content database. Blosxom's weblog entries are plain text files like any other. Write from the comfort of your favorite text editor and hit the Save button. Create, edit, rename, and delete entries on the command-line, via FTP, WebDAV, or anything else you might use to manipulate your files. There's no import or export; entries are nothing more complex than title on the first line, body being everything thereafter.

Despite its tiny footprint, Blosxom doesn't skimp on features, sporting the majority of features one would find in any other Weblog application.

Holy crap. Just imagine that. Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks' worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog.

Also, the flat they relocated the machine to is one that I crashed in last June, while Richard "GNU" Stallman was crashing in the flat below (a total, mind-croggling coincidence). I configured the WiFi router. There are some really hot politico-nerds in London, and no doubt about it. Link Discuss

The rights to the films featured in most MST3K episodes were purchased for only a few years and, in the majority of cases, those rights have expired, and will have to be renewed before the episodes can be shown on TV or released on video and DVD. In quite many cases the rights owners have set prices prohibitively high; in a few cases they are apparently doing so to suppress the episodes in which their property was ridiculed.

If the Court had overturned the copyright extension, an undetermined number of films featured in MST3K episodes might have gained "public domain" status, markedly lowering the price TV networks or video distributors would have had to pay to make those episodes available.

When the entertainment industry has cooperated with the technology and consumer electronic industries in the past, the results have been good for everyone -- especially consumers. For example, the entertainment industry has used anti-copying technologies to provide consumers:

* DVDs, a medium with stunning content, creating the most quickly adopted entertainment technology in history;

* Movielink, an Internet service that lets consumers legally download and pay for movies to watch at home;

* Pressplay, an online service that enables consumers to preview individual songs as well as entire CDs, and then pay to download legal copies to their computers.

After all, the iPod can download up to 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes. What's 3 billion As, Ts, Cs, and Gs? Well, with 4x compression, Gilbert estimates, the human took up less than 1GB of disk space on his 5GB iPod, which also contained 300 songs. He recently upgraded to a 10GB iPod, on which he stores 600 songs plus the human genome.

UPDATE: The MP3 links above have been totally boingboinged. Be kind, and *download* tracks ("save as" to local drive, then play) instead of streaming them live by clicking directly on the links above. Someone's web server thanks you.

One of my favorite haunts is cleaning windows at the Haunted Mansion. It has become common knowledge by mansion fans that it is a job in itself to keep the place dirty, so what would I be doing cleaning windows at the mansion at five a.m.? It isn't the outside windows, but rather a protection device for the ghosts on the inside that gets daily attention. If you ever were of a mind to shoot gum and spit balls at the ballroom scene, you are plum out of luck hitting anything. The gigantic plates of glass used for creating the "Pepper's Ghost Effect" are protected by spit guards mounted on the balcony railing. These plexi-glass shields are very similiar to what you would find at a salad bar. Maintaining clean and clear guards are essential to keeping the special effects "special".

Sometimes it is the dust itself that builds up on the plates of glass. My lead took me down below the balcony to the ballroom floor. We walked past the "dancing ghosts" out onto the floor itself. "See those panels of glass? It took cranes to get them in here. To clean them we use that cherry picker over there." He pointed to a lift parked in a dark corner under the balcony. It was explained to me that to clean the glass each time we had to start from the top and work down. One mistake like a smudge or a streak could cause us to start the process all over until a desired appearance is achieved. "Just hope you won't be in Windows when it comes time to do it," he warned with a grin. Lucky or not, I never had the opportunity for that task.

"We don't want (massage therapists) massaging animals at the same facility where humans are massaged," Health Agent Dennis Lacourse told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. "Do physicians let you bring your dog into the examining room? No."

Although both smell tests and laboratory analysis confirmed the new aroma, Zhou and professional perfumers struggle to describe it. "What we thought was it was something that was a little out of this world," said Jan Little, spokeswoman for International Flavors and Fragrances Inc . of New York.

IFF, the world's No. 1 fragrance maker, is the commercial partner on the flower experiments following the success of its earlier space rose scent. Oils extracted from an Overnight Scentsation rose launched in 1998 aboard space shuttle Discovery lead to the creation of a new scent that has been incorporated into a perfume called Zen by Shiseido and a body spray called Impulse by Unilever.

It's as if we were having a party and someone came into the room and told everyone to be quiet and gave out pieces of paper with a time and a place telling each person when and where they could talk. If there were a possibility young people would overhear you couldn't use certain words even if there were no other venues and even if you felt the language was appropriate for them.

Put that way it seems outrageous. Yet if we communicate using radio waves instead of sound waves that is precisely what the FCC is doing.

The 90-minute feature will be based on King Bhumibol Adulyadej's "Mahachanok (The Great Father)." The plot centers on a fictional Buddhist ruler who sacrifices himself for his subjects.

The film, to be produced by the government's National Youth Bureau, should be ready by 2006 when Thailand celebrates the 60th anniversary of the king's reign, the newspaper said this week.

"Rising labor costs, problems with conventional milking methods and a desire for more flexibility have persuaded dozens of farmers in Canada and a handful in the United States to follow the lead of thousands of European dairy farmers in turning the crucial part of their operation to machines.

'Right now in North America, robotic milking falls on the expensive end of the ways to milk cows,' said Douglas J. Reinemann, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin who heads the school's milking research and instruction lab. 'But the very strong impression you get on every robot farm is that it's a much nicer place - not just for the people but the cows as well.'"

Thanks to our current system of privately-financed elections, Congress has become a huge bazaar, where everyone knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Big corporations and the super-wealthy invest millions in political contributions and get all kinds of special deals in return. For a few millions in donations, they get a $20 billion tax break here, a $10 billion subsidy there-returns on investment that would make honest entrepreneurs blush, but makes Wall Street salivate.

All this adds up to real money, and ordinary Americans like you and me pay the price. With higher deficits, cuts in vital programs, a dirtier environment, more dangerous working conditions, lower wages, greater health insecurity, a diminished future for our children.

It's time for us to decide: Should public policy be bought and sold like commodities in the stock market? Should a tiny elite, insulated from the everyday needs of average Americans, be able to buy politicians and obtain special treatment? Or should we offer candidates who refuse special-interest donations a source of "clean" public money?

The question boils down to something fairly simple, Braunstein and several other speakers noted at the Pacific Telecommunications Council annual meeting this week. Should giant telecommunications companies -- namely the cable and local-phone provider -- have vertical control over everything from the data transport to the content itself? Or should we insist on a more horizontal system, in which the owner of the pipe is obliged to provide interconnections to competing services?

The cable and phone companies are insisting that they need vertical control or they won't provide broadband (fast) data connections to U.S. households. They appear to have persuaded the Federal Communications Commission's industry-lapdog chairman, Michael Powell, and a majority of his colleagues.

Many labs can now print arrays of DNA, proteins or even cells. But for tissue engineers, the big challenge is creating three-dimensional structures. Mironov became interested when Thomas Boland of Clemson University, also in South Carolina, told Mironov how he could print biomaterials using modified ink-jet printers.

The default unchecked boxes that are visible at the outset clearly lead the user to believe that ALL of the boxes are unchecked, and the avg customer probably won't think to scroll all the way down and uncheck these boxes. Which means that by clicking "next" when confonted with the first four unchecked boxes, the user unwittingly elects to receive sports, entertainment, music and new service announcements.

The nation's transport ministry is running pilot projects to find out if signals sent from drivers' mobile phones to base stations can be used to time trips along popular routes.

The signals will help the transport ministry work out where traffic jams are building up and warn drivers of impending delays.

Using mobile phones could be a cheap way of gathering useful information because the phone network already covers the entire country.

Anti-circumvention lets rightsholders rewrite copyright law. Even though you may have the right, under copyright law, to make some use of the work you buy (say, resell it to a friend), rights-holders need only implement an access-control system that makes this impossible without circumventing, and they can take away your rights. No one is allowed to give you a tool that would let you get your rights back. What's more, the access-control doesn't even have to be very technically good (CSS, the system used to control use of DVDs, was broken by teenagers in a day), because the law forbids your crossing the line.

The Copyright Office wants comments from people who tried to do something legal and useful but were locked out by access-control, because they are considering making exceptions to the anti-circumvention rule. EFF is recruiting volunteers to contribute to this:

• People who have had bad experience with access-controls, to write comments
• Editors, who will put the comments into the format the Copyright Office requires
• Law-students, who will check the comments to make sure that the phraasing speaks directly to the questions the Copyright Office is asking

Nearly one in five people living in Toronto and Vancouver have been in the country less than 10 years. And more than a third of the people in those cities are members of visible minorities.

But other cities have also opened their doors to immigrants who are not Caucasian. We are "starting to see larger numbers of new immigrant groups going to places like Calgary, Ottawa, Kitchener and Windsor," Mr. Norris said.

Now, Locustworld has released the full Meshbox: a standalone 500 MHz (fanless) PC, suitable for installation in any living room next to the audio equipment.

Its simplest form is with a single antenna, which works on WiFi (802.11b) standards anywhere in the world, and provides shared access to the PC, but also looks for other Meshbox installations in the neighbourhood. There's a second option; an additional, long-range antenna, which you can mount on the roof of your house, to pick up signals from other Meshboxes further away - across the village, perhaps.

Some of Pelton's adventures include breaking American citizens out of jail in Colombia, living with the Dogon people in the Sahel, thundering down forbidden rivers in leaky native canoes, plowing through East African swamps with the U.S. Camel Trophy team, hitchhiking through war-torn Central America, and completing the first circumnavigation of the island of Borneo by land," his bio says. But that only begins to scratch the surface of Pelton's remarkable life.

NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena. It is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent "agents" all operating in parallel. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals.

But most people used MUDs to chat, and to play around and impress one another with objects they created. They were at first a highly evolved successor for the chat room.

The term spamming got used to apply to a few different behaviours. One was to flood the computer with too much data to crash it. Another was to "spam the database" by having a program create a huge number of objects, rather then creating them by hand. And the term was sometimes used to mean simply flooding a chat session with a bunch of text inserted by a program (commonly called a "bot" today) or just by inserting a file instead of your own real time typing output.

There are confirmed reports as well that the term migrated to MUDs from early "chat" systems. Rich Frueh believes the term originated on Bitnet's Relay, the early chat system that IRC was named after. When the ability to input a whole file to the chat system was implemented, people would annoy others by dumping the words to the Monty Python Spam Song. Peter da Silva reports use in early 80s chat on TRS-80 based BBSs, but feels since they imported other Bitnet Relay customs, the term may have come from there.

For more than three centuries botanists and mathematicians have marveled at the complex and beautiful spiral patterns that form as plants develop. As they generate leaves around a stem, or seeds or flowers in a blossom, plants as diverse as broccoli, pinecones, artichokes and water lilies create intricate spirals that follow a well-known mathematical sequence of numbers.

I KNOW BETTER:
A clever and socially acceptable way of denying what someone has said by claiming to know more about what the other person thinks or feels than they do. Believe it or not, this technique is quite commonplace and effective.

"That's a cruel thing to say, and I know you don't mean it."

"You've made that point well, but: (1) I know where your heart is... (2) I sense that you're not comfortable with what you're saying... (3) I know what kind of person you are deep down, and that you cannot continue to hold this position and maintain your integrity."

This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of "filter, then publish" is giving way to "publish, then filter." There is no need for Slashdot's or Kuro5hin's owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed side-by-side with New York Times columnists.

The music industry is largely untouched by the Big Flip. The industry harvests the aggregate taste of music lovers and sells it back to us as popularity, without offering anyone the chance to be heard without their approval. The industry's judgment, not ours, still determines the entire domain in which any collaborative filtering will subsequently operate. A working "publish, then filter" system that used our collective judgment to sort new music before it gets played on the radio or sold at the record store would be a revolution.

Staff members may not hold public office or wear campaign buttons or attend political rallies. Members of the culture staff who collect objects of art must annually submit a list of their acquisitions to the associate managing editor for news administration. Reporters and editors can't own individual stocks that might pertain to their beats, and editors who determine the placement and display of business and financial news cannot own individual stocks at all (other than New York Times Company stock, of course). The same goes for editors and writers on the editorial page. The stock holdings and political activities of husbands and wives can also create serious conflicts of interest, or, worse, the appearance of them--as Article 2 states, "Our first duty is to make sure the integrity of the Times is not blemished during our stewardship"--but the rules on spouses are vague. (Generally, you get the impression that it would be best not to have one.) There is also this, about free food: "A simple buffet of muffins and coffee at a news conference, for example, is harmless."

This page has insane video of Dance Dance Revolution masters from Tokyo scoring perfect games on the hardest setting with crazy/insane insane/crazy moves. They're the cup stacking girls of Japanese arcades. I recommend the third video, Take getting 10 Greats/3 Misses on Maxx Unlimited Reverse Stealth.

UPDATE: Declan McCullagh has posted the court docs here (PDF), and his CNET news story is now online here.

"America's Army: The United States Army, with Americas Army: Operations being heralded as one of the largest and best first person shooter games, is proud to bring to the gaming community the ability to rent their own servers running on state of art high performance computing technology through goamericasarmy.com. It is with great pride that we bring yet another first from the United States Army in enhancing the community and their gaming experience."

Bucks, the famous Silicon Valley breakfast haunt of venture capitalists, had two Wi-Fi providers as early as March 2002. Both wireless ISPs, Airwave and Wi-Fi Metro, have since exited the WISP business or failed entirely. So the owner of Buck's, Jamis MacNiven, decided to provide free access to his well-heeled clientele. MacNiven says, "I pay $60 for 1.5 mps signal which I need anyway. Charging for the online usage would be, for me, like charging for salt and pepper. It is a tiny cost of doing business and we are glad to give it away. I can't see how the wireless providers will make money in public places...."

In her chambers at the U.S. Court of International Trade, in New York, the judge examined Prof. X and the rest of his band of X-Men, all of them little plastic figures at the heart of a six-year tariff battle between their owner, Marvel Enterprises Inc., and the U.S. Customs Service.

Her ruling thundered through the world of Marvel Comics fans. The famed X-Men, those fighters of prejudice sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are not human, she decreed Jan. 3. Nor are many of the villains who do battle with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. They're all "nonhuman creatures," concluded Judge Barzilay.

The Snail Mailbox, designed by Boym Partners, is a beautiful example of an old-fashioned concept made new all over again. Made from sturdy, powder-coated steel and available in cream and silver, it's an ode to utilitarian chic that'll dress up your abode while protecting your precious snail mail. For apartment dwellers, it makes a great indoor accessory -- perfect for storing your whatnot (keys, TV remotes, dog leash) or just showing off your excellent taste. We don't know about you, but we've yet to find a Hotmail inbox that can do all that. Available [in L.A.] at Homework, 1153 North Highland Avenue, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue (323-466-1153).

We recently observed several useful navigation features within the user interface or your site www.museumtour.com. For example your site includes several selectors or tabs that correspond to specific locations within your site documents. These selectors seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface. And, as such, the selectors are not lost when a different part of the document is displayed to the user - see screen shots from museumtour.com enclosed. By sperating the selectors from the content, Museumetour has truly simplified site navigation and improved the shopping experience for its users.

As you review the Structured Document Patent you will notice that the above-discussed features appear to infringe several issued claims in our patent. In light of Museum Tours presumed respect for the intellectual property rights of others, we are pleased to offer you a Preferred Rate license under the structured Document Patent - see enclosed rate schedule.

"I think it's great, really I do.

"There is nothing anyone can do about it.

"I am sure my record label would hate me saying it, and my manager and my accountants."

For example, the first phone, called SoMo1, gives its user a mild electric shock, depending on how loudly the person at the other end is speaking. This encourages both parties to speak more quietly, otherwise the mild tingling becomes an unpleasant jolt. Such phones, the designers suggest archly, could be given to repeat offenders who persistently disturb people with intrusive phone conversations. (...)

SoMo4 replaces ringtones with a knocking sound: to make a call, select the number and knock on the back of the phone, as you would on somebody's door. The recipient of the call hears this knock (cleverly encoded and relayed via a short text-message) and decides how urgent the call is. How you knock on a door, says Mr Pullin, is freighted with meaning: there is a world of difference between tentative tapping and insistent hammering. SoMo5 has a catapult-like device that can be used to trigger intrusive sounds on a nearby user's phone, anonymously alerting them that they are speaking too loudly.

He does, however, tell me CafePress has exciting plans to expand into publishing in early 2003: The company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CafePress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable.

Should the military and/or emergency services have their own protected frequencies?

First, we believe that the frequencies that the military uses for communications, radar, etc. would be as secure and interference free as any other set of frequencies in a world with Open Spectrum. This is a question that needs to be argued on its scientific merits, free of scare-mongering.

Second, assigned frequencies have their own vulnerabilities. One of the basic technological enablers of the Open Spectrum approach is some form of "frequency hopping" that opportunistically moves transmissions into the most accessible bands. This approach was invented during World War II (and, surprisingly, Hedy Lamaar is one of the two names on the initial patent) to get around the fact that a radio-controlled torpedo could be jammed if its assigned frequency were detected. If the military wants to own its own slice of spectrum because allowing others onto it might cause "interference," what would keep terrorists from purposefully causing the problem?

We have all been learning, across the board, that open, distributed networks are far more secure and robust than hard-wired, centralized ones. That lesson applies to spectrum as well.