Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

"I couldn't be more excited about this," said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn't discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the "resources to build on the vision I've been working on for years."

Back to Meganet. They build an alternate reality where every cryptographic algorithm has been broken, and the only thing left is their own system. "The weakening of public crypto systems commenced in 1997. First it was the 40-bit key, a few months later the 48-bit key, followed by the 56-bit key, and later the 512 bit has been broken..." What are they talking about? Would you trust a cryptographer who didn't know the difference between symmetric and public-key cryptography? "Our technology... is the only unbreakable encryption commercially available." The company's founder quoted in a news article: "All other encryption methods have been compromised in the last five to six years." Maybe in their alternate reality, but not in the one we live in...

Reading their Web site is like reading a litany of snake-oil warning signs and stupid cryptographic ideas. They've got "proprietary technology." They've got one-million-bit keys. They've got appeals to new concepts: "It's a completely new approach to data encryption." They've got a "mathematical proof" that their VME is equal to a one-time pad. A mathematical proof, by they way, with no mathematics: they simply show that the encrypted data is statistically random in both cases. (The "proof" is simply hysterical to read; summarizing it here just won't do it justice.)

Boom cars are also called ground pounders, street pounders, or (rarely) trunk thumpers, and no wonder considering the brain-liquefying power of some of these car stereo systems. A decent home stereo might pump out 200 watts, but boom car units often boast 1,000 watts of power, and systems with 2,000 or even 3,000 watts have been recorded. As a point of reference, the human pain threshold for noise is 120 decibels (dB), but these rolling sonic factories can hit 140 or even 150 dB. Because decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, the sound level doubles every 10 dB, so (it turns out) 150 dB would be the equivalent of standing next to a 747 with its jet engines at full roar.

Noise Free America's expansive legislative agenda calls for actions -- outlawing gas-powered leaf blowers, punishing owners of barking dogs, impounding loud cars and so forth -- that might seem radical "until people think about it," Rueter said. He prefers to characterize the agenda as "comprehensive."

Bottom line on chemical weapons (it's the same if they use industrial chemical spills); they are intended to make you panic, to terrorize you, to heard you like sheep to the wolves. If there is an attack, leave the area and go upwind, or to the sides of the wind stream. They have to get the stuff to you, and on you. You're more likely to be hurt by a drunk driver on any given day than be hurt by one of these attacks. Your odds get better if you leave the area. Soap, water, time, and fresh air really deal this stuff a knock-out-punch. Don't let fear of an isolated attack rule your life. The odds are really on your side...

Finally there's biological warfare. There's not much to cover here. Basic personal hygiene and sanitation will take you further than a million doctors. Wash your hands often, don't share drinks, food, sloppy kisses, etc., .... with strangers. Keep your garbage can with a tight lid on it, don't have standing water (like old buckets, ditches, or kiddie pools) laying around to allow mosquitoes breeding room. This stuff is carried by vectors, that is bugs, rodents, and contaminated material. If biological warfare is so easy as the TV makes it sound, why has Saddam Hussein spent twenty years, millions, and millions of dollars trying to get it right? If you're clean of person and home you eat well and are active you're gonna live.

A little altruism could go a long way in speeding up the Internet.

That's the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be "selfish" when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.

If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.

Ms. Nickel [of Tropicana], who examined a photograph of the object in the grapefruit juice, said, "It did look like an eyeball, but sometimes mold will take on some unusual shapes."

Mr. Hadzovic [who bought the bottle] remains deeply skeptical. "I'm not a rocket scientist," he said, "but I know an eyeball when I see one. I've literally skinned lamb for food."

At a reporter's urging, Mr. Hadzovic asked for his bottle back. On Feb. 1, he received it. By now, the object did not look like much of anything.

"It looked like a muffin wrapper with half a muffin it," he said disgustedly.

After a few days, his mother threw out the bottle.

"She got tired of seeing it in the refrigerator," he said.

The idea isn't new; Woody Allen (news) created new dialogue for a Japanese film and released it as "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" in 1966. More recently, commercials have altered old movie footage starring John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire (news) to promote beer, soda and vacuum cleaners. Myers is already known for his homages to pictures. In his previous film outings, including the "Austin Powers" trilogy and even "Wayne's World 2," Myers has re-staged or spoofed scenes from pics including "The Graduate" "The Thomas Crown Affair" and the James Bond franchise.

But the new deal with DreamWorks will have him take the tweaking to a new level. Myers' pact, which isn't a traditional first-look production deal but specific to the films made from sampling, will have DreamWorks acquiring the rights to films so the actor can use advancements in technology to digitally alter them.

So you're working on weblog search?

No, companies such as Google already provide keyword search over weblog posts. We want to help readers browse weblogs when they *don't* know what they're looking for. A best-of-the-blogs show, if you like.

Hindu nationalists claim the Western holiday promotes promiscuity, and in recent years they have marked the day by trashing shops, burning cards and chasing hand-holding couples out of restaurants.

"Valentine's Day is against the ethics and culture of Indian society," said Bal Kalsekar, a leader of the nationalist Shiv Sena party, which is based in Bombay.

"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software. "This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point. The MSN site is sending Opera users what appear to be intentionally distorted pages. The Bork edition illustrates how browsers could also distort content, as the Bork edition does. The real point here is that the success of the Web depends on software and Web site developers behaving well and rising above corporate rivalry."

I'm eight chapters into Cory Doctorow's new novel and I want to drink his blood.

EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE is published in November. Cory emailed it over last night for me to read and provide a cover blurb. Here I am still slowly building something called STEALTH TRIBES and Cory sends something called EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE. You can imagine how happy I was. So far, the book is striking minors off the same chords as STEALTH TRIBES. Plus, it's really bloody well-written. Me kill Cory Doctorow now.

I'll write a nice blurb for his book first, though. It can be the doomed bastard's epitaph. I'll send a squad of finely- trained San Francisco Death Pervert Girls into his warehouse home, and they will wear his dangly bits as grisly murder trophies.

"It's an electrical smell, a plastic smell, only there's something else," says John Sylvia, his mouth lost in a bushy beard and his arms tattooed to the knuckles. "There's a fear factor that goes along with the smell. You know something went bad." Sylvia is describing the first CPU he ever fried. It now sits on the desk in his home office in Fallsington, Pennsylvania, a reminder that being a power user has its perils. "Everyone was telling me how to turn up the front-side bus, and how you've got to start upping your voltage," he recalls. "I got too eager and turned it up too high too fast. The next thing I knew, I smelled the core burning."

In a Feb. 12 press release about its DeepSight Threat Management System, Symantec boasts that the company "discovered the Slammer worm hours before it began rapidly propagating … then delivered timely alerts and procedures (to DeepSight users), enabling administrators to protect against the attack."

Security experts are angry that Symantec did not publicly release any information the company had regarding Slammer.

"This appears to be what I would term gross negligence," said Jeff Johnstone of the Diamond Technical Group, a security consulting firm. "This was not prior knowledge of a bug or exploit, but was knowledge of a pending worldwide attack on the infrastructure of the Internet. That type of information is always shared among peers within the security community."

In 1997, for example, a fire destroyed a key plant of the Toyota company, halting the production of more than 15,000 cars a day and affecting more than 200 companies whose job it is to supply Toyota with everything from electronic components to seat covers. Without question, this was a first-class catastrophe. But what happened next was every bit as dramatic as the disaster itself. In an astonishing coordinated response, and with very little direct oversight by Toyota, those same companies managed to reproduce -- in several completely different ways -- the lost components, and did so within three days of the fire. A week after that, the volume of cars rolling off the production line was back at its pre-disaster level. Because Toyota managed to escape the crisis relatively unscathed, the whole incident was largely forgotten. But it could easily have failed, as could the next company faced with a similar crisis. By accounting for the networks of connections between individual decisions or events, we can see that predicting the future based on previous outcomes -- even in situations that appear indistinguishable from those in the past -- is an unreliable business.

It had been just over thirteen years since the Aliens had descended from the stars and seized the reigns of earthling power. Somewhere between declaring Minnesota their own sovreign territory and dismantling the planet's ridiculously outdated copyright system Supreme Overlord and Ruler Lil' Skippy had somehow got it in his head that Lessig was exactly the person to forge the entire legal apparatus of the human species into one coherent whole. Lessig still wasn't sure why. His memory of the three years following the alien invasion was nothing but a continuous blurred orgy of fatigue-denying go pills, all nighters with UN staff, and endless amounts of legislation. It hadn't been easy, but in the end he had created the two things that the aliens wanted: First, a system of indigenous courts where native earthlings could settle their differences without having to clutter up that administrative apparatus of their Alien rulers or risk incurring the fearsome and often sadistic judgement of the Courts Of The Alien Blood God. And second, a streamlined legal code featuring a revamped notion of property based on an expanded Creative Commons system of licensing rather than relying on superstitious native beliefs which took physical possession of meatworld objects as somehow paradigmatic of ownership and control. The aliens didn't care much for the details of the system - the centrality of biotech to their own civilization rendered obsolete such basic jurisprudential concepts as the 'individual' (as in physically discrete sentient body) in ways that Lessig still hadn't really figured out. They just something that wasn't embarassingly primitive, would lighten the load on their over-worked staff, give humans an illusion of autonomy, and make them feel good about how magnanimous the imperial administration was.

And none moreso than David Stutz, who once handed me a bizcard that read "BSD Sympathizer." He was MSFT's guy on P2P (we shared a stage once, with Gene Kan, at Esther Dyson's PC Forum), and then went on to lend a critical helping hand to the Mono Free Software port of the .NET common-language runtime. The last time I saw Stutz, I jotted down the names of the CDs he'd appeared on (he was in the chorous on the Hellraiser soundtrack and played along on a fantastically swell disc of Shaker revival music).

The time before that time, he was on-stage with Craig Mundie at the O'Reilly Open Source conference, translating Craig's heavy-breathing condemnation of open source for an audience of slavering, blood-crazed geeks.

Now, David has left Microsoft. He's written a farewell note to his former employer that is by turns scathing and brilliant, and exposes the short-sightedness of MSFT's steadfast refusal to embrace Free Software. It's required reading from the end of an era.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't .

Exciting new networked applications are being written. Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed. To avoid dire consequences, Microsoft should favor an approach that tolerates and embraces the diversity of the open source approach, especially when network-based integration is involved. There are many clever and motivated people out there, who have many different reasons to avoid buying directly into a Microsoft proprietary stack. Microsoft must employ diplomacy to woo these accounts; stubborn insistence will be both counterproductive and ineffective. Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols.

Press release is here. Map is here. People are flying in from San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago to attend, but thanks to some fierce WLAN love from Southern California Wireless Users Group, live video stream will run here for those who can't make it in person (RealPlayer required). Prefer audio? A live Shoutcast audio stream will be provided here, courtesy of Gabe and AvantBard. 802.11a and 802.11b WLANs will be in effect, so attendees can blog wirelessly via laptop throughout the evening.

Before and after the panel discussion and audience "town hall meeting" on the state of the blogosphere, master post-turntablist John Von Seggern (whose work was noted on BoingBoing here and here) will be spinning and mashing sick, dope, funky Asian-fusion grooves on his laptop. If you want to make a night out of it, galleries all along the Chung King Road art district are holding openings that evening. Get your food on before or after at local spots like Yang Chow, or Full House @ 963 North Hill Street. Afterparty at Hop Louie post-event, with mind-numbingly delicious Singapore Slings. Arrive early, as turn-out is expected to be strong. The Cowgirl says: "A $5 donation will be requested of you by the undeniable Chuckles the Clown at the door, or else she will get her spank on with your bootay." Meet BoingBoing's founding father Mark, plus Doc, Evan, Tony, Heather, Susannah, Beverly, me, and an overflow crowd of really cool geeks... just like you. See you there, or online. Link Discuss

Naive would-be poets sent in their lyrics -- and a fee (nowadays around $100 to $400), expecting entree to the music business, maybe even a hit song. What they got, instead, was a cheap-ass recording of their words set to music -- usually recorded in four or five minutes. One take.

If they were very lucky, Rodd Keith, who worked for several song-poem companies in the '60s and '70s, had composed the accompanying melody and arrangement. In his hands, leaden, awkward poetry sometimes achieved a kind of transcendence; he could actually extract the original intent of the writer, it seemed -- or else make something far more interesting, at risk of offending the customer. On "I'm Just the Other Woman," Keith sang in a woman's falsetto over a piano recording played backward. The lyricist demanded a new version.

All living creatures, on this planet at least, are the same "make". The consequences are amazing. It means that a software subroutine (that's exactly what a gene is) can be carried over into another species. This is why the famous "antifreeze" gene, originally evolved by Antarctic fish, can save a tomato from frost damage. In the same way, a Nasa programmer who wants a neat square-root routine for his rocket guidance system might import one from a financial spreadsheet. A square root is a square root is a square root.

Residents of the small community on the west coast of Vancouver Island have been getting friendly with the orca, known locally as Luna, for the past two years.

The whale became separated from his pod and has gradually become more accustomed to people, now spending much of his time near the local government dock.

Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 31/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said.

"We were not asked by NASA to do this," said Robert Fugate, the optical range's technical director. "There was no official project or tasking to do this. The people who work here are geeks. This was an opportunity to look at a rapidly moving object and try to take a picture of it. That's really all it was."

For many, MP3s are the musical equivalent of a hairy kiss from a maiden aunt: it's music, yes, but it lacks a bit. So many fans have turned to swapping music in another file format: music recorded from concerts, with the permission of bands.

The file format is called Shorten, and is a lossless compression format. So while the files are relatively small, they don't lose any musical fidelity. MP3s, on the other hand, use a "lossy" compression technique -- they save on space by missing out some of the detail.

I can't figure out if this is cool or not. this article that it'll run GBP130, about $210 (though it may run cheaper than that in the US), which seems very high, and being an OS X guy, UPnP is pretty unexciting to me, but is there a good way to do this without UPnP? Rendezvous?

"Consumers are embracing digital photography, digital music, and home networking in increasing numbers, and they see real value in the ability to use the performance, features and flexibility of the PC to extend their favorite digital content out to other audio and display devices in their home such as the stereo and the TV," said Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group. "We're pleased to be working together with Linksys and other industry leaders to help make the digital home a reality for consumers."

The Linksys Wireless Digital Media Adapter will reside in home entertainment centers next to the television and stereo. The device resembles the Linksys Access Point, with two 802.11b antennas. Instead of connecting to an Ethernet port, the device will be equipped with audio/visual connectors. To process JPEG, MP3 and WMA digital content, the adapter uses Intel's XScale(TM) architecture PXA250 application processor. Using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology, the adapter can be easily setup to work with other UPnP devices on the network such as a Linksys Wireless Router. Other features are currently in development by Linksys and will be announced at time of product availability.

I recall attending a lecture given, back in the 1960s, by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. A questioner asked him what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blastoff. He wryly replied "I was thinking that the rocket had twenty thousand components, and each was made by the lowest bidder".

Glenn was aware of the risk he was taking-so surely, would have been the astronauts who perished in Columbia. But their fate injects a dose of reality: space travel is not a routine exercise. We need to ask-as we do of any pioneering venture-whether the goals of manned spaceflight are inspiring or valuable enough to justify the hazards involved.

"You'll be tempted to tuck the FSV-PGX1 into your coat pocket as you leave the office, since it looks a lot like a PDA or Pocket PC, but, if you do, you may well stuff up your boss' plans for an evening of high level meetings with the lawyers. That's because the FSV-PGX1 is, in fact, a wireless handheld file server from Sony -- not an electronic diary at all. Stick it in the middle of a meeting table, have everyone sit around it with their laptops, and the FSV-PGX1 will act as a file distributor -- kinda like a blackjack dealer -- tossing out the files to anyone who needs to take a peek. There's a 20GB internal hard disk for storage and it uses the IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) standard for file transfer at speeds of up to 11Mbps. Shunning your regular Windows OS flavors, the PGX1 runs on the Linux 2.4.20 operating system but can, of course, route any file system from any computer OS. There's a back-up battery, effectively providing UPS capability if the power goes down via the AC adapter and a neat little cradle with built-in Ethernet for sale separately."

"[Joe Frank] travels in the emotional landscape of Bergman and Fellini; there's a tension and sense of mystery halfway between Kafka and Chandler, plot twists worthy of Rod Serling, and a satiric edge worthy of Firesign Theatre and Woody Allen." The Washington Post.

A special Valentine's Day story from the {fray}: Ten stories on love and sacrifice and everything in between: The Things We Do for Love. And of course, you're invited to answer the question yourself: What have you done for love?

Our Coverage will be called America's War with Iraq In writing copy please call our coverage, 'LIVE In-Depth Team Coverage of America's War with Iraq...'

Branding liners have been produced and are in the system. Michael please issue a memo making it clear where board ops will find this important imaging. Mike also make certain that our cross promos on the FMs all address Live in-depth team coverage of the War with Iraq on Newstalk 1530 KFBK

The initial hours of coverage are critical. People who have never listened to our stations will be tuning in out of curiosity, desperation, panic and a hunger for information. RIGHT NOW, convert them to P-1's, or at least make them a future cumer. We must make sure we meet their expectations, otherwise they're gone forever and they ain't coming back.

This epiphany has some really interesting implications for security:

"In social networks, where popular people are friends with other popular people, diseases spread easily, said Newman. At the same time, however, this type of network has a small central set of people that the disease can actually reach. 'They support epidemics easily, but... the epidemic is limited in who it can reach,' he said.

The opposite is true for the Internet, the Web and biological networks, said Newman. This makes these types of networks more vulnerable to attack than social networks are."

After Hazelton and the Kozakianwiczs looked through every room in their home, they decided the laundry room would provide the best safe haven for the family.

"FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] says the ideal room would be an interior room with no windows," Hazelton said.

Hazelton suggests filling a bag with your essentials and leaving it inside your designated emergency room, whether it's your laundry room or your bedroom. It should include the items recommended by the federal government.

In case of an emergency, Hazelton suggests sealing the door of your holding room with plastic sheeting which has been sized and pre-cut in preparation for a disaster. Then, cover the door and use duct tape to secure it on the wall surrounding your door. Don't use clear tape, electrical tape or anything else because it won't hold.

Low-lying, futuristic vessels, the karaoke pods in Live Forever look as if they might take flight or speed away at any moment. Just climb in, don the headphones, grab the microphone, select a song and you're off! The darkly tinted windows and enclosed space of each sound-contained pod assure that no one is witness to your private performance. You may find that your voice sounds a bit higher, and maybe even a bit better than usual—Lee has set up the sound mixer to improve and enhance the quality of your voice.

Professor Wallace's institute uses materials known as conducting polymers that are as flexible as plastic but have been "doped" with chemicals that change their atomic structure so that they conduct electricity.

Last week, Simmons threatened a boycott of Pepsi and its subsidiaries to begin Wednesday unless the company ran the ad and donated $5 million to Ludacris' foundation.

There was no indication the ad would be placed back on the air. Neither Pepsi or the Hip-Hop Network would comment on the ad's status.

* Local and remote denial of service.

* Distributed denial of service (flooding remote computers with data packets to freeze it).

* Bounce attacks with spoofed UDP packets. (This is how attackers can flood a server without using all of their bandwidth. It creates a data transfer loop within the targeted computer.)

* Most importantly, PivX says, the holes could allow the execution of malicious code on a targeted computer.

"This carrot is totally bizarre dug it up last week could not believe my eyes a carrot with a vagina. It is approximately six inches long. I believe to be life size. [T]otally freak out Your friends and neighbors with this carrot. OK this auction has obviously gone completely out of control. Obviously many of the bids are apparently a joke.... Any legitimate bid that goes over $100,000 I will personally deliver the carrot see my other auctions!!!!!"

Link!!!!!!! Discuss!!!!!!! (Thanks, Litza!!!!!!!!)

Last month, Penguin Classics began a $500,000 promotion to kick off a two-year global program under which its entire 1,300-book list of classics, the industry's largest, will receive a complete facelift.

"Penguin Classics has always been a sizable percentage of our business," said Kathryn Court, president of Penguin Books, a unit of Pearson. "We determined in the last couple of years to reinforce our brand identity." Ms. Court would not provide sales figures but said 2002 revenue for Penguin Classics was 13 percent higher than in 2001.

This story (in Danish) in the web-edition of the weekly newspaper of the Danish Association of Engineers says that an 802.11 WLAN has been installed in the train between Gothenborg (Sweden) and Copenhagen (Denmark). The connection to the Internet is made with a combination of several GSM-nets (mobilephone-nets) and a satelite-link. Icomera is the supplier of the system. And in the article Michael Johansson from Icomera says:

"It's the first place on Earth where passengers will have access to high-speed Internet This is the first place in the world where passengers on a train can get access to the the high speed Internet." (Thanks, Daen!) What's unique is that it's without a cache - and the stability is also quite unique."

The price is around $9 for access during the whole trip from Gothenborg to Copenhagen (or the other way).

In an editorial Thursday, the editors of the New York Sun call on New York City to obstruct a protest against a potential war in Iraq for as long as possible and to monitor the protestors for "an eventual treason prosecution." This breathtaking article is a direct attack on the free speech rights of every American.

What this means is that the MusicBrainz tools can sample a piece of an audiofile, create an "acousitic fingerprint" of the song, and then check with the MusicBrainz server to see if it knows about the song yet. If it does, your music-player will automagically fetch the artist, album, track title and other info (as well as reviews, ratings by people you trust, playlists that include the song...). If it doesn't, you can enter the track info yourself and submit it to the MusicBrainz database so that the next person who comes along will get the info.

This is a lot like GraceNote's proprietary CDDB service -- which is how iTunes and other players figure out which CD you have in the drive -- but it's way, way better. Organizationally, MusicBrainz is setting itself up as a nonprofit, so there'll be none of CDDB's expensive and restrictive licensing terms for people who want to make players that use the service.

But it's also technologically far superior. CDDB can only recognize CDs. But as music is increasingly distributed online without any CD package, CDDB is getting less and less useful (plus, CDDB is riddled with errors and has a really bad API, so it's hard to build sophisticated services that rely on it). MusicBrainz works off of acoustic fingerprints, which are granular to the level of a single track, recognizably at different sample rates, and work across different file-formats.

It gets better. Because each fingerprint is unique, it means that two people can unambiguously discuss the same track. I can send you a playlist from my computer and your computer can play the songs I'm suggesting, even if you've given them different filename, have them stored in different formats, or have added different metadata about them.

This is also an extremely sweet basis for building collaborative filters atop of. If your computer and my computer can say with confidence that two tracks are the same, we have the basis for collaboratively filtering our collections and finding stuff that we should be listening to -- even if we don't know it yet.

There's only one catch: none of this stuff runs under OS X -- yet. Which is a goddamned shame, but Robert's broke, and he needs Apple hardware to play with in order to get this stuff ported over to MacOS. This is seriously cool stuff, and all the kids're gonna want it. Let's hope someone out there knows someone at Apple who can intervene on Robert's behalf and get him a loaner so that the Rest of Us aren't left out in the cold.

The answer to this lies in the MusicBrainz community -- the community is comprised of individual contributors who work hard to enter and correct the data in the system. The MusicBrainz server software also enforces a peer review system, under which users must review and approve changes made by other users. The peer review system combined with the motivation, expertise and pride of its contributors will ensure that the data in MusicBrainz will be comprehensive and reasonably correct.

Only reasonably correct? No one can guarantee that all the data in a database is correct. Not even the commercial companies that provide metadata services can give this assurance. The MusicBrainz community will respond to problems found in the database and fix mistakes faster than any commercial company with paid contributors can, since the MusicBrainz community is global and is never closed for business. Furthermore, the community is more supportive of MusicBrainz than of other commercial services due to its open nature.

* A FWD member who is a father living in Berlin calls his son, a FWD member, in Hong Kong. Both the father and the son use their home SIP phones and "the call" is routed soley over the Internet. Both father and son can talk for as long as they like! Free! Any time, any day!

* Save on purchasing more phone lines for your sons and/or daughters. Setup FWD in their rooms, dorm rooms, your basement (if they talk too loud) and inform their friends' parents about FWD too. Everyone will be happy. The parents for the incredible savings and your kids because now they can talk all day long without hearing you complain to them. Everyone who lives in a broadband home should consider signing up for FWD!

The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Office has sanctioned the presentation of adoptable children on the Web site.

The safety of the children featured on the site, however, is being questioned by some child welfare experts, given the problems already surrounding predators who seek out victims on-line.

* Image auto sizing allows a user to toggle between full-sized images and images sized to fit the browser window. To give it a try, load a large image into the browser window or size the window to be much smaller. Now clicking on the image will alternate between auto-sized and full-sized.The feature can be disabled (or enabled) from the Appearance panel in Preferences.

* Mozilla Mail's junk-mail classification is mostly complete. Users can now automatically move junk mail to a spam folder.

Taking an aggressive stance on the issue of the digital divide, the Kentucky Housing Corporation, or KHC, has listed broadband Internet access among the inalienable rights of its low-income housing residents.

As part of an effort to enact universal design standards for public housing, the KHC passed a mandate (PDF) stating that all new housing units funded more than 50 percent by the KHC must be equipped with access to high-speed Internet service.

Miriam Rubano, who describes herself as a "poor student," said she earns about $200 a month reselling coupons on eBay to help pay her rent. She was careful to point out, as most coupon hawkers note in their listings, that "most coupons are available for free somewhere, it just takes time and effort to obtain them. That is what people are bidding on -- my time and effort to clip and sort, not the actual coupons themselves..."

"The coupons are part of a special program for new customers who are moving into new store neighborhoods," said Matt Van Vleet, a spokesman for the home improvement chain. "They are not intended to be sold online. We are strongly advising to consumers not to buy any Lowe's discount coupons on the Internet..."

Latent semantic analysis (or indexing) is an application of what's called principal components analysis (PCA), or factors analysis, to the domain of information organization. In the basic version, you form a big 2-D matrix with documents (e-mails for instance) along one axis and terms (word, phrases) along the other, and fill in the entries with a 0 when the term doesn't occur in the document, and with a 1 (or count) when it does. Then you take the resulting monstrous matrix and grind it up with an algorithm that finds covariance patterns. That's to say, the associations of words "latent' in the document base you feed in are going to be found. Shovel in several weeks worth of news stories and it's going to be obvious that 'Saddam' and 'Iraq' are highly correlated, or 'Tiger' and 'golf'. The method actually kicks out a transformation matrix into which you can feed the terms observed in a particular document, and get out a score for that document in terms of "warness" or "golfness" - those are principal components, or factors. You compute and save as many factors as you want - presumably less than the number of original terms. (Apologies to any wandering mathematicians for the gross simplications.)

Having security guards search through visitors' belongings at the entrance to his beloved park could not have been part of Walt Disney's idea of a "big, big beautiful tomorrow" when he opened Disneyland in 1955. But ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that's become as much a part of the Disney experience as standing in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean. And after Tom Ridge decreed a heightened state of alert (Code Orange) last week, Disney's security was ratcheted up even further...

Inside the park, mentioning terrorism seems mean, and almost impolite, in a world so determinedly dedicated to innocent escapism and perfect order. One of the attendants at the entrance to the Haunted Mansion gave me a blank stare when I asked about the real-life horrors possibly lurking behind that Code Orange. "I thought the air was cleaner now, and that we didn't have to worry about that ozone stuff anymore," he said.

An utterly unscientific poll of 11 groups of visitors showed that all but two were aware of the federal government's call for stepped-up vigilance, although not everyone got the colors straight. The two families that had missed the news were Japanese. "Should we go home now?" one man inquired.

Our downtown keeps getting better all the time. Even the sidewalks are being widened here and there. Instead of gas stations, you can hardly find a gas station anymore. Buildings have been put in, and often very nice buildings. And there's lots of people living downtown now. That was a distinct policy of the city. We had a remarkable mayor, whose name was Barbara Hall, She went to work to get the zoning and get the whole vision of this changed and believe me, it was very hard for her to educate her planning department to be able to accept this or do this. The various visions she had were excellent...

Here's what I think is happening. I look at the, what happened at the end of Victorianism. Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the first world war and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. That was one of the first places it was happening. But it was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

From 1976 up until 1979, Grovski Carbunkle hardly knew a sober moment. "I have gone over this so many times with my therapist," said Grover in his famous Playboy interview from 1979, only weeks after drying out. "Losing the Muppet Show gig was like some kind of affirmation for me of all of my worst insecurities at once. It was as if the whole world was telling me 'You are not good enough, Grover. You are only a children's show character, Grover. Go back to Queens and die a slow death, Grover."

And to his friends and co-workers on the set of "Sesame Street", it seemed that Grover was dying a slow death, by his own hand. "He'd come in looking like hell," said Ernie in a recent interview. "Sometimes with a drink still in hand or a hooker draped around his neck, snapping at everybody. It would take make-up 2 hours to get him looking halfway decent, during which time he invariably fell asleep." But despite this, Grover's work didn't suffer- intead he worked harder than ever and came up with some of the most brilliant material of his career. This was the time during which "Super Grover" was born. An album was released in 1976 called "Grover Sings the Blues" which was well-received, and another in 1978, "Sesame Street Fever" featured a disco-dancing Grover on the cover and shot to the top of the charts.

So, if you have been active with your phone camera, or any other digital camera, send us your pictures. Our picture editor will choose the best each week and publish them on this page every Friday...

If you want to send your picture from your mobile phone, dial 07970 885089. You can send them from any network or phone. Please send the large full size images (usually 640x480 pixels) taken by the mobiles. Otherwise they are too small to publish. If you want to email it to us, send it to yourpics@bbc.co.uk And don't forget to include your name and a bit of context about your snap.

A lost weekend test-driving a Sanyo SCP-5300 in crowded San Francisco nightclubs proves the point. Flipping the Sanyo open and snapping a few shots with its LED flashbulb turned heads, but hipsters shied away from its electric eye--until a few microbrews later in the evening. Then the same free-spending demographic who shunned the Web phone, the game phone, and the annoying custom-ring-tone phone sauntered over, glass in hand, to try the cam-phone for themselves. Snapping bar stool photos ("Wassuuuuuuuuup?!") and e-mailing them to friends drew crowds. Thumbing through the phone's other features sent the drunkards wandering

Under the USA Patriot Act, passed by the U.S. Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants will need ID with either a fingerprint or an eye scan to get into the U.S.

At next year's projected level, Washington will be spending nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. With Al Qaeda not yet defeated, war looming with Iraq and tensions mounting with North Korea, America obviously needs to spend generously on defense. The armed forces deserve decent pay, up-to-date ships, planes and tanks, and cutting-edge technologies designed to minimize vulnerability and assure battlefield superiority. But all of that can be had for tens of billions of dollars less than what President Bush proposes.

Basically, I set the ranking algorithm to give more weight to people with a moderate link cosmos (but at least 40 bloggers are linking to them) who have said something that has caused a proportionately large number of new inbound links to come their way.

It isn't a perfect system, but hopefully a random click on any of the blogs listed in the top 100 will lead to interesting reading, and perhaps, a new addition to your blogroll.

...a lot of the things we make we need to connect to the net, and they are not really computer peripherals, they need to be citizens of the net. So this is a few years of evolution in the internet, each of these is a complete website, just done simpler and simpler as we really understood how to do that. So we thought that's great, I can make a complete website for a dollar and this little thing, we'll put it everywhere, we'll put it in light bulbs, door knobs, we'll fill the world with that. We thought that was a good idea. Until we thought a little bit more, and once again if those things work in any way like this one, it leads to a fairly distopian vision of the future: like if you wake up in the morning, and you are greeted by "Your house has crashed".

Now, a step after that is making conventional chips and pouring them out; painting them: we have realised we can paint the computer itself. We've developed a range of printing technologies; so this, for example, is an electronic ink you can print, it has the contrast mechanism of ink on paper, but you can change it after you put it down. This is a printed semi-conductor, that lets you print; this is a printed mechanical structure; this is a printed piece of paper that can move another piece of paper, your desk, and clean itself up; it was made out of this.

"These two create works of art using grass that's been exposed to differing amounts of light. Many of their works are the result of projecting light through a photographic negative onto grass, but I think my favorite is the tiger skin coat made of grass fabric striped with tiger stripes. Weird and nifty."

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world...

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution...

If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.

Each glass in Mitsubishi's system is tagged electronically by a microchip linked to a thin radio-frequency coil inside its dishwasher-safe base. A coating of a clear, conducting material makes the glass behave like a capacitor - a device that stores electrical charge between two conducting plates separated by an insulator. In this case, the drink is the insulator and the glass's base and sides are the conducting plates.

This is what allows the glass to measure how much you have drunk. When you have had a few sips and the level of the drink starts to fall, there is less of the glass's surface in contact with the insulating liquid. This lowers the capacitance of the glass.

Celebration is now a test market for Segway Human Transporters, people movers that are powered by a battery, balanced by gyroscopes and look something like pogo sticks on wheels. The machines will be available nationwide in March, but people here who agree to answer the company's e-mail messages and questionnaires for a year may buy Segways early and receive a $2,000 refund on the $4,950 price.

"We want to know how the actual owners use it in their everyday life," said Morgan Smith, brand manager for Segway of Manchester, N.H., "whether it is saving time or helping them get to and from work or running errands during their lunch hour or just getting outside to see people."