I would wake up early, usually around six, and when I didn't already have food I would walk in the dawn to find something for a morning salad. These were quiet and relaxing times, when the rest of the college community was still sleeping, and it felt like I had the whole world to myself. My generous friend Ryan had two blocks away in his yard a huge Turkish fig tree that produced an exceptional bounty of the most heavenly fruits. The tree was about thirty feet tall, and I spent many hours in those branches, filling bags with ripe fruit or just stuffing myself. The tree's figs were as big as small apples, green outside and bright crimson inside, and the best were those so ripe that they had burst open. They had begun to ferment inside and tasted faintly of wine.

IEEE is better than this. If you're a member of the organization, please take a moment to read up on this disaster-in-the-making and then use the form at the EFF's action-center to write to the IEEE and ask them to investigate this -- before it's too late.

...instead of using this opportunity to create a performance standard, setting benchmarks for e-voting machines to meet with regards to testing the security, reliability, accessibility and accuracy of these machines, P1583 created a design standard, describing how electronic voting machines should be configured (and following the basic plans of most current electronic voting machines). Even more problematic, the standard fails to require or even recommend that voting machines be truly voter verified or verifiable, a security measure that has broad support within the computer security community.

To make matters worse, EFF has received reports of serious procedural problems with the P1538 and SCC 38 Committee processes, including shifting roadblocks placed in front of those who wish to participate and vote, and failure to follow basic procedural requirements.We've heard claims that the working group and committee leadership is largely controlled by representatives of the electronic voting machine vendor companies and others with vested interests.

The existence of a bedrock valley was first documented in the first half of the century, but its exact location remained largely unknown, said Steve Holysh, a hydrogeologist working on the project...

In tests done in August, researchers at the High Park site expected to hit bedrock at about 40 feet, but it wasn't until a depth of 123 feet that they hit the river system, technically known as an artesian aquifer. They hit bedrock at 145 feet.

# you have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).

# you are the first to think of the FUSSP.

# you started looking for the FUSSP after observing that it is impossible to filter more than 99% of spam with fewer than 0.1% false positives by currently available mechanisms.

# despite being the inventor of the FUSSP, you are unfamiliar with "false positive," "false negative," "UBE," "tarpit," "teergrube," "Brightmail," "Postini," "SpamAssassin," "DNS blacklist," "HELO," "RBL," or "mail envelope."

# you plan to make money by licensing the FUSSP.

# you don't plan to make a fortune from the FUSSP, but you do expect fame as its generous and public spirited netizen inventor.

# you are deeply hurt and angry because you are not respected as "spam fighter."

...service providers need to make their networks 'intelligent' so they can identify users and the applications used.

Just what I want -- a network that identifies the application I'm using!

I can imagine
*** ERROR 4XX: UNAPPROVED APPLICATION ***
*** PERMISSION TO USE NETWORK DENIED ***

The suit, filed Monday in the Southern district of New York, claims that Internet service provider iNYC Wireless and London Terrace Towers, a residential apartment complex, have been illegally pirating and marketing Road Runner through a Wi-Fi network.

In 1998 the FDA approved Provigil to treat narcolepsy, but doctors prescribe it "off label" as a fatigue fighter for airline pilots, long-haul truckers, and medical residents. Users say the drug doesn't make them jittery the way caffeine does. One 200-milligram pill restores focus and alertness as effectively as three tall lattes and costs $5. And all the clinical data show that the drug has none of the addictive qualities of amphetamines like Dexedrine. Because Provigil has fewer side effects than Ritalin, it's even being prescribed to some children with attention-deficit disorder.

Come play Tele-Twister! Have fun while learning about gravity, anatomy, ergonomics, and social dynamics! The party game Twister, introduced in 1966, was the first board game played with human bodies. This version, "Tele-Twister," is a game designed for the Internet. As in the original, the game is played with human bodies (the twisters), but in this version you get to play along and direct their moves from the comfort of your computer. As a player, you log in and are automatically assigned to either the Red or Blue team. You view and play from your computer screen. You see two twisters (real humans), one dressed in red, the other in blue. They respond to moves chosen by the Red and Blue online teams. Your team chooses moves for the twisters (eg, "right hand YELLOW") using a Java-based online interface. You can log in as a guest, but we much prefer if you register for your own password. Just go to the Register page anytime before the game starts and we will email you a password. Please note: you'll need a PC with Internet Explorer, or a Mac with OS X to use the Java interface. Tele-Twister includes audio, so if your computer has speakers, be sure to turn up the volume.

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). Arrrrrrrr!

"It means you now have a wearable camera which nobody will notice and can take pictures while being involved in events," said Huw Robson from Hewlett Packard.

WRONG (possessives)
"Service providers admire the Sun Fire's features"
RIGHT
"Service providers admire the features of the Sun Fire servers"

WRONG (plurals)
"We bought fifty new Sun Rays"
RIGHT
"We bought fifty new Sun Ray appliances"

WRONG (verbs)
"I Java-tized my applications."
RIGHT
"I improved my applications with Java technology."

WRONG (puns)
"Let the Sun shine in your datacenter!"
RIGHT
"Bring Sun servers into your datacenter and make your net work."

Many teenagers leave their mobile phone on while they are asleep. About 2500 children in Flanders (aged 13 years and 16 years respectively) were asked how often they were awoken at night by incoming text messages on their mobile phone. Among the 13 year olds, 13.4 per cent reported being woken up one to three times a month, 5.8 per cent once a week, 5.3 per cent several times a week and 2.2 per cent every night.

We kindle and char and inflame and ignite.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We burn up the city, we're really a fright.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We're rascals, and scoundrels, and villains, and knaves.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We're devils and black sheep and really bad eggs.

1. Rhotic, like, to the max.

2. The basic phonetic unit of pirate speech is the single long-drawn-out letter: R, I, A, etc.

3. Interpolate random piratical interjections: avast, belay, matey, me hearties, blow me down, bugger me standing, etc.

4. In a pinch, try the Pirate filter. If you’re fluent in Gangsta, you can also use the Pirate - Gangsta glossary.

5. Only to talk like a pirate. Not to make walk the plank. Not to sack the Accounting Department. For that is the law.

The first problem arises from the fact that publicly available wifi hotspots could do away with the need for users to register or identify themselves in some way, tying their computer to a personal identity in meatspace. In some set-ups, users of hotspots will be able to act anonymously, making detection of abuse (DOS or other computer related crime, spam, harassment, etc.) much, much harder.

'You don't know what TiVo is.'

'If you put a gun to my head I'd guess it was like a Palm Pilot?'

'Doctor, seriously, what the hell. I was referred to you specifically, Doc, specifically because of your expertise with technology-related disorders. Your alleged so-called expertise.'

'I know Palm Pilots. It's usually about Palm Pilots or voicemail or cell phones, like ninety percent of the time.'

You would have expected the US media to sit up and take notice; instead, it slumped in its comfortable chair and closed its eyes. Yes, Spiegelman is a Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist; yes, he has a particular genius for describing the human price of fanaticism. Rarely have commentator and theme been so perfectly matched. But in the new "with-us-or-against-us" climate of aggressive US patriotism, his habit of expressing uncomfortable truths was becoming awkward. Once, The New Yorker had been happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with Spiegelman in the face of controversy (notably in the case of his notorious 1993 cover depicting an orthodox Jew passionately kissing a black woman); now he found himself being urged to tone down his work. "I found that I was fighting for every picture, and that was really exhausting." He realised that his new cartoon stood no chance of being published there; and, by extension, that he was probably working in the wrong place. (Spiegelman finally resigned this February, after 10 years, saying that The New Yorker was "marching to the same beat as The New York Times and all the other great American media that don't criticise the government for fear that the administration will take revenge by blocking their access to sources and information.")

Other leading publications were no more enthusiastic about the prospect of a Spiegelman cartoon on the theme of September 11. The New York Times never even responded to his offer of a strip; The New York Review of Books rejected what it saw with the opaque comment: "This would be great for Europe." Eventually, "In the Shadow of No Towers" was commissioned by the German newspaper, Die Zeit - whose editor, Michael Naumann, is an old friend and admirer.

We know that the current economy has hit all of us hard. The loss of our van made our situation at The Book Thing even more precarious. We appreciate all of those who have made the very valuable contribution of their books and time. we also need those of you that can and are willing to make a financial commitment, however small, to come forward to insure that The Book Thing can keep giving away books... we will continue our policy of not requesting donations from our patrons at our distribution site, since we don't want to discourage those who most need our service from coming to The Book Thing simply because they cannot afford the "suggested donation." Those who wish make a donation, however small, should make the donation payable to The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc. Donations may be sent to The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc., P. O. Box 2197, Baltimore, MD, 21203-2197. We are a non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status, and all donations are tax deductible.

"This is borderline cynical - - well maybe just cynical - - but in the week that UMG sued a 12 year-old girl for something she didn't know was wrong, the new owner of Napster sent out street teams to start the buzz for the late fall launch. UMG owns a hunk of Roxio which owns the market leading ripping software responsible for the mix CDs that little girl listen to and, of course, Roxio owns the new Napster. Like good street teams do, Napster is busy defacing everyone else's posters. Attached are on Santa Monica near the Century City Shopping Center. Napster. It's Bad. It's Back. (It's Legal)."

from what I understand the Napster campaign is fully legal, they aren't covering up other people's ads, only fake ads they themselves put up. Unlike those Nissan Electric Moyo, they really do seem to be pasting the heads on, not printing out fake paste ups. But I think they are pre pasting the heads before putting up the ads...the amazing Wooster Collective has more images here.

I'm getting great pleasure watching corporate america try its hardest to create "street cred" for a brand that once was the hottest shit around without even a business plan.

But DVD players are frozen in amber. The features that the public demands have not been forthcoming -- rather, they've stayed pretty much at the level that they started out at in the mid-nineties. They got cheaper, but they didn't get cooler, or weirder, or more flexible.

Case in point: Kaleidescape, a company in Mountain View, has built a "legit" DVD jukebox with permission from Hollywood. This is pretty easy hardware: big-ass hard-drives, some user-interface, and a commodity optical drive. Should be cheap as hell.

It's not. By the time Kaleidescape pays its license fee to the Hollywood studios and calculates the price it can command without any competition in the field, it ends up fielding a box that holds thirty DVDs on its hard-drive and costs thirty-thousand dollars.

The idea that a 30-movie DVD-ripping jukebox -- which I can build "illegally" in my living room for a couple grand -- should retail for thirty thousand bucks is revolting. It's what we, as customers of the CE companies, pay for adopting a technology that is proprietary to the Hollywood companies that take the view that watching movies out of order, skipping commercials, time-shifting and home taping are theft. Shame on us, and what a shame. Link

I first wrote a C program that simulates a single person rolling the dice and moving around the board a great number of times. It included all of the rules for going to jail and the Chance and Community Chest cards. Although this gave good aproximate answers, I decided that I wanted to write another program that would find the exact probabilities using a Markov matrix, which was the method described in a simplified form in the Scientific American article. I used an extended version of this program to generate this web page...

In the process of figuring all of this out I ran into an interesting difficulty. When trying to calculate the probabilities exactly using the Markov matrix, it is necessary to estimate the probability--for each square--that the last two rolls of the dice are doubles (since three doubles in a row sends you to jail). First I used an estimate of 1/36, but in practice it's different for each square and it's not that high for any square. I used my simulation program to find the empirical probability for each square and then used these values in my Markov matrix program. I simulated 32 billion rolls to make these estimates, so I believe they are reliable and any deviation from their exact values is extremely small. Interestingly, the probabilities of two previous rolls being doubles is slightly different on certain squares for the two jail strategies. Additionally, the average roll when landing on a utility is a bit lower or higher than 7 depending on the utility and the jail strategy, which affects the rent value.

What follows is a conversation between private investigator Michael McGill and the Chief Of Staff to the office of the President of the United States, essentially explicating the initial plot engine of the book. Again, this is all crabby-looking first draft stuff, so, you know, just roll with what it's saying, rather than how it's saying it. Good prose and funny jokes will be inserted later. I've got nine months to finish the book and make it pretty, and then it's published in early 2005. I'm probably going to need that long to come up with a title.

# "Are you experienced little girl?" - reference to Jimi Hendrix's song and album titled "Are you experienced?"

# "Cause you know why a you see H..." If you take the last five words of this line pronounced phonetically, Why=y, a=a, you=u, see=c, h=h = Y+A+U+C+H

# "customs jailed me over an herb seed" - refers to an incident in 1988 when the US customs arrested a man at the mexican border for posessing three marijuana seeds

# "Do Wah Diddy" (song by Manfred Mann)

# "Proud Mary keeps on turning..." song by the name of "Proud Mary" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

# Bob Dylan-famous folk singer

# Dragnet, TV show and pulp-movie

# Harley - Harley Davidson Motorcycle

# Miss Crabtree and Spanky (characters in Little Rascals)

Welcome to VantiyDate.com [sic -- you'd think those gorgeous Mensa wannabes could spell their own name, no? --XJ], the world's most judgmental, shallow dating website. At Vanity Date we have a vision of creating the largest database of the world's most good looking, rich and superficial people. Now, this doesn't mean you have to be a super model, but you have to be a so called 7.0 and above to be allowed full access to the database or be talented and have an income over 200,000 dollars per year. Leave a bad taste in your mouth? If so, then we have accomplished our goal. Remember though, intelligence is encouraged. In fact, if we find out you have an IQ below 100, you will be kicked off the site.

"Atherosclerotic plaques and the risk factors that cause them, including hypertension, classically have been considered important potential causes of the expansion of the aorta," says Bijoy Khandheria, M.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiologist and study author. "Intuitively, it makes sense that high blood pressure would stretch the vessel walls and make them more likely to become enlarged. This study shows that while these risk factors are highly important in a host of diseases and conditions, they are bit players when it comes to causing the dilatation of the aorta that can lead to aneurysm."

This book is one of those classic "I really want to read this book so I guess I'll have to write it" situations. That was last summer, and I knew we had the movie coming up in a year-and-a-half, so I figured the timing was as good as it was going to get. I ran the idea by Don Winton, our VP of Creative down here in Florida, and he suggested taking it to Marty Sklar himself. Marty thought it was a great idea and told me to write up a proposal.

So, I wrote a five-page outline that broke the whole story down into three sections: the history of the attraction in all four parks, a scene-by-scene "tour" of the show, and the making of the movie.

The "spine" of the story was the evolution of this idea, from the very first sketch of a "Haunted House" that Harper Goff did back in 1951 to the attraction's transformation into a feature film. I thought it was a fascinating idea, because Imagineering was born of the movie industry. The first Imagineers were all filmmakers from Walt's studio and the attractions gave audiences the opportunity to experience Walt's stories in three dimensions instead of two; so the movie really represents that process in reverse. In a sense, I thought the book would give me the chance to show people how The Haunted Mansion came full circle.

At any rate, Marty helped me tweak the outline a bit and the next thing I knew he told me that Wendy Lefkon, the Editorial Director of Disney Editions, was waiting for my proposal. So I sent the thing off and about two weeks later Wendy called me and told me that everyone at Disney Editions loved the idea and they were going to do it. I think the whole thing was a result of very good timing and having the ability to get the idea directly in front of the decision-maker.

Francesca Sterlacci is head of the fashion design department at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. She says it's expensive and risky to actually create new designs. It's cheaper and easier to simply knock off successful ones. Typically, Sterlacci says, designers just let the copies go. After all, new designs will come out in a couple of months, and lawsuits are time-consuming, expensive "and you're never really sure whether or not you're going to win," she says.

Certain ports on an ADSL line are 'prioritised', meaning all the others are basically useless. A 3GB cap is enforced per month. Line speed is 'deprioritised' after you have been capped, meaning your line is useless for everything but browsing local sites.

1. You oppose the PATRIOT Act and would fight the expansion of its powers.

2. You are firmly pro-choice.

3. You filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's affirmative action case.

4. You would get rid of the Bush tax "cut" and make the rich pay their fair share.

5. You respect the views of our allies and want to work with them and with the rest of the international community.

6. And you oppose war. You have said that war should always be the "last resort" and that it is military men such as yourself who are the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who have to do the dying. You find something unsettling about a commander in chief who dons a flight suit and pretends to be Top Gun, a stunt that dishonored those who have died in that flight suit in the service of their country.

It shouldn't be illegal," said 14-year-old Sonya Arndt. "It's not like I'm selling it."

"Isn't it like recording movies?" asked Korbi Blanchard, 13. "They're making a big thing out of nothing."

"It's wrong to be downloading hundreds of songs, but if you only want one or two, it's not that big a deal," said 13-year-old Kristina Lee.

Set aside by the West, but avidly (if sloppily) pursued by the Soviets, who saw bacteriophages as their best defense against infection. Now, former Soviet scientists have abandoned their bankrupted, catastrophic science-parks in Tblisi and emigrated to the US, there to establish a rigorous science of bacteriophages.

To gather new strains, Sulakvelidze need only drop a bucket into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The waters of the Chesapeake Bay, of which the harbor is an inlet, have enough exchange with the Atlantic that he can find a phage for almost any species of bacteria, he says. If one doesn't work, he simply refills his bucket and looks for another that does.

"This upgradability is one of the unique qualities of phages," Sulakvelidze adds. "Developing a new antibiotic takes 10 years and God knows how many millions of dollars."

As he puts it, "Mother Nature runs the best genetic engineering lab out there. No institution or company can match it."

Legally, the issue of dogging is a grey area - "doggers" are committing no offence unless they are witnessed by a member of the public who can be defined as "outraged" in the eyes of the law.

Third Runner-Up: Excuse me, ma'am, but the gentleman at that table has sent you a FYH 2005 energy and water appropriations bill rider for a $52.3 million solid-waste treatment plant upgrade in your home congressional district, with his compliments. (Mark Briscoe, Arlington)

Second Runner-Up: I'm guessing you work for Fannie Mae, because your fanny may be the best I've ever seen. (Chris Doyle, Forsyth, Mo.)

First Runner-Up: Babe, why are you wasting your time with an assistant to a deputy secretary, when you could be with ME, a deputy assistant undersecretary?

They're our words, dammit!

Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours. For instance...

For instance, the word "pirate" itself has been taken over by the Big Content companies. They mean "anyone who shares files." Real pirates murdered, raped and stole. They didn't share music, rightly or wrongly.

In short, fair use is outside but not opposed to the exclusive rights copyright grants. It is a realm of unconstrained sharing that balances a complex array of competing claims on published work. All of these rationales can be applied to supercommons transmissions around the exclusive transmission rights that administrative licensing or private ownership guarantee. The primary difference is that fair use is limited to functions such as education and parody that do not directly compete with the primary commercial exploitation of the work. The supercommons is a full-fledged communications space that may be utilized for any purpose.

The universal access privilege, in effect, says that any transmission that is not otherwise prohibited is allowed, though whether it is subject to a Hohfeldian privilege depends on whether it exceeds a flexible set of boundaries developed through decentralized legal mechanisms. This proposal reverses the current approach, under which actions must be expressly authorized by the government, or in a property regime by the property owner. It resembles the unambiguous language of the First Amendment, which is nonetheless is limited and balanced in application.

This campaign's grassroots base - you - are incredible, and as you are discovering, quite powerful. Spawning from ad-hoc meetups and spilling over into Yahoo Groups and mailinglists you are defining the future of the political process. But while Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups have been very instrumental in this campaign, they were not designed specifically to be tools for political organization and expression. So I decided someone should build them.

Thus began the DeanSpace project. From a simple webpage with some rough ideas on how these tools should work and a mailinglist for development discussions, the project has grown into a full fledged open-source development community. Complete with rowdy IRC design debates and weekly tarballed releases, we are coding the tools we think will help define the future of political and civic participation.

My phone has more buttons and features than Luke Skywalker's cockpit console. Trouble is, I think Darth Vader led the design team. It's 2 a.m., and I want to tell you why I hate Motorola. I should be circumspect, since I've had the privilege of serving Motorola as a consultant, and the company was an exceptional client. But I've been staring at the ceiling now for more than an hour, my sleep destroyed by a thoughtful feature on my cell phone called the Low Battery alarm.

In the normal course of events, when I arrive home in the evening, I plug my cell phone into its charger, which sits on the kitchen counter not too far from the coffeemaker and the key rack. In the morning before I leave, I make my coffee, grab my keys and phone, and go on with my life. The phone is happy. I'm happy. The world is a happy place. Every so often something disrupts this routine, however. Sometimes I forget to take my phone out of my pocket. Sometimes my two-year-old finds the phone and, after exhausting the imaginative possibilities of make-believe conversation, abandons it under a couch or behind the desk. And there the phone sits, slowly trickling out of energy.

Like many smart devices, my phone has an alarm to tell me when the battery is low. I suspect this drains a lot of the remaining energy from the battery in order to fulfill its prophecy more quickly, but normally I might consider it a useful feature. Right now, however, at 2am, I've discovered that the usability engineers at Motorola designed this feature not as an alert, but as a behavior-modification tool. Make the punishment for forgetting to plug in the phone painful enough, and I won't do it again.

Trade in beluga and the caviar they produce is governed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES believes that beluga sturgeon numbers are on the increase, reaching 11.6 million in 2002, up from 9.3 million in 2001 and 7.6 million in 1998...

But critics say there may in fact be fewer than half a million fish left, and that raw data published by CITES itself suggests that the sturgeon population crashed by 40 per cent in 2002 alone. Continued fishing and trade in beluga caviar will only hasten the demise of the species, they say. CITES's approval also comes at a time when the US government, the world's leading importer of beluga caviar, is considering an outright ban.

Two weeks ago, a federal judge in New York dismissed an obesity lawsuit against McDonald's that alleged it had been hiding the health risks of eating its popular Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. It was the second time this year that U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet threw out a class-action lawsuit that blamed McDonald's for making people fat.

Greene, who can't remember the last time he visited a McDonald's restaurant, said consumers had to take "personal responsibility" for the choices they make when it comes to consuming food. He will also consult on new menu items for the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company, which also announced a new taco version of its premium salads on Tuesday.

Bill Scannell, the guy who outed both Delta and Jet Blue for particpating in CAPPS II, has the smoking gun on this -- a document showing that:

In September of 2002, JetBlue Airways secretly gave the Transportation Security Administration the full travel records of 5 million JetBlue customers. This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet.

Knock that broadband connection down to 300 baud and let's get started, shall we? Jason Scott runs textfiles.com, a collection of BBS-era textfiles that have turned from a side project into a foundation for about dozen other computer history related sites. Besides the original project he has also been maintaining a list of all North American BBSes in history and has spent the last two and a half years filming and editing a documentary about BBSes. Throughout his journey into the past, he's unearthed some pretty interesting stuff. Welcome, Jason!

The announcement Tuesday was just one of nearly a dozen products ranging from mobile phones with tiny built-in television sets to huge TV screens being unveiled at the company's annual showcase of new devices. The new Napster-ready device will be available in retail stores this fall, Samsung said in a statement. "Samsung is trying to do what Apple Computer has done with its iPod music players and iTunes online music store," said Michael Kelleher, an analyst with market research firm Yankee Group in Boston. "Certainly if Napster can build itself up as a legitimate file sharing portal, then that's good for Samsung."

"Xeni, have you seen the collective moblog that children from 7 to 11 years old have created (with me) at the Plessis-Trevise city (closed to Paris) where I worked. The children have done a report of their (school's) sportive outdoor centre by moblogging themselves the pics during all the day (this wednesday) from 9.00 al to 5.00 pm. they have been equiped of Nokia 3650s and all the pics have been moblogged by the children and I have helped them to configure and use the phonecams. they had not any problem in term of usability to use the phonecams. it seems to be very natural for them and they have a great dexterity with using their thumbs. this was funny (imagine 3 phonecams in the hands of children that run in playing soccer for example, at the swimming pool, etc.) and they are gonna add some comments and legends to their pics in some days at the telecenter of the city and we will edit a written newspaper of all of this."

"Today, there are thousands of wireless Internet access points in hotels and restaurants across the nation, with more appearing every day. This special-edition guide, created by Zagat Survey and brought tyou by Intel Centrino mobile technology, will help you find the coolest hotspots fast." Cities include: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle."

Today, the makers of the BIND DNS software responded by announcing a patch that will interpret Verisign as damage and route around them.

However, the ISC is about to undercut the Site Finder service with a patch to its BIND software.

BIND runs on about 80 percent of the Internet's domain name servers -- the machines that translate human-readable Web addresses like www.wired.com into machine-readable Internet addresses used by the Internet's vast network of computers.

The patch will be released by the end of Tuesday, said Paul Vixie, ISC's president.

We will be back at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across of the San Mateo Caltrain Station. 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 650-341-5560

Cory Doctorow will be the debut guest of the Hamlet Linden Book Club, the first reading group (far as we can tell!) to be conducted in a massively multiplayer online world -- Second Life.

This Sunday, Sept. 21, at 6:30pm (PST), Cory Doctorow's avatar will appear in the main auditorium of Second Life, the 3D online society where Hamlet Linden (aka Wagner James Au) is the world's embedded journalist. Cory will discuss his acclaimed novel *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom* with an in-world audience of Second Life residents.

Gangstah	Pirate
fo'ties	bottles o' rum
bling bling	booty
Yo!	Avast!
Homey	Matey
Bee-atch	Scurvey dog

It's about 10'X10' and reads "Dear America, Thanks for all the money, sorry about your kids. -- Halliburton Oil" on one side and "Nobody Died when Clinton Lied" on the other. Somebody's opened a website dedicated to this mysterious group, and I'm thinking of doing the same. In the meantime, check out Nobody Died.

Halliburton Corp.'s (HAL) U.S. government contracts to restore Iraqi oil production and provide support services to troops will cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion and are expected to rise, Army spokesmen said.

An Army Corps of Engineers contract to rehabilitate the country's oil fields, controversial because it wasn't competitively bid, now is valued at $948 million, more than $200 million above the level projected last month. One particularly expensive item: importing fuel to the oil-rich country, at a cost of as much as $6 million a day.

CAPPS II isn't a reality -- yet. But that didn't stop Delta Airlines from deciding to pilot CAPPS II for its flights last spring. Massive public outcry changed Delta's mind about selling its passengers out to the governmental elements who believe that the Constitution only applies when we're not "fighting terrorists."

That was a real victory, but now JetBlue has stepped up to volunteer to run its customers through the TiA-meatgrinder.

The airline industry is in real trouble. Boycotts against the airlines work -- they can't afford to lose even a few patriotic customers. I'm not flying JetBlue again until they change their tune.

Rather than being merely the airline with free DirecTV, JetBlue shall henceforth be known as the airline with thousands of daily, non-stop trips from Washington, DC into the private lives of Americans foolish enough to fly their Orwellian, unpatriotic airline.

It's time for all patriotic Americans to share with JetBlue a little of that Boycott Delta love. If the JetBlue leadership hadn't been under a rock for the past six months, they would be well aware of the pillorying in the media and the countless millions of dollars in lost revenue borne by Delta by participating in the first round of CAPPS II testing.

Until JetBlue publicly withdraws from any and all CAPPS II testing and apologizes to the American people for their reckless disregard for the US Constitution, a boycott of JetBlue Airways is in effect.

The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003.

Ben Smith, the former head of financially troubled startup Casbah Corp. , knows firsthand the boom-and-bust cycle of the late '90s. It all converged one day during his topsy-turvy four-month ride as chief executive officer, when Upside magazine listed his company among the hot 100 firms in technology. Ironically, the accolade came just when the startup was about to be sold to a rival firm.

"I got a letter telling me that we were in the Upside 100 -- and we were out of money," said Smith. "Everything just sort of fell apart very quickly."

Despite his disappointing debut as a Silicon Valley chief executive officer, the 36-year-old is back in the startup business. As head of Spoke Software in Palo Alto, he has found venture capitalists willing to give him another chance -- and millions in cash -- to start and lead another company. Smith isn't alone. Today, venture capitalists are looking for management gems among ex-dot-com managers who survived an extremely turbulent time in the technology industry. Experience, leadership skills, tenacity and perseverance are qualities they are seeking in candidates.

1. If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?"

2. If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!"

3. If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on."

4. EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."

5. (And remember to accept all trade requests from other players by giving them a melon.)

JH: Hello. I just downloaded some illegal MP3s and my friend told me that the RAII is going to sue everyone who downloads music. What should I do?

RIAA: Hold on just a sec...

RIAA: The best advice I can offer you at this moment is to go to dub-dub-dub-musicunited.org and you can learn there how to uninstall your peer-to-peer software or file-sharing service.

JH: But I don't have a pee service. Someone just e-mailed me a song and I listened to it. Am I going to jail?

copyright, noun

The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.

The danger, pointed out in this passage from Doctorow's novel, in having a completely subjective, reputation-based economy is that it is quite possible for someone like me to be made an outsider from the economy due to actions for which I had no responsibility. Granted, similar problems exist in a cash-based economy. The market could bottom out, as we all certainly know, and I could be left with stock in… nothing. Still, there are objective factors, along with the subjective ones that move the market, that justify such occurrences. With a reputation economy, the threat of being ostracized unfairly is very real, and very much free from the protections of objectivity. Thus, this points to a problem with such a system. I do not think it is a problem that would defeat the system, as a general concept, but it is one that may justify eschewing it as a device for commerce.

The subjective nature of reputation is an interesting issue that goes beyond Herodotus. It is one that troubles modern politicians and entertainers, sometimes rightly, and sometimes wrongly. It's for this reason that I think X's website, and Doctorow's novel, are such interesting topics of discussion. Reputation is a matter that merits consideration, because it is a value that, subjectively, has massive impact on our life -- and on the lives of the ancients.

To put it more pithily: "Popular speech never needs defending." Free speech shouldn't be a popularity contest. Link

Three months ago, the British Federation of Bakers made headlines when it announced that bread sales have declined 2 percent per year since Dr. Atkins’ book was re-released in 1997. Wheat consumption has dropped from 147 pounds per person to 139 pounds in the past six years. And in May, the Tortilla Industry Association held a high-profile seminar titled “An Industry in Crisis: The High-Protein, Low-Carb Diet and Its Effects on the Tortilla Industry.”

Atkins-friendly foods, on the other hand, are booming. News reports have credited Atkins for an increase in U.S. beef sales in 12 of the past 14 quarters. Prices on cattle futures have climbed from 65 cents per pound in 2001 to 82 cents per pound today (suggesting the beef market has grown by $3 billion in 3 years). Consumption of bacon and eggs are at 10-year highs. Beef jerky sales are up more than 40 percent in the past two years, and pork-rinds have tripled their market share to $496 million per year.

ocial pressures to watch the latest seasons of Charmed, Buffy and Angel combine with file-sharing apps such as Kazaa to mean that many 15-24 year olds have watched entire seasons from the US on their PCs or Burned VCDs before they are shown on satellite pay TV or the much later free-to-air...

A "Social Scheduling" scenario as shown above could see p2p filesharing apps such as Bittorrent (which increases in efficiency with each concurrent user) thrive in the creation of ultralocal, and/or ultratribal media channels.

...it's a little applet which displays a bunch of pixels in a rectangle. Instructions tell the user that the area ought to look like a world map. One pixel is highlighted, and a form asks if the highlighted pixel ought to be land or water. Rinse, lather, repeat, and ten thousand visits later or so, it's moved from random noise to a recognizable world map. Pretty incredible...

Furthermore, imagine the difficulty of changing that consensus. Maybe you're a Pacific Islander, and you want to change the map to reflect the actual size of the Pacific. Too bad! Given the momentum of the consensus, it would be prohibitively difficult to move all the pixels of North America over the east, or shrink Asia, or whatever it would take. For the architecture of this application, consensus is what the old chaos mathematicians would call an attractor, and it's a powerful one.

The particular bug that this update will correct for the user is the ability to run Linux. Once the update is in place you will not be able to install Linux on your Xbox any more, at least not in the convenient way that the Dashboard bug allowed, according to the XboxLinux pages.

It isn't surprising that New York's electrical grid malfunctioned during the big blackout of 2003, says one Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor. It's not that the grid is antiquated; it's that our demand for energy is insatiable. While proponents of conservation seek ways to get people to use less energy, Anna Dyson, who teaches architecture at Rensselaer, has another idea. She is leading a team of researchers who are trying to prevent future power failures by making energy-sucking office buildings ultra-efficient at peak hours. They plan to combine a series of highly efficient, low-cost technologies into a single sustainable device that would be almost transparent to those using its energy.

Wesley's most recent album, Fabian Road Warrior contained some 24 original tunes -- including the timeless triumvirate, Suck a Cheetah's Dick, Suck a Pitbull's Dick, and Suck a Donkey's Bootyhole. Shortly after he finished his first album, he was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Wesley described having "schizophrenia demons" in his head that removed him from the "harmony joy rides" that inspired his music, placing him instead on "torture hell rides". Snip from the Geeklife news item on his passing:

"He lived an interesting life, going from homeless bum to revered musician. Some of his more memorable songs in my mind have been "Chicken Cow", "Kill That Jerk" and "I'm Sorry I'm So Fat (I will slim down)". I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Wesley one midsummer's night after a show at the Metro after a Reel Big Fish show (i think). I said hello to him and asked him how he was doing on his latest album. He was very friendly, albeit extraordinarily incoherent and when I moved to take my leave and shake his hand, I got a head-butt instead! I guess I should count myself lucky he didn't kill me as Wesley was a 6'5 350 lb. behemoth. Head knocking aside, Wesley will be missed for his whimsical outlook on life and his unfailing sense of humor in his song-writing."

"Timeframe, you're probably looking at a year, a year-and-a-half down the line. It will take a while to make. If we could do it within a year it would be very exciting."

The total was 968 CDs labeled with one Sharpie marker. You can view tiny images of the CDs on the gallery page.

I estimate the total distance marked to be 1,800 feet.

Now, Tor Books has brought out a beautiful new edition of the public-domain text of the novel, deisgned by Chesley-Award-winning art director Irene Gallo (who is astonishingly good at her job, and who has a special fondness for this book, I'm told), and lavishly (and I do mean lavishly) illustrated by Gris Grimly, in sepia-toned macabre ink drawings that are as angular and jocularly grim as the text itself. I got a copy of the book in the mail last week, and I've laid aside the book I'm supposed to be reading to read this one -- to devour it again. It's wonderful to have this brilliant text married to this brilliant package. Link

The announcement of the walkout came at about 3:30 while US trade representative Robert Zoellick was giving a press conference declaring the intentions of the US to continue negotiations on the Singapore issues. As the press stormed out of the room into the hallway of the convention center, they were met by the dancing and singing of NGO members celebrating the collapse of the meetings.

Developing countries have said for weeks that they were already overburdened and hurt from previous concessions, and were not prepared to negotiate until the issues of agriculture was sufficiently addressed. Unsurprisingly, the demand of rich countries to include the Singapore issues was a clear indication that they were not committed to development, or even to the so called "development agenda" agreed upon in Doha.

We want to be part of this information environment and feel more empowered with each new gadget, service, or digital connection in our lives. The concept of "information everywhere" provides instant gratification to satisfy our needs for books, music, porn, and digital interaction with others through web searches, e-commerce, wireless, instant messaging, e-mail, and streaming content over broadband. High-speed links enable organizations to operate around the world at light speed and conduct business on a twenty-four hour clock. (...)

Yet as we rush to embrace the latest and greatest gadgetry or high-tech service and satisfy our techno-craving, we become further dependent on these products and their manufacturers ­ so dependent that when something breaks, crashes, or is attacked, our ability to function is reduced or eliminated. Given the frequent problems associated with the Information Age - losing internet connections, breaking personal digital assistants, malicious software incidents, or suffering any number of recurring problems with software or hardware products, we should take a minute to consider whether we're really more or less independent - or empowered - today than we think, knowing that how we act during such stressful periods is similar to a heroin junkie's actions during withdrawal.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hill, of the Australian robotic company Kadence Photonics, has reprogrammed robots to give them some "feminine" intuition. As wrote the author, "a robot that thinks like your mum may be running your kitchen and home sooner than you think." Peter Hill's new method of programming robots [is] based on co-operation rather than exploitation. These reprogrammed robots, Michelle, Romy and Goldie, "are able to switch between a number of jobs according to priority and circumstance." "If a man does the housework, he'll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it," Dr Hill said. "A woman will go off and do something else." Check this summary for more details.

"SEPTEMBER 12--North Carolina cops are searching for a guy who successfully passed a $200 bill bearing George W. Bush's portrait and a drawing of the White House complete with lawn signs reading 'We like ice cream' and 'USA deserves a tax cut.'"

Link to photo gallery

Ashcroft was bombarded by cries of "Shame!" and the sound of the "Imperial Death March" from the movie "Star Wars" as he entered a meeting with law enforcement officials in Faneuil Hall.

The new glossy black clamshell-shaped phone, called the MPx200, will go on sale in Britain in October through Orange for a retail price of £239 ($383). It will be introduced in the United States through AT&T Wireless and in Asia through various Hong Kong-based distributors during the fourth quarter. The price has not been announced. The phone is aimed at executives on the go and is designed to make it easy to use e-mail messaging and synchronize the phone with a computer, the companies said.

Executives said the model was the first of a new line of Motorola phones to be based on Microsoft's software, although Motorola will continue to make phones based on other operating systems, like Linux and those developed by Symbian, Microsoft's main competitor in the market for operating systems for high-end phones. Symbian, based in London, is a software licensing consortium owned by companies including Nokia; Psion, a maker of hand-held devices; the cellphone makers Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, as well as Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of the Panasonic brand.

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