"According to Shoemaker, the 'impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets,' as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been extracted from remote observations of impact craters on planetary surfaces. However, the nature of the geophysical impact events is that they are non-reproducible. Moreover, their scale is enormous and direct observations are not possible. Therefore, we choose an alternate and of course downscaled experimental approach in order to guarantee reproducible results."

Would a game built around The Simpsons or the Looney Tunes characters be "realistic" enough to trigger the Act? Is the level of conflict represented in spoofs like the Dukes of Hazard sufficiently "aggressive?" Do the Roman centurions of Age of Empires, the enemy officers depicted in Splinter Cell, or the conquering forces of Freedom Fighters qualify as "public law enforcement officers?"

The venerable Economist magazine has been Bluespamming potential customers - sending unsolicited advertising messages by Bluetooth to phones in the area. I never thought we'd see The Economist tarnish itself with spamming. What will we see next "Ho.t L!ve Fore.cast.ing" or "Wanna BI.G 0ne? Gro.w bigg3r id.eas wiv The 'Conomist" subject lines in our emails?

Dr. Sawkins, a musicologist, has won a copyright battle in Britain over a 300 year old piece of music, "Music for the Sun King" by Michel-Richard de Lalande. I understand that particular editions of literature, for example, are often copyrighted: the layout, the footnotes, etc, are all original. But the actual editorial choices- what to include, how to conflate contradictory texts- I had assumed were not copyrightable. By the logic of this argument, a good editorial choice made in one edition of a piece of music can be seen as infringing on the same choice made in another edition.

BoingBoing reader Jon-o Addleman counter-argues:

The question isn't really whether editors can be granted copyright for their work or not. It's really a matter of how much new material is needed. In this case, new viola parts were composed to replace missing ones, among other things, but it's far from clear whether this has crossed the line between 'reproduction' and 'a new derivative work'. This is not an easily-answered question, as this thread on the harpsichord mailing list shows.

The 'wada pav' (batter-fried mashed potato with bread & chutney) is a daily fast-food staple of millions of Mumbai citizens. Now it has been branded and TQMed to compete with McDonald's and is all set to take over the world. This is true reverse globalization-Here comes India!

I went to check out the North Korean news wire earlier today and noticed that they had heavily revised their web site since the last time I looked at it a few months ago. The layout was still kind of bad and the English a bit weird, but there were now buttons for email, shopping, etc. I discovered that the North Korean government is actually letting people sign up for free web based email accounts. Their web page actually claims that they have an advanced IT industry, but somehow after experiencing it's fruit, I am left doubtful. One of the most amazing things about it was the selection of password hint questions, which include gems such as 'How would Korea change after reunification?'

AT&T Wireless will launch its third-generation or "3G" mobile phone service capable of transmitting e-mail, pictures, and video at high speed in four cities -- San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Detroit, the sources told Reuters. The company will offer the data service at a fixed all-you-can-use rate of about $25 a month to consumers and $80 a month to corporate customers, one of the sources said.

Los Alamos National Laboratory director Pete Nanos shut down the country's leading nuclear weapons lab on Friday, after a set of classified computer disks disappeared, and a student was hit in the eye with a powerful laser beam -- all in the space of a week.

"As of today, Director Nanos has suspended all Operations at the Laboratory," an internal e-mail obtained by Wired News read. "This is a very serious step."

"This willful flouting of the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop. If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble," Nanos added in a separate e-mail to Los Alamos employees.

Sandia National Laboratories has located a floppy disk that had turned up missing in a recent inventory. The floppy disk, which had been marked classified, was found about 1 p.m. today (Friday). Sandia had reported the disk as missing June 30 in a wall-to-wall inventory. (...)

Sandia Corporation President and Laboratories Director C. Paul Robinson said: "We are relieved the disk has been found. But in my mind, the nature of the near miss of this recent incident is far too close for comfort. We must find better ways and procedures for ensuring the protection of such material."

# How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?
# Bust an Additional Move
# Seriously, Eileen, Come On
# I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie
# Whoomp! There It Continues to Be

# "As My Eyes Became Accustomed to Her Science, My Sight Was Restored"
# "Baby Lost 20 Pounds of Back (on Atkins)"
# "I Am No Longer Too Sexy for My Ten-Year-Old Shirt"
# and of course, "100 Luftballoons"

Update: Make it stop! More followup song titles. And more. Aaaand more. Also, see this exhaustive list of supergroups that never were.

With today's film release of the feature film "I, Robot," the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launced a new website, "3 Laws Unsafe", to explore the non-fictional problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are they truly reasonable?

The original brief by ComCom was to design a remote control. Thank Toshiko, he looked further than the brief and designed a line of 22 integrated electronic products. One of them is this wall mount triple socket. It has a USB port and a built-in hard disk. You can store music and movies in it and send them to other products in the same product line. The system will be shown in October in ComCom's show apartment in Tokyo.

# We're not $10 million over budget. We don't even have a $10 million budget.
# Our promises for the future are supposed to be fiction.
# You don't have to donate thousands of dollars to us (though we wouldn't complain)—we'll give you a high-level appointment to work for us for free!
# The media will not outnumber the attendees.
# Thoats and banthas are more interesting animals than donkeys and elephants.
# The folks wandering around with walkie-talkies are likely to be helpful and friendly.
# The slogans on our buttons are actually funny, and many of them are about cats.
# No one will be kissing babies except their immediate families and friends.
# When we talk about "skull and bones" it's probably in a discussion about paleontology.
# When we sling mud, it's probably in a workshop on making alien pottery.

Wednesdsay, August 4, 5-8pm
Yerba Buena Gardens

Austin Willacy
Josh Fix and the Furious Force
Josh Fix
The Megan Slankard Band

I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. If I'm gone for a couple days and improperly used your when I meant you're, I'd love it if a friend fixed that while I was away. I first got the idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member, which seems to be the closest form of relationship there).

He was asked if he regretted not distributing Fahrenheit 9/11. He said no. Disney is not partisan and the movie was clearly political. Disney is an entertainment company. He said Rupert Murdoch said no for a completely different reason. Murdoch said he hated Moore and liked Bush. That's not why Disney didn't distribute the film.

When asked whether he liked the movie, Eisner said he loved it. It was like going to a rock concert. It was entertaining, hilarious. He loved it in a non-political way.

"This new meeting series will examine all aspects of advanced nanotechnology, also termed molecular manufacturing or MNT: research status, prospects for disruptive applications, and policy issues — including maximizing access for those who would not otherwise benefit."

"Mobile phone virus sounds alarm in Moscow!" "World's First Mobile Virus is Not Lethal, Yet!" While the exclamation points are mine, the words are actual headlines from, respectively, The Guardian and Reuters articles published June 16. A proof-of-concept worm had been demonstrated that infects Symbian-based mobile phones with Bluetooth. The wireless public gasped. Computer security experts yawned.

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Update: Geraldine Sealey at Salon on Hersh's remarks:

After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse. (...)

Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."

There are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?

Update 2: BB guestbar alum Russ Kick of Memory Hole reminds us of a post he made in May about the type of as-yet-unreleased evidence Hersh is presumably discussing. Here, Russ quotes Republican Senator Lindsay Graham: "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

Update 3: BoingBoing reader Lars has an update from Germany -- some European media perspective on the allegations:

"Report Mainz" is a German TV show/magazine of the SWR (Sudwest-Rundfunk = South-West broadcasting). "Report Mainz" reported already on 5th July 2004 about the potential abuse of children in Abu Ghraib. (Link). A video (in German) of the feature is available at the page (Link to streaming Real file). You can see interviews with persons who testify that they have seen children arrested in Abu Ghraib and who have seen and have heard of a boy and a 12 year old girl terrified (cold water and mud were spilled over them) by guards or military personal. The boy and the girl were then used to terrify their also arrested parents who were willing to cooperate after seeing their children terrified by the guards/military personnel.

Another TV show/magazine covered the issue too: "Kulturzeit", of the German-Austrian-Swiss broadcaster "3Sat" (Link). The main theme in these features is the concern about the fact that children are arrested and that they are used to apply pressure on their parents."

UPDATE: Evidence to support Hersh's claims in the Taguba Report? Link

[Turner] "The invasion of Iraq was the biggest debacle in the history of the world... except maybe the AOL Time-Warner merger. The AOL Time-Warner merger was bullshit.
[Moderator] You were quoted as saying that signing was as good as having sex for the first time.
[Turner] I was just being a team player. It wasn't really. It was the stupidest move I've ever seen. Almost as stupid as the war on Iraq... Gerald Levine was like Rasputin. He was my enemy. But he said he was my best friend. I said to him, "Gerald, I've never been to your home." But I was a team player. I always pulled for the team. We split the money with Jim Baker 50/50. We used to open the envelopes together as they came in because we didn't trust each other."
[Moderator] Can you start a new empire from now?
[Moderator] No. I'm too old/tired. I'm doing bison... they are the original American cattle.

Update: Observant BoingBoing readers will note that Eisner appears to be fidgeting with a small wireless gadget in Joi's snapshot. Defamer intercepted a copy of the mobile chat session taking place at that very moment between the Disney CEO and Mr. Mouse. Link

"As with all energy sources, you have to make the most of what is available and we certainly have an abundance of visitors - and almost all of them use our toilets," museum head Jon Tucker told the BBC.

July 7 - 13:46 GMT - Keith McCanless files a bug in the Bugzilla Database reporting a new vulnerability. It exploits the windows "shell:" handler and allows a malicious web page to execute a program on a client's computer (The program has to already be present on the computer). McCanless notes that the bug is "BOTH a security concern and a DOS," since if the link points to a nonexistent file, it makes the Mozilla browser spawn off endless amounts of new windows. The bug is marked private since it is security-related; only developers with proper clearance can see it. (source)...

July 7 - 18:16 GMT - Mozilla developer "timeless" creates patch closing vulnerability. He posts the patch on the Bugzilla Database so that other developers can approve it. (source) The bug had been known to the world for a matter of hours before a patch was created to fix it

The thrill of Space Mountain – I had the pleasure of enjoying the festivities of the inaugural flight, “it was great” now I have the opportunity of sharing part of the enjoyment with others by offering these items for sale. ·The Disneyland Line publication - SPECIAL Space Mountain Edition, features all kinds of articles on the concepts and efforts of the show and ride, costume design and facts and figures of the building / ride. ·The Space Mountain WED/Mapo Inaugural Flight invitation for June 2, 1977. ·Disneyland Cast Premiere Inaugural Flight Crew Pin/Button, May 1977 ·The portfolio for the publication and invitation. All of the items are in excellent condition.

Update: Elmotion points out this 90 min RealAudio of a talk that Adams gave at UC Santa Barbara a month before his death. Too bad (shocking, really), that the university chooses to use a proprietary, DRM format for distributing its stuff, rather than an open format.

That taking has consequences, human and creative. [Some of the consequences are good, some are bad. Separating them, however, is a pain and may not be possible.] My companies make money almost exclusively from the sale of our creative product. [And they still can, they will have to make some adjustments to their business model.] We don't have a performance right on radio and therefore derive no income from radio play. [Welcome to the wonderful world of "when Congress tries to dictate business models." And so, the RIAA proposes a sequel.] We don't make money from artist tours or merchandise. [And why is that? Is there a law against it? If so, I would recommend it be repealed.] We don't make money from endorsements of other products. [Is someone stopping them from doing that?] We just sell recorded music. [You're free to structure business however you like.]

We take profits from sales – when we're good and lucky enough to get them - and plow money back into the search for that next great talent who will thrill music fans around the globe. [I guess the industry must have been bad these last few years.] When we think we have found that talent, we invest huge amounts to sign, nurture, promote and distribute their creative product. [And the RIAA is the only way talent can be found and promoted, because?] Our economic vitality is based on generating hits – finding special talents that enjoy strong commercial appeal. [And we should care about the hit-maker mentality, because?]

Splicing gives people the ability to offer a single RSS feed which contains a chronologically ordered arrangement of their photostream from Flickr and the feed from their existing blog (so you might end up with something like blog post, blog post, photo, photo, photo, blog post, photo, blog post, photo, photo, and so on).

Part of the story is this: photos are a perfect application of RSS. You can stick an html reference to a photo into a feed right now, but our namespace will allow for passing along the social context of the image: the raw pixels have value, but the title, description, comments, tags and notes, along with things like EXIF data add a whole other dimension of value.

"I've been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years," he told Attitude magazine, "and I just started saying to the record company, 'Look, I really, really love what they are doing.' I think that my record company was a little taken aback but, genuinely, if I could make that type of music then I would. If I could master the equipment then I would love to. Maybe I will now that I've got my own studio set up."

* streamlined definition of responsibilities as it relates to the management of the domain name. Under the new policy, only the Administrative Contact or Registrant can authorize a domain name transfer to a new service provider. This was extremely unclear in the old policy and led to a lot of abuse and confusion.
* minimizing Registrar gaming and abuse. Under the old policy, it was quite common for unseemly Registrars to abuse their position and prevent outgoing customers from transferring to a different service provider.
* introduction of arbitration. The new policy includes several policies designed to "fix" problems before they are taken to the courts. The old policy didn't make it easy to fix problems and often relied on the good graces of usually uncooperative policies. The new policies fix this by introducing undo procedures and a dispute resolution process designed to make it fairly easy and relatively inexpensive for Registrants and Registrars to fix problematic transfers.

I knew what was up with the big khaki push. Remember that one? Ads everywhere saying "Hemingway wore khaki"? We'd all been wearing black for several years. We had black levis, good black skirts, black leather or denim jackets, little black dresses—a great installed user base of basic black clothing, plus the colored stuff we wore with it. I hadn't heard anyone sighing for the return of khaki, and if I had, I'd have pointed them to one of the WASP mail-order catalogues. What's the big deal with khaki? It gets dirty too easily, and for a lot of people it's an unbecoming color. But there's only so much new black clothing you can sell a happy consumer who already has a closet full of black-and-coordinates; so the clothing industry pushed khaki remorselessly.

At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office.

Incidentally, while he was doing this, Maile, our administrative assistant came in for her first interview with us and saw Barak. A week or two later when we called her in for a second interview I asked that she speak with Barak so that he could interview her as well. After we hired Maile and explained who Barak was she laughed and said "Oh, I thought he was the handyman and that this company really liked to get everyone involved!"

But recently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.

Michael Moore's headline grabbing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Disney declined to distribute, grossed more than $80 million in its first three weeks of release, more than any Disney film this year and any documentary ever.

"It's held up fairly well," said Andy Spencer, a '96 graduate who works at Raleigh's Rialto theater. "It was two weeks straight of either sellouts or virtual sellouts."

[Daryl] Miller then said, "There, how do you like your job," thus ending the screening, according to the police report. He was charged with indecent exposure and released on $300 bail. "We've never had anybody do that before," said airport police Lt. Matt Christenson. "But it's not abnormal for people to become frustrated with the screening process."

Miller also became belligerent during the screening, Transportation Security Administration officers told police. One TSA employee also told police that Miller had a note inside a magazine in his bag with an expletive, and told a TSA employee "Oh yeah, it's for you" when asked who the note was directed at. "This person exposed themself in a public area, a clear violation of the law, and we needed to take some action on that, otherwise everybody would be dropping their pants," Christenson said.

Update: Sacre blog! Reader Kurt H. says: "Not the first time someone has gotten pissed at airport security and stripped. Back in 2002, a French woman got upset and took off her top."

In a follow-up to your Boing Boing post about the photography student's odd run-in with Homeland Security , a peaceful protest is being organized in response.

Update: Seattle Times story here. And a Seattle Post-Intelligencer column ends with this line: "I don't think Ian's a spy. Ian loves America. Ian's crime was being a brown man with a camera in hand during a time of runaway fear." (Thanks, Ari!)

The tracks people seemed to dig most were all from an amazing mashup album by a group of DJs called Hanzo Steel -- remixes inspired by the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 2. My favorite track: "Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down" (Link to free MP3 track). The track includes samples from: "Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down" by Nancy Sinatra, "Big Beat" by Billy Squier/"Fix Up Look Sharp" by Dizzee Rascal, "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band (as used by Nas), "Take Me To The Mardis Gras" by Bob James/"Peter Piper" by Run DMC and audio samples from many of the original Kung Fu films which are referenced in Tarantino's movies. I can't stop playing this track. It scratches the funk spot in my brain.

Here are two more freebies from the same disc: "Twisted Nerve (Biter's Revenge)" (Link to free MP3). Includes "Twisted Nerve" by Bernard Herrmann and "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson. And "Ironsides" includes "Ironsides" by Quincy Jones plus Divine Styler. (Link to free MP3).

Link to Hanzo Steel home (check the fine cover art! Buy the CD!). Check out SENT in person through Saturday July 17 (12-5pm daily) at the Downtown Standard Hotel in LA. Oh, and the image shown here is one of the 1500 +/- phonecam snapshots submitted by the public. You can never have enough phonecam pics of hot electroclash babes licking themselves in the mirror, I always say. (Thanks for the free tracks, Hanzo Steel!)

"For higher level control, we've attached a Virgin Webplayer. The Webplayer was sold as a loss leader for Virgin's internet service in the late 90s, and thus can be found on ebay for under $100. It has two serial ports, a 200MHz Geode processor, 64M ram, and a miniPCI port. Thus, we can give it an 802.11b card, a webcam, and a usb-serial adapter."

Following on from the ice-cream van dub sound system and the piano bar on wheels, i'd like to draw your attention to the Miniscule of Sound. i've been going to summertime festivals in the uk for years, and these guys have been on the circuit for almost a decade. It's basically a converted horsebox kitted out on the inside with disco ball, coloured lights, day-glo fluffy roof, light-panelled dancefloor, and a dj (usually) dressed as one of the vilage people playing something cheesey on a tiny pair of decks. The door staff on the outside advise us they are "'avin it tiny!" on the way in. Club capacity is about 8, maybe 9 at a squeeze. As clubbing experiences go, it's one of the best and it's free. If you see them at a festie this year, pay them a visit.

Several high-profile technology companies and movie studios are expected to announce Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to ensure that high-definition video and other content cannot be pirated in home networks.

Sources familiar with the group's formation said the initial members include IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., Disney and Panasonic. The announcement is scheduled to be made at the cross-industry Content Protection Technology Working Group (CPTWG) meeting in Los Angeles, although last-minute membership changes could occur before then.

The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling.

Freeculture.org has launched an official site for the National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day project, at www.barbieinablender.org. Users are invited to submit artistic pieces inspired by Forsythe's "Food Chain Barbie" series to blended@barbieinablender.org for the site's upcoming gallery of submitted work.

About a dozen fellow members of the Insular Order of Druids sat in the court's public gallery, while chief druid King Arthur Pendragon, wearing white robes with a red lion emblazoned on the front, acted as Williams's legal adviser.

The sword, named Talisen, has been confiscated by police as evidence.

Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds"

* "This is not the Beach Boys. It can't be. Why? No beach songs! I thought it was some kind of joke. All 'Pet Sounds' offers is the opportunity to hear Brian Wilson whine for forty minutes, backed by elevator music."
* "It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim."
* "The lyrics consist of commonplace rhyming conversational prose, totally lacking in imagery, metaphor and anything else that separates verse from poetry."

Adult Video News (AVN) interviewed Jason and some of the Acacia people about the ongoing work to bust the patent, and the Acacia people busted out this bizarre analogy about stealing SUVs ("If someone broke into your garage and stole your SUV, and put a speaker on the top, and was driving around the neighborhood making some political statement, trying to get your SUV back wouldn't be trying to stifle free speech, it would be you trying to get your property back. If somebody is using your property, you have a right to stop them or receive a license or receive royalties").

Jason's repsonse was classic:

"There's no question now that an SUV in your garage is something you own. But here there's a real question as to whether Acacia actually invented anything new or simply is claiming monopoly on technology that millions of people use every day to express themselves," Schultz told AVNOnline.com.

"And the other thing is, I don't have to break into your garage to steal your SUV to express myself in the physical world. But I can't think of a modern Website, especially news Websites, that don't depend on streaming some kind of audio or video to express themselves on the Web. It has become a fundamental part of free expression online," he continued. "And I would say it has become the predominant method for artists and news organizations to connect to their audiences. [Acacia] doesn't want to own just the SUV, [they] want to own every single automobile and stereo system in the world, to use [their] contorted analogy."

Although the presumed allure of the PeopleMover during a graduation takeover of the Magic Kingdom would be hopes for a nice view of the Anaheim skyline and a hummer, the usual proliferation of the drunken testosterone penned another chapter of the ride's storied existence in blood during the summer of 1980.

Gerardo Gonzales had presumably never heard of the name Ricky Lee Yama when he boarded the sluggish trail of candy-painted tram cars that night, which is a shame. Aside from sparing his parents the embarrassment of recounting his story to relatives at the wake, it would have also denied an opportunity for ironic history to repeat itself. Sadly, this wasn't the case.

Update: Chris sez, "The story posted on Disneyland deaths has at least one big error. The most recent mentioned death spoke of the wrong person. The 43 year old woman supposedly killed survived the accident, although she suffered a severe injury. Her husband, Luan Phi Dawson, however, died tragically. He was a fine software engineer on Microsoft Word and deserves to be remembered."

You should be aware that Blog was originally devised by British fans in the 1950s. There were two versions. A Liverpool fan named Peter Hamilton came up with the recipe for Blog Mark I, which consisted of "a brandy and egg flip base, to which was added black currant puree, Alka Seltzer, and Beechan's Powder. It effervesced." A second, simplified version (Blog Mark II) was produced by hotel barmen at the first Kettering Eastercon (1955) and consisted of "a half-pint of cider and a measure of rum." Anybody know what `egg flip' and `Beecham's Powder' are? (Quoted material taken from p.168 of A WEALTH OF FABLE, by Harry Warner, Jr.)

Update: Neal sez: Dr. Seuss's "The Shape of Me and Other Stuff" contains these lines:

'And speaking of shapes/now just suppose/you were shaped like one of these!/or those!/or like a Blogg/or a garden hose!"

The Blogg in question is pictured only in silhouette (like everything else in the book); it looks sorta like a bipedal camel.

Sunday, July 04, 2004
Hulk saw movie about bug-man and it was good but needed more smashing.

AND HULK DID NOT GET SNIFFLY DURING ROMANTIC SCENES SO IF YOU HEAR IRON MAN OR THOR TALKING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LIARS.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 4:15 PM // Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

Thursday, June 24, 2004
HULK AT LIBRARY USING COMPUTER.

SHHHH.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 10:32 AM // Comments (4) | Trackback (0)

n fact, we don't think it would be too provocative to suggest that JRR Tolkien may have been inspired by over a thousand years of common history when he first came up with the name "The Shire" as the idyllic home country of the books' main protagonists, the hobbits.

However, the legal letter claims that "goodwill in the name has been achieved through sales of such books". Certainly The Shire sounded rather nice as presented in the fictional books, but we suspect the goodwill towards the area in which people live was there before Mr Tolkien even put pen to paper.

Changes are due by July 21 -- thanks in advance! Link

Like good mongo, the New Yorkers of Botha's book were hard to find. It took him two years to collect the cast of New Yorkers portrayed in his book. Some were open to talking about collecting other people's trash and reusing it, others were more reserved.

"It was a gradual process. I approached a lot of crazy people. They swore at me, they chased me away and they started running. You start to know how people are going to act," Botha said while on his way to visit one of the collectors in his book -- a New Yorker named Dave who uses a metal detector to parse through silt from sewers.

Bloomberg news added "about 160 Mexican officials will carry the microchip" and that "the chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires." Link

John sez: Note that the link Mark Frauenfelder posted earlier today, the "Japanese geek status hierarchy," is a clear rip off of/homage to Lore Sjöberg's geek hierarchy.

The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise.

"I love to go to amusement parks and ride the the rides, but I can't stand waiting in line... To be honest with you, I'm not an educated engineer or mathematician or anything like that. It was more or less trial-and-error."

Take the network's "some people say" mantra (as used in my first paragraph, above). I had watched plenty of Fox News without ever noticing this -- it's a way of introducing commentary, and specifically the reflexive right-wing views of the presumptive Fox core audience, into what is supposed to be news coverage, while appearing to not quite endorse it. "Some people say that criticizing the war at a time like this is letting down our men and women in uniform," or "Some people say Richard Clarke is a political operative who's trying to sell books." (Or, yes, "Some people are saying that John Kerry looks French!" -- uttered with a peculiar mixture of consternation and delight. Gosh, what a weird idea! But now that you mention it ...!)

"It was in the early 1900's that Rorschach and other psychiatrists developed hunches regarding symmetry and the internal workings of man. Humans, great pretenders to bi-lateral symmetry, are in actuality, closer to potatoes in their lack of precise symmetry. A close look reveals what is truly inside the people around us."

[T]he indifferent young man I talked to at the Sprint store in the Bonair shopping center in San Rafael, California then said that they didn't do repairs or diagnostics and didn't know who did. He actually SURFED THE WEB to give me the phone number of Palm. So I called Palm, who told me they could deal with everyone's Treo 600 except Sprint's. They directed me to a third party repair service whose voicemail sends you to the web.

Tropisms started in 2002 as a personal videolog or "vlog," a weblog that integrated streaming video-files with a travel diary. The site has grown into a collective movieblog with a small group of participating filmmakers. Peter Boonstra and Marcel van Brakel (NL) are currently in Chernobyl, where they upload movies in an internet cafe. Josh Koury (VS) traces his aunt and uncle that have been stationed to a small section of backwoods Tennessee by the military. Earlier this year, Luuk Bouwman (NL) went to Ethiopia to find out about computer love in a place usually associated with famine. Tropisms is a heavy site, it uses flash and quicktime streams, so a broadband connection is needed. On Macs, Mozilla is preferable.

On the piano bar website, an archived interview in the Sacramento Bee, in which the eccentric dude says:

(Reporter) Do you have a favorite weekend song to play?
(King) I've got a Sacramento song that people like.
(Reporter) What's that?
(King) I don't know. I guess it's called "Sacramento Song."
(Reporter) You go to any music spots around town?
(King) I am a music spot around town.

"When you get down to the nuts and bolts, critical care is chiefly about one thing - getting oxygen molecules and putting them into the cellular machinery so that they can be used to make energy. At high altitudes, for example, you have healthy people who have extremely low levels of oxygen in their bloodstream by virtue of their physical environment. And somehow they manage not just to be alive but to climb mountains. If you show measurements of the blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in a mountaineer on top of Everest to a critical care physician, they will say: "When did this patient die?" The numbers don't look compatible with life. How someone can go to the edge of human survival and come back to live a healthy and productive life is what critical care is all about. I've begun to regard intensive care as another extreme environment."

Let someone take an idea, do something cool with it, and not have to hesitate because of legal nitpickings. If a company can take something that I made, and turn it into a product that other people enjoy, I'm all the happier for it. Why should I care if someone else profits off of something I made? It's already free.

Demanding that someone pay homage to my work is just ego-stroking, and I'm not into that. Sure, as a courtesy it would have been nice for Jaleco to tell me "hey, thanks for the source", and they didn't, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it, because I didn't write PocketNES so people would pat me on the back.

I wrote it so people could have fun playing old games. And that's exactly what's happening here. Mission accomplished.

In what appears to be the first pharmaceutical patent revocation, China has revoked the patent. Not long after the patent was granted, pharmaceutical producers (12 in this account) requested re-examination. It isn't quite clear yet exactly what happened at that re-examination. Some claim the patent failed the detailed description required by Article 26 of China's patent code. Others claim it failed the novelty requirement. Pfizer claims its patent still stands pending appeal. The Viagra patent was already poorly enforced, and now the prognosis looks even more bleak for Pfizer.

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before—that we now have an option for all humanity to 'make it' successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."

update: Francis Hwang of Rhizome.org points out that this web page contains a proposal for a competition -- apparently, the project never secured the funding needed, so there is no actual competition, prize, or Pac Mondrian face-off. A geek can dream, though, can't s/he?

"ATTENTION To maximize connection speed, leave this modem on for 10 days after DSL installation is complete. Please Note: You can use your DSL service during this time. It is not necessary to leave your computer on, only the modem."

special guest Geoff McFetridge who will share a retrospective of his video work including his music videos for the Avalanches, Simian, Plaid and his quirky spots for Jinro, X-Games, Burton and HP. The program will also include new short films from Suk & Koch, Brett Simon and Cheryl Dunn who will present the world premiere of Come Mute. Also screening: breaking new music videos for Placebo, Mr. Lif, Armand Van Helden, Supergrass, Los Amigos Invisibles, Colder and Floria Sigismondi's latest for the Cure.

Bill Beaty points out that the creator of this image ( Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who is uncredited in the site linked above) has a lot of other optical illusions, which are well worth checking out.

There was a minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80's, with the almost simultaneous appearance of Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking ''Maus''; of the ''Love and Rockets'' series, by two California brothers, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez; and of two exceptionally smart and ambitious superhero-based books, ''Watchmen,'' by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and ''Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,'' by Frank Miller. Newspapers and magazines ran articles with virtually the same headline: ''Crash! Zap! Pow! Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!'' But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren't enough other books on the same level.

The difference this time is that there is something like a critical mass of artists, young and old, uncovering new possibilities in this once-marginal form, and a new generation of readers, perhaps, who have grown up staring at cartoon images on their computer screens and in their video games, not to mention the savvy librarians and teachers who now cater to their interests and short attention spans. The publicity that has spilled over from movies like ''Ghost World,'' originally a graphic novel by Dan Clowes, has certainly not hurt. And there is much better distribution of high-end comics now, thanks in part to two enterprising publishers, Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal and Fantagraphics Books in Seattle, which have managed to get their wares into traditional bookstores, not just the comics specialty shops. Some of the better-known graphic novels are published not by comics companies at all but by mainstream publishing houses -- by Pantheon, in particular -- and have put up mainstream sales numbers. ''Persepolis,'' for example, Marjane Satrapi's charming, poignant story, drawn in small black-and-white panels that evoke Persian miniatures, about a young girl growing up in Iran and her family's suffering following the 1979 Islamic revolution, has sold 450,000 copies worldwide so far; ''Jimmy Corrigan'' sold 100,000 in hardback, and the newly released paperback is also moving briskly.

The florid theme park is not as glorious as it used to be! "Southforkscu" as locals call it was opened in 1996 in Slobozia, South-Est of Bucharest, by the King of Romanian cheddar, Ilie Alexandru: he's one these egomaniac and corrupt nouveau-riche entrepreneurs typical of post-Communist Eastern European countries. It's like a cross between an amusement park and a luxury resort. Originally, visitors could tour the ranch, ride horses, swim in the swimming pools, visit a small zoo, enjoy the lake and climb the 50 meters Eiffel Tower. And of course, spend a night in the Dallas ranch. Larry Hagman even visited! But Alexandru went to jail for fraud. A string of investors have failed to revive the place. One of them, a Russian dude even painted the ranch in ORANGE! The zoo is closed, the horses are gone... The Romanian hotel chain now in charge wants to remodel it, open a night-club. We interviewed the manager - pure Commie style, just unbelievable. I don't have much faith in this guy's management!

This artist Sean Snyder produced an exhibit about the esthetics of the place "Script For Dallas Southfork In Hermes Land, Slobozia, Romania (2001)" It went to Paris and Berlin (Link). This page contains details about the place and a pic of the ranch before the paint job. It's quite surreal, especially when you see the Eiffel Tower from the road, behind rows of cornfields.

[H]ow to keep up? For a while, I just visited a couple of interesting and well written mp3 blogs, but then they'd link to a couple more, and I'd start reading those. And then that happened a few dozen more times. My desire to stay in touch was in conflict with my increasingly limited free time.

Wget to the rescue. It's a utility for unix/linux/etc. that goes and gets stuff from Web and FTP servers -- kind of like a browser but without actually displaying what it downloads. And since it's one of those awesomely configurable command line programs, there is very little it can't do. So I run wget, give it the URLs to those mp3 blogs, and let it scrape all the new audio files it finds. Then I have it keep doing that on a daily basis, save everything into a big directory, and have a virtual radio station of hand-filtered new music. Neat.

Update: BoingBoing reader ill says, "I was sad thinking that it was a shame that it was unix/linux only when the light popped on in my head... I have a mac, therefor I have a unix box. Here is an easy to follow tutorial on how to get wget working on OS X 10.2 (also works on 10.3) as long as you have the developer tools installed (my mac came with them installed): Link. I followed these instructions to the letter, and it's working."

On the os.x 10.3 tip, reader plemeljr adds, "Here is a nifty free program named DeepVacuum. It is a gui frontend for wget for os.x. Link"

And reader W3 says, "Wget is available for all *nix platforms _as well_ as for Windows." Link

The woman many remember best for "O Superman" is as superfly as ever, and happily cooking with multiple pots: composing garden music for Japan's world expo, planning a fall tour and going on ten-day long walks. So cool. Link

When the front flap is open, you can see the USB hub to which are connected a BT receiver, iPod sync cable, palm sync cable and webcam cable. Behind the cables sticking in the hub you see the BT gps receiver (from www.tomtom.com), to the right of the hub the webcam itself, beneath it a pen (with a little LED light, yay!). And below that my two toolkits, one containing often used tools (crosscable, various jeweller's screwdrivers,knife, PCMCIA HD, USB storage, and sticky notes) and the other containing various nuts and bolts, some PCMCIA network cards, some torque screwdrivers, and some electrician's tape)

Update: Brian sez, "The robot wasn't developed by Sanrio, but by Nagoya-based robot developer Business Design Laboratory Co. And the robot won't be released until Nov. 1, which is apparently Hello Kitty's 30th birthday."

"Here's what I do: I tell stories. I tell them simply. And I tell them in a way that is understandable to the industry's real business and financial leaders – the average consumer, the average voter, the average investor, the average reader. They are my true bosses and, ultimately, they will dictate the future course of nanotechnology as a science, an industry, an idea."

ZOOM IN, SKID AND POP
ZOOM IN, SKID AND CRASH
ZOOM IN, SKID, TRIP AND FALL
BOW STRETCH AND TWANG, ARROW HIT AND VIBRATE
SHOOT ARROW AND POP BALLOON
STRETCH, SNAP AND CRASH
STRETCH, BOING AND HIT BULLSEYE

It's happened again. Same problems as last time. mutt can't make temporary files, the computer won't shut down cleanly, then it won't boot (stays at the grey Apple screen) DiskWarrior can't repair it (and it freezes in Target Disk mode). If I go into verbose mode on book, the errors are:

Load of /sbin/mach_init, errno 2, trying /etc/mach_init Load of /etc/mach_init failed, errno 2

The hardware check, on the original CDs, comes back fine.

Coincidentally, it's after about 11 days of usage (again), and after the hard drive has got 45Gb of data on it (again).

I called tech support. Very helpful guy in the Danish tech support call centre. He says the next thing they'll ask me to do is reinstall.

Hang on, I've been here before.

I'm not going through this again.

I know this story. This is the one where I spend days doing what tech support ask, send my computer off, Apple hang onto it for months and send it back, still broken.

"The iPod 1.x firmware is simply not capable of using Talking Panda. You can either purchase a new iPod, give the software to a friend as a gift, or I can offer you a refund of $8. Unfortunately it costs us $1 for each transaction (once for sale, once for refund), so I can not offer you a full refund."

"You should ask Apple, not me. The revision 1 and 2 iPod hardware is technically capable of doing the things that the newer iPods do, at least in this case, but they simply have chosen not to add the functionality to the older firmware. If you want to do cool new things with the Notes functionality, you simply need to buy a new iPod. Seriously, there is no possible way for me to do anything for older iPods, short of developing a new firmware image myself and having the users void their warranty and lose iTunes integration! The iPod firmware is an extremely closed environment and I was lucky that I was able to get the kind of integration that I did."

01 Altered Beast
02 Punch Out
03 Balloon Fight
04 Super Mario Brothers 3
05 The Adventures of Lolo
06 Tetris
07 Kirby's Adventure
08 Punch Out
09 Excite Bike
10 Mega Man 2

As the Times article describes, Greenwald's style for distributing documentaries may be the beginning of something new -- political criticism, using interviews and clips, making a strong political point, distributed through DVDs and political action groups. (See some other examples here). On what theory does he, and others, have the right to use such material without permission? On the free culture theory we call the First Amendment: Copyright law must, the Court told us in Eldred, embed "fair use"; "fair use" is informed by First Amendment values; the values of the First Amendment most relevant here are those expressed in New York Times v. Sullivan. As with news-gathering, critical political filmmaking needs a buffer zone of protection against the overreaching of the law. And if the potential of this medium -- now liberated by digital technology -- is to be realized, we need clear precedents that establish that critics have the freedom to criticize without having to hire a lawyer first.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.

The magazine cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the election if an attack occurred on the day before or the day of the election.