UPDATE: Here's a link to the torrent. (Thanks, Brian!)

For the first time in two decades I'm not on the payroll of a large media corporation. As of today I'm on the payroll of a one-person company, comprised of me, but media is still on my agenda.

As many of you know I'm going to work hard on a project to inspire, enable and create what many have been calling a new kind of journalism. In the new world that I and many others believe is coming, the grassroots will have a fundamental and crucial role in the process -- a change that I tried to outline in my book, We the Media, which appeared in the second half of 2004.

For me, this departure is challenging and exciting. I've left what surely is one of the best jobs in mainstream journalism, and will miss my former colleagues immensely (not to mention the pay, benefits and freedom to say what I believed).

I'm also jazzed. Yes, this is a chance to truly walk my talk. But the opportunity to be in on what I consider a pivotal shift, and to be involved just as it begins to happen, made my decision easy.

The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and also breaks up existing plaques.

When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, Sanjaya Senanayake found he could not make calls on his cellphone or regular land line at first - but he could send and receive text messages from his cellphone. Mr. Senanayake, a 23-year-old television producer, has spent the last few days reporting on the disaster, frantically searching for friends and posting his experiences to the networked world through a [redacted] (desimediabitch.blogspot.com) - often via text messages relayed by a friend in Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay. "It's a very easy, instant way to get the message across," he said in a cellphone interview.

Experts say that thousands of deaths might have been avoided if warning systems had been in place to alert the people around the rim of the Indian Ocean of the tsunami. No such system exists there now, although the United States has such a system in place for countries of the Pacific basin. Those who design and use the wireless technology known as Short Message Service, currently used for chatter and advertisements, say it could be used to jumpstart governments' warning networks.

"This tragedy is going to put this more to the forefront," said Greg Wilfahrt, cofounder of SMS.ac, a company that sells text message services in more than 170 countries. The technology, though used most avidly in the United States by teenagers, is wildly popular worldwide and has accompanied the international boom in cellphone use. Even in parts of the developing world, cellphones are everywhere: almost half of the Malaysian population uses them, according to a survey released this month.

"The way they use the cellphones over there, it makes us look like amateurs," said Steve O'Rourke, a director of the Asia Pacific Research Group, which has studied cellphone use. Cellphone use has not spread quite as widely in many of those nations as it has in the developed world, of course. But getting cellphones to people living in remote, impoverished areas has been a major focus of economic development efforts. Even a few phones might do the trick in the face of an impending disaster, Mr. Senanayake said. The message need only reach "one person in every locality who has a phone," he said, and that person can spread the word.

BoingBoing reader Jacob Rome writes,

I read the post this morning about using SMS to help warn people of disasters. While this is a good idea, no one has talked about a much better technology for warning masses of people-- radio & TV broadcasting. The US has a system set up to do this, as I'm sure we're all aware from the tests of the Emergency Broadcast System. The geologists in US & Japan who recognized the threat of a tsunami could have called international broadcast media such as CNN & the BBC. In turn, by broadcasting news of the possible tsunami in the Indian Ocean, they would alert national authorities, local media & even some residents about the pending disaster. This was a tremendous missed oppurtunity, no formal system was needed to warn people and a little creativity could have send tens of thousands of lives.

Update: BoingBoing reader Gene Cowan says,

Arlington County, Virginia -- home of the Pentagon -- has been using an SMS alert system for a couple of years now. It was very helpful a week ago when a gas tanker overturned on the highway near my house -- just beside the Pentagon. Most of us woke up thinking it was another terrorist attack, but within minutes the SMS system send a message to my phone with the news of the truck crash, then a second message telling us to stay indoors because of possible fuel spills. Very helpful and reassuring.

Dear Vintage Gamer Geek,

Atari logo shirts are played out. I'm pretty sure most of you know that, but it bears repeating. They're been played out since the nerd character in Road Trip wore one and danced like a jackass to Run DMC. I hate to break it to you but Nintendo shirts are almost over too. Mark my words: Commodore shirts are going to be "the next big thing".

But why Commodore? Because when all else fails, it's best to go as retro as you possibly can. Since I couldn't find any Timex Sinclair shirts, Commodore had to be it. So pull out your VIC-20, C64 or C128 and let's party.

Best wishes to everyone in 2005!

The 17-page document states flatly that torture violates U.S. and international law and omits two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.

"Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture," said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.

Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement document to be released Friday. The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee is to consider President Bush's nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.

Here is the actual memo document, via the BBC story: Link to PDF(Thanks abi). Choice words in the final graf:

"There is no exception under the statute permitting torture to be used for a "good reason." Thus, a defendant's motive (to protect national security, for example) is not relevant to the question whether he has acted with the requisite specific intent under the statute."

Concrete Ron describes himself as "perhaps the greatest video editor of all time", and anyone who's ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn't argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of "raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort" in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup. If we ever had to show visitors from another planet what's going on in our collective brains at any given moment, we'd make them tune in here.

Whois shows the crowd behind Exeem are in fact a company by the name Swarm Systems Inc. that are in fact located in Saint Kitts and Nevis, so would presumably be free from prosecution and lawsuits like Sharman Networks.

Just wanted to let you guys know that exeem IS compatable with torrent files, you can load them up just like any other client. The ads sloncek was talking about are just ads not adware. The reason there isnt a mac or linux version is cause the program is still in beta and chances are that eventually there will be mac and linux versions. Here are some screenshots of it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Keep in mind that these are shots of the private beta so the public beta will probably be different since it has changed a lot sinse version 0.1.

(Check out the cover of the 1960s Mechanix Illustrated near the bottom of the page, too. The articles sound great: "ICE CUBES MADE WITH FLASHLIGHT BATTERIES," "NEW ARMY COMBAT VEHICLE 'WALKS' LIKE A MAN", and "WEEGEE TELLS HOW TO MAKE THOSE WEIRD PHOTOS." I'd buy that magazine for 25 cents.) Link (Via Mookie)

Instead of using the tiny pieces of metal that add up to lots waste, this ingenious little device joins your papers by punching a small, neat hole in your documents and folding the remaining flaps together for a secure binding.

Here's a rough update. Smartbridges located in Singapore has pledged 5 access points to begin with and more as specific needs arise. They can be used to connect remote locales over a distance or to create coverage in a local area.

Individuals have pledged spare antennas and radio bridges. Several people have volunteered their time and expertise, including volunteers from the US and Europe prepared to travel to the area to help set up the equipment.

I have been asked specifically to help rebuild communications from people in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and an island near the epicenter without any telecom connection to nearby Sumatra.

We are now working in coordination with the efforts of the Wireless Comm Association International, and I will be attending the Jan. 13th disaster relief meeting in san jose. Other wireless activists and group leaders have contacted me about working together, which I am thrilled to do. I am in touch with companies that want to help, but are working with us to determine what specific models we could put in use.

Bloggers without Borders has pledged 10% of current donations will go to socalwug for this effort.

Donations can be made to socalwug via paypal (through my account at mo@transstellar.com) or credit card. Equipment can be sent to me to redistribute or may ship directly from the manufacturer to the site if practical (as in SmartBridges case from Singapore.)

I doubt that I'm the only GTD nerd who now has faster and more ubiquitous access to the internet than back in 2001, when Getting Things Done was first published. Just as one data point, I work primarily on internet-related projects from home on a 1.5Mb DSL line and house-wide wifi: "@online" is virtually all of the time for me. So, the GTD contexts associated with my work demand more subtlety to be useful (or even worth the bother of maintaining them).

Take me and multiply it by an order of magnitude for students with Hiptops, full-time AIM access, and a completely wifi campus with unlimited, lightning-fast bandwidth. I suspect that this desk-free, under-25 crowd are a group worth Davidco devoting some avid attention to.

Debbie Marter, who works on a wild tiger conservation programme on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, one of the worst-hit areas in Sunday's disaster, said she was not surprised to hear there were no dead animals.

"Wild animals in particular are extremely sensitive," she said. "They've got extremely good hearing and they will probably have heard this flood coming in the distance. There would have been vibration and there may also have been changes in the air pressure which will have alerted animals and made them move to wherever they felt safer."

Like all the hacks books, Gaming Hacks is arranged around 100 "hacks" -- tricks you can use to get more from gaming. They proceed from the simple to the hellishly complex, so there's something here for everyone.

That's even more true than is usual in the Hacks series, though, because of Carless's incredible, comprehensive, eclectic view of the kinds of hacks that might interest a gamer. Here are some of my favorites:

• How to hack an old Atari 2600 controller: rehabilitate your old paddles without WD40, then splice them into a modern PC (also: how to download, play and write "homebrew" games for the 2600 and other boat-anchor platforms that are produced by console aficionados who enjoy the challenge of programming for 8-bit, minimal-RAM game environments)
• Roll your own "machinima" -- movies made by recording the action taking place in a game environment, then dubbing in studio-recorded voices
• Learn to read enough Japanese to play grey-market games imported from Japan
• Create your own scripts for automating repetitive "grinding" tasks in massively multiplayer games
• Etiquette for joining adventuring parties in MMOs
• Detect and foil cheaters in networked first-person shooter games
• Build a killer home theatre audio setup to maximize your game platform's 3D sound
• Build a portable device out of an old console, like the NES
• Overclock your console
  

Combine that with a stupendous introduction by sf-writer-turned-game-writer Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the Half-Life series for Valve, and a slew of highly knowledgeable co-authors who contributed various tips, and you've got the perfect mix of informative, enjoyable and fascinating. This book is staying on my shelf. Link

Five things I'll be doing while you're at Burning Man

1. carefully stewarding my pallor
2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
3. defecating indoors--copiously, often, and without queueing
4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named "Shanti"
5. wearing clothes--lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes

Update: The "People of the Year" ABC featured here -- bloggers. Link to segment transcript. The ABC News piece closed with a screenshot of this Photoshopped "fantasy" cover of what some thought a more deserving candidate for Time's "Person of the Year" issue. The image pays homage to Dan Gillmor's essential book, We The Media.

Update 2: Link to video: WMV (4.19 MB) (Thanks tons, Mike O!)

After a few days of having a teaser on their site, Suprnova's Sloncek did an interview with NovaStream.org about a new P2P app and network called eXeem that will be released for download in a couple of weeks. It's being developed by a new, unnamed company, which asked Sloncek to be a representative for them.

It will be Windows only, with no Mac or Linux versions planned at this time. It will be ad supported, and not just banner ads either. It will be full of adware, most of which you can opt out of, according to Sloncek. Some of the less intrusive ones will be required for the application to function though.

Apparently eXeem is based off of BitTorrent, but is different enough that it can't be called a BitTorrent client, and I assume it won't be compatible with BitTorrents either. The application will be downloadable from eXeem.com in a couple of weeks.

I have had the worst time setting up a single, integrated workflow that works for me. I've flitted endlessly between text files, Entourage, Mail.app, vim, online RSS-based calendars, all-in-one apps, paper planners, Moleskines, index cards, and more in search of the right combination. Each tool and habit has its benefits, to be sure, but I never seem to land on a really satisfying set of apps and practices that feels like it has exactly the right "flow" to it. Most corrosively, I often (really often) blow tons of time ramping up to some new bauble only to ultimately discover it lacks some critical piece (export, reminders, etc. etc.). Bad habits for someone who ostensibly wants his work life to be more productive and waste-free.

Of course, I can write some of the time and effort down to "research" and the fact that part of my work involves learning about new productivity widgets, but I can't avoid the fact that I still don't have a method of handling all my information (and actual work) in a way that I find satisfying and intuitive. Plus I have to admit to some terrible habits surrounding my ongoing search for "The Perfect System(TM)."

The study explores the implications of the current terms of rights acquisition on the creative process of documentary filmmaking in today's marketplace, and from them makes recommendations to lower costs and promote creativity. It focuses on the lived experience of independent documentary filmmakers who work primarily within a broadcast environment (sometimes with a theatrical "window"), in coping with the creative challenges created by acquiring and granting rights. Click here to read Untold Stories.

Independent documentary filmmakers were selected because their work regularly requires them to interact with a wide variety of rights holders, from archives for photographs and stock footage to musical performers to other filmmakers. This is especially clear when it is a historical documentary or one that comments on commercial popular culture, but it is an issue for most documentary filmmakers, no matter what the subject matter. When a trademark appears on a baseball cap, or a subject happens to be watching television, or a radio in the background plays a popular song, or a subject sings "Happy Birthday," rights clearance becomes a professional and creative challenge.

Overpeer is the same company that the recording industry has hired in the past to dump fake versions of songs on file sharing networks. What the article doesn't answer is whether or not the industry hired Overpeer to dump spyware on the network as well, but it's likely they're pleased either way. Overpeer defends their actions by saying that anyone obviously deserves what they get because, obviously, they were looking for unauthorized files. It's not clear that everyone would agree. Sneaking malicious files onto someone's computer because "they deserved it!" doesn't seem like a very good justification. What may be even more important to this story, however, is the revelation of just how easy it is, thanks to a huge loophole in Microsoft's copy protection technology, to include a malicious file with an audio or video file. Basically, because Windows DRM needs to look for a license, all anyone needs to do is point that license to a website that loads malicious content and off you go. Thank you Microsoft, for creating a huge loophole that will probably make sure millions of new computers are loaded with spamming, DDOSing trojans shortly.

This is Pearl. I am currently in Bangkok waiting for a flight I have cajoled my way onto. I am one of the survivors. With only scratches, briuses and infections I am fine. Everything I own (almost - a small plastic jesus doll made it through!) is gone. My house was wiped out, as were 3000 hotel rooms, around 600 other resident/vacation homes and almost all the business' in the area.

Our house was 150 feet from the beach, that is THE hardest hit beach in Thailand. As water rushed into our house and then ripped open the second story wall, I leapt off our second story roof and swam and swam and swam, riding the wave deep into the jungle, as it destroyed building after building, ripping up trees and spinning diesel trucks into the air. All this with me in the center of it clinging to anything that floats and swimming to avoid the standing buildings or trees that crushed and impaled many others. The wave deposited me, a small swedish girl and a 60 foot poilice cruiser (medium sized steel patrol boat - around 20 tons) 1 kilometer from the beach - in the jungle.

For the next 5 hours i set up a triage center and cared for dead and dying foreigners. Finally we got helicopters in, and I made my way back towards the main town. I found Karin (my girlfriend) and collapsed. We had both assumed each other dead as the destruction was so massive. She had climbed a coconut tree, wrapped her arms and legs and held on. The water kept pullng the tree and her under, but it and she survived. That day I saw around 100 bodies. The next day, another 200, and the day we left there were cattle trucks full of rotting corpses being taken to Phuket.

After days of no news, dwindling food and water - a group of divers virtually kidnapped a driver to take us away. Every few hours someone had created a rumor that another wave was coming, or there was a gas explosion, or the Muslim rebels were attacking. None were true, but it caused massive panic and killed many more people. We were already under massive psychological strain, and this just made it insane. We ran.

My town is gone. There are probably 2% of the original buildings in a recognizable form. I am very lucky to even be making my way home. The U.S. goverment offered me a phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport. No hotel, no food, no flight home. I was told that I could take out a loan if I could list three people who would vouch for me at home. The process would only take a few days. I was alone, injured (superficially - but I sure did look bad), no possesions, no money and my government offered my a book.

I don't know who or what to acknowledge for my presence. That will take a lot of soul-searching. I am certainly among the luckiest people in Thailand right now. According to local news it looks like my town had a SURVIVAL rate of 60%. Please think of what you value. Look around, have you given a hug to someone recently? Anyone? If everything you had were taken away, who would you turn too? In the end it is each other, not the things, that make the world spin. I won't ever forget that.

Update: Una traducción en español del recuento personal de Pearl está aquí. (gracias, edmz)

*Following up on a previous BoingBoing post, an anonymous Microsoft employee says:

Responding to this: "Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."

Most of Microsoft's efforts regarding Tsunami relief is focused internally. MS offers a dollar for dollar charitable donation match to all FTE, and is doing everything it can to expidite the process of trying to get the money to where it will do the most good.

* Tsunami Outreach: Bloggers Without Borders' first international project launched last night. Link (Thanks, Sean)

* BoingBoing reader Nicholas Bentley says,

"Hello Xeni, We thought you might be interested in passing on the news of one person's great efforts for tsunami relief. We wanted to donate to a tsunami relief effort with our funds in a PayPal account but had difficulty finding an agency that took PayPal. Eventually we found Kevin McDonald's site where he is doing a fantastic job of collecting PayPal contributions and passing them on to AmeriCares (AmeriCares disaster relief has a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator.) Kevin has even persuaded AmeriCare's webmaster to see about accepting PayPal transfers direct in the near future."

*BoingBoing reader Chris Cummer says,

Family members of a close personal friend of mine are still missing in Thailand. Her father and brother have flown there to try and find them, as this Globe and Mail article details, but the help of the blog community would also be greatly appreciated. I've posted a request for help on my blog at Missing in Khao Lak, Thailand. Hopefully someone might have some information for a Canadian family that's been living on the edge of grief for five days now.

* Reader Roberto says, "Every year at this time, I empty my jar full of loose change. But this year I discovered I could donate to the Red Cross (among other charities including UNICEF) from a Coinstar machine at my drugstore. And big kid that I am, I had fun playing with the machine." Link.

* Reader Chris Holland says,

I stumbled upon Austin's Blog who's done a fine job of gathering more videos. So earthlink homepage servers don't get creamed, I've created this torrent gathering 5 of the videos from his blog that weren't already covered in the previous torrent which is still available here. Remember, the more people click those torrent links, the easier and faster it is for everybody else to download them too. And try to keep the torrent opened for as long as possible even after you're done downloading. Big Kudos to prodigem's very easy-to-use torrent service. Link

* Andy Carvin says,

I've just set up a tsunami news digest using the news aggregator Kinja.com. The page contains latest news feeds and first-person blogs related to the tsunami disaster from around the globe. I'd like to see others add their own tsunami-related feeds to the site. If you have a news feed or blog that's focusing on the tsunami, or are reading one that you'd like to add to the digest, please visit the website and log on with the following info: login: tsunami-info / password: southasia. Once you've logged in, you can add a news source to the digest by pasting it into the "Add a Favorite" form field in the right column. Or, you can follow this shortcut.

* Stuart Ian Burns tells BoingBoing:

This del.icio.us tag is offering good links to information about the Tsunami. There is also a tag at flickr: Link. And The SEA-EAT blog have begun a profile to collect photos of the missing: Link.

"Everyone wants to talk about the tsunamis, and so yesterday a reporter contacted me to ask about what impact all this would have on cryptozoology. Questions about cryptozoology in the midst of a global disaster? I frankly was shocked. But then I saw this as an opportunity to emphasize humanitarian efforts, first and foremost, and stressed zoological awareness would be an objective far down the priority list."

Andrew Westphal, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says he was recently able to examine some microscopic dust from outer space with the help of the RX5's plastic lens. That is because a conventional microscope's glass lens would have suffered from the hydrofluoric acid used to separate the particles from other elements. "Had it not been for the toy, we would have been at a loss," he says.

Meanwhile, patients suffering from Morgellons, a rare type of skin disease, have been getting medical information by using the microscope in sending images of their lesions to Morgellons Research Foundation in McMurray, Pa.

I'm wondering if the idiots who are doing this are using lasers like the ones sold at Lasershoppe.com. Wow: I just went to lasershoppe to read more about the $600 lasers the site sells (which can burn holes through plastic cups, and I learned that they are no longer selling lasers because they don't want to have anything to do with people who would use their lasers maliciously. They link to a CNN article that says six commercial jets have had their cockpits illuminated by laser beams in the last four days. (Photo by Phillip Torrone)

UPDATE: Patricio Lopez sez: A while ago the Ask the Pilot colum at Salon dealt with the whole lase threat issue. Excerpt:

For the record, even a well-aimed laser would be highly unlikely to cause a crash. Hitting both pilots cleanly in the face, through a refractive wraparound windshield, would require a great deal of luck, and even a temporarily blinded crew would still have the means to avoid disaster. Do not equate the results of a laser strike with, for example, having to drive sightless through a busy intersection. Maintaining a jet's stability would be challenging under the circumstances, but not impossible.

The threatened resignations...reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a "pseudo-science" that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments...

The list of critics include FSU's two Nobel laureates - Robert Schreiffer, a physicist, and Harold Walter Kroto, a chemist - and Robert Holton, the chemistry professor who developed the cancer-fighting drug Taxol, which has brought FSU tens of millions of dollars in royalties. In recent weeks, more than 500 faculty members have signed petitions against the chiropractic school, including about 70 in the medical college, said Dr. Raymond Bellamy, an assistant professor who is leading the charge against the proposal.

DNA extracted from these cultures may then be re-sequenced, translated to musical notation and interpreted as new musical forms.It is anticipated that the first public manifestation of GeneMusiK will be a series of elegant body adornments that contain ‘musicalised’ synthetic DNA sequences. Each item will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and an audio CD of the musical sequence. Subsequent editions are envisioned that will contain DNA sequences hybridised within bacterial cultures, together with installations of living ‘musical low-life’.

apple cripples recording on an ipod so belkin and griffin then have to sell us add-on devices for over $50 that can only record at 8khz, which is all pretty shitty. apparently (the rumor is) apple does this so people don’t use their ipods to record stuff they think we shouldn’t, like concerts, whatever.

but don’t worry, there’s a way around it and you can record at high quality, all for free.

He's just posted part one of a roundup of his lessons learned from a year of pursuing the lessons of Getting Things Done (more to come tomorrow). It's really good stuff, and it's helped me make sense of my last decade's work.

In a previous life as a producer and project manager for some good-sized web projects, I once approached my work with a completely baseless optimism and sense of possibility that I had absolutely no business feeling--let alone foisting off on others as way to guide big projects. Especially given how extravagantly long-range I now realize most of those projects' aspirations really were. Yikes. Simpler times.

The reality is that projects change, and projects break; that's what they do. It's their job. The smaller your project is, and the shorter the distance there is between "here" and "there," the less likely you are to have to chuck it and start over for reasons you couldn't possibly have foreseen when you were knitting up them fancy GANTT charts for Q3/2007.

You know how it works with The Big Plan. Projects kick off, a series of heavy documents with 4-color covers is produced and distributed, everyone gets pumped for a week or two, and then somewhere, somehow, along the way, changes start to rain down, and the pretty, pretty plans for the next 3/6/9/12 months go completely to hell, often taking team morale and productivity right along with them. Say what you will about the volatility of go-go dotcoms and the nature of venture IT projects, but two bald facts won't wipe away: things always change, and Big Project Plans make great door stops.

Since picking up GTD, I've gotten more comfortable with employing informal, "back of the envelope" planning to derive very short-term goals and actions. Clients in particular seem to really like this. It helps them keep a handle on the tab, plus they all enjoy seeing one piece of the work rolling out every month or so. All without the need for endless commitments, rosaries, or finger crossing.

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Update: Ole sez, "Enabling pipelining in Firefox can speed up complex page retrievals, as you note, but it can also break Flash.  This is a Macromedia thing not a Firefox thing but that’s why the app defaults to pipelining disabled."

Update 2: Gav sez, "There are reasons why Firefox isn't configured like that out of the box. Asa at Mozilla.org explains why.

Here's a modern twist on an old favorite: buy a Powerbook for a double-sawbuck. What's in the black, sleek Powerbook box?

"A fake laptop made of gray garbage bag and cardboard, spray-painted platinum silver and finished with A HAND-PAINTED APPLE LOGO DONE IN WITE-OUT."

Oh, man, that's some Martha Stewartoid crackhead creativity. Link (via Making Light)

Update: Here's an archived video file of tonight's ABC News segment on Google, in WMV. Offers to convert or torrent welcomed with thanks. Link to 3.4 MB file (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine!)

"I came across his work in 1993," said Michael Bartalos, a San Francisco-based illustrator who was among the first to locate Flora. "Our styles were very similar - strangely similar, actually - but after I met him I was even more influenced." Among the other prominent artists and illustrators today who are strongly influenced by Flora's art are Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, J. D. King and Melinda Beck, who all wrote appreciations for Mr. Chusid's book, each praising his effortlessly jazzy spirit. Gene Deitch, a contemporary of Flora's, admits that through the 40's and 50's he was "brazenly imitating his style."

The remote cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only about three dozen are inhabited, is home to six tribes of Mongoloid and African origin who have lived there for thousands of years. Many of these tribal people are semi-nomadic and subsist on hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.

"They are a vital link to our prehistoric past. If they are lost, India and the world lose a bit of their glorious heterogeneity," said Ajoy Bagchi, executive director of the People's Commission on Environment and Development, India, which has worked with tribal groups in the region for years.

"Even a small loss in any of these groups, barring the more numerous Nicobarese, could seriously endanger their survival. We need to immediately do a count on how many of them are alive."

Scott Hanselman proposes that Google allow bloggers that use AdSense to donate ad proceeds to tsunami relief. Link (Thanks, Peter Provost).

Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network says, "In response to this week's devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Digital Divide Network has created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness: Link. The virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site's Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries."

BoingBoing reader Andrew Falconer proposes that folks who've received holiday gift cards convert them into donations to a tsunami relief charity. "I've emailed Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Swapagift.com regarding gift card donations directly to tsunami relief charities. Amazon.com has already implemented the ability to donate via their One-Click system."

Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Hey -- If, like me, you are a non-Indian, find reading Indian new sources valuable (especially during this disaster), but don't really know your lakh from your crore, and find the placement of commas in Indian numbers utterly baffling, this guide to the Indian numbering system will prove helpful: Term / Figure / No. of zeros / In words
lakh (lac) / 1,00,000/ 5 / Hundred Thousand
crore / 1,00,00,000/ 7 / Ten million
arab / 1,00,00,00,000/ 9 / 1 billion
kharab / 1,00,00,00,00,000 / 11 / 100 billion

Chris Holland says,

I've used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage -- many of them big enough to hold refrigerators -- built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.

Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process -- before the bodies become impossible to identify.

In a well-choreographed drill -- they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo -- almost as if they were trying to rescue the living -- rather than preserve the dead.

On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.

The pictures are grisly -- bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais –- all victims of the earth's unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.

From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi's SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman's post about Myanmar), there's a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:

"At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: 'Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety.' His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo walking by. 'It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo.'"

Link to story.
Fox News did a segment on this subject yesterday. I spoke with anchor Jon Scott about some of the blogosphere reports we've been pointing to from BoingBoing in recent days. Here are video clips of the Fox News segment: Real, Windows (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine, for TiVoing and kindly hosting.)

There have been a number of related stories out in the past 24 hours in the Wall Street Journal (Link, sub required), Libération (France) (Link), the Inquirer (UK) (Link), and AP (Link). (Thanks to BB readers including Jean-Luc for pointers).

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Chris takes a "middle ground" position that I've heard described as "radical centrism" -- his position is that the EFF's opposition to DRM is "idealistic" and that there is therefore a practical "reality" that is better suited to the world. I think it's a false dichotomy, and I'd like to have a little go at Chris's post here and see if I can show why:

Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

But all of those propositions are materially untrue. Start with "DRM is protection." DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is; any entertainment exec you put on this spot on this will retreat to a badly-thought-out mantra to the effect that "DRM is a speedbump, it's not meant to keep files off the Internet, it's meant to 'keep honest users honest.'" As Ed Felten has pointed out, keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM may keep a naive user from buying a cheap DVD abroad and bringing it home, and it may make it possible to charge you for things that you used to get for free, like format-shifting, but it won't ever keep an honest user honest.

DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the complete impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money. Chris loves his Microsoft Media Center PC, "essentially a DVR on steroids" -- at least, he loves it so far. That's because he hasn't been bitten on the ass by it yet, like this guy, who bought a Media Center PC so that he could catch the Sopranos and burn them to DVD. When he bought the PC, it was capable of doing that. Halfway through the season, the studios reached into his living room and broke his PC, disabling the feature that allowed him to burn his Sopranos episodes to DVD. And if you got suckered into letting your cable company give you a "free" PVR, you've got a nasty shock coming this season: your episodes of Six Feet Under will delete themselves from your hard drive after two weeks, whether you've gotten around to watching them or not.

If you want to watch all the Sopranos or Six Feet Unders in a row at the end of the season, you'll have to do it on Pay Per View. You'll have to buy what you used to get for free: the right to record a show and watch it for as long as you'd like. You get less, you pay more. And the studios can change the rules of the game after you've bought the box and brought it home: the only way you can protect your investment is if you can somehow ensure that no studio executive decides to revoke one of the features you paid for back when the box was on the show-room floor. Remember, these are the same studio execs who are duking it out for the right to limit how long a pause button can work for.

Chris likes the iTunes Music Store, calling it a success, but it's got the same problems as the Media Center and all the other DRM devices. The record labels can demand that Apple selectively break your music player, removing features based on secret negotiations, long after you've made your purchases. Apple will even force "updates" on you that remove features that you've chosen to add to your device, shutting you out of listening to your own music on the player you shelled out good money for.

The problem is that once your device vendor sells you out to the studios, they're 0wned. The studios' protection racket lets them demand practically anything from a device vendor -- check out "selectable output control" for some truly heinous world-domination horseshit.

So, Chris, that's why I disagree with your "realistic" notion:

• There's no reason to believe that DRM makes more content available
• There's no reason to let the studios "call the shots" -- we haven't before this
• There's no reason to believe that DRM makes media cheaper, quite the contrary
• The features that make your "reasonable" DRM palatable to the market today can and are rescinded tomorrow

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast, but they can't find any dead animals.

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Dvorak: "The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers -- not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity."

Smith: "[Those statistics] show that the number of Mac users online (or at least visiting the W3 Schools site) has gone from 1.8% in March 2003 to 2.3% in December 2003 to 2.7% in December 2004. But noting that the number is increasing would completely destroy Dvorak's premise, so he doesn't mention it." Link (Via Scoble)

I am working to organize a disaster relief effort to help those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. I'd like to send wireless equipment and expertise to damaged areas to help reconnect the people. I'm still working out the details and will update you as more develops. It will be organized with folks from the Southern California Wireless Users Group, SOCALWUG and other wireless groups that wish to participate. I started calling it the Post-Tsunami Reconnect.

Xeni Jardin mentioned the effort today on Fox News Channel during an interview about bloggers and the tsunami. I will have a video excerpt available soon. Here is a statement I sent to the Center for International Disaster Information about the effort:

"We are a Southern California based user community of experts and advocates of wireless data communications. Wireless community members supplied technical expertise and wireless equipment for the Florida hurricane relief efforts and to military personnel stationed in Iraq. We would like to organize, collect, and deliver wireless data equipment to disaster relief workers and others in the affected region to help maintain a high level of communication and internet access ability. We would also be able to send engineers into the area to help bring connections online."

For more information or to discuss a donation of funds, equipment, or your expertise, contact Mike Outmesguine by email "mo at wifi-toys.com" or voice: +1-818-889-9445 ext. 102

Previous BoingBoing posts: Link

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.

PS: I am reasonably certain that this server will be shortly overwhelmed. If you've got a mirror, email me and I'll post a link to it. However, I have no such mirror, so if you find yourself unable to get a copy, don't look at me!

Update 1: Ian Clarke, the co-author of the awesome P2P tool Freenet, has graciously offered to distribute this file through Dijjer, his new (still pre-beta) P2P content distribution tool; here's the Dijjer Link

Update 2: Brian Arnold offers this more conventional mirror

Update 3: David Chin was good enough to make and seed this Torrent for the file (though I have my doubts about BitTorrent's efficacy with a file of a paltry five megabytes)

Update 4: Guillaume Champeau sends in these links you can use to get the file over P2P nets: eDonkey/eMule Link, Gnutella (Limewire, Bearshare, Shareaza...) Link

Update 5: Phil Nelson provides this old-fashioned Web mirror

Update 6: Jeroen Sangers also has a traditional Web mirror

Update 7: Andre Nantel invites us to consume her/his "20,000 megs of unused bandwidth for this month," via this link

Update 8: Doppeljr has this mirror on offer

Update 9: Matt Lyon has an archive for your downloading pleasure

Update 10: If a dijjer link isn't obscure enough, how about a Red Swoosh link, courtesy of Travis Kalanick?

Update 11: Scott Lawrence's mirror promises unlimited bandwidth!

Update 12: Everett Guerny provides another .edu mirror.

One possible explanation is increased metabolism. "The more a person weighs, the higher their basal metabolic rate, which can shorten the duration of a medication's effectiveness," she said. Another possibility is that the heavier a person is, the more liver enzymes they have to clear medications from the body, causing a drop in circulating blood levels of the drug. A third theory is based on the fact that the active ingredients in oral contraceptives – the hormones estrogen and progesterone – are stored in body fat. "The more fat a person has, the more likely the drug is sequestered, or trapped, in the fat instead of circulating in the bloodstream," (epidemiologist Victoria) Holt said.

"The combination of newly developed high-response hardware and the new Posture Control technology enables ASIMO to proactively bend or twist its torso to maintain its balance and prevent the problems of foot slippage and spinning in the air, which accompany movement at higher speeds. ASIMO is now capable of running at a speed of 3km/hour. In addition, walking speed has been increased from the previous 1.6 km/hour to 2.5 km/hour."

Update: Daniel sez, "You might want to amend your article to say that the Steve Jackson interviewed is not the Steve Jackson of the famous RPG company Steve Jackson Games, makers of G.U.R.P.S., Toon, Ogre, Car Wars and other RPG classics along with the popular trading card game, Illuminati: New World Order."

They set up a cartel in 1995, now called the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA), to dole out these licenses. Anyone making players without one is breaking the law. A Fox Studios executive told me, "It's a polite marketplace." Sure, if polite means stagnant.

Think of all the things you can do with a track from a CD now that you couldn't do 10 years ago: rip it to your laptop, turn it into a ring tone, send it to your friends, burn a mix. Many of these capabilities are illegal, and the recording industry has tried to stop them all, but they're out there, challenging the old rules and feeling their place in the market. Innovators have tried to enable the same flexibility for the DVD. Last year 321 Studios released software that let you back up prerecorded DVDs, but the MPAA sued it into bankruptcy before a court could rule on whether or not the product was legal.

Just last month, this magazine gave a Best of What's New award to a $27,000 movie jukebox from Kaleidescape, praising the maker's efforts to appease Hollywood by locking down content on the device so it can't be shared. Kaleidescape thinks the product is within the boundaries of its DVD-CCA license, but my Deep Throat on the cartel says the group disagrees and is currently deciding how the company will be punished. Penalties range from a stern warning to fines to lawsuits. (When I called the DVD-CCA for an official line, I got this reply: "I've been asked to tell you we have no comment." "Who asked you to tell me that?" "I can't tell you.")

There's two possible explanations for this story. One is that Myanmar, with 1930 kilometers of coastline, numerous fishing villages and huts on stilts along the coast, and a common border with Thailand - where over 1500 are reported dead - miraculously escaped the effect of the tsunami.

The other explanation is that Myanmar's famously secretive military government hasn't wanted to reveal the extent of the tsunami damage to the outside world... and especially to their own citizens. (As in many represive regimes, it's easier to to get news from outside the country than news from within it.)

Wired seems to be a little soft on DRM these days; the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you've bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you're publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: "If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled."

There's a strong tie here for the use-case for BitTorrent. I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

Which brings me back to Clive's casual note that Microsoft DRM can keep media "out of pirate hands." It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.

Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate." Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.

Cohen seems curiously unmoved by the storm raging around him. "With BitTorrent, the cat's out of the bag," he shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about piracy and the future of media, and at first I think he's avoiding the subject because it's so legally sensitive. But after a while, I realize it simply doesn't interest him much.

He'd rather just work on his code. He'd rather buckle down and figure out new ways to make BitTorrent more efficient. He'd rather focus on something that demands crazy, hair-pulling logic.

The people being photographed have no interest in the photographs being made; the people making the photographs have no interest in the photographs they have made. 

It turns out that iPods have a "museum" mode where text notes and audio clips can be combined so that museums and other venues can hand out iPods to patrons, who trigger narration by clicking the iPod's button based on signs at each exhibit. This is also well-suited to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games.

So here's a choose-your-own-adventure Harry Potter parody game for the iPod -- wow! Link (scroll down page to 3/25/04 entry)

"Struck mid-size tower with car going 25mph, propelling it 15-20 feet forward. This causes damage to car but troublesome DVD drive finally ejected jammed disc upon contact with pavement. Still worked but HDD reported errors, and case wasn't attractive. Sold on eBay (with new case and HDD). Beware of this computer if you find it on eBay."

"Slammed keyboard with fists hard enough to pop most of the keys off. Lost the 'A' key and the top row of characters stopped working. Threw keyboard into the swimming pool. Kinda nice watching it sink."

"Smashing boards and plastic bits with a hammer is satisfying. Stomping on things that make a nice "CRUNCH" noise is even more satisfying. "

"I once shot a computer with a .50 cal BMG sniper rifle."

"This is a natural color, 60-centimeter (2-foot) high-resolution QuickBird satellite image featuring the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka. Imagery was collected at 10:20 a.m. local time, slightly less than four hours after the 6:28 a.m. (local Sri Lanka time) earthquake and shortly after the moment of tsunami impact."

Link (Thanks, WW!).
Previous BB posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Craigslist - now partly owned by eBay - beat out the papers by being more customer friendly and by being quicker to act than its rivals. Other papers around the US should take notice of Craigslist' Bay area success, as the site continues its march into new cities.

Unlike most first-time visitors entering the world headquarters of Biolathe, Inc., Dr. Samuel Fisher didn't pause at the moist cloying air that moved across the building’s threshold like breath. If anything, his pace increased; he threw his shoulders forward and his streaker-clad feet rushed as if to prevent a fall, sinking into the plush rose ruglings with each step. Unlike the sunlit diamond and gold, seemingly mandatory in corporate buildings, this lobby throbbed pink and organic. The entire building was alive. Despite the omnipresence of biotechnology, walking inside it rather than sitting on it still made most hesitate.

Not Fisher -- he was in the middle of five major projects. He didn't believe his life would be as transformed by the upcoming presentation as the Biolathe agent had hinted. He charged ahead, glancing about the nearly empty lobby for signs to guide him. What was this? He’d been here six seconds already! There was never enough time to waste any of it. He decided there was one thing he would hesitate over in the future: being talked into a physical meeting.

In the middle of the cavernous chamber Fisher stopped abruptly, brought up short by a bipedal mobile with wrinkled gray skin attached to the wall by a pulsing umbilical.

An entry on LJ prompted me to look at Boing Boing entry concerning the sale of Disney parody/porn on Ebay. Thought you'd appreciate knowing that Disney animators actually made an orgy scene using characters from Snow White.

I once worked at Facets Multimedia, an art movie house in Chicago. During the mid 1980s, I attended a lecture by famous animator Seamus Culhane. Mr. Culhane had worked for Fleischer, Disney and Warner Brothers at different times. And he was an animator on Snow White. (Mr. Culhane was fired by Walt Disney for trying to organize an independent union - but that's another story.)

During his talk, Mr. Culhane was asked if there had ever been any porn created that was like the famous picture from The Realist [Ed. Note: the "Disney porn" image auctioned last week on eBay]. He answered that, yes, the work was so long that the animators got bored and created very explicit orgy scene sketches and cells. He further said that when Walt Disney heard what was going on, he personally hunted down and burned all of the objectionable material.

Thought you'd like to hear this story. I don't know if Mr. Culhane or any other animators were ever quoted in a new source about this episode in Disney history.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a pilot study looking at whether the recreational hallucinogen can help terminally-ill patients lessen their fears, quell thoughts of suicide and make it easier for them to deal with loved ones.

"End of life issues are very important and are getting more and more attention, and yet there are very few options for patients who are facing death," Dr John Halpern, the Harvard research psychiatrist in charge of the study, said.

The small four-month study is expected to begin early next spring. It will test the drug's effects on 12 cancer patients from the Lahey Clinic Medical Centre in the Boston area. The research is being sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a non-profit group that plans to raise 250,000 (-184,816) to fund it.

Bobby: I've played this on my cell phone.

EGM: [Pointing to the humans on the ground] What do they look like?

Parker: They look like those little characters in the game Life, the little people you have to stick in your car.

EGM: Before this came out in compilations, we used to put quarters in arcade machines.

Parker: You wasted quarters on this?

EGM: Yeah.

Parker: That's so sad.

Now Hugh has expanded the piece into a short book, which is online in its entirety. He's found an agent and the agent is shopping the book -- I'd certainly buy a copy!

Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don't happen when everything is neat and "just so". Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they've got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There's just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.

Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die. I've already done so. I know all about it. It almost cost me my liver but like I said, education is expensive.

The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.

We live in amazing and interesting times. If we're lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving i

"Say I sit down at a black jack table and I have a player's card. I place it and a $100 bill on the table. My card is swiped which places me at that table," explained Mr. Meyer. (A player's card is another way for casinos to track frequent gamblers. They earn points on the card for free meals, or other rewards.)

Without RFID, "as I play over time, the only way the casino can estimate the kind of player I am, is by using pit boss estimates. That's a pretty rough estimate. That's where table tracking comes in. Every chip is associated with me and is tracked using a reader. Exactly what I'm betting and losing or winning is tracked automatically. Without tracking, they (casino) don't know what I'm betting." In other words, the reasoning behind RFID utilization is that the casino will know what every player is doing at every table.

"Say you move away from one table with $500 in chips. You now go to cash in those chips. Those RFID chips can be read at the cage and associated with you. In your moment of generosity, you give a cocktail waitress a $25 chip. When she cashes it in, we know how generous a tipper you are."

"I did a prototype of a ‘pitching machine’ sort of thingie powered by 2 sewing machine motors that was supposed to fire anything from pencils to Sharpies, but it turned out to be insanely over-powered…workplace murders would have gone through the roof if I’d brought it to market. I have a newfound respect for 2H pencils these days."

Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn't have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can't have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog's disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I'll never forget Annie's underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko.

No, like most people, I was going to have a little MidWinter Event, just Annie and me. So long as I was careful to steer clear of licenced products we'd be fine.

Ivy decorations you can still get away with; holly's a no-no but I'd hoarded a load of cherry tomatoes, which I was planning to perch on cactuses. I wouldn't risk tinsel but had a couple of brightly-coloured belts I was going to drape over my aspidistra. You know the sort of thing. The inspectors aren't too bad: they'll sometimes turn a blind eye to a bauble or two (which is just as well, because the fines for unlicensed Christmas™ celebrations are astronomical).

Well, it would be what I call the System Administrator Force. It would be a people-intensive, UN-peacekeeping-plus approach that could defend itself -- could do counter-insurgency, could fight and not be some ineffective, pussy UN force where you shoot at them and half of them run away. It would be a tough force. You shoot at these guys, or start committing atrocities in their presence, and they would stop you, and if necessary, kill you. It could not only keep the peace, but enforce it.

It would also have a highly-trained civilian component. You'd have international, inter-agency teams. It'd look like the Casbah bar scene in Star Wars -- you'd want to see loads of uniforms from all sorts of countries, and you'd want to see civilians from all sorts of NGOs and aid agencies: you'd want the whole package, acting in a Great Depression, FDR sort of mode, where the first order of business (after enforcing the peace) would be to get everybody busy. The government that would be there would be some sort of transitional organization, an international reconstruction fund, with the goal of getting things stabilized, an economy working and laws written.

Update: Angus sez, "there's a tremendously compelling (albeit in .rm) presentation by Barnett at the CSPAN site that I watched a couple days ago. He's tremendously insightful, not just on military issues, but the nature of globalization the networked world."

Update 2: Jesse sez, "Here is an MP3 of Barnett's talk at poptech."

There's no reasonable explanation for bringing software patents to Europe. The American experiment has been such a complete and utter failure, it's crystal-clear that software patents in Europe would be just as bad.

And the Euro-activists have won again and again, every battle, and the greedy jerks who support patents have strong-armed and cajoled the European Parliament into breaking its own rules to overturn the victories of the activists.

But at the very final moment, the Polish Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology stepped in and blocked the Patent Directive, taking it off the EU agenda (for now, anyway). It was an incredibly brave and important moment, one that will keep the European technology industry and the citizens who rely on it free and safe.

ThankPoland is a site that is collecting thank-yous for the Polish Undersecretary of State, particularily from the EU, but also from around the world. We owe him a debt of gratitude and it's an honor to thank him today. Link (Thanks, Crosbie!)

# I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.

# Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive. Made...

# ..contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day. Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands. Go..

#..ing with gear to get him tommorrow morning. He sounded disturbed. Guess grave digging does that to you.

UPDATE: Mumbai-based blogger Rohit Gupta from ChiensSansFronteres tells BoingBoing,

"We now have two bloggers on the ground in Sri Lanka. Morquendi/Sanjay is recruiting more bloggers for us. Sri Lanka is mobbing. India is not. No reports from Anadaman and the south so far, but that's probably because traditional media already has access. Here's the latest SMS post from Sanjay in Sri Lanka:

There's 1600 bodies found by the LTTE in Mullaitivu, in the Eastern Province, so far. They are not allowing any journalists in till rescue operations are done.

I'm going absolutely insane with the mail that's pouring in. I need more hands and ears and eyes, preferably attached to a human being. BlogVolunteers invited to help us.

For anyone volunteering to blog at tsunamihelp.blogspot.com (help the group post information), contact Rohit Gupta (fadereu@gmail.com), Dina Mehta (explore@vsnl.com) or me (zigzackly@gmail.com). And on ChiensSansFrontiers (http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/), we've got first person accounts going from Sri Lanka at the moment. Anyone else who'd like to provide first person accounts from anywhere in the region is welcome. Mail Rohit or me.

Just thought I would present some snapshots for the rest of the world to see the real situation in the south. The State run media (if you can even call them media anymore) is presenting a rosy picture of a Government coping well with the issue. Here are snippets from my notebook.

27th November 2004 10:30 AM, Matara Fort / Town: Two men carry a body in from the now calm sea. Hundreds of locals swarm around, trying to identify the boy. Wearing dark blue shorts and a faded red t-shirt, he can't be more than four or five years old. His eyes glazed, he stares at the onlookers. His left skull is fractured, but there is no blood running. The crevice stares ominously at me, a reminder of the untamed power of the sea.

In the Fort, the courts complex is in pieces. Cops stop us as we try to enter the Lawyer's quarters. They're scared as well. Confused. Just orders to sit and guard the place from looters. Former Minister and UNP MP Mahinda Wijesekara's room is gutted, tangled sea weed hanging on his name board. A sign perhaps of the inactiveness of all Politicians. Sure, they're doing something. But, IT'S NOT ENOUGH.

(...) At the mass graves, we watched as bodies were lifted out of vans. No records of death. Only one Policeman on duty. No law. No order. Just people burying the dead. Body after body. Shovel after shovel. All along the Galle Road the destruction just made me numb. The media footage delivered by our FREE media brothers and sisters out there tell the truth. But they don't do the real carnage justice. No, not at all. You have to see with your own eyes bodies by the road. Unknown bodies. Stinking so much you feel the need to wretch. You have to see with your own eyes vans stuck on trees. Trawlers on the main road. Broken bridges. You have to see the power of your sea. And you have to be humbled.

Previous BB posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

We saved a few hours installing the garbage disposal by using this great wireless switch purchased at Home Depot. It cost $18 and has a range of 100 feet (we mounted it just a few feet from the disposal, of course). I'm wondering what else I use these things for. What a terrific idea!

Wikipedia is also maintaining coverage in a richly linked, well-organized web page with ongoing updates. Link. And Wikipedia Commons offers related media (photos, data animations, and the like): Link (Thanks, Nick Douglas)

Loic Le Meur tells BoingBoing, "On Philsland, a French blogger writes of having been alerted by e-mail three hours before the tsunamis hit the coasts. An earthquake alert was issued by the USGS center three hours before it hit -- we could have saved thousands of people's lives if information had moved faster. This blogger was informed by the alert (Link, in French), and I also talk about it here (Link, in English)."

Image: snapshot from Phuket. Link. Another gallery of "citizen photojournalist" images here: Link.

Previous BB posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

In the 2003 science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, author Cory Doctorow imagines a society where all of life's necessities are free, and market laws such as supply and demand cease to exist for everything else. Instead of trading in a hard currency, citizens living in this "post-scarcity economy" measure their wealth with an ephemeral, reputation-based currency called "Whuffie." Doing something that benefits the community, like baking a cake or writing beautiful poetry, increases a person's Whuffie, while causing a traffic accident or publishing clumsy prose can temporarily put you in a virtual poorhouse. Everyone is wired into the Internet via brain implants and can routinely view and modify others' standing instantly (and free of charge), ultimately making one's status the subject of majority opinion.

So now you know! Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be available from July 16th 2005 (and I do hope you consider it a decent birthday present, Delleve-who-posts-at-the-Leaky-Cauldron... not that I was watching the fansites on Monday night or anything...)

"How did we decide on what we would look like, and our gender? We formed the man avatar first, because that day, we had more men in the group. We always wanted a female one, but we haven't taken the time to create her yet. Mary and Johanna would like that very much. We decided on how wilde would look first by starting with skin colors. We have both black and white in our real life group, and didn't want to have those because neither is better than the other. So we picked orange...

"Micah and Charlene could use the mouse," lilone replies, when I ask her if it's possible for each member of wilde to enter Second Life directly, perhaps with their own individual accounts. "John and Nichole could, but wouldn't alone. Micah can't read. Charlene has one hand, but can read." She shrugs. "None of them, really."

Their solution, for now at least, is lilone effectively acting as their interface: she sits at the keyboard, with the wilde group gathered in a semi-circle in a cramped care center room, peering over her shoulder and into the monitor, at the world inside...

This thin book (50 pages) is overpriced at $15, but if you'd like to purchase one, order it fast because I won't be reprinting this version. Once they are gone, they are gone. (You can always get all the reviews online).

Previous BB posts related to blog coverage of the Asian quake and tsunami: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6.

Update: World Changing and AFH have just announced a new, joint fundraising appeal. The goal: raise $10,000 for reconstruction projects in the Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Indian regions affected. Link

Also, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a 3D quicktime animation of the Indonesian tsunami here: Link (3.5 MB) (thanks, Rob)

"The message is sure to get lost on this guy, who was caught on film riding a monster wave that would give mere mortals heart attacks (though from the looks of it, it isn't nearly on the magnitude of the walls of waters that wiped out tens of thousands of people in South East Asia yesterday). Link

UPDATE: Peter Orosz sez: "Professional big wave surfers can ride waves that are taller than normal tsunami waves (the biggest wave ever ridden was in Hawaii on January 28, 1998, when Ken Bradshaw rode a wave with an 85-foot face on the North Shore of Oahu at Outside Log Cabins). Natural big wave spots like Waimea Bay in Hawaii, Teahupoo in Tahiti or Mavericks in California can produce waves 50-80 feet high, while yesterday's tsunamis were no higher than 30 feet (as far as I recall from CNN's report). The destructive power of tsunamis result from the immense amount of water in motion: the earthquake sets the entire ocean moving. In many places, a tsunami is not an actual wave but a rapidly rising tide that surges inland.

"Apparently, it's quite difficult to measure waves and there are several methods. According to Surfline, Bradshaw's 1998 wave was "a 45-foot wave with an 85-foot face", whatever that means. Billabong has a contest called XXL with a cash award going to the person who rides the biggest wave of the season, and according to their site, the world record holder is Pete Cabrinha with a 70-foot wave ridden at Peahi/Jaws on Maui this April. This page gives a guide to estimating wave height and describes the different methods used."

Nick sez: "I think (though I'm not 100%) that this is referring to the fact that waves have both crests and troughs. The "height" of a wave should be defined as how high the crest reaches above the standard ocean level, while the "face" of a wave should be what one sees when one looks directly at it, namely the entire distance from trough to crest. If ocean waves were shaped like perfect sine waves then one would expect the trough to be as deep as the crest is high, so a 45-foot wave would have a 90-foot face. Of course they're not but a 45-foot wave with 85-foot face would seem to make sense."

Christian Anthony (Video Editor, Surfline) sez: "The link you have under the 'Surfing a Tsunami' story to the big wave video is misleading.

"It's labeled as 'Surfing Hurricane Ivan Waves' but Hurricane Ivan was on the East Coast and did not produce waves of that height, nor are there spots on the East Coast that break like that. That video on the site has been ripped off from the Billabong Odyssey movie and is from Hawaii, specifically a break called Peahi (or Jaws).

"Last week there was a really big swell that hit Peahi and all the professional big wave riders were on it. You can see the video here."

Alberto sez: "You know about Laird Hamilton, cross-board virtuoso? He's invented the foilboard, which he uses to surf the huge swells that cross the oceans for miles. Although at the reported 450 mph of the Sumatra 2004 tsunami, I'm not too sure even he'd be able to catch-up. (He also surfs monster waves once they break on shore, but with a more-conventional surfboard.) He has a bare-bones website that offers a couple of DVDs of his jaw-dropping exploits (Flash interface alert, with and unkillable soundtrack of wave sounds)."

Thank you for your concern about my safety in the wake of Sunday’s devastating tidal wave. I am enormously relieved that my family and household have escaped the ravages of the sea that suddenly invaded most parts of coastal Sri Lanka, leaving a trail of destruction.

But many others were not so fortunate. For hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans and an unknown number of foreign tourists, the day after Christmas turned out to be a living nightmare reminiscent of The Day After Tomorrow.

The picture here is taken from the southernmost tip of India, where until today there were hundreds of tourists trapped at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, off the coast of Kanyakumari district. In an amazing display of humanitarian collaboration and bravery, the local fishermen saved roughly 500 of the 600 trapped people, while the role of relief agencies was severely limited by the breakdown of communications and bad weather. Even as I write this, most local media can only offer conflicting figures. Link.

A majority of the deceased from the mainland were local fishermen who had gone out in the sea, to net their nightly catch. Throughout the day and night, and the following day, small boats and catamarans, perhaps too small to brave the violent sea, were plying up and down the strait that divides the island from the Indian mainland. While the Indian Air Force kept dropping food and medical supplies, it is the fishermen who've kept the Kanyakumari death toll (524) as low as it is. Most of the saved were not locals, but tourists, including a Supreme Court judge. There were no riots or cases of civic indiscipline reported in that district, nor in any other part of India, during the rescue efforts. Thankfully, the Indian media has taken due note of the effort. Also, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, has offered extensive aid to Sri Lanka, and at least four Indian Navy ships have already carried medicines, food and water to Galle, one of the most affected areas in Sri Lanka.

A part of me wants to say fuck you to being a journalist and go out there and get involved in the aid work. Carry bags of food to the people who need it. But another part keeps saying my work is here. Making calls and making sure people stay informed. Seen things today I never thought I'd see. Seen things I don't ever want to see. How do you ask a question from a father who saw his 4 year old child being dragged off into the sea and be sensitive about it? Do you say sorry? Does that cut it? 2 friends dead. They were on a romantic beach holiday. I like to believe they died holding each other's hands. 2 more missing. Presumed dead. Find a vehicle in about an hour and head off down South to look for them, or identify their bodies. If anyone had told me the day was going to be like this maybe I'd have stayed in bed.

Cameron Sinclair of the nonprofit group Architecture For Humanity tells BoingBoing, "Two members of the WorldChanging.org crew live close by the Tsumani disaster and are reporting on whats going on: Link. As for reconstruction issues, a page is being set up at Architecture for Humanity to cover this: Link."

Here is a photoblog maintained by a man named Fred in Sri Lanka, with snapshots of the destruction in Jaffna, where he lives and works: Link. Here's another Sri Lankan blog maintained by "Zeus": Link. See also this livejournal maintained by a man named Ernest who was in Phuket when the catastrophe hit. Link. Here's a personal blog maintained by a person in Malaysia, with posts related to the event: Link. Blogger Rezwan in Bangladesh posts about a near-miss here.

BoingBoing reader Dav asks how he and other displaced Western tourists can help.

"Just since I know you guys are at the nexus of a lot of information: I'm here in Thailand on holiday, been staying on the island of Koh Samui on the east side of Thailand. We had been planning to go to Krabi (one of the places hit hard in southern thailand) in a couple of days for a psy-trance party. Now we're thinking of keeping the flight tp Krabi and trying to volunteer to help however we can. Any ideas on how to find out if any organization would want volunteers and where/what? I tried a few sites like Red Cross, etc but didn't notice any info on emergency volunteering and the net connection is so slow it is difficult looking around."

Pointers to other blog coverage welcome, submit sites here.

Update: Alex Steffen of worldchanging.com says,

"Some South Asian bloggers, including a couple of my colleagues from Worldchanging, have set up a blog tracking relief efforts and how folks can contribute: tsunamihelp.blogspot.com. We're also going to be posting more throughout the day on Worldchanging. This is not "just" one of the worst disasters of the decade, one where every bit of help will be needed to save lives and rebuild, it's also a call to change the way access to basic science is shared on our planet. Most of the tens of thousands of people who died yesterday might have been saved with better scientific, communications and warning systems."

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor's technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against "traffic analysis," a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Traffic analysis is used every day by companies, governments, and individuals that want to keep track of where people and organizations go and what they do on the Internet. Instead of looking at the content of your communications, traffic analysis tracks where your data goes and when, as well as how big it is. For example, online advertising company Doubleclick uses traffic analysis to record what web pages you've visited, and can build a profile of your interests from that. A pharmaceutical company could use traffic analysis to monitor when the research wing of a competitor visits its website, and track what pages or products that interest the competitor. IBM hosts a searchable patent index, and it could keep a list of every query your company makes. A stalker could use traffic analysis to learn whether you're in a certain Internet cafe.

monochrom.at has, therefore, obtained samples of Holy Water from ten selected Viennese churches. These samples have been mixed in correct proportions, purified from pathogens through distillation and osmosis, and then bottled in handy portions. monochrom.at therefore feels confident that they are offering not only the best Holy Water of all Vienna (city average) but the most aseptic Holy Water in the entire world.

monchrom is offering 20 vials (signed, dated) for sale, each containing 0.125 liters of purified Holy Water (city average) for E 44.95 per vial.

Tube Lines has bought computer cards, old chips and other equipment which are now out of stock.

Company bosses said they had to use the internet because some of the signalling systems on the Tube were so old.

The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It's easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings' self-implemented population-density management plan.

So lemmings do not commit mass suicide. Indeed, animals live to thrive and survive. Consider a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty. It's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming..

Durring the beginning of the Iraq war, I used P2P to get video and pictures that were censored from the US. The instant I hear about pictures, recordings, etc. on another network they can't show in the US, I go find them on P2P. Along with that search, I also found pictures that solders had taken along the way. Then I found gunship video (de-classified and classified because it had altitude/other readings) showing people walking into a building. The order came, and they leveled the building. Then started firing on anyone leaving the scene. You could actually see the men get thrown around after getting hit with munitions. On, and this video just happened to show one man running into a mosque so he was let go. (sure it wasn't leaked on purpose)

01 - Superman Christmas Story - Light Up The Tree, Mr. President
02 - Batman Christmas Story - Christmas Carol Caper - Part 1
03 - Batman Christmas Story - Christmas Carol Caper - Part 2
04 - Wonder Woman Christmas Story - The Prisoner of Christmas Island

RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.

Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!

Super Mario Bros.
This game ran fine up to about 4.0 MHz when the graphics went insane. It maintained stability no matter what. I couldn't get it to crash except going past that.

Super Mario Bros. 3
This also ran nicely, but the graphics went nuts around 3.6 MHz. It maxed out around 4.2 MHz, but wouldn't crash unless pushed further.

Kirby's Adventure
This game lags like mad all the time, so the gameplay is actually noticably slower at the stock speed. Using the abilities like Fire and Spark, especially around enemies using them as well, can grind the game to a halt. At 3.0 MHz or so the lag was pretty much entirely removed, and gameplay smoothed out tremendously. Around 3.4 MHz however, the graphical corruption became very, very bad. The status bar at the bottom of the screen started to rise up onto the game area. The higher the clock, the higher it went, blocking out my view of the game. Then the topmost sprite layer started to go insane around 4.0 MHz. The game kept running stably in the background though. ;)

Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers
It's very hard to find lag in this game, but there are a few distinct points. These were smoothed out at 2.3-2.6 MHz, but the game ran stable up to 4.4 MHz. Past 4.0 MHz however, the sprite layer went nuts like the other games, with random tiles flashing everywhere. No crashes however!

My cow-orker, EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, has posted a little blog entry about the inherent failings in all the DRM vendors' systems for determining "proximity" of two devices over the Internet.

...DRM vendors are falling back on other tricks. One you hear a lot about is "IP TTL" (a part of the Internet Protocol specification where routers are supposed to subtract 1 from a header field, to prevent a misaddressed packet from floating around the Internet forever). That doesn't provide evidence either, though, because (1) IP headers like TTL are under the minute control of end-users wielding firewall software, and (2) "bridging" software doesn't subtract 1 from TTL in the first place because conceptually it is not acting as a router.

So the last resort of people trying to use TCP/IP and get evidence about locality or proximity has been to measure latency -- how long it takes for one device to communicate with another. Latency is harder to tamper with because there are physical limitations like the speed of light. For example, you can never get any message from New York to Paris in under 19.5 milliseconds because that is how long it takes light to go from one to the other. If you're using a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, there is a magic number around 250 milliseconds (depending on your latitude) because geosynchronous orbits can only occur at one particular altitude and it takes light about 250 milliseconds to cross that entire path. (Geosynchronous orbit is far away!) So some systems have been adopting rules about not sending some programming to devices that take more than a certain number of milliseconds to answer you when you say hello and ask them for acknowledgment, on the theory that devices that answer really quickly plausibly are on the same local network, whereas device that answer more slowly probably are not.

"Termes takes a unique perspective in his art. In effect, he imagines crawling inside a transparent ball, then looking out with one eye in all directions from a center point. He then transfers what he sees onto the outside of a sphere.

Suppose, for example, that the ball he's inside is in a starkly geometric, cubical room. The room is defined by three sets of parallel lines. From his perspective inside the ball, these lines lead to six vanishing points. And the lines are curved. This six-point perspective, with the six vertices of an octahedron serving as the vanishing points, becomes the basis of his spherical paintings.

In essence, Termes geometrically translates the view from inside a sphere to the outside of one."

Flores has generated headlines before, but not the kind that attract tourists: famines in the 1960s and natural disasters in the '70s and '90s. Economic crisis hit in the late '90s, followed by political problems in East Timor and Bali. By 2000 tourism had plummeted from 35,000 visitors a year to just 10,000.

This year, however, the Flores Tourist Authority reports that travel to the island has already rebounded by 21 percent, probably due to fossil-related media coverage.

Although waves swamped parts of the Sumatran coast and nearby islands within minutes, there would have been time to alert more distant communities if the Indian Ocean had a warning network like that in the Pacific, said Dr. Tad Murty, an expert on the region's tsunamis who is affiliated with the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, in fact, scientists running the existing tsunami warning system for the Pacific, where such waves are far more common, sent an alert from their Honolulu hub to 26 participating countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, that destructive waves might be generated by the Sumatra tremors.

But there was no way to convey that information speedily to countries or communities an ocean away, said Dr. Laura S. L. Kong, a Commerce Department seismologist and director of the International Tsunami Information Center, an office run under the auspices of the United Nations.

Reader Brennen says, "I stayed in Prague for a few days this summer, and blogged about a day-trip to Kutna Hora. The cathedral is spectacular; the ossuary is just weird. One skull might be shocking - several thousand used as decorative elements are bizarrely mundane. Incidentally, I'm told that a portion of the recent Dungeons & Dragons flick was filmed at Kutna Hora." Link

RLD says, "Here are more photos of the Sedlec Ossuary. Very interesting." Link.

JPA in Portugal writes, "After reading your entries about the churches in Poland and near Prague, I should mention that in Portugal we also have a couple of those. The most famous is called Capela dos Ossos, or Bone Chapel. It is smaller than the ones you mention, but no less interesting." Link

Joe Goldberg says, "Saw your post on the Kostnice bone ossuary, and I have a few images of it as well, that capture the scale of what 40,000 dead dudes look like. See: Link, Link, And a coat of arms made of at least one of every bone in the human body: Link."

BoingBoing pal Quinn says, "Even I have a set of pics from the ossuary outside of Prague, with a couple of shots up on flickr: Link."

Mark Gallagher says, "I used to live near a cathedral in Germany that was situated on the narrowest point of the Rhine river. This area was a pretty popular spot for armed conflict throughout the ages even as recently as WWII, when Patton made a fuss about pissing in the river there when crossing on the way to Berlin. Anyway, the story goes that the local cathedral always had kind of a shortage of hallowed ground for burying people due to all the medieval bloodshed, and at one point just resorted to warehousing a lot of the fallen soldiers to make way for more traditional burials for VIPs. I can't seem to find my own photography, but here's a link to a good one. I'm going to say that it looks a lot more impressive in person, but here it is: Der Beinhaus in Oppenheim."

And reader Zizkov in the Czech Republic writes, "Read about the ossuary on BoingBoing. I visited it last year and found it macabre and grotesque, though perhaps not quite as grotesque as the gambolling snaphappy backpackers (mainly American) who were there at the same time. I'm not exactly an ancestor worshipper but I found the general visitor behaviour, uh, distasteful. As I recall, entrance was 35 Kc and a photo pass the same, that is, around $2.50 all in. Many individual opinions available at virtualtourist.com (search keyword: ossuary). For those interested in ossuarys, here is another in Rome: Link. 4,000 Capuchin friars (I passed this one by when in Rome). Merry Christmas -- or whichever festivity you may be celebrating."
Thanks to all.

A September 2004 TSA directive granting airport security screeners broad leeway to conduct "pat-down" searches has led to numerous reports of sexual harassment and abuse.

Victims -- particularly women-- are reporting that they are not being offered private searches or searches by screeners of the same sex, and that "private" searches are being conducted behind screens that provide no privacy. Passengers are reporting rough, rude, and humiliating manhandling and groping of their breasts and crotch areas, demeaning sexual comments, and being forced to remove business jackets in full view of crowds, despite the fact that it is a widespread convention in our society for women to wear only bras or other undergarments underneath such jackets.

The ACLU is assessing possible responses to this policy. In doing so, it is extremely helpful for us to gain a sense of the kinds of abuses that are taking place. If list members have experienced a problem with pat-down searches at airport security, they can help us end this problem by reporting their story here. For more information on the abuses, Politiech readers might want to look here, where we have collected many of the news stories.

Slavic Mexicans were not limited only to former Yugoslavia - they were also playing in communist Poland during 60s. Nearly everyone here was subjected to torture of listening their biggest hit "Pamelo, Aegnaj" ("Farewell, Pamela"). Some of them are playing to this day - check out Tercet Egzotyczny (or, translated, "The Exotic Trio"). MP3s (unfortunately, only from their recent and not-so-great period - well, they are elderly people now!) and tour dates are available here. If you want to check them out they are playing in US and Canada soon. And yes, they are *very* cheesy.

In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep.

Even as I hurriedly dressed, I knew that dozens of telepresent armed-response drones would already be sweeping in from the District, skimming mere inches above the chill surface of the Potomac. Vicious tri-lobed aeroforms that they were, they resembled nothing more than the Martian war machines of George Pal’s 1953 epic, “The War of the Worlds”.

And while, from somewhere far above, now, came that sound, that persistent clatter, as though gunships disgorged whole platoons of iron-shod mercenaries, I could only wonder: who? Was it my estranged wife, Lady Betty-Jayne Motel-6 Hyatt, Chief Eco-Trustee of the Free Duchy of Wyoming? Or was it Cleatus “Mainframe” Sinyard himself, President of the United States and Perpetual Chairman of the Concerned Smart People’s Northern Hemisphere CoProsperity Sphere?

"The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained: (...) typeface as typeface" 37 CFR 202.1(e).

House of Representatives report accompanied the new copyright law when passed in 1976: "The Committee has considered, but chosen to defer, the possibility of protecting the design of typefaces. A 'typeface' can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable 'pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work' within the meaning of this bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101." H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Congress, 2d Session at 55 (1976), reprinted in1978 U.S. Cong. and Admin. News 5659, 5668.

It's also in accordance with a court case that has considered the matter: Eltra Corp. V. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294, 208 USPQ 1 (1978, C.A. 4, Va.).

The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not copyrightable:

"The [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision [published at 53 FR 38110] based on the [October 10,] 1986 Notice of Inquiry [published at 51 FR 36410] reiterated a number of previous registration decisions made by the [Copyright] Office. First, under existing law, typeface as such is not registerable. The Policy Decision then went on to state the Office's position that 'data that merely represents an electronic depiction of a particular typeface or individual letterform' [that is, a bitmapped font] is also not registerable." 57 FR 6201.

In the late 90's I worked for Emigre Fonts in Sacramento. Emigre is the developer and publisher of some of the worlds best known typefaces. While I was there we became very agressive in protecting Emigre's type, on the internet and elsewhere. I refer you to this link, where you can see that in 1999, Emigre and Adobe sucessfully sued a software publisher, preventing him from selling fonts based on Emigre and Adobe Designs. The press release reads:

"Defendants Paul King and Southern Software agreed to have judgment entered against them in each case for copyright infringement and intermediate copyright infringement of more than 1,100 Adobe font software programs and 35 Emigre font software programs, and agreed to have permanent injunctions entered against them barring them from distributing the font programs they created by copying Emigre's and Adobe's font software programs. The permanent injunctions also bar defendants from creating or distributing any font software which copies or extracts the points in an Emigre or Adobe font software program."

My understanding is that you cannot copyright the design of the font, but you CAN copyright the PostScript program or TrueType data that draws it. Copyright a font design: no. Copyright program, data or other "writing": yes, even if it draws a font. So you can make your own fonts that look the same as another font without infringing copyright, but you can't copy another program or dataset that draws the font. IANAL, but I've worked in design and repro.

On his blog, Lawrence Lessig has announced a new experiment for his first book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. He's going to post version 1 (that's the original published version) to a wiki under a Creative Commons license. Updates and corrections will then be supervised by "chapter captains", and around June time Lessig will take the contents of the wiki, and mould it into Code v2. All royalties from the book will be donoated to Creative Commons, and the wiki will live on 'for ever'. He has an email address up if you have expertise and are interested in volunteering to be a "chapter captain".