web log.

Some things for you to read tomorrow while waiting in line to vote:

Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama For President —

If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government. The domestic cultural and political reasons for an Obama presidency remain as strong as they were when I wrote “Goodbye To All That” over a year ago. His ability to get us past the culture war has been proven in this campaign, in the generation now coming of age that will elect him if they turn out, in Obama’s staggering ability not to take the bait. His fiscal policies are too liberal for me - I don’t believe in raising taxes, I believe in cutting entitlements for the middle classes as the way to fiscal balance. I don’t believe in “progressive taxation”, I support a flat tax. I don’t want to give unions any more power. I’m sure there will be moments when a Democratic Congress will make me wince. But I also understand that money has to come from somewhere, and it will not come in any meaningful measure from freezing pork or the other transparent gimmicks advertized in advance by McCain. McCain is not serious on spending. But he is deadly serious in not touching taxes. So, on the core question of debt, on bringing America back to fiscal reason, Obama is still better than McCain. If I have to take an ideological hit to head toward fiscal solvency, I’ll put country before ideology.

The Economist, It’s Time —

And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

Wick Allison, A Conservative for Obama —

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Matt Taibbi, My Campaign Memories —

We were all educated in this culture of blame-the-other-sap, and that’s why we Americans are always whining about getting jobbed by someone: the media, Hollywood, Big Tobacco, anybody. But this year, the more the other side whined and pointed fingers, the higher Obama’s star climbed. It’s reassuring to see that someone in this country is finally doing some growing up. Let’s hope that it says as much about us as it does about the presidency.

Barack Obama, Closing Argument —

Good night. I’ll see you at the polls tomorrow.

Google announces its entry into the browser arena with a great comic book (by Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,no less), called Google on Google Chrome:

There’s a good (if lacking in Safari 3 comparisons) overview at Blogoscoped, which notes:

I think it can’t hurt to have more competition in the browser area.

I can’t help but agree. It will be interesting to see how it competes against the Webkit/Safari family of browsers, especially with the upcoming release of SquirrelFish to set new Javascript speed records. Many of the other new Google Chrome features are already in Safari (cough porn mode cough), so I suspect this will turn out to be a good, solid entry into the browser market.

I just hope that the comic isn’t the best thing about the browser.

Darien Library website relaunches with new social features:

John Blyberg, Darien Library’s Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, has created our website and the connection to our online catalog using open source software, and at his initiative, we are making it freely available to all libraries, as a contribution to strengthening the role of all libraries in their communities.

I’m really happy to see John’s work on SOPAC go live, and not just because I went to middle school with him years ago. The suite he’s developed to allow libraries to integrate internet social media with their internal systems is really amazing. Effective searches need interoperable data to be successful, and SOPAC helps libraries assemble that in an inexpensive, sustainable way.

You can read more about John’s work on SOPAC 2.0 at Library Journal, or right on his website.

Congratulations, John!

The old:

The new:

When one of the country’s best-known oilman starts talking about renewable energy sources, you best take notice and listen.

More at pickensplan.com.

(All of the videos are worth watching, but this is the best intro.)

I know that I have that other site for posting stuff like this, but sometimes, I can’t refuse. Because there are some things that I must call out to my friends.

Like cows.

Pirate cows.

Yarr! Mooo!

As you were, then.

I’m trying another experiment: Appendix A.

I want this site to be clean, tidy, with a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that desire sometimes often nearly always conflicts with my desire to share a whole bunch of neat stuff with you. The desire to centralize online stuff can distort one’s focus. So, I’m trying out a separate Tumblr site (yes, again) to post those links, removed from the main flow of this site.

The name comes from one of my favorite books, which makes copious use of appendices. I think nearly half of the book is appendices and footnotes, and some of them are better than the source material! So, I figured it was about time for my own addendum.

It’s only a few days old, but I’d love to know what you think about it.

John C. Welch, Goodbye, Gary:

Gary helped do that. His creation, along with other people’s creations at the time, led to millions upon millions of creations. The Dragonlance epics. Ed Greenwood helping create the Forgotten Realms, Elminster, and all the rest. Books. Movies, usually bad.

For those of us his creation touched, he changed our lives. He brought me friends and times that I probably wouldn’t have found without him. He created something that anyone could do, and have fun with, and make their own. There’s not a lot of people you can say that about. In truth, I’d rank what he did above what even Woz and Jobs created. Those two created an industry. D&D created worlds.

pamie.com: ow.:

pamie: I’m… Okay, I’m eating this curry. And it’s seriously the hottest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. After every five minutes I have to stop eating it because my face hurts and my lips start to swell and I’m drooling.

jessica: Heeeeeee. You know, you sound really upset. I was worried.

pamie: Because I’m crying. But this curry is so good! I’m not kidding; I put the bowl down and wait until I can feel my face again, and my skin is getting kinda blotchy, but after five minutes I crave it and I’ve forgotten all about the pain. Then I dig in, shovel four bites into my mouth and then: “Flames! Flames, on the side of my face…heaving!”

jessica: Ha!

Language Log: Scrupulously avoiding sigma:

It’s not a new idea to base legal, educational, or social prescriptions on scientific findings. It’s not a bad idea, either, unless such arguments are based on bad science, or on good science badly applied. But I’m afraid that in today’s educational policy debates — and not just about segregation of the sexes — the density of bad or misrepresented science is high and rising. In self-defense, our society needs to persuade people like Anastasia Rubis that standard deviations should not be so scrupulously avoided.

Tonight, Merrystar pointed me to the Dewey Donation System’s 2008 Book Drive, where you can purchase books for kids who need them and surprise the crap out of some very nice librarians.

Which, all things considered, is both a good thing to do, and pretty damn fun, too.

(Via.)

New York Magazine, Learning to Lie:

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons--to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

Forget Dark Matter: This Astrophysicist Found the Fastest Way to Board a Plane:

Steffen is ready to show the industry what he’s found, and eager to do some real-world testing. But no one in the industry has called.

He isn’t surprised. “When they come across a problem,” he said, “I don’t think their first thought is, Let’s go talk to an astrophysicist. Oh look — here’s one that’s studied extra-solar planets. He’s our guy!”

Seth Godin has a short, but good post on social networking sites, and the difference between ‘friends’ and ‘that guy who saved my life’:

I don’t think a large volume at the easy end of the spectrum is a replacement for a few at the hard-earned end. Not at all.

Huh. OS X Help manages to even make managing Safari bookmarks interesting.

(I mean, it’s not quite as interesting as a visit to Diggerland, but it’s a well-done article on a dry subject. Right now nothing is cooler than Diggerland.)

Shall we play a game? (kottke.org):

But kids are amazing little adaptive sponges…Ollie understood the rules of the game at least as well as I did, even though we hadn’t actually agreed on any rules (or that we were even playing a game!) before starting. He just crawled off and followed his instincts.

This is going to be fun.

I’m enjoying reading OS X Help: Insanely simple tutorials for the first time Macintosh user, a new weblog on making the switch over to Macs. Much of my joy is seeing someone present things well to their intended audience.

Well done, Scott & co.!

(Via.)

From Shawn Blanc’s excellent interview with John Gruber, the following gem:

bq JOHN: … Who doesn’t like to hug their wife? Is there an anti-hugging contingent out there I’m not aware of?

SHAWN: No. My wife just likes to know how other wives are treated by their work-from-the-home-office husbands.

(The rest of it is quite good, too.)

Steven Brust’s written a Firefly novel, and released it online with a CC license.

(Via.)

Paul Graham has another great (short) piece out, “Six Principles for Making New Things”. It talks about informal presentation and rapid iteration, two phrases that sing close to my heart. (The Trilogy Fast Cycle Time methodology really left its mark on me.)

(Of course, I’d be remiss in not referencing the Worse is Better post, which is saying about the same things, but with more computerese.)

Perhaps this is why we’re seeing so many blogs lead to books these days?

If You Can’t Let Go, Twitter:

In theory, the five members of my immediate family could use our cellphones to broadcast our locations, kind of like a G.P.S. with words.

To get things rolling, I sent my daughters and husband standard Twitter e-mail invitations (“slatalla wants to keep up with you on twitter”) that contained a link to the service’s home page. Then, while I sat in my car in front of my youngest daughter’s school, I sent an update on my whereabouts: “car pool dilemma will French horn and trombone both fit in a mini” Then?

Nothing.

“hello” I typed. Three minutes passed. Four. Still nothing. For the first time in the nearly 19 years since I first gave birth, no one wanted to keep tabs on me.

Then suddenly my cellphone buzzed. It was my first Twitter — a text message from Zoe, my 18-year-old daughter, how exciting — and so I eagerly opened it onscreen.

It said, “twitter?? what the hell is this?”

My family finally text messages (blame the rampant iPhoneism), but they don’t get Twitter, either.

Oh well.

Oh, this takes me back. Unboxing an Apple //c.

(Via.)

MarsEdit has quickly moved up the list of software that I use on my Mac that I can no longer really imagine working without. (Take note, weblog platform developers: support XML-RPC, or there will be trouble.)

I mention this because Shawn Blanc continues his excellent series of Mac Software Reviews with the story of MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution, which is well worth your time if you have a Mac, a weblog, or both. (Jim, I’m looking at you, Scrivener’s not the only Mac software worth considering…)

One of the best things about Shawn’s review is that even though I’ve used (and loved) MarsEdit for months, I learned ways to make it even more useful to me. Not many reviews go into enough detail for software that I use on an almost-daily basis to do that.

Jade over at Ars Technica conducts a MacBook Air spec shootout, and comes away with some interesting (i.e. not tainted by an obsession with the Toughbook) points:

Let’s be rational. It’s not even remotely affordable, especially at the high end--the high end being defined by the option of a 64GB SSD. There aren’t a lot of subnotebooks in that category but, if you are contemplating buying a MacBook Air, you still owe it to your credit card limit to do some research.

A friend of mine at work alerted me to a local musician — you may have heard of him — offering a free Christmas album from a recent performance.

Check out Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers’ Christmas 2007 (Live Music Give Away).

Nikon D3 / D300 Vs. Canon:

A friend once said to me that Canons are the best cameras available designed by engineers, and that Nikons are the best cameras one can buy designed by photographers. There may well be some truth to this aphorism.

(Via.)

Godspeed, Andy Olmsted.

(Via Jim, who knew him much better than I.)

James City Service Authority offers new rain barrel rebate:

The James City Service Authority (JCSA) has created a new Rain Barrel Rebate Program to reinforce water conservation efforts. A rain barrel collects and stores rainwater from your roof so it can be used to water lawns, gardens or indoor plants, fill birdbaths, and wash cars, boats, dogs or muddy shoes.

The JCSA will refund the purchase price of up to four rain barrels, with a maximum of $50 per rain barrel. Long range weather predictions call for a hot, dry growing season. By conserving water, you will save money, help ensure water availability for emergencies such as firefighting, reduce stormwater runoff to protect waterways, and promote wise water use and conservation.

For more information, click on “Rebates” at www.bewatersmart.org, e-mail bewatersmart@james-city.va.us or call 253-6859.

Meet Thievey, a ring-tailed lemur. He’s very cute, but he needs your help.

Consider doing something good and help Mike reach his goal before the end of 2007. He’s got 3 2 1 lemurs left to give away.

Update: Mike reached his goal, but there’s still time to make a difference. The MGF is totally blown away by the amount of support they’re getting here ($10,450 + $167/month for the next year), but there is still more need.

You may also consider purchasing one of the Moon Bears from Vermont Teddy Bear (which we got Trip for Christmas), or a contribution to Defenders of Wildlife. There are still like three hours left in 2007! Go!

I hereby dub this Gruber’s Law of Apple Analysis:

“A good rule of thumb, by the way, is that the more a writer attributes the actions of Apple, an enormous corporation with thousands of talented employees, to Steve Jobs, who is just one man and neither an engineer nor a designer, the more likely the writer is an idiot, a hack, or both.”

Of course. I go and let my Flickr Pro account lapse, and Flickr goes and rolls out stats… but only for Pro members.

Grumble.

From Why Are You Reading All That News?:

“The world won’t end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.”

This is very, very true. She will (and did.)

Shawn Blanc has begun A Series of Reviews: Some of The Greatest Software Available For Your Mac that, based on his previous posts, will be well worth your (Mac-using) time.

Update: That was fast. NetNewsWire is already up!

(Via, via)

Shopping at Target, I came across an entire line of Star Wars/ Transformers toys.

The hell?

I know that the Transformers line isn’t big on continuity, but I think this is even more of a travesty than the X-Men/Star Trek novel I ran across a few years ago.

Because, you know, that was fan-fiction. This is merchandizing.

| View | Upload your own

Via Blackfriar’s Marketing.

If you haven’t read it already, may I recommend the long (but well-done) rant regarding the state of the music industry: When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

Via kottke. Also.

Just saw this in the iTunes Store: 4 free episodes of “Learn Along Of Sesame” are now available for download:

I am seriously running out of disk space here, people! Enough with the free stuff!

Just saw this while picking up the iTunes Free Music Tuesday songs: the first season of Enterprise is now on iTunes.

I’m actually looking forward to cherry-picking the episodes instead of getting the whole series - mixed in among the gems are some real turkeys. (And I’m willing to skip almost all of the third season, Twilight excepted.)

The Amateur Gourmet: We Begin In Bellingham.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

Search Engine Land: Fury Over Google’s Self Promotion & Wishing For Perspective:

I really dislike other companies getting free passes when Google is held up to higher standards. Blake notes that Microsoft and Yahoo both do self-promotion, but he somehow thinks it’s Google that should be put on fire. I disagree. They all should be put up on fire. Singling out Google distorts the underlying argument. If it’s bad, it’s bad for any of them to do it, not because we love Google so much and are disappointed or because Google should be held to a higher standard.

Typically when Google gets burned, it gets burned because I feel people are too lazy to survey the entire competitive landscape and call for general across the board changes. It’s much easier to point at Google and say Google’s the leader, so I’m focusing on them.

Google News is a good example of this. I honestly want to puke if I have to hear another thing about Google News needing to be more transparent when Yahoo News provides the same or less transparency but no one squawks about that. Want an example of this? Check out the mini-debate I had with Dan Gillmor last year on the issue.

Picking up on the Google “tips” stuff, Smugmug dives in to declare “Google’s gone evil.” Really, because of these tips? I’d rather reserve the evil charge for more serious things like, I dunno, censorship in China.

Dinosaur Comics: Resolution One.

jwz: delete yourself from the internets!

I do not quite know what I am doing when I get to your site. I want to download the 200 screen savers. I’m running fedora core 4 on and hp computer. What ever I click it doesn’t give me the option to install, can you give me a little help please?

O’Reily Radar: OpenID on the Upswing.

Aha, finally found it. Rodney Matthews now has a site, so Merrystar can now find out why she’s never been able to find The Moth and the Moon in any bookstore.

(It was never written.)

Bruce Sterling: My Final Prediction —

If an innovation works, some people will thrive on it, while others who are screwed up to begin with will face severe new problems.

I know this is true because I’ve lived it. I’m a pre-Internet novelist who became moderately famous online, only to have my paperback writing slow down as I began to spend uncontrollable amounts of time surfing and blogging. This experience is both grand and problematic. It reflects not two extremes but the slider-bar that is my everyday life.

dooce: As festive as I’ll ever be

After the chipmunk album broke we listened to a collection of Christmas songs by the Osmonds, songs I have never seen on any other compilation since. My favorite was a song called “Sleigh Ride,” and I remember thinking it had to have been sung by one of the cuter Osmonds, because only someone cute could rock that hard, or harder than any song I had ever been allowed to listen to. Not very hard at all. It was the only Christmas song I’d ever heard that featured an electric guitar, and it was fast and breathless and unforgiving, like a Sunday spent skipping church. When we played it we’d dance recklessly around the tree in our footed pajamas playing air guitar, hoping one day we would grow up to be as cool as the Osmonds. You could say that we had been taught to aim high in life.

James Duncan Davidson: More Lightroom and Aperture RAW Comparisons

Now it’s obvious, isn’t it? At least it should be unless your monitor is totally whacked. And this isn’t even really in the realm of pixel-peeping yet. What you are seeing above is a 500 pixel crop from a 1500 pixel wide rendering of a 4372 pixel wide original. In other words, looking at it on your screen here is probably about the same as looking at that crop on a 14” or so wide print, albeit at a lower resolution than what I could print for you in person.

As you can imagine, for a large print, the Lightroom rendering is going to win hands down. The icky blocky stuff from Aperture prints out like posterized muck. On Flickr, especially at the default presentation size of 500 pixels, it doesn’t matter so much. But, if I were just worried about pictures for Flickr, I’d still use my Canon Powershot for all of my images.

I think this may be my favorite fashion piece ever. Go Fug Yourself: The Fug Wears Prada :

My grandma had a doll that sat on top of her toilet. Her crocheted gown belled out to cover the extra roll of toilet paper that lived up there. As a child, this fascinated me. Why didn’t the toilet paper in my house have outfits? Why didn’t everything in my house have outfits: the spatulas, the drinking glasses, the cat? “Because that would be tacky,” my mother told me. “But Grandma’s toilet paper has an outfit,” I protested. “Your grandma is an eccentric and fascinating woman,” my mother replied, “but my toilet paper does not need a dress.”

Wohba! Slow Motion Golf Ball:

Excellent!

Also, discussion.

fire at the Blue Talon, originally uploaded by intheburg.

Fortunately, I don’t think anyone was hurt.

Over at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog, Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests:

Using a packet sniffer, we discover what takes place in that other 80%. Figure 1 is a graphical view of where the time is spent loading http://www.yahoo.com with an empty cache. Each bar represents a specific component and is shown in the order started by the browser. The first bar is the time spent for the browser to retrieve just the HTML document. Notice only 10% of the time is spent here for the browser to request the HTML page, and for apache to stitch together the HTML and return the response back to the browser. The other 90% of the time is spent fetching other components in the page including images, scripts and stylesheets.

Oddly enough, today’s dinosaur comics is very apropos of a conversation Merrystar and I had on our drive into the City today.

Oh, dear lord, please make this happen.

Via jwz: A Building Shaped Like Godzilla —

The people of Tokyo should construct a giant building shaped like Godzilla. Imagine what it would do to the city’s skyline, and to the tourism industry. People would come from all over to take pictures. His eyes could flash red so airplanes don’t hit him. There could be an observatory in his mouth so people could look out over Tokyo. One of his arms could house a bar, and the other arm a restaurant. They could serve drinks called Mothra Martinis and dishes like Grilled Gamera Steaks, with a side of Mashed Potatoes.

The fuss over the tv.yahoo.com upgrade continues, with interesting observations from Dave Winer about how some (and I’m being careful not to generalize here out to “Silicon Valley”) are viewing the comments.

As a commenter on that thread, I object to charges of incivility and anonymity. I didn’t post any of the curse words that first came out of my mouth when Merrystar showed me the site. However, it’s easier to get page views by staking a position, so… whatever. The game’s afoot, the meta-analysis is on about what this means… I just want to know what time the football game is on.

Yahoo!, for all of their openness (and the willingness of past and current employees to comment on the matter really is impressive) still hasn’t restored the original tv.yahoo.com/grid, so it’s left me and Merrystar with a vaccuum. Like Dave, TitanTV gives me much of what I liked, so I’m probably jumping ship. Bookmarks are easy to change. I’m not that invested in the site.

There are more important things in life than spending time trying to convince a company to do things your way when they obviously don’t want to. I won’t completely abandon Yahoo! over this (Flickr still is better for my needs than Zooomr, for instance), but it says something that Merrystar — who uses Yahoo’s front page every day, for crying out loud — is tired of all the upgrades and improvements-that-aren’t.

Enough of this. Yahoo!, do what you want. I’ve got Christmas decorations to put up.

I feel better.

I just geotagged my screenshots of the tv.yahoo.com rant to Yahoo!’s corporate headquarters on both Flickr and Zooomr.

Petty? Perhaps. But it’s because they changed something I used that didn’t need to be changed. Sometimes, progress isn’t.

(And I would kill for users as passionate as the ones who use Yahoo!, by the way.)

Merrystar and I are both relatively content Yahoo! partisans; Merrystar even more so than me, I think. Which makes this post that much harder to write.

Yahoo! really fucked up, and badly. They released a new version of their TV listings pages - one of the only pages I could be reliably counted upon to hit, night after night - that not only gives worse performance than the old version, it doesn’t work in Safari.

Or Firefox.

Whaaaa?

No, seriously. Let me show you. This is what it looks like in Safari:

tv.yahoo.com home page Hosted on Zooomr

tv.yahoo.com listings page (safari) Hosted on Zooomr

And this is Firefox:

tv.yahoo.com listings (firefox) Hosted on Zooomr

By the way, the performance in Firefox is absolutely terrible. In the time it’s taken to write this post, I still haven’t gotten the new page to load.

I rarely call a site redesign absolute shit, but I think this might qualify. This is absolute shit. Did they not test it? What the hell were their QA people thinking?

Yahoo!: If you are reading this, please bring back the old TV listing. Please, please, please. Call this a beta, give us a link to the old stuff that actually worked. Otherwise, we’re switching to Google. Or TV Guide. Or anyone else.

Thank you.

Cheers,
Brett

(Please feel free to give the Yahoo! TV team a piece of your mind. They say they’re listening.)

Welcome to the club, Thomas Hawk!

(Pssst… Don’t forget to turn on Software Update. There’s a new patch out tonight.)

Doug serves us some compelling reasons to not see Borat in Match Frame: the problem with Borat.

There’s no question that BORAT is, more than occasionally, really damn funny. It’s also in my mind incredibly problematic. The difference between BORAT and the (even funnier) JACKASS 2 is that, after JACKASS 2 did something in public in front of unsuspecting people, they copped to who they were, and got release forms signed, and if you wouldn’t sign one, they’d pixelate your face or not use the footage. BORAT, by contrast, claimed to be a small production not intending to distribute in the States, and often not only set things up under entirely false pretenses but maintained those false pretenses well after the fact. […] This is a massive breach of filmmaking ettiquette (and, most likely, law); further, expect people who aren’t nearly as funny to duplicate the same kinds of stunts in the near future; further, as a result, expect any serious but seriously underfunded short-film or documentary filmmakers to have increasing amounts of trouble getting releases to film places.

More from Wohba: The Sorting Algorithm Demo.

Watching a bubble sort is actually painful in comparison to the other algorithms. Very good visualization.

Two weeks too late for me, but: How to Avoid a Moose or Deer Collision - WikiHow.

(Rule of thumb remains: Don’t Swerve.)

Via Wohba —

Can Dr. Evil Save the World?

(Via jwz.)

(Also, if this plot doesn’t show up in a movie in the next year, I’ll be seriously disappointed.)

Don’t forget to claim your Federal Excise Tax Refund Credit next year. If, for some reason, you’ve kept your phone bills for the last 4 years or so, you might want to dig them out when doing your 2006 taxes.

Otherwise, there’s a standard deduction you can take.

More Wohba!, this time: Ski-gliding:

I’m always impressed by how good XKCD is:

Whoba!: Fog Bows.

OmniNerd: 2006 Leonid Meteor Shower.

Astronomy buffs in Europe and America’s East Coast will be treated to a particularly powerful meteor shower this year. Barring weather, at 11:30pm EST on November 18th, viewing conditions will be excellent due to the new moon. If skies are overcast, however, try “listening” to the radio signals generated by shower’s electrified trails. Practiced observers say that even more meteors can be detected via radio waves than can be seen with the naked eye. For more information on this annual event, check out the Top 10 Leonid facts.

Evan Morris reminds me why Ballmer deserves his moniker.

LinuxWorld: Ballmer: Linux users owe Microsoft.

“Only customers that use SUSE have paid properly for intellectual property from Microsoft,” he said. “We are willing to do a deal with Red Hat and other Linux distributors.” The deal with SUSE Linux “is not exclusive,” Ballmer added.

This has pretty much guaranteed that I will be stripping SuSE Linux off of every machine I own. And that’s on top of no more money to Microsoft, ever!

Nicely done, Steve! Good job with that marketing.

(Via)

• Boing Boing: Patriot act makes it harder to get real Sudafed.
• Slate: Meth madness at _Newsweek_.

Dudes already know about chickens.

Like the man sayeth:

Instead of a quantum encyclopedia, with vandalism and falsehoods peppered throughout at various locations AND at various times, Wikipedia becomes a consistently RELIABLE encyclopedia that covers every topic in the universe, except chickens. We say it again: dudes already know about chickens.

evan morris: tastes like surrender.

And, for your amusement, more reasons why I don’t read digg.

jwz: Hacking Democracy.

Dooce: Monthly Newsletter: Month 33

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Yeah, that’s true enough. You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

Presentation Zen: Boom!

jwz: R.I.P. Habeus Corpus, 1215 - 2006.

For a certain family member (you know who you are), I give you *ROCK ALBUM DEATHMATCH*:

Wow! My Moo Cards arrived today, and they turned out great. I have but one regret —

I forgot the oxford comma in my message.

(Via Amy.) Halushki: A Series of Unfortunate Conversations.

Woman: Hey girls! Guess what we’re going to do today?
Girls: What, Mommy, what?!
Woman: We’re going to visit the hospital!
Girls: Yipee! We‘re going to have the baby! The baby!
Woman: No, no…remember the bat we had in our house the other night?
Girls: Is the bat having babies?
Woman: The bat might have rabies.
Girls: Yipee! Rabies! Rabies!
Woman: Do you know what rabies is?
Girls: Rabies are bat babies!

Via JWZ — Keith Olbermann: Why does habeas corpus hate America?

In fact, Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial “declaration” indicating that back then, “depriving us of Trial by Jury” was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that “liberty” was an unalienable right.

Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable.

The reality is, without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning.

But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to that pesky Constitution — you’ll see just how many remain.

Well, ok, Number One’s gone.

If you’re detained without trial, you lose your freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly. And you can’t petition the government for anything.

Number Two? While you’re in prison, your right to keep and bear arms just may be infringed upon.

Even if you’re in the NRA.

Three?

No forced sleepovers by soldiers at your house. OK. Three is unchanged.

Four?

You’re definitely not secure against searches and seizures, with or without probable cause - and this isn’t even limited to the guards.

Five… Grand juries and due process are obviously out.

Six. So are trials, let alone the right to counsel. Speedy trials? You want it when?

Seven. Hmmmm. I thought we covered “trials” and “juries” earlier.

Eight — So bail’s kind of a moot point…

Nine: “Other” rights retained by the people. Well, if you can name them during your water-boarding, we’ll consider them.

And Ten — powers not delegated to the United States federal government seem to have ended up there, anyway.

So as you can see, even without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that’s the Bill of “Right” now… remains virtually intact.

Idle Words: Hong Kong.

Hong Kong was the first place where I ever felt like I was in the 21st century. Free internet terminals in the subway, Jetsons architecture, a giant Central Escalator, chirping traffic lights, storefronts filled with tiny robotic gadgets - this was the new millenium I’d been waiting for. From the moment my plane docked at the world’s most advanced airport and the cute policewoman scanned my eager retinas with her retina-scanning gun I felt like the future wasn’t just a cynically oversold ripoff, but a place I might actually want to spend some time.

Very cute, via the Muppet Wiki:

No comment.

Oh, my.

(Via Whoba.)

Presentation Zen: Urban life: Graphic design is everywhere.

By slowing down a bit we will be able to see all of the graphic design that fills our daily lives. Living in Japan is a designer’s dream in many ways; there is just so much to see. Some of the “best” graphic design in the world is right here in Japan, and so is some of the “worst.” Much can be learned by examining both extremes and all the bits in between. We can even learn something during the morning commute. I usually spend a couple of hours everyday on trains, all of which are filled with an ever-changing tapestry of banners, signs, and ad posters. All most every day I notice something particularly good (or bad).

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asks Will the Next Election be Hacked?

Magic 8-ball: Signs Point to Yes.

(Bonus reading: Was the 2004 Election Stolen?)

Dave Winer thinks our country has lost its mind, and I think I agree with him.

If you aren’t a regular reader of Amalah, I invite you to view her tribute to her son’s first birthday.

Really well done, Amy and Jason. Bravo.

DF: Kieren McCarthy: Still a Jackass

From Pajiba —

Via JWZ — The Fox Clinton Interview: transcript, movie

Oh boy. Christopher Tolkien finished The Children of Hurin?

I have many, many mixed emotions about this one.

Neat. How To Apply Conditional Formatting in Excel.

Omninerd: Martini Glass Ceiling

(But did they account for the cost of drinking in their analysis?)

Don’t forget, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Wohba!: That’s No Sunspot!

I think I’m developing a serious YouTube problem.

I’m watching clouds on the internet, people. Help!

Boing Boing: Princeton researchers show how to steal an election with Diebold machines.

Via JWZ: Reno Balloon Race 2006.

Funny. I don’t watch much TV these days (_Project Runway_, golf and football as notable exceptions.)

But I do watch TV on YouTube. And the best part?

You can actually share things with other people. Like this.

Panasonic Toughbook line gets an update. Sweet!

Holy crap! Invisible cow alert!

I’m really coming to love xkcd.

After writing the previous, I am reminded of Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass —

That’s bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let’s look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don’t. I see a bunch of crap.

Amalah: Entirely Hypothetical.

Presentation Zen: Steve Irwin: ‘Passion, enthusiasm push an educational message.’

Signal to Noise: Even with primitive materials, one can work small wonders.

Daring Fireball: Vacation, All I Ever Wanted.

I hand three tickets to the attendant and carry Jonas toward the boat, which, thankfully, was ignored by the children ahead of us. Jonas takes his seat, and I ask him whether he wants me to stay. He’s been riding by himself on this and other similar rides all week, but this time he says, “Daddy stay with me.” And so, of course, I do. There’s a bench circling the central axis of the carousel, obviously intended for just this purpose. Jonas says, “No, here”, meaning here in the boat with him. I explain that I won’t fit in the boat, but that I’ll be here on this bench, close enough that we can hold hands. I show him, by holding out my left hand. He clasps my index and middle fingers, and that is good enough.

If you value your time, do not, for the love of all that is good, go visit flOw. It’s strangely beautiful and compelling.

And ruthless. (Just like life.)

(Via Table of Malcontents.)

Listening Post: DRM has a bad week.

The internet creates the oddest situations.

I’m watching the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational on TV. It’s on a time delay. Tiger is behind. There’s drama, but I’m not watching it.

Instead, I’m watching the real-time leaderboard on Yahoo! Sports. Tiger is ahead, but just dropped a shot.

Argh, my coat for an actual live video feed!

Unqualified Offerings: I Win!

Tinsleman: Bugfish.

BBC: ‘Product sabotage’ helps consumers.

Take the secret cappuccino, which you can buy in two of the leading coffee chains, Starbucks and Coffee Republic.

The sales assistants know what the drink is and they have a little button on their cash tills to ring it up. It’s cheaper than the other drinks on offer, but it doesn’t appear on the menu.

Starbucks claims that’s because they don’t have room on the menu board. Coffee Republic doesn’t even have that excuse: there’s a blank space with no price where this drink should be listed.

It’s called the “short cappuccino”, and it’s smaller, cheaper and better than the smallest size on the menu, the “tall”.

Pajiba — Snakes on a Plane.

And, of course New Line didn’t screen Snakes on a Plane for critics. Why? Because it motherfucking sucks. That’s why. The CGI is subpar. The plot is paper thin. The dialogue is atrocious. And the acting is downright horrendous. […]

And yet … and yet despite it all …

I haven’t had this much fun watching a movie since Ash Williams stood with a shotgun in one hand and a chainsaw in the other, beckoning: “Gimme some sugar, baby.” I shit you not, folks, Snakes on a Plane is every bit of god-awful fantastic that the hype portends. And I say this not as a movie critic, but as an enthusiast of so-bad-it’s-good. I consider the Final Destination series one of my favorite trilogies of all time; The Skulls is a minor classic, and nary anything can compare to the joy that was Cool as Ice. But Snakes on a Plane beats them all, hands down, fists balled, and middle finger to the sky. It absolutely kills. The only way I could’ve found it more entertaining is if the snake venom turned the passengers into zombies, but I suppose you gotta leave something for the sequel(s). […]

Truthfully, SoaP defies everything I ever believed about filmmakers who actually set out with the intention of making a good-bad flick; I didn’t think it could be done. And maybe without the attendant hype, it couldn’t have, because damn near half of Snakes success comes from the spectacle of 75 college kids ripped to the tits chanting “Snakes on a Plane” and tossing toy planes around the theater. Indeed, Snakes absolutely demands an audience. It’s a participatory event. And it may be the only time you can ever watch a film and not hate everyone in the theater for yelling throughout, because hell if you don’t find yourself treating the whole experience like a college basketball game, just waiting for Samuel Jackson to drain the Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane to win the game. I actually applauded. More than once. And I didn’t even shake my head in wonder when the audience gave it a standing ovation as the credits rolled.

Kathy Sierra: Give users a Hollywood ending.

Via Tinselman — Desolation Row

Bruce Schneier Facts.

Flying Spaghetti Monster apparition in flare salvo smoke.

No. Really.

Seth Godin: Awkward.

Welcome back, Jim.

You’re on notice!

Signal vs. Noise: Why Big Version Trains Are Always Late.

Amalah: Stuff On My Kid dot Com.

XKCD:

Reminds me of another happy/vicious cycle.

Eric Meyer: Angry, Indeed.

I don’t even know where to start with this. Presentation Zen: PowerPoint printouts used for communicating battle plans?

In the book, Ricks quotes an Army Lt. General who was frustrated over getting vague PowerPoint slide sent to him instead of clear orders or plans. Said Ricks:

“That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning.”

— Thomas Ricks

Reliance on slides rather than formal written documents — sound familiar? It should. Remember the findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003?

“The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic technical communication at NASA.“

— Columbia Accident Investigation Board

Déjà vu.

jwz: Terra! Terra! Terra!

As the initial “OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD THEY CAN BLOW US UP WITH SNAPPLE BOTTLES!!” hysteria subsides, we discover that these guys had been under surveillance, completely penetrated, by no less than three major intelligence agencies. That they were planning on cell phones, and some of them openly travelled to Pakistan (way to keep the cover, Reilly, Ace of Spies). Hell, Chertoff knew about this two weeks ago, and the only reason that some people can scream this headline:

“The London Bombers were within DAYS of trying a dry run!!!”

— was because MI-5, MI-6, and Scotland Yard let them get that close, so they could suck in the largest number of contacts (again, very spiffy police work). The fact that these wingnuts could have been rolled up, at will, at any time, seems to have competely escaped the media buzz.

Presentation Zen: Steve Jobs and the Summer Keynote.

Joel On Software: The Identity Management Method.

Idle Words: Dirty Old Town

The best way I can describe the pollution in Beijing is to tell you that I have been here almost exactly three months and only saw the mountains yesterday. They are called the Fragrant Mountains; they stand right outside of town, in three beautiful sawtooth condignations. People say they are a lovely place to visit in the autumn, when the colors turn, but I am skeptical. The notion that any kind of leafy plants could thrive here is hard to credit. What would they eat? The Fragrant Mountains butt up right against the city, the same way they do in Phoenix, Arizona, and yet it took three months and a freak windstorm for them to become visible.

This morning I woke up to a wall of dust so thick that I could barely distinguish the shape of the residential tower across the street from mine, about two hundred meters away, and I breathed a dusty sigh of relief. Everything was back to normal.

Sucked in to Project Runway tonight, but the Kid’s Republic is too cool to not post. Via Boingx2.

Last night it dawned on me why I like Zooomr better than Flickr.

It’s not the features.

It’s not the look.

It’s one single screen.

Flickr Ts & Cs Hosted on Zooomr

And here is is on Zooomr.

Zooomr Ts & Cs Hosted on Zooomr

Isn’t that interesting?

Joy of Tech: He wanted to be the most revolutionary Phone Tree Designer of our time.

Ouch.

I think my little spat with Zooomr is over. She’s behaving nicely again and we’re uploading sweet, sweet photos again.

I have some complaints, of course.

• Geotagging is ardous. I type in an address into the “jump to” box and it doesn’t work. This may be Safari’s fault, but still; this isn’t 2000 and we’re fighting to get sites to work with Mozilla.

• Also, whenever I click on a point on the geotagging map (to center, and then manually zoom), it asks if that’s where I want to tag it. No, I want to center! Cancel! Cancel! Sigh. Geotagging is cool (mostly because of the photos nearby) but it’s a pain in the ass with the current interface.

• It occurs to me that there could be tools within the LightMap that would make this easier. If they’re there, I’ve missed them, which means the UI is not so good. There are a lot of elements of the UI that are so minimalist I have trouble with it, like all the little icons that appear when you hover over photos. A guide would help.

• Changing privacy settings once a photo is uploaded. I like changing my mind. I like uploading a batch and choosing the public ones later. I like being able to see the privacy status of each photo. These are simple things.

• Some of the AJAX is wonky, especially in the photo view. Does AJAX work differently across different browsers? I have no clue.

• Two words: Desktop. uploader. Please.

At the same time, I think I’m starting to like Zooomr. Maybe even better than Flickr… I certainly like the more open terms and conditions better.

sunrise at the grand canyon. Hosted on Zooomr

Someone must be listening to me.

Shortly after the previous post, Zooomr started working again. Fickle, I tell you!

(Edited previous post to add irony.)

Zooomr, we have to talk.

See, I want to like you. I really do. You were nice to me at first, what with the Pro account, and the nifty geotagging, and did I mention the Pro account?

I was even willing to risk the ire of my current mistress for you. I know; I’m fickle.

But is that any reason to not let me modify the privacy settings on a photo?

And what did I do to you that you decided to show me this screen for thirty or forty minutes?

please hold tight. Hosted on Zooomr

I bet you would have kept me waiting had I not given up.

I want to love you: but you don’t make it easy.

(Hey. Call me?)

27B Stroke 6 — Yearly Database Exam.

Via Boing Boing, very, very good reading: Vanity Fair | 9/11 Live, the NORAD Tapes

Sleep.

Where the Hell is Matt?

I’ve been very pleased at the recent collaborations between Piro and Hawk:

If you haven’t been reading Megatoko or Applegeeks, you might want to give them a look.

Via Scoble, Google Gets Girl.

jwz: Stargate Command to close. No, really!

You ever go searching the web for a post you know is out there, somewhere, that you remember reading on a specific person’s site? But then you can’t find it, even after a hour of searching instead of sleeping?

And then you find an absolute gem of a link?

(Perhaps sleep would have been a better choice.)

jwz: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Boing Boing: New Bravia Ad. This one, in Glasgow.

Sweet!

When you have a bad day, make it your own.

Oh dear. For the Iron Chef Meat: BBQ Zen.

Help (fellow ex-Trilogian) Jeremy Blachman bring down The Sonoma Diet.

Oooo. Minimalist sandbox.

(Via Jim).

Via UO, Bellwether.

Presentation Zen on Speaking extemporaneously, tubes, and ninjas. For real. Could I make this up?

What makes a good icon?

Is Don Norman right about Google?

Oh dear lord: The Daily Show Explains Net Neutrality.

I’m all for swtiching to Macs, but this parody of those )(*@#$!@ ads has it just about right.

(More on Jeff Sandquist’s site.)

Did I really just spend 10 minutes reading about squid?

I guess I did.

Interesting, via 37Signals: CSS Browser Selector.

Does Zooomr love bloggers? Yes, enough to give away free pro accounts if you have your own blog (and post a picture hosted on Zooomr.) Sounds fair enough, right?

Unfortunately, I can’t get the login registration to actually work, which doesn’t bode well. Hmmmm. Fixed now. Looks like a webserver hiccup. The problem when everything is beta…

Site looks very Flickr-like, but without some of the T&C nonsense.

Did I ever post this one before?

cathedral stairs. Hosted on Zooomr

Must go now. Trip teething. Requires rocking. More on photos later.

Update: Ars Technica pretty much covers it.

Via Boingx2, YouTube, what the hell are you thinking?

“…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Nice way to kill the business, guys!

Found on flickr:

Night Daisies |
Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

I love the colors on this one.

I came across this in my browsing tonight, but I can’t find the source: Why Are Americans So Angry?

jwz: obsolete ways of thinking —

This has made me see the error of my ways: what the hell was I thinking, trying to store things that I care about on little plastic discs? Haven’t I learned this lesson many times over already? Why yes. Yes, I have. I should have been storing them as normal files in my well-backed-up home directory all along, just like I do with music.

Now, this sounds promising: Send a Calendar via Email in Outlook 2007 —

I’m busy testing the latest dogfood version of the new 2007 Microsoft Office system. As I journey ever deeper into the new applications in the system I’m uncovering some really neat features. One of my favourites is Outlook 2007’s new Send a Calendar via Email feature which allows you to, er, well, send a calendar via email.

Via Dave Winer, Target is now offering an RSS feed of their weekly specials.

Sweet!

Oh dear. Secret Society and Last but not Leashed, by Scott Adams.

Finally! Pictures from Scotland, now with 100% more raptor!

Why Skype is Bad:

I’ve used Skype. And I like it. It has a really simple user interface and does what it promises very well. The call quality is generally great, but I’ve now uninstalled it from all my PCs preferring instead to use the new Windows Live Messenger client. Why? Because Skype, for all its merits, can start behaving as a bandwidth hungry super-node. What does that mean? It means that with Skype installed and running my internet bandwidth was potentially being used by other Skype users without my knowing about it. Which could mean that my PCs consume more electricity and I suffer a slower internet connection. Not exactly the reasons I signed up in the first place.

How did I miss posting this one? Via Hawk Wings, one of the best email management posts I’ve read in months. Forget all that GTD methodology, because you need one button: The Delete Key, your best friend.

(Okay, the Ctrl-Shift-V, T shortcut is also really handy. Holy moly, Outlook is usable again!)

Via Guy Kawasaki, Stanford Magazine’s Kids Today special issue is quite good.

Dell’s new customer service blog serves up a post on magic wands, which are unfortunately in short supply.

In case you need it: A Guide to Texas Blackberries.

I am glad to see that Amalah was added to Guy Kawasaki’s Ultimate Mommy Blog List.

This story was literally dropped on my desk today. Wall Street Journal: Rice University Revives Its Press In Digital Model

One of the nation’s most prestigious universities is resurrecting its defunct academic press online — a move that adds a new wrinkle to the debate over who will profit from Web publishing.

Rice University in Houston will today announce plans to relaunch its Rice University Press — a money-losing venture that went out of business 10 years ago — under a new all-digital model. Although the new press will solicit and edit manuscripts the old-fashioned way, it won’t produce traditional books. The publishing house will instead post works online at a new Web site, where people can read a full copy of the book free. They can also order a regular, bound copy from an on-demand printer, at a cost far less than picking up the book in a store.

“Our overriding mission is to make this scholarship available for free,” says Joey King, executive director of Connexions, the Rice Web-publishing platform that will serve as the new press’s backbone. The nonprofit Connexions, founded in 1999 by a Rice engineering professor, offers free downloadable educational course materials on everything from electrical engineering to music theory.

Via jwz, Monkeys Taught Game Theory, Whoreing.

Via 27B Stroke 6 (among others), an excellent primer from Ed Felten on net neutrality.

Interesting points by Seth Godin: The Trend to ‘Best Available’.

(I will leave it as an excerise to the reader as to why this particular article is appropriate right now.)

Also cool, from Hawk Wings: Innovative email client design: Thinking outside the Outlook box.

This is pretty cool: Creating a Log file with Notepad.

Guy Kawasaki: The 120 Day Wonder and The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint.

I saw Guy talking about the 10/20/30 rule in his video for the Art of the Start video, and I’m glad he has it as a post. (If nothing else, it’s much easier to link to.)

Unqualified Offerings: 2006: A “Blogofascist” Oddity.

Jim opens up his Second Annual Tour De France Comment Thread.

Improv Anywhere: The MP3 Experiment III: The Search For Steve.

Via Iris & Banjocat: Toren van beren (tower of bears.)

Via Jim: Johnny Cash, American V

Dooce: Britney Spears, Mother

The Hivelogic Narrative: At Last: Mac OS X 10.4.7 Update, with a discussion on anti-aliasing.

Squidblog/Seth Godin: 2 Cents on AdSense

Boing Boing: Fake Eyes Boost Honesty

cnet: Does WiFi Security Matter?

Via Red Ferret: Roll Your Own Solar Heater

Widgetoko

Interview with Jim Henley

TNPI: Do it yourself .Mac

Bookdragon log files: We Feel Fine

Scobleizer: Inside Sharepoint’s Blogs, Wikis and RSS Feeds

Seth Godin: Dividing By Zero

Hawk Wings: Quicksilver Documentation

Toughpigs: Muppets: 1, Host: 0.

UO: Money for Nothing

Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start Video

Tinselman: Looming. Also, comments.

David Pogue: Reconsidering Bill Gates.

Making the rounds at work today: The Ringtone Only My Kid Can Hear, except, of course, that my wife can hear it very, very well. Try it and see.

(I cannot hear it at all, and had my volume up full-blast when I tried. Did I mention Merrystar can hear it very well?)

UO: Cartoon Bullseyes

Dinosaur Comics: Hippocleides doesn’t care!

Schneier: AT&T Rewrites its Privacy Policy

he new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

Amalah: Laughing Noah.

Who knew? Baby dolls repeatedly plummeting to their deaths are the FUNNIEST THING EVER.

Via Boing Boing, Darwin’s tortise dead at 176.

Eric Myer, Mail Mishandling

Thunderbird vs. Mail 2.0.

Joyeur: Sunshine.

The excellent Mac OS X / Linux discussion continues with:

• Tim Bray: Unswitch
• Mark: Juggling oranges
• Tim: Time to switch?
• John Gruber: Why Apple Won’t Open Source Its Apps

The hardware/OS integration is essential to the Just Works-ness that makes the Mac (and the SGI, and NeXT, and Sun boxes, and DEC Alphas, and the Amiga, etc.) work so well. Linux’s very nature, however, is opposed to this integration, and that’s its strength. Linux runs on anything. Anything. With enough work, I can wire the tree outside my window to run Linux. But that tree won’t Just Work. You better believe I will have to recompile my tree kernel at some point.

Here is the thing I hope that a Linux vendor gets, and soon, because when they do, they’ll capture the geek market (and probably much more): Do what Apple did, but do it open source. Optimize your Linux for your hardware, and your hardware only, but leave your applications open and take advantage of all the eyeballs looking at them.

I remain pessimistic on the matter.

Laid-Off Dad: Instinct and Improv.

Jon Gruber has a thoughtful response to Mark Pilgrim’s switching away from the Mac and the flood of commenters he unleashed on Mark’s site. I’ll point the way over there and let you make up your own mind about the respective arguments. There’s a lot of depth in both posts, and they’re both worthwhile reads.

Reading Mark’s writing reminds me of why I don’t listen to Led Zeppelin anymore; it’s excellent, superb in places, but tinged with too many memories of sadder times. Unresolved issues from my youth keep me from enjoying Thank You or Four Sticks. Ditto for Dive Into Mark. Sorry: it’s me, not you.

While I personally think the arguments are interesting, I ultimately don’t see it as an either/or proposition. I currently use a Mac as my primary machine, Linux for my servers, and Windows at work. I may not be happy about the last one, but ultimately I can do my job with the tools at hand..

When I switched from Linux to OS X, I experienced a sense of great relief. More than the pretty shiny thing, I got time back. And time is precious. No more working with hardware incompatabilities. No more constant monitoring of security lists, upgrades, updates, tinkering to make it work better. Life will be perfect with a Mac!

Then an upgrade broke bluetooth, and I still read all the same security lists, and the wireless network needed upgrading… but overall, I still had more time. Using the Mac as my primary computer did not solve everything. But it made enough things easier to make a difference.

When did the choice of tool acquire such moral overtones? This thing on my lap — whatever thing you’re reading this on — is a glorified screwdriver. That’s it.

Daring fireball: confidence game.

I offer this juxtaposition between Apple and Microsoft simply as an interesting contrast.

Confidence can lead to arrogance, both in individuals and in organizations, but I don’t see that happening with Apple today. It was arrogance in the ‘80s when the Sculley regime maintained almost absurd profit margins on Macintosh hardware. Today, Apple’s confidence is leading them to lower their prices, not raise them.

It’s also leading them to simplify their product line. The new MacBooks replace both the entire iBook line and the 12-inch PowerBook.

Maybe the lesson here is that you can’t make a billion dollars a month in profit with a simple line of simple products. What I’d like to think, though, is that the lesson is that good design can be good business.

Microsoft, in contrast, plans to offer Windows Vista in seven different editions: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Small Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. The names read like something out of The Onion.

Can anyone explain how this seven-tiered edition plan is good for anyone other than the managers within Microsoft’s bureaucracy?

Wil Wheaton: your earth moves beneath your own dream landscape.

Have you seen the trailer (and related mashup contest) for A Scanner Darkly?

Very cool! A pity that now we’re going to see all sorts of duplications.

jwz: dooooooomed.

Improv Everywhere.

Worst in history?

It’s Earth Day today, and the consumer electronics industry isn’t above a little shameless self-promotion to show off their green cred. And, we have to admit, recycling your old gear is a lot better than just tossing it into the basement — or worse, a landfill. So follow the examples of these companies, and make your gear green!

• Apple Computer will pay for shipping and environmentally friendly disposal of any old computer with the purchase of a new Mac from the company’s retail or online stores. So, if you’re a switcher, you can now let Apple deal with getting rid of that old Windows box, and if you’re upgrading, Apple will give that old Quadra a proper send-off.
• Sprint Nextel will spring for shipping and recycling or disposal of any brand of cellphone — and you don’t even need to buy anything. Just grab a prepaid mailing label from Sprint’s web site, stuff your phone in an envelope and send it off. So forget about the sentimental value already and send off that MicroTAC.
  
• Verizon Wireless will also accept any old cellphone for recycling — but you have to bring it into one of their stores. But, hey, at least they’re trying.
• CTIA has more info about cellphone recycling programs nationwide.
• Dell offers something called the Asset Recovery Program. It’s similar to Apple’s plan, but it’s only good for corporate customers. So, if you’re an IT manager and you’re about to upgrade, get Dell to clear out your old stuff, dude.
• Staples will give you $30 worth of coupons if you drop off an old computer for recycling — at least at certain Chicago-area stores. We hope the coupons are good on items like recycled printer paper, so you can double your greenie points.
• 100 Percent Day is a project sponsored by Microsoft, Intel, the US Chamber of Commerce and others with the goal of collecting 100,000 computers for recycling — today. The project’s web site has a list of dropoff locations where you can bring your gear.
• For more ideas, visit the official Earth Day web site.

The history of the DeCSS Haiku:

I wrote the poem known as the “DeCSS Haiku” three years ago, in 2001. (The poem’s full title is “How to decrypt a / DVD, in haiku form / Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.”) The 456-stanza work, sometimes described as an “epic”, was an anonymous contribution to Prof. David S. Touretzky’s “Gallery of CSS Descramblers”, which collects a variety of ways of expressing technical information about the decryption of DVDs. My poem has now become a part of the folklore of the Internet.

The poem includes a traditional opening invocation to the Muse:

Now help me, Muse, for I wish to tell a piece of controversial math.

It proceeds to describe, using only haiku-like verses with lines of five, seven, and five syllables, all the mathematical steps required to convert an encrypted DVD into a usable form.

Jim Henley has a posse.

You know what today needs?

That’s right. Poems about spelling!

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

So, I’ve got this love/hate thing with Powerpoint, you know? You might even call it a hate/love/hate thing. Or a HATE/like/HAAAAAATE/love thing.

Well, whatever it is, I was tickled to read this post on slideuments:

Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the “slideument” (slide + document = slideument). Much death-by-Powerpoint suffering could be eliminated if presenters clearly separated the two in their own minds before they even started planning their talks.

(Yes, I read weblogs entirely devoted to Powerpoint. I told you it was a love/hate/love/hate thing.)

Via jwz: Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames.

Daring Fireball: familiarity breeds a user base.

Late night reading: great overview of the WMF Backdoor in Windows.

Current styles in web design.

Very cool: you are here.

Just Duet.

Stanford on iTunes?

Sweeet!

A good day for dissent.

(Also in the Post.)

Authentically neat from CES: Google Pack.

(Only for Windows XP, though.)

All of the typepad sites I read have reverted back to December 9. An attempt to get more shopping days in before Christmas?

Have I plugged my own web host recently? If not, plug plug plug. Cornerhost remains fantastic.

But if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to check my own backups.…

Warner/Chappell says they’re sorry.

… and, the EFF’s response to Warner/Chappell.

We write today to inform you that the distribution of software such as pearLyrics does not violate U.S. copyright law and that any legal threats by Warner/Chappell against U.S. software developers in connection with software similar to pearLyrics could expose Warner/Chappell to legal action in U.S. federal courts.

As you know, Apple’s iTunes software includes a “lyrics” field for every digital song file, permitting users to add lyrics to song files purchased from the iTunes Music Store or copied from CD. Lyrics can then be displayed when the song files are played on certain iPods. It is our view that this activity--annotation by individual music fans of legitimately acquired music--would be viewed as a “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. At a minimum, we know of no legal authority suggesting that such personal, noncommercial copying of lyrics constitutes infringement.

Cute overload!:

Music Publishers Want Jail Time For Lyrics Posters.

I’d really like to see “Musicians Want Jail Time for Music Executives” as a headline. Can someone make that happen?

Just when I thought I had a handle on things, a blob of rat brain neurons goes and flies a plane.

Huh. Guess I was wrong.

• Design of Confirmation Messages & Automated Customer Service Email
• Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines

Joel on Software - Set Your Priorities:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, “are you sure?” and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, “is this what you want?” and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you’re really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

Somewhere in the middle is consultingware, where you pretend to be doing shrinkwrap while really doing custom development.

jwz - the beatings will continue until morale improves:

Set the policy and expect your colleagues to follow it because it is their job to do so, and not because of some halfassed technical impediment.

Disturbing news about cuts to the NSF funding and possible closing of the Arecibo. I encourage you to write your representatives against this:

Dear Colleague,

As you may be aware, the NSF is conducting a Senior Review of its astronomy facilities with the goal of saving $30M per year (out of about $150M per year) by 2011. This is to be reallocated to new programs. This amount of $30M per year is about three times the annual operating budget of NAIC / Arecibo Observatory.

Public input for the Senior Review will be solicited at a series of “town meetings” with NSF representatives. The dates and locations of these meetings are listed below.

As a result of this review, there is a real possibility that the Arecibo Observatory will be closed, or that the astronomy portion of NAIC will Observatory will be closed, or that the astronomy portion of NAIC will be substantially curtailed. We urge you to consider the impact of such an event on your research, and to attend one of the town meetings and / or contact the NSF (email: astsenior-review@nsf.gov) with your opinions and concerns.

Further information is available on the website:

http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/ast_senior_review.jsp

The schedule of NSF-AST Senior Review related town meetings is:
------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Boston, Massachusetts - 29 September 2005
Boston University

(2) Minneapolis, Minnesota - 7 October 2005
University of Minnesota

(3) Washington, DC - 14 October 2005
AAS, to be held at the Carnegie Institution

(4) Clemson, South Carolina - 15 October 2005
Clemson University

(5) Boulder, Colorado - 24 October 2005
University of Colorado/High Altitude Observatory

(6) Berkeley, California - December 2005, date to be determined
University of California, Berkeley

(7) Washington, DC, AAS Meeting - 8-12 January 2006
Schedule to be determined

Note that the last two meetings will occur after the initial meeting of the Senior Review panel.

Harris County OHS&EM “Home of the Real-Time Rainfall Maps”

Twenty hours and thirty minutes later, Claire and John Paul pull into Dallas:

• un - freakin’ - believable!
• additional details

Via Banjocat, whose Mom and brother are going to ride out Rita and my thoughts are very much with them — Rice explains why Houston is not NOLA.

Hurricane Rita: Rice University shuts down.

Audio of General Honore talking to the press: don’t get stuck on stupid!

Transcript:

Honore: And Mr. Mayor, let’s go back, because I can see right now, we’re setting this up as he said, he said, we said. All right? We are not going to go, by order of the mayor and the governor, and open the convention center for people to come in. There are buses there. Is that clear to you? Buses parked. There are 4,000 troops there. People come, they get on a bus, they get on a truck, they move on. Is that clear? Is that clear to the public?

Female reporter: Where do they move on…

Honore: That’s not your business.

Male reporter: But General, that didn’t work the first time…

Honore: Wait a minute. It didn’t work the first time. This ain’t the first time. Okay? If…we don’t control Rita, you understand? So there are a lot of pieces of it that’s going to be worked out. You got good public servants working through it. Let’s get a little trust here, because you’re starting to act like this is your problem. You are carrying the message, okay? What we’re going to do is have the buses staged. The initial place is at the convention center. We’re not going to announce other places at this time, until we get a plan set, and we’ll let people know where those locations are, through the government, and through public announcements. Right now, to handle the number of people that want to leave, we’ve got the capacity. You will come to the convention center. There are soldiers there from the 82nd Airborne, and from the Louisiana National Guard. People will be told to get on the bus, and we will take care of them. And where they go will be dependent on the capacity in this state. We’ve got our communications up. And we’ll tell them where to go. And when they get there, they’ll be able to get a chance, an opportunity to get registered, and so they can let their families know where they are. But don’t start panic here. Okay? We’ve got a location. It is in the front of the convention center, and that’s where we will use to migrate people from it, into the system.

Male reporter: General Honore, we were told that Berman Stadium on the west bank would be another staging area…

Honore: Not to my knowledge. Again, the current place, I just told you one time, is the convention center. Once we complete the plan with the mayor, and is approved by the governor, then we’ll start that in the next 12-24 hours. And we understand that there’s a problem in getting communications out. That’s where we need your help. But let’s not confuse the questions with the answers. Buses at the convention center will move our citizens, for whom we have sworn that we will support and defend…and we’ll move them on.

Let’s not get stuck on the last storm. You’re asking last storm questions for people who are concerned about the future storm. Don’t get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don’t confuse the people please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight. And if you don’t understand, maybe you’ll confuse it to the people. That’s why we like follow-up questions. But right now, it’s the convention center, and move on.

Male reporter: General, a little bit more about why that’s happening this time, though, and did not have that last time…

Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I’m not going to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita. This is public information that people are depending on the government to put out. This is the way we’ve got to do it.

So please. I apologize to you, but let’s talk about the future. Rita is happening. And right now, we need to get good, clean information out to the people that they can use. And we can have a conversation on the side about the past, in a couple of months.

SciGuy: From bad to worse, I am afraid —

The current track for Rita is just about as bad as you could imagine for the Houston-Galveston area.

Unless the storm turns south or north in the next 24 to 48 hours we are set up for a truly horrific event. I am not going to sugar-coast this, my friends. If the storm comes ashore as forecast, it would essentially be the worst-case scenario described here.

As a Houston resident and property owner, I am truly mortified right now. If you are under a mandatory evacuation order, you should heed it.

The storm has gone from potentially bad on Monday to terribly bad today. Tomorrow will have to bring better news, won’t it?

One can only think the a city that opened its arms so wide to the victims of the truly catastrophic Katrina deserves a better fate. We shall see …

So.

Years after I’ve moved away, I still consider Houston home. Every shot of the highways is familliar, every map a reminder of days gone by. I used to joke about living 10 feet above sea level; the lack of topography was funny.

And now Jim Cantore is there. You know what that means, right? When Jim shows up, you leave. Period.

Here are some sites you should see.

• The Houston Chronicle. Make it your home page for the next few days.
• Houston Chronicle’s map of the storm surge (and associated estimates of damage).
• The SciGuy blog, which was fantastic during Katrina and will continue to be so.
• The Weather Underground’s Wunderblog
• Images from the GOES satellites
• Live NOAA radio
• Wikipedia is a good place for updates.
• No idea what they’ll do, but Rice’s KTRU is always worth a listen.
• Remeber Tropical Storm Allison and the ‘500 year floods’? My college roommate John Paul does.

I know too many people still there - good luck to you all. Let me know if you need anything. Godspeed.

Only in Texas do the evacuation routes include free ice cream:

John Vanden Bos, assistant emergency management coordinator for Brazoria County, said evacuees there who live east of the Brazos River are advised to take Texas 288 to the Beltway.

Those west of the Brazos should “take Texas 36 to Brenham and eat Blue Bell (ice cream),” he said.

Via jwz: Earth Departure movie:

The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2, 2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth.

Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth — farther than the Moon’s orbit — when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.

Earth rotation (4.90 MB) or Earth rotation with date and time (5.78 MB).

An insider’s view of Ciscogate.

Ryan sent me a CSS Zen Garden design he thought I’d like.

(He was right. Canterbury CSS, indeed! Thanks!)

Happy Pi Approximation Day!

Google, not satisfied with indexing Earth, moves on to the Moon. Aren’t they opening up a facility there real soon now?

(Tip: try zooming in REAL close.)

Don’t forget: The British Open is livecast on the BBC.

How to Start a Startup

Previously, I did this:

• Move pictures from camera;
• Create “date-name” directories for each session: e.g., if I shot a show that had three bands on June 1, the directories would be 2005-06-01-foo, 2005-06-01-bar, and 2005-06-01-baz.
• Put all the photos of each subject in a RAW/ subdirectory (e.g., 2005-06-01-foo/RAW/). Never touch those.
• Copy */RAW to */EDIT. In the EDIT subdirectory, delete the junk, and color correct and crop the rest.
• When publishing to the web, copy some subset of EDIT, and resize and post the copy.

I don’t think I can easily do this with iPhoto. iPhoto seems to want to obscure the actual location of the files on disk from me: it wants me to access my photos only through the iPhoto UI, using its notion of galleries. It always stores files on disk in its world in directories like YYYY/MM/DD/, which is close to my layout, but I want my “keywords” in the directory names as well, not solely in some undocumented metadata file off to the side somewhere.

jwz - that was, in fact, the final straw.

Dream Theater as Wikipedia’s article of the day?

What the?

Episiotomies May Bring More Risks:

For years, some doctors believed that an episiotomy, an incision to enlarge the vaginal opening during childbirth, would prevent spontaneous tearing that would be harder to repair. They also believed the procedure would help women avoid incontinence and improve their sex lives.

It turns out those beliefs were myths.

A new review of 26 research studies shows that episiotomies are linked with a higher risk of injury, more trouble healing and more pain.

Episiotomies also had no effect on incontinence, pelvic floor strength or sexual function. Women who had the procedure waited longer to resume sex after childbirth. And their first post-birth intercourse caused them more pain.

Ask, and ye shall receive:

Lord God Bird! Rare woodpecker discovered in Arkansas:

Wildlife scientists confirmed on Thursday that a bird long thought extinct, the Ivory-billed woodpecker, has been found in Arkansas. The remarkable birds have a 30-inch wingspan and stand nearly 20 inches high.

The birds inhabited a wide swath of American bottomlands and mountain pine forests until the latter part of the 1800’s. They require a large feeding ground, and it is thought the expansion of towns and cities closed off their domain. They went extinct in Cuba during the same period. Ornithologists say each mating pair of Ivory-billed woodpeckers needs three square miles of forest to survive. There were thought to be only 22 of them left in 1938.

There have been several independent sightings of the bird in Arkansas over the last year, and even a videotape. In an effort to support the birds, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Nature Conservancy and other groups have joined to form the Big Woods Conservation Partnership to conserve 200,000 acres of forest habitat and rivers in the area during the next 10 years.

John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology told the Associated Press, “the bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives.”

Blogs @ Rice

Wired News: NASA Funds ‘Miracle Polymer’:

NASA will pay Rice University $11 million over the next four years to develop an experimental power cable made from carbon nanotubes, the agency announced Tuesday.

The cable, also known as a quantum wire, would theoretically conduct electricity up to 10 times better than traditional copper wire and weigh one-sixth as much.

Panasonic’s latest Let’s note lineup, the R4, T4, W4 and Y4:

Panasonic’s at it again with major overhauls to their Let’s note lineup (what we call the Toughbooks, over here). This round’s got all their laptops rocking Sonoma, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, and integrated SD readers. The R4 is the 10.1-inch XGA screen subnotebook, with a 1.2GHz Pentium M 753; the T4 hits up the thin n’ light tip with a 12-inch XGA display, an enhanced 12-hour battery, and the same 1.2GHz Pentium M 753; the W4 adds a DVD-R/RW drive to the T4--that’s pretty much it; the Y4 is the most feature-rich, with a 14.1-inch SXGA+ screen, 1.5GHz Pentium M 758, DVD burner, and yet it still manages to stay at almost exactly 3.4 pounds. Yow, we won’t even think about how many nines these prices are going to have

I want pictures: Yahoo! News - Herd of Buffalo Disrupt Traffic in Md..

Decoded at last: the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

For your next cocktail party: a handy list of popes!

Mitigating identity theft in this month’s Crypto-gram:

Fraudulent transactions have nothing to do with the legitimate account holders. Criminals impersonate legitimate users to financial institutions. That means that any solution can’t involve the account holders. That leaves only one reasonable answer: financial institutions need to be liable for fraudulent transactions. They need to be liable for sending erroneous information to credit bureaus based on fraudulent transactions.

They can’t claim that the user must keep his password secure or his machine virus free. They can’t require the user to monitor his accounts for fraudulent activity, or his credit reports for fraudulently obtained credit cards. Those aren’t reasonable requirements for most users. The bank must be made responsible, regardless of what the user does.

If you think this won’t work, look at credit cards. Credit card companies are liable for all but the first $50 of fraudulent transactions. They’re not hurting for business; and they’re not drowning in fraud, either. They’ve developed and fielded an array of security technologies designed to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. They’ve pushed most of the actual costs onto the merchants. And almost no security centers around trying to authenticate the cardholder.

That’s an important lesson. Identity theft solutions focus much too much on authenticating the person. Whether it’s two-factor authentication, ID cards, biometrics, or whatever, there’s a widespread myth that authenticating the person is the way to prevent these crimes. But once you understand that the problem is fraudulent transactions, you quickly realize that authenticating the person isn’t the way to proceed.

Again, think about credit cards. Store clerks barely verify signatures when people use cards. People can use credit cards to buy things by mail, phone, or Internet, where no one verifies the signature or even that you have possession of the card. Even worse, no credit card company mandates secure storage requirements for credit cards. They don’t demand that cardholders secure their wallets in any particular way. Credit card companies simply don’t worry about verifying the cardholder or putting requirements on what he does. They concentrate on verifying the transaction.

Britannica takeover of Wikimedia:

On April 1 2005, Encyclopædia Britannica, The Ligatured Encyclopædia, announced its immediate semi-hostile takeover of the Wikimedia Foundation (to be known henceforth as Wikimædia) and all of its projects, including Wikipedia (now Wikipædia), Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. Founder Jimmy Wales, a suspected cylon, giving a brief statement to the New York Times from his Maui survivalist compound, was reported to be “extremely pleased” with the £633.7 million severance package given to each of the five-and-a-half trustees of the Wikimædia Foundation. Wikipædia is best known as the “encyclop[a]edia” that any old fool can edit.

Despite the board’s confidence, some Britannica investors privately indicated financial concerns about the deal, noting that “the Wikipedia wasn’t really a free encyclopædia after all.” Economy measures expected to be implemented as part of the agreement include an immediate restriction on contributions to Wikipædia and its sister projects to those that have already signed formal agreements with Britannica and an immediate appropriation of all funds donated during the last funding drive to be divided amongst previous contributors to Britannica. It’s expected that to create or edit a page will now cost users £99.97/page in English or American language. Affordable fee localisation will be provided for wikipædias of economically troubled states.

Excellent… Roshambo Rampage:

Welcome to Roshambo Rampage, the only source for online, networked games of Paper-Scissors-Rock that we’re willing to allow ourselves to be aware of.

For centuries, perhaps longer, people who wanted to play ‘Paper-Scissors-Rock’ (also known as ‘Rock-Paper-Scissors’ or ‘Rock-Scissors-Paper’) have suffered from the debilitating limitation of having to be in the same room with their opponent. With our completely unpatented Send-O-Mail® technology, though, such tragedies are a thing of the very recent past.

It’s pretty darn simple. Just enter your own e-mail address and the e-mail address of the person you wish to challenge below, along with your choice of attack strategies. (We won’t use the e-mail addresses for anything, or give them to anyone else.) The challenge will be sent, and your opponent will have two days to respond. You will be notified of the winner. May God smile upon the favored.

Ian’s Shoelace Site - Shoe Lacing Methods:

In this section, I’ll present a (somewhat more realistic) few methods that I consider worthy of devoting the time required to create instructions, either because they have a particular benefit or just because I like the way they look.

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis

Update at 23:40 UTC

There appear to be two issues at hand. The first is the DNS cache poisoning. At this time, it appears to be affecting Symantec firewalls with DNS caching. If you recall, there was a vulnerability back in July that made these products very succeptable to DNS cache poisoning. Some victims have responded that they applied the patch, but were still affected. So this could be a different vulnerability or the patch didn’t work properly. Maybe someone at Symantec could enlighten us?

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2004.06.21.html

The second issue is the ABX toolbar spyware that gets loaded onto the machine when visiting the target servers. This appears to happen using an ActiveX control. Users running Windows XP SP2 or a web browser that does not support ActiveX will probably not get hit with the spyware if they visit the server.

Unfortunately, information on the ABX toolbar spyware is very limited at this time and it doesn’t seem to be detected yet by the normal toolset of spyware/antivirus tools.

In the meantime, we have been working to get the IP addresses and DNS servers supporting this attack shutdown. Some of the IP addresses are already blackholed.

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis:

Global DNS cache poisoning attack?

We are currently investigating a report from several sites that indicate users being re-directed to malware sites. At this time it appears to be a DNS cache poisoning attack (not a spyware, adware, or browser hijack) and we are seeking more information.

Popular domain names such as google.com, ebay.com, and weather.com are being directed to the following servers. Of course when connecting to these servers, “bad things” (tm) will happen, so don’t go to them.

www.7sir7.com (217.160.169.87)
123xxl.com (217.160.169.87, 207.44.240.79, 216.127.88.131)
abx4.com (217.160.169.87, 207.44.240.79, 216.127.88.131)

If your site has been affected, please submit the following information:
1. When the attack was first noticed and whether it is still occurring.
2. What DNS server software you having facing the Internet. This information will be kept in strictest confidence.
3. If you identified any other sites that users were being re-directed to (besides the ones listed above).

Updates will be made to this diary as we find out more information.

I love it! Groupware BAD, Users GOOD, Calendars USEFUL:

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, “So we’ve got this big pile of code we’re going to release, and we’re going to build an open source groupware system! It’s going to be awesome!”

And I said, “Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the ‘Groupware’ albatross around your neck! That’s what killed Netscape, are you insane?” He looked at me like I’d just kicked his puppy.

…

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

…

And then Nat went back to whichever flyover state Novell is in, and a few days later he said to me, “wow, you really bummed me out, because the dozen other people I had talked to before you were all like, `a free groupware system, that’s an awesome idea!’ Then you depressed me, and I came back here and told the other guys what you had said, and they were all, `Oh, fuck. He’s right.’”

Wait, was there a funny part? Ok, maybe not. Nevermind.

jwz - “and furthermore…”

Yahoo! Finance Special Edition: The Joy of Living Frugally.

The internet is a strange, strange place.

Some friends of ours occasionally invite a group of us out to swanky places we’ve never been in D.C.. This month, they chose Komi in Dupont Circle. I googled the place and wondered if there was anything there I could actually eat. (Food allergies make swanky places interesting.)

I’m looking at this blog review of Komi when suddenly I recognized the face on the page.

“I think I work with this guy,” I told Merrystar. And indeed, I do.

Google makes for a small world. Hello, Jason, and congratulations on your Valentine’s day gift.

(Still haven’t decided if there’s anything I can eat at Komi’s - I distract easily some nights.)

Yahoo! News - ID Theft Scam Hits D.C. Area Residents

Crypto-Gram: February 15, 2005

ABC News: Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?

U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings:

More than 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they have been directed to alter official findings to lessen protections for plants and animals, a survey released Wednesday says.

The survey of the agency’s scientific staff of 1,400 had a 30% response rate and was conducted jointly by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

jwz - how Google Maps works

Panasonic’s latest Let’s note/Toughbook laptops:

God bress multinational corporations who remain unafraid to rock the Engrish: there’s a lot of ground to cover on Panasonic’s non-Sonoma (i.e. Carmel/855-based Centrino) sexy new Let’s note lineup--we know them this side of the Pacific as the Toughbook series--which has four new model revisions of the W2, T2, Y2, and R3, so in brief: the W2F and T2F has an 12.1-inch XGA screen, Pentium M 753, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, 802.11a/b/g, and SD; the Y2F has a 14.1-inch SXGA (1400x1050) display, Pentium M 758, 60GB HDD, 256MB RAM, 802.11a/b/g, and SD; the diminutive R3F has a 10.4-inch XGA LCD, Pentium M 753, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, and, of course, 802.11a/b/g, and SD. Now we’re going to go on as though we didn’t see these, our importer has run the company card quite enough already this week.

The Lions of Al-Rassan as a movie?:

Warner Bros. has attached Ed Zwick to direct period epic “The Lions of Al-Rassan,” an adaptation of a Guy Gavriel Kay novel about the collision of religions in Spain during the Middle Ages that melds fact and fantasy.

An open letter to AA.

LWN: The LWN.net 2004 Linux Timeline

Damn you, irony!

Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing

Orca - not a whale.

Lilly Shares Fall on Report About Prozac Documents:

It is unclear what, if any, action might result from the matter. In October, the F.D.A. ordered pharmaceutical companies to include “black box” warnings on the labels of their antidepressants, including Prozac.

The warnings are the strongest restriction the government can impose on pharmaceutical companies, short of banning a drug.

The warnings state that antidepressants increase the risk of “suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents.”

British medical regulators have recommended that many antidepressants not be prescribed for children and teenagers, but had not included Prozac in those advisories.

JPL/Caltech Float Cam 2005 Rose Parade:

JPL and Caltech are very excited to have a float in the upcoming, New Year’s Day 2005 Rose Parade!

Our float will tower 50 feet above the ground and promises to be spectacular! The view from the top will be out of this world! And we don’t want you to miss it!

On parade day click on the link below to see a live web cast of the parade route from the top of the JPL/Caltech Float! Tune in starting at approximately 8:00am PST on January 1, 2005.

Yahoo! News - ‘Jeopardy!’ to Hold ‘Super Tournament’

Boing Boing: Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM

Via Jim, Understanding Terror Networks - FPRI

Character entity references in HTML 4

jwz - fade to gray

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Bridge tolls set to be scrapped:

The Skye Bridge Company was subsequently set up to the collect the tolls.

Even before the bridge was built critics voiced their hostility at having to pay to cross from the mainland to the Island of Skye and vice versa.

Campaigners, led in part by activist Robbie the Pict, have continued a long-running campaign of civil disobedience ever since in an effort to bring the tolls, the highest in Europe, to an end.

Four protesters, including Robbie the Pict, were convicted of not paying the tolls and were sent to jail for refusing to pay.

Very cool: Google Suggest.

ReadyMade: Feature - Boy Scout Napkins

Slashdot | Linux From Scratch 6.0 Released

HOW-TO: Hacking the iPod firmware (changing the graphics) - Engadget:

In this How-To we’re going to show you how to change the Do not Disconnect circle/slash icon that endlessly and annoyingly flashes all the time on our desk. We replaced ours with the Engadget logo, the Sony CEO, and Hello Kitty but any graphic will do. You can also change battery icons, power status, boot up logos and fonts, or so it seems. We sprinted to write this up, so we might update it as we try some new things. Now on with the How-To!

Wired News: PowerPoint Message Is the Medium:

Usually, PowerPoint presentations are dry affairs with someone in a suit trying hard not to vocalize the exact same information that appears on their slides. But what if a group of artists got hold of the software and competed with each other to see who could use it most imaginatively?

Wired News: Spyware on My Machine? So What?

Not all web surfers think spyware is a problem. Some say the snoopy software is a fair trade-off for free applications, even with the intrusion into their computers and lives.

“Typically the assumption has been that spyware sneaks onto computers, or users are unaware of what they have agreed to install,” said Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at antivirus vendor Sophos. “But some people actually do knowingly install adware because they want to use a particular application that comes bundled with it. Some just aren’t particularly concerned by adware’s presence on their computers.”

Perhaps Jim was right: it is just a google search page. And since Firefox has a Google search bar always available, it’s not really useful to have Google as your home page.

Back to Wikipedia, I guess…

Actually, I don’t find this hard to believe at all. This is the biggest reason I don’t get a newspaper.

Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry:

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

jwz - file under “bad ideas”

Yahoo! News - Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents:

Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

Microsoft offshores patent war - so goes the WTO? | The Register

TiVo responds to the ads-while-fast-forwarding controversy - Engadget - www.engadget.com:

TiVo has responded, at least sort of, to the brewing controversy over their plans to introduce banner ads when people fast forward through commercials, with someone from TiVo’s marketing department posting a message on the tivocommunity.com bulletin board trying to explain a little bit more what’s going on. A few people didn’t seem to get that they’re not eliminating fast-forwarding altogether (but it’s the Internet, what do you expect?), and the marketing person wants to make it clear that the ads will not be full-screen and that they’ll be similar to the “thumbs-upâ€� you sometimes see during commercials right now that’ll ask you whether you want to record a TV show. Honestly, it’s not that the whole idea of ads that seem so bothersome, it’s more the idea of buying something, paying a monthly fee for it, and still having to deal with them popping in commercials everywhere (eliminate the monthly fees and we’d be a lot more receptive the ads). It’s like if we started having to listen to a little ad everytime we wanted to check the voicemail on our cellphone—it’d be one thing if they were giving away the service for free, but we’re paying for this, you know? Plus, given how many other options there out there for digital video recorders, we worry that TiVo, a company we actually like, is only going to hasten its demise with moves like these.

GROKLAW:

I would not be surprised if Microsoft abruptly reconsiders its decision to break off negotiations. On the other hand, Microsoft has a demonstrated pattern of stumbling along in litigation until it is thoroughly embarrassed. Novell’s lawyers have obviously thought about their strategy quite a bit. Unless Microsoft can come up with other, stronger defenses, the statute of limitations defense looks poised to unhinge Microsoft’s nondisclosure policies at an early date.

FOSS could be one of the big beneficiaries of this lawsuit by assembling and disseminating the evidence. Do other folks feel that gathering and disseminating information about Novell v. Microsoft is important? Are people ready to help? Your feedback is important.

Great Northern Lights photos from November 8, 2004

Crypto-Gram: November 15, 2004:

It should be no surprise that there are problems with voting. What’s surprising is that there aren’t more problems. So how to make the system work better?

— Simplicity: This is the key to making voting better. Registration should be as simple as possible. The voting process should be as simple as possible. Ballot designs should be simple, and they should be tested. The computer industry understands the science of user-interface — that knowledge should be applied to ballot design.

— Uniformity: Simplicity leads to uniformity. The United States doesn’t have one set of voting rules or one voting system. It has 51 different sets of voting rules — one for every state and the District of Columbia — and even more systems. The more systems are standardized around the country, the more we can learn from each other’s mistakes.

— Verifiability: Computerized voting machines might have a simple user interface, but complexity hides behind the screen and keyboard. To avoid even more problems, these machines should have a voter-verifiable paper ballot. This isn’t a receipt; it’s not something you take home with you. It’s a paper “ballot” with your votes — one that you verify for accuracy and then put in a ballot box. The machine provides quick tallies, but the paper is the basis for any recounts.

— Transparency: All computer code used in voting machines should be public. This allows interested parties to examine the code and point out errors, resulting in continually improving security. Any voting-machine company that claims its code must remain secret for security reasons is lying. Security in computer systems comes from transparency — open systems that pass public scrutiny — and not secrecy.

But those are all solutions for the future. If you’re a voter this year, your options are fewer. My advice is to vote carefully. Read the instructions carefully, and ask questions if you are confused. Follow the instructions carefully, checking every step as you go. Remember that it might be impossible to correct a problem once you’ve finished voting. In many states — including California — you can request a paper ballot if you have any worries about the voting machine.

Schneier on Security: The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines

Japanese toilet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Economist — Music’s brighter future:

According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part.

Judging the overall quality of the music being sold by the four major record labels is, of course, subjective. But there are some objective measures. A successful touring career of live performances is one indication that a singer or band has lasting talent. Another is how many albums an artist puts out. Many recent singers have toured less and have often faded quickly from sight.

Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons:

Best Buy’s strategies could represent the beginnings of a shift in how retailers approach their customers. As consumers become more savvy, and online shopping continues to grow, you can bet other retailers will watch Best Buy closely. Early results indicate that Best Buy’s test stores are outperforming their established stores by a significant margin, and it’s safe to assume that the trend will continue as they shift to their new sales mode across the board. Of course, if you aren’t Barry, Jill, or Buzz, then who are you and how will you be treated? Customer profiling has a nasty side to it, one which we can attest to. It’s common, for instance, to be utterly ignored in some commission-based sales environments if you look too young, or too poor.

Meanwhile, Dell and others seem to be doing their best to attract those customers Best Buy doesn’t really want. While Best Buy has pulled the plug on their relationships with some of the more well-known bargain sites, Dell is using those same sites to run their promotions and clear out inventory with insane coupon deals. The biggest danger for Best Buy is the prospect of getting upside down. They run the risk of selling out for profit margins at the cost of sales volume.

jwz - election rigging:

bellaciao.org has some graphs of the major discrepencies between exit polling and vote counts. They’re pretty incredible! Now, maybe the exit polling methodology is just fundamentally broken, but isn’t it funny when you see pictures like the one at the right, knowing that last year, Diebold’s CEO swore that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to President Bush.”

And in Florida, some numbers and graphs: districts using electronic voting machines tended to skew Republican, while those without electronic voting ran even with predicted ratios. “An analysis of variance conducted on the percent change for each party ([Actual vote minus expected vote]/expected vote) in each county, with ‘machine type’ as a predictive factor, indicated that machine type was a significant predictor of percent change in voting. Counties using E-touch machines showed significantly positive percent changes in vote for both Republican and Democrat candidates, with greater mean percent changes for the Democrat. However counties using Op-scan machines showed significant positive percent change only for the Republican candidate, the mean change for the Democrat being insignificantly greater than zero.”

You don’t steal an election with a landslide, you steal it with 3%. You stay within the margin of error across the board so that it’s not obvious.

BBC NEWS | Americas | How world sees Bush victory

Universe Today - Venus and Jupiter’s Upcoming Conjunction:

A conjunction very much like the one occurring on the 5th occurred in August of the year 3 B.C. This historic conjunction occurred on August 12th at 03:00 UTC and was widely visible from the Middle East. That year Venus and Jupiter were only 10 arc-minutes or 0.16 degrees apart in the constellation of Leo the Lion. With such a narrow separation, light reflected from the two would seem to merge into one as seen with the unaided eye.

Some scholars have speculated that this close conjunction may have been interpreted as a sign by a group known as the Magi. The Magi, or wise men, were priests of an ancient religion known as Zoroastrianism. Could this close conjunction have been what sent the wise men traveling to a far of city known as Bethlehem? Unfortunately we can’t draw any definitive conclusions. There are no known written records that tell exactly what the Magi saw, or how they interpreted it.

jwz - maps

Slashdot | BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic

format c:

My goal was to mass erase these disks from the command line and so far I hadn’t had much luck. With Windows I knew I was going to have to take a different approach, with Linux, I knew exactly what I had to do to kill this system.

I decided to attack Windows from the same attack point as I was hitting Linux. Instead of trying to do a low level erasure of my files I was just going to recursively delete them. So after a little mucking around at the command prompt, I came up with del /F /S /Q *. Linux was a no brainer. All I had to do was escalate my permissions with sudo, sudo rm -Rf * to be exact.

Slashdot | Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request:

Blackboxvoting.org has raised the largest Freedom of Information request in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems — optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips.

Suffer a soul-crushing defeat recently? Be of Good Cheer!:

Well if that’s your attitude, the only thing I have for you is that the Bush Administration will not be able to get out the door before its irremediable clusterfucks . . . fuck clusters. Or whatever. Iraq is not fixable. When it goes definitively kablooey, its architects will not be safely tucked away in their ranches and sinecures, able to tut-tut that if only we had stayed the course ….

The downside? Oh, little things, like returning to office the government that

• *asserted that the executive can unilaterally and unreviewably strip any citizen of citizenship and declare any non-citizen an “enemy combatant” without rights;
• *argued in its work papers that the President is not bound by either domestic or international laws of war because - he’s the President! and it’s a war!

From jwz, Spider Jerusalem on voting:

“You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch ‘Republican Party Reservation’. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome.”

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.01

Via jwz — Never Forget: Internets Vets for Truth

Pretty fast mirror of just about every recent political QuickTime of the last few months (including “Fahrenheit 9/11”, “Going Upriver”, John Stewart on Crossfire, etc.)

So wrong, but so right: 2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes.

washingtonpost.com: Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths:

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article’s timing was up to him.

“I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election,” Roberts told The Associated Press. “My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

“I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives,” Roberts said. “As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this.”

Holy crap! The Economist is endorsing Kerry?

I suppose the Red Sox couldn’t win the World Series without bringing us a little closer to Ragnarok…

YOU might have thought that, three years after a devastating terrorist attack on American soil, a period which has featured two wars, radical political and economic legislation, and an adjustment to one of the biggest stockmarket crashes in history, the campaign for the presidency would be an especially elevated and notable affair. If so, you would be wrong. This year’s battle has been between two deeply flawed men: George Bush, who has been a radical, transforming president but who has never seemed truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have made up his mind conclusively about something only once, and that was 30 years ago. But on November 2nd, Americans must make their choice, as must The Economist. It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush.

Whenever we express a view of that sort, some readers are bound to protest that we, as a publication based in London, should not be poking our noses in other people’s politics. Translated, this invariably means that protesters disagree with our choice. It may also, however, reflect a lack of awareness about our readership. The Economist’s weekly sales in the United States are about 450,000 copies, which is three times our British sale and roughly 45% of our worldwide total. All those American readers will now be pondering how to vote, or indeed whether to. Thus, as at every presidential election since 1980, we hope it may be useful for us to say how we would think about our vote--if we had one.

…

John Kerry says the war was a mistake, which is unfortunate if he is to be commander-in-chief of the soldiers charged with fighting it. But his plan for the next phase in Iraq is identical to Mr Bush’s, which speaks well of his judgment. He has been forthright about the need to win in Iraq, rather than simply to get out, and will stand a chance of making a fresh start in the Israel-Palestine conflict and (though with even greater difficulty) with Iran. After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America’s moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America’s great tasks.

Wired News: Lost Tribe of Little People

Wired 12.11: How I Learned to Love Larry

Total Lunar Eclipse: October 27-28, 2004

Slashdot | Challenging The ‘Unbeatable’ Polygraph

jwz - TV-B-Gone:

Altman’s key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.

At a Laundromat and cafe down the street, a lone man sorted clothes in the glow of larger-than-life bikini babes on a 60-inch Sony HDTV. A punch of the button and the screen instantly went dark. He went on folding his T-shirts, seemingly unaware of the change.

“It’s always like that,” Altman said. “It’s so much part of the environment in the U.S. that people don’t even notice when it disappears.”

It is different in Hong Kong, Altman said. There, when he clicked off store TVs, everyone looked around to see who did it.

At Best Buy, neither customers nor staff responded as one set after another turned off — Sony TVs first, then a JVC and an Apex, all from a single click. The interview was easier without competition from Pirates of the Caribbean.

I married a Red Sox fan just in time.

Cheers!

Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor

Critical Section - The Tyranny of Email

komo 4 news | Small Town Library Takes On The Feds:

WHATCOM COUNTY - The FBI wants to know who checked out a book from a small library about Osama Bin Laden. But the library isn’t giving out names, saying the government has no business knowing what their patrons read. … At the center of the issue, a book titled “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America.”

The FBI confiscated the original book after a patron reported than some one hand wrote a bin Laden quote in the margin that read: “Let history be witness I am a criminal.”

The FBI demanded to know the names and addresses of everyone who ever checked out the book.

“Libraries are a haven where people should be able to seek whatever information they want to pursue without any threat of government intervention,” said Director of Whatcom County Library System, Joan Airoldi.

Because of privacy policies, the library does not give out circulation records without a court order. When the FBI got a grand jury subpoena, the library filed a motion to quash it — citing the rights of all people who use the library.

“Like the right to read and to read the material of one’s choice without fear that someone will come around with questions about why you chose that book,” said Garrett.

The FBI withdrew the subpoena, reserving the right to file it again.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office says they are not permitted to discuss anything that involves the grand jury.

If the feds had demanded the records under the Patriot Act, the library would have had to hand them over without question and without help from the courts.

The FBI still has the bin Laden book.

Librarians point out, it’s overdue.

I finally watched the clip off the torrent, and wow! Here’s more from Salon.com on Jon Stewart’s Crossfire appearance:

It’s almost a cliche by now to talk about “The Daily Show” being more trusted than real newscasts, but Stewart showed why. He pointed out to Carlson that he had asked Kerry if he really were in Cambodia but “I don’t care,” and when Carlson asked him what he thought about the “Bill O’Reilly vibrator flap,” Stewart said, “I don’t.” It was as concise a demonstration of the triviality of the media as you could hope for.

“I thought you were going to be funny,” Carlson said toward the end of the interview. Stewart responded, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” And that was what was so bracing.

Stewart’s “Crossfire” appearance is going to generate talk about how prickly he was, how he wasn’t “nice” like he is on “The Daily Show.” But prickliness is just what was needed. If you’ve built your reputation as a satirist pointing out how the media falls down on the job, you’re not going to make yourself a part of their charade.

I’ve heard people talk about “The Daily Show” as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn’t agree more. Stewart’s appearance on “Crossfire” was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show’s purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.

Please Support The Word Detective:

and let this kitten play again.

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Oh yeah, the kitten thing was just crass manipulation.

jwz - John Stewart on Crossfire:

STEWART: In many ways, it’s funny. And I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad.

BEGALA: We have noticed.

STEWART: And I wanted to — I felt that that wasn’t fair and I should come here and tell you that I don’t — it’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America.

CARLSON: But in its defense…

STEWART: So I wanted to come here today and say… Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys.

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: Stop.
Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.
…

STEWART: No, no, no, you’re not too rough on them. You’re part of their strategies. You are partisan, what do you call it, hacks.

What a wonderfully odd little site: How old is old enough?

Interesting to see how different places define the age of consent.

Historical Fiction: How do medieval-themed restaurants get it wrong?:

Medieval food was many things — garish, over the top, unsubtle. But it wasn’t crude. And neither were medieval people. So, the real question is: Where does the familiar medieval stereotype come from? As with all questions of intellectual decline, Hollywood deserves some blame. (The studios had a thing for bringing the Middle Ages to the big screen in the ‘50s: Knights of the Round Table, Prince Valiant, The Black Shield of Falworth, The Black Knight.) Yet historical stereotyping, wherever you find it, is symptomatic of a deeper societal ill. Gustave Flaubert famously wrote, “Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.” When it comes to slander caused by ignorance, history is sometimes on the receiving end, too.

Yahoo! News - Cheney Blunder Lauded Anti-Bush Web Site:

Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to direct millions of television viewers to a Web site calling for President Bush’s defeat but that’s what a slip of the domain achieved.

Anyone who heeded Cheney’s advice and clicked on “factcheck.com” was greeted on Wednesday morning with a message from anti-Bush billionaire investor George Soros entitled “Why we must not reelect President Bush.”

Very funny: Review: Juvenile felis catus:

Bear in mind that, against all evidence to the contrary, kittens are not able to transport themselves through solid objects by means of teleportation, osmosis or matter rephasing.

…

Herewith, a rundown of the relative merits of four options for the computer enthusiast - a kitten, a puppy, a baby, and (as a representative example of the more usual kind of home information technology purchase) a new video card.

Jim points out all those things they didn’t talk about:

Things that naturally didn’t come up: torture; the costs of interventionism; how much of a blank check to give Ariel Sharon’s Likud government; whether we truthfully want to democratize cooperative Muslim autocracies or should want to; our continuing involvement in the Andean Initiative; sanctions on Cuba; the difference between prudence and panic in anti-terror policy. What we had was vigorous disagreement on tactics with no serious debate on grand strategy. Both candidates agree that America must be the busiest busybody in the busy busy world. The rest is a question of application.

Just outside my office window — TERROR BLIMPS are GO!

Pentagon police said the Defense Department is testing a security blimp - fully equipped with surveillance cameras. The white blimp was spotted early Wednesday morning hovering at various times over the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. The 178-foot-long device, which is expected to remain in the skies until Thursday, is conducting a mission for the Defense Department.

NPR : Connie Rice: Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates:

“The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984,” Rice says. “The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn’t like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates — the CPD — in 1986.”

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US scientists warn of out-of-town health hazard:

The study by the Rand Corporation, an American thinktank, discovered that the health profile of an adult with a home in the spacious suburbs of Atlanta was the same as someone who lived in inner-city Seattle but was four years older.

Roll back the garage doors and you’ll find the reason for the suburban malaise, according to the scientists.

Studies have found that inhabitants of sprawling suburbs are dependent on their cars and so walk less, weigh more and suffer from higher blood pressure than their city cousins.

/. | Less Might Be More

Engadget : Caring Cot (as long as the hand that rocks the cradle isn’t mine):

You must forgive the Smiths reference, we only save them for stuff we’re really excited about. The Caring Cot was invented by one Gary Cho, whose agenda wasn’t just keeping that damned baby quiet in the middle of the freaking night, but also safety and preventative care. If the device (which is estimated to cost £150 — that’s about $270 US) ‘hears’ the baby cry for more than thirty seconds, it automatically begins rocking the cradle vertically (which he claims is more effective at calming a child than horizontal rocking); it also monitors the child’s movement and ambient temperature and can sound an alarm if it thinks something’s up, which could help detect early symptomps of Sudden Infants Death Syndrome (SIDS). Jeez, you’d think babies couldn’t just take care of themselves, or something.

/. | Microsoft To Provide IE Patches for Windows XP Only:

“We do not have plans to deliver Windows XP SP2 enhancements for Windows 2000 or other older versions of Windows,” the company said in a statement. “The most secure version of Windows today is Windows XP with SP2. We recommend that customers upgrade to XP and SP2 as quickly as possible.”

What a crock of… — Slashdot | U.S. Government Wants All June Airline Passenger Records.

Ah, more good times: Interliant Memories.

I still have that mug, too.

Ah, good times: Interliant Valium.

2600 | 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC

web economy bullshit generator:

Instructions:

1. Click the make bullshit button.
2. Watch bullshit appear in the box.
3. Repeat to taste (use your Enter/Return key).

How odd: I was reading this Wired article about Hayao Miyazaki’s work on Howl’s Moving Castle when it hit me that Merrystar has the book (by Diana Wynne Jones) down in our bookroom. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s little credit given to the original.

Pity.

Jaws in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies, at Angry Alien Productions.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Higher | Antarctic craters reveal asteroid strike:

But it was not until this year, when two satellites operating above Antarctica began to map the anomalies in the gravity, that the scale of the crater emerged. The mapping showed that the holes in the rock created by the strike had refilled with a mixture of ice, rock and other debris far less dense. This material, called breccia, shows where and how deep the craters are.

Prof Van der Hoeven said: “The extraordinary thing about this meteor strike is that it appeared to do so little damage. Unlike the dinosaur strike there is no telltale layer of dust that demonstrates the history of the event. It may have damaged things and wiped out species but there is no sign of it.”

One thing that did happen at exactly the same time was the reversing of the Earth’s magnetic field. There is no other explanation as to why this took place and Prof Van der Hoeven believes it was caused by the impact.

Slashdot | IBM Moves To Enforce GPL By Summary Judgement

Boing Boing: EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn’t have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap!

EFF has won its Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — this is the case that establishes that if you make truly decentralized P2P software — like Gnutella — you can’t be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the “Betamax principle,” from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn’t responsoble for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.

The Studios’ argument was that people who make P2P software should be obliged to build it in such a way as to make it easy to police — i.e. not on Gnutella-like lines — an idea so sickeningly dumb that it’s a tremendous relief that the court refused to buy it.

Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2004

Slashdot | SHA-0 Broken, MD5 Rumored Broken

CUAgain : Neighborhood Hazard (or: Why the Cops Won’t Patrol Brice Street):

Picture a large man on a huge black and chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and leather gloves puttering maybe 25mph down a quiet residential street…and in the fight of his life with a squirrel. And losing.

I Love You, Madame Librarian — In These Times:

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I was wondering when this would show up: Merrystar found the BBC feeds on Friday…

Wired News: Let the Web Games Begin:

The Summer Olympics, which began Friday in Athens, is the first Olympic Games to be broadcast from a collection of websites. The BBC and other European networks are offering live, on-demand Internet video streaming of Olympic events to broadband viewers. But the BBC and fellow members of the European Broadcasting Union are required by their Olympic broadcast contracts to block U.S. Internet users and others from outside their home counties.

NBC paid $793 million for the exclusive U.S. Summer Olympic broadcast rights, and NBCOlympics.com is the only U.S. website licensed by the International Olympic Committee to broadcast video coverage of the games. The network is offering 1,210 hours of Olympic coverage — live and tape-delayed — on NBC, CNCB, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, Telemundo and a high-definition channel.

Despite its contractual lock on Olympic footage, NBCOlympics.com is offering only highlights of selected events after they have been broadcast on one of the network’s TV channels. U.S. customers of AT&T Wireless’ mMode information service will also get video clips. By contrast, those online in the United Kingdom can watch live simulcast coverage from BBC TV’s five video streams.

…

“Ultimately it will fail,” said Len Sassaman, a privacy-technology researcher. Once the American Internet viewing public realizes that U.K. Web surfers are watching better Olympic coverage than they are allowed to see after forking over their credit card, said Sassaman, they will look for better ways to access those images. “Bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper over the years, so it is not so far-fetched to think that someone will set up proxy servers in Britain that would do this.”

Wired News: Copyright Crusaders Hit Schools:

For the third year in a row, software companies are supplying schools with materials that promote their antipiracy position on copyright law. But for the first time this year, the library association is presenting its own material, hoping to give kids a more balanced view of copyright law.

The American Library Association will distribute its materials through high-school librarians this winter or spring. In September, the ALA will hold focus groups with teenagers to better understand how they use the Internet, what they think about the technology and what language they use. That information will contribute to ALA-created comic books that address various copyright issues relevant to students.

The ALA sees a need for this because materials offered by groups like the Business Software Alliance and the Motion Picture Association of America are designed to influence kids with one-sided information, said Rick Weingarten, director of information technology policy for the ALA. Topics like “fair use” — the right to use copyright material without the owner’s permission, a key concept in American law that intellectual-property experts say leads to innovation — are not adequately addressed.

Definition of Elliptic curve cryptography:

Given an elliptic curve E, and a field GF(q), we consider the abelian group of rational points E(q) of the form (x, y), where both x and y are in GF(q), and where the group operation “+” is defined on this curve as described in the article elliptic curve. We then define a second operation “*” | Z×E(q) → E(q): if P is some point in E(q), then we define 2*P = P + P, 3*P = 2*P + P = P + P + P, and so on. Note that given integers j and k, j*(k*P) = (j*k)*P = k*(j*P). The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) is then to determine the integer k, given points P and Q, and given that k*P = Q.

It is believed that the usual discrete logarithm problem over the multiplicative group of a finite field (DLP) and ECDLP are not equivalent problems; and that ECDLP is significantly more difficult than DLP.

In cryptographic use, a specific base point G is selected and published for use with the curve E(q). A private key k is selected as a random integer; and then the value P = k*G is published as the public key (note that the purported difficulty of ECDLP implies that k is hard to determine from P). If Alice and Bob have private keys k_A and k_B, and public keys P_A and P_B, then Alice can calculate k_A*P_B = (k_A*k_B)*G; and Bob can compute the same value as k_B*P_A = (k_B*k_A)*G.

This allows the establishment of a “secret” value that both Alice and Bob can easily compute, but which is difficult for any third party to derive. In addition, Bob does not gain any new knowledge about k_A during this transaction, so that Alice’s private key remains private.

Save the []:

Welcome to SaveThe.org, a continuation of SavetheiPod.com… it’s not just your iPod that is threatened by this innovation-killing legislation, everything from VCRs to tech journalists could conceivably come under fire if this overly broad bill is passed. Formerly known as the INDUCE Act (Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act), the bill is now called the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 (IICA), but don’t be fooled, it’s still just as dangerous.

Yahoo! News - Fiennes to Play Voldemort in Next ‘Potter’

Answer the pepperoni:

MAX: Oh, I’m not confused. I’m just . . . what do you mean?

DEAN: Their eating habits are just the start of what you’re gonna have to get used to. There’s tons of stuff you should be aware of.

MAX: Really?

DEAN: Oh yeah. Like, don’t ever use the last of the parmesan cheese. And never get into a heavy discussion late at night ‘cause that’s when they’re at their crankiest. Oh, and uh, go with their bits.

MAX: Their bits?

DEAN: Yeah, like, if you’re eating pizza with them and Lorelai decides that the pepperoni is angry at the mushrooms because the mushrooms have an attitude and then she holds up a pepperoni and the pepperoni asks for your opinion…don’t just laugh. Answer the pepperoni.

MAX: Answer the pepperoni.

DEAN: And don’t let them near puppies ‘cause they’ll want to take home every one.

MAX: Oh, that one I knew.

DEAN: Oh, and uh, here’s a big one. If you ever think that they’re doing something crazy, they’re not. You see, after a while, their thinking becomes clear, but by the time it’s clear, they’ve already done two other totally crazy things that you can’t figure out. So there’s no catching up.

A Taste of Computer Security

Wired News: Freak Waves Are No Tall Tale:

Massive waves up to 100 feet in height — once thought to be extremely rare — actually roam the oceans quite frequently and could threaten to overturn ships and oil rigs, a European Commission study has found.

The study, announced last week and conducted on radar images gathered by two European Space Agency satellites during a three-week period in 2001, revealed that no fewer than 10 of the so-called rogue waves rose from various oceans around the world in that time. Not too long ago, scientists had believed that such waves formed just once every 10,000 years, according to the space agency.

Oh no, not again. At least Merrystar isn’t observing this week…

Sunspot Grows to 20 Times Size of Earth:

A sunspot group aimed squarely at Earth has grown to 20 times the size of our planet and has the potential to unleash a major solar storm.

The amorphous mix of spots, together called Number 652, has been rotating across the Sun and growing for several days. On Friday, it sat at the center of the solar disk.

17th Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey:

Owning a PC is an up-and-down affair: Sometimes things go well, and sometimes they don’t. Even the best machines have problems, and from time to time, even the best manufacturers have trouble fixing them. …[T]he key is finding a machine whose problems are few and far between — and a manufacturer that can, and will, tackle those problems.

To help you find the most dependable computers and PC manufacturers, we give you our 17th annual Reader Satisfaction Survey, in which Jerry Shipley and more than 8,000 other PC Magazine readers describe experiences with the desktops, notebooks, and servers that they use at home and at work: over 17,000 computers in all.

As you peruse the results, you’ll see that no company is beyond reproach. Each is guilty of selling machines that need repair and providing poor technical support at times. The leading vendors — Apple in the desktop and notebook categories, Dell in desktops and servers, and IBM in notebooks — are those that keep criticism to a minimum.

“My Beef With Big Media” by Ted Turner

Slashdot | Toyota Patents Winking, Laughing, Crying Car

Anything and everything on eBay — eBay item 2256298346 (Ends Jul-31-04 01:00:00 PDT) - The K.I.T.T. car from Knight Rider

437. K.I.T.T. (Knight Industry Two Thousand) car from Knight Rider. (Universal TV, 1982-85) This highly-modified 1983 Pontiac Trans Am is an original screen-used hero car used during the second season of the hit TV series. Instantly recognizable with its working scanner in the front and highly futuristic interior, this vehicle was arguably the star of the show! Accompanied with the original ownership certificate listing MCA Universal Studios Inc. as the registered owner. For insurance and liability reasons the vehicle’s identification number was removed by Universal (common practice for their film and TV cars) and it was subsequently assigned the in-house inventory control number of “1177” (numbers can be found on the driver-side door and under the hood).

Polydactyl Cats:

Polydactyly, or extra digits, is a common trait among cats, particularly it seems, among Celtic cats and cats on part of America’s Eastern coast and South West Britain. This distribution may well be linked. Except for Twisty Cats, polydactyly is not a product of bad breeding. It is simply a naturally occurring genetic variation and, as noted later on, polydactyly is found in fossil reptiles - meaning that five digits might be the abnormal form! Only one form of polydactyly is known to be harmful.

The Word Detective adopts some kittens:

New Scientist:

What sort of explosives do you use now?

There are two types of explosive - low order and high order. Low makes a slow heaving explosion, which pushes more than it shatters. We tend to look for a shattering explosive because we want to instantaneously remove the structural integrity of whatever we’re working on. So we would opt for nitroglycerin or NG-based dynamite. With a steel structure, we use something called a linear-shaped charge that concentrates the force of a high explosive called RDX. For example, it took 80 pounds of shaped charge to bring down two New York gas tanks built with 5 million pounds of steel.

Hello, Elliott!

Support Literacy, Win Books:

To celebrate ten years of online bookselling, we are asking our readers: What was your most memorable reading experience of the last ten years? Submit an essay and Powells.com will donate one dollar to Reading Is Fundamental, the nation’s largest nonprofit children’s literacy organization.

• The author of the best essay will win $1,000 in books
• Ten runners-up will receive $100 in books
• Submit your essay by July 31, 2004, and Powells.com will include a free mousepad in your first order placed before January 1, 2005

Oooo.

Exclusive Sony u50 review.

A new summer pastime: the virtual bughunt:

The vaguely unsatisfied child is then fobbed off at the exit with some sort of fakey certificate that shows pics of the day’s specimens. In fifty years the entire populace will have been raised like this, and grown men will run screaming at the sight of a real live butterfly.

Slashdot | 4 New “Extremely Critical” IE Vulnerabilities

Send a text message and hose down a German:

A German gardening equipment maker Gardena has put up what would surely be the equivalent of lawsuit-bait here in the States: a billboard with an enormous sprinkler that can be triggered via text message to spray passersby with water, finally fulfilling our lifelong dream of being able to anonymously hose down strangers.

jwz - today in police state news

best. marriage. proposal. EVER.

Oh, didn’t I mention? I got engaged! Oh yeah, I did mention. But did I mention how? Well, this is how! I added google.com to the DreamHost dns servers (um, maybe you noticed if for some reason you were using lynx to go to Google directly from our servers back around May 16th) and set up a fake Google website! Then I changed the picture at the top and changed our home dns servers to be DreamHost’s (instead of Earthlink’s DSL like they normally are). So if you went to www.google.com from our house, you got the fake version I’d set up on our servers! Mwah hwah hwah hwah! Well, “Tweeny” goes to Google a lot, so Saturday night I switched it over and next thing you knew, Sunday morning she was all “How much did you have to pay Google?!”… check it out, I archived it at:

http://www.groo.com/google.com/

Aren’t I romantic? And a huge nerd? Worse than those guys in line for Star Wars that Triumph the Insult Dog interviewed? Probably.

Wired News: Court Creates Snoopers’ Heaven.

Via Emily: MLA Language Map:

The MLA Language Map is intended for use by students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning about the linguistic and cultural composition of the United States. The MLA Language Map uses data from the 2000 United States census to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages and seven groups of less commonly spoken languages in the United States. The census data were based on responses to the question, “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” The Language Map illustrates the concentration of language speakers in zip codes and counties. The Data Center provides actual numbers and percentages of speakers.

jwz - Why do I even bother, part 32767.

/.: A Parent’s Guide to Linux Web Filtering.

Via jwz — SUV takes plunge in Hawai’i Kai:

Pat Campanella, left, and Affordable Towing and Recovery owner Devin Statts discuss how to get Campanella’s SUV out of Katherine Peacock’s pool in Hawai’i Kai. Campanella was giving his wife a driving lesson when she overcompensated and drove into the pool.

Wired News: Rocket Hobbyists Dropping Hobby:

Rocketeers up and down the skill-level range are feeling the pinch of post-9/11 regulations promulgated by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Today, thousands of people fly model rockets that range in size from about 12 inches to more than 30 feet tall. But since the ATF imposed new rules, some hobbyists have abandoned their pastime, and the next generation of engineers and scientists, some fear, is being driven away.

“If we’re in an environment where the government says you’ve got to get fingerprinted and background checked, and spend three to four months to do it, (adults are) not going to participate in my hobby,” said Mark Bundick, president of the National Association of Rocketry. “We need more kids. It helps them learn technology. It’s the technological base here in the country that we need to protect, and this hobby is a good introduction for kids that are interested in technology. If I lose those adults, then I will not be able to train those kids.”

Good overview with lots of links from the Internet Storm Center: yesterday, today.

Boing Boing: Death metal band with parrot as lead singer — Hatebeak:

The new album by HATEBEAK — the world’s only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist — promises music so terrifying it will “make you vacate your bowels.” Song titles inlcude Beak of Putrefaction and God of Empty Nest. “Hatebeak pecks your eyes out and assaults your ears in a flurry of pummeling riffs and grey feathers that leaves you lying in a pool of blood begging for more.”

SecurityFocus: Time to Dump Internet Explorer:

The latest version of IE is 6, and it has certainly accumulated an impressive record of holes: 153 since 18 April 2001, according to the SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities Archive. There have been some real doozies in there. For instance, last August, Microsoft issued a patch that fixed a hole that the company described this way: “It could be possible for an attacker who exploited this vulnerability to run arbitrary code on a user’s system. If a user visited an attacker’s Web site, it would be possible for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability without any other user action.” Oh, is that all? Well, that’s super - simply visit a Web page, and you’re 0\/\/N3d, d00d!

…

I could go on and on. Look, let’s be honest with each other. We all know this is true: IE is a buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure (I’m not even going to go into its poor support for Web standards; let that be a rant for another day). Yes, I know Microsoft patches holes as they are found. Great. But far too many are found. And yes, I know that Microsoft has promised that it has changed its ways, and that it will now focus on “Trustworthy Computing.” But I’ve heard too many of Microsoft’s promises and seen the results too many times. You know, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Who’s shamed when it’s “fool me the 432nd time”? Who’s the fool?

We’re security pros, and we know the score. It’s time. It’s time to tell our users, our clients, our associates, our families, and our friends to abandon Internet Explorer.

Get The Facts about Microsoft’s “Get The Facts” tour. (Then get the rebuttal.

Wired News: More False Information From TSA:

This is the third time in the past nine month that knowledge of the scope of secret information disclosures by airlines has expanded, and now six of the 10 largest airlines are known to have given data to the government secretly. Stone’s disclosure also raises questions about whether TSA officials intentionally withheld information from previous inquiries by the Government Accounting Office, members of Congress and the Department of Homeland Security’s chief privacy officer, Nuala O’Connor Kelly.

An Atlas of Cyberspaces.

HOW-TO Tuesday: War Kayaking:

As the summer approaches, we crawl out of our protective wired covered lairs to sometimes partake in outdoor activity. Last weekend, we went kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle, WA and of course, we couldn’t help but bring along a lot of equipment and decided we’d hunt for open wireless spots, this friends- was “War Kayaking.” We found a ton, charted it with GPS, Wifi finders and we’ll show you how we did it for this week’s HOW-TO Tuesday.

Ars Technica: KDE 3.2 Overview(2/2004)

Censorship’s Trial Balloons - What happens when wartime news gets censored? By Liam Callanan:

Actually, the balloon battle may have less to do with us today than it does with citizens, soldiers, reverends, and children 60 years from now. Because as compelling a case as the balloon story may be for the virtues of wartime censorship, what’s troubling is not that Americans in 1945 didn’t know about these balloons; it’s that most Americans today don’t. The balloon bombs were erased not only from our national awareness, but from our collective history. We believe it never happened, just as our children might have been led to believe Abu Ghraib never happened.

The administration needs to do a better job of providing us with the kind of information that will truly help us—not just this summer, but in decades to come, when we look back and try to learn what happened in this war and how we can prevent it from happening again. Torture memos, torture photos, and chatter in the system must not be erased. Otherwise, we may never understand what we were fighting for. It’s true, the truth hurts. But gaps in our history hurt more, and the hurt lasts longer.

What does your firewall sound like? | Linux Gazette

LinuxDevCenter.com: Windows Compatibility for the Linux Desktop:

In any business switching to Linux, there’s at least one person who’s stuck. These people need to use files from some Windows-only program, and usually have to do so by dual booting to and from Windows. Dual booting is very slow when all you really want to do is cut and paste a few screenfuls of data. Worse, because it is so slow, there is a real temptation to remain in Windows and use programs such as Outlook and Exchange, this year’s favorite virus targets.

There is a better alternative: run just the necessary Windows programs under Linux. This solves the same problem we saw when DOS started to replace CP/M. There was always something that only the older operating systems’ programs did, so you ran the older programs with an emulator.

Wired News: Word Refuseniks: Never Upgrade

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War:

The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with.

…Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle.

Ah, irony — SecurityFocus HOME News: Backdoor program gets backdoored.

In a disclaimer evocative of advisories from more mainstream software vendors, Sleaze pointed out in his posting that the backdoor password in circulation only works on an older, unsupported versions of the Trojan horse, and that the latest version of Optix Pro uses stronger encryption to protect a different master password. “So make sure you update!,” he wrote.

At least one security expert says there’s a lesson to be learned from the whole affair. “It obviously says you should always use open-source Trojans,” says Mark Loveless, a senior security analyst with Bindview Corporation. “That’s the moral. You can’t even trust Windows malware.”

Crypto-Gram: June 15, 2004

Yahoo! News - Teens Suffering From Rebound Headache:

Also, some specialists think months of painkiller use by migraine sufferers can transform their pain, until the rebound-prone experience a chronic tension-type headache. (Overusing any painkiller can trigger rebound headache, but over-the-counter drugs are the most widely used and thus most blamed.)

Lest anyone doubt rebound headache is real, Pina-Garza points to typical cases in his office: Youths whose parents have migraines but have never suffered a serious headache themselves — until a week of high-dose painkillers after knee surgery or a sports sprain spurs headaches that they continue to medicate.

Wired News: A Jet-Powered PDA for Astronauts:

“Clearly the concept of something that is part webcam, part PDA, part intercom and part lightsaber practice droid has many applications in an environment where so many things are going on simultaneously,” NASA Watch editor Keith Cowing wrote in an e-mail.

Legalizing Torture (washingtonpost.com):

Perhaps the president’s lawyers have no interest in the global impact of their policies — but they should be concerned about the treatment of American servicemen and civilians in foreign countries. Before the Bush administration took office, the Army’s interrogation procedures — which were unclassified — established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” What if the foreign interrogator of an American “knows that severe pain will result from his actions” but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country’s security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should

Bruce Sterling — Wired 12.06: Suicide by Pseudoscience :

The Union of Concerned Scientists in a February report pointed out something the science press has known for years: The Bush administration has no respect for science. Ideologues prefer to make up the laws of nature as they go.

…

When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Trofim Lysenko was Joseph Stalin’s top stooge in Soviet agricultural science, a field that was mercilessly politicized by fanatics. His specialty was inventing nutty schemes - things like stimulating the evolution of trees by overcrowding them to get them to cooperate, as though they were communist minions. This totalitarian huckster spent his whole career promising exciting results and bringing about only disaster. But the party never judged itself on results, so he always got a free pass.

…

Trofim Lysenko was a funny case. He had the authority to reduce a major scientific-research power to a dismal Burkina Faso with rockets; he left behind practically no scientific achievement or discovery. As a scientist, he was a nonentity, but his menace is universal. Wherever moral panic, hasty judgment, arrogance, fear, brutal partisan ignorance, slovenly standards of research, overcentralization of authority, conspiratorial policymaking, jingoism and xenophobia, and spin-centric travesties of disinformation can flourish, Lysenko’s spirit will never die.

Following up on this BugTraq report is a techworld.com layman’s article on the latest Internet Explorer zero-day hole:

Two new vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer which allow a complete bypass of security and provide system access to a computer, including the installation of files on someone’s hard disk without their knowledge, through a single click.

Worse, the holes have been discovered from analysis of an existing link on the Internet and a fully functional demonstration of the exploit have been produced and been shown to affect even fully patched versions of Explorer. …

In simple terms, the link uses an unknown vulnerability to open up a local Explorer help file - ms-its:C:\WINDOWS\Help\iexplore.chm::/iegetsrt.htm. It delays executing anything immediately but instead uses another unknown vulnerability to run another file which in turn runs some script. This script is then used to run more script. And finally that script is used to run an exploit that Microsoft has been aware of since August 2003 but hasn’t patched.

That exploit - Adodb.stream - has not been viewed as particularly dangerous, since it only works when the file containing the code is present on the user’s hard disk. The problem comes in the fact that the Help file initially opened is assumed to be safe since it is a local file and so has minimal security restrictions.

By using the unknown exploits, code is installed within the help file window, all security efforts are bypassed, and the Adodb.stream exploit is then used to download files on the Internet direct to the hard disk.

…if you click on a malicious link in an email or on the Internet, a malicious user can very quickly have complete control of your PC. And there is no patch available.

Wanna bet? Wired News: Website Analysis Isn’t a Game

jwz - How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop

Slashdot | Netgear’s Amusing “fix” for WG602v1 Backdoor

Universal Life Church - ordination information

jwz - gadget review:

Helpful advice for young geeks: do not succumb to the temptation of the Gerber Recoil multi-tool. The Leatherman Wave remains the One True Way.

Bookslut: A Nerdy Day At the Movies, and The Three Laws of Adaptations:

1. A film adaptation may not, through omission or direct action, undermine or reverse the meanings and morals of the source material.
2. A film adaptation must adequately capture what made the source material compelling, as long as it does not conflict with the first rule.
3. An adaptation can make the changes necessary to work as a product of its medium, as long as these changes do not conflict with the first or second rules.

Seattle Weekly: News: Microsoft’s Sacred Cash Cow by Jeff Reifman

• Stupid Email Disclaimers
• E-mail Confidential - Who’s afraid of Time Inc.’s legal disclaimer? By Jack Shafer
• Slashdot | An Analysis Of Email Disclaimers

Slashdot | Recording Industry Hopes To Hinder CD Burning

Wired 12.06: You Can Cure AIDS. Or End Hunger. Choose.

Danish professors of statistics aren’t known for lighting fires under anyone. But there was Bjørn Lomborg sparking an inferno in 2001 with his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he methodically demolished widely held ideas that the earth was, well, going to hell. Since then, Lomborg has fought a running battle with the eco establishment, which calls him a 21st-century Dr. Pangloss. But Lomborg doesn’t deny the existence of global scourges; he just wants to face them honestly. Which brings us to the Copenhagen Consensus, his ambitious effort to set priorities for the top 10 issues facing the world: climate change, disease, war, education, financial instability, corruption, hunger, population, water, and trade. The project has tapped nine respected economists - four of them Nobelists - to create a hot list for spending limited resources.

Grist | Haiku vote:

A frog in water
doesn’t feel it boil in time.
Dude, we are that frog.

Yahoo! News - Do you have ‘cicada envy’?

I know that I don’t. Ick.

NTFS Resize Frequently Asked Questions

Since I’m considering resizing my work laptop partitions, perhaps I should burn a System Rescue Cd before I get too far along with it?

jwz - exterminate all rational garfield:

Auto-generated Garfield strips: needless to say, much funnier than the original…

jwz - more election fun

jwz - prisons:

America’s inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last year, to almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75 men living in prison or jail.”

“The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss on himself.’”

jwz - putting the SOY back in SOYLENT GREEN!:

The Chinese government has shown an unusually high level of concern as a result of a bold media exposure towards a scandal in which human hair was used to make soy sauce.

China Central Television first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China’s Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.

Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce.

By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as “blended” on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce.

Alaska Freedom :: Our Freedom to Travel In Jeopardy

Photographer’s Rights

Informed Comment : Abuse of Women Detainees:

A scandal that has not yet broken in the press is the story of how many women ended up in US prisons. The fact is, few were suspected of having themselves committed a crime or an act of insurgency. Rather, they were taken as hostages or potential informants because their husbands or sons were wanted by the US military. This kind of arrest, however, is a form of collective punishment and not permitted under the Fouth Geneva Convention governing military occupations of civilian populations. The sexual abuse of these women is therefore a double crime.

Eventually these photographs of abused or tortured Muslim women are likely to leak, and the reaction in the Muslim world will be explosive. One shakes one’s head in bewilderment as to what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

Two thirds of emails now spam: official | The Register:

Spam hotspots are emerging as the global levels of junk mail worldwide continue to increase. More than two thirds (67.6 per cent) of the 840m emails scanned by filtering firm MessageLabs last month was identified as spam. MessageLabs figures also indicate significant regional variations and spam “hot spots”, despite attempts to deter spammers through legislation.

An Open Source Wi-Fi Roundup:

The general belief when it comes to setting up Wi-Fi connectivity is that you need a Wireless access point (AP) device and computers with wireless client cards. This site has reviewed dozen of consumer and business oriented APs, some better than others. One thing always remains the same, however: the access point always costs more than the wireless card.

Guess what? You don’t always necessarily need a fixed wireless router device to create your own WLAN. You can do it with two machines that both have Wi-Fi cards, and leave more expensive APs out of the picture.

There are a number of different ways to accomplish this with freely available GNU/Linux based open source software. A typical Linux distribution will generally allow you set up a Linux box as a ‘wired’ router, so turning it into a wireless router isn’t really that big a leap.

For instance, if you have a desktop machine in your home office, and want to create a WLAN for the notebook that you or other family members use in the rest of the house (or to create an AP for a console gaming platform like Xbox or PlayStation2), all you may need is two Wi-Fi cards.

Holy crap. Now *that’s* how you fold things!

From my sister, concerned for my safety — Cicadaville, A Premier Cicada Information Source:

FACT: Cicadas are vicious killers.

FACT: Cicadas prey on innocent children and pets.

FACT: Cicadas are seething with deadly venom and flesh-eating bacteria.

FACT: This year Cicadas will kill more people than snakes, spiders, scorpions, and sharks combined!

RH9 to Feodra Legacy.

Fedora News Updates #12

For Merrystar:

• Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil
• textism: Stalin’s Bullet List
• PowerPoint Remix
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• PowerPoint: shot with its own bullets

TrekToday - Fan Campaign Claims ‘Enterprise’ Is Renewed:

UPN has decided to renew Star Trek: Enterprise for a fourth season, the SaveEnterprise.com fan campaign reported today.

KHAAAAAAAN!

Boing Boing: UK cinema copyright warnings: a call to action:

I went and saw Troy, Brad Pitt’s new men-in-skirts movie last night, at the big Odeon in Leicester Square, paying £10.50 for the privilege. Not that I begrudge it: apparently, acquiring the rights to the Iliad was very expensive, and they have to charge a small fortune to viewers if they hope to recoup.

I don’t even begrudge them the 30 minutes’ worth of commercials they subjected their captive audience to. Well, I did. But I didn’t let it get to me.

What did get to me was this warning, shown before nearly every film in the UK:

“You are not permitted to use any camera or recording equipment in this cinema. This will be treated as an attempt to breach copyright. Any person doing so can be ejected and such articles may be confiscated by the police. We ask the audience to be vigilant against any such activity and report any matters arousing suspicion to cinema staff. Thank you.”

Every time I see this, my blood boils. I just paid a fortune to see this movie, I’ve been subjected to 500 percent concession stand markup and half an hour of commercials and now you’re going to give me a little lecture about how badly I’ll get beaten up if I turn out to be a pirate, and ask me to snitch on my fellow moviegoers?

It’s adding insult to injury, if you ask me. It’s unforgivably rude.

So here’s what I’ve started doing: whenever this warning is screened, I take a very obvious flash photo of it. I’ve done it twice now, and both times, I got a round of applause. You can do it too. If we all do it, if we all laugh and boo when this warning comes on, maybe the movie companies will get the picture.

SSRN-Copyright’s Communications Policy by Tim Wu

A Bug’s Life Cycle

Why Windows is a Security Nightmare:

A typical Windows system follows a simple lifecycle: it starts out with a clean Windows installation, which gradually deteriorates as programs are installed, and uninstalled. Eventually, the Windows registry accumulates so much crud that the user is forced to do a clean install. When a user does a clean install that user’s system loses all the previously applied security updates, and becomes a sitting duck for worms and other malware.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if the user was able to update the new system with security patches painlessly, but Windows Update makes it very hard to do so. My personal experience with the killer duo is an enlightening example of how all of this works.

The New Yorker: The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersch:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

Wired News: Hy-Wire Driving Is a Gas

Yahoo! News - Moore Hopes ‘Fahrenheit’ Influences People:

Even those skeptical of Moore, who has drawn criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.

“I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore’s work,” said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, saying he found Moore too smug and stunt-driven in the past. “There’s no such job as a standup journalist.”

Yet in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.

Slashdot | Fedora Core 2 released to Mirrors, Bittorrent

Crypto-Gram: May 15, 2004

jwz - historical maps:

Rumsey has a collection of 10,000 historical maps scanned in at extremely high resolution, and has been doing a lot of really cool stuff with them, like taking old maps, correcting their scale to match up with reality, and letting you crossfade between old and modern maps of the same area; placing the maps on a globe and letting you zoom in from space; combining the maps with topographical data and letting you fly through 3D scenes; and all kinds of stuff. Not only is there a vast amount of data on his site, there are also really cool visualization tools.

Popular Science | Is This What War Will Come To?

Many weapons in the pipeline, such as the space-launched darts and electromagnetic railgun, will use no explosives at all, relying instead on kinetic energy to destroy targets. Some, like Metal Storm, will use electricity rather than mechanical firing mechanisms. Laser weapons will disable enemy gear with heat rather than force, providing pinpoint accuracy and speed-of-light delivery.

Dagen H - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Dagen H or H day was Sunday, September 3, 1967 at 5:00 am in Sweden. It was the time traffic switched from the left side of the road to the right. The H stands for Högertrafik, the swedish word for “right-hand traffic”.

Slashdot | Lithium-Sulfur Batteries Unveiled

Slashdot | RIAA Loss Report Contradicts Nielsen Sales Record

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Library of Alexandria discovered

Wired News: Designer Virus Stalks HIV:

It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.

That’s because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered to latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. They’ve tested the theory in a computer model and in cells in a dish. The results have been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year.

Always useful: Latin abbreviations and expressions.

Slashdot | Justice Department Censors ACLU Web Site

A cautionary tale of two hats:

 <oss_crowd> Uh... ping?
 <fedora_uh> oss_crowd: what's up?
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: We're feeling kinda useless. What exactly is our
             role, again?
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: well, it would be really helpful if you could
             test some things and file the bugs.
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: ugh. We ALWAYS did that.
           * oss_crowd begins to wonder what exactly is the purpose of
             fedora_rh
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: it's the open-development, proving-grounds for
             new technology component of Red Hat, as opposed to RHEL.
  <rh_sales> Told ya it'll eat your brane.
         --- rh_pr kicks rh_sales from the channel (you're a dolt)
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: so, let me get this straight. Effectively, you
             want us to download the packages you release, test things,
             file bugs, and submit patches.
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: Sure, why not?
 <oss_crowd> ...but when it comes to things like features, direction of
             the project, and which software to include in the
             distribution, it's the decision of Red Hat?
           * fedora_rh is away: I AM RH
 <fedora_us> I'm still not dead.
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: How is that different from how things were
             before the whole "publicly-supported distribution" thing?
 <oss_crowd> rh_dev: where is that long-promised public CVS/SVN repo?
    <rh_dev> dunno, talk to fedora_rh
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: look, such things don't happen in a week, ok?
 <oss_crowd> IT'S BEEN A YEAR!

Wired News: Hybrid Mileage Comes Up Short:

The 19-year-old EPA tests for city and highway mileage actually gauge vehicle emissions and use that data to derive an estimated fuel-efficiency rating. The EPA tests pre-production vehicles in a lab to simulate vehicle starts and stops on crowded city streets and open road conditions. According to the EPA website, “The tests measure the waste substances emitted from consuming the fuel, not the actual fuel consumed. From the measurement of emissions, EPA can estimate the miles per gallon achieved by the vehicle on average.”

“The (EPA) test needs to include more fundamental engineering,” says John H. Johnson, an automotive expert who co-authored a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report on fuel-efficiency standards. “They haven’t been updated to encompass hybrids.”

Wow. Starship Troopers really wasn’t very much like the book, was it?

ChrisW’s “Starship Troopers” Page

Boing Boing: Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview.

Slashdot | Novell To Release Ximian Connector Under GPL

Bruce Schneier on warrants:

Unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. People ask: “Should we use this new surveillance technology to catch terrorists and criminals, or should we favor privacy and ban its use?”

This is the wrong question. We know that new technology gives law enforcement new search techniques, and makes existing techniques cheaper and easier. We know that we are all safer when the police can use them. And the Fourth Amendment already allows even the most intrusive searches: The police can search your home and person.

What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse. This is the proper question: “Should we allow law enforcement to use new technology without any judicial oversight, or should we demand that they be overseen and accountable?” And the Fourth Amendment already provides for this in its requirement of a warrant.

The search warrant - a technologically neutral legal requirement - basically says that before the police open the mail, listen in on the phone call or search the bit stream for key words, a “neutral and detached magistrate” reviews the basis for the search and takes responsibility for the outcome. The key is independent judicial oversight; the warrant process is itself a security measure protecting us from abuse and making us more secure.

Much of the rhetoric on the “security” side of the debate cloaks one of its real aims: increasing law enforcement powers by decreasing its oversight and accountability. It’s a very dangerous road to take, and one that will make us all less secure. The more surveillance technologies that require a warrant before use, the safer we all are.

Beverage Monitor:

Our overall project design can be reduced to three specific states that can be seen in the state diagram below. The first state, the state entered at the beginning of the programs execution, is the Set Table state. In this mode the wait staff can select the table that they are serving. The selection is made by using two buttons, one to increment the table number and one to decrement it. Once the correct table is selected, the enter button is hit and the program then goes into Monitor mode. In this mode the wireless device on the pitcher sends the signal from the accelerometer to the server station. At the server station, the wait staff can see the number of the table being served and how many rounds have been served to the table. There is also a status bar showing the status of the pitcher’s volume. The MCU at the server station uses the signal from the pitcher to calculate its volume. In this state, there is a reset button in case a different table is about to be served. Unless the reset button is pressed, the program will stay in this state until the pitcher is empty. Once the signal indicated the pitcher is empty, the last state, the Refill state, is entered. Here the server station indicates that the table needs a refill. Once the wait staff refills the pitcher they press the enter button and the project returns to the Monitor state, and the additional round is indicated on the display. The reset button can also be used in the Refill state if the table decides not to go for another pitcher.

Slashdot | Free Software Tracking a Stolen Computer?

Slashdot | Comcast Plans Cable Boxes with Integrated Wi-Fi and Snooping

Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program

Locate Superfund Sites, Superfund, US EPA:

From this page you will be able to locate Superfund sites through various methods. You can find sites by geography, contaminant EPA ID, and other identifiers.

The Mideastization of the US, or: Rumsfeld Must Resign

jwz - enough about cicadias already:

bezoar:

The sound of the phaser in the original Star Trek TV series was the sound of a cicada brood. I know this because I went on a camping trip in 1982, just as these little fuckers were coming out of the trees and flying everywhere. I woke up, and heard the sound of phasers, everywhere around me.

Worst. camping. trip. ever.

Oops: RIAA Forgets to Make Royalty Payments.

But the real problem are those pesky downloaders and piracy! Really! Don’t forget, we have our artist’s best interests in mind!

What a world we live in.

LuMiXtech:

LuMiXtech is a leader in Linux library computing with a secure LuMiX (pronounced loo-mix) PAC model that is featured in the Spring 2004 issue of NetConnect, a supplement of Library Journal. Also, check out the LuMiX article on Newsforge, the online newspaper for Linux and Open Source.

NewsForge | Linux in action: A public library’s success story

So, Microsoft is for stopping spam, but only spam they don’t make money from?

SecurityFocus HOME News: MS opens Hotmail to bulk mailers:

Microsoft said yesterday it had introduced a white list scheme to allow well-behaved email marketing firms to reach its customers without falling foul of its spam filters. Marketing firms who post a cash bond of up to $20,000 through IronPort’s “Bonded Sender Programme” will get guarantees that their message will be delivered to the estimated 170 million regular users of Microsoft’s Hotmail and MSN e-mail services, providing they follow a strict set of guidelines. Firms who flout the guidelines - standards that exceed those defined in the CAN-SPAM Act - risk losing their money. The approach rewards marketeers who agree to be held accountable for the messages they send. Microsoft has been working on the programme with IronPort for five months but the arrangement was only made public yesterday. With the support of Microsoft, more firms are likely to adopt the scheme. Good news for Ironport’s sales team. Microsoft is behind the idea because it wants to reclaim email marketing from criminal spammers. For end users the scheme makes it less likely that messages they have requested from companies they do business with will be blocked (i.e. fewer false positives).

What I really enjoy in this BBC article about the Sasser worm is the picture they chose to use:

Wow, that’s one powerful little program!

Fedora Core 1:

Introduction

This article discusses the dual boot installation of Red Hat Fedora Core 1 (FC1) on a Dell C600. Several packages not included in FC1 are also discussed. In addition, we compare the Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.1 desktop environments.

Slashdot | Red Hat Desktop Unveiled:

Red Hat announced yesterday that they will be releasing a version of their OS — dubbed ‘Red Hat Desktop’ — targeted at corporations, universities and government agencies, “looking to upgrade their PCs but don’t want or need all the features that ship with the latest version of Windows”, said Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s chief executive, although it’s not targeted at consumers. It will cost on average about $5 a month per machine, with additional support services available.

NBCSandiego.com - News - State Pulls Plug On Electronic Voting:

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned touch-screen voting Friday in San Diego and three other California counties in the November election, saying the lack of a paper trail makes them unreliable and he threatened to block computerized voting in 10 other counties.

Pac Manhattan

Wired News: More Reasons to Love Google

Slashdot | Google Files for IPO

Howdy Jim! I won’t tell anyone at work if you don’t.

Office 2003 vs. Openoffice.Org.

Wired News: Diebold Machine May Get Boot:

A California voting systems panel recommended Thursday that the secretary of state decertify an electronic voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems, making it likely that four counties that used the machines will have to find others for the November election.

…

The panel discovered last November that Diebold had installed uncertified software on the machines.

The voting panel also recommended to Shelley that he ask the state attorney general to examine the possibility of bringing civil and criminal charges against Diebold for violating California election codes, which state that vendors cannot change software without notifying the secretary of state’s office. The codes also say that no vendor can install uncertified software on voting systems.

“This doesn’t solve the problems,” said Tab Iredale, a Diebold developer. “It just sets a tone of confrontation at a time when we should be working together to address issues with the certification process.”

Shocked, Shocked, I tell you — Wired News: Damaging Drug Study? Bury It:

The risks for children taking some antidepressants could outweigh the benefits, according to an analysis of data that pharmaceutical companies did not make widely available to the public or to researchers.

Researchers in the United Kingdom analyzed 22 randomized controlled trials that compared the effects of antidepressants and placebos in children from 5 to 18 years old. Data on four out of the five antidepressants examined showed the drugs had the potential to do more harm than good in depressed kids, according to research published in the April issue of the British medical journal The Lancet.

jwz - coffins

John Doyle, writer for the conservative Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, learns how to laugh at Bill O’Reilly.

Via Boing Boing — The Silmarillion in 1000 words.

AINULINDALE:

ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you’re out of the band.
MELKOR: Fine, I was leaving anyway.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: What are you waiting for?
AINUR: Oh. Right. Newly created world. Sorry. Great jam session, big guy!
ILUVATAR: Yeesh.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Study limits maximum tree height:

The tallest any tree could grow would be about 130m (426ft), say US scientists.

George Koch and colleagues climbed five of the eight tallest trees in the world - including the biggest at 112.7m - and examined their physiology in detail.

The researchers found these massive Californian redwoods pushed the limits to which water could be raised from the ground to support further growth.

The team tells the journal Nature that under present conditions, the trees are unlikely to gain 5-15m more in height.

Yahoo! News - Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment:

But I can say of
certain knowledge that nothing
was taken out

that would naysay what
I just indicated in my
response to the question

What I don’t get is that this group of Trekkies somehow forgot that Klingons are ugly bags of mostly water, too!

TrekToday - Klingon Film About Ugly Humans To Debut In May:

A Klingon look at humanity, Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water, will make its debut at the Cannes Film Market held from May 12th-23rd.

A press release from the producers, which also promotes the film’s official web site, revealed that the film visits the Klingon Language Institute’s Annual qep’a (Conference) directed by professor Lawrence Schoen.

Get married on the bridge of the Enterprise-D:

Now you can get married on the Bridge of the USS Enterprise, have Klingons and Ferengi witness your vows and then have an out-of-this-world reception at Quark’s Bar & Restaurant.

Scroll down to view all the options below. Options include Starfleet Wedding, Captain’s Wedding, Admiral’s Wedding, JR. Officer’s Wedding, Continuum Reception, Andorian Reception, Haven Reception…

SecurityFocus HOME News: Core Internet technology is vulnerable.

New cars are getting too expensive to fix

2003 SFWA® Nebula Awards® winners

jwz - heavy metal corn

DNA Lounge: DNA Sequencing:

If I could send a message back in time to myself, to before we opened this place, that message would be, “do not allow any computer in your club more complicated than a non-electric cash register. In fact, consider not having telephones.”

But I wouldn’t have listened, because I’m a dumbass.

O’Reilly Network Weblogs: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus

Wired News: Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Porn:

You have a right to buy whatever you want. You may not be able to afford a printing press to print it, but you have a right to buy it. That’s not something that’s often talked about in relation to the First Amendment. But civil liberties and individual rights are all we really have in this country.

That’s what upset me so much about the Patriot Act. We got right down in the mud with the terrorists. What we were doing was reducing ourselves to their level. We are the beacon of freedom in the world. For us to give up all of these freedoms to wage war with lunatics just isn’t necessary.

A Message From Al:

On April 9, my mom and dad, Nick and Mary Yankovic, passed away in their home in Fallbrook, California. It was the result of a terrible accident — that morning they had started a fire in the fireplace with the flue closed, and were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Suzanne called me that afternoon on the bus to give me the news, so that I would hear about it before the wire services picked it up.

Needless to say, I feel pretty much the way you would expect me to feel — shocked and devastated beyond words. I loved my parents so much, and this all still seems like a horrible nightmare that I can’t wake up from.

Wired News: Clearing Up The Confusion

Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson’s latest 800-page dispatch, The Confusion, arrived in stores this week. But Stephenson fans hoping for another brain-wracking, cryptographic puzzle to solve will find a surprise instead: A central scene in the book provides a long, detailed description of the mechanics of 17th-century bills of exchange. Pivotal themes in the book involve the emergence of a cashless market at Lyon, France, and Sir Isaac Newton’s 30-year stint at England’s national mint.

Slashdot | Injunction to Enforce GPL

April 2004 Crypto-gram

The Onion | New Negative Campaign Ads Blast Voters Directly:

Although the ads have angered voters, Charles Wayne, a professor of political science at Georgetown University, called them “a refreshing shift toward more honesty in the political process.”

“Emotionally manipulative attack ads obscure the candidates’ real positions and insult the intelligence of America’s voters,” Wayne said. “The fact that the major political powers are voicing their disdain for the public shows they are no longer hiding behind empty rhetoric. I see that as a positive step.”

The Long Strange Journey of the 959.

New search engine from Amazon: A9.

Check out John Battelle’s Announcement, and the A9 What’s cool page.

Maybe playing around with it will show me why it’s a Google-killer. I just don’t see it yet.

Slashdot | AmEx vs. rec.humor.funny

SecurityFocus HOME News: Microsoft releases new patches for Windows flaws.

Glad to know they’re on the ball - one of those critical flaws is only 8 months old. I’m still not patching Lower Corte (the only Windows installation left in my home); I have no desire to rebuild that system again.

Music industry in uproar over UNC research:

The Recording Industry Association of America has long bemoaned declining sales, which it blames on illegal downloading. According to the association, the industry shipped almost a third fewer units in 2003 than in 1999. The industry is suing consumers to stop the free downloads.

“If illegal downloading is not the cause of the precipitous decline in sales of recordings, what is?” asks a six-page paper the recording industry group released in response to the study by Strumpf and Harvard’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee. “The results are inconsistent with virtually every other study.”

There could be many causes for the decline, Strumpf said. The economy is weaker. More entertainment choices might be drawing consumer dollars. Radio consolidation has reduced variety.

He says the industry’s response amounts to, ” ‘We have 20 studies, they have one.’ If 20 or 100 or 1,000 people say the sun revolves around the earth, it doesn’t make it so.”

Wired News: Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11:

The article in the Beijing Evening News told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof.

There was a problem with the story. Rather than do his own original reporting, Evening News writer Huang Ke had cribbed, nearly word for word, his text from an American publication. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Ke hadn’t bothered to vet the source he had plagiarized: The Onion.

At first, the Evening News stood by its story, demanding proof it wasn’t true. It finally did apologize, but stubbornly tried to deflect blame for having been duped.

April 15th: National High Five Day

Schneier.com: Op Ed: A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer

But my primary objection isn’t the totalitarian potential of national IDs, nor the likelihood that they’ll create a whole immense new class of social and economic dislocations. Nor is it the opportunities they will create for colossal boondoggles by government contractors. My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler:

It won’t work. It won’t make us more secure.

In fact, everything I’ve learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.

My argument may not be obvious, but it’s not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.

It doesn’t really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.

2004 Jefferson Muzzles are out:

Since 1992, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has celebrated the birth and ideals of its namesake by calling attention to those who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that freedom of speech “cannot be limited without being lost.”

Announced on or near April 13 — the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson — the Jefferson Muzzles are awarded as a means to draw national attention to abridgments of free speech and press and, at the same time, foster an appreciation for those tenets of the First Amendment. Because the importance and value of free expression extend far beyond the First Amendment’s limit on government censorship, acts of private censorship are not spared consideration for the dubious honor of receiving a Muzzle.

Wired News: Data Disclosure Contradicts Feds

American Airlines’ announcement Friday that it shared more than a million passenger itineraries with four government contractors reveals that Transportation Security Administration officials have repeatedly issued false statements about the development of the passenger-profiling system known as CAPPS II.

American Airlines joins a growing list of carriers that have come forth in recent months to say that they have shared massive amounts of information about their passengers with the TSA. For the past eight months, TSA officials have repeatedly said they were not collecting this data. But American’s disclosure raises questions about why the department has given false information about its data collection.

…

American Airlines is the third major domestic airline to admit sharing vast amounts of customer information to aid government data-mining efforts, following JetBlue’s admission in September 2003 and Northwest Airlines’ admission in January. Both Northwest and American gave false information to the press in the wake of the JetBlue scandal, saying they had never turned over information about their passengers.

…

The TSA also apparently failed to inform members of Congress or the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, about soliciting airline data for its contractors or testing CAPPS II with real data. The GAO released a report in February about the program. According to the report, the TSA told the GAO that CAPPS II has only been tested with 32 itineraries provided by agency employees.

Slashdot | Are You Reporting Your Internet Purchases?

From jwz: Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party

This site is not about religion, nor about Christianity, nor about Republicans. This site is about how a small group of Republican strategists targeted a religious constituency to expand the base of their party, and how a small group of religious extremists targeted the Republican Party to bring the United States government under religious control.

Pop!

Wow. Mach 7?

NASAs X 43A Scramjet Sets Air Speed Record:

Psychology professor’s research deemed ‘classic’ by expert panel:

Tell people not to think of a white bear for five minutes, and chances are they won’t be able to get polar bears out of their heads.

Google Job Opportunities: Google Copernicus Center is hiring:

Google is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007. This unique opportunity is available only to highly-qualified individuals who are willing to relocate for an extended period of time, are in top physical condition and are capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen.

The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated research, development and technology facility at which Google will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering, high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo) and de-oxygenated cubicle dwelling. This center will provide a unique platform from which Google will leapfrog current terrestrial-based technologies and bring information access to new heights of utility.

Which reminds me of Google’s PigeonRank Technology…

Pigeons bandwidth higher than ADSL

Is the bandwidth of broadband (ADSL) wider then the wingspan of a pigeon? A few days ago, an experiment took place near the Sea of Galilee, attempting to confront two technologies: ADSL vs. pigeons’ enabled wireless technology. During the experiment, 3 pigeons carried 4 GB (gigabytes) achieving what apparently looks as pigeons’ record in data transfer to a given distance. Will B2P (back to pigeons) save an endangered technology?

Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2004 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail – a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.

The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. “She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them,” Page said. “And when she’s not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, ‘Can’t you people fix this?’”

The idea that there could be a better way to handle email caught the attention of a Google engineer who thought it might be a good “20 percent time” project. (Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs). Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born.

Why We Went In: Version 10.0

Via /., Tom’s Hardware Guide looks at migrating from Windows to Linux:

Crashes, viruses and headaches. You have had it with Windows and you want to switch to Linux. Where to begin? How do you save your documents? Will my hardware work?

Slow down… take a deep breath, because you have a lot of work ahead of you. Millions of people have made the same switch before you, so it’s not impossible. We are going to take you step-by-step through a whole migration from Windows to Linux, covering everything from picking the right Linux distribution to installing Linux applications.

Fundrace.org

SecurityFocus HOME News: Hosting company reveals hacks, citing disclosure:

Citing California’s security breach disclosure law, Texas-based Allegiance Telecom notified 4,000 Web host