December 2000 Archives
Less than eight hours remaining in the False Millennium. Thank ghod, the Year of Too Many Zeroes seems to have been a brutal one, and I hope the next one will be better. Happy New Year, everyone!
P.S. I've never been much for resolutions, and don't believe I made any last year. However, even though I've fooled around, and even backslid a few times, 2000 is the first year in which I have ever weighed less on December 31 than on January 1. Maybe next year I can do even better.
HST isn't taking Bush's election at all well:
The other night, Hunter's Aspen neighbor's heard a barrage of shotgun bursts coming from his ranch. Apparently suffering what you could call "election-anxiety angst," Thompson awoke from a troubled sleep, ran outside into the snow, and started blazing away at shadows. All the time, he was raging against Bush - although I'm sure he stopped well short of actually making threats against the president-elect. That would be a federal matter, and Hunter steers well clear of government agencies.[via Media News]
I'm glad that wind power is proving to be a success in Germany, but I don't think the author of this article seems to be aware of wind power initiatives in Colorado.
I don't buy the idea of teachers being expendable either.
Dan gives good rant on weblogs.
I say, Go to hell. I mean it. Maybe this form means nothing to you. Well, fine, because I am not writing for you. I am writing for me. I am writing for what I get out of the process of thinking about a political issue or a scientific discovery and explaining it to my readers. I am writing for the responses I get from my readers. I am writing for the interplay with the larger community of webloggers.In case he tones this masterpiece down in the light of day, I'll link the original post to MeFi for archival goodness. At any rate, Dan and Rebecca both make similar points about weblogging as self-discovery. There's something about writing for an audience, no matter how small (or even imaginary), that makes you have to explore your own ideas more deeply than you would ordinarily.
The hardware copy protection I've been moaning about for the past week has a name: Content Protection for Recordable Media or CPRM. The Register has posted a good FAQ on the subject, as well as a few comments from the EFF's John Gilmore:
So spread the word. No copy protection should exist ANYWHERE in generic computer hardware! It's up to the BUYER to determine what to use their product for. It's not up to the vendors of generic hardware, and certainly not up to a record company that's shadily influencing those vendors in back-room meetings. Demand a policy declaration from your vendor that they will build only open hardware, not covertly controlled hardware. Use your purchasing dollars to enforce that policy.There's no reason why CPRM can't go the same way as DIVX. Just remember that DIVX failed because informed consumers took a careful look at the technology, saw its limitations, decided that wasn't what they wanted, and made their feelings clear. If you don't want restrictions on your use of your future hard drives, let the industry know.
Here's a feature I'd love to see in a web browser: Link queueing. Imagine that clicking on a link, instead of taking you to that page immediately, the browser adds that link to a queue. When you're ready to move on, you click on a button that takes you to the next queued link. This would be really handy for reading long articles with embedded links; you could mark anything of interest for later viewing without breaking up the continuity of the article. Does anybody know of a browser or add-on that does this?
Will drives with built-in copy protection ever sell?
Any hardware device that limits what consumers can do with their music or video files will face steep hurdles before being adopted. Previous devices with built-in copy protection have reached the market only to disappear under the weight of consumer indifference.If the feedback to this ZDNN article is any indication, the answer is a resounding "Hell, No!"
My coolest Christmas present this year: a Motorola T900 communicator. Wireless e-mail in a pager; it's already been nice to keep people apprised of my progress on the long drive up from MS yesterday. I don't want to put the address out for spammers to find, but if anyone wants my address, ask me.
Oh my ghod. Becky, would you look at her butt.
If you think there's anything unusual about this headline, you've never been to a Microsoft technology demo.
- Supporting programs to help victims of domestic violence: $2 million.
- Advertising your good works to show what a good corporate citizen you are: $108 million.
- Good publicity for a company making a detested product: Priceless.
Home again. The holiday was enjoyable, the trip back wasn't. More when I feel up to it.
I'm escaping from work while I have a chance so I can begin the trek down to MS. (Too bad I have to run back to my apartment for my light jacket.) Maybe I'll post from there; maybe I won't. At any rate, have a Merry Christmas!
I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, but Firda's list is rather inspiring. Despite being fairly active on MeFi, I'm generally a loner, both on-line and IRL. Creating this website has been a step towards breaking out of a shell I've built around myself, but only a step. I'll have to make an effort to reach out a bit more in the coming year.
Don't set hopes too high for any real reform of the Democratic National Committee in the wake of AG2K's defeat; Bill Clinton is already stacking the deck in favor of business as usual.
Is globalization inherently destructive of rights for common citizens, or is it really the type of globalization that matters?
Some within the movement advocate centralized global government as the solution to corporate globalization; others seek a reassertion of national or even local sovereignty. But the problems of globalization are unlikely to be solved either by some central global authority or by national or local autarky. The real choice today is between a globalization from above that disempowers people at every level and a globalization from below that expands self-government not only at a global level but at regional, national and local levels as well.
The Online Journalism Review has a good piece about Hunter S. Thompson: both his history and his gurrent gig for ESPN. [via Media News]
I guess I didn't pay enough attention to this story the first time it turned up. Industry groups are starting to put together plans to build digital rights management and copy protection capabilities into the next generation of computer hard drives. This would have a number of unpleasant technical side-effects:
The ramifications are enormous. Although the benefit to producers is great - bringing the holy grail of secure content one step closer - the costs to consumers will be significant. For example, corporate IT departments will be unable to mix compliant and non-compliant ATA drives as they try to enforce uniform back up policies, we've discovered. Restoring personal backups to a different physical drive - a common enough occurrence when a disk has failed - will require authentication with a central server. Imaging software used by OEMs and large corporates to distribute one-to-many disk images will also need to be modified.Second-chair Linux guru Alan Cox isn't thrilled with the idea either:
"It seems to be very similar to the DVD stuff, including ideas for play once only blocks and the like. Pay per read hard disk," wrote Cox in a posting to the Linux Kernel Archive "Its probably very hard to defeat."
"It also in its current form means you can throw disk defragmenting tools out. Dead, gone. Welcome to the United Police State Of America."
Warner Brothers seems to be winning some domain name squabbles. This particular case seems to have involved a true cybersquatter, as opposed to the fans WB has begun bullying. However:
The U.N. system, which started last year, allows those who think they have the real right to a domain to get it back without fighting a costly legal battle or paying large sums of money.So, if a big company thinks they should have your domain, they can ask the WIPO to take it away from you. Lovely.
Peter, it appears that you're right about E-Com-Con being some sort of promo for the (allegedly) upcoming Lone Gunmen TV series. If names from The X-Files aren't proof enough, check out the domain registration
Hopefully, I'll be able to escape the already ugly St. Louis weather when I go down to South Mississippi for a holiday trip to see my parents. I figure that if I can get safely down I-55 to Arkansas, the rest of the trip should be a breeze, but I plan to check Missouri road conditions before I depart. Fortunately, the forecast doesn't seem to show any further snow before the holiday.
Coffee, tea, or... Ow!!!
I had no idea when I bought a Gameboy Color that I had, in a sense, come full circle in computing. It turns out that my first computer (a TRS-80 Model I) has something in common with my Gameboy: a Z80 microprocessor. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that the chip which gave me my start in computing is still in such widespread use after more than two decades.
A Register staffer spins a tale to show how anti-piracy measures can cause more problems for legitimate users than for the pirates.
MetaFilter is finally back online. *phew* I was really starting to miss my virtual third place.
Who says dotcoms don't have a revenue model? [via Lake]
Looks like Shrub will not be the only child of a former occupant to take up residence in the White House next year.
Though inspired by the Florida election, a column about Preferring Machines to Human Judgment seems relevant to my earlier remarks on education:
I can't say it surprised me, because Americans don't seem to trust human beings very much anymore. Give us a complex, human problem, and instead of studying the situation and sitting down to think it through together, you can count on us to come up with a simple, uniform mechanical solution.More to my particular point:
Of course, when the Internet came along, every school needed T-1 lines and an Internet connection and masses of computers . They needed to hire techies to keep the machines in good repair, too. That cut into the money available for teachers, counselors, and art and music programs, but that was OK, because the Internet was going to make our kids sophisticated and computer-literate -- all we'd need teachers for would be guides along the information highway. Does anybody ask what educational results we might have gotten if that same amount of money had been spent on more and better-paid teachers, more library books, and new buildings? Not the politicians.I can't find anything to fault in the author's comments on Bill Gates, web filters, metal detectors, or the vote itself, either. [via YAWL]
I was so upset when I read an article yesterday [via the Dog] about the "importance" of broadband internet for education, that I couldn't write about it coherently. The line that upset me the most:
School buildings are becoming less important, Isakson said, because the lessons taught inside them are often available with a click of a mouse.Looking back at the article now, I can see a little more context that suggests that Isakson may have been talking more about college and other high-level education; if so, then it doesn't bother me as much in reference to students who should have developed some independence by then.
Just the same, even though I'm usually a rabid technocrat, I have reservations about the promotion of high-tech learning at the expense of traditional methods, and I'm not the only one. I think that the most important thing that can possibly help students is to have teachers that care enough about their work to impart unto children a fundamental love for learning. I was incredibly fortunate to have had a number of such teachers in my early years, and believe that the best hope for public education is to pay teachers well enough to entice such people from other, more lucrative fields. I know there are a lot of people in the non-educational world who would make incredible teachers, but who can't see the possibility of making a decent living in that most important of professions. After teachers, students need a safe, comfortable environment for learning, and I that's why I can't buy into the "school buildings are less important" rhetoric in a country where many schools can't get the funding to maintain or repair crumbling (and sometimes unsafe) buildings. Only after these absolute necessities are taken care of can we seriously consider classroom materials, and I've yet to be convinced that computers are as effective a tool as good, old-fashioned textbooks. (I wouldn't mind a good portable e-book system replacing heavy stacks of dead trees, but the technology still has a way to go before it can reasonably replace paper.) I still think computer skills are useful, but I'd prefer to see more emphasis on general computer-based research (alongside traditional library research) over subject-specific tutorial software.
Bah. I rant. Perhaps more later.
Like most any weblogger, I post on a wide enough variety of topics that search engines index my site to all kinds of odd terms, which I find in my referrer logs. So, I've begun to contribute a couple of the more interesting searches to the Disturbing Search Requests weblog.
A good progressive profile of Shrub's nominee for SecState, Colin Powell.
The best part of last night's Buffy was the five minutes where Xander had a spine.
The Leaky Cauldron folks had better watch out; Warner Brothers is continuing to get even nastier in its treatment of Harry Potter fansites.
Warner Brothers' stated approach to Harry Potter fan Web sites is in direct contradiction to what is really happening. Not only that but our suspicion that it believes it has a right to ANY domain containing ANY reference to Harry Potter has been confirmed. AND it doesn't even look at people's sites before firing off threatening legal letters.
Which makes it all the more strange that anyone that registers a domain name with the words Harry Potter in, will soon receive a letter from Warner Brothers telling them that the company is concerned that your domain "is likely to cause consumer confusion". It uses the author's name prominently, saying that Ms Rowling is "concerned" over the site. (We decided to ask single mum JK Rowling why she was so concerned that young children might want a Harry Potter Web site. Her agent informed us that "Ms Rowling won't be available for interview for the foreseeable future".)I tend to doubt that Ms. Rowling has as much awareness of the domain name jihad as WB claims.
I finally finished Christmas shopping last night. I can now enjoy the holiday.
Dammit, Haughey, I need my MeFi fix! (Yes, I know it's not his fault. But... Arrrgh!)
Obviously, somebody had to drug Hillary before the Bushes showed up. (Come on. Tell me she doesn't look stoned.)
The anti-censorware activists at Peacefire have released a program to allow users (children in particular) to bypass web-blocking software. While the group has a number of reasons for opposing the use of censorware, the release of an automated program is a response to a particularly ugly piece of federal legislation:
The filtering rider mandates that libraries and schools use valuable resources to install and maintain unreliable Internet filters, or be stripped of key federal funding. With this bill, the federal government has seized control over families and communities and blocked their power to make decisions about the ways they protect their children.[via The Reg]
How to survive being a wrestling fan in an anti-wrestling world. Personally, I just admit that I can enjoy any soap opera as long as it's weird enough. Which also explains my enjoyment of Dark Shadows, Twin Peaks, Robotech: The Macross Saga, and Roswell, not to mention the political news of the past month and a half.
GORE: I just gotta know. All the stuff that happened in Florida: the phantom felons on the voter rolls, the scrub list from Texas, the crappy voting machines and busy phone lines in African-American precincts, the illegally altered ballot applications in Martin and Seminole counties, the roadblocks, the confusing ballots -- that scary broad with all the makeup. Was it all part of a master plan devised by you, your Dad and Jeb? Please, tell me -- I can take it. Was the fix in?No, this exchange never took place. But it should have.
The Harry Potter fansite debacle gets ugly again. Because the father of the 15-year-old who created the site was insufficiently grateful for WB's self-serving press release, WB is letting slip the dogs lawyers of war.
Shortly after I woke up this morning (about 10:00), my neighbor came banging on my door because his apartment was on fire. I grabbed enough clothes to be able to survive the single-digit temperatures, and headed out to my car; even though I was pretty much blocked in, at least I could stay warm in the car. My apartment was never in significant danger; the apartment on fire was on the other side of a wide stairwell/breezeway area. The fire department got the blaze under control before it could spread, although there may have been some fire and/or water damage to the apartment beneath his. The fire department just let me back in, but I've already called family members. Much unpleasentness, but I was lucky.
A massively multiplayer economic sim? Actually, that appeals to me more than most online RPG's or combat games.
Freezing rain in STL today; odds favor getting sent home before the roads turn into an ice rink.
Does unmetered have a different definition in the UK, or when applied to internet service providers? "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Anybody who's read William Gibson's early "cyberpunk" fiction may remember the East Coast Fusion Authority, the jumping-off point for a number of cyberspace intrusion missions. I always figured it was a host with bandwidth to spare and lax security, well-known among the cracking community as an easy gateway to the network. In that light, I find it kind of amusing that someone set up a game server on a power company's systems, under a lazy administrator's nose; life imitates art.
Privacy concerns aside, I'm already finding the Google toolbar quite useful.
The resolution of the dispute over the Harry Potter fan site I mentioned earlier throws some light on how Warner Brothers selects which sites to attack:
It's not stupid, however. While legal notice has been served on the owner of harrypotterfan.co.uk, the owner of harrypotterfan.com says that WB hasn't even contacted him. It's not hard to see why - a dotcom battle is a story and bad publicity, a co.uk isn't. This is probably why it thought it was on safe ground with the harrypotterguide.co.uk URL. The shame is that WB withdrawing from this case is unlikely to have any effect at all on its future behaviour.Of course, I'm sure the AOL / Time Warner merger will make things much better for fansites. Not.
I just registered for a videogame hint site, and I'm already annoyed at the designers. If you're going to have a 10-character limit on passwords, why don't you (a) tell users that there's a 10-character limit, (b) reject overlong passwords, (c) truncate the password at signin, (d) give users a chance to change their passwords after the fact, or (e) give users an address where they can tell you what bozos you are for not doing any of a through d? Stripping trailing spaces off userid entries might be a nice touch, too. *grumble*
Full-contact free speech at the Library of Congress:
In a louder voice, we shouted back: "Why are you using a public institution to promote a junk food product?"
The next thing we know, we are on the ground. The Library of Congress police had tackled us. Again, the crowd cheered -- not for our question, but for the tackle.Tsk, tsk, tsk. Shoulda learned a lesson from the kid with the T-shirt.
Missouri now has an official No Call Law that is supposed to reduce telemarketing calls to those who sign up. There are a lot of loopholes; in particular, phone companies will still be able to call, and I suspect that headhunters may qualify as having a "business relationship". Those two groups account for the bulk of my unwanted calls, so we shall see how well this works. [via postnet]
For the record, St. Louis ended up getting about 6-8 inches of snow yesterday. That may not be much by some folks' standards, but it's the biggest December snow STL has seen since I moved up here, and more than this Mississippi boy wants to deal with.
Fair Play for Linux! It seems that I didn't get the full joke on MeFi a couple of days ago.
The Illuminati appear to have had a major power outage today, which is why a bunch of entries were batched up into one big update.
I have no idea how the Linux Documentation Project bookmark I had on Backflip got turned into a link to this site. How is it that I always run into the "New World Order" nutcases?
Has our contested presidential election been a boon to American democracy?
I was wandering through a shopping mall in Eureka, Calif., the other day and came upon a gaggle of citizens looking raptly at a bank of TV sets in Radio Shack. Suddenly, they raised howls of excitement. The verdict on the Seminole absentee ballots had just come through. The Eurekans continued to watch, commenting knowledgeably to each other as law professors from Georgetown and Yale did battle over the meaning of the Florida Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the thoughts of Madison and Hamilton.It's anybody's guess whther the citizenry will still be Paying Attention to how our government works when the next election rools around, but I can hope.
I always figured that mass media would admit that 1/1/2001 was the true beginning of the 21st century because they'd find some way to sell people the millennium all over again. I'm mildly disappointed that they haven't.
A web bug is one of the more obnoxious uses of invisible GIFs. Instead of simply using transparent GIFs at spacers (which, as this site demonstrates, can be dangerous enough), a web bug is placed inconspicuously in an HTML document (webpage or HTML mail) to generate a hit in a web server's log. This allows all kind of covert tracking, even to the point of tying e-mail addresses to web profiles. Some creative and twisted individuals have some up with even more sinister uses of web bugs:
For a very sweet dirty trick along those lines, one could embed a link to a porn picture on-line, resized at 1x1 so it's invisible in the e-mail. Network logs will show that a given employee requested, say, preteen_bestial.gif from www.loathsome-sex-offenders.com. Even better, if the company has spyware in place, the jack-booted network thugs won't even have to be notified by the trickster before grassing him out to senior management.I'm sure Hayduke would approve.
The Springfield crowd seems to have had enough sense to stay home today. Lucky them. STL only has a few inches so far, but I bet the drive home is going to be gruesome; estimates of snowfall seem to keep being revised upwards.
I cannot make contact with the Illuminati. Therefore I cannot update my site. <fnord>Damn Discordians.</fnord> (Of course, by the time anybody else reads this post, it will have obviously been fixed.)
Fandom.com was allegedly created as a safe haven for media fan sites, to give them a sort of blanket protection from legal action by official copyright holders. So why has it become as big a bully as the companies it was built to oppose?
Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ruled in favor of Shrub, is AG2K psychologically capable of conceding?
I hate snow.
The Register plans to stand up for a Harry Potter fan being bullied by Warner Brothers in a domain name dispute.
Our *inhale* National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism for the White House National Security Council *gasp* wants to replace the Internet.
Clarke however sees security vulnerabilities that need an expensive Big Fix, and his proposed one seems strangely familiar. "We have a chance now to make security features inherent rather than appendages... our focus must be the new network." He proposes more secure switches, operating systems (a tip of the hat to the host here), and traffic management protocols. This should be done "as part of a private-public partnership."What crreps me out the most is the suspicion that these folks' idea of "secure" is likely to involve Carnivore-type snooping systems so that the Right People (i.e. themselves) can make sure what they're keeping us secure from.
It's been months since the passing of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, but his absence can still be felt:
For the first time in 35 years, Charles M. Schulz will not be here to usher in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the most beloved, contemplative, and melancholy holiday special ever aired on network television. And for those who knew, worked with, and loved the Peanuts creator, the holiday loses just a little bit of its joy.The best Christmas special ever made comes on TV tonight; it's one of very few Christmas shows I still don't find too cloyingly sweet. [via Fresh Hell]
Today's Non Sequitur is the most clever and well-reasoned pro-Bush cartoon I've seen so far. At the very least, the checkmate / Electoral College analogy seems pretty apt.
Although I do not use and have no desire to use illegal drugs, the War Inquisition on Drugs terrifies me at times. Why?
"The Fourth Amendment has been virtually repealed by court decisions, most of which involve drug searches," says Steven Duke, a professor of law at Yale University.This Wired article gives a laundry list of many ways in which our rights to privacy and legal protection have been eroded in the name of Protecting Our Kids from Drugs.
No recounts. None of this makes any sense to me any more. If we get through this without an armed insurrection in Florida, I'll be surprised.
The fat lady was merely clearing her throat: The Florida Supreme Court has just issued its ruling, by a margin of 4 to 3, in favor of AG2K. They have elected to accept the manual recount results from Broward and Dade Counties, allow incomplete manual recounts to continue, and (I think) allow any new manual recounts that are requested. "The recount shall commence immediately."
More copyright news from Vulture Central: Microsoft is defending their copyright on their bug reports.
So far Microsoft has issued 96 security notices this year, and there is keen anticipation in security circles that this figure might exceed 100 by the end of December. If it were to license the publication of these bug reports a tidy revenue might be derived with perhaps a premium for those flaws which are the most potentially devastating.Perfectly understandable, since bugs are such an important element of the company's brand identity.
Just remember that the recording industry's crusade against non-secure digital music is all about protecting the artists.
Is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cartoon in the works?
Commercial of the day: It's the celebrity cameo that makes this one.
The iTag may have failed, but companies are still trying to find a way to let radio listeners identify and purchase radio tunes on the fly; this time, the technology uses cell phones. Personally, even if I had a cell phone, I wouldn't use this service because you can only buy the whole CD. If I could buy an MP3 of that one song, that would be another story. Unfortunately, the recording industry is desparate to resist any sales model that doesn't force listeners to buy a dozen songs they don't care about along with the one or two tracks they enjoy.
An English scientist has a pretty nutty idea for fueling electric fuel cells.
Commercial of the day: Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.
I knew ActiveState had an enhanced Perl distribution for Windows, but I didn't know that they'd done the same for Python, or that they also had a cross-platform integrated development environment. I've got some downloading to do tonight.
Wireless Napster? I love it! Anything that has the RIAA trembling is cool with me.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I thet my parents gave me for Christmas back in, oh, 1980; so long ago that computers and software actually came with manuals. The manual for the Model I was essentially a BASIC programming tutorial. Pre-packaged software was available in those early days, but there was an underlying assumption that anyone who used the computer for anything nontrivial should have some undertanding of programming. Python creator Guido van Rossum seems to believe that we should return to that level of understanding.
At least I'm not the only one.
Tert, V bapr svtherq bhg NFPVV pbqrf va zl urnq juvyr jngpuvat n Fngheqnl zbeavat pnegbba. EBG13 vf abguvat.
David Chess has some fascinating thoughts about dirty words:
The theory I like the best at the moment is that the naughty words are markers. They give us ways to indicate who we are, what the conversational context is, what group we belong to, how we feel about the person we're talking to.
This Sony Walkman site may well be the most obnoxious piece of flashturbation I've seen to date. If I want to try and click on a moving hotspot, I'll play Missile Command. If I want information on personal electronics... Well, I guess I'll have to go somewhere other than Sony.
I'm no big fan of guns, but I am fascinated by the engineering behind the latest innovation in automatic weapons: an electrically-triggered chemical-propellant gun that can fire a million rounds per minute with no moving parts.
The gun works through a combination of specially designed bullets and an electronic firing mechanism, which O'Dwyer describes as "a barrel tube with an electrical wire attached." Jacketless bullets are lined up inside, nose to tail, and are separated from one another by a layer of propellant. When an electric current makes its way down the strip, the bullets are set off one by one. To stop them from going off simultaneously--a problem previously encountered when putting many bullets in a single barrel--O'Dwyer designed the bullets to work together. The high pressure caused by the firing of the first projectile makes the nose of the next one in line swell against the walls, temporarily sealing off the rest of the barrel. (In ballistics terms, the nose of the second bullet effectively acts as a breechblock to prevent an uncontrolled sympathetic ignition.) After the first bullet exits, the pressure drops, and the nose of the second one loosens up, enabling the bullet to be fired. This process continues for each successive bullet.What makes this especially fascinating is that this was created by a garage inventor with no background in ballistics. [via STREETtech]
Tech lust of the day: The eXpanium is the first portable MP3/CD player I've seen from a brand (Phillips) that I recognize. In addition to standard audio CD's, it can play CD-R's burned with MP3 files, playlists, etc. for several hours of decent-quality music on a single CD. I'd definitely choose this type of device over low-capacity RAM-based MP3 players, and it looks like a better buy than the pricey hard-disk-based MP3 jukeboxes. Still, I'm in no hurry, and am perfectly willing to wait for more players to enter this market, and for prices to drop a bit.
Inamongst more SF News than you can shake a spoon! at, comes the word that The Tick TV series has begun production. If you can't hold out until it makes the airwaves, do you think you can survive until Friday? That's when a new online comic is supposed to begin its run. [via Ars] Just wish I could find some news on the status of the alleged Buckaroo Banzai series.
It's snowing here in West St. Louis County. My usual 20-25 minute drive into work stretched to an hour and 20 minutes today. I passed half a dozen wrecks and only avoided getting in one myself by sheer, dumb luck. Can somebody remind me why I left Mississippi?
A post about Scalable Vector Graphics over at MeFi led me to do a little more searching on my own. What I found was Adobe's SVG viewer plugin. Now I'll have to give Trajectory Pro a try.
Ever wanted to drive Speed Racer's Mach 5? You can, but it'll cost ya. Just one of many bizarre money-wasters at space.com's holiday gift guide, along with grafitti-spraying robots and that flying car Avery Brooks was ranting about.
In case you were wondering about Lara Croft's, umm, technical specs...
I picked up a yo-yo at McDonald's yesterday. It's been too long since I've played with a yo-yo, and I was never that good at it, but I already think I'm in danger of being Yo-Similated this time.
For some reason, new Dean Koontz novels always seem to come out right after Christmas. In the case of his next novel, From the Corner of His Eye, the very next day, which is the only thing keeping it off my Christmas list. (Sorry for the Amazon link, but it was the only one I could find with the date.) Koontz is far and away my favorite horror author. However, I wish he would return to Moonlight Bay and the chronicles of his most fascinating cast of characters to date, Christopher Snow and his friends. According to an old interview, he originally planned three books in this series; Fear Nothing and Seize the Night were fantastic, and leave a number of questions worthy of future exploration.
Why have I never looked at space.com before? Lots of good stuff there. This is month-old news, but plans are in the works for a Ringworld movie. I'm not that much a fan of Niven's novels (though I love his short fiction and many of his collaborative works), but I think this movie would be spectacular if it were made right.
I've been looking for some article which will explain, in a bit more detail, exactly what went wrong with the international space station's solar panels. At least the engineers think they can go ahead with the second solar array as long as they take it slow and easy.
Overnight analysis by engineers at Mission Control suggest that the second array can be properly unfurled if the rollout is done in increments stretching over an hour, rather than non-stop in 13 minutes as was done last nightIn the meantime, election and space news go hand in hand: a dimpled chad is visible from space.
I wish I could remember who called the 2000 presidential election "America's first quantum election" on NPR this weekend. Whoever it was, though, he made two good points: First, there will always be an element of uncertainty in vote-counting, no matter what technique is used, although it is still a good idea to use the voting methods which offer the least uncertainty. The only reason that such uncertainty matters in this election is that the degree of uncertainty is greater than the margin of votes between the candidates. Second, you cannot observe a phenomenon without interacting with it; media coverage of the election certainly had some effect on voting patterns, though it may not have been enough to change the results. (This entry corrected multiple times for typos, and I'm sure something's still misspeled.)
GameCopyWorld appears to be an archive of information and utilities for copying "copy-protected" CD-ROMs. Such as games. Not that I'd ever advocate doing so. Or do it myself. No, not me.