Your Freewill Astrology for this Week
Aries	Libra
Taurus	Scorpio
Gemini	Sagittarius
Cancer	Capricorn
Leo	Aquarius
Virgo	Pisces

Technorati Profile

Words fail me.

I got to work especially early that day. I did the usual routine of buying my coffee, going outside by West Street for my cigarette, and heading upstairs to the 87th floor to my office. I sat at my desk and responded to my e-mails when Amy, John, and Mike came in. Amy and I chatted, and it was about half past 8. Shortly after that I heard a noise, it sounded like I was on the platform of a subway station and the train was coming full speed ahead. I remember thinking "what the hell is that." It was then that I heard a crash, the ceiling came down, and fire consumed parts of the office and the entire hallway. Via root.cellar

So sad it's incredible. And, if only they had a clue...

This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program (basically a program that visualizes the sound spectrum), so I decided to try it myself.

First I needed to extract the track from the Windowlicker CD, which was easy with CDex. The extraction of the whole track was not really necessary because the "face" is situated at the very end of the track, starting from the 5:27 mark and lasting for about 10 seconds. There are other "audio images" on this particular track as well (and one at the end of the first track), but the face is certainly the most exciting of them all.

After I had the wav-file, I used a program called Spectrogram to visualize the file. To my amazement, it worked, and I was soon staring at the "demon" face.

In his role as agent provocateur, Marvin Minsky, cofounder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, recently told a surprised Boston University audience that the field of AI has lost its way. Researchers are making little progress developing computers with any knack for reasoning. He took a break from dictating the final chapters of an upcoming book into his G4 using ViaVoice software to give us his thoughts on gray goo, bartender bots, and the importance of plain ol' common sense. [READ IT]

We may be pushing the stratosphere away.

The sky isn't falling in, say scientists - it is rising. And it's our fault.

The top of the troposphere - the atmosphere's lowest layer - has risen by several hundred metres since 1979, mostly because of transport and industrial emissions, reckon Ben Santer, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and colleagues.

Huge Compound Can Handle 3 Million File Sharing Suspects and Their Supporters
Citing lackluster results in its aggressive Subpoena-the-Family campaign, The Recording Industry Assocation of America, or RIAA, announced today it was escalating the war against music file sharing even higher by opening its massive detention facility in the high desert of Movaje, CA. The facility, designed to indefinitely detain up to three million people suspected of illegally or even legally sharing music files on the Internet, consumes 4,000 acres of the desert region some 70 miles north of Los Angeles. [MORE]

The warning came Friday, after hackers from the Chinese X Focus security group forwarded source code to several public security lists. The code is for a program designed to allow an intruder to enter Windows computers. The X Focus program takes advantage of a hole in the Microsoft operating system that lets attackers break in remotely. The flaw has been characterized by some security experts as the most widespread ever found in Windows.

While many security researchers believe the publication of such information can encourage security personnel in businesses to patch holes faster, the release of exploit code has typically preceded the largest worm attacks of the past few years.

In a previous installment you've seen some of the alternatives to numbers that exist. But can we do something even more radical? How about going to the very foundations of mathematics itself and replacing logic itself? That might sound a little unusual, I mean logic's logic, you can't choose what you want to be true can you? Well actually there are plenty of alternatives to familiar classical logic, so many that I can't hope to do justice to them in one article.

A new twist on an old polymer

Time's up, Mr Phelps

EVERY time Jim Phelps, the leader of the "Mission: Impossible" team, picked up pre-recorded details of his latest assignment, he was told: "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." And lo-and-behold, with a puff of smoke, the tape turned to cinders. In August, fact will follow fiction with the arrival of the first real-life self-destructing recording medium. This has been made possible by tinkering with the molecular structure of a plastic that is even older than the television series.

A polar bear who was sprayed with meds for a skin irritation turned
purple temporarily from the spray. You have to admit it's kinda cute...

This is an interesting idea. Another that I had was to make a P2P network that users paid a bare minimum fee to use (thereby becoming members, legally speaking). The user fees would be used to "pay off" ASCAP for the digital "broadcast" rights to the MP3s circulated among members (much like radio currently does for airplay rights). This of course is only a stop-gap measure to keep the RIAA and MPAA off of people's backs until the entire entertainment industry sobers up and gets with the program.

The Air Force ruled that Boeing Co. broke the law by stealing a competitor's trade secrets and, as a penalty, took away seven military satellite launches that were to use Boeing rockets.

The Air Force also indefinitely banned Boeing from bidding on future satellite-launching contracts.

Only 15 years after University of California, Berkeley, engineers built the first micro-scale motor, a UC Berkeley physicist has created the first nano-scale motor - a gold rotor on a nanotube shaft that could ride on the back of a virus.

Move over, college kids. Grandparents and roommates may be among the first ones to face the music for downloading songs on the Internet.

The music industry's earliest subpoenas, issued as part of a high-stakes campaign to cripple online piracy by suing some of music's biggest fans, are aimed at a surprisingly eclectic group: a grandfather, an unsuspecting dad and an apartment roommate.

''Within five minutes, if I can get hold of her, this will come to an end,'' said Gordon Pate of Dana Point, Calif., when told by the Associated Press that a federal subpoena had been issued over his daughter's music downloads. MORE

Note: The Techfocus page may move a little slow today due to the BLOCK THE RIAA project getting Slashdotted last night.

After, go to this MetaFilter page.

Text Modification Studio...Anti-Genre Elite Corps...Worldwide Literary Mobilization Network...Ink Bomb Disposal Unit...And that's just for starters. Lordy, but there's enough on, around and connected to Litob.com to keep the dedicated weirdlit aficionado busy for...well, way too long. I think some of the material MAY have been written by text manglers or other quasi-intelligent 'ware, but one can never really be certain. Thus I am once more reminded that a brain is a computer and verse-vicea. WARNING: Interesting reading, yes...but the design is a bit sloppy: some of the CSS starts picking little fights with my browser here and there. (For all I know, this may be intentional.)

Including the zero dimension there are five dimensions: 0 - 4. The zero, first second and third dimensions have long been accepted as true, but the reality of the fourth dimension was questioned. Since Einstein, however, the existence of the fourth dimension is now an accepted fact and the first, second and third dimensions are now understood as imaginary. We live only in the fourth dimension, but in order to understand our dimension, our reality, we must also understand each of the other dimensions. Moreover we must realize how infinity permeates each dimension, including the fourth. So we begin our exploration of Number as a Wisdom tool by understanding the dimensions and their relation to the infinite.

Painter Todd Schorr is a bit of a genius I think.
His paintings are like Pop Rocks and Coca Cola for the eyes.

A million in spare change buys you the first bid for naming rights of this new Pennsylvania monastery. The old one kinda outlived its time, and "in full recognition of the economic realities of post 9/11 charitable giving", the monks are seeking "one spiritually generous individual" to plunk down the sum and name Bell Towers ($100,000) or the monastery building ($650,000) itself.

Link goes to eBay. I'm currently trying to find a permanent place to mirror this beauty, so if you're running into an "auction closed" page, don't despair, come back in a few hours.

It is important to know about them. It is absolutely essential to rule them out whenever considering the possible existence and/or presence of extraterrestrials. Why? Because they are the world's greatest tricksters and their ET charade may be the World's Greatest Hoax.

The 2003 Blogathon will raise money for various organizations; Portland participants got a shot in the arm when the event was covered in today's Oregonian (free site, requires marketing info to access; and yes, you can put in 2003 as your birth date); the Portland Bloggers group was also mentioned. Sadly, the newspaper's online article fails to publish online info about either one.

The Blogathon itself, which lets you sponsor a blogger to keep posting for 24 hours and pledge money to charity, is at www.blogathon.org. 2GQBlog and Magdalen Sez are not participating this year, but we hope to raise money for 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts next year. Portland Bloggers meet up at Kells Pub in real life, and online via email.

Many observers  reported that the fireball passed over making a pulsed roaring noise, similar to a very loud road train diesel engine, and that after the seismic wave hit they heard a huge long drawn out explosion - similar to a very major, but long drawn out, mine blast - but somehow peculiarly different.

At the time we reasoned that Ed Paul was probably correct and that a meteor fireball (a bolide) could have impacted explosively into the ground and caused the apparent "earthquake" by impact, or by airburst explosion shock wave induction. This area has no record of quakes since West Australian seismograph's were first installed in 1900, nor Aboriginal racial memory of same.

As such an impact is a major geological curiosity, often observed in the Recent geological record, but rarely recorded as occurring in human history, we decided to embark upon a private research project to document the event - leading, we hoped, to scientific fame and glory.

We did not then appreciate just where this research work and interest would lead to .......

For those that missed this, TechTV has at least a partial list of usernames from Kazaa which they are issuing subpoenas for. Are you on the list? Via Techfocus

Burning Man participants are often borderline fundamentalist about the mores of their desert bacchanalia. Over the years, they have steadfastly insisted that organizers never consider opening the doors to anything corporate.

So last week, when a message advertising an all-inclusive package tour of Burning Man spread like some out-of-control virus among the desert fest's regulars and their e-mail lists, a lot of people went ballistic.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world. [more]

via NWD

The House this afternoon approved a bill that would block the Federal Communications Commission from allowing television station ownership to be concentrated in fewer corporate hands.

As the recording industry prepares hundreds of copyright lawsuits against online music swappers, the makers of file-sharing software are fortifying their programs to try to mask users' identities.

Some of the upgrades reroute Internet connections through so-called proxy servers that scrub away cybertracks. Others incorporate firewalls or encryption to thwart the sleuth firms that the recording industry employs.

By Jason Ankeny

Opposable thumbs have long been a line of demarcation that separates man from beast. And with the advent of home video game systems, GameBoys, mobile phones and PDAs, the line now separating young from old is the primacy of those thumbs as the hand's most dexterous digit--according to a 2002 study, the majority of people under 25 employ their thumbs for tasks like gaming and typing wireless text messages, relegating the once-dominant index finger to relatively primitive tasks like pointing and scratching. In fact, the thumb has become so ubiquitous that doctors in SMS-crazy China are now alerting their patients to the phenomenon of tenosynovitis--in short, thumb soreness and even tendon strain brought on by overuse of mobile devices.

For all the societal and cultural changes that the emergence of wireless technology has wrought, this might just be the most strangely fascinating--scientists have actually classified the generational shift from finger to thumb as a "physical mutation." It may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but think about it: Modern technology has crept into the collective subconscious of an entire generation to alter a pattern of physical behavior that has been ingrained in humankind for millennia. While wireless users in their 30s and older rely on index fingers to do their keypad navigation, teens and twentysomething users--the same demographics the wireless industry so actively courts, mind you--have changed the rules completely.

If the wireless industry is the catalyst behind changes, the industry itself must evolve in turn. In this case, it might mean working to create new, more ergonomic handsets and devices that better fit the demands of younger users. But whatever the change, whether it's large or small, the industry can't rest on its laurels--it must keep adapting with the adaptations. After all, Chinese doctors recommend to patients suffering from tenosynovitis that the best way to keep thumbs healthy is to write fewer messages and get more physical exercise. And we certainly can't have that.

A north Louisiana prison sold illegally pirated copies of recordings by hundreds of artists, including the Rolling Stones, Eminem and Garth Brooks, to inmates and visitors for $3 per compact disc, according to a record company’s lawsuit.

Gee, you can have a cd-burner even in prison? Who knew?

The massive success of ELECTRIC SIX's 'GAY BAR' has turned frontman DICK VALENTINE into a power-crazed dictator.

Valentine unveiled his new South American dictator chic (pictured right) to NME.COM after learning that his single had birthed the 'gay bar' catchphrase that has fired around the playgrounds and offices of Britain. He will maintain the new look as Electric Six release new single 'Dance Commander' in September.

He owned statscanada.ca, among other names, but surfers looking for the Canadian public sector would find themselves instead on Web sites where God isn't welcome. Domain disputes just got more interesting.

After issuing a subpoena to the MIT, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) finds itself in yet another legal battle as university officials have refused to divulge their students' names. MIT is protecting students suspected of trading copyrighted files, citing privacy concerns and improper legal tactics by the RIAA as a defense.

It's nice to know that some institutions are actually protecting the rights of the individuals within them.

Also see:
Pumping Up the Hits Against Pirates
US universities delay unmasking file-swappers

Thanks to everyone who have expressed admiration for the new banner designed by Denny of DP. A few of you have expressed interest in taking a crack at banner design yourself. For those of you interested in such an endeavor, here's the raw assets that you'll need.

it is true that i love the compare/contrast exercise, which is
going out of fashion as people more and more equate the
term "intellectual inquiry" with the importance of learning
exactly what the term "room service" means in colorado.
for me, events in that colorado hotel only suggest that it
is increasingly possible to be both stupid and spectacularly
overpaid. the rest of it, like all chronicles, will become history
as soon as it is troped. the troping is the interesting part,
though, because tropes make the world go round. tropes
are, if you will forgive me for re-stating what i suspect you
know, a way of coloring points of view in works of
expression: irony. romance. erotema. etc.

lately i am more and more thinking that we live in a time
of syllepsis. syllepsis, broadly speaking, means that we
take one term and modify it by using with other terms
or ideas with which it would not ordinarily be connected. a
standard example of syllepsis runs something like:

"the ink, like our pig, keeps running out of the pen."

part of the fun of playing with words, though, is that you don't
always need to cling to the standard definition of anything, and
this is the thought that came into my mind when i read peter linebaugh's
essay about magna carta in the BOSTON REVIEW of summer 2003. linebaugh's essay
begins with an interesting question: why did sub-commandant marcos, the spokesman
of the indigenous people's revolt of 1994, writing from the lacandan
jungle of central america, cite magna carta? surely hardly anyone
even thinks of magna carta anymore. written in approximately 1215,
magna carta is the now mythical well-spring of the energy that ends up
fueling most modern conceptions of individual rights, including the rights of women
not to be disvalued or forced to marry as well as the more well-known rights
of the commons.

the syllepsis linebaugh creates in his analysis of magna carta is this: western
society has revived some very medieval ideas about governance
and royalty, but we do not see it as such. linebaugh
quotes bush II addressing the UN security council in jan 2003:
"i do not need to explain why i say things. that's the interesting
thing about being president." soon we will need someone to
deconstruct the divine right theory as it applies to the presidency. l
inebaugh points out that 92,000 barrels of oil are sucked out of central america
by what he calls "global foces" every day. this is immense
wealth to be sure, but the campesinos (read serfs in the real, nasty,
agricultural sense, not the cute microsofty sense) cut wood to survive, and
"prostitution is the only 'decent-paying' job". having described this,
and many other events, he goes on to make a case that there are
provisions of the magna carta worth re-examining, particularly
sections 47 and 48.

linebaugh sees sections 47 and 48, which deal with the wooded
pastures, as a possible solution to "petro-violence": the terror, dislocation,
separation, poverty, and pollution associated with petroleum extraction which
has now been intensified by the US government under bush II, with war.
as linebaugh describes, the forest was the supreme status symbol for
english monarchs after the norman conquest, because the monarchy appropriated
what had been the common property of the people. the forests in question were
not wild forests. they were "forested pastures" and the trees in the forests
had been developed for various purposes over centuries. nonetheless,
the monarchy appropriated these resources, gave away the produce as
marks of favor and deprived the residents of their common rights to food,
firewood, and building materials. substitute petroleum for forests and you have
an idea of where linebaugh is going.

it was i think 1972 that eco first wrote about "the second middle ages" where
he suggested that the so called barbarian invasions would be an attack upon
the city from the city's inner core; where he suggested that western society
might be subjected to new and more interesting types of attack; where
if memory serves me well, he talked about a-literacy.

it seems interesting to think about syllepsis where postmodern and medieval
can sit in the same sentence.

abstract of linebaugh's essay is at: http://bostonreview.net/BR28.3/linebaugh.nclk

A 14-year-old Iranian director is up for one of the main awards at this year's Venice Film Festival. Hana Makhmalbaf's first full-length film, Joy of Madness, is up for the £71,000 prize for best debut, reports the BBC.

Mysterious force of cosmic acceleration marked Big Bang's afterglow.
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that dark energy - a sort of push balancing gravity's pull - pervades the Universe.

Stan Liebowitz, professor of Economics at the University of Dallas, Texas, became a controversial figure during the Microsoft anti-trust trial, when he testified that "network effects," the phenomenon where market saturation determines consumer choice, were more likely to have been responsible for Microsofts' dominant position than anti-competitive practises.

He later found himself to be an unlikely ally of the file-sharing community, when he released a study commissioned by the Cato Institute asserting that file-sharing "should be causing the industry a lot of harm. But we're not seeing it". However, with his latest paper, "Will MP3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence So Far", he concludes that we are beginning to see an undetermined, yet detrimental effect of file sharing on music sales. On examination I am concerned by several obvious flaws in Liebowitz's logic and would suggest a revision: that there is as yet no clear evidence that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that MP3 downloads are solely responsible for the current downturn in CD sales.

Many people have gotten involved in hacking together different .htaccess files and some include variants of the one we provided. As a result, there are areas all over with addresses and files, and also questions from users on how to restrict access.

We'd like to offer this area as a place where people can work together to develop legal methods that allow you the ability to restrict access from fair-use-infringing networks.

He's built the World's Largest Sculpture on a science fiction landscape, from old carburetors and discarded power house machines - like Star Wars weaponry from the Age of Steam.

From the highway, the top of the 320-ton Forevertron is barely visible, its trans-temporal egg chamber poking up above the foliage.

Some of you will definetely be sending legal threats my way soon. On BitTorrent, I'm intentionally sharing only a couple of KB of each torrent, but specifically, torrents that you are likely to target, I'm sharing this purely for the purpose of trapping p2p-enemy-IPs, nothing more. 3KB (roughly the amount of each torrent I have) of a file - that's around 1/100000th to 1/200000th of the file, which isn't really a great contribution to copyright infringement! - That's what I'm doing, I do expect legal threats but I'm not really sharing the files, I'm intentionally appearing to share them in order to trap your IPs. VIA Methlabs.org

A movie review by Al Gore (Typing by P.J. Gladnick)
My plan now is to send a ruthless Algorithm-537 (for the 537 Florida votes that I was shy of the presidency) Terminator back in time to change the past. And don't even think of trying to stop the Algorithm-537 Terminator. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are politically dead!

RIAA Radar is a tool that lets you check whether particular albums are made by RIAA affiliates. They also have a bookmarklet to make checking while you surf easy.

Oh, and don't miss the Top 100 Non-RIAA albums on Amazon

The movie industry is trying a new tactic in its war against people who download pirated copies of films over the Internet -- it's asking nicely.

Movie studios will launch a campaign Tuesday that includes television ads and in-theater spots featuring makeup artists, set painters and other crafts people saying that piracy robs them of a living.

The Motion Picture Association of America has also developed a curriculum on copyrights for use in classrooms by Junior Achievement. The "Digital Citizenship" program covers the history of copyright and culminates with a nationwide contest in which students suggest ways to persuade peers that swapping illegal copies of music and movies is not only illegal, but wrong.

Our friends and new sTaRe contributors, Techfocus have made some kEwL buttons available (see below) for your site. They've also stayed hard at work devising multiple methods for websites to block RIAA and MPAA from snooping around their sites. Will this accomplish anything in the end? Maybe not, but it's a signal to the myopic pinheads at RIAA and MPAA that we won't stand still for their bully tactics. Carpe Musica! Everybody sing along!

New: Boycott-RIAA and and Dmusic just ran an article on this.
Also: Techfocus now has a breaking news page for this story.
See: These links as well

A screed from HyperSpaceGirl

Why is the RIAA going to so much trouble as to look into every nook and cranny of anyone that makes a comment against them no matter how small the voice? Why is it that "if you're not with us, you're against us" - complete with pursuing those who speak against them (or report both sides) by actually hacking their websites? And issuing writs to individuals who are only doing what millions of others do because they don't have readily available options that they understand? And publishing soundbites from quotes by those who speak against them to make them sound as if they are pro-RIAA? What happened to freedom of speech here (echo…echo…echo…)? Haven't we seen this strategy before somewhere else? Isn't this how conspiracies operate? I'm not sayin' it is, I'm just sayin'…

As a music industry professional, why do I sense artists are potentially being hoodwinked and used as pawns for some bigger agenda because of this behavior? In private, colleagues agree, but no one dares speak out publicly. And given the misquoting strategy that is being subjected onto the tech world, I wonder how many artists really said what the RIAA claim they did? I've seen the list of quotes - there's a lot of one-liners in there. Hmmm.

The thing is, the average artist receives less than 15% (if that) of the pie of their record sales… and up to 25% of their sales are deducted from their account as "Free Goods." Free Goods are meant to be used by the label for promotional leverage, but I do not personally know anyone who has ever seen an accounting of this area of business. Free Goods are also given away to retail stores to encourage promotion. I don't know of anyone off the top of my head who has questioned this publicly since Led Zepplin and The Beatles did way back when. Why? I'll leave that with you to figure out.

What's the difference between giving a single away to the fans instead of retail corporations? The reality is that most fans that I know personally will buy the album if they hear some tracks on download and like them. But radio is single driven and format obsessed. For a band to be successful and have a hit, they must fit into a narrowly defined box, dictated by radio. And by the way, it costs a small fortune to promote a song to radio. With this pressure, no wonder there are so few good full albums. The truth is that a band with too much creativity simply will not get signed and everybody knows it. I know several A&R folk who have the integrity to not sign a good band because their label has a narrowly defined format and they don't want to kill the band's career because of it. No wonder the fans only want the singles - that's all they're spoon-fed and often they're watered down at that. So they don't trust that album will be all that great and in many cases, they're right.

As a side note, the other thing that has confused me recently is that certain people have a problem with fans being able to pay to download a single without downloading the album. I don't understand the difference between that and buying a single at retail - you'd probably sell more singles on the internet, so the pro-rated financial and promotional mileage works out for me. Be that as it may....

Living in the past doesn't mean you can make the rest of the world do so with you. It seems as if there is an industry old guard trying to force outdated analogue modems to operate in a new digital matrix. The fans have shouted all of this from the rooftops, but it falls on an industry with deaf ears at the top and tied hands throughout its infrastructure. The creative sector of the industry agrees on the whole, but are constricted by the radio departments, who are restricted by Clear Channel. There I said it. Of course, Clear Channel have their own pressures, but that's another issue.

So, it's business as usual and we all know it. The age old battle of art vs. commerce. The music industry has had its eyebrow-raising moments throughout its history, but things have never gotten this weird and ugly. It is the nature of the detailed effort that is going into this campaign that sets it apart.

Recent surveys show that the majority of the 15-25 year old demographic listen to internet radio, which is not (currently) controlled by one or two companies. So we are in transition and a lot of things are going to change by natural progression. Perhaps the RIAA is trying to control something that is moving on anyway. The labels have known about the internet for many years and chosen not to react until others made music easily available on the internet for them. I think they would commercially behoove themselves to simultaneously look to the future in creative and productive ways. Perhaps it's time for the new guard - a technologically savvy and realistic one at that. To me, the bottom line is that it all means big changes are coming and I say bring it on. I am not a political animal and I am not taking sides here. But I do love a good mystery and the RIAA's recent behavior has me wondering: what the F is really going on? Is there a bigger picture here?

Users express anger at record industry move to force ISPs to shop file swappers...

Hey there, kids... why not try this at home?

If you're already using p2p networks to upload and download music, go grab some copyright-free music files (you can find'em all over the place) and change the names to something like 'madonna.mp3' or 'michael_jackson.mp3'. Then just start uploading them to Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella and the like.

This sort of p2p-jamming is just the perfect sort of thing to waste the RIAA's time like they're wasting ours. It's an old trick, and it's been done lots of times in the recent past (see various strings of 'Madonna WTF' stories floating around the 'net recently, including this one from the Boycott RIAA site).

Also see: Music industry steps up war on downloaders

St Jude, aka Jude Milhon, was an artist, hacker, author, revolutionary, fiend and friend. Senior Editor of the seminal Mondo 2000 magazine, she inspired young grrls to take up what was then the very male pasttime of dealing with computers and hangin' out online. She is credited with coining the term cypherpunks and with leading many lumpen humps of wetware into the far-flung wildernesses of consciousness & communication. Pictured here with RU Sirius, she collaborated often with him and other Mondoids such as Bart Nagel, co-authoring and editing books including How To Mutate & Take Over the World and The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook. (And she was the Agony Aunt for my zine, Hot Geeks!.)

Jude passed away at 3 a.m. Saturday, July 19, of cancer, under a Cancer sun. I've collected some links, quotes, and such at Magdalen Sez.

With all the recent talk about cellphone tracking, I thought that everyone might enjoy knowing how it can be done by the hobbyist.

Cell phones are two way radio transmitters that work by connecting to a nearby tower and exchanging data. Despite the FCC's limitation on maximum power output of a cell phone, they are still able to connect with towers miles away at UHF frequencies and produce enough RF power to supply those fancy replacement flashing antennas with energy. Because cell phones put out a constant RF output (sometimes pulsed) they can be tracked using the tower triangulation method where the network administrators can find your precise location with their administrative network access. Unfortunately most of use don't have access to the network's administrative features. This experiment will demonstrate an alternative method for tracking a cell phone.

Thanks to long time Incunabula.org friend and supporter Denny of Darkplanet for the latest banner. DP has their own blogstation and a nice little side line in art and unique gaming items. In case you were wondering, the prolific Mr. Unger was responsible for this as well. Check it out !

If anyone else is feeling artsy-fartsy and wants to contribute a banner in the future, email us.

Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Nearly every major Internet provider has been subpoenaed by the music industry in its fervor to stop the illegal trade of music over the Internet.

We got a mention in the new blog, LA Observed. Check 'em out.

A Los Angeles federal court has put the record and movie industry's appeal of April's surprise file-swapping decision on the fast track. The move means that the appeal of the lower court's ruling, which said that file-swapping software like Grokster and Morpheus is legal, could be heard by the end of the year. Briefs for the record labels and movies studios are due August 18, with reply briefs for the file-swapping companies due on Sept. 17.

"When the Israelites were wandering in the desert after their exodus from Egypt they were fed with the mysterious manna.  Much evidence has been found that this food did not fall from the sky, as the Bible states, but came from a machine, which was kept in a tent under conditions of great secrecy.  (The Manna Machine by George Sassoon and Rodney Dale, London, 1979).

When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna supply ceased.  The now unproductive machine was kept at Shiloh by a clan of priests.  Later Kings David and Solomon brought the device to Jerusalem and built the Temple to house it.   It remained there until the destruction of the city by the Babylonians in 587 BC, at which time the priests hid it somewhere and the location was forgotten.  Solomon is said to have given the machine to his son by the Queen of Sheba, but it is probable that this was only a wooden box, not the machine which it had been built to contain.

Andrea & Sara Forman have been chanting Sanskrit since they were nine and seven years of age, respectively, and are now considered among the top scholars in the U.S. in their field. The girls have performed Sanskrit nationwide, including appearances on PBS television programs, and on various radio broadcast shows.

Slipping in and "borrowing" her mother's Vedic books from the study became an obsession for nine-year-old Andrea, as she had an indescribable drive to read the ancient texts. By the end of her ninth summer, Andrea was "hooked" on Sanskrit!

I "borrowed" books from my parents' room too, but unfortanately I cannot make a career out of it.

These girls, in their early twenties, are incredible talents.

This SubGenius-inspired anonymous match-up device for entities allows for a more diverse spectrum of psychology and physiology than your merehume "champagne walks on the beach" dating service.

Effective immediately, the RIAA and MPAA will need to find another way to get to Techfocus. In response to their legal targeting of individual file-swappers, access from their known networks to this site has now been blocked. While it may still be possible for them to access Techfocus via address ranges which we're not aware of, they'll otherwise have to use non-RIAA and non-MPAA networks to view the site.
It's worth the click to read this entire article!

Also see:

Can you say, "BLOW ME!" ?

P2P Networks Try to Throw RIAA Off Their Trail

RIAA Ties up District Court in DC

The man whose name is synonymous with kung fu died 30 years ago Sunday, at just 32. His early death only enhanced his legend, which lives today in the hearts and fists of Hollywood. Lee's movies still sell. Internet shrines abound, examining his best quotes, his smoothest moves and conspiracy theories about his death.

Speaking of Fung Fu, if you haven't seen this gem yet, find it and watch it. Two words: Kung Food!

Astronomers have made a 'mass map' of one of the most massive structures in the Universe, showing how much more there is to it than glowing stars and gas.

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing. | via [root.cellar] via [Post-atomic]

PARIS, France (AP) -- Goodbye "e-mail", the French government says, and hello "courriel" -- the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.

The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.

The ministry's General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail -- a claim some industry experts dispute. "Courriel" is a fusion of the two words.