] Scientists have created the ultimate pet: genetically
] modified fish that glow in the dark. In future, there
] will be no need for aquarium lights - fluorescent fish
] will provide their own illumination.

Oh yeah, I would buy glowing fish. No question. I will own these some day. If there is someone out there tracking market for this kinda thing, mark me down as saying "i'll buy".. Hell yeah.

] Scientists have not restricted their GM work to
] aquarium creatures. In other experiments, scientists
] have attempted to engineer cats that do not produce
] allergens.

I'd buy that too! I'm allergic to cats.. Aside from that, cats are alright. And I'm sure they could make it piss less ammonia, glow, etc.. Sweet..

I'd save up for this shit. After the cat and the fish, I'd just need something that flys. Something can be done with the parot.

However, I don't think its a good idea to make any new animals that are capable of surviving in nature on their own. But I have no doubt that the comercial world will tackle these problems. There are simple and elegant solutions possible. You just have to make sure the thing can't possibly survive or breed without constant human intervention.. Kitty gonna need something in her water or .. Fishy gonna need some mad UV.. etc.. Unless that can be pulled off, no way. And maybe some kind of virus kill switch, "just in case". And screw Jurassic Park and "life can find a way" and all that crap. Thats Hollywood. There are solutions for this kinda thing damnit, there have to be. I want value added to my pets!

There is a service end to the business. Thats a good thing. When I get my consumer pet, I don't want to have to go through picking up supplies all the time, they have to be custom anyway, with this kinda investment, they are going to control that suckers whole life cycle. They can mail me whatever I need. I want to order it like a laptop. Select boxes for configuration, pick accessories, get a support contract, etc..

Pets.com might have been a flop, but when the shit glows, its going to be a different story.

'Fluorescent fish' give the green light to GM pets

] Most of the new information comes from handwritten
] documents and computer hard drives seized during the
] March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, regarded by
] some government analysts as al Qaeda's most important
] operational planner. Known inside al Qaeda as "the
] Brain," Mohammed has acknowledged being the principal
] author of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot. Significantly, one
] official noted, Mohammed was arrested at a Rawalpindi,
] Pakistan, home owned by Abdul Quddoos Khan, a
] bacteriologist with access to production materials and
] facilities who has since disappeared.

More info from Mohammed's laptop.

Al Qaeda Near Biological, Chemical Arms Production (washingtonpost.com)

you have to enter some (fake) demographic information to get this article..
quoted:
===

Enraged Computer Owner Shoots Up Machine

The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 5, 2003; 3:53 PM

George Doughty hung his latest hunting trophy on the wall of his Sportsman's Bar and Restaurant. Then he went to jail.

The problem was the trophy was Doughty's laptop computer.

He shot it four times, as customers watched, after it crashed once too often.

He was jailed on suspicion of felony menacing, reckless endangerment and the prohibited use of weapons.

"It's sort of funny, because everybody always threatens their computers," said police Lt. Rick Bashor, seconds before his own police computer froze at police headquarters.

Enraged Computer Owner Shoots Up Machine (washingtonpost.com)

] Science fiction has long been William Gibson's electric
] guitar - the instrument he uses to gain perspective, to
] transform life's ditties into anthems of transcendent
] strangeness. In Pattern Recognition (Putnam, $26), he
] goes acoustic, unplugging the overt sci-fi tropes that
] have marked his work and producing a mainstream product.
] He succeeds because our real world has such gnarly tech
] (Web surfing on a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection is
] functionally the same as jacking your brain into a
] cyberspace deck) and because his riffs make such a good
] read.

Rudy Rucker reviews Pattern Recognition for Wired.

Wired: Legomancer

"Infamous Hacker's Laptop Up For Auction "

Forbes.com: Infamous Hacker's Laptop Up For Auction

MADISON, WISCONSIN-When I arrived in Afghanistan (news - web sites) last November, Operation Enduring Freedom-the American bombing campaign that eventually toppled the Taliban-was being hailed by the U.S. media as an unqualified success. Precision bombing and first-rate intelligence, the Pentagon (news - web sites) claimed, had kept civilian casualties down to a few dozen victims at most. Long-oppressed Afghan women burned their burqas and walked the streets as the country reveled in an orgy of liberation. Or so we were told.

The amount of disjoint between television and reality was shocking. The "new" Northern Alliance government was no better than the Taliban; with the exception of the U.S.-appointed former oil-company hacks in charge, they were Talibs. Women still wore their burqas, stonings continued at the soccer stadium and the bodies of bombing victims piled up by the thousands. Not only was the War on Terror failing to catch terrorists, it was creating a new generation of Afghans whose logical response to losing their friends and parents and siblings and spouses and children would be to hate America.

Why didn't the truth about the extent of civilian casualties get out?

I blame the journalists, though Lord knows, some of them tried. As a novice correspondent for The Village Voice and KFI-AM radio in Los Angeles, I carefully studied the pros. A brilliant war reporter for a big American newspaper-he'd done them all, from Rwanda to Somalia to Kosovo-filed detailed reports daily from his room down the street from mine as I charged my electronic equipment on his portable generator. The next day we'd hook up a satellite phone to a laptop to read his pieces on his paper's website. Invariably every mention of Afghan civilians killed or injured by American air strikes would be neatly excised. One day, as a test, he fired off a thousand words about a 15,000-pound "daisy cutter" bomb that had taken out an entire neighborhood in southeastern Kunduz. Hundreds of civilians lay scattered in bits of protoplasm amid the rubble. His editors killed the piece, calling it "redundant."

MEET THE PRESS - The Corruption of Journalism in Wartime

Whether it is computer, laptop, or even a projector, you can now rent it all

Computers, Laptops and Even Projectors – For Rent!

A fired Fannie Mae contract worker pleaded not guilty Friday to a federal charge he planted a virus designed to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant's 4,000 computer servers nationwide.

Had the virus been released as planned on Saturday, the Justice Department said the disruption could have cost millions of dollars and shut down operations for a week at Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage finance company.

Rajendrasinh B. Makwana, 35, of Glen Allen, Va., pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to one count of computer intrusion, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Makwana's federal public defender, Christopher C. Nieto, didn't return calls seeking comment on the case.

The Associated Press was unable to reach Makwana in Glen Allen, Va., a suburb of Richmond. A search of public records found no address or telephone number for him there.

Makwana is an Indian citizen who has lived in the United States since at least 2001, according to public records.

He was fired Oct. 24 from his computer programming job at Fannie Mae's data center in Urbana, about 35 miles from the company's Washington headquarters, where he had worked since 2006, according to the Justice Department. He was fired for erroneously writing programming instructions two weeks earlier that changed the settings on the servers, according to an FBI affidavit.

Fannie Mae did not immediately terminate Makwana's computer access after telling him he was fired early on the afternoon of Oct. 24, the affidavit states. Before surrendering his badge and laptop computer about 3 1/2 hours later, the indictment accused Makwana of "intentionally and without authorization caused and attempted to cause damage to Fannie Mae's computer network by entering malicious code."

As first reported by The (Washington) Examiner, the code "would have resulted in destroying and altering all of the data on Fannie Mae servers," the indictment states.

According to the affidavit signed Jan. 6 by FBI Special Agent Jessica A. Nye, a Fannie Mae engineer discovered the malicious instructions by chance Oct. 29. The virus was removed that day and did no harm, according to the affidavit.

Had the virus been released, "it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shut down operations" for at least a week, Nye wrote.

Fannie Mae may have had to clean out and restore all 4,000 servers, restore and secure the automation of mortgages and restore all data that was erased, the agent said. Fannie Mae declined to comment.

Fannie Mae owns or guarantees about $3 billion in home loans, or one in every five mortgages in the United States. A slowdown would have affected the investors who rely on Fannie Mae to guarantee the timely payment of mortgage interest and principal, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance.

"To the extent they can't meet those obligations, that's a big problem," Cecala said.

The charge against Makwana carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Makwana was arrested Jan. 7 and released on $100,000 bond Jan. 8, according to court records.

The Justice Department didn't disclose the name of the contractor for whom he worked. He was one of 10 to 20 workers with access to the server from which the virus would have launched, according to the FBI affidavit.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both publicly traded, were created by Congress to inject money into the home-loan market by purchasing mortgages and bundling them into securities for sale to investors. Both were taken over by their government regulator in September after mounting mortgage losses put them in distress

Feds allege plot to destroy Fannie Mae data

Jace Clayton:

Borders are about violence and fixedness and centralised authority. Music is about pleasure and fluidity and endless waves of influence.

Decius, from the archive:

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

From Tim Winton's Breath:

The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

From the recent archive:

Though some federal appellate courts do not appear to require any degree of suspicion to justify a search, one federal district court stated categorically that all laptop searches conducted at the border require at least reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

From way back:

Neyshabur, one of the oldest cities on the Silk Road, was a major cultural crossroads that boasted one of the ancient world's first universities. It produced many of Iran's greatest poets and was also known for its turquoise.

In Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur, Kayhan Kalhor combines Western strings and Indian tabla with his core ensemble of kemancheh, santur, and ney.

The piece is an arabesque-like elaboration of an Iranian melodic formula called chahargah. According to Kalhor, chahargah means literally "fourth time," and its mood reflects the quiet and introspective atmosphere of the fourth part of the old Iranian daily cycle, from late night until just before dawn.

Rory Stewart:

Without music, time has a very different quality.

Rupturing Borders

There's been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

How do you organize this in a way that protects an incredibly valuable asset in the United States but does it in a way that doesn't alarm reasonable people, and I underline reasonable people, in terms of civil liberties?

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

Focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps pose to a democratic society.

I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me.

Though some federal appellate courts do not appear to require any degree of suspicion to justify a search, one federal district court stated categorically that all laptop searches conducted at the border require at least reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Surveillance and Privacy | Another Noteworthy Year