] The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether a
] church in New Mexico can continue using hallucinogenic
] tea in its religious services.

Supreme Court to Hear Case About Hallucinogenic Tea

] As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules
] governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the
] majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of
] prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast
] portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for
] blocking President Bush's nominees.

Pandering by any other name ... utterly despicable.

I have struggled for some time to understand what's really driving the fundie side of this. Maybe they're just fascists. On the other hand, maybe this represents the death throes of that fantasy of the 1950s and that they see this as about to go away for good and are trying desperately to hang onto it. I can't figure it out.

Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue

] This is the homepage of the revived GPLFLash, and is
] based on Olivier Debons original work, which hasen't had
] a release since June 2000. This project hope to bring
] GPLFlash back as a free, portable and useable alternative
] to the flash-decoder released by Macromedia
] The project contains a decoding library, a player and
] (perhaps most importantly) a mozilla/netscape plugin.

I just built and installed v0.4.13 on my work machine with
Epiphany and uninstalled Macromedia's plugin. I'm really sick
of flash allowing ads to lock out the controls, etc, etc.

U: Definitely not without issues. Sound only supports
open(/dev/dsp) (not esd, etc). Plugin crashes the browser, etc.

GPLFlash - Flash decoder, player and plugin

]
] After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid
] as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now
] saying that drinking too much during intense exercise
] poses a far greater health risk.

Study Cautions Runners to Limit Their Water Intake

] A Stratellite%u2122 is a high-altitude airship that when
] in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary
] platform for transmitting various types of wireless
] communications services currently transmitted from cell
] towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It
] is a high-altitude airship.

Apparently, this is getting "close" to being able to be deployed... they're working on FAA approval right now, apparently.

About the Stratellite

]
] Viewers eagerly awaited director Shinichiro Watanabe's
] first broadcast series since Cowboy Bebop, and this
] quirky, violent period adventure was worth the wait.

This came out just last year, apparently.

U: Premieres on Adult Swim this Saturday at 11:30EDT!

Amazon.com: DVD: Samurai Champloo - Volume 1 (2005)

RMS likes to play the recorder for parrots.

More RMS Parrots

] This week I met Irene Pepperberg and Alex, the African
] gray parrot that she has taught to understand and use a
] large number of words.

RMS gave a talk at Pitt yesterday. He mentioned his interest
in meeting parrots and asked the audience if anyone had a parrot that would like to meet him afterwards. This seemed more than slightly batty and I decided to look into the matter further...

RMS' Blog: Conversation with a Parrot (2005-01-05)

] For a quick and entertaining look at the benefit that perpendicular
] recording delivers, view our animation “Get Perpendicular”

And I may end up working for these people...

Hitachi Perpendicular Recording

] monotone is a free, distributed version control system.
] it provides fully disconnected operation, manages
] complete tree versions, keeps its state in a local
] transactional database, supports overlapping branches and
] extensible metadata, exchanges work over plain network
] protocols, performs history-sensitive merging, and
] delegates trust functions to client-side RSA
] certificates.

v0.17 is out. In the aftermath of the BitKeeper stink that's going down with Linux, Linus is saying that Monotone is looking like the
most plausible alternative, at least for him, right now. Apparently it has some performance problems for Linux-size source trees.

My chief beef with it is that they roll their own crypto rather than using something off-the-shelf like OpenPGP or X.509 which IMHO is a Cardinal Sin.

monotone: distributed version control