By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

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Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies - New York Times

All new vehicles will be required to have antirollover technology by the 2012 model year, the government said yesterday.

The Transportation Department said the technology, called electronic stability control, could save 5,300 to 9,600 lives annually and prevent up to 238,000 injuries a year once it was fully deployed into the nation’s fleet.

Systems to Prevent Rollovers to Be in All New Cars by 2012 - New York Times

Well, obviously, I can't say much about this new SCO filing [PDF] at this time. It's all about moi. A bit more here and here.

Sheesh...

Groklaw - My Very Own Motion, Tra La

EMI Group will soon sell digital music with better sound quality and no digital rights management restrictions through Apple's iTunes Store.

NYTimes article

EMI, Apple partner on DRM-free premium music | CNET News.com

EMI, the world’s third largest music company, said today that it was making its music available online without a key anti-piracy measure in a deal with Apple Inc. to boost sales of digital music.

!!!

EMI Dropping Copy Limits on Online Music - New York Times

“Gunboat diplomacy is a thing of the past, even if we could find a spare gunboat,” Mr. Norman said. “The days when Britain had the stature, self-confidence and façade of moral authority to play sergeant to the U.S. chief inspector on the global stage are over, and the villains know it.”

Iran Broadcasts New Video of Seized Britons - New York Times

Pilots of a Chilean commercial aircraft approaching the Auckland airport in New Zealand spotted flaming pieces of a satellite falling past their jet, the LAN Chile airline reported Wednesday.

SPACE.com -- Report: Flaming Piece of Space Junk Misses Airliner

The problem has prompted a spooky, but elegant, business idea: why not use the Web to create marketplaces of willing human beings who will perform the tasks that computers cannot? Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, has created Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online service involving human workers, and he has also personally invested in a human-assisted search company called ChaCha. Mr. Bezos describes the phenomenon very prettily, calling it “artificial artificial intelligence.”

Of course the spammers are already doing this to solve captchas :/

Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

I have long been intrigued by the question of how do we turn the internet into a lifeline grade infrastructure.
My hope that this will occur soon or even within decades is diminishing.

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?