Silicon Graphics, a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage, announced today it will begin trading its stock on the Over-the-Counter (OTC) securities market under the ticker symbol 'SGID'.

Alas, poor SGI.

Silicon Graphics Announces New Stock Symbol SGID

In 1973, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow landed on my brain and exploded there like, well, a V-2 rocket.

Long piece that gives some more historical details about the writing and publication of Gravity's Rainbow that I hadn't heard before.

Pynchon from A to V

The Senate moved the digital TV transition one step closer to reality on Thursday, setting a firm date for television broadcasters to switch to all-digital transmissions.

I thought that something like 80% of households got TV from somewhere other than terrestrial broadcast anyway. If that figure is in fact accurate, it almost makes me want to say "to hell with terrestrial broadcast and spend the $3B to subsidize cable or DSS for the few people that don't have it already." It seems like a huge waste of resources to convert all those transmitters to digital when most people will never tune in the signal in the first place.

Is watching broadcast HDTV in your car ever going to be a killer ap? People seem to have bought a lot of SUVs with (video) entertainment systems but those seem more oriented towards pacifying children.

Am I missing something here? Why is broadcast TV still relevant? Cellphones and PDAs? Is this the right infrastructure to deliver that content to those devices?

RE: Senate Sets 2009 Digital TV Deadline - Yahoo! News

Ben S. Bernanke, who is expected to take over at the Fed in February, will almost certainly echo Mr. Greenspan's step, raising rates at his first meeting next year, in part to demonstrate his commitment, too, to keeping inflation under control. But for all the similarities of their actions upon taking office, Mr. Bernanke faces a fundamentally different set of circumstances than those that Mr. Greenspan confronted 18 years ago.

To Fight Rising Prices, Fed Nominee May Need New Weapons

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was forced to step down as a member of its board on Thursday evening.

The move came after the board began reviewing a confidential report by the inspector general of the corporation into accusations about Mr. Tomlinson's use of corporation money to promote more conservative programming.

Broadcasting Ex-Chairman Is Removed From Board

Decius wrote:

The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. BAC recently has been adopted as a best practice by the ICAO New Technologies Working Group and will soon be formally added to the ICAO specifications. BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number (PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted, providing further protection.

Most of the folks commenting on the new RFID rule didn't mention this. This will satisfy most of the security concerns.

But see Schneier's piece on Wired about it.

RE: Anti-skimming covers are not the only feature in new passports.

We have begun an effort to clarify the meaning of multi-threaded C programs, and to provide some standard thread-related APIs where those are currently missing. Here we list some of the documents relevant to that effort.

Hans Boehm gave a talk about this stuff at work today. The main takeaway I got was that the compiler, optimizing for single-threaded execution, can reorder instructions in such a way as to create race conditions when executed concurrently. What a mess...

Threads and memory model for C/C++

We have this stuff (among various other things) in the fridges at work. It tastes sort of like kambucha without quite so much of the kick to the head.

Cricket Cola

Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating drafts of three bills that would give federal agencies the ability to write regulations preventing digital radio and TV broadcasts from being pirated.

Something's gone seriously wrong when you have to hold someone at gunpoint to get them to pay you for a product that they obviously want (but don't "need").

Copyright was a first-approximation solution to valuing information that served well enough for the first 100 years or so. Its really showing its age now, though, and we're in desperate need of a new system.

Broadcast flag bills circulate on the Hill

General Motors is most bullish on [fuel cells].

"We're going to prove to ourselves and the world that a fuel cell propulsion system can go head to head with the internal combustion engine," said Lawrence D. Burns, G.M.'s vice president in charge of research and development.

He said that by 2010, G.M. will have designed a fuel cell car that can go as far on a full tank and is as durable as a gasoline car. Some financial analysts are skeptical that G.M. will have even staved off bankruptcy by then.

Taking the Future for a Drive