] "If you're 15 and angry at your dad, you want to go and
] break something. But the biggest part of hacking is
] creation," notes "Acidus," a speaker at a Friday panel on
] intellectual property and technology.

The line that got be the biggest applause was "Do you think Marconi and Tesla could have built the radio if the telegraph was a little black box you couldn't open? We are selling out our future inventors and innovators for the short terms profits of the RIAA."

USATODAY.com - Hackers have HOPE

] We got to listen to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
] computer and hacker legend speak today with his HOPE
] keynote.

This speech has something I had never seen in countless shows about Woz or Apple. It talks about *why* he did and thought the way he did, as well as how he taught kids in school.

Steve Wozniak HOPE Keynote for download

There is a service on the net for bloggers that lets you post your GPS coordinates in your blog and submit it. Then people can surf for weblogs geographically. Does anyone recall what thats called?

Does anyone know of any open source, free, or reasonably priced mapping software solutions for the server side? Basically something that will let me put a dot on a map at a particular Lattitude/Longitude and then display the map on a web page?

Acidus wrote:

] "Fuck you and your adjectives" -Rattle

You forgot a couple of mine...

"Is this the 'bad part' of town?"

"Nick, you realise that if you were a politician your career would now be over."

RE: Quotes From HOPE 5

] Don't be so quick to toss out your old PCs, fax machines
] or digital cameras -- office supply retailer Office Depot
] is offering to recycle one electronic product a day for
] free all through the summer, according to a published
] report Tuesday.

Office Depot offers to recycle electronics for free - Jul. 13, 2004

] By raiding nature's tool cabinet, researchers have
] developed a potentially faster and more practical version
] of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), itself a
] foundation of modern genetics.
]
] The breakthrough, called helicase-dependent amplification
] (HDA), could result in small, hand-held devices which
] enable doctors to test blood samples directly in the
] surgery and forensic teams to detect a suspect's DNA at a
] crime scene.

nano says:

I am going to go ahead and file this one under "Damnit, why didn't I think of that". This is a discovery that someone could have made ~25 years ago. Helicases were discovered in 1976, and Mullis presented PCR to the world in the early 80s. If Kary had of thought about adding helicases to his tube of nucleotides and polymerase, it would have saved alot of work for grad students in the 80s (of course, just the fact that he came up with PCR already saved grad students from alot of work, but whose counting). PCR sans helicases require temperature changes in a cyclic fashion in order to make the copies of the DNA. Before the invention of the thermal cycler (god bless this machine), grad students would have to move tubes from water bath to water bath by hand (keep in mind that to make enough copies to work with, the PCR reaction has to be cycled through all required temps ~25-30 times, which resulted in hours of moving tubes every couple of minutes to a different water bath (once again, god bless the thermal cycler).
Adding helicases to the mix was a genious idea - could be nobel worthy. With helicases, the reaction can take place at 37 degrees, which means that PCR just got portable, and cheaper too (helpful for labs without alot of money to buy a thermal cycler). My hats off to these scientists....its always those discoveries that were sitting right in front of our faces for years that are sometimes the most amazing.

New Scientist

] In practice this means giving people a specially-equipped
] mobile phone that allows them to wander around central
] London and leave virtual notes for other people to read
] by writing them on the phone and then 'sticking' them to
] a building.

Slashdot | Net Sticky Notes All Over London

Having finally had time to sit down and read Hamdi v. Rumsfeld its clear to me that the press reports so far have been confusing at best and misleading at worst. While I am heartened that the court has decided that there are some limits to the power of our executive, their decision is far from the stalwart defense of our traditional understanding of civil liberties that it has been presented as. I must express that I share the cynicism of the Russian commentator whose article I posted in spite of that commentator's hypocrisy.

My (apparently incorrect) understanding of how things work in this country is that the legislative branch makes the laws (within the framework of the constitution), the executive enforces them, and the judicial interprets, applies, and upholds them. In this case the legislative passed a vague authorization for the use of military force against Al'Q and the T. From this the executive invented an entirely unprecedented and undefined legal status for prisoners. We'll call this "legislating from the Oval Office." In this decision the judicial has upheld the existence of this undefined status and invented a vaguely defined and unprecedented legal standard to go along with it. We'll call this "legislating from the bench."

From now on, as long as Congress has authorized the President to use "force" against an "enemy" the President may name any citizen an "enemy combatant" and place them in prison. The President is required to present its case against these individuals to a neutral decision maker (which need not be a civilian court), but the standard in these cases is "guilty until proven innocent." This is an enormously important precedent that will continue to impact our history forever.

I do not recall "guilty until proven innocent" ever being a part of how Americans view justice. Nor do I recall that the Supreme Court has the power to invent standards like this for cases of this sort. Missing from every event leading up to this moment (the solidification of a new legal standard for certain prisoners in our justice system) is the explanation of why. Why won't standard POW processes work for "combatants" in Afghanistan? Why do we need a new standard? Why is this situation so significantly different from any we've faced in the past? Justification is what you'd get if this new creation was the product of a normal legislative process. Instead what we have is the technical assertion of power by the executive and the judicial, with no more explanation then "these are bad people."

Maybe the court has reached the right balance here and this is the standard we ought to have. Its certainly preferable to me then Justice Thomas's unsaid statement that the only recourse that you have against unreasonable executive detention is to Impeach him. (If Thomas's well referenced dissent is correct, then I would say we are in need of new laws immediately!) However, I think it ought to have gone through the legislature, and that it ought to have been birthed in the open, with the traditional discussion of ends and means that is typically afforded a democracy when creating a new basic legal framework.

Repeating my basic point to ram it home: A new legal standard has been created in our justice system. It applies to enemies of the state. The standard is guilty until proven innocent. Its use requires Congressional authorization, but that authorization need not be specific. This is a watershed event that will inform future generation's basic understanding of what the Constitution means.

] Our family of Indian Pale Ales includes the 60 Minute
] I.P.A. and the 90 Minute Imperial I.P.A.. Both feature
] our unique continuous hopping program, where they receive
] a single hop addition that lasts over the course of the
] entire boil (60 and 90 minutes respectively). This
] breakthrough hopping method makes for a beer that is
] extremely hoppy without being overly bitter.

This is the best IPA that I have ever had. It fucking rox!

Dogfish Head: 90 Minute IPA

] The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer
] Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week
] when it recommended for security reasons using browsers
] other than Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

Ouch!

DHS/CERT: Don't use IE