] No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the
] record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for
] invading Mars.

CNN - 3 Yemenis sue NASA for trespassing on Mars - July 24, 1997

John Perry Barlow has started a blog!

] Here I am, in the lobby of the highly attitudinal W Hotel
] in San Francisco, creating my very first blog entry.
]
] Joichi Ito, a blog sensei if ever there was one, is introducing
] me to the Blogosphere. I'm wary. Am I too old a dog to blog?
] Am I actually too sick of things virtual to plunge myself
] deeper into electronic immateriality?
]
] We'll see.
]
] But, I am motivated. For years, I've been sending out
] BarlowSpams and then privately enjoying the responses,
] both from friendz and friendz of friendz. Now I will have a
] place to pass to these on to our little community and, with
] luck, grow this into something besides my own little
] personality cult.

BarlowFriendz

In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. As a result, all their communications in these spaces, even messages with no more commercial content than "BRITN3Y SUX!!!1!" are hidden from prying eyes. This is not because such messages are sensitive, but rather because once a user starts encrypting messages and files, it's often easier to encrypt everything than to pick and choose. Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.

The RIAA makes everyone a cypherpunk

] If King remains a one-dimensional grainy black-and-white
] figure who utters the same sunny sound bite year after
] year until it's a cliche, it's because news networks
] won't pay for more, and researchers have been kept from
] delving deep into his papers to tell us something new
] about the Martin Luther King the man, not the statuette.
]
] And his family wants it that way.

And once again we are promoting science and the useful arts by creating economic incentives for people to engage in historical events by preventing people from talking about them.

You need a license to quote Martin Luther King Jr. (phillyBurbs.com)

Annalee Newitz offers an interesting observation on the grayness of the hacker scene. SFOBug is one of the most elite open meetings of computer geeks that I'm aware of.

SFOBUG - Fyodor Article

] Here we have the old courthouse in Biloxi, Mississippi, (left)
] and its 1970s replacement (right) -- the sublime and the ridiculous.
] The old building is garbed in the architectural vestments of authority
] in decorum. The new courthouse invokes arbitrary bureaucratic
] despotism.

This is an absolutely hillarious cynical commentary on the bad architecture we see every day.

Yes the Bat building in Nashville is included. Someone needs to send this guy a photo of that fucking statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on I-65. Not only is that a horrible statement, but they didn't even have the decency to make a proper statue. Its this multi-colored plastic thing. Ugh...

Eyesore of the Month by James Howard Kunstler

Guys, thats most evil. Its pure evil. Evil Evil Evil...

"If you know my name
don't speak it out
it holds a power..."
- Einstuerzende Neubauten : Chrysantemum

evil

] "We can easily distort memories for the details of an
] event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we
] can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories
] - we call them rich false memories because they are so
] detailed and so big."

Memory is much more unreliable than you might recall.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'We can implant entirely false memories'

] At the heart of the program is a Europe-wide drive to map
] noise levels in cities in 25 nations.

Links to maps at the end of the story.

Yahoo! News - Europe Begins Program to Map Urban Noise

I didn't recommend this before so I'm doing it now.

This webpage will redirect you to a Google image search using a random search term based on the filename scheme used by many popular digital cameras. What results is the most random, random sampling of pictures.

Basically, it offers random views into people's lives... See something interesting and you can dive in and explore. Its really quite an experience.

The Google random picture generator