Georgia Tech officials have lifted the academic suspension of a student accused of making a bottle bomb that exploded and led to the evacuation of two dormitories.

Georgia Tech did the right thing. Lets hope the Grand Jury follows suit.

11Alive.com: Atlanta News - Tech Suspect's Suspension Lifted

Memeing "Prosecutor who ought to be run out on a rail" watch for easy reference.

The latest is that the idictment is being sent before a Grand Jury. No plea bargain was "reached" (because Hollot did not commit a crime, duh)! My understanding is that the Grand Jury process is rather broken and they almost never fail to approve a prosecution, so this will go to trial. If the Grand Jury does rebuke this idiot prosecutor it will great day for our justice system.

Several press outlets are continuing to milk this thing sensationally. One website specifically pointed out the Hollot was "unemployed," others underline the fact that the janitor was taken to the hospital for "injuries" (his ears were ringing) and talk about "explosive devices" and "homemade bombs." Dry ice in a plastic bottle is a "homemade bomb" in the same sense that a super soaker is a "rifle."

Not one press report has mentioned the prosecutor's name. Who is this guy who would ruin someone's life over a prank?! The people have a right to know!

Google Search: theodore hollot

Haven't heard this yet but I have fond memories connected with this band.

Last Smashing Pumpkins album ever... intarweb download only.

Decius and Rattle will be representing Industrial Memetics at PhreakNIC this year by giving a talk entitled "Information Warfare for The People". Everyone is encouraged to attend. The talk will be at 3pm on Saturday. Please refer to the speakers page and schedule for more information. We look forward to seeing you all.

In addition to this, Decius will be delivering his yearly rant at 10pm Saturday night.

Industrial Memetics is also sponsoring the hotel's contention TV channel. During the day, the TV channel will be showing the talks. At night, it will be showing whatever content we can put up without licensing concerns cued by [adult swim] style bumps. In an effort to make the channel as open as possible, we are encouraging convention attendees to bring with them any content they would like to see on the station in file format that VLC will play, burned to either CDs or DVDs. Make sure its something that does not require a license for us to use. Find Rattle at the convention on Friday and give him whatever you have.

... and that's far from being all the content at the convention from MemeStreams related people.

Fellow MemeStreamer and Industrial Memetics Resident Engineer Acidus will be giving a talk entitled "Layer 7 Fun: Extending Web Apps in Interesting Ways" on Friday at 6pm. This talk encompasses using web applications such as Google Mail for uses they were not intended for.

Virgil will be giving an updated version of his talk on "Artificial Intelligence". MaxieZ will be giving a talk entitled "Web Security 101". Dolemite, who is also running the con, is going to be talking about "MythTV". And much, much, much more..

Be there, or be ^2.

'Information Warfare for The People' | Decius and Rattle to speak at PhreakNIC 2005

Theodore Hollot, an 18-year-old engineering major, appeared at two separate hearings Wednesday morning on a felony charge of possessing a destructive device and a misdemeanor of reckless conduct.

So, it turns out the Georgia Tech student was putting dry ice with water in bottles and throwing them out the window of his dorm. A few of them didn't go off and one blew up when a janitor picked it up later.

They went on national television and called THAT a TERRORIST ATTACK!?@#!@ Now that the smoke has cleared they are charing him with a FELONY!@# Somebody has their head planted firmly up their ass.

I put dry ice in a scope bottle and blew it up in the exact same quad when I was a freshman. Of course I was careful to clean up what was left. The cops showed up because they thought the noise might have been a gun shot. When they realized it was just some kids fucking around with dry ice they left. That was it. No national news. No felony charges. No night in jail. No terrorism warning. No big fucking deal. Its really really hard to hurt someone with dry ice and plastic bottle. Its certainly possible, but its no more dangerous then umpteen billion other stupid things college freshmen do.

Give me a fucking break!

DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST THEODORE HOLLOT

Acidus wrote:

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

Tom will be talking about some enhancements he is working on for Wikipedia at Phreaknic. Looks like this issue is only growing.

Ironically, the original poster suffers from having looked at a particular article at a particularly bad timeslice and gotten an ugly result. The present text of the Bill Gates article is greatly improved. Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of problem that my wikipedia talk looks toward addressing.

Furthermore, its important to understand what wikipedia is and what it is not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. This does not mean it isn't useful. A famous engineer's cynicism is: Cost, Speed, or Quality, pick one. An Encyclopedia is a model that picks Quality. Encyclopedias are slow and expensive, but the results are good. Wikipedias are fast and cheap, and the results are not as good.

If you want to teach 11 year olds about the history of Greece, you don't want wikipedia. They may get bad information, they can't easily reference a particular revision (most people don't understand how to do that with wikipedia), and they are going to be exposed to poor grammar and poor structure at a time when you are trying to teach them how to communicate effectively.

If you want to learn about a terrorist incident that occured two months ago, an encyclopedia is of no use. You could turn to the press, but old press articles are hard to find, and Wikipedia is often a vastly more useful resource, because it presents information in a matter of fact way and often draws from a wider array of resources (including press reports which form a primary source material).

Wikipedia fills the gap between the bleeding edge of the headlines and the cast in stone of dusty reference materials in a way that no other resource can. The sooner people realise that every tool doesn't have to solve every problem the better they'll be at figuring out how to make their tools really succeed at the particular things they are well suited for.

RE: Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems | The Register

Tim O'Reilly, Malcolm Gladwell, Clay Shirky, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, David Brooks, and Moby.

TIME.com: The Road Ahead -- Oct. 24, 2005 -- Page 1

A Science staff writer, Jocelyn Kaiser, said, "Both the authors and Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists could, in theory, use the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu virus." And yet the journal required that the full genome sequence be made available on the GenBank database as a condition for publishing the paper.

Proponents of publishing this data point out that valuable insights have been gained from the virus's recreation. These insights could help scientists across the world detect and defend against future pandemics, including avian flu.

There are other approaches, however, to sharing the scientifically useful information. Specific insights - for example, that a key mutation noted in one gene may in part explain the virus's unusual virulence - could be published without disclosing the complete genetic recipe. The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security assurances.

Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil oppose "full disclosure" of immuno-security vulnerabilities.

Recipe for Destruction - New York Times

Nearly exact self-similar fractal forms occur do in nature, but I'd never seen such a beautiful and perfect example until, some time after moving to Switzerland, I came across a chou Romanesco like the one above in a grocery store. This is so visually stunning an object that on first encounter it's hard to imagine you're looking at a garden vegetable rather than an alien artefact created with molecular nanotechnology.

Coolest vegetable ever.

Fractal Food

EULAlyzer™ 1.0

Analyze license agreements for interesting words and phrases.

Nice idea!

EULAlyzer