] During replication, when the virus invades and colonises
] human cells, the RNA makes errors, resulting in genetic
] mutations to the prongs. Such mutations are known as
] 'antigenic drift'. The reason they are dangerous is that
] they trigger small changes to the haemagglutinin,
] enabling the prongs to stick better to human cells and
] evade the antibodies produced by the immune system. In
] addition, type A viruses such as H5N1 can also 'swap' or
] re-assort genetic material with other viruses. This
] process, known as 'antigenic shift', occurs when animal
] strains mix with human strains, producing viruses to
] which no animal or human has immunity.
]
] 'The problem is, one chicken can contain hundreds of
] thousands of strains of H5N1,' explains Oxford.

A long, scary, interesting article about Bird Flu.

The Observer | Magazine | On a wing and a prayer

This April a hacker broke through Negativland's UMN mainframe firewall and stole the final version of Negativland's top-sacred for-internal-use-only "Mashin' of the Christ" video project. Negativland prayed that their in-house project would not make it into the hands of the unsuspecting public, but we all know how hard it can be to stop those "peer to peer" criminals from illegally sharing the property of others.

And what exactly did these hackers steal from Negativland??

"The Mashin' of the Christ" was/is Negativland's top-secret-not-for-viewing video response to the number one film in America. Negativland decrypted, downloaded and mashed up the most violent religious film ever made along with over 27 other Hollywood portrayals of Jesus to create their own vision of the last moments of Christ's life... all in four minutes and 14 seconds. Is Christianity still stupid? Is Communism still good? Negativland hoped that no one would ever find out for sure.

But that hope was dashed on Easter Sunday, 2004, when the video project was stolen from Negativland's hard drive, and then, just last week, released onto P2P networks worldwide. Negativland's friends and lawyers who had seen "The Mashin' of the Christ" had strongly advised against a public release ever occuring (the "anti-circumvention" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that doing this sort of decryption to make collage is illegal), but since God is said to see all secrets, only the public is left to be surprised by this unauthorized birth from Negativland. Voracious pirating of this work has spread across the Net and in the last few days high-resolution versions of "Mashin'" have even been appearing on P2P networks disguised as a complete copy of "The Passion of the Christ."

This was recommmended to me and I thought I would pass it on.

'The Mashin' of the Christ'

] The first production run of the GameOptics X1620 is ready
] to meet its public! With more than a year in development,
] this USB LCD has been designed with the PC gamer in mind
] to enhance the gaming experience.

For those of you who are always gawking at my RSS feed LED sign, someone has decided to market a small USB variety.

ThinkGeek :: GameOptics LCD Display

] News agency Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc.,
] alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos,
] news headlines and stories on its news site without
] permission.

Thats the sound of a shoe dropping.

CNN.com - News agency suing Google - Mar 19, 2005

] A self-replicating 3D printer that spawns new, improved
] versions of itself is in development at the University of
] Bath in the UK.

It begins....

Do we need a technopocalypse topic on MemeStreams? Right under Current Events?

New Scientist Breaking News - 3D printer to churn out copies of itself

] If a dog alerts and nothing is found, then cops will
] never record that as an error, but will claim that the
] dog detected lingering odors of contraband that were
] recently present. Cops will testify that dogs never make
] mistakes, never have and never will, and that apparent
] errors are skillful detections of lingering (residual)
] odors of contraband.

Does our legal system really make smart decisions? If you can convict someone based on a dog barking with no physical evidence one wonders if the standard of reasonable doubt is really being upheld in our courts.

[Politech] Anti-drug attorney's critique of police using drug dogs

] As already reported on quite a few blogs, Jeremy was
] detained and interrogated by US Immigration when he
] arrived in New York last week for a meeting with
] McGraw-Hill to discuss a great business opportunity for
] Jeremy in the area of blogging. It appears that the
] immigration people simply did not believe that Jeremy
] could make a living as a blogger. And they gave him the
] third degree - including an humiliating strip search - as
] a result for some hours. And banned him from entering the
] US.

Protecting our borders does not involve creating an opportunity for people who have chips on their shoulders to harrass random travellers. We need a bill of rights for travellers.

[Politech] Don't say blogger to customs!

] del.icio.us is still giving me food for thought. Here are
] two toys I've made recently: a tag stemming tool that
] helps you tidy up your tagging using the Porter
] algorithm, and a (Flash) screen-recorded demo of
] del.icio.us seamlessly embedded in the BBC Radio 3
] website.

Memed for later reference.

hackdiary: Stemming tags, and one website to the tune of another

] I'm Stratton, the CEO. This is a picture of me on the
] left. Nice tie eh?

IDN spoofing Verisign parody example

] a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield,
] Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the
] O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy
] is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags
] to shared items and then discovering which tegs users share with
] one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags
] aren't "controlled"

What are people's thoughts about replacing the topics system in MemeStreams with a folksonomy like Del.icio.us?

Folksonomy conversation