] The Quantum Sleeper Unit is a high-level security system
] designed for maximum protection in various hostile
] environments.

This is positively fucked up. Intruders in your home? House burning down? Biological warfare? Red Dawn? Just press a button and your bed becomes a sealed bulletproof coffin complete with entertainment system, rebreather, and optional offensive weapons systems. Sit happy and dry in your little pine box while you watch the cataclysm unfold through your one way view port.

If you really feel like you need this product I suggest that you:
A. Go back on your meds.
B. Just give the mob the money you owe them.
C. Stop watching television.
D. Move to Alaska.
E. All of the above.

Quantum Sleeper

] Likewise, the savings clause in the Induce Act saying
] that its provisions do not enlarge the doctrines of
] contributory and vicarious copyright liability will be
] equally ineffective because the bill creates the new
] offense of inducing copyright violation, under which
] actions under the bill would be brought.

Congressman Boucher talks with folks on Lessig's blog about Induce

This year's Phreaknic T-shirt art is pretty cool.

PhreakNIC Pictures :: PN8 :: hack_or_die_final

] Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems
] project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked
] by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that
] would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant,
] articles that were 6-10 years old, etc.

Acidus is on Slashdot today.

Slashdot | Unlocking The Power Of the Magstripe

] John Walker recently helped me run a little computer
] experiment with me to quantify the word linkiness
] distribution. Rather than wrestling with the vague notion
] of which words suggest which other words, we took an
] electronic dictionary file and decreed that any two words
] are linked if either of the words appears in the
] dictionary definition of the other word.

Rudy Rucker has been doing the sidebar on Boing Boing. The most recent post was kind of interesting.

Rudy Rucker on Boing Boing

] The number of employed software engineers in the U.S.
] dropped from 856,000 in the first quarter of 2004 to
] 725,000 in the second quarter. (of 2004)

IEEE's numbers seems to conflict with the fed's numbers.

ITworld.com - High-tech employment numbers drop in second quarter

] An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows nearly
] 160,000 IT jobs have disappeared in the past three years,
] while the IT unemployment rate has nearly doubled since
] 2000.
]
] The biggest IT job category--computer software engineers--grew
] to 816,000, up from 757,000 in 2000, a nearly 8% increase. (from 2000 to 2004)

InformationWeek - IT Jobs Continue To Disappear

] Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi: The problems started after the
] Americans entered the city at the end of April, 2003:
] Provocations, humiliations and arrests. All of us
] remember the incident at the school, which led to several
] civilian deaths [after U.S. troops opened fire on Iraqi
] civilians, killing 15 people and wounding dozens of
] demonstrators protesting the occupation]. Now, thanks to
] Allah, Fallujah is back to normal. We solve our problems
] through scholars, tribal sheikhs and police. The problem
] was the Americans inside the city because they started
] the violence.

MSNBC - Interview with insurgent leader in Fallujah

] In September, Pantheon Books will publish Art
] Spiegelman's comic strip musings on 9/11 and its
] aftermath, In the Shadow of No Towers. Spiegelman, of
] course, is the author of Maus, a key book in the
] development of the modern graphic novel, as well as the
] editor (along with his wife Francoise Mouly) of Raw, the
] award-winning anthology of avant garde comics. 

ICv2 News - In the Shadow of No Towers

] A well-managed corporation devotes some portion of its
] research and development budget to basic research, in
] fields of science that underlie its main business. Isn't
] understanding the market as important to the economy as
] understanding solid-state physics is to IBM? If we can
] map the human genome, why can't we map how a man loses
] his livelihood? If millions can contribute a few cycles
] of their PCs to the search for a signal from outer space,
] why can't they join a coordinated search for patterns in
] financial markets?

Wired 12.08: Mandelbrot's challenge to the finance industry