] Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday
] that people concerned about losing freedom to government
] anti-terrorism efforts should speak out.

The court system is influenced by public outcry.

[Politech] Justice Ginsburg warns against apathy

] Since the system went into place last September at the
] new elementary school here in Cambodia's remote northeast
] corner, solar panels have been powering three computers.
] Once a day, an Internet "Motoman" rides a cherry red
] Honda motorcycle slowly past the school. On the passenger
] seat is a gray metal box with a short fat antenna. The
] box holds a wireless Wi-Fi chip set that allows the
] exchange of e-mail between the box and computers.
] Briefly, this schoolyard of tree stumps and a
] hand-cranked water well becomes an Internet hot spot.
]
] It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their
] routes five days a week, downloading and uploading
] e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First
] Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the
] motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly
] past the school to download all the village's outgoing
] e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. The school's computer
] system and antenna are powered by solar panels. Newly
] collected data is stored for the day in a computer
] strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the
] motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung,
] where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite
] dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside
] world.

Rural Cambodia, Though Far Off the Grid, Is Finding Its Way Online

] Artists get a full 50% of the purchase price. And unlike most record labels,
] our artists keep the rights to their music.
]
] Founded by musicians, for musicians.
]
] No major label connections.
]
] We are not evil.

Awesome!!

Magnatune: try before you buy MP3 music.

] But while the U.S. economy ekes forward, then slips back,
] the Korean and Chinese economies are growing some twice
] as fast. While the U.S. pretends to have a stock market
] resurgence--the figment of a commendably reflated
] dollar--Korea and China are undergoing real equity
] expansions

Check out South Korea Index:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EWY&t=5y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Forbes.com: Korean Broadband Explosion

Each Robot Chick begins as a hand sculpted original, built by the mad artist himself, Brent Harris. A high quality resin casting is then made and customized for a one-of-a-kind piece of sculpture. Each Robot Chick is numbered and comes with her own hand stamped ID tag. Materials used for customizing include: sheet aluminium, copper wire, springs, rivets, screws, bolts, and old sewing machine parts.

The prices are too high and breasts are too perky, but these are interesting to look at.

Robot Chicks

This post is a little over the top, but at the bottom is a great collection of links to critical articles about social networking sites.

apophenia: venting my contempt for orkut

] When the internal architecture of a trained
] artificial neural network is gradually relaxed or
] destroyed, that network tends to spontaneously
] produce a succession of "impressions" from it's
] learned knowledge domain. I refer to this state
] as "dreaming." A dreaming net's output stream
] often holds a mixture of both straightforward and
] hybridized exemplars from its training set. If we
] allow a second neural network to watch for any
] useful concepts that emerge from the first, we
] form a so-called "Creativity Machine." Creativity
] machines may perform remarkable feats of
] invention and discovery, ranging from the composition of
] music to the prediction of totally new ultrahard
] materials.

A technical discussion of Creativity Machines

] Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than
] any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B
] CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the
] Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered
] substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new
] English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.
] Technically.
]
] Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination
] Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all
] those things, but he's really just "the man behind the
] curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer
] program called a Creativity Machine.

This is rather amazing. The article makes what must be tremendous programming projects sounds very simple. They guy actually has neural networks inventing technologies.

Computers that create patents

] Eight security experts held a Red Team exercise on
] January 19, using a GEMS server and six AccuVote-TS
] terminals, replicating an election scenario with no prior
] knowledge of source code. As suggested by the earlier,
] Hopkins report, the team quickly guessed the hardcoded
] passwords to administrator and voter smart cards. At a
] cost of less than $750, they were able to reset voter
] cards to allow multiple votes with the same card and
] suggested similar abuses with forged supervisor and voter
] cards. All 32,000 statewide terminal locks are identical,
] and the team picked them in less than 10 seconds,
] allowing physical access to the PCMCIA bay, which
] contains cards for the modem and the ballot definitions
] and results. These cards could be tampered with,
] destroyed, or stolen for their valuable data. Attaching a
] keyboard to the terminals allowed resetting of all
] counters in the PCMCIA bay without an administrator card
] needed.
]
] The server was missing over 15 Microsoft security
] updates, and the team was able to use the flaws used by
] the "Blaster" worm. By using insecure USB ports or more
] secure CD drives, the team was able to modify results and
] databases

LawMeme - Voting Machines Compromised in Election Simulation

Click on these various links. I had a conversation about building something like this at a 2600 meeting once. Unfortunately it doesn't look as easy to deploy as we had hoped. The idea is to be able to deploy these things rapidly so humans don't end up getting in trouble for creating the "art." In any event, this should be faster the spraying by hand.

Hektor.ch - Graffiti Robot