"Battlefield sites are considered noble places in the landscape of American history. Gettysburg, Bunker Hill, and Normandy stand as monuments honoring the people who fought and died there. Massacre sites, no less a part of our history, are often hidden. Vaguely worded road signs might give some indication of the tragedy, but visitors are not greeted by museums as they are at battlefield sites, and there are no official cemeteries in which the victims lie. Because they are shameful episodes in our past, massacres are not commemorated and the innocent dead are not honored. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sand Creek Massacre, and Tulsa Race Riot do not usually come up in history class, but over 500 people were brutally killed in these events. Although they took place long ago, they exemplify the impact--emotional, legal, and political--that the past can have on our own society today."

For better or worse, archaeology is opening the lid on American massacres

From an article in Forbes magazine, circa January 1994:

Entertainment is becoming as mobile as money. In the 1950s, Hollywood moguls established hegemony by monopolizing U.S. movie theaters. Antitrust litigators forced a divestiture. Hollywood has since reinvested in theaters, but today's antitrust police just yawn, because theaters now account for barely 20% of movie revenues. Television deals generate just under 40%. The biggest single earner is tapes for videocassette recorders, those pernicious Japanese gadgets that Hollywood worked so hard to kill a decade ago. The VCR, it turned out, was a superhighway in a box -- just what Hollywood needed to double its profits. More recently, a Beatles movie was transmitted in highly compressed form over the Internet. Within a few years it will be as easy to download compressed movies by telephone as it is to unload the family fortune.

... Nobody has any clear idea what will be the dominant distribution medium for entertainment or wealth at the end of the decade. You can be pretty sure, however, that it won't be whatever culture police choose to guard most closely.

The New Maginot Line

] Of all our chromosomes, it is the only one that is
] permanently locked into the germ cells of men, where the
] frenzy of cell division and error-prone DNA copying
] required to keep up the daily output of 150 million sperm
] creates the ideal conditions for mutation. And it shows.
] Seven percent of men are infertile or sub-fertile and in
] roughly a quarter of cases the problem is traceable to
] new Y chromosome mutations, not present in their fathers,
] which disable one or other of the few remaining genes.
] This is an astonishingly high figure, and there is no
] reason to think things will improve in the future --
] quite the reverse in fact. One by one, Y chromosomes will
] disappear, eliminated by the relentless onslaught of
] irreparable mutation, until only one is left. When that
] chromosome finally succumbs, men will become extinct.
]
] But when? I estimate that, at the current rate, male
] fertility caused by Y chromosome decay will decline to 1
] percent of its present level within 5,000 generations --
] roughly 125,000 years. Not exactly the day after
] tomorrow -- but equally, not an unimaginably long time
] ahead.

This is a very entertaining article, particularly if you are into genetic engineering. How well accepted is this theory?

On the death of Y chromosomes

UM, yeah, this is an autonomous robot that goes around cracking wifi passwords. Once it cracks a password it triangulates the person who is transmitting it, drives up to you, and shows you your password on a big LCD screen. Promptly you begin to kick it. Thats why these guys need to talk to the people at battlebots.

ToorCon Pics: Hackerbot

] Not only was BlackBoxVoting.org pulled down, but ALL of
] the documents, databases and programming for approximately
] 500 pages of material, most of which did not relate to Diebold at
] all, was confiscated. Dozens of web pages were pulled down which
] had nothing whatever to do with the disputed information. AIT Inc.
] has indicated that it believes it has the right to pull down the entire
] web site including unrelated pages. AIT Inc. is now prohibiting Bev
] Harris or Black Box Voting from accessing any of her own files, even
] for the purpose of removing them.

If these allegations are correct, there could be another interesting DMCA court case in here...

[IP] yet another misuse of dmca? Black Box Voting files confiscated

An interesting discussion of how Google manages it's server farm...

Paper on Google's filesystem

] EFF last week called on IEEE members and other citizens
] to voice their concerns about the standard. Nearly five
] hundred people wrote to IEEE leadership pointing out
] flaws in the draft standard. On September 22, the first
] working group ballot on the draft failed overwhelmingly,
] causing the simultaneous ballot at the sponsor level to
] fail as well.

EFF: Flawed E-Voting Standard Sent Back to Drawing Board

Denali.....lead female vocal rocks....her voice sounds like velvet....check them out, they rule.

DENALI

ICANN has set up a clearing house for information about the Verisign incident. There are some documents up here that are new.

ICANN | Information Page: Verisign's Wildcard Service Deployment

] When David Fitzpatrick's software for tracking and
] analyzing junk e-mail didn't work correctly, the Web
] designer assumed he had made programming mistakes and
] spent hours trying to fix them.
]
] Then he discovered it wasn't his skills that were faulty,
] but the Internet that essentially broke. Elsewhere, more
] spam slipped through, printers misbehaved and cell phones
] got unusual Web traffic.
]
] "I'm upset about this because it's cost us time and
] money," said Fitzpatrick, who runs Lone Star Interactive
] in Arlington, Texas, and tracks spam on the side.

There is little new in this story, but it reflects a number of stories I've heard from people who were troubleshooting various things the day sitefinder went live and ended up spending hours trying to figure it out before they realized the responses were coming from the root...

Engineers caught by suprise by Verisign while troubleshooting problems...