While we're on the subject of video games...

A Japanese arm wrestling game is being withdrawn from arcades across the country after three players broke their arms, company officials said.

"The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it," company spokesman Ayano Sakiyama told AP news agency.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Japan recalls arm wrestling game

I've had a Sidekick for a while. Unfortunately, I now have a Blackberry, per my employer's "request." They are terrible. If you own a Blackberry and think you've got a "real" phone, stop kidding yourself. Its a scam. If you are professionally able, switch to a different phone. Of course, my experiences come from dealing with T-Mobile, a company that has dropped about 15 notches in my opinion scale as each new horror of what living with this thing will mean becomes apparent. Your mileage may vary, but it probably won't.

1. With a Sidekick $20 a month covers unlimited internet and sms. They want $30 a month for "unlimited internet" for a blackberry. This doesn't include SMS. Unlimited SMS costs another $15... So thats $20 or $45 a MONTH for the SAME THING.
2. Apparently tmobile tries to charge you for AIM messages as if they were SMS messages. IE the "unlimited internet" doesn't apply to some internet services. Now I'm fucking down for federal network neutrality legislation. If you are selling me "unlimited internet" access, you better fucking be selling unlimited Internet access. Anything else is FRAUD.
3. The keyboard is too small and the keyboards keep getting smaller in newer phones.
4. There is no way to scroll sideways on the older phones.
5. You called BBSs in the late 1980s that had a more pleasant form UI than the one used for adding new contacts to the address book.
6. They are just now adding cameras. Its 2007.
7. Trying to download software over GPRS and having to restart every time you don't make it through the 30 minute process without a hiccup. Honestly, I haven't had to deal with something this stupid since Z-Modem was released.
8. They are charging your company a bunch of money to run this system that allows you to access your email from your cellphone. Its called IMAP over SSL, and its MUCH MUCH cheaper than a Blackberry Enterprise Server. In fact, ITS FREE.
9. IMAP over SSL is less likely to provide a backdoor through which someone can gain complete access to your corporate network. How often have you accessed your intranet server from your cellphone? I didn't think so.
10. tmo.blackberry.com... Worst email domain ever.
11. All your Internet access is proxied through your employer's servers!

The bottom line is the Paris Hiltons of the world ARE in fact smarter than your average account executive. They are buying more phone for less money. This isn't terribly suprising, but thats not how things are supposed to work.

Joe Engressia has died.

Boing Boing: RIP: Joybubbles, Granddaddy of Phone Phreaking, 1949-2007

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Virgil's on Wired. :)

Threat Level is voting on the best self interested Wikipedia edit.

Slashdotted!

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

Is there anyone on MemeStreams who regularly uses linux on their desktop?

I have to use Windows every day at work. There is something nice about my home computing environment being a little more slick. I like being able to open a unix command prompt. I like the design subtleties of my mac. Its pleasant to use. But I think it may be time to part ways.

I'm tired of Apple. My first mac, an iBook, had a problem where the screen would "go fuzzy" and require a motherboard replacement. This would happen annually, sometimes twice a year. For a while, Apple replaced the motherboards for free, but every time this occured, it involved a week without a machine. Once it also involved a computer which came back with a completely new hard drive. All my data was gone. Clearly, Apple never got to the root cause of the problem, as it kept happening over and over again. Eventually, last summer, Apple said they wouldn't replace the motherboard for free anymore, and their price was in excess of $1000. I had no choice but to buy a new computer.

So I bought a Macbook. I knew it was going to be trouble, but I did it anyway. It was nice for while.

About a month ago I spilled some beer on it. Obviously, my fault. Not like my prior problem. However, these things do happen to laptops and laptops ought to be designed with that in mind.

Instantly, one of the design flaws of the MacBook that I knew would be a problem going in reared its ugly head: There is no way to remove the keyboard. Keyboards get nasty. They get dirty. They do not last as long as the rest of a laptop. Good laptops are designed to make them easy to replace. But not the macbook. Its keyboard is embedded into the system. Its hard to remove and hard to clean. You have a problem with it, you have to send the system in for service.

After 24 hours of drying out, the keyboard didn't work, and so I figured it was going in for service. Fortunately, after a few more days of drying out the keyboard miraculously recovered. Worked fine. Worked fine for a while, anyway. Eventually the mouse started sticking. This got worse and worse over time until last week, when the mouse simply stopped working altogether.

Having no simple way to take the computer apart, my theory was that dust had collected to stickiness in the mouse, and that if I removed the battery and literally sprayed some water on the trackpad and then gave it a few days to dry out, it would likely be fine. This was a stupid idea. I should have SSHed into the thing and cleared out my data first. But I didn't. Again, my fault, not Apple's.

The computer isn't fine. I must have shorted something against the clock battery (which is basically impossible to access) and fried a motherboard component. There is gunk in the computer which might be capacitor guts. I'm fucked.

The reason its hard to get inside the macbook is that it has 27 screws which must be removed. These screws are extremely small, ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

New program color-codes text in Wikipedia entries to indicate trustworthiness.

Acidus mentioned this to me this morning. I saw that this paper was at www2007 and it sounded like really good work, although I haven't read it in detail yet. I plan on it. There is a link in this press release to a demo site they are running, and they even referenced my Puppy Smoothies paper. :) I'm really happy to see this sort of idea being pursued in an environment with adequate resources to do it right. I hope my paper was helpful to them...

UC Santa Cruz Wikipedia coloring project

Wow!

YouTube - Singing Tesla Coil at Duckon 2007

The core Internet protocols have not changed significantly in more than a decade, in spite of exponential growth in the number of Internet users and the speed of the fastest links. The requirements placed on the net are also changing, as digital convergence finally occurs.

Will the Internet cope gracefully with all this change, or are the cracks already beginning to show?

In this paper I examine how the Internet has coped with past challenges resulting in attempts to change the architecture and core protocols of the Internet.

Unfortunately, the recent history of failed architectural changes does not bode well. With this history in mind, I explore some of the challenges currently facing the Internet.

Why the Internet only just works

This report is auto-generated by a daily script. The report you are seeing here was generated at 24-Jul-2007 07:58 UTC 1000.

Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 30-Mar-2010

Projected RIR Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 25-Jan-2011

IPv4 Address Report

Acidus recommends we watch the Techcrunch deadpool, but he didn't link it, so I'm linking it. Its interesting... The sad thing is that there are websites here with fewer users than MemeStreams that are getting more press than MemeStreams or Tabjab have ever gotten by being mentioned on this site as dead. Maybe we should announce that MemeStreams is going out of business and put out a press release. It might actually increase our traffic.

deadpool - TechCrunch