Suicide Girls opened a Federal Criminal Lawsuit (now on public record, I couldn't discuss it prior) as an adjunct to the suit detailed in livejournal. It started yesterday. They themselves called the FBI regarding (what I believe is a bogus) computer hacking charge against Chad Grant, of Deviant Nation, whom I had some prior affiliation with.

Suicide Girls opened themselves up to the FBI. Perhaps they didn't know of this particular law? It seems they did though... so I'm unsure. I didn't until just now. But this is what happens when Sean jumps the gun and goes to the courts over something I believe was for about 20K only, with criminal charges of up to 10 years. The U.S. legal system is not very sympathetic to porn sites, and why Sean CHOSE to expose himself to this level of Federal scrutiny is something only he can answer, especially when he's claiming this minimal amount of monetary damages in this suit, which is a rather trigger-happy methodology, and my feeling is it's an attempt at monopolizing the alt porn industry.

tales from the dark site - DAMMIT!!!!!!

It seems that not enough people know the truth about the Suicide Girls and still think it's some sort of hip, progressive, women owned and operated porn company.

American Samizdat: Rebel Scum Since 2001

What we can however discuss in some detail are the two central philosophies behind the Revolution controller and their market implications.

* The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
* New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

Is Iwata-san spouting nonsense or is Nintendo actually onto something?

Very compelling article that describes the general gaming market, and then the OTHER gaming market.

I think he's right, at least about the hardcore segment. It motivates why video games within a genre become more similar over time, why we see a dozen clones and then they fade off. The audience continues to grow smaller, but more profitable. And Nintendo cedes that market, and goes back to casting a creative net for new genres to catch and release new niches.

Lost Garden: Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on the Revolution's new controller

Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download - completely free of charge – at http://www.opera.com.

Feel Free: Opera Eliminates Ad Banner and Licensing Fee

The railway to Tibet is one of the greatest symbols of that spirit. Since it was built in 1984, the route from Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai Province, to Golmud, the garrison town in China's wild west, has been the train to nowhere. No one, it was believed, could build a line any further across the Qinghai plateau, certainly not one all the way to Tibet. It was too bleak, too cold, too high, too oxygen starved. Even the best Swiss tunneling engineers concluded that it was impossible to bore through the rock and ice of the Kunlun mountain range.

If that were not enough, even the flats were filled with perils. A meter or so below the surface was a thick layer of permafrost; above this, a layer of ice that melts and refreezes with the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun. How could anyone build a track on that? And how could a regular service be run in an area plagued by sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter?

...

Soon after leaving Golmud, we hit the start of the Kunlun range. The craggy slopes on either side are so steep and barren that it is like driving through an alien planet. This is where engineers started blasting and building the first of the seven tunnels and 286 bridges on the 1,110-kilometer-long stretch of new line. At its maximum altitude in the Tanggula Pass, the track runs 5,072 meters above sea level -- higher than Europe's greatest peak, Mont Blanc, and more than 200 meters higher than the Peruvian railway in the Andes, which was previously the world's most elevated track. The longest tunnel -- at Yangbajin -- stretches 3.3 kilometers. The longest bridge spans 11.7 kilometers over the Qingsui River.

...

From Xidatan, the railway climbs steadily toward Kunlun Pass (4,776 meters). This is one of the great doorways to the top of the world. It is also the northern shore of a vast sea of permafrost that stretches more than 600 kilometers across the plateau toward Tibet and the Himalayas, prompting some to describe this area as the third pole of the world.

This barrier of ice and rock had been considered impassable, but China's scientists believe they have overcome the challenge. Their big technological breakthrough has been to insulate the track from the top level of ice, which thaws every summer day and freezes by night. On a normal line this would buckle the rails, collapse bridges and cave in tunnels. But for the new railway, engineers have pumped cooling agents into the ground so that the earth around the most vulnerable tunnels and pillars remains frozen and stable. It is not cheap. Largely because so much of the line has been built on viaducts rather than the semifrozen surface, the budget for the railway is 26.2 billion yuan ($3.24 billion).

...

This is the dark and dirty side of China's development. Pan Yue, the deputy minister of the environment, says the Qinghai Plateau and the western region of China are so ecologically stressed that they can no longer support their current populations. Because there is not enough space for them all to be resettled quickly, he estimates that the country will soon have more than 150 million environmental refugees.

The problems are evident throughout the country. When the railway is finished, travelers on the train from Beijing to Lhasa will pass through some of the most polluted cities and overexploited farmlands in the world. Acid rain now falls on a third of the Chinese landmass. According to the World Bank, 16 of the planet's 20 worst polluted cities are in China.

Salon.com Technology | Bigger, faster, higher

After the speech, there was a panel discussion which included me and a Canadian lawyer representing Creative Commons. I used to support Creative Commons, but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I can no longer endorse it as an activity. (I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public--see http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html--but I go a little further: I don't think that licenses which deny that minimum freedom are legitimate at all.) Since people tend to treat Creative Commons as a unit, disregarding the details like which one of their licenses is being used, it is not feasible to support just part of Creative Commons--so I can't support it at all now. I asked the leaders of Creative Commons privately to change their policies, but they declined, so we had to part ways.

I explained this briefly, in words were no harsher than the ones above. So I was rather shocked by how the lawyer from Creative Commons responded. After leading the audience in a simplistic game, designed for them to choose his position over a single other option, he then accused me of acting like a fascist ruler, claiming that I was trying to command the audience to agree with me. I responded calmly, explaining the difference between stating a political position and forcing people to agree, and quite pleasantly did not even get angry. The audience, aware I had done nothing to interfere with their freedom of thought or speech, was not very sympathetic to him.

Immediately after the panel ended, he did the strangest thing: he came up to shake my hand.

FSF - Fireworks in Montreal (2005-07-01 to 2005-07-05)

In a footnote to the survey of nearly 1,000 Netflix subscribers, women preferred the 36-year-old Jackman, who stands a Bond-like six feet, two inches, by 30 percent to 20 percent over Owen. Men, on the other hand, chose the 40-year-old Owen, who's appeared most recently in leading roles in "Closer" and "Sin City" by 23 percent to 20 percent over Jackman.

Clive Owen would be an excellent choice. Jackman lacks the refinement.

Netflix Survey Reveals Hugh Jackman as Members' Choice to Become the Next James Bond: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
~John Updike

The Big Picture: Chart of the Week: U Michigan Sentiment Index Gives Market Warning

The solution is Continuations, a new feature introduced in Jetty 6. A java Filter or Servlet that is handling an AJAX request, may now request a Continuation object that can be used to effectively suspend the request and free the current thread. The request is resumed after a timeout or immediately if the resume method is called on the Continuation object. In the Jetty 6 chat room demo, the following code handles the AJAX poll for events:

Ajaxian: Java Web Server: Jetty 6.0 Continuations for Ajax Architectures

If you’re dissatisfied with a limited underwater view when diving, then you might be interested to learn about Hydrooptix’ Mega-4.5d mask. After years of engineering, Jon Kranhouse – with the help of Hollywood computer gurus, who helped correct the once-fuzzy Hubble Space Telescope – has developed a mask that reportedly provides “a view almost five times wider than the view available through conventional flat masks, and the vision is completely distortion free.” Sounds great! But there is one small drawback…

Makes sense -- a flat view is inherently limited, and with the crazy optical properties of water, flat side vision doesn't work -- and standard curved technology would be entirely too distorted.

Because the “concave shape of water” creates an optical phenomenon, you must be nearsighted to use the mask. Many naturally nearsighted divers can use the Mega-4.5d with just their naked eyes. Apparently the view is so astonishing, however, that many divers with 20/20 vision have purchased contact lenses just to use the mask. Voluntarily becoming temporarily nearsighted, the divers claim that wearing contacts is worth the hassle, because of the vast improvement in vision. I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I hadn’t looked at the testimonials. The Mega-4.5d ships for $200; contact lenses not included.

Woo! I use a prescription mask now, that my mom gave me after her Lasik surgery. They work ok, but I worry about the difference in prescription. In this case... I finally have a vision advantage.

(Until I go through surgery, of course. It would be funny to start being a contact user AFTER losing the need for glasses).

Divester