] Man of the moment Keanu Reeves has shown his generosity
] by giving away £50 million of his earnings from the
] Matrix sequels. The 38-year-old decided to hand over the
] money to the unsung heroes of the sci-fi blockbusters -
] the costume and special effects teams.

He may not come off as the sharpest crayon in the box, but he really does seem like a genuinely nice guy.

Whoa!

] A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly
] show water travelling up each of them before it pours off
] the top, only to start again at the bottom of the next
] ramp.
]
] It is a sight which defies logic, and has become probably
] the most memorable image of this year's show.
]
] Mr Dyson says his inspiration was a drawing by the Dutch
] artist MC Escher (he of Gothic palaces where soldiers are
] eternally walking upstairs, and of patterns where birds
] turn into fish).

BBC NEWS | UK | How does Dyson make water go uphill?

] Until last week, it appeared that Apple Computer Inc.'s
] iTunes Music Store had solved the problem of how to sell
] music over the Internet with just enough digital security
] to satisfy nervous record labels but not so much as to
] deter consumers from using it.
]
]
] But a few enterprising Mac hackers figured out how to get
] more mileage from one of the built-in features of iTunes
] 4, streaming music between Macs on a local network (such
] as a home network).
]
]
] Within a week of iTunes 4's introduction, Web sites such
] as ShareiTunes.com and Spymac were offering lists of song
] collections that could be streamed from the hard drives
] of dozens of online Mac users who made their collections
] available.
]
]
] Streaming, it should be noted, is distinct from
] downloading. When you stream a file, it's like listening
] to the radio; no file is transferred to your hard drive.
] Many Mac users doing this believed that since they were
] just listening and not downloading, the activity was
] legal.
]
]
] Before anyone could start debating the legality of
] streaming, however, other clever hackers devised a way to
] use the sharing function to download songs from one
] another's drives.

Hackers bite Apple in its iTunes

A fairly accurate timeline, er, from some points of view, of the progression that the internet has taken over time.

Enjoy!

The Lemon: History Of The Internet

Wow, I'd never heard of Ellen Ullman before, but after reading her interview at Salon, I think I may have to check her books out.

When C.P. Snow first identified the rift between "two cultures" of scientists and literary intellectuals who could neither understand nor communicate with each other, it was 1959, and computing was in its infancy. Today, in many fields, the denizens of Snow's two cultures are reaching across the gap. But computer programming remains a vast unknown country to most outsiders -- even as more and more of our work and our culture stands on its foundation.

Ellen Ullman has lived in that country, and ever since the 1997 publication of her memoir, "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents," she has meticulously and articulately chronicled its customs and dangers. An English major turned programmer turned writer, she has a knack for talking about the experience of writing code -- "thought that works," as one of her characters puts it -- in ways that nonprogrammers can understand. She does so without glorifying the creators of software, as scribes of the Internet boom would; but she doesn't trivialize their work or their lives, either. She does full justice to the highs and lows of the programming life -- as both an unnatural punishment for the human organism and an invigorating challenge to the human brain.

She then goes on to talk about the process of writing her latest book, "The Bug", at a writer's colony. She doesn't feel that it's ok to write about what code would do; she has to write the code itself...

It's not only obligation. When I wrote the code samples that are in "The Bug." I sat and then I thought, well, what would these connect to? And there I was, sitting at the MacDowell Colony, ostensibly writing the novel, and whole days would go by when I was just writing code. I actually had a little compiler on my laptop. Finally I thought, this is really a bad idea -- code really eats up your time. I thought, I'll never write a novel if I set something where I actually could write the companion code. So I thought it would be better to set it in a time with an old version of the C language -- a whole technical environment that had come and gone.

These days so much of coding involves using packages or other layers of code that have already been written. At that time, in the mid-'80s, you really did have to write everything yourself. There were some things we slurped in, minimal stuff, the usual packages available on Unix, like termcap or terminfo. But the rest of it, you had to write it all yourself, there wasn't Motif, there wasn't Windows; if you wanted a windowing system, you had to start by figuring out, how do you interact with all these devices? And how do you abstract all the devices? None of that existed at the time, so I thought it would be good to remember that.

<JONESING>
Yep. Gotta make a trip to Barnes and Noble tomorrow.
</JONESING>

Bugged out

Rattle wrote:
] Oh, yeah, this was such a GREAT idea the first time around
] when it was called DIVX.
]
] The discs stop working when a process similar to rusting
] makes them unreadable. The discs start off red, but when they
] are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the
] coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
]
] You get a week from most rental places. I don't see what the
] consumer appeal is going to be with these. They are not going
] to sell.
]
] Oh, wait, I know.. You can buy them, take them home, and copy
] them with the DVD burners that are starting to become cheap..

Well, the problem with that is that currently there are no dual layer burners - after all, DVD-9's and DVD-18's are mastered as separate passes on the disc. What does that mean for copying? Well, the studios have finally given us *so much* content (yay!) that it won't fit on one side of a 4.7 GB DVD+/-R. You can fit a < 2 hour movie with only one audio track on a single disc, so you'd lose all of those special features.

Some may ask, then, "who cares?" since you get the movie. Many people would agree with you, but I think that the demographics intersect such that those with DVD burners are also those that want the extra content. At that point, and with online discount houses, you may as well go ahead and buy the real thing. As the price of DVD burners drops (and more importantly, the media, which is still in the several dollar range in quantity) the impact will increase, but then again, that's why the manufacturers are pushing hard for blue laser technology. The DVD player has turned into a commodity (you can get a DVD/FM tuner/DD5.1 amp/speakers combo for < $150 these days) so the electronic manufacturers want a new stream of income.

RE: Yahoo! News - Disney to Begin Renting 'Self-Destructing' DVDs

Oh, yeah, this was such a GREAT idea the first time around when it was called DIVX.

The discs stop working when a process similar to rusting makes them unreadable. The discs start off red, but when they are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.

Yahoo! News - Disney to Begin Renting 'Self-Destructing' DVDs

] To this end, I have decided to publish the top ten signs
] that your son is a hacker. I advise any parents to read
] this list carefully and if their son matches the profile,
] they should take action. A smart parent will first try to
] reason with their son, before resorting to groundings, or
] even spanking. I pride myself that I have never had to
] spank a child, and I hope this guide will help other
] parents to put a halt to their son's misbehaviour before
] a spanking becomes necessary.

Before reacting to this piece, I advise reading all of it very carefully and thoroughly. And especially check the embedded hyperlinks. My own reaction is that it's very clever satire, since it's far too well-researched to be as ignorant as it sounds (grin). But many of the people who replied to it seem to have very different opinions . . .

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?

Nina Simone was a great singer, but also much more. Her voice became attached to the civil rights movement in the United States, much as the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. was a symbol of protest. Many critics associated her closely with Billie Holliday, which Nina felt to be an insult, as Billie was a drug addict more than a singer.

She was trained as a classical pianist, and her playing is infused with the Bach of her childhood; her youth spent in church tinges her sound with traces of gospel. Though she didn't begin to sing until after she'd developed her skills as a pianist, her voice demonstrates these influences as well, mirroring her playing. When Simone sings the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," its dreadful sadness and enormous ecstasy make it seem like it could never have been anyone else's song. Beneath the complex layers of her voice and her playing are longing, loss and happiness laid bare. As Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins has said, "I mostly listen to Nina Simone when I am feeling raw. The more I feel raw, the more I relate to her."

...

In her 1991 autobiography, "I Put a Spell on You," she discusses how the term was simply a box critics put all black performers in. "Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be," she writes. "It was a racist thing." Simone eventually became a "jazz-and-something-else singer" in the press, but, she says, she identified mostly as a folk singer. There was more of a folk-and-blues foundation than jazz in her playing.

...

A teacher of mine, whose uncle dated Simone, saw her at the Village Vanguard with his father during the early '60s. He told me that before she began to sing, she asked if there were any black people in the audience. Only he and his father stood up, somewhat uncomfortably, and Simone said, "I'm singing only to you. I don't care about the others." It was a time when such a remark made the white audience clap madly.

Nina Simone: 1933-2003, Dead at Age 70

[The Justice Department won't say what Hawash is a witness to or how long they intend to keep him.]

These aren't the only things the Bush administration won't say. It won't say why it's holding individual detainees at Guantánamo Bay; it won't disclose the factual basis for its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui; and it won't say how many immigrants it has detained or deported in INS proceedings. It won't say how many of us are having our telephones tapped, our e-mail messages monitored or our library checkout records examined by federal agents. The administration's defenders say such secrecy is an unavoidable cost of the war on terror, but it's an orientation that predated Sept. 11 and that extends beyond the terror threat. The White House won't reveal who Vice President Dick Cheney consulted in concocting the administration's energy policy; it won't disclose what Miguel Estrada wrote while working for the solicitor general; it won't even release documents related to the pardons that former President Bill Clinton granted during his last days in office.

...

Steven Aftergood, a researcher who monitors government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, calls Hatch's proposal a "direct assault" on Congress' ability to monitor the Justice Department. "If it goes through, we might as well go home," he told Salon. "The administration will have whatever authority it wants, and there won't be any separation of powers at all."

...

With the Domestic Security Act of 2003 -- the draft legislation dubbed "PATRIOT Act II" -- the administration is apparently contemplating other ways in which it might avoid the inconvenience of operating in the public eye or answering to the federal courts.

The draft legislation, prepared by the Justice Department but not yet proposed to Congress, includes provisions that would allow federal agents to keep secret the names of individuals arrested in investigations related to "international terrorism"; expand the circumstances under which agents could conduct searches and wiretaps without warrants; and allow the attorney general to deport resident aliens in certain circumstances without any possibility of judicial review.

Another good update on the scary legislation that is both in effect and being proposed in the future. Keep getting the information out there so that more people will raise their voice - while they still can.

Dolemite

The secret society