Even more of Abaddon being up to no good.

Abaddon, still up to no good.

Abaddon up to his usual no goodery with Cisco.

Abaddon causing a ruckus at Black Hat

Old news, but I came across news of the impending God of War release in the UK and it reminded me what an awesome game this is. The little I played of it was fantastic. The gameplay was spectacular and the graphics make you wonder what else your decript PS2 can still do.

I'm sure K can give more details as he spent a zillion hours playing this, but if you have a chance to pick it up on the cheap, I _highly_ recommend you do.

Associated Links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4664555.stm

God of War

"In moving away from our decisions sanctioning the condemnation of harmful property use, the Court today significantly expands the meaning of public use. It holds that the sovereign may take private property currently put to ordinary private use, and give it over for new, ordinary private use, so long as the new use is predicted to generate some secondary benefit for the public–such as increased tax revenue, more jobs, maybe even aesthetic pleasure. But nearly any lawful use of real private property can be said to generate some incidental benefit to the public. Thus, if predicted (or even guaranteed) positive side-effects are enough to render transfer from one private party to another constitutional, then the words “for public use” do not realistically exclude any takings, and thus do not exert any constraint on the eminent domain power." -- Justice O'Conner

Associated links:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002951.html
Opinion: http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZO.html
Dissent: http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZD.html

Supreme Court drastically extends definition of 'public use' in eminent domain

"In February, the agency opened Pasona O2, an indoor urban farm where vegetables, rice, flowers and herbs flourish under fluorescent lights and LEDs in an environment that is almost entirely chemical-free. In a basement that was once a bank-vault, plants are cultivated and nourished hydroponically – using nutrient-enhanced water instead of natural soil. Temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide levels are all controlled by computers. This kind of tank-farming makes it possible to grow plants rapidly, all year round, by maintaining an optimal balance of nutrients."

Associated links:
http://www.pasona.co.jp/pasona_o2/about/
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/makeprfy.pl5?fl20050522x2.htm
http://www.cityfarmer.org/newpages.html

Urban Agriculture

The CNET report on Apple switching to Intel microprocessors manifests a new logo for the concerned Mac community

Without a Reality Distortion Field, I feel so lost in the cold.

I beg someone with time or inclination to produce a Dashboard widget for Memestreams article and URL submissions. Between the new RSS reader in Safari and such a tool, you could see me become a very active poster.

] After more than two decades of research, the science and technology behind
] electromagnetic (EM) rail guns has now advanced sufficiently to allow practical
] exploration of novel military applications, according to Dr Harry Fair, director of the
] Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT) at the University of Texas (UT).

This particular implementation is quite interestesting. I had the opportunity to participate at the IAT lab working under Harry Fair while in Austin. There's nothing quite like seeing a two stage light gas gun throw an aluminum rod through active armor plating.

http://www.iat.utexas.edu/visit.html

EM gun on the brink of fruition for land and sea applications

The ninth annual "World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics" (WMSCI -2005) is scheduled to take place this July in Orlando, Florida. According to its web site, the conference focuses on "specific disciplinary research, as well as for multi, inter and trans-disciplinary studies and projects" with an aim of "fostering analogical thinking and, hence, producing input to the logical thinking." One of the academic papers included for presentation is titled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" (pdf doc). The product of three MIT graduate students, "Rooter" is a very difficult read. To the untrained eye, it seems to be a bunch of gibberish. In this case, the untrained eye is in the right, because "Rooter" is a grade A prank.

According to Jeffrey Stribling, one of Rooter's authors, the paper is a computer-generated research paper. It includes graphs, figures, and citations and prints out hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the paper. How random and context-free can the report be? Here's a sample from the paper, "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning." Stribling said the trio was inspired to contribute the paper to WMSCI because they have a thing about academic conferences which only seem to exist to make money for organizers. Stribling said that WMSCI is one such example, a conference which spams the academic world looking for contributions.

MIT students pull prank on conference

In recent months proposals have been made for the introduction of competition into the system of allocation of IP addresses. In particular, calls have made for new IP address registries to be established which would compete with the existing Regional Internet address Registries. Specific proposals have been made by Houlin Zhao of the ITU-T and by Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project, both of which propose that the ITU itself could establish such a registry group, operating as a collection of national registries.

This is a response to these proposals by Paul Wilson, Director General of Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), and Geoff Huston, Senior Internet Research Scientist at APNIC.

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?