] So what was the point of the whole thing? Announcement:
] Be scared to death. Next Announcement: Don’t mind us. Next
] announcement: For heaven’s sake, go right ahead to Portland,
] Oregon, or wherever; that’s your duty as a true-blue,
] red-blooded Amurrican.

Sometimes I wonder if the government really realizes how stupid they sound sometimes.

The Orange Alert Follies

] Hey, "reality" TV show fans, I've got a concept to pitch: Break
] the Alky. Fox picks a recovering alcoholic and pretends to kidnap
] his wife, kill his child, and get him fired from his job - all
] with the consent of those involved, of course. A camera crew then
] follows him to see how long it'll take for him to turn back to the
] demon of liquor after having denied it for so long ... and then we
] watch the hilarious results!

The way reality shows are going this might not be that far away.

Jose Millionaire... of Death!

] "We can easily distort memories for the details of an
] event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we
] can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories
] - we call them rich false memories because they are so
] detailed and so big."

Memory is much more unreliable than you think it is.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'We can implant entirely false memories'

] "We are beginning to see a shift in the traditional
] privacy debate from simply focusing on an individual's
] right to privacy, to also including consideration of
] society's right to protect itself," says a letter from
] ChoicePoint CEO Derek Smith in the company's most recent
] annual report. "ChoicePoint as a company and I as an
] individual continue to believe, however, that in a free
] society -- particularly in today's society -- we do not
] always have the right to anonymity."

Creative Loafing Atlanta | COVER | BIG BROTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

] "Judge granted both IBM motions to compel, gave SCO
] thirty days to comply 'with specificity' and suspended
] further discovery. Did not rule on the SCO motion until
] next hearing scheduled for Friday, Jan 23 and 10:00 am.

] So it looks like they have 30 days to finally tell us
] what code they are talking about "with specificity".
] Finally.

GROKLAW: First Report from Grokker Inside Hearing: IBM Wins Both Motions to Compel

] That seems to be a theme here: the South takes Northern
] ideas and blows them up into gigantic proportions
] undreamt of by the Yankee originators.

Are Southerners trying to become old-fashioned Northerners?

The Old North

well, i suppose we all saw this coming.

they want their quarter mil out of Apple, Diamond, Cannon, Samsung, Olympus, Phillips, SanDisk, Viking, etc, etc. etc.

my initial reaction was to flip out over this, but decided to do some research on the licenses for, say, HFS+, to make sure i'm not being unfair to microsoft. well, it turns out that apple's HFS+ implementation was made available under their APSL as part of the Darwin core. APSL looks to be fairly commercial friendly though IANAL... even so, Microsoft isn't likely to write a filesystem driver for HFS+ and then make the code available to the public as the APSL requires. I couln't find any details on commercial, proprietary licences.

FAT File System Technology and Patent License

] It's, like, official: like it or not, adults now talk
] more and more like their kids. Whatever

Heather and I are making an effort to stop saying 'like'. It's a lot harder than we thought..

It's like, American slang.

] Understand that 802.15.3 is a high data rate Personal
] Area Network with a range of about 10 meters. This isn't
] a WiFi competitor. Think of it as a kind of Super
] Bluetooth, capable of sending video over short distances
] without interference and with true quality of service,
] which 802.11 can't provide. Conventional wisdom says a
] deal will shortly be worked out in the IEEE, Multiband
] OFDM will become the standard and we'll see products
] appear in late 2004 or early 2005.

An interesting discussion of new networking protocols, related to tablet PCs. I think tablets will be great as long as you can flip them around into a laptop mode. I saw something like that at phreaknic. Little $500 machine. Perfect for couch surfing...

UWB might be coming sooner than you think

Will someone please tell Howard Dean that the Soviet Union no longer exists? As someone said on Metafilter, "If you refer to Russia as the Soviet Union three times while discussing foreign affairs should you really be the President of the United States?".

I can't wait to hear what he thinks about all the recent problems in Rhodesia and the Ottoman Empire.

Democratic candidates interviewed on Hardball