A four-dimensional tribute to the late Madeleine L'Engle (Video) - Boing Boing
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:33 am EDT, Sep 12, 2007
In honor of A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L'Engle (who died last week), physicist David Morgan explains tesseracts (aka a "four dimensional cube")
Aw, I didn't know about this... I loved those books.
Adapted from Johan Sundstr�m's flags of the world exhibit, with images from famfamfam.com. Here is the Exhibit JSON data file.
Using Exhibit, you can make this map with just the few simple files you see in this directory. Could you have built the same map with as little effort using anything else?
Another huge mixed-use project planned for DeKalb | ajc.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:09 pm EDT, Sep 6, 2007
"From the beginning of the Garvin study, there was a clear understanding that the entire area is ripe for development," said Angelo Fuster, a Sembler spokesman. "There's been no development here for many, many years. It's valuable property."
Not for long. Another generic, treeless, unpleasant strip mall and office park hell.
With no fucking trains.
It's disgusting. The only marginal ray of sunlight is that at least it's inside the perimeter. I do support people staying ITP. I just hate the way these developments are executed. They strip the land to it's foundation in order to ease the grading and then after building they plant a token number of small, scrub trees that can't and won't grow to replace what was there before (can't have the roots fucking up our roads!)
Taken together, the two projects would turn the once-sleepy, suburban neighborhood into one of the region's premier shopping and office hubs, with almost as much retail as Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza combined.
I love this "sleepy, suburban neighborhood" despite it's already substantial traffic problems because it's got lots of trees and not a lot of noise or sunlight. They could be redeveloping the ever more pointless Loehmans plaza, but instead they're gonna cut down all the trees behind it.
NBC shows leave iTunes but join Amazon's Unbox - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:49 am EDT, Sep 5, 2007
That's right, NBC's upcoming season of shows may not be available via iTunes (pending contract negotiations), but they will be available at Amazon Unbox.
They neglect to mention that NBC's shows will also be widely available on BitTorrent and other file sharing networks, which I suspect a number of current payers will be exploring this season.
These assholes are really just making me want to give up on TV and movies wholesale. Even iTunes has this problem with being locked in, and I don't like it, but they remain the most convenient, largely because they support Macs, unlike everyone fucking else.
I've made arguments against subscription models and will continue to do so.
Sadly, however, DRM turns even "purchases" into subscriptions. You can only keep using the media while you continue to support the proper hardware/software configuration. And these keep changing as media producers jump back and forth between services.
Makes me want to give up paying anyone a dime for any of it, which is a damn shame.
The hacking saga began in the spring of 2005, when Rob Anderson -- a former ad-salesman for a BA Ventures , an ad selling company then run by TorrentSpy founder Justin Bunnell -- had a falling out with Bunnell. Anderson then used the IP address from a Bunnell email and hacked into the mail server by guessing the password.
He then set the system to automatically forward a copy of all incoming and outgoing messages to a Gmail account. Then in June 2005, Anderson wrote the MPAA, offering to sell emails and the MPAA bought 34 pages of e-mails for 34 dollars and signed a contract saying that he got the e-mails legally.
Apparently its perfectly legal in California to hack into someone's email system, steal their email, and resell it! It is hard for me to understand how our system can reach such obviously incorrect conclusions with a straight face... Did it not occur to this judge that a violation of law might have occurred when the defendant's consultant hacked into the mail server? Was she born yesterday, or was everyone hoping that no one other than the plaintiff would notice? Why does the MPAA expect to be taken seriously as a moral authority in regard to copyright law when they engage in this kind of crooked behavior?
[This really is an astonishing result. Doesn't even make sense on it's face. Assholes. -k]
Perhaps I’m not a soldier, but insofar as my experience playing Quake translates to the realities on the ground in Iraq, I should like to say that running over stim packs increases gibbing and is awesome.
Daring Fireball: It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:49 pm EDT, Sep 4, 2007
There’s a lot of jackassery to pick apart in this short statement from NBC Universal executive vice president Cory Shields, responding to Apple’s “don’t let the door hit you on the way out, idiots” statement yesterday, but I’ll focus on this curious tidbit for now:
In addition, we asked Apple to take concrete steps to protect content from piracy, since it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material.
Illegally downloaded material THAT THEY DIDN'T GET FROM APPLE, you dipshit! And, incidentally, material that lot of them will go back to getting illegally if it's not conveniently available to them.
This head-in-the-sand mentality that DRM can solve this problem is perverse. The market will solve this problem. Embrace it, make it work. Perhaps that's what they're doing and this is just a negotiating tactic.
One hopes. This one, particularly. If NBC/Universal pulls out, I will likely lose my access to Battlestar Galactica. This is not an acceptable situation.
Additional data points in preparation for the Petreus / White House report
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:52 pm EDT, Aug 30, 2007
Linked is a WaPo article (entitled "Report Finds Little Progress On Iraq Goals : GAO Draft at Odds With White House") covering a GAO study which assesses Iraq's progress in meeting the Congressional benchmarks set some months ago.
Here PM Maliki says that his country does need the American forces in place, though perhaps barely so. He has some very critical things to say about their methods and the results thereof.
Finally, perhaps only tangentially related, and unverified, we have here a quote from General Wesley Clark which appears to reveal that as far back as 2001 there were plans describing an apparent domino effect series of wars in the Middle East, culminating in the fall of Iran. Assuming for a moment that this plan was real, I'm not sure if it's comforting or depressing to know that the execution was so handled so incompetently that 6 years later we've not only not conquered 7 nations, but haven't even pacified the first. A little of both, I guess.
