] Here's what he said: "If you are a 12-year-old girl or
] boy, you must go and see 'Kill Bill,' and you will have a
] damn good time. Boys will have a great time, girls will
] have a dose of girl power. If you are a cool parent out
] there, go take your kids to the movie."
]
] Now, Tarantino has an impish sense of humor -- he's a
] funny guy, a fairly likable guy, actually -- and I
] imagine he probably said this with a smile, relishing the
] audacity of his statement and the fact that it would make
] some people crazy. The truth, which Tarantino must know,
] is that "Kill Bill" had no business even being rated R.
] It should have been rated NC-17 and made inaccessible to
] children. Period.

thoughts on this commentary? at what age are you old enough to handle the subtleties of a violent presentation? should this have been NC-17? Would that keep kids from seeing it? *ARE* kids seeing it?

I have little love for the MPAA rating scheme. It's imprecise and misleading, even before you add the cultural stigmas built up around it (such as NC-17 being virtually equivalent to porn for most people). The theater's don't really police their patrons very strictly, or at least, they never did when i was a kid... i once bought a ticket for an R movie at the under-14 discount price. I'm not sure it should be up to the theaters to do this at all really.

Other people wanna weigh in? I don't think i'd take my 12 year old to this, but i guess that would depend a lot on how mature my 12 year old is and if i thought they could sort out (with parental guidance) and safely absorb the artistic and stylistic aspects of the movie without being injured by the violence. It's not likely, I'll admit, but possible.

COMMENTARY / Tarantino clears it up -- 'Kill Bill' is great for kids

] E-Data, a Long Island-based company that's focused
] largely on licensing its patents, contends that
] Microsoft, Internet service provider Tiscali and digital
] music company OD2 are collectively trespassing on its
] rights with their new music download services, recently
] released in several European countries. E-Data is asking
] that the services, variously called MSN Music Club and
] Tiscali Music Club, be shut down until a patent licensing
] deal is worked out.

bullshit patent or legitimate case? seems kinda tenuous to me, but....

Microsoft sued over music downloads | CNET News.com

From the Truth-Is-Stranger-Than-Fiction-Department:

...

A German man is to appear in court charged with teaching his dog to give the Hitler salute.

The black sheepdog-mix, named Adolf, has been taught to lift his right front paw up straight in the salute on command.

Police were called to the scene in Berlin when Roland T, 54, shouted at passers-by last year.

When a patrol arrived, he allegedly showed them the trick he had taught his dog, gave the salute along with Adolf, and shouted: "Sieg Heil."

German man charged with teaching dog Hitler salute

"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."

Alexander Tyler - 1787

(Actually, I think the present dependence is part of an 80 year cycle rather then a 200 year cycle, but we'll see...)

[IP] A forecast of the future of the US?

]] A controversial IVF technique could see babies
]] being born with three parents, scientists have suggested.
]]
]] Experts in China say they have created embryos using eggs
]] from two women and sperm from one man...
]
]Marie, should this be legal or not?

i have no problem with this. they're just using a healthy woman's egg cell as a carrier, right? there shouldn't be any of the donors DNA left to complicate the fertilization.

it's like, one lady had a cracked mixing bowl, so she borrowed her neighbors bowl in order to mix up the ingredients for some cookies. as long as the neighbors bowl wasn't still caked with paprika and chili powder from her own cooking, the cookies should be fine, untainted by her neighbors recipe.

seems like calling it three-parent is misleading if the donor of the "blank egg" has no genetic effect. does the cytoplasm have more to do with embryonic development than i think it does? a genetic or mechanical influence?

BBC NEWS | Health | Foetus with three parents created

] With the recent demise of the Bush administration's
] controversial Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA)
] programme to monitor everyone in the US, citizens now
] have a chance to get their own back. A website to be
] launched later in 2003 will allow people to post
] information about the activities of government
] organisations, officials and the judiciary.

thoughts? will a distributed, citizen-run watchdog system make this country better? will it work at all?

Government Information Awareness?

not so original, maybe, since drexler covered all this, but it's a discussion that should probably be brought to the front if anything's gonna get done...

Ray Kurzweil - The Future - CIO Magazine Fall 2003

] Last year Yihau Gao and Yoshio Bando at the National
] Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba found that the
] height of a column of liquid gallium in a nanotube varies
] linearly with temperature.

sounds like they need to find a way to read the thermometer easily (i.e. not requiring an SEM), but still neat.

nanotechweb.org - News - Nanothermometers feel the heat (October 2003)

] Adding sulphur to the NanoKids' feet enables them to
] stand up - albeit only on gold. The two elements bind
] strongly, allowing some ten trillion NanoKids to line up
] on a metal platform the size of a postage stamp.

nano in education.. neat.

NanoKids made in lab: Man-shaped molecules help students learn chemistry.

another interesting tack in the fight against cancer...

there's a lot going on in this area now, and i'm optimistic that cancer deaths will diminish steadily in the next 30 years.

AP Wire | 10/13/2003 | Doctor Tests Gold in Fighting Cancer