The schedule for the D*C space and science track, headed up by our own jonnyx, is available for your perusal.

You'll also find at least 4 MemeStreams regulars presenting both here and in the Electronic Frontiers Forum. The schedule does not appear to be updated yet, but Decius and I are confirmed to be speaking at the Hacking 101, 201, and 301 panels.

Dragon*Con Space and Science Track Schedule

Welcome to the Engadget BBS! How’s it going? Sorry if you had a busy signal a bunch, the board’s been growing like crazy—we’re adding a third line next week, so check out the boards to get that number!

Engadget is a prefect example of the booming BBS scene springing to live on America's phone network thanks to the advent of affordable modems (short for modulator-demodulator). Engadget's lines have been busy almost all the time recently, so this fellow was nice enough to dump his scrollback log to one of these Internet Blog things. You can see all the recent posts to the Engadget BBS without having to wait for a line to clear up.. Check out the latest in cellular phones, personal computers, GPS receivers, game console units, and storage media.

This might lead you to believe that the Internet will eventually replace the BBS, but we all know that's a load of horse shit. BBS's Forever!!

Engadget 1985 - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Because of the A-list names--such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Technorati founder Dave Sifry--and the level of discourse involved, the trip, known as Foo Camp (for Friends of O'Reilly), has become one of the must-get invites among the geek set.

But when the event convenes again this weekend near the Sebastopol, Calif., offices of O'Reilly & Associates, O'Reilly's publishing company, a number of people who have attended previously or who would like to be on hand won't have gotten invitations.

That's why some of them have gotten together to organize what they're calling Bar Camp and referring to as an open-source alternative to Foo Camp. Bar Camp is a play on the word "foobar," a common programming variable.

FooCamp has fallen prey to the Outerz0ne phenomenon. Here is the wiki.

Geeks to hold anti-foocamp

Among the first NerdTV guests are PayPal co-founder Max Levchin; original Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld; and Sun Microsystems co-founder and the father of Berkeley UNIX, Bill Joy. The premier program will include a two-minute feature called "What the heck is NerdTV?" The 13 one-hour shows will be made available on a weekly basis after the launch date and all previous episodes will continue to be available through the NerdTV Web site. NerdTV viewers are actually encouraged to download and copy the shows, share them with friends and even post them on their own Web sites - all legally.

PBS brings on the nerds. The nerds always win.

PBS | I, Cringely . NerdTV

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Absolutely true...

California's subtle influence on computer culture

Jason Scott's BBS Documentary is shipping...

BBS: The Documentary

] This design, by Brooklyn company Brave Space, is intended
] for "Life-size play", and the blocks really do have the
] exact proportions of the original Tetris pieces. The
] storage units are sold piece by piece, so you can buy as
] many as you want and arrange them however you want. Just
] think - you can recreate your own gigantic Tetris
] game in your living room - only without the bottom
] row disappearing every time you align things properly!

This is awesome.

Each piece is $350. That's a little too much. The first to have the same concept in Ikea style fiberboard cheapness, wins all the money. Ready, set, go!

Furniture - Tetris Shelving

] The broadcast nails the podcast down in two dimensions:
] 1. Time and 2. Geography. So it seems that the
] broadcasted podcast should reflect the specifics of the
] time and geography. This says that the KYOU broadcasted
] podcasts should somehow reflect the culture of the Bay
] Area, something I know about, luckily, having lived there
] for 22 years. Even better, I like the culture of the Bay
] Area, when compared to that of say, Nashville, which I am
] coming to detest. With a passion.

] Sylvia Paull says it's time for me to head west. She might
] be right. Maybe Nashville is the clue. Or maybe, as Steve
] Gillmor says I could do the Bay Area scene from Florida
] or New York. Or maybe Nashville is really saying "Come
] home Dave." Maybe that would be the punishment they
] are asking for, the penalty they deserve? Heh.

The intelligent and the rational are able to separate ideas and positions from the people expressing them. This is one of the key practices necessary to engage in fruitful discourse where opinions differ radically.

Winer, while someone who preaches roughly this same idea, seems unable to separate the ideas and positions of the people he dealt with in Nashville from the city itself. This is the mark of a fool.

Scripting News: Dave Winer, Respectfully Disagreeable

] For more than 4,000 years humans have used locks to
] secure some of their most private places and prized
] possessions. And for just as long, other humans have been
] trying to find ways around them.

] Now, videogamers, hackers and others who just enjoy a
] good challenge, are coming out of the woodwork - or
] hiding in it - and adopting lock picking as their
] new hobby of choice.

ABC News: Lock Picking for Sport Cracks the Mainstream

] Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively
] shared virtual world. There is no server at all: it only
] relies on end-users' machines.
]
] The shared virtual worlds of nowadays MMORPG strongly
] rely on privately owned servers. These servers are an
] expensive bottleneck that limits their scalability. In
] addition, these servers bound the freedom of the virtual
] world inhabitants and the imagination of the
] world-builders and developers. Solipsis solves these
] problems with a free and open-source system.
]
] Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is
] initially empty and only users will fill it by creating
] and running entities. No pre-existing cities, habitants
] nor scenario to respect...
]
] Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the
] protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system
] architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so
] that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can
] find here a good place to have fun !
]
] The best approximation of what could be Solipsis in a
] near future may be Neal Stephenson's Metaverse.

Interesting.

Development is being lead by France Telecom's R&D division.

Solipsis: A peer-to-peer system for a massively multi-participant virtual world