"Such laws only make sense if you have no idea what you are talking about."

Common sense commentary about video piracy. Not news to any of you, but maybe a breath of fresh air if you are sick of hearing from Valenti and Rosen, or you want a quality reference for discussions.

LawMeme: Legal Bricolage for a Technological Age - The LawMeme Guide to Spider-Man and Star Wars Bootlegs

Fans of Star Wars, meet my good friends politics and capitalism. Requires Flash.

Clone-spotting [Flash]

TechNetCast is making available the audio tracks for the keynote speeches given at the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. As I log this URL, only four are available, but the rest of them are promised within days. (Hopefully that will include Steven Johnson ...)

The keynotes include:

Rethinking The Modern Operating System, by Richard Rashid, Microsoft.
Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate, by Bruce Schneier.
Autonomic Computing, by Robert Morris, IBM.
The Shape of Things to Come, by Tim O'Reilly.

O'Reilly Emerging Technologies 2002 [Audio]

Bruce Schneier on the business aspects of computer security.

Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate

I'm really not sure what to say, but it will undoubtedly be an interesting read.

Wired 10.06: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...

One of the most interesting movie review sites I have seen. Not for the faint of heart however. The Filthy Critic is aptly named. He's frequently right on though and almost always worth a read assuming you aren't one of the easily offended.

From the Spider-Man review comes one of the (less offensive, but) interesting lines he's given:

"Go stroke your action figure (or diddle your dodecahedron die) until you've ensnared yourself in a gooey spidey web. Then cry yourself to sleep."

I know it's a bit of an inside joke, but "diddle your dodecahedron die" still sends me into fits of laughter.

Spiderman - The Filthy Critic

A meta-meta-site slicing, dicing, and crunching Fark.com photoshop contests.

[ Originally from Vep. A bit hard to understand, but go here:
http://www.fark.com/farq/photoshop.shtml
http://www.fark.com
To get more information... -Rek ]

fpm.contests

NEW YORK-This is fair to say: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a 55-year-old Pashtun warlord, is a bad man. Evil, even. "What we're talking about here is someone at the absolute margin of violence in Afghan society-in his own way someone as extreme as Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)," Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview. "He has a history that has proved about as conclusively as anyone can that this is a violent, vicious man who deserves to be a target."

A target of what? A target of whom? Hang tight through the next 124 words:

[ Originally from w1ld. What do you want? This is business as usual. Rules do not apply to the U.S. government. Even when they create those rules themselves. This happens so frequently that it's almost boring. What is truly pathetic is that most U.S. citizens cling to some kind of almost morbidly fascinating belief that the U.S. government is a law-abiding global citizen. -Rek ]

George W a gangsta?

"In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.
Which makes the rebels--Lucas's heroes--an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back. "

[ Originally from Decius & w1ld. A fun read, but it's hard to take too seriously when the guy is basically advocating dictatorial fascism. It's telling when he says: Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. Riiiight. Pinochet == Benevolent Dictator. Ah well, what do you want from the Weekly Standard anyway? -Rek ]

The Case for the Empire

"Presiding over a memorial service commemorating the victims of the attack on the Death Star, the Emperor declared that while recent victories over the Rebel Alliance were "encouraging, the War on Terror is not over yet.""

Emperor issues statement following Death Star attacks