Geek Cruising - Doc Searls... "After the third free Bloody Mary, it doesn't matter what the hell Richard Stallman says. Well, actually it does. The man's uncompromising certitude fronts a set of ethical and technical convictions (not to mention achievements) that have so arguably shaped the world we'll never stop arguing about them. But arguing was not the first order of our week at sea on a Geek Cruise around the Eastern Caribbean. Schmoozing was. Also eating, drinking, dancing and hanging out on various decks and lounges between lectures by V.I.G.s and forays to ports of call."

FMOD Audio Media Player... (via Lockergnome) Running Windows Media Player, are you? I guess that's okay, but there's so many other media players you could be using - and lots of them are free. Like, oh... I don't know. This one? Being just a little over 100k, you know it's not going to hog up lots of system space. This magical media player will play mp2, mp3, mod, s3m, xm, it, ogg, wma, and asf files to boot. A spectrum analyzer and some hella-cool DSP effects are wrapped up in it as well. "FMOD is the fastest, most powerful and easiest to use sound system on Windows and Linux and WinCE there is." It requires LESS system resources than most other players.

Flag3D Screen Saver... Flag3D Screen Saver uses accurate physical modelling techniques to simulate the movement of flags with amazing realism. Your own images and pictures can be used to make your own custom flags. Flag3D does not use up all your available processing power, allowing background tasks to continue.

Flag3D Screen Saver was designed to be fast and impressive - you can display stunning dynamic animated flags without needing a high-performance PC or 3D card.

The MTV Chronicles... From 1987 to 1995 Adam Curry was an MTV VJ. In The MTV Chronicles he talks about his previous life at MTV and has begun documenting many interviews he had with performers and bands from the '80s.

Weblogs.com Turns the Corner (ResearchBuzz)... Weblogs.com used to automatically check Web logs and list those most recently changed.

Due to the heavy load of changed Web logs, they have changed the way they pick up changes. Now, Web logs (or their owner/sysops) must notify Weblogs.com that the Weblog has changed. There is a fairly simple manual process as well as more technical "automatic" processes which can be used to notify Weblogs.com of changed pages.

Living Without Microsoft :: XPloring the alternatives... This site is for those who, for whatever reason, wish to explore realistic alternatives to using Microsoft software. They plan to provide analyses of various software packages which are as objective as possible and to discuss the benefits and problems you are likely to encounter if you adopt them instead of a Microsoft solution.

American Tribute by Alison Rivera... A Flash tribute to the United States of America and the victims of the heinous terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.

It's a long download, but it's worth every minute spent. Here's a list of alternate mirror sites for Alison's Flash movie. Music: "God Bless America" sung by LeAnn Rimes.

Can government balance civil liberties, security? -- the American people would be glad to give up many more of their liberties if they believed that would protect us from further terrorism.

Why Do Lights "Burn Out" and Go Black?... Ever wonder why lights only function for just so long and then go black? Well, after extensive research and expense, Bell Labs has found the answer. And it may not be what you've always thought it was.

Font Island... where you'll find an island full of FREE FONTS! All of the fonts are neatly categorized for easy searching, or you can view the fonts alphabetically. When you find the font you like simply click for a free download.

Unfortunately you'll find zillions of pop-up ads too.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.... And remember: Do you know why Marines are sometimes called "leathernecks?" It has nothing to do with sunburn, as I have heard before. It's a name given to them by Navy personnel. Marines used to have a piece of leather sewn into the back of their uniform collars to deflect sword strokes.

Here's another military fact. The name of the "Jeep" automobile came from the fact that the original versions were delivered to the Army with the letters "G.P." painted on the side. The letters stood for "General Purpose." It was simply shortened to Jeep.

And one more...the acronym SNAFU is a military term. At least that's where it originated. It stands for "Situation Normal, All Fouled Up."

Of course, young men in the military tend to change out one of the words on occasion.

StarDate ... Do all planets orbit the Sun in the same direction?

CNN.com - Anti-terrorism proposals worry civil libertarians... Advocacy groups, legal experts and some members of Congress are voicing strong concerns that a proposal to expand law enforcement powers in order to ratchet up the fight on terrorism could end up treading on civil liberties enjoyed by all Americans.

Guardian: Attackers did not know they were to die... FBI investigators have officially concluded that 11 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the aircraft on 11 September did not know they were on a suicide mission

Peggy Noonan: ... It is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

Anthrax

Educate yourself about anthrax... Tim Paustian has a FAQ on anthrax. He's a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin.

FACT:

1. Anthrax is not contagious. The only way to get the disease is to be exposed to spores of the microbe.

2. Not much will kill these spores. Microwaving, baking, and disinfectant have no effect. If you burn your mail, that will work, but then you can't read that letter from Aunt Marge.

3. Getting spores in an envelope is not a real threat. Anthrax spores need to be dispersed in the air with very advanced equipment to become the dangerous form, pulmonary anthrax, that is lethal. Since whoever is doing this is mailing the stuff, it's obvious we are dealing with amateurs who really don't understand what they are doing. In that you can take some comfort. If you do recieve a suspicious package report it to your local authorities and consult your physician. However, it will be very unlikely that you will recieve one of these letters. Think about how many pieces of mail go out and how many people there are. Your chances are very low.

4. Cutaneous antrax only occurs when the spores encounter broken skin creating an easily recognized boil. Even then the illness is rarely fatal.

5. Anthrax is easily treated with antibiotics if it is caught early enough. The only time I would be worried about this is if everyone around you is coming down with the flu at the same time. Believe me the government will be all over something like that and has a stock pile of antibiotics for such an occasion.

6. You should not try to get vaccinated nor buy antibiotics just in case. First, your chances of contracting the disease are less than getting hit by lightning or winning the lottery, so you would be wasting your money. Second, you are depleting the stores of antibiotics that are available to treat people who may end up having the illness. Finally, the antibiotics will go bad over time and not be effective anyway. No responsible physician should be filling prescriptions to people who have not been exposed to anthrax, just in case. If you find a doctor willing to do this, can you trust them? What's to say that they are not just selling you sugar pills or something worse?

7. The disease is caused by a bacterium not a virus as reported by some news agencies. (By the way some journalists are woefully ignorant of medicine and microbiology - be careful what you believe.)

The new evil... September 11 showed us all that we are living in a world which has given unrivalled power to individuals who have no appreciation of the value of human life. History has known empires of evil. However,they all rose and fell without endangering the very existence and the continued development of life-desiring humanity. There was a certain logic to the relations between the empires of evil and life-seeking humanity that ultimately brought about the eradication of the empires. Whereas, what we are now facing, is the ability and readiness of individual persons to produce spectacular killing on a mass scale.

Make A Shorter Link... This web site provides a simple service - when you find a page on the web whose address is too long to paste into an email or other document, you can use their free service to generate a shorter, simpler address.

Safe and Free: Safe and Free in Times of Crisis "This bill has simply missed the mark of maximizing security and, at the same time, minimizing any adverse effects on America's freedoms," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington National Office. "Most Americans do not recognize that Congress has just passed a bill that would give the government expanded power to invade our privacy, imprison people without due process and punish dissent."

SmoothWall GPL... "SmoothWall is a secure operating system that converts a redundant PC / workstation / fileserver / rackmount device into a firewall and VPN gateway, but goes way beyond that remit. First launched in July of 2000 and based on ideas and concepts that took in the best philosophies behind the installation and procurement of hardware security devices, we decided to really come up with a way for everyone from your IT director/SysAdmin down to the home user to have the same level of security regardless of budget. SmoothWall GPL is free, free as in libre. It is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence which means that yes we also give you our source. SmoothWall is webmanaged so no keyboard, monitor, or mouse on the device is needed. It supports Internal ISDN, all popular NICS, all popular connection types (Modem / ISDN / Cable / ADSL / USB ADSL / Ethernet) and also features a fully logging firewall, DHCP server, IPSEC VPN capabilities and much, much more." Found at lockergnome.

'Mommy Liberty' Packs a Gun 17-year old high school student Eliza Gauger's drawing of Mommy Liberty spread across the Internet in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the U.S.

HTML Goodies - Joe Burns, Ph.D.... And remember: When you make your way down here to New Orleans, maybe you'll find it interesting, as I did, that instead of catsup being on the restaurant table, it's hot pepper sauce. I like it, but those who grew up here just put it on everything. The hotter the better. What makes a pepper "hot" is the amount of capsaicin it contains. In 1912, a fellow named Wilber Scoville devised a scale that ranked peppers in terms of hotness. The scale was measured in Scoville units for obvious reasons.

A pepper is sweet if it ranks between 0 and 100 Scovilles. A Jalapeno has between 2500 and 5000 Scovilles. The hottest pepper is the Habanero, which ranks over 100,000 Scovilles. Some have gone as high as 350,000 Scovilles.

Ouch.

Bin Laden's Felt-Skinned Henchman? - FOXNews.com... Do the global terror links reach even as far as Sesame Street? Is Bert the Muppet a henchman of terrorist mastermind Usama bin Laden? The answer is clearly no, but puzzled newspaper readers are still wondering how the Sesame Street icon ended up in a news service photograph of a pro-bin Laden protest in Bangladesh. The pictures clearly showed demonstrators holding up a large poster in which bin Laden and Bert are standing next to each other.

DeskFlag from Tiger Technologies... DeskFlag places an animated United States flag on your screen. The flag waves in the lower-right corner as you use your computer.

DeskFlag was created after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and is dedicated to the memory of the victims. We hope that in some small way, using this program helps people demonstrate their condemnation of this senseless act.

DeskFlag should work with any Windows computer running Windows 95 or later.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Doomsday fears of terror cyber-attacks... Computer experts have painted a chilling picture of the potential threat from a combined terror and cyber-attack on the United States. They told Congress that terrorists could target computer networks critical to power supplies, telecommunications and financial systems and wreak havoc on the country. Fears of a cyber-assault on the US have been heightened following the 11 September attacks.

Software sought to expose terrorist cells (10/09/2001)... In a move that has some privacy rights advocates concerned, the Pentagon is hoping to track down terrorists with the help of a growing battery of computer software developed to combat consumer and business fraud.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is trying to design its own version of the software to uncover terrorist cells that are posing as legitimate groups and lying about such things as past employment, education and business affiliations.

On losing FREEDOM and LIBERTY... Must we give up the freedom and liberty we have as U.S. citizens in order to fight terrorism? Must we become a police state? Some of our lawmakers and of course the law enforcers think so. But recall Benjamin Franklin's sage words: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Franklin's admonition is just as true now as it was when he helped found our country and create our Consitution. It's not just foreign terrorists that are a threat to the the U.S. and the freedom and liberty it represents for the common man.

Convert-me.Com: Interactive measurements calculator... Here you will find interactive calculators for many measurement systems both commonly used like metric and U.S. Avoirdupois and quite exotic like Ancient Greek and Roman.

Brain Fingerprinting... an improbable story about a revolutionary new technology called Brain Fingerprinting that has caught the interest of both the CIA and the FBI. It is the creation of Dr. Larry Farwell, a scientist from Iowa, who says that by analyzing the brain waves of a criminal suspect, he can tell whether or not that individual has committed a crime. Dr. Farwell believes Brain Fingerprinting could one day be as effective as DNA in helping police investigate crimes, and in helping free those who have been wrongly convicted.

Why Liberty Suffers in Wartime... Anyone worried about the fate of civil liberties during the U.S. government's growing war on terrorism might want to consider this Latin maxim: Inter arma silent leges. It means, "In time of war the laws are silent," and it encapsulates the supremacy of security over liberty that typically accompanies national emergencies...

Hit the buildings, Missed America . . . .

Posted By: Charles Brennan, Windrose 18, So. Florida

Date: 9/11/2001 9:07p.m.

An open letter to a terrorist:

Well, you hit the World Trade Center, but you missed America. You hit the Pentagon, but you missed America. You used helpless American bodies, to take out other American bodies, but like a poor marksman, you STILL missed America.

Why? Because of something you guys will never understand. America isn't about a building or two, not about financial centers, not about military centers, America isn't about a place, America isn't even about a bunch of bodies. America is about an IDEA. An idea, that you can go someplace where you can earn as much as you can figure out how to, live for the most part, like you envisioned living, and pursue Happiness. (No guarantees that you'll reach it, but you can sure try!)

Go ahead and whine your terrorist whine, and chant your terrorist litany: "If you can not see my point, then feel my pain." This concept is alien to Americans. We live in a country where we don't have to see your point. But you're free to have one. We don't have to listen to your speech. But you're free to say one. Don't know where you got the strange idea that everyone has to agree with you. We don't agree with each other in this country, almost as a matter of pride.

We're a collection of guys that don't agree, called States. We united our individual states to protect ourselves from tyranny in the world. Another idea, we made up on the spot. You CAN make it up as you go, when it's your country. If you're free enough.

Yeah, we're fat, sloppy, easy-going goofs most of the time. That's an unfortunate image to project to the world, but it comes of feeling free and easy about the world you live in. It's unfortunate too, because people start to forget that when you attack Americans, they tend to fight like a cornered badger. The first we knew of the War of 1812, was when England burned Washington D.C. to the ground. Didn't turn out like England thought it was going to, and it's not going to turn out like you think, either. Sorry, but you're not the first bully on our shores, just the most recent.

No Marquis of Queensbury rules for Americans, either. We were the FIRST and so far, only country in the world to use nuclear weapons in anger. Horrific idea, nowadays? News for you bucko, it was back then too, but we used it anyway. Only had two of them in the whole world and we used 'em both.

Grandpa Jones worked on the Manhattan Project. Told me once, that right up until they threw the switch, the physicists were still arguing over whether the Uranium alone would fission, or whether it would start a fissioning chain reaction that would eat everything. But they threw the switch anyway, because we had a War to win. Does that tell you something about American Resolve?

So who just declared War on us? It would be nice to point to some real estate, like the good old days. Unfortunately, we're probably at war with random camps, in far-flung places. Who think they're safe. Just like the Barbary Pirates did, IIRC. Better start sleeping with one eye open. There's a spirit that tends to take over people who come to this country, looking for opportunity, looking for liberty, looking for freedom. Even if they misuse it.

The Marielistas that Castro emptied out of his prisons, were overjoyed to find out how much freedom there was. First thing they did when they hit our shores, was run out and buy guns. The ones that didn't end up dead, ended up in prisons. It was a big PITA then (especially in south Florida), but you're only the newest PITA, not the first.

You guys seem to be incapable of understanding that we don't live in America, America lives in US! American Spirit is what it's called. And killing a few thousand of us, or a few million of us, won't change it. Most of the time, it's a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of Spirit. Until we're crossed in a cowardly manner, then it becomes an entirely different kind of Spirit.

Wait until you see what we do with that Spirit, this time. Sleep tight, if you can. We're coming.

Charles Brennan

Note: Abreviations used by Charles

** IIRC - If I Recall Correctly

** PITA - Pain In The Ass

Proof has just come to light that George W. is a Linux user: He just issued the following command: chmod a+x /bin/laden If you are not a propeller-head & you don't understand this, see the note below.*

Translation: "grant all users permission to execute /bin/laden" Old style Unix version would be "chmod 111 /bin/laden" Interestingly the inverse would be "chmod 666 /bin/laden" which would prevent the execution.

The Web of Terror... John C. Dvorak -- The world will not forget the events of September 11th, and the World Wide Web-stocked as it is with many sites run by people who long ago declared a Jihad (holy war) against the United States-complicates the problem. Most of these sites, including one site hosted by NBCi via its free homepage service, offer graphic images such as the New York skyline in flames. The site on NBCi remained open until recently. Until they recently disappeared, Jihadroad.com and jihadpath.com mirrored it. If you got on the Web within a day of the attacks, it was easy to find numerous sites advocating a Jihad against America for various reasons. The American flag was always on fire at these sites.

Patrick Henry... "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Somebody forgot to tell Congress - we haven't even found --much less buried-- all of the bodies from the WTC and Pentagon attacks, and yet Congress is talking about I.D. cards as a way to keep track of foreigners...Doesn't that make you feel ever so much safer?

Somebody thinks so... House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt acknowledged that Americans, in the past, rejected ideas such as a national identification card as a possible infringement on civil liberties. But he indicated that last week’s terror attacks had changed the nature of the debate. Congress, he said, would need to quickly debate measures such as a national ID card.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Doctors claim world first in telesurgery... Doctors in the United States removed a gall bladder from a patient in eastern France by remotely operating a surgical robot arm. The procedure could make it possible for a surgeon to perform an operation on a patient anywhere in the world.

Reflections on a Mote of Dust... Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

Make bin Laden look over his shoulder... Dave Winer: "Heard on NPR yesterday, an account of how bin Laden's organization was infiltrated by an Egyptian secret service agent and prevented the destruction of the Holland Tunnel in NY a few years ago. One thing that came out in the report was this agent's motivation -- money. We paid him $1 million to work for us. The individuals in the terrorist organizations like money. So instead of spending $40 billion to do the linear thing, going to war, why not have a fund for terrorists who turn against their leaders? We have lots of cash. It's a good tool to return the terror. Spread this meme. Make bin Laden look over his shoulder. Make him wonder about everyone around him. $40 billion could go a long way. Isn't that an interesting idea? $1 million can buy lots of Nikes and Big Macs."

I think this sounds better than another Viet Nam where we start trying to bomb some third world victims even further toward the stone age and place our military in a situation they probably (based on historical experience) can't win. Bin Laden doesn't appear to be afraid of us. But what about his own ruthless and unscrupulus kind? RETURN THE TERROR.

A conversation with the most dangerous man in the world. ... This is an article on Osama bin Laden that was published in the February 1999 issue of Esquire. It has not been updated. They've posted it simply because it contains some unique background information on the lead suspect in the attack on America.

Radio Stations Of The Clear Channel Network Asked ToPull Some Songs... First Falwell and Robertson say the tragedy is God's wrath because because gays, abortionists and virtually anyone else they don't agree with is allowed to coexist. And now this: Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and Neil Diamond's "America" deemed Inappropriate?

"...These include "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles, "On Broadway" by the Drifters and "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John. Even odder, some songs on the list are patriotic, like Neil Diamond's "America." Others speak of universal optimism, like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," and others are emotional but hopeful songs that could help people grieve, like "Imagine" by John Lennon, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and Garfunkel, "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens and "A World Without Love" by Peter and Gordon.,,"

Then again

"Powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt." - John Adams

Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan This piece should be considered by our leaders. Don't forget that the citizens of Afghanistan are also victims of the Taliban and bin Laden. Tamim Ansary, ... "I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."...(DaveNet)

Ryan's Photo Essay... An essay composed entirely of photos demonstrating the world wide anguish over the terrorist attacks. Photos of people offering support over what has happened from Canada to Palestine. From Germany to Israel.

A Response To The Terror... This sounds like the correct response to me. Now if the powers that be will only take this tack instead of using the terrorists as an excuse to take away OUR freedom and liberty.If you agree, then kindly forward the suggestion to your representatives in the U.S. government. Thank you Jerry for publishing the proposed letter to those who provide support to the terrorists.

From The President of the United States to the Council of Afghanistan,

You are known to be host to bin Laden. Within 24 hours you will deliver him and all those in his compound to the US Embassy in Khaboul. They will be bound and in chains. We expect at least 24 persons.

Dealing with the Palestinian authorities ought to be similar regarding accessories before and after the fact.

...Jerry Pournelle

Bell Labs scientists find potential improvements to optical lenses... Researchers at Bell Labs may have discovered a new way to design lenses for optical networks and thereby boost traffic speeds. The skeleton of the brittlestar, an invertebrate starfish, contains calcite crystals that both provide structural support and act as optical receptors for the starfish.

Sony unleashes robotic puppies... This is the latest evolution of Sony's original Aibo robo-dog, which created a sensation and sold out in 20 minutes in Tokyo when it first went on sale for $2,500 in 1999. "The idea is to expand the appeal to a broader demographic," said Stuart Wallock, director of marketing and business planning at Sony's Entertainment Robot America unit. (MSN Tech & Gadgets)

As Big PC Brother Watches, Users Encounter Frustration Although the use of cookies is generally benign, the fact that they can be used for detailed tracking of Web users and their activities has upset many consumers. But when it comes to protecting privacy online, most consumers still do not even know where to start. (NY Times)

Consumer Privacy—A Free Choice Approach... Privacy is one of the most contentious issues that the 107th Congress and state legislatures are considering. The pressure is mounting for legislators to act, but hasty reactions to polls and privacy doomsayers could lead policymakers down the wrong path. Since privacy demands fluctuate widely among individuals and different situations, it is essential that privacy remains a matter of individual choice. (Pacific Research Institute)

Study: Who Needs Privacy Laws?... The PRI study lauds privacy-protecting technologies -- call it the "self help" approach -- such as Anonymizer.com, SafeWeb, Pretty Good Privacy and Zero Knowledge's Freedom software, saying those are better at protecting privacy than laws and don't suffer from the same negative side effects. (Wired)

Scripting News:Is Education The Next Revolution- - - "... the role of computers in education is simple. Make the tools available to students, teachers, administrators and families. Teach them how to use the tools (there's something educators should be able to do!) and kick back and just let them use them. See what skills each of the tools develops and provide that information to the people who create the software." (Dave Winer)

Distance Learning Yet to Hit Home... The University of Phoenix Online, the nation's largest private university serving working professionals, tops the list of survivors. Other thriving ventures include DeVry and Renaissance Learning, which both address real needs among the vocational and K-12 markets. (Wired)

A Tale of Two Classrooms... Scoble : Yeah, I gotta admit, "real" classrooms do teach, but I've found that my best learning was done either outside of the classroom, or in an innovative way inside the classroom (For instance, I'll never forget the day -- or the lessons from -- a couple of Holocaust victims visited my classroom in high school).

SatireWire | THE TOUGHEST DECISION: Assisted Computing Facilities... It is often the most difficult and painful decision you will face: to accept that a co-worker or a loved one — a parent, a spouse, perhaps a sibling — is technologically impaired and should no longer be allowed to live independently, or come near a computer or electronic device without direct supervision. The time has come to place that loved one into the care of an Assisted Computing Facility. But you have questions. So many questions. We at Silicon Pines want to help. ROTFLOL

The Color Wheel... The Color Wheel shows how colors are related. Red, yellow and blue are primary colors. Orange, green and purple are secondary colors made by combining two primary colors. All colors are made from some combination of white, black and primary colors. Other terms explained and demonstrated: related colors; complementary colors; neutral colors.

Big Brother Logs On... Police departments, government agencies, banks, merchants, amusement parks, sports arenas, nanny-watching homeowners, swimming-pool operators, and employers are deploying cameras, pattern recognition algorithms, databases of information, and biometric tools that when taken as a whole can be combined into automated surveillance networks able to track just about anyone, just about anywhere.

CHIPS AND CHEATING... Teachers are looking out for tech-assisted academic dishonesty, even using software to detect plagiarism.

Class keeps cyber-sleuths current... People in computer forensics can earn $200 to $500 an hour, or up to $200,000 a year for hard-working full-timers

Daypop is a current events search engine. Daypop crawls the living web at least once a day to bring you the latest information relevant to your searches.

Famous Name Changes... On this site you will find out who the stars were before they were stars, and a few not so well known surprises too.

InternetWeek >The Real Lesson Of Code Red: Insecurity Is A Way of Life Bruce Schneier: The Internet moves too fast for static defenses. You can't install every possible patch, and you don't know which ones will be important. Likewise, viruses and worms appear all the time, and you don't know ahead of time which ones to worry about. If we're going to make Internet security work, we need to think differently. I've put my effort into detection and response, instead of protection, because detection and response are resilient. I've put my effort into people instead of software because people are resilient.

Lawyer Lessig raps new copyright laws - Tech News - CNET.com The desire of entrenched commercial interests to control information is crushing the spirit of innovation that allowed the Internet to blossom, Stanford Law School professor and technology pundit Lawrence Lessig said Wednesday.

StarDate Online... Cassiopeia, the queen, stands well up in the northeast a couple of hours after sunset tonight. It looks like a bright letter "W," with the tips pointing upward.

Location, Location, Location... Scientists review geographic factors to learn why wealth concentrates predominantly in temperate zones. In 1990, 35 percent of the world's population lived on 1 percent of the ice-free land according to data from SEDAC, the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center operated by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University.

Don't Lose Contact... KEEP IN TOUCH: Ever Changed Your E-mail Address? Don’t Lose Touch! Veripost, an e-mail change of address service, makes it easier for you to stay connected with family, friends and e-mail newsletters after an E-address change. You control who gets your address, for free

SpamCon Foundation... Unsolicited email ("spam") forces unwanted and objectionable materials into our mailboxes, impairs our ability to communicate freely, and costs Internet users billions of dollars annually. The SpamCon Foundation protects email as a viable communication and commerce medium by supporting measures to reduce the amount of unsolicited email that crosses private networks, while ensuring that valid email reaches its destination.

Rules fight over FBI cyber-spying... Government officials might agree among themselves that snooping technology should meet one legal standard rather than another, but given the inroads into personal privacy likely to result from eased controls, a public debate seems in order.

Human Spare Tires... Spare tires, according to the U.S. National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (CDC), are responsible for more than 300,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. Reducing the prevalence of these dangerous objects is not, as researchers have found, an easy task. Central obesity (referred to, in slang, as a human spare tire) refers to the buildup of adipose storage inside and surrounding the abdominal region of the body. This excess fat, in many cases, changes body shape and increases risks for associated chronic diseases.

Anything you code can and will be used against you ... It looks like the now-infamous case of until recently jailed Russian software developer Dmitry Sklyarov was just the beginning of a broader trend to cast IT professionals in the role of info cop. Software developers like Sklyarov and even help desk and system administration workers, it appears, are being deputized to enforce ill-conceived laws aimed at perceived Web-borne threats to society.

The Undefended Airwaves... For more than a decade, cryptographers have possessed strong encryption techniques that could virtually guarantee that data falling into the wrong hands—through a stolen laptop, say, or an intercepted radio signal—would be impossible to decode. Unfortunately, these techniques have not made it from the lab into the mainstream.

J. Edgar's Finest At Their Worst... One family’s ordeal at the hands of the FBI, which fingered the wrong man in its quest to unmask a spy, upending the lives of the CIA officer and his three children for the next two years. The accusations leveled in August 1999 prompted the CIA to suspend the officer for 21 months. He remained under surveillance, and his daughter was denied a promotion. His ex-wife, two sons and two sisters were interrogated at work and at home by FBI agents who cast doubt on the man they thought they knew. Friends and colleagues whispered about the traitor in their midst.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Universe at their fingertips,,, The Cosmology Machine, has 128 UltrasparcIII processors, 112 gigabytes of RAM, and 7 terabytes of storage and can perform 10 billion calculations per second. The machine is attempting to re-create the entire evolution of the universe from the big bang to the present.

ASCI White - World's Fastest Computer... Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoy showed of the world's fastest computer yesterday. ASCI White (from IBM) can perform 12.3 trillion calculations per second. Among other things it is being used to simulate nuclear reactions , 3D modeling of atoms, and genetic research.

Scripting News: Beasts of Burden...A very intriguing post from Dave Winer, "I don't remember where I heard this idea, it could have been in NY. It goes like this. We think of ourselves as creatures of free will, the only conscious beings on this planet. We wonder if we're the only conscious beings in the universe. But there's another view of who we are -- beasts of burden for our genes. We carry them and propogate them, or let others propogate into ourselves, only to create more beasts driven to propogate their genes. In that view of the world, the genes are a higher form of life than we are. Who knows what drives them?"

Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene

Big Blue places $1 billion bet on Linux ... BY DAN GILLMOR, Mercury News -- For about an hour at the start of the IBM Technical Developer Conference Tuesday morning, a casual listener might have been forgiven for thinking he or she was at another kind of event entirely: a celebration of the GNU/Linux operating system. IBM is investing a huge amount of money and talent -- a reported $1 billion this year, including the efforts of hundreds of employees -- into Linux, as the software is more generally known. And, as was evident at the San Francisco conference, IBM executives are roaming the globe to boost a technology their company doesn't own and can't possibly control.

Easy Magic for You! ... Here are some very easy, but highly effective magic tricks for you to perform, from your Magic & Illusion Guide. Have fun!

(Wired) "...Octavo Digital Imaging and Preservation... Octavo's advanced digital imaging technology allows average readers to access 500 years of religious, artistic and scientific works that have been essentially inaccessible. Historians can examine Renaissance-age etchings in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius or Giovanni Battista Braccelli's Bizzarie di Varie Figure, which languished in near-total obscurity until being rediscovered in modern times. The digital editions are produced on CD-ROM in PDF format. Scholars can purchase digitized renditions of 400-year-old texts worth thousands of dollars for $20 to $75. Each book is laid in a custom-built cradle and carefully lit to minimize exposure to light and heat. High-resolution digital cameras capture as much as 750MB of digital data with every scan at resolutions up to 10,600 x 12,800 pixels..."

Joe Burns, Ph.D.... And Remember: College football is going to get underway soon and already people are talking about who will win the Heisman Trophy. I can't comment on that but I can tell you that the model for the trophy was Warren Mulrey of Fordham University. Frank Eliscu sculpted the face. Trouble was, the first sculpture showed a smile on the stature's face. Eliscu changed the face to a snarl because he felt football players were fighters. The uniform Eliscu used for the sculpture was taken from a photo of Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago. Those of you who know football trivia might find that last fact rather interesting past the historical. Jay Berwanger was the first player to win the Heisman. Go figure.

Are You Trying To Find A Spammer?... Query the 200 top-level domain registries and Regional Internet Registries around the world, and returns information about Internet sites. Information available includes owner of domain name, and often owner's mailing address, email address, phone number, and fax number. AND IT'S FREE!

Netscape 6.1 - Software Reviews - CNET.com... The good: Much more stable than Netscape 6; finally launches nearly as quickly as Internet Explorer. The bad: No significant new features. The bottom line: Netscape 6.1 is the browser that 6 should have been, but nine months later. If you're running Netscape 6, upgrade pronto; otherwise, there's no reason to jump the IE ship just yet.

Signs suggest final IE 6 is near... Supposedl Microsoft has told beta tester, "Internet Explorer 6 sets a new level in terms of stability and robustness, providing a quantitative improvement from Internet Explorer 5.0," the e-mail reads. "Also, Internet Explorer 6 provides a high level of support for W3C recommendations, ranging from base technologies, such as CSS and DOM, to brand-new ones such as SMIL 2.0."

AOL launches new Netscape browser... Whether Netscape 6.1 can rally the Netscape faithful remains to be seen. While Netscape 6 encountered first delays and then scathing reviews, Microsoft assembled an overwhelming lead in the browser market.

Privacy: The ugly truth... If anything, privacy is more about the right to remain anonymous. It's the right to know we are not being watched as we walk down the street or attend a public meeting. It's the right to know that facts about our personal lives are revealed only as we decide to release them and that the facts are correct. Privacy is about massive databases, identity theft, and the access to information.

New Hope for Alzheimer’s?... Although the vaccine has shown potential in animal studies, it’s not yet clear how successful it will be in humans. NEWSWEEK’s Laura Fording asked Dale Schenk, the developer of the vaccine and senior vice president at Elan, to elaborate on the work that has been done so far.

Hmmmm? Bill Gates must read Gilmore too. Microsoft has given PC makers the go-ahead to ship Windows XP as much as one full month before the operating system's official Oct. 25 launch date, sources close to four major PC makers told CNET News.com

Feds should force Microsoft into showdown over Windows XP :Dan Gilmore... Perhaps it's beginning to dawn on federal and state antitrust officials that Microsoft is playing for keeps. The company's unsurprising decision Tuesday to appeal its antitrust conviction to the Supreme Court looks more like a stalling tactic than anything else. But it comes at a crucial time -- on the eve of the release of Windows XP, the linchpin in Microsoft's plan to extend its monopoly into new areas of commerce.

BadBlue Server Software... It's FREE -- Search other PCs. Share files with others. Serve live web pages on your PC. Turn your PC into a powerful, file-sharing web server. BadBlue is a tiny, free download that lets you share files, serve powerful web applications (like PHP) and search other PCs (see screen shots, take a quick tutorial or read user testimonials).

BadBlue Server Software... It's FREE -- Search other PCs. Share files with others. Serve live web pages on your PC. Turn your PC into a powerful, file-sharing web server. BadBlue is a tiny, free download that lets you share files, serve powerful web applications (like PHP) and search other PCs (see screen shots, take a quick tutorial or read user testimonials).

A Violent Sun Affects the Earth's Ozone... “A lot of impacts on ozone, like those caused by humans, are very subtle and happen over long periods of time,” says Jackman. “But when these solar proton events occur you can see immediately a change in the atmosphere.”

A Violent Sun Affects the Earth's Ozone... “A lot of impacts on ozone, like those caused by humans, are very subtle and happen over long periods of time,” says Jackman. “But when these solar proton events occur you can see immediately a change in the atmosphere.”

Upphafssíða... Check out the drop down menu on this site for a list of cams from all over Iceland. They offer a glimpse of a country that not many of us have seen.

NOVA Online... You can watch many Nova programs in full, right on their Web site. The episodes are divided into chapters so you can skip to the parts that interest you most.

AT&T Labs Speech Technologies -- has a demo of their speech software. It puts a whole ne spin on 'HELLO WORLD'.

PhysicsWeb Features - The physics of the Web... All previous Internet-related research concentrated on designing better protocols and faster components. More recently, an increasing number of scientists have begun to ask an unexpected question: what exactly did we create?

CNN.com - Study: Multitasking is counterproductive - August 5, 2001 -- Multitasking is a managerial buzz-concept these days, a post-layoff corporate assumption that the few can be made to do the work of many. But newly released results of scientific studies in multitasking indicate that carrying on several duties at once may, in fact, reduce productivity, not increase it.

PERCobol COBOL Compiler bridging capabilities of COBOL with Java technology for client/server and WEB... PERCobol is a COBOL compiler that bridges the strength and power of COBOL with the features and functions of Java. PERCobol is a full function COBOL compiler allowing programmers to make use of the existing skills and business logic to build applications with features only present in Java. It understands most HP COBOL II syntax. This means that it will allow you to continue to develop in HP COBOL on the 3000 for as long as you like with the knowledge that the code is portable. It also means that you will have to make minimal changes to existing code in order to use it on your target platform(s).

GM Tests Fuel Cell Power Generator — The same fuel cell technology the automakers are developing in hopes of producing pollution-free vehicles may also be the answer to preventing power blackouts, a General Motors Corp. executive said Tuesday. In a statement distributed to reporters at an industry conference here, Larry Burns, GM vice president for research and development planning, said for the past six months the automaker has been testing a stationary fuel cell-powered generator at its Rochester, N.Y. research facility. The fuel cell generator GM is testing extracts hydrogen from either natural gas, methane or gasoline. The hydrogen is then mixed with oxygen from the air and the fuel cell converts it to electricity.

Scientist gives dinosaurs a nose job... Turning up his nose at a century of conventional wisdom, a scientist studying dinosaur fossils and the physiology of their closest living relatives has determined the creatures’ nostrils were perched near the end of their snouts and not toward the top of their heads. The research in Friday’s issue of the journal Science represents a fundamental change in the way scientists view dinosaurs — not only in their outward appearance but in several important traits.

CSIRO Team Brings Back Deep Ocean Life Sample... Bismarck Sea - May 9, 2000 - A huge undersea chimney, laced with gold and other minerals and swarming with remarkable lifeforms has been recovered from the seabed in the Bismarck Sea, north of Papua New Guinea, by the CSIRO Research Vessel Franklin.

Flying A Ranch Arabians-Live Foal Cam ... View the latest arrivals at the Fying A Ranch. At this posting the view is of Beau's Dancer.

Catch a sure-fire meteor show Cosmic dust, some of which has been wafting through space since the American Civil War, is renewing a summer ritual by slamming into Earth’s atmosphere, lighting up the night sky with shooting stars whose numbers are building to a peak on Aug. 12.

Are You A Robot?... Do you sometimes think you might not be human. Maybe you have a codependent relationship with your motherboard. But that doesn't mean you're not a real person. Want to know if you're artificial? Take Worst of the Web Guide Dave Spohn's amusing exam.

THE EYE OF ARGON by Jim Thiels ... A classic of science fiction? Well -- yes, after a fashion. THE EYE OF ARGON is probably the worst science fiction story ever published. At least that's what it's known for.

A Free PC Tuneup ... PC Pitstop can help you get your PC in top form -- running fast, stable and secure. PC Pitstop runs diagnostics on your PC to identify things that might help improve performance. The process is fully automated, private and safe. After the diagnostics run, they'll give you tips for improving all kinds of things. Best of all, the service is free!

Happy Birthday, Thong!... The Itty-Bitty Underwear, Once a Novelty, Now a Cultural Phenomenon turns 20! It's time to honor the underwear that nearly brought down a presidency. Which came first, the underwear or the bikini? In the evolution of the thong, the bathing suit inspired the founder of Frederick's of Hollywood to create a new line of underwear. (Frederick's of Hollywood)

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The page you are looking for sucks and is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, you may need to adjust your browser settings or it might suck.

Cringely on Widows XP... "Unless this feature [raw sockets] is changed before XP is released, it will mean that millions of new computers will be manufactured as perfect little virus machines. Virus authors who are anticipating these new PCs will be able to pre-position their digital vermin to take advantage of the socket flaw as the new machines appear. The result is that, in all likelihood, there will be massive data security problems, as well as massive damage to files and property, all as a result of Windows XP.... Programmers who ought to be familiar with Microsoft's plans have suggested that the real motive for raw socket support is for Microsoft to use Windows XP to exploit a bad situation, to deliberately make things worse....According to these programmers, Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol -- a protocol owned by Microsoft -- that it will tout as being more secure."

Dan Gilmore: Government should block XP release (8/02/2001)... The antitrust cops are the only people with sufficient clout to make a difference at this stage. Do they understand that it may be too late to remedy much of anything once Windows XP is on 100 million computers and Microsoft has another $10 billion in its checking account? Do they have the spine to do the right thing?

Update Your PC - CatchUp Services - CNET.com It's never been easier to manage your PC.From software updates to security fixes, CatchUp automatically finds what you need to keep your PC up-to-date. Get started by installing the free CatchUp software.

TIME.com: Columnist-- Chris Taylor -- Why Worms Like Code Red Are Good For You... At most, Code Red proved you should always be wary about what Microsoft software does to your machine, like turning it into a server without your implicit knowledge. Apart from that, the whole red-alert reaction only demonstrated that there's seemingly infinite space on the Feds' faces for more egg. That's what happens when you cry wolf over a microbe, guys.

It just got way worse than Amazon patenetin "One Click" shopping.... Dave Winer: "Microsoft files and gets lots of patents. Last week for the first time they said they will use patents to limit competition. That means if you produce software that uses some technique that Microsoft has patented, they'll either make you take the feature out or send you a bill."

Cowgirl's Dream® Trading Post Catalog... Hey! Wanna buy a horse? Cowgirl's Dream is a small mother-daughter business out of Colorado that has been on the web since March 1995. They try to find items of interest to western folks that are not that easy to find either locally or on the internet.

Feng Shui For Dummies... I've been thinking of trying to use Feng Shui. This may just be the way to go about it.

Bottomquark ... Science can be interesting and often entertaining; you shouldn't need Bill Nye or Beakman to explain it. If you're lucky, you might have had a high school science teacher who made learning fun, rather than some old guy reading molecular equations from a blackboard. The quark team collects interesting stories and tidbits from the world of science, and posts them for your scientific enjoyment (and you can post your own stuff, too). Those with curious minds will enjoy this resource, though I'd also recommend it for anyone who's interested in seeing how much a part of our lives science has become. From Chris Pirillo.

Vmyths.com- Truth About Computer Virus Myths & Hoaxes... Poor Internet, we hardly knew ye. Vmyths.com hopes the fearmongers prove us wrong. Call us jaded, but we want to see the Internet writhe in agony. We want only 30 million AOL users to survive when the Code Red worm strikes... Rob Rosenberger reports just hours before the Internet's predicted "meltdown." [7/31/01]

TechTV | Transfer Video to CD... If you have piles of videotapes crowding your home entertainment center, it's probably time to consolidate the tapes and upgrade your system. You can transfer the videos to CD and watch them in a DVD player.

Cyberspace--it's for stupid people too!...Deborah Branscum on spam reminiscent of the snail mail scam, "You may already be a Wiener".

HMOs are sick, and there´s no cure in sight -- The Washington Times... Excerpt: "When or if enacted, patients' rights legislation may mollify managed care consumers and critics. But those who know say it's too late to save the $600 million system.... As managed care weakens, the need increases for a new way to assure that ordinary people can get medical care they can't otherwise afford. Yet financial consultants say any new system will cost more."

Cringely on the Code Red worm... This thing, or something very much like it, is going to be with us for a very, very long time....This is very, very bad news, but there is a solution that will shortly be presented that will be claimed to save the day. This miracle solution will be the subject of my regular column this week, which will appear, as usual, on Thursday. Please come back then. Because while there is a solution, I believe that many people will see the cure as being nearly as bad as the disease.

Amazon Auctions: Going once... "I don't think they're putting a lot of effort into (auctions) right now, and I don't expect them to," said Jeetil Patel, a financial analyst who covers Amazon for Deutsche Bank Alex Brown. "If they're looking at areas to trim the fat, obviously this seems to be one of them," since revenue from auction sales is an "insignificant" piece of Amazon's business.

Genesis Mission - Search For Origins... NASA's Genesis mission will send a spacecraft to collect pieces of the sun, called solar wind, that may contain the answers. After an August 1, 2001 launch, the Genesis spacecraft will journey a million miles sunward, unfold its collectors, and "sunbathe" for nearly three years before returning to Earth with its precious cargo. Scientists will study the solar wind samples for years to come.

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It seems Ebay is being invaded by honest to goodness brick-and-mortar stores. According to a report heard on a talk radio investment program, some major retailers are using Ebay to rid themselves of unwanted or out-of- fashion merchandise. The report stated that Bloomingdale's now has a staff of 12 whose only job is to take digital photographs, post to Ebay, and ship when sold. The retailer is said to make more than 1000 posts per day.

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The Magnificent DOORSTOP?... This doorstop documentary includes: never-before-seen footage from a rubber doorstop factory; philosophy professors debating the essence of a doorstop; an all-doorstop auction; confessions of doorstop-obsessed collectors; a doorstop dispute that wound up in court; a linguist unraveling the etymological riddle of frog doorstops; film critics revealing how they keep their doors open; and much more!

Jail Time in the Digital Age... Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's copyright.

Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex... MIT's Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.

How much are you worth?... The more honestly you answer the questions, the more realistic the dollar value returned will be.

LANCE IS NUMBER ONE! TOUR DE FRANCE 2001/... For the third successive year, Lance Armstrong has proven that he’s the most complete cyclist of July. And in the minds of most riders – particularly the likes of, Jan Ullrich, who also has just one focus for the 11-month season – the American is the most accomplished rider of the current generation. Lance’s hat-trick win came through consistency. This year, however, it was also a stage-winning blitz – two time trials and two mountain-top victories – which confirmed the dominance of the rider who, in his own words, wants to be remembered as a cancer survivor. Last year Lance came back for his second consecutive win after fighting testicular cancer into remission.

Lance's story is available in: It's Not About the Bike : My Journey Back to Life.

Old Friends Found Again... More than just a hyper text link - a link to my past and hopefully to my future as well. Friends from the sixties and seventies, rediscovered. Mike's site contains, among other things, many interesting links to gardening information, haiku and Zen.

Big Ball of Mud... A BigBallOfMud">BIG BALL OF MUD is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle. We’ve all seen them. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition.

Still, this approach endures and thrives. Why is this architecture so popular? Is it as bad as it seems, or might it serve as a way-station on the road to more enduring, elegant artifacts? What forces drive good programmers to build ugly systems? Can we avoid this? Should we? How can we make such systems better?

Talking Moose : Moose Sales Strategy...Ever wonder what a saleperson does? The Moose says, "You know, we all sell. Some sell our bodies. Some sell our minds. Some sell products. Some sell other stuff. So, why do we spend so little time studying the sales process?"

How Californians got burned... The state electricity system is in a shambles, and the worst may be ahead. How did things get to this point? - - - Sacramento Bee. An excellent article on how just about everyone involved in California's power "deregulation" dropped the ball.

Here's a link to free online courses offered by HP.... NOTE! THESE CLASSES ARE NOT HP SPECIFIC. Classes are self-paced, instructor-led, and can be accessed 24 hours a day. List chages each month - some courses added and some removed.

Le Tour... Lance Armstrong leads Jan Ullrich Overall By 6'44"! Lance Armstrong's 1'38" advantage over Jan Ullrich in the 18th stage has pushed the American's overall advantage over the German to 6'44". Joseba Beloki's 6th place today - 2'08" ahead of the rider who started the day in 3rd overall, Andrei Kivilev - is enough to put the ONCE rider in 3rd overall. If the current top 3 hold their advantage through to Paris (as is highly expected), it will be only the second time in Tour history that the same three riders have finished in first, second and third! Go Lance!

DaveNet : Transcendental Money... How much money do you need to feel secure? Ask this question in different parts of the world, and you'll get different answers. In a poor country like India, it might be $1 million. In poorer parts of the US, $3 million. In California where you can hardly throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a billionaire, the answer might be $25 million.

Test Your Temperament... According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, in psychology, temperament is the aspect of personality concerned with emotional dispositions and reactions and their speed and intensity; the term often is used to refer to the prevailing mood or mood pattern of a person. The notion of temperament in this sense originated with Galen who developed it from an earlier physiological theory of four basic body fluids (humours): blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. According to their relative predominance in the individual, they were supposed to produce, respectively, temperaments designated sanguine (warm, pleasant), phlegmatic (slow-moving, apathetic), melancholic (depressed, sad), and choleric (quick to react, hot tempered).

Foot-and-Mouth First Virus Unable To Spread Through Microsoft Outlook... Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) — Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed to propagate a major virus

Oliver "Ollie" Yantis - Old West Gravesites... Yantis became a member of Bill Doolin's gang, The Wild Bunch, by request of Bitter Creek Newcomb. It was rumored that Newcomb had a thing for Yantis' sister.

I send you this file in order to have your advice. ... Does that line sound familiar? If so, you're one of the tens of thousands of Internet users around the world who have received the SirCam virus since it was released into the wild last week. BEWARE! This one isn't some cookie-cutter toy from the script-kiddies it was created by a coder who knows what he's doing. Insideous and diabolical come to mind.

New shirt or cloth keyboard?... U.K. startup ElectroTextiles has demonstrated a keyboard made out of a soft, water-resistant cloth--something the company claims could be a breakthrough for mobile computing and text messaging.

George Chamberlain..states in his column "By George" for July 25, 2001, "Philip Morris deserves an award for having the nerve to suggest that early deaths of cigarette smokers is good for the economy. The tobacco company issued a report saying the Czech government saved the equivalent of $30 million in health care, pension and housing expenses for the elderly as a result of "cost savings due to early mortality" of smokers."

HP Awarded Key Molecular Electronics Patent... Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP) announced it has been awarded a key patent that could remove a major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a reality.. "We have a strategy to reinvent the integrated circuit with molecular rather than semiconductor components," said HP Fellow Williams, director of quantum science research, HP Labs. "We've received two key patents and have several more pending that we believe will eventually enable computers to be millions of times more efficient than they are today."

Book Review: XML for Bosses... In XML and the Enterprise for Managers author Benoît Marchal doesn't try to be all things to all people. He writes for the CTO and project leader market. In the short time it takes you to read Marchal's thirty-five page piece, you'll know what XML is, what standards have been built around XML, how to apply XML in publishing and development, and a little bit about parsers, the Document Object Model, Document Type Definition and XML Schemas.

Fuel Cell Applications The emergence of fuel cell applications in transport, industry, the home, and even consumer products, is already hinting at the enormous potential of this technology. Honda R&D director Takeo Fukui projects: "Fuel cell vehicles will probably overtake gasoline-powered cars in the next 20 to 30 years." Ford Motor Company Chairman William C. Ford, Jr. said last year: "I believe fuel cell vehicles will finally end the hundred-year reign of the internal combustion engine as the dominant source of power for personal transport-ation." Fuel cell manufacturer PlugPower, in combination with General Electric, is offering home scale fuel cell systems on a pilot basis. And micro fuel cells are under development that could even power laptop computers and cell phones.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute ...A geodesic dome is the only man-made structure that actually becomes stronger as it increases in size. It's only one thing designed by "Bucky".

News: Hitachi to cash in on money chip... Hitachi has developed a chip that could be woven into paper money to help identify counterfeits, and which could also have wide ramifications for identification and surveillance technologies.

Joe Burns, Ph.D..-.And Remember: Mind your Ps and Qs! No matter which history of the term you give, someone has a different one they proclaim is correct. There are two that are most often stated as being the correct history. One is that Ps and Qs stood for pints and quarts. Barkeeps would keep a tab of drinks by marking P and Q down on a sheet. So, to mind your Ps and Qs was to keep an eye on what you drank. Tell that to someone. More than likely you'll get that that is wrong. He or she will most likely tell you the term came from early printing whereas the letters were placed, one by one into a plate that was then loaded into a press. The problem was that all the letters were backwards so they would print correctly on the paper. To mind the Ps and Qs was to make sure the correct letter was being used. Those are just the big two. Another is that the term is a shortened version of "Mind your Please and Thank-you" used in order to remind children to be polite. What about the theory that is came from the French? The term might have been from dance suggesting to students to mind their figures pieds and queues. I actually found seven different theories in just a quick look around.

Opensecrets.org--Money in politics data... Can big campaign contributions determine which bills become law? Find out where special interest groups stand on important issues, which elected officials received campaign contributions from those groups, and how Congress is handling related legislation.

Nolo Self-Help Law ... "When it comes to self-help legal stuff, nobody does a better job than Nolo." -- USA Today

A Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP 1.1... This document describes a subset of SOAP 1.1 that forms a basis for easy interoperation between different environments. When we refer to "SOAP" in this document we're referring to this subset of SOAP, not the full SOAP 1.1 specification.

Adobe helps graphic designers turn ideas into art. Adobe also helps turn security experts into felons.... On 16 July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by federal agents in Las Vegas, Nevada. His crime: pointing out major security flaws in Adobe PDF and eBook software.

Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.... Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Case highlights law's threat to fair-use rights (7/18/2001)... Under the DMCA, it's a crime to spread the word about technology that maintains your fair-use rights. One of these days, it may be a crime to talk about anything that displeases the control freaks who run the entertainment and software industries.

Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches... Strawberry Pop Tarts may be a cheap and inexpensive source of incendiary devices. Toasters which fail to eject Pop Tarts cause the Pop Tarts to emit flames 10-18 inches in height.

Guardian Unlimited:Douglas Rushkoff ... The internet is for amateurs.

Yahoo - Online Report Cards Draw High Marks... Web-based report cards are getting high marks in schools across the country, as online grading systems replace traditional paper reports.

XML's Greatest Hits (And Misses)... Tim Bray, CEO, antarcti.ca systems, co-editor XML 1.0 specification. The co-inventor of XML takes time off to evaluate what worked -and did not work- and suggests directions for future growth of the language. [2001-06-25] (0:39:24)

Patterns: Non-Software Examples of Software Design Patterns - AGCS... Software design patterns have roots in the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander, and in the object movement. According to Alexander, patterns repeat themselves, since they are a generic solution to a given system of forces. The object movement looks to the real world for insights into modeling software relationships. With these dual roots, it seems reasonable that software design patterns should be repeated in real world objects. This paper presents a real world, non software instance of each design pattern from the book, Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software [13]. The paper also discusses the implications of non-software examples on the communicative power of a pattern language, and on design pattern training.

Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq... The instant message has fast become a staple of European corporate communication. The technique spread from Finnish children to businessmen because the kids taught their parents. Nokia employed anthropologists to tell them this. Finland has become the first nation on earth to acknowledge formally the childcentric model of economic development: if you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed to promote rapid technical change, and if you intended to promote rapid technical change, you needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority.

The Parking Meter Page - History... The world's first installed parking meter was in Oklahoma City, on July 16, 1935. Mr. Magee had been appointed to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce traffic committee, and was assigned the task of solving the parking problems in downtown Oklahoma City. Apparently, folks who worked in the area were parking on downtown streets, staying all day, and leaving few spaces for shoppers and others who visited the central business district.

IBM: Web services : A Primer for HTTPR... Reliable HTTP (HTTPR) is a new protocol that offers the reliable delivery of HTTP packets between the server and client. This solves a number of issues that are evident in current HTTP and opens the way to reliable messaging between Web services.

Top VC Doerr apologizes for helping fuel dot-com frenzy (7/15/2001)... Silicon Valley's highest-profile venture capitalist, John Doerr, publicly apologized Sunday for his famous statement that characterized the Internet as ``the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.''

From blackholebrain - an interesting article on libraries in the internet age:... But why aren't writers suing the public libraries? Maybe the more important question is why do people still buy books? I believe the library system still works for many obvious reasons, but the primary reason libraries exist today is the same as *forever ago* when the first libraries were established: love of the craft. Writers love to write... and they love to read... and they want as many other people doing the same.

Zoom in on Los Angeles, California -- The image shows the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles, California. It is the final frame in an animation that demonstrates the wide range of spatial resolutions viewed by current state-of-the-art sensors.

Watching the Creation of Southern California's Largest Reservoir ...The new Diamond Valley Lake Reservoir east of Temecula is billed as the largest earthworks construction project in U.S. history. Construction began in 1995 and involved 31 million cubic meters of foundation excavation and 84 million cubic meters of embankment construction. See it from space courtesy of NASA's Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR).

Summer Friday Nights - Old Town Temecula... July 6th through September 28th - every Friday Night (5:00pm- 9:00pm) - it's HOT SUMMER NIGHTS IN OLD TOWN TEMECULA - bands, singing, carraige rides and more(909) 694-6412.

Roy Rogers (Leonard Franklin Slye) -- Encyclopædia Britannica Article -- American cowboy actor-singer (b. Nov. 5, 1911/12, Cincinnati, Ohio--d. July 6, 1998, Apple Valley, Calif.), starred in some 90 motion pictures and over 100 episodes of a weekly television show from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s and reigned as king of the cowboys...

OpinionJournal - Court Ruling Was No Victory For Microsoft -- King Pyrrhus, meet Bill Gates. BY ROBERT H. BORK AND KENNETH W. STARR -- While trumpeting last week's "victory" in the Court of Appeals, Microsoft executives would do well to recall the words of King Pyrrhus after his famous battle with the Romans: "One more such victory and we are lost." ...

Who would call this a win for Microsoft?... Thomas Madsen-Mygdal has excerpted and annotated the decision, showing text that affirms the lower court rulings. Microsoft hasn't won. It's just that a different judge will determine the punishment.

Noted in one of this week's Infoworld columns: "If you were supposed to understand it, we wouldn't call it code."

Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction. A simple design always takes less time to finish than a complex one. So always do the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you find something that is complex replace it with something simple. It's always faster and cheaper to replace complex code now, before you waste a lot more time on it. Keep things as simple as possible as long as possible by never adding functionality before it is scheduled. Beware though, keeping a design simple is hard work.

Australian IT on WEBLOGS - BLOGGING is an unfortunate word. It sounds like some worthy, rather dull activity, yet keeping a weblog, at its best, is nimble and quick-witted, hard to capture in old media prose.

Andrea's Weblog: Fried Rice Recipe - TRADITIONAL MANDARIN FRIED RICE Recipe Courtesy of Ming Tsai, (modified by Al Hawkins)

Inheriting Physics, By Susan Kitchens on her gandfather's 100th Birthday - - ... Susan writes: I'm so glad to be able to come here and hear stories about your growing-up years and your working years and to learn all manner of things that took place before my time. And grandpa, a love of learning is just one of the many things that you've demonstrated that is part of a rich intangible inheritance. I rejoice in the vitality of your mind and heart. I'm so proud to have a grandfather who has reached such a splendid great age. Even now you are still learning, and I gladly claim that as a thing I have inherited from you. Happy Birthday!

You should follow the link and read the entire essay.

Arabs See Jewish Conspiracy in Pokemon - - Oh boy! What's that saying? . . . Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. Some Mullah obviously has too much time on his hands.

Copyright tempest over `The Wind Done Gone' is outrageous - - BY DAN GILLMOR, Mercury News : In the war raging over ``intellectual property,'' the news from the front hasn't been encouraging, as corporate interests slaughter the public good in case after case. But a lawsuit involving the work of a famous American author could help put at least one issue in front of a public that remains remarkably oblivious. On Friday, a federal judge blocked the publishing of a novel called ``The Wind Done Gone'' -- a retelling of the 1936 saga ``Gone With the Wind'' from the perspective of a slave, a half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara. The estate of Margaret Mitchell, the ``Gone With the Wind'' author, had sued on the grounds that the book violated copyright protections.

It is generally agreed that the loudest sound ever produced (in recorded history) was the volcanic eruption on Krakatoa in 1883. The blast created a sound wave that sent a tidal wave halfway across the world. The wave was so strong that it blew a Dutch warship 30 feet onto the land in the Harbor of Batavia (now Djakarta). - - - - - Joe Burns, Ph.D.

Greeting Cards - Java Lake effect greeting cards from Lake Cards Java Lake Effects Greeting Cards. Send these beautiful Java Lake effect greeting cards to your friends and loved ones for free!

My Daughter, Megan, sent me one of these with hot air balloons over a lake. It's sooooooo cool! Note: Greeting cards require that Java be enabled.

Dave Winer, Scripting News -- Reminder, it's Tuesday and that means only one thing. Take a programmer to lunch. Give your friend the programmer a hug, a meal, some fresh air, and listen. Ask how it's going. What do you think of this or that. How could it all work better. Listen. There's a mind in there. Don't be afraid. Programmers can be friendly if you just give them a chance.

BTW, all programmers want to tell you How It Works. In excruciating detail. As if you cared. Try to be patient.

The WIZ Project -- It starts with the creation of a new race of creatures, little guys called WIZes. And it follows through with how they will change the way the Human race relates to the material universe and to each other. Physically, a WIZ is a small piece of electronics, perhaps the size of a pea. It is self-powered, and in radio communication with all other WIZes. Electrically, a WIZ is a general purpose electronic circuit which will replace just about every other electronic circuit on the planet. Look at anything that has electronics in it today. A single pea-sized WIZ replaces it. And functionally, a WIZ is a bit of a "mind". A WIZ-mind is a communication and control system between a human and a WIZ-object. A WIZ-mind is able to sense its environment, make recordings of its environment, compare the current environment to previously recorded environments, and make decisions which produce the best chance of success. I see the WIZ as operating mainly in two spheres of existence. One, as a mind in all material, electrical, or mechanical objects. And secondly, as the pure beingness of a "communicator".

DaveNet : The Web is a Writing Environment -- Just as typewriters fell by the wayside as word processors and inexpensive printers came online, the big brand names of journalism are relatively slow and dilutive, and don't deliver enough flow. Amazingly the print publishers are pulling back from the Web, as if to say "Whew glad that's over." Fundamental mistake. When their point of view is no longer on the Web, there will be no more barrier to entry. What follows? Explosive deconstruction of the brand names of journalism. What's said outside the barriers is already more interesting. Eventually we will shed our need for approval from the brand names of journalism. Today they look for teddy bears and warm-fuzzies, the cute stories that mask the real one -- writers who work for others have less integrity to offer than those who do it for love. Dave Winer

Tech Workers' Stock Options Turn Into Tax Nightmares - By LIZ PULLIAM WESTON, P.J. HUFFSTUTTER, JON HEALEY, Times Staff Writers

Thousands of technology workers are facing huge tax bills by Monday's income tax filing deadline because of company stock they purchased last year that has since plummeted in value. Accountants and politicians from Silicon Valley to Boston say they have been inundated with horror stories about shares purchased with employee options that workers once had hoped would make them rich. Instead, the shares saddled them with big tax bills on profit they never saw. Many of these workers now owe far more in taxes than their stock is worth. Former Cisco engineer Jeffrey Chou, 32, owes $2.5 million in taxes on company stock he purchased last year that has since withered in value. Chou figures that if he were to sell everything he owns, including the three-bedroom townhouse that he shares with his wife and 8-month-old daughter, the family still could not pay the bill. Chou used incentive options to buy, in one transaction, about 100,000 Cisco shares in March 2000, paying 5 cents to 10 cents a share. At the time, Cisco shares were trading for $62 to $63 each. The difference between the price he paid and what the shares were worth--a total of about $7 million--is taxable to him as profit. Chou could sell his shares now, but it wouldn't solve his problem. Cisco closed Thursday at $17.98, which means that his entire stake is worth about $1.8 million. To pay his state and federal tax bills, he needs $700,000 more.

Firms underestimate power of 'blogging' - There's an Internet application that few people have heard about, although it is gaining popularity and will likely become a regular part of our working lives. It's called a Web log, or "blog." And yet, for a technology that is so useful, Web logs are surprisingly absent from corporate intranets. That's because, as with e-mail 10 years ago, few in the corporate sector understand their power -- until they begin using them regularly.

Java-enabled air conditioners - Carrier, in Farmington, Conn., is one of the leading consumer and commercial providers of heating, ventilating, and refrigeration systems. The company inked a deal this week with IBM that will put Java-enabled microchips inside carrier air conditioners to allow air conditioner owners to remotely set the temperature or to switch on or off their air conditioners. The system will also send fault code and diagnostic alerts in real time to a service technician's cell phones or PDAs. Alerts can also be sent via e-mail or fax.

Harness the excess power in your PC to fight Cancer - I'm a fan and supporter of Seti@home but here's something new. Computer owners have the opportunity to use their personal computing resources to perform scientific research, such as searching for improved treatments and potential cures for cancer and other diseases, by downloading a computer program to their PCs from the Internet. It is projected that the resulting "virtual supercomputer" will ultimately be capable of more than 50 teraflops (trillions of operations per second) of computational power and involve millions of participants, and will be ten times more powerful than today's highest performing supercomputers. In many ways this is even more appealing than Seti@home.

And Remember: The Howard Hughes plane, "The Spruce Goose" was actually made of birch wood. The nickname was not invented for the Hughes plane anyway. At the time, almost any wooden plane was nicknamed a Spruce Goose. When Hughes built the massive aircraft, the media just perpetuated the name. It is said that Hughes greatly disliked the moniker. Joe Burns, Ph.D.

"Fear of a Hacked Planet", MSN Computing Central - Uncle Sam subjects new drugs to thorough scrutiny before approving them. Were he equally careful with new laws, people wouldn't wonder whether his top hat and beard conceal Big Brother underneath. At issue: the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Convention, which, said former deputy associate attorney general Ethan M. Posner during congressional testimony in May 2000, "will define cybercrime offenses and address such topics as jurisdiction, international cooperation, and search and seizure." Not to mention threatening the rights of individuals and businesses worldwide, according to numerous opposition groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology, or CDT.

RANDOM - A very interesting experiment in interactive Flash animation. While trying the different forms be sure to move the mouse around to different points on the screen.

And Remember: Did you know the great English playwright William Shakespeare Actually mentioned America in one of his plays? It was "The Comedy of Errors." Act III, Scene II. Joe Burns, Ph.D.