GEEK PRIDE FESTIVAL A 2 Day Celebration of the Geek Way of Life. Speakers, Quake, Music, Bouncy room, Movies, Nerf Battles for real this time, screeching violins, and a whole lot more!

BYTE Column - What The Heck Is SOAP, Anyway?, David S. Platt Given the heterogeneity of the Internet environment, our new programming strategy needs to separate the representation of the function call from the protocol used to transport the call from one box to another. For encoding this information, we'll have to find the lowest common denominator that everyone on the Internet supports. As international air-traffic control uses English (even in France), the lowest common denominator for data encoding on the Internet is XML, and this is what we'll use for representing our function calls.

FEED | RE: Ian Clarke talking about FREENET At first, the world at large ignored the Internet, missed its significance, scoffed, then jumped in with both feet, thinking it was a bandwagon, asked the wrong questions about how to make money with it, got too excited when it seemed to be something it wasn't, got too depressed when it turned out to be what it is. Mirrored fractal nets within nets: the collective intelligence of the human race unfolding in real time -- and for the first time, on its own terms. The Internet routes around obstacles; the bigger the obstacle, the more joyous the detour. The humorless power of the state, the iron-fisted control demanded by the corporation, the sexless desire insinuated by broadcast advertising -- all are falling to networked imagination.

National Fire News - Large Wildland Fires If you live in the west and smell smoke, this site will show you why. It will also tell how you can help.

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music Microsoft: "During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play Fur Elise or It's a Small, Small World seemingly at random...This is a design feature..."

Claudia Schiffer is my Pilot!The supermodel's special-edition Palm PDA inspires aisles full of celebrity gadgets at K-mart.By Janelle Brown

I Bet You Thought The Record Companies Had It Bad? Taking a cue from music-bootlegging teenagers, sewing enthusiasts have discovered that they too can steal copyrighted material over the Internet, thanks to anonymous file-sharing techniques. Like the record industry, the sewing world has been unable to come up with any practical alternative to innovative file-swapping communities that proliferate online. Some of the same entertainment conglomerates whose music divisions are fighting Napster--such as Time Warner--are also feeling the pinch from the pattern-swapping.

IBM offers free tool for writing Linux software The tool, called "Sash Weblications," allows Web developers who don't have extensive programming experience to write software that runs on the increasingly popular Linux operating system. Big Blue has taken a keen interest in Linux in recent months. The company is attempting to position itself as a leader in the Linux market, should it develop into a sizable business, by offering the operating system on all of its computer systems. Last month, IBM sweetened pricing for Linux on its mainframe systems in an effort to remove some of the obstacles of running the operating system on large computers.

BetaNews - Stephen King Novel Downloads Break Records Internet distribution of The Plant, the new novel by Stephen King, topped 100,000 completed downloads in its first two days of online sales, Conxion, the Internet operator handling the e-book, announced. The download, the firm said, was a record for King's work, and a respectable figure for the digital delivery of books. Antonio Salerno, Conxion's CEO, said that King has become a pioneering author in digitally delivering his books directly to readers.

Fortune 2000 Retirement Guide: Introduction: Retire Rich None of it makes sense--the frantic saving, those grueling 18-hour workdays--without keeping the fantasy firmly in mind. The empty beach, soft as talcum under your toes. The breathtaking mountain retreat that's actually home, not a two-week hideaway. Retirement, on your terms. Yes, that's the goal. The task, however, is getting there in one piece.

Hey PDA! There's a penguin nipping at your ankles! I just bought a Handspring Visor Deluxe for my wife and while we're generally happy with it the screen takes some getting used to. That's hardware. This link points to an article concerning attempts to put Linux on Windows CE PDAs.

NASA Historical Archive for Manned Missions Want to know the what and why of the US space program? This NASA site has a wealth of information.

Edgar Governo, Historian of Things That Never Were A collection links to (mostly) other sites containing alternate timelines of fictional history. You might think that was a limited field, but he's collected 188 examples by now. Dune, Heinlein, Asimov, H2G2, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Highlander, Wing Commander, anime…the range is amazing

Add a little spice to your life Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages will tell you everything you evr wanted to know (and maybe didn't want to know) about spices from around the world.

Applause for IE's Cookie Catcher "Microsoft has started an important correction ... (in) its decision to make its Web browser stop and ask users before reporting data about them," said Richard Smith, a prominent security expert who has exposed several Internet privacy bugs.

Can light travel faster than light? For weeks, scientific circles have been buzzing about an experiment that pulsed light through a special chamber so fast that it left the apparatus before it fully entered it. The answer is no, light can't travel faster than light. It's a matter of interpretation of the theory of relativity. In other words, it's all relative. &;^)

Stephen King to post book on Web, sell it directly, bypassing publishers Stephen King plans to begin an experiment in direct publishing Monday by posting the first installment of a new novel online and asking readers to pay through the honor system. Installment one of "The Plant" will be posted on King's Web site on July 24 and installment two on Aug. 21. Part three will appear in September if "pay-through" equals or exceeds 75 percent, according to a message on his Web site dated July 11. Readers will be asked to send King a check or money order for $1 per installment in a direct transaction that King describes as a way to thumb your nose at the publishing industry.

The Constitution of the United States The work of many minds, the Constitution stands as a model of cooperative statesmanship and the art of compromise.

Why Encrypt Your Email? Like a mile-long drift net that snatches up dolphins, corpses and fifty-five gallon drums of toxic waste along with tuna, the FBI’s new "data sniffer" equipment, Carnivore, doesn’t care whose email it snags and scrutinizes. The FBI demonstrated the technology weeks ago, which can examine millions of email messages in a short period of time, but admitted that it was in use for over a year before being publicly acknowledged."

DaveNet: Tom Matrullo on Napster "...Mozart once heard a piece of music so piercingly beautiful that he was moved to write it down from memory after hearing it performed in a church. He had no choice. The church believed it "owned" the music, and forbade anyone to copy it. So, Mozart pulled a Napster. The piece has been in the public domain ever since, for all to enjoy...." Just one small paragraph from an excellent essay.

Mp3 Discman MPTrip Discman. Now you can record the MP3 files to a 650 megabyte CD-R or CD-RW and play them directly on an MP3 player. Each CD-R or CD-RW can hold more or less 160 songs, which can be arranged in different directories in the order that you want. Of course it plays regular audio cds too.

The U.S. women's water polo team made it clear to the world that it is a gold medal threat come Sydney. The Americans went 6-0 in the 2000 Holiday Cup and defeated world powers in the process.

The Future of Energy What is needed is a system that generates electrical power locally, uses resources that almost everybody has in their backyard, and operates with minimal emissions of pollutants. And, while we're at it, let's say it should be as quiet as a household air conditioner.

Figure This One Out Two triangles formed using the same "puzzle" pieces, but in different positions. The triangles have the same dimensions but one has a "bite" taken out of it.

Speech recognition leaders aim to give PDAs a voice and ears "Excuse me - are you talking to me or your PDA?" Coming soon from the technology world: another inanimate object to talk with. Two leaders in speech recognition, IBM and Belgian speech technology giant Lernout & Hauspie, have each built speech-enabled prototypes of handheld devices that could be commercially available as early as next year.

UC Santa Cruz Puts Human Genome Online/Programming wizard does job in 4 weeks The human genome has been called the Book of Life, but it's one tome few have ever seen. That started to change yesterday, after the University of California at Santa Cruz unveiled a Web site -- http://genome.ucsc.edu/ -- where people can download the only completely assembled version of the human genetic code for free.

Dave’s Page of Bogus Science Many of us now use this time to whine about the very things that made it possible. Sadly, the typical American acquires most of his or her “science” knowledge from TV and movie stars, politicians, and cartoon characters. The result is a lot of bad, dangerous, and sometimes funny science.

How Fireworks Really Work As you ooh and aah at the dazzling explosions of a fireworks display, there are three things going on that you probably wouldn’t guess: The chemists who made those pyrotechnics designed most of them so they wouldn’t explode, you’re actually seeing nature conserving energy, and most peculiar of all, when things are at their flashiest, you’re actually seeing the fireworks as they’re cooling down.