... and doh! I now see Camp Concentration was specifically mentioned in the lead article. OK, I'll add The Genocides for people who like really really really depressing SF.

The story of the Brave Little Toaster is an altogether different thing from the movie. I would have said you couldn't possibly make a Tom Disch story into a movie for kids, but I was surprised; deadpan humor/satire in the former turns into straight if very odd children's fare. (I actually liked both in very different ways.)

Disch's writing is all over the map. If you want something sparkling and spectacular but easy to read, I recommend his early novel Camp Concentration; somewhat the same sense of black humor as Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. I suspect it would appeal to a lot of BoingBoingers.

Probably the reason they'd be launching it is so that they are not vulnerable to the US turning off the unencrypted GPS service. (Even if we no longer deliberately degrade the open service, I bet it can be turned off at a moment's notice.)

As to the Galileo system, if the EU ever fails to turn it off on US demand, the US DoD has threatened to shoot down their satellite network. (I can imagine some scenarios where that wouldn't be entirely unreasonable, though they may not be too likely.)

What a great idea! I'll buy one for some group even though I haven't read the book yet, because I just like the idea.

(And Hellhead, no we don't all think you work for the devil. SRS, CPS, whatever your state calls it provides a sadly necessary service, at the cost of getting blamed both for intervening too soon and too often and for not intervening fast enough or often enough.)

"No one considers me a 'loon,' either."

I've got some bad news about that.

This is just about the perfect Boing-Boing headline. I would have liked it for that reason alone, even if I didn't like the print. Me happy.

Suggestion: at the end of the trip, note down anything you brought that you didn't use once. After a couple times doing that, you'll know for yourself what you can leave behind next time, without needing to listen to a bunch of dicks telling you how they'd do it.

The NEC Starlet, ca. 1984. 80x16 monochrome display, nice keyboard, RS-232 and built-in 1200 baud modem, ran CP/M, and had WordStar and a terminal program in ROM. It could run for about 8 hours on C batteries. Very fine little computer for the day. My employer back then used to have a small pool of them to loan out for the travelers.

Takuan @ #69

"Firearm suicide rates are strongly impacted by the rate of gun ownership. (Kaplan and Geling, 1998)"

So if you don't own a gun, it's harder to kill yourself with a gun? As surprises go, that would be right up there with a study revealing that deaths by motor car were extremely rare prior to 1900.

It does not, however, say one thing about the overall suicide rate. If the same number of people snuff themselves without guns via hanging, drowning, pills or what-not, there would be no overall effect on the net suicide rate, so this statistic would be valid but meaningless.

I believe when you look at gun ownership vs. overall suicide rate, it does end up having a definite correlation, but a very small one. (This is probably because suicide attempts with a gun are more likely to succeed than with most other methods.)

You should remember that the FCC went all the way to the Supreme Court demanding a ruling that they did not need to uphold any laws passed by Congress - and got it.

This is why you don't have cable Internet access offered by your choice of ISPs, as the law says you should, and instead you have to take whatever the cable monopoly and telco monopoly dole out to you. That's what the FCC wants.

A great band. "I bought my baby/A red radio..."

padster123:

I think what you really meant to say is, "I can't think of any way this can be justified, and it scares me - so I'll just make up a completely different set of facts on my own and pretend they were the case."

I just realized I was remiss in not mentioning Octopus Pie's notional Bake 'n Bake bakery: "Every baker is totally high."

Hegemonic?!?

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

BTW, I think Baldhead is actually Indie Rock Pete's posting pseudonym.

So first the military bans all soldiers from blogging because it's a security threat, and then they determine that they need to go looking to secretly recruit bloggers? Genius!

Congrats and good luck!

That was certainly my favorite paragraph of the morning.

Those would be klystrons, used to distribute a very narrow high-voltage high-amp pulse to all the explosive detonators and possibly other components of the bomb simultaneously. Coordinating the explosive lenses is supposed to be one of the trickier parts of getting a plutonium bomb to go bang rather than blow itself to pieces.

#19: Sorry, but I have to jump in there: Ursula LeGuin never wrote anything of the kind.

You're mixing up her Hain with R.A. Lafferty's lovely satirical short stories 'Polity and Custom of the Camiroi' and 'Primary Education of the Camiroi'.

Spammers have been advertising searches for a while now, as a technique for getting around URL blacklists. If you make some unusual combination of words point to a page, then you can have a Google search take you to that unique spamvertised page.

My cats started howling half-way through.

I'm sorry, but this is only a papercraft LOLcat. I wanted a steampunk papercraft LOLcat that saves the Internet from censorship via Creative Commons remixed mash-ups, and you all are bastards because you aren't giving me one.

Thanks much to Ben Johnson for the link bomb above! Those all sound incredibly cool, especially The Shab al-Hiri Roach. Man, I've got to get back into gaming.

Actually, Spitzer may be an excellent example of Schneier's point. (We don't know all the facts yet.) We do know, though, that it wasn't some informal network of bloggers Bringing Knowledge to the People that socked it to him.

His name was, apparently, given out to the media by an insider on an investigation run by the FBI. Now the FBI is not well known for the way it stands up for the Little People when politics is involved. Maybe it's coincidence that the FBI leaked only his name out of 9+ important people under investigation, maybe it was a chance to whack on a prominent NY Democrat in an election year, maybe the anonymous informant was pissed off at Spitzer's hypocrisy in denouncing prostitution rings in NYC while visiting one in DC, maybe he plans to collect a favor from someone in Wall Street who still has it in for Spitzer, or maybe some other reason. All the same, I don't think you can call that one for Transparency. Just DC political backstabbing as usual.

Unicorn chaser, stat!

A net-friend in Ireland has sworn by emusic for years.

Hawaii thrives on kimchi too, a requisite accompaniment of every plate lunch, with no higher stomach cancer rates.

The epidemiology showing higher rates of stomach cancer in Korea and Japan (where they don't eat kimchi) is usually attributed to the light talc coating that most rice was traditionally sold with in those countries. Powdered talc is a known carcinogen which is why you no longer find it in baby powder.

As regards the worries about space-mutated kimchee, Korean science can be a little odd at the fringes. For example, it is widely believed in Korea, even by many doctors, that sleeping with a fan running in a closed room is deadly, as it can suck all the air away from the sleeper causing asphyxiation. Despite the complete thermodynamic impossibility of this theory, believers come up with elaborate rationales as to how sleeping with a fan "actually" causes hypothermia, hyperthermia, or various other bogus explanations, and many unattended deaths are set down to fan death.

Google "fan death" if you think I'm making this up.

Besides borrowing the visual style, the ad also uses fonts strongly associated with Apple ads; that's another way to borrow the cachet.

I just think it's hilarious that someone who has chosen the name 'Moonbat' to describe himself will rant for post after post on thread after thread about how nobody takes him seriously, and how it's all because of their bad bad groupthink. Impressive.

"I'm terribly sorry your expectations were not congruent with reality. Maybe you could start your own blog and write about the Bedu and what it feels like to possess such a fully developed sense of entitlement?"

Dear JOEL JOHNSON, you win one Internet. Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. May require some assembly.

Holy shit. That's even worse than what most people thought of for the reasons they were hiding those meetings.

Note that the US indeed has usury laws about the maximum rate of interest that could be charged to the public. Why? Because all kinds of institutions used to do this exact same thing to all the poor up through the '30s, and the public finally got disgusted with it. (For those who like old music, listen to some of the "furniture man" songs like 'Cocaine Blues' and understand that this is what they referred to.)

During the early '80s, the "usury" laws got effectively sidelined for banks, and payday lenders worked out how to do some manipulation of the laws on the books against "loan sharks", accompanied with sob-story justifications about how much better the poor people with bad credit would be if only we allowed them to get the loans that the poor sympathetic lenders would only make them at interest rates above 400% per annum.

Well, you'll be pleased to know it worked! Ever since the 1980s, there are no more poor people! Everybody is better off! And they all have ponies!

Well, Mercedes Lackey for one says she writes fanfic (game-based) but the difference I see is that she hasn't come out and said "Here's a complete fanfic novel I wrote, enjoy!"

If she did, I'd be very surprised if Cory didn't note it here; I expect the reason he's noting this, given his espoused values, is that it includes: 1) Very fine F&SF pro writer, 2) doing for-the-love fanfic, 3) under Creative Commons license.

Besides, if you've never read any of Steve Brust's books, you should, and now you can do it for no money. He's a fantastic writer.

I am surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Azorian Blue Hades as a possibility (cf. Stross.)

Gosh, how the English language has degenerated since my younger days. Why when I was a youth, it was a simple rule that the girls should be called douche-bags, and the boys should be called scum-bags. Simple and clear.

Moon, it's good to know then that Mexico must have no problems with gun violence, since they have strict gun control throughout the whole country. It's a pity though how everyone who lives there is hallucinating a huge problem with rampant shootings by drug gangs.

Alternatively, maybe passing laws against something doesn't magically make it vanish. You think?

Consider carefully Takuan's note @ 192. There are societies with near-universal gun ownership and very low homicide rates, and societies with near-universal gun ownership and high homicide rates, and societies with almost no gun ownership and very low homicide rates, and societies with almost no gun ownership and high homicide rates.

Why do Americans kill each other in such astoundingly greater numbers than Canadians, Norwegians, or Swiss, when guns are quite accessible in those countries? I think it's necessary to look more to cultural differences as to where the problem lies.

Congratulations, Cory! Parenthood is the most worthwhile adventure in life. Don't let any naysayers get you down; 21 years ago I gave my daughter an unusual name, and she has thrived with it.

If you don't like beets, then I suggest not licking the streets in Cincinnati. Just a thought.

Genghis Blues is a amazing film. Incredible heart, incredible people. (Netflix has it, if you don't want to buy a copy sight unseen.)

Korpo: You seem to know a lot about terrorists' plans. OK with you if we decide you know too much and start waterboarding you until you confess your involvement with terrorists?

You will, you know.

One of the crazier parts surrounding this is that our training programs in torture and allowed forms of torture are based on the torture experiences that Special Forces troops and other groups in the military were forced to go through; this is because the military wanted them to understand that they would break eventually and confess to whatever the torturer wanted. This in turn, is because North Korea, North Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia had used those techniques on American prisoners and gotten nearly all of them to confess to all kinds of imaginary atrocities. (For example, US pilots captured by North Korea confessed to germ warfare after prolonged sleep deprivation, cold, and "stress positions".) We're torturing with the techniques our worst enemies in the Cold War used to extract false confessions, and then pretending that whatever confessions they produce are true, just as they did.

To make it shorter, the US has chosen to become what we once claimed to most hate. (And while I'd like to Believe it's just our government and not our people, the Americans who keep showing up here to defend torture prove that that's wrong.)

Dang, Teresa, now I want one of those obsidian knives. Some of those are gorgeous.

The Moomin books are awesome. Hunt them all out for your kids, and you'll enjoy them for yourself.

... and then the butler says "If it's gonna be that kinda party, I'm'a stick my dick in the mashed potatoes" - It's the punchline to an old dirty joke. Unfortunately I've never been able to find the first part of the joke.

Jan Svankmajer's Alice was pretty awesome, but I like his Faust better. Say, can we have a Tim Burton version of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus? That would be just luscious.

With regard to that copyright infringement checkbox notice, I feel I must post a relevant link to the second geekiest* webcomic I read:

The technology really is designed this way

Matt Skala has also written an excellent essay on the fundamental folly of DRM, entitled What Colour are your bits?

Svein: Splendid idea! I suggest you post your credit card number here, as evidence that your idea is your own and not somebody else's copyrighted material! In other words, no thanks.

* next to XKCD.

One semi-joking theory has postulated that AI is most likely to emerge evolutionarily from the arms race between spamware and spam filtering software. Perhaps instead it will emerge from the arms race between text and music pirates and antipirating software.

At least in this case, the burgeoning AIs might be more literate and attentive to nuances of the human experience.

Android @11: The sacred herb habafropzipulops. You know, 'frop. It's a SubGenius thang.

Wow, thanks! That just went on my Christmas wish list.

Does anyone remember the incredible PBS documentary on the 1939 World's Fair, The World of Tomorrow, written by John Crowley?

He really captured a special feeling about the fair, a combination of giddy optimism about the distant future with unease and avoidance of the very foreboding present (with all the international pavilions celebrating friendship and peace, just before Hitler's Anschluss into Poland.) Man, I'd love to see that available on video.

One moment from it, segueing from the World's Fair to The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy and her friends run towards the distant Emerald City, was hauntingly evocative, and has stayed with me in the 20-some years since I last saw it.

Thanks Beanolini for that link. I had no idea that it came from somewhere prior to the Illuminatus series. You learn something every day...

<cough> Much as I'm fond of Charlie Stross, that would be a Robert Anton Wilson/Bob Shea quote.

Realcatholicmen @ #41: ...why would I want to copy a book? What would I copy it to? I never feel the need to copy a real book, so I'm not sure why I'd copy an eBook.

Well, let's see. Suppose the Kindle doesn't sell because too many people have qualms about it, and it's discontinued next year after you've bought $300-400 worth of books for it. Or, suppose 15 years have gone by and Amazon is out of business and its successor doesn't give a damn. Hmmm. Might you not want to still read those books, particularly as you've said you like to keep books and reread them? With a paper book, it's no problem. With something in an open electronic format, it's also no problem. With DRMed media you're out of luck if you can't convert it - and you're breaking the law if you do convert it, even for perfectly valid reasons.

Naturally the what-if cases I gave above are hypothetical, because the product's just been introduced; they're not going to kill it in its first week. They'll continue to be hypothetical right up until it goes away, and then they'll be real problems. I've been around the computer industry nearly 30 years now, and seen data retention and conversion problems happen with pretty much every proprietary format, again and again.

If you plan to use it with non-DRMed media, the DRM still poses a problem, though a lesser one. It requires obstacles be put in the way of doing whatever-you-like with the product (because that might enable you to break the DRM.) I think that's the other half of what Cory's getting at. That's annoying, but a lesser problem.

It's why I won't buy music off the iTunes store, but have an iPod loaded with the MP3s I've recorded off my CDs. I'm OK with it as a player, just not as the gatekeeper for what I own.

Another case I recall here in Hawaii: maybe about 20 years back, the Mormon Church in Laie attempted to use adverse possession to claim a number of properties of land surrounding the temple there. What made it particularly egregious was that the land in question belonged to a number of families which had been long-standing members of the church. What a nice way to reward your parishioners' devotion, by trying to seize their property!

Niftier and niftier. One of these days I'll start blogging, but until then, what could be nicer than being treated as an appreciated guest in a neat hang-out? "Drink to me only with thine fox!"

Hmmm... this might actually point to a solution to a problem where I'm working now. I'm a software guy not a hardware guy, but I've been overhearing their discussions. If you're dealing with trying to accurately measure and calibrate oscillators in the GHz range for technical measurement hardware, apparently you've got a big problem with 1) inherent imprecision in your oscillator frequencies, 2) drift, and 3) figuring out what to calibrate against. If it's possible to get a rubidium atomic oscillator this small... wow. I think I'll mail the hardware guys this link.

Have they installed the flash-bakes yet, or is that another couple weeks away?

Jay: Touché!

"This is Gen1. How secure was email when it started?"

Totally insecure and open by design. Gee, you think maybe that's why over 90% of email volume today is spam, and why pretty much anybody can send email that looks like it came from pretty much anybody they'd like?

If you don't design a security model into a system at the outset, it's exponentially harder to add it later, when it isn't flat-out impossible. Of course, there's also the little difference that nobody is suggesting implanting your MUA into your body.

Here is the actual Peter Gutmann presentation this article is based on. It is looking pretty scary out there.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/malware_biz.pdf

Just so it's not all gloom and doom, he also includes some suggestions on things that serious geeks can do to protect themselves, such as running a relatively less popular browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari), reading mail via a Unix shell interface, browsing through a filtering proxy you run yourself on a Unix box, etc.

The eyes are probably some kind of bacterial infection. Remember, no antibiotics back then.

Psoriasis is an autoimmune skin condition - red rashes and skin flaking. I suspect artistic license.

Obviously French airport security is being run by vampires.