This sounds like an excuse for Oyster card swap parties. Drop your new cash paid card into the bucket by the door as you arrive. Collect a random one on the way out.

Mine's the hoodie with the tinfoil lining.

Can they turn the plastic back into oil?

This is clearly straight out of Half Life, it just needs automating. So where are the paint ball versions of all the other Half Life weapons? Surely we *need* paint ball mines with laser proximity detection.

This seems to me to be a microcosm of the difference between corporate ethics and government ethics and the dangers of confusing the two. It seems inevitable that corporate ethics result in questionable moral behaviour in the pursuit of higher profits and shareholder value. But this is diametrically opposed or at best orthogonal to Government ethics which ought to be in pursuit of social value and the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. Whenever government decisions are driven by monetary gain (often justified with reference to "free market economics") those decisions eventually shift into the realm of corporate ethics.

Or in fewer words, give local government the power to make cash out of prosecuting violations and they'll eventually and inevitably abuse that power by encouraging violations or making violations impossible to avoid.

Can we expect to see them both turning up to all photo opportunities wearing latex gloves from now on? Or maybe secret service staff doing things like collecting their beer mugs when we get the kind of "meet the people" event where they demonstrate they're one of us by drinking a half of shandy in some northern village in front of TV cameras.

That'll be The Execution Channel then. Life imitates art yet again.

Re #9 and UK CCTV. I actually think it should be a legal requirement that every CCTV in a public place should be a publicly accessible webcam.

Of course that might lead to an escalation of the neighbourhood watch and curtain twitchers into lynch mob justice.

There's a delicious irony in a fully automated total surveillance state. It's only the criminals who are completely free. We're seeing this corollary in the UK now. Drive a car with no tax, insurance and a fake number plate (or better yet somebody else's) and you're completely immune from parking fines, the congestion charge, bus lane penalties, speeding tickets and so on. Get to know exactly where the cameras are (especially out of town) and you can treat most of the country as your own private race track.

Is "The Execution Channel" showing on Sky yet?

Am I wrong to have a perverse pride in seeing the UK leading the way and breaking new ground in Surveillance within a Liberal Democracy? Where the UK is now, you will be. Makes a change from; what happens in California eventually happens everywhere else.

Mine's the hoody with the embedded infra red lasers and tinfoil lining.

At least one story says that this will apply to the iTouch. Um, why? Or are Wifi networks as fragile as the Cell networks?

Oh. Wait. Right.

Complaining about Apple DRM is *ALWAYS* acceptable, even if the fanbois don't like it. In fact especially if the fanbois don't like it.

Amused to see that one has already turned up on the Infoweek article.

Ping-Pong throwies?

Those were the days! Time magazine cyberpunk edition. Science Fiction Eye. Mondo 2000. alt.culture. Smart drugs, RetroHell. Never mind "Bring Back Retro-Futurism", bring back the early 90s.

OMG! We got 7 of those for the kids. Needless to say I spent way more time than them building fleets of Starwars speeders.

I think there should be a special shout out for the motorized R2D2 as well. The last project we did with all the bits was a powered 6 leg walking insect.

"This internet thing you keep talking about. It'll never catch on. And if it does, we'll bury it."

That entire quote sounds like yet another cocaine decision. After all, what's happening to EMI could never happen to us...

The big problem up until the eeePC was that these things carried a seriously premium price.

I think there's a sweet spot here. Something with just a little more than the eeePC. The question is how much more without breaking the bank and scales. Or you can start at a full featured laptop and start leaving things out. Do we actually need a built in optical drive any more? Or an external PCMCIA slot? However, now that 1.8" drives are up to 160Gb I don't really want to lose the hard drive. And 1024 width is really a minimum which means a 10" screen. Then there's the processor. The 1.0GHz Via is just barely enough but low power is important.

I'm not sure what it is that is winding me up about this discussion or if those things are more a reflection on my mind than actually in the discussion. But I've been reading it (even contributed) and it's making me angry.

- It's titled "State of the world 2008" and Bruce started it with a global overview but it keeps getting dragged back to "USA this" and "USA that". Come on people. The world is more than the USA and you're in it.

- The endless doom and scarcity thinking, rightly named apocaphilia. Isn't anybody aggressively optimistic any more? Doesn't anybody want to think in terms of abundance instead of scarcity? Go back and read Buckminster Fuller. We're not in the end times, we've hardly begun.

- The feeling that this is a bunch of old fart hippies moaning into their bongs. Jeez' we even had the old "there's no good music any more" theme. Hasn't anyone noticed the fragmentation, long tail meme? There's more stuff, including music, being created and consumed by more people than even before. And even if 90% of it is shit as it's always been, that 10% of good stuff is bigger than ever. Just because the short head of mainstream culture is dying doesn't mean it's stopped.

Grrrr!

Except, Except, data on the web seems to have a half life despite the best efforts of the Wayback Machine. There's an awful lot of sites in the deadpool that took all their data with them.

Your requirements are a bit leading edge, but actually lots of people have the same problem and more are going to. There's a hole in the market for *home* NAS. Not SoHo or Enterprise but Home. And the few boxes available tend to be riddled with horrible MS Win only drivers.

What we need and what we want (right now!) is the old Linksys NSL-U2 "Slug" updated and put in an empty 2-4 bay 3.5" enclosure for a 100 bucks-quids. In fact they could put the guts of a WRT54G in there as well with a 4-8 gigabit hub as well and reduce the number of electricity sucking, always-on devices in the cupboard under the stairs. The nearest thing I've seen to this is the Buffalo Linkstation.

I'm reminded of Poindexter's Information Awareness Office (IAO)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

I love it when the real or imagined link between occult societies and the US military-industrial-government complex is hidden in plain sight. Is it all real or do the guys who design these things get a wicked grin from subverting the process?

In roughly 1966, a very similar magazine made a huge impression on me and led to a lifetime of SciFi reading. It's name, "You will go to the Moon." it had a fresh-faced (freckled) American kid flying to a moon base with his Senior Nasa Officer Dad and watching the World series on the way.

The definitive text on this stuff is of course Robert Anton Wilson's "Everything is under control"
http://www.rawilson.com/undercontrol.html

I was disappointed that David Icke didn't get a mention. The UK royal family as shape shifting, blood sucking lizards from Zeta Reticuli, running everything in the world for their dark eldritch purposes, really appeals to my sense of humour. That and Prince Charles performing baby sacrifices in the pyramid at the top of the phallic symbol, Canary Wharf, on the main intersection of ley-lines in London. It gets even better when the underlying ideas end up as story lines in Doctor Who.

At last we’ve got some real competition for iTMS with a product thats actually worth buying. 256Kbps VBR non-DRM MP3 is a good enough format. And there’s quite a lot of whole albums available at well below the $0.89 per track.

What we need next is a good old fashioned price war until the price drops to AllOfMp3 levels. Somewhere around there is a price point that can compete with free.

One of the sites I've created is an RSS aggregator of UK Political blogs. I had the phone call from somebody who claimed to be from Schillings demanding that a potentially libelous article shown on my site about Alisher Usmanov was removed. It took quite a while to work out what she was talking about and it turned out to be a copy of Craig's article that had been picked up by my RSS robot. She also claimed to have sent me a fax and email though neither have ever turned up.

She made the comment that it was proving very difficult to find all the copies, references and links. Particularly when Arsenal are involved so this was all over the football discussion forums. I'd been found via Google and then my Whois entry.

The whole story.
http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=3014

Make every CCTV a webcam. Why should they get all the fun?

It may be worse than it appears (to quote a famous blogger). Aledgedly, the new iPods also have encrypted firmware making Linux and Rockbox difficult or impossible. Although it may just be that the completely new hardware just requires a completely new port of the Rockbox and ipodlinux projects.

There's a lot riding on 3rd parties being able to build sync utilities. It's going to be very interesting watching to see if this is easy or hard over the next few weeks.

"It’s very humbling to know that we have set an Army historical mark in having the first successful launch in combat from an Army weaponized UAV"

Rather odd use of the word "humbling" there. Is that "humble" as in Uriah Heep? Shouldn't it be "We're insanely proud"?

This reminds me of the Bavarian Fire Drill from Robert Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. It's beginning to feel like real life is becoming more like that book, because the people designing this sort of craziness are copying it!

Just a thought. What if when confronted by TSA people shouting "Do Not Move" you immediately sit down? "Just Sitting" protest can be surprisingly effective.