@44

My immediate thought was "well then why isn't there an open source translation wiki for the Quran somewhere on the internet?" I see a need.

I put my Glen Ord in a dirty shotglass labelled 'Kernel Panic' which is expressly reserved for stressful programming situations at work.

I'll put those ice balls in my Jagermeister tho.

404

OB<

@6

That was my thought. I'm not impressed by the stealth aspect, I'm impressed that I could wear these on vacation and take pictures easily. I spend way too much time hauling the camera out of the case, turning it on, composing the picture, taking it, then turning the camera off and stowing it. If they added a heads-up display to this it would win.

I was tunneling down through some links on the main linked site and found this:

http://www.halproject.com/

which had some nifty HAL9000 screen savers and active desktops. I have been staring down the active desktop version for a little while and I am thinking, wouldn't this be a nifty way to read RSS feeds? I went looking for one but no one seems to have made one yet. Does anyone know if one exists? Because if not, I'm going to start coding one up.

Can't help you with the graphic, but I have been pointing out for years that Sinistar looks like Merv Griffin:

http://www.z7q2.com/merv_sinistar.jpg

@13

Elfquest (and Cerebus, the other comic I was collecting at the time) both got started before the infamous Black and White Crash of 1986. The first EQ run was just finishing up when TMNT#1 came out and started the wild speculation period. I was going to alot of conventions at the time, and all the high-priced crap that was being hawked at the time was apalling, very low signal-to-noise ratio. When the B&W market imploded soon afterwards B&W indy comics were a barren wasteland for more than 10 years. Opinion is varied on whether this was a good thing or not.

A good telling of the tale is here:

http://www.io.com/~patman/posts/thompson.txt

So in this context, it is more correct to call the Pinis 'pioneers', even though they were not the first indy publishers.

@9

OMFG A GEnie alumnus! I remember the EQ boards there well! S&SW!

GEnie as a whole had a most excellent SF/Comics discussion board section. I accessed it from a Mac Classic and a 2400 baud modem, and logged everything, so I have all those boards archived in plaintext. Lots of great interactive fanfic went on there.

Oh awesome! I had a piece in 'issue 21' of the original self-published run. Good lord that was a long time ago.

It will be great to read these again, I sort of lost track of what they were doing around 1990 or so.

It irks me that this never got animated properly. The Pinis did right I think to not let the various studios they tried to get it animated at ruin the story, which is the real treasure of the series.

@22

Not so much needed, as found useful on occasion. I keep my Altoids survival kit in the car and I have used the band-aids and the duct tape on the road. I keep a Pak-Lite in there too and that has proven useful many times.

In this case I think 'survival kit' is more of an anachronism. It's more like 'handy thing to pull out and impress people with' when the need arises.

You could drop $12.99+S&H on this, or you can take an Altoids tin and make your own. If you want waterproof, put it in a hardy ziplock bag. Once you crack open the sardine tin, you have to use all the stuff in it and then discard it. An Altoids tin is restockable.

I find this whole thing rather fascinating, and I am really curious how it is going to play out.

Bashing scientology on the internet has been going on since alt.religion.scientology, nearly 16 years now, and has generally involved a measure of personal risk to being subject to scientology's dirty tricks. Because of that, the digital battle so far has not yielded much real world organized protest because the stakes are too high. So it's very curious that Anonymous decided to take up this fight after all this time, prompted by nothing more than a video takedown threat and Gawker's defiance of it.

So far, they seem to be doing it because they think it's a funny thing to do. I am sure there is some genuine concern among Anonymous for the bad things scientology does, but it is still mostly posturing for the lulz. I do not think scientology is used to being laughed at so they haven't reacted yet.

I am very interested in how Anonymous will react once scientology starts punishing them for their insolence. This could get very interesting.

It's about crippling the Euro-based Iranian Oil Bourse. Once oil trading in Euros gets underway the dollar will suffer even more.

Bill Gates owns Corbis. It has not made any money yet and I think Bill would like it to make money. My thought was that MS may sell Flickr to Corbis after acquiring Yahoo, which lets Corbis cook up a scheme to help Flickr users make money by handling the licensing of their content. Right now you can license your Flickr content however you like. But if Corbis owned Flickr, they would be able to 'encourage' people to let Corbis handle their licensing rather than going the free or CC route.

When I want a certain image, I used to go to Google Image Search. But Flickr searches have yielded much better results for more than a year now. As a huge stock photo repository it has great value.

Perhaps the DOD employee who tagged the recently discovered evidence did so at a time soon after the disaster, before Central Park had been given a new name.

Clover is a great crop to grow in poor soil, and is one of the first plants to grow in an area after a disaster, such as a fire or volcanic eruption. So I was thinking that's the name that is ultimately settled on for post-monster Manhattan - Cloverfield.

At least Mr. Gibson went and saw the movie before opining on it. I took a friend to task last night for writing a screed about the movie without bothering to see it. He based his objections wholly on other people's (somewhat inaccurate) descriptions of the movie, which I find quite suspect.

Oh man, that video ends way too early. I SO want to hear what went down after the booming "HOLD PLEASE" voice.

Great stuff! Keep throwing monkey wrenches!

I'll second the 'when is it out of alpha' call, I've been waiting patiently on the sign-up list for awhile now. I am starting to wonder if Spore is going to get released first, which I can guarantee is going to take up ALL of my gaming time :)

Something to keep in mind when viewing stuff like this: it is very difficult for a school system to throw away textbooks. When new books are bought to replace the old ones, the old ones are typically warehoused. One of the reasons for this is that if schools are caught throwing away old books, bad publicity results, on the order of OMGWTF SCHOOLS ARE THROWING AWAY TAXPAYER-BOUGHT TEXTS WHAT A CRIME!!1. So they retire the books to mass storage until the silverfish eat them, or until they can be disposed of quietly.

It would be nice if they could be redistributed to other places that could use them, but it doesn't happen too often.

I rushed right out and bought this book after hearing an NPR piece about it about 2 weeks ago. The book is awesome, I read it over a weekend. It's philosophy fits right in with my low glycemic index diet.

If you care about your food you should definitely read it.

tl;dr: stop eating processed food and dead things

wireless modem

Now we need someone to come up with a $20 greybox that auto-hacks these to say I'M A DUMBASS when you drive by.

Aw yeah, one of my favorite error messages. Back in 2003 PostGreSQL would throw out a 'catastrophic failure' message in some situations. They disappeared after an upgrade, but I still thought they were kind of cool.

@#47

It's a whole new paradigm.

Right! And you know one of the best ways to use it? Embrace it! Abandon the controlled environment of the album and go with immediate distribution of your work as a promotional device.

Think of it as blogging. Bloggers are writers who write every day and publish immediately. As a musician you can do the same. The minute you write a song, put the demo on the web. As you work on it and revise it, keep putting the versions on the web. People will tune in and become part of the process. Don't wait for an album's worth of 'worthy' material to accumulate before you publish, publish every day, something, anything, like TMBG do with Dial-a-Song.

Show your worth as a musician and an artist and make stuff continuously. Work hard, 10, 12 hours a day, and make something every day, and publish it. Feed your fans, they will do your promotional work for you.

To make money, put a PayPal link on your site and ask people to give you money if they like your work. They will if you're good. Sell T-Shirts and compilations right off your site. This is where the real money is. Do it all yourself, it's part of your job. Stuff the envelopes and process the checks and go to the post office every day. Record every live show you do and sell those for cheap. Put videos of your shows on YouTube, it's free. Put some live shows on archive.org. Use the paradigm for all it's worth.

Don't be fussy, don't be picky, and most important, don't be a spoiled musician who thinks fame should be handed to them by the music industry. Go out and make it yourself.

We flew to Cancun (to vacation in Tulum) in 2004 and 2006. On the way back the first time we had left-over vacation money and upgraded to first class with cash at the ticket counter. Big mistake. My wife got the SSSS, and we nearly missed the flight back because of it. And sure enough, for the 2006 trip she had the SSSS both ways. So never upgrade your flight ticket with cash!

Another interesting thing is that when we arrived in Cancun on the second trip, our bathroom bag with all the liquids in it had extra stuff in it - someone else's perfume and suntan lotion and soap container. So while it's possible that people get stuff stolen by TSA, it's also possible that they are sloppy when they are pawing through your stuff and end up putting it back in the wrong bag.

I had a carry on bag with all our electronics in it and the angry TSA guy handed it off to a nice looking TSA girl, barking the order at her that she needs to look at every little thing in it. So I decided to enjoy the experience, smiled at the girl, explained what each thing was as she took it out of the bag and how she should handle it, asked a bunch of questions about the swabbing process as she ran those little cotton thingies over the edges of stuff and fed them into a machine that checked them for explosives residue. It took a few minutes but I didn't care, I was three hours ahead of schedule on purpose. I'm never in a hurry.

That happened just a few minutes after probably the only time in recent memory I felt like taking a swing at someone, this tall, lanky tanned asshole with a Hawaiian shirt in front of me in the security line who remarked, rather loudly I thought, that we ought to go nuke all those damned arabs so we don't have to stand in security lines anymore. Where do you even start with someone like that? He looked at me for acceptance of his joke and I frowned at him silently until he looked away again.

BACON IN SIXTY SECONDS

O brave new world.

Ha! It's better than that! We have shelf bacon! That's BACON IMMEDIATELY

BEHOLD

Squatting has been a form of urban renewal in Amsterdam for many years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting#Netherlands

It's a tricky subject. Adverse Possession is supposed to prevent land barons from being greedy. I'd opine this particular instance is abuse of the common law, and Kleins' decision was bought and paid for.

I do think this is a one-time stunt for Radiohead. They will learn from it like they learn from all their past experience, and build on it.

So, next time, they will have an HTML 3.2 page with direct links to individual mp3 files that can be downloaded immediately. At the bottom of the page will be a PayPal link with the text 'pay for this if you like it'

And they will make twice as much money as this time.

Google should buy it, put a data center in half of it, and fill the other half with autonomous Google Blimps, which they can use for makeshift cell phone towers for their Google Phone rollout.

And on Wednesdays - hangar badminton!

Have you ever read "The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit"?

Fascinating! My first exposure to the subject many years ago, I found it in the public library and read it several times. Basically, a company moves to a punch-card system to track it's employees, but the name field is only 20 characters long, and one of the employees with the name Albert Duane Cartwright-Chickering has one character too many in his last name. So the company decides it's cheaper to terminate him rather than revamp the system, and he fights back, and hilarity ensues!

Long out of print unfortunately.

At this point I am reasonably sure that 9-11 was simply allowed to happen. It was planned and executed by Al Qaeda, but the details became known to intelligence, and someone made the decision to not do anything about it.

Now, if they were smart, they would have stopped with that idea, waited for the attack, picked up the pieces afterwards and gotten on with their global war profiteering just like they are now. But two dumb things happened:

1. Someone decided to run all those military exercises on 9-11 to occupy the domestic armed forces that might have responded. I'm not sure why, because I think shooting down the airliners before they hit their targets would have caused just as much panic as the actual event. They wouldn't have the dramatic performance art piece of the towers burning and falling to replay 1000 times to program the masses correctly, but they still would have gotten their war out of it.

2. Someone inside got greedy and played the stock market the few days before 9-11. Again, I'm not sure why, because the coming war would guarantee anyone correctly positioned in the market would profit in the long term.

And I think that's the extent of it.

As for all the rest, the people who go on about false flag attacks and thermite on WTC steel and Dick Cheney crouched down behind a console in WTC 7 flying planes by remote control - please. You only need to look back on the last 6 years to realize these people can't run a war, much less pull off something so elaborate and keep everyone quiet about it. And it's pretty clear to me that they don't even want to run the war correctly, they want it to go on indefinitely, thus competent war-waging is discouraged.

This is all about middle-east hegemony and making money, and always has been. So far it seems to be working, but for how long is anyone's guess.

This is why the internet was invented, for truly great projects like this.

Being a graphic artist for more than 20 years, I can attest that this used to be a good idea. We would fill used soda cans with worn x-acto blades, then mummify the can in duct tape and throw it out when it was full. But sometime in the late 90s this became impractical because the can skin became so thin that even the dull x-acto blades would poke through.

Now, if we go back to the 70s-style straight-side steel cans with the welded seam, this might be practical. But I don't think beer can collectors are going to give them up just for sharps disposal.

I noticed that my local indie used CD store had lots of promotional items with the not for sale text on them, but the store owner assured me that it was meaningless drivel - unless a contract is signed, items given out for free for whatever purpose are allowed to be re-sold.

Be sure to read to the bottom of Erik's story about the Knopfler CD - I think my reaction would have been to write NO on the CD with a sharpie and mail it back to Warner's.