MetaFilter posts by Steven Den Beste.
Displaying 51 through 100. Subscribe: http://www.metafilter.com/user/522/postsrss 
The new martial arts powerhouse in the world isn't China, and isn't Japan. It isn't in the Orient at all. It's Brazil.
posted on Sep-10-01 at 7:33 AM
The latest exercise craze "Aerobic stripping". "I get people to move in a figure-eight with their hips," Costas said. "There's a lot of body rolling, starting with your chest, rolling down through the abdomen and through your buttocks. There's also a lot of touching yourself, and the session finishes in lap dancing." Where do I sign up?
posted on Sep-9-01 at 3:33 PM
Hook, line aaand sinker. Garry Trudeau falls for a hoax about President Bush's IQ.
posted on Sep-7-01 at 7:29 AM
Microsoft wins!!!
posted on Sep-6-01 at 7:57 AM
Napster is dead but the dream lives on. After two years of hard fighting, RIAA managed to kill Napster -- and now at least four comparable systems have appeared, all of which will be much harder to either control or to kill off. An RIAA rep acknowledges the problem. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
posted on Sep-4-01 at 11:40 PM
I tell you, the United States is truly the land of opportunity. Where else but in America could a man make a fortune selling his urine through the mail for $12.50 per ounce?
posted on Sep-3-01 at 9:57 AM
In 1999, every company worth its salt was trying to figure out how to pretend that it was a "dot com". Now even the real dot-coms who have survived and prospered (they an't all dead, you know) are trying to figure out how to pretend that they aren't really like that. It's a sign of the times.
posted on Aug-31-01 at 3:29 PM
A rare (in the US) view of the conflict in Israel from the point of view of a Palestinian. His conclusion: young men are making suicide attacks because "death is a better option than the life they are leading." Meanwhile, Sharon's long term plan is to make things even worse for the Palestinians.
posted on Aug-27-01 at 9:24 AM
I think I just melted my irony meter. The radically innovative new plan at VA Linux is to reach profitability by selling proprietary software. (Larry Augustin has invented Microsoft!) But not just any software; they're going to sell the software which operates SourceForge, one of the largest repositories of open source software in the world. And this is now going to become the core business; they may even change the company name. I can't wait to see what the folks on SlashDot think of this! (VA Linux also operates SlashDot.)
posted on Aug-23-01 at 10:38 PM
The Reverend Catherine Sims, on behalf of her Detroit-based "Love Thy Neighbor Corp.", has been using ICANN UDRP complaints to try to wrest control over the domain LoveThyNeighbor.org from "Love Thy Neighbor Fund Inc.", a Florida charity. She's also been trying to gain control over GodSpeaks.net and WuzUpGod.com.
posted on Aug-4-01 at 10:29 PM
The crypto used in 802.11 wireless networking has been cracked. The crack is devastating; it's fast and passive. Simply by listening, the 40-bit key can be cracked in 15 minutes. Worse, the crack scales linearly with the number of bits in the key, so raising the key length to 128 bits would raise the crack time to about an hour. 802.11 is used in such products as the Linksys Etherfast Wireless and the Apple Airport. From now on those products should be considered to be completely insecure.
posted on Aug-3-01 at 10:55 PM
Another "new economy" company bites the big one. A month ago Metricom filed for chapter 11. Tomorrow they're shutting down the Ricochet wireless network, leaving their subscribers high and dry. Employees are getting one week of severance pay. They're leaving behind $1 billion in debt. (It's Webvan all over again.)
posted on Aug-2-01 at 7:43 PM
A major advance in genetically modified foods. Developed with government funding, and intended eventually to be given away to farmers, there has been a major success in the use of salt water to irrigate crops. They've developed a tomato which grows fine in salt water or on salty soil. Thousands of lives will be saved in parts of the world where fresh water for irrigation is scarce, including up to one third of the arable land in India where salt has been accumulating. Interestingly, these tomatoes are so good at what they do that they remove salt from the soil, improving it. The genetic modification which was done to these tomatoes should be possible with many other crops, including especially rice (on which major effort in Egypt is underway now).
posted on Jul-30-01 at 1:28 PM
There's cars, and then there's Ferrari. There's wine, and then there's Château Margaux. There's home computers, and then there's the Athlon Deathstar (picture). It's the computer for the best of us.
posted on Jul-29-01 at 12:56 PM
The ultimate online community: a massively-multiplayer online sex game. Be a dominatrix! Experiment with whips and chains! Sleep around in a place where everyone is beautiful and willing and there is no disease! Pick your own body: you can be the stud or babe of your dreams! Ah, the virtual life for me. (Why are all the samples heterosexual?) (Via Lum the Mad)
posted on Jul-22-01 at 9:09 AM
Third Voice may be gone but that ability will rise again, and this time it's going to be open source. How soon before I can subscribe to the Winerlog RDF stream annotating Scripting News?
posted on Jul-17-01 at 3:01 PM
I for one am getting fed up with ICANN's bureaucratic muddle and the slow pace at which they do everything, not to mention their fundamentally anti-user attitude towards things. Now they've declared that they're in charge. Horseshit! It is the users who are in charge of the Internet. You don't have to limit yourself to the top level domains that ICANN is dribbling out; you can go to new.net and install their plugin (Mac version available), and enable such domains as .travel, .mp3, .sport, .club, .tech and (hoo-hah!) .xxx. Strike a blow for freedom, and tweak ICANN's nose! They need to learn that they'll have to move fast or become irrelevant.
posted on Jul-14-01 at 8:21 AM
"I think that first world environmental groups (who oppose development of genetically modified crops) should put on the hat and shoes of farmers in Mali who are faced by repeated crop failure." -- Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, lead author of the U.N. Development Programme's annual Human Development Report. (Here's another report on the same issue which includes a great deal of background information about the problems which still need to be solved, and why genetic modification of food crops is an essential part of the solution.)
posted on Jul-12-01 at 10:50 AM
Someone reverse engineered the Win-XP activation mechanism. It's not as bad as many people thought. It's certainly no cause for paranoia.
posted on Jul-9-01 at 11:06 PM
From 1972 to 1998, the number of American voters claiming to attend church regularly has stayed stable at 37%. The number who say they never attend church at all has risen from 14% to 33%. What affect will this have on American politics?
posted on Jul-8-01 at 9:08 AM
China has sent a bill to the US for $1 million to pay for the time that our spy plane spent sitting on the tarmac in China, waiting for the Chinese to grant permission to get it out of there.
posted on Jul-6-01 at 5:15 PM
Silicon Graphics announces the end of reality. (Via Segfault) Where will we all live now?
posted on Jul-5-01 at 4:08 PM
"Biggest flame war of all time: Danny Boy - sentimental Irish favorite, or stupid song decried by true Celts everywhere?" A link to a discussion in another forum about how one prevents the banal from driving out the profound in online public-participation forums. (Their conclusion: ruthless and efficient moderation.)
posted on Jul-3-01 at 2:40 PM
"Survivor" meets "Star Trek". The next tourist in space may be a game-show winner. (Gad.)
posted on Jul-3-01 at 7:57 AM
What would you do if you opened your front door and found two and a half tons of marijuna sitting there?
posted on Jun-26-01 at 8:47 AM
Minorities are underrepresented in the ranks of geeks. While 84% of the population of the US is white, 90% of geeks are white. (Obviously we need quotas and white angst. Let's get some righteous indignation going here.)
posted on Jun-24-01 at 6:35 AM
When is contraception not contraception? When is RU-486 a contraceptive pill and when is it a birth control pill?
posted on Jun-9-01 at 3:29 PM
"Three of the top Net-nerd forum/discussion sites, Metafilter, Plastic.com and Slashdot, have threads discussing ways to block these ads." Ouch. I don't know which I resent more: "Net-nerd" or being grouped with "Plastic.com".
posted on Jun-7-01 at 7:46 AM
8 people trapped in a cave have been reached by rescuers. Against advice, they went spelunking during bad weather and got trapped by rising water. After two days they're safe, but they're weak, hungry and dehydrated. Our heros weren't able to find anything to drink in the middle of a flood. (I bet they'd also need to be rescued from an escalator during a power failure.)
posted on May-18-01 at 1:00 PM
Where (and how) does the European Community think they're going to store a million gigabytes of data per day -- for seven years?
posted on May-16-01 at 4:23 PM
Go is better than Chess. (This discussion started in MetaTalk through topic drift, and it really belongs here.)
posted on May-9-01 at 12:05 PM
Disenchanted comments on the "Web Standards Project" and he disagrees with it. And I think what he says rings true: "There's no point in hanging a 'No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service' sign outside a web site."
posted on May-8-01 at 9:10 PM
Top 25 Women of the Web as selected by "San Francisco Women on the Web". Evidently they have different criteria than I do; no Hannah, no Jennifer Ringley, not even Danni Ashe. In fact, I've never heard of any of 'em. What make these ladies "top"?
Who would you nominate for a list titled "Top 25 Women of the Web", and why?
posted on May-8-01 at 10:18 AM
Pssst -- buddy, wanta buy a kidney? There is a regular trade from China of transplant organs taken from executed prisoners. People from the US have been travelling there and buying organs, then coming back to the US. Should we do anything about this, and if so what?
posted on May-5-01 at 3:15 PM
This is unquestionably going to be the next "everybody's doing it" on the Web for the next two weeks. (My ninja Sakai Saburo has already been sent on his first mission. Via Robert at CrackerJap)
posted on May-2-01 at 11:15 PM
Why isn't Jesse Jackson being prosecuted for embezzlement? Jackson's Citizenship Education Fund gave $35,000 to the mother of Jackson's illegitimate daughter for "relocation expenses". Is this routinely done for all ex-employees of the foundation?
posted on Apr-28-01 at 5:42 PM
Apparently exposure to violence in media caused the Columbine massacre. There's a best-selling book, readily available in nearly every book store in the US, which includes descriptions of genocide, wars, deliberately-caused plagues, mass killing of children, cities being put to the sword, and which portrays those responsible for these crimes as heroes! Clearly it establishes a culture of violence and should be suppressed. The success of this book (the best selling book of all time, which is regularly given to children!) makes clear that the publishing "industry will not effectively regulate itself, and that court intervention is necessary to keep violent [books] out of the hands of minors."
No question about it: there should be a class action suit against all publishers of the Bible.
posted on Apr-22-01 at 10:44 PM
Why are these people still together? Or maybe they should get married, eh? (By the way, the page is really long, but do a string search for "hit the ground running".)
posted on Apr-22-01 at 7:33 AM
You too can be a felon! Last year, the SDMI Foundation made a public challenge to see if anyone could crack 6 proposed protection mechanisms for digitally-encoded music. All six turned out to be feeble and all six fell. Since then, the SDMI Foundation has been relying on lawyers to cover up for the incompetence of their engineers. They're trying to suppress this article, so everyone reading this has a duty to make and store a copy of it. (Everyone should also own at least one copy of DeCSS. I have the 442-character C version printed on the back of my personal card.)
posted on Apr-21-01 at 8:03 PM
Anyone want to get into Madonna's panties? Leather ones, at that. Studded leather. (Not me. Gack.)
posted on Apr-17-01 at 12:02 PM
Conjoined twins separated. But while that operation is always challenging, this one was particularly bad. The girls were joined at the top of the head, and their brains were merged -- and shared common blood vessels. It took eight-eight hours of surgery to separate them, most of which was spent rerouting blood vessels. Both girls survived the operation. This is only the sixth time this operation has been attempted and only the second time that it has succeeded. (Vertical craniopagus is, mercifully, exceedingly rare.) The operation was only possible at all because the surgeons have spent the last four months practicing it with virtual-reality software on computers (presumably using models based on MRI). Anyone have any idea what software package they used?
posted on Apr-10-01 at 6:31 AM
Perry Wacker gets a 14 year sentence. For killing attempting to smuggle 60 people into the UK, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison. For killing 58 of them he was sentenced to a further 6 years. He should have gotten the death sentence, or at least life-without-parole. Why was he charged with manslaughter instead of murder?
posted on Apr-5-01 at 9:41 AM
If you're into such things, how to remove the advertisements from ICQ and AIM.
posted on Apr-1-01 at 10:13 AM
Be very afraid. The only real solution to this is backlash and boycott. Technical solutions to "InTether" are inadequate (especially since every such will be a violation of the DMCA). If content vendors will only sell their material this way, don't buy! (Ultimately, it's going to take an act of Congress to straighten this all out. How about a law making it illegal to prevent "fair use"?)
posted on Mar-13-01 at 7:57 AM
"MOMMAS, LET YUOR BOYS GROW UP TO BE JEFF BEZOS!!!! BY JEFF K,!!!!!" Suddenly I understand it and it makes sense!!!! I'll go out and sign up for a dozen mailing lists right now!!!! (How does Rich Kyanka come up with so much good material so often with nary a misstep? He's simply amazing.)
posted on Mar-10-01 at 6:05 AM
One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted on Mar-9-01 at 10:20 AM
Can "blocking software" companies be sued? This is interesting. The Register (a respected if somewhat snide computer industry online rag) has somehow managed to land on Cyber Patrol's block list as a "sex site". Now they're conducting something called an ABCe audit and they're making nasty noises about "restraint of trade". Which makes me wonder if they're thinking "lawsuit".
The blocking-software companies have been using rather broad brushes in making their blocking lists. Although some claim that any site they block is checked by a human first, with thousands of new sites appearing every day there simply isn't any way. Peacefire has documented hundreds of sites which were blocked inappropriately. I am pretty certain that under US law that blockees have no recourse -- but perhaps the law in the EU is different. Anyone over there care to comment? Is it plausible that an "ABCe audit" could result in a lawsuit? (I'd really love to see a few high profile big-bucks lawsuits here.)
posted on Mar-8-01 at 7:53 AM
Separated at birth? Michael Jackson and Lon Chaney. (Good heavens! Michael, what have you done to yourself?)
posted on Mar-5-01 at 10:03 PM
Let it rest, already! The fifth Star Trek series is going into casting, with filming to begin in May for a release in Autumn 2001. From the character descriptions it looks like it's basically a remake of the original series. I think they've run out of ideas. (Link via GeekPress.)
posted on Mar-5-01 at 6:27 AM
Who do you root for when everyone's a villain? It turns out that everyone involved in the "Internet Twins" fiasco is scum. Sure as hell the biological mother is (she gave the babies up twice and now wants them back; I wouldn't trust her to care for my cat); the woman from the UK is, and now the man in the US is. A plague on all their houses.
Now the biological father, Aaron Wecker, has begun proceedings to gain custody of the babies. I hope he isn't as despicable as everyone else involved. Let's hope this circus doesn't follow the girls around for the rest of their lives. If there's any sort of lesson in this, I wish someone would tell me what it is.
posted on Mar-2-01 at 5:39 PM
posted on Sep-10-01 at 7:33 AM
The latest exercise craze "Aerobic stripping". "I get people to move in a figure-eight with their hips," Costas said. "There's a lot of body rolling, starting with your chest, rolling down through the abdomen and through your buttocks. There's also a lot of touching yourself, and the session finishes in lap dancing." Where do I sign up?
posted on Sep-9-01 at 3:33 PM
Hook, line aaand sinker. Garry Trudeau falls for a hoax about President Bush's IQ.
posted on Sep-7-01 at 7:29 AM
Microsoft wins!!!
posted on Sep-6-01 at 7:57 AM
Napster is dead but the dream lives on. After two years of hard fighting, RIAA managed to kill Napster -- and now at least four comparable systems have appeared, all of which will be much harder to either control or to kill off. An RIAA rep acknowledges the problem. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
posted on Sep-4-01 at 11:40 PM
I tell you, the United States is truly the land of opportunity. Where else but in America could a man make a fortune selling his urine through the mail for $12.50 per ounce?
posted on Sep-3-01 at 9:57 AM
In 1999, every company worth its salt was trying to figure out how to pretend that it was a "dot com". Now even the real dot-coms who have survived and prospered (they an't all dead, you know) are trying to figure out how to pretend that they aren't really like that. It's a sign of the times.
posted on Aug-31-01 at 3:29 PM
A rare (in the US) view of the conflict in Israel from the point of view of a Palestinian. His conclusion: young men are making suicide attacks because "death is a better option than the life they are leading." Meanwhile, Sharon's long term plan is to make things even worse for the Palestinians.
posted on Aug-27-01 at 9:24 AM
I think I just melted my irony meter. The radically innovative new plan at VA Linux is to reach profitability by selling proprietary software. (Larry Augustin has invented Microsoft!) But not just any software; they're going to sell the software which operates SourceForge, one of the largest repositories of open source software in the world. And this is now going to become the core business; they may even change the company name. I can't wait to see what the folks on SlashDot think of this! (VA Linux also operates SlashDot.)
posted on Aug-23-01 at 10:38 PM
The Reverend Catherine Sims, on behalf of her Detroit-based "Love Thy Neighbor Corp.", has been using ICANN UDRP complaints to try to wrest control over the domain LoveThyNeighbor.org from "Love Thy Neighbor Fund Inc.", a Florida charity. She's also been trying to gain control over GodSpeaks.net and WuzUpGod.com.
posted on Aug-4-01 at 10:29 PM
The crypto used in 802.11 wireless networking has been cracked. The crack is devastating; it's fast and passive. Simply by listening, the 40-bit key can be cracked in 15 minutes. Worse, the crack scales linearly with the number of bits in the key, so raising the key length to 128 bits would raise the crack time to about an hour. 802.11 is used in such products as the Linksys Etherfast Wireless and the Apple Airport. From now on those products should be considered to be completely insecure.
posted on Aug-3-01 at 10:55 PM
Another "new economy" company bites the big one. A month ago Metricom filed for chapter 11. Tomorrow they're shutting down the Ricochet wireless network, leaving their subscribers high and dry. Employees are getting one week of severance pay. They're leaving behind $1 billion in debt. (It's Webvan all over again.)
posted on Aug-2-01 at 7:43 PM
A major advance in genetically modified foods. Developed with government funding, and intended eventually to be given away to farmers, there has been a major success in the use of salt water to irrigate crops. They've developed a tomato which grows fine in salt water or on salty soil. Thousands of lives will be saved in parts of the world where fresh water for irrigation is scarce, including up to one third of the arable land in India where salt has been accumulating. Interestingly, these tomatoes are so good at what they do that they remove salt from the soil, improving it. The genetic modification which was done to these tomatoes should be possible with many other crops, including especially rice (on which major effort in Egypt is underway now).
posted on Jul-30-01 at 1:28 PM
There's cars, and then there's Ferrari. There's wine, and then there's Château Margaux. There's home computers, and then there's the Athlon Deathstar (picture). It's the computer for the best of us.
posted on Jul-29-01 at 12:56 PM
The ultimate online community: a massively-multiplayer online sex game. Be a dominatrix! Experiment with whips and chains! Sleep around in a place where everyone is beautiful and willing and there is no disease! Pick your own body: you can be the stud or babe of your dreams! Ah, the virtual life for me. (Why are all the samples heterosexual?) (Via Lum the Mad)
posted on Jul-22-01 at 9:09 AM
Third Voice may be gone but that ability will rise again, and this time it's going to be open source. How soon before I can subscribe to the Winerlog RDF stream annotating Scripting News?
posted on Jul-17-01 at 3:01 PM
I for one am getting fed up with ICANN's bureaucratic muddle and the slow pace at which they do everything, not to mention their fundamentally anti-user attitude towards things. Now they've declared that they're in charge. Horseshit! It is the users who are in charge of the Internet. You don't have to limit yourself to the top level domains that ICANN is dribbling out; you can go to new.net and install their plugin (Mac version available), and enable such domains as .travel, .mp3, .sport, .club, .tech and (hoo-hah!) .xxx. Strike a blow for freedom, and tweak ICANN's nose! They need to learn that they'll have to move fast or become irrelevant.
posted on Jul-14-01 at 8:21 AM
"I think that first world environmental groups (who oppose development of genetically modified crops) should put on the hat and shoes of farmers in Mali who are faced by repeated crop failure." -- Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, lead author of the U.N. Development Programme's annual Human Development Report. (Here's another report on the same issue which includes a great deal of background information about the problems which still need to be solved, and why genetic modification of food crops is an essential part of the solution.)
posted on Jul-12-01 at 10:50 AM
Someone reverse engineered the Win-XP activation mechanism. It's not as bad as many people thought. It's certainly no cause for paranoia.
posted on Jul-9-01 at 11:06 PM
From 1972 to 1998, the number of American voters claiming to attend church regularly has stayed stable at 37%. The number who say they never attend church at all has risen from 14% to 33%. What affect will this have on American politics?
posted on Jul-8-01 at 9:08 AM
China has sent a bill to the US for $1 million to pay for the time that our spy plane spent sitting on the tarmac in China, waiting for the Chinese to grant permission to get it out of there.
posted on Jul-6-01 at 5:15 PM
Silicon Graphics announces the end of reality. (Via Segfault) Where will we all live now?
posted on Jul-5-01 at 4:08 PM
"Biggest flame war of all time: Danny Boy - sentimental Irish favorite, or stupid song decried by true Celts everywhere?" A link to a discussion in another forum about how one prevents the banal from driving out the profound in online public-participation forums. (Their conclusion: ruthless and efficient moderation.)
posted on Jul-3-01 at 2:40 PM
"Survivor" meets "Star Trek". The next tourist in space may be a game-show winner. (Gad.)
posted on Jul-3-01 at 7:57 AM
What would you do if you opened your front door and found two and a half tons of marijuna sitting there?
posted on Jun-26-01 at 8:47 AM
Minorities are underrepresented in the ranks of geeks. While 84% of the population of the US is white, 90% of geeks are white. (Obviously we need quotas and white angst. Let's get some righteous indignation going here.)
posted on Jun-24-01 at 6:35 AM
When is contraception not contraception? When is RU-486 a contraceptive pill and when is it a birth control pill?
posted on Jun-9-01 at 3:29 PM
"Three of the top Net-nerd forum/discussion sites, Metafilter, Plastic.com and Slashdot, have threads discussing ways to block these ads." Ouch. I don't know which I resent more: "Net-nerd" or being grouped with "Plastic.com".
posted on Jun-7-01 at 7:46 AM
8 people trapped in a cave have been reached by rescuers. Against advice, they went spelunking during bad weather and got trapped by rising water. After two days they're safe, but they're weak, hungry and dehydrated. Our heros weren't able to find anything to drink in the middle of a flood. (I bet they'd also need to be rescued from an escalator during a power failure.)
posted on May-18-01 at 1:00 PM
Where (and how) does the European Community think they're going to store a million gigabytes of data per day -- for seven years?
posted on May-16-01 at 4:23 PM
Go is better than Chess. (This discussion started in MetaTalk through topic drift, and it really belongs here.)
posted on May-9-01 at 12:05 PM
Disenchanted comments on the "Web Standards Project" and he disagrees with it. And I think what he says rings true: "There's no point in hanging a 'No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service' sign outside a web site."
posted on May-8-01 at 9:10 PM
Top 25 Women of the Web as selected by "San Francisco Women on the Web". Evidently they have different criteria than I do; no Hannah, no Jennifer Ringley, not even Danni Ashe. In fact, I've never heard of any of 'em. What make these ladies "top"?
Who would you nominate for a list titled "Top 25 Women of the Web", and why?
posted on May-8-01 at 10:18 AM
Pssst -- buddy, wanta buy a kidney? There is a regular trade from China of transplant organs taken from executed prisoners. People from the US have been travelling there and buying organs, then coming back to the US. Should we do anything about this, and if so what?
posted on May-5-01 at 3:15 PM
This is unquestionably going to be the next "everybody's doing it" on the Web for the next two weeks. (My ninja Sakai Saburo has already been sent on his first mission. Via Robert at CrackerJap)
posted on May-2-01 at 11:15 PM
Why isn't Jesse Jackson being prosecuted for embezzlement? Jackson's Citizenship Education Fund gave $35,000 to the mother of Jackson's illegitimate daughter for "relocation expenses". Is this routinely done for all ex-employees of the foundation?
posted on Apr-28-01 at 5:42 PM
Apparently exposure to violence in media caused the Columbine massacre. There's a best-selling book, readily available in nearly every book store in the US, which includes descriptions of genocide, wars, deliberately-caused plagues, mass killing of children, cities being put to the sword, and which portrays those responsible for these crimes as heroes! Clearly it establishes a culture of violence and should be suppressed. The success of this book (the best selling book of all time, which is regularly given to children!) makes clear that the publishing "industry will not effectively regulate itself, and that court intervention is necessary to keep violent [books] out of the hands of minors."
No question about it: there should be a class action suit against all publishers of the Bible.
posted on Apr-22-01 at 10:44 PM
Why are these people still together? Or maybe they should get married, eh? (By the way, the page is really long, but do a string search for "hit the ground running".)
posted on Apr-22-01 at 7:33 AM
You too can be a felon! Last year, the SDMI Foundation made a public challenge to see if anyone could crack 6 proposed protection mechanisms for digitally-encoded music. All six turned out to be feeble and all six fell. Since then, the SDMI Foundation has been relying on lawyers to cover up for the incompetence of their engineers. They're trying to suppress this article, so everyone reading this has a duty to make and store a copy of it. (Everyone should also own at least one copy of DeCSS. I have the 442-character C version printed on the back of my personal card.)
posted on Apr-21-01 at 8:03 PM
Anyone want to get into Madonna's panties? Leather ones, at that. Studded leather. (Not me. Gack.)
posted on Apr-17-01 at 12:02 PM
Conjoined twins separated. But while that operation is always challenging, this one was particularly bad. The girls were joined at the top of the head, and their brains were merged -- and shared common blood vessels. It took eight-eight hours of surgery to separate them, most of which was spent rerouting blood vessels. Both girls survived the operation. This is only the sixth time this operation has been attempted and only the second time that it has succeeded. (Vertical craniopagus is, mercifully, exceedingly rare.) The operation was only possible at all because the surgeons have spent the last four months practicing it with virtual-reality software on computers (presumably using models based on MRI). Anyone have any idea what software package they used?
posted on Apr-10-01 at 6:31 AM
Perry Wacker gets a 14 year sentence. For killing attempting to smuggle 60 people into the UK, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison. For killing 58 of them he was sentenced to a further 6 years. He should have gotten the death sentence, or at least life-without-parole. Why was he charged with manslaughter instead of murder?
posted on Apr-5-01 at 9:41 AM
If you're into such things, how to remove the advertisements from ICQ and AIM.
posted on Apr-1-01 at 10:13 AM
Be very afraid. The only real solution to this is backlash and boycott. Technical solutions to "InTether" are inadequate (especially since every such will be a violation of the DMCA). If content vendors will only sell their material this way, don't buy! (Ultimately, it's going to take an act of Congress to straighten this all out. How about a law making it illegal to prevent "fair use"?)
posted on Mar-13-01 at 7:57 AM
"MOMMAS, LET YUOR BOYS GROW UP TO BE JEFF BEZOS!!!! BY JEFF K,!!!!!" Suddenly I understand it and it makes sense!!!! I'll go out and sign up for a dozen mailing lists right now!!!! (How does Rich Kyanka come up with so much good material so often with nary a misstep? He's simply amazing.)
posted on Mar-10-01 at 6:05 AM
One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted on Mar-9-01 at 10:20 AM
Can "blocking software" companies be sued? This is interesting. The Register (a respected if somewhat snide computer industry online rag) has somehow managed to land on Cyber Patrol's block list as a "sex site". Now they're conducting something called an ABCe audit and they're making nasty noises about "restraint of trade". Which makes me wonder if they're thinking "lawsuit".
The blocking-software companies have been using rather broad brushes in making their blocking lists. Although some claim that any site they block is checked by a human first, with thousands of new sites appearing every day there simply isn't any way. Peacefire has documented hundreds of sites which were blocked inappropriately. I am pretty certain that under US law that blockees have no recourse -- but perhaps the law in the EU is different. Anyone over there care to comment? Is it plausible that an "ABCe audit" could result in a lawsuit? (I'd really love to see a few high profile big-bucks lawsuits here.)
posted on Mar-8-01 at 7:53 AM
Separated at birth? Michael Jackson and Lon Chaney. (Good heavens! Michael, what have you done to yourself?)
posted on Mar-5-01 at 10:03 PM
Let it rest, already! The fifth Star Trek series is going into casting, with filming to begin in May for a release in Autumn 2001. From the character descriptions it looks like it's basically a remake of the original series. I think they've run out of ideas. (Link via GeekPress.)
posted on Mar-5-01 at 6:27 AM
Who do you root for when everyone's a villain? It turns out that everyone involved in the "Internet Twins" fiasco is scum. Sure as hell the biological mother is (she gave the babies up twice and now wants them back; I wouldn't trust her to care for my cat); the woman from the UK is, and now the man in the US is. A plague on all their houses.
Now the biological father, Aaron Wecker, has begun proceedings to gain custody of the babies. I hope he isn't as despicable as everyone else involved. Let's hope this circus doesn't follow the girls around for the rest of their lives. If there's any sort of lesson in this, I wish someone would tell me what it is.
posted on Mar-2-01 at 5:39 PM
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