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I made one seven years ago for neurological pathogens, but I think in this case, the best idea might be a variant of the skull and crossbones, replacing the crossbones with the traditional radiation symbol.

What really got me excited today was the news about Inkwell, the handwriting recognition engine for 10.2.

I'm excited because it's so useless. There is no way that Jobs would put his people through the effort of bringing handwriting recognition to OS X unless it was a precursor to the iPad. My guess is October, January at the latest.

Soooooo happy.

Start to MAKE music of your own! Not only do you have the freedom to do so, not only do you probably already have a CD burner that is the modern-day equivalent of a million-dollar mastering lathe in the 60s and 70s, but more and more software for working with music data is not only out there at no cost, but even Free.

You presume that I have any musical ability at all...

I am doing my part on the video front though, documenting my first skydive. Sit back, watch, and forget about renting that DVD tonight! :-)

Every time you sign up for some mailing list or discussion group, create a new e-mail account or alias for just those mailings. Bam, it's automatically sorted out by itself with extreme ease. If you have limited bandwith (or are checking, say, on your palm) sometimes, just check your important addresses frequently, and reserve your mailing lists for a once-per-day check.

If some site asks for your e-mail address to download a piece of software, or to register, make up a new alias and give that to them. If you start getting tons of crap at that address, you can just remove that alias, and they get it all bounced back in their stupid spamming faces.

Give one address to your cow-orkers just for work stuff. Give a different one to your Mom and other techno-nots that blocks all attachments. Give another one to your friends with brains that goes unfiltered. For people you don't want to talk to, give them the address of an autoresponder tied to Eliza.

Be a *Happy Camper* and let your addresses be *Bubbles* and you be just *You*.

And they still didn't let on that it was a joke.

The worst -- and funniest -- abuse of the clueless is AOLiza. Take the oldest and lamest online shrink, hook it up to a well-known message system, and you will laugh until you have trouble breathing.

God, I'm cruel and arrogant...

I'm surprised that nobody here noted that Eve was one of the first webloggers, and an inspiration to thousands.

I met her at a dotcom party in '1997 and she inspired me to learn pi to 100 places.

Beautiful, inelligent, geeky. Truly, Eve, you are the best of us.

...Either that or I am a sad, sad man.

First a store-within-a-store at CompUSA, now IKEA!

(Or should that be iKea?)

Don't believe everything Joss says in the newsgroups. He has a flare for misdirection.

Part of the gov't mandate is that the cellphones must be equipped to transmit requested GPS data even if they aren't turned on.

But they're only going to use it to find people making 911 calls. Right. Absolutely.

This is an urban legend. Even though it was just 'born' today, it's totally fabricated.

Here's the debunking.

Speaking of brilliant uses of eliza this one guy used some applescript to create AOLiza, a program which replies to anyone spamming this AIM account using Eliza.

I recommend number 36 for a quick giggle.

have you seen AOLiza? I think the guy who conceived of the idea is a poster on /. ... Kevin Fox i think?

it's the funniest thing ... he had an AOL screen name with a high ratio of random chat requests, so he took a freeware version of ELIZA and hooked into into AIM. it's was a truly distressing look at the shear idiocy of a lot of AOL members...

actually, just decided not to be lazy... it is Kevin Fox, and the link is http://www.fury.com/aoliza/... he explains it all on the site. great way to wast 45 minutes (check out #60)...

Ok, maybe the Cyc-bot would be slightly more sophisticated...

--

Jos Whedon, Buffy:TVS creator, has already pioneered using Zepplin technology over Neptune for an upcoming episode.

Kevin Fox
--

Funny? I suppose, but if you'd like a slightly harsher review, here you go.

Kevin Fox
--

"There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.

"I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon."

Check this shit out:

The planet used an estimated 415.6 Billion BTUs in 2000. This translates to 121.8 trillion kilowatt-hours, whick boils down to 121800 terawatt-hours, or 13.9 terawatt-years.

Now, mind you, global energy-consumption is increasing at around 2.2% per year (ibid). So, the first year we'd only lose 0.015 seconds. No big deal.

To see how this would all work out in the longer run, I wrote a little script.

After 100 years we'd only have to adjust our clocks 5 seconds slower every year. In the year 2360 the Earth's rotation would exactly match that of Mars, with a 24 hour, 36 minute day. By 2540 the calendar would only have 364.25 days in it, and just 30 years later another day is lost.

In 2693 we've lost December entirely, and days are 26.2 hours long. By 2773 things have kicked into serious gear and we're down to a year of 182 days that are each 48 hours long.

Assuming that in the interveining 800 years we find a way to overcome the logarithmic problem of sucking the energy at a constant rate from a slowing source, we can take out the last of the rotational power in the Earth by the year 2812.

Pretty early on people would have to rewrite timing code that was based on the assumption of a constant number of days in a year and seconds in a day. And geosynchronous satellites would have to have ion drives constantly pushing them gently away from the earth into higher and higher orbits to match the slowing rotation.

Of course, the biggest problem here is clearly that we can't use DirectTV after 2812 because the geosynchronous satellites can't stay in non-orbit.

Kevin Fox
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http://fury.com/aoliza/

Does an AOLer trying to have cybersex with AOLiza count as adultery too? 8-)

Taking Aoliza as a model, what you need to do is get some speech software and hook it up to an ELIZA program. call the 800 numbers with your modem and see how long you can get the customer service agents to talk to the computer. ok, this may not be feasible to implement right now, what with current speech technology, but you wouldnt have to spend any of your own time and if you kept logs of the long ones it could be really funny.

• How would Christ benefit from me putting my tongue in someone's mouth
• How does me putting my tongue in someone's mouth make you feel.
• Huh?
• What about your tongue in someones mouth?
• Are you messing with my mind
• Would you like to talk about it

I've put together a page illustrating three alternate ways a person could cognitively process the Palm Beach ballot, all of which would give erroneous Gore votes to Buchanan.

It's just a first pass, but it should make my visual perception and cognitive neuroscience teachers happy.

Kevin Fox

Yes, and someone used Eliza to talk to AIM users. The Result!

I'm looking for a handful of people who have done this before, and are as geographically diverse as possible, to help me out with a small adjunct to Project Cameo.

If you're interested, please drop me a line at cameo@slash.fury.com.

Thanks!

Kevin Fox

--

I threw up a 50 cent donation link on the AOLiza site a few days ago and I've already gotten a good response. A few people decided to 'buy' multiple donations, upping the donation.

It makes me feel a lot better than throwing up a stupid banner on every page just to get some money. Apparently it makes my visitors feel better too.

Paypal rocks, though I'm really disappointed that they dropped support for the Palm...

Kevin Fox

The post I'm replying to should say: "Posted by ELIZA" or maybe Posted by AOLiza

• First, how can you get DVDs in or out of a stacked cube? This of course is assuming there's a DVD slot tucked near one of those plastic ridges.
  
• Second, is this some sort of 'in-series' ventalation? With three stacked macs, the same air would chimney through three machines!

• The power button (the 'third screw') would never be on the top of a machine.
  
• The font used in the picture is a variant of Adobe Garamond, and is slightly shorter than Apple Garamond.
  
• One of the ideals of the new Apple aesthetic is no hard lines, yet this has hard lines on thp and bottom.
  
• A true Apple product would have the Apple logo on the sides as well.
  
• It looks like a lucite office trash can turned upside down and apple-ified.

Here's a mirror for just the pictures.

Kevin Fox

Netscape Navigator has actually had a very weak and undocumented version of alpha channels since at least NS 3.0

The way it works is: Take a gif, double its resolution, then overlay a checkerboard pattern of transparent pixels. Then, create a page with that picture, halving the pixel dimensions so it's compressd down by NS. In most version sof NS 3 (And I believe IE3) this will actually create a 50% non-dithered alpha channel, letting the background show through.

You can see an example of this here, but be warned that it doesn't work on all browsers. There should be two copies of the same image. the first, reduced by 50%, the other full size. Note that on NS 4.7 on Linux the first doesn't show up at all. Elsewhere, YMMV.

Kevin Fox

Check it out here, and add your own user review!

They gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but use that page to reach ./ and it'll climb in the popularity rankings.

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

What I took away from today's keynote was that Jobs is taking advantage of the fact that they basically control a platform from hardware to software to website, to renew a focus on proprietary tools.

Several times in the speech Jobs commented on how Apple was one of two proprietary widespread desktop OS solutions (I forget the euphemism he used for it) and that Apple will be leveraging off of that with iTools: programs and webapps from apple.com that will only work on Macs. He didn't stop there either. He used this proprietary dominance to justify the overhaul of the UI (oh my GOD, a blinking button to indicate a default response?!?) while at the same time trying to convince the audience that this was one of 4 key building blocks establishing Apple as one of the top 10 internet companies.

It amazed me that Jobs, who is doing such a great job of rebuilding Apple, would be so forthright about this strategy. It's almost as if he actually said "Microsoft is being sued for incorporating the browser, but since we're obviously not a monopoly, we'll incorporate everything else and make it proprietary."

They're doing exactly the things that Microsoft would like to, but can't because of the DOJ, and as much as Apple tries to appease the open source movement by open-sourcing the aspects of the OS that are furthest removed from the actual user experience, there is no way is an open-sourced kernel is going to make any difference to Joe User. They're open-sourcing Darwin because all that can be done is add API functionality and increase efficiency and security. And while they're doing this they build new, closed source layers on top of it, so that any features added can only be used in this locked-up, proprietary OS, unless you plan on building or porting all of the implemenation layers above the kernel, at which point there's little reason not to just enhance FreeBSD or Linux instead.

Jobs is quite the marketeer, but as far as today's keynote goes, the i in iCEO stood for illusion.

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

Well, naturally they had to convert all three results (including the 3 meg original) into 256 gif (or better yet, jpeg uncompressed) because I doubt your browser can show JPEG2000 files. They had to put the results into a framework you could see.

What disturbs me is that the '19K jpeg' example on the bottom is in no way or form what would happen if you tried to compress the top file down to 19K in jpeg. It's like what you would get if you reduced the original file to 25%, shoved it down to about 16K in GIF compression, then blew it back up 400%.

With that and degrading the original source image down (by converting it to 8bit GIF) far more than (presumably) JPEG2000 compression degraded the second image, before it too was degraded into 8-bit GIF, this demonstration is useless...

They need to give us two 3 meg files: one souce file, and one file that has been JPEG2000 compressed, then saved as a full-size source file (in BMP, PICT or some other lossless mode) so we can do our own comparisons...

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

My favorite example is Lexicon, a top-flight naming companythat in the same 4 month period came up with the ultra-imaginative words:

Triples (for a cereal)
Quadra (the new mac)
Pentium (duh)

They liked numbers used in new and innovative ways. I believe Apple spent over two million for the groundbreaking names "Quadra" and "Centris"

Kevin "I used to work for Dantz, and they named themselves!" Fox
www.fury.com

Visa and MasterCard reiterate every quarter that neither one has traced a single instance of credit card fraud to online interception or acquisition of a credit card number.

Wow, what are the odds that the first guy it happens to is Novell's CEO? It's a good thing he has a plan to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else! Phew!

Sounds to me like the second case of stealing money over the net is being propogated by Eric Schmidt himself!

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

What kind of information could be gleamed from them by the record of all thier internal urls?

The software only sends them info when you hit a cometcursor aware site (with special cometcursor tags in it). Your own internal urls are safe and sound.

Kevin Fox
www.fury.com

What laws are they breaking?

For starters, there's the Data Protection Act (amended 1998). This requires all databases to be registered, along with a list of their structure, so that people upon whom information is held can serve a data disclosure notice on the database owners and find out what is being said about them. I believe there's also a requirement to notify the subjects that information about them is being stored.

(Violation: up to two years in prison and a honking great fine, although it's very rare for infractions to get as far as a prosecution.)

This applies to companies in the UK. This company is based in New York, and their databases ae based in New York. Just because someone from the UK accesses it doesn't mean the company has to register the database they're accessing with UK authorities. Secondarily, do you have any evidence at all that they don't have their databases registered, or is this an ipso-facto "they're evil, so they're breaking laws, and therefore they're evil" mentality?

Next: Computer Misuse Act (1994). This act has teeth -- it was introduced as an anti-hacking measure and it would seem that if they're tampering with or using a computer in the UK for any purpose without the consent of the owner they could be liable for five years as a guest in one of Her Majesty's hotels. It is a criminal offense to run software on a computer without the owner's permission, or to cause software to be run (ditto), or indeed to do anything with a computer without permission from its owner. Oh, and you can be guilty even if you're not in the UK (but meddling with a UK-based computer), or if the computer's not in the UK (but you are).

They have the user's permission. The user has to agree to a terms of service before the software is installed and they say that it transmits GUID information in those terms of service. They didn't hide anything.

Finally there's the EU declaration of human rights which, implemented in law, has an explicit right of privacy. The EU recently disseminated some directives on data security -- specifically banning the export of personal information from jurisdictions with strict privacy laws to other jurisdictions with weaker protection -- that means this company is violating the law, right across the EU.

Slashdot gathers more information about you than Comet cursor does. Are they violating human rights? The fact is that Comet's not doing anything they didn't explicitly say they do, and if you're concerned with privacy you should take the time to read the privacy policies of the software you're installing. This article, along with yesterday's Quake 3 article, is an example of the knee-jerk holier-than-corp litigiousness that's become rampant with the linux crowd recently. It's about time that we investigate what's going on before calling red alert, and drawing distinctions between gathering anonymous marketing data in a legal and open manner and ilicit hacking into computers.

Kevin Fox

www.fury.com

They explain the information they collect, which is good (and probably makes it legal even in the UK) but they also explain that the code might auto-update with bugfixes or new functionality without any notification at all.

This is dangerous, as someone forging an address could conceivably deposit executable code on your computer and callit however they wanted to. While some other software (MacOS 9 and Quicktime 4 come to mind) have this functionality, they always ask you before downloading new code, and you can turn the feature off, while here it's just an invisible process.

Also, as a side note, they claim their data-collection doesn't violate the user's privacy because their GUIDs have never been correlated to any user-identifiable data. It's not to say that they couldn't though. Cross-referencing their logs with a site's logs (with the site's own guid that is correlated to a profile) could open the door for tracking where else that person's gone.

On the brighter side, they have a link for a 'cleaner' program that will wipe Comet Cursor off your computer.

Share and Enjoy,

Kevin
www.fury.com

Without creating a gun that could reach close to escape velocity, you could only achieve orbit by performing an OMS burn at the apogee, in other words, circularize the orbit so the probe doesn't just crash down ala Newton.

The problem here is thaqt the size of the OMS burn needed is directly proportional to how vertical the launch was. If you shoot straight up, you need a strong enough burn to accellerate the craft to orbital speeds (17Kmph) which is a lot of fuel and kind of wrecks the point. Also, the lower the metal-nonmetal ratio, the less acceleration there will be on the craft.

So you have to launch at an angle, slicing through a serious cut of atmosphere to make for a projectile moving closer to paralelling the orbit it's trying to get into. This would of course mean a huge slowdown from drag.

So either way, you're toast, unless you're building a gun powerful enough to launch something so fast that even after the parachute that is Earth's atmosphere, it's still going 7 miles per second (and I'd LOVE to see one of these going up. The plasma trail would be quite a sight!) or you've got a gun that's really good at throwing rocks at other people. Metal rocks, mind you. I wouldn't even want to think of the implications of trying to construct a nuclear (or even worse, a biological) weapon that could survive those g-forces and remain intact and functioning.

Makes Pegasus and moon bases seem simple...

www.fury.com