- Of monkeys and penguins:
Darl McBride, capitalist crusader against the commie horde of Linux users
SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced “skoh”, as in Scopes. Indeed “the SCO case” of 2003 sounds increasingly like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious fundamentalists against progressives wanting to teach Darwin alongside the Bible in American classrooms. The SCO case plays the same role in a culture war now consuming the software industry. On one side are the equivalents of the fundamentalists—buttoned-down types clinging to proprietary and closed computer systems. Facing them are today’s evolutionists—the pony-tailed set championing collaboration and openness in the form of Linux, an operating system that anybody can download and customise for nothing. The 1925 trial had a monkey as its symbol; the 2003 case has the Linux trademark, a cute penguin.
I bumped into this article over at Freedom-to-Tinker. It appears more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, though, the author’s underlying theme: established fundamentalism versus liberal progressivism is a little too… liberal — I think he tried a little too hard with the analogy. Rather, I think a stronger argument could have been made using self-incriminating statements Mr. McBride said himself. For that, there is WeLoveTheSCOInformationMinister.org — a site dedicated to capturing all their priceless moments for the world to see.
Note: I did find The Economist Kulturkampf prescient as the delay of any GNU/Linux deployment will be in the best interest of Microsoft (though Sun also benefits too – qui bono…).
- North Korea goes GSM:
Axis member shrugs off CDMA blockade
FOLLOWING the US government’s intervention last year to prevent South Korea helping its impoverished neighbour to build a CDMA based mobile network, the North has apparently gone GSM.
For those of you not keeping up with CDMA and GSM, check out my summary of the Yin and Yang.
- Church sullied by secret porn film:
A bishop will have to re-bless weddings that took place in an Italian village church after it was discovered it had been used as a location for a porn film.
“All ceremonies performed here since this scandalous act are illicit,” Father Paolo Ferrini of San Vincenzo said.
But Father, they were doing The Missionary, surely you don’t frown upon hands-on Jesuitism? More on that here.
- Related Books: Terrorism & True Crime – This reminds me of the TiVo giving viewers fuzzy results for “programs you might like.”
- Man who lived in forest cave for a decade evicted:
FLAGSTAFF – A 57-year-old man who had been living in a cave in the Coconino National Forest for more than a decade has been evicted.
For 11 years, Thomas J. Crawford made his home in a cave. Federal authorities say he had a bed, books and clothes arranged on hangers. He even had pots and cutlery for cooking in his cave home.
On Friday, he was arrested for using a national forest for residential purposes after a Flagstaff resident reported a suspicious camp in a remote drainage on Mount Elden.
If a guy can’t homestead an uninhabited cave, what can he homestead? It’s tyranny I tell you, Islamofacism even.
- Trillian Pro 2.0, now with tabs: A few months ago I mentioned several utilities that I find useful for my everyday digital life. Among them was Trillian which was just updated to include one of my favorite features from DeadAIM: tabs. This means that I can streamline my desktop, increasing my productivity level 10000% — obtain it somehow now.
- Music ‘pirates’ flying flags more proudly despite suits:
So far, the recording industry’s legal blitz against Internet music swappers has produced the intended publicity: Children, grandparents and even a Yale University professor were branded as pirates this week in lawsuits that threaten hefty fines.
But usage statistics, and interviews on New Jersey campuses, suggest the industry is far from achieving its intended result. The lawsuits may have spurred more piracy, if only temporarily.
Worldwide use of popular file-sharing networks rose this week, according to BigChampagne LLC, an Atlanta market research company that tracks traffic on a dozen “peer-to-peer” networks such as KaZaA and Grokster.
Arr, matey. Pirates off the port bow!
Look, Captain Hook is terribly insulted, because he looted physical property. Individuals using Kazaa are not Hook’s esteemed colleagues by any stretch of the imagination. At worst they are infringing on State-guaranteed copyrights, which is not the same thing as “stealing” or “theft” or even “piracy.”
Shiver me timbers, get it right already. [Note: I mentioned BigChampagne a few days ago. Arr.]
- Chong gets 9 months for selling bongs:
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) — Tommy Chong, who played one half of the dope-smoking duo in the Cheech and Chong movies, asked for leniency from a judge Thursday but was sentenced to nine months in prison for conspiring to sell drug paraphernalia.
Whew, I’m really glad they got him off the streets. He was truly a menace to society and civilization. Incarcerate for life I say!
- New light on China’s decade of chaos:
Li Zhensheng hid his photographs for fear of recriminations [Picture]
A previously unseen archive of photographs from China’s so-called Cultural Revolution is finally being published, 35 years after they were buried for safekeeping. BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard reports.
That reminded me of The Onion’s “Giant Poster of Mao Seizes Power in China. Enormous Placard Now Controls World’s Most Populous Nation.” Oh, and uhh up to 100 million people died because of that guy. Some statistic, eh?
- Beijing police taught to tackle problem foreigners:
Police in Beijing have been given English phrase books which teach them how to deal with troublesome foreigners in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, a news report said yesterday.
I was going to post this a couple days ago, I just thought it was kind of funny, some of the things the police train for there — not too different than some of the “circumstances” here…
- China bids to stop Sars re-run:
China plans to spend more than $1bn on increasing its healthcare in case of medical emergencies such as Sars, the state media said on Thursday.
A total of 11bn Yuan ($1.3bn) will be invested in new centres and hospitals for infectious diseases, the China Daily reported, in an effort to avoid a repeat of mistakes made during the Sars outbreak earlier this year.
That last part was a little ironic — wasn’t it the Chinese State (the CCP more precisely) that fumbled the ball time and time again in allowing doctors/medicine/resources/etc. to reach those infected with the feline-based disease?
- Today’s Wikipedia Entry of the Day — Mike Ditka. It has nothing to do with Da Bears, or Da Bulls, but rather Da Boys. Good ole Mike played for the Dallas Cowboys for the last 4 seasons of his football career and managed to even catch a touchdown in Super Bowl VI against the Dolphins. Afterwards, Mike became a couch with Dallas under Tom Landry.
I’ve been a Cowboys fan ever since I knew they existed (having been born and raised in Dallas) and had no clue that Ditka was ever associated with the team. The More You Know…
Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground:
Some people may well be intimidated by the 261 lawsuits that the music industry has filed against Internet users it says are illegally sharing songs.
But hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music — hidden from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America, or from any other investigators.
That’s a pretty good story on new P2P programs that add layers of encryption and proxies to allow anonymous file-swapping. A few months ago I mentioned that K-lite (K++) was adding features that block organizations like the RIAA from sniffing your upstream traffic. A few days ago I also mentioned Earthstaion 5, a new P2P application that uses anonymous proxies in combination with encryption to keep prying eyes at bay — I haven’t been too impressed with it so far.
Skype is the new must-have application:
Skype is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users – not to share files this time, but to talk and chat with your friends.
The technology is extremely advanced – but super simple to use… YouÂ’ll be making free phone calls to your friends in no time!
Wow, they not only want to piss of the RIAA and MPAA but every land-line telephone company (hell, even cell’s). VoIP telephony has actually been in the news quite a bit lately as “regulators” (those guys that can’t get normal jobs in the private sector) are trying to do their thing and deter innovation.
Anyways, this might spread like chlamydia, seeing as Kazaa is apparently the number one downloaded piece of software ever (that doesn’t count Blaster or SoBig spam…).
And I just spent about 10 minutes talking to David long-distance with it. The sound is pretty good (crisp even). There is a little delay, maybe a second at most because of several things: we both use routers, so data is being shoveled through “someone elses” computer and each call is encrypted (I’m not sure as to what algorithms, it could merely be “beep beep” added to the conversation periodically. Ed. 9/15/03 – the FAQ answers this question — AES 256-bit encryption, the same used in 802.11i).
At any rate, it’s free and extremely easy to setup, check it out sometime (I can see them add IM functionality to it too, they already have a basic version built into Kazaa).
Here’s a modified screen capture I took of the default window:
ET phone home – por gratis
Dolly lab to create ‘virgin birth’ embryos:
The team that cloned Dolly the sheep have been granted the UK’s first stem cell research licence allowing the creation of human embryos from unfertilised eggs.
This process is called parthenogenesis – Greek for “virgin birth” – and occurs naturally in some reptiles and insects. It allows females to reproduce without males, as their eggs are prompted to develop into embryos without being fertilised by sperm.
I thought parthenogenesis was something similar to asexual reproduction in sponges (hermaphrodites). Alas my public school biology class was misinformed!
Of course, this should be condemned because it’s pure terrortastic evil: no sperm is used at all — and the Bible says that every act of carnal fornication requires spooge.
Well as you can see, I’ve had a bit of time to blog this past week, quickly ending what I thought would be the retirement of my blogging days.
Anyways, I’d like to start adding blogs to my blogroll, so here is some criteria that I’m looking for:
- Original, I’m not interested in yet-another Instapundit
- Updated several times a week, you’re entertaining me too
- Not many sexamaphones, keep the pr0n down, unless it’s Venezuelan Beauties
- Reciprocal link, I wash your hand, you wash mine and together we wash our faces
All of these rules can slide of course, if you’re willing to give me mucho ducats and/or your hand in marriage.
Anyways, either leave a comment or email me.
AP: TTD to auction gold offerings:
Tirupati, Sept. 14. (PTI): About 200 kg of stone studded gold ornament offerings made by devotees in the ‘hundi’ at the famous hill shrine of Lord Venkateswara near here would be auctioned soon, temple sources said today.
The gold offerings proposed for public auction had already been separated from the huge gold reserves of the temple.
The auction would take place amid tight security within two weeks in the premises of the headquarters of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) which manages the temple.
India’s richest hill temple has been netting annually an average of about 700 kg of gold offerings through its ‘hundi,’ the sources added. (via The Sage Chronicle)
My lord that alot of money. Based upon the Sage’s calculation’s that is ~220,704 Troy ounces of gold. As of this writing, the spot for one troy ounce is currently around $375. So if you do the math, the annual donations in gold alone is about $82.76 million.
I need to start a cult asap — note: I will accept gold and silver in any denominations from this point on.
Sinking City:
Shanghai Officials Struggle to Keep City Above Water
S H A N G H A I, China, July 28 — The only thing keeping the Huangpu River out of the Peace Hotel’s Art Deco lobby on Shanghai’s waterfront this summer is a concrete flood wall.
A flood wall was built in the early 1990s by city leaders worried that the summertime Huangpu would overflow onto Sun Yat-sen Road, the eight-lane riverfront boulevard.
ItÂ’s not that the river has risen more than usual during the rainy season. Instead, Shanghai is sinking.
The land under the skyscrapers and 13 million people of this bustling metropolis is deflating like a giant air mattress, slowly settling as its shallow water table collapses after decades of overuse.
Remember the Kansai International Airport? The Japanese state decided to build a man-made island and place an airport on top of it — so far so good, right? Well within a couple years of it’s completion it had already sunk to what they projected would take 50 years — sink holes had already formed as well.
Anyways, the State of Japan’s answer is apparently to spend a hojillion dollars to fix a problem the State caused in the first place (poor planning among other things).
Back to Shanghai, the BBC is also reporting that the “fathers of the City” are trying to slash building of buildings — though, they’re largely to blame for allowing overusage of underground acquifers. Whoopsie.
SCO Admits To Not Knowing Own Code History in Recent Q&A:
From the start, questions have surrounded the process and people SCO used to determine the alleged code violations in Linux, from the phantom MIT mathematics department team which MIT itself can’t identify to SCO saying this week that it has no idea what the history of a particular snippet of code might be – even a high profile snippet like the one SCO highlighted at SCO Forum.
Ever played ‘Pin the tail on the donkey?’ For those of you that have not, here is how it works. It’s a super popular game in college during sorority parties… err, it’s a game in which a contestant is blindfolded, then given a string or strip of paper with a tack/tape on one end. The object of the game is to place the “tail” onto the appropriate part of the donkey, which is usually either dead or merely another piece of paper as well.
That is how I envisage the blokes at SCO: wandering through the night without so much as a clue, holding what they believe is the silver bullet which ushers in the End Game.
Beyond File-Sharing, a Nation of Copiers:
The week the music industry brought suit against 261 users of Internet file-sharing services, Donald L. McCabe was in St. Louis to talk about a different form of digital copying. Mr. McCabe, a Rutgers University professor, has made a career of studying the cheating of American high school and college students. His most recent study found that cheating was spreading almost like file-sharing. Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year.
More striking to Mr. McCabe, 44 percent said they considered this sampling no big deal. Because the Internet makes it easy to copy information, he said, “it’s made it much more tempting.”
I’ve mentioned before my own views of plagiarism, though I should add, I don’t expect much from individuals whom have gradumacated frum publik skewl (contemporaneously, I don’t consider file-sharing ‘heinous’ or ‘evil’ either). It’s a Confederacy of Dunces I say. Damn Prussians.
Simple woods ape? Bigfoot academics say not a chance
Symposium unites experts of the weird-footed mystery beast:
Willow Creek, Humboldt County — In the pantheon of legendary beasts, Bigfoot plays Rodney Dangerfield: a shambling hominid that doesn’t get any respect.
Even here, in the heart of his putative stomping grounds — where an international Bigfoot conference was held Saturday — he is a mere shill rather than a point of pride, a leering caricature used to purvey everything from burgers to used cars. Few locals believe in Bigfoot, except as an effective way to hawk junk food or trinkets to gullible tourists.
Reminds me of Captain McCallister profiteering off of Homer’s “All You Can Eat” issues, stating “Come for the freak, stay for the food!”
