Dictator-in-Chief: Has Bush Become One?

An excellent article by Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. The article defines dictatorship, explains what a democratic dictatorship means, and gives historical precedence for its existence as well as tests for determining whether Bush wields dictatorial power.

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HELL of falling sand: NOW with zombies!

Simple little graphics experiment, but truly addictive for some odd reason. Water feeds the pin-wheel, salt kills it, fire sets it ablaze...

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A Gentle Introduction to SQL

Interactive SQL tutorial, learn about: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Mimer, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Access.

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Woot! Level 50!

On Saturday, Creesis (my cleric) finally hit level 50 in Dark Age of Camelot - Bedevere server. Currently, all his artifacts are level 9 and on their way to level 10. Now all I need is Enyalio's Boots and I can wait for Labyrinth to come out before buying some MP crafted armor. In the meantime, RvR is going to see a non-bot cleric!

RIAA Backs Down 1 Day After Being Counter-sued

In Warner v. Stubbs, in Oklahoma, the defendant filed her answer and counterclaim against the RIAA on August 23, 2006. In it she likened the RIAA's tactics to "extortion".
The very next day, on August 24, 2006, the RIAA turned around and asked the Judge for permission to withdraw its case:

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T-Shirt with Arabic Script = Terrorist?!?

While traveling through JFK airport, Arabic blogger Raed was told he must change his t-shirt. Raed asked "Isn't this my constitutional right to wear it?" with which Inspector Harris responded "you can't wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads "I am a robber" and going to a bank".

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Steal This Film

The first part of a free documentary series about file-sharing. This part focuses on The Pirate Bay, the world's biggest Bittorrent tracker, and copyfighters Piratbyran. It includes interviews with Anakata, Brokep, Tiamo and others -- plus some pretty cool pro-filesharing propaganda!

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Bryce 3D 5.0 for FREE until Sept. 6th !!

Awesome 3d Rendering software usable by non-artists that retails for $60 is being offered FREE from DAZ Software. If I had to guess, I'd say this is largely due to the release of Bryce 5.5.

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Bush : Pull out of IRAQ & Terrorists Strike USA

Bush's new assertion -- and it is apparently going to be his central message in the run-up to the November elections -- is that pulling out of Iraq would embolden terrorists and lead them to strike here again.

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NASA's World Wind giving google earth a run for its money!

What could be better than google earth? How bout being able to track real time weather, fires, floods, sandstorms all across the globe by the click of the mouse! Also super maps of Saturn, the Moon, EVEN A DEEP SPACE VIEWER! WOW is all I can say.

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Live Rattlesnakes Released In 'Snakes On A Plane' Theater

Authorities said pranksters released the young venomous rattlesnakes in a dark theater at the AMC

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Electronic Arts Announces Multi-Title Unreal Engine 3 License

In surprising news released over the wires late on Friday, Electronic Arts, who bought game engine company Criterion of Renderware fame back in 2004, has announced it has licensed Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for "several next-generation titles that are currently under development." All things considered, I wonder if I'll get to see Warhammer Online or Dark Age of Camelot making use of the Unreal engine in the future....

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Wiretapping Declared Unconstitutional.

"There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,'' said U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in rejecting President Bush's claim that he had the inherent power to authorize the program. The Justice Department has already declared that they will appeal the ruling.

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A new way to test your bandwidth (and it looks pretty cool too!)

The site allows you to select servers to ping from around the country on an interactive map and graphically displays connections as they travel with varying speeds along the way. It also lets you store results of tests for your computer and sort them by date, time, speed and distance. I've been using speakeasy.net for one of my bandwidth tests for awhile, but this is soo much cooler!



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Hacker Coalition Releases Lawsuit Proof P2P System

The Digital Douwd has challenged the media giants by releasing its Owner-Free Filing System. The new system is purported to be immune from the consumer lawsuits that have plagued previous P2P systems. While the creators do not contend the fact that copyright laws exist, they do maintain that OFF System peers don't actually break any of those laws. In the system's own words:
So now lets translate these principles to big numbers. When we translate something into a computer file we create a sequences of digits that represent the original.

Lets take a song for example. Let's say, "Lawyers, Guns and Money" is 3MB long. That means the song is three million bytes long or twenty-three million bits long. This makes a very big number, but it is still a number. As every binary number can be translated into a decimal number, I'll use them to simplify these examples.

Picture the song as this, but much longer.
24332984303829732498...398724

Now there are two other numbers that may be of interest, depending upon how you interpret them. Consider the following big numbers:

11230243302314110327...264211

and

12102741001515622171...134513

Then consider adding them together.

Are these numbers copyrighted? Can I store them on two separate computers? Would that break the law? What if they were never added together? Would their existence still break the law?

What if I give you two other numbers? Again, and again.

There are two consistent ways to answer the above questions. One leads to the conclusion that "All numbers are copyrighted." The other leads to the conclusion that, "There exists encodings of copyrighted number that are NOT copyrighted."

If the first conclusion is true, copyright is pointless. If the second is true copyright is meaningless.

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9/11 Detainee released after 5 years of not being charged with any crime

The date was Sept. 12, 2001, but Benemar "Ben" Benatta was clueless about the death and destruction one day earlier. About a week before, Canadian officials had stopped Benatta as he entered the country from Buffalo to seek political asylum.

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The TRUTH about the RIAA

Some very interesting information on the RIAA and their practices.

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RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days

The RIAA brought a file-sharing lawsuit against a guy who died; they offered the departed's family a 60-day grieving period before they began to depose his children for the suit against his estate. If they don't reach an agreeable settlement (in other words if the family doesn't settle) they anticipate suing the family.

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Consumer Electronics Association lambasts the RIAA

No, I'm not going to talk about today's foiled "mass murder" plot in the UK. It's been covered everywhere, and right now I'm not really all that happy about the changes the TSA has decided to implement in response. Maybe later. In the meantime, CEA president/CEO Gary Shapiro lambasted the RIAA concerning a letter the RIAA sent to Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) about copyright issues. Shapiro said that the RIAA has avoided participating in the copy-protection technical working group because the RIAA does not want to change its business model. No surprises there!

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Bandwidth Monitoring Tools

I did a lot of research about bandwidth monitoring tools recently. Here's a link to a blog with some interesting bandwidth monitoring tools.

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AOL Releases Search Logs from 650,000 Users

AOL released the logs of all searches done by over 650,000 of their users over the course of March-May of 2006. They didn't ask any of these users whether they could release the information, nor did they take extensive steps to hide personally identifiable information in the search queries. They took the token step of anonymizing the screennames by assigning them to a number. As has been reported on Slashdot, Technorati, and other sites, the data has already yielded some rather... interesting information. Personally, I grabbed a mirror and plugged the files into a mySQL database to play with. So far, it's been interesting.
Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for "next page" of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID's

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What Kind of Dream Are You?

You're an Adventure Dream! Your life is fast paced with things, people, and places. When people think of a modern day Hero amoung them, they think of you. You're dreams are usually about someone needing to be saved, and you're the only one for the job!

Linux Command Line Cheatsheet

I was recently forced to remember my 4-week course on UNIX commands when I learned that our company is making use of m/cluster software running off a Debian-sarge distro for our mySQL data warehouse. As if in answer to a prayer, Digg has a nice article with a list of linux commands for common operations including: file searching, networking, directory navigation, etc.

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