...more recent posts
I was mentioning this crazy scheme last night to Alex, so here's the link for documentation:
The White List (or "clean list") is proposed policy which will extend government and corporate control over the possession, importation and movement of anything that is alive - plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, everything.In other words, it's not obnoxious enough to make certain plants illegal, they want to make everything a priori illegal, and then make exceptions for just certain plants.
The Plant Protection and Quarantine Safeguarding Review recommends that the United States Department of Agriculture "Consider adopting a modified 'clean list' approach for propagative material, specifying what is permissible subsequent to risk assessment, rather than the current 'dirty list' that prohibits or restricts specific articles only."The cover is that this legislation will protect us from evil invasive species, but you'd have to be pretty dim to think this is trying to protect anything except unbridled profiteering. Look who's behind it:
"Monsanto, DowElanco, American Cyanamid, Zeneca, Dow AgroSciences, SePro, Helena and other herbicide manufactures and "life patent" corporations have funded tremendous propaganda in recent years hyping a spurious "invasive species" threat to natural ecosystems in order to sell more herbicides.(via ethel)
There must be a catch. Silk is a freeware program that enables Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 in all Carbon applications. Mozilla looks amazing with Silk installed! Best upgrade ever. But why doesn't Apple enable this?
I like Silk so much I'm not even going to make fun of them for calling their programs Haxies.
I haven't been too motivated lately. Hopefully that will change soon.
Mozilla is finally done. Officially. Good luck getting through to their servers though. If you want to grab it, try the mirrors.
Apple released a (so far minor) update to X (10.1.5 now.) Stable on two machines so far. Apparently iDisks are much faster, but I can't confirm that personally. If you're running X (sarah, stephen...) click on 'software update' in preferences (that's the light switch icon, don't ask me why) and then click 'update now'.
Apple also released a "public preview" of Quicktime 6. This is built on the new Mpeg 4 standard. Here's a short interview with Jobs. I don't recommend installing this yet, but you can start to work up a little interest. Much better quality at much smaller file sizes (for video and audio.) Now if they could just work out that license fee issue with the MPEG-LA. The also released Quicktime broadcaster looks very interesting too.
Detailed scenario of a 150 kiloton nuclear blast at the base of the empire state building. (Keep clicking 'next' at the bottom of each page.)
I'm very curious why publishing this information (how to defeat a particular audio CD copy protection method with a felt tip pen) does not violate the DMCA? (I think Reuters and C/net published it too.)
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but it seems to be a clear violation. Is it just that the RIAA isn't pressing the issue because it will make them look like fools? Like bigger fools, that is. It certainly would make it clear how over reaching the DMCA is.
In the test, WiFi Metro will integrate Green Packet's SONaccess IP routers and software with WiFi Metro's system of LAN (local area network) "hot spots," allowing users to switch from one network to another as they move in and out of the respective coverage areas, without having to log on and off.That will be an important step. No doubt others are working on this as well.
O.K., now it's starting to get hot. My boasting about not needing an air conditioner for the second straight summer is already looking not so smart...
Dailywireless.org is a good source of news on the burgeoning wireless world with an emphasis on community networking.
Here are some good notes (with some good links) about the kind of networks we should be aiming at (relatively short.) That link is from this quick roundup of Pulver's Connectivity 2002 conference at the always informative satn.org.