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The "trusted client" is upon us. Wes is right on it as usual. First he points to the classic Richard Stallman piece The Right to Read. The key passage in this dystopian short story is: "Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger." And then Wes points to this fine print on the Adobe eBook (a new format for publishing books in electronic form) website:
" If you are a software programmer, you should note that the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader's security implementation does not allow program debuggers to be executed on the machine while the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader is running."Not quite threatening prison terms yet, but the idea that Stallman's fears are looking a little more reasonable is very scary indeed.
Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress as it is commonly known, is the first plant to have its entire genetic sequence read by scientists.
Massive list of links concerning the intersection of Art, Technology, Science & Culture.
Been thinking about Montana a lot lately. My father's side of the family is from the big sky country. My great grandfather was a homesteader in Paradise Valley. Despite the promising name, there is a good reason why they were giving away that land: you couldn't grow enough food to make it through the winter. But thanks to a little side work on the newfangled railroad, my ancestors survived, although the land was lost - in good cowboy fashion - on a hand of poker. Tough life, or so the legend goes. I "lived" there briefly during my college years, but only through the good will of some real westerners. It's beautiful country, but it's cold. The people have to be tough. I, on the other hand, am clearly from the east ("the concrete jungle" as my grandfather would say) where you just have to be loud, and maybe a little pushy. That's a survival skill too, I guess, but it's different. Anyway, it seems like a few lucky (where 'lucky' means 'crazy') modern people are going to experience the real thing: frontier.
More planets discovered in the "habitable region."
We saw the new Ang Lee movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" last night. I heard somewhere (NYTimes?) that you want to break into applause at the end of the first fight scene, and that's exactly what happened in our theatre. Really impressive. They managed to capture exactly what "flying" feels like in my dreams. Not so much Superman-style all out flying, but an almost weightless running, bounding, hopping, floating. Good stuff. Highly recommended.
Space.com has this article about NASA's contact with the 35 year old Pioneer 6 spacecraft.
"NASA successfully contacted Pioneer 6 on Friday, nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency’s oldest working spacecraft was launched into solar orbit on what was to have been a six-month mission. NASA used its 231-foot (70-meter) dish antenna in Goldstone, Calif., to lock onto a signal from the spacecraft’s 8-watt transmitter at 7 p.m. EST. 'We have made contact with the spacecraft and have a downlink from it,' said Washington Downs, the Deep Space Network operations chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), halfway through the 2.5-hour tracking period. At the time, the spacecraft was 83 million miles (133 million kilometers) from Earth."(via /.)
More on Tim Berners-Lee's semantic web vision.
Brenda Laural, Brad Wieners, and Douglas Rushkoff on "What ever happened to the cyber revolution, part II."
"My overall point, even though I didn't set out with this as my overall point, isn't that the world needs an Etymologizer, although it desperately does..."