Thursday, August 07, 2003

Ted Kaczynski wants his stuff back (the Smoking Gun), including Of Mice and Men, Mushroom Hunters Field Guide, and On Being Sane in Insane Places. Details at The Smoking Gun. 3:27:10 PM    comment []

The police state: On the surface, beehives and ant nests seem to be model societies, with each individual striving for the common good. But maintaining this social order sometimes calls for brutal tactics. by John Whitfield, in Nature. [I]n any society, it is possible to prosper by breaking the rules. Worker honeybees do occasionally lay their own eggs. As well as being against the queen's interests, this puts them at odds with the rest of the workforce. And in the late 1980s, evolutionary ecologist Francis Ratnieks, now at the University of Sheffield, UK, showed that honeybee workers act as a 'police force' that cracks down on miscreants, eating their eggs. Worker policing is a mechanism by which a society resolves its conflicts, says Ratnieks. I think it's the best example of conflict resolution in nature. Policing by egg-eating is common to all species of Apis, not just the familiar domestic honeybee, A. mellifera. And bees are not alone - the phenomenon has recently been observed in some species of wasp and in a group of ants. It may be very widespread, says Ratnieks. But sometimes policing breaks down. Beehives occasionally dissolve into anarchy, as workers begin to reproduce en masse. And a parasitic subspecies of honeybee is wreaking havoc in South Africa, destroying colonies by evading their police. Evolutionary biologists hope that studying such face-offs between authoritarianism and anarchy will provide a deeper understanding of the balance between cooperation and selfishness at many levels, from genes within the genome to individuals in human societies. [Notes deleted.] 12:26:52 PM    comment []

GPL may be unenforceable under German law: Study concludes liability of software developer community is unresolved issue. By John Blau, IDG News Service. It's worth noting that VSI [which retained Herr Professor Spindler for this opinion] is a lobby group for closed source software vendors and that any report from this camp is likely to be critical of open source. 12:26:47 PM    comment []

Where ''Think Different'' Is Taking Apple, Business Week Special Report by Jane Black. Rather than accept being a niche PC maker, Steve Jobs is transforming his baby into a high-end consumer-electronics and services company. 12:26:42 PM    comment []

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? -- a quiz. 11:26:32 AM    comment []

Seoul now to punish attempted hacking (Korea Herald). The government is pushing for a law revision to toughen the punishment for computer hacking and enhance measures to protect private information online. The Ministry of Information and Communications said yesterday that those convicted of attempted hacking would face punishment of up to three years in jail or fines of 30 million won ($25,410) from next year. 10:26:41 AM    comment []

Hackers lose 'patron saint' (St. Jude obit from the Times of India). 7:05:00 AM    comment []

Oyez! The Supreme Court, Now on MP3. Jerry Goldman is taking the original audio recordings of the Supreme Court and turning them into MP3 files for free distribution on the Web. By Jeffrey Selingo. [New York Times: Technology] 7:03:49 AM    comment []

xian: Harvey Pekar has a blog. Why didn't anyone tell me? From Off the Streets of Cleveland... Comes Harvey Pekar's Official Blog. 7:02:05 AM    comment []

Thin Lizzie. Work hard! Be a people person! Use Google! And other useful tips from Ms. Grubman's new seminar for suckers. [Salon Headlines] 6:56:27 AM    comment []

New Security Woes for E-Vote Firm. A January source code leak revealed the innards of Diebold Election Systems' proprietary voting software. A new breach threatens to expose the company's business practices -- including its security methods. By Brian McWilliams. [Wired News] 6:51:55 AM    comment []

Camera Van Brakes for Close-Ups. An avid photography fan has built an extreme version of the classic pinhole camera. He converted a mail truck into a giant box camera that takes enormous pictures, and he's ready to go on tour. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 6:51:08 AM    comment []

Joe Conason's Journal. Authoritarian Ashcroft rankles judges -- even Rehnquist. Plus: Fox poll numbers are bad news for Bush. [Salon Headlines] 6:49:22 AM    comment []

Very Strange Things on the Web, from TOURBUS. 6:48:50 AM    comment []

It's Always The Preacher's Kid Who's The Biggest Hellraiser In Town. Plastic::Politics::Religion: The grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini who ousted the Shah in Iran in 1979 has praised the US for its separation of religion and state. [Plastic: Most Recent] 6:47:50 AM    comment []

A Bum Trip Reborn, by Simon Reynolds, in the Voice. Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-'70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. ("Authentic" meaning non- revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back- projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at "total art" only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid- tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed "no sound shalt go untreated"; both adulterated rock's "naturalistic" recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise. 4:25:26 AM    comment []