Sunday, November 27, 2005

Joi Ito's Web: Learning Commons launches 'Copyright, copyleft and everything in between' [unmediated] 9:19:53 PM    comment []

Anti-Landmine Arrows. Land mines are a problem we've mentioned many solutions for. Well, here's a new one: arrows. New Scientist reported a few days ago that Raytheon has developed a mortar shell containing hundreds of heavy steel arrows inside, which are shot out as the shell is coming down. The arrows are massive enough, hit hard enough, and spread out enough to "wipe out every mine in an area several metres square, even when the mines are buried under sand or under nearly a metre of water." This disarms mines from a safe distance, without having to know exactly where or how many there are--large areas can be cleared by firing shots in a systematic overlapping pattern. The New Scientist article is the only thing I could find about it online--even Raytheon's site doesn't have it--but I'm sure if it goes from invention to product we'll hear more about it eventually. [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 9:19:17 PM    comment []

Escape from Corporate Voice Mail Jail. Paul English's IVR Cheat Sheet, a handy guide to getting a real human being on the phone instead of those exasperating "interactive voice response" phone systems, has drawn this rebuttal from one of the companies selling these systems. Here's English's response. I wonder if any of the companies he names have changed their message systems to thwart his excellent guide. [Dan Gillmor's blog] 9:19:06 PM    comment []

Perry on Philosophy and Philosophers. Charming, short essay by John Perry (Philosophy, Stanford); a taste:[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. [Leiter Reports] 11:51:22 AM    comment []

The Net I love continues to dig, and the collective turns up the Pre-history of the Sony rootkit. An old email thread shows the early efforts of the authors of Sony's infamous rootkit. In 2003, Ceri Coburn (to whom first4internet.com is registered) appeared as a novice programmer in a technical mailing list, asking questions about how to cripple CD drives. Subject: CDAUDIO Filter Driver Dynamic Load ThreadID: 42117 From: ntfsd member (xxxxxx@first4internet.co.uk) next msg Date:Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:06:30 -0000 (quoted) Hi, Is there a way that I can get the CDAUDIO filter driver example in the DDK to load and unload dynamically? I have used the addfilter app in the DDK to install it but the driver does not load until the next reboot. Thanks Ceri Link (Thanks, Quality!) Previous installments of the Sony Rootkit Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III (Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank) [Boing Boing] 11:51:15 AM    comment []

Defending Nuclear Ambitions, Iranian President Attacks U.S. [New York Times: International News] 6:20:13 AM    comment []

Some from among Roland's Sunday Smart Trends #86. Spray-On Computers Reach Hard Places Grain-sized semiconductors could one day be sprayed onto surfaces like paint onto walls to give computers access to places previously out of reach. The so-called Specknet combines sensing, computer processing and wireless communication to link the physical and digital world in a kind of computational aura. Source: Tracy Staedter, Discovery News, November 16, 2005 UK's first hydrogen-powered house switched on A newly built family house, belonging to Berwickshire Housing Association (BHA), has provided an ideal ‘live’ domestic venue for the installation of a prototype hydrogen-powered fuel cell, which uses a Polymer Electrolyte Membrane and separates out hydrogen from natural gas to make heat and power. Source: Jon Land, 24dash.com, November 21, 2005 The Geography of Corporate Giving Where a company is headquartered influences the types of social programs it supports, such as housing assistance, disease research, and the arts, according to new research by professor Christopher Marquis and his coauthors. Is social spending too confined by geography? Source: Sean Silverthorne, HBS Working Knowledge, November 21, 2005 How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks [The 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain] created a home page, The Million Dollar Homepage, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. [At publication time, Alex Tew has generated $623,800 toward his $1 million goal.] Source: Gwendolyn Bounds, The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2005 (Paid registration required) The Ants Go Marching – on Your Screen Brian Fisher, curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, has such enthusiasm for ants, he can make you feel guilty over spraying the little devils in your kitchen. His entomological evangelism extends to his leadership of AntWeb, the Academy's comprehensive Web resource for ant species. AntWeb's graphically rich Web site opens its collection – tens of thousands of specimens strong – to both the research community and the general public. That makes AntWeb an interesting visit for anyone with anyone with an entymological bent. But what makes AntWeb unique among life science databases is its integration with Google Earth (GE), a freely available software tool from search goliath Google. Source: Karen Heyman, The Scientist, Volume 19, Issue 22, Page 24, November 21, 2005 [Smart Mobs] 6:20:08 AM    comment []

Time-lapse video of Panama Canal locks -- hypnotic.  This hypnotic video is made with time-lapse frames from seven days' worth of the webcam at the Panama Canal's Miraflores canal. Watching the stately dance of the giant ships, day and night, passing through the locks, is like watching ogres waltz -- their grace is perfectly offset by their hulking, container-stacked brutal unloveliness. Link (Thanks, Bob!) [Boing Boing] 6:18:40 AM    comment []

Who's in the Corner Office?. In ways less obvious than race and gender, the corporate elite has become less elite and more diverse over the last decade or two, while its counterpart in Washington has become more homogeneous. By DAVID LEONHARDT. [NYT > Education] 6:17:52 AM    comment []