Skype
(which just today released version 1.0 btw!), the free peer-to-peer
baed IP phone service, is now planning to go along with offering pre-paid VoIP calls to land line and mobile phones. If they get around to making their client a bit less of a resource hog, I'll be happy too. I better check out 1.0...
Eliza is very old news. But here's Jenny18 - A Cybersex Bot Implemented in Eliza.
Be warned, the linked IRC logs are rather adult in nature if adolescent
in quality. If you think this explains a few weird IM conversations
you've had lately...
To the fury of groups
working with animals, Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon and prominent
figure in the anti-vivisection movement, told The Observer: 'I think
violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad
happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage
others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and
that it will be effective.'
Vlasak,
who likens animal experimentation to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews,
said he stood by his claim that: 'I don't think you'd have to kill too
many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives,
we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.
A few moderate animal rights groups are distancing themselves from
the statements. Incitement to violence could well bring Mr Vlasak into
trouble with the authorities, as it well should. We don't need more
home-grown terrorist threats right now, thank you.
Today's prices, combined with high production levels, mean an extra NOK
200 billion (nearly USD 30 billion) can roll into state coffers over
the next four years. In a country of just 4.5 million people, that's a
lot of money.
It means, theoretically, that every single Norwegian will have another
NOK 45,000 than earlier estimated to their credit in the state's oil
fund by 2008.
I hope my cheque is in the mail (yeah right).
Here's a bonus conspiracy theory for you: Norway brokered the tragic "Oslo"
peace process to further mess up the Middle East to ensure high oil
prices for the future. And Iraq? Remember that both Karl Rove and John Ashcroft of the Bush administration are Norwegian-Americans. Forget the Jewish cabal. The ultra-secret viking cabal has
them all outfoxed!
Star Wars Episode III will be called Revenge of the Sith. How many
really care? Episode I was a scifi comic flick with some cool scenes, but I actually never
bothered to watch more than a few minutes of Attack of the Clones.
Somebody should teach George Lucas to write dialogue. Or he should
stick to the special effects and outsource that job to somebody who
could do it.
As Chatterbox noted in the earlier column, "Let America be America again" comes from a poem published in 1938 by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. But Hughes intended the line ironically.
A black man living in the pre-civil rights era would have had to be
insane to look back to a golden age of freedom and equality in America,
and Hughes was not insane. Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote "Let America Be America Again," which explains the poem's agitprop tone.
This slogan will surely set the democrats up for some cheap but potentially effective counter attacks.
