Pledge of Allegiance Ruled Unconstitutional by an appelate level court!!!

Comparison Of Google To Teoma, SearchEngineWatch.com compared the good and the bad of both engines. They wrote the cool thing about Teoma is that its community-seeking behavior is both query-specific, and happens in real time. Whenever you type in a query, we're actually looking for the communities after you type the query. Teoma's approach differs from Google's, which uses a similar, but more static ranking system. It's also unlike the approach taken by Northern Light that classify web pages based on pre-defined categories!!!

Shocked At Payola, Slashdot makes a couple of pointers to some new articles on the subject. Parrticularly timely given recient rate setting done for webcasting!!!

Lawmaker: Let Studios Hack P2P Nets, Congressman Berman suggests a law that would allow media companies to use tactics that might be deemed illegal today under common law, state statutes, or the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He suggests "flooding", "spoofing", "redirections"! Amazing!!!

MIT Project Oxygen: Visual Interaction, more cool stuff by MIT. People and machines, groovy man!!!

Mysteries Of The CDRW And Backups Revealed "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Robot On The Run, Scientists running a pioneering experiment with "living robots" which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it "lives"!!!

Holographic Storage Overview At CNET CNET has an article about how holography is being used to create next generation storage devices. The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude." Actually, it's an overview with four separate articles -- no bets on when the technology covered will really be available though. Haven't heard about this stuff since the early '90s maybe we have gotten somewhere!!!

New York Times Plugs OpenOffice Suite, for thoes that don't know, this is a completely interoperable, reads and writes all office files types, free for use, and free of microsoft. Win., Linux, and Solars suppported. MacOS X on the way. Oh yeah and its open source too!!! For now Mac users can try ThinkFree it costs a $50 thats $250 less than M$ Office and it to is completely compatable. Or use AppleWorks also compatable and only $80. This ones for you mike!!!

Space Rock's Close Approach Astronomers have revealed that on 14 June, an asteroid the size of a football pitch made one of the closest ever recorded approaches to the Earth. It is only the sixth time an asteroid has been seen to penetrate the Moon's orbit, and this is by far the biggest rock to do so. What has worried some astronomers, though, is that the space object was only detected on 17 June, several days after its flyby!!!

Rates Set For Royalties On Internet The government on Thursday decided that songs delivered online by Internet music broadcasters will be charged royalty fees at a rate that amounts to 70 cents per song for every 1,000 listeners, the Copyright Office announced on its Web site. John Jeffrey, vice president of Live365 Inc., the largest Internet radio network, said "[W]e think that this is a rate that still means the majority of independent webcasters will cease to operate." Call you people and fix this before it getts out of hand, broadcasters do not pay this same royalty only the new tech kids do. Thanks dad for the heads up!!!

New 'T-ray' Space Camera Also Sees Through Clothes, Walls, i always wanted x-ray vision!!!

Peer-to-Peer Cell Phones? A few years a go while driving through Rancho Santa Fe with a car load of cell phone packing friends no one could get a signal. So we came up with this idea, unfortunately i hadn't taken a patent class yet and none of us were engineers but nice to see it get done just the same!!!

Royalties Proposed For Booming Used Market As New-CD Sales Stagnate, its amazing it never occured to them that either 1) there product is not as good as it used to be, or 2) they charge more than the free market is wil;ling to bear. Instead lets just bastardize the law to get back at our customers for no longer lining our pockets. First lets remove the parts of copyright we don't like, such as fair use, and make stronger thoes we do, like the period to exist in perpetuity. Oh yeah and now that these pesky kids have begun to start a parallel economy of used cds lets tax thoes too, forget about the first sale doctrine. Lets just license the cd to the first purchaser, or should i say licensee!!!

Lawsuit Challenges Copy-protected CDs, i have been advocating this for months. Thanks Mike for the heads up!!!

Scientists Grow Human Thymus From Stem Cells, and its about time. i need some spare parts. Human trials could begin within two years!!!

The Boy and his Breeder Reactor Boy Scout who went a little too far in trying to achieve a merit badge in Atomic Energy!!!

Another One Goes Down, Today AudioGalaxy reached an out-of-court settlement with the RIAA. To sum up the settlement, AudioGalaxy will pay the RIAA a lot of money and from now only provide songs for which the copyright holder has specifically given permission.

AlltheWeb, is trying to take on Google for dominance. First the was the OS war, then the Browser wars, now the search war is on. Other contenders include, Teoma.com and WiseNut!!!

File Sharing: Innocent Until Proven Guilty, An economist says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn't -- and he doesn't know why.

The Big 5 Are Slow, But Trying To Catch Up This summer, Universal plan to sell tens of thousands of high-quality digital singles for 99 cents or less and albums for $9.99 through online retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy and Sam Goody. Sony will start a similar service priced at $1.49 a song. The new services suggest that Universal and Sony no longer will handicap their online music business for fear of eating into CD sales, which have been the industry's lifeblood. Neither service will have secure file formats. The revolution will be burned!!!

Can Superconductors Block Gravitational Fields? Gravitational shielding anyone? Just put some magnets in your shoes and were off to Pluto!!! : )

Lawrence Livermore Lab On The Chopping Block?, welcome to the future of the motherland. When i was little i went to the lab on several occasions and saw really cool tech that impacted me greatly. i saw my first holograms there!!! Thanks GW. : (

bowieart is David Bowie's art gallery for his own work and that of art students. Quite cool!!!

David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur, "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing." Thank you!!! Mr. Ziggy Stardust speaks his mind a very important read!!!

SDSU Students Create Sporty Hybrid Vehicle, students working in conjunction with real life designers create an electric hybrid vehicle that actually...well.. looks cool, maybe hybrids will catch on!!!

Dee Dee Ramone Found Dead In Los Angeles Dee Dee Ramone, a founding member of punk pioneers the Ramones, died Wednesday night in his Hollywood home, according to a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Coroner's office. The bassist was 50. I saw the Ramones and Dee Dee play just before he left the band, it was my first punk show. He will be missed...

VeriSign Hit With Marketing Lawsuit On CNET.com And Reuters, WOW i guess we hit the big time.And since i didn't post it before, here's one naming D! CCAN is doing alright!!!

MacOPINION : Matthew Ruben Writes Celine Dion Killed My iMac! This is truely the most insightful and educational article i have read on the net in quite some time. Ruben breakes down all the components of the "color book" standards that maybe effected by Sony and how ultimately they may not even be the key to Sony's liability. i may disagree with his findings but as he puts it, it is difficult to determine weather or not these disks conform because the standards are not public. They are owned by Sony (along with Philips) and odds are they are not going to show them to non-paying licencies any time soon. In any case this is a very cogent article that articulately discusses not only the technology involved but the law as well. Very, very much worth the read for anyone who loves music and feels the RIAA/MPAA/Big 5 have started to cross the line. Next they'll be telling you what you can think about their products!!!

Flash Critic To Coach Macromedia, my problem with flash is most people misuse it. Its like lets make everything bounce and spin and well flash just because we can! Nevermind it is more taxing on the browser/OS and that most often the metaphores used by designers are ridiculous. Anyway enough soapbox, looks like Macromedia is getting help!!!