The Antigravity Underground, The fantastic floating device called a lifter has no moving parts, no onboard fuel, and no shortage of wide-eyed admirers. Even inside NASA.

WOW, my very own UFO!!!

Maybe everyone knew this already but it occured to me just yesterday. Sorry i'm a little slow.

Anyway i have a new theory about the Green Flash, at least its new to me. You know how everyone is always looking for that elusive green flash just as the sun sets. i think it is an after image on your retna. you don't notice the green because it is mixed with the orange from the sun. but as soon as the sun leaves the field the green becomes most apparent and then slowly fades.

anyway, my new theory!!!

Machinima Invade Hollywood's Turf?, "Thanks to Wired News for posting an article discussing the rise of machinima, which are "animated movies.. utilizing the [real-time] 3-D graphics engines of games like Quake or Unreal." The article cites prominent machinima such as Jake Hughes' Anachronox: The Movie and the machinima-created music video for Zero 7's 'In The Waiting Line', and according to Bill Rehbock of Nvidia, "..machinima methods, in addition to providing a hobby for aspiring filmmakers, are starting to be used in the creative industries far more than is apparent. For example, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies." There's also a significant cash prize for machinima makers as part of Epic's Make Something Unreal competition we mentioned a few weeks back."

Distributed Computing Economics, "In a ClusterComputing.org article, Jim Gray, director of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Lab, provides an interesting economic analysis for building distributed systems. When do you choose a grid over a cluster or a supercomputer? When does it pay off to move a task to the data vs moving the data to the task? He takes current hardware and networking costs into account to answer those questions."

i had an idea a few years ago after reading "Peer-to-Peer", why not have a company sell computers at a discounted rate with a future allowance for the use of spare cycles. The company fronts part of the cost of the computer and the consumer pays them back the loan in resources. You could also say "donate" resources as many do today to organizations like seti@home, or even sell them to corporations who could use them. There could be an interface between the distributed client and server which tracked the available jobs. The user then could select which jobs it wanted to work on and the server would get the work units and credit the users account for futre payment.

Just an idea!!!

Apple gets Exclusive Distribution of Soundtrack, "MacCentral reports that Apple has obtained exclusive distribution rights to the soundtrack for "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". The album is on sale for $9.99 through Apple's iTunes Music Store -- and will not be available in traditional music stores and no physical CDs are being made for the U.S. market."

Well i guess the music world is changing!!! ;)

Hi-Tech Babble Baffles Many, AMD just did a study of what high tech terms consumers understood. According to this write up "the word megahertz...mystified many". Looks like trouble since new 64 bit chips are in the pipe and multi-prossesors with multiple cores are becoming more common. Whats a marketer to do!!!

9th Circuit Court Finds 'Thumbnailing' Fair Use, "A photographer named Leslie Kelly had sued Arriba Soft Corporation for infringing his copyrights to photos when they made thumbnails of his pictures and stored them in a public image search engine. Today the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's ruling that making these thumbnail copies of images for the search engine was 'fair use.' Since the applicability of fair-use defenses to copyright infringement touches on all kinds of common uses of the Internet as well as rulemaking related to the scope of the DMCA, this decision will probably have an effect on the discussion. (Note that this case was decided by a 3-judge panel and thus isn't binding precedent.)" Note that the court also reversed in part the lower court's ruling, specifically saying that the lower court should not have ruled on "whether the display of the larger image is a violation of Kelly's exclusive right to publically display his works."

This is a nice holding but the DMCA is a terribly written law. The '76 Act covers almost everything necessary for copyright protection without the need for a new and confusing addendum. Learn the DMCA well so you can toss it out!!!

Piracy and peer-to-peer, which would better read "Privacy and P2P" is a somewhat coherent if slightly inacurate look at the current state of affairs in the high technology copyright battle. The article is defintely worth a read howerver as the latter half is a debate between Ian Clarke, Freenet creator and Matt Oppenheim, RIAA's senior vice president of business and legal affairs. Their perspectives are very interesting. And if you have an interest in keeping any part of the world free you might want to take a read!!!

The Semi-Blog "Greetings Earthlings", While he's living aboard the International Space Station, Expedition Seven NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing about his experiences. You can also ask Ed or Commander Yuri Malenchenko a question. Pretty cool!!!

oh yeah another little personal bit, my t250 has been retired. :) by and thanks for all the hard work my little (ok not so little) blue friend.

in comming a bright shiny new nokia with an xhtml and wap 2.0 browser :)

i love toys!!!

Big ups to all the kids on the adventures this weekend. Much fun and love to all, cars, boats, kegs, boards, friends, speakers!!! Oh my!!!

Nobel Prize Winners on Sci-Fi Flicks, In case you missed it, Harold Varmus, Nobel prize winning retrovirologist and cancer biologist, former NIH director, and current head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has written a review of 28 Days Later in this weekend's New York Times. One would think that his time is more valuably spent running important medical institutions, searching for new cancer insights/cures, etc, but the dude's also an English lit major and has a penchant for sci-fi. 28 Days Later is the new flick from director Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, etc.) about a virus termed rage that is advertently released from a Cambridge primate research facility and goes on to devastate much of merry old England more rapidly than the dragons did in Reign of Fire. Although Varmus appears to go out of his way to be even handed, it's clear that he has a problem suspending disbelief on a topic (virology) that is near and dear to him. Reviews from professional movie critics on 28 Days Later have been mixed, but Ebert and another NY Times reviewer were into it. Good, clean summer fun - aside from 'the scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting'."

Btw run! Do not walk, to see 28 Days Later. I had been trying to see it since the first week in Jan!!! It was worth every minute of the wait.

Also a big up to Brian who knew on spec it was gona be a classic and i thought people wouldn't get it. Looks like you were right my man.

Only one bit of caution. Do NOT watch it alone, and do watch it durring the day. :) Enjoy!!!

Court Says Gator-style Ads Are Legal, "A federal court has ruled that pop-up ads for rivals of U-Haul International, placed atop the moving company's own site by a third-party software application, are legal."

"The summary decision", came out last week. Not sure what type it was or the rational. Full decision will be available next week.

Hopefully more analysis then. As for now note this is not a decision about "drive by downloads" but is probably really an issue of "palming off".

I can't really see how any court would not think this was palming off or some other form of unfair competition but only time will tell!!!

Filesharing Up 10% After RIAA Threatens Users, "Technews says filesharing has gone up 10% on some sites such as Grokster since the Recording Industry Association of America's announcement on June 25 that it will start tracking down and suing users of file-sharing programs. Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, commented 'even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers'."

Maybe its uh time for a new plan?!?

Science Faction, "Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot, brain implants that let you tap into people's memories and a newspaper that updates itself when a big story breaks. It's not science fiction, it's science fact, as technologists catch up with - and surpass - the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers."

Welcome to your present!!!

Anti-Patriot Act Movement Expands, "Mount Shasta, California has become the latest city where the USA PATRIOT act is creating a controversy. This story at the Record-Searchlight describes petitioning by a local citizens' rights committee to order police to defy the PATRIOT act. To date, 3 states and 130 cities have passed legislation forbidding local authorities from cooperating with federal PATRIOT requests, not to mention the numerous businesses who are taking pains to hamper the Act's coverage."

Let the revolution begin!!!

GPL May Not Work In German Legal System, "It may be that the (L)GPL can not be (fully) enforced under German jurisdiction. This is at least the conclusion professor Gerald Spindler of the jurisprudential faculty of the University of Goettingen came to when he examines the Legal questions of the open source software (It's long, it's complex and it's in German and it's written by a professor, so don't expect to understand anything, if you are not a German lawyer). Heise News has the article in German, however, the fish may be with you. IANAL, however, as one can put some of the legal problems aside, most of the concerns mentioned in there should provoke at least some thought by brave men around RMS."

Solar Sailing and Physics, the New Scientist writes that the next generation of spacecraft might be propelled with the help of the sun. "Both NASA and the European Space Agency are developing solar sails and, although never tested, the concept is quite simple. A solar sail is essentially a giant mirror that reflects photons of sunlight back in the direction they came from." But Thomas Gold from Cornell University in New York says the proponents of solar sailing have forgotten about thermodynamics, the branch of physics governing heat transfer." And this is where it's becoming interesting. Gold's paper, "The solar sail and the mirror," states that "either Carnot's accepted rule is in error, or the solar sail proposal will not work at all." So, as this illustration from New Scientist shows, the real question is: "Can it really sail away?" We'll know it in September when the first tests are done.

Digital Shoplifting From Bookstores?, "According to a report from Tokyo via IOL, Japanese publishers have launched a campaign to stop 'digital shoplifters.' These 'digital shoplifters' are using cellphones to photograph magazine pages in bookstores, rather than buying them. 'Digital shoplifting is becoming a big problem as camera-equipped mobile handsets are spreading fast and their quality is improving greatly,' said Kenji Takahashi, an official at the Japan Magazine Publishers Association. Will entry into a bookstore soon include a 'cell-phone patdown?'"

What about mp3 players, that have reording functions, or cell phones that do video too? Will all stores and events take away all our gear?!?

Anonymous P2P No Defense, "Operators of peer-to-peer networks cannot escape copyright infringement claims by giving their members the ability to mask the content that changes hands on their networks, a federal appeals court ruled Monday."

Watch this case closely i believe some very seriously bad law is about to be made!!! :(