Ben's Phaster Online Web Utilities (Hacking Tools), is a set of gateways to just about every utility i have ever needed. Pretty damn cool!!! : )

Mega Hurts, Clear Channel DIE DIE DIE!!! DIE DIE DIE!!! DIE DIE DIE!!! DIE DIE DIE!!!

Web Revival for Old Mac Interface, theres this new thing going on called "lowercase music". Very odd, but really quite interesting given the new '80s penchant via "electroclash". Looks like its effecting design as well!!! This ones for Mike!!!

Free Love and Selling Macs, During the late 1980s, the biggest dealer of Apple computers in Northern California wasn't a computer megastore. It was a free-love commune in San Francisco's hippie Haight-Ashbury district.

Eminem #2 on Gracenote... Before Release, According to this article on news.com last week, Eminem's "The Eminem Show," which was yet to be released, cracked the chart at No. 2. This is the first time an unreleased CD has been number 2 on this list of CD's played in computers." I've pre-ordered my copy and am looking forward to hearing it. But its pretty amazing that Gracenote registers a pirated CD #2 without the benefit of it being for sale yet. Thank god they shut down napster and stopped piracy.

'Solid Water' Invented for Planting Trees in Deserts, what do you get when you add water and plastic? Solid bricks of water, its like water balloons only different... Chinese scientists have developed this kind of "solid water" that can be used for planting trees in deserts. Ninety-seven percent of the "solid water" is actual water, while the rest 3 percent is a kind of macromolecular polymer extracted from animals and plants.

Alex Cox, the writer/director of cult classic Repo Man and punk movie Sid And Nancy, writes today in The Guardian's media section that the movie industry's real pirates are the Hollywood studios and the MPAA - for squeezing out independents. He rejects the widespread claim that Spider-Man suffered from widespread net piracy, and asks: "Are [the MPAA's] claims of lost billions even credible?" (In a strange coincidence, Cox has another article in the same newspaper today, where he defends using 35mm film rather than digital cameras a la George Lucas, saying digital cinema gives too much power to the distributors and studios because the technology is less portable than 35mm.)

Koji Hase, the father of DVD technology speaks! Wow man i owe this guy big time!!!

1936 TV, E. B. White describes the fledgling technology as it looked three years before RCA showcased television at the 1939 World's Fair. Pretty cool and right out of The New Yorker archives!!!

RIAA Sues Audiogalaxy, here we go again. The RIAA has filed another one, this time filing suit against Audiogalaxy's "Satellite" file sharing program. i personally don't use it because of its affiliation with gator, but thats no excuse to sue them!!!

Forbes.com New Article On Apples Latest, best part is predictions of a Mira like tablet using airport. Heres a question, why invent a new machine, why not just a sivle for the screen of all shipping laptops so the screen folds over the keyboard face up, and make the screen touch sensitive. Now all shipping portable mac will also be tablets, a more adaptable machine without the need to do major redesign and support for another line of machines. Seems especially a good idea now that OSX will be comming with InkWell out of the box!!!

Opensource vs Microsource, Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign. The best part of the article is, "Microsoft has said using free software with commercial software might violate companies' intellectual-property rights." Not sure how this is not blatent anti-trust kinds of behavior (wow thats alot of negatives for a single sentence). All this on the heels of a "senior Microsoft Corp. executive telling a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan because Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed." Amazing!!!

Digital Video Recorders Give Advertisers Pause, More on the Replay saga at NYtimes...reg req and all that.

Architect for Echelon II speaks. Echelon now has a big brother. Meet Bruce McIndoe, lead architect for Echelon II, the 'most productive intelligence program' in history. He also reveals Echelon works by using word and voice recognition, as well as automatic translation. Pretty neat read, but best part is now you can hier the guy to spy for you!!!

Music Swapping Firm To Fold Under Weight Of Lawsuits, again in as many weeks! First Napster now, Kazaa, the company behind a popular file-swapping Web site, said it will fold because it cannot afford to defend itself against copyright infringement charges brought by the major studios and labels. Someone really needs to put this crap to an end. Its one thing if these people are actually breaking the law. But even that is in question. Some like myself think they are not, but the point is the courts have given no final answer and are unlikely too if everone just gets sued out of existance before the case is finshed!!!

Court Holds Internet FAQ Pages Not Subject to Copyright Protection, but i seem to remember instructions or at least contest rules could be, couldn't they? Anyone one look that one up.... Seems to me that this is a very good direction for the courts to be going. A FAQ is not much different from a set of FACTs and facts can not and should not be copyrightable!!!

E3 Roundup...Well first off everyone has slahed prices, PS2 = $199, Xbox = $199, Game Cube=$149, GTA3: Vice City Announced, Sims come to the PS2, and everyone talks online plans, Sony&Nintendo=open system, BigBrother=closed and proprietary, as a result of the latter EA seems uninterested in an Xbox online venture. Oh one more thing, seems The Matrix is going to get an online universe!!! Make that two more things, the US Army is no longer sponsoring little green army men and GI Joe action figures. They are making games!!!

Megarad Technologies, is Slashdots little distant cousin, with areally big ego. He calls, or she, or maybe it calls itself the "Ultimate in underground tech-news". i think not but at least worth a look from time to time!!!

Wearable Computer Laboratory, has pretty much built the coolest video game the world has ever know. i for one am not a first person shooter fan, but this could turn me. Augmented Reality Quake oh yeah!!!

Imagine A World With No Scarcity Of Spectrum, no FCC, no limits on what you could say, what you couldn't...at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference David P. Reed suggested just this idea. Dan Gillmor runs it down. Most of his commentary i agree with except for one major point. And for some reason it seems to be a recurring misconcepton. Gillmor in speaking of entrenched companies says "Their business model is based on economics that Reed's notions, should they become reality in the marketplace, would shred." This is very similar to the notion all record lables will go out of business if Napster, Gnutella, and Fast-track opperate. The truth is inovation is required to stay in business in a capitalist system. If spectrum becomes more available, then thoes who had it when it was scarce should inovate and keep there customers by being better than the new guy. The same is true for the music industry. Neither's buisness model should "shred" unless it was faulted to begin with. Anyway good reading. This one thanks to Dee!!!