Good Anti-Right Wing Rant

"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because its exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America ? whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper youll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite ? or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads ? your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/

AI Depends On Your Point Of View

Even the dumbest people can look at a situation from several different angles. But thats still a problem for even the smartest computer systems. The Real-World Reasoning project, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, is designed to get computers to start examining situations in more than one way. Its part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the Agencys Information Processing Technology Office, or IPTO, to move toward machines that can think for themselves. Software has gotten a lot smarter in recent years -- computers are now much better at recommending books, guessing your chances for getting appendicitis, and even piloting a spaceship. But each of these efforts requires a different type of reasoning. And programs still stink at switching from one mode to another.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59799,00.html

Robot Rover Covers 1km Of Rough Terrain Autonomously

Experiments completed. We came to the Atacama this field season to gain information and experience. We will now begin research and development of a comprehensive robotic system that will seek life in desert environments. To enable that process we needed understand the requirements and make basic measurements for system design. We have been working from an experimental plan in which we intended to test components and subsystems and to collect data in the relevant environment.
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/atacama/

Gravity Density Survey Of The Earth

The sweep of colours shows minute variations in the Earths gravitational field. If you were to fly over the red areas, you would be tugged ever so slightly downwards; the blues mark regions where the planets attraction is much weaker. These gravity anomalies, as they are known, are imperceptible to the human senses, and so the scientists have wrapped the data on to a sphere and exaggerated the highs and lows.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3093927.stm

Zen In The Workplace

Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Dont just do something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. Theyre being won over, in part, by findings at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_30/b3843076.htm

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail80.html

Play NES Classics In Your Browser

http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/ONE_Play.html

Canada, The New Home Of The Free

For all they share economically and culturally, Canada and the United States are increasingly at odds on basic social policies - to the point that at least a few discontented Americans are planning to move north and try their neighbors way of life.A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforksherald/6343068.htm

Peppers Say No To iTunes

This is the one of the first main stream mp3 articles that got it right...
Of all the iTunes holdouts, the Chili Peppers, with their longstanding popularity and reputation for artistry, are perhaps the most respected. Others include bands spanning hip-hop to metal rock, from Linkin Park to Metallica. All of them fret that they would lose creative control if they let Apple sell their songs individually on iTunes. "Our artists would rather not contribute to the demise of the album format," Mark Reiter of Q Prime Management Co., which manages the Chili Peppers, Metallica, and several other artists, told Reuters recently.
TOO MUCH FILLER. Its a bogus argument that makes these bands sound like shills for the music-industrys suits. After all, most individual artists and groups lost that kind of control when they signed up with a big label. For listeners, the album format has all too often been a tool of oppression.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2003/tc20030715_6812_tc056.htm

Tron: Reloaded

A young hacker. An evil mainframe. A mind-bending motorcycle chase. Sound familiar? Long before The Matrix uploaded us into a computer world, Tron provided a glimpse of what life would be like with a master program in control. Two decades of f/x innovation later, Tron fans will soon be back in the middle of the films futuristic bike race, this time on the computer screen. Tron 2.0, due in August in the form of a PC game, upgrades the bright colors and sharp angles that made Tron a cult favorite - and finally puts you inside the system. Game developer Monolith stayed true to the 1982 motion pictures minimalist aesthetic but upped the visual ante. Syd Mead, one of the films production designers and a contributor to the game, was impressed with how well the developer understood and respected Trons vision. "Monolith perfectly exploited the movies look," says Mead, "but made it much more layered and colorized." He had a blast updating his designs for Trons signature race sequence. "For the movie, the light cycles had to be geometrically simplistic to suit the severe limitations of the early computers. The game has the classic cycles, but I designed a new supercycle that incorporates some of my initial ideas, like making the rider visible."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/tron.html

Lava Lamps, Chaos, and Encryption

Now Noll is working with Cooper on an improved RNG called LavaRnd (which debuted in May at www.lavarnd.org). The new process replaces the lava lamps with a more Zen-like source of entropy: a webcam with its lens cap on. The chaotic thermal "noise" emitted by the webcam is digitized and put through a hash algorithm that churns the number set, stripping unwanted sections of predictability. The result is a cryptographically strong sequence of numbers, ready for use in the real world. And because the new service is open source, patent-free, and license-free, anyone will be able to cheaply build and operate a LavaRnd server and receive the precious commodity free of charge - a random act of kindness.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/random.html

Posthumus Interview With Philip K. Dick

After spending the bulk of his life cranking out pulp paperbacks for peanuts, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is now finally recognized as one of the most visionary authors the genre has ever produced. While masterminds like Arthur C. Clarke anticipated technological breakthroughs, Dick, whose speed-ravaged heart called it quits in 1982 when the man was only 53, foresaw the psychological turmoil of our posthuman lives, as we enter a world where machines talk back, virtual reality rules, and God is a product in the check-out line.
Dicks fractured and darkly funny novels have left their mark on video games and rock bands, avant-garde theater and electronic opera. But his influence has been particularly profound in Hollywood. Ridley Scott turned Dicks novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, one of the most powerful SF films of all time. A 1966 short story formed the basis of the Schwarzenegger hit Total Recall, and Steven Spielberg turned Dicks tale "Minority Report" into his darkest flick yet. The reality slips and cartoon metaphysics of The Matrix are thoroughly indebted to Dick, and his spirit hangs heavy over Richard Linkletters astounding Waking Life.
http://frontwheeldrive.com/philip_k_dick.html

Celebrating 20 Years Of The NES

On July 15, 2003 a very special milestone will occur: That day will mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Nintendos Family Computer (aka Famicom) in Japan. You may know the system better by its Western name, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). But whatever you call it, theres absolutely no denying the impact that Nintendos 8-bit console had on the video game industry. The Famicom virtually took over the game market in many parts of the world, and it single-handedly revived the flagging interesting in video gaming in North America. Not bad at all for a gaudily-colored lump of plastic built from 1970s technology.
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/july03/famicom/index.shtml

Curve Puts Old Videos Online

http://www.curve.co.uk/missinglinkmovie.html

Oldest Known Planet Found

In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe itself.The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and so may be more abundant.Astronomers reported yesterday that the planet is more than twice as massive as Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of burned-out stars. It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/national/11PLAN.html?ei=5062&en=376db8d91712a12f&ex=1058500800&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

Antigravity For The Masses

Conspiracy theorists have always insisted that antigravity was being developed "in the black" by covert government commissions and military units. Its the secret engine in the B-2 bombers, man! Theyre testing them at Area 51! What makes lifters different is that theyre no secret at all. Fans post home videos of themselves grinning as their devices hover above their kitchen tables. Last spring, three Detroit high school students won the citys science fair by floating a giant lifter, and the teachers sent out an exuberant press release ("BEAM ME UP SCOTTY," they gushed). With stuff like this, who needs black ops? This is antigravity for the masses.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/pwr_antigravity.html

Only Dopes Get Duped

On both sides of the Atlantic, opposition politicians, commentators, anti-war activists and even military men claim to have been conned, misled or downright duped by Bush and Blairs pre-war claims. There is something distinctly disingenuous in all this dupe-talk. Weapons and intelligence experts were picking holes in Britain and Americas evidence long before the war kicked off. In the USA, there were newspaper headlines like Evidence on Iraq challenged and Doubts over administrations case as far back as September 2002 (2). Britains main dossier of evidence was ridiculed six weeks before the war started, for having been plagiarised from a students 12-year-old PhD thesis (3). Who could possibly be duped by such dopey claims?
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DE39.htm

RAFs Secret Hunt For Aliens

The secret papers obtained from the US military give an insight into an astonishing chain of events sparked by UFO sightings over East Anglia in 1956.
After receiving numerous calls reporting bright lights darting across the sky, fighters from RAF Lakenheath spent more than seven hours trying to shoot down the objects, which were picked up on army radar screens.
The classified documents were secured under the US Freedom of Information Act by Dave Clarke, an author researching the subject.
One US Air Force intelligence report described how 12 to 15 objects were picked up on radar screens on 13 August 1956. They were tracked for more than 50 miles. One object was logged travelling at 4,000mph. Operators making these radar sightings are of the opinion that malfunctions of equipment did not cause these radar sightings, the document said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,992218,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail79.html

Top 10 Lies About Gulf War II

On the terrible day of the 9/11 attacks, five hours after a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, retired Gen. Wesley Clark received a strange call from someone (he didnt name names) representing the White House position: "I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein," Clark told Meet the Press anchor Tim Russert. "I said, But ? Im willing to say it, but whats your evidence? And I never got any evidence."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16274

Andreessen: Browser Innovation Dead

Andreessen says that "that there hasnt been any innovation on the browser in the last five years" and doesnt see any in the next five years. "Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons - we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser," he told an industry audience in London yesterday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31525.html