Thursday, July 11, 2002
Researchers show that a dangerous virus can be made in the laboratory
Paul Recer, Associated PressExperts can now download a genetic blueprint from the Internet and use mail-order materials to assemble a deadly virus, say researchers who made a synthetic polio virus in the lab to demonstrate the threat.
Discussion at Slashdot.
Sounds a lot like The White Plague by Frank Herbert. (Bummer, it's out of print...)
Senate OKs Yucca Mountain nuclear site
The Senate Tuesday rejected Nevada's attempt to block construction of a permanent storage site for highly radioactive nuclear waste from power plants at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Discussion at kuro5hin.
House votes to allow guns in cockpit
To the delight of pilots and chagrin of the White House, the House of Representatives Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed the idea of letting commercial airline pilots carry guns in the cockpit.
Discussion at kuro5hin.
Go: Life Itself
GoStoneThere is one board game that stands above all others. The most beautiful, most ancient, most strategic, most subtle. The king of games. A game which teaches as much as it entertains, whose enthusiasts number tens of millions and which has often been compared to life itself.
Saying 'just one game'
they began to play...
That was yesterdayJapanese senryu poem
Neither here nor there
Joe KleinThe American identity can be summarised in a single polling question: we are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed - with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s - that next year will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world, especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power. The essential American credulousness - we believe in our nation, our system, our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God - must seem pretty obnoxious, too.
Control freaks tightening their grip on the Internet
Dan GillmorDo the currently disorganized, decentralized forces of bottom-up creativity have a prayer of countering the highly organized, moneyed forces who want to maintain their top-down grip on creativity and information?
ACLU says cable could close Internet
Cara GarretsonAs Americans move from dial-up Internet access to logging on via cable broadband networks, they're also moving from the open, regulated telephone network to proprietary cable networks that are controlled by a few large companies, according to an ACLU report issued Wednesday. This means the Internet could come under private control of the cable operators, the report said.
The Digital Dark Age
david embertonWe're storing almost all of the world's total information on hard drives with one-year limited warranties. What's to become of our cultural and personal history?
Discussion at Slashdot.
Eavesblogging the Internet Law Program
Notes from Dan Gillmor...
Day 24: Providing text equivalents for image maps
Mark PilgrimImage maps sound like an accessibility nightmare, but they're not. In the same way that every image needs a text equivalent, every image map and every clickable area of the image map needs a text equivalent. You can provide
alttext for the image itself (in the<img>tag), and for each clickable area in the image map (in the<area>tags of the associated<map>, that defines where the clickable areas are and what they link to).
