Between Doc, John, and myself , I'm about ready to give up on technology. Outlook choked over the weekend and lost all my email passwords. Oddly, it did this right after I installed the latest security patch. What could be more secure than allowing no one, even me, to get to my email? Luckily I have two of my three email passwords memorized. Unfortunately, my Hotmail password is gone baby, gone. NOw, I could just use my old machine for reading my hotmail messages, which are by and large spam, but I also use it for osme semi-personal communications, and it's my oldest email address, so I would like to be able to access it as I occasionally get mail from old friends there.

So, how do I get access again? I'll see if Hotmail has a password recovery system in place. OK, no problem, Hotmail has a hoop to jump through to get a new email password. While this assumes that I told them my actual state, country and zip when I signed up, I should haev  no worries. I tell them what happened, and I get an email chain going that ends with a rep telling me that I need to contact the OEM of my PC in order to resolve this issue.

Excuse me, but how the hell is Sony going to know my Passport ID and password?

I ask as much, in a far kinder fashion, of the latest in a series of drones who has been progressively asking me for more and more information while simultaniously telling me this is all an SEP, and then handing me off to the next guy.

I'll keep you all posted as to the results of this fun little descent into madness later.

I know that I mentioned getting a new PDA  the other day, and migrating my data over was a joy. First, I installed all the software that went along with the new machine. Installed smoothly, no worries whatsoever. I installed the additional software, which included a univeral remote control that has a 15' range, as well as a variety of other software. All went smoothly, no worries whatsoever. So I decide to install my handspring Visor on the new PC, so that I can sync it once and then uninstall, insuring that ALL my files come over.

More later.

9:59:30 PM    

South Asia on the Brink of Nuclear War. The Indian Subcontinent may be at the nuclear 11th hour. Indian and Pakistani generals are talking about a limited nuclear exchange. One million troops stand eyeball-to-eyeball at their disputed border. Pakistan is believed to have 20 or 30 nuclear warheads and actually made them operational in a previous conflict; India is believed to have 100 nuclear warheads. Can they fight a conventional war without resorting to a nuclear exchange? What can the world do to prevent nuclear war? BBC latest. Invasion drills are being practiced. [kuro5hin.org]

All I'm seeing on the news is the non-info about Chandra Levy being found. Hello? CNN? MSNBC? nations on the brink of war, both unafraid to use nukes?

>Taps microphone

Hellloooo?

9:34:42 PM    

GM mosquito resistant to malaria parasites - New Scientist 05-22-2002. The GM mosquito that stops malaria  - South China Morning Post
Gene Researchers Create Malaria-Resistant Mosquito  - Yahoo! Headlines
GM mosquito could prevent malaria spread  - Ananova [Google Technology News]

So, whay aren't ehy creating a super mosquito that will create a malaria vaccine in it's belly instead?

7:09:17 PM    

Neurotypical brains have better things to do. Larry Welkowitz on neurotypical brains: ... [Jon's Radio]

While I'm not a high level geek, I agree with Larry's sentiment. Get it to work, don't mystify me with buzzwords, and for gosh sakes, keep it simple. All that matters is that the majority of the time, the tool works. Forget dial tone reliability, people want the reliability of hammer.

6:35:47 PM    

Wow, stop the presses! I'm not doing anything else until I get the activeRenderer code working on my blog! This is too cool.

It Worked! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Rick Klau found a Palm outliner that understands OPML. This is very cool. That outliner could plug into our content system in a variety of ways.   [Scripting News]

No more updates today, as I'm going to be playing around with both of these (and learning CSS for the rest of the day/week.

10:41:51 AM    

Mark Twain. "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." [Quotes of the Day]

George Burns. "Age to me means nothing. I can't get old; I'm working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work. As long as you're working, you stay young. When I'm in front of an audience, all that love and vitality sweeps over me and I forget my age."

10:41:41 AM    

Thomas Friedman: "Let's make a deal: We won't criticize the administration for not anticipating 9/11 if it won't terrorize the country by now predicting every possible nightmare scenario."  [Scripting News]

10:36:21 AM    

Big Blimp That Apparently Couldn't. Sixty-five years after the Hindenburg exploded and effectively ended the era of the zeppelin, Carl von Gablenz's dream of lighter-than-air transportation is crashing and burning as well. By Edmund L. Andrews. [New York Times: Business]

I remember reading about this company in Wired a while ago. Sorry to see that their vision will not likely come to fruition. The only solution that I can think of to keep the blimp form shooting skyward after dropping it's cargo is to teather it to the loading dock, and run some massive pelitier coolers to compress the helium, negating some of it's lifting ability until it is time to lift off again. I Am Not An Engineer.

10:02:55 AM    

Digital video starts small, thinks big. Technology companies, struggling to convince big film studios to switch to digital video, are trying their services out on cash-strapped independent moviemakers. [CNET News.com]

Bootstrapping, by bringing in the next generation. Great way to insure long term adoption, as long as your tech grows with the user base needs. I grew up using Apple machines in school, and only moved over to the PC once I had to buy my own (in the mid 90's) because of the cost factor. If Macs had been as cheap as PCs were then, I'd likely be running one right now. As it stands, I'll probably be buying either a laptop or an iMac before long, if only to start learning Unix stuff in portable environment.

9:51:28 AM    

Bacteria signpost gold deposits. Gold prospectors could use changes in soil bugs to uncover new reserves of the precious metal [New Scientist]

Given that there are life forms that can live on petrochemicals, why shouldn't there be baccili that are indicators of gold in an area? I wonder if the same holds true for the prospecting of other minerals.

If we can determine the likelyhood of finding diamonds by the makeup of the geology of a region (coal seam near an formerly active volcano, so you have a high pressure/temperature field in which to "grow" the diamonds) couldn't we apply the same criteria to finding gold? Likewise, what baccili serve as flags for diamonds? Time will tell.

9:45:13 AM    

CARP Rejected!.

Yay Librarian of Congress!

"On February 20, 2002, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) reported its determination to the Librarian of Congress in the above-captioned proceeding. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 802(f), the Librarian is given 90 days from date of delivery of a CARP report to review the determination and issue a decision setting forth the final royalty fee and terms of payment. However, if the Librarian rejects the CARP's determination, section 802(f) provides an additional 30 days for the Librarian to render his final determination.

The Register of Copyrights recommends, and the Librarian agrees, that the CARP's determination must be rejected. A final decision will be issued no later than June 20, 2002."

[The Shifted Librarian]

This is fantastic news, as CARP would have unfairly hampered online broadcasts of music. What is interesting is that the RIAA appears to have used precident to negotiate fees at what is described as as a "sweet spot." [p 58] Siad sweet spot is not a legal precident, but the rate that others are willing to pay.

RIAA meticulously crafted confidentiality clauses for each and every license agreement. These clauses prohibit any licensee from discussing the terms and conditions of the agreement with other parties. See RIAA Exs. 60 DR- 84 DR. But it simultaneously reserved its own right to use each agreement however it wished at the CARP proceeding. See id. These clauses belie the notion that RIAA’s primary29 concern was to establish precedents for other potential licensees.

As we have noted, in the statutory marketplace, one would expect to find some buyers - for various reasons – that are willing to pay higher rates for a product than most other buyers pay. But, if a seller is in a position to temporarily sacrifice volume, it can afford to negotiate deals only with those buyers willing to pay above-market rates. By engaging in this conduct, the Panel finds, RIAA created a virtually uniform precedent
with rates above those that most buyers would be willing to pay. 30

Wow. Way to be a bunch of low down knobs, RIAA. Congrats, I'm buying nothing but used cds from now on, and T shirts for the bands I like as well as going to their concerts.

9:28:38 AM