New Free eBooks from Microsoft. Microsoft has posted the next batch of free eBooks in their summer reading program. Last week the titles weren't too interesting, but this time around it includes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Flying Book by David Blatner and The Face in the Frost by John... [Artima MacOS X Buzz] 
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P2P Prohibition: Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA. Pho list cofounder JP points us to the...

Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA as a dangerous KaZaA user:
11. All the files in your favorite MP3 play list are now "Lars Ulrich sings 'Feelings'"

10. Your KaZaA rating changes to "Defendant"

9. Eminem insults your mother in his next single

8. Recording Industry Association of America president Hillary Rosen sends you e-mail messages with embedded .wav files of heavy breathing

7. All the spam in your inbox is from Motion Picture Association CEO Jack Valenti

6. You get a bill retroactively charging you 99 cents per downloaded track. Total bill: $29,700

5. A Tommy Mottola screen saver suddenly pops up on your computer

4. Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer picket your home with signs that read, "Piracy don't pay my bills"

3. You receive a request from someone using outdated hacker wannabe slang claiming a friend said you could "hook me up" with the latest Snoop Dogg album

2. You suddenly have numerous songs from someone named Avril Lavigne

1. CD-shaped crop circles appear in your backyard

Link, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
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Deep Linking Legal in Germany. BlueWonder writes "German news site Heise Online reports a recent decision of the Bundesgerichtshof, the highest court in Germany: Deep linking is not illegal. ... [Slashdot] 
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Similarity Searching Now Available !.

If you do a Feedster search now, you'll see a link in the result set "similar posts" (next to "cached") and, when selected, it uses the selected article to return all other articles like it.  Right now this is, unfortunately, hard wired to english.  And it operates by content analysis not by link analysis.  We had actually planned to release this later this week but we did a massive update dealing with the DDOS issues and it just happened to sneak out into the wild when we moved stuff from our dev box to our production box.  Ah well.

[The FuzzyStuff: aaaaFeedster] 
1:24:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  



I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows...

Has anyone yet attempted to create "RSS email", where the "feeds" served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc?  (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.)  Rather than just inserting RSS into an email client paradigm as in Newsgator, it might be amusing to invert the solution and explore the usability issues of rethinking email as being just another form of feed served up to a reader, with plug-ins for creating & replying, etc.  Hmm.

Has anyone yet attempted to create what I guess I'd refer to as a "Hyki" - that is, a character-by-character real-time collaborative (Hydra-like, Groove Text Tool-like) editor with automatic creation of real-time linked sub-documents when CamelCase words are typed, etc.  ??

[Ray Ozzie's Weblog] 
1:21:35 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Are you freaked out yet? Keep watching.. This animation freaks me out. And now it will freak you out too! via the everlasting blort [MetaFilter] 
1:09:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



At last night's dinner, which was a lot of fun, Marc Canter said that a lot of people don't know that RSS 2.0 is extensible. They think it can't evolve without changing the spec. He said I should do something to correct the misunderstanding. I agree. So here's a list of modules that extend RSS 2.0. In a way it's like the list of implementations for XML-RPC or SOAP. The larger and more diverse the list of extensions, the richer the environment. The authors of these modules claim that their namespaces work with RSS 2.0. As with the XML-RPC implementations, as new modules come online I'll keep you posted so you can watch it grow. [Scripting News] 
1:04:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Unbrand America. A Plague of Black Dots: "In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper - it's there. It's on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world's biggest, dirtiest corporations.

This is the mark of the people who don't approve of Bush's plan to control the world, who don't want countries 'liberated' without UN backing, who can't stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

This is the mark of the people who want the Kyoto Protocol for the environment, who want the International Criminal Court for greater justice, who want a world where all nations, including the U.S.A., are free of weapons of mass destruction, and who pledge to take their country back.

A bus stops in traffic, a major logo on the back is covered with a funny black spot. Hey, is that supposed to be there? A sultry model leans forward on a billboard; a round, dark blob is stuck on her cleavage. Huh?

Take the pledge and spread the meme." Adbusters [Follow Me Here...] 
12:32:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Basic features of the web (deep links) not illegal... Deep-Linking in Suchmaschinen in Deutschland nicht rechtswidrig. Aus einer Pressemeldung des Bundesgerichtshofes geht hervor, dass der u.a. für das Urheber- und Wettbewerbsrecht zuständige I. Zivilsenat des Bundesgerichtshofs in einem Urteil vom 17. Juli 2003 entschieden hat, dass Anbieter, die das Internet für ihre ihre Angebote nutzen, auch die Beschränkungen in Kauf nehmen müssen, die sich aus dem Allgemeininteresse an der Funktionsfähigkeit des Internets für die Durchsetzung ihrer Interessen ergeben. Dazu gehören z.B. auch Suchmaschinen und deren Einsatz von Hyperlinks (gerade in der Form von Deep-Links). Ohne diese sei die sinnvolle Nutzung der unübersehbaren Informationsfülle im World Wide Web praktisch ausgeschlossen. (Quelle: Pressestelle des Bundesgerichtshofs) [WebDEV] 
12:30:23 AM      comment []   trackback []