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Boing Boing Blog
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| 1. |
Crippled "disposable" digital camera hacked and improved. The Walgreens-branded PureDigital camera is a "disposable" digital cam, requiring that you bring the device to a Walgreens to have your pix "developed" (printed and/or exported). A hacker has cracked the device, so that you can add Smartmedia memory and export pictures to your PC at home, reusing the camera.
you will see there is a daughter board on there with the nand flash for picture storage ..
if you remove that board you can add a smartmedia socket and using smartmedia card you will
be able to get the pics with a smartmedia reader standard jpg's but it will not do more that
25 pics still (think its using fat12)..
Slashdotted Link,
Mirror Link,
Another Mirror
(via /.) |
| 2. |
Help the music industry figure out which way to jump. Aaron Swartz has started a blog to record and discuss "alternative compensation schemes" -- business models for music in the era of P2P nets.
Here's the proposal in a nutshell: Some group of people pay a small fee (like a couple dollars a month). In return, they can download whatever they want, however they want. We track what is downloaded and then distribute the money received, in proportion, to the people responsible for the songs. Everybody wins: users get all the music they want, software developers can continue innovating, and the industry gets paid.
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| 3. |
Voting By Design. Voting By Design is a "Knowledge Map" and report on how design affects the voting process.
Link |
| 4. |
Left Behind deconstructed. "Left Behind" is an immensely popular science fiction series about the sinners left behind on earth after good Christians are swept up in the rapture. Over at Slacktivist, a blogger has been dissecting the book in two- and three-page chunks, tearing apart the assumptions, fallacies and curiously compelling heresies in the story.
Charlie Stross and I just finished "Appeals Court," the sequel to Jury Service, which Argosy magazine will publish bound together in January, in a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds." "Appeals Court" is, in part, a response to "Left Behind": a story about a world where the only hominids who haven't ascended to the post-human cloudmind are reactionaries, missionaries, and religious fundamentalists.
Here's a little chunk of "Appeals Court," so you can see what I mean:
The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.
The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They've learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space-suits and send them off to Bible classes.
The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony -- anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouth-part with a lot of hydocarbons). They've eaten the bee-hives and wasp-nests, and they've laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.
The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit -- plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.
What more could they possibly need?
and here's Slacktivist on "Left Behind":
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.
It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.
Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)
Link
(Thanks, Kathryn!) |
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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| 5. |
El Paso to Sell Interest In GulfTerra Energy-Sources (Dow Jones). Dow Jones - NEW YORK -- El Paso Corp. (NYSE:EP - News) , still trying to recover from a costly move
into energy trading and a scandal tied to the California energy crisis, is
selling its controlling interest in a natural-gas pipeline unit, GulfTerra
Energy Partners LP , to Enterprise Products Partners LP in a deal
that values GulfTerra at $3.2 billion in cash and stock, people familiar with
the matter said, The Wall Street journal has learned. |
| 6. |
Book 'Em Jerry (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - The state of Virginia, channeling the frustrations of millions of e-mail users worldwide, yesterday put its tough anti-spam law to work, busting a North Carolina man believed to be one of the Internet's most prolific spammers. |
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Slashdot
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| 7. |
Netscape-Branded ISP Launching February 2004 |
10:36:00 PM 
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Sunday, December 14, 2003
