[T]he result of this mysterious panel's deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama...) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding...

28 million Americans are now being protected from Sabrina...

Link

(Thanks, Sam!)

The local TV station had been running radio promos for a story about a local school magazine fundraiser that included an "adult" magazine. It's a conservative area, so we figured maybe they accidentally got order forms with Playboy, or maybe the locals were just throwing fits over FHM and Maxxim.

Nope -- the adult magazine in question was Asimov's Science Fiction.

Link

(Thanks, Brian!)

Link

(Thanks, Brian!)

Newsweek correspondent Brad Stone has written a "how-dunnit?" piece about the recent theft (and recovery) of his 2003 Honda Civic hybrid [affectionately nicknamed "Honky" --XJ]. In theory, thieves shouldn't have been able to steal the car, because it's equipped with a security transponder that's all but uncrackable. Brad writes, "Were we to believe that a thief stole our car to brag to his friends about getting 40-plus miles to the gallon and preserving city air? Odder still, how could they have bypassed the security chip in the thick black jacket of our car key, designed so that our keys, and only our keys, could send the unique code needed to activate the car's ignition? We still had all our keys in our possession."

The mystery remains unsolved, so Brad is soliciting theories from armchair-detectives who think they can explain this high-tech hybrid heist.

I noticed that people have been making a stink about Orkut.com's TOS lately, saying that it reserves the right to do pretty much anything with content posted to Orkut.com. I was actually a little more disturbed by another item from the TOS. Orkut.com forbids "directing any user (for example, by linking) to any Materials of any third party without such third party's prior written consent." That runs counter to the ethics of practically everyone on the Web, right on up to Tim Berners-Lee himself. So I made a PHP hack so Orkut users can strictly comply with the letter of the law in the TOS, but still point to any site they want on the Web without guilt. The URL I give here is just an example of how it works; as you can see, it refers to bOING bOING. There are no specific instructions on my site yet for using my hack, but I may remedy that if needed. In the meantime, anyone on Orkut has my permission to use it. Link

"PONZI: For those who believe orkut is a Ponzi scheme, fans of Ponzi schemes, or those who think Ponzi was on Happy Days. It's all about the Ponzi is all we're sayin." Link

The source of these vulnerabilities is insufficient s...

Figures of famously fine flaxen-haired females (Britney, Xtina, Pamela, and others) -- made entirely from chewing gum. The bio page on this Flash-based site states that the artist doesn't actually chew the gum himself to make the art, and that color in the images is all from the gum itself, no extra pigment added. Link (Thanks, Steve; also spotted at Fleshbot)

Hussein Ben Hani, the director of the newly established audio visual department has confirmed to the press that his governmental department has submitted a draft law that regulates internet broadcasting. Jordan will be one of the first countries in the world to impose such a regulation. Jordan's Higher Media Council is said to be opposed including the internet in the new media regulation. In his statement, Kuttab said that any restrictions on internet publishing is illegal according to international law and contradicts the efforts of King Abdullah to open up Jordanian society. "How can the Kingdom succeed in attracting new business and convincing the world that they are scaling back their media laws when such restrictions are being regulated," he asked. Kuttab warned that such regulations are harmful to all forms of free expression. "Once you charge a license fee on audio broadcasting you will next charge a fee on all internet publishing. Imagine government regulators knocking on every Jordanian citizen's home to see if their 12 year old son has created and published a web page for himself."

Many E-mail and Usenet News reader programs, usually the mail and news reader programs that come with browser packages, allow users to include binary attachments (MIME or other encoding) or HTML (normally found on web pages) within their E-mail messages. This makes URLs into clickable links and it means that graphic images, formatting, and even color coded text can also be included in E-mail messages. While this makes your E-mail interesting and pretty to look at, it can cause problems for other people who receive your E-mail because they may use different E-mail programs, different computer systems, and different application programs whose files are often not fully compatible with each other. Any of these can cause trouble with in-line HTML (or encoded attachments). Most of the time all they see is the actual HTML code behind the message. And if someone replies to the HTML formatted message, the quoting can render the message even more unreadable. In some cases, the message is nothing but strange looking text. For this reason, many mailing lists especially those that provide a digest version, explicitly forbid the use of HTML formatted e-mail. See examples section.

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(via Dive Into Mark)

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(Thanks, Pablos!)

So-called social networking is very popular these days, as show the proliferation of services like Friendster, Orkut and dozens of others. But do the companies behind these services have any idea of what is hidden inside their complicated networks? When these networks reach a size of millions of users, it's not an easy task. A researcher at the University of Michigan is trying to help, with a new method for uncovering patterns in complicated networks, from football conferences to food webs. This overview contains more details and references about this non-traditional method. It also includes a spectacular representation of the Internet and another image showing a food web at Little Rock Lake.

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In this month's Popular Science Magazine, an illustration by Kenn Brown, who says:

"DARPA is putting together a race of autonomous (robotic) vehicles that runs from LA to Las Vegas. Completely remote, no one at the wheel. They are recruiting people (these guys are serious robot geeks who build and tinker with this stuff as a hobby and obsession) to build their own vehicles to participate in the race. The vehicles range from motorcycles to HumVees. The point of this story is to illustrate DARPA's interest in this technology, and that they hope to have autonomous vehicles waging war by 2015. "

Oh, goodie. I can hardly wait. Link

In some cases, the programmers themselves appear to have been frustrated or surprised.

privatentosw32ntuserkernelmnpopup.c:
// Set the GlobalPopupMenu variable so that EndMenu works for popupmenus so
// that WinWart II people can continue to abuse undocumented functions.

privatewindowsshellaccesoryhypertrmemuminitel.c:
// Guess what? Latent background color is always adopted for mosaics.
// This is a major undocumented find...

privatewindowsshellaccesoryhypertrmemuminitelf.c:
// Ah, the life of the undocumented. The documentation says
// that this guys does not validate, colors, act as a delimiter
// and fills with spaces. Wrong. It does validate the color.
// As such its a delimiter. If...

Link

"The Sims must routinely refurbish the buildings to keep the citizens happy, or just let them deteriorate and force the citizens to become unhappy and move away," says Alvey. "Happy citizens go to work and pay taxes, which the Sims collect as revenue. The higher the profits, the more attractive the city becomes, so more citizens will move into it."

Link

(via Futurismic)

SAYING CLELAND WAS "LUCKY" TO HAVE LIMBS BLOWN OFF: Coulter said, "Luckily for Cleland…he happened to [lose his limbs] while in Vietnam" and said that had he been injured "at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator." Of course, Cleland probably would not have been dealing with live grenades and enemy fire in the save haven of Ft. Dix. But, then, many top conservatives might not know this because they do not have firsthand knowledge of a combat zone. President Bush did not go to Vietnam because he was in the Texas National Guard. Vice President Dick Cheney did not serve in the military, saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." According to the Houston Press in 1999, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) "tried to blame minorities for his lack of military experience" saying, "so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks" like him. And Rush Limbaugh avoided service by apparently claiming his "anal cysts" prevented him from defending the nation. See more conservatives who attack veterans while avoiding military service themselves.

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(via Dan Gillmor)

My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group’s qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.

While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children’s safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children).

Link

Sami FTP Server has been reported prone to multiple remote denial of service vulnerabilities. ...

Email-filtering company MessageLabs has issued an early warning to antivirus ve...

RealPlayer/RealOne Players have bee...

It has been reported that various R...

A problem in the handling of some types of input has be...

Ms. Crumb at work is reminiscent of several scenes in "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary about her father. The resemblance is only heightened by her surroundings, the remnants of the hippie subculture from which Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and the rest of her father's most famous characters sprang. She's currently living in a communal household — "It's so stuck in the 70's it's really painful," she said — and she and her housemates often raid local dumpsters for food. Her sketchbook, whose pages are imprinted with kitschy cat motifs, was also found in the garbage. "I'm trying to not spend money so I don't have to get a job," she said.