1. Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
2. Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
3. Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
4. Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

100K PDF Link

(Thanks, Alex!)

1980 Food Factory - fast food from outer space (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1980 Watercouch (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1981 Communications Implant - I think therefore I network (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Mole - Underground vehicle (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Underground MagLev Train (from Dream Park by Larry Niven (w/S. Barnes))
1981 Arcology - Soleri's dream (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle)

(via Ben Hammersley)

I'm selling blank notebooks with my cover illustration of a girl feeding some magic pellets to her pet slugs. (click here for a larger image) The notebooks are wire-o bound, measure 5" x 8", and contain 80 sheets of paper. Yours for just $10. Link

Jonl sez: "Time is running out to register for the Wireless Future conference, which will be held March 12-16 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Explore the future of licensed and unlicensed wireless technology with such luminaries as Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs), Kevin Werbach (organizer of Supernova and author of New America Foundation's Radio Revolution), Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary Dave Hughes, David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Dewayne Hendricks of Dandin Group, Joichi Ito of Neoteny, Ltd., Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury, John Quarterman and many more! This is a great conference for wireless entrepreneurs, business strategists, developers, inventors, creative thinkers and anyone else interested in the promise of mobile technology. Sponsored by Andrews Kruth, Metrowerks, Motion Computing, RockSteady Networks, The Futures Lab, Polycot Consulting, Austin Wireless Alliance and Ink PR."

Link

My cow-orker Jason Schultz has just filed a breif the Southern District Court in the BNETD case, iin which Blizzard -- a Universal company that makes video games -- is suing some hackers who wrote their own free software version of Blizzard's game-server, called bnetd. The arguments from the other side are the height of bogosity, and Jason makes not bones about it in his brief. The prose here positively sings, and is as good a treatise on fair-use reverse engineering as you could hope to read.

First, as discussed in Defendants' opening brief, the dissimilarity between the "BATTLE.NET" and "bnetd project" marks alone warrants summary judgment for the Defendants on Blizzard's Count III. Also weighing heavily in Defendants' favor is the fact that Blizzard has still failed to come forward with any admissible evidence of actual customer confusion. Blizzard's sole set of ?evidence" are two hearsay statements in a declaration from Paul Sams, a Blizzard employee. These vague assertions regarding what other unnamed people have said when contacting Blizzard constitutes inadmissible hearsay, and therefore cannot be considered as evidence of actual confusion. Even if these statements were admissible, misdirected communications such as these have been considered in other cases to be ?de minimis and to show inattentiveness on the part of the caller or sender rather than actual confusion."

296K PDF Link

Click image for full size. A mysterious epidemic of posters is reported in LA this week. We understand they bear the work of famed street artist Robbie Conal They're Robbie Conal-esque, and we know they're some sort of sneaky underground campaign for some Hot New Thing Which Shall Be Revealed Shortly, and that posters sending up Wynona, Courtney, and Moby are also in the works, but we're told we'll be sent on a one-way ride to Naked Scientology Boot Camp for extensive botox torture if we reveal their true origin and purpose. (Thanks, Susannah!)

Glenn writes,

I've met the CEO and the marketing director when I invited the CEO to speak at a panel I moderated at Wi-Fi Planet last year, and the most interesting aspect of the Wi-Fi is that they're not excited about the technology but its uses. There's a financial aspect to this, of course: the average purchase price of a Schlotzsky's customer is about $7.

But the CEO wasn't a geek; he liked seeing entire families or sports teams or groups of parents and kids come in and spent time using the high-speed connection. It's important to recall that a small but significant minority of Internet users have broadband; for the rest, Schlotzsky's offering is a profound (and free) pleasure.

Link

(via WiFiNetNews)

Areas that do show noticeable changes appear on the images as a cluster of bright yellow pixels, fading out to orange and red at their peripheries. The images look strikingly like the Doppler radar images you see on the Weather Channel. (If you blur your eyes a little, you might think that yellow patch on the image was a thunderhead, not a brainstorm.) The image is projected over a grid with numbers running along each axis. The numbered grid and the slices create a three-dimensional system of coordinates, the latitude and longitude of neuromapping. The grid is made up of small cubes called "voxels," and each voxel has a specific address.

Joy begins by laying down the twenty-five slices for stage one of our experiment, the dreaded checkerboard. The pattern of activity is immediately visible, even to my untutored eyes, mostly because there's literally nothing going on in 95 percent of my brain. Only a thin band wrapping around the back of my head, roughly at ear level, glows yellow.

"We know that the flashing checkerboard is a very salient stimulus for just the visual processing areas of the brain," she says. "And that's exactly what's happening here."

Link

Robotics Society of America President and Robolympics founder David Calkins tells BoingBoing:

"While in Japan, I saw the coolest thing ever! Fighting robots. But not in the traditional Battlebots sense. Imagine rock-em sock-em robots, only fully articulated and computer controlled. It's called Robo-One and it's amazing. 15" tall androids belt each other boxing style until one falls down. These mini androids are as articulate as the Sony Curio, Honda ASIMO, or Fujitsu HOAP - only guys are making them in their apartments for about $3000, rather than 10 Million. I've uploaded a bunch of videos to give you an idea. Robolympics is sponsoring a Robo-One match in San Francisco in March - along with Battlebots, sumo bots, and others. Watch these videos!"

Link

Feeling overly humanized? Let this Flash-based barcode-generator dehumanize you a little: apparently this UPC decodes to "32-year-old male, 173 lbs, 5'10", living in the US."

Link

(Thanks, Liz!)

Link

(Thanks, evilevilmatt!)

Link

(Thanks, Glen!)

1. Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
2. Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
3. Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
4. Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

100K PDF Link

(Thanks, Alex!)

Click image for full size. A mysterious epidemic of posters is reported in LA in the past 48 hours. We understand they bear the work of famed street artist Robbie Conal, and we know they're some sort of sneaky underground campaign for some Hot New Thing Which Shall Be Revealed Shortly, and that posters sending up Wynona, Courtney, and Moby are also in the works, but we're told we'll be sent on a one-way ride to Naked Scientology Boot Camp if we reveal their true origin and purpose. (Thanks, Susannah!)

Don't be naive enough to think that because you run Linux you won't be a ...

The Pagan Hierarchy: like the Geek Hierarchy, but for pagans. I don't know why this kind of chart is so inherently funny, but damn, it sure is.

Link

(via Making Light)

If you tilt a sealed, new Pepsi bottle at 25 degrees and squint at the underside of the cap, you can tell whether it's a winning free-iTunes-track bottle or a try-again bottle.

Link

(via Futurismic)

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

Link

(via Futurismic)

The Rockaway Township woman, who claims she was targeted for her teenager's school research project, is among hundreds of individuals sued by the music industry since last summer. Another 531 computer users were sued yesterday in "John Doe" suits filed in Trenton, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Orlando.

Labels are using "scare tactics (that) amount to extortion" in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark.

"They're banding together to extort money, telling people they're guilty and they will have to pay big bucks to defend their cases if they don't pony up now. It is fundamentally not fair," Scimeca's lawyer, Bart Lombardo, said yesterday. The Cranford attorney said he occasionally downloads songs for personal use and sees nothing wrong with that.

Link

(Thanks, Jason!)

Link

"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge said. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."

Link

(via Electrolite)

Where: Zeitgeist Bar and Guest Haus, 199 Valencia St at Duboce, San Francisco, (415)255-7505
When: Sunday, February 22, 2004, 5-9PM
What: Cory's going-away party

Link