Just saw the Scooby Doo movie. Damn. Best film adaptation of a TV show since the Brady Bunch Movie. Velma -- always my favorite -- is a stone fox. Better still are the sets and costumes: utterly delicious tiki bars, a hotel I'd give a finger to stay in for a week and a theme-park to end all theme-parks. And Matthew Lillard as Shaggy is absolutely, positively brilliant. A loving updating of Scooby Doo, by unabashed Hanna-Barbera fans, with just enough adult subtext to make it just as good for grown-ups as it is for kids. Oh, and what they did to Scrappy Doo was no more than the little rodent deserved. Link Discuss

Aural Delight: links to excellent and eclectic (and endangered, thanks to the recent punitive CARP royalty rate) Internet radio stations. Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

Brilliant author/editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted her "Evil Overlord" formula for devising a plot for your flagging science fiction story. It's terrific.

* A plot doesn't have to be new. It just has to be new to the reader.

* In fact, it doesn't even have to be new to the reader. It just has to get past him. (It helps if the story's moving fast and there's lots of other interesting stuff going on.)

* A plot device that's been used a thousand times may be a cliche, but it's also a trick that works. That's why it keeps getting used.

* Several half-baked ideas can often be combined into one fully-cooked one.

* If you have one plot presented three ways, you have three plots. If you have three plots presented one way, you have one plot. (I stole this principle from Jim Macdonald's lecture on how to really generate plots, which is much better than my lecture on stupid plot tricks.)

* Steal from the best.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

David Rothman challenges NPR Ombudsman to start his own blog, in order to learn more about the nature of links:

I'm just across the Potomac River from you and would be delighted to drop by and offer some free advice on a Dvorkin-NPR blog, though your in-house Web folks could probably accommodate you just as well or better. Blogger and Radio are merely two of the blog products you might consider. Via your blog, you could effortlessly link not just to NPR programs referenced there but also to listeners' contributions to your discussion boards.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

Forbes online has added a box of Slashdot headlines to its technology pages ("providing senior-level business readers with access to cutting-edge, high-tech content online."). Pretty cool to see /. getting this kind of mainstream cred. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bytes)

MacWorld has put together an excellent round-up of Mac-friendly 802.11b access-points. Great to finally get an exhaustive list of the APs that support AppleTalk. Link Discuss (via 802.11b Networking News)

Congress passed a resolution declaring the American inventor Antonio Meucci as the father of the telephone. The Canadian Parliament responded by passing a contrary resolution declaring Alexander Graham Bell, the Canadian inventor as the true originator of the phone. Link Discuss

Prilosec -- the heartburn medication I live and die by -- is about to go over-the-counter and what's more, the patent is about to expire. This is fantastic news for chronic, severe acid-reflux sufferers like me, who pay upwards of two bucks a pill (or have to hassle with insurance companies about our lifeline). No more calls to the doctor's office to renew our scrips, and with luck the price will drop to the level of ranatadine (Zantac), about $0.60 a pill or so. Link Discuss

NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.

The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.

Unpacking that:

• The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.

  This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.

• We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.

  Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.

• We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.

  You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.

• This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

  No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.

• NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.

  How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.

• Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

  In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

Another great TBL piece on popular misconceptions about links:

The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else...

Users and information providers and lawyers have to share this convention. If they do not, people will be frightened to make links for fear of legal implications. I received a mail message asking for "permission" to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed.

There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

Tim Berners-Lee anticipated NPR's absurd link policy in 1997, in this paper on Links and the Law:

The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.

A normal hypertext link does NOT necessarily imply that

* One document endorses the other; or that
* One document is created by the same person as the other, or that
* One document is to be considered part of another.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

Much as I love SpamAssassin, it's not without its flaws. It relies partly on the SPEWS blacklist of known spammers, a blacklist that is managed with a great deal of caprice and dogma, but not a lot of sense, it seems. Howard sums up a recent thread of messages regarding SPEWS thus:

"Hi, we used to have a spam problems from our customers but we've cleaned up"

"You profited from spam! You go to hell, you go to hell and you die!"

"Hi, we are a law firm that bought from UUnet and it seems the last owners of this IP block were spammer. We're not, can you please remove us."

"Every heard of due diligence? Thats what you get for buying from UUNet, you'll get unlisted when they clean up all their spammers."

"Hi, we bought from some people who turned out to have a problem with hosting some spammers, but we're locked into a 3 year contract. We're a small shop without the money for lawyers to get out of it. We're not spammers, could you please unblock this one piece of IP which is just us."

"Sorry, you have to change providers. They breached your contract by failing to provide full internet access (since people are filtering them based on our listing)"

Of course, having your name on the SPEWS blacklist isn't sufficient to cause your message to be tagged as spam by SpamAssassin; SPEWS only counts for two point towards a required threshold of five before a message is tagged. Still it seems like these blacklists always devolve into thrashes about abuse of power. I really like the Vipul's Razor approach (which is also integrated into SpamAssassin). No person or group of coordinated actors has the power to blacklist someone; distributed reputation continually demotes and promotes spam-reporters based on accuracy. Lots of checks and balances. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

The Hedonistic Imperative, a post-human, post-suffering manifesto:

The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Link Discuss (via The Schism Matrix)

Aaron Swartz suggests expressing software/IP licenses as haiku:

MIT: take my code with you / and do whatever you want / but please don't blame me

LGPL: you can copy this / but make modified versions / free in source code form

GPL: if you use this code / you and your children's children / must make your source free

RIAA: if you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain

Link Discuss

Yesterday, I was interviewed for Minnesota Public Radio's Future Tense, along with NPR's ombudsman, about NPR's link policy. The piece turned out great -- Jon Gordon, the producer, did a great job of framing the story, and he was kind enough to provide an MP3 of the interview for those of us without RealPlayer support on our OS of choice: Link Discuss (Thanks, Jon!)

Here's my letter to NPR's ombudsman, regarding NPR's link policy.

>"It's part of keeping our integrity that our journalism remain
>noncommercial, and we're not engaged in advocacy in any way,"
>Dvorkin explained.

Your integrity rests on the public's perception of your reasonableness, your understanding of the ways of the world. With every passing moment that this policy remains in effect, your erode that perception, erode the public's confidence in NPR's ability to deliver accurate and balanced news. No one wants to get their picture of the world from a fool; please show the world that NPR is not made up a fools and eliminate this policy immediately, apologize and get on with the news.

Link Discuss

Airline Meals supersite collects pix of airplane food from travellers round the net, along with notes, files 'em by airline, lets you vote on 'em, etc and so on. The vittles on the Beijing to Guangzhou night flight on China Southern look pretty good. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!)

Indulge your fetish for tall buildings with the Sky Scraper database; search by city, region, stories, architect or name and get a comparison chart back. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

Eli the Bearded sez:

Illustrator "King Velveeda" (Stu Helm) is being sued Kraft to stop him from using his pen name. So far Kraft has gotten a temporary injunction against KV so he has had to remove his name from his website.

(Some images on some of the pages on his site might not be work-friendly for you. The Castle Hassle page should be fine.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

Israeli bookies are alleged to be making book on the site of the next suicide bombing.

Betting on the Red Sea resort of Eilat, which has not seen any violence during the past-21-months of conflict, is the long shot at 17-1, while often-targeted Jerusalem was given odds of 6-4 against.

Bets begin at 10 shekels ($2), the betting sheet states, adding that bets only count for attacks of "Arabs against Jews and not the opposite."

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

David Rothman reports on his blog that NPR is reconsidering its policy requiring linkers to seek permission before putting a link on their websites. This is good news! Let's hope they do the right thing.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin has just told me that the legal, news and Web sides will reconsider the policy this afternoon--he himself will participate. I'll think good thoughts.

Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

Possibly apocryphal exchange between a Blockbuster customer and various tiers of Blockbuster management over the "Be kind -- please rewind" stickers on their DVD rental cases:

I emailed Blockbuster regarding the rewinding of DVDs, they told me that "Most DVD players have a "Rewind" button on it, what it does is spins the DVD the opposite direction from the direction the DVD spins during the play mode, so by spinning the DVD the opposite direction rewinds the DVD, it's similar to the rewind feature on a VCR."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

Neuroatomik: a great extropian big-science-weirdness blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Hoeken!)

Sneaky astronomers reveal that the earth narrowly avoided disaster on June 14 when an asteroid the size of a football pitch made a too-close-for-comfort approach to our beloved rock. Yikes!

Catalogued as 2002MN, the asteroid was travelling at over 10 kilometres a second (23,000 miles per hour) when it passed Earth at a distance of around 120,000 km (75,000 miles).

Link Discuss (Thanks, Amanda!)

It's been a couple of weeks now, and I can't adequately express my joy with Mozilla. No pop-ups, tabs everywhere, nary a spinning-beach-ball (the scourge of OS X browsing, and a "feature" that is omnipresent in other browsers, including the otherwise excellent Moz-based Chimera), and banner-ads are a thing of the past. I am in browsing heaven. I wish I could get the Bookmark Groups thing to work, but even absent that, I'm browsing faster and better than I ever have. This is a revolutionarily good piece of software, Browsing As It Should Be. Try it for a couple days -- you'll never go back. Link Discuss

Journos for the Providence Newspaper Guild and Washington Post are on a byline strike; rather than walking out, the reporters are refusing to attach their names to their stories. Of course, there's not a lot of coverage in either paper about the strike. Lucky ofr us, Sheila Lennon, a blogger who writes for a Providence paper, is covering it in her Subterranean Homepage News blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sheila!)

A robot in an evolutionary software experiment escaped from its pen at a robot expo and went wild, escaping across a pasture.

Sharkey said: "Since the experiment went live in March they have all learned a significant amount and are becoming more intelligent by the day but the fact that it had ability to navigate itself out of the building and along the concrete floor to the gates has surprised us all."

And he added: "But there's no need to worry, as although they can escape they are perfectly harmless and won't be taking over just yet."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

Portal for the Pittsburgh community wireless project, with coverage maps and news. Link Discuss

Ben Hammersley writes about setting up his public WiFi node in his Guardian column. Ben's experience is a little unusual -- within a dya of setting up his access point, Doc Searls (who was 9000 miles from home), stumbled upon it (and Ben). Later, at a group dinner with a bunch of British geeks, Matt Jones suggested chalking "WiFi hobo-runes" on the sidewalk marking discovered wireless service, so that other netstumblers and war-walkers may connect to it. Link Discuss (via Doc)

Wired News interviews NPR's ombudsman and gets a pack of clueless and disingenous quotes about its linking policy:

Dvorkin said he told the e-mailers "that NPR does not refuse links but it just wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a noncommercial and journalistic organization.

"We wouldn't want a commercial outfit to use us in any way they pleased..."

It isn't only commercial activity that concerns NPR. Asked if a link from someone's noncommercial homepage would bother the company, Dvorkin said: "It depends on your homepage -- what if you're an advocate for left-handed socialist diabetics? We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups."

"It's part of keeping our integrity that our journalism remain noncommercial, and we're not engaged in advocacy in any way," Dvorkin explained.

Let's look at those:

• "wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a noncommercial and journalistic organization."

  Inbound links do not reflect on the organization they're targeted on. This is like Disney taking the position that it wants to be sure that Mickey Mouse watches may only be worn by people who support its brand of family values, or the NYT trying to ensure that only smart and well-dressed people read the Grey Lady on the subway in the morning.

• "We wouldn't want a commercial outfit to use us in any way they pleased."

  Then get off the web. There is nothing about the citation of a web site through a link that should distinguish between commercial and non-commercial linkers. Google is a commercial organization. Does it need a special arrangement to make a link? If Google receives your dispensation, might its competitors be denied the privilege of linking to you?

• "We wouldn't want to give support to advocacy groups."

  I think you misunderstand the nature of the news (which is disheartening, considering that you work for NPR). As reporters, your job is to present facts and opinions to the public. These form the underpinnings of public discourse. That discourse (on the web) consists of links and commentary. A debate in a public hall between "left-handed socialist diabetics" and "$SOME_OTHER_STUPID_EXAMPLE" might very well include references to NPR pieces. That same debate, on the web, will augment its references with links. How very curious that a news organization would take the official position that its material is not to be cited in public discourse.

Link Discuss

Yoz Grahame, one of the excellent geeks I met in London last week, has posted a sure-to-be-classic essay, "Perl is Internet Yiddish." Like Yiddish, perl has no one canonical way to express any one idea, and like Yiddish, perl can be lyrical or it can be pidgin.

Let's talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it's mainly German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There's quite a bit of classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian, Slovak and Polish as well. It's where it came from. And now, where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep, refusenik, nosh, etc. - all essential Yinglish.

As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My father's mother says "nit" instead of "nisht", something that has my mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in this case it's a core philosophy of the language.

In other words: There's More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl hackers often say, TMTOWDI.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Yoz!)

Martha Stewart Living in Jail: prison merchandise in high style for the crafty con in you. Pictured here: "Apricot Inmate Baseball Hat." Also available: "The classic brimless 'black and white' spectator cap" and others. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)

Matt sez: "Showtime's site is only accessible to Americans. I've attached a screenshot of what I see as a Canadian when I go to their home page. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

A mysterious "bloop" sound recorded repeated on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array baffled marine biologists. Now, CNN reports that Brit scientists think it's evidence of a honkin'-big deep-sea squid.

Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and tell-tale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild.

The largest dead squid on record measured about 60ft including the length of its tentacles, but no one knows how big the creatures might grow.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

My pal Helen Rykens has the lead story in the Canadian sf magazine "Challenging Destinies." Her story, "Deciphering Vermilion," is simply lovely, and you can read it in its entirety online. Link Discuss (Thanks, Helen!)

Meryl sez: "Enter your SMS texting lingo and let transL8it! convert it to plain English OR type in a phrase in English and convert it to SMS lingo. CU L8r." Link Discuss (Thanks, Meryl!)

Matt Jones recounts the crushing defeat of a UK initiative to eliminate every vestige of electronic privacy. The defeat came at the hands of irate netizens who had excellent Internet-based tools like FaxYourMP.com at their disposal, allowing for rapid organization and highly effective action.

"...we thought it was worth saying that you won. And the next time you're talking to someone about these issues, and someone says "what's the point?" - well, you now may now point at yourself, and mention how you got the government to blink."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

Horrifying and fascinating six-legged insectoid Finnish logging machine with the power to stop a thousand Loraxes without straining its thoraxes. Don't miss the videos.

The walking machine adapts automatically to the forest floor. Moving on six articulated legs, the harvester advances forward and backward, sideways and diagonally. It can also turn in place and step over obstacles. Depending on the irregularity of the terrain, the operator can adjust both the ground clearance of the machine and the height of each step.

The machine's nerve center is an intelligent computer system that controls all walking functions - including the direction of movement, the travelling speed, the step height and gait, and the ground clearance. The harvester head is controlled by the Timberjack measuring and control system. To further optimize machine operation, Timberjack's Total Machine Control system (TMC) regulates the functions of the machine's loader and engine. All control systems are designed for ease of use. The operator-friendly controls are incorporated in a single joystick.

Discuss Link (Thanks, Richard!)

Hobo Nickels -- Buffalo Nickels customized by rail-riding Depression-era tramps -- are back. Sam Alfano, an American engraver, has revived the lost art and is making fantastic Hobo Nickels like the Casey Jones portrait pictured here. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

David "Sputnik" Sifry has built a cool-ass Google API tool for his blog. Every entry on his blog is accompanied by ten links to related stories automatically discovered with Google (these ten stories are refreshed every time he updates his blog, though he could also put it on a timer). The integration is slick-tight, thanks to Movable Type's API, and David's published the source for his hack so that other intrepid Movable Typers can implement it. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

Cloudmark, the company that is hoping to commercialize the excellent spam-busting service Vipul's Razor, officially launched last night at midnight. My pal Dan Moniz (former OpenColon, memepool editor, founder of Forwarding Address: OSX and all-round cranky LISP-geek) is their latest hire, and I'm awfully excited at the idea of this service coming to my desktop. The Cloudmark site reports that Vipul's Razor has processed 4 million+ emails today, and caught over 1.5 million spams out of that pool. Nice. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dan!)

Punk Rock Baby -- a CD of punk classics recorded in lullabye style: "You didn't fight the punk wars for nothing: make sure they have a riot of their own." Link Discuss (via Biznicality)

Carabella is the EFF's latest project -- a Flash game where you steer goth-hottie Carabella through a series of adventures in which she attempts to acquire an album without compromising her privacy, legality, or fair-use rights. Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

New terahertz "T-ray" cameras will allow us to see into space and under each others' clothes.

One camera, already built by a company called QinetiQ and working in so-called millimetric waves, has demonstrated the ability to eerily peer through clothes and reveal a concealed weapon -- as well as much of a person's body. The image shows far more detail than an infrared camera, which detects heat.

Terahertz radiation is similar to but more revealing than what the QinetiQ camera detects. Scientists say T-rays are emitted by pretty much everything. They come from "the human hand, an envelope, someone with clothes on or a comet," says Geoff McBride, who works on Star Tiger, the British project. It is supported by the European Space Agency.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jay!)

Paul Boutin has a great pick-of-the-litter review of 802.11b base-stations in the new Wired. It's hard to differentiate among the different access points and Paul does a good job of distinguishing among them. And on Paul's blog, Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman adds his two cents. Link Discuss

In addition to prohibiting linking to their site without permission, NPR also prohibits framing of their site without permission: Link Discuss

Damning mathematician's review of Enigma, the new movie about the protocypherpunks of WWII's Bletchley Park that somehow fails to mention Alan Turing.

Instead of dramatising intellectual discovery, as Harris made some effort to do, the film has played up the spy-thriller elements that made his novel a 'best-seller'. If you want to see a mathematician in country-lane car chases, then swimming fully-clothed in a heavy sea, while shooting a pistol at a spying colleague trying to reach a surfacing U-boat, then you should see this film. The best I can say is that it pays faithful homage to Graham Greene's 1943 atmospherics. A deeper problem is that throughout the film, the codebreakers appear as browbeaten by spymasters in the Secret Intelligence Service, and that betrayal of material to Germany is pivotal to the plot. In fact, spying played very little role in the Anglo-American war with Germany (though no doubt it was more significant in relations with the Soviet Union): cryptanalytic intelligence, obtained through scientific ingenuity and organisation, was all-important. The problem lay not in treachery but in implementation: successful use of the intelligence would tend to give it away. The British success largely continued because the German command were quicker to suspect treachery on their side, in reality non-existent, than to doubt the efficacy of the Enigma machine. There are passages in the film where the radicalism of the scientific revolution is made clear enough: the resentment at the 'swots' suddenly being 'stars,' the amused contempt of the codebreakers for irrelevant brass-hat pep-talks. There is also a fine passage where Jericho quickly calculates on information-theoretic grounds whether the coming convoy clash will supply enough material to break back into the U-boat Enigma. But these are disconnected exceptions to the overall emphasis on a traditional war-story plot.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)

Great Red Herring story on the attempts of incumbent wireless companies to squelch disruptive ultra-wideband radio technology at the FCC:

All of which makes one wonder: why are the wireless carriers so afraid of UWB, especially as the FAA and DOD have been using it without incident for 40 years? Perhaps because they know how effective UWB is. "This is about competitive concerns," says Maura Colleton, managing director of Qorvis Communications, the Washington, D.C., public affairs firm that lobbied Capitol Hill on behalf of XtremeSpectrum. "These companies are protecting their existing markets and their ability to go into future ones."

Indeed, UWB mightily threatens a number of existing markets. The 802.11 community will be in immediate danger, and Bluetooth, the emerging wireless standard for device-to-device communications, may be rendered obsolete before anyone actually gets to use it. But far more significant is the effect that UWB could have on the next-generation networks that mobile carriers have spent so lavishly on to develop over the past three years. "I believe the wireless carriers' objections really stemmed from a financial and a political perspective, more than from spectrum interference," says Martin Rofheart, the cofounder and CEO of XtremeSpectrum. At the current power restrictions delineated by the FCC, UWB is not yet approved for commercial use beyond networks of a couple hundred feet at the most.

Link Discuss

NPR joins KPMG and other bastions of cluelessness by requiring that anyone who wishes to link to the NPR site fill in this form. No matter how deep or shallow your link is, NPR requires you to fill in this form.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

Please use this form to request permission to link to npr.org and its related sites.

Gosh, I hope they don't take away my tote bag.

Really, it beggars the imagination to think that anyone in this day and age could be this fatally stupid. If you agree, drop a note to NPR's ombudsman. Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

Kevin "Jailbird Hacker" Mitnick is in danger of losing the ham radio license he's held for 25 years; the FCC has decided that he doesn't possess the moral fortitude to own an amateur radio license.

The FCC has refused to allow his license to be renewed, despite the fact that he isn't accused of misusing it or breaking any FCC rules.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Vince!)

Blogathon -- drum up sponsors, pick a charity (like the EFF!) and post a blog entry every 30 minutes to raise cash for the charity of your choice. No fair writing 48 entries in advance and using a python script and the Blogger API to auto-post!

Remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Well a Blogathon is an event for charity that lasts 24 hours. Each participant finds sponsors who can either donate a flat amount for the entire event, or an amount per hour. Once you sign up, you blog for 24 hours on the day of the event and raise money for charity.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Joe Clark, a freelance disabled-rights activist, talks to the Toronto Star about the growing, positive trend of making TV and films accessible to the deaf and blind, and about the CRTC's (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, which, among other things, regulates Canadian television/radio to ensure that a minimum proportion of the programming has "Canadian content") role in inadvertently undermining it:

Clark is now battling another thorny problem. Under CRTC rules, Canadian cable companies that simulcast U.S. programs on Canadian channels must carry them not only with closed captions but also with audio descriptions.

"If a U.S. (program) feed has closed captioning or audio description and the Canadian feed doesn't, the cable company cannot substitute the Canadian feed," says Clark. "But they are doing so, unintentionally."

He's complained to the CRTC in writing: "We went through this denial of accessibility with captioning in 1981, and despite years of warning that U.S. programming on commercial networks would begin to be aired with descriptions, Canadian broadcasters ... are still blocking the description signals."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)

Disney's migrating its animation back-end to HP's GNU/Linux boxen. The great irony, of course, is that Disney is also using the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to make it illegal to develop open source digital video applications. Link Discuss (Thanks Lisa!)

Carl "Plastic" Steadman's posted a long, hilarious counterpoint to Kuro5hin Rusty's plea to K5 users. Carl's going to be selling Plastic webmail accounts to Plastic users to underwrite the cost of running the system. In his fine satirical style, Carl introduces the idea:

But I don't want your webmail, with all its elitist claptrap... A webmail with no ads? With no positively negative opt-outs to receive periodic special deals and offers from a long but selective list of partners and affiliates? That isn't "free," with an asterisk? Sounds positively un-American. What I want is a Plastic t-shirt. But not made out of plastic. Made out of cotton.

If you sign up for a year's service for US$60., you'll receive a quality heavyweight 100 percent cotton screen-printed Plastic 't,' as a token of appreciation for supporting the kind of specious, questionable thought and delusional, self-important blather you've come to expect from Plastic. And yes, of course - they'll be available in S and XS for the ladies.

So US$60. for a lousy Plastic t-shirt.

No, US$60 for the kind of exclusive email address that tells people you've managed to peck out 'I liek Pokemon' or suitable variant enough times to earn the minimum karma needed in order to qualify for a Plasticmail account - and you had 60 bucks. The t-shirt is my gift to you.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Carl!)

Passport won't let you create a new ID if your surname happens to be "Woodcock:"

Your lastname contains a word that has been reserved or is prohibited for .NET Passport registration. Please type in a different lastname

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

Philip K. Dick makes Time Magazine!

The philosophy he dreamed of. Behind the plots of empathetic androids and cybertorpedoes, two questions obsessed Dick: What is real? and What is human? He also asked, What's next? "I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place," he said in a 1972 speech. "But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future." It is in his future, our present—in readers' minds and on the huge mindscreen of the movies—that Phil Dick lives.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

Pete Seeger describes his father predecessor (Thanks, Misha!) Woody Guthrie's view on copyright:

Pete Seeger, June 1967:

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." W.G.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

Ohio State students who protested Shrub's presence at their graduation by silently turning their backs to the stage were led out of the auditorium by the police, who told them that they would be charged with disturbing the peace if they didn't leave the premises. Earlier, they had been threatened with arrest and withholding of their diplomas if they engaged in their First Amendment protected right to silently protest the President's policy. (For contrast, Clinton's presence at an Ohio State grad ceremony enjoyed no such protection -- he was heckled and jeered and simply toughed it out like a grownup).

Update: In the discussion area BB readers have posted some first-hand accounts and links that suggest that the AP wire that orginally carried this story misstated the facts, or rather, conflated them. It appears that the administration only banned verbal protests of the Shrub (still a First Amendment right, last time I checked), but turning one's back was permitted. Link Discuss (via Ambiguous)

The O'Reilly catalog page is up for "Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools," which is the blog-book I contributed to, along with Rael "Blosxom" Dornfest, J. Scott "Radio" Johnson, Shelley "Burning Bird" Powers, and Mena and Ben "Movable Type" Trott. You can pre-order your copy now; Nat, the editor, tells me that there'll be a shot of the cover up soon, too.

Anyone can run a blog (an online journal). From personal diaries to political commentary and technology observations, bloggers are making their voices heard around the world. Essential Blogging helps you select the right blogging software for your needs and show how to get your blog up and running.

You'll learn the ingredients of a successful blog, and then get detailed installation, configuration and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. After showing you how to acquire, set-up, and run these leading software packages, Essential Blogging takes you through the more advanced features, so that by the time you finish, you'll be up and blogging with the best of them.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nat!)

Meg's written an excellent tutorial on migrating mail from Outlook for Windows to Entourage or other OS X mailers. Link Discuss

Eli the Bearded sez: "Inspired by your Joan Aiken blurb, I'll point out to you Arthur Ransome. He wrote the Swallows and Amazons series, which I suspect is even more Patrick O'Brian for kids, at least the Peter Duck one which involves a a trip to Trinidad. Other ones have them climbing an imaginary Kachenjunga an expedition to the 'North Pole,' etc. Each book has the kids get older, smarter and more ambitious." Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

Dave "Scripting News" Winer's in the hospital -- here's to a speedy recovery! Link Discuss

Microsoft just released the 5.2 updater for Internet Explorer for OS X -- weirdly, there hasn't been any fanfare about this release, and there're precious few notes on it, other than:

This latest version — version 5.2 — provides all the latest security and performance enhancements for Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS X and a new home page — www.msn.com — for Internet Explorer. It also provides support for the new Quartz text smoothing feature provided in Mac OS X version 10.1.5 and later, so text on your screen is easier to read.

Update: Just ran the installer. It makes you quit out of all your other apps before it'll run. Hellooooo? This is Unix! Jesus. The installer overwrites your preset homepage with MSN. Argh. The actual app is not visibly faster or more stable than 5.1 was and the Quartz support is no better than I'm getting with Silk.

I've gone back to Mozilla, which is not without its failings (I hate the download manager, and the inability to specify that links from other apps should open in new tabs, not new windows is a pain), but which is far more stable and far faster than Explorer. Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

Joel On Software's written an excellent article on the economic reasons for free software/open source. It all comes down to complimentary components: cheap plane tickets to Miami drive up the cost of hotel rooms in Miami, so Miami hoteliers want to lower the cost of plane tickets.

By the same token, it's in the best interest of hardware vendors to drive down the cost of operating systems; of media companies to drive down the (potential) cost of browsers, etc etc etc. The essay is clear and well-argued, and a nice defense of the economic value of free-as-in-beer software (it explicitly exempts free-as-in-speech from its scope), but I think Joel makes a misstep on the question of Sun.

Sun is in the business of commidifying software (through their support of free Unix variants and tools) and hardware (through their support of Java). When the costs of everything drop to zero, where is Sun's business? As Joel puts it: "Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley."

But he is mistaken about Sun. Sun's unique sales proposition is what it has always been: interoperability. Sun has always led performance computing vendors on the free-as-in-freedom front. IBM and SGI and their ilk have built hardware that attempts to lock their customers in, making peripherals and software proprietary, high-cost add-ons. (I once had a gig running a proto-hosting service that was built on an SGI WebForce Indy. The machine shipped without a compiler, and SGI wanted to charge us $1000 for "developer tools" like perl). Sun's commitment to its customers is that its products can be hacked, that other vendors will be able to support them without punishing license terms, etc. That is why Sun isn't a commodity. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

OpenOffice, the free software/open source successor to Sun's Star Office, has shipped for Mac OS X. It's just a developer build, and you need to install XFree86 to get it to run, but it is a free-as-in-speech/free-as-in-beer alternative to MSFT Office. OpenOffice reads and writes Microsoft Office files, including most of the complex ones (you can use OpenOffice to exchange revision-marked documents with Word users, for example).

It's butt-ugly and a pain in the ass to install, but both of those are temporary conditions. The OpenOffice Mac OS X hackers are promising to build an Aqua version of the software for 1.0, which'll increase the ease of installation and the aesthetic pain considerably. Can't wait.

Meantime, Open Office 1.0 is available for most Linuxes and other Unix flavors -- enjoy the freedom! Link Discuss (Thanks, Charlie!)

Women in Iran have created over 1,200 Perisan blogs, online outlets where they can discuss taboo issues of gender and faith.

"Women in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and there are some taboos just for women, such as talking about sex or the right to choose your partner," she said.

"I have the opportunity to talk about these things and share my experiences with others."

For the most part, the response to her blog has been positive.

"I've had e-mails from men who have told me that I changed their attitude towards women in Iran," she said.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Brian!)

The rumormongers at ThinkSecret are reporting that Apple's next rev of its Airport hardware will support 802.11g, a wireless standard that runs at 54Mbs over 2.4GHz (the same frequency as 802.11b, or "WiFi," the frontrunning, 10Mbs wireless standard). 802.11a is a more mature standard, but it runs at a different frequency, 5GHz, which means that in order for hardware to be compatible with both the popular-but-slow 802.11b and the faster 802.11a, it would be necessary to include two different radios, one tuned to 2.4GHz and the other to 5GHz.

Software-defined radio, like the GNU Radio project, would make these considerations obsolete. Software-defined radio "tunes" and demodulates radio signals with software, using off-the-shelf, low-cost computer parts. A functional, high-frequency SDR will turn your PC into an 802.11* card, a cellphone, an FM/AM/digital TV/analog TV receiver, and every other radio you can think of, all at the same time. Hell, it will tune every single radio and TV station simultaneously.

But there's a catch. The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) has drafted a would-be mandatory digital TV standard for "protecting" Hollywood movies from being captured and rebroadcast over the Internet. One of the many rotten characteristics of this proposal is that is requires every digital TV device to be "tamper resistant," so that "end users" (i.e., me and you) can't modify our lawfully acquired property to circumvent the copy-prevention that keeps us from using it to the fullest.

But GNU Radio is Free Software -- aka open source -- and it is designed to be modified by end-users. Free Software projects improve when end-users modify the code to extend its functionality and patch its bugs. And so the BPDG would make GNU Radio illegal.

The worst part of it is, no computer or IT company has come out in public opposition to the BPDG mandate. As Louisiana's Representative Billy Tauzin prepares to enact the BPDG mandate into law, he's able to proceed with ease because none of the IT giants -- Apple, MSFT, IBM, Intel, HP, Gateway -- have come forward. Yet.

A lot of IT employees and execs read this blog. If you're a decision-maker at a major IT company that believes that outlawing open source is bad for your business, contact me. If you beleive that turning the design-specs of general-purpose computers over to Hollywood (another piece of the BPDG proposal) would be bad for your business, contact me. We need one -- just one -- major IT company to speak up for its own interests in public, and we can defeat the BPDG.

But we can't do it alone. Link Discuss

Rusty's posted a heartwrenching note to Kuro5hin explaining the economics of running the site. K5 is powered by free software, donated hardware, gratis bandwidth and community-contributed editorial.

Nevertheless, it's a full-time job for Rusty to keep the site going, and he's got to cover things like accounting, payroll taxes, medical insurance, etc, all told, about $70,000. He's tried banner-ads, text-ads, premium memberships, whatnot, and none of them have come close to covering that sum. So he's gone to his members, the super-smart brawling K5 readers, and hit them up for an idea.

As Rusty points out, he sees over 300,000 unique visitors every month. If every one of them were to pay in one dollar, just once, he'd be set for four years. All he needs is a way of convincing them all to kick in that buck and he's in biz. If you've got any ideas to help K5 afloat, go create a (free) membership and post a message. Link Discuss

Wanna burn a bunch of business-card discs? $40 gets you 100 CD-biz-card blanks, each holding 50MB. You could hand out copies of Seth Schoen's Bootable Business Card Linux, a substantial fraction of Project Gutenberg, you name it. I'm told that you can burn these with any tray-loading burner. Link Discuss

A third literary link for today. Kelly "Stranger Things Happen" Link turned me on to the "Wolves of Willoughby Chase" books by Joan Aiken last fall in NYC, and I've been hooked ever since. These are a series of juvenile adventure stories set in an alternate Victorian England (and abroad, on the high-seas). Like a kids' version of Patrick O'Brian's high-seas adventures, these books are fantastically addictive. Aiken's ear for dialog and dialect is superb, her characters are rich and well-realized and her stories -- which weave in delicate and subtle fantasy elements -- are gripping as hell. Aiken deserves a place among JK Rowling, Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket and JRR Tolkien as one of those rare and wonderful children's authors whose works are equally enjoyable for adults. Link Discuss

I gave a reading from "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" last night at the Writers With Drinks event at the Cafe Du Nord. I was followed by Lynn Breedlove, who read from her new novel, "Godspeed," which is an intense and comic story about a bike courier's unrequited love for a stripper, witty as Bukowski at his finest, but with the ferocity of Chuck Palahniuk. Another book vying for the top of my must-read pile.

Thanks, by the way, to all the friends and readers who came out last night -- it was a full house, and it was terrific to see you all. Link Discuss