So, I figured that with Webvan's biz being reinvigorated by Safeway, that I'd be able to buy some groceries online and eat something besides take-out burritos. No dice, though!

From: "Home Shopping"
Date: Tue Aug 06, 2002 09:25:37 PM US/Pacific
To: doctorow@craphound.com
Subject: RE:safeway.com [#265651]

Dear Mr. Doctorow,

I am writing in response to an e-mail I received regarding your technical problems. I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Unfortunately, our website is currently not compatible with Mac computers. This is already under research by our Web Development department and hopefully they will have this issue resolved in the very near future.

If I can be of any further service to you please feel free to contact me again or call us toll free at 1-877-505-4040.

Thank you for your time and thank you for shopping with Safeway.com.

Sincerely,

Trent Gurney
Customer Service Representative

Must...restrain...fit...of...self...righteous...Mac...fanatic...pique. Link Discuss

I always get a kick out of this classic 1950s film clip documenting the dosing of army troops with LSD. Note: StileProject redirects off-site links, so you'll need to copy the link below and paste it into a new window if you wish to view the clip; also, be warned that there may be hardcore porn banners on this page. Link Discuss

The Feds have asked "America's Most Wanted" to vet snitch calls from TIPS.

But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."

Has Ashcroft turned his embattled volunteer citizen spy program -- which has been blasted by left and right alike -- over to Fox Broadcasting's "America's Most Wanted"? If so, the connection shouldn't be all that surprising. Ashcroft's Justice Department and John Walsh's popular crime-busters show have been a mutual-admiration society for some time now. Walsh started coaxing ratings out of the 9/11 disaster for Fox TV while the dust was still settling from the twin towers' collapse. Only two days after the attack, Walsh loaded his whole production team onto a bus in Indiana and drove the show to ground zero, where, he claimed, government officials had told him to "help us catch these bastards."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Andrew!)

Benjamin Franklin was a member of a leet hacker-clan/secret society called "Junto."

Franklin was a socially and politically effective hacker who created the leading edge of science, technology, and society. He was responsible for breakthroughs like lighting=electricity, and inventions like bifocals and the Franklin stove. His printing operation was the 18th century equivalent of the web (the number of newspapers in the colonies expanded from a couple of dozen to a few hundred during his life, and he funded the creation of several of them)...

The Junto had a series of questions they'd ask at each meeting. It's revealing...

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?...

6. Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?...

14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?...

15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?...

23. Is there anv difficulty in matters of opinion, of justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have discussed at this time?

Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

Danger, the hiptop phone/PDA combo I yearn to own, has inked a deal with T-Mobile, in which T-Mobile will offer Danger-based phones in 45 of the 50 top US markets and 8,000 cities. Link Discuss

Cat and Girl is a great net comic-strip. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

"We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs," the book that Meg "Megnut" Hourihan and Matt "Metafilter" Haughey co-wrote with Paul Bausch, is coming out in two days. Yippee! Link Discuss (via Megnut)

My pal David Findlay, a science fiction writer, smut-peddler and video-guy, is hosting a DIY smut workshop in Toronto next week.

This hands-on workshop walks you through conceiving, writing, planning, casting, shooting, editing, critiquing and distributing your own ultra-short video with explicit sexual content. Whether youíve been shooting sex scenes for years or are entirely new to the idea; whether you think of it as "porn", "erotica", "smut" or "home movies", come learn how to do it better with a group of like-minded video enthusiasts and an instructor who has years of experience working on both sides of the camera.

You provide performers and your own dirty little mind. We supply the gear and the guidance over (and between) two weekends in August. The course covers everything from ethical representation to negotiating with performers; low-budget lighting to microphone placement; addressing body image issues to translating difficult fantasies on camera. Integrating technical and conceptual concerns, this workshop is oriented toward simplicity and completion, premised on the idea that youíll learn most (and perhaps be most satisfied by) having and seeing your own smutty imaginings realized on tape in less than 10 days.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Nalo!)

Stefan sez, "Science Impresario John Brockman's brain trust write to describe their summer vacations:"

Here we are in a little village on the Mediterranean, where I am working for a few weeks with my friend Carlo Rovelli, who is a Professor nearby in Marseille. Carlo and I discovered the main ideas that went into loop quantum gravity working together in a setting like this, in Verona, getting together each day to talk, and then going home to calculate and check on our own, and it is wonderful to be back working with him. We understand each other easily, and from long experience know how to compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses and so we work quickly. We are making fast progress on understanding the implications of the existence of a cosmological constant for quantum gravity. I had taken a detour of a few years to apply what we had learned about quantum spacetimes to string theory, but there is so much about nature, not the least the apparent fact that there is a cosmological constant, that string theory seems not to incorporate. Now it is wonderful to be back in reality, four dimensional and non-supersymmetric as it seems to be after all.

From the patio where I work I have a view of the bay of Cassis and the beautiful cliffs that rise to the east of it. Today there is little wind on the bay and the sailboats hardly move. Yesterday was windy and we took Carlo's boat out. He has bought an old wooden boat, built a century ago in this harbour, five meters, open, symmetric front to back, with gentle curves such as one sees in old paintings. Working from drawings in 19th century books Carlo has restored it to what might have been its original design, adding a mast, sail and rigging of the style used in the Mediterranean from the middle ages to the advent of modern, triangular sails. The sail hangs from a pole, which in turn is hung by a complicated organization of ropes from the top of the mast. Carlo has a lot of fun watching me try to sail his boat. Downwind we do get some speed, but the boat will hardly go upwind, and coming about takes practice. In such a boat one understands why it took Ulysses so long to get home and one wonders, watching the modern fiberglass sloops speeding by, whether it was a matter of materials or imagination that it took more than 20 centuries for people to realize it's much better to attach the sails directly to the mast.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

Great gallery of fancily shaped kids' tinned pasta. I remember all these pastas as being shaped like blobs of starch, back in my day, but it appears that the starch-shaping technology has improved, as these clearly recognizably R2D2 and Jar-Jar Binks pastoids attest. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

Excellent nerdy t-shirts from halibut.com. Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)

I pulled this off Dave Farber's IP list (which pulled it from Christian Bailey's blog):

A marvelous video spot is starting to appear, sponsored by the Ad Council. It's worth watching for.

It begins with a teenager who approaches the help counter at a library. He tells the librarian that he can't find the books he has on a list, which he hands her. She looks them up in the computer, and replies, "These books are no longer available... may I have your name, please?" When the kid walks away from the counter without giving his name, he's approached by two men in suits (one of whom takes his arm) appearing from behind some shelves, who "just have a couple of questions" for him. Meanwhile, the librarian is watching with a look of sadness and concern.

A tagline appears: "What if America wasn't America?

Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it." Definitely one of the most chilling (and unfortunately appropriate) ads I've ever seen.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

Lots of pictures of pre-70s Vegas here. Too bad the image quality is pretty crappy. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jimmy!)

Interesting article about the status of the search for the unathraxer. Dr. Steven J. Hatfill sounds suspicious, but the FBI is begin extra cautious, fearful of another Richard Jewell style mistake.

Last November, agents stormed the home of Aziz Kazi, a Pakistani-born budget official for the city of Chester, Pa. They hauled away dozens of boxes of his belongings and questioned him for hours about a mysterious liquid he had been seen carrying out of the house. It turned out the family dishwasher had backed up, and Kazi was bailing out his kitchen.

Link Discuss

Great roundup of the new candy for 2003:

Popart Hologram Lollipops -- A new line of exciting hologram lollipops in assorted fruit flavors feature cool words like "flirt," "rock star," and others. (LightVision Confections)

Clicker Licker Pumkin Pops -- The newest Clicker Licker Pop is an interactive goodie that combines a whistle with a bright orange plastic figure that sports a beguiling smile. Also, Sweet Frames, a heart shaped Valentine’s box with a clear top photo frame filled with heart-shaped chewy candies. (R.L. Albert & Sons)

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

Bob "Connectivity" Frankston has posted a great essay about the real-world ambiguity that ICANN is trying to shove into neat pigeonholes with its .COM and other DNS schemes:

The mindless literalness of computing devices forces us to be explicit about these distinctions. Yet we still manage to miss the point and ignore the obvious message. Perhaps it is no different from the 1950's when mother's thought everything their babies touched had to be sterilized except for the 90% of the day when they are crawling around and putting everything in their mouths. That 90% of the day was simply invisible.

Perhaps this explains the ".com" mania. We tend to assume that because we can guess the name of some very popular sites that the naming scheme works and makes sense. We gloss over the many serious and fatal flaws in such names as if they were the exceptions rather than the rule. What I find most disappointing is that even those technical adapt and aware of the details of the DNS implementation manage to sustain this dissonance....

The DNS was created to meet a need. The IP address is not a stable handle. Instead we use the DNS name as the stable handle. The Internet was a small community and, as in the medieval village, we could talk about the miller without making a distinction between the profession and the surname. The tax collector had to be able to identify the person and thus treated the name as an abstract identifier rather than a description.

In today's world we can't simply tell people to ignore the meaning of the words used in .COM names even though they make the DNS meaningless since names can't be stable and track changes in meaning. Instead we must understand the concepts of naming and binding and create an abstract handle that can be the stable identifier. After all, isn't the purpose of the DNS to provide some stable bindings?

Link Discuss (via SATN)

American film execs could face jail time or barred entry in Australia if they engage in hacking under Berman's anti-P2P bill, which allows rights-holders to break the law in order to exact vigilante justice over file-traders whom they believe to be infringing on their copyrights.

Under section 9a of the Victorian Summary Offences Act (1966), "a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so". The penalty if convicted is up to six months' jail.

Computer, Internet and intellectual property lawyer Steve White says the Berman bill is "stupid and counterproductive", and he believes it will lead to an online arms race as PC owners and the networks seek to thwart the efforts of copyright holders.

He says US executives may be unable to enter the country to give evidence in court cases, attend conferences, speak to government, customers or possibly to make movies because afflicted PC owners could seek to have them arrested for unauthorised computer trespass.

Link Discuss (via /.)

Public Space is a Toronto clearinghouse site for urban renewal/reform initiatives. They're working on two campaigns right now: The Trailer Park, a festival of bike-trailers ("You don't need a car to move stuff!"); and Stop the Poster Ban, a political action campaign directed a quashing a move in City Council to ban independent posterers, while every other public space in Toronto is plastered with advertising on behalf of monied interests.

The proposed changes to the postering law include:

* Posters only allowed on 2% of all hydro [power] poles.

* Posters have to be 100 metres apart.

* Glue and wheat paste are not allowed.

* You must put your personal name and phone number on every poster.

* If you break this law, the minimum fine is $60 per poster. There is no maximum fine.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)

The British tabloid The Sun reports that security guards at LAX confiscated a two-inch plastic GI Joe rifle from a seven-year-old's toy action figure. I feel safer.

Security chiefs at Los Angeles airport said: “We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.

“If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him.”

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Matt Groening sez that Homer Simpson is a Canadian:

In Montreal for a performance of The Simpsons - In the Flesh stage show at the Just for Laughs comedy festival, Groening noted Thursday his dad was born in Canada and Homer is named for him so . . . .

"That would make Homer Simpson a Canadian," Groening said in an interview. "I hope Canadians won't hold it against the show now that they know.

"We were counting on Canadians feeling superior to the Simpsons as being doltish Americans but now the secret is out."

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Lloyd Wood Bob Braden (Thanks, Danny!) has posted the slides from his "The First 31 Years of the Internet -- An Insider's View" talk. The first 24 screens are just net.history, but things get pretty juicy round-about slide 25:

Deep philosphical gap between Computer Scientists who developed Internet architecture, and telecommunication engineers:

* Engineers: The Internet is under-engineered --

it does not solve all current problems in the most optimal and controllable manner.

Besides, we LOVE virtual circuits and complexity.

* Internet Researchers: Optimal is NOT the point.

The future adaptability of the Internet to new technologies and to provide new services depends on NOT over-engineering the Internet! Uncertainty: live with it.

Besides, we LOVE datagrams and simplicity.

---

Internet Architecture Melting...

* Orgy of tunnel-vision engineering taking place in IETF to meet these problems, and others.

* A shortage of wisdom; continual need for damage control.

* Easily forget the cost of [over-] engineering; remember: generality, heterogeneity, robustness, extensibility?

* Maybe we need to pay people NOT to develop new protocols.

* But perhaps, it is also time to rethink the architecture.

Note to self: Use the word "orgy" in next talk. Link (356k PDF) Discuss (via Oblomovka)

The Feds have filed a response brief in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, where Lawrence Lessig is arguing that the continuing extension of copyright (timed, not uncoincidentally, to extend copyright's lifespan every time it threatens to expire Mickey Mouse's earliest movies into the public domain) is unconstitutional. The constitution says that copyright exists as monopolies of limited times, granted to authors to promote the useful arts and sciences, but the continuing extension of copyright (now at author's life plus 95 years!) hinders the arts (by keeping us from being able to make new works from older works) and does not promote them (since retroactively extending Hemingway's copyright can't possibly provide him with an incentive to write new books -- he's dead.).

Aaron's helpfully summed up the government's arguments in response:

* All the lower courts agreed with us.

* Times are different now and the extension act was designed to reflect that. Times are different for previously published works too, so being retroactive makes sense.

* If the acts weren't retroactive, people would delay publishing things so they'd get a better deal.

* We cannot have a copyright gap. The EU has a 75-year copyright law and we wouldn't want to lose all our content producers to Europe.

* "Ultimately, petitioners wish to displace Congress's preference for copyright-based dissemination of works during the CTEA's prescribed proprietary term, and instead to allow indiscriminate exploitation by public domain copyists like petitioners. But the Constitution assigns such policy choices to Congress, not the courts."

* Oh geez, they quoted the dictionary (a 1798 dictionary, no less!) definition of "limited" (as in "limited Times"). Isn't that the lawyer's equivalent of Godwin's Law?

* It doesn't matter that extending copyright doesn't promote progress because only copyright is required to promote progress, not the limited times provision. 'The Framers did not require Congress to select "limited Times that promote" progress, any more than [...] allowing Congress to protect only "Authors that promote" progress, or "Writings that promote" progress.'

Link (156k PDF) Discuss (via Aaron Swartz's Weblog)

The Japanese government is assigning every citizen a mandatory, permanent 11-digit number. The move has provoked rare civil-disobedience activity from privacy-sensitive citizens, who point out that in three years of work on the system, the Japanese government has failed to create a single privacy policy in respect of the disposition of records that are linked to the number. 86 percent of respondents to a newspaper poll are concerned about the privacy implications of the new system.

Today, protesters compared the residential registry to a 10-digit computerized identification system for cows, which was adopted last fall in an effort to contain mad cow disease. "Cows are 10-digit numbers and human beings are 11 digits," read one protest banner outside the Public Management Ministry, the agency responsible for creating the network.

Inside, the minister, Toranosuke Katayama, met reporters and appealed for "more dialogue" with opponents. His spokesman, Yoshiuki Baba, stressed that even without a new privacy law, people convicted of leaking personal information face up to two years in prison and a fine of $8,300...

"Right now, the government is saying that the card will be used for 93 types of administrative matters," he said, referring to such steps as obtaining pensions and passports. "But in the future, the government has a bigger project, named "E-Government" which will have 16,000 administrative usages."

Link Discuss (via Werblog)

AT&T Broadband is offering a 3Mb/s cable-modem service, twice as fast as their existing service, for about $80/month. The idea is to sell this to power-users who have home LANs or need to transfer giant files, but as Kevin points out, "What power users need is faster upload speeds, but the AT&T Broadband service only does 384 kbps in that direction.... Until high-speed service providers understand their customers, we won't see much innovation in broadband services." Link Discuss (via Werblog)

New report on the economic opportunities of WiFi. As Kevin sez, "The number of analyst firms issuing wireless LAN reports is growing almost as fast as the market itself. This is a danger sign that the hype wave is about to crest."

The worldwide market for all products based on the 802.11 standard by 2006 will grow to $3.1 billion in annual revenue, from $1.2 billion in 2001, according to research company Dell'Oro Group, in Redwood City, Calif.

Link Discuss (via Werblog)

Sweet diagram showing the connections and capacity of the data-lines between Asian nations. Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

A remote Texas resort town has elected three successive generations of beer-drinking goats to the office of mayor. It was all fun and games until the assassination attempt:

It was Clay Henry's thirst that prompted his attack, according to the sheriff. On a Sunday last November, the new owner of the resort, Steve Smith, wanted to show a few visitors how Clay Henry drinks beer. Blue laws prevented him from buying one at the trading post, so Mr. Smith asked two men sitting nearby for a bottle. They obliged, but the sheriff said one of the men was offended that Mr. Smith had given a perfectly good beer to a goat.

Later that day, witnesses overheard Mr. Hargrove boasting that he planned to go back and castrate Clay Henry. The sheriff said Clay Henry was found in a pool of blood the next morning. Housekeepers cleaning the condominium where Mr. Hargrove had stayed found something in the refrigerator. Sheriff Dodson says it was Clay Henry's testicle. Mr. Hargrove, who could not be reached for comment, is scheduled for trial in August.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Songdog!)

Encode any arbitrary string as a UPC barcode (Thanks, Jef!) with the barcode generator. Link Discuss (via Everything Isn't)

BlogTree lets bloggers describe their sites' progenitors and builds "family trees" of which blog begat what. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sean!)