Next up on Prime-Time News: the market for illegal imports. Nope, not drugs, not Al-Qaeda fugitives, not anthrax. Kinder Eggs.
What’s a Kinder Egg? A milk chocolate egg, about the size of a duck egg (for you city folks, that’s slightly larger than a jumbo chicken egg) with white chocolate insides and a prize in the center where the yolk would be.
There are some serious questions about the crash of UA 93 on 9/11 that remain unanswered. Here is a pretty good summary of the questions and various theories.
The good guys win one: a Superior Court judge here in San Diego has sided with the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit over red light cameras. The judge threw out 290 traffic tickets issued by the miserable things. The city says it will appeal.
Unfortunately, the judge stopped short of agreeing with the plaintiffs that vendor, Lockheed Martin, engaged in racketeering. Oh well, that’s a matter for the federal courts anyway.
If you don’t know what a “red light camera” is, you’re fortunate.
At certain busy intersections in the city of San Diego, the city has put up automated cameras that are tied to sensors in the roadway. If you run the red light, the camera takes a picture of the front and rear of your car, showing the license plates, and you get a picture and a bill for $271 mailed to the registered owner.
The annoying part is that the intersections have not been chosen because of a threat to public safety, but to maximize the revenue stream; they appear at badly-designed intersections, where drivers find it difficult to stop or get stuck in the intersection by traffic.
We live in a screwed-up world. Two companies that have managed themselves into unprofitability through repeated mergers and takeovers, are themselves merging into the second-largest computer company. Like that’s going to somehow make them profitable? Oh, I want my DEC back!
[I think this originally came from the Washington Post, but I haven’t seen a link to the original. If anyone has the link, please add it in the comments. I stole it from Follow Me Here — fhic]
The following is a very early draft of the letter sent by United States Ambassador to China Joseph H. Prueher to Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tang prior to the release of the crew of the American surveillance plane. The letter was obtained by Rough Draft from sources in an alternate universe.
Dear Mr. Minister:
We are sorry that our plane crashed on your island without obtaining the expressed written consent of your government at least 48 hours prior to the emergency.
We are very, very sorry that your brave pilot attempted suicide by flying his nimble fighter jet into our lumbering surveillance plane as it cruised through international airspace on autopilot.
We regret that aerodynamic principles required that we construct our plane out of metal, rather than out of cotton or silk or polyester or some other lightweight fabric that would have caused less damage in the collision your pilot instigated.
We are extremely sorry that this incident has strained the great friendship that has existed between our countries as a diplomatic fiction since the Nixon administration. We look forward to the resumption of the trust, good will and intensive espionage that is the historic foundation of our relationship. We are pleased that this unfortunate episode did not culminate in World War III, which we would have won easily.
We are a tiny bit sorry, but not really all that sorry, that we destroyed the electronic gear on our jet before allowing it to fall into your possession. We merely did not want you to feel sorrow yourself when you discovered that our military technology is not nearly as sophisticated as we claim it is in the written documents your spies have previously stolen. Do what you will with the Polaroid cameras, sketch pads, binoculars and opera glasses we left behind. Note: The 24 pairs of “X-ray vision” glasses on board were obtained from the back of a comic book, and do not work worth a dang.
We are very sorry that, in a moment of overreaction to the crisis, we transferred the giant pandas from the National Zoo to the Sing Sing prison in New York State. We assure you that the conditions in the prison laundry and the license-plate manufacturing plant were relatively humane.
We are very happy to reflect that our countries share many similarities, such as the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when our professors lectured naked before marijuana-addled long-hairs, and your professors were exiled to “re-education” camps in a spasm of totalitarian horror. We are very, very sorry that you had that little problem with the Gang of Four. We’ve had some characters on our side, too.
We are pleased to report that, as a cultural gesture, Mao’s Little Red Book will finally be published in our country in Large Print Format.
We sympathize with your need to translate any and all portions of this letter as you see fit, even if it means turning the phrase “we did nothing wrong and wish you weren’t so paranoid” into “we prostrate ourselves before your mightiness and beseech your forgiveness.”
We are very, very, very sorry that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did not win Best Picture.
Sincerely,
Ambassador Joseph H. Prueher
Ian Thomas, a contract employee of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was fired recently — but that’s not a story.
He lost his job for putting some maps he’d made up on a public website — peculiar, but still no story.
However, the maps defined caribou calving grounds in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, public lands where some powerful interests want to extract oil — that’s the story.
(Shamelessly stolen from Ken Dawson’s Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.)
It looks like the end is near: Napster to Begin Blocking Copyrighted Songs
[T]he wildly popular online song swap service would begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted songs this weekend as part of its effort to conform with an injunction expected at any time[…]
That doesn’t appear to have happened yet. I, and 11,104 other users, are currently connected and sharing 2,125,697 files (9,034 gigs.) And yes, I’m downloading just as fast as my DSL line can pull stuff in.
My feeling is that music sharing will temporarily devolve into a feudal model, with “guilds” of people who have similar tastes in music, banding together in a less-public venue. These guilds will continue to exist, adding and changing members, until some unifying event occurs that makes the “servent” [server-client] technology work as well as Napster does/did.
Currently it looks like that unifying event will be based on the Gnutella protocol. So far today, two different friends have sent me two different programs that both operate on the Gnutella model. One of them, Bearshare, I’ve been playing with for a while, but I haven’t tried the new beta. The other is called iMesh, and I’d never even heard of it before.
All of these programs are quirky (and let’s face it: Napster is too) but if every computer is a servent, it’s going to be darn near impossible to shut down.
The end of Napster (as we know it) is probably imminent. But if the RIAA thinks they can shut down music sharing, they need to take a lesson from King Canute: the incoming tide will not obey you when you demand that it stop.
Would someone care to enlighten me on just where Napster plans to actually get a billion bucks?
The RIAA and the other plaintiffs may be dinosaurs, but they’re not that dumb! Maybe some teenager who’s using Napster to rip off Eminem songs will take this at face value, but will anybody else? And does anybody think the Napster subscription model is actually going to go anywhere but down the toilet? Hello! It’s about getting music that you’re not going to pay for. Deal with it.
It should come as no surprise that in our modern political world, you can buy a night in the White Houseor a presidential pardon. But a boat ride in a US Navy submarine? This has got to stop. And I’m sorry you f***ed up, Cdr. Waddle, but you were negligent, probably criminally negligent, and good luck at your court martial.