I used to fret about the return of the draft. Now don’t have to worry, because it’s here. Involuntary military servitude under the name ‘stop loss‘ and the recall of retired officers is happening right now. Not later, now. The draft has started; all that remains is a draft of people who aren’t already signed on to the military. And that wouldn’t happen now, would it?
Archive > June 2004
The next time you are in Massachusetts, make sure you don’t violate this law.
Interested in a circa 1970s psychedelic light show effects box? I bought one at a yard sale, now offering it on ebay here. SubGenius background poster not included.
Before Joe Taylor opened a science museum demonstrating that Noah took dinosaurs on the ark during the Great Flood (thereby confounding the claims of both creationists and evolutionists), he designed the Blippo Black typeface that was used by Mr. Pibb, the Beatles and some little old lady National Socialists.
“My pet rat, Beavis, a slighty stupid, slightly blind, unusually loveable thing that lived on my coffee table, died the morning of May 3rd, 2004. He was mummified very soon afterwards. I did it myself, with the help of my husband. It took about three hours. And I took lots of pictures.”
During the Grey Tuesday online protest, several sites offered .torrent files so that people could get the Grey Album without overwhelming central servers. Unfortunately, most internet users don’t have BitTorrent, and downloading it, installing it, and then getting the torrent file was too much hassle for the average user. But Grey Tuesday also showed how important p2p systems like BitTorrent are, because many of the sites that were hosting the Grey Album directly on their servers were overwhelmed by download traffic. If everyone was using BitTorrent, bandwidth wouldn’t have been a problem.
When we decided to make BannedMusic.org, we knew we needed a peer-to-peer distribution system that was as easy as a direct download. The goal of BannedMusic.org was to make suppressed music available to everyone. We certainly didn’t have enough bandwidth to host large music archives that could potentially be in very high demand, so it had to be p2p. On the other hand, if the system for getting the music was too complicated or too much hassle for people who had never used filesharing software, that narrowed our potential audience and compromised our goal of extreme accessibility.
The best solution seemed to be a simple modification of BitTorrent: an installer that runs BitTorrent and begins download of an included torrent file. Windows users can click on the “Easy Download” button on an album’s download page to get a 3mb executable. When they launch this executable it installs BitTorrent (which happens very quickly in the background) and immediately begins downloading the album they were seeking. After they’ve used the “easy download” once, they can simply click on the .torrent files to begin downloading. And they’ll be able to use other sites that require BitTorrent.
Wouldn’t you rather be listening to The Rudy Schwartz Project than anything else in the world? Well my friend, now you can – at Schwartztone.com!
He invented the backspace key and the backslash key, but we won’t be having him back. Bob Bemer, co-inventor of ASCII, has died. He also helped create COBOL (and coined the name) and helped create the 8-bit per byte standard. No Bemer, no Internet. A pleasant goodbye to someone we never met nor heard of before today. Obituary at Canada East, ghostly Web page here, and everything you could possibly want to know about ASCII here.
I am better than your kids.
Pavitr Prabhakar is a man who is also a spider.
From the Raving Atheist: “It’s beyond the scope of this blog, so I won’t quibble with the Supreme Cour’s ruling on the standing issue in the Pledge of Allegiance case. In any event, whether the state should be permitted to side with a mother on the question of her child’s religious indoctrination and loan her the entire public school system to trash the father’s atheist beliefs is clearly a matter for local domestic relations tribunals – or maybe the traffic courts. But the concurring opinions on the constitutionality of the Pledge itself raise another standing issue. Did Justices Rehnquist, O’Connor and Thomas have standing to participate in the case, insofar as they’re a pack of sanctimonious, god-whoring, mouth-breathing morons who lack the mental capacity to grasp simple legal and logical principles?”
What happens when the President of the United States antagonizes the CIA and the US Military? Perhaps we’ll find out soon.
Here is how Mailinator works: someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you’ll be on their spam list. On the other hand, you do want at least one message from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don’t need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com – pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign). Later, come to the site and check that account. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you’re done you can walk away – an instant solution to one way spammers get your address. The messages are automatically deleted for you after a few hours. Even better, it is (and they point this out themselves) not secure at all. Guess someobody else’s e-mail address and you can read their messages too.
BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).
Feeling like you don’t get enough online news? Try World Newspapers for a bazillion more sources.
There are bags for your laptop and then there are bags for your laptop.
Uncle Joe. The Man of Steel. Joseph Stalin – film critic.
