The manufactured controversy over California’s plans to kill Stan “Tookie” Williams demonstrates once again why all but 12 states and the District of Columbia returned to executing prisoners after the Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling authorizing its resumption. In a word, the anti-death penalty movement comes across as a bunch of loons. Idiot actors like Jamie…
November, 2005
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When it is not busy installing rootkits on its customers’ computers, Sony is in an arms race with another group of its customers — aficionados of the Play Station Portable. By all accounts, the PSP is an awesome piece of hardware and I see these things everywhere I go. The PSP has been so popular,…
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DRM Talk for Hewlett-Packard Research Corvalis, Oregon Cory Doctorow European Affairs Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation www.eff.org doctorow@craphound.com 9/28/5 – This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative Commons public domain dedication: > Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law) > > The person or persons who have associated their work with this…
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Earlier this month, an anonymous donor gave the Methuselah Mouse Prize a cool $1 million, bringing the total payout for the Methuselah Mouse Prize to more than $3 million. The Methuselah Mouse Prize is modeled on the X Prize, which set a $10 million prize for the first private craft to make it into space.…
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Fishbowl DC reprints excerpts from an internal bulletin board system at the Washington Post. The topic of this particular series of posts is the latest controversy involving Bob Woodward after he only recently admitted a Bush administration official had disclosed to him that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent. The amusing thing about the…
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It still amazes me how fast the cost of hard drive storage continues to fall. These days you can pick up — with rebates — 250gb internal IDE hard drives for $70 or so. Grab four, and you’ve got yourself a full terabyte for less than $300. Internal 500gb hard drives have recently appeared on…
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I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff anyway, but NESCover is some of the best Nintendo-based music I’ve heard in a long time. I used to work with someone who constantly hummed Europe’s “The Final Countdown”, and the NES-based cover here is simply amazing. I could (well, I did, actually) listen to this stuff…
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I have about 4-5 external hard drives and they work great, for the most part, but the major drawback is the huge amount of noise that some models make, especially the LaCie drive I have. That fan on my 200gb D2 drive is actually louder sometimes than my dehumidifier. So I’m really geeked about this…
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The last thing that any anti-RIAA activists needed to do was distort what RIAA chief Cary Sherman had to say about the Sony rootkit debacle. And yet both Boing! Boing! and Slashdot have chosen to push completely ridiculous interpretations of a comment Sherman made in response to Sony’s actions. Boing! Boing! claimed that Sherman said…
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One of the longest running jokes in storage technology — the DataPlay disc — is apparently back thanks to Ridata, but still leaves the basic question in the air: who would actually be stupid enough to buy this? In the late 1990s, DataPlay was going to be the Next Big Thing in data storage with…