Category: outside

Check out this flash movie spoof on the Matrix. It’s funny and provides information about the current state of factory farming in America. If you want to know where your food comes from, take the red pill…

A co-founder of both Palm and Handspring as well as the founder of a brain research lab, this guy‘s one of the most forward thinking people in technology today. This is my favorite line, haha:
“I have some things to work on that are totally new, which Nokia would never do and Compaq and Microsoft would probably never think of.”

this wired.com article tells the story of a high school student who has been charged with a felony for writing a short fiction story.

These days, people are so scared of what might happen that they’re willing to supress art and creative thinking to protect themselves from the future. It’s exactly this kind of reasoning and thinking that creates the kind of environment that fosters terroristic behavior. When we get to a point when merely thinking about violence can land us in jail, who among us would be safe from the law?

We can only hope to reduce the amount of violence in the world by practicing non-violence in our own lives.

According to this article, Universal Music plans to drop its wholesale price for CD’s by about 3 bucks and is asking record stores to chip in another 3 bucks for a total price drop of about $6.

This sounds like a step in the right direction to me.

Is this the beginning of the end for humans? Haha, well maybe or maybe not. Scientists have managed to hook a couple of monkey’s brains up to a computer hooked up to a robotic arm. The monkeys are able to move the robotic arm entirely with their brain, performing simple tasks like picking up objects and moving them around. The scientists seem to assume that this means humans will be able to do the same thing. Wouldn’t it be quite the disappointment if monkeys can do it and we can’t?

Jean Luc Picard is apparently a popular result, but I ended up as Galadriel, the Elf Witch from the Lord of the Rings, in this geek personality test.

The hot Internet news of the day appears to be this article detailing evidence of electronic ballot box tampering dating back as far as 1990. Apparently the source code to some ballot box software and lots of other related files were made publicly available, accidentally or otherwise, at some point in the past and those files provided proof of this apparent conspiracy. People in power allegedly control the companies that have created these electronic polling booths and use that control in their favor. This is all hearsay, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true.

This site is an information source on the new computerized and otherwise high-tech voting booths that have started to come into use. It is inevitable that voting booths will go the higher-tech route, but it seems to be being done more for publicity as the technology is being rushed out with bugs and poor security features. It is becoming easier than ever to stuff a ballot box, and now it can be done without any chance of being detected.

Wired Article
The source code for the highly anticipated upcoming game Half-Life 2 was stolen from Valve Software and released over the Internet. They don’t think it will have much of an impact on the sale of the game as it is not playable with just the source code. Allegedly, security holes in Microsoft products are one again to blame.

The article goes on to talk about ‘Steam’, a new Digital Rights Management (DRM) system Valve has been working on. It could be used to require players to pay a monthly fee to play all Valve games online as well as prevent piracy and cheating. I wonder if the theft of the source code might be used to release a version of Half-Life 2 that does not include the Steam system, or if that is even a possibility. At this point, that seems like the likeliest motive to me.

Yahoo Article

Random picture I was directed to. Weird.