I’m leaving for 8 days in Hawaii tomorrow morning. I suspect the lure of my website will be weakened by the force of the tropical paradise so don’t expect much in the way of updates.
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Monkey Minds Controlling Robots
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?
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Which Fantasy/SciFi Character are You?
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.
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More Ballot Tampering News
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.
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Sony PSX pricing announced
Financial Times Article
Sony has released more information on their upcoming PSX entertainment console, combining a Satellite TV Receiver, TiVo-like functionality, a DVD recorder (nice!), and a Playstation 2 into one box. The pictures I’ve seen of it show it as more of a ‘living-room friendly’ box than the existing black plastic Playstation 2. It will only be available in Japan to start (of course) and the announced price is around $719. That’s a couple hundred bucks too much in my eyes.
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Character Changes
I grew up as an air force kid (air force brat in some circles) and that meant my whole family moved every 3 or 4 years pretty much my entire life. My whole family consisted of my Mom, my Dad, and me. There were other relatives around in some of the places we were, and there were always family friends and what-not, but it was essentially just the three of us. The situation gave me the power to change how I represented myself each time I changed schools. If I was tired of being the dorky kid with the striped collared shirts, I could become the dorky kid with the leather jacket and long hair, haha. But really, I somehow realized somewhere in the back of my mind that when meeting new people you would basically be perceived however you represented yourself. If you dressed dorky, you were dorky… if you dressed like a Load (or Hessian or Metalhead or whatever your town called it) you were a Load.
That was great when I entered high school, because no one knew me so I was taken at face value. Eventually people realized I was still a dork at heart, but I got my foot in the proverbial door first. Now, however, I’ve noticed that I have trouble with people figuring out too much about me. I want to maintain some sort of hiding places in my character that I can retreat into when I feel threatened or uncertain. Haha, but now you know too much.
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Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century
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.
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My computer hates me today.
I don’t know what I did, but my powerbook is not playing nice today. It seems to have started with the new 10.2.8 update, but I think it might be a problem with the drive. My pbs (pasteboard server) keeps crashing, making it so I can’t copy and paste. Agh! I can’t live without copying and pasting. I’m still fiddling with it right now. Hopefully it won’t take too long to fix.
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.
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Happy Birthday, Picasso
On this date in 1881, Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. The birthday is shared with Steve Miller (born 1943) and the founder of McDonald’s (Ray Kroc, born 1902). Weird mixture.