Geeking

Another take on DRM. We come at the issue from different points of view, and end up at the same place: just wanting to make unencumbered MP3’s to work around the whole thing.

The iPod, WMA, and DRM get Scobleized. The point he makes is that having many players available to you is important because once you commit to buying media locked up via DRM, you are locked in to whatever platforms support the kind of DRM your content uses. The problem with that argument is that I don’t accept the premise that content I buy should be locked up. I am responsible in the way I use and distribute digital music files. I do not share them more than I shared CD’s when I used to use them. My behavior might not be squeaky clean to the letter of the law, but I’m certain that I am not sharing my digital content more than the industry was able to bear in the early 90’s. But in order to exercise the same rights I used to enjoy with content I bought, I need it to be unlocked. ...

Wow, is this list of “Ten Reasons RSS is not ready for Primetime” clueless. He makes some fair points. But out of the ten, these are either simply false, irrelevant, or seriously debatable: 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10. I’m not going to rebut them one at a time, because I expect others to jump down his throat for me.

Turns out plants are thinking too. So there’s only one non-sentient food product left on the planet: Right-wing Republican Ribs! Finger lickin’ good. (And if you happen to get Rush’s ribs, you’ll get a nice buzz from the residual oxycontin.) Seriously, this is neat stuff. It is further proof that cellular automata are a critical part of the working of the world. Far from being simply a mathematical curiousity, they appear to be the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges from simple systems. ...

This is so cool! That explains why there are all those silly yellow “20”’s in the background of the new US 20 dollar bills. The political/social/freedom aspects of this story leave me totally irritated. But the technology involved is pretty nifty, and the fact that the authorities managed to get this integrated into software for image editing, photocopiers, etc without any public scrutiny is just absolutely unbelievable. So now the countdown starts. How many days until a hacker writes a tool to fix this brain damage in Photoshop? All that is required is a program that takes a bitmap with EURion constellations in it as input and creates as output a bitmap missing the minimal amount of data so as to not trigger the EURion detection algorithm. ...

Jhango is throwing a party Friday night to Saturday morning to celebrate when Unix time rolls over from 230-1 to 230. Since I can’t be there in person, I made her a binary clock that runs under Win32. It was surprisingly easy. I had it working in under 2 hours. I’ve made a few Windows apps before, but nothing like this. Yay for good documentation and an IDE that literally forces you to do it their way. (But I’m still glad my day job is not making Win32 apps.) ...

Interesting new report from CAIDA on the DOS attacks against SCO.

On the first day it was released, I installed iTunes for Windows. I figured something from Apple has a chance of dislodging WinAmp as my music player. They pay attention to important details, and except for the ongoing Quicktime debacle, make software most people seem to like. Using it to edit MP3 metadata has been a disappointment. Though other people claim it makes perfect sense to them, I can’t for the life of me understand how to make a playlist. Part of the problem is that I keep right clicking on stuff, and nothing useful happens. ...

On a whim, I typed a few naughty words into Mozilla’s URL bar, just to see what would happen. I typed “ass”, and I got sent to the DNC blog. WTF?

Biology is neat, and is making huge progress towards being able to explain human nature. Check out this article on security mechanisms in bee populations. Perhaps someday we’ll know how to overcome human nature. Will we choose to do so?