Peachpit plans plethora of Panther publications. Peachpit Press has unveiled the first of its seven Mac OS X 10.3 ("Panther") titles with the release of Maria Langer's "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide" (ISBN 0321213513). The US$24.99 offers task-based, step-by-step instructions and includes chapters on networking, security, Unix, the Classic environment, utilities, and system preferences. [MacCentral]

8:46:09 PM     leave/read comments []

Dept. of Always Cool Stuff

Cool! A new QTVR blog entry from Sydney-based photographer, Peter Murphy.

Last weekend on Saturday I went to a book launch at St Andrew's College at the University of Sydney. Panorama. The book "Dark Sparkers" is the first extensive treatment of Aboriginal Astronomy and is the result of a collaboration between Bill Yidumduma Harney -- an Aboriginal elder (he is also a painter) -- and anthropologist Hugh Cairns. Here is Bill addressing the audience and here he is talking to my videographer friend Goretti Bello.

8:42:31 PM    

Police 'sorry' for shooting man. The chief of Sussex Police is due to apologise in person for his force's shooting of an unarmed man in his bed. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

At least they apologised.

I'll get me their coat.

8:29:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Ohhhh....big science:

Scientists have simulated a solar flare in the lab, recreating the super-heated cloud of electrically-charged gas seen on the Sun known as a plasma.

It was part of an initiative to develop fusion power - the nuclear energy that keeps the Sun shining.

The plasma in the lab behaved like a miniature version of a solar flare.

Scientists hope they can create a flare at low energies in the lab, to enable them to study the explosive events that take place on the Sun's surface.

8:14:03 PM    

Church Sign Generator

Get yours today!

Amen.

6:02:09 PM     leave/read comments []

ITunes Undermines Social Security. Although perusing other folks' digital music libraries using iTunes can broaden musical horizons, there can be drawbacks. Like being judged for your taste in music. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

Hey man, I'm not afraid to show you Maggie's Recently Played Playlist

But that's not true for everyone.

The ability to examine the music collections of co-workers, neighbors or fellow students is akin to peering into their souls: Someone who appears cool and interesting from the outside is revealed as a cultural nincompoop through the poor sap's terrible taste in music.

.....

Aubrey said an iTunes music library tells a lot more about people than the clothes they wear or the books they carry.

"It's the T-shirt, plus the book, plus the haircut," Aubrey said. "It's everything."

Ah, college.

5:43:39 PM     leave/read comments []

I am ashamed of my government.

Don't get me wrong; it's not okay to overstay one's visa, but it's hardly an act of global terrorism. It's an act of neglecting to file some paperwork. Whether it's intentional and what the penalty shall be as a result is for the bureaucrats to decide.

Or it used to be. See Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel was working as a waiter in a restaurant where some terrorists happened to eat. This, of course, means that Bellahouel is also a terrorist, right? That reasoning is naturally ridiculous, but it's good enough for government work, as they say.

Bellahouel was held in prison for five months without being charged with anything, without access to an attorney, and without the government even admitting that he was being held. After being freed on bond, he's now petitioning the government for a redress of his grievances.

.....

If you look at that PDF and think something is wrong with your Acrobat reader, it's not. The fact of the matter is that huge sections of the document have been determined a threat to national security. Which really means the state is covering its ass.

5:21:56 PM    

Post Office Gets Pressured to Pry. Still wary of the anthrax attacks through the mail, Washington bureaucrats push the Postal Service to trace every piece of mail. Citing privacy concerns, the post office is resisting. But for how long? By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]

Big Brother wants to know what you're sending, where you're sending it from and to whom you're sending mail. Because, after all, you might be doing somthing all terrorist, like criticizing the pResident. Or maybe admiring someone, secretly.

For their part, postal officials are resisting far-reaching suggestions from politicians and homeland security officials that all mail should be tracked and the sender of every piece of mail be identified. The head of the Postal Service's technology drive and its chief privacy officer say they have no plans to implement such a system. But several powerful bureaucracies are pushing the USPS to trace mail.

Chris Hoofnagle, associated director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, argues that a system requiring postal identity cards or secure stamps would sacrifice anonymity for little gain in security, since anyone who could acquire anthrax would be clever enough to filch a few stamps.

"It's not until anonymity is lost that individuals see its value," Hoofnagle said. "Say you are estranged from your family and want to send them a letter, but don't want them to know where you are. You might want to mail an angry letter to a newspaper or a congressman, or you might want to send an anonymous note to a love interest."

3:49:23 PM    

Morons in the News: Christian Kung-fu. A North Carolina martial arts school is teaching martials arts with a Christian philosophical basis [Morons Dot Org]

Oy. What are they putting in the Communion wine these days? LSD?

This article is about sensei David Sgro's comment, "As a Christian, I believe that martial arts didn't originate in Korea or Asia. It originated in biblical times."

3:36:25 PM    

Doubts resurface about lunar ice. New observations of the Moon's permanently dark polar regions show no sign of thick ice deposits. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Is there or isn't there? Listen up you primitive screwheads, a scientist is talkin' to ya:

Bruce Campbell and his colleagues used the Arecibo radio telescope to look at the Moon's shadowed poles, choosing a previously unused radar wavelength of 70 centimetres. This can penetrate several metres of dust but would be reflected strongly by thick ice.

They did not detect any strong reflections from the lunar poles which may mean that any ice is likely to be present only as grains or thin layers embedded in rock.

Some researchers say this is only to be expected, as the data from Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998-99 suggested that the ice was sparse, occupying less than 2% of the volume of the lunar dirt.

If there's water on the moon in any significant amount, that could be a huge boon to space travel, as the water could be used not only to supply drinking water for a moon base, it also could provide liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel.

The only way we'll really know for sure is to go there. The cloest we'll come in the near future is in 2004, with the ESA's SMART-1 project.

2:28:41 PM     leave/read comments []

EU calls for expanded space efforts. Europe should undertake more ambitious space projects, including possibly developing an independent means of launching... [spacetoday.net]

The U.S. is smelling more and more like the Isabellan Spain of Outer Space- first to arrive, and then phppppt. Back in the 1500's while Spain was busy with an inquisition and a bunch of other nonsense, the English, Dutch and Portuguese got busy in the New World, leaving Isabella to fiddle with torturing Jews and wondering why there wasn't much in her coffers.

2:13:15 PM     leave/read comments []

More on the naked lady sushi controversy, again from Boing Boing:

Naked Lady Sushi, part deux..

Seattle sushi restaurants aren't the first to serve food on the bodies of naked women, nor are various Japanese porn sites displaying X-rated human sashimi platter tableaus. Boingboing pal Eli the Bearded points us to this image by William Klein: Photograph of Models and the Surrealist Group around Meret Oppenheim's "Festin," 1960. The image was a fashion shot for Vogue magazine, under the title of Inaugural Feast in the March 1960 issue.

Link to image, Link to previous BoingBoing post.
[Boing Boing Blog]

1:59:52 PM    

Ohhhh...hope that Max and Kenka are doing OK!

1:30:52 PM     leave/read comments []

The Unbundling of Network Elements: Japan's Experience. [ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

The Unbundling of Network Elements: Japan's Experience (PDF) by Nobuo Ikeda.

Abstract: With the advent of the Internet, the emphasis of communication policies has moved from the regulation of telephone networks to the unbundling regulation to enforce sharing of network elements. Since unbundling is often impeded by the renegotiation by incumbents over the control of essential facilities, it would be advisable to separate the company that owns local loop (LoopCo). Recently the number of subscribers of DSL in Japan has grown phenomenally due to the unbundling regulation. This suggests that unbundling can accelerate the proliferation of broadband, but this lesson cannot be easily generalized to other countries, because the success depends on the special conditions such as extremely low pricing of entrants and strategic mistakes of NTT that neglected DSL. If the unbundling regulation succeeds in increasing competition, the telecommunications industry in the narrow sense will shrink, making the universal services of telephone network increasingly difficult.

 

 

[Nippon Goro Goro]

1:27:05 PM     leave/read comments []

This actually might have started in Tokyo some years back but we never saw it nor do we know anyone who experienced it -- but we did see it in a really bad American movie about Japanese gangsters. [Nippon Goro Goro]

Boing Boing had a link to this story yesterday.

1:15:28 PM     leave/read comments []