Those guys are the apple of my day, I tell ya:

Snowflakes that just might hurt the proper and pampered routine of a soccer mom.

……………………..

THE RESPONSE I GIVE TO YOU IS…………..

The E-mail missives, often addressed to the senders themselves, are technology’s answer to time capsules–reminding people of their hopes, dreams, and goals.
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/esyO0GTTVw0G4S0D3dv0GF

In the year 2009, on the 25th of April, a man named Greg is supposed to get an e-mail. It will remind him that he is his own best friend and worst enemy, that he once dated a woman named Michelle, and that he planned to major in computer science.

“More importantly,” the e-mail says, “are you wearing women’s clothing?”

The e-mail was sent by Greg himself–through a Web site called FutureMe.org. It is one of the messages open to public view at the site, and Greg used only his first name.

FutureMe is one of a handful of Web sites that let people send e-mails to themselves and others for delivery years in the future. They are technology’s answer to time capsules, trading on people’s sense of curiosity, accountability, and nostalgia.

“Messages into the future is something that people have always sought to do,” said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a research group. “In a way, it’s a statement of optimism.”

Matt Sly came up with the concept for FutureMe.org about four years ago after recalling how, during his education, he had been given assignments to write letters to himself.

Sly, 29, who partnered with 31-year-old Jay Patrikios of San Francisco on the project, said the site has made maybe $58 through donations. He insists it is not a reminder service and that users should think in the long term.

FutureMe and other service providers try to make the delivery process fail-safe through partnerships or back up software, and they urge people to hang on to their e-mail address, but there’s no ironclad guarantee that the message will ever arrive.

FutureMe lets people send messages for delivery as much as 30 years from now, though Sly’s numbers show most users schedule their e-mails to be sent within three years.

“We want people to think about their future and what their goals and dreams and hopes and fears are,” he said. “We’re trying to facilitate some serious existential pondering.”

He said a large number of the messages do one of two basic things: tell the future person what the past person was doing at the time, and ask the future person if he or she had met the aspirations of the past person.

“The tone of the past person is not always friendly,” said Sly, now a Yale University graduate student. “It’s often like ‘Get off your lazy butt.’”

Recently, Forbes.com jumped on the idea, offering an “e-mail time capsule” promotion. More than 140,000 letters were collected over about six weeks. Nearly 20 percent are supposed to land in the sender’s inbox in 20 years but others requested shorter time frames. Forbes.com is partnering with Yahoo! and Codefix Consulting on the project.

“A lot of people have kind of been freaked out by it,” said David Ewalt, a Forbes.com writer who worked on the project. “It really makes you stop and think about your life in a way that you usually don’t.”

Another type of future message service can be found at sites such as myLastEmail.com or LastWishes.com, which promise to send messages to loved ones (or less-than-loved ones) after the writer’s death.

Paul Hudson, co-founder of the International Time Capsule Society, said e-mail time capsules were new to him.

“Part of the value of time capsules are that they are thought processes in the present,” said Hudson, a historian who teaches at Georgia Perimeter College. “You define yourself when you do a time capsule. It might be a good exercise in introspection.”

But sometimes the past is best left behind, said Saffo, who personally finds the whole thing “sad and really weird.”

“The lesson about all these things, it’s the lesson from time capsules, is you have to be careful lest you set yourself up for enormous embarrassment in two decades,” Saffo said. “Do you really want to be reminded that you thought ABBA was cool?”

In response to this recent revelation…..
Bush defends illegal spying on Americans!…..i give you the means in which to respond to the madness!

Dear {Name},

I write to you as a constituent and as an American horrified to see the principles of this great country disgraced by the officials installed to uphold them.

George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzalez may believe that the law and the Constitution specifically can be disregarded when they see it fit to convenient themselves, but I do not.

Where I come from, when the people in political control of a nation choose to rewrite the laws to suit their own purposes, it is called autocracy and dictatorship.

This is completely unacceptable. It is a subversion of the principles on which the United States was founded and borders, in actual literal fact, on treason. It must be stopped and it must be punished.

As my elected official, it is your bounden duty to represent both me and the principles on which you were elected. As your constituent, I hereby charge you with the responsibility of seeing to it that these confessed criminals — George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzalez — are brought to justice.

Do not let posterity find that you shrank from the task of doing what is right. Do not let the world watch you sit inactive in the face of crisis, like someone whose loyalties have been bought. The world is watching and the American people are waiting. The integrity of the law is in your hands.

Sincerely Yours,

[Name and Address]

Feel free to use this letter as the basis for your own, if you like.

You know where to find the names of your elected officials, right? http://www.firstgov.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Repetition doesn’t hurt.

If you don’t agree that Bush and Gonzalez are doing something very very wrong, and that their wrongdoing doesn’t deserves serious redress, I want to hear about it because I need to put a foot in your azz!

GO-GO LITTLE LIPAN

Study Finds Regulation Good For Telecom Customers [who would of thought?]

http://www.itworld.com/Man/2681/051202custsuf/

“Customers pay more and are offered fewer telecommunications services in European countries where regulators have done a poor job of weakening former monopolies, according to a report commissioned by the European Competitive Telecommunications Association and released on Friday.”

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Barcode Scammer Busted…
Police say Baldino used homemade bar codes to buy electronic gadgets at prices far below any legitimate discount. Baldino was detained by Target security Wednesday after he purchased a $150 iPod with a bar-code label of $4.99.
[UMM, idiot did you actually believe that no one would notice that large drop in price? DURRRR.]

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_3270764

In the kindred spirit of the story above I give you:

http://www.barcodemagic.com/

Generate barcodes for home, hobby and retail with our easy to use barcode software. Simply select a bar code style and font, enter desired text and numbers, and a barcode is automatically created. Copy your new graphic into a Windows application, save it to file, or print it out for instant labeling. Barcode Magic supports numeric formats like UPC, alphanumeric like Code 128, and even specialized Postnet formats.

You didn’t hear this from me, but can anyone say SELF-CHECKOUT LINES?

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Just as big music industry moguls look to unsigned talent in the streets to get ideas for their next big ‘act’; it now seems that big movie CEOs are looking to steal the music of unsigned artists for their movie scores.

http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=85465

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Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF] Defamed by The Register: [kiss my glowing white azz]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/eff_needs_to_die/

excerpt:

“This is a very good cause. Sony installed stealth spyware on many thousands of Windows computers (although calling it a rootkit is an exaggeration), and it’s crucial that the company get its bottom spanked quite painfully as a deterrent to its sister cartels in the entertainment racket.

This is, in fact, such an important matter that the worst possible development would be to find the EFF arguing the case. That’s because EFF will do what it always does: lose, and set a legal precedent beneficial to the entertainment pigopolists. By the time these pale vegetarians get finished, spreading musical malware will be considered a spiritual work of mercy.”

OUCH! = http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/12/06/166248

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The U.S. Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these “mileage-based road user fees.”

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5982762.html

[From the.....'BC we all know that NO government ever abuses its concentrated power'.......Dept.]

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Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

This guide provides a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists. Select your choice of formats from the list below:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php

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Big brain means small testes [Now we have to decide what one considers, in basic measurements, a 'Big Brain'.]
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8429 [digital news it's not]

First things first……

superfledermaus turned me on to other modifications you can perform on your basic NES system that does not include the Midines 8-bit Musical Genius Project…….[ok, ok so i made that name up]

Second things last…….

…..been meaning to post a link to this for a while: Scott Adams, probably best known for Dilbert cartoons, recently released his book “God’s Debris” as a free PDF download – a nonhumor, fascinating book on philosophy, free will, probability and evolution……

Excerpts:

“Very few people believe in God,” he replied.

I didn’t see how he could deny the obvious.

“Of course they do. Billions of people believe in God.”

The old man leaned toward me, resting a blanketed elbow on the arm of his rocker.

Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief.

……………………………………..

“A belief in God would demand one hundred percent obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in that fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs—an earthly and practical utility—but they do not believe in the underlying reality.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“If you asked them, they’d say they believe.”

“They say that they believe because pretending to believe is necessary to get the benefits of religion. They tell other people that they believe and they do believer-like things, like praying and reading holy books. But they don’t do the things that a true believer would do, the things a true believer would have to do.

“If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.”

…………………………………………..

“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease— the problem of being right too often.”

“How’s that bad?” I asked.

“If you are proven to be right a hundred times in a row, no amount of evidence will convince you that you are mistaken in the hundred-and-first case. You will be seduced by your own apparent infallibility. Remember that all scientific experiments are performed by human beings and the results are subject to human interpretation. The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.”

The New York Times is reporting that a team of researchers led by Matt Blaze has discovered that technology used for decades by law enforcement agents to wiretap telephones has a security flaw that allows the person being wiretapped to stop the recorder remotely. It is also possible to falsify the numbers dialed. The flaws are detailed in a paper being published by the IEEE. Someone who thinks he’s being wiretapped can apparently just send a low tone down the line that turns off the recorder. The link has a demo.

http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretap.pdf

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BellSouth Executive Officers Want to Rig the Internet in their own favor….
Executive Wants to Charge for Web Speed
Some Say Small Firms Could Be Shut Out of Market Championed by BellSouth Officer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/30/AR2005113002109.html

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On Tuesday FCC chairman Kevin Martin spoke to a forum, sponsored by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in Washington, which has been examining indecency on radio and television. Martin told the forum that the FCC will soon release a report that concludes that offering TV programming a la carte is economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers. Today, instead of subscribing to the channels they want to watch, cable and satellite TV consumers must buy packages that include a standard set of channels. This new FCC report advocates a la carte TV pricing

http://news.com.com/New+FCC+report+advocates+a+la+carte+TV+pricing/2100-1034_3-5975559.html?tag=nl

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Media Centre that downloads from P2P?

Yes, you read the headline correctly! A Dutch company has developed the worlds first media center that gets its content from P2P networks. The hardware, called Lamabox, gets content from P2P networks such as eDonkey, Fasttrack (Kazaa), Gnutella, Overnet and also has BitTorrent support. The developers have said that they know the product is “somewhat controversial” but are relying on a past court case to protect them from any legal troubles.

The court case actually was the Supreme Court’s ruling on Kazaa (when it was Netherlands-based). The ruling only classifies the uploading of copyrighted material as illegal. However, the company has set aside some money for legal defense just in case. The hardware was presented at a consumer trade show in Utrecht last week. It is basically a hard disk drive that plugs into your TV that has search and download support for the P2P networks.

What makes this even more offensive to the entertainment industry is that it has a “P2P Spider” that constantly searches out new content; making the procedure automatic if the user wishes it. Music or movies can then be selected on the TV screen for playback. The first LamaBox (with 40 GB) will sell for €279. A 400 GB version with a DVD burner will cost €479.

The company said it has had a lot of interest particularly from foreign countries. Supply is limited however, as each of these devices is handmade. I think the question of whether or not this company will face legal action from the entertainment industry should be changed to “when” it will.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/7072.cfm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/29/p2p_mediacenter/

obviously this is should be expressed with a resounding and proverbial…..

to the RIAA/MPAA……….

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Coffee improves short-term memory and speeds up reaction times by acting on the brain’s prefrontal cortex, according to a new study.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8401

[ok, so that last one isn't technology related......OR IS IT?]