I wrote them the following... I wonder if I'll get a reply:

Dear Avery,

I thank you for contacting me regarding this issue. First let me be clear that Mr. John Zhang is indeed a business partner of mine. He has been in charge for our operations in the Asian market. I personally cover European market and we have several other partners serving the Americas and the Arabic countries.
Alas, Mr John Zang has fallen in disgrace with our company as he fleeced the shareholders of jawtheshark.com for over 1.000.000$. We have filed suit against Mr John Zhang and he is currently searched by law enforcement in Europe and North America. Currently, we are trying to get an international search order by Interpol to get this criminal.

If I were you, I would most certainly refrain form doing business with Mr. John Zhang. If he gets caught, it is most certain that his assets will be seized and official investigations will be opened with companies that were informed about his criminal background. While I am convinced that your company is honest and true, it is a minor disaster for any company to have to open their books to law enforcement, which will most certainly happen if you do business with Mr John Zhang.

I hope this information will be useful to you and I wish you much success in your future endeavours.

Regards

Dick Boobcock

General Manager

-- jawtheshark.com -- Speciality Laser products for Selachimorphas.

Dear Sir/ Madam

I'm sorry to disturb you so abrupt. We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,

On 3th November. we received a formal application submitted by Mr. John Zhang who wanted to use the keyword " jawtheshark " to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn /.hk /.asia / domain names.
After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren't sure whether you have any relation with him. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down his registration, but if we do not get your company's an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve his application

As authorized anti-cybersquatting organization we hereby suspect Mr. John Zhang is a domain investor. so we need you to attach importance to this issue.

In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely 　　　　　　 　　2010-11-5
Avery
Oversea Marketing Manager
-------------------------------------------
Room 1008,
International Building,
No.38 YueLong road,NanTong City
Tel:+86(513)85330968
Fax:+86(513)68099585
Email:Avery@vip.ntchinadns.com
Website: www.ntchinadns.com

Obviously this is a scam and should be ignored. However, I am so tempted to reply that, yes, John Zang is a former business partner and that he owes me in excess of 100k$ and if they follow suit to the registration I will have to impound on their property... Or somthing like that. Fellow trolls, any ideas?

There's a new site called Phygg.com that is a cross between the arxiv physics feed and Digg.com in that you can read papers up for prepublication and then vote them up or down. I think this poses an interesting new step in peer review and academic journals in that it gives the public a chance to participate in reading and voting on papers. From there, the journals can separate the wheat from the chaff. While it's not exactly innovative (digg + arxiv = phygg), it'll be interesting to see if people take to it and how good the general public will be at reading lengthy physics papers. MIT's Tech Review has a short blog on the launching.

I found it exceedingly amusing, reading the story "Google Logo Changes Again, Hinting RT Search?" where many people do it off as "pure speculation" and then doing a Google Search this afternoon and getting "Google Instant".

Sure, from the doodle it couldn't be deduced, but I bet someone at Google actually posted this to slashdot to get some extra attention.

So, RT-Search is named "Google Instant".... Just in case you missed it ;-)

There's a neat site for Google Chrome users that shows how artists will be able to liberate themselves from Flash and use HTML5 when the standard is finalized and browser independent (if ever that happens). If you're bored and have five minutes and have speakers/headphones, I hope your childhood address shows enough up on here to make it worth your while. My parent's farmhouse had nothing but my hometown had a couple images that brought me back.

Of course prior to this we would have to use flash to enjoy the Aracade Fire's sites.

Hope someone else enjoys this as much as I do.

Hi, my name is Nat^H^H^HJim, and I admit, I have a problem: I'm addicted to tragic love stories.

It started simply enough with "Romeo and Juliet", but then I saw "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and I was hooked, because it had not one, but TWO sets of star-crossed lovers.

Next was "Moulin Rouge", which even my gay brother despises. But it holds a special place in my heart.

I was okay for a while, high on such movies as "Fight Club". But then that bastard Chris Nolan had to make "Memento" (I'm particularly drawn to stories about men who have lost the woman they love). For some odd reason, the "Star Wars" prequels didn't really strike a chord, although they were close.

Then I got married, and I thought I was doing better. Then along comes "Inception". Oh sure, everyone hypes it for being "mind-bending" (what? it wasn't like it was "Primer"), but I secretly believe that Nolan knows how to make an excellent tragic love story, and it shows in not only "Memento" but "Inception".

As I sit here listening to the final track of the "Inception" soundtrack CD (the music from baggage claim to the credits; my favorite by far), I find myself hungry for more. I'm not even sure how to find more, as it's hard to describe. Some other stories I'm acquainted with touch close on similar feelings: the ending to "Lord of Light" by Zelazney, "Permutation City" by Egan (and even further off track, but still close in tone "Diaspora"). "The Fountain" by Aronofsky is definitely another movie that meets the criterion, as well as "Chasing Amy" by Kevin Smith.

I guess I could at least take a stab at some adjectives: a sense of loss, a longing for those truly special people we will never meet again, a feeling of mystery and awe; stories that end with catharsis. So, could you do a junkie a favor and find him one more fix? Thanks :)

You know why I hate Microsoft? They can't follow standards. Or they declare themselves a de facto standards body, even over things they have no rights to dictate standards on. Like C++. I had forgotten that MSVS has a broken version of std::copy(). It doesn't work on simple char arrays. Works fine on VxWorks and Linux. Fucking Microsoft.

Developer to me (laptop boss is busted, so I'm trying data recovery first):

You're booting with Linux to recover data? That's not going to work because Linux doesn't read FAT32...

*blink*

I couldn't even grasp what he was talking about. Any recent Windows system uses NTFS and second, Linux can read FAT32 and NTFS just fine, thank you very much....

Did these people even try Linux recently?!? (Or Windows, for the matter?)

Tonight on Comedy Central, the first two episodes of the sixth season of Futurama were shown. It's been highly anticipated on Slashdot and as a fan I was satisfied with the return to television. I really liked the first episode and found the second episode mediocre.

*Spoiler Alert*

The first episode, Rebirth, had a lot of elements that Futurama episodes of yore contained that made me love it: social commentary, extrapolation of current technology into future technology, apparent deaths, sci-fi twists and a bit of character development. The trivial elements are certainly present like Fry's homeresque stupidity and cheap jokes but that's not something that distinguishes Futurama from other comedies. I think that the professor's quirky inventions and old age behavior remain strong in this series and for some reason never loses its humor with me. The professor can (and often does) invent anything that is necessary for the plot as well as sending the crew anywhere in the universe to deliver a package. Rebirth has a lot of those classic elements when the professor plays god with bringing the crew back to life as well as going to the cyclophage habitat planet to sacrifice Leela. If this sort of predictable formula annoys your or bores you, Futurama probably got old a while ago but for me the high quality of animation, music and voice acting really make willing to belly up for every contrived new world that is conjured. Rebirth also addresses Fry and Leela's loneliness and isolation but has a cheap cop out (the ones in love turn out to be robots) at the end to avoid any permanent character development at the end.

Episode Two, In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela, was less satisfactory for me because it dealt with an old card: Leela engaging in coitus with the Zapper (and his insecurities). While some parts made me smile, it just wasn't as funny or memorable as the older episodes. Some parts had their moments (Obi Wan Kenobi GPS with a different voice saying the wild cards was a favorite) but the overall story and plot didn't really pass muster for me. I enjoyed the cheesy black and white "The Transcredible Exploits of Zap Brannigan" (reminded me of many MST3K episodes) and of course you have to love Zap heavy episodes with his ill formed sentences and logic. But aside from that, we get a cookie cutter invention from the professor and nothing too impressive with the explanation and resolution of the V-Giny death sphere. I think a lot more could have been done with that.

All in all, not bad. I was hoping for more secondary characters that I've loved from the first four episodes like Roberto or Scruffy. These secondary recurring characters have always been a favorite of mine and a strength of the show. I guess I can't expect them to put one in every episode but I was disappointed there weren't a whole lot from the movies and none from these two episodes. Definitely worth my time to watch and for those of you outside the United States, you can find torrents out there online by searching for Futurama S06E01 and S06E02. I hope they make it all the way through this sixth season and I also hope Comedy Central ponies up for a lot more after that. If there's one show with usable potential, it's Futurama and its endless possibilities. I mean with the amount of money being dumped on other crappy shows, you'd think a fraction of that could be afforded for a show with a highly devoted following. Then again Firefly is long gone.

Saw this on facebook this morning:

"It's like everyone agrees that a car should have rubber tires and then Microsoft brings out a car with stone tires and expects all roads to be made using Microsoft rubber" -- Jeremy Naus on Microsoft Networking

I thought it was a very good car analogy :-)

The guy is someone who went to University with me. I asked him if I could re-use it, he agreed but I needed to quote him. Consider it done. :-)

James Randi comes out as at 81. He discusses his life as a closeted gay man, and why he is now at age 81 coming out, and why he hasn't been publicly open about his sexuality sooner. He describes the possible impact his coming out may have on his tireless work advancing skepticism and critical thinking. He discusses his atheism, and whether it, or his sexual orientation, influences the mission of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He talks about gay rights issues such as marriage equality. He discusses his detractors and what they might make of the news of his homosexuality. And he explores the relevance of gay rights to the skeptical movement.

Suicide Linux

The foe/friend limit is ridiculous, even with subscription. 400 friends/foes is simply not enough to foe all the people who post baseless assertions and get modded to +5, and simultaneously friend people who who get modded troll for posting an informative link that blows the moderators' beliefs out of the water. Pls fx, kthxbye.

I'm building a public wiki to document *everything* that campaigns need to know about software patents.

When you need to check something or need to find a study to back up a claim, en.swpat.org aims to be the place to go to.

I spent a few years working on the anti-swpat campaign in the European Union. We did amazing work, but the online legacy is a mess and a lot of sites have even disappeared. So when I started working on the Bilski case in the USA, I decided that everything had to be documented in a publicly editable wiki - and the same is true for every other campaign I've been involved with since. The information gathered by each campaign must be made easily available to all future campaigns; we can't start from zero each time.

Your help is sought! When you see something interesting, or if you can dig up something interesting you saw years ago, please add it somewhere on the wiki. Don't worry about finding the right place or following any conventions - I regularly review the changes.

The mother project of the wiki, is the End Software Patents campaign. (donations sought)

No, not the racial kind. This has to do with code efficiency. I was recently writing patch acceptance guidelines, and was trying to explain that maintainability matters far more than efficiency. I was trying to be polite about people who harp on "efficiency", but my basic feelings boil down to: "People who talk about software efficiency, yet aren't familiar with software profiling, are idiots." Discuss.