I saw this Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert. It caught my eye because:

Saudi Arabia has been sending people to the US for education training, conferences and even ncaete. Infact, they've been hiring people from the upper-educational world and paying *big* money for help (ie consulting).

Personally, I think you'll see Jordan doing this next. Because some of these countries are finally realizing if they don't reinvest all the oil money they've made off of us, they're screwed.
 

I'd completely forgotten I wrote this three years ago:

Joshua Kinsberg has been released. But his bike and invention are impounded, at least until his court date on Friday (after the RNC is over).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5850151/

NYC's anti-graffiti law is very strict:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nograffiti/html/legislation.html

"No person shall write, paint or draw any inscription, figure or mark of any type on any public or private building or other structure or any other real or personal property owned, operated or maintained by a public benefit corporation, the city of New York or any agency or instrumentality thereof or by any person, firm, or corporation, or any personal property maintained on a city street or other city-owned property pursuant to a franchise, concession or revocable consent granted by the city, unless the express permission of the owner or operator of the property has been obtained."

I wonder if the framers of that law realized they were banning kids from chalking hopscotch onto their schools' playground or onto the sidewalks in front of their houses. I wonder how many children have been arrested for chalking up a 4-square game.

One important point: the police did not see the chalk-spraying invention being _used_. So the inventor probably could not have been charged with the above law. But the only other anti-graffiti laws describe "aerosol spray paint cans," and the video of the arrest clearly shows the inventor explaining to the police that it uses chalk, not paint. Predictably, the New York Post gets that wrong, describing the invention as "a convoluted spray-paint mechanism": http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/29532.htm

Earlier this month, a family was threatened with a $300 fine for their 6-year-old girl's drawing with sidewalk chalk.

On her own front step.

It's legal of course. The police screwed up. Notice the final clause from the law as of 2004 ("unless... permission of the owner... has been obtained") and the similar clause from the 2005 law Natalie Shea was threatened with (only if "not consented to by the owner").

But a street artist was later arrested for drawing on the sidewalk with chalk (while being filmed by PBS about his artwork!). And I won't be surprised if sooner or later some kid literally chalking hopscotch onto the sidewalk or a school playground gets arrested.

That's the law, after all. We had to make sure nobody chalked anti-Bush slogans while the RNC was in town. And the law's the law.

The $150 laptop was apparently too good to be true. 2Checkout has suspended all sales of it, refunded all orders that were marked shipped, and allowed all authorizations not charged to expire. An email from 2CO said there may be a time in the future when saleswill resume but its mentioned as a "when and if" situation.

The Oregon Brewers Festival was interesting. I attended with out at OSCON 2007. Lots of tents. Lots of beer. Lots of people.

But the most odd thing of all was the 'beer growl'. Seriously, people would just kinda do this. It was like a roaring growl. I hear this unique "thing to do when drinking good bear" was invented in Portland and is a common thing at this festival.

On my trip out there I had a number of local beers. I don't recall finding a single one I didn't like. I should have kept the labels, because I now remember none of their names :( Aw well, maybe next year :)

Again, no formatting, just saving the story and links. This article got pulled because it's a dupe of one from several weeks back, maybe even a few months ago. I remember seeing it; it may have been this February article on Graphene Transistors, but I thought it was more recent than that.

Edit: The article has been restored. I guess the previous article was way back in February, so this one adds useful information.

Science: Replacing Copper With Pencil Graphite
Posted by kdawson in The Mysterious Future!
from the carbon-all-the-way-down dept.
Late-Eight writes
"A key discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help advance the role of graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics. Researchers believe graphene's extremely efficient conductive properties can be exploited for use in nanoelectronics. Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, eluded scientists for years but was finally made in the laboratory in 2004 with the help of everyday, store-bought transparent tape. The current research, which shows a way to control the conductivity of graphene, is an important first step towards mass producing metallic graphene that could one day replace copper as the primary interconnect material on nearly all computer chips."
Researchers are now hot to pursue graphene for this purpose over the previous favorite candidate, buckytubes (which are just rolled-up graphene). Farther down the road, semiconducting graphene might take over from silicon at the heart of logic chips.

Links:
Story: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/2123225
Submitter: http://www.shellscript.co.uk/
"graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics": http://www.physorg.com/news104473084.html

(By the way, it's strange that I can't get a Science icon. I went for the Sci-Fi icon instead, for lack of anything more appropriate.)

I'm signed up for EcoTours of Oregon's Columbia River Gorge Waterfalls
and Mount Hood Loop Tour.

I had contacted them months ago, when I knew I was going to OSCON (ie, when the payment check was cut). The guy from EcoTours who responded was nice, but informed me they have a minimum-party requirement. One, well, just wasn't enough. But he said he had any one else inquire about doing that tour, that day, he'd let me know.

He called sometime today while I was in bed (the flu). The tour is on! I'm psyched! Geek to the woods, here I come!! ha ha

I've never done anything like this before. I figure I'll take my camera (wide angle lens and a 70-200) and my hiking stick/mono-pod, along with hiking boots and hat. Add in an extra battery and an extra CF-card too. That should do the trick I suppose.

I'm going to OSCON this year. If anyone who's reading my journal's going, let me know and let's meet up for a cold beverage or something.

I am going to be there Sunday to Sunday. In fact, if any of you would be interested in doing an Eco Tours Columbia River Gorge Waterfalls and Mount Hood "Loop" Tour on the 28th, let me know. They do it in packages of 4 people. I have one person, myself, interested for that date.

If you know someone going to OSCON that'd be interested in doing this with me, please by all means forward this JE to them.

SARE, the SpamAssassin Rules Emporium where Spamassassin users can download useful anti-spam rule sets, has been down since yesterday (2007-06-07). (View rulesemporium.com via GoogleCache).

In the Spamassassin Users mailing list, one user suggested that it was related to the fact that surbl.org was also down, as was www.uribl.com, the latter of which, at the time of writing, is now showing an Apache default page saying "It works!".

According to a diary entry by Bojan Zdrnja at The SANS Institute, spammers have been carrying out a DDOS against these sites and also against Spamhaus (which appears to be weathering the storm better than the others).

"Yet Another Ninja" requested in a reply that users disable the downloading of Spamassassin rules from rulesemporium.com until further notice (RDJ = Rules Du Jour - described here).

Update 2007-06-09: URIBL is back online...

On my route to work each morning, I go through a ~2 year old neighborhood for about a mile before I reach the turn-in for the office. The houses are built right along the Scioto river. The houses along the river have woods seperating them from the river (as well as steep banks). Most of the development's completed, but they are still building the last 10 or so houses and there's a handful of for-sale lots.

So I was driving down the road, ogling the $500 - $700k houses that maybe, someday, I'd be able to afford. When I noticed the car ahead of me just miss something rather large in the road. As I approached, I could see it was a turtle. I looked, no one oncoming, no one behind me, so I pulled over.

It was a rather large snapping turtle. I carefully picked it up on it's sides, towards the back, and started walking to the other side of the road where it was heading. At which point it let lose a torrent of, well, piss. Luckily, I was not wanting to get dirty (since I had my dilbert outfit on) and I didn't want to get bit, so I had it held out far from me. But most importantly, I had it pointing the opposite way. So it's jetison was no where near me.

I grumbled some explative about how unappreciative it was. Maybe something towards the idea of I should put it back down and let it be flattened. But I didn't, continued walking across the road. Went to put it down, and *swoosh* it let loose another torrent. Luckily this hit the mud that was on the other side of the curb where I was putting it down.

After it was down, I waited a second to see if it'd scoot away, but it was too alarmed to move. And I had to get to work, so I left.

Towards the end of that street, I noticed another large object on the opposite side, right on the curb. It was another turtle, looking to make the opposite journey the other had. I didn't stop. I hope he made it.

Looking back on it I should have pulled out my cellphone and taken a picture of the turtle. Tho not having handled all that many turtles in my life, this one seemed a pretty good size.

I'm going to try the rapid-response, no-formatting method again.

MacBook Hacked in Security Contest
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the caught-with-your-pants-down dept.
TheCybernator writes
"Macaulay, a software engineer, was able to hack into a MacBook through a zero-day security hole in Apple's Safari browser. The computer was one of two offered as a prize in the "PWN to Own" hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. The successful attack on the second and final day of the contest required a conference organizer to surf to a malicious website using Safari on the MacBook -- a type of attack familiar to Windows users. CanSecWest organizers relaxed the rules Friday after nobody at the event had breached either of the Macs on the previous day."

Links:

Story: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/23/1457220
hack into a MacBook: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39286793,00.htm

I'm too tired today to add the fancy formatting, sorry. I've got two other ghosts from last month sitting on my hard drive, and I don't want this one to join them for fear of ectoplasmic overload, or something. So here's the basics:

Science: "Smart Dust" to Explore Planets
Posted by ScuttleMonkey in The Mysterious Future!
from the new-but-not dept.
Ollabelle writes
"The BBC is reporting how tiny chips with flexible skins could be used to glide through a planet's atmosphere in swarms to gather data and report back. 'The idea of using millimetre-sized devices to explore far-flung locations is nothing new, but Dr Barker and his colleagues are starting to look in detail at how it might be achieved. The professor at Glasgow's Nanoelectronics Research Centre told delegates at the Royal Astronomical Society gathering that computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed.'"

Links: tiny chips with flexible skins

Article link: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/1925206

Update: Good thing I didn't go to all that trouble, because the article was only playing dead. It went to "Nothing to see here", but remained in red on the front page and eventually went live.

Slashdot's moderation system is mentioned at the end of the article:

Tim O'Reilly: Web 2.0 Is About Controlling Data.

I can't believe I missed it. I had a ghost slip right through my fingers!

When I came to work, I fired up my list of morning bookmarks. After checking email and half a dozen news and message boards, I got around to Slashdot. I ctl-shift-clicked the two red links and went on to read another dozen or so sites, and even went and got some work done.

When I happened to click the Slashdot links in another window, I saw "Nothing to see here. Please move along." Yikes! That meant that between when I first fired up the browser and when I shift-ctl-clicked, the article met its untimely (or perhaps just-in-timely) demise.

But there's nothing left of the ghost. I'd already gone on to read other Slashdot articles, and Opera 9 no longer seems to keep cached versions of pages -- when you hit "Back", it reloads with the current version.

I don't even know the original title of the article. All I have is the URL... like a feeling of cold in a creaky old house on a warm summer night.

Rest in peace, http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl? sid=07/03/06/1227222

This past weekend my wife and I went and saw Breach at one of the local movie theaters.

What was interesting is my wife had previously gone to the movies a few days before with our son. So when we sat down, she quirped something about "this movie's brought to us by Vista ugh!!". I didn't know what she was talking about, and she's not a techie (though she sure has to listen to all sorts of 'techie stuff' all the time because of me). So I gave her a quizzical look and continued unwrapping myself from my gloves, hat, jacket, flannel, etc, as did she.

Well what do you know? She was exactly right! The movie's 30 minute set of ads,community spotlights, quizzes and what-not were definitely brought to you by Vista!. Each commercial, each movie clip, each ad, was shown in various window-arrangements and settings via a Vista desktop. And it was so pretty! ;)

Seriously, they made the windows (each representing a commercial that you'd either just watched, or would be soon) flip over each other, jump over each other, shuffle their order, jump around ala OSX's Expose. Every once in a while they'd try to delve into other "pretty" aspects of Vista, but soon after jump right back to the window management and the flippy window icons.

Yes, all brought to you by Vista!

We were so thankful. Because of Vista's unique window arangement tools, we fully comprehended all of the advertisements. And because of Vista, we gleefully watched each and every ad diligently throughout the entire ~30 minute spell. That is, before the ~15 minutes of forced-real-previews started. But they weren't brought to us by Vista. At-least, not yet.

Ghosts of Slashdot: 02/08/2007
[This is the second ghost in two days, but this time it's likely to stay dead. It's a dupe of yesterday's OLPC security article -- which was still on the front page.]

The Radical OLPC Security System
Posted by kdawson in The Mysterious Future!
from the tighter-than-yours dept.

CHaN_316 recommends a Wired article about the One Laptop Per Child project entitled "High Security for $100 Laptop":

"The laptop... will premiere a security system that takes a radical approach to computer protection. Krstic's system, known as the BitFrost platform, imposes limits on every program's powers. Every program runs in its own virtual machine with a limited set of permissions... Krstic contrasts this approach to Microsoft's Windows XP where every program, including Solitaire, has the right to access the web, turn on the video camera, open spreadsheets and send e-mail... 'This kind of model makes it more difficult for glue between applications to be built,' Krstic said. 'But 99 percent don't need glue.'"

What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.

Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! These stories were accepted, posted for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.

By the way, any Subscriber can join the Ghost Hunt, but so far only morcheeba has shown the requisite sensitivity to ectoplasmic vibrations.