After losing a pretty hefty anti-trust case, Microsoft has agreed to pay $1.1 billion to people who purchased products from them from Feb 1995 and Dec 2001 in the state of California. Lindows is willing to give you a free PC with their operating system installed on it if you sign your claim over to them… not a bad deal from what I’ve seen.
Amidst all the Gray Davis controversy, Larry Flynt is considering running for governor. Not that he has a prayer in winning, but I do agree with several of his proposed policies, namely:
“California is the most progressive state in the union, quite unorthodox at times. I think its citizens would welcome having a smut peddler who cares as their governor.”
So I guess Friendster is taking off. It’s a little disheartening to see people making money (well, they’re not making money yet) with a service you know you could have built in yourself 2 weeks’ time. I distinctly remember a site called Sixdegrees that was similar back in college. After a while, it got boring and people stopped looking at it though. Sixdegrees also had more sophisticated relationship classifications so you could define “mother” or “boyfriend” instead of everyone as a friend. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out, but if you sign up feel free to invite me to be your friend so I can look incredibly popular (in cyberspace).
Wired News had a fairly interesting story (I also heard about it on O’Reilly last night) about “Terrorism Futures.” Essentially, people at DARPA came up with this idea that they could open up a lottery where people could place bets on tragic world events happening. They could then use this information to help define what events are most probable and stop them before they happen.
Some interesting quotes:
“The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” fumed [Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden.
“Among the many things we do for intelligence, this is one of the least reprehensible,” [Economics professor Robin] Hanson said. “Paying people to tell us about bad things. That’s intrinsic to the intelligence process.”
“Market mechanisms are more accurate than asking people their opinions because they’re putting their money or reputation on the line,” said Ken Killitz of the Foresight Exchange, which speculates on everything from the future of human cloning to the possibility that Roman Catholic priests will be allowed to marry. “It gives people an incentive to reveal what they know.”
Some think this would encourage people to commit terrorism and bet on themselves, and others disagree stating that doing so would tip their hands (voting would not be anonymous) and get them in trouble (or at least warn us about it so we could stop it). My question is: if we don’t expect those linked with the terrorism to vote because it’s not anonymous, how would they expect to get good information?
The supreme court ruled a Texas law banning sodomy unconstitutional.
I support this decision, as well as all other decisions that keep the government off people’s asses (badump-cha!).
I recently happened upon Knoppix and was totally blown away. It’s a Linux distribution (Debian-based) that runs completely off of a CD. You don’t have to install anything. You can pop it into your Windows machine’s CD-ROM drive, tell your computer to boot off the CD, and Knoppix loads. It auto-detects your hardware (on my laptop, it even autodetected the wireless card and I was running wireless instantly) and you are up and running in a KDE 3.1 environment.
For people who are interested in Linux but don’t want to go through the aggravation (“fun”) of getting it installed and getting peripherals working just to try it out, this really is a great program. You can go back to Windows just by rebooting your PC and taking out the CD. Piece of cake.
Check out this search engine.
So it turns out Georgia is still a little behind the times. Who would have thought? In 2002 they had their first “mixed race” prom, and now in 2003 they’re going back to the ‘ole seperated prom.
I guess they’re trying to avoid scenes like this.
Business 2.0 had an article about the Nissan Murano in the last issue. It’s kind of interesting, because magazines like this don’t usually do car reviews. The particularly interesting part is how they came up with the design:
Nissan spent five years and shuffled through dozens of iterations to achieve the look of the vehicle, knowing full well that some people would instantly hate it (e.g., Mrs. Foil), while others would quickly like it (e.g., me). Such aesthetic tightrope walking is scientific these days: Nissan tweaked the design until it arrived at a point where opinion diverged neatly into thirds. That is, a third of the people who saw it hated it, a third loved it, and the final third could possibly warm in their ardor at some future date.
With so many bizarre looking cars out there these days, this sounds like it could be a pretty common practice. You have to admit, those cars are fairly memorable. If you happen to fall into the 1/3 that likes the appearance, it probably beats looking like everyone else driving around in a Saturn or something.
“Part of what makes a Gansta Rap artist marketable is the fact that the artist is a current ongoing participant in violent gang activities,” the lawsuit said.
“Singleton met this criteria and was even more marketable because his songs were as violent as his lifestyle and included rape, murder and ended with him eating his victim’s body organs.”
Pretty creepy article here.