by Chris Barrus
Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones “Bloop.”
While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain’s New Scientist reported on Thursday.
It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.
Let the Cthulhu jokes begin!
The Internet Pinball Database has shots of backglasses, playing tables, and promotional flyers for just about every pinball machine ever created, including my favorites: Fireball, Fan-tas-tic, Space Station, and Twilight Zone
Can’t find any more pinball arcades? Go here.
ClearChannelSucks.org has come online today “to be the premier source for information about Clear Channel, its corporate mentality, and its practices, on the Internet.” About time too!
“Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright” is a terrific 1999 essay on the rise of the Free Software movement, written by a legal historian. Stirring stuff that will get the geeks marching in the streets and give Microsoft, et. al. migraines. At least I would like to think so…
We need to begin by considering the technical essence of the familiar devices that surround us in the era of “cultural software.” A CD player is a good example. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an optical storage disk. The bitstream describes music in terms of measurements, taken 44,000 times per second, of frequency and amplitude in each of two audio channels. The player’s primary output is analog audio signals. Like everything else in the digital world, music as seen by a CD player is mere numeric information; a particular recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorale is (to drop a few insignificant digits) 1276749873424, while Glenn Gould’s peculiarly perverse last recording of the Goldberg Variations is (similarly rather truncated) 767459083268.
Oddly enough, these two numbers are “copyrighted.” This means, supposedly, that you can’t possess another copy of these numbers, once fixed in any physical form, unless you have licensed them. And you can’t turn 767459083268 into 2347895697 for your friends (thus correcting Gould’s ridiculous judgment about tempi) without making a “derivative work,” for which a license is necessary.
At the same time, a similar optical storage disk contains another number, let us call it 7537489532. This one is an algorithm for linear programming of large systems with multiple constraints, useful for example if you want to make optimal use of your rolling stock in running a freight railroad. This number (in the U.S.) is “patented,” which means you cannot derive 7537489532 for yourself, or otherwise “practice the art” of the patent with respect to solving linear programming problems no matter how you came by the idea, including finding it out for yourself, unless you have a license from the number’s owner.
Then there’s 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being “copyrighted,” this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished.
Lastly, there’s 588832161316. It doesn’t do anything, it’s just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn’t owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.
First in a series of articles on Kuro5hin on room acoustics. Essential knowledge for the home recorder.
A big pile of mostly Soviet radio transmissions and transponders from manned and unmanned satellites.
This is cool… Punch in the URL (or upload) of an image and this page will generate the X-Face code for you.
Charles Dodgson of The Looking Glass ‘blog nails it in regards to the “Homeland Security Department”:
The problem in the runup to September 11th, it is increasingly plain, was that the FBI and CIA had plenty of information concerning the people and the plan, but failed to make good use of it. The agencies failed to distribute critical information to each other, and headquarters failed to distribute critical information to agents that could have used it in the field.
The proposed solution is a government reorganization which doesn’t touch the FBI and CIA, but combines other agencies including the Secret Service (which handles counterfeiting), the Coast Guard (which handles rescue and shore safety), Customs (which does revenue and tariff enforcement), the INS (which issues tourist visas) and so forth into a single agency which will focus on counterterrorism.
The intelligence problems are addressed by creating a center within the new agency which will review intelligence gathered by other agencies (FBI, CIA, apparently, NSA).
So — the problem of turf wars between the FBI and CIA is dealt with by giving them both a new agency to fight with, the problem of information hoarding at headquarters is dealt with by establishing a new hoard of information at headquarters, and we also improve matters by imposing a new layer of centralized bureaucracy on agencies which (with the possible exception of INS) didn’t have much to do with the problem.
But it does have strong bipartisan support in Congress.
What could possibly go wrong?
And we haven’t even addressed the issue of zero civil liberties after this…
As you may be aware, most of your low-powered devices come with what’s known as a “wallwart,” an external transformer pack which hangs off of the wall. Please stop using wallwarts for everything.
Yesterday and today, Democracy Now! ran a pretty good radio documentary on the infiltration of the left by the US government during the COINTELPRO years. MP3s are available on their site.