Holy crap! Cats and dogs are expected to begin cohabitating immediately, now that Microsoft is leaping on to the open source bandwagon.

It appears that I'm the last guy in the world to link to this make your own freeway sign applet. Requires Java 1.4 (as far as I can tell) to work.

I keep saying I need to take a look at Maven, since it appears there's quite a lot of movement towards it as a build tool. Here's IBM's take on it.

As an aside, I always thought project management was about managing the project goals, requirements, stakeholders, and schedule. How surprised I am to find out that project management really only means "smarter build tool". Who knew?

Holy f*cking crap, that's insanely hard.

Only about six months ago (see! I'm getting less irrelevant by the minute!), Chuck Cavaness wrote an article about Struts best practices. Excellent stuff, that.

I still occasionally go look at the Sitemeter stats to see who's coming to the page, and what they were looking for. Most of the stuff is more-or-less normally bizarre, but this just blew me away.

According to Google.co.kr, we're the sixth best hit for "f*cking my brother's wife".

Holy crap. Since I don't have a brother, they must be looking for you, Lee. Better watch your back.

I lurv Homestar Runner. I do I do I do.

Also, am I the only person who doesn't understand why Cartoon Network isn't offering them a production deal? WTF?

ScrappleFace: Looting Suddenly Stops in Baghdad. Oh, my aching sides.

Hooray for Brigadier General John Kelly, United States Army. Thanks to Tim Blair for finding this loverly article.

The Tech Report has a review of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. I really need to start saving up, don't I?

I'm only a year out of date, it appears. I just found an article about web application development comparing XMLC and JSP. I now officially have my curiousity bit latched high, and I must now go poke around a bit.

Our weapons technology is so amazing, we now actually need (and have) bombs that don't explode.

Hooray! Finally, someone has compiled a list of the 100 best hoaxes ever.

My name is Mitchell, and a ridiculously large percentage of my extended family suffers from HEV.

Look! hours and hours and hours of fun, as found by 2 Blowhards.

Ummmm .... you did what with your floppy drive? Drives? As in plural? Good God, man, are you insane?

The Department of Defense has published it's favorite photos of the war so far.

Goddammit ... now I'm getting all weepy again. You people stop writing these things, would ya? I'm going to run out of Kleenex.

<sniff/>

Behold the power of Trogdor!!!1! And all was in burnination!

In another stunning discovery, American entrepeneurs have discovered an entirely new way to make money without discarding their hipster cred.

Hey, Lee! This guy's got you pegged completely. Who knew you were so easily winkled out?

Damn me, but Bill Whittle can f*cking write. I have to go compose myself again.

BWA-hahahahaha! Finally, some signs I'd be willing to carry in the "protest"

My irony-o-meter just pegged. Oh, my aching sides. Stop it! You're killing me!

Unfortunately, the only people who will get this joke will have already understood how stupid the broadcast flag is. It's really a pity, because RFC3514 is hilariously funny and deserves a much broader audience.

HaloScan has crapped out. Again. Gah, but I'm sick of this. Who's a good hosting company for two guys running a blog for nothing but their own self-gratification? They need to allow something by way of decent blogging software, probably Moveable Type, although I don't have an opinion yet on whether that's the right bandwagon to hop on.

Crap, but this is irritating.

BBC news chief claims there's no systemic bias to their reporting. This would be more meaningful if he hadn't been speaking at meeting of Media Workers Against The War. It's okay to be biased; everybody is. It's not okay to be biased enough to go to a meeting for Media Workers Against The War and give a speech while claiming you're neither for nor against the war. That isn't being unbiased; that's flat-out lying.

What's the opposite of "nationalize"?

Curious about how many people are playing massively multiplayer online games? Well, wonder no more.

Massachusetts doesn't really surprise me, but Texas did: Use a Firewall, Go to Jail.

First the dolphins, and now the monkeys have joined the coalition of the willing.

Kewl!!! A map of the developing force deployment.

Lee, I'll be buying you a beer plus any other Britsh gentlemen I can find just because. Offer dependent on my financial state at the time of the purchase, of course.

Like most people, I didn't go to West Point. So this Flash animation describing U.S.Army doctrine for dealing with an emerging target was all shiny and new to me.

I've only started reading this essay on the roots of European anti-Americanism, so I can't really comment yet. I also have a habit of losing bookmarks, so I'll stuff it in here until I get back to it.

The scariest part about this story is this was a manager, for f*ck's sake, and he's able to drive a car and vote and everything.

Lee, this article is just for you.

More fun with iconography from Homeland Security.

Lee: send me an email or an IM when you wake up, would you?

It appears the clock has officially run out on the warm-up, and the serious business has begun. I'm one of the most atheistic people you'll ever have the sorry misfortune not to have been able to avoid meeting, but sometimes a little ceremonial deism is in order:

God save the United States, and protect the brave men and women serving in her armed forces.

My wife has been threatening me recently. It seems that an acquaintance of ours has a soda fountain in his house, and she wants one. Luckily for me, somebody wrote up a HOWTO.

Click now. Sign. Press the button.

Oh yes ... this makes it clear how the entire world is opposed to supporting our line on Iraq.

WARNING: Extreme time-suck ahead.

Chinese Characters and Culture will let you waste entire days just poking around inside a huge dictionary of Chinese words plus etymology and other huge great happy word-fun bits.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Holy crap, um, carp. I mean it ... "holy", that is. Whole religions have been built around less.

Let me start with "I love Strong Bad". Notice the link over there (<===) on the left side. Now his fame is spreading far and wide: two new words in the dictionary.

Yet another nation signs on to enforce the U.N. mandate, whether or not France wants them to.

Woo-hoo! Hooray for the Aussies!!!1!

Okay, so it's only American cowboys who insist on attacking a peaceful sovereign nation in the Middle East? Guess again. Once more it appears that the more a person finds out about Iraq, the more determined they are to see the UK/US/Aussie/Spanish/Italian/[...]/Jordanian coalition take his punk ass down.

BWA-hahahahahaha

All who are in favor of helping the regime that retains and trains people like this stay in power, raise your fucking hands so I know who to shoot.

Umm ... not yet guys. You have to wait for the whistle. Found via Brian Tiemann

BWA-hahahahaha!!!! I'm absolutely dying! Thanks to Jane Galt for finding this treasure.

I'm watching the Preseidential press conference, of course, and getting more irked by the moment. President Bush did a good job of seeming presidential, but I'd like to go yell at his handlers for a while.

Why, when reporters asked about the opposition of France and Germany et al, didn't he respond that neither Chirac nor Schroeder is primarily concerned with the good of the U.S.? Even if he (and you) want to assume that's understood by all the people in the room, he should still state it. Out loud, and with force.

Also, when the same (or equivalent) reporters asked about the masses opposed to the U.S. policy, why didn't the President respond by naming the nations and masses who are with us? He said even France approved resolution 1441, but he completely dissed the Vilnius group by not mentioning that the majority of the citizens' governments in Europe have published an open letter stating their support? Why would he just let the barely unstated assumption that it's us against the world go unchallenged?

Crap crap crap. Another opportunity not completely capitalized upon. Still, it was much better than it could have been. He stayed on message and didn't provide any wiggle room whatsoever. Plus, as a bonus, he smacked every maroon who asked about "another last chance" with the clue-stick that they so richly deserve.

A history of graphing, as found by Colby Cosh. Only geeks with more analytic skill than life will find this compelling, but boy do we ever!

Today was a very special day in the life of Mitchell Morris. For the past four weeks, I've been busting my ass writing a web application for data visualization and dimensional alaysis of some performance metrics. Today I arrive at the client site to install the first code drop (version 0.1.0) only to find my <quote type="scare">partner</partner> had shown up and told the client that I was his employee, not his partner, and that he'd fired me and I should be escorted from the building. Hooray for internal power politics!!!

Unfortunately, my lawyer tells me I can't send a cease-and-desist to the client for reasons with long legalese names that I promptly forgot. All I've got is this pitiful little soapbox.

So ... fuck James Copher and his horse.

Actually, the last time we were delivering a product to the client that was primarily my work-product and not his, he also engineered a big row just before the deadline. Apparently, he always has to make damned double sure that he's always got somebody else he can visibly blame if things aren't just right. Here I thought we were partners and it turns out I was just his scapegoat.

Behold! The Power of The Oracle of Starbucks!!!!.

I'm not dead yet ... just very very very busy. I'm so far behind my required reading now I may never catch up. It's so bad, in fact, that I might have even missed a few days reading Megan's work.

BWA-hahahahaha! Get it? "line" sounds like "lion"! One of our cats, Miz Boo, gets this haircut during the summer and she loves it.

HA! Hahahahahahaha! Kevin Mitnick's security company's website gets hacked. Twice. Hee hee hee.

Let me see if I've got this straight: a U.S. Senator was the CEO of the company that made the voting machines that tallied his "landslide" victory, and he's also facing questions from the ethics comittee? I can spell "conflict of interest" ... can you?

Way back when, Microsoft added some special code to Windows 3.1 to detect DR-DOS (a competitor to MS-DOS) and throw up spurious error messages during install in an effort to make customers think there was something wrong with the not-from-MS product. They appear to be doing it again, the bastards.

And now Haloscan seems to have restored another backup tape. We now have back our comments between Feb 2nd and Feb 5th, but lost those left yesterday. Crap crap crappity crap. This is almost as bad as YACCS.

Haloscan seems to have lost all our comments left since February 2nd. Sorry about that.

Moe, I had left a comment following your comment about open source which was one of the lost bits. One person who's spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about the economic and sociological bases for open source v. closed source is Eric S. Raymond. He has a dead-tree book named "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" available now from Amazon.com as well as probably everybody else. He also has the original essays online at http://www.catb.org. I suggest, given the economic nature of your question, starting with The Magic Cauldron.

Why is JBuilder evil?

Among all the other things I do that suck up my time, I read the two main Struts mailing lists. On struts-user, there is periodically a message or two observing that JBuilder is the Worst.Tool.Ever!!!1! or similar unsupported statement.

Do either of you readers know what they're talking about? I use JBuilder all the time, and find it an excellent tool worthy of my attention (not least because I can get "vi" key bindings in it, and we all know that CUA and EMACS are the sperm of the devil).

What gives? What's so evil about JBuilder that I just don't see?

Apparently AT&T isn't the only group trying to make a completely human sounding conversation without any human involved. I'd heard "Most Requested" a time or two before, but never really thought about the time commitment that would be invovled in honestly doing such a thing.

Note to self: start working out. I would have added "more often" but that implies "workouts(current) > 0" which isn't quite true.

Ooooh! Shiny toys!

Hooray! Homestarrunner is back! 404 Doodoo Error

Step 1 of my all-time-consuming project is (apparently) done: today I submitted a tag library to allow Struts projects to target small-footprint wireless devices via WML. Because 1.1 is about to go release candidate 1, the submission is being set in abeyance, but it should be part of the "contrib" distribution post 1.1 release.

Maybe 1.2 ... we'll see.

Analysis of the Sapphire Worm, which managed to infect almost 80,000 hosts in just 30 minutes. I'll graciously allow you three guesses to figure out which manufacturer's products were affected.

God-botherer or no, I still laugh out loud reading about Tony and his brood. Hilariously funny, I think, but I no longer know what it's like not to have small children.

Hey Lee! The Mad Emperor Misha I lets fly with what I think is essentially your take on amnesty for illegal immigrants. Nicely put, and the argument sounds sane coming from somebody that isn't, um, you.

Hey! What happened to my post about the Columbia? I've been Blogger-ized!

Crap. It was pretty good too, as far as that goes. I'll rewrite it, but it won't be the same.

Not that anybody's noticed, but writing has been inordinately light here recently. Big things are afoot, and I hope to be issuing press releases in a few days to a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

Phillipe DeCroy, of the inestimable Volokh Conspiracy, finds an interesting common-law precendent that may shed some light on lawfully putting a cap in Saddam's asshat.

I fear the coming conflict for the lives of our soldiers and the lives of the Iraqis, but sometimes the dog has to be shot (cf. "Old Yeller", not that Saddam is our dog mind you)

Hmmmm again

Hmmmm

A law lecturer from across the pond writes about DeCSS, DVD encryption, and translating them as numbers.

Ever wondered if you've got what it takes to be a techno mixer? Well, wonder no more. In my case, the answer seems to be "no".

This suXor5. Hard. F*ck f*ck f*ckity f*ck.

Hey, Jim! F*ck him and the horse he rode in on. I, for one, will miss your online presence. Hurry back, would ya?

Be afraid; be very afraid. Mr.Lion points out that Microsoft makes the software that makes the BMW 745 run (or not run, as the case may be). Remember all those old jokes about having to stop the car, open and close the doors, and start up again? Here, again, we have life imitating comedy. Remind me to drive less often, huh?

Ummm ... holy crap! Lee, man, what the f*ck is happening to your erstwhile nation? The bobbies have been told not to investigate crimes such as burglary, vandalism, or assault. Do the gummint officials want more such crimes? That's the only possible result of such a policy. I am ... boggled.

Sometimes I do stuff that I know is just stupid. Today, I responded to a post by Tony Woodlief about his time working the Abortion Clinic detail for his local god-bothering collective. This was inordinately stupid for a couple of reasons:

1. Nobody is ever convinced of anything by a short argument presented once
2. There's no way to respond to his other commenters in an essay short enough that they'd be willing to read the whole thing
3. There isn't anybody who hasn't already had their opinion on abortion solidified by now
4. See item #1 repeatedly

Every now and then I forget my commitment not to try to educate anybody who isn't paying me for an education. People who don't want to learn new stuff generally don't. The only reliable way I've found to identify people who are open for instruction is that they'll offer cash money in trade.

I'll probably be able to resist responding to this kind of stuff for another six months at least, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste.

Hello, Mr.Panthorn: I'm looking forward to watching you choke down that crow sandwich. Yummy!

Crap crap crappity crap.

Today, I spent several hours troubleshooting my network here. Currently, I get cable modem service from Adelphia (28 kilofeet from the CO is no place for DSL CPE), with a Netgear RT311 firewall/router. The Netgear, unfortunately, doesn't tunnel PPTP connections because it doesn't understand PPTP well enough, so I'm replacing it with a Cisco SOHO71 (same as the 806 with a four-port 10Mb switch). Ought to be a breeze, right?

Wrong. When I plug the cable modem directly into a Windows box and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a real routable address with DNS options attached. When I plug the cable modem into the Netgear and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a real routable address with DNS options attached; the same address, in fact.

When I plug the cable modem into the Cisco and retrieve an IP address via DHCP, I get a non-routable address with invalid DNS options attached. Turning up debug a bit shows that the DHCP server's IP address is on the same subnet as the IP address I would have otherwise retrieved myself.

That means that some brain-dead n00b on my cable segment is stupidly trying to serve DHCP over the WAN. Of course, there's no way to configure the Cisco to ignore some DHCPOFFER packets, so my only recourse is to wait for Adelphia tech support to get around to investigating the problem and doing, um, something. I suspect they're pretty much limited to disabling the culprit's cable modem and waiting for him to call so they can tell him he's violating the TOS.

In the meanwhile, I still can't PPTP and the Cisco, on which I spent quite a bit more of my hard-earned cash than I wanted to, just sits idle. I swear to <diety/>, I'm this close to breaking out the ol' NMAP to see if he's willing to let me shut him down myself. F*cking dork. If you're going to set up a server, then for f*ck's sake set it up correctly.

Finally! A slogan I can support: Celebrate Diversity!

It's the modern-day equivalent of bear-baiting, I tell you. Steven Den Beste writes 5000 words (plus another 17000 words worth of pictures) tweaking the Mac faithful and they respond. My question is: why?

Or to rephrase the question slightly, who cares what's on the business desktops? Companies that have specific software needs purchase the software they really need, and whatever hardware is appropriate to run it, and the decision is made in that order. Sure, there are lots of Intel chips running Windows on various desktops, but they're the red-headed stepchildren of the business world. If you're in the image manipulation business, your art-school dropouts have Macs. Sure, the MBAs in the front office have Windows so as to make those shiny PowerPoint presentations and to read the Word docs from the client, but the real guts of the business is on (as far as I can tell) Macs and the serious Unix hardware in the glass house.

When you're serious about performance, you go buy a Sun E10000 and run Oracle on it. They're both complicated products from companies with truly horrific pricing schemes, require a professional priesthood to sacrifice the goats at the right time, and provide lifetime employment for their cadre, but when you by-Gawd have to have the data available, that's where you have to go.

In modern post-pro houses, I'd bet the artists are probably running Maya, and the render farm is almost assuredly running Linux. Those guys don't seriously give a crap about the material on the desktop, which is why they can afford to let Windows in the building at all. If it was really a corporate asset, it'd be housed on a Unix box. Where do you think all those source code repositories live? Where is the actual rendering of the 425 FX shots for "Matrix Reloaded" taking place?

I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve Redmond.

I'm super-delighted to point to my miniscule contribution to the world's stock of accumulated knowledge: begging Capitalist Lion to write stuff about video production. Woo-hoo!

Mindles H. Dreck fires a broadside at a British "friend" with delightful accuracy. Now, them's some fightin' words, there, boyeee. Woo-hoo!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is our brush with greatness. Mr. Simon walks in, graces us with his presence for a brief moment, and then he's gone, leaving only his timeless prose and a faint smell of cologne behind. Give it up for Laurence Simon, ladies and gentlemen! Hooray!

I would like to add that I don't hate Carrot Top, but I do (generally) hate people that hate Carrot Top. Does that mean we now have to duel with plastic grocery store paranoia bars? I'm game, I suppose.

(And now, a brief message from Laurence Simon of Amish Tech Support, who is appearing here as part of the Amish Tech Support 2003 Blog A Day Tour.)

I really don't have much of important to say today on the Tour. I don't even have anything overly hateful to say on this Full Of Hate site.

I do want to talk about a party, however.

We went to the birthday party of a friend's 4 year-old yesterday where Spider Man was the theme. My wife pronounces that Spider Man, and I pronounce that Spiderman, as in the Spidermans from Long Island who import hats.

Many parents were there, occasionally pointing at the roaming, rolling tide of small children. A costumed Spider Man (Spiderman) and Bat Man (Batman, of the Hamptons) were there entertaining the kids, too.

"Who are those guys really?" someone asked me.

"Don't tell the kids this," I said. "But they're Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne."

Most people know that it's futile to ask me question I can use as a straight line. Others still haven't learned yet. They suffer for my art.

Then there was this pair of Harry Potter glasses. Someone requested that I put those suckers on, see if they fit:

"Yeah, I know why the fifth book of the series is late. I've been away, you see. After my fourth year at Hogwarts, well, I kinda used my magic powers to blow up the Dursleys. The fat little bastard was getting on my nerves, I just couldn't take it anymore. Then I set Draco Malfoy on fire, his whole gang, and most of those kids in Slytherin, too. So I was shipped off to Magician Reform School, having a rough time of it. I wish Ron Weasley would return my calls, man, because I've got a great idea for a business when I get outta here. And Grainger... oh man, chicks dig scars.

Bah. Voldemort was right. Screw 'em all. Once I get a second-hand wand and a spellbook, my ass is outta here."

And then there was the Spider Man disk shooter. I was about to reach for it and make a comment about speeding up Catholic Mass by using one of those for firing out wafers and a Super Soaker full of sacramental wine when I realized...

This is what Carrot Top does.

I hate Carrot Top.

Everybody hates Carrot Top.

I went back to drinking my Bud Light and didn't play with another toy for the rest of the evening, reminiscing to the earlier part of the evening where I noticed that I enjoyed Snickers Ice Cream Bars better than actual Snickers Bars.

But I don't hate Snickers Bars like I hate Carrot Top.

(If you understood all of that, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. However, it doesn't mean you can't also participate in the Amish Tech Support Blog A Day Tour... go to Laurence Simon's weblog and volunteer your site today!)

Recently, my wife's laptop started displaying some interesting errors. "Corrupted registry" has to be the worst possible error message a Windows box can give you, because now you know you're completely hosed. Various bits of error correction, volume scanning, etc kept it limping along for a while as we considered what to do about it. Coincidentally enough, while reading something or other from IBM developerWorks, I saw a banner ad for IBM laptop hard drives. I clicked through (yes, I'm embarassed for me too) to see what was up.

The vendor was Googlegear.com, and the deal was a 40GB drive in the right form factor to stuff into the laptop for $131 shipped. If you haven't priced hard drives from Sony (it's a VAIO), then you don't know how astoundingly good this price is. I ordered one immediately. That was late Friday afternoon. I was hoping that since I'm on the east coast and they're in California that it might get shipped out then, but no luck. They shipped it UPS 2nd day on Monday, and posted the tracking number. UPS admitted they had the package and estimated that they'd deliver it on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I had to run to the grocery store for stuff and, of course, that was when the UPS guy dropped off the package. Or rather, that was when the UPS guy dropped off some other persons' package but not mine. That's right ... the hard drive was AWOL with UPS claiming it had been delivered. I called the 800 number for UPS the instant I got home and told the customer disservice clerk that there had been a misdelivery and my package was still missing. They told me that my package had in fact been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I repeated that no, it had not been delivered, but someone else's package had been delivered instead. The clerk typed in a note and said they'd have the local depot contact me within the hour.

Three hours later I still hadn't gotten the phone call. I called the 800 number again, and told the second rep that I was expecting a call from the local depot and could they give me the phone number or connect me directly. They asked what the story was, so I repeated it. This clerk then looked on their web page and said the package had been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I told them, slightly less politely than I told the first clerk, that no it hadn't been delivered but someone else's package had been misdelivered to me instead. Then I asked them why my previous contact wasn't showing, and what had the first clerk been typing if it wasn't a contact record. They told me that there was a contact record but they hadn't read it. Super. Clerk #2 said they'd call the local depot and I'd get a call within the hour.

Two hours later, the local depot finally called. I told him (clerk #3) the story. He looked on the web page and said the package had been delivered and I should go look on the porch. I used my last remaining smidgen of patience to tell him that I didn't care what his website said, I didn't have my package but instead had someone else's package that had been misdelivered and I wanted him to find my damned hard drive. He said he'd go find the truck and see if it was still on there and call me back within an hour. If it wasn't on the truck, he continued, then he'd have to wait until tomorrow because the driver had already left for the day. I was flabbergasted to find that they hadn't done a damned thing in the five hours since I placed the original call, but told him that would be okay since I had no other choice. He called back eventually, and of course it was more than an hour later. He repeated he'd have to wait until tomorrow to check with the driver, but he'd call first thing in the morning.

By lunchtime Thursday I still hadn't heard anything, so I call back to the UPS 800 number and begin politely demanding that clerk #4 solve my problem and find my hard drive. I wasn't interested in getting a call back, I wasn't interested in hearing anything about online presence, I just wanted her to find my package. She finally said she couldn't do anything and I needed to get the shipper to start a trace. I boggled. "What can they do that you can't?" I asked. "Start a trace" she replied, and continued that she couldn't start one and nothing I could say was going to change her position.

I called Googlegear and they were not only sympathetic but actually helpful. The customer service people there started the trace process, and continued to email me when they said they would with schedule updates. I don't mind that things don't always go perfectly, but if the vendor will just do what they said they would, I would be much happier about giving them my custom. On that metric, Googlegear is worthy of my repeat business.

The moral of this story is Googlegear good, UPS bad. If you're looking to buy computer-y bits online, then I will strongly recommend Googlegear, and will further recommend either (1) using FedEx instead or (2) requiring a signature from UPS since if they think you got your package then they're not going to do a damned thing to help out.

And yes, I'm still pissed off. Why do you think this public jeremiad is making its appearance?

Oh yeah ... the hard drive showed up in my mailbox Friday morning. It was probably misdelivered to a neighbor who stuffed it into the mailbox Friday morning as they went to work. The laptop survived its surgery, and things are back to normal. Now that Kathy can check her email on her own machine again, I'm golden.

Microsoft have finally admitted what the rest of us figured out quite a while back: as a brand, ".Net" can't possibly mean anything if it includes everything in sight. So, they're dropping dot-net from their unrelated products. Occasionally, they do seem to show quick flashes of cluefulness.

Usually, I'm able to resist this sort of thing, but alas, I'm too weak today. (Found via Jim Henley)

Mang! I must have been sleeping or something. The Apache foundation has released Apache Axis, an implementation of SOAP in a yummy stable 1.0 release. It's so tasty, in fact, that it's passed Sun's JAX-RPC and SAAJ compliance tests. I'll be having some now, thank you very much.

How did I miss this? The Supreme Court lifted their injunction on the distribution of the DeCSS program, which decrypts the information off a DVD. Hooray for fair use!

A real first on the Internet. Pictures from SomethingAwful.com that haven't been photoshopped. Will wonders never cease?

There used to be a time (long, long ago) when there were images on the Internet which weren't porn. I'm sure many of you nice folks out there can't remember this magical time of lore, but trust me, it once existed. During that time, a brave SA Forum Member did a Google Image Search for the phrase "The Greatest Picture Ever." Google, like always, did not disappoint and returned a marvelous image, but it also brought up the question, "what image do you feel is the greatest picture on the Internet?" Forum members immediately began tossing in their favorite non-Photoshopped images to the thread, turning it into .a surreal, comical series of non-sequiturs. Why are these pictures funny? I don't have any idea, I just know that these are some of the greatest pictures on the Internet.

Apparently, our engineering students do have a little too much spare time. People's Exhibit #1: Squirrel Fishing

Derek Lowe has this to say about the Raelian brouhaha:

My opinion of the human clone claims can be easily expressed: bullshit. Look, you fools: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Come up with multiple blood samples now for DNA microsatellite analysis, in full view of multiple witnesses, or shut up. This is an important issue, and watching all of you hit each other with pies and try to cram yourselves back into the midget car isn't very instructive.

[ed. emphasis in original]