Amazon to Sell Non-DRM Protected MP3's

Well, it is a slow day as far as things happening, plus work is keeping me exceptionally busy this week, so my offering today is meager, and one you probably have already heard before.

Cnet confirms reports that Amazon.com is going to enter the MP3 market, and if I am correct they are going to sell non-DRM protected MP3's. Cool. I really liked Rhapsody, but the download, burn to a CD, then RIP cycle got old fast. I'm willing to pay for my media, just don't make it a pain in the rear for me to manipulate it when I can within 5 minutes find a DRM free hacked copy of a song on the internet. Hopefully Amazon will get it right.

Read more [HERE].

Iraqi WMD's

It looks like a small sample of an Iraqi chemical warfare agent that had been removed from Iraq by our good friends at the U.N. "in the last decade" turned up in the U.N.'s New York offices.

Would that mean that it was retrieved in '97? I thought Iraq's WMD's had all been destroyed before then? No?

Read more [HERE].

The Cat Lady

Here she is...I thought this was computer animation...nope, it is real.




and the musical

Anyone Want to Go Into The Bottled Water Business?

I've got a hose...let's run it through a filter and sell it in plastic bottles as "Le Wa-tur"

Read more about the sad state of the bottled water industry [HERE].

AeroGel: Meet the New Armor and Insulator of the Future.

This stuff is amazing.

Read more about it from Wired's defense blog [HERE].

IVS for Second Life

It looks like Second Life is going to implement some sort of identity verification system (ISV) in the game, and from the blog post below it sounds pretty hard core. If you read through some of my other post about Second Life and Identity Bending it will not be hard to see that I like this. Yet the whole "cross checking with other public databases" seems a tad on the Orwellian side.

Hopefully this ISV will kill a lot of the 50 year old dudes playing 18 year old chicks type of activities that are way common in Second Life. But what the Lindens may find out is that the population of the game might drop by about 50% once they have the ISV in place. I'm cool with that (bu bye freaks), but will the Lindens be with a significant loss of freak revenue?

Well, the ISV is in infant beta stages, let's see if the perv lobby will get together and muster up enough political strength to mute the ISV from having any real usefulness. Hopefully not.

Anyway, read more [HERE].

More Media Control Revealed

A senator recently made the headlines for getting busted trolling for sex in a public restroom in a Minneapolis airport. Now that the story is out liberal bloggers are having all sorts of fun with it, as they probably should have.

But that isn't what interest me here. What interest me here is that the arrest happened THREE months ago. You mean to tell me no news outlets got wind of it until a week ago? Doubtful.

If the story was discovered and suppressed, just like bad news suppressed about other politicians, it shows that there is an element of filtering going on about what we see and when we see it. I don't like that. I want data, not fast food information. This also shows that this filtering is broad and deap in the established American and perhaps global press.

Editor and Publisher elaborates on that point [HERE].

Allegid "Scientific" Theory for Out of Body Experiences

Interesting article. Even more interesting is that allegidly out of body experiences affect 1 in 10 people. Which is a greater number then I thought.

Read the article [HERE].

Feds Nab the Yellow Submarine.

Yes, we all have heard that the yellow submarine sung about by the Beatles was something drug related. Well, it looks like the U.S. Navy busted the yellow submarine today, even though it was has been painted blue.

Read more [HERE].

Another one from http://www.drudgereport.com/

What Makes Success

I stumbled on a small video today that is worth taking a look at. It is just three minutes, and it hits on eight factors leading to success.


Check it out [HERE].

Always keep in mind though the words of the one who created it all, Jesus.

"What good does it do if a man gains the whole world but looses his soul?"

But still, whatever you do, you should do it with all your heart, ideally to glorify God who gave you the passion and the talents to do what you are doing in the first place. If you don't have a passion for what you are doing...maybe you should be doing something else. Something I struggle with at times.

More on Virtual Identities: Identity Bending and Freaks

I met my real life girl friend and most likely future wife on Second Life. I will always be thankful to the platform for that. But we have a really big problem here...or maybe we don't. To me it is, to others it is not. What's the problem? Identity Bending. It is one thing to enter a virtual world and maybe make an avatar a little more thin, a little more attractive, a little more stronger appearing, then how you appear in real life. But where does it end? Fifty year old men playing 19 year old women? So called "Age Play"? Furries? More importantly, what responsibilities do you have to let others know that you aren't as you appear? Are people deliberately deceiving others about who they are so they can fulfill their twisted fantasies? If so, do they have any accountability for this? Are they doing wrong? I think so.

Read this article on the Second Life Herald found [HERE] for a sad commentary on Identity Bending. It is just another nail in the coffin for me in my thoughts concerning Second Life.

Reading this article, and more importantly, reading the comments made in response to this article, just made me sick. Is Second Life just full of a bunch of closet homosexuals playing out their gender bending fantasies?

Groups are making valiant attempts to use Second Life. I do think there is validity to the argument that encountering someone in a virtual space brings a greater sense of presence then say having a 2D chat or a webx or net meeting. Virtual businesses are trying to wrap their heads around Second Life and use its potential. I hail these people, and I am one myself to a lesser degree. You see potential and are willing to be on the bleeding edge of technology adoption. But we are continuously failing in Second Life. Why?

Let's face it. The potential for serious use and even game use if Second Life is there, but not really close to what it needs to be for SL to fly. So we have this crappy virtual world where we can't do much except text and voice chat in small groups and animate our characters and listen to music. We can't really game or do game type activities due to lag and the crappy game engine.

So where does that leave Second Life as? A virtual stalking ground for social encounters. And it looks like the primary draw of Second Life is to homo's and pervs. This is why serious users (except maybe the fringe world of academia who have isolated "islands" in Second Life and less accountability for immediate results) are failing. The target demographic in Second Life, I really, really, hate to admit, is a bunch of pervs. Not all, there are many good people in Second Life trying to make the crappy virtual world into something akin to the mythical metaverse (And hats off to Linden Labs for making a low tech stab at making the metaverse...you aren't there but you are closer then anyone who had come before you). But based on my own experience it seems like over 70% of Second Life's denizens are there to live out their perverted secret fantasies. Is this something I want to be involved with? It is too bad, because I've had some great experiences in Second Life. I've met some great people there. And I've seen Second Life enable physically challenged people in RL to enjoy being fully functional in the virtual world. But Second Life is just too full of whack jobs for me. The more I read, the more people I encounter lately in second life, the more I get depressed and find myself logging in less and less. The initial attempts at making more activities to do in SL besides cybersex are mostly abandoned or have disappeared.

Maybe one day I'll take the queue and vanish like millions of others already have.

Russia's New UACV

The Russian's are in the UCAV game too.

Check out their first prototype [HERE].

The New Flying Wing

This is a pretty cool video unearthed by the wired defense blogger guys of an an experimental flying wing aircraft. Note its orientation...it is flying at a 45 degree angle. Pretty trippy.




Wired Defense article is [HERE].

Virtual Identities: A Tale of Deception and Murder

This one was made for TV. I don't want to spoil it for you, but lets just say there is a cool twist at the end. This article on wired is long, but worth the read. It was made for an ABC TV movie to capitalize on real or perceived Internet identity fears.


Read it all [HERE]. Page three is where it gets good.

If you don't want to read the article, here is the skinny. Old guy pretends to be young marine in Iraq. Meets young girl online. Romance. Old dude's wife finds out, lets young girl know. Young girl finds solace in Old dude's younger friend. Old dude goes crazy, kills younger dude. Police investigate. Find out young girl was really an old fat mother of two.

Ah the tangled webs we weave.

Funny: Dwarf get His...You Know...Glued to a Vaccum

Sad that we laugh at other's misery...but I'm laughing. This guy kinda brought it on himself.

Read the sad tale [HERE] if you must.

An Example of Media Control: Iran shells villages in Iraq

It is significant to me what the American media chooses to pick up and what it chooses to ignore. It points to a cabal at worst at best an oligarchy of like minded media moguls who have incredible influence on what we hear, the context in which we hear it, and when we hear it. With the world wide web we see some gaps here in there in their control, as they don't move as a unified whole.

So what am I talking about? Iran shelling Iraq. Isn't this an act of war? Isn't this a significant event? It is, but our media overloads have decided that it would not be prudent to "stir up the masses" on this one. The story leaked...but why isn't Fox news, CNN, and for that matter the Comedy Channel picking up on this story? And when and if they do, will the story just be a quick blurb with a commentator saying something like "That's disturbing." Then quickly moving on the the Paris Hilton drama of the day?

Here is the story that I am referring to to use as a center point for my argument above. The BBC let it slip though...just like we heard a few rumblings of something going on with Turkey and Iraq...but not much traction. Why?

The article is [HERE].

History: CIS Style

Where back! An article about the new history guildelines for Russian schools would make Joe S. proud. More evidence that the Cold War II is on its way. This time a weakened U.S. will face an axis of powerful enemies while having fewer friends.

Read [HERE] to be depressed.

Forwarded to me by Jason Sinclair.

Second Life .Net User's Group Has Big Plans

Microsoft Developers and Second Life? We will see how it works out. But the .Net User's group in Second Life has big plans.

Check out the user's group in Second Life or the website [HERE] to get involved.

D & D Fourth Edition Announced

I'd say that from about 6th grade to 12th grade I played role playing games on average of about 20 hours a week. Then in college I realized that playing D & D, Space Master, Gamma World, Car Wars, etc... weren't really helping myself meet members of the opposite sex, so I curtailed my RPG'ing somewhat. But I still love to play when I can.

So, it was interesting to me that AD & D lives on, and there is a new 4rth edition coming out.

Here is a video teaser of what to expect.




And here is a slashdot'ed blog post with a little more info on likely and rumored rule changes. Check that out [HERE]

One of the things that D & D has been plagued by is the argument that D & D in particular and RPG's in general promote occultism and pagan world views. I sometimes struggle with that. Most of the arguments I hear are B.S., but this article brings up a few good points. I think RPG's, along with music, tv, new age philosophies, have all had a huge and I hate to admit generally negative impact on our culture.

But you decide, read Chick's take [HERE].

Image Detection, JavaScript, Safari and InnerHTML

Another cross-browser DOM tip. Safari (at least versions =< 3.x) can't handle innerHTML operations until the page has loaded.

Another tip. I ran into a situation where I had to verify that an image existed remotely. Apparently the image tag supports the "onerror" method, so if the image doesn't load you can point your onerror to a javascript function to do something about the image not being available. Example <img onerror="myfunc();" src="some source" /> onerror must be lower case else earlier versions of IE won't pick it up.