ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.

Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products

Not 1, but 2 people told me about the Thin Mint Straw this weekend. I had never heard of before this weekend so I gave it a try.

-Take 1 Girl Scouts Thin Mint cookie
-Take 2 a small bites on opposite sides of the cookie. Just enough to get through the chocolate coating to the crunchy cookie
-Insert cookie into milk; use as a straw.

It sounds silly but you'll wonder why you never did it before.

Interview With Cryptographer Elonka Dunin

from the old-school-geeks dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running a very interesting article with the DEF CON speaker and cryptographer Elonka Dunin. The article covers her career and specifically her involvement with the CIA and other US Military agencies."

Awsome! Elonka looks like Meryl Streep in that photo.

Slashdot | Interview With Cryptographer Elonka Dunin

Bored in the final minutes of the day I did a Google search for "WOPR site:.mil"

Instead of a global thermonuclear war playing computer, I found "Wing Office of Primary Responsibility"

The world would be more fun if there were global thermonuclear war playing computers running on .mil sites...

Metal Gear Solid 3 for stealing 3 days of my life... [checks watch]... shit, now its Sunday, so make that 4 days.

[Does google search for "Atlanta Crime"]

Local results for crime near Atlanta, GA:
-Crime Victims Advocacy Council - 9.3 miles NW - 3101 Paces Mill Rd NW, Atlanta, 30339 - (770) 333-9254

-Crime Victims - 9.3 miles NW - 238 Paces Mill Rd Se, Atlanta, 30339 - (770) 384-0300

-Georgia Network To End Assault - 1.6 miles N - 131 Ponce De Leon Ave NE # 122, Atlanta, 30308 - (404) 815-5261

Google Search:Atlanta Crime

From - Sat Nov 05 02:50:29 2005
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 02:50:28 -0500
From: Acidus (acidus@yak.net)
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050317)
To: tonykel nkem (djkelvin2003@yahoo.com)
Subject: Re: sort code

tonykel nkem wrote:

: i have some valid credit card with the billing information how can i
: get or generate the cvv2 or cvc of the card plz i need reply.
: hacker kelvin

Step 1. Remove your pants
Step 2. Insert your dick into your own ass
Step 3. Go fuck yourself

Sincerely,
Acidus

A Dutch dentist who amputated his own finger and attempted to convince insurers that it had been severed in a car crash was fined €25,000 yesterday for the failed fraud, Reuters reports.

The unnamed 50-year-old snipped off his pinkie before piling his car into a tree in Belgium. He claimed €1.8m from insurers, saying the finger had been chopped off by the vehicle's steering wheel.

However, the master fraudster had failed to consider the forensic evidence, which showed "the shape of the cut on his index finger, the level of anaesthetic in his blood and the absence of skid marks on the road" pointed to a scam.

Dutch dentist amputates own finger for fraud

Writely is a web word processor that provides simple and secure document collaboration and publishing on the web using only the browser.

Neat web appliation that includes some nice collaboration features.

Writely - Tour the Web Word Processor

The Birth of geocoder.us

Strangely enough, the removal of useful features from online map services seemed to occur right before a surge of interest in free sources of geodata among the free and open source software community.

Collecting this data and keeping it up to date with "ground truth squads" who go around and verify that streets are where they are supposed to be and that houses haven't up and run off, is quite expensive.

An alternative to the full expense of this data lies in the U.S. Census Bureau. They have compiled TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system) data. TIGER data is used as part of the normal fulfillment of their duties to do an actual enumeration of the people every 10 years. This data is imperfect, but the regular tasks of census workers are similar to our own needs. They wish to identify the location of a residence based on a street address, just as we do when we geocode.

Again, it is important to stress that TIGER data is imperfect, however "imperfect but free" has its own charm. TIGER data is also used as the basis for the free TIGER Map Server offered by the Census Bureau at http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapsurfer.

There is a lot of interesting information about geography and the challenges of capturing complex and inconsistent information to be found in the TIGER documentation. But for simple geocoding, all you really need to know is that the TIGER data endeavors to include information on every street segment in the U.S. For each block, the TIGER data includes the street name, the latitude and longitude at each end of the block, and the range of address numbers for the left and the right side of the street.

O'Reilly: Hacking Maps and addresses with US Census data