Mitchie Brusco seems like your average 5-year-old boy.

He loves Power Rangers and his favorite movie is ``Spider-Man.'' He spends hours on swing sets, and he still thinks school will be fun once he attends.

But when Mitchie hops onto a skateboard, he is anything but average.

He is becoming one of biggest -- and smallest -- sensations in Northwest skateboarding.

Mitchie, who lives in Kirkland, is a skateboarding prodigy -- already sponsored by six different companies.

He has won his past three competitions, including the first-place trophy at the 8-and- under Northwest League Competition held in Portland in June.

The win earned Mitchie an all-expenses-paid trip to the Gravity Games in Cleveland, one of the biggest skateboarding events in North America.

``Everybody has a talent,'' said his mother, Jennifer Brusco. ``I think he just found his sooner than most.''

southcountyjournal.com - Skating prodigy, 5, turning heads

I was pretty bummed when they whacked the Olivetti lab that was working on VNC, but some righteous Russian dude has picked up the slack AND added a boatload of features. Check it:

Local cursor handling
Efficient compression algorithms
Optional JPEG compression (Phat!)
Automatic SSH tunneling on Unix

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks great.

TightVNC: An Enhanced VNC Distribution

Man opens strip club in 'sovereign nation' south of Twin Cities

Associated Press

Published Nov. 18, 2002
STRI19

ELKO, Minn. -- An Ojibwe man has declared a piece of land in this tiny town a sovereign nation, opened a strip club and pledged to fight anyone who tries to mess with either.

``There ain't no way on God's Earth that they're going to stop me,'' said Al LaFontaine, 82, of St. Paul.

It's not the first time LaFontaine has said that.

In 1959, he offered to sell a third of North Dakota to the Soviet Union and he's put forth a variety of schemes to build casinos on land that he's bought and declared sovereign.

Man opens strip club in 'sovereign nation' south of Twin Cities

Tommaso Toffoli, a quantum computer researcher, puts it best: "In a sense, nature has been continually computing the 'next state' of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do — and, actually, all we can do — is 'hitch a ride' on this huge, ongoing Great Computation."

Wired 10.12: God Is the Machine

ooh! how to make a duct-tape wallet. i'm going to try!

Sean's Duct Tape Wallet - The Sequel

this gave me a little bit of a chuckle.

Realistic Internet Simulator - B3ta.com

Giving License to Creativity: Our initial goal is to provide an easy way for people (like scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and authors--from world-renowned professionals to garage-based amateurs) to announce that their works are available for copying, modification, and redistribution. We are building a Web-based application for dedicating copyrighted works to the "public domain," and for generating flexible, generous licenses that permit copying and creative reuses of copyrighted works.

Creative Commons

Interesting analysis of news stories from 10 different media outlets. Passages are quoted from 1998 and 2002. All of these passages relate to the big lie that UN weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998. It's a bold faced lie being propagated by the following culprits:

ABC News
NBC News
Associated Press, The
Los Angeles Times, The
National Public Radio
Cable News Network
USA Today
New York Times, The
Washington Post, The
Newsday

Not terribly shocking given the corporate media consolidation in the last decade (what are we down to now, like 4 or 5 major holding corporations?) but I've never seen it laid out in such a clear, concise before and after format.

History, recovered

[Originally from Decius:]

"Britney Spears is among the pop stars fronting a new advertising campaign aimed at warning people against online piracy."

...

The TV adverts will be shown at a Congressional hearing on piracy in Washington on Thursday before making their debut on US screens a few weeks later.

...

"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD," said Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA)

...

[Hijexx's Commentary]

piracy (from dictionary.com):

1. a) Robbery committed at sea. b) A similar act of robbery, as the hijacking of an airplane.
2. The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy.
3. The operation of an unlicensed, illegal radio or television station.

I agree, begrudingly, that downloading and using copyrighted music does, in fact, break the law. That is not to say that the law is just (thanks to Walt Disney's palm greasing.) If all the RIAA can muster is Britney's Pears (sorry little girl, it's all about your tits, always has been) and Missy Elliot to preach to the masses, I'd say we have not a thing to worry about on that front.

What is disconcerting to me is the Nazi style, Joseph Goebbels inspired propaganda being spewed by Hilary Rosen. Two times in this article the idea of an "unlicensed internet service" is mentioned. I am not making this up. Folks, there is NO SUCH THING as an "unlicensed internet service" in the context of peer to peer networking. It's a glorified telephone with theoretically unlimited conferencing abilities, that's about it.

As Goebbels proved, if you repeat a lie enough, eventually people believe it. This is especially the case when said people are unwashed (dare I say brainwashed?) mass consumers.

Moo.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Britney's Pears warns against piracy

Tim Lawrence has found a drug that is far more effective at controlling the symptoms of his Parkinson's Disease than any prescribed by a doctor.

The only problem is that it is Ecstasy, the illegal and dangerous stimulant much favoured by night-club ravers.

His discovery could overturn 30 years of medical thought, and eventually lead to a new treatment for Parkinson's.

BBC News | HEALTH | Ecstasy 'relieves Parkinson's Disease'