Online worlds such as Second Life will soon become training grounds for artificial intelligences.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Online worlds to be AI incubators

MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video

The Windows Genuine Advantage plan became a genuine disadvantage over the weekend when the server that verified users went down and began to disable operating systems around the world. At least, it disabled the operating systems of computers that checked into the home base to affirm their legitimacy.

Dvorak on the WGA outage over the weekend and by extension, the big problem with "software as a service."

Don't Trust the Servers - Columns by PC Magazine

Yesterday the new Gerhard Richter glass window was unveiled at the Cologne Cathedral. It looks like a group of pixels and is stunning to look at.

This is neat.

Boing Boing: New Pixelated Glass Window in Cologne Cathedral

This is the (extraordinarily obvious) point the Wall Street Journal missed when it chimed in yesterday in support of the Senator. As the Journal wrote:

Her answer was met with jeers, but what Mrs. Clinton was daring to tell her left-wing audience is that lobbyists are an essential means by which average Americans transmit their political concerns to Washington, and in turn hold their elected Representatives accountable. Not everyone in America can afford to trek to D.C., or has the clout to demand an audience with a Senator. Lobbyists represent the collective voice of groups with shared ideals, whether they be gun owners, union workers, corporate employees or the pro-choice movement.

Just the sort of reasoning that makes that page so famous: Look, lawyers represent their clients before a judge. Does it follow from that that judges must be free to take money from lawyers? Even just to redecorate their office?

On Clinton and lobbyists (Lessig Blog)

Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.

Groklaw - Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive!

DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: f*** the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. F*** him. F*** him to hell.

YAY! F**k the dim!

A Special Way of Being Afraid: David Simon Doesn't Care for Your Lawn Furniture

Here's an article by one of the more bizare writers at Wired, discussing several breakfast cereals. Considering that I eat some generics I usually call "Shucky Darns" I find this pretty amusing.

Lore Sjöberg on Movie Cereals

k wrote:
This is already awesome, but even more, i want this with a 12 hour cycle.

This is way cool. It would be fun to deconstruct some pop tunes and visualize them with this technique.

RE: whitney music box var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines

When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...
...
As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

Welcome to America | www.guardian.co.uk