Bahahahahaha! I'm about as likely to downgrade to their mp3 player as I am to go back to a PC. Ain't gonna happen Mikey...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc. (Nasdaq:DELL - news) is running a promotion that gives customers $100 off on some of its Dell Digital Jukebox music players if customers send in to the No. 1 personal computer maker their old Apple iPods to be recycled, the company said on Wednesday.
The mail-in rebate offer applies to Dell's 15-gigabyte music player, which carries a regular price of $199, said the Round Rock, Texas, company. The player has a battery life of about 20 hours, about two times that of Apple Computer Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) market-leading iPod, Dell said.

[ Indeed. I hear people deride the Cult of Mac psychology and the way in which Mac users tend to see their Apple kit as part of a lifestyle, whereas the pragmatic PC users treat their systems as tools. I'm no zealot... i believe in the right tool for the job, which isn't always gonna have an apple on it. But for me, it *is* a lifestyle choice. It's me saying, "I value style, design and the experience every bit as much as i value the end product of my efforts." It's why i'd have art on the wall of my home, if i could afford it, and nice stylish furniture... because i desire more than the plain pragmatic use of a wall as a separator. Maybe I'm pretentious, but it's a quality of life thing, and yeah, my computer, which i use for a very noticable percentage of my life, needs to reflect those same features, if it's within my means. Fortunately, my powerbook gives me great pleasure to use, beyond getting the basic task done. -k]

Dell Offers $100 Rebate for Old Apple iPods

] Authorities charged Councilman with violating the Wiretap
] Act, which governs unauthorized interception of
] communication. But the court found that because the
] e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM,
] of the defendant's computer system when he copied them,
] he did not intercept them while they were in transit over
] wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even
] though he copied the messages before the intended
] recipients read them. The court ruled that the messages
] were in storage rather than transit.

[ Is this total bullshit, or should they have gone after this guy under a different guise? What if the guy had a clickthru when people signed up that any email coming to that address may be read and that they have no expectation of privacy on that system?

Seems to me like he should have done the latter, if indeed he didn't, and that this interpretation of the law is exceedingly narrow, and wrong. But, of course, I'm no lawyer. -k]

E-Mail Snooping Ruled Permissible

The technologies, if approved by the Food and Drug Administration, would not only find cancers in their earliest stages before they can do damage or spread, but also deliver a small amount of a drug targeted directly at tumors, which would cause little or no side effects.

Pretty neat.

Wired News: Nano Killers Aim at Mini Tumors

] Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! I'm here today to talk
] to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for
] the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff
] (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a
] kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally
] they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and
] send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble.
] I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing
] completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk
] about DRM. I lead a double life: I'm also a science
] fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight,
] because I've been dreaming of making my living from
] writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based
] biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's
] every bit as important to me as yours is to you. Here's
] what I'm here to convince you of: 1. That DRM systems
] don't work 2. That DRM systems are bad for society 3.
] That DRM systems are bad for business 4. That DRM systems
] are bad for artists 5. That DRM is a bad business-move
] for MSFT It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk
] a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of
] time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around
] to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft
] DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world.
] Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this
] issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to
] soak up without driving the engine block back into the
] driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft
] might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular
] momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.

This is a great talk Cory Doctorow gave at MSFT recently regarding all of the arguments we have made over the years regarding DRM. (via boingboing)

Why Microsoft should get out of DRM

] VisitorVille employs a graphical, urban metaphor to
] present information about customers' real-time
] Web-traffic flow. A company's entire Web presence is seen
] as an urban or suburban neighborhood, with each
] individual Web page presented as a building. The more
] visitors on a site, the taller the buildings, and the
] brighter the lights on each floor.
]
] Continuing the metaphor, visitors who have found a site
] using popular search engines arrive in the "city" on
] virtual buses emblazoned with their logos.

This is neat. Really neat. Worth looking at. Unfortunately it works by using a web-bug. Their website is slow. Really slow. I don't want to tie the performance of my site to theirs. I don't want their server holding complete logs for my website. I also don't want to pay bling bucks host their software. Nor do I want to put their bug into all of my pages. You'd think they could handle Apache logs. Apache has something like 60% of the market.

Wired News: Website Analysis Isn't a Game

[ Sounds like a cool project, if those unknowns get answered... -k]

The Red-Dead Conveyance Project

] Cingular today announced that it has selected Lucent to
] deploy a WCDMA/UMTS and HSDPA trial network in Atlanta.
] The 3G network will use 1900 MHz PCS spectrum to test
] WCDMA/UMTS technology, supporting data rates up to 384
] Kbps. Cingular will also test the network with Lucent's
] High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSPDA)software
] upgrade. HSDPA boosts WCDMA data rates to as high as 14.4
] Mbps.

[ cooool! -k]

Cingular Taps Lucent for WCDMA/HSDPA Trial Network (Phone Scoop) 14.4 MBPS WIRELESS IN ATLANTA

] The Washington think tank responsible for 'Linux aids
] terrorism' claims two years ago is at it again. The
] Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is now casting doubt on
] Linus Torvalds' authorship of Linux, and implying that
] it's a knock-off of Unix.

Can we say "libel?"

[ Leave it to the register to come up with exactly the right headline... just dripping with that british sarcasm. Anyway, this report is a huge load of crap... tailored perfectly to come out just in time to scare a few more fools out of their OSS plans. And they better get it out before IBM finally and definitively smacks SCO into utter oblivion and lays down the law, literally, on the validity of the code in Linux. Or at least, that's what seems likely at present.

I'd love to see the AdTI jackasses get pasted for defamation tho, that'd be great. -k]

Alien puppet Linus swiped Linux from SCO, says balanced study

Well, I've been agitating for some friends of mine to help me work on this for the better part of a year. Now, its here. But the glory goes to someone else.

I wish I had a compatible cellphone...

] As of this moment, semacode reader is now available as a
] free download for your Symbian/Series 60 phone. It's been
] a while that we've been working on this, and we also have
] a preliminary semacode creator up for your creative
] uses. I've written updates site-wide, with lots of
] pictures, screen shots, a quick start guide, and
] there's more. Join the mailing list. Send us an email;
] join the mailing list. Enjoy! #

[ Decius certainly wins on this one... i remember when he brought this up to us, at least a year ago. Too bad we're all such slackers that he couldn't motivate us. Nonetheless, i think this bodes well for Memestreams... the vision behind it is genuine.

I guess I should extrapolate a moral from the story and volunteer some perl hacking time to the project... -k]

Semacode: BarCode to URL translation for the people

] SmarterChild, for those not in the know, is America
] Online's artificial intelligence program. That's right -
] an AOL IM AI.

Elonka says:

The IM-bot SmarterChild disappeared for awhile, but seems to be back now. I find it enormously useful, since it's a quick way to get word definitions, find out what movies are playing, check the weather in a city that I'm traveling to, look up an encyclopedia entry, check a stock quote, etc. etc., all in plain english queries, "What's the weather forecast for Butte, MT?" "What time is Hidalgo playing?" or "What time is Hidalgo playing at the St. Charles 18?"

Or, when I'm really bored (or just want to procrastinate), it's fun testing the limits of its conversational ability, like to ask it about its parents (which it does indeed respond to).

If you haven't checked this out this bot yet, I recommend it. Just open an IM window and send a message (any message, even just "hi!") to "SmarterChild", and watch the time-wasting begin. :)

[ It's pretty rad. Certainly if i didn't have sherlock to answer this sort of thing, i'd use it pretty much all the time... when i'm away from the mac, i'll definitely use it... -k]

Observational Humor - Conversations with SmarterChild