Year: 2004

Sinclair-Pappas-FCC-FEC- Paging Harold Feld!

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I know Harold has just posted that he expect to be swamped until after election day, but I, for one, am very anxious to hear a Sausage Factory opinion on all the Sinclair Broadcasting fiasco, the Pappas

story, and other issues related to the public airwaves, media consolidation, and democracy.


We know you’re busy, Harold, and we’ll all wait if we have to. But this is just to let you know that there are at least a few of us out here who really do look to Sausage Factory to help us make sense of this confusing, and scary, nexus.

Living rat brain in a jar controls flight simulator

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Well, this one is just…. out there. Researchers at the Univeristy of Florida managed to grow neurons from a rat’s brain in a jar, and have it control a flight simulator.

It appears the primary goal of the research was to determine how the brain processes information. So, this really isn’t a mad scientist trying to create a race of rat-brained killer robots. At least, not yet.

(Link lifted from BoingBoing.)

Creating reality

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I’ve always been interested in the “fake it to make it” credo, which is pretending that you are something until you become that thing.

Fiction writers contiually create realities that exist on paper until someone later makes it real (like Heinlein’s waldos). When governments create realities, then what? Cyberpunk author William Gibson has begun to blog again. In a post Sun, Oct. 17, he quotes an article from the New York Times Magazine by Ron Suskind.

In the quoted section, Suskind recounts a conversation with an unnamed senior advisor to Bush.

‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’

That level of arrogance, of certainty, scares the heck out of me.

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quantum theory and relativity finally wed

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“Is causality an inherent and necessary characteristic of the Universe, or just an illusion produced by the way our brains interpret the world?”

That’s the opening line of an article in Nature news titled How to Build the Universe

After a long estrangment, quantum views of small-scale interactions and relativistic views of large-scale interaction have been married to reveal how quantum mechanics brings about the fuzzy, four-dimentional universe in which we live.

FDA approves RFID chips for human implantation

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Oh boy! The FDA has approved the same RFID technology that is used to identify pets for human implantation. This particular take on the technology over at Ars Technica is a bit off the mark, though… all an RFID does is broadcast an ID number. It’s up to whoever is doing the scanning to figure out what that ID number is for, and what database the ID number is a key to. It wouldn’t give someone a copy of your medical records unless they could look up any and all medical records in the first place. And if they can do that, they can probably look up your medical or financial records without the RFID ID number anyhow.

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Open Laszlo

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Here’s a write-up lifted from the site of Oliver Steele., Laszlo’s chief software architect. (I’m the Laszlo “doc guy.”)

As of today, the Laszlo platform for building rich internet applications is open source. This includes everything: the server software, the client software, the examples, the documentation, the language — the whole platform. Like Mozilla, this is open source with a corporate sponsor; and like Mozilla, it’s honest-to-goodness open source — no dual licensing, no poison pill. It uses the Common Public License, listed on OpenSource.org.

OpenLaszlo.org has the source distribution for our new release, LPS 2.2, which also includes support for SOAP and XML-RPC, and over 500 new pages of documentation. For developing Laszlo applications, as opposed to hacking on the source to the Laszlo compiler and runtime, I recommend the binary distribution instead, which comes with installers for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. (You don’t have to actually write any code to see some neat stuff in the standard installation.) If you want to see some examples of the kinds of applications you can write, take a look at the customer showcase, the demos, and at MyLaszlo.com. If you want to dive into the source code, look at Laszlo Explorer and the Developers Guide.

Today is part one: the source code is available, the license is free. Part two is to open up our development process, including our source repository and bug tracking systems, so that you don’t have to be at Laszlo Systems (the company) to see what’s going with Laszlo (the open source project). Currently we’re in send-mail-to-the-dev-list mode for questions, and send-us-a-patch mode for contributions — about on a par with some of my other open source projects, but we can use those corporate sponsorship $$ to do better.

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Judge overturns ISP provisions of PATRIOT act

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A judge has struck down a portion of the PATRIOT act which requires ISPs to hand over records on their customers and keep silent about the handover. The ruling means the FBI can no longer use National Security Letters to demand an ISP’s record on a customer without any sort of recourse.

The enforced silence is one of the more nasty aspects of the PATRIOT act… in fact, we covered one aspect of this earlier when the ACLU was prevented from discussing a lawsuit they filed against the NSL provisons of the PATRIOT act itself.



Read more over at News.com.

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Alert on INDUCE

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I am reproducing below a legislative call to action from the Association of American Law Libraries. You can find similar alerts and more infromation at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge.

Remember — if we do not act, we get the legislation we deserve. Pick up the phone and call these folks!

Stay tuned . . . .

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