Ok now this is getting goofy. With everyone attacking Napster for the whole MP3 thing the consensus among a lot of people has been 'Yeah, but what about gnutella?' even if they do manage to put Napster out of business. Well someone has just decided to sue AOL for for assisting (indirectly) the development of gnutella. So they cant sue gnutella, but they can attack AOL.

However, as described, it would appear to be a lawsuit based more on desperation than it is in law." According to the Times, MP3Board argues in its filing that it has committed no copyright violations in it service. But if it should lose its suit, the company argues, AOL and Time Warner should help shoulder any penalties because of their indirect role creating the Gnutella program.

Ah yes.. the perfect way to piss off our oh so wonderful political system. a Political Science grad has started up a website offering up votes in the presidential election in an open auction.

"The election industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to influence the presidential election, This system is an inefficient waste of money for the candidates and their supporters. Voteauction.com is committed to improving this system by bringing the campaign contributors' money directly to the voters."

The highest bidder pays up and the group of voters from the website all vote for the candidate of the bidders choosing. Being as I dont follow politics much I just find this amusing as all hell from the outside.

To celebrate my sweetie's birthday I'm making this special post.  I'll be keeping an eye on you punks today.   So everyone better be extra nice and take care of my passion plum.  Come join me in the festivities of Steve reaching 25 and (hopefully) puberty!

Shitty story of the day has got to be this one that Sean sent to me. Some dude was in an outdoor toilet (Outhouse) and the floor fell out of it and he went plunging down into the poopy sludge. It gets worse, he was trapped and couldnt get out for 3 days. He said it best: "I tell you what, it was hard to get one breath down there," I bet.

"Down it went and took me with it,'' he said. ``I thought it was an earthquake. Then I realized where I was at. ... I done a lot of hollering, but nobody couldn't hear me."

Shit happens? I um.. cant think of any other poop jokes.

Yeah! unless you are some kind of commy you have probably watched and enjoyed The Simpsons. Matt Groening (the creator of the show) announced Wednesday in London that there will be a Simpsons movie. (Thanks Hazel & |HAWKEYe|)

"It's a little daunting coming up with a half-hour TV episode, let alone a full-length feature..."

I'm wondering if they will go with the standard PG level of stuff or will push PG13... Would be interesting to see Homer say 'Bart, you cocksmoker'. The SouthPark movie (as comparisons will be made for sure) pulled off a worthwhile feature, but that was mostly due to pure shock value than anything else. Not sure I see Simpsons doing that, they are a bit more high-brow.

Apologies for lack of updates, but as expected I'm out on errands. Just found this article which has word that the internet media is banned from covering the Olympics (!) Lookie:

The Olympic organizers strenuously defend the deals that keep the Net far from the action. The IOC sells the broadcast rights for billions of dollars to finance the Games and support the various sports governing bodies that select the athletes and judges. As the exclusive U.S. TV broadcaster, NBC can recoup the costs -- and make a sizable profit -- selling ad time to major sponsors

I'll be back online with email etc later this evening, and will wrap up more gaming stuff then.

The Register has an entertaining story about a recent survey that looked at how much a person's PC can tell about someone's personality, just like with cars or clothes.

This has got to be bad news for anyone with a one gig processor. These speed machines are clearly the penis extensions of the digital age, if this survey is to be believed.

They checked PC owners, laptop owners and also iMac owners. Of all the things to do a study on...

Well, it looks like ESPN has found out why Steve is moving to Redmond from Plano.

According to a new study, violent games aren't bad for you. As long as you dont play longer than an amazing 15 minutes. If you read the article, it pretty much changes from "parents need to pay a little more attention to the contents of the games that their children are playing " to "there was no evidence that the children became more violent or less empathetic after playing the games".

The research, presented yesterday at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, D.C., adds to the growing number of studies that say that there is a link between violent behavior and an attraction to violent video games. The problem is no one knows for sure how they're related.

Money well spent.

About as closely related to gaming as Steve wearing a cowboy hat, but everyone must've seen Survivor at least once by now. It turns out that their executive producer is a l33t hax0r. For a while he was trying to trick people into thinking Gervase Peterson was going to win, by editing the credits of the show and pretending a hacker broke into the site and made an X on everyone's face except Peterson. "It's all in good fun" is what he says. Peterson got booted out last week. But hey, that producer just knows he can never be as 1337 as JeffK.

Yet another one of my updates without anything to do with games. Woo hoo! Anyway, while Maarten and Steve are playing grabass with CliffyB at QuakeCon, me and Andy remained here in good old Austin because a friend came into town. Well, we're at a bar on 6th street last night and Andy was driving so he was having water. The most responsible waitress ever came up to us at had this conversation:

[Waitress] Would you like something instead of your water now?
[Andy] No thanks, I'm driving.
[Waitress] Oh come on, it's Friday night!

Now that's what I call being desperate for tips - risking your patrons' lives! Never a dull moment!

Havent had one of these today and I thought hey wtf its a Monday and Mondays always suck. Things could suck worse though, check out these stories:

- Some dude got shot for his sunglasses. They were valued at $1,000 though.. eek
- 8,000 Minnesota students got shafted on with bad test score results (which were wrong) and some may have even missed out on graduation due to the error
- A house exploded just south of Chicago that could be heard miles away. Crazy
- A 91yr old guy was going crazy with a shotgun and the police hosed him (literally) (Thanks Carnivac)

Here is an interesting story of the little man winning one. Recently clan page Sting.com got a legal letter from the singer Sting basically asking (demanding) that they give up the domain to the singer. Instead of caving in though they went to court, and won!

I believe that owning a domain name as a home for my "internet persona" clearly shows a legitimate interest, but in my case the panel's opinion was that a handle is used for anonymity and therefore it was ruled that I had no legitimate interest.[snip] I believe I was fortunate in my case that I am using a "common english word" as a domain name, and to have a fair panel to decide the case.

Its good that he won but um.. arent both people in question using an alias? Sting isnt that guys real name either, but because one of them is using the alias on the internet instead of 'real life' the court doesnt see it as legit? Bah.

Anyone suffering from insert_query errors when posting, should now be able to post error free. Sorry it took so long to get fixed, but I started up a contracting job with 3dfx on Monday so I haven't been able to put in as much time on the Shack during the week. Plus it was a fairly tough one to track down, since neither Steve or I could reproduce it. There is a pretty rare error left, that I assume is browser dependant, because I can't see how it could happen unless either someone is trying to hack posts or is using a browser that doesn't know how to properly post form data. If you get the error "content length expected" let me know, I'm curious about it.

Hey neeto, NASA has released the details on their planned mission to Mars in 2003. They kinda goofed up the past 2 missions (My favorite being that metric system mix-up) but fear not! NASA is gonna spend another 400million and hopefully they'll land on the planet this time. This is just a robotic rover that will drive around on the surface, not a human mission just yet.

NASA’s plan had called for its 2003 mission to be followed by further probes that eventually would bring Martian samples back to Earth for analysis. But the precise schedule and goals for long-term Mars exploration are still under discussion as part of the space agency’s wider-ranging strategic review.

If you call yourself a computer geek this stuff has to interest ya. Its almost as cool as scratchin yur gonads with your eyes closed and a stain on your shirt.

Some follow-up to that bit about Stephen King selling chapters of his book on the internet in an attempt to bypass publishers. It seems to have been a success in some points, but a failure in others. Most amazingly they are claiming to have actually hit the 75% paying readers goal (!?!?) but the actual number of people paying for the first chapter is only in the 40,000 range. (awww.. poor guy only made $40,000 for his first chapter of a book)

"When the dust settles, Marsha and I are hoping - quite reasonably, we think - for a pay-through rate of 85-90 per cent. [snip] Regarding sales, King admitted they weren't equal to the previous book he sold online, Riding The Bullet, but said that the publicity campaign for this second book had been smaller.

This kind of strategy and the surprising success they are claiming could have some interesting possible impacts on other industries. (read: games) Well, maybe..

Several people sent in this story (but I saw it first, so nyah!) that AOL has finally done the evil deed. ICQ is now carrying banner advertisements. It was only a question of when though. Even though it is AOL, a free service is a free service. If you have a recent ICQ install the auto-updater will run without even asking you and install the new stuff to handle the banners.

ICQ users started seeing advertisements late Monday afternoon after launching the ICQ application. Based on initial observations, it seems ICQ must be restarted before Auto Update kicks in to patch the client.

Here's something for 'fight the man' day. Famed author Stephen King is posting a portion of one of his books on the net for download. It's a new work called The Plant. Mr. King is trying something new. He's looking to publish a book on the net without the middle man book publishers (Who take a large chunk of profits). Lookie:

...a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare. Not only are we going glueless, look Ma, no e-Book! No tiresome encryption! Want to print it and show it to a friend? Go ahead! There's only one catch: all this is on the honor system.

Mr. King says he'll publish at least the first 2 parts, and if the experiment works out and 75% of the people who grab the document send in $1 a piece, he'll continue to publish more of the story. Thanks JCal @ Stomped

The man holding you down? You're not alone. Here are a couple of stories which should make it easy to funnel your hate towards the government and large corporations. Firstly, the US Government asked a dozen large ISPs to host their 'carnivore' machines a while back and now they are defending them. The boxes basically monitor net activity and spy on unknowing users. You gotta love this quote:

"The FBI's position is essentially, 'Trust us, we're the government,'"

On top of that, NSI (the people until recently who handled all domain name registrations) Appears to be holding on to domains as they expire and keeping other people from picking them up according to a few reports around the web. Supposedly this has been going on for a few months now. What are they gonna do with the domains? Well auction them of course. Great...

Your nerdy story of the day or something, thanks to Wilka. Researchers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton have broken the light speed barrier by some 300 times, according to this article. With some lasers, a chamber containing cold caesium atoms and a super-fast stopwatch (heh) they created this effect

Scientists have seen a pulse of light emerge from a cloud of gas before it even entered

According to Einstein, it would never be possible to go faster than light, and right now scientists aren't even sure how this is happening. No such things as travelling back in time ever gonna happen though, but they can reduce the time between cause and effect just a little bit.

Update : euh seems Steve has posted this story a while back. I blame the BBC, or maybe Steve can travel time huh. I will never trust English people again :~(