Play Time Icon Set

INTERFACES: There are some great icons of game systems (including the fabulous GameCube and those other systems I care nothing about) at MaxThemes. The artist is Max Rudberg.







Icons are available for Windows and Mac, but Mac users can also find some other cool icons and system tweaks for their system at MaxThemes. Also, note that the mac versions won't have those jagged lines; those are unique for us old-skool (a.k.a. lame) .ico users.



(Via Iconfactory)

P2P Threatens Economic National Security (Huh?)

INFO SCIENCE: Just when you thought the most evil administration (and unlike the administration, I don't use the word evil very often) couldn't get anymore fucking eviler, John Ashcroft's Intellectual Property goon says that downloading music is a threat to national security.

Business Week: You've said that the theft of intellectual property is a national security problem. Why?



Butt Hat: First of all, we talk about it being an issue of economic national security. Our economy is so based on intellectual property ideas that, unless we can protect them, we're really looking at a situation where it's going to hurt our ability to survive as a country.



Secondly, so much of what we do now involves computers, whether it be with software or other types of communication lines. Often, intellectual property is a key component to the things we do to protect ourselves as a country. (Me: does that make any sense to anybody?)

Um, yeah. Good thing these guys don't have anything better to do with their time, like, perhaps real threats to national security, like Homo Matt Drudge.



(via BoingBoing)

Trucker Hats Be Gone

VISUAL COMMUNICATION: You have to appreciate this poster, snapped up by jameswagner.com in Hollywood.

ReBlogging2

BOOKMARK: Some quick links:



A critique of Mozilla's marketing and website design:

Let's look at the Download Now! box on the same Firefox page. Hmmm. Download now or get a CD thru the mail. Thru the mail obviously means money so is the download for free? It doesn't say free anywhere... Why should I pay for a revelatory Google thing computer experience... I don't even know what it does.

A program to find out what an RFID tag is saying:

RFDump is a tool to detect RFID-Tags and show their meta information: Tag ID, Tag Type, manufacturer etc.

An article about the future of AI:

Will machines make humans smarter or just more dependent on our calculators, car navigators, and kitchen conveniences? Dr. Ken Ford of the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition reclassifies several key problems in developing smarter machines into a category called "Amplified Intelligence."

Desktopronaut

INFO SCIENCE: I hope you all are familiar with Celestia. It's a great way to explore space on your PC. The amazing part about Celestia is that you're not just limited to our exploring our solar system, but you can actually travel to over 100,000 other stars systems too. Here's a sample of how photo-realistic its real-time rendering actually is:







How is this news? It's not! Haha! Celestia has been around for a while. What is news however is their great new sister site, The Celestia Motherlode. This site is a (long overdue) central repository for a number of cool plug-ins that enhance or completely change Celestia. Not only can you download improved textures for your planets, new asteroids to put in orbit, and new clouds for Jupiter, but you can also throw in fictional fun stuff too, like, say, the DEATH STAR. w_(O_O)_t!

Arab-American Relations Crisis

DATA: Egypt's Al-Ahram:

Two recent opinion polls held in several major Arab countries proved that the main reason for rising anti-Americanism was opposition to its foreign policy, particularly towards Palestine and Iraq, and not its values or civilisation as repeatedly claimed by US President George W Bush.

I have a feeling that won't stop him from saying they hate freedom.



The article gives these statistics for the percentage of those holding a favorable view of the U.S.:

4% Saudi Arabia

11% Morocco

14% United Arab Emirates

15% Jordan

Peekaboo

INFO ACCESS: Nasa has put a number of digitized Apollo 11 photographs online.

Internet Enforcement Analyst

INFO SCIENCE: The MPAA is hiring an "Internet Enforcement Analyst." Sane individuals need not apply.

Full-time Internet Enforcement Analyst needed immediately for the Motion Picture Association’s (MPA) Worldwide Internet Enforcement department in Encino, California. As part of the Worldwide Anti-Piracy team, the Internet Enforcement Analyst works on the front lines of the MPA’s online anti-piracy efforts, enforcing the copyrights of the MPA’s member companies.



Responsibilities include:

· Intensive Internet use, research, and online piracy site evaluation.

· Technical and developmental oversight of automated search engine.

· Worldwide coordination of online piracy investigations.

· Conducting training in Internet functions and piracy-related issues.

· Gathering and preparing evidence for submission to law enforcement and litigation counsel for possible legal action.

· Developing and maintaining cooperative relationships with ISPs, universities, corporations, and other organizations to further anti-piracy efforts.

· Researching and evaluating new technologies, Internet protocols, and methodologies used to conduct and to combat Internet piracy.

· Conduct limited investigation into Internet piracy sites.

Interested parties should email melissa_valenzuela@mpaa.org. Melissa can be faxed at 818-461-1560. You can call Melissa at by dialing "1-800-NOCOPYS", "*" to pick a mailbox, "#" to list the names, and dial "8" and "#" to list names starting with "V".

See What You Share on P2P

INFO TECHNOLOGY: P2P Weblog points us to See What You Share, a site all about things people share on Peer 2 Peer networks, oftentimes, it seems, inadvertently.



Amazingly, there are a large number of photos available from soldiers in Iraq and even what appear to be U.S. Army documents all shared online. Doh!

"This Exemplifies The Contemporary Media Continuum"

INFO SCIENCE: John Shirley, guest blogger at BoingBoing, posted this insightful piece about dense text vis-à-vis the modern media.

This blog might be too dense-looking to be successful. If I want it to be successful I have to break it up and make it like a bag of candy. Ideally the individual wrappers should be edible. As it is, it can be forbidding looking. The internet is about being like one of those birds that skims over the surface, dips its beak, comes up with a nourishing fish, flies away. The bird doesn't want to dive in. This exemplifies the contemporary media continuum. Thus those little news blips that go scrolling by, one sentence for this, one for that, beneath footage of something else entirely, on CNN and elsewhere. We can't absorb all that's on offer so we just skim the surface--and this is universally regarded as John Kerry's biggest campaign problem: he's not a skimmer, he's a diver. He dives in and explores, thinks about things. No good for present day culture. There are even those who refer to "ADD culture", Attention Deficit Disorder culture. In the crushing gravitational pull of that media gas-giant, can Kerry stand up and be noticed? Bush on the other hand... Wait a minute...stop!



The above text is still too dense for a blog.

He's right on too. I'm always cherry-picking the things I read online. The first thing I look for is anything graphical. The first things I read are bold text, quotes, bullets, etc. I almost always read quotes carefully in news articles, but quickly skip past names and titles. If I'm looking for something specific online, I usually use Google's Cached page because of the handy highlighting. If that is unavailable, I use Firefox's built in find feature by hitting "/". I don't see this so much as a problem as just being efficient with your time online.