Music disc copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200 and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and electrical tape, crackers have discovered.
To quote Nelson Muntz, “Ha ha!”
Just got back from dinner at Hut’s Hamburgers with Drew.
There were a couple of strikingly beautiful young women at the table next to ours, but what’s weird is they were both wearing so much makeup, so badly applied, that it made them look genuinely hideous. Was it done as a gag? I have to wonder. They were with (I assume) their boyfriends, who were completely conventional-looking.
The town of Art, TX is for sale. Asking price $299,000.
Now, mind you: Art is barely even a wide spot in the road, located midway between Llano and Mason on State Highway 29. I’ve spent the night there, at the guest house attached to the Hoodoo Cafe.
U.S. Protests Mexi-Canadian Overpass. So funny it hurts.
If you’ve ever fought a bad road project yourself, you know what I mean.
OK, you can stop feeling guilty now. About downloading MP3s, anyhow. Fairtunes to the rescue. I like this. A website that let’s you make a payment directly to a musician in return for MP3s you’ve downloaded. This leaves the record labels out of the loop. Boohoo. If you donate even a couple bucks for one album’s worth of music, the artist is getting more from you than they’d ever get from the sale of one CD.
The New York Times has a review of the new BMW 745. In addition to pointing out that dealers allow new buyers 3 hours to get acquainted with the car before actually driving it, the reviewer mentions this anecdote:
My beagle, whose job description is “scan roadsides for squirrels,” is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.
I like high-tech gadgets as much as the next guy, but come on! This is technology run amok.
From the New York Times: A Faulty Rethinking of the 2nd Amendment
There is one striking curiosity to the Bush administration’s advancing its position at this time. Advocates of the individual-right interpretation typically argue that an armed populace is the best defense against the tyranny of our own government. And yet the Bush administration seems quite willing to compromise essential civil liberties in the name of security.
With all the other civil liberties George II (and even moreso, Ashcroft) is keen to delete, he definitely shouldn’t be so gung-ho about leaving guns in the hands of the peasantry.
We all hate spam, right? (I’m assuming that anyone who actually likes spam is probably a spammer, and therefore not the type to read this blog) We hate receiving it, and those of us who have websites have to face the prospect that if our pages contain any e-mail addresses, that spambots will attempt to strip-mine those addresses from our web pages, consuming resources on our web servers and making us complicit in their evildoing.
The simplest and most Draconian approach is to remove all e-mail addresses from your site. But that goes completely contrary to the two-way spirit of the Internet. You could just show a graphic representation of your e-mail address, but that’s inconvenient–your legitimate correspondents would need to hand-type it into their mail clients. (And what happens when spambots are wired up to optical-character recognition software? And what about people who have image-loading turned off?) Some people have gone to extraordinary length to foil spambots. One approach is to create a spambot trap, also called a tarpit. Another approach is to encode your address in a way that most web browsers will represent as a normal, usable address with a clickable link, but will confound an unsophisticated spambot. I was impressed by this one, which actually uses javascript and prime-factoring encryption to conceal the underlying address.
I’m telling ya, it’s a jungle out there.
Watched Shadow of the Vampire with Gwen last night. Excellent movie. In a way, Willem Dafoe was wasted in the role of Max Schreck, because Dafoe is already creepy-looking, but the character had so much makeup on that even Britney Spears would have been creepy-looking. But he did a wonderful job with the part.
And while this is hardly the first movie where the story involves a movie-inside-the-movie, where the movie and the inside-movie have parallel plots, this one seemed to subtly blur the lines in a way that I like.
I’ve noticed that when returning to some kind of exercise after a hiatus, it’s not the day after that I feel stiff and sore–it’s two days after.
So it is now with running. Various minor aches and pains in my legs. But you know what? The pains are symmetrical. This is a good sign.