Need To Know 2002-04-05

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"Changing software is not permissible. The software is mine." http://www.msnbc.com/news/732865.asp - JAKOB NIELSEN one-up's Bill Gates' "I get half" bid >> HARD NEWS << lighting the fuse Now, either Tony Blair thinks that enthusiastic use of the word "tits" in an eulogy will boost his "man of the people" popularity - or those pesky Chris Morris fans at COOKDANDBOMBD have been busy re-editing his tribute speech to the Queen Mum. You can download the results from the ever-excellent Boom Selection blog, along with the original if you want to have a go yourself - although, in deference to the current mood of the CookdAndBombd site, you are requested not to mock the recent death of Dudley Moore which must - of course - be treated with the utmost reverence. Or, if you fancy a pop at another nation's favourite "Grammy", a reader identifying himself as LORD IAN DOUGLAS has tracked down that "Insidious Virus of Illegal Music Downloading" speech which only last month seemed oh so very amusing... http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/speech.mp3 - plus transcript: http://grammy.aol.com/features/speech.html http://www.base58.com/booms/archives/2002_04_01_archive.html - "yield a sigh" advise http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/ Normally this is the sort of thing we'd run in Tracking, but it's a veery slow news week - and anyway, we want to look good to our inevitable Super-Intelligent Overlord. After much wrangling, "CYC" - the leftfield artificial intelligence project shepherded since 1984 by Doug Lenat, finally released its "open source"-ish version, OpenCYC, this week. As you will all recall from "The Mad Mad World of Military-Funded LISP Code", CYC was Lenat's gonzo attempt to handcode all of "commonsense" as a set of 10 zillion logical assertions. So, Cyc knows that the UnitedKingdom is a Country, and that the USPresident is a Sentient Primate (Allegedly). Lenat's theory was that once a computer was hardcoded with enough of these common sense links, it'd be able to suck up new axioms just by reading the paper (or, as some sick Netizens suggested, by being forcefed Usenet until it went crazy). To this day nobody outside CycCorp really knows what Cyc knows - but Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C kids have pursuaded Doug to dump the top lump of its ontology out into the wider world, to be used as basic infrastructure for the Tim's "Semantic Web". So the theory is that, intermingled with your usual Weblog rants, you'll be able to repeat in XML what you mean in gobbledook Spockian logic-language that computers can understand. All very interesting - so how do we encode "implies a time-event when pigs will fly"? http://www.opencyc.org/ - cyberspace-based voodoo AIs usually better at keeping up their DNS than this http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencyc/ - linux only. No source; just a cold, unsympathetic java app http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html - Tim! Come down, mate! http://www.cartome.org/neural-jokes.htm - maybe we'll have a function in the new order after all >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious official memorial site still using those old DIANA filenames: http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/page1011.asp (view source)... CITIBANK credit card hits back at Saddam with competing offer: http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/dohwin.gif ... "previously uninhibited" island flaunts coconuts for playboy BRANSON: http://www.neckerisland.com/LE/necker/explore1.asp ... PERRIER AWARD issues timely "warning" about comedian Dave Gorman: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0091879647/ ... latest issue of EDGE (p68) quotes NTK quoting eternal wisdom of Tim Wapshott: http://www.ntk.net/1999/10/01/ , and Steve Boxer: http://www.ntk.net/1999/09/17/ , yet manages to miss out exponentiation operator in "2^96"... "Will Not Publish" maintain BBC, hoping (believing?) that she'd live for ever: http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/dohbit.gif ... CAPITAL clearly distraught: http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/dohcrapital.gif , http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/dohcrap2.gif ... leaving it to the UK's hedgehog-lovers to maintain some sense of proportion: http://www.ntk.net/2002/04/05/dohhedge.jpg ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Expect the... expected at this year's FORTEAN TIMES UNCONVENTION 2002 (from 10am, Sat 2002-04-06, Commonwealth Institute, London W8, from UKP17.50 per day), with speakers including Graham "Lost Kingdoms" Hancock, Rev Lionel "Fortean TV" Fanthorpe, Colin "The Outsider" Wilson, Ken "those Peugeot ads" Campbell, and Jon "Secret Rulers of the World" Ronson. We were hoping that next week's ALIEN PANTS exhibition was going to be a complementary display of crashed-saucer-underwear, but it seems to be a slang term for promotional videogaming nethergarments, on show at one of those JOYSTICK JUNKIES club nights (from 7pm, Thu 2002-04-11, SAK Bar, 49 Greek Street, London W1, "non-members" UKP5) - a refreshing change from their usual "Playstations 'n' nightclubs" schtick which everyone else lost interest in about 4 years ago. http://www.ifgsubscriptions.co.uk/uncon2002/ - vs http://www.peltorro.com/intro.htm http://www.alienpants.com/news/prevreleases/28-01-02-tshirts.shtml - and Steve "boxer shorts" Boxer - together at last! http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/ - dorkbot returns to London's State51 on Wed http://www.yurisnight.net/ - then next Fri: Yuri's Night (all Yuri's get in free) >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering "strace meets expect" about covers it. SUBTERFUGUE for Linux 2.4 kernels lets you insert Python code between the OS and an application, mangling and filtering any data along the way. To show you the way, various neat tricks are pre-included, so you can spool all filenames through a regex, fence off bits of the filing system willy-nilly, redirect or block Net connections, throttle data transfers (with a GTK interface), make time(2) go faster or slower. Or just ROT13 everything ls sends. There are, we suppose, easier ways to do all that; but none quite so pervasive or flexible. And none that allow as much fine-tuning of the headfuck that you can inflict on alien binaries when you're unhappy with what they're doing. A version for MacOS X could be a timely development. Oh go on. http://subterfugue.org/ - get it, before it's banned by the SSSCA >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ killer app http://www.potce.com/Cat1/01/H&G/Home/izek.htm was waiting for: http://www.phink.net/phashion/baby/alien8.html ... Peter Buck diagnosed with "REM behaviour disorder", may have been acting "non-insanely automatic" (for the people): http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1913000/1913066.stm ... increasing evidence that RAINBOW SIX is getting way too realistic: http://www.ashleypomeroy.com/rainbowsix2.jpg , http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/020330/168/1bw4r.html ... blond Aryan kid led astray by foreign-looking neighbours: http://www.thetruthforyouth.com/images/comics/pornography/page1.html ... office hugs "really can boost profits", reports BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1912000/1912766.stm vs "a very group-oriented culture, and a lot of our meetings end in hugs. There was no retribution for noncompliance": http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO9015,00.html ... liven up your presentations with crime scene evidence: http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/visCrimeScenesddl.aspx ... http://www.aolwatch.org/cgi-bin/tvquiz.cgi?Need+To+Know ... Commonwealth countries somewhat divided on role of royals: http://www.hicow.com/hk/poll_details.php?t=444&v=103 ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> a couple of questionable tech-industry role models this week, in the form of the mobile ringtone millionaire profiled in FLASH (11.05pm, Tue, C4), plus a feature on Danni Ashe in PASSENGERS (11.35pm, Fri, C4), whose claim to be the web's "Most Downloaded Woman" was queried for potentially including "photos of her with other models", if you know what we mean: http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/08/31/downloadable/ ... elsewhere the schedules largely imitate Lee & Herring, as Angus Deayton and Alexei Sayle sip from their SDP mugs in A HISTORY OF ALTERNATIVE COMEDY (9pm, Sat, BBC2), and Greg Evigan stars in EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK (8pm, Wed, C5)... C4 combines Andromeda with a Stargate SG-1 double-bill for five hours of non-stop sci-fi, of which the best bit is probably the JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (2.25pm, Sun, C4)... there's another electronic press kit masquerading as a late- night "making of" documentary in 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE: THE FACTORY RECORDS SAGA (12midnight, Sun, C4)... while the US version of "Scrapheap Challenge" JUNKYARD WARS (8pm, Mon, C4) appears to have constructed a more photogenic presenter than Robert "Kryten" Llewellyn... it's supposed to be 3 separate films, it's uncannily similar to the French film "Deathwatch" http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s53until1.html - but there are still times when you wish the apocalypse would just bloody get on with it in Wim Wenders' improvised cyber-epic UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1.30am, Mon, C4)... FOOD JUNKIES (9pm, Wed, BBC2) appears to be an unofficial adaptation of that "Fast Food Nation" book... a better sequel for SPEED (9pm, Thu, C5) would have been "Speed - The Second Derivative", where the bus has to maintain a minimum constant acceleration... and it's a great week for fans of adjectives preceding abstract nouns, with showings of RANDOM ENCOUNTER (9pm, Fri, C5), MATERNAL INSTINCTS (12.20am, Fri, BBC1), PRIMAL FEAR (10.15pm, Sun, BBC1), LETHAL INTENT (12.25pm, Sat, BBC1), IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSE (10.50pm, Fri, C5), and not forgetting Alyson "Willow" Hannigan's INDECENT SEDUCTION (12.40am, Fri, BBC1)... FILM>> it's a double-bill of movies postponed from last Sept, with what appears to be a collage of elements from most of Arnie's previous movies causing most of the COLLATERAL DAMAGE ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/collateral_damage.html : "IMITATIVE BEHAVIOR It's possible someone could copy the idea of using terrorist bombings for their own particular agenda") ... and Ed Burns continuing his - unsuccessful - bid to become the Irish-American Woody Allen on the SIDEWALKS ON NEW YORK ( www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Movies-X!ArticleDetail-47254.html : "In one of the first scenes, you can see the late World Trade Center, looming majestically, directly over Burns' right shoulder. Which wouldn't be so bad. But it's giving the better performance")... failing that, 1870s nobleman Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman travels forward in time to be baffled by the modern- day conventions of Meg Ryan romantic comedies in KATE AND LEOPOLD ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/kate&leopold.htm : "Typically in movies for teens the kissing is gaping-mouth tongue kissing, with the face disappearing behind the cavernous mouth. The kissing between Ryan and Jackman was quite probably the best example-setting kissing I have seen in a PG-13")... and "I'm Tony Wilson, A-haaa!", declares Steve Coogan in usual-suspects arch Hacienda hagiography 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : "Contains very strong language and drug use")... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "an entertaining side project" http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1017820788.php NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? Mail ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ (K) 2002 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.