>> HARD NEWS <<
404 42s
And so the previously popular figurehead faces the public,
weakened by age and damaged in the eyes of many by a
dalliance with an unpopular American hegemony. Nonetheless,
you're still going to go see THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE
GALAXY, aren't you? Our angle has always been that HHGTTG
isn't SF, but geek prophecy. For instance, MJ SIMPSON, the
fan-man whose scathingly overprecise preview brought new
meaning to the word "spoiler", seemed last week to enter
his own personal total lack of perspective vortex. "Nobody
else in the world has," he humbly wrote, "... the
sufficient knowledge of [DNA's] life and work to be able to
put any piece of news into context, which is why there is
no other site providing a service like this, and from now
on there won't even be this" - and at this point,
disappeared himself and his site PLANET MAGRATHEA in a puff
of his own logic. Joining him - in a remarkably improbable
way - is occasional NTK ice-cream correspondent MICHAEL
BYWATER, who also swore in the Independent never to write
about his friend ever again. Seeing all these stars boiling
away into the ultraviolet must be as sign we have reached
the Franchise At The End Of The Trilogy, where finally,
Hitchhiker's is awkwardly wrapped up, dispatched with, and
will no longer be quoted at length in young geek
conversations. To be replaced, it seems, with a new
generation, who, in an unfortunate temporal eddy, are
commencing to quote Douglas Adams' earlier work, Dr Who,
instead. Leaving, perhaps, Mr Adams to that quiet cup of
tea and Tiger install that he probably wanted all along.
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=631129
- and so the words wink out into the subscription firewall, one by one
http://www.cow.net/laststraw/magrathea.txt
- "worst. fish. ever."
http://google.com/search?q=magrathea+short+review
- Google cache of the controversial review, on which more later
A fortnight ago, at US conference COMPUTERS FREEDOM and
PRIVACY and CAKE, the US State Department said that its new
RFID passports could only be read from 10cm away. These are
the same passports as will be introduced later this year in
the UK. Well, almost the same. They have a different
country on the front, and American passport holders don't
have Her Brittanic Majesty doing their dirty work for th-
waiiit. Anyway, a few minutes after that claim, Barry
Steinhardt of the ACLU turned up and, using that ingeniously
brainy science that makes high-gain wi-fi antennas so popular,
read it from a meter away. Cue coughing from US, and a
subsequent statement that they'll be encrypting the chips'
data. Oh, and maybe putting a little tin-foil hat around the
wallet. The question is: will the UK passport be encrypted?
And even if it is, will the little bits that say "Hey! I'm a
UK citizen with a valuable passport! Kidnap me!" to anyone
tuning in still be out in the clear?
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/2005/03/contacless_rfid.html
- maybe a scan checking US visitors aren't smuggling in bad ideas
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22552
- apparently the US doesn't want us to have biometric ID cards though
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/2005_04.html
- that's nothing, we can get the Executive Lounge's wi-fi on this too
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
Just a suggestion, but - given that the vast majority of
best-known audio mashups have been based around unaccompanied
"a cappella" vocal samples (or, in the case of many Beatles
recordings, often just one of the stereo channels), if you
wanted to foster a new kind of "remix culture", couldn't you
just provide a lot of more of those? (Or, at the very least,
some guitar tabs?) Hopefully this - and other issues - will at
last be resolved at next Fri's REMIX CULTURE: CREATIVE COMMONS
AND CREATIVITY symposium (9.15am-4pm, Fri 2005-05-06, EDB
Building, Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9RH, free but RSVP
to the address on their site), in the company of TED "inventor
of Hypertext" NELSON, MusicBrainz "lead geek" ROBERT KAYE (who
doesn't seem to be speaking, he's just going to be "hanging
out"), plus heads of the main Creative Commons-y record labels
currently active in the UK: JOHN "Magnatune" BUCKMAN, NEIL
"Fading Ways" LEYTON, and DAVID "Loca Records" BERRY (the last
of whom also sent us a spoof Bertolt Brecht play that he's
rewritten to feature modern mythic archetypes Larry Lessig and
Richard Stallman - with the slight caveat that non-fans should
skip straight to the action on page 7, as "the joke preface by
Bertolt Brecht appears to be throwing a lot of people").
http://www.musiccommons.org/
- otherwise, it's a bit like banging on about free software...
http://www.remixreading.org/node/489
- ...and not actually showing anyone your source code?
http://www.remixreading.org/node/255
- sounds a bit like Em7/ G/ Cadd9/ A7sus4 to us (ymmv)
http://www.acidplanet.com/contests/
- loops + a cappellas from known artists + demo Acid software
http://www.musicbrainz.org/
- retrospective MP3-retagger we've failed to cover somehow
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
not sure quite whose "translations of the necessary documents"
http://www.borenius.lv/en/office/team/index.php?id=20 produced
such an intriguing profile of their swashbuckling philosopher-
CEO: http://www.borenius.lv/en/office/team/index.php?id=2 ...
can you spot the new content on this recently snapped-up
domain? www.healthywiltshire.org.uk ... "Click here to view
the accessible version", invites www.coca-colafootball.co.uk ,
magnanimously... political web-humour almost over for another
5 years: http://industrialandmarine.com/archives/000113.html
vs http://www.martian.fm/gambling.htm ... to commemorate the
launch of http://maps.google.co.uk/ (which seems to list the
same prestigious establishment under both "arse end" and
"shithole"), it's special geo-Google goofs o' the month:
"United Kinkdom", all these moons are yours - except Cisco's:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22moons+of+Juniper%22 , while
fear of Southern California now so common there's a medical
term for it: http://google.com/search?q=%22SoCal+phobia%22 ...
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
You can imagine, around a month ago, six zillion authors
rubbing their hands and cackling to themselves: "Soon,
thanks to its ingenious and novel feature-set, my version
control system will take over the world! And with that fool
Linus Torvalds distracted by developing an operating system
instead of competing with me - NOTHING STANDS IN MY PATH!".
Cut to now, and Torvalds, post BitKeeper spat, is cranking
out his own cra-ah-azily simple VCS, GIT/COGITO, just to get
things done. Given the surfeit of next generation systems -
including darcs, codeville, arch, monotone, bazaar,
bazaar-ng, vesta, svk, ArX, aegis, we suspect that the
winner will be git, just out of the Mighty Power Of
Fanboyism. Survival credits, then, to Tom Lord of Arch, who
mere days after it was announced, decided to re-engineer
arch to use Git. The branching has ended - let the merging
commence!
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2005-04/msg00176.html
- isn't Tom Lord an Alan Moore superhero?
http://www.zooko.com/revision_control_quick_ref.html
- the one offering a free pr0n repository will win
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> as THE APPRENTICE (9pm, Wed, BBC2) draws to a close, we
now maintain that no-nonsense troubleshooter Alan Sugar would
be the ideal choice to play the next DOCTOR WHO (7pm, Sat,
BBC1) - "Davros, your dictatorial management style and
persistent inability to tackle glaring design flaws have seen
your 'cybernetic master race' fail to dominate the universe
time and time again. And yes, as it happens, lots of planets
have an 'East End'"... the fascination-with-fascism Dalek-
subtext then continues with a repeat of THE NAZIS: A WARNING
FROM HISTORY (7.50pm, Sat, BBC2), HITLER'S PLACE IN HISTORY
(8.40pm, Sat, BBC4), HITLER - THE DEBATE (9.40pm, Sat, BBC4),
THE LATE SHOW SPECIAL: LENI RIEFENSTAHL (10.30pm, Sun, BBC4)
plus propaganda classic TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (11.20pm, Sun,
BBC4) - way to celebrate general election week, BBC4... you
know, maybe interminable D&D road movie LORD OF THE RINGS:
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (7.45pm, Sat, C4) would have been
improved by the addition of a talking Monster Manual, a la
the repeated HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (11.20pm, Tue,
BBC2)... though sadly they didn't manage to schedule in it a
double-bill with the "Real" RIDDLE OF THE HUMAN HOBBITS: AN
EQUINOX SPECIAL (9pm, Bank Holiday Monday, C4)... expect
"zany" songs, not very many practical insights in three-part
evolutionary biology "science musical" DR TATIANA'S SEX GUIDE
TO ALL CREATION (11.05-ish, Mon-Wed, C4)... the ubiquitous
Martin "The Office" Freeman reappears in the dumb-but-fun ALI
G INDAHOUSE (9pm, Wed, ITV)... while the "Somaliland" opener
to HOLIDAYS IN THE DANGER ZONE - PLACES THAT DON'T EXIST
(7.30pm, Wed, BBC2) remains one of the few contemporary
factual programmes where a British person goes to a foreign
country - for some reason other than to buy a house there...
FILM>> it's worth staying for the Magrathea f/x at the end -
but, although they've ditched a lot of the dialogue, there's
still no real plot and way too much throwaway exposition in
the clearly-aimed-at-children HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
( http://www.ahafilm.info/movies/mr.phtml?fid=7647 : Dolphin
footage was shot under the supervision of trainers from the
"Dolphinarium" at Loro Parque in Tenerife, Spain; In another
scene, two mice chew on fiber optic wires in the spaceship.
These rodents did not actually chew the wires - trainers
smeared the wires with peanut butter, which the mice happily
licked off)... we still think it ought to be an "adult film
star turned secret agent" in now-Vin-Diesel-free daft action
franchise XXX 2 - THE NEXT LEVEL ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ :
During post-production, the distributor sought and was given
advice on how to secure a 12A classification. Following this
advice, a sequence early in the film in which a man is stabbed
from behind was changed prior to submission to remove detail
of the knife emerging from his stomach).. then, next week,
Ridley Scott picks up the "nice visuals, no story" baton in
his latest sword-and-CGI romp KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (MPAA: Rated R
for strong violence and epic warfare)...
>> 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
"beginning to do well"
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-1519700,00.html
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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