Need To Know 2003-12-12

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"In terms of marketing, however, US web users are seen as the perfect demographic, in that they tend to be non TV-watchers with an income over $60,000, [and] 'pre-marital interests'..." http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1104848,00.html ...and likely to stay that way >> HARD NEWS << IMHOs Everyone's got an opinion, haven't they? In a week when even the taciturn Torvalds started opining on how copyright law worked, the president of the notoriously fair and open-minded ICANN had *his* views summarily squelched, after a literal kickban from this week's WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY. As guards hussled PAUL TWOMEY away from the DNS pre-meeting at the UN summit, he whined his complaints like... like... like an obscure domain registrar bitching on an ignored "public" ICANN mailing list, say. Will ICANN humbly learn its lesson? Hopefully not - given that the WSIS bouncers waved ROBERT MUGABE through to give his views on the Net (summary: Sluggy sucks, Penny Arcade much cooler). Is this some kind of hint that ICANN needs to start cracking down on its opposition? Or should it be more like the President of Iran, who found his WSIS Q&A getting bogged down in questions relayed from his nation of bloggers. "Do you blog?", they demanded, before going on to ask him whether he preferred Moveable Type or Livejournal, and Which Character From "24" Was He, exactly? http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1735 - I Am Not A Linus http://www.itworld.com/Man/2685/031208torvalds/ - ... but I play one when subpoenaed http://www.iht.com/articles/120570.html - squeal little piggie http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3303129.stm - Mr Mugabe has "giant Orwellian viewscreen" in his rider http://www.dailysummit.net/english/archives/2003/12/11/iran_roundup_.asp - I'm sorry, am I hot or what? Meanwhile, in less well-lit, well-heeled meeting rooms, darker deals were cut. A double-cross in the EU's JURI committee briefly led to all copyright infringements being rated as criminal offences, from carol singers to - well, you, almost certainly. We're told that subsequently "the oral amendment was withdrawn", which is apparently more pleasant than it sounds. The Home Committee stumbled through their examination of that whole ID Cards business without much oversight. And most dread of all, Ubisoft sneaked a check into the latest "Rainbow 6" patch, which makes it snoop through your hard drive looking for virtual CD utils, and refuse to play until you uninstall them. Which is fair enough, given how people root through prospective dates' bookshelves for Tom Clancy's original novel, then refuse to play if they stumble across *that*. http://www.fipr.org/copyright/draft-ipr-enforce.html - does *anybody* ever know what's going on in the EU? http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000137.html - select ... committeee ... id cards ... zzzzzzz www.evilavatar.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2214 - interesting aside on how lame it is to say "irrespective" Let's face it, if you *had* to be trapped on a website with someone going on about kids' television programmes that nobody remembers any more, you could do (slightly) worse than one of the dedicated Dr Who apologists over at TV.CREAM.ORG, who have been providing unpaid (and uncredited) research for the Daily Mail (and other net users) for something like six years now. Of course, their efforts have not gone completely unrecognised - site contributor (and Sam from "Pop Idol" lookalike) STEVE BERRY fondly recalls their excitement over receiving Web User's (November 2001 edition) prestigious "Home-made Web Site Of The Month" award - but now the big time is beckoning at last. Get your vote in now to help TV Cream triumph over other rubbish contenders - that "Commercial Breaks and Beats" ad music database, Danny Wallace's pointless "Join Me" cult - and teach Yahoo! a thing or two about *real* nostalgia, by making the 1998-era site the proud recipient of Yahoo's "People's Choice 2003 Find Of The Year". http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/Find_of_the_Year_2003/Entertainment/ - narrowly missed Esquire's "Sharpest Man" shortlist again http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02002-11-01&l=46#l - and where's that Xmas toy round-up you promised, eh lads? >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious Christmas party season playing havoc with BBC news spelling: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohwok.gif ... ie, busy making trouble: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohbusy.gif ... and many, many more: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohseeme.gif ... ironically - huge image-map: http://www.esws2004.org/ ... more Amazon mayhem: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohbiz.gif , http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohdeliv.gif - and, in his new bestseller, Stephen King plans to really mess with your head: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohneuro.gif ... bloody Mac users now claim to have "world's most powerful" monitor stand: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohstand.gif ... also known as - security-in-the-toilet: http://kitchens-on-the-web.co.uk/admin/ ... Guardian explains why the US bombs so many civilians: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohgalileo.gif ... and why the moon is only 36,000km away (ie, approx 2-3 x the distance from London to Syndey): http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/12/dohcass.gif ... >> EVENT QUEUE << GOTOs considered non-harmful Ah, Christmas: a time to put aside traditional disputes and rivalries - and for us to look beyond our usual London-centric focus to report on MANCHESTER WIRELESS'S BRING AND BUY SALE AND CHRISTMAS CURRY. In the local vernacular, they'll be "having it" (the bring and buy sale) from 2pm-5pm tomorrow Sat 2003-12-13 at Bridge-5-Mill, Manchester M4, and it looks like it's free for anyone to get in (and/or bring/buy vaguely relevant technical items). And, in a bridge-building occasion as potentially historic as that football match between British and German troops during the First World War, LONDON JAVA MEETUP are inviting other techies "from LONDON PERL MONGERS etc" to their Xmas (piss|punch) up across the no-man's land of the Electricity Showrooms, Hoxton Sq, London from 6pm, Monday 2003-12-15, in order to discover common insights, share jokes about Python users, and - who knows - maybe add some of their technological and biological distinctiveness to their own? http://www.manchesterwireless.net/ - venue: deserted warehouse converted to fashionable lofts? http://javanicus.com/londonjava/items/60-index.html - hey, are those UK Slashdot Meetups still going? http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/ - few places left for London Dorkbot's farewell to 386DX? >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Tracking's arch-enemy Sweetcode.org has returned, damn them. To celebrate, we're stealing one of their many good pointers - to FILELIGHT, an "interactive visualisation of disk space consumption". It's a beautiful KDE app that intuitively highlights large files and directories over small ones, in a way that lets you quickly spot what's eating away your disk space. A forgotten mail logfile from the SOBIG epidemic, an old and rusty CVS checkout, and a file that should have been bzipped years ago equalled one gig for us. It's not the first visual space scanner, but it's one of the prettiest, and worth a look if you're writing something similiar for your own platform. http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/ - or just mechanically download everything on Sweetcode, like us http://www.sweetcode.org/ - pay no attention to the site >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of http://snackspot.org/ a living "Burgess Shale" of mostly extinct Cambrian gameforms: http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/jae.html ... bid 4 sh3llz!: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2772390911 vs l33t marketing: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_9912.html ... UseCrime in progress - complete with "hint" on navigation: http://www.glass-page.com/flash/main.htm (Flash, sorry)... worth printing out and handing to tourists when they arrive: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/BirthplaceMaps/Maps/UK3.gif ... hideously photoshopped cover art of the week, number 2: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00008YGS0.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg ... press release misses out sentence "Jenson Button advertises BBC digital with all the natural verve of a downed Tornado pilot being forced to denounce coalition forces at gunpoint": http://qwer.org/TerribleButtonPressRelease.html ... http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html - "science safe", says author of Prey, Westworld, Jurassic Park... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> Clive Anderson introduces the last minor reshuffle among the 21 finalists in THE BIG READ FINAL (9pm, Sat, BBC2)... gardens inspired by the "Big Read Top 100" - including "Lord Of The Flies" and "Lord Of The Rings", though sadly not Frank Herbert's "Dune" - battle to be acknowledged as the work of GARDENER OF THE YEAR (9pm, Fri, BBC2)... and who cares about lame Ben Affleck "Reindeer Games" rename DECEPTION (10pm, Sat, C4) or indeed low-budget female-teenwolf horror GINGER SNAPS (11.40pm, Sat, BBC2), when BBC1 is showing the epochal all- star Tom Green grossout-fest ROAD TRIP (10.30pm, Sat, BBC1)? ... TROUBLE AT CHRISTMAS (7pm, Sun, BBC1) seems unlikely to plumb the depths of http://www.mymiserablechristmas.com/ ... Zoe "Where is she now?" Ball hosts a "revised repeat" of the elegantly titled 100 GREATEST TV MOMENTS FROM HELL (9pm, Sun, C4)... as the "Guns and Gangs" season concludes with a look at the ammunition format immortalised on gangsta classics such as Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" and Arnee and the Terminators' "I'll Be Back", aka 9MM (10.30pm, Sun, BBC2)... HEAR THE SILENCE (9pm, Mon, C5) dramatises the MMR/ autism debate, though feral Ukrainian docu BODYSHOCK: WILD CHILD (9pm, Mon, C4) reveals kids aren't all that sociable if they're raised by wild dogs either... "Tuesday 16 December 1660: I learn I am to be played by the troubadour Steve Coogan in what is called a 'period romp' - A-haaaaa!", notes THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SAMUEL PEPYS (9pm, Tue, BBC2) - vs http://www.pepysdiary.com/ ... and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (6.45pm, Thu, BBC2) finally outlives her welcome - but don't worry, because all the dead characters will ultimately be revived by Frank Tipler using tech unveiled in the "Time Trip" taken by HORIZON (9pm, Thu, BBC2)... FILM>> the title sounds like a slang term for needing the toilet, but it's actually a "999"-style dramatised mountain recreation of TOUCHING THE VOID ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Contains very strong language)... also on limited release is bonkers over-the-top horror B-movie DEAD END ( imdb: black- comedy/ body-bag/ body-count/ cabin/ gay-slur/ man-in-black/ whiskey)... and we'd rather see the story of the "Fightin' Whities" http://www.fightingwhites.org/ than Beyonce Knowles and Cuba Gooding Jr gospel-fest THE FIGHTING TEMPTATIONS ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/fightingtemptations.htm : dressing to maximize the female form; equating no sin with no fun; underhanded connivings to impede change)... >> 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 "phew, made it into *this* month's 'will not be televised' parody" http://jackfear.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_jackfear_archive.html NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe or subscribe at http://lists.ntk.net/ NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2003 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Full license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. 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.