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                               >> 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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