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Tips, news & gossip to tips@spesh.com - with NTK in subject line, cheers.

[Being lazy until Friday January 13th shakes us out of our complacency]
  

                              >> HARD NEWS <<
                             bewildering menus

        Not to be confused with this week's 1,000th US death row
        execution, some future digital rights criminal bravely put
        his or her name down as the thousandth OPEN RIGHTS GROUP
        founding member, thereby setting off alarm bells at
        Pledgebank HQ, and prompting 100 of the UK 1K (plus American
        imports Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales, Jonathan "Eldred v.
        Ashcroft" Zittrain, and David "Stupid Network" Isenberg) to
        hunker down in a basement in Soho, and plot and machinate on
        what to do next. Sue Sony? Lobby MEPs? Throw oneself under
        horses in the name of supporting fair use? Or, as the
        cream.org gang indelicately suggested before going a bit mad
        with the trolling possibilities of an open meeting, plotting
        to win over "the unhosed stupid masses"? Whatever happens,
        the thousand ORG founding members begin their whip-round on
        Monday. Four extra basic civil liberties to the first fifty
        to stump up their money!
        http://www.pledgebank.com/rights
    - of course you know they're just going to bank it and go to Rio
        http://www.digitalrights.ie/
                          - on the 6th, ORG's sister in IE kicks off
        http://skimmed.cream.org/?p=13
                                  - thanks guys, that ought to do it


                              >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                        GOTOs considered non-harmful

        Is it just us, or do HUGH MACLEOD's quirkily ultra-modern
        business card doodles remind anyone of an illustrated version
        of Carl Steadman's "99 Secrets" of about 7 years ago? Either
        way, it may be hard to avoid the irrepressible Stormhoek wine-
        promoter in the future, as he's speaking at next week's LES
        BLOGS 2.0 (Mon and Tue 2005-12-05/06, "Negocia", 8 Avenue de
        la Porte de Champerret, Paris, EUR 200 but sold out anyway), a
        reassuringly US-dominated gathering of folks who still think
        that blogs and wikis are a pretty neat idea. Hugh then lures
        Microsoft "Technical Evangelist" ROBERT SCOBLE back to the UK
        for another crowd-pulling GEEK DINNER (from 6pm, Sat 2005-12-
        10, The Texas Embassy, 1 Cockspur Street, London SW1Y 3DQ,
        UKP20 inc Tex-Mex buffet and maybe some free booze) - a 1900%
        cost increase over the other events that Ian Forrester had in
        the basement of that pub that time, but perhaps a small price
        to pay for some of the spiciest autistic groupthink around!
        http://lesblogs.typepad.com/blog/program/
         - "How is ze blogging affecting ze corporations?" Ooh-la-la!
        http://thehughpage.com/London_Geek_Dinner_With_Robert_Scoble
         - vs...
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cheesebro.nonexiste.net/misc/99secrets.txt
        http://www.etceteratheatre.com/page.php?pageID=2#show5
         - speaking of quirky, London run for friend-of-NTK Ben Moor


                               >> ANTI-MEMES <<
              there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/

        A squirrel, yesterday: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/4489792.stm -
        and the same lethal species as seen in Hertfordshire just 6
        weeks ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/4365002.stm ... all-new
        "not that I'm bitter": http://xooglers.blogspot.com/ ...
        slightly "things you might see in ads" Google goofs o' the
        month: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22central+hating%22 ,
        http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22hated+towel+rail%22 ,
        http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22minty+condition%22 ...
        a vital step towards establishing any "causal relationship":
        http://google.co.uk/search?q=%22causal+sex%22 ... this year's
        http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02002-11-15&l=10#l -style
        "risumi": http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fagade+building ,
        inevitably also affects other French words with cedilla
        accents, eg http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gargon+waiter
        ... how the new Kraftwerk-sampling Coldplay single sounds,
        with Kraftwerk mixed back into it: http://www.m-1.us/ (search
        page for "Kraftwerk")...


                               >> TRACKING <<
              sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

        Okay, so this is a Tracking that's about something that's
        not actually ready, as such. Or even usable. Or even (our
        usual excuse) something requiring all-hacks-to-the-deck
        contributions from NTK readers. But as we note more and more
        PowerBook-wielding ex-Linux users beginning to twitch at the
        jerky kernel-crashes of Tiger, feel a little burnt by the
        whole "Oh, Did We Say Big-Endian?" switch to Intel, and keep
        suffering repeated "interventions" at conferences by their
        Debian-wielding friends, we thought we should fire a flare
        for a project that's just *about* to get interesting. The
        convoluted Chinese-walled reverse-engineering of the
        Broadcom chipset used in Apple's Airport Extreme is now
        getting to the point where it can fire and receive radio
        packets, and the team is now hard at work at building a
        software implementation of the MAC layer. They've had
        success at scanning and associating, they have a plan for
        syncing nicely with the latest Linux kernels, and soon -
        perhaps as soon as next NTK, they may well have something
        you can use on your PowerPC kit to let Linux connect
        wirelessly. Just in time for Apple to upgrade from
        Broadcom completely, of course - but isn't that always the way?
        http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/
           - somebody writes the specs, someone else writes the code
        http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/irc-logs/?C=N;O=D
                           - remember, IT STILL DOESN'T WORK. So shh!
        http://softmac.sipsolutions.net/
- still, if you are thinking of helping out, here's where the work should go


                               >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                 get out less

        FILM>> Roger Ebert complains that the Human Genome Project was
        actually completed in 2003 - but maybe future researchers will
        discover they "missed a bit", thus justifying lines like "10%
        of the human genome has not yet been mapped. Some say it's the
        soul" in the promisingly knuckleheaded videogame adaptation
        DOOM ( http://capalert.com/capreports/doom.htm : At a rate of
        58.8 examples of violence per hour, that is very near an
        average of one example of violence per minute; relatively
        "lite" sexual content; massive firearms, repeatedly)... then
        it's a great big unconvincing CGI animal Christmas, with Peter
        Jackson both directing and starring in the title role of KING
        KONG ( http://cndb.com/movie.html?title=King+Kong+%281933%29 :
        While many have microanalyzed the inspiration that Fay Wray
        provides, few have bothered to note that King Kong is totally
        naked throughout the movie)... as New Zealand's Middle Earth
        scenery is hastily repurposed as the backdrop to THE LION, THE
        WITCH AND THE WARDROBE (imdb keywords: talking animal/ faun/
        1940s), raising hopes that Disney will go on to make films of
        all the books, including "Prince Caspian" and - acknowledged
        by fans as the best of the series - "The Narnia Engineers"...


                              >> 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
                        "not 'obscenely' overweight"

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/food_and_drink/features/article327908.ece


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