Stony Stevenson writes to point out that Netscape has finally reached end of line with the release of version 9.0.0.6. A pop-up will offer users the choice of switching to Firefox, Flock, or remaining with the dead browser, but no new updates will be released. "Nearly 14 years after the once mighty browser made its first desktop appearance as Mosaic Netscape 0.9, its disappearance comes as little surprise. Although Netscape accounted for more than 80 per cent of the browser market in 1995, the arrival of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the same year brought stiff competition and surpassed Netscape within three years."

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Elizabeth McGrath, the incredible sculptor-of-the-strange who I interviewed for BBtv late last year, has created two new limited edition creepycrafts in honor of Saint Patrick's Day. The green bat pin, named Seamus O'Shay, is $35 and comes in a hand-sketched box. The lucky rabbit knife and green mouse butcher knife (mouse size, in fact) are $25 and meant to "cut all the bad luck out of your life." Link

Previously on BB:
• Liz McGrath, creator of creepy creatures, on BBtv Link
• Liz McGrath show in Los Angeles Link

Ah, I see, the one for Obama precedes hillaryismomjeans. If someone sprouts a McCain, to this also I shall gladly link. (thanks, commentsers)

Bill Gates has been an incredibly successful businessman, but that doesn't mean he's particularly good at predicting the future of technology. Remember his claim that spam would be gone within 2 years... which he made in 2004? However, if there's one prognostication that Gates just can't let go of, it's his belief that speech recognition will replace keyboards as the preferred input device for computers. He's been saying it for years and years and years, without much to show for it. I had thought (hoped?) that he'd realized maybe he was wrong on this one, but apparently not. In a recent speech, he's insisting that speech recognition (and touch screens) will start to surpass keyboards as the input method of choice for many people. I was going to go back and put together a list of the times he had predicted that in the past, but it appears that Matthew Paul Thomas already did that a few years ago. Note that his earliest predictions (starting in 1997) were that speech would surpass keyboards within a decade. This quote is from October 1997:

"In this 10-year time frame, I believe that we'll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface."

If you go to Matthew's site, you'll find a lot more like that, continuing on through the years, with some different prediction time frames. This isn't to say that speech recognition hasn't gotten a lot better, and isn't used in many more ways today than it was in the past -- but it's not come anywhere close to replacing a keyboard for a variety of good reasons that have much less to do with technology than with how people work. Imagine just how noisy your typical office would be if you had to speak to your computer rather than type? Typing isn't used just because it's efficient, but because it lets people work without disturbing others, and without letting everyone else know every little thing that you're doing. Yes, speech recognition technology is getting much better and it's useful in some situations, but it's certainly not the perfect interface for an awful lot of what people do on a computer.

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Hypnotically holzeresque reload fun for the whole fam: HILLARY IS MOM JEANS. (via sfslim's twitterstream.)

fab writes "Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, using 'nano-dust' is able to push dirt to the side. The third layer acts as a sensor that activates the second layer when it detects dirt, while the fourth layer is a conductor of electricity to power this complex mechanism. I haven't been able to find an English article, but there is always a google powered translation of the Italian article."

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fab writes "Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, using 'nano-dust' is able to push dirt to the side. The third layer acts as a sensor that activates the second layer when it detects dirt, while the fourth layer is a conductor of electricity to power this complex mechanism. I haven't been able to find an English article, but there is always a google powered translation of the Italian article:"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now that online dating has become commonplace, would-be suitors are having a hard time making themselves seem interesting in an increasingly large dating pool. So, what to do if your own interests and achievements are boring and average? Well, just borrow the good bits of the exciting profiles that you find, and add them to your own. Apparently, these acts of profile plagiarism are fairly commonplace now amongst the online dating set. When people find well-written, exciting descriptions, they grab them for their own profiles. Unfortunately for the daters, eventually, a real-world meeting delivers a product that the marketing has misrepresented, and disappointment usually results. Although in some cases, it's possible to track down the "original" author, most origins are fairly difficult to trace -- surely more than one person enjoys "long walks on the beach."

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Scott Beale says, "I made a quick stop by WonderCon 2008 today and while there shot a few photos." Link.

One of the key themes around here for a while has been that technology has a way of making certain laws either obsolete or antithetical to their intended purposes. Often, however, lawyers, judges and politicians have a difficult time recognizing this. That's why it's at least somewhat encouraging to see Australian High Court Judge Justice Kirby publicly recognizing that computer code tends to make laws obsolete or meaningless. "It was a good moral and ethical principle to keep people's control over the usage that was made of the information... And then along came Google and Yahoo. And when the new technology came, there was a massive capacity to range through vast amounts of information. The notion that you could control this was a conundrum." However, while he does realize that technology can make laws obsolete, his solution is still to push for more laws: "To do nothing is to make a decision to let others go and take technology where they will. There are even more acute questions arising in biotechnology and informatics, such as the hybridization of the human species and other species. Points of no return can be reached." It's an interesting point -- though, he doesn't exactly explain what those points of no return are (at least not in the article that quotes him), and why the law would do a better job preventing those points from being reached than technology itself. In some ways, this is merely echoing Larry Lessig's concept that "code is law," though Lessig better recognized that trying to regulate technology with regulations was likely to be a lot less effective than regulating technology with technology.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Groklaw has examined that 'new leaf' Microsoft turned the other day. PJ has a lengthy analysis of Microsoft's latest promises. To make a long story short, the promises are more of the same stuff and don't help anyone but Microsoft. They only protect 'noncommercial' development and are set up to create a patented standards toll road so that Microsoft can charge competitors to compete. As PJ puts it, 'This is a promise to remain incompatible with the GPL, as far as I can make out.'"

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My mind is buzzing with lots of interesting little projects/ideas.

1. I want to find a way to flow some of my Twitter updates to Scripting News, into a Today's Links section, or Random Questions for the day (like the post you're reading right now). Here's an example. I'm using the exclamation point to delimit an update that I want to appear over here. Maybe that's not the right special character. Equal sign? Slash? Backslash?

Update: Sol Young has been thinking about this too.

2. Do people use AppleScript these days? I honestly don't know. I'm thinking of making a tool to run in the OPML Editor that calls one of your scripts when a new Twit from someone you follow comes in. The script would be in a special folder on your desktop and could be written in AppleScript. It seems to me people want to script Twitter, and I know how to make it easy. Not sure if AppleScript is the way to go in 2008.

3. Scoble is really into the BlogTalkRadio zero-config podcast tool. That's so cool. Scoble is a useful guy to have around. Want to know what a user thinks or likes? As Scoble.

4. I went to see There Will Be Blood today. I had to see it cause everyone says it's going to win a boatload of Oscars on Sunday. I liked it. Great acting. Not exactly a feel-good movie, but that's okay. Adults like movies that aren't necessarily feel good. (But I still think Juno is the best movie of 2007, and I'm a big fan of Michael Clayton.)

5. The talking heads on cable news don't get the point in yesterday's USA 2.0 post. The Dems should be aiming at running the table, taking solid majorities in both houses and a mandate-level plurality for President Obama, an LBJ-level landslide. We need a government, not more bullshit. The Republics need to move over for four to eight years so we can resume our position of leadership in the world, the new world, not the old one. The one where our workers have to compete for the business. We used to get all the business by default. That's not the world we live in anymore folks. The Republics don't get that.

6. Most people seem to be missing the substance in NY Times story about McCain and the lobbyist. It's not really a scandal, what happened is that the lobbyist was going around telling people she had special access to McCain, which seemed to be substantiated because she was seen around town with McCain a lot. Whether they were having sex or not is a distraction. That his aides met with her and told her to stop saying she had access was perfectly natural and appropriate. It happens in Silicon Valley too.

Last month, we noted that a lawyer wasn't just trying to trademark the term "cyberlaw" but was already threatening other lawyers for using the term. As the news broke a bunch of folks (mainly lawyers) pointed out how ridiculous this was, and now the guy has dropped his attempt to trademark the term (though he is still trying to trademark a logo of the term). He claims: "It was very clear that this was not going to be an academic argument, it was going to be more of a shouting match, and I didn't think it was worth my time to get involved in a shouting match with people that were going to shout louder." However, as Eric Golman notes at the link above: "Funny--I would have thought it wasn't worth his time because the application was completely unmeritorious."

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Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked in the past about how both DirecTV and the RIAA have used a borderline legal version of a shakedown to get people to pay them money, without them having a chance to defend themselves. The way the process works is simple. They come up with a mere slip of evidence that the person might be guilty, and then send them threatening letters offering not to sue if they merely pay up first. With DirecTV, the company used names of people who had bought smart card writing devices, even though such devices have perfectly legitimate uses beyond pirating satellite TV signals. With the RIAA, obviously, it was through a list of (often questionable) IP addresses. By using this method, many people pay rather than face a lawsuit -- even if they're innocent. They recognize that the cost of a lawsuit is much worse than just paying the settlement charge. In the organized crime world, this is generally known as a shakedown, or if you prefer, extortion. Yet, for some reason, it's legal when these businesses do it.

And, it turns out, the RIAA and DirecTV are not alone in doing so. Perhaps they even learned the practice by watching how big retailers approach shoplifters. Reader Josh sent in a Wall Street Journal article showing how many large retail chain stores are using a very similar process against suspected shoplifters. In the most egregious case, Home Depot detained a guy it thought was stealing drill bits, but dropped the effort after he showed them a receipt. A few weeks later, though, he received a letter demanding $3,000, which was later raised to $6,000. Admittedly, the amount is quite high there as the law firm that handled the case later admitted to a typo in entering the amount -- but the process seems quite similar to the RIAA/DirecTV process. It doesn't matter if the person is guilty or innocent. You just ask them to pay up or threaten them with a lawsuit. The retailers all insist this is a necessary process since shoplifting costs them so much -- but it's hard to see how forcing people to pay up without a chance to defend themselves is ever right, no matter how much shoplifting costs these retailers.

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Sighn says:

I just want to let you in on a project I'm working on. A hand cut edition of 1 million. No joke, this will probably take the next 30-60 years to finish.

I am now planting a tree for every piece sold off my site. I'm also planning a 24 cut-a-thon this summer, where I will see how many I can cut out in one day.

Link | Video

An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"

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The Day After
Jasmina Tešanovi?

22.2.2008

The day after: the streets are suspiciously clean. The local government has taken care to obscure the shame of the rioting, because obviously, it has echoed around the world and Serbia is once again the leading news in the foreign press.

The Serbs, with their legitimate right to mourn for the loss of Kosovo, were transformed into vandals who loot their own city. They broke into many foreign shops, stealing off with the foreign branded goods, made by those powers which gave away