The Null Device
2000/10/23
I was just thinking: what if the SDMI group had instead called itself the Secure Music Expert Group? At least the acronym would be more appropriate.
More evidence that SDMI is a lame duck; now a coalition of academic cryptographers is claiming to have defeated the watermarks, and plans to publish full technical details. The SDMI group will probably try to stop them from doing this, but may not have a clear-cut case for doing so.
Some scientists studying "near death experiences" claim to have found evidence of life after death; more specifically, of consciousness being independent of neural activity.
"The brain is definitely needed to manifest the mind, a bit like how a television set can take what essentially are waves in the air and translate them into picture and sound."
Other scientists, though, think this is spurious, and that the "evidence" is an artifact of neural dysfunction, oxygen deprivation and such. Personally, my money would be on this hypothesis, as it seems much more economical than any Cartesian-dualist notion of spiritualism.
Interesting software du jour: Mac-on-Linux, which allows you to run MacOS in a window on top of Linux/PPC (a bit like SheepShaver, only this one is GPLed). I should probably have a look at it at some stage (if I decide to play with Linux/PPC once I get more disk space on my Mac); though I probably wouldn't end up using it much (I suspect Cubase VST probably wouldn't run on it as efficiently as on MacOS alone).
Scare meme of the day: Flying economy-class can kill you.
The condition is frequently caused by long periods spent in cramped conditions. Tightly packed seating -- such as that found in the economy class section of airliners -- can restrict movement and trigger the blood clot illness.
The train I caught to work today was one of the new refurbished Connex trains. Other than being painted blue on the outside and having a dot-matrix display on the front, they redid the seating and added emergency intercoms. Most interestingly, though, most of the walls between the carriages have been replaced with see-through windows. Which means that when you look through them, you see another tube of commuters, in that limbo state of almost suspended animation one enters in the space between actual places. It's eerily like looking into a fish tank (from the adjacent fish tank).
For some reason, I never liked Toxic Custard. It always seemed to have that strained, unfunny quality you'd get from a commercial radio morning team doing a mediocre Blackadder impression. Oh well; to each his own.