The Null Device

2001/5/27

I have just been informed that the first Designers Republic book is coming out in July. Titled 3D>2D:The Designers Republic's Adventures In and Out of Architecture, it will retail for £35, and be available through their web site. Tempting, though I probably pass.

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Here is the text of an email I recently sent to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about DVD region coding (which they are investigating).

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Famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki voyage fame) believes that the Norse god Odin may have been a real person; more specifically, a tribal king in what is now Southern Russia, some time during the first century. If that is true, that could go some way towards explaining those stories about the British royal family's official genealogy showing them being descended from Odin.

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Everybody's favourite corporate citizen and all-round Good Neighbour McDonalds admits to having lied to vegetarians for the past 10 years, saying that their fries are suitable for vegetarians, whereas they were, in fact, cooked in beef fat. Mind you, this affects not only the minuscule proportion of the dreadlocked feral population who eat at McDonalds, but the rather large Hindu population of India, whose religion forbids eating beef. Hindu nationalists are not amused.

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A disturbing new subculture has appeared on the Net: pro-anorexia web sites and mailing lists, organised by groups of young women who believe that being morbidly thin is attractive, and more important than health. The sites offer commandments such as "thou shalt not eat without feeling guilty", tips on how not to eat and how to hide your anorexia from caring people who just don't understand, and encouragement to surrender to peer pressure and constantly strive to be thinner.

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The street/own uses/tech: Some well-meaning cracker has written a paedophile-hunting email worm. The Noped worm searches the target's hard drive for things that look like child pornography (apparently by looking at file names; not the most accurate method) and, if found, mails a sample to a US federal agency.

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