Proposed punishment for spammer

Prison. Solitary confinement. A very limited computer, able to
receive Email but nothing else. An Email address widely and
frequently exposed on newsgroups, web pages, and other venues
liable to harvesting.

Three times a day—at unpredictable times—an Email with a
random subject line would contain a password needed to get the
next meal served. This might be at the end of the (otherwise
typical SPAM) message, in the middle, near the beginning, but
the prisoner would need to read each and every EMail to find the
password for his next meal.

[Found in a newsgroup]
[and in email]

Windows released 20 years ago

IT-viikko, a Finnish IT news magazine, reports on their today's number that Windows was first released to public 20 years ago.

They have quite an interesting choice for pictures, I have to say.
And words.
"Steve Jobs of Apple competing with Gates, tried a mouse on a computer's side" .. doesn't make sense? As if most things written in Finnish would...

Kernel panic wear

Kernel panic mug ... for safe boot mornings.



Kernel panic shirt



Kernel panic inside?



Kernel panic in fridge?

And yes - why did it take so long for anyone to come up with kernel panic wear? The mug feels perfect for the mornings before 11 AM, the wear for just annoying people at work, and I want a fridge magnet - if for nothing else, to see how the people will look like when they see a fridge that asks to be shut down...

Sajida Richawi running away from the bombs, and innocent victims kids try illegally racing cars

And more Sunday browsing and rants...

Stupid kids, now described as innocent, victims, saints. A bunch of teenagers were driving their parents cars in Rome, and had a competition which one would be the last to hit the brakes. So the kids were driving at full speed, hit the brakes 50 meters before wall, and one of the kids died in the crash, 3 ended up in the hospital. The description of how fascinating and important this sort of driving - getting to full speed and seeing who has the courage to be the last one to use the brakes, is amazing. At least they were illegally racing these cars in a zone where no one was living - so at least no one uninterested was hurt. To have such competition occur on a curvy street, and the car end in a living room would have been far worse. But victims? Of course. They were so totally not seeking that to happen.



The second "smart news" is from Amman and Jordania. The missing, failed suicide bomber, Sajida Mabrouk Atrous Richawi, has confessed, and showed her face in the TV. While she and her husband entered the Radisson hotel, her husband exploded, and she did not - she escaped with the other people. Oh why? If you are there to suicide yourself, and to kill a bunch of other people, why would you run away to save your skin?


She looks a lot older than the Internet information suggests (that would be 35).

Evangelist's DRM opinions boingboinged and /.ed

Previous Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications, Mike Evangelist, does not really like DRM music - which I totally agree with him.

"From this day forward I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period.

They can all take their DRM, and their broadcast flags, and their rootkits, and their Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines."

So entertaining - firs the story, the blog entry, was boingboinged, then nearly a day later slashdotted.

And, talking about Apple ... for your enjoyment - Serialbox November 2005.

Serialbox November 2005

Serialbox November 2005 (11/2005)

If you need a mobile phone, you'll buy an iPod???

Of the series of stupid slashdot articles: Apple sabotages ROKR so that the people who were wanting to buy a mobile phone, will buy an iPod...

Laughing on that alone, without bothering to even read more than the headlines for a day.

"Oh yes, I need a new phone ... so I'll just buy an iPod". What next? Someone who is looking for a new phone, buys a new digital camera? I still don't get how I can call with an iPod. There is no addon for a mobile phone functionality for an iPod, so if I need a mobile phone, why would I get an iPod?

But then.. why would I need to buy a new phone? I'll wait until the promised price drop of PSP will be true - their price at $ 150 as what they promised when 5th Generation iPods got out -- that and a USB microphone, and I'm covered for where ever I am at work and at home -- VOIP rules, who needs a mobile phone when you can PSP?

Well, the "original" Appleblog article linked as a source info for that /. article was stolen from Wired: Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone .

Excerpts from that Wired article that sum it up:

Zander had been hired to jazz up the staid midwestern company, and an association with iPod would provide a much-needed infusion of cool - maybe even more than the upcoming RAZR. For Jobs, a partnership with Motorola was a way of neutralizing a threat to the iPod, which already dominated the US music-player market. Consumers around the world are expected to buy 75 million MP3 players this year, but they'll purchase nearly 10 times that many mobile phones. If music players become standard in handsets, the iPod could be in trouble. Partnering on a music phone gives Apple a way to enter that market yet protect the iPod. So although the two companies were superficially aligned, in fact their ambitions were diametrically opposed: Motorola dreamed of bringing the iPod to the cell phone-buying masses, while Apple sought to protect the iPod from them. [..[

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia group, has bad news for the labels. In an impossibly sleek conference room at Nokia's steel and glass headquarters in Espoo, a woodsy Helsinki suburb, Vanjoki is showing off the new N91, a 3G Symbian handset that will go on sale this winter. As a music phone, the N91 is everything the ROKR is not. It can hold a thousand songs or more. It has a rugged 4-gigabyte hard drive as well as Wi-Fi and a high-speed USB connection. "If you want to do file-sharing, this is also possible," Vanjoki says. "Because this is not a mobile phone, it is a computer."

He pushes a couple of buttons on the keypad. Up pops Symella, a new peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary. As the name suggests, Symella is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia research center. Symella doesn't come installed on the N91; Vanjoki downloaded it from the university Web site. "Now I am connected to a number of peers," he continues, "and I can just go and search for music or any other files. If I find some music I like and it's 5 megabytes and I want to download it - the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of traffic." [..]

In the end, what's surprising about the Moto ROKR is not that carriers resisted it but that it is so short on innovation. Instead of creating new possibilities, as the N91 does, the ROKR allows FairPlay to close them off. Why won't Apple open iTunes by licensing FairPlay to a wide range of manufacturers? "That's a good question for Steve Jobs," replies Alberto Moriondo, a Motorola executive who helped lead the development of the ROKR. (Jobs declined to be interviewed for this story.) Another handset person says he asked the same question in a meeting with Apple execs, only to have them roll their eyes and mutter, "If only …"[..]

Hey, this Nokia N91 actually sounds interesting. I might even consider switching back to Nokias after a 5 years pause of them.



Nokia's press release
ROKR product page

I have a perfectly working Sony Ericsson P800 that I have no intention of changing, an Ericsson T39m (yes, it has bluettoth) as a secondary phone, and a 20 GB iPod (first of the kind), an iPod mini, and an iPod shuffle, and a Newton 2000. Do I really *need* to buy a new phone? Most reasonably NO, I don't, but ... anyone who needs a PHONE, will buy a phone. Until you can call with your digital camera or palm. They buy a phone, or a Treo, or something. The reverse engineer part of me wants to get a PSP and hack that to be a VOIP with a USB microphone, then again, I might be curious enough to get the Nokia N91 soon enough - if they have fixed finally an annoying bug which made me ultimately run away from the Nokias a few years back.

New STD: Gonorrhea Lectim

New STD: Gonorrhea Lectim
Beware the Carriers of a New Disease

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent
strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. This disease is contracted through
dangerous and high risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim
(pronounced " gonna re-elect him "). Many victims have contracted it after
having been screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken measures
to protect themselves from this especially troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequelae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include,
but are not limited to, anti-social personality disorder traits; inability
to tell the truth, delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor;
chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance;
inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia; inability
to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts
of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; ignorance of geography
and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a
strong propensity for categorical, all-or-nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington, trailer parks, and the red states.
Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant
disease originated only a few years ago from a Texas Bush.