“The AACS Debacle”

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Like many geeks, I’ve been watching the progress of what BoingBoing is calling “the AACS Debacle” with interest over the last couple days.

For those of you not familiar with it, here’s the executive summary: some guy, apparently irritated that he wasn’t allowed to play the next-generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs on his Linux machine, dug around and discovered an easy way to break the copy protection scheme on them — the one that companies spent years and many millions of dollars to painstakingly work out. It all boiled down to a sixteen-byte hexadecimal number, which he posted. This week, the company that controls the copy-protection technology decided to get heavy-handed about it and force everyone to remove it from the Internet using the legal blunt weapon of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA), sparking a user revolt on the popular site Digg. Continue reading ‘“The AACS Debacle”’ »

Good Religions, Bad Churches

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Once you understand the basic urges that motivate people, the ones that are the same worldwide regardless of racial group or culture, it doesn’t take much additional effort to understand and even appreciate the tenets of practically every religion. No matter how different a religion may be from what you believe, they’re all good at their core.

Unfortunately, the followers of a religion don’t always follow that religion’s tenets. That’s when groups, and churches, go bad. Continue reading ‘Good Religions, Bad Churches’ »

“How Spider-Man Compares To Real Spiders”

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As a long-time fan of Spider-Man stories, I was somewhat disturbed at the changes that were made to the canonical Spider-Man for the recent movies. The radioactive spider was out, replaced by a genetically-spliced one — more hip and new-millennium, you know. He now generated webbing from within his arms, instead of using a fast-setting (but short-lived) chemical glue and mechanical web-shooters, both of his own invention — a neat trick, and it prevented the writers from using the rather tired trick of having him run out of “web fluid” at just the wrong moment, but he doesn’t give the same impression of being a science geek without them.

Fortunately, the stories have been very well written so far, and the differences in the details didn’t detract from my enjoyment of them. We’ll soon see if the magic extends to the third movie as well, as it’s supposed to hit North American theaters tomorrow (GoddessJ and I will probably see it sometime next week). The “Saga of the Alien Costume” is one of my favorite Spider-Man stories, and Venom one of my favorite bad guys (if he’s in this one at all, I’ll be very disappointed if they don’t have him say something about eating Spider-Man’s spleen or other internal organs at least once), so you can bet that any major changes to the main storyline will be carefully and critically examined.

To make a long and rambling story a little shorter, I ran across this article the other day, on how the new and improved Spidey compares to real spiders. I didn’t realize that some spiders actually can spin silk from their legs, or that there were so many different kinds of spider silk. If you’re at all a fan of Spidey, or just like science or nature stories, have a look.

Malaysian Astronauts

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There was a rather nationalist (if not racist) joke making the rounds a while back, about an Arab who visits the US and sees an episode of the original Star Trek series. He notes to his American hosts that many different races and nationalities are represented: Russian, Japanese, African, Scottish, even races completely alien to Earth, and wonders why there are no Arabs on the show. The punchline is when an American says, “because it’s the future.”

Fortunately, it turns out that at least some Islamic countries are not so inflexible. A story in The Register says that Malaysia “has had Islamic scholars working on the problem for a year, and have come up with a set of guidlelines [sic] to help their astronaut to meet his religious obligations when he arrives at the International Space Station later this year.”

Maybe the Arabian crewmembers of the original Enterprise just weren’t on the bridge that day.

Next-Generation Toys Read Brain Waves

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All sorts of interesting news today… this article talks about biofeedback technology being used in games. It’s a nice idea, but I don’t think this one’s going to happen real soon either:

“Mom, I need a biofeedback controller for my Nintendo.” “A what?” “It’s this really neat thing that reads your mind and lets you control things just by thinking about them!” “But you’ve already got a game-pad, two joysticks, a steering wheel, foot pedals, a throttle, a light gun, a keyboard, a mouse, a touch screen, and a high-speed Internet connection for your Nintendo.” “Yeah, but I need this!” “Sorry dear, you’re just going to have to learn to trounce your friends the old-fashioned way.”

“Plastic Sheet Delivers Wireless Power”

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This is one of those little SF technologies, like the flying car, that has long been dreamed of but has never happened. It’s easy to understand why the flying car hasn’t — safety concerns, security concerns, and price. But the only reason I can come up with against short-range wireless power is the chicken-and-egg problem: no one is going to create electronics to take advantage of one of these sheets until the sheets themselves are ubiquitous, and no one is going to start mass-producing the sheets until there’s a large and demonstrable demand for them — which won’t happen until there’s a large number of things that use them.

As nice as this kind of thing would be, it’s not going to happen until someone comes up with a cheap transitional technology, or some extremely popular piece of electronics incorporates it. Such as… the iPod? Oh, Mr. Jobs…

First Blog-Comment Spam

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I’ve heard all about blog-comment spam, and I’ve even stumbled over a little of it here and there around the ‘net. I’d wondered how long it would be before the Geek Drivel blog attracted it’s first one. No need to wonder any further: it showed up a few minutes ago, a credit-card spam, and was instantly caught by the awe-inspiring Spam Karma 2 plug-in that I installed at the same time I set up the blog. If only e-mail spam filters could work this well right out of the box!

Good and Evil, A Geek Philosophy

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(This entry is only here for reference purposes. I plan to refer to it in several future entries on both religions and technology.)

Philosophy is like an onion.

Most people, on reading that, might think that I’m referring to layers… how you can peel away layers of both, seemingly forever, always finding more layers below. Some might mockingly take that analogy even further, pointing out that if you keep going long enough, both of them turn out have nothing at all at their core.

I mean it in a more gustatory fashion: Continue reading ‘Good and Evil, A Geek Philosophy’ »

Skype “Spim” Entry Most Popular

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Apparently I hit a chord with my Skype Spim entry. It has had more hits than any other entry, most of them from Google searches. I tried entering one of the searches into Google myself, and sure enough, that blog entry was the first hit on the list. Apparently there were only two pages that mentioned it, but I still feel special. 😉

It seems that this company has been spamming (or rather, “spimming”) everyone they can, and some people are doing searches to see if they’re the only ones seeing it, or maybe (given the company’s damnable persistence) to see what they can do to stop it. I hope my entry helped.