Finished Eragon by Christopher Paolini tonight.

Before I get to the book itself I want to mention something that I found a little sad. Paolini wrote this book when he was a teenager. And as it turns out, his parents owned a small press (Paolini International, LLC), and it was them who first published the book. Chris then spent some time bopping around the US, promoting, and selling, the book. It was only after it became obvious that people wanted to read it that Knopf Books acquired it and published/promoted it.

OK, how incredibly freaky and sick is this?

Man Arrested For Allegedly Hiding In Women’s Toilet

In case you’re wondering, its a strange type of toilet…my guess is that there’s no plumbing at this rest stop so stuff goes into a storage tank underneath. This freak got into the tank so he could, well, get shat upon I guess.

Some little girl looked down into the toilet and saw a face looking back at her.

Takes all kinds, I guess… I shudder to even think about it.

Microsoft, Toshiba team on HD-DVD players

The latest volley in the DVD format wars. The article gives MS a lot of weight, which is understandable in the PC marketplace but I’m not sure it matters so much when it comes to consumer electronics.

DVD-HD won’t be ready for the launch of XBox 360, though MS has hinted that you may be able to upgrade your 360 to a more capable model as time goes by.

Meanwhile, everyone that buys a PS3 gets a Blu-Ray DVD player as a ‘bonus’ and to me, that just seems like a huge boon for Blu-Ray in the consumer space.

I’m firmly pro-Blu-Ray and I see this as a slight setback, but nothing to get too concerned over. If the 360 came out with a DVD-HD a year ahead of the PS3 and its Blu-Ray drive, I’d be a lot more worried.

Today thehe Supreme Court ruled that peer-to-peer companies could be held responsible for copyright infringement on their networks.
Supreme Court rules against file swapping

“There is no evidence that either company (Grokster or Streamcast) made an effort to filter copyrighted material from users’ downloads or otherwise impede the sharing of copyrighted files,” Souter wrote. “Each company showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement, the market comprising former Napster users.”

Souter wrote that the lower courts had misinterpreted the 1984 Sony ruling as saying that any non-infringing use, no matter how minimal, was enough to relieve a company of liability for copyright infringement.

Now I’m strongly against stealing intellectual property, but decisions like this can have a ripple effect through our lives.

For instance, I have a Tivo. There area few shows that I watch with my girlfriend at her place. So I copy them to a VCR tape, and take that tape to her place where we watch the show together.

I can do that because neither Tvio or my VCR have any kind of built-in DRM technologies, and I really want to keep things that way. Whenever I see the courts make a ruling like this, especially since they mentioned the Sony Betamax trial from 1984, it makes me really nervous (had the Betamax trial gone the other way, we wouldn’t have VCRs or CD-Roms today…at least, not in the format we have them now).

I despise the RIAA. I don’t believe they care about the artists. They just care about their huge cut. I’m much happier when I can buy a CD directly from the artist’s web page because I know then that the artist will get a fair share of my money.

Caveat: I’m certainly no lawyer, so the above are all layman’s opinions only….

Just got finished watching Hero, the Jet Li crazy-wire work movie.

I’m really growing to like this ‘real life anime’ style of movie, though when they get totally crazy with the wire work it just starts looking silly. Unfortunately, I watched it off of cable. It was badly dubbed and wasn’t widescreen. I might see if I can find a dvd version and watch it with sub-titles and in widescreen format. The dub was potentially awful. I’m basing that on the fact that they showed two warriors playing Go and referred to it as Chess. If they twisted that detail so badly, I assume they twisted many other details as well.

The overall flow of the movie was very similar to the classic Kurosawa movie Rashomon (the same events seen over and over from differing points of view) but of course the storyline wasn’t as good and the special effects were much better.

This one takes place in China…well, in what we now know as China when it was still broken up into several kingdoms. The King of Qin is fighting to unite the Warring States into a single empire (and eventually does so). Three assassins have been trying to kill the King, and no one can catch them. At least, until The Nameless warrior (Jet Li) does away with all three and is granted an audience with the King to receive his reward. Still, if you enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, you’ll enjoy Hero.

Oh, and for us guys, Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk was looking great as Flying Snow. Hard to believe she was almost 40 when she did this movie…

If you use del.icio.us (the ’social bookmark manager’) then you owe it to yourself to check out del.icio.us direc.tor. This builds a browser-based GUI for your del.icio.us bookmarks. (Unless you’re using Safari…it won’t work with Safari.)

Well worth checking out.

If you’ve been playing a lot of Destroy All Humans and it’s making you paranoid, this should help put your mind at ease.

read more | digg story

Russia: Solar sail launch fails

I haven’t been blogging this story since I’ve only been watching it with 1 eye for some reason, but I’ll be a vulture and swoop in now that failure is confirmed.

At least this won’t, or shouldn’t, dampen enthusiasm for solar sails, since the craft never got into orbit, or so it seems.

OK, this is strange. And I’m not sure why we need to know this. Yet, I feel compelled to share it:
Orgasms: a real “turn-off” for women

Basically, some scientists did brain scans of women being stimulated in various ways and determined that all emotions turn off in a woman while she is having an orgasm.

Who the heck paid for this study!!?

Finally finished Steven Johnson’s Emergence today. It started off pretty interesting, talking a lot about self-organizing systems, from ant colonies to cities to software. All good stuff. And that was probably the first half of the book.

But then Johnson starts talking about the Web and it starts to fall apart. The book was published in 2001 and the fact that it feels so outdated is great evidence of how rapidly things change today. Johnson is pretty enamored with Slashdot and uses it over and over again as an example of how the Web will operate, the idea being that all our opinions will get bundled together to make ‘clusters’ that we’ll each spend our time in. This would be a better argument if Slashdot actually based its articles on user ratings, rather than just its comments. Another example he cites is Epinions which is all but gone now…at least, the good parts of it are gone.

Actually his best arguments are when he talks about eBay and how it self regulates via users rating users. But still, he talks about how in 2005 we won’t care that The Sopranos is on HBO, since all our media will be delivered via the web anyway. Instead, we’ll see what’s playing in the “Organized crime fiction” cluster, or what have you.

What Johnson never factored in was litigation from the RIAA and MPAA. If these organizations had embraced the web and its distribution methods rather than trying to oppress them, we might be living in Johnson’s world now. He did get some things right, for sure. Tivo was new enough when he wrote the book that he had to explain what it was, and he talked about its impact on advertising. And in fact made some great points about advertising (basically that a person might watch ads if the ads are well done and pertinent to the viewer).

Johnson talks a lot about video games and SimCity and The Sims and so forth. As a game geek it was fun to read about this, until he started talking about how cool The Sims Online was going to be (but to be fair he was basing his thoughts on the advance-hype for the game…of course it shipped horribly broken).

So is it worth reading? Sadly, probably not, unless you read it for the fun of hearing predictions gone wrong. The early parts are interesting but you can probably find the subject explored in more detail elsewhere. Emergence would’ve been a fun read in 2001, but now its just a little sad…

I’ve been groving on http://digg.com for a while now, and of course I’m not the only one. Another Digg fan has been doing some, ah, digging around to get some info on the site:

Recently, I have been using Digg instead of Slashdot to get all of my geek news, tech, info, and deals. I hardly ever use Slashdot any more because Digg usually has the same links as well as a lot more interesting links. Now that Digg is becoming so popular here is a little more info about it.

read more | digg story

CNET’s 10 hot vehicles for techies

I’ve got another year of payments to make on my 2001 Xterra, and I’ll probably keep it for a year or two after just to enjoy some time with no monthly car payments.

That said, I’m still looking forward to my next car already..something a bit more high-tech. C|Net’s article has me drooling.

Thanks to Scott for bringing this one to my attention:

Astronomers: Earth’s ‘bigger cousin’ detected

This, to me, is huge. Think about how long its been since the first extra-solar planet was found. Just a few years, right? And already we’ve gone from gas giants to the first rocky worlds.

I can’t help but think that this all but proves that there are other planets out there capable of sustaining life. We’ve looked a such a tiny percentage of the galaxy and we’re already finding planets. Its likely that eventually one (or dozens) will be found in the right ‘belt’ to have liquid water.

And while this doesn’t mean that there’s any other life out there, it does mean that there are horizons still to be explored.

It saddens me that I grew up with the Apollo program and the future held such promise and then…it just stopped. For 30 years the exploration of space crawled forward where it had been bounding before.

I truly hope that the kids who’re growing up with SpaceShipOne and other private space exploration endeavors see the excitment build and build, rather than dropping off. We need the room and the resources, but most of all, as a race, we need to keep exploring.

Report: Five worst jobs for young workers - Jun. 9, 2005

My god, can we swaddle the world in any more layers of padding? Now they’re saying that lawn mowing is one of the 5 most dangerous jobs for teenagers.

“Working to help save for college, contribute to your family’s budget, or just to enjoy some spending cash is a great idea,” said Darlene Adkins, vice president for fair labor standards policy at the consumer organization. “But teenagers and their parents need to ask: is this safe work?”

The article goes on to say that more than 175 teens died on the job in 2001. I’d love to know what percentage of the teen workforce that represents. And in that same year, how many teens died while riding their bikes to a sporting event?

Cut the damned apron strings, will you America!?

Thanks to Kevin Gerich for pointing me to this.

t3h blox0r is an RSS aggregator along the lines of bloglines, but its built on Gecko’s XUL toolkit. So you’ll need Firefox or something along those lines to use it. (Firefox is a great browser anyway, if you don’t have it, get it.) Anyway, it’s a lot more ’slick’ than Bloglines. I think I’ll be switching…

UPDATE: Nope, I won’t be switching, yet. Some of my feeds that work in bloglines don’t work in blox0r. I imagine they’ll get that sorted out, though. I’ll check back in later.