This is weird...according to this Wired article, the FBI may have missed a Hotmail email account allegedly used by terrorist conspiracy suspect Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui, who is defending himself, claimed that email from the account would provide him with an alibi, but FBI agents had no record of it...and by the time they looked, the account had apparently been automatically deleted due to its inactivity.
This is a really tough one to make a call about. On the one hand, the FBI has proved notoriously inept at handling technical evidence; on the other hand, Moussaoui has been eccentric, to say the least, in his handling of his defense.
Here's a neat article on hi-tech innovations that led the creation of a new business jet that can sell for one-fourth the price of current models (the low, low price of $850 grand) and can operate for about one-fourth the cost (around a dollar a mile).
Great googly moogly! Technology from IBM would hook college dorm washers and dryers to the Internet, allowing college students to monitor the progress of their laundry from their dorm room, classroom, library or even their cell phone.
Mr. Vampire: Hong Kong, like Hollywood, is not known for creativity. Although similar to A Chinese Ghost Story, this movie is unique in many ways. Well written and played out, this funny horror is a true treat.
Leftist politics has its roots in compassion; we'll never be comfortable or convincing selling meanness and hatred. More than that, I think in the long run, nastiness is counter-productive. Ann Coulter's political pornography may feed the lusty anger of bigots and gun nuts, but I doubt she's ever lured a single person off the fence. She's a whore, not a siren. There may be some value for the right in holding the interest of its angry, resentful base, but the left's base isn't angry or resentful. It's frustrated and ready for change, but it isn't inherently angry. It isn't entertained by hostility. And that leaves very little for a left-wing Coulter to feed on.
Once considered a productivity-enhancing tool, sorting through e-mail has become daily drudgery as employees separate wanted messages from heaps of spam. Market research firm Gartner estimates that a company of 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost productivity because of internally generated spam. Add the Internet, and the problem gets much worse.
"A year, year-and-a-half ago, spam was an annoyance; now it's a productivity drain," said Maurene Carson Grey, research director for e-mail and messaging at Gartner. "A lot of the spam has become quite distasteful, and it's a drain...not just on bandwidth, but on storage."
Shoot, I could have told them that. My youngest daughter is a little more than a year old now, and while she has a few words, she mostly speaks what I call "Babish." But there's no doubt that as far as she's concerned, she's saying things...she'll rattle off a whole sentence or two in babish.
I've actually wondered if my youngest isn't really saying more words than we think, and we're missing them. When our first daughter began to speak, we were listening so closely to her speech that we could really pick out when she she said recognizable words among the babish. Now she's three and quite the little chatterbox, so there's a certain amount of competition (and distraction) for our attention. On the other hand, The Baby has one more person talking to her, and I'm sure that helps too.
I love it when I notice a search in my referral logs that actually pertains to something I've discussed in my blog (as opposed to searches that hit on unlikely and unrelated word combinations, like "tales for the l33t flash soundtrack" and the ever-popular "cowboy bebop nude").
So checking this morning, I saw a hit from someone searching for "etsuko shiomi," the Japanese action actress. I'd linked to a review I wrote of Sister Street Fighter, and posted a few pics of my own as well.
Airport screeners will no longer ask passengers whether they've kept a close eye on their luggage or if anyone has asked them to carry something on board the aircraft. The questions are being phased out becasue they wast 20 seconds per passenger, according to Transportation Security Administration head James Loy.
"Over the years they have lost whatever original value they contributed and can now be safely eliminated," Loy said.
I just had coffee with Dodd, who was driving thru on his way to Chi-town to see the Dave Matthews Band (he even offered me his extra ticket--unfortunately, I have a meeting for my daughter's preschool tonight--drat!). We sat outside the $tarbucks on Monument Circle and enjoyed a pleasant cup and conversation. Have a safe trip and enjoy the show, man!
The submarine, which still has both of its torpedoes and is marked by bullet holes, may be the one sunk by a US Navy destroyer early on December 7, 1941. Its discovery may lend physical evidence to the contention that the US destroyer firing on the sub were the first shots in the United States involvement in WWII.
The remains of two Japanese sailors are believed to be inside the sub, which is said to be in excellent condition at a depth of 1,200 feet.
Oh, wow. I mentioned the other day that several noted anime directors are preparing a series of shorts set in the world of The Matrix. The Matrix Web site now has more details about the Animatrix project--a direct-to-video (and DVD) set of nine short films by seven directors (including Square USA, creators of the Final Fantasy movie). They've even posted a highly impressive trailer.
As Jules said in Pulp Fiction, "I'm going. That's all there is to it--I'm @#$%^&*! going!"
For the first time in weeeks, I didn't rent anything at my local video store's two-for-99-cent Tuedays. That's because over the weekend I reaped a massive haul (well, like seven or eight) of DVDs that'll take me a while to watch. Also, I've decided to stop renting so much until I actually sit down and write more reviews of the stuff I've watched so far. (For example, the Record of Lodoss War review I wrote for Destroy All Monsters was the result of renting the entire series over the course of several weeks).
Of course, it's been longer than that since I've posted any of the stuff I've picked up on Tuesdays. I decided to quit, not only because it probably isn't that interesting, but also because, again, I'd rather discuss movies in more detail instead of just name-dropping. I'm still keeping track of my rentals--along with permalinks to my external reviews--on my movies page.
For my birthday, my wonderful wife got me the DVD set of Record of Lodoss War (and I still owe Musashi at Destroy All Monsters an update on the DVD contents--sorry, Musashi!). My in-laws got me DVDs of Say Anything (wonderful, wonderful movie) and Iron Monkey, an utterly magnificient kung-fu movie. w00t!
Now, you might think that, plus the Our Man Flint and Poseidon Adventure DVDs I picked up the other day, would satisfy me. If you thought that, I'd say you haven't been reading this blog long enough. So as we were heading out to get my anime cel framed, we passed a roadside stand advertising 5 DVDs for $19.95. I'd passed stands of this type while I was on my self-imposed movie-buying hiatus, but now I had the opportunity--and the 20 smackers cash--to take a look around. I'd suspected they might be pirated (or just outright stolen), but it turns out that it's just cheapo DVDs by the box. Of course, one of the things about cheapo DVDs is that there are a lot of them of obscure kung-fu flicks, which , of course, is me all over. I was even more pleased to find a DVD of Godzilla vs Megalon--far from the best Godzilla movie (as the boys at Stomp Tokyo would tell you), but one of only two I have on DVD now and four lousy dollars!
I was disappointed not to find more horror films, but I very easily picked up four...since their individual price as five bucks, that meant that any other movie I got was essentially free, and since it was starting to rain, I just grabbed a random kung-fu flick and split. The haul:
Godzilla vs Megalon
Dragon Princess (Sonny Chiba and Sue Shiomi! w00t!)
The Asylum (A British horror anthology with Peter Cushing)
Deadly China Hero (A Wong Fei Hung story starring Jet Li and directed by Yuen Woo Ping)
Dragon vs Vampire (A random, obscure kung fu movie starring nobody I've ever heard of)
I'm about to take a break, in fact, and check out that Jet Li DVD. Cheapo DVDs are nearly always dubbed from videotape, so the quality can be spotty and there's almost never goodies like subtitles or alternate language tracks, but the tape this one is from was in Chinese with subtitles already, and that's pretty keen.
USS Clueless has an impressive piece deconstructing the apparent political agenda behind a recent Harvard study of merit scholarships. As always, Den Beste's full piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some key quotes:
What Harvard's researchers discovered was that the administrators responsible for these programs were administering them honestly, and awarding the scholarships without regard to race or financial means, based on academic performance and test scores. That's what the Legislators said they wanted when the programs were set up, and that's apparently what the administrators have actually been doing...it's not that these programs are broken, but rather that Harvard's researchers disagree with the goals of the programs
They did their studies of recipients and discovered that since the poor and blacks did worse in school, they also got disproportionately fewer of the scholarships. Harvard's researchers think these programs should not be merit based, but rather be means-tested, and deliberately should seek out non-whites and the poor irrespective of their academic merit.
But that's a political opinion, not a scientific observation. They think that these programs should be changed, but their study doesn't do anything to prove that, because that's not susceptible to proof. Rather, this study is just an attempt to embarrass the leaders of the states with uncomfortable statistics.
Full disclosure: I received a merit scholarship myself, and used it to attend the university of my choice. And frankly, I feel I deserved that scholarship and that my subsequent economic activity has returned its value to the state of Kentucky, which was not part of the Harvard study.
Although it certainly looks like there's a price war going on, calling it the "console wars" is something of a misnomer. Sony has shipped 33 million PS2 units worldwide since its Japanese launch in March 2000. Microsoft claims it has sold 3.9 million units worldwide in the 7-1/2 months the system has been available.
I have a couple of projects to complete this morning, so posting will be sparse until the afternoon. I want to get things done so I can spend some time here without the pressure of looming deadlines.
image courtesy fredart studios One of my favorite links is MegaTokyo, an online comic about two American computer game/anime fans who travel to Japan on a whim and are forced by circumstances to stay much longer than expected. The strip is funny, with an utterly engrossing story line and interesting, sympathetic characters. I've recently bookmarked a couple of excellent resources for MegaTokyo fans, especially new ones. The MegaTokyo Fan Network is a Web site run by, not surprisingly, fans of the strip. It hosts fan art and a handy FAQ that, in addition to introducing the strip's characters and plot, defines common anime and computer geek terms that get thrown around in the strip.
Another site of note is the Reader'sGuide to MegaTokyo, an impressive compendium of links to strips in chronological order with many annotations.
In addition, there are always lively discussions going on in the MegaTokyo Forums, and they just got a brand-new server, so performance is much better.
According to industry projections, Americans will spend nearly $3 billion more on DVDs this year than they did last, an increase of 50 percent. Some recent hit films...have earned more from their DVD releases than from their first-run theater engagements. And for the first time, DVD sales have surpassed those of videocassettes, even though DVD players are in only about a third of American households, compared with a saturation of more than 90 percent for videocassette players.
In the face of this, American retailers have shown the first major signs of making a per- manent shift to DVDs from videocassettes, much as they did to CDs from vinyl albums a decade ago.
"It is the most successful home entertainment device in history," said Warren Lieberfarb, president of Warner Home Video. "In five years, it has gone from zero to 30 million households, and a quarter of those have more than one DVD player. Nothing else has come close to doing that in such a short time, not CDs, not VCRs, not personal computers, not even television itself."
Early estimates in 1997 and 1998, the first years that DVDs were on the market, projected that it would take substantially longer for the new format to assert itself. But no one foresaw how quickly Hollywood studios would move to put their recent releases and extensive libraries onto the shiny new discs. By decade's end, all of them had.
The article also cites the unprecedented price drop of DVD players; units that averaged $600 to $700 in 1997 now go for about $150 and as little as $79. Also, next-generation video game systems like the PlayStation 2 have DVD capability built in.
Correction: I misidentified the newspaper as the DallasStar-Telegram; thanx to anna for the correx! (via FARK)
enetation had a notice on its site over the last few days that the frequent failures of its comments system were due at first to problems andthen to a massive system upgrade. Comments appear to be functioning at present, so I'll take back--at least for now--my assertion that enetation sux0rz.
I'll be checking over the comments, so if you've wanted to sound off on a previous post, now's your chance.
