January 2003

The Economist on how copyrights aren’t really helping creativity, which is what they were intended to do in the first place. via andersja

Smarter spam via Scripting News

Letters to the Editor. Except that they’re a marketing campaign. By the President, no less. via Scripting News

Some (light?) reading on physics: Motion Mountain – a rather large and comprehensive physics book for download. And some links on Quantum Field Theory.

US is the biggest threat to world peace?! A Time survey. via kuro5hin

John Ashmead offers a view of quantum mechanics in which the collapse of the wave function can be done away with. Given that the world is emphatically quantum mechanical, there should be no separate domain of competence for classical physics. All classical results should ultimately be explicated in quantum terms. I was long hoping this was the case.

The first time Bertie meets Jeeves. via RobotWisdom

The real face of Jesus. Jesus, it turns out, looked like a peasant, bearded and green-brown eyed. At least, if forensic anthropology is to be believed. via Nilesh

Obesity reduces lifespan. An obese 20-year-old man may have his life expectancy cut by as many as 13 years compared with normal-weight people.

Kazaa is next. Even though it’s not based in the US, Kazaa has been ruled to be subject to US laws. No matter what the outcome, Kazaa is going to be in trouble. Well, time to move on to the next P2P software.

Now IBM offers supercomputing on demand. Pricing is unclear, but Big Blue is clearly positioning itself as the computer utility house of the 21st century.

The Future of the Book from Xerox PARC is an interesting paper I picked up from The Social Life of Information by Brown and Duguid.

Article on 64-bit processors. Interesting description of the PC industry pecking order: Microsoft > Intel > HP / Dell. Keeping that in mind does help predict a lot of the PC’s future. via RobotWisdom