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| NewScientist rubbishes
Bush's Missile Defence System again, pointing out flaws
and doubts in each stage of the system - very little of its technology
has been proven to work particularly well,
if
at all. And it all seems like ominous
posturing, regardless; as if any "rogue states" are going to seriously
consider chucking missiles at a country that could retaliate tenfold.
Graagh. Eyes down for a needless arms race, funding cut from elsewhere.
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| Alarming bit of brain-adjustment yesterday; after a couple of hours
wading through the Recreation Deck on System
Shock II,
I took a break and wandered along the riverbank for a little late-night Tesco'ing.
My first instinct on hearing a human voice was "Organic biped. Switch
to shotgun.", neurons flailing uselessly for the "3" button of
my consciousness. Ominous.
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| "Everyone I regularly read has been quiet today; is that because you're
all as sickened by the police, government, BBC and ITN as I am?" says
Nik,
before thoroughly living up to his blog moniker. While I snipe weakly at
the evil hypnotic capitalism of, erm, Amazon wishlists. Cough.
The Guardian had a lucid timeline of events
and Urban 75 give an insightful report
from one of the cyclists; overall it seems the fairly classic thing of
opposed groups vaguely demonising each other, egged on by the
media
entertaining its audience with promises of Samurai swords versus rubber bullets.
Crushing several thousand people into a rainy Oxford Circus for four hours, and
then tsking them for being a bit angry, though, seems rather pathetic.
And Niketown
is an actual place, rather than a sneering nickname for a generic shopping
mall? Good grief.
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| Amazonian wishlists infuriate me, strange hybrids that they are
of "since you've no idea what I'm interested in" Christmas lists for
disinterested grandparents, and dead-letter drop-points for people
you'd rather not give your address to.
It's faintly nauseating that they steer people away from buying
gifts the receiver might not know about, that the wisher would
prefer acquaintances to buy things expensively through Amazon than to
find them cheaper locally and pop them in a jiffy-bag. And it's all
rendered pretty absurd by people making unsubtle "I'd really, really like
this!" comments - buy the damn thing, if it's
that important; there's a link right in front of you.
What we need is wishlists of things that you can't buy easily
online, that other people might own or have seen locally. And - something I've been meaning to do to keep track of
where my friends live, regardless - an online address book which only
reveals your details to nominated "friends" (much more subtle than
saying "So what's your address, again?" a few days before a birthday).
And to be as much about bootlegs and lending out as air-mailing
polystyrene-wrapped originals for keeps. But I guess that's not very
commercial.
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| Record publishers claim to be able to produce
unpiratable
CDs which "redirect" evil MP3-kiddies to commercial Web sites
when they try to take recordings of them. I may be being outmodedly naïve here,
but surely if you can listen to something with your ears, you can record it?
Even if it's complicated to do so at a decent quality level, it only takes
one copy of Artist X's boastingly uncopyable album to get to a file-sharing
system. This sort of thing really isn't worth throwing the technology at.
| (To friends who read this page more often than they talk to me - I won't
pretend that other readers are that bothered, and they shouldn't either -
yesterday's job worries have been pretty much assuaged, although things
are only just within spitting distance of satisfactory.)
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| Warlocks -
Raven's Web-based version of the elegant turn-based spellcasting game
Firetop
Mountain - is up and running again. Something like a complicated two-handed
spells-and-monsters version of paper-scissor-stone, it deftly mixes simple
game rules with fearsome strategy and a fantastical atmosphere.
| Impressively comprehensive Web pages for
John Shuttleworth,
who's currently halfway through a tour and a
repeated radio series.
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| After waking up the other morning genuinely unsure whether I could
sometimes half-levitate or not, I've been wondering just what the
evolutionary advantage of remembering dreams is, such random
pre-breakfast confusion seeming a pretty bad thing for savannah survival.
This
paper argues fairly cogently in favour of it being "threat
practice", at least reminding you what to watch out for, if not
giving realistic simulations of retaliation and escape ("Oh no,
a tiger! I'd better turn into a cloud and float away!"), as well
as often being psychologically comforting.
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| The lack of company sign on the office door this morning speaks
greater and more ominous volumes than my otherwise decent employer has
been keen to, lately. If this page goes very quiet later in the
week, you can safely assume that I'm back in the DHSS (my only real
Internet access being through work).
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