Anyone got an old NES?

April 4, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Sci-Tech

Everything you need to know for turning an old Nintendo system into a working PC.
"Well, of course before you can fit anything inside the system, you need to take out the old Nintendo. There's a series of about 1,000,000 screws, all phillips, holding the top of the case on, and holding the guts inside the NES. Be sure to save about 6 or 7 of these screws, because you'll need them later on. If your Nintendo worked before dismantling it, save the guts and build a new case for it."
[NES_PC.jpg]
http://www.junkmachine.com/nintendo/members/5.shtml

+ Read More

Use a Firewall, Go to Jail

April 4, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Hacking

The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that "conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication". Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal -- with no exceptions.

+ Read More

Bush Suffers Senate Defeat, Criticized by Lawmakers

April 2, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Politics

Washington is a new kind of place for Bush now, meaner, with less slack being cut. It's the kind of place where the merest hint of blood in the water alerts the sharks.
Last week, the same week he was grilled by lawmakers on the $75 billion (U.S.) in supplemental spending the administration needs for the first phase of the war, his $726 billion tax cut plan was chopped in half by a Senate in which Republicans hold a 51 to 49 majority.
"Even appeals to Republicans' patriotism have failed to win backing for the president,'' noted the Washington Post.
The Senate also defeated his controversial plan to open up the Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling.
And, in the coup de grace, lawmakers gutted his faith-based proposal to pump money into church-supported social agencies, such as drug-counselling centres.
These are serious portents. And Bush still has to go back to Congress for more money if the war drags on.
To make matters worse, a member of his own party, Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, criticized Bush last week for not using "strong-arm tactics'' to bring rebel Republicans in to line on the defeated legislation.

+ Read More

Bush approves use of tear gas in battlefield

April 2, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Politics

President George W. Bush has authorized American military forces to use tear gas in Iraq, the Pentagon says, a development that some weapons experts said could set up a conflict between American and international law.

+ Read More

God=Strange Brain Disorder?

April 2, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Sci-Tech

Why do people experience religious visions? BBC Two's Horizon suggests that in some cases the cause may be a strange brain disorder.
Controversial new research suggests that whether we believe in a God may not just be a matter of free will. Scientists now believe there may be physical differences in the brains of ardent believers.

+ Read More

Super squid surfaces in Antarctic

April 2, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Eco

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.
There have only ever been six specimens of this squid recovered: five have come from the stomachs of sperm whales and the sixth was caught in a trawl net at a depth of 2,000 to 2,200 metres.

+ Read More

The Core: Hollywood Fiction or Science?

April 2, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Sci-Tech

Deadly asteroid impacts, reincarnated killer dinosaurs, alien invasions. Just when you thought Hollywood had thrown it all at us, a fresh, new, end-of-the-world scenario opens in theaters tomorrow.this time the action is 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) below our feet in The Core.
It seems the core of the Earth has stopped spinning and is no longer generating the planet's protective magnetic field. This triggers a cascade of diabolical events for man and beast. Birds can't navigate and fly erratically into buildings. People with pacemakers unexpectedly drop dead. Massive electrical storms destroy all electronic communication, and unfettered blasts of solar radiation fry the planet.
And unless an intrepid team of "terranauts" journey to the center and start it spinning again, everyone on the planet will be dead within a year.
In The Core, radioactive particles and beams of microwave radiation literally cook the planet. In one scene a microwave beam from the sun slices the Golden Gate Bridge in half. Electrical super storms, triggered by the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, destroy Rome's Coliseum.
It has all the makings of a blockbuster.and it may not necessarily all be fantasy.

+ Read More

Clones that Go Thump in the Night

April 1, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Sci-Tech

As we await the first cloned baby to appear on our TV screens with varying degrees of horror and fascination, we might do well to put this latest science fiction story into perspective. First, human suffering is an issue. If a clone is born, it will face the agonizing prospect of lifelong scrutiny. Unwanted media attention made the lives of the first Dionne Quintuplets, born in Canada decades ago, a living horror. Second, the clone will hardly have a life of her own. She will be as much a medical curiosity as Wang and Chang, the original Siamese twins who were probed, prodded and ultimately exhibited as medical curiosities. Third, the clone.s prospect for a normal existence is jeopardized by its very novelty. Every shiver and runny nose will be taken as evidence of its medical demise, brought on by hysterical, as yet unwarranted assertions, that cloned animals that make it to birth face a life fraught with medical catastrophe.
The reality is somewhat less chilling: cloned kids are likely to be no more or less freakish than were the first in vitro fertilization babies. They may experience more medical problems than do average children, as did some in vitro fertilization babies. But then, clones are not average and objecting to cloning on the basis of risk is temporizing, as it was for in vitro fertilization. Over time, the "risks" will be made acceptable, and more fundamental concerns will be lost in the heady success of the first generation of "clone kids" just as they were with the first generation of in vitro babies.

+ Read More

Honesty: The Worst Policy

April 1, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Politics

When NBC -- which is owned by General Electric, a prime military-industrial complex contractor -- decided to fire Peter Arnett for the thought crime of plain speaking, it was undoubtedly responding both to pressure from the White House (which accused Arnett of "pandering" to the Iraqis) and to the imperatives of its MSNBC ratings chase against the gung-ho, pro-war frothers of Fox News.
What provoked Arnett's defenestration? In an interview he accorded on Sunday to Iraqi television (which an MSNBC spokesperson initially described as a "professional courtesy"), Arnett allowed as how media reports of civilian casualties in Iraq "help" the "growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan."

+ Read More

Hackers Being Blamed For Al-Jazeera Outage

April 1, 2003 D. H. McKee
Off
Hacking

Once again, hackers are taking the blame for a denial of service attack which almost anyone with the desire and decent net connectivity could have accomplished.
The difference in this case is that hackers are being drawn into the military conflict between the United States and Iraq. The site in question belongs to Al-Jazeera, an Arabic news organization based in Qatar. And according to this Washington Post story, "many Americans" were angered by that network's rebroadcast of Iraqi television's video of captured and killed American soldiers. By making the leap that hackers were responsible for the massive attack which started Tuesday morning, hackers are mistakenly viewed as some kind of cybersoldier dedicated to carrying out American military policy.

+ Read More