Tomasulo.net

A follow-up on the Mike Hawash detention story. He's been officially charged after being held for over a month as a "material witness". According to the charges, he attempted to travel to Afghanistan in October of 2001 by way of China with the intent of joining with the Taliban and al-Queda forces during the war.

All of which sounds like grounds to declare someone a material witness (he was traveling with men who had already been charged,) and later charge him. Still, a month in solitary confinement without being charged with a crime is not something you like to think happens in the U.S., especially to its own citizens.

Linux From Scratch

The Scrolling Game Development Kit Homepage

GameTable Online - Strategy Gaming Just a Click Away! This ought to be interesting once they get there act in gear. They seem to have online versions of several Cheapass Games in the works.

Hardware Hackers - Truly dangerous With A Screwdriver

Changing World Technology claims to have developed an efficient process to turn Anything into Oil. "Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a glass beaker."

Harper's Magazine: EYES WIDE SHUT. -- A review by Lee Siegel

Washington Post has a good article covering the competing plans for rebuilding post-war Iraq.

Speech synthesis under Linux

The Poetry of Donald Rumsfield

Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The 5th Annual Independent Games Festival

Part One of building a Linux Media Jukebox. I've been wanting to do something like this for a couple of years now. I'll have to give it a try someday now that I've got a roadmap.

The RIAA recently filed lawsuits against 4 college students -- including 2 at my alma mater RPI -- seeking damages adding up to $97,800,000,000. The students had all set up general search engines to index the public or "shared" folders of all the the computers on the school's network. The RIAA is claiming that this creates an "emporium of music piracy". Zack Rosen has put together a page linking relavent news stories, and providing an execellent explaination of file sharing and the difference between this and the Napster case. The two main weaknesses here are that (A) these search engines provided little service beyond what can be done with a few clicks in the Windows Search tool and (B) since these were on university networks and not limited to audio files there was likely a great deal more authorized material than un-authorized. We do not make useful tools illegal simply because they can be used in the comission of a crime. Napster was brought down by the fact that it was MP3-only, and never seemed to have anything but "unauthorized" content on it.

One favorite link is this Open Letter to the RIAA from MTU President Tompkins, taking the to task for neither providing promised support to the University's anti-piracy initiatives, nor including the University in its investigation of their student.

This, of course, doesn't even begin to address the idea that the RIAA doesn't speak for all it's artists in these anti-piracy crusades. There are plenty of artists who understand that file sharing expands there audience in ways that commerical radio refuses to.

David Dowe's chess, games and game theory page

Harrisonburg City Schools Lunch Choices

ScummVM -- This should allow me to play my old copy of Sam and Max Hit the Road under Linux (or win98).

Baghdad earlier today:

Hawash, a U.S. citizen, was arrested last month by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. For nearly two weeks, he has been held as a so-called "material witness" in solitary confinement in a federal lockup in Sheridan, Oregon. The designation allows authorities to hold him indefinitely without charging him with a crime.

Institutional Comics was the comic strip I wrote and drew for the Rensselaer Polytechnic when I was a sophmore there.

Microsoft's spell checker provides two alternatives for those of us who type "consistant". They are "consistent" and "consist ant".

Someday, I'll have meant "consist ant".

A bunch of home-brewed, text-based games from Adam Cadre

Linux Game Publishing held a contest recently to find folks to form a development company. The resulting group has dubbed themselves Angry Pixels.