So I did it I entered that MMFT thing... Now we will see how badly cut up I get... Yeah!

What an interesting set of tech stories: Two wrongs don't make a right, the little guy sells out, and the 'Evil Empire' sticks up for you.

Actually, I thought that the Lycos thing was wrong from the beginning. Everyone seemed to love it, but somehow being equally evil and annoying as the spammers never seemed to be the right way to solve the problem.

As for Shawn Fanning, I think that kowtowing to the recording industry's model is not the way to (a) deal with online music or (b) make money with online music. The problem with online music is that it the song files are so small, you can't convince me that you can sell me a better product on a per song basis. This is a problem that, currently, is unique to music (I am sure that the Movie and TV industries could provide their content that people would pay for because of the premium on good quality and fast downloads.)

I would rather see (and would probably pay for) an unlimited monthly subscription idea. Essentially, I see it as something like customized radio. Just connect, find an artist you want to hear, click and, in a few seconds, you've got music (which is conceptually the same model as having your mp3s on your hard drive.) If you really want the album, you can go out and buy it, or pay to download it. You wouldn't have to download it, though, because, as with so much on the internet, it would just be available to find (for example, I don't download a dictionary, I go to Dictionary.com.) Moreover, this could open up the Amazon-style market of the bottom part of the popularity curve. (Amazon makes far more on the less popular items it can provide because they link them to popular items. The cost of providing niche items is the same as the popular stuff and people are more willing to buy niche merchandise than ubiquitous items (something about the thrill of "the find".)) Similarly, they can expose that lower popularity end of the market without (much) added cost. At the very least, a model that fits the medium (rather than shoehorning the medium to fit the industry model) would be much better received, and I have no doubt it would be far more profitable than the current stance.

You should google my name and find out... Expect suprising results... Tee Hee!

Maybe you skipped it, Jess. Or maybe, through some bizarre coincidence, you added it to the dictionary once long ago. My favourite, Douglas-Adams-esque explanation, though, is that it's conclusive proof that time travel is possible...

Hank, I don't know what happened to tvtorrents, but btefnet is pretty good. If you get Azureus and the RSSFeed plugin, you can use btefnet's RSS feed to automatically (or is that automagically?) download tv shows when they get posted.

Alb... er, I mean, Ginji, I think a better question than why your clothes never change is why is your cod named Silver?

My bad, 10 spots still left... If no one enters in the next 2 weeks I might have a chance to finish my design and enter the tournament... Or I can just enter him:



Either way I got to enter to see how well I will do.

Only 4 spots left in this months MMFT tournament... If I don't do homework or study and work on one of my incomplete mecha designs I can enter this months tournament... Probally shouldn't, so I guess next month it is...

Actually on closer inspection I am actually a high school student and those clothes are actually my school uniform... Damn it is Kyo Kusanagi syndrome all over again...

Nothing to report here in the land of the geeks... Why am I still wearing the same cloths? Like most anime were the characters don't change their clothes this question will never be answered... Either that or the clothes identify me since everyone kind of looks the same, So if I change my clothes I lose my identitiy and possibly my "badassness".

Signing off

Does anyone know what happened to tvtorrents.net? it no longer seems to exist

So, I handed in a paper yesterday and I was feeling really awesome about it and today I re-opened the file to find out how many words it was (so as to judge how long each section needs to be in my next paper) and I notice this funny little thing on page 2: "(adfh;adfjjkdf;laiu)". Which was me forgetting where a quote came from but (as I was on quite a roll right then) typing that so I could come back to it later and add the reference. Which I didn't do. So now I've deleted all my research files and the paper has been handed in. My only question, how the hell did that get by spellcheck?