NPR

Iceland, the country where Bobby Fischer won the world chess championship a generation ago, grants citizenship to the 62-year-old recluse. This was a boost to Fischer’s efforts to fight deportation from Japan to the United States.

VS2005 Pricing and Licensing

First off, only Microsoft would use the word “simplifies” in the headline of the press release that ultimately requires reading through a zillion Web pages and following flow charts to figure out. Having taken the time today to do just that, I hope I can save Larkware readers at least a bit of trouble. My guess is that a lot of your are already MSDN subscribers and Visual Studio users, and so you might well be interested in what’s coming our way whenever the next versions release.

Google Code

New open source tools from Google.

Funny and provocative, this 1992 documentary explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist. Chomsky illustrates how the media tacitly manipulates public opinion to further the agendas of the powerful. A compelling examination of the suppression of news about the U.S.-supported Indonesian invasion and subjugation of East Timor brings home the point.

The above is the Netflix quote. I don’t know how someone could consider this film ‘funny.’ In fact, it made me awfully angry and generally disgusted due to our society’s apathetic ignorance. This flick is a must see and is even more viable today than it was twelve years ago. Might I submit that our current congressional hearings on steroid use in professional sports is a perfect example of what Noam Chomsky is building a case against in this film (and the book. ). A federally subsidized jingoistic dumbing agent being used as a national distraction! Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! I assert that the majority of the material addressed in this movie has become exponentially more relevant over the last five years.

Camino

The Camino project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all types of users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

Economist.com | Technology and development

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points (see article).

And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world’s poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.

What the hell is that boy talking on? A cell phone? A cell phone shaped rice crispy treat? A cell phone shaped hyena turd?

Google

“Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.”

Microsoft Watch

Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.

Microsoft instead will be releasing their MS-CSS3 spec days after the release of IE 7.0 and will provide full support for that. 😉

LWN

Some 13 vendors of commercial software and appliance products present at CeBIT receive an open warning letter against their alleged misuse of GPL licensed software. Those warning letters will be personally handed over to the respective companies at their CeBIT booth by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.

The list of companies includes high-profile names of the computing industry, such as Motorola, Acer, AOpen, and continues with Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware.

SETI Fiction

“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”