A cool Press Release from NASA about a device that lets pilots land planes using nerve signals read from the pilot’s arm. Very funky.

There’s a great article on Cryptome called What’s Wrong With Content Protection. It’s a summary of the efforts being made by corporations to make it impossible for people to duplicate anything.

Well, the revisions to the site are up and running! Yay to the magic of CSS!

We now return you to your scheduled browsing.

Richard Stallman has announced the GNUPedia Project, a project aimed at providing a free, public encyclopedia before corporations have a chance to put a price on everything.

Check it out here.

I’m glad to see I’m establishing a tradition in my posts, namely, that of not posting for ages, and then posting saying ‘Wow, I haven’t posted in ages!’.

Just a thought.

Crikey, I didn’t realise it had been so long since I posted. I’m working on a rewrite of the pages, so that they use CSS instead of the Dreamweaver craziness that is DIV tags.

I jjust finished reading Michael Marshall Smith’s ‘One of Us’ the other day, and had the third satori out of three times finishing his books. Somehow, he just manages to get your mind working, without you even realising it, so that when you’re done, you need some time to think about what you’ve just read. Amazing.

I’ve also just finished the fourth Harry Potter book, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.’ Reading these books is the first time in a very long time that I literally have had trouble putting a book down. To top it off, not only are they a cracking good read, but, as children’s books, they’re amazing. They are the first entertainment made for children I have seen in a long time that have people getting injured, and even dying. Maybe, just maybe, this sort of thing might make people think about the fact that didactic teaching methods have evolved over a long time, and thus might possibly have something in their favour.

I think I’ll write a paper about this and put it in the soon-to-debut Musings section here. I’m planning on uploading a whole heap of stuff at once, including some new wallpapers, some writings from Uni and before, and also finally getting the ‘About me’ page up and running. Yay!

In Honours news, I;m starting to realise that what I will be saying in my honours will be very contentious, and also that, if I pull it off, I’m going to be putting myself up against big names like Kant, Russell, Quine, and so on. Quite scary, really.

Anyway, that’s enough updating for now, given that I’m at Leveraged 2.0, and the General Manager just walked by.

Got this from Cryptome:

At issue is H.R. 46, a seemingly harmless bill titled ‘Public Safety Medal of Valor.’ The bill sets up a federal board to award federal Medals of Valor to policemen, federal agents, and the like. But Congress, unlike many state legislatures, does not operate under a constitutional requirement that a bill’s subject matter and title be the same. And it turns out that there’s much more in this bill than just medals for firefighters. What the bill does is:

• Expand federal asset forfeiture.
• Expand wiretapping.
• Provide special additional punishments for people who use encryption.
• Federalize juvenile crimes, which are properly matters for state governments to address.

The House committee report on the bill, of course, only discusses medals for police officers ? and not any of the unrelated material which is being added in the closing hours of Congress. The unrelated, dangerous, material comes mostly from the never-passed H.R. 2448.

Crazy, no? Just another example of how fucked up the US legal system is.

Ah well, another lengthy no-posting interval.

Anyway, after some comments by people actually visiting this site, I’m working on fixing it up, tidying up the code, and finally adding the ‘musings’ and ‘about’ areas, and finally putting in some links.

The 27th of December has been decided by me to be ‘The Geekfest at the end of the (real) millenium!’ Hopefully people should be able to bring computers over and there will be much fun and gnashing of teeth.

For those of you with a codey bent, I’m working on replacing the dreamweaver autogeneration craziness with CSS goodness. I must say, Netscape really doesn’t seem to understand the idea of layout inheritance, which is a bit irritating. I’m also proud to say that I will be only using fancy software for generating really complex code now, which I will then edit the hell out of in notepad. So it’s back to notepad for HTML editing for me!

Wow, that was incoherent.

Well, I wish all a merry celebration of consumerism, and a happy real millenium!

Wow, I didn’t realise I hadn’t posted in so long.

c’est la vie, I guess.

The essay was completed, handed in, and returned to me to be modified, and it looks like it will be around 5000-6000 words.

Today is Trang’s birthday, and I’m taking her to The Italian Village at the Rocks. Large amounts of spending ahoy!

In other news, (heh, I’ve always wanted to say that…) Dr J and I have roughed out a very basic plan for my thesis.

Basically it goes:

• Summary of Barnes and Ravetz, and a comparison.
• Leading into a discussion of my own ideas about concepts.
• Followed by a study of the field of AI research, and how some of my stuff is reflected there.

My own ideas concern how we as human beings acquire and manipulate concepts. Basically, I think that a lot of the confusion about this results from the vestiges of postivist philosophy, and the idea that concept membership is a binary function.

Well, I seem to have missed the deadline on my essay. Sigh. Ah well, 3500 words in two days is pretty good in my book. Hopefully I should be able to do the last thousand or so in the next couple of days.