"deep throat" identified

The man who first told Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein about the Watergate affair has finally revealed his identity. W Mark Felt, a retired FBI official, claims he is the source who for years was only referred to as "Deep Throat", in an exclusive interview with Vanity Fair. The reporters released a statement neither confirming nor denying the claim: they swore years ago not to reveal their source until the person had died.

Link to pdf of the Vanity Fair pressroom advance article; link to related MSNBC story; via the Regular.

stick people beware

Well, looks like it's time to explode some more stick people. If you liked the flash game Hapland, why not go play the recently released sequel, Hapland 2? It is as addictive as the original, and seems harder. (Before pulling your hair out, just google "hapland 2 walkthrough".)

here we go

The New York Times has this article, with the headline "Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs". It's all damned frightening until this choice paragraph:

"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year.

Oh, thank God. We can all sleep easier now tha--

"Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."

Link to full article.

Previously on SFB: Colin Powell on the weaponization of space.

archeologist jones to uncover lost ark

Archeologist Dr Vendyl Jones, who may or may not be the inspiration for Indiana Jones, claims to have finally figured out the location of the Holy Ark of the Covenant, which is what Indy was searching for in the first movie.

"The ark was the resting place of the Ten Commandments, given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, and was hidden just before the destruction of the First Temple. ...He believes the ark will be discovered by Tisha B'Av (Aug. 14), a day of repeated tragedy in Jewish history. Most notably, it is the anniversary of the destruction of both the First and Second Holy Temples."

Link to article; via Boing Boing.

wormhole woes

So it turns out that, no, you can't travel through time-space using a controlled wormhole. I mean, come on! Grow up.

Ok actually:

"However, there is still support for the idea of traversable wormholes in the scientific community. 'Violations of the null energy condition are known to occur in a number of situations. And their argument would prohibit any violation of it,' they commented."

Link to BBC article.

koreans klone kells

Scientists in South Korea claim to have cloned a batch of human embryos! Although this same group alledgedly cooked up some clones a while back, "the process appeared to be hopelessly inefficient, requiring almost 250 human eggs extracted from female donors to get just one cloned embryo with its precious cache of stem cells."

The big deal now is that they now only need an average of 17 eggs on average to make one precious cache. These batches "have the capacity to develop into any type of tissue". Link to full Washington Post article.

a toast to rurality

I'm still in Saskatchewan. In celebration, here's an mp3 which sounds a bit like country music (maybe it's just the slide guitar). I don't know anything about it but I got it from Stereogum and the chorus is great. Here's the band's website.

Magnolia Electric Co. - The Dark Don't Hide It (mp3, 4.9 MB)

aw

The good people at Optimus Crime discovered a baby squirrel on their patio. And they have pictures!

blood: not just for dracula anymore

OK, wow. Apparently, a Japanese research team has developed an implantable fuel cell that runs on blood. Right now, it only generates 0.2 milliwatts of power, but that's enough to run simple electronic sensors and the like.
Brown University is also conducting research on miniature fuel cells designed to work with a pulsing flow - i.e. flow in the circulatory system.

This technology can only improve. How long before I can charge my Palm with a plate of pasta?

the MPAA strikes again

This week saw another salvo of lawsuits against BitTorrent communities by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The interesting part about this latest legal action is that it was primarily against TV show sharing, not movies. Is downloading TV shows, many of which are freely available over the air, illegal? That's debatable, depending on where you live. Should such activities be illegal? Don't get me started. About the only things that are crystal clear about downloading movies and TV shows are these simple facts:
1 - There is a market out there of people who want to get their video content over the internet.
2 - This market is big. Big enough that the industries see it as a significant loss of revenue.
3 - The industries are making absolutely no attempt to offer services to this market that would turn lost revenue into a profitable business. They are instead intent on plugging their ears and singing "La la la" whenever people talk about new business models, and flexing their huge legal arms to make sure their physical-medium monopoly is maintained.

On the upside, this week also saw US courts denying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s "Broadcast Flag" legislation. The basic idea is that all digital TV programs (which are scheduled to completely replace analog TV by 2007) could be "flagged" as a broadcast, and that VCRs and the like would recognize this flag and refuse to record the shows. The legislation would have made it illegal to manufacture recording devices that did not implement this technology. The court decision said that the FCC is responsible for regulating the contents of our airwaves. Period. They don't have power over regulating consumer electronics. Don't worry, though. The MPAA promptly began lobbying to give the FCC this power.

one small step for man, one giant leap for Big Brother

The United States Congress just passed the RealID Act. This piece of legislation requires that each state issue a driver's license that conforms to a federal specification. This spec requires a national database of every cardholder, and that each card contain all its data (including a digital photograph) in a machine-readable format. The method they're leaning towards is Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), which is just stupid.

Of course, the bill that passed this act wasn't called the "National ID Card" bill. It wasn't even called the "Driver's License Reform bill". No, this minor, inconsequential law was quietly inserted as an addendum to a bill for "Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief". It was passed 100-0, surprise surprise. There's a huge backlash against this. State Governors are calling it unconstitutional, and threatening a mass refusal to comply.

oh no!

I'm in scenic Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan! Don't be fooled by the photo above: most of Saskatchewan is semi-arid.

Anyway, it looks like I won't be posting to Small Flightless Bird very often, and our other writers also seem to have slowed down under the searing summer sunlight. If you get angry with blogs that don't update three times a day, you might as well (a) calm the hell down, and (b) reduce the frequency of your visits to our little website, at least until the start of September.

Another option is to get all into RSS by downloading the free and very easy to use Feedreader (recommended by at least two of our writers), and pointing a subscription to SFB's feed. Feedreader will check all your blogs and newsfeeds and let you know which ones have been updated. RSS: because surfing the internet from your ergonomic office chair should require as little effort as possible.^TM

copywrong

I've posted previously about Canada's pending copyright reform. Though I think the legislation currently being proposed is too strong, the US has decided that it's simply not good enough.

Apparently, the States publish something every year called the Special 301 Report. Officially, this is a place to identify "Priority Foreign Countries", which "are those pursuing the most onerous or egregious policies that have the greatest adverse impact on U.S. right holders or products, and are subject to accelerated investigations and possible sanctions."
So basically, it's a list of countries the US doesn't feel is paying them enough money for intellectual property - and this year Canada isn't only on the list, we get our own special "Out-of-cycle review" to make sure we start behaving ourselves.

What does this mean? Michael Geist has a good breakdown, but in short it means that we're going to see a LOT of pressure from US lobbying associations in the next while demanding a Canadian version of the United States Digital millennium Copyright Act. There are dozens of things about that piece of law that are just plain wrong, but the worst in my opinion is the "notice-and-takedown" enforcement system that it forces Internet Service Providers to adopt. Right now, Canada has a "notice-and-notice" system: some concerned body (like, say, the RIAA) notifies your ISP that they think you're infringing on their copyrights, and your ISP then notifies you and asks you to stop doing it. In the States, if an ISP receives a notice of infringement, they are responsible for removing the content - and if you're using Kazaa, that means they must disconnect you. Notice that the RIAA doesn't have to prove anything - they need only allege copyright infringement, and the default action is bye-bye internet with the onus on the user to prove their innocence.

That makes signing this petition all the more important.