Eminent Domain

There's news that the Supreme Court has ruled that eminent domain can apply to non-public uses. In the past, eminent domain was evoked to widen roads, etc., e.g. for the general public benefit. With this ruling, basically anyone can be evicted as long as someone high enough up in government thinks that it's a good idea. How one feels about notions of land ownership aside, this is bullshit. Better keep one eye on the proposals flowing through the city office, or you might wake up one morning to find your house being knocked down (to make room for a bypass).

The trend these days seems to be that even lawmakers and judges don't respect the law—so how can citizens be expected to behave any differently? The Bill of Rights is very clear on the point of not reapportioning land from one private party to another. But I suppose the same people who have trouble with the 2nd Amendment are now also having trouble with the 5th.

Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil

Apparently there's a piece of software called Airfoil that allows any software running on Mac OS X to stream audio to the AirPort Express. This is probably just an adapted version of Jon Johansen's JustePort. On the other hand, he's pulled JustePort off his site, and it only worked with Apple Lossless anyway. Fortunately I already saved the source code, but it's written in that bastardized Java called C#. Ugh.

Here's an interesting Apple wireless fan blog, AirPort Blog.

This guy Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (who apparently works for Six Apart) has a blog entry mentioning the RAOP protocol used by the AirPort Express. Apparently Apple Lossless is the only format the APX likes. And it looks like I need to start hacking Perl on OS X.

The implementation of the AirPort Express player is located here on SourceForge.

My AirPort Express doesn't want to play nice with my iodata WAP in WDS/WPA mode. I suppose it's not that big of a deal, since the only benefits would be the use of the Ethernet port and the ability to adjust the signal strength (also maybe the ability to playback tunes from the other segment of my network). Well, for now I suppose this will have to do.

Contract Machining

Somec Corp.
Industrial Support Inc.

CNC Links
Yahoo business directory

Nerdcore is disturbing

An article on Wired News describes "nerdcore", aka "geeksta rap", which is a bunch of anti-cool people with a DJ/MC habit trying to make a buck. Nice. I prefer the guns-n-hos motif, myself.

Businesses for sale

This is a site that lists businesses like a realtor's website. Good for wannabe M&A (mergers & acquisitions) people, I suppose.

AMD Geode

AMD's manufacturing low-power solutions called Geode, something like Via's offerings. They have development boards available. Unfortunately, pricing information isn't listed, for either the boards or the bare processors.

More Mini-ITX

Interesting mini-ITX review site. Yet another one based out of Europe....

Tokyo is the world's costliest city

An article by the Associated Press cites a survey by Mercer HR that evaluates Tokyo as being the world's costliest city to live in.

Linguistic mysteries solved

The female equivalent of a 'misogynist' (misandrist)
Are there any other English words with three consecutive sets of double letters besides 'bookkeeper'? (not without a hyphen)
Is there a unisex word for cows/bulls? (bovine)
What does bimonthly really mean? (both every two months and twice a month: but really, semimonthly should be used to mean twice a month)
Is 'deliverables' a real word? (yes, although recent)
Once, twice, thrice, ...? (there're no words continuing this series)
Primary, secondary, tertiary, ...? (quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary!)
What's the difference between a 'street' and a 'road'? (road is general, street is has a more restricted meaning, typically an urban setting with buildings along it)
What's the opposite of 'exceed'? (there's none yet, but 'deceed' might be a candidate)
Is there a word with five vowels in a row? (yes, 'queueing', but this is often 'queuing' in American English)

U.S. Treasury

One can buy U.S. government securities directly from TreasuryDirect.

Stocks

AMD AMZN GTE IBM INTC KO MSFT RGR XLNX
And the current darling of tech stocks: GOOG

Buying Gold

Lately I've been looking into dealers of precious metals. So far, the most interesting site I've found is Certified Mint (they have an old website here). The minimum order for gold is 1oz, as opposed to 10oz for many other sites, which is good for first-time buyers. They also purport to have quick turnaround, something important on my time schedule. For consideration....

Urban Legends - "Fucking, Austria"

This is great: Apparently there's a real town in Austria called Fucking. The picture at the bottom is hilarious.

Check out this big kitty, a "liger". Now I want to see what a "tigon" looks like....

"How'd ya get all the way up there?" (deer on an electric pole).

Supposedly all these things are legitimate. The world is a crazy place.

Steve Jackson Games

Whoa, Steve Jackson Games is still around! I used to play a bunch of SJ Games when I was a kid, like Ogre and Car Wars. I had GURPS but no one I knew played it. Designing vehicles in Car Wars was fun, which was probably one of the reasons I ended up being an optimization biatch in hard disk drives: I would try to produce the most kick-ass car given the design constraints and fixed funds. Learning the rules in a game was my kick as a kid. Should've gotten into science/engineering earlier. All this sounds weird, but that's my life.

Apparently there's an SJG online sales shop called Warehouse 23. Looks interesting.

Steve Jackson sounds like a character: An otaku if there ever was one, but I can appreciate that! Ahh, echoes of my otaku past takes me back to the idle days of my childhood.... Well, it was kinda a waste, but it made me me, so I can't second-guess myself too much.

Random News, 2005.06.01

Is Rodi BitTorrent’s Replacement? - Sounds cool. "Bouncing" is one way to deal with being analyzed. I have an idea on how to prevent the problem LaryTet mentions in the article, but I'll save that for my own P2P soft—whenever it is I manage to get around to writing one.
Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born? - Sure. He's done more good than bad. This is the concern with eugenics, judging people on factors unrelated to their contributions to society. The debates on eugenics are going to get more intense as the capabilities for genetic discrimination increase. Me? Well, I'd rather know if a girl I was going to marry would impart propensity for a genetic disease to my children, even baldness for that matter, but is that capability a good thing? Maybe we aren't supposed to know.
The Midas Formula - Was Star Wars really that good? I liked the first movie (Episode 4) ok, but the rest weren't so great. Of course Han Solo is the coolest character in the films!
Linux Powers Airborne Bots - This is way cool. Now I want one of those Bladerunner model helicopters. I always thought "co-axial counter-rotating blades" was a cool phrase. Inter-disciplinary research is what makes science and engineering interesting.