she called me at work,
you have a crazy neighbor
who bought a new mac.

it is my own fault...
fixing someone's internet
always a bad idea.

though to help a friend
i will always come fix shit
if pie is involved.

like you she complains,
slow internet really blows goats.
(don't live in the sticks)

real bad idea: crazy lady
wants to change network settings
to fit her simple mind.

over the cell phone
skip can be an ass sometimes
when asked to tech support.

you gave her my number.
i will kick you in the nuts.
now i'm back to work.

< redrocket> this is why isc2 isn't getting any of my cash, check this spam:
< redrocket> Earn 32 Continuing Professional Education (CPEs) credits anytime, anywhere for only $556.50 (65% off standard prices)!
<@bob> OMG WHAT A DEAL
< redrocket> it's a scam for money and they're workin it...
<@bob> dude im way cooler NOT having gotten cissp
<@bob> its like
< redrocket> hey i know let's start an organization and test people into it
<@bob> im 2 l33t for that
<@bob> 31337 cert
<@bob> we test them on like
< redrocket> i'm way cooler for not having paid for it too
<@bob> their ircwarrior skills
< redrocket> yah
<@bob> special guest instructor aempirei
< redrocket> and charge them $$$/year, and sell "points" so they can retain their certification
< redrocket> that's the way to be...
<@bob> its such a scam

lol. from andrewteman, execs are asking us to enjoy their products now more than ever. i guess i need to uninstall adblock... i'm missing out on some damn funny ads.

from: http://andrewteman.typepad.com/worldchamp/2005/01/mcdonalds_wants

McDonalds Wants You To F*ck It's Sandwiches

This stuff never gets old. Nothing is better than when a giant company makes an attempt to be cool with their marketing, only to do something that is completely moronic causing the very audience it is chasing to mock them. One of my favorite examples of this is a Wal-Mart commercial I saw some weeks back that contained a fake family made up of some wildly talented African American actors who were working hard to show us that not only do black people shop at Wal-Mart, but it is very cool to do so. In an attempt to gain some street cred, the Bentonville company has one of the actors use the line "Wal-Mart has everything I need. No diggity." I am not making this up. (incidentally, if anyone has this clip...PLEASE send it to me).

Clearly this is not an isolated incident as evidenced today when I headed over to Page2 on ESPN.com. I instantly was hit with a great McDonalds ad that can be seen below. Although I firmly believe that McDonalds is not advocating hot man on sandwich action, it is quite obvious that they did not do their homework on urban slang. If they had, it is likely that they would have realized "I'd Hit It" is not exactly the catch phrase to use when selling fast food.

[11:31] < lorax> but why worry about that when you can just drive over nature like it's not even there?
[11:31] < void> at least according to hoffman. but then again, he'd know.
[11:31] < sp> hummers are suburbans with new plastic
[11:31] < void> hummers are the ultimate in dick extension devices.
[11:31] * void looks around
[11:31] < lorax> I thought that was a $100 bill.
[11:32] < void> maybe $100 canadian.
[11:32] < sp> hummer: because there's too many porches in your neighborhood
[11:32] < void> down here all $100 will get you is crabs.
[11:32] < graver> shit you should see our new 100s
[11:32] < void> sp: HA
[11:32] < void> i'll stick with my tiny 2wd truck.

[22:04] < wcu> http://member.melbpc.org.au/~lborrett/computing/petals-bg.htm
[08:17] <@vicod1n> http://www.ns.nie.edu.sg/faculty/chewsf.htm
[11:22] < skp> identify the rapper cause he's knee deep in the vag

i wish my ipod had 802.11 and could browse playlists of other ipodders nearby, even listen to whatever they're listening to... see someone freaking out down the street and wonder "wtf is she listening to". japan would probably make it into another dating thingie where you are systematically matched up with the oposite sex when your playlists matchup a bit.

my wife and i just moved to a new house, and we've notices some interesting goings-ons: a week ago this huge package arrives for some random person... "must be a previous owner" we think, setting it asside as we leave. a few hours later when we come home the package is gone. we had planned to stick a note on it for the post man and have it returned, but apparently someone was expecting it. we don't know what exactly it was, but the return address had something like "mini-bikes" in it.

this week we get some annoyingly yellow stickers from UPS saying they have something for us, and we should come by and pick it up. hrmm not expecting anything... though we did notice the neighbors unloading some shiny new mini-bikes from their truck.

some crazy credit card scam to equip pre-teen biker gangs? i don't really care, but what worries me is they're using my address for this crap.

1. 200gig HDD $129 (compusa)
2. ATI TV Wonder VE video capture card $50 (compusa)
3. Color nightvision security camera $60 (fry's)
4. motion or zoneminder on slackware $time

luckily the ati card from compusa is running the BT878 chipset (already in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel) so it wasn't an issue to get the card up and happy. i've used quad cards before but the input hopping pissed me off so it'll be one card per input. i'm running this on an old P2 400mhz box i had lying around and it seems to be happy. here's some tips for the hard parts:

install mysql

install mp3lame

install ffmpeg:
./configure --enable-mp3lame && make && make install
cp libavcodec/libavcodec.a /usr/lib/

install zoneminder:
./configure --with-ffmpeg --with-mysql=/usr/bin --with-webdir=/var/www/htdocs/zm --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin/zm --with-webuser=apache --with-webgroup=apache --with-lame
perl zmconfig.pl && perl zmconfig.pl -noi && make && make install

zoneminder seems to get it's paths screwed up often... so if you're missing pictures or can't get the video stream make sure it's going to the right place in /cgi-bin/ ... tail -f /var/log/apache/error_log if you're missing something on the webpage.

also i failed to notice debug messages spit out during ./configure for zoneminder. it wasn't finding the libraries it needed so watch for that.

ended up having to fix mysql perms for zmadmin and zmuser since they didn't get write perms into their own db. the website was only streaming... it couldn't show pictures or thumbs or anything.

also had to dig to figure out how to edit detection zones. you have to click on the number under "zones" on the main page and define some. he's put a ton of work in on this part so the zone config is super cool. really though the zoneminder software freaking rocks...if i had a paypal account i might send this guy some cash.

since i didn't want to deal with cambalooza and java i can't use IE... but mozilla works just fine.

having been to a ton of trade shows i have to say the gaming industry probably has the most fun. here's my report from GDC 2004 San Jose:

i live in san mateo, so i figured i might as well stop by the game developers conference... blizzard was going to be there, and maybe if i impressed them with my amazing social skills and whatnot they'd realize what a great beta tester i would be and give me a key or something. so that was my premise for going to gdc.

unfortunately it costs $150 to $200 for just an expo pass (unless you're a student) so obviously there's no way i'm gonna spend much cash to play xbox in san jose. it's time to get your forgery skills out... i crafted myself a student id from some random college, glued it to the front of my safeway card, and bingo i'm a student.

oh yah i also have this job. take a sick day. i get on my kawasaki and ride down the 101 to the convention center, where parking is imposible. they don't give motorcycles a break, you have to pay the full car price. so i pull around the back and park by an air conditioning vent. hopefully security doesn't have me towed.

enter the conference. i get in line for my badge, adrenalin pumping simply because now it's time to see if my new student id passes the test. guy takes my drivers license and student id, looks at them for a second and *poof* i'm in. sweet. now what to do for the next three hours until the main floor opens...

the doors open and i make a straight line to the blizzard camp. having already checked the map i know exactly where they are. first one up to the booth! make small talk with the guy there... d'oh he's from blizzard north, recruiting for jobs and whatnot. i don't want a job, i want a beta. so i ask him if they're having any raffles or any beta give-aways today and he says, "huh. that would have been a good idea". crap. nope they have no betas here to give away. well can i take a picture of your huge orc? sure:

[14:45] <@dmuz> A 13-year-old Hong Kong boy flew into a rage and threatened his parents with a kitchen knife after his
father pulled the plug on his computer game, police said on Monday.
[14:45] <@dmuz> http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/fun.games/03/16/boy.videogame.reut/index.html
[14:49] < LordMael> hah
[14:49] < smellypooface> my grandma tried to stab me with a butter knife when i wouldn't pause my game of pong to take
out the trash
[14:49] < smellypooface> on the atari 2600
[14:49] < smellypooface> it had no pause
[14:50] < smellypooface> but i doubt it was pong... probably more like indiana jones or something
[14:50] < LordMael> lol
[14:50] < LordMael> battle tanks!

today started out great: woke up early, it was a beautiful day so i rode my bike to work. "it's early, i should try that secret parking spot i noticed last week" i thought, "it's right acrost from the office so i wouldn't have to walk the three blocks to get to work". i parked my bike and double checked the no-parking signs. they're always confusing... but after a minute of reading i believed myself to be safe. i looked both ways before crossing the street, there's a bus coming but i've got plenty of room to run.

so i ran across the street, red biker jacket, black chaps, harley boots, ipod in pocket. i felt something happen as i'm about to reach the curb, but there's a bus coming so i don't stop to look back until i'm safely there. oh damn. just like in the movies. slow motion. a distinct decision tree forms in my mind. choose your own adventure:

1) stand there and watch. hope the tires of the bus miss your iPod.
2) run into the street, look death in the face and snatch your iPod out from in front of the bus. risk your life for $400.

i stood transfixed on my favorite toy, silently praying the four sets of tires would miss. although i didn't look up at the driver, i could feel his grin. iPod all borken and bent out of shape. (pictures here) ebay: slightly used ipod (like new)...

whatever. it's still a good day (i got a sweet parking spot) so i'm working, and decide to show off my sweet parking job to a fellow bike-riding coworker. we walk to the windows and i point to my bike, sandwiched between a DPT scooter and a towtruck. damn.

i've never ran so fast. the elevator has never been so slow. it was too late, the bike was already up on the truck and he wasn't going to give me a ride to the impound lot. choose your own adventure:

1) freak out and try to get your bike down. punch the guy and pull the levers. note the meter maid is behind you... you'll probably also have to take her out. she's already wrote you a parking ticket, so you'll need to steal her little scanner so they won't be able to track you down.
2) hail a taxi and get to say "follow that towtruck"

i got to the police station on 7th and bryant before they had "registered" my bike... so i had to wait a while until it showed up on their computers. an hour and $181 later i'm back at the office. time for a soda.

[09:57] < skp> so all i have to do is adopt a child for every three days of PTO i want? cool
[10:01] < amolitor> That's awesome
[10:02] * amolitor wonders where he can find 84 children to adopt
[10:02] < skp> heh yep
[10:05] < terlin> can you adopt the same child more than once?
[10:05] < terlin> ya know, to show how MUCH you love him/her?
[10:06] < skp> i guess you could un-adopt and re-adopt the same child every three days
[10:06] < skp> i wonder if this stuff is online...
[10:07] < terlin> if you un-adopt them, they feel like you don't love them anymore.
[10:07] < skp> it's paperwork only... they'd never know
[10:07] * terlin weeps for un-adopted children around the world
[10:07] < skp> it's like a -NOHUP kill
[10:08] < terlin> I'm going to tell some social worker that I want to kill -NOHUP my adopted child.
[10:08] < terlin> what would they say?
[10:08] < terlin> ...after they had me arrested, I mean.
[10:08] < skp> you wouldn't use that terminology with a non-tech
[10:08] < terlin> but then it wouldn't result in the same hilarity
[10:09] < skp> true s/hilarity/jailarity/

[11:17] < lemonparty> lol i don't wanna pay the ISC2 anything
[11:17] < lemonparty> what have they done for me lately?
[11:18] < lemonparty> i dunno if i'm going to keep my membership... it's like uhmm what's the word... useless?

amy rocks. she heard this audio clip of howard dean's scream and thought "that'd sound cool to a metal soundtrack". here is her remixed version.

i've always lusted after monster cable's voltage stabilizers such as the AVS2000... but they're soooooo damn expensive. in short, they act as a battery-less UPS system that makes minor corrections in the power flowing to your components. since normal ac power can fluctuate between 80 and 140 volts, these cool little toys ensure a consistent 120V output.

a normal surge-protector can only prevent too much power from reaching a system. a few years ago the power coming into my house went really low (brownout) early in the morning, for probably about 30 minutes or so. ended up frying a ton of my equipment. yah, low power can be as painfull as high power. then you watch the lights dim as the refridgerator comes on...

so i found a good option to spending $1000+ at monsterpower: APC makes a similar product, the Line-R which, at $40, is perfect. really it'll save me money on not having to buy a large VA UPS, since i'm prefectly content putting a monitor on this, and leaving just the workstation on a UPS.

excerpt from apcc.com:

Protect your sensitive electronic equipment from brownouts and overvoltages with APC's Line-R automatic voltage regulator. Uncorrected voltage fluctuations gradually degrade the life of electronic components, potentially causing premature failure. The Line-R not only adjusts voltages to safe levels, but also provides surge protection against electrical surges and spikes - even lightning.

Features & Benefits
Protection
Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR) Automatically steps up low voltage and steps down high voltage to levels that are suitable for your equipment.
Lightning and Surge Protection To prevent damage to your equipment from power surges and spikes.
Resettable circuit breaker Easy recovery from overloads; no need to replace a fuse.
Convenience
Status Indicator LED's Displays input voltage level (low, normal, or high).
Transformer Block Spacing Connect bulky transformer block plugs without covering up other outlets.

so it seems there's a bit of a pissing match between the founder of valentine one and the author of radartest.com. what it boils down to is personal preference, since the valentine-1 and the passport seem to come out even in both range and detection. consumersearch.com seems to have fairly unbiased thoughts on the topic as well.

i stay with the valentine since it does really help to know where the radar is coming from, and no other detector has directional indicators. also it seems that in car and drivers latest test the valentine one rocked. in the end, i love my valentine enought to buy another one for my next car, even though it's $100 more expensive than anything else.

why police radar instant-on POP mode is prone to errors.

why valentine one radar detectors are spiffy.

an excerp from consumersearch.com:

While we're used to seeing heated competition among makers of radar detectors (particularly between Valentine and Escort), we didn't anticipate the head-butting we observed among reviewers of radar detectors. Whether you're reading test results at RadarTest.com, SpeedZones.com or Car and Driver magazine, you'll notice some none-too-subtle jabs at the other reviewers in the field. Not surprisingly, all three claim to offer the most unbiased testing of radar detectors, albeit with somewhat different methodology and policies.

Some reviewers accuse Car and Driver of having a decided bias in favor of Valentine; others accuse SpeedTest.com of fostering potential bias because it charges manufacturers a testing fee, and RadarTest.com gets the Inquisition treatment for accepting sample products from manufacturers for evaluation. In our research, we found all three of these charges to be mitigated by other factors.

Car and Driver, for example, bases part of its glowing review of the Valentine One on a set of features that other reviewers just don't care about that much (some lighted directional arrows and a bogey counter). SpeedTest.com does collect a standard fee from manufacturers, but due to the amount of critical information we found on this site, we find it hard to believe that SpeedZones would be taking payoffs for good reviews—in fact, testing for some models (whose manufacturers presumably ponied up the testing fee) receive downright poor scores. Finally, RadarTest.com (as well as SpeedZones.com) does accept sample products from manufacturers for testing, but both organizations also separately purchase blind samples to make sure manufacturer-supplied units haven't been 'juiced.'

And generally, all three reviewers get similar results from radar detectors. In fact, performance of individual models at all three sites usually fell within a pretty narrow range, and no reviewer's test results varied so much from another reviewer's that we suspected any hanky-panky. Although RadarTest.com, SpeedZones.com and Car and Driver may want you to think differently, we felt that all three publications took a well-reasoned, insightful stab at evaluating radar detectors and laser jammers in the most conscientious way they knew how.

We did find one topic with virtually no dissention, that laser/radar jammers from Rocky Mountain Radar (*est. $180 to $400) don't work. In lengthy articles at RadarTest.com and SpeedZones.com, Rocky Mountain Radar models fail to jam any radar or laser aimed at the test vehicle (attempting to jam radar guns is illegal in all states, but jamming laser guns is perfectly legal in states where radar detectors aren't prohibited). Rocky Mountain Radar claims to mix white noise with the oncoming beam from a laser or radar gun, deflecting back only confusing noise to law enforcement, thereby making a vehicle 'invisible' to laser and radar speed measurement. In measured testing, Rocky Mountain models, including the Phazer II, Eclipse and Mini-D models, did show some capacity for radar and laser detection—but no jamming ability whatsoever. See the articles at SpeedTest.com and RadarTest.com for more commentary and analysis on Rocky Mountain Radar if considering one of those units.

i finally decided to buy a monster power ac line conditioner the other day after reading these articles and asking around:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/building_gaming_opteron_2003_Part1/page9.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/2d_picture_quality_quicklook/page2.asp

and i wanted to simply say it makes the biggest difference i've ever seen. i plugged my home workstation and tv/amp/tivo etc into it and immediately could tell the picture was clearer on both the tv and monitor. i've never had any complaints about my home audio quality... but there was a serious improvement there too. i bought the least expensive model: HTS 1000 MKII

it was $89 from avstreet.com (use froogle) and can support up to 1875W of equipment, which means it's getting my workstation, monitor, tv, amp, tivo and everything else nearby.

2775 joule rating provides a high level of surge absorption.
$250,000 Connected Equipment Warranty.
Extra-long 8ft PowerLine® 200 AC power cord.
24k gold contact plug for maximum corrosion resistance and power transfer.
12 outlets for AC surge protection.
3 ultra-low loss, protected coaxial connections for cable TV/HDTV.
1 pair of protected phone/network connections for satellite/TiVo/phone/network surge protection.
Monster Clean PowerTM Stage 2 v.2.0 circuitry filter dramatically reduces electronic noise.
Tri-Mode power protection circuitry with audible alarm and auto disconnect.

searched google and got this:

Besides how to u tell the difference as of revision, i had sent in my Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI found it defective so they sent me a new one but, still cant run AGP 8X, My Mobo is Asus P4S8X SIS 648 POS chipset. Do U know what dont hear anything about abit boards on here, good or bad, maybe they are the better board maker considering ASUS has been way too busy with releasing new boards and not Fixing the problems of the older ones by like making revisions and such.

rant found on gamemethod.com that makes tons of sense, and an interview from wtfman.com:

The game development business model:
1) Come up with an innovative design, if that fails use the tested and true models.
2) Make sure to try to be different, new races, new graphics, new concepts.
3) Attract as many players as possible, even players from a non-MMOG background.
4) Make entering the world easy and acceptable, a good interface and tutorial.
5) Retain those newbies, and turn them into a constant revenue stream.
6) Bend over backwards and ruin the game to keep your customers.

Here’s an all too common scenario:

Community: “Hey, we just wanted to compliment you guys on the archery system, it’s great! On a side note that healing bug is terrible, its ruining gameplay, could you please fix it?”

One week goes by….

Two weeks go by…

Dev’s : “We are running a community poll, Do you think we need more colored robes?”

Another week goes by…

Dev’s: “The patch has the following fixes: We noticed players were having too much fun with archery, this caused an imbalance for players who did not have the archery skill, so we had to fuck up archery completely, we’re sorry. We also attempted to fix the healing bug...

Community: “Omfg, wtf”

Here’s a generalization of the instant thrill player who jumps into an MMO: He doesn't have much time, so he hates to have his fun disrupted. He works during the day and has to take care of other matters at night so he can only play an hour a day, but he wants to become up the ultimate rat slaughter, all hailed throughout the kingdom for his abilities to slaughter rats. He plays a bit, but realizes that he’s not doing so well, another player “Pow3rGamer” has all day to play and he’s just destroying the rats, he’s a virtual genocide. The player says, “Damn, this isn’t fair. I really want to be a rat destroyer, but I don’t have time! And his pockets jingle with lose change amounting to $9.99” The developers ears, which are normally plugged with wax and other crap hear his $9.99 in change (a month) jingling in the players pocket and the developer gets down on his knee's and fixes the game for the player. They add “Power rat poison” It only works for the first hour a day that you play, but it allows you to kill 10x the rats that you normally could. The player is happy, he is now a masta rat slaughter, killing 10x the rats he used to. But after a few months he realizes he didn’t work for any of it. He realizes the game has evolved into a great Rat killing machine, nothing more. As time rolls on the players will sit back and say to themselves, "at level 1 I use a wooden sword to kill a rat, at level 10 I will use a broadsword to kill a rat warrior, and at level 20 I will use a golden sword to kill a rat queen" and he will think to himself, "How is this progress? How is this accomplishment? I'm doing the same thing over and over, my progress is a function of the amount of time I put in... where is that cancel button again?"

Developers and businessmen are trying to mold the MMOrpg genre that was built on the backs of hardcore DND (dungeons and dragons) and MUD (multi user dungeons, text based mmorpgs) gamers into a genre that can be played by everybody, only an hour a day, and you get the same rewards for your time and feeling of accomplishment. Bullshit. The sense of accomplishment in DND doesn’t come from the fact that you got that “+5 sword of Rat slaying”, instead it comes from trials and tribulations you and your character took along the way. The rewards are gained on the path, not at the end. People play MMOrpg’s now with the mentality of “when I get there…” and it’s sickening. This entire mentality is built from the design of EQ where you needed to “get there” to get the next shiny sword, EQ was about the end game, or more precisely a multitude of small steps to “get there” instead of a living breathing world in which your character resided. The end-game mentality further ruined Mmorpgs for some time, they were no longer worlds, but rather overcomplicated chat rooms where you could perform actions over and over until you “got there.” As a newbie in Shadowbane you are tossed into a ass-backwards “world” with a “kill everything” mentality. Lo’ and behold, your first targets to be bashed are some ants that are only a few steps from your spawn point. After you bash a total of five ants you “advance” to you next level, where you proceed to bash more ants. The fun of Shadowbane isn’t about bashing the ants, but it’s in the end game where you can have town vs. town combat. The leveling (*aka* tread-milling) process in Shadowbane is completely unnecessary to the game design as a whole, a fundamental waist of time because of the “end game” mentality. Shadowbane also failed on its attempt to deliver good town vs. town combat because of some of the crappiest game design ever, which totally disregards everything we know about the way people play; they are lazy. Why would a guild spend the time and effort to raid a town while the defending towns’ guild members are online? Well, they don’t. They raid the town at 4am. The next day you log into 7 protected buildings, and a shitload of rubble. Terrible game design lead to many guilds waking up realizing, “wtf, I just wasted a four hours a day for the last month putting this town together, and it got blown up overnight… where’s that cancel button?”

Aparently, being silly is the way to stop telemarketers:
1) You know, I'd really love to talk, but the Viagra is just starting to kick in.
2) I just finished stuffing my mother-in-law into a trash bag and am way behind schedule.
3) I'm sorry, I can't take this call, I'm too busy telemarketing a competing product.

this very well designed website will surely help.

wow. who knew there are so many types of lightbulbs.

=== mirrored from clickondetroit.com ===

What Type Of Bulb Suits You?
Shira Kantor, Contributing Writer

That plush burgundy sofa looked so luxurious in the store -- but in your home, it looks dull.

Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your home lighting techniques.

The familiar yellowish-hued incandescent bulb has typically dominated home lighting, along with the truer to natural light, but harder to handle halogen bulbs.

Now, with the introduction and increased availability of some new types of bulbs, designers and lighting consultants say that scenario is poised to change.

Susan Livingston, a consultant with Cartier Lighting in Minneapolis said people are becoming much more conscious not only of how much, but also of the type of light they use in their homes.

"There is a new appreciation for fluorescents," Livingston said.

Updated fluorescent lights are made with electronic ballasts, as opposed to flashy magnetic ballasts, Livingston said, so they don't flicker or make noise. And the whiter light fluorescents provide "lifts colors" and looks more natural.

The New Bulbs
The standard amber-toned incandescent is somewhat arcane, as far as bulbs go. Xelogen bulbs -- a combination of xenon and halogen -- are growing in popularity for their efficiency and their more accurate lighting.

Halogen lights usually last a couple thousand hours, crushing the incandescent, which only lasts a few hundred. Xelogen bulbs, however, last up to 10 times the halogen, and unlike halogen bulbs, can be touched with bare hands without affecting the bulb's performance or lifetime.

"Xelogen gives you the crispness of halogen, and it doesn't degrade as rapidly as incandescent," Livingston said.

Neodymium bulbs, too, create a closer to sunlight effect, by filtering out red- or amber-toned light.

Incandescent bulbs enhanced with the earth element neodymium, adding a lavender tone, last almost twice as long as a regular incandescent light bulb. But the neodymiums also produce less light per watt, and cost about two to three times as much as a standard incandescent bulb.

Because the light bulb filters out reds and yellows, colors appear sharper under neodymium light. It even increases the contrast between print and paper, so reading is made easier.

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are also beginning to surface in home lighting. They're the lights commonly used in exit signs, and because of their low voltage, longer life span, and color-control option, LEDs are gaining popularity -- albeit slowly.

"It's been in the works for quite a while," said Kim Kuerbs, a representative at Citilights in Minneapolis, Minn. "But it's just starting to catch on."

LEDs light up in "pretty much the whole spectrum," Kuerbs said, and all within one bulb.

They last about 10 times the length of a regular incandescent bulb.

Mixing Light Sources

Blending different types of lights is a growing in popularity.

"Contemporary lighting is picking up quite a bit," Livingston said. And it's showing up with older fixtures, like European colored glass.

"High-tech lighting blended with dark colored lights or colored glass is in," Livingston said. "Blending old things and new things."

Another trend in home lighting is to mix several light sources within a room. Sconces -- single lamps often found on the wall or floor -- are being matched with recessed fluorescent lights hidden in the ceiling.

"Layers of lighting are popular," Livingston said. "People will have some low key lights and also a real high-pump type of light."

Indirect and direct layered lighting also helps bring about a more natural sunlight effect.

"Typically, in winter, you want to have several sources of light," Livingston said.

And because of the warmer feeling amber-toned lights give, both Livingston and Kuerbs agree that incandescent bulbs -- though "old" -- are welcome during winter.

"It's good for when you want to cuddle up," Livingston said.
Show Your True Colors

The overall message, though, is that right now, colors reign.

Whether it's the fun and funky color that LEDs and even fiber optic lights -- although far less common residentially -- can bring to a home, or the accentuation of "real color" with neodymium or fluorescent bulbs, color is at the forefront of current lighting trends.

gator (now claria) is spyware (software that didn't install, didn't ask for and forces itself onto my machine. tards at gator/claria are trying to get all websites calling it's software "spyware" to go away using legal strongarming. well guess what? they can blow me. gator/gain/claria software is spyware. simple. other things to call it would include: malware, snoopware, adware, trojan, virus or simply crap.

=== mirrored from news.com ===
In an effort to improve its corporate reputation, adware company Gator has launched a legal offensive to divorce its name from the hated term "spyware"--and so far its strategy is paying off.

In response to a libel lawsuit, an antispyware company has settled with Gator and pulled Web pages critical of the company, its practices and its software. And other spyware foes are getting the message.

"There is this feeling out there that they won the lawsuit, and people are starting to get scared," said one employee of a spyware-removal company, who asked not to be named. "We haven't been sued, but we've heard that other companies are being sued for saying this and that, so we've changed our language" on the company Web site.

Gator often distributes its application by bundling it with popular free software like Kazaa and other peer-to-peer programs. When downloaded, Gator's application serves pop-up and pop-under ads to people while they're surfing the Web or when they visit specific sites. Ads can be keyed to sites so that a pitch for low mortgage rates, say, can appear when a surfer visits a rival financial company's site.

The distinction between such "adware," which can report back to its creator with information about the computer user's surfing habits, so as to allow for supposedly more effective ad serving, and "spyware," which similarly monitors surfing habits and serves up ads, is sometimes a hazy one, and lies at the heart of Gator's libel suit.

Gator maintains that its software differs from spyware in that people are clearly notified before they download it, and in that they do so in exchange for a service, like the peer-to-peer software.


Related story
Web sites prey on rivals' stores
It's called getting "Gatored,"
and some Web sites are out to stop it.

Spyware, the company maintains, is surreptitiously installed and gives the unwitting computer user no benefit.

But critics of adware companies question how clearly such downloads are marked--PC users may suddenly be deluged with pop-ups and have no idea where they're coming from--and protest that companies like Gator are collecting information without sufficiently accounting for what they do with it.

The defendant in the Gator libel suit, PC Pitstop, offers software to cleanse computers of spyware and other undesirable code, and until signing a preliminary settlement with Gator on Sept. 30, vociferously targeted Gator's application.

In settling the suit, which alleged false advertising, unfair business practices, trade libel, defamation and tortious interference, PC Pitstop apparently removed several pages from its Web site that referred to Gator's application as spyware--along with many that went beyond that to urge action against Gator itself.

Executives for both companies declined to discuss settlement terms, citing a confidentiality agreement. But Gator advised a reporter to "go to their new site and draw your own conclusions" about what PC Pitstop did to comply with the settlement.

PC Pitstop used to publish pages on its Spyware Information Center titled "Is Gator Spyware?" the "Gator Boycott List," and the "Gator Quiz." Those pages are now gone. But as of Tuesday, they could still be found in the Google cache, which keeps copies of missing or unavailable Web pages for a limited time. (By Wednesday the cache of those pages had expired.)

"PC Pitstop believes that Gator products degrade the quality of a user's PC experience," read the cached PC Pitstop page urging a boycott of companies advertising through Gator. "This belief is based on our hands-on use of Gator products and experience with hundreds of systems in our forums....Although Gator Corporation likes to make a distinction and call their products 'adware,' other sources make no such distinction. Independent research has shown that they collect extensive information and have not clearly explained how the information is used once it reaches the Gator servers."

A Gator executive said the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was part of a larger strategy to educate spyware-removers about the company's software--and to put an end to the practice of calling it "spyware."

"If we find anyone publicly calling us spyware, we correct it and take action if necessary," said Scott Eagle, Gator's senior vice president of marketing.

In addition to going on the offensive against detractors, Gator has spent significant time in court defending its practices against the charges of companies that run Web sites that Gator has targeted with its ads.

Gator in February settled litigation brought against it by the New York Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones and other media companies. The Washington Post, L.L. Bean and Extended Stay America have sued the company, and their consolidated lawsuit will be decided by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the courts have smiled on a company that operates a similar ad network. Last month, WhenU survived a legal challenge brought against it by moving company U-Haul after WhenU served ads for U-Haul's competitors on top of U-Haul Web pages.

Eagle declined to comment on other specific spyware-busters, such as the New York City-based Enigma Software Group or InterMute, in Braintree, Mass. Those companies have advertised that they can rid computers of Gator--but their Web sites no longer mention the software. Eagle said he could not talk about ongoing actions.

Enigma Software Group could not be reached for comment. InterMute, which previously has spoken openly against Gator, declined to comment.

"Companies like Gator are the Goliath that average computer users are up against in the war for online privacy," Ed English, CEO of InterMute, said last month in an interview with CNET News.com.

Gator said it would take on its critics on a case-by-case basis.

"There are going to be detractor sites," Eagle said. "What we can do is focus on education and getting the word out there. We have discussions on this topic whenever we need to."

For its part, PC Pitstop said that, whatever the terms of its settlement, it continued to target Gator's software on people's computers.

"PC Pitstop detects a variety of situations that we would consider problems, including certain software that we didn't think was in the best interest of the end user," said Dave Methvin, chief technology officer for the Web-based start-up. "We currently detect and recommend removal of Gator."

ongoing photoshop battle here in the office

first pic of amrit:

second pic of amrit:

his reply:

my backpack's got jets, i'm boba the fett. i bounty hunt for jaba hut, to finance my vette (thanks joe) track used on adult swim after one badass sealab episode. check the mp3 here

lyrics from http://one.mcchris.com/lyrics.html

cruisin mos espa in my delorian
war's over I'm a peacetime madalorian
my story has stumped star wars historians
deep in deabte buffet plate at bennigans
rhyme renegade sure to penetrate
first and second defense I won't hesitate
got a job to do darth's the guy that delegates
got something against skywalker someone he really hates
I don't give a fuck I'm after solo
For all I care he could be hiding at yoda's dojo
Got make the money credit's no good
When the jawas run the shop in your neighborhood
Think you can cook I got a grappling hook
Let's make this quick cuz I'm really booked
I'm a devious degenerate, defender of the devil
Shut down all the trash compactor's on the detention level

chorus
My backpack's got jets
I'm boba the fett
I bounty hunt for jaba hut
To finance my vette
I chill in deep space
A mask is over my face
I deliver the prize but I still narrow my eyes
Cuz my time I don't like to waste.
Get down

I'm a question wrapped inside an enigma
Get inside the slave one find your homing signal
From endor to hoth, ripley to spock
I'll find what you want, but there's gonna be a cost
Say my name is boba fett I know my shit is tight
Start not acting in right, you're frozen in carbonite
Got telescopic sight, flame throwers on my wrist
You still don't get the jist, spiked boots are made to kick
Targets are made to hit, you think I give a shit
Yer mama is a bitch, I see you in the sarlaac pit
You just flipped my switch integrity been dissed
You scratchin on my itch you know I shoot the gift
Got bambinas at cantinas waitin to lick my lusty lips
So I'll let you get back inside you're little space ship
Give you a head start, cuz I'm the sportin kind
Consider the starting line the sneaky smile I hide inside
Hope you have hyper drive, pray to stay alive
Don't try to slip me a five cuz I never take a bribe
To the beat of a different drummer, bad ass bounty hunter
Let no man put asunder or else they be put under
As in six feet, got an imperial fleet
Backin me up gonna blow up any attempt to defeat
They gotta death star, got four payments on my car
Hand it over to hammer head at mos eisley bar
He used to carjack, now he's a barback
Just goes to show how you can get back on the right track
As for me that's not an option can't say that with more clarity
Me going legit would be jar jar in speech therapy

chorus

Slice you open like a tan tan, faster than the autobahn
Or a motorbike in tron, do the deed and then I'm gone
Jaba has a hissyfit, contact calrissian
Over a colt, the paln unfolds, no politic is legit
Back in the day when I was a slave
Living live in the fast lane like in a pod race
My mean streak tweeked I became a basket case
So this space ace split that place poste haste
Took up a noble cause called the clone wars
Cuz life's not all about girls and cars
Getting fucked up in fucked up bars
See I'm not a retard or gay like de barge
I'm large and in charge with a face so scarred
A cold black heart that's been torn apart
The sith wish that they had a dick so hard
Cuz it's long long ago in a pussy far far
Call me master cuz I'm faster than pryor on fire
I no longer have to hot wire
I'm a hunter for hire with no plans to retire
And all the sucka mc's can call me sire

chorus

happy day. someone finally stuck a dvd burner on a TiVo. Saves me the trouble of downloading the .ty files, converting and burning them. Problem is the damn things probably sell for $1000++ and that'll keep me from owning one.

The Pioneer Elite DVR-57H includes a 120-gigabyte hard disc drive while the Pioneer DVR-810H boasts 80 gigabytes of storage space. Both models are powered by the TiVo service and offer the ability to:

-- Schedule and record programs while playing a DVD.
-- Play programs from the hard drive while recording from the hard drive onto a DVD.
-- Watch a program from the beginning while the recorder simultaneously finishes the recording.
-- Transfer content at high speeds from the hard drive to a DVD for long-term storage.

===== slashdot article here =====
--------- article extracted from biz.yahoo.com --------------

Pioneer Introduces World's First DVD Recorders With TiVo(R) Service
Wednesday June 25, 8:05 am ET

LONG BEACH, Calif., June 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., a leader in digital home entertainment products, is revolutionizing home video recording with the introduction of the world's first DVD recorders featuring the TiVo service. These new recorders offer consumers the control provided by the easy-to-use TiVo service integrated with advanced DVD recording for the option of short-term storage on a hard drive or long-term archival of broadcast programming on DVD-R/RW discs.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020628/PIONLOGO )

The Pioneer Elite DVR-57H includes a 120-gigabyte hard disc drive while the Pioneer DVR-810H boasts 80 gigabytes of storage space. Both models are powered by the TiVo service and offer the ability to:
-- Schedule and record programs while playing a DVD.
-- Play programs from the hard drive while recording from the hard drive
onto a DVD.
-- Watch a program from the beginning while the recorder simultaneously
finishes the recording.
-- Transfer content at high speeds from the hard drive to a DVD for
long-term storage.

Both DVD recorders offer DCDi(TM) by Faroudja progressive scan circuitry for outstanding image quality when watching DVD movies.

"Pioneer is setting the standard for value-added DVD recorders by including the TiVo service with these two new products. Unlike many of the original DVD recorders, we're offering effortless operation with maximum benefit," said Russ Johnston, senior vice president of marketing for home entertainment at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "Consumers will not see this type of innovation from any other manufacturer in the near term."

TiVo Service and Recording from Television

Both the DVR-57H and the DVR-810H offer consumers the TiVo Basic(TM) service with no monthly fee upfront. Consumers will get DVR functionality such as; pausing live TV, recording from the program guide, manual repeat recording by time and date and three days of program guide data. Consumers can upgrade their TiVo service at any time, to include features such as a fourteen-day program guide, Season Pass(TM), WishList(TM) and Search by Title.

Both DVD recorders come equipped with a 181-channel cable TV tuner for instant one-touch recording to the hard drive. Once the content is stored on the hard drive, consumers can transfer the content on to a DVD-R/RW disc and navigate the DVD menus using the friendly TiVo interface. This is the first product to seamlessly integrate DVD-R/RW and TiVo service functionality in one easy to use product.

When a disc is inserted, the recorder automatically searches for available recording space. There is no tedious process of finding blank space to begin recording as exists with today's VHS recorders. Through automatic menus and easy navigation with the sophisticated TiVo user interface, consumers can simply locate and play a desired portion of the broadcast material instead of fast-forwarding and rewinding through videotape.

Transfer Home Movies to DVD

Both units are equipped to transfer old videotapes to longer-lasting DVD-R or DVD-RW discs for more permanent storage. By connecting a VCR via analog inputs to the DVD recorder, transferring content becomes a snap. Unlike videotape, DVD will not degrade over time when exposed to heat and humidity. Transferring home movies from tape to disc will preserve them for future generations. DVD-R discs are best for archiving because they are write-once discs (like CD-R) and cannot be accidentally erased. Once a consumer has transferred their videotape collection to DVD, the VCR is obsolete.

Create New Home Movies

The DVR-810H and DVR-57H offer analog inputs, enabling consumers to connect a camcorder to the DVD recorder for basic transferring functions. Once the content from the camcorder is stored onto the hard drive, users have the ability to edit the content before burning it to DVD. The newly created DVD-R disc can be played back on most other automobile, home, portable DVD players and DVD-ROM computer drives.

The DVR-810H and DVR-57H will be available in the fall 2003 with a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $1,199 and $1,800 respectively.

Pioneer's Home Entertainment Division is the leading manufacturer of plasma and projection televisions, DVD players and DVD recorders, A/V receivers, CD players and CD recorders, speakers and other audio and video accessories. Its focus is on the development of new digital technologies including Digital Network Entertainment. The company markets its products under the Pioneer and Pioneer Elite brand names. When purchased from an authorized dealer, consumers receive a limited warranty for one year with Pioneer products and two years with Pioneer Elite products.

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. is headquartered in Long Beach, Calif., and its U.S. Web address is www.pioneerelectronics.com . Its parent company, Pioneer Corporation, is a leader in optical disc technology and a preeminent manufacturer of high-performance audio, video, computer and cable equipment for the home, car and business markets. The company focuses on four core business domains including DVD, display technologies, Digital Network Entertainment and components. Founded in 1938 in Tokyo, Pioneer Corporation employs more than 34,000 people worldwide. Its shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: PIO -News ).

For further information, please contact: Aaron Levine of Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., +1-310-952-2401, aaron.levine@pioneer-usa.com ; or Julie Jaqua, +1-323-761-7405, jjaqua@gcigroup.com , for Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc.

Unverified MAIL-FROM auth. Broken PGP auth. Keeping expired domains. Claiming they own domain names, and allow customers to use them as a "service". Redirecting the InterNIC neutral site to themselves. $150 during the domain "holding period". The Domain Registry of America scam. The CA screwup. The current DNS wildcard scandal. Verisign needs it's powers revoked completely, it should never be able to hijack the major namespaces again.

==== petition to icann ====

To: ICANN
We internet users, who either own domain names or have an interest in the domain name system, wish to object to the Verisign Sitefinder system. We believe that the system:

1. breaks technical standards, by rewriting the expected error codes to instead point to Verisign's pay-per-click web directory, and threatens the security and stability of the Internet;

2. breaks technical standards affecting email services, and other internet systems;

3. is anti-competitive, providing Verisign with 20 million eyeballs per day for "free", while not paying for the domains they are resolving. All other market participants pay at least $6 per domain per year (wholesale);

4. violates trademark rights of domain holders, by typosquatting on their .com and .net domains; and

5. violates the authoritative nature of DNS, turning it instead into a "best guess" system filled with uncertainty, thereby destroying the coherence of the DNS for Verisign's own short-term profit.

We hereby demand that ICANN immediately:

a) insist that Verisign cease giving incorrect answers to any query in .com and .net, and should instead follow the IETF standards;

b) if Verisign refuses, should redelegate the .com and .net zones to registries that are more willing to follow the DNS standards;

c) for greater certainty for all gTLD registries, pass a resolution stating that "gTLD Registry operators WILL return NXDOMAIN for ALL DNS queries for which there is not a REGISTERED domain name"; and

d) that Verisign be reprimanded for their monopolistic abuse of the DNS system, and return all audited gross revenues from their Sitefinder system to stakeholders, via a payment to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) of ICANN in the name of the Non-Commercial constituency

[Supporting documentation can be found at the sites below]

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/
http://www.opensrs.org/archives/discuss-list/0309/date.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/0034210
http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/registrars/
http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga/
http://log.does-not-exist.org/
http://www.icann.org/correspondence/lynn-message-to-iab-06jan03.htm
http://www.icann.org/correspondence/iab-message-to-lynn-25jan03.htm
http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga/msg00336.html

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The diamond industry is in fact even more concerned about gems made using chemical vapor deposition than it is about Gemesis stones, though Gemesis poses a more immediate threat. The promise of CVD is that it produces extremely pure crystal. Gemesis diamonds grow in a metal solvent, and tiny particles of those metals get caught in the diamond lattice as it grows. CVD diamond precipitates as nearly 100 percent pure diamond and therefore may not be discernible from naturals, no matter how advanced the detection equipment.

To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones. The price per carat: about $5. read the article (diamond wafers are set to replace silicon in breasts ooh i mean semiconductors)

---- from the wired story:

"This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars."

"I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him.

He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.

"These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope.

"No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars."

Ian White
A microwave plasma tool at the Naval Research Lab, used to create diamonds for high-temperature semiconductor experiments.
Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says, "these stones will bankrupt the industry."

Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure - say, 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres - and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in Earth's mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab isn't easy, but that hasn't kept dreamers from trying. Since the mid-19th century, dozens of these modern alchemists have been injured in accidents and explosions while attempting to manufacture diamonds.

Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by year's end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the public's perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors.

Diamond, it turns out, is a geek's best friend. Not only is it the hardest substance known, it also has the highest thermal conductivity - tremendous heat can pass through it without causing damage. Today's speedy microprocessors run hot - at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon. But manufacturers have been loath even to consider using the precious material, because it has never been possible to produce large diamond wafers affordably. With the arrival of Gemesis, the Florida-based company, and Apollo Diamond, in Boston, that is changing. Both startups plan to use the diamond jewelry business to finance their attempt to reshape the semiconducting world.

But first things first. Before anyone reinvents the chip industry, they'll have to prove they can produce large volumes of cheap diamonds. Beyond Gemesis and Apollo, one company is convinced there's something real here: De Beers Diamond Trading Company. The London-based cartel has monopolized the diamond business for 115 years, forcing out rivals by ruthlessly controlling supply. But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gem-quality synthetics has sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem Defensive Programme - a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help distinguish man-made from mined stones.

Ian White
"I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam. You better believe that I can handle the diamond business," says Gemesis founder Carter Clarke, center. His lieutenants have 27 diamond-making machines up and running -- with 250 planned -- at this factory outside Sarasota, Florida
In its long history, De Beers has survived African insurrection, shrugged off American antitrust litigation, sidestepped criticism that it exploits third world workers, and contended with Australian, Siberian, and Canadian diamond discoveries. The firm has a huge advertising budget and a stranglehold on diamond distribution channels. But there's one thing De Beers doesn't have: retired brigadier general Carter Clarke.

Carter Clarke, 75, has been retired from the Army for nearly 30 years, but he never lost the air of command. When he walks into Gemesis - the company he founded in 1996 to make diamonds - the staff stands at attention to greet him. It just feels like the right thing to do. Particularly since "the General," as he's known, continually salutes them as if they were troops heading into battle. "I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam," he says after greeting me with a salute in the office lobby. "You better believe I can handle the diamond business."

Clarke slaps me hard on the back, and we set off on a tour of his new 30,000-square-foot factory, located in an industrial park outside Sarasota, Florida. The building is slated to house diamond-growing machines, which look like metallic medicine balls on life support. Twenty-seven machines are now up and running. Gemesis expects to add eight more every month, eventually installing 250 in this warehouse.

In other words, the General is preparing a first strike on the diamond business. "Right now, we only threaten the way De Beers wants the consumer to think of a diamond," he says, noting that his current monthly output doesn't even equal that of a small mine. "But imagine what happens when we fill this warehouse and then the one next door," he says with a grin. "Then I'll have myself a proper diamond mine."

Clarke didn't set out to become a gem baron. He stumbled into this during a 1995 trip to Moscow. His company at the time - Security Tag Systems - had pioneered those clunky antitheft devices attached to clothes at retail stores. Following up on a report about a Russian antitheft technology, Clarke came across Yuriy Semenov, who was in charge of the High Tech Bureau, a government initiative to sell Soviet-era military research to Western investors. Semenov had a better idea for the General: "How would you like to grow diamonds?"

A few hours later, Clarke was looking at a blueprint for an 8,000-pound machine that used hydraulics and electricity to focus increasing amounts of pressure and heat on the core of a sphere. The device, he was told, re-created the conditions 100 miles below Earth's surface, where diamonds form. Put a sliver of a diamond in the core, inject some carbon, and voilà, a larger diamond will grow around the sliver.

Ian White
Apollo's Robert Linares, looking through a chemical deposition chamber. His patented method produces flawless crystals of diamond.
General Electric managed to do this in 1954 by using a 400-ton press to crush the hell out of carbon. GE's machine economically produced diamond dust for industrial uses, and by the early 1970s the company had even managed to manufacture stones as large as 2 carats. But that effort took so much time and electrical energy, it was more expensive than buying a mined diamond. The Russians claimed their machine was relatively cheap, took no more energy to run than a dozen lightbulbs, and would produce a 3-carat stone in a few days. And the General could have it for just $57,000.

Clarke was skeptical. On the long flight back to the States he tried to forget about the offer and sleep, but the light creeping through his window shade kept him awake. If this thing really could make a diamond, he thought, $57,000 isn't that much money. "Hell," he mused, "what could be more fun than trying to make diamonds?" By the time the plane touched down in New York, he'd decided to give it a shot.

Three months later, Clarke returned to Moscow. Bodyguards met him at the airport and took him to a warehouse outside the capital. In an unheated room in the middle of winter, he watched Nickolai Polushin - one of the original Siberian scientists - lift the top half of the machine's sphere. Polushin pulled out a small ceramic cube, smashed it with a hammer, and handed Clarke a small diamond. Everybody smiled. The General eventually ordered three machines and told Semenov to ship them to Florida.

But there were two immediate problems. First, nobody in the US knew how to run them. Clarke solved that by moving a crew of Russians to Florida. ("I felt myself all the time in a sauna," remembers Nickolay Patrin, who now lives full-time in Sarasota.) The second and more fundamental obstacle was that the Russians themselves had not yet mastered the process. In fact, the machines did not reliably produce diamonds.

The General and his newly minted Gemesis needed help. He turned to Iranian crystal expert Reza Abbaschian, head of the University of Florida's materials science department in Gainesville. Abbaschian agreed to try turning the Russians' hit-or-miss method into a rigorously controlled and more reliable technological process. With the aid of some graduate students, he ripped out the analog knobs and dials and installed a computer control system. They upgraded the power supply and methodically tracked the slightest variation in each diamond synthesis attempt. With more than 200 parameters to control, it was painstaking work, and by 1999 - three years after Gemesis was founded - the General needed another infusion of cash.

Abbaschian's efforts had produced some very high-quality stones. So Clarke flew to London to show off a batch to potential investors. Rather than simply present them as a pile of loose diamonds, he went to a jeweler in Hatton Garden, the city's diamond district, and asked if a few of his stones could be set in rings. The jeweler agreed, and Clarke returned to his hotel room at Claridge's. The phone rang. It was De Beers.

According to Clarke, a De Beers executive, James Evans Lombe, was tipped off about the synthetic diamonds within two hours of their arrival at the jeweler's. Lombe asked for a meeting with the General. The De Beers executive drove directly to Claridge's, and the two men sat down in the tearoom to the strains of a piano and violin duet.

De Beers refuses to comment on the meeting - or about anything for this story - but Clarke says he simply placed his diamonds on the table. "When I told him that we planned to set up a factory to mass-produce these, he turned white," the General recalls. "They knew about the technology, but they thought it would stay in Russia and that nobody would get it working right. By the end of the conversation, his hands were shaking."

But De Beers wasn't backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines - dubbed DiamondSure and DiamondView - to the largest international gem labs. Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size. Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal's internal structure. "Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic," De Beers scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop authentication devices. "Unfortunately, our research has led us to conclude that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument, inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and chemically."

In the summer of 2001, Abbaschian told the General that they were finally ready to mass-produce diamonds. There was one last decision to make. Each machine was capable of generating a 3-carat yellow stone every three days (colorless takes longer). Given their scarcity, the price per carat was much higher for yellow diamonds - so much higher, in fact, that only the very wealthy could afford them. Plus, colored diamonds have gotten hot in recent years. (J. Lo's engagement ring? Pink diamond.) Clarke decided that he'd make the biggest splash by bringing yellows to Middle America. He'd compete on both price - charging 10 to 50 percent less than naturals - and style. And, if he succeeded with the yellow stones, he could transition into colorless.

The diamond industry fought back. Early last year, De Beers began shipping improved, even more sensitive DiamondSure machines to labs around the world. Meanwhile, industry groups led by the Jewelers Vigilance Committee have pressured the Federal Trade Commission to force Gemesis to label its stones as synthetic.

The tussle goes to the heart of the marketing problem for Gemesis or any maker of synthetic gems: How will consumers feel about them? The mystique of natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful - De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply.

Clever marketing may bring buyers around to manufactured diamonds. After all, there's no chance that they are so-called blood diamonds - stones sold by African rebels to fund wars and revolutions. And they aren't under the thumb of an international cartel accused of buying off foreign governments, despoiling the environment, flouting antimonopoly laws, and exploiting mine workers.

In fact, Gemesis is developing a marketing campaign that portrays synthetics as superior to naturals. The General came up with a proposal to brand the company's diamonds "cultured" - a deliberate echo of the designation given to the wildly successful (and more valuable than natural) cultured pearl. In an ambiguous April 2001 ruling, the Federal Trade Commission said that it was "unfair or deceptive" to call a man-made diamond a "diamond," but offered no opinion on the question of calling it a "cultured diamond."

So, for now, Clarke is sticking with cultured. But in the end, he insists, it won't really matter. "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one."

Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week." So goes the De Beers-backed line. And forget the cultured pearl comparison, Van Royen says. Man-made diamonds are more like synthetic emeralds, introduced in large quantities in the mid-'70s. At first, their price was very high, but then the gem labs discovered that the synthetics could be easily distinguished using a standard microscope. The price collapsed and is now less than 3 percent of naturals.

Van Royen is confident the council's lab can pick out synthetic stones. To test him, I ask him to look at a half-carat light yellow Gemesis diamond. A jovial, bearded man prone to nervous laughter, Van Royen takes the rock and peers at it through a 10X jewelers' loupe. "It is very pretty," he admits, giggling. "But so is cubic zirconium." Although Van Royen's lab is outfitted with DiamondSure and DiamondView machines (the Diamond High Council works closely with the Gem Defensive Programme), he instead puts the gem into a more elaborate piece of equipment - a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer that registers the diffusion of light through crystal. Above the machine hangs a large printout that shows six sets of graphs. Van Royen points to one with a distinctive spike toward the right end of the horizontal axis. "If it is synthetic, it should look like this," he says. Sure enough, the machine displays a graph just like the one Van Royen indicated.

But such high-end testing is far from the last word. Only a small percentage of larger diamonds are lab-certified - though the number seems to be growing as the industry becomes more aware of synthetics. Diamonds that are smaller than a fifth of a carat are almost never sent to labs, since the cost would eat up any profit made from them. These modest stones actually represent a significant portion of the market, since jewelry designers regularly use them to create sparkling fields of diamonds on watches, earrings, rings, and pendants. Almost all diamonds of this size are bought, processed, and sold by Indians based in Antwerp and Bombay.

One such group - headed by the Choksi family - bought a $35,000 batch of preliminary Gemesis research stones last year and is currently selling them in India at a 10 to 20 percent profit. I met Sabin Choksi, one of the company's principals, at a jewelry convention in Las Vegas. He admitted that his customers don't know the stones are synthetic, but says they don't care one way or the other. In other words, Gemesis may be fully disclosing the nature of its stones, but already one of its wholesalers is not.

In Antwerp, Van Royen tells me of another threat. There's a rumor of a new, experimental method for growing gem-quality diamonds. The process - chemical vapor deposition - has been used for more than a decade to cover relatively large surfaces with microscopic diamond crystals. The technique transforms carbon into a plasma, which then precipitates onto a substrate as diamond. The problem with the technology has always been that no one could figure out how to grow a single crystal using the method. At least until now, Van Royen says. Apollo Diamond, a shadowy company in Boston, is rumored to be sitting on a single-crystal breakthrough. If true, it represents a new challenge to the industry, since CVD diamonds could conceivably be grown in large bricks that, when cut and polished, would be indistinguishable from natural diamonds. "But nobody has seen them in Antwerp," Van Royen says. "So we don't even know if they are for real."

I take a transparent 35-millimeter film canister from my pocket and put it on the table. Two small diamonds are cushioned on cotton balls inside. "Believe me," I say, "they're for real."

Three days before traveling to Belgium, I had flown to Boston to meet Bryant Linares, president of Apollo Diamond. Linares has been secretive about his company and was suspicious about me. He checked to make sure I was really working for Wired by calling my editor, and he wouldn't say where his company was located other than to tell me to fly to Boston and wait for him at baggage claim.

When I arrive, a preppy, square-jawed man approaches me.

"I'm Bryant Linares," he says. "Follow me."

We get in his blue Saab and begin driving. In a half hour, I realize I'm seeing the same scenery. I ask if we're driving in circles. "We're not taking the most direct route," he allows. For 45 minutes, he questions me about stories I'd written. Finally he seems to decide I'm not a De Beers spy. "You're OK," he says. "There's no need for a blindfold."

We pull up at a suburban strip mall occupied by a fitness gym and a graphic design company. Linares leads the way into the graphics firm's reception area, which looks normal enough. But when he opens one of the interior doors, I catch a glimpse of a man dressed head to foot in Intel-style clean-room scrubs.

"Welcome to Apollo Diamond," Linares says, waving me inside and quickly shutting the door. He hands me a bunny suit, including booties, goggles, and a hair cap, and leads me into a third room. Three men dressed in similar contaminant-control outfits stand around a cylindrical contraption that looks like a heavy-duty coffee urn outfitted with a bolt-on porthole. A preternatural purple-green glow emanates from the window.

I peer through the glass. Four diamonds are growing beneath a shimmering green cloud. "It took me a long time to get to this point," says one of the men standing beside the machine. This is Robert Linares, Bryant's father. In the 1980s, he was a well-known researcher in advanced semiconductor materials. His company, Spectrum Technology, pioneered the commercialization of gallium arsenide wafers, the microchip substrate that succeeded silicon and allowed cell phones to become smaller and handle more bandwidth. Linares sold the company to PacifiCorp, a diversified utility, in 1985 and disappeared from the semiconducting world.

It turns out he took the money and built a secret diamond research lab. "I knew diamonds were going to be the ultimate semiconductor at some point, but everybody thought it was impossible at the time," Linares says. "I had the freedom to do what I wanted after I sold my company, so I spent almost 15 years researching on my own."

To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones.

By January, Apollo plans to start selling them on the jewelry market. But that's just the first step. Robert and Bryant Linares expect to use revenue from the gem trade to fund their company's semiconductor ambitions. Not surprisingly, the diamond industry is hostile to the idea, as the younger Linares discovered four years ago when he attended an industry conference in Prague. He was hoping to find out whether any other researchers - possibly De Beers scientists themselves - had discovered the sweet spot. During a break in the conference, a man approached Linares and told him to be careful. "He said that my father's research was a good way to get a bullet in the head," Linares recalls.

The diamond industry is in fact even more concerned about gems made using chemical vapor deposition than it is about Gemesis stones, though Gemesis poses a more immediate threat. The promise of CVD is that it produces extremely pure crystal. Gemesis diamonds grow in a metal solvent, and tiny particles of those metals get caught in the diamond lattice as it grows. CVD diamond precipitates as nearly 100 percent pure diamond and therefore may not be discernible from naturals, no matter how advanced the detection equipment.

But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.

Back at the Diamond High Council, I open the film canister and shake the Apollo stones onto the table. Van Royen tentatively picks one up with a pair of elongated tweezers and takes it to a microscope. "Unbelievable," he says slowly as he peers through the lens. "May I study it?" I agree to let him keep the gems overnight. When we meet the next morning in the lobby of the High Council, Van Royen looks tired. He admits to staying up almost all night scrutinizing the stones. "I think I can identify it," he says hopefully. "It's too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless."

Van Royen reluctantly hands the diamonds back. "You have something that nobody else in Antwerp has." he says. "You should be careful - somebody might jump out of the shadows with a mask on." He leans in conspiratorially: "If you want to know how important these diamonds are, talk to Jim Butler with your Navy. He is the man."

Jim Butler is the head of a project known as Code 6174 - the Navy's diamond research arm, which is housed in a guarded facility outside Washington, DC. A civilian scientist, Butler has been been researching CVD diamond and semiconducting for the military for 16 years, long enough to see plenty of failure in the field. But today, he's more optimistic than ever. There have been three long-standing roadblocks to diamond semiconducting - and each of them appears to be on the verge of falling. First, diamond is viewed as wildly expensive, due to the artificial scarcity that De Beers maintains with its lock on the market. Synthesized diamonds created outside of the cartel will greatly reduce that problem. Second, there has never been a steady and dependable supply of large, pure diamonds. You can't depend on mined diamonds, as there is no way to ensure that each stone will have the same electrical properties as the next. Apollo's CVD diamonds solve that.

The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."

Still, Butler is frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the US computer business. "Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond semiconductor research," he says, citing the Japanese government's announcement in December that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to build a first-generation diamond chip. "Bob Linares has given the US the advantage, but nobody's paying any attention," he says. "If we're not careful, the Japanese or the Europeans are going to claim the diamond niche."

Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."

But someday, that's exactly what chipmakers will be forced to do. Just ask Bernhardt Wuensch, an MIT professor of materials science. "If Moore's law is going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter," he tells me. "Eventually, silicon is just going to turn into a puddle. Diamond is the solution to that problem."

The JCK Show is one of the biggest events in the jewelry business. It draws every major diamond dealer in the US, most of whom buy their goods from De Beers. This year, for the first time, the General tried to get a booth. He was told that he'd applied too late. He suspected that the industry simply didn't want him there, but he took it gracefully and announced that Gemesis would unveil its stones at a smaller satellite convention down the street.

I head to Las Vegas to check it out. The Gem and Lapidary Dealers Association Show is held in a large room at the back of the Mirage. Here - amid purveyors of quartz-encrusted, electric-powered water fountains ("Be amazed by their magic!"), Lithuanian amber salesmen, Nigerian tanzanite dealers, and Vegas-style cowboys in ostrich skin boots - is the Gemesis booth, which displays more than 1,000 carats of yellow diamonds. The show ends tonight, and JCK starts tomorrow morning, so the last few hours see a whirlwind of recently arrived JCK-bound buyers. Efraim Katz, a yarmulke-clad, heavily bearded gem wholesaler from Miami, literally jogs through the room but pauses in front of Gemesis.

"Diamonds mined in Florida?" he asks a Gemesis rep. "I can't believe it. Give me your number - I will be calling."

Kevin Castro, a jeweler in Cedar City, Utah, comes to a surprised halt. "These are awfully pretty," he says.

I tell him that they are man-made and ask if that bothers him.

"If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it's not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America," he says. "It's grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a beautiful orchid."

"Do you care that it's not from De Beers?" I ask.

"De Beers?" he says. "Nobody cares if it's from De Beers. My clients just want a nice diamond."

silly email blacklist nazis, don't piss on our parade. Check the comparison of spews to scientology and this google cache

SPEWS.ORG is a shadowy internet organization, run by unknown people that provides IP blocklists for mail servers to use to filter out unwanted spam. SPEWS.ORG includes entire class c, b, and a subnets (ranging into the millions of IP addresses) in its blocklists if it means blocking only handfuls of spammers originating from within the subnet. Their blocklist includes entire states and entire service providers for countries ranging from Brazil to China. If you have DSL and are in Sao Paulo, Brazil you cannot send an e-mail to an administrator who is utilizing the SPEWS.ORG blocklist. To get off of the SPEWS.ORG blocklist you are told by the FAQ to post a request in either of two newsgroups frequented mainly by people not affiliated with SPEWS. When you post that you are not a spammer the people on these newsgroups will insist that it doesn't matter because you are supporting a spammer by using their hosting/service. Essentially there is no way to get off the blocklist without either switching ISPs or forcing your provider into doing whatever SPEWS demands of it, which ultimately boils down to SPEWS blackmailing people into fighting whatever ISPs they don't like.

google cache from a dead site --------

why i won't use spews

For awhile, the spam blocking rules configured in the clapper.org email server included data from the SPEWS database . However, in mid-2002, I removed use of the SPEWS database, because I believe the criteria for inclusion in SPEWS is too broad. This document explains why I no longer use SPEWS. (You're free to disagree with my position, of course, and I welcome well-reasoned, polite discourse on the topic. I will not respond to flames, though I will save--and possibly post--them.)

Regarding email blacklists

I am not against email blacklists. My mail server still uses other blacklists to screen and reject incoming mail, including a local blacklist I maintain solely for my own use. Blacklists can be a useful tool in the fight against spam. However, when using blacklists, one must balance the aggressiveness of the blacklist against the risk of rejecting legitimate messages (i.e., false positives). False positives are an unfortunate consequence of using any email blacklist; no blacklist is completely free of them. If you block email using a domain or IP blacklist, you run the risk of rejecting mail from a non-spammer. When using a blacklist, your goal should be to eliminate as much spam as possible, while minimizing the number of false positives. Those two goals are often contradictory, so using a blacklist can force you into a delicate balancing act.

No one blacklist can meet everyone's needs; different sites have different spam profiles. For instance, if you receive a lot of spam via machines in South Korea, and no legitimate email ever comes to you from that country, it might be perfectly safe for you to block all incoming email from South Korea. That same broad blocking policy is probably inappropriate for an ISP, and it's certainly inappropriate for a company that has customers in South Korea.

When using blacklists to control incoming spam, I believe the best approach is to use a local blacklist combined with several narrowly targeted blacklists. The blacklists should:
list the smallest possible set of addresses or domains necessary to accomplish the required block
have simple criteria and procedures for inclusion in and removal from the blacklist
fit well with your site's spam profile

It's especially important to be able to tailor and tune your spam blocking rules to maintain an appropriate balance between rejecting spam and rejecting legitimate email. You must be able to tune these rules on a site-by-site basis. Relying solely on someone else's spam-blocking policies is simply a bad idea.

SPEWS fails to meet those basic criteria.

"It's okay if innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire."

There's no question that SPEWS is effective. It certainly managed to block spam that my other spam blocking rules did not catch. However, an SMTP server that uses the SPEWS data to block incoming email may also be blocking a surprising amount of legitimate, non-spam email. The SPEWS FAQ acknowledges this problem:

Q16: I'm not a spammer or spam operation... heck I hate spam, but my email is getting bounced by someone using SPEWS, or I can't access a website due to SPEWS based blocking.

A16: You maybe part of the rare "inadvertent blocking" that can occur when a spam friendly provider is listed in spews. Your best option is to try and educate your provider or switch to one who is not listed in SPEWS as spam friendly. SPEWS aims to avoid listing any non-spammer or non-spam support areas if possible - we just want to stop spam.

However, the FAQ is disingenuous here: It seems that part of the strategy of those who maintain SPEWS and those who use its data is to deliberately cause inadvertent blocking (which SPEWS previously called "collateral damage"). By inconveniencing non-spamming customers of spam-tolerant (or merely slow-to-respond) ISPs, the SPEWS enthusiasts apparently hope to bring economic pressure to bear on those ISPs. See, for instance, this article , posted to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup; in it, the author states, "it's called 'targeted economic pressure.' Only innocent victims would be collateral damage." The author of that article has conveniently redefined "innocent" to exclude anyone who happens to have an address within a blocked IP range.

As it turns out, I don't really have a philosophical problem with that approach, when it's applied by individuals. An individual is free to block access to his email in whatever manner he sees fit. I am free to configure my SMTP server or my mail reader however I choose. It's my computer, after all; I can put up as many "No Trespassing" signs as I wish. But the situation becomes murkier when the entity applying the block is an ISP that has made contractual arrangements with paying customers for email delivery. Many ISPs implement blanket spam-blocking policies without informing their customers of those policies or making any provisions for individual customers to customize the spam-blocking behavior. When those invisible spam-blocking measures include the use of SPEWS, the ISP will often block incoming mail from many non-spammers whose netblocks happen to be listed in SPEWS.

As the above news.admin.net-abuse.email shows, some SPEWS adherents rationalize inadvertent blocking by demonizing the victim. A non-spammer caug