Once the prototype of the original arcade game Pong was made, it was set up at a local bar for testing. Its makers, the first Atari engineers, watched as bar patrons started playing, then left. Next morning, they learned the machine had stopped working after some time. When they opened the box, they found that the money coins had filled up the bin and caused the machine to hang.

Found in a 2003 Discovery Channel documentary, "The Story of Computer Games", a Leopard Films production.

I was surfing in the security of God when I fired a Google search from Firefox. Lo and behold, the Google results page appeared right-to-left, with the navigation controls written in Arabic! After the initial annoyance - Arabic font is not rendered as clearly as Latin - I got curious at why the page language had changed. A quick surf to Google.com opened a Google.com.eg. So it's true, somebody finally did it!

Who did? I got this whois response from DNSStuff.com:

Sorry, Egypt doesn't seem to have WHOIS:
  IANA has no contact information for .eg; www.frcu.eun.eg has no WHOIS or web-based WHOIS.
  

This is, of course, pure speculation.

When I think about Time, a recurring theme that I find is cycles. A year is a full cycle around the Sun. A day is full rotation around the Earth's axis. Since 1967, a second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. In simpler terms, it is a specific (and large) number of electron cycles.

Intuitively, this makes sense. After all, if nothing at all ever repeated, there would be no numbers because there wouldn't be two of anything, let alone more. So it would make no sense to say: 2 minutes please!

We want to setup SMTP relay for Drupal home server using Postfix.

PREREQS:
Drupal
Postfix (through Ubuntu's apt-get)
A verifiable domain name for your IP (dyndns address will do)

PROCEDURE:
* Change /etc/mailname to your domain name, in my case karimratib.dyndns.org.

* Enable SMTP relay for Postfix. The name of your relay is assumed to be foobar.com.

* Set the email name of your Drupal site in administer > settings

TESTING
Try creating a new login on your Drupal system, preferably supplying an email address that you can check.

If you're a regular P2P user, you might have spent a few days downloading the latest box-office hit, only to discover that the file you received is really a cheap porn flick. (Or vice-versa.) Other variations on the theme include dummy files posing as music album archives, and subversive material distributed as tech e-books.

Typically my reaction has been avoiding to look again for the correct artifact. That means that the corrupt file actually succeeded at preventing me from pirating the original material. This strikes me as very effective means of piracy protection if institutionalized by RIAA-type corporations.

What if the founding economic principle of the scarcity of resources turned out to be a myth, an unverifiable assumption? The fact that technology hasn't learned yet how best to extract energy from our environment (the universe at large) isn't a proof in itself. The only conclusion is that there is a constant momentary scarcity of resources, brought about by humans onto themselves, as if under the spell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the principle of scarcity has important consequences. It establishes the legitimacy of competition as the higher behavioural value at all levels of the individual and society, at the expense of its dual, cooperation. Indeed, the all-importance of competition is currently being questioned by economic scientists and game theorists.

Faith is a powerful human force, always at work even without the awareness of its agents. Like reason or creativity, faith is a human quality that shapes the behaviour of individuals and of societies.

In the western world, faith is commonly regarded as irrational, and discarded altogether from social or psychological discourse. Canadian philosopher and humanist John Ralston Saul, in his social critique entitled On Equilibrium, argues that democratic society must progress by balancing the essential human qualities or forces, to reach global justice with individual freedom. The qualities that he cites are: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He argues that reason has been the predominant quality in the West, leading to the tyranny of that trait at the expense of loss of balance with other qualities. A humanist message indeed.

Try this: choose a crazy thought you've been keeping to yourself and google its keywords. You'll be surprised to find people having actually written about it!

It keeps happening to me. For a few months I've been thinking about ambiguity. A few days ago it hit me that it can be a powerful compression technique. So I googled "ambiguity compression" and got some interesting results, notably an article about Loglan, a synthetic language designed to eliminate ambiguity, and a Cyber conference paper regarding ambiguity as an artistic expression tool. Right on!

This phenomenon reinforces my belief that

The issue of fairness in P2P music exchange is complicated. On one hand, it is universally accepted that the traditional business model of music labels is not compatible with the Internet. It is also universally suspected that it does not properly retribute the artists, and that it leads to over-priced products.

On the other hand, free-rolling file sharing completely bypasses both middleman and artist to let listeners find their music online, free of charge. The businessmen are fuming. But it is useful to remember that recorded music was originally intended as *promotional* material for the actual live performances, before the record made centerstage and the big-business marketing machine started manufacturing hits for profit.

I was practicing my daily piracy routine, downloading the new Strokes album. On aMule, I found a .rar file called The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth (complete + bonus) with many sources and a decent-looking size. "Great!" I told myself and happily selected it. When I extracted the package a few hours later, the Strokes album was there alongside with the full album of a band I'd never heard about, The Honkers - Roll Up Your Sleeves And Help Us Rock Up This Honker World, which turned out to be a punk band from Brazil.