President Eisenhower famously warned America about the risk of the military-industrial complex, but he also foresaw the risk that public policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

(HT: American Experiment and Victory Girls.)

I'm a big supporter of public education -- I went to public school and university for my entire education. Despite my libertarian leanings, I think taxpayer-funded, locally-directed public education can be a very valuable governmental function. However, I'm not a fan of the grift and graft that engulfs public education, for example the money laundering between teachers' unions and the Democrat party. I'm also not fond of the ideological indoctrination that many of the grifters seek to impose on American children, without the consent of the parents.

So I think it's great that the "get woke, go broke" trend is finally hitting the public education grift infrastructure.

Seventeen NSBA affiliates have cut ties with the NSBA over their coordination with the White House and Department of Justice in casting parental complaints over curricula "domestic terrorism." And as Axios reports, they're taking their checkbooks with them -- accounting for a 40% loss in revenue at the NSBA:

The National School Boards Association has since apologized, but the fallout could be seven figures in annual funding. At least 17 state affiliates have severed ties with the group -- and some are even considering establishing a competitor.

The 17 state affiliates accounted for more than 40% of annual dues paid to NSBA by its state association members in 2019, according to Axios' analysis of documents detailing those contributions.

Officials fear upheaval at the organization -- the nation's leading trade group representing U.S. public schools -- will handicap it just as national debates over school curricula and COVID-19 mitigation measures dominate the political conversation.

Good.

This is fantastic news that will hopefully turn into a treatment for people with spinal cord injuries and other nerve injuries.

A self-assembling gel injected at the site of spinal cord injuries in paralysed mice has enabled them to walk again after four weeks.

The gel mimics the matrix that is normally found around cells, providing a scaffold that helps cells to grow. It also provides signals that stimulate nerve regeneration.

Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Chicago and his colleagues created a material made of protein units, called monomers, that self-assemble into long chains, called supramolecular fibrils, in water.

When they were injected into the spinal cords of mice that were paralysed in the hind legs, these fibrils formed a gel at the injury site.

The researchers injected 76 paralysed mice with either the fibrils or a sham treatment made of salt solution, a day after the initial injury. They found that the gel enabled paralysed mice to walk by four weeks after the injection, whereas mice given the placebo didn't regain the ability to walk.

The team found that the gel helped regenerate the severed ends of neurons and reduced the amount of scar tissue at the injury site, which usually forms a barrier to regeneration. The gel also enhanced blood vessel growth, which provided more nutrients to the spinal cord cells.

Why did Willie Sutton rob banks? "Because that's where the money is."

Why does the government want to tax your IRA and ROTH retirement savings? Because that's where the money is.

When the income tax first went into effect in 1915, the top rate was a mere 7% and fell only on those making $500,000 a year or more -- that's $13.5 million in today's dollars. The vast majority of Americans paid the lowest 1% rate.

Today, the federal income tax ranges from 10%-37% and that's on top of all the FICA withholding. Today's top rate -- more than five times higher than it was in 1915 -- falls on those making about $500,000.

Which means top rate-payers are paying 5.5 more income tax on about one-thirtieth of the income.

The lowest rate-payers are paying 10 times more on about the same fraction -- and that still doesn't count FICA deductions, which hit the poorest the hardest.

The income tax was sold by early 20th Century progressives as a way to sock it to the rich, but progressives made sure it become a way to sock it to everybody.

You can bet your bottom dollar -- if Congress doesn't confiscate that, too -- that today's "Billionaire Income Tax" is tomorrow's "Tax Your Middle Class Retirement Accounts Before You Even Retire."

Our government is too big, too unaccountable, too incompetent, and entirely dedicated to growing its own power. Anything that can't go on forever, won't.

I recently wrote that Facebook should be regulated like a utility, but maybe social media is more like an addictive, harmful drug than a utility. The companies that push social media on us are like drug dealers. Given my libertarian sympathies, adults should generally be free to use the drugs they want, but society should regulate promotion and distribution of the substance and protect children from being preyed upon by the dealers.

The real problem with Facebook's behavior is the revelation of its rampant institutional lying. In the XCheck story, we learned that after Facebook spent more than $130 million to create an Independent Oversight Board to oversee its content-moderation decisions, Facebook executives routinely lied to that board. Facebook told the Oversight Board that XCheck was only used in "a small number of decisions," even though the program had grown to include 5.8 million users in 2020.

"We're not actually doing what we say we do publicly," and the company's actions constitute a "breach of trust," reads a confidential internal review done by Facebook.
We also learned -- shockingly -- that the CEO and COO of the trillion-dollar behemoth are regularly involved in decisions of what posts to remove when such posts are made by certain people who are exempted from Facebook's community guidelines and content-moderation procedures. This is all while Facebook asserted that it applied the same standards to everyone.

Apparently, XCheck was created to mitigate "p.r. fires" or negative media attentions when Facebook takes the wrong action against a high-profile VIP. Even worse than the existence of the XCheck program was Facebook's dishonesty about it, reflecting the state of mind of a company that knew it was doing something wrong -- and still did it anyway.

These revelations strengthen the case that Facebook likely serves increasingly as the censorship arm of the US government, just as it does for other governments around the world.

That last sentence gets to the heart of the matter, and explains why collective action against social media dealers has been so slow: the elite class wants to control our speech, and is happy to use social media dealers to do it.

Facebook is soma.

What is soma in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? In the context of the novel, soma is a recreational drug that several of the main characters take throughout the story. The government in Brave New World strongly encourages individuals to take soma as a way to increase the happiness and complacency of the population. Soma can be taken as a pill or as a powder and can also be released as an aerosol. It is freely available to everyone in the novel. Its inclusion in the text is central to the novel's themes of complacency and resistance in society as well as the theme of escapism.

Embark on a rescue mission to free your friend of the clutches of your arch-enemy

read more

Diogo Patrão's Alley Cat remake for MSX2 will be available for sale soon.

read more

A classic 1996 game has been rebranded and updated

read more

The FutureDisk crew release an expanded cartridge version of their Sokoban game "A Lone Wolf".

read more

Due to popular demand, the Digital Edition of Tiny Magic is now available.

read more

The MRC Christmas quiz saga continues

read more

A noodly adventure

read more

A new RPG coming from the Land of the Rising Sun.

read more

Long term MSX user and wife of MCWF chairman

read more

MSX port of a classic homecomputer game

read more

I was watching an episode of Chuck called “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome“.  Besides the silly humor and marginally interesting plot, the show has some REALLY great music.  The theme for the show is Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” – the extremely contagious instrumental track for it that is, with some sound effects – here’s the [...]

I was just browsing Reddit, and saw a discussion about people’s favorite smells.  Unfortunately, it looks like my favorite smell is also the overwhelming winner on Reddit.  I don’t know if I should be happy, or if I should be sad that my favorite smell seems to be a lot less original than I thought. My [...]

I’ve recently had to copy my development environment over to a new MacBook due to the fact that my old one developed severe wear and “shut down at random times by prompting me and assuming I said Yes to the shutdown prompt with any keystroke”-disorder.  Yes, sad, but I do put my laptops through a [...]

Using Mac OS X as my primary development platform is great since I can emulate my LAMP production environment a lot closely than I ever could developing on Windows.  One thing I missed for a while is being able to load the CHM (Compiled Help format used on Windows) manuals for PHP and MySQL quickly [...]

My brother Konstantin has been working on a BlackBerry app for NextJump’s Overwhelming Offers site.  Looks like the app got some press coverage today, on PCMag’s TechSaver site.  Way to go Konst, too bad the article doesn’t mention all the hours you’ve poured into that application.  Oh well, the developers behind the product rarely get [...]

Hats off to Louis Gerbarg on his excellent write-up of how a Flash chip manages reads, writes, and most interestingly – deletes.  I have a relatively comprehensive understanding of how file systems work from classes back at CMU.  But back when I was taking those classes, Flash storage was basically non-existent in a file system [...]

I was just pointed to an article where Jonathan Abrams pretty much claims that he invented friend requests and possibly even social networking. He takes pride in his claim to inventing the idea of requesting and accepting friendships online. But because he’s been around it longer than anyone, he’s also getting sick of all the friend [...]

Wow, I was just stuck on a train from Philly to New York, and for lack of anything better to do, I looked up the progress of the official Wordpress App for the Blackberry. And I’m proud to report that its out, works great, supports multiple blogs, and looks great! You can download and install over [...]

Its been about a month since I started using Twitter, and I have to say the thing I’m most disappointed with is the fact that its so easy to miss interesting information.  Depending on how busy I am, I may have the time to spend half a day catching up to stuff on Twitter, or [...]

If you’re wondering about sustainable business models, bear with me while I rant about ABC’s free episode streaming, or just skip the first bunch of paragraphs to the Sustainable Business Models heading.  Ohterwise bear with me, I’ve got a couple lung-fulls to spend talking about why I’m not having the best time I could be [...]

Technology Acording to Strong Bad:
(Right click on video and select play)

Homestar Runner
+MacMan

This is just a follow up post on embedding video. I decided to use Google Video this time.

Systm Episode 1


Steps for uploading video:
1. Download the Google Video Uploader here.
2. Upload your video to your Google account.
3. Allow Google to verify your video.

Steps for adding video to website:
1. Go to the page the video is on and click the "Put on Site" link
2. Copy the code to your website.

Using Google video is nice because it generates all the code you need for adding the video, it stores the video on their server so you don't have to, and it already has a huge database of video that you can add to your site for free.

Enjoy
+MacMan

All over the web I'm seeing more and more embedded video on websites. This is a really nice add-on that gives your site just a little more of the cool factor.



Steps:
1. Find a video. Any short quicktime movie will do. Remember, try to keep file size small.
2. Use this code on your website:

< src="sample.mov" width="320" height="256">< /embed>
(Remove the " " just before "embed" and before the "/embed" when copying and pasting.)

3. Replace "sample.mov" with your movie file (either absloute or relative URL)
4. Set height and width to desired values. (Add 16px to the height so that the play/pause controller will show up.)

That's It!

There are several varibles that can also be set such as autoplay and start time. Check out everything shown here and more at Apple's tutorial page.

+MacMan

If you want to download and save the embeded movies from a website, read my how to.

Here's another music related post for ya. I just stumbled across a program called Tunatic. Tunatic analyzes the music playing through your sound card and returns the song name and artist to you. It doesn't matter if the sound is comming from iTunes or a microphone. It just works. Its a little creepy when it is able to correctly identify your music.



Tunatic does have a few bugs though. The main problem is it has a limited music database. By downloading a program called Tunalyzer, users can help increase the size of the database. So, if you are listening to a popular band such as Green Day, you should have few problems matching songs. However, if you are listening to a more obscure band, don't expect Tunatic to get it right everytime, if even at all.

Download Tunatic: Mac Windows

+MacMan

Yep, its true. They Might Be Giants (TMBG) has released their first podcast.

Here is TMBG's announcement:

They Might Be Giants' very first podcast is available right now right here. To subscribe to this unique free service subscribe here. This first episode is approximately 20 minutes long and features a number of exclusive recordings and some unusual tracks we suspect you'll find interesting. The host is the Duke of Dead Air- Cecil Portesque- broadcasting from an undisclosed, very rainy location. Future podcasts are already in the works. Please check it out, and we sincerely invite you to hip as many people you know about this show- especially you blogtopianists out there.

If you never podcasted before, you might want to check out your iTunes application if you are on a Mac or PC. Just open the application and click on the "Podcasts" button. Under "advanced" select "subscribe to podcast" and paste the below link in the field.

http://www.tmbg.com/_media/_pod/podcast.xml

If you don't have iTunes, it's avalible free from Apple. Go to apple.com to download it now.

+MacMan

Do you find it hard to find new music artists to fit your taste? Well, now you can let Pandora do the searching for you. Just type in your favorite band or song and let Pandora tell you other artists that are similar. It uses its Music Genome Project Database of more than 10,000 artists. It even plays full length songs for you, not those little 30 sec clips.



This service is similar to Yahoo's Launchcast, however instead of one big radio station, you make separate playlists based on different generes, or tastes. Also Pandora works in Firefox, Launchcast does not.

Dr_Worm_Md: Lanchcast has met its match...

Happy Listening
+MacMan

I said Skype was free, and it is for the most part. To be able to use more advanced features you have to pay, but the basic chat service is free.

Skype is basically an instant messenger for voice. Most IM clients support voice, but the quality of Skype is great! Just download skype, create an account, and add friends. It's simple.

You need a mike to use skype for what its intended. Any computer mike will do, but for really good sound quality invest in a nice headset. I bought the Logitech Internet Chat Headset and I Love it. Its comfortable, sounds great and its reasonably priced.

One thing Skype leaves out of the free version is an answering machine. This can easily be fixed by downloading SAM. Sam is a free, fully functional answering machine program that everyone who uses Skype should have.

Skype works on Mac and PC so don't worry about not cross platform compatibility.

Get Skype For Windows
Get Skype For Mac
Get Skype For Linux
Get Skype For PocketPC

Let me know if you get Skype set up, or are already using it.
+MacMan

Don't you hate coming across a great video or audio file on the web, but you aren't given the option to download it. These embedded files can be tricky get, but Firefox has a feature built right in that makes it a breeze.

1. In Firefox, go to any website that has an embedded media file you want to download. (In our case a flash file .swf)
2. Right-click on the page and select "view page info".
3. Click on the Media Tab.
4. Scroll through the list until you find the file you want (it will probably be of type embedded.)
5. Then click the save as button and you got it. (To run a flash object, just open it in a web browser.)



For the complete guide visit inner.geek.

+MacMan

Apple FINALLY gave in to the pressure to make a multi-function mouse. With the new "Mighty Mouse" you can right/left click, scroll 360 degrees, and program other buttons. Apple didn't sacrifice design for functionality, they accomplished both.



For $49 you can buy one of these new mice for OSX or XP. Yes, the mouse will work with Windows XP.

+MacMan

Ever want to make a shirt that says just want you want? Well, NeighborHoodies makes this process a breeze. You can make shirts, hoodies, bags, pants, and even stuff for kids. You've gotta check this site out just to look at some of the shirts people have made.



What would your shirt say?
+MacMan

Check out the music section for a new free downloadable mp3 every day.

Some guys super glued a CRT monitor to a wall and let anyone on the internet post a message to the screen. It's kinda fun just to see something you typed show up on a screen that you know thousands of other people are looking at. You HAVE to check it out.



+MacMan

FTS (From the Shadows) recently released their newest episode, Box 4.0. Man, these guys keep getting better and better. Yoshi and Robert are on this one.

Topics Covered in Box 4.0
ATSAC - LA Traffic Control
Make virtual drives to run your PC games directly from a hard drive (Robert)
Remove scratches from iPods and PSP screens ;-) (Yoshi)
Use a traffic pre-emption device to force traffic lights to change from red to green

Box 4.0 is one of the best episodes of FTS. Can't wait for 5.0.
+MacMan

Well, my traveling days are almost over. For the past 2 weeks I've been out and about in central Texas and then in Colorado. I'll be flying h0me Sun. and can't wait to get back to my computer. Here's some stuff I've seen besides a monitor.





//MacMan

Wonder why I've been gone so long? I've been watching/listening to a bunch of tech programs that you can get free off the web.

Podcast
Podcasts are great because they are very portable. Just download 'em, sync your favorite mp3 player, and listen. Really, you can listen to them any way you want (computer, cd, etc.)

My favorite podcasts are TWiT (This Week in Tech) and Diggnation. TWiT is made up of the old TechTV crew like Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Patrick Norton, Robert Heron and others. If you want hardcore tech check out TWiT. Diggnation is a new podcast put out by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. They review the most dug stories from Digg.com and throw in some of their favorites along the way. Diggnation also puts out a video version of the podcast which is hilarious. Watching Kevin and Alex again is really cool.

Apple is getting on the podcast bandwagon with the new version of iTunes. They now have podcasting service built right into the music store. Its really easy to use, and its free. iPodderX still reigns supreme on the Mac, but for everyone else, go get iTunes.

Video
With the fall of TechTV its been hard to find good tech video programs, but now the internet tech shows are becoming alot better. I like Systm, theBroken, and FTS (From the Shadows)
Systm and theBroken are put out by Kevin Rose and Dan Huard. Now that they are working on the shows full time there starting to get better. FTS is another great tech show that Yoshi has been working really hard with.

get your geek on
+MacMan

Systm is here, NOW. Get the links on Systm. They've got a ton of different formats, so choose your favorite.

Kevin Rose announced that he has gotten out of his contract with G4 and will devote all of his time to Systm and theBroken. Get ready for a ton of content to be comming your way.

I'm at 20.2% downloaded on Systm. As soon as I watch it I'll post my feedback.

+MacMan

In February Microsoft published an article to parents on how to interpret "leetspeak" so that parents could understand what their kids were saying. The article is off the wall funny. Microsoft seems so serious in its presentation of the facts. Below are some excerpts from the article. The full article can be found here.

1. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of "elite") is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of Pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

2. Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed. Some leetspeekers will capitalize every letter except for vowels (LiKe THiS) and otherwise reject conventional English style and grammar, or drop vowels from words (such as converting very to "vry").

3. Non-alphanumeric characters may be combined to form letters. For example, using slashes to create "//" can substitute for the letter M, and two pipes combined with a hyphen to form "|-|" is often used in place of the letter H. Thus, the word ham could be written as "|-|4//."

4. The suffix "0rz" is often appended to words for emphasis or to make them plural. For example, "h4xx0rz," "sk1llz0rz," and "pwnz0rz," are plural or emphasized versions (or both) of hacks, skills, and owns.

•	"kewl": A common derivation of "cool."
•	"m4d sk1llz" or "mad skills": Refers to one's own talent. "m4d" itself is often used for emphasis.
•	"n00b," "noob," "newbie," or "newb": Combinations synonymous with new user. Some leetspeekers view "n00b" as an insult and "newbie" as an affectionate term for new users.
•	"w00t" or the smiley character o/: An acronym that usually means "We Own the Other Team," used to celebrate victory in a video game.
•	"roxx0rs" Used in place of "rocks," typically to describe something impressive.
•	"d00d": Replaces the greeting or addressing someone as a "dude."
•	"joo" and "u": Used instead of "you." This is also commonly written as "j00" or "_|00."
•	"ph": often replaces "f," as in "phear" for "fear" (as in "ph34r my l33t skillz") and vice versa, such as spelling "phonetic" as "f0||371(." Well, thank you Microsoft on that fine lesson in leetspeak. *cough* +MacMan

Hi All! I just got through making a widget that counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the release of Systm. This is a Konfabulator only widget.

*Note: The image below will not update as it is a screenshot. The real widget updates every second.


What is a widget? Its a small program usualy written in HTML and Javascript that is designed to do a simple task such as display the weather, a calender, to-do lists, clocks, etc. In order to work they need to be run in a program like Konfabulator or Dashboard.

UPDATE!
You can now download the widget here. Its set up on the Konfabulator widget gallery.

ou'll need to download Konfabulator to run it. I'm going to make a Dashboard version soon for all you Tiger users out there.

This is my 1st attempt at a widget, so any feedback will be most welcome.
+MacMan

Also in the way of TSS, Kevin Rose, and online technology content, This Week in Tech is a new PodCast put out by all the old TechTV guys.

Leo, Kevin, Pat, Yoshi, Robert, and Dvorak are all onboard on the project. The just released episode 5 today. TWIT was #1 on PodCast Alley this week, so check it out.

The best way to enjoy TWIT, download some PodCast software. Then listen to it on your computer, iPod, non-iPod player, or cd.

Mac - iPodderX

Multi-Platform - iPodder
Windows
OS X
Linux

+MacMan

Have you been to the Google Store yet?



I'm going to get this and iron www.MacSpot.Blogspot.com on the back

Oh the possibilities...
+MacMan

If you remember, a little over a month ago I made a post about Yahgoohoogle and SearchThe4 as alternatives to the standard Google search. We'll, its been brought to my attention that SearchThe4 is dead. But, with its passing comes another site almost identical to it, only better.

Rjnsmith Search is a search engine that is basically SearchThe4 but with more options of search engines to use. The user has the option to use these search engines for general web searches.

Yahoo Ice rocket AllTheWeb

Ask Jeeves Teoma Lycos Excite

WebCrawler Vivisimo MSN Google

Meta Crawler Search.Com Mamma Dog Pile

These for images

Yahoo Ditto Picsearch

Alta Vista Ice Rocket Ask Jeeves Alltheweb

WebCrawler Object/Image fotosearch Google

Meta Crawler MSN Mamma Dog Pile

These for news

News.com Google news Market Watch

Fox News ABC News CNN Daypop

NewsIndex Poynter PBS Sky News

Reuters World News SlashDot.org The Street

These for info

Answers Dictionary Onelook

Infoplease about.com Education W. Encyclopedia

Encarta bartleby britannica Bible

Merriam libraryreference reference.com Thomson

Being able to pick from all these different search engines from different categories makes Rjnsmith Search a one stop shop

Also, Yagoohoogle might be going away. Its new site will be Twingine

Thanks to the Anonymous commenter for the link.
+MacMan

It's 5:50 CST and I cant get to google. It says "google.com cannot be found"

Is Google getting hacked, or are they just messing with their servers. We'll see.

Updates to come

Update:

Its back online. I wonder why it did that.

+MacMan

I found this website thanks to a post by Ozir.

Just type in the word you want to spell with pictures and let the website do the work. If you dont like the picture it chose, just click the letter and it will find a new one for you. Check out what I made:



+MacMan

Amazon is now giving away free music downloads on their site. I'm not sure why they are doing this, but they are. As of now they have about 200 songs of all genres on the site to download. They are supposed to update the list every 6 hours, so keep checking back for more music.



+MacMan