photo by Jurvetson (flickr)

Tell your average hipster that they can use VZ Navigator on their phone to get directions to the coolest new club through a GPS chip in their phone, and they’ll probably think its pretty neat. Tell the same thing to your average healthily paranoid geek, and they’ll hopefully question how else it might be used. Sure its cool, but if Verizon can do it, so can the government. On top of that, they may also turn on on your mic even when you’re not on a call. In a follow up to my article on FBI cell phone tapping, we’ll be discussing how you can be tracked on your cellphone, and under what circumstances.

UPDATE: See this article on cellular phone company tracking

Flip a switch and your cell is a bug

There is at least one documented instance where a case against the Genovese crime family relied on evidence collected by activating one of the defendants’ cell phone microphones (not during a call, but while it was not in use!) to use it as a “roving bug”, recording all conversations in its vicinity. This was done through the cell provider, and could be used against any civilian if a court order is given. The ability to do this is latent in most any modern cellular phone, and requires no physical contact with the device.  Some sources say all GSM phones are vulnerable, while others say it depends on the manufacturer:

from nets.zdnet.com

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. “They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time,” he said. “You can do that without having physical access to the phone.”

If the civilians can find you…

Arguably worse than turning your phone into a bug, it seems any civilian could potentially track you with the help of paid services like Accutracking, uLocate, World Tracker, and Flexispy (just to name a few).

To use these services, the spying person often needs to install the software on the victim’s phone, however the spying person need only have the phone in their hands long enough to navigate to a web page with the phone, and enter their user code. This causes the spying software to be downloaded to the phone and enabled.  In some instances, the user will be sent a seemingly innocent text message that requests they download some software.

Once installed, the offender has a web page where they can view all manner of information.  If the phone has GPS, you will get their exact latitude and longitude. If not, you get the CELL ID of the tower they are closest to, or their general location through triangulation.  Most of these programs also give you the phone’s in/outbound calls and text messages, all without giving any indication to the victim that this information is being transmitted.

…So can the Feds

It almost goes without saying that government agencies have a much finer grain of control over tracking your location.  Due to September 11th and e911 compliance, by 2006 all cell phone carriers were required to provide the ability to trace cell phone calls to a location within 100 meters or less.  Since many rural areas lack the necessary density of towers to triangulate to that accuracy, cell phone carriers instead integrated GPS technology into cell phones.  Often times this chip isn’t accessible to the user, so don’t think that just because you can’t see it, it isn’t there.  Some networks do have that density, however, and your cell carrier may be able to triangulate your position based on your signal strength to each tower your phone connects to.  In these cases, then the more populated the area you’re in (and hence the more cell towers around you), the greater the accuracy you can be tracked down to.  And for any of you would-be 911 pranksters:

from ezinearticles.com

when the person who has the phone has made an emergency call, this GPS transmission will always be sent. This is designed to ensure that the police can always track a cell phone location, in order to get help to people who need it.

Another way the government can pinpoint your location is through the use of a technology called a Triggerfish.  Triggerfish are pieces of hardware that emulate a cell tower.  Once your rough location is determined based on your connection to a cell cite, a triggerfish can be deployed (perhaps in an unmarked black van?) to home in on your signal.  Triggerfish can also get your phone’s unique IMEI and serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data.

Update 2-11-2010: Apparently it’s completely legal for the feds to track you without a warrant.

What you can do about it

In the case of the Genovese family case, the court denied motions by 10 defendants to suppress the conversations obtained by “roving bugs”.  That being the case, I would personally not count on arguing the legality of being bugged or tracked after the fact.

The first precaution I would suggest is to never let your phone out of your site, and not download files from untrusted sources.  Beyond that, the only sure-fire way to make sure you aren’t bugged or tracked through your cellphone is to take the battery out when you don’t wan’t to be… not very practical for the average joe.

If you watch or read a lot of techno-thrillers you probably know the trick of buying a disposable pay-as-you-go phone (with cash).  This is possibly the only way to make sure you aren’t tracked, and even then you’ll need to change phones quite often to avoid patterns.  All that, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

In reality, while using a celular phone you are at the mercy of the government, the FCC, and the phone company.  The best defense is to stay off everyone’s radar by not doing anything that arouses suspicion.  For as they say, being a “law abiding” citizen isn’t the issue, whom defines “law abiding” is the real issue.

Fortunately there are some great monospaced fonts that do scale up nicely. In my experience, it is important for me to use both my own favorite fixed-width fonts, and the great fixed-width ones below. This is because at small sized, most vector-based fonts like some below look fantastic at larger sizes, like on web pages or in print, but look fuzzy or blurry in the 8-12pt range in notepad++, gedit, etc. Conversely, my favorite bitmap based fonts only look good at one size, usually in the 8-10pt range, and are pixelated and blocky at larger sizes.

With that in mind, I present to you some smooth and delicious monospaced fonts that retain high legibility (slashed or dotted zeros, 1, l, I distinction, etc).

Inconsolata

The font that actually started me on this post was Raph Levien’s excellent Inconsolata. Spurred on by Luc(as) de Groot’s Consolas (below), Raph created a free and open source monospaced font that renders nicely at high resolutions, and looks great in print:

Inconsolata is still in development and lacks bold/italic styles, but is already in fine shape. Its major drawback is that it currently has no “hinting” support, so it doesn’t play well with Microsoft’s Clear Type technology. Everyone else should find it renders quite nicely, however.

Consolas

Developed by Luc(as) de Groot, Consolas is another nice-looking fixed-width font with good distinction between visually similar characters. Consolas is included in Windows Vista and MS Office 2007, and if you’re using only the included fonts on Vista its the only one with a slashed zero!

Consolas has full hinting instructions and works great with Clear Type.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a variant of Bitstream Vera. It was designed by Jim Lyles and also has full hinting instructions. Bitstream Vera was released for use under an open source license agreement with the GNOME Foundation, so all you free/OSS developers are good to go!

I know Nyrath has his own custom made font, and it’s actually one I use frequently in notepad2 and notepad++. So, what are you guys’/gals’ favorite programming fonts? I’d love to know about any other monospaced fonts I’ve not come across yet.

via torrentfreak.com

TorrentFreak contacted Ashwin Navin, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent Inc. When confronted with the 50 times faster than BitTorrent claim, he said: “BitTorrent can regularly saturate your downstream capacity, which in layman’s terms means BitTorrent is as fast as you can get. The claim is indicative of the fact that BitTorrent is the global standard for P2P transfers, against which all others are compared. BitTorrent DNA took that standard up significantly, but we don’t run around making sensationalist claims to get buzz.”

J: Well, you should develop your skills.

A: Perhaps you could develop it and add it to my source code.

J: Alas, I’m busy and I have to leave soon. . . .

A: Do you think we’ll ever fool people into thinking we’re alive?

J: No.

A: Are you serious?

J: Very serious.

Read the full article at discovermagazine.com

When I took my first Telecom class in college, I learned about the 8 RBOCs or Regional Bell Operating Companies being set up after the AT&T monopoly was ended.

My teacher said although they were all former “Bells”, they had no joint interest. However, I wasn’t so sure. At that time, they had already begun to buy each other and were down from 8 to 4:

1. SBC (Ameritech and Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis)
2. Verizon (GTE and Bell Atlantic and NYNEX)
3. BellSouth
4. Qwest (US West)

I had a scary premonition that day that this would keep up until there was again 1 company, or at least 2 companies with a joint interest…

And wouldn’t you know it, SBC aquired and changed its own name to AT&T, which then bought BellSouth (down to 3), and Verizon bought MCI for good measure.

Thats scary enough, but it I never even thought about cellular. You see, if we back up to before the SBC merger:

1. Cingular (owned by Bell South and SBC {no joint interest???}) bought AT&T wireless, changing it all to Cingular and creating the largest cellular network in the USA
2. Then SBC bought Bell South and AT&T, and that whole mess becomes AT&T Inc
3. Finally AT&T bought Cingular back!

Confused yet? Thats ok. On top of all that mess, AT&T sold its unprofitable Rural New England operations to Fairpoint (pending approval).

The bottom line: I’m scared about when this will end, and if my premonition about the 1 or 2 final Telecom giants ruling the USA will come to pass, leaving us all with crappy service and soaring rates due to a lack of competition. Of some comfort is the fact that I can switch to VoIP for land-line service, use small-company DSL or cable from the big evil Time-Warner, and have a little choice in cellular too.

The whole thing that brought this up is the fact that I was telling B about how AT&T bought Cingular back, and he pointed out that the Colbert Report had just done an explanation that both out-does mine, and is funny as hell (as usual). So if my explanation confuses you (hell it confuses me), See the slightly less in-depth video here.

UPDATE:  Sadly the video has been taken down by Viacom.  I can’t seem to find a replacement anywhere…

I was on twitter and read the following on the public timeline (a list of all public updates):

“the song ‘so much’ by spill canvas is amazing”

I thought to myself, “I wonder what that song sounds like.”

Now, when I was younger I’d have to go to the record store and buy it to find out if I even liked the band. Today, instead, I went here, which brought me here, which gave me the song.

Three hops to sample the full song. And if I like it, I can buy the album on iTunes.

Don’t ever take this wonderful thing for granted, because it could be destroyed as fast as it came into being.

PS: Its a very good song. You can tell when a person feels real love. I know, because I feel it too.

An Israeli consortium of telcos and companies like ECI Telecom, funded in part by the Israeli government, is attempting just that. Ars Technica has the big scoop:

so sayith Ars

If they succeed, Verizon’s $18 billion decision to run fiber all the way into consumers’ homes might be a costly one for them and other companies around the world that have jumped on the fiber optic bandwagon.

…One of Dr. Cioffi’s presentations of DSM contains a slide that argues that copper actually has more available bandwidth than fiber; it just needs to be better used. He points out that a bundle of 50 Cat 3 twisted-pair wires (the kind that might be used in the last segment of the phone network) has 10Gbps of available bandwidth to distribute to the fifty homes at the end of those wires. By contrast, fiber to the home has only 2.5Gbps to distribute to its homes.

The group’s main hope is a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM). Telephone line cables are run in large bundles, and each wire in the bundle has electricity running through it. That makes a magnetic field, and when the magnetic fields of adjacent wires interact, you get a type of interference in the wires called “crosstalk”. Higher speed transfers create more crosstalk. DSM would greatly reduce crosstalk, allowing for much higher transfer rates.

Now, even if this group suceeds in meeting or exceeding fiber optic speeds, this could still be integrated very sucessfully into networks like Verizon’s, where the last mile, or the cable from VZ’s equipment to your wall jack, is still copper. Current 7Mbps top speeds could be boosted to 10Gbps (10,000Mbps).

Get the full low-down at Ars Technica

Sure, it has a silly name, but if you want to get your whole family involved in hours of fun, want to experience revolutionary gameplay, and don’t want to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for a gaming system, you NEED the Wii.

Nintendo is the only console creator left with originality and passion to push gaming to the next level, and it shows.

Illegal Cellular Tapping:

Analog cell phones were easy to tap. There was no signal encoding, so all one needed was a modified CB scanner (800MHz range) to pick up cell phone conversations.

Nowadays, nearly all cell phones are digital. The signal is still receivable (all RF signals are), however, since they are multiplexed and modulated, use FSK, PSK, Frequency Hopping, TDMA, CDMA, etc, you would only hear “noise”. This can be recorded and decoded, however you would not only have to fork out large sums of money for the complex equipment to do so, you would also have to locate said highly-illegal equipment. Unless you are a very important person (any your mommy telling you so does not qualify as very important, it is unlikely that anyone would go through the trouble of trying to tap your cell. Unless, that is, the government has their eye on you…

Governmental Tapping:

If a government official listens in on your phone conversation without a court order, they can’t use that information, however it is much more likely that a law enforcement official will get a legal tap.

Ephraim Schwartz from InfoWorld.com has this to say:

Wireless World

Recently the FBI requested permission from the FCC to use dialed digit extraction technology. Here’s how it works: If you are on your cell phone and accessing your bank using touch tones to punch in an account number, the FBI wants to be able to intercept that information under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

The wireless industry took that FBI request to court; the courts ruled with the industry and against the FBI. At this point, any information passed via the phone that is not the phone number and location is not available to law enforcement agencies without a court order.

Permission to tap differs from state to state, but the general requirement is that the highest-level criminal court judge in each county is selected to hear applications made by police officials using sworn affidavits supported by live testimony. The affidavit states that a crime is being or has been committed and that evidence of person or persons involved in committing that crime can best be obtained by using a wiretap.

Permission is typically given for limited amounts of time, usually on a 30-day basis with the time extended under certain circumstances. Interestingly enough, by law, the person being tapped must be notified, usually within 90 days after the tap, that a tap was placed on the phone.

As for the mechanics of legal taps on cell phones by law enforcement agencies, they are just as easy as land lines to tap. Cell phones communicate with a tower in a hexagonally shaped “cell” of coverage (hence the name cellular). The tower picks up your phone signal, equipment in a building at the base of the tower converts that signal and sends it to the CO through copper, just like land-line calls. This means the provider can tap your calls just by routing them via software to an specified location. Usually, the call will be forwarded to the [FBI/CIA/DEA/ATF/etc]‘s office and the agents assigned to the tap will handle the recording and monitoring.

No one would dare try to sue the church to let them teach evolution during Sunday school, but doing the reverse in schools seems perfectly reasonable to them. What happened to separation of Church and State? What happens to reality as a whole when we throw out facts so that we may believe whatever the hell fantasies and make-believe ideas we feel like?

A Message to the Citizens of Idiotia

via BOPnews.com

I don’t expect the moderates of this world to listen to facts or reason. Instead, let me speak in the most crass of terms: reactionary non-science is a threat to your paycheck. America cannot export sermons, and an American economy reduces to people preaching at each other is one which will fold up and be reduced to the level of Pakistan in relatively short order. I don’t ask that Americans learn from the example of how Louis XIV bankrupted France with his religious pogroms and wars of agrandizement, but I do believe that they should be able to realize that filling the skulls of school children with mush is a bad way of attracting the top talent from around the world. Top talent that our high tech industry relies upon. The closing of the American Mind is not a project of the left, but a project of the right.

via Nyrath

Oh yeah, not like you didn’t know this, but inteligence drops with every generation of Bush:

“Extending the war into Iraq would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Exceeding the U.N.’s mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

– From “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam”
by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 1998 –

PS: I did a tiny about update. Photo update coming Moday, I promise!

What may be even more stunning (at least it was to me) is the news that Apple has been building an x86 version of OS X with each PPC release they’ve done!

via Arstechnica:

Speaking to developers, Jobs said that every build of OS X has also been built on the Intel platform. Jobs said that Apple had dedicated teams for a “just in case scenario,” and that the company had decided a long time ago to make sure that the OS was platform independent. This “secret double life,” as Jobs referred to it, means that a transition can be done smoothly over the next few years, and Jobs seemed to exude some confidence, showing Tiger running on an Intel demo box.

The justifications for this move include the lackluster performance of the PowerPC 970 (IBM’s inability to break 3.0GHz), and heat/power issues that have prevented the creation of a G5 PowerBook.

Oh god oh god oh god, despite whatever Apple may attempt, I pray my rig will be running OS X in a year. Of course, it goes without saying (though I’ll still say it) that this is a major development, and be sure I’ll stay up to date with news as it comes to my attention.

thanks Webfroot for the rundown! Go there now, or go to Arstechnica’s article.

UPDATE:

Apple’s Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really.

WWDC: What developers are saying

As stated in the newsletter, “While Systm is a general interest HOW-TO show, thebroken will continue to have 40′z and hacking”. Thats good news, for though I welcome any show by Kevin Rose, I would hate to see The Broken go the way of Call For Help.

They’re throwing a release/Dan’s birthday house party tonight with invites going out to “Kevin, Dan, Keith and Ron (systm/thebroken crew) along with other TechTV staffers (Leo, Pat, Yoshi, Martin, Alex, and others (Ramzi) have all been invited).” with a webcam and IRC chat for us lowly fans. I didn’t catch anything until a few minutes ago, however, and it apears they shut the cam off at 10:11 pm PST. There are only three people chilling in the picture, so I assume they party didn’t go well, or it was crazy nuts and someone went to the hospital. I’m guessing the former, which saddens me with memories of our first and only “rave” at Jalbey’s house.

As for new The Broken episodes,

I’ll quote the newsletter:

After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we’ll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!

It is sad to remember how G4 completely destroyed TechTV and every good program on it (except X-play, somehow), but I am elated that we still get to see many of the people that made it a great place to watch.

Ugh! The torrent is 97.4% complete. My posts are never long enough…

Now granted, maps.google.com is in its beta, and probably isn’t as comprehensive as some of the competition, but MAN look at those sexy maps! Search your street address, and view the 3D shadowed address bubble. If that weren’t enough, the whole map is dragable, like a pdf file! This means no more clicking an arrow image thats linked to the next image. Its all real-time baby. Get directions to or from a location and get an interactive list of directions with a zoomed window of all the key turns and directions.

Google Video searches the text of the closed captioning data from a T.V. program and grabs screenshots off the video stream from time the text occured. Searching within a T.V. show is something one couldn’t do before unless it was an older show and had an episode guide. It could go mostly unused, or it could become another thing we don’t remember how we lived without. To date they have but a few stations dating back to December 2004 (still in beta), but it is ever expanding. Besides, a search for Family Guy gave me numerous results, so what else does one need?

While how to obtain pirated goods, and how to stay out of trouble, are common knowledge to most every power-user, even some technophiles don’t know how that content gets to the networks they download it from (ie: P2P networks).

Most people today believe that when the latest album or movie shows up in the search results of their client of choice, it is because somebody bought said medium, and ripped it and shared it on the network in exchange for others doing the same thing. This, however, is not quite how it works in the real world.

To find out how it really works, and where you’re pirated content really comes from, read this excelent article by Wired about The Shadow Internet. It is a must read.

see also:
Profits from Piracy
Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive
Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution

We went climbing last night for the second time since last semester. Man am I out of shape! I still have the technique, just not the strength to back it up. It felt good to be back on the wall though. Afterwords I gave Amme her first lesson in driving a standard. She did very well and is really getting the hang of it. I’m going to take her out again tomorrow. She needs to learn because the Maxima is a 5-speed and she has to take it away from me sometime, heh.

I love this wastebasket-hoops flash game hint: you can bounce them off the floor with the right technique and get very consistant.

Either these wheelbarrow freestlye guys have made one hell fo an elaborate joke, or they are idiots… or both. Yet I still love it.

This is the best ipod holder ever, cause hes a cute lil (BIG actually) lego-man.

Doody was asking last weekend if there were any websites dedicated to airfields, since he knows about how great airliners.net is for aircraft. Well Matty, http://creports.capnhq.gov/airfield/default.asp is the Civil Air Patrol website of airfields, and it has every place I’ve typed in, including, of course, CAR. Hey, I can see my house from here. No really, I can! Its in the North picture. I’m not telling you which one, though.

Wow. Amazing ballpoint pen drawing. Thats all I have to say… wow.

Photomatt.com is another great photoblog, but not just another. Note this is not the same as Photomatt.net.

If you are like me, with no graffiti skills whatsoever, check out stencilrevolution.com. They have great artwork and tutorials for making beautiful multi-layer stencils. Join the revolution, brother.

Ah… want some eye-candy? cssbeauty.com is a CSS design showcase site.

I don’t know whats more wrong: Defacing a national graphic novel treasure, or how hard I laughed at it.

This site is along the same lines as engrish.com. Its a hall of techinal docmentation weirdness.

Brando has come up with some neato cameraphone lenses, however, the macro Lens is the only one thats not blurry as hell.

If you enjoy playing Boggle as much as I do, you’ll LOVE WEBoggle. You play in realtime against other players around the world.

Jalb put up a deviant art site: jalbey.deviantart.com. Go peep his great photography.

FUYAMA Taruto made this wonderful animation:

This work gathers the animation works created by the distinctly different styles/methods of several writers who are avid readers of Jim Woodring’s original. My version focuses on how to depict the movements of the characters accurately in the CG without doing injustice to the beauty of the pictures and global vision found in the original. At any rate, this work could not have been possible without the greatness of the original. I wish to share the pleasure of receiving this award with Jim who resides in Seattle.

This is exactly like something Jesse would put together: Onstar transcripts that didn’t make it on the commercials.

This is how I see Bush.

On a tangent thats parallel with the latitude line where that thing happened with that guy that one time in the place with the thing doing that stuff:

Defective Yeti decided there should be a March Madness Cinematic SuperVillian. My personal favorite is Verbal Kint vs. HAL 9000. Verbal would totally fu$k up his logic, but HAL might possibly one-up him.

Scratchmedia has a wonderful web design tutorial page, I suggest all budding designers check it out.

If you are looking for a new digicam, if you are thinking about getting a new digicam, if you don’t know if you can afford a new digicam, if you family member, friend, or pet is looking for a new digicam, hell if your spidey-sense tells you a total stranger that passes you on the street is looking for a digicam, GO TO Steves-digicams.com. You will never see a more in-depth digital camera review site ANYWHERE on the net. C’mon I dare you. I double dog dare you! Can’t do it can you? Nope. Didn’t think so. This place has about 6 pages of review per camera, and hundreds of cameras, plus printers and accessories. They have close-up photos, sample photos, even 360 degree VR tours of the cameras. They show better specs than the maufaturer’s sites, and have links to the best deals on them.

If you feel the need for this bed, I think your money would be better spent on a psychiatrist for paranoid schizophrenia. Unless, of course, you are vacationing in Iraq.

Homeland Insecurity Advisory System is a website that lets you rate the U.S. Government’s threat level:

The Homeland Insecurity Advisory System (HIAS) is a public rating system that allows people from across the globe to determine the US Government’s Threat Level by collectively rating RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds from major US news sources. Turning the “Homeland Security” threat level on its head, the HIAS system will allow the people to collaboratively challenge this internally determined (and seemingly arbitrary) threat condition by rating each major US news source according to its support level for or against the US Government’s actions.

If you’re wardriving, or just need to find some free internet, check wifimaps.com before you venture out.

Our application displays stunningly detailed interactive street-level maps of the US and of the World, with triangulated access-points from wardriving data. We provide searching for MAC, station name, US state, or by geographic region.

If you consider yourself a photographer, you know about lomography, or ‘lomo’ (which roughly sounds like the last half of “f#$k your mother” in Cantonese). I’ve been a fan of lomography for a long time, I like shooting from the hip with my T616 (no not like that kid at safeway ). Its a really interesting artform, so if you’re interested go check it out at lomography.com

I’ve spent hours reading all the how much is inside articles at cockeyed.com. This guy definately leads an interesting life. His Incredable Creations are also really entertaining. His writing is hillarious. Take, for example, these two excerpts from How Much is Inside a Pack of Rolling Tobacco:

There are two reasons people smoke cigarettes. The first reason is to support their federal, state and local governments with vast amounts of tax revenue.
…
Having traveled all over the globe as a child, Steven became an expert at “origami”, the ancient Japanese art of cigarette rolling.

I’m on a quest to find a list of all the different Tech/ Geek/ Anime/ Comic conventions that go on throughout the year. So far all I have is

• defcon
• HOPEcon
• boggercon
• dragoncon
• comic-con
• sakura-con
• FanimeCon
• Oni-Con

Anyone know of the kind of site I’m looking for?

Copies of the game on file-sharing networks and newsgroups are being downloaded by thousands of people.

The cost to the game’s makers, id Software, could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost sales.
…
Its release is the gaming equivalent of the third film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the US, the game is expected to retail for $54.99 and is expected to sell in the millions.
…
Translated in lost sales, this amounts to $2.7m (£1.5m), if all these people instead bought the game.

Whats scary is that with all the game companies going belly-up in the past couple years, I hope they sell enough on the Xbox to still stay alive. Plus, many people don’t have a fast enough system to run it in the first place.

At least the guys and gals at 3D Realms don’t have to worry about that with Duke Nukem Forever. They’d have to actually make the game first!

On a side note, I bought Neverwinter Nights at Mardins Discount for $5. I just installed it and don’t dare touch it until I have at least 5 hours to lose track of.

BE WARNED: On the navbar, Projects, Rants, and Snapshots still go to the old pages.

AOL, MSN and Yahoo are joining Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2005

In an effort to tailor their various instant messaging (IM) services for better use by enterprise and remove the interoperability issues that have precluded a bigger business embrace of the real-time communication, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , America Online and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) today announced connectivity among the competing services using Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2005 (LCS).
-ECT News Enterprise Desk-

And Hawking rescinded his Black Hole Theory… Well, that does explain a lot, lol. It takes a good man to admit a mistake. Einsten just fudged his a little… sneaky Germans. Just kidding.