NE Asia Online, my source for weekly DRAM prices, redesigned their site and broke the link I was using. I've now fixed the problem and brought my data up to date.

Which reminds me. All links work at the time of publication. If you find something that has stopped working, leave a comment or send email using the link at the top of this page.

Libraries that have 800 year old books don't display them very much. They keep them in climate-controlled vaults, or under glass in dim light with only two pages visible. The British Library's Turning the Pages project aims to change that by digitizing some of the library's most precious treasures. They've put Sultan Baybars' Qur'an and The Sherborne Missal online (Shockwave player required), and have even more cool stuff at the library itself.

In recent days, yet another reform plan for Japanese banks has been greeted with cheers outside Japan and withering criticism inside. Unfortunately the plan may pose an even greater threat to Japan's economy and political hierarchy than the structural problems it's intended to fix do.

(New York Times link. Free registration required.)

Here's why profiling makes such a lousy basis for security screening. Police in the Washington, DC area saw the car that turned out to be the shooting platform for the area's serial sniper. They checked the vehicle's plates at least ten times, but let the driver go each time. According to profilers, most serial killers are white, but the suspects now in custody are black.

Arts and Letters Daily is back. The Chronicle of Higher Education rescued them after their parent company went bankrupt. And there was great rejoicing.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)

Since last September, former civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz has been musing about circumstances in which state-sanctioned torture might be appropriate. In doing so, he has clearly forgotten why civil liberties are important and what happens to societies that abandon them for the sake of expedience. Richard Thieme hasn't forgotten.

The November Scientific American has a good article on quantum information science, explaining why it's important as science as well as some of the applications. For those interested, there are also several articles about quantum computing here at Thin Film Manufacturing.

The Google search engine is so good it's almost frightening. I don't remember the last time it couldn't find the information I wanted. Best of all, the user interface is one of the cleanest on the web. This interview with Google product manager Marissa Mayer helps explain why.

(Link by way of Tomalak's Realm.)

The basic idea of distributed computing is simple: put unused computing cycles to work solving big problems. Thanks to the Internet, the unused cycles could be anywhere, not just in a particular research group's offices. Distributed computing projects have been around for years, tackling problems from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to breaking encryption schemes. Most recently, scientists at Stanford University simulated part of the protein folding process, one of the biggest unsolved problems in biochemistry.

If you have a few computers with cycles to spare, find a project that interests you and sign up.

Nice deal if you can get it. Get an executive position with millions of stock options. Borrow money (tax and interest-free) from the company to exercise the option. If the stock goes up, you get rich. If the stock goes down, the company forgives the loan. All the other shareholders get hammered, but you're high and dry. Sweet!

Business 2.0 estimates that loans to insiders in recent years reached US$5 billion, of which as much as US$1 billion have been or will be forgiven. Insider lending is illegal now, thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley reform legislation, but lobbyists are hard at work trying to water down the law and lawyers are hard at work designing new compensation schemes.

(Link by way of Techdirt.)

Arts and Letters Daily went belly up, alas, so I'm looking for a substitute. I don't yet know if Robot Wisdom is it, but the site's intriguing. Worth a look.

Transcripts of the Supreme Court oral arguments in the Eldred v. Ashcroft copyright case aren't yet available. I did find this firsthand account, though.

(Link by way of Jordon Cooper.)

For those who haven't been keeping up, Eldred v. Ashcroft challenges the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act on the grounds that repeated copyright extensions for existing works contradict the US Constitution. This is the law known as the Walt Disney Protection Act in some circles. Without it, the first Mickey Mouse cartoons would enter the public domain next year.

If it's illegal to circumvent encryption of digital media, which it is under the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act, then it's also illegal to explain security vulnerabilities in encryption software. Which, of course, makes it very difficult to fix them.

Now, any law that makes it illegal to fix a security hole is obviously ludicrous. Just how ludicrous became painfully obvious when Red Hat released a security patch but declared that only people outside the US can read the documentation for it.

What's the next killer application, the one that will pull the technology industry out of its two-year funk? No one knows, but Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner makes a convincing argument that incremental improvements to $500 devices aren't it. To win sales, innovators must actually, well, innovate.

I'm sorry updates have been sparse lately, and I'm afraid they will be for the next week or two. Most of my time has been tied up with revenue projects. Good news for me, but not such good news for the site.

Hmm... For some unknown reason, I've been getting quite a few visits back into the Blogger weblog archives lately. Many of those visits have turned up File not Found errors because of the way I reorganized directories at the end of 2001. If you're having trouble finding something in the blog section, either try the search engine at the top of this and every page, or try browsing the blog archives for the appropriate date.

There are potholes, and then there are sinkholes. Make sure you know what's under that water-filled puddle you're about to drive into.

(Link by way of Metafilter)

It's about time. San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has introduced legislation which would guarantee legal consumers fair use of digital media. According to Lofgren's office, the legislation supports the radical idea that it's possible to "prevent and punish digital pirates without treating every consumer as a criminal."

Mark your calendar! Don't miss tomorrow's Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony, dedicated to research that cannot or should not be reproduced. A few tickets are left, if you happen to be in the Boston area, and the festivities will be webcast.

It's amazing what you find on the Internet. This morning, I found blatant plagiarism of nearly a dozen articles from my stay at Semiconductor Online.

No, I'm not going to provide a link to the offending site. Suffice it to say that both the webmaster and his ISP have been notified. I'll be encouraging other journalists whose work was stolen to take action as well.

The copyright policy for this site is linked at the bottom of every page, but one more repetition won't hurt: Inbound links to any page on this site are welcome. Unauthorized copying of material on this site will not be tolerated.

Sigh...