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Brilliant. Love the stickers.

Link [via Micahel Totten]

About damn time, too. Fricken vultures.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on Wednesday obtained a court order to temporarily suspend the sale of commemorative Sept. 11 coins heavily advertised as being minted from silver recovered at ground zero.

Link

To the Christian right, “Dred Scott” turns out to be a code word for “Roe v. Wade.”

I can’t keep all this crap straight anymore. Can we just get rid of Ashcroft and make some of us conservatives feeel a hell of a lot better about voting based on other issues?

By the way, I clicked through some of the linked articles in the Slate article linked here, and I am so disheartened by the conspiracy-theory-laden talk on these pages… I need to ask my folks about this stuff.

Awesome tip.. thanks to Jon for the info! I’m putting this here so I don’t lose it.

In yesterday’s item I complained about the opaqueness of PDF files. As Mark Kunzmann pointed out (in email), the situation is less dire than I suggested. He illustrated by pointing me to page 100 of the government’s energy report here. I can point you to the page describing necessary URL syntax here. This scheme is workable, for large documents like the 170-page energy report, thanks to the same HTTP 1.1 byte-range technology that I’ve been using for random access to MP3 audio.

Thanks for the reminder, Mark. This falls into the category of things I used to know, but forgot. Now arguably, there’s a reason I forgot about it. You rarely (if ever) see PDF URLs ending with #page=6 in the wild. My feeling is that’s because a PDF page is an arbitrary unit of content, and it usually won’t precisely address the element you’d like to refer to.

Note that there’s also the #nameddest option, which works like an HTML fragment identifier and takes you to a specific location within a page. However this seems to be used even more rarely. I suspect that’s because of the manual nature of the procedure required to prepare the destinations. Courtesy of Planet PDF, here is that procedure:

First up, you’ll need to create the destination. To do this from within Acrobat:

1. Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
2. Go to View > Navigation Tabs > Destinations
3. Under Options, choose Scan Document
4. Once this is completed, select New Destination from the Options menu and enter an appropriate name

Now that you have created your destination, you can link to it using
a similar syntax to that used for page linking. After the name of the
PDF, append “#nameddest=” and the name of your chosen destination. So,
if your PDF has a named destination, “TOC”, that points to a table of
contents, then your link code will look like this:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#nameddest=TOC">Link text

[Planet PDF]

Live and learn. Or in this case, relearn!

[Via Jon’s Radio]

No more lorem ipsum for those test layouts.

Link [via TinyApps]

It has begun…

Awesome for the team and a real tribute to ingenuity and good ole elbow greese. I can’t wait for the announcement that they’ve achieved orbit.
Link to Slashdot
Link to CNN

SpaceShipOne started its pursuit of the X-Prize today by launching from the Mojave Spaceport today. While the flight appeared to have some issues (the rolling post ignition reared its ugly head once more), the flight was successful. Rutan and Co. have two weeks from today at 11:34 AM EDT to make a second flight to the 100km altitude.

It’s difficult to say at this point just how significant this prize could be. Cheap, efficient, and solid technology to orbit payloads in the hands of private business and citizens will revolutionize the way we think about and use space. The difficult part is to say how this revolution will materialize. Will we vacation in space? Will we finally start to reach beyond the surface of this planet in numbers? Will science finally have a way to experiment and manufacture things in ultra-low gravity?

Aeronautics changed the way we think of the world; places once off the grid are now accesible just by changing planes. Extrapolate that concept to space flight and then you start to get really excited about the potential that is quickly becoming part of our lives.

Spaceflight Now running commentary
Link to Slashdot discussion
X-Prize homepage

We need to bring this back!

In 1962, the interrobang (‽), was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as “a twentieth century punctuation mark”. The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards.

What a great symbol for the internet-enabled masses. How many times have you gotten a message that ended with the string of question marks and exclamation points. (ala ?!?!?). You can make the symbol with Unicode; just enter ‽.
Link [via BoingBoing]

UPDATE: Go figure, Microsoft, the king of standards, doesn’t support the Unicode for the interrobang. If you’re reading this post in IE, sorry. Try Firefox; it displays this properly and it’s a hell of a lot safer.

How bloody cool would this be? A (Virgin-themed) space hotel. Sure, Richard Branson is a loud, arrogant, blowhard, but he’s got the track record and accumen to, if not pull something like this off, at least give it a good gooes in the right direction.

It’s getting closer to reality. Sounds like Branson is going to license the SpaceShipOne tech from Paul Allen/Burt Rutan. Private flights could begin as soon as 2007. We need to bring Howard Johnsons back just to have one in space.

Link [via Drudge]

Another great article from what is becoming one of my favorite sites, Spiked. In her article/critique “Bashing the McMasses”, Josie Appleton takes filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who made the “docu-blockbuster-cum-human-experiment Super Size Me,” to task. It’s good to see people who watch movies for the techniques used to sway your opinion and not get caught up in the emotion with which so many filmmakers try to cloud your judgement. (See any Michael Moore or Leni Riefenstahl joint for ample reference material.)

Super-Size Me is one of those films that starts off with a pre-ordained path: the filmmaker is dating a vegan chef and walks all over Manhatten on a daily basis, which makes him relatable to the majority of Americans (oops, forgot to turn off that sarcasm toggle… ah, there we go).

Read the article; it’s a wonderful example of why so many “artists” love deconstructionalism. If you can’t or aren’t supposed to deconstruct a piece of art, you can’t put it in context. No context == no frame of reference. Very post-modern.

Link