by Ken Layne

ISBN 1 875989 97 8

$19.95

Publication date: June 2001
Dot_Con is can be ordered from outside Australia. Cost is $US20 including postage. We accept international bank draft or credit card details. Email us at info@duffyandsnellgrove.

Quick, somebody send me twenty bucks!

Posted by at June 30, 2001 07:30 PM

"The National Writers Union must be smoking something if they think there is any likelihood of reaching an agreement." - Publishers' attorney Charles Sims, on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that likely will prompt the removal of freelancers' works from online databases

Christ, Charles, couldn't you at least pretend to like your inferiors?

Posted by at June 30, 2001 06:31 PM

District Attorney John Kennan later said Haouari is in "good condition" and that there is "nothing wrong with him."

...nothing wrong with him aside from a disposition to beat himself unconscious with his bare hands.

Posted by at June 30, 2001 06:22 PM

Posted by at June 30, 2001 05:50 PM

Does anybody who reads this blog know how I could get replacement screws for a Powerbook 5300cs? I'll probably end up calling Apple but their customer service is, ah, lethargic most of the time. If you know, kindly drop me a line.

Posted by at June 30, 2001 05:08 PM

'Deprecate' itself has shifted sense quite substantially down the years. When it came into the language in the early seventeenth century, its meaning was strongly influenced by its older cousin 'deprecation', from Latin 'precari', to pray. That meant a prayer to ward off something evil or disastrous or to reverse its effects. Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century Bishop of Winchester, used the verb in this sense of warding off evil in his translation of the book of Isaiah: "Evil shall come upon thee, which thou shalt not know how to deprecate".

...which is why so many people are still using FONT tags.

Posted by at June 30, 2001 05:22 AM

Contact: Evan Williams

Location: 350 Townsend St., Suite 110, San Francisco

'cause Blogger's moving to upscale new digs, recently vacated by .com billionaires-turned-street-people.

Posted by at June 30, 2001 04:00 AM

The new economy is proving to be as resilient to change as the old economy. In spite of high profile women entrepreneurs in the e-conomy, far from being a nirvana for female entrepreneurs dot coms are as sexist as not coms in sustaining male ways of doing business. Dot Bombshell: women, e-quality and the new economy, the latest Provocations report authored by Helen Wilkinson for Futures at the Industrial Society, finds that, despite the success of a few high profile women e-entrepreneurs and contrary to the media hype that surrounds them, the new economy is founded on business as usual for the predominantly male investment and finance community.

Posted by at June 30, 2001 03:49 AM

Posted by at June 29, 2001 12:43 PM

Posted by at June 29, 2001 12:34 PM

When she turns four-score, surely this will be a milestone? "No, that's silly. Why would it feel any different? July second follows July first, right?"

Posted by at June 29, 2001 06:08 AM

Posted by at June 28, 2001 05:11 PM

Upgrade your Napster application to version 2.0 beta 10.3 for Windows or version 1.0 beta 2 for the Mac. All previous versions of Napster have been disabled. We're making this change as part of our ongoing effort to comply with the court's orders. It will take some time for our new filtering technology to accurately identify files; so initially, the number of files available will drop. As more users upgrade to the new versions and more files are identified, more music will become available through Napster. When you download the new application and log on, you're strengthening the Napster Community.

Read: Oh, that recording industry machine isn't so bad after all. Eat this implant!

Posted by at June 28, 2001 03:58 PM

Posted by at June 28, 2001 03:34 PM

Posted by at June 28, 2001 08:52 AM

Posted by at June 28, 2001 07:41 AM

Posted by at June 28, 2001 07:37 AM

The Microsoft portals will host and publish official sites for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. And it's getting the rights for free.

Posted by at June 28, 2001 07:16 AM

That's not right.

Posted by at June 28, 2001 05:41 AM

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Our charitable purpose is to bring about the Singularity - the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence - by building real AI.

Posted by at June 27, 2001 07:27 PM

Posted by at June 27, 2001 06:21 PM

Posted by at June 27, 2001 12:51 PM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 06:02 PM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 10:57 AM

Formerly a classical music listener, he had once referred to pop music as "mere noise".

Posted by at June 26, 2001 10:06 AM

TWELVE hundred and thirty-eight pages on the life of James Grover Thurber (1894-1961)?

Posted by at June 26, 2001 08:47 AM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 08:00 AM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 06:27 AM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 03:43 AM

Posted by at June 26, 2001 03:35 AM

The lawyer for the publishers had warned the Supreme Court at arguments that a loss would force them to delete large amounts of material from databases or else they would face ''massive'' copyright infringement damages.

Read: "writers aren't as important as publishers, but if they are, they're also sleazy little Nibelungen, and we're noble Siegfried gettin' knifed allll the damn time."

Posted by at June 26, 2001 03:30 AM

Posted by at June 25, 2001 01:16 PM

Posted by at June 25, 2001 08:35 AM

Posted by at June 25, 2001 08:12 AM

Posted by at June 25, 2001 07:52 AM

Posted by at June 25, 2001 04:49 AM

It set off a national debate still raging today: Are scholars in the humanities trapped in a jargon-ridden Wonderland? Are scientists deluded in thinking their work is objective? Are literature professors suffering from science envy? Was Sokal's joke funny? Was the Enlightenment such a bad thing after all? And isn't it a little bit true that the meaning of gravity is contingent upon your cultural perspective?

Posted by at June 25, 2001 04:45 AM

My uncle wandered by this big statue (under construction) during his cross country trip. He also spent some time at the Corn Palace.

Posted by at June 24, 2001 11:03 PM

Posted by at June 24, 2001 07:36 AM

Had Green just shacked up with a harem of willing single women, no one would have cared. But when he lives as a dutiful husband to five women in a collection of trailer homes in the Utah desert, he somehow presents a dire threat to our social foundation.

Posted by at June 24, 2001 07:17 AM

Posted by at June 23, 2001 02:15 PM

Former FDA Commissioner Alexander Schmidt aptly summarized the regulator's dilemma:

In all our fda history, we are unable to find a single instance where a Congressional committee investigated the failure of fda to approve a new drug. But, the times when hearings have been held to criticize our approval of a new drug have been so frequent that we have not been able to count them. The message to fda staff could not be clearer. Whenever a controversy over a new drug is resolved by approval of the drug, the agency and the individuals involved likely will be investigated. Whenever such a drug is disapproved, no inquiry will be made. The Congressional pressure for negative action is, therefore, intense. And it seems to be ever increasing.

Posted by at June 23, 2001 12:46 PM

Posted by at June 23, 2001 12:07 PM

the online toy where you can build and play with things made out of masses, springs and muscles

Posted by at June 23, 2001 10:30 AM

Posted by at June 23, 2001 10:28 AM

Posted by at June 23, 2001 10:23 AM

One out of every five kids who uses the Internet regularly is targeted by sexual predators, according to a study to be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report found that girls, older teens, troubled youth, frequent Internet users, chat room participants and those who communicate online with strangers are at the greatest risk.

Posted by at June 22, 2001 05:12 PM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 03:03 PM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 03:02 PM

Watts said he was confident lawmakers would ``defeat any backdoor attempts to permit human cloning with mandated embryo destruction under the guise of medical research.''

Superstitious nonsense!

Posted by at June 22, 2001 02:50 PM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 02:27 PM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 02:23 PM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 11:24 AM

Posted by at June 22, 2001 11:15 AM

...nothing has prepared you for the souped-up surprises and adrenaline-jolting thrills of "Mohandas," Disney's latest no-holds-barred feature animation chronicling the extraordinary life of India's political and moral leader -- Mohandas (The Mahatma) Gandhi.

Posted by at June 22, 2001 11:08 AM

Celery (yes, again)

Posted by at June 22, 2001 11:04 AM

Posted by at June 21, 2001 05:04 PM

General Blasphemy
Blasphemic content is any material that is seen as sin through the eyes of our Lord. It is expected that all Internet users familiarize themselves with The Bible. Ignorance is no excuse! If you are involved with the distribution of, or obtain in any fashion material that is considered offensive, then you are in violation of the NA-AIUG.

Posted by at June 21, 2001 11:03 AM

Properly used, information technologies offer huge potential to empower people in developing and emerging countries to overcome development obstacles, to address the most important social problems they face and to strengthen communities, democratic institutions, a free press, and local economies

Posted by at June 20, 2001 02:49 PM

Although there's more female nudity than male.

Posted by at June 20, 2001 02:37 PM

Posted by at June 20, 2001 02:33 PM

Terry Gilliam has for the second time this year secured financing out of Europe for a large-scale production, partnering with the UK's Renaissance Films to direct $50m comic fantasy Good Omens. Renaissance has also announced that it will handle Los Alamos, a $25m romantic thriller to be directed by Nicholas Hytner.

The Gilliam picture is being adapted by the director and Tony Grisoni from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's best-selling book. UK and US-based Marc and Peter Samuelson are co-producing with Charles Roven's US-based Atlas Entertainment. The picture, which is to shoot in the UK late 2001, tells the story of an angel and a demon sent to Earth to track down the Antichrist.

Los Alamos, which follows a murder investigation set against the race to develop the nuclear bomb, is being adapted by Laurence Dworet from Joseph Kanon's novel. Good Machine's Ted Hope and James Schamus are producing the project, which re-teams Hytner with Renaissance co-chief Stephen Evans after their collaboration on The Madness Of King George.

Renaissance's involvement in Good Omens comes after Gilliam this year secured financing from European sources including UK National Lottery franchise Pathe Pictures and France's StudioCanal for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Also on Renaissance's slate are two pictures currently in production - Rose Troche's The Safety Of Objects and Paul McGuigan's Morality Play.

Posted by at June 20, 2001 02:25 PM

Posted by at June 20, 2001 02:00 PM

Posted by at June 19, 2001 03:40 PM

Posted by at June 19, 2001 01:43 PM

Posted by at June 17, 2001 04:07 PM

Posted by at June 16, 2001 06:11 PM

"I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of any organizations for which I work."

Posted by at June 16, 2001 06:02 PM

Thirty Canadian artists whose works have been displayed at the gallery have designed picket signs for the strikers.

Posted by at June 16, 2001 04:33 AM

You gotta love any manifesto that mentions puke.

Posted by at June 15, 2001 06:46 AM

Posted by at June 15, 2001 06:40 AM

Sharon Stone's editor-husband released from hospital

The Komodo incident: the victim's account

L.A. Zoo reviews its tour policy after lizard attack / Chronicle executive editor remains in hospital

This story went national on NPR this morning.

Posted by at June 15, 2001 06:35 AM

Posted by at June 15, 2001 03:20 AM

Posted by at June 15, 2001 03:19 AM

Posted by at June 15, 2001 03:17 AM

He mulls over how to sell the 100,000 hats Zoho ordered with a ``Z'' on the front. He says he might sell them to Mexico for 15 to 25 cents apiece -- they could be sold as ``Zorro'' hats. Then there's the three cases of third-tier ``Zoho'' wine, and the bag of golf clubs.

Posted by at June 14, 2001 02:27 PM

The New York Post also seemed unimpressed and asked, "Who would sit in the dark in a cramped space, surfing the Web for hours on end?"

Is that a trick question?

Posted by at June 14, 2001 10:26 AM

The Original Whizzinator - HOME - Pass Your Drug Test!

Posted by at June 14, 2001 09:38 AM

Posted by at June 14, 2001 08:31 AM

Posted by at June 14, 2001 08:11 AM

No, but thanks for asking.

Posted by at June 14, 2001 05:43 AM

Posted by at June 13, 2001 11:35 AM

Beverage maker Cott Corp. is buying out its concentrate supply contract with Royal Crown and buying the RC International business for a total of $94 million US.

Posted by at June 13, 2001 11:04 AM

"How much do you want to offer per kilogram? Please find me at least 100,000 U.S. dollars and I will deliver immediately."

Posted by at June 13, 2001 10:47 AM

Posted by at June 13, 2001 08:06 AM

Posted by at June 13, 2001 07:51 AM

Posted by at June 13, 2001 07:50 AM

There's more arguing and bickering among members of the Canadian Alliance over Stockwell Day's leadership of the party. On Tuesday, some party members who want to see Day removed as leader of the party formally set up an organization to do just that.

Stock bears a striking resemblance to the American perennial boob Pat Buchanan, though he's also been compared to Hitler for promising to return "pride and strength" to the Canadian Armed Forces.

Posted by at June 13, 2001 07:33 AM

...The pro-death-penalty people have an underdeveloped taste for vengeance, as far as I'm concerned. McVeigh got off too easily. If we'd put the s.o.b. in the Cowboy Gulag for 50 years, then he could have learned what suffering is...

The death count goes up one, the cycle continues, and the message is clear-- killing someone is an acceptable solution to a problem.

Posted by at June 13, 2001 07:28 AM

Posted by at June 13, 2001 07:05 AM

"He's essentially hiding behind scientific uncertainties and his interpretation of climate science is fantasy at best and deliberately misleading at worst," Hare said. "Putting more money into research does not qualify as a serious response at this stage. It's worse than odd. It's verging on the sinister. It really indicates that certain branches of industry are having an astonishing influence on Bush and his approach to the problem of climate change."

Posted by at June 13, 2001 06:04 AM

The attractions of Italy, "the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy", nourished British homosexuals in particular during the late-Victorian period, allowing the Renaissance scholar John Addington Symonds to wax lyrical on the "rosy nipples . . . marble man-spheres . . . lustrous gland" of some peasant boy. Symonds found his Arcadia among the gondoliers of Venice. "They think little of gratifying the caprice of ephemeral loves," he approved.

Posted by at June 13, 2001 05:43 AM

Salman Rushdie on the perils of voyeurism

Posted by at June 13, 2001 05:39 AM

Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat an fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

William Butler Yeats

Posted by at June 13, 2001 04:26 AM

Venture capitalists soon got the message: Fund a new technology for delivering content across the Web and buy yourself a lawsuit. VCs hate lawyers. Funding for this innovation quickly dried up.

Posted by at June 12, 2001 11:58 AM

"A good friend came to me recently trying to get me in on a bridge loan deal," says one hedge-fund manager in San Francisco. "And I said to him, 'A bridge? A bridge to what?'"

Posted by at June 12, 2001 04:18 AM

WITH a full range of colours* at its disposal for the first time, The Economist can now focus on a ubiquitous but unremarked feature of modern Britain: purple.

Posted by at June 12, 2001 03:45 AM

"Britain's e-government vision into a reality" has mysteriously turned into a lockout for users of anything other than IE on Windows. Linux, Netscape and Mac (even with IE, friends...) can look but not touch, because the digital certificate system selected by the developers mysteriously always seems to lead to IE 5.01 or above on Windows.

Posted by at June 12, 2001 03:40 AM

Graphology - the art of studying handwriting - has been used for centuries to try to analyse people's characters, but since the demise of personal handwriting, the experts have moved on to typefaces to look for clues to our identities.

Posted by at June 12, 2001 03:37 AM

Posted by at June 11, 2001 04:24 PM

Posted by at June 11, 2001 10:59 AM

Posted by at June 11, 2001 08:11 AM

Matt Welch

For all you fuckedblogslaves people out there ready to perform an end-zone dance on the grave of yet another dumb New Economy failure, let me say this -- there are far fewer publications that have approached greatness, embraced romance and made you laugh out loud, than there are Web sites with the word "fucked" in their URLs.

Personally (though Welch appears to be speaking of a specific group that he has some issue with), I hated Suck/FEED/Red Herring/Salon/The Onion/etc before they made any money. Themestream too, when you get down to it. They're like hybrid gas-electric cars: I know they're an evolutionary dead-end, however good they look now, so I begrudge any attention or cash that go their way. The next generation will show them as the stiffly tentative prototypes they are. It's neither kind nor fair to be strongly anti-firstgen sites; it's simply an instinctive reaction, as an animal avoids eating a plant it knows gives nourishment but also makes it fart like a banshee.

Posted by at June 11, 2001 04:45 AM

Posted by at June 11, 2001 04:08 AM

Posted by at June 10, 2001 09:36 AM

When I saw this on SatireWire, I thought it was a joke. Which, in a way, it still is.

Posted by at June 08, 2001 06:46 PM

AS OF JUNE 8, 2001, Automatic Media, Inc. has ceased operations due to an inability to secure additional financing. Inquiries should be directed to inquiries@automatic-media.com.

Which includes FEED, Suck, Plastic and altculture. Frankly, I always hated them and I'm glad they're near dead. I never liked Salon either.

Posted by at June 08, 2001 06:44 PM

Scientology critic Keith Henson has been released from a Canadian jail...

Posted by at June 08, 2001 03:35 PM

Posted by at June 08, 2001 12:06 PM

Posted by at June 08, 2001 12:00 PM

According to Mercer, the governor had decided workers shouldn't need a filter in order to follow the rules.

"People are adults, and if they can't be adults they have to pay the consequences," Mercer said.

Posted by at June 08, 2001 11:34 AM

Posted by at June 08, 2001 05:50 AM

Posted by at June 07, 2001 02:04 PM

All available Sound clips on the Adrian Belew WWW Site.

peas.ram - most popular unreleased track in Belew History

Posted by at June 07, 2001 08:35 AM

"They're thinking what I did when I showed up here," she says. "It's the same thought that we all have, every hour of every day: 'I have no cubicle. I have no stock options. I am nothing.'"

Posted by at June 07, 2001 05:10 AM

One can laugh at the silly mistakes - the equator going through Texas, say. Far more serious are the routine garblings of basic science: misstating Newton's laws; claiming that no solid substance can contain a plasma; and on and on.

Posted by at June 07, 2001 03:33 AM

Posted by at June 07, 2001 03:30 AM

In the past two weeks, two deaths have shocked parts of the Internet community. The deaths, both of young women who had a host of online friends, became all the more shocking when it was discovered in both cases that neither of the women had ever actually existed in the "real" world.

Posted by at June 06, 2001 04:25 PM

Scientists will alter the plant, adding marker genes from other species to make it glow in response to environmental stresses like drought, extreme temperatures and noxious soils.

Posted by at June 06, 2001 03:37 PM

Posted by at June 06, 2001 12:33 PM

Posted by at June 06, 2001 11:07 AM

William Vincent... confessed to murdering his hard drive by delivering several sharp blows to the tower of his Dell computer.

Posted by at June 06, 2001 11:03 AM

According to a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Gateway offered supposedly "free" or flat-fee Internet access that consumers were then charged for. The FTC complaint alleges Gateway never made clear to consumers that the "free" services carried hidden costs.

[...]

...the FTC said those disclaimers, printed in miniscule 2-point type, were hardly sufficient notice.

Posted by at June 06, 2001 10:42 AM

In the end, Le Tocq said, Gibson's statements should help raise awareness of security issues for consumers. Now, end users just have to make sure their computers are as secure as possible.

Now remember, press control-alt-6 to engage your car door locks, kiddies.

Posted by at June 06, 2001 05:55 AM

The New Politics Initiative is being launched by a diverse assembly of Canadians who are committed to the goal of creating a new political party in Canada - a party dedicated to the ideals of egalitarianism, solidarity, environmental sustainability, community responsibility, and socialism. We think the NDP should lead a process of constituting this new, progressive party, and we'll be submitting resolutions to that effect at the NDP's federal convention this November.

Svend Robinson, MP - NDP

Posted by at June 06, 2001 04:44 AM

This is not a sex site. There are no photograms of nude women.

Posted by at June 05, 2001 04:50 PM

I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.

Posted by at June 05, 2001 04:36 PM

Yes, the treatment of women by the Taliban government in Afghanistan is deplorable and numerous human rights groups has rightly protested it, and, yes, the email petition was started with the best of intentions, but no, signing and circulating an email petition will not help them.

Posted by at June 05, 2001 04:15 AM

Does anybody out there want to buy a respected magazine with a great brand name and 3.5m monthly readers? Quick sale preferred. All bids considered.

The answer, if you happen to be Salon.com, one of the original general interest webzines, appears to be no.

Posted by at June 04, 2001 05:20 PM

Negri argues that the challenge for welfare is to mirror life rather than to shape it. This means an end to corporatist welfare and traditional notions of the family wage. "The family wage keeps family control firmly in the hands of the male wage earner, and perpetuates a false conception of what labour is productive and what is not." He argues instead for what he calls "constitutive welfare": continuous schooling and training, home services for working women, daycare, and aid to children.

Posted by at June 04, 2001 02:13 PM

"I can imagine myself staring up at this 800-foot-high mass of rock with steep flanks," he says, "the same as Middle Butte in Idaho. An apron of boulders around the base would make the climb difficult [for a robot], but a human could do it well." The latest MGS images of the Face are so detailed that Garvin already knows what route he would take -- he's even prepared a trail map! "The start and midsection of the hike would be easy, with some steep flanks in between. It would take about two hours to reach the summit."

Posted by at June 04, 2001 02:05 PM

Posted by at June 04, 2001 02:00 PM

Oh, everybody's so mean online, how terrible. Lord, I get tired of reading all this nonsense. When will You destroy the Internet, oh Lord?

Posted by at June 04, 2001 01:49 PM

Posted by at June 02, 2001 12:59 PM

Posted by at June 02, 2001 12:57 PM

"Since when is the world "Canadian" interchangeable with or similar to "crappy"," countered McFadden in his submission to WIPO.

Posted by at June 02, 2001 12:56 PM

Posted by at June 02, 2001 12:46 PM

Posted by at June 02, 2001 11:59 AM

Posted by at June 01, 2001 04:38 AM