Update:

Teenage Blaster Worm Suspect Arrested (TechNews.com): Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minnesota, a middle- class suburb west of Minneapolis, was arrested on one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a computer, according to a St. Paul district court clerk. Parson, who was described in the complaint as being 6-feet-4-inches tall and weighing 320 pounds, is scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in St. Paul later on Friday. ... Parson appears to have links to the hacker alias "Teekid," which was the name of a file in a variant of Blaster, according to anti-virus vendor Symantec Corp. The Web site t33kid.com is registered to Parson at an address in Hopkins, Minnesota. A woman who answered the telephone at that house declined to comment and immediately hung up the telephone.

My remarks: First, the MS Blaster worm was not really damaging. It took less than a day before a cleanup program was available, and infection was avoidable through the MS security patch. And most importantly, it didn't do anything permanent to the systems it infected. It was really a minor nuisance. American businesses are claiming over $3 billion in damages. How the hell do they come up with those numbers? Absurd. Second, this kid is plainly a half-ass goof, not a major threat to society. He registered a web site identifying his less-than-legal hacker alias, publicly linking it to his real name and home address. These are the acts of a child. Third, his poor mom. How'd you like to be the parent of that kid? With the phone ringing off the hook with newspaper reporters asking questions about your demon-child who tried to destroy capitalism and the rule of law. I'd be pretty pissed off right now. Perhaps his mother is Australian, in which case she might say "That bloody kid just shits me to tears."

Another case of misplaced blame:

FBI to Arrest Teen in Internet Attack (washingtonpost.com): "The FBI has identified a teenager as the author of a damaging virus-like infection unleashed on the Internet and plans to arrest him early Friday, a U.S. official confirmed Thursday." ... All the Blaster variants took advantage of a flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s flagship Windows software. Government and industry experts had anticipated such an outbreak since July 16, when Microsoft acknowledged the flaw, which affects Windows technology used to share data files across computer networks.

The news media have a habit of feeding the public's perception that viri and worms are sinister threats cooked up by evil geniuses. A computer virus can do just about anything in the minds of many computer users. And the government responds by furiously pursuing the wicked geniuses who device mind-bogglingly complex plots to bring society to its knees. The facts, though, are often much less sinister: as is often the case, a kid wrote the MS Blaster worm. It was an easy little program taking advantage of a gaping whole in MS Windows. The kid's action was not much worse than a petty prank. He could have done a lot worse: he could have sent the worm blasting across the net, deleting every document on every machine. Thank God this kid wasn't malicious. Businesses and consumers ought to be beating down the doors at Microsoft. We all ought to be putting the blame squarely where it belongs: with the developers of the MS Windows operating system. They made this worm possible. Indeed, they opened the door for much much worse. Thank God for this kid for releasing his relatively tame worm before someone with truly sinister intent had a chance to wreak havoc. Don't send that kid to jail. Send him to college.

Neocon 101 | Christian Science Monitor: "Believing that authoritarianism and theocracy have allowed anti-Americanism to flourish in the Middle East, neocons advocate the democratic transformation of the region, starting with Iraq. They also believe the US is unnecessarily hampered by multilateral institutions, which they do not trust to effectively neutralize threats to global security..."

Odd analogy: one of the Alabama supporters of the Ten Commandments monument was on camera on CNN just now. He was defending justice Moore's refusal to comply with the federal order. His argument: "what if the federal court ordered us to obey segregation laws?" Are people really unable to pay close attention to the details of what they think and say, or is that just out of fashion right now?

CNN is currently airing a phone interview with a Northeast-Asia analyst named "Bates Gill." What a name.

This is a phenomenal article about the imminent invasion of synthetic diamonds:

Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age: "In its long history, De Beers has survived African insurrection, shrugged off American antitrust litigation, sidestepped criticism that it exploits third world workers, and contended with Australian, Siberian, and Canadian diamond discoveries. The firm has a huge advertising budget and a stranglehold on diamond distribution channels. But there's one thing De Beers doesn't have: retired brigadier general Carter Clarke."

This article is just fantastic; you have to read the whole thing. It has adventure, intrigue, transactions with former Russian military scientists, veiled death threats against scientists by evil diamond cartels, ultra-secret labs hidden inside of completely different businesses... everything! Just look at this:

[Says General Clark:] "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one." Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."

The Diamond High Council! That's great! They're the real-life, literal Stone Cutters!

By January, Apollo plans to start selling [synthetic diamonds] on the jewelry market. But that's just the first step. Robert and Bryant Linares expect to use revenue from the gem trade to fund their company's semiconductor ambitions. Not surprisingly, the diamond industry is hostile to the idea, as the younger Linares discovered four years ago when he attended an industry conference in Prague. He was hoping to find out whether any other researchers - possibly De Beers scientists themselves - had discovered the sweet spot [for chemical vapor deposition]. During a break in the conference, a man approached Linares and told him to be careful. "He said that my father's research was a good way to get a bullet in the head," Linares recalls.

This stuff is amazing! They are growing diamonds in a way very similar to how silicon ingots are currently grown, at a cost of $5 per carat. They are producing diamonds that are more pure than natural ones. This is going to be the wave of this century for electronics. A new boom is upon us. And behold: some mafioso JEWELRY DEALERS want to hold it back! BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! HAHAHAHA!!! HA!

Anchorage Daily News | Tested love: "She was a pregnant 15-year-old ninth-grader. He was a 35-year-old disabled vet. Other people called their love a crime, including, unfortunately, a prosecutor and a judge. Even sympathetic observers scoffed at George and Lisa Micheaux's 'happy ever after' talk. But guess what. They did it. He did his prison time for sexual abuse of a minor, then they got married and lived happily ever after."

Japan is really moving forward in fundamental research in physics and electronics:

EE Times - NTT verifies diamond semiconductor operation at 81 GHz: "Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) has developed a diamond semiconductor device that operates at 81 GHz frequency, more than twice the speed of earlier devices. The advance promises to make amplification in the millimeter-wave band from 30 to 300 GHz possible for the first time, NTT claimed. Diamond is expected to be the next generation semiconductor material because of its high thermal conductivity, high breakdown voltage and high carrier mobility. Together, these characteristics makes diamond semiconductors most suitable for high frequency, high power devices."

It seemed like they got a little quiet for a while. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. But as time goes by I'm noticing more and more of the really big news is coming out of Japan. Back in February, Japanese researchers at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory demonstrated entanglement of two qubits using quantum dots on a silicon substrate [New Scientist]. I'm not sure whether it counts, but in June a team from Toshiba Research Europe demonstrated quantum cryptography over a distance of 100km in fiber optic cable [New Scientist]. Toshiba is a Japanese company.... Go Japan!

I meant to post this link sooner, but, you know, all those excuses... The ever-cromulent and unimpeachable Foptimus Prime sent me this link, which is fabulous: Elite Force Aviator George W. Bush Action Figure. A George W. Bush Naval Pilot action figure is like a Ronald Reagan Best Actor Oscar Recipient action figure.

From CNN just now: "I think it is a fair bet that God will not be charged with homicide here in Milwaukee." (Remark was made in reference to the death of a boy at a church service [link]).