The Null Device
2002/5/15
French videogame giant Infogrames (who now own the Atari name) and some other outfit plan to relaunch the Atari 2600. Only it will fit in a joystick, plug directly into a TV, and contain 10 classic Atari 2600 games. No news on whether it'll be emulated or whether they'll actually reconstruct the Atari's crippled 6502-based architecture in hardware. (via Slashdot)
How do we know we're not in the future? Because we don't have flying cars, or jet packs or food pills, or indeed submissive housewives. (via Found)
Too many hits from the bucket bong? An 18-year-old in Brisbane has appeared in court and been fined $300 for borrowing his housemate's credit card and going on a spending spree, buying among other things a mail-order penis enlarger and hotel accommodation on the Gold Coast. I'll bet he feels like a right idiot now.
Our Furry Masters: A psychology researcher at Cornell University has found that domestic cats' meows have evolved to hook into human perception, and better communicate with (or manipulate) humans, over the millennia of domestication. Recordings of the calls of wild desert cats (believed to be closely related to domestic cats' wild ancestors) were found by test subjects to be harsher and less pleasant-sounding than those of domestic cats.
"I think cats have evolved to become better at managing and manipulating people."
(via Techdirt)
Napster is dead. As in "dead" dead, not just "terminally lame" dead; the CEO has stepped down and remaining employees were offered severance pay. Probably just as well; this way the Napster name remains synonymous with a short-lived, quixotic temporary autonomous zone on the Net, rather than becoming a brand of corporate pay-per-play services.