xXx
Watched xXx yesterday morning while they were drawing out my blood, oh man what a crappy movie it is...!!! I have seen XX movies with better acting :P. I was really really sad to see Sam Jackson play some scarfaced NSA man. And when did NSA start tracking the russian mafia? I thought that was CIA's job. And oh boy, America's talent pool has really hit the pits I think because they go about recruiting criminals to become agents, my oh my, the country will really really benefit from the intel these idiots gather.

Bulls and Bails Presents
I was browsing through politech last night, when The Dude messaged me asking for my resume, he wanted it for some comm skills assignment. After the resume issue was resolved, The Dude told me that he plans to make a movie. I thought it would be fun to play along and get into his head. What follows is a transcript of that chat.

[ChatTranscript]
[The Dude] dude
[The Dude] thr??
[cypherpunk] yeah
[The Dude] yup
[The Dude] send me all the resumes you have
[cypherpunk] for wat?
[The Dude] i need to prepare my resume for an assignment......so wanna have a look
[cypherpunk] k
[The Dude] or tell me where have yo keptit on your comp

Waiting for [The Dude] to accept the file "resume.himanshu.24082002.rtf" (139 Kb, less than 2 minutes with a 28.8 modem). Please wait for a response or Cancel (Alt+Q) the file transfer.

Transfer of file "resume.himanshu.24082002.rtf" has been accepted by [The Dude]. Starting transfer...

Sending of "resume.himanshu.24082002.rtf" to [The Dude] has failed.

[The Dude] dude tell me your password and in while drie is it
[The Dude] drive
[cypherpunk] \\cypherpunk\The Dude$
[The Dude] ok
[The Dude] you had a few plps resume also with you right?
[cypherpunk] nope
[The Dude] ok
[cypherpunk] k
[The Dude] oj there
[cypherpunk] nope
[The Dude] ok
[cypherpunk] k
[The Dude] what you upto man
[cypherpunk] just reading some stuff
[The Dude] regard?
[The Dude] regarding?
[cypherpunk] general stuff
[cypherpunk] toi
[The Dude] ic......so man what have you been upto lately
[cypherpunk] nothing man
[The Dude] is there any exam for directing some stuff or movie making
[cypherpunk] wat kinda exam?
[The Dude] i think i can ace that exam
[cypherpunk] u making a movie?
[The Dude] planning to direct one....
[cypherpunk] for?
[The Dude] have watched so much stuff in recent time that can make up a good shit man
[cypherpunk] cool
[cypherpunk] do u have ne ideas?
[The Dude] like now i started watching alias...ican guesswhats he gonna do next
[cypherpunk]u started watching wat?
[The Dude] no thinking on it.......see some good theme.....and i am sure i can develop it pretty well
[The Dude] Alias
[cypherpunk] and whos gonna be on ur team and all?
[The Dude] not yet planned ...i was thinking for a long while ...what industry will suit the name bulls and bails.Inc*
[The Dude] this will definately
[cypherpunk] sure man doesnt matter wat name u pick
[cypherpunk] does 20th century fox make ne sense to u, no...
[The Dude] yeah thats there.........
[The Dude] but anyway ...i am now planning to read all the nuke histroy ...and make a movie about current operations of CIA
[cypherpunk] whoa damn nice...
[The Dude] the booming of the car...which suppoed ot had thier own agent in it..when it was boobed
[cypherpunk] care to elaborate please
[The Dude] read that some where
[The Dude] boomed
[The Dude] yeah it seems they had some confusion ofsome shit...
[cypherpunk] u shud hav a counter intelligence agent too
[The Dude] also making up my own story on line of the spy in CIA caught and kept in house coustody for life......this office ho asked for operation in cousody right now...
[The Dude] cos no one hd approved that mission
[The Dude] and same case going onm for some missions in iraq
[The Dude] soe thing on these lines
[cypherpunk] yeah i saw that in one of the vids i d/led
[cypherpunk] u planning to put in some hot chics ?
[The Dude] yeah obviously...
[cypherpunk] cool man...
[cypherpunk] like a female agent or something?
[The Dude] will have to make new charaters for them or make some key agents girls
[The Dude] yeah
[cypherpunk] alrite
[cypherpunk] and who r these guys gonna fite? the terrorists or some commies who still operate from russia?
[The Dude] should let my imagination go wild man......it makes up really good stories....
[cypherpunk] yeah man u shud
[The Dude] yeah make a mix man.......that will make it longer ......and more intense .....will ahve 2- 3 things going on at same time.....some like the frame work by 24
[cypherpunk] ah ic... so u gonna involve the agents family life and all?
[The Dude] nono.....totally field sence.......no emotions ......just all professional....as near to reality as possible
[cypherpunk] but agents hav problems dealing with their private lives man, u shud try and deal with the emotional parts as well, dont u think?
[cypherpunk] i mean dont u think that it wud be a good idea to give the agents a emotional touch
[The Dude] yeah...........but not extensive.......i wanna get arealitiy effect whatever it takes iam read to put it in
[cypherpunk] ic, u planning to add a lotta sfx and all?
[cypherpunk] like matrix?
[The Dude] no....not like that .....which seems realy in present time ..with present tech
[The Dude] anyway when you plp planning to sleep?
[cypherpunk] yea i guess u dont wanna make it like a bond flick
[The Dude] yeah...
[cypherpunk] yea and r there gonna be a bunch of heros or just one?
[The Dude] no one signal hero win a battle on solo....that what the fact is
[cypherpunk] hmmm...
[The Dude] i am planning to come down if you are not planning to sleep any time soon
[cypherpunk] so neway tell me who r u gonna cast man?
[The Dude] you suggest.............
[The Dude] let start with some indians.......which will be in r.a.w
[cypherpunk] oh nationalistic film and all
[cypherpunk] i thot u were gonna make it on the CIA agents
[The Dude] yeah........as you may have rad...now as indian is provind very use fill intelegence they have signed up defence intel sahreing agreement
[The Dude] so need to give it feeling of indian
[cypherpunk] yea true man and then u can drop ur hero in NWFP
[cypherpunk] undercover wat do u say?
[The Dude] yeah...can do that .....
[cypherpunk] wat kinda operation wud it be thot
[cypherpunk] though
[The Dude] hmm....... thinking man.....will come to when i get again into ...some reading on some issuse concering like this
[cypherpunk] hmm u can send him in search of missing nukes maybe?
[The Dude] thats done man....
[The Dude] too many times
[cypherpunk] hmm to u want a thoda hatke film?
[The Dude] yeah....
[The Dude] not the usual.......that would freakout howle world out of its witts.....like ...some agengy ......planned to detonate all the nuke arsenal ....of all the 8 nations at one time......
[cypherpunk] whoa man doomsday and all
[cypherpunk] go ahead tell me more
[The Dude] everything is planted......ow htey are just awaiting some govt . agent to make a mistake and set the nuks off
[cypherpunk] which country's agent makes a mistake?
[The Dude] and only plp who can now save the world are with saddam
[cypherpunk] oh so uncle sam i gonna be the villian for the first time?
[The Dude] so now US has to make a decision ...to get onto it..to find these plp
[The Dude] yeah
[The Dude] no some thing likethat
[cypherpunk] ic
[cypherpunk] do u plan to add songs and dances like hindi films?
[The Dude] no man i hate it....
[cypherpunk] oh come on man isha koppikar cud earn a few bucks...
[The Dude] no man.......none of that stuff..........but yeah planning to get aditi govitrikar in
[cypherpunk] any whitey chicks u planning to get in too?
[The Dude] seen her in real life man......she is too hot
[cypherpunk] or maybe some middle eastern booty?
[The Dude] may be sera side ...csi?
[cypherpunk] sara from csi... not a bad idea
[The Dude] its sera
[cypherpunk] but u cud get nina from 24
[The Dude] no man ...
[The Dude] didn't like her much
[The Dude] the one in alias forgot her name
[cypherpunk] wat does she not hav that sara has?
[The Dude] is also quiet good
[The Dude] yeah ....can't afford a heavy one
[cypherpunk] heavy one?
[The Dude] yeah you came bak with very sharp reply so had to do that
[The Dude] heavy budget
[cypherpunk] oh... finance wise
[cypherpunk] could you weave ntu in the plot somehow?
[The Dude] anyway i am coming down there......bored in room......hall 6 sucks no one around.............
[cypherpunk] yea sure come down, lets go drink milo
[The Dude] eah
[The Dude] sure
[The Dude] cya then
[cypherpunk] yep c u in 5-10
[The Dude] whats 5-10...
[The Dude] new shop?
[The Dude] like 7-11
[cypherpunk] mins
[The Dude] ok
[cypherpunk]yea rite P
[/ChatTranscript]

* : each guy in NTU has a dream company and he proudly puts this name in the organization field when registering pirated softwares, including Windoze... ;-)

How retarded is that?
Notice on Friday times site.
Attention TFT Readers
Owing to a particularly nasty virus that has attacked our server and slowed downloading, we are giving readers direct access to our website without having to login with username ID and password. This "facility" is temporary and our service will revert to its login requirements in due course. The login ID and Password of Readers will remain unchanged. Click here to continue

Network Solns exposes 85,000 customer email addresses

The Mystery of Capital
In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is the inablity to produce capital.Capital is the force that raises productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engange in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.

I will also show, with the help of fact and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor already possess the assests they need to make a success of capitalism. Even the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense - forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assests of the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than all the foreign investment recieved since Haiti's independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations- 0.7 percent of the national income- it would take the richest country on the earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those they already possess.

But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assests cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against investment.

In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assests can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assests can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can be then rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assests and makes them generate capital.

Third World and former communist nations do not have this representational process. As a result most of them are undercapitalized, in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representation, their assests are dead capital.

The poor inhabitants of these nations - five-sixth of humanity - do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailabiltiy of these essential representation that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work.

This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assests with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. Not everything that is real and useful is tangible and visible. Time, for example, is real, but it can only be efficiently managed when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history, human beings have invented representational systems - writings, musical notation, doub-entry bookkeeping - to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch. In the same way, the great practitioners of capitalism, from the creators of integrated title systems and corporate stocks to Michael Milken, were able to reveal and extract capital where others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invsibel potential that is locked up in assests we accumulate.

[taken from The Mystery of Capital - Why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else by Hernando De Soto]

Ranchoweb, the popular image hosting site which is quite popular amongst bloggers is no longer free... :-( the notice says that you have 30 days to download your images or else you will lose them, so ppl if you wanna make backups go ahead and do it fast... here are a few alternatives - ImageMagician,VillagePhotos,TuPics.....

Flower Power?
The anti-war group MoveOn.org has revived the controversial 1964 Daisy ad. The original ad was President Lyndon Johnson's attempt to portray his opponent in that year's election, Barry Goldwater, as a senseless warmonger who would lead the United States into nuclear war.

This will remind Red Alert fans of the kick ass Telsa Coil and Weather Control device.

Proganda Machine in full swing?
A Google search on the phrase "demonstrating genuine leadership" returns a number of nearly identical letters sent to the editors of various newspapers and publications this month, each one with the name of a different individual attached:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22demonstrating+genuine+leadership%22

A number of other identical letters dated last October and November can be found by searching for "taking a courageous stand against Saddam":
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22taking+a+courageous+stand+against+Saddam%22
[via Politech]

Just read that MS is going to open its code to governments under a new program called Government Security Program, what am I suppose to do now?? jump with glee shouting hey hey look my govt gets to see what goes into windows. Methinks its a PR stunt. A post on /. says it nicely...

You: "My boss just got a new car."
Your friend: "does he let you drive it?"
You: No, but atleast I get to look at it."
Your friend: "who cares then"
You: "Good point."

links - Reuters Bloomberg

I watched The Pianist last night. The Pianist is an account of the true life experience of a pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman (pronouced as Shpeelman), a polish jew, in freshly occupied Warsaw, at the beginning of WWII. Adrien Brody is excellent in his role of Szpilman. The cinematography, soundtrack, direction almost everything about this movie is awesome. The movie drags a bit in the middle but I guess thats a minor flaw or maybe it was supposed be that way so that the climax pulls back the viewer into it. It deserves a strong presence at the oscars '03.

I know some of you might hate me for writing this, but lets be honest here, the Holocaust was not the only genocide in the history of mankind. There have been genocides far and wide in the world, its just that the western world takes a apologetic view at the Holocaust and not at the others. Fortunately or unfortunately, the jewish community also has mastered the art of extracting the maximum mileage out of the Holocaust.At times I am sick and tired of these books and movies that keep coming out every couple of years, crying out loud how terrible the holocaust was, ok fine I know about it already...!!! What troubles me the most is that, we will never know the stories of the other genocides, because the people who suffered during those are not rich and are not expert lobbyists. But then films like Rabbit Proof Fence give me hope.

Happy Makara Sankranti/Pongal/Lohri to all u folks out there...
and especially for the marathi ppl - heres some tiL guL - * * * * * * * * * (i think it looks like those coloured spiky grains of sugar) - tiL guL ghya goD goD bola :-) and heres some food for thot

The AIDS-gandhi? link



Will women go there?

Wow i cant believe it, maybe its the magic of sankranti but i got two comments while i was in the midst of posting for the day, i guess my blog is gettin popular ;-)

Rock legend Pete Townshend admits paying for kiddie porn. link

As we are talking about kiddie porn, i think these guys are doing a really wonderful job

Oh wow..!! What a brilliant marketing startegy !!! link

Luckily i've got 6 numbers in my email id, maybe thats the reason why i dont really get a lotta spam... ;-) link

thankfully this time the project is not being done just cuz some big shot is coming. link

IT villages of Laos link

r these ppl aware of the concept called 'backup' ? link

After Elcomsofts acquittal in the DMCA case, one more victory for the geeks... Jon Johansen, the creator of DeCSS, is acquitted by the Norwegian court. BBC Aftenposten

Prentice Hall to deliver Open-Content books link

Now this is just pissing off, I believe Rediff needs to interview Sunita Rani, instead of Paradorn Srichaphan (no questions that hes a good sportsman in his own right) and what is up TOI's ass? Is Salam Khan boasting about Shakeel being one of his fans more important than Sunita Rani getting back her Asian medals??

almost an year old but an interesting and off-beat read... link

The Network is the Battlefield -- "All you need is Internet Explorer," says Doug Barton, the director of technology for Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, based in Gaithersburg, Md. link
Oh boy, i will pray for those pilots who will use IE to carry out sorties, imagine that stupid Restart Internet Explorer box popping up in the middle of an attack.. hehehehe

The White House speech writers should read this :P link

i discovered something... the title of my blog is a google whack..!!! click but the result page is not my blog... :(

Hahaha check this out... RIAA hacked for the 6th time more

a nice little paper on defacements of indian websites... link

the week in questions My score - 5/7

For some reason, the archive links dont appear in IE but work perefectly with Mozilla...

Welcome to my blog, had the template and all ready for the past couple of weeks but thot that i wud start posting in the new year... so going live today...

Happy 2003 to all ya folks

was too lazy to go abt looking for hosting sites that would allow me to link directly to my files, so go to my stupid index page first and then download the slide show....