When many people consider prosthetic limbs, they often seem to think of mechanisms that replace some of the functions of the original but don't seem to add anything new. Prosthetics limbs are not very common and they're almost always very expensive. To the best of my knowledge I don't know of anybody modifying a prosthetic in any substantial way (or any way, for that matter). That's what made this news article jump out at me: A student at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media named Jason Barnes lost his right arm in an accident in the workplace. He wears …

A couple of weeks ago, the RIAA managed to get a law passed that requires royalties to be paid to them for all music streamed across the Net, regardless of the reason or origin of the music. If you listen to the audio stream coming from a local commercial radio station's website, they're paying the RIAA royalties for the privilege (then again, chances are they're getting paid by the RIAA to only play certain songs - this has been known for years but no one's been in a position to do anything about it). If you read the fine print, though …

Lyssa and I spent a good portion of Saturday sitting around relaxing. Lyssa had preordered the first season boxed set of Beauty and the Beast and we watched the first disc on Saturday afternoon while I wrote and hacked for a while on a project I've been working on. Later in the afternoon we headed out to get sushi for dinner at Konami in northern Virginia, and then set forth for Jarin's apartment for his Chinese New Year party, which almost didn't happen. One of Jarin's upstairs neighbors had had a fire earlier in the weekend, and not only had …