• Grand Theft Autobot
• Grand Theft Autoclave
• Grand Theft Autonomous Region
• Grand Theft Otter
• Grand Theft Autoharp
• Grand Theft Auteur
• Grand Theft Audubon
• Grand Theft Tugboat
• Grand Theft Oxbow

I’ve just looked over the program for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. This’ll be the first one I’ve gone t. For a long time, I thought of it as a place where epic things happened, something I might someday aspire to attend. So when Frank asked me to be on a panel proposal he was putting together, I thought, “That sounds like fun, but I’m not even worthy to attend CFP yet.”Well, long story short, we’re on the program, so I’m going, and it’s a bit of a rush.

In addition to our own panel — Rights & Responsibilities for Software Programs?, the program looks great. Among the highlights:

• Frank has another panel, Privacy, Reputation, and the Management of Online Communities, with a line-up of supersmart Young Turks of Internet Law.
• I almost wish I didn’t have to present, because at the same time as my own panel is another neat-sounding one on :charismatic content.”
• The first day includes the usual tutorials, including the disturbing-sounding E-Deceptive Campaign Practices: Elections 2.0
• A ten-year retrospective on David Brin’s The Transparent Society.

The Onion A.V. Club, Say Goodbye to the Blockbuster:

The thought of filmmakers trying to capture Norbit’s lightning in a bottle once more is chilling enough to consider, but if they pull it off, summer entertainment in the future may be targeted exclusively to single-celled organisms. Excellent news for Protococcus algae, which currently can’t get enough of Deal Or No Deal.

The Librascope/Royal McBee LGP-30, an early computer, is now best remembered for being the computer at the heart of The Story of Mel: drum memory, one-plus-one addressing, index register, and all. (The “free verse” version is better-known, and I think better.)

But did you know that Mel was real?

Also, did you know that the LGP-30 used non-standard hexadecimal? Perhaps you are asking yourself how hexadecimal could possibly be non-standard: there are sixteen digits, right? Well, yes, but in our modern computers, those digits are:

 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

Whereas, on the LGP-30, they were:

 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 F G J K Q W

Makes sense, right? It’s related to the layout of the LGP’s Flexowriter—you can see the lower-case letters continuing the stride of the decimal digits—though that layout is itself a baroque marvel that has the same character serve as a lower-case “l” and as the digit “1”.

With such an unlikely sequence of letters, one needs a mnemonic. According to Wikipedia, the canonical one was “FiberGlass Javelins Kill Quite Well.” But according to M. Mitchell Waldrop’s biography, J.C.R. Licklider preferred “For God and Jesus Christ, Quit Worrying.” The observant reader will have noticed that the mnemonic only works if you treat “Christ” as though it started with a K.