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The transience of networks
Fair warning..
Sooner or later I'll be moving my blogging, et. all to a new service. (I was expecting to make the change 6 months ago, actually, but getting set up was much harder than I expected.) I'd give the URL, but it's already changed once and it'll change again Real Soon Now™ so I don't want to get everybody confused by posting it now ( Read more... ) -
Childhood memories
Yesterday I was shopping for music at Amazon.com and was exceedingly disappointed to learn that the soundtrack for the Disney movie "Aladdin" has multiple versions: the out-of-print original, and the 'cleaned up' version(s) that change a few song phrases. Worse, (according to reports) the dub-in was done so badly that it doesn't even sound like ( Read more... ) -
Silky: The Silkworm of Fate!
(Ok, the topic's a stretch, but it is related to the 'tied together' theme..)
IMHO there are a number of problems with social networking sites. The obvious one is that they're silos (I've heard an interesting rumor about how Windows Live is going to integrate with several of them, but that's just a rumor until it's not) but less obvious is the fact ( Read more... ) -
Link (x2)
For when you need to have a fact-based debate: http://www.uberspat.com/
I don't even know if I believe this one: the "R2 Fish Training School Kit" http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/science/adca/?cpg=wnrss (Shamu, eat your heart out.) -
Copyright Royalty Board (redux)
It's a fairly breathless entry, probably an opinion piece given the rather heavy tilt toward the webcasters, but here's an article from The Washington Post regarding
Pandora and the (apparent lack of) progress toward resolving the CRB decisionOnce again I wrote to my senators and congresspeople; I humbly ask you to do the same, no matter how you ( Read more... ) -
"Large Hadron Collider? What's that?" "Glad you asked..."
With an apparently un-credited intro by MC Hawking (Edit: Though we can't, of course, be certain it's actually MC Hawking..):
musical introduction to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (set to go live on Sept 10, but with tests starting before then)!
Edit, 2008-08-17, 10:45pm PDTFrom the Science-can-be-pretty department (a VERY large page--give it ( Read more... ) -
"Don't trust anyone without the passcode." "Ok, but that's not the passcode..."
For years now, I've been cryptographically signing my outgoing e-mails. This serves a variety of purposes, the most direct one being that a person can always check that I authored a message, without question. (If more people used crypto then social-engineering attacks and phishing wouldn't work, but that's for another post ( Read more... ) -
Faking the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics
Ok, I have to admit I'm torn on this one...
During the opening ceremonies, people in the stadium saw a series of 29 fireworks in the shape of footprints "walking" toward the stadium. At home and on the screens around the stadium, people also saw a series of fireworks walking toward the stadium. However, it's being fairly widely reported that ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
It has been well-known for quite a while that companies sometimes do stupid things to ship products or items. However, I don't think they're going to get any dumber than this (at least I hope and pray not):
"HP shatters excessive packaging world record" -
(Untitled)
There was an episode of Futurama that involved the following exchange:
Lawyer: "To my loyal butler, `You There', for his decades of service, I leave a pittance, to be paid in 20 equal installments of one twentieth of a pittance each."
I believe this could be strongly applied to NASA, who (despite their various faults), still manage to generate ( Read more... )