Wow. I didn’t expect anything like what happened, and apparently neither did anyone else — including the MPAA. From the e-mail I received from FightForTheFuture.org: The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Science and Technology category.
“Phages: The powerful new bio-ammo in superbug war”
A medical breakthrough in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria! In a nutshell, these things render such bacteria vulnerable to antibiotics again, and it looks like bacteria have no way to defend themselves. This is the kind of science I love to hear about.
Stop SOPA/PIPA!
As you may have noticed, this site — along with thousands of others — was blacked out today, to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. If you’re an American Internet user and haven’t heard of them before, what rock have you been hiding under? Go find out what it’s all about (this page might help), [...]
“US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux”
So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold [...]
“7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketting” [sic]
In honor of the year’s first Friday the thirteenth: it’s not bad luck when you bring it on yourself.
“Locating Change: Science and Technology Controversies”
From this article: [...] This is why one of the great contributions of science fiction is its ability to create monsters and technologies from the ether. When they show up out of nowhere, they challenge us to think more broadly and to make new connections. [...] That’s one of the things — maybe the main thing [...]
“Man convicted of murder gets retrial after virus eats transcripts”
Twenty years ago, headlines like this one wouldn’t have even been imaginable.
“H&M Under Fire for Using Fake, Computer-Generated Models”
That’s not data models, it’s women who model clothing. There was a near-future SF novel I read many years ago (I don’t recall which one) that posited that actors would be replaced almost entirely by computer-generated models. We’re already seeing the precursors of it — all the Pixar releases, for instance. And characters in games [...]
“IBM: Mind-Reading Machines Will Change Our Lives”
I have no doubt that it will — but in five years? That seems more than a little overly optimistic. I’d love to be proven wrong though. Oddly enough, this sort of thing rarely appears in science fiction, at least the SF I know of. When people in SF literature deal with computers, it’s almost [...]
“Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz”
Wow… it seems that hacking, and hacker pranks, got their start well before the first computers were created. I can’t imagine how Marconi could have thought any clear-text wireless signal was secure against eavesdroppers. Even if his patented tuning system worked to keep the signal on a very narrow band, all it would take to [...]