“Is the music industry dying?”

That seemed like a rhetorical question to me when I first read it. But after reading the rest of the article, I’ve changed my mind. The music industry is alive and well, and in fact is thriving — it’s just the existing music labels, with their extremely wasteful business models, that are suffering: EMI, recently …

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It works!

As reported yesterday, I’m now using ThunderBayes/SpamBayes to filter spam. I manually classified several hundred recent spam messages, and a roughly-equal number of recent personal (“ham”) messages. So far, it hasn’t had a single false positive on either side, and most of the “unsure” classifications have been of legitimate commercial messages (that do resemble spam …

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Getting SpamBayes/ThunderBayes Working (Under Linux)

Thunderbird’s built-in spam filter is pretty good, more accurate (and a lot easier to set up and use) than several others I’ve tried, but even so it’s accuracy still leaves something to be desired. I don’t get anywhere near as much spam now as I used to, but roughly half of my daily e-mail is …

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“Top 10 Telephone Tricks”

This collection of tips can come in quite handy. I already use a small Radio Shack device to “trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead” (number 1), but I wasn’t aware of number 4 (“skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress“). I’m rather surprised at number 2, “get …

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“Reasons (and Ways) to Avoid Buying Just-Released Gadgetry”

Like many techno-geeks, I love gadgets. When I was younger, I spent a great deal of money (that I usually didn’t have) buying the latest and greatest techie toys. For me, that stopped when I looked around and realized that I had more unused computers than ones in use — and that was without even …

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The State of Medical Technology

Two recent articles from Boing Boing suggest major advances in medical science. The first talks about a compound which “reverses Alzheimer’s in minutes,” which is a pretty bold claim and has so far been tested on only one patient, but has at least the possibility of being true. The second talks about using the rabies …

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