One family I know (whose identity will not be mentioned to protect the guilty as well as myself) is well-known for their knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battles. When they get into arguments, their opponents are called every name in the book and accused of the most heinous crimes against humanity, whether the names or accusations make …
Those of you who care about such things might have heard that Apple recently released a new version of it’s desktop OS, 10.7, code-named Lion. It was inevitable that I would upgrade my current system (a mid-2009 model MacBook Pro) eventually, but I wanted to put it off for a while. I’ve talked before about …
I’ve been reading e-books since about 2001, first on my several Palm machines, and more recently on my iPod Touch. I appreciate their compactness (GoddessJ and I already have to devote an entire spare bedroom to our library), the fact they don’t wear out, that I can read them in the dark, and that (depending …
Continue reading ‘“Amazon heralds unstoppable rise of the e-book”’ »
I was rather surprised at this assertion, at first. Then I thought about it… there are only about 95 printable characters in the basic seven-bit ASCII character set. A very conservative estimate puts the number of distinct English words at well over 65,000, most of which are many letters long. If you knew that someone’s …
You’d think that a company like Microsoft would come up with something better written, better acted, and altogether better thought-out than this. Disappointing. (I’m not a big fan of Google, but I’m far less a fan of Microsoft, given that they’ve done their damnedest to sabotage any progress for at least the last ten years …
Continue reading ‘“Microsoft ribs Google’s ad tech with ‘Gmail Man’”’ »
Science fiction, computers, and security, all in one post? And it’s not something I’ve written?! 😀 (Seriously, it sounds like a pretty good idea.)
Vitamin D, produced in human skin when it’s bombarded by the ultraviolet rays of the sun, may be the most powerful anticancer agent ever known, and lack of it during a mother’s pregnancy and breastfeeding (and keeping babies shielded from ultraviolet sunlight) could be the cause of most autism: Many researchers now fear that the …
Continue reading ‘“Tanning Can Cause Cancer, but Not Tanning Could Cause a Lot Worse”’ »
Um… this is a matter of excessive authoritarian zeal, personal opinion, or dollar signs (imagine all the people driving through their town that they could ticket for having these). Whichever it is, these people should be publicly slapped down for abusing the law. Leaving aside the obvious First Amendment issue, consider this: if testicles are …
Continue reading ‘“Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda”’ »
Well, turnabout is fair play. Computers have been driving us crazy for decades already. 😉 And does this mean that we’re ready to create the HAL-9000? 😉 (Really interesting ideas about brain research using neural nets, though I have my doubts that it will be very useful for most things until we understand the brain …
Continue reading ‘“Boffins develop method of driving computers insane”’ »
I do not recommend trying this at home, for the reasons listed in the comments… but it is pretty neat-looking. 🙂