“National Popular Vote — Electoral college reform and direct election of the President of the United States”

As my US readers may remember from their mandatory high-school civics class, presidential elections in the US are kind of odd. Presidents aren’t elected by the people. Instead, their elected through the Electoral College — the people’s votes tell the Electoral College what candidate the state votes for, and each state has a certain number …

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“Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon”

No, there’s no real Star Trek-style tractor beam (yet, anyway). What they’re discussing is parking a large spacecraft near such an asteroid and using its gravity to drag the asteroid onto a course that would miss the Earth. That assumes that we detect the threat early enough to launch such a craft, get it into …

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“Arsenic life does not exist after all”

Remember that claim, about a year ago, that a scientist had discovered arsenic-based life forms right here on Earth? It seems that other scientists are having trouble reproducing that research. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the original scientist was wrong, but it puts the assertion in doubt. If it does turn out to be wrong, …

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“US Supremes: GPS tracking requires warrant”

Wow! Maybe the US won’t turn into a technology-driven police state, as all recent indications had pointed toward (and as I had cynically expected, as the “security” apparatus has more money, and thus influence, than ordinary citizens). Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.

“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”

The literary and film genre known as the Western covers a very short period of American history — 1850 to 1900 by the most commonly-accepted definition, but it’s more accurate to say from the end of the Civil War (1865) to maybe 1890, when our forefathers ran out of frontier — a small window of …

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“Authentication by ‘Cognitive Footprint'”

This entry could almost have come from Geek Drivel: […] I remember reading a science fiction story about a computer worm that searched for people this way: going from computer to computer, trying to identify a specific individual. I immediately thought of The Adolescence of P-1, one of my teenage favorites, and I was tickled …

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“MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren’t Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought”

Remember the SOPA drama last week? It has given MPAA not-quite-lobbyist Chris Dodd a bad case of foot-in-mouth: he publicly threatened politicians who’d taken MPAA money for not doing what the MPAA wanted. On national television, no less. Un-freakin’-believable. And just this side of actually criminal. Dodd is a former senator — he should know …

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