“Bloated, slow and leaky – what version numbers really mean”

This is satire, but wickedly on the mark. Obviously poking fun in the direction of Microsoft, but that’s not the only target — I saw at least one other large company using the same tactics, just before I dumped their product in disgust. I’ve no doubt that several other companies (that I’ve been fortunate enough …

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“What Happens When the Average Lifespan is 150 Years?”

As a semi-related extension of yesterday’s rant, here’s some more evidence that science does have some idea what it’s talking about. If it didn’t, none of this would work. It’ll be interesting to see how humanity adapts to much longer lives. So long as life expectancy climbs slowly, I think we can handle it without …

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“Moon *Not* Made of Cheese, Physicist Explains”

Just in case you were wondering. šŸ˜‰ I don’t know the context of that quote, but I’m very concerned about the science deniers in the US. It seems that, despite mandatory science classes in high school, most people still don’t understand science. Conservatives seem to think that science is like religion: convince enough people of …

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“Wooden Mars ark voyagers set to step out on Earth”

Remember that wooden “spaceship” I mentioned a few months ago? Well, it has almost completed its journey, and I’m happy to say that the astronauts survived without major conflict for the full trip. Of course, they knew in the back of their minds that it wasn’t the real thing, so the stress wasn’t as bad …

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“Halloween Sadism: The Evidence”

It seems that our parents were — again — worried about absolutely nothing. Which makes sense… anyone contemplating such a move would quickly realize that if they did it on a mass scale they’d be tracked down in a day or two at most, and even targeting it at the one brat that has been …

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“Boss leaves robot in charge of office”

I love it. Lounge around in your underwear all day and still keep an eye on those shiftless no-good employees of yours. šŸ˜‰ I doubt it’ll catch on in the near future though. And I hope the robot has a good software security system… if it has arms (something I can’t determine from the two …

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“We like zombiesā€¦ because we *are* zombies”

I always wondered at the popularity of zombies in popular fiction. They have no skill and no intelligence, and they move very slowly, their only truly horrifying trait (other than their dire need of cosmetics) is that they won’t stop so long as they can move even a single digit in your direction. It requires …

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“Secret Codes in Bacteria”

In Michael Stackpole’s book I, Jedi, set in the Star Wars universe a few years after Return of the Jedi, the main character must develop his latent Jedi abilities in order to track down and rescue his kidnapped wife. Unfortunately, the late and unlamented Emperor has done a very thorough job of wiping out all …

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“iPad baby baffled by paper magazine”

I saw something in a science fiction book once (I don’t recall which one, but it might have been David Brin’s Earth, though I can’t locate my copy of it now to verify that). It described a young man’s first encounter with a printed book, after spending all his life with a World Wide Web …

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Spam: More than 54.8% of Hits

That’s right: more than one out of every two hits on this blog recently are spam attempts. I say that because that was the percentage of the last 1,600 or so hits that were on a single post with very little content… not coincidentally, the exact same post that spammers have been pounding on without …

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