Topics on my particular interests.
ZDNet has a roundup here, everything from IBM’s fateful 1980 decisions on MS-DOS to this year’s HP TouchPad debacle. I thought it was interesting, as a my-God-it’s-horrifying-but-I-can’t-look-away kind of thing.
Science fiction fans have long been known to make replicas of things from their favorite books, movies, or shows. There was even a fellow in Britain who turned his apartment into a replica of the Star Trek ship Voyager a few years back. This, however, is the first full-sized building created from a cartoon movie …
Continue reading ‘“Replica of Disney-Pixar ‘Up’ house for sale in Utah”’ »
When we tell kids that they have to be careful what they share on FaceBook, that it can affect them in the future, it seems that even we don’t realize all the possible implications.
In 1985, the Wall Street Journal had a quote from an unnamed Xerox executive to the effect that “we’ll have a paperless office when we have a paperless bathroom.” Well, paperless bathrooms are here, but offices still use a lot of paper. In a bid to reduce that, Xerox has come up with self-erasing reusable …
Bruce Schneier points out a newly-published analysis on recent terrorism in the US, and provides his own comments (which I fully agree with). From one of the final paragraphs: The risk of dying in the U.S. from terrorism is substantially less than the risk of drowning in your bathtub, the risk of a home appliance …
A primary theme of this blog is that science fiction drives science. Apparently science is now directly feeding back into science fiction too. 🙂 I don’t expect this to really go anywhere. The motivation for it is pretty transparent: keeping NASA in the public eye now that there are no shuttle launches, so that Congress …
Continue reading ‘“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”’ »
I doubt this sort of thing will become the preferred way to attend a wedding any time soon, but until recently it wouldn’t have been possible for the home-bound bridesmaid to attend at all. Telepresence will only get better — easier to use, more reliable, with more control for the remote user — over time. …
Continue reading ‘“iPad bridesmaid attends wedding via FaceTime”’ »
I generally ignore conspiracy theories. The more you know about history, probability, and human nature, the harder it is to seriously attribute malicious intent to things that happen by random chance, or as a result of public and well-known systems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was (probably) a legitimate conspiracy. The claim that Kentucky …
This fellow (warning, PDF file) claims that all computer science graduates should take a course in writing Trojans, viruses, worms, and the like — “malware” — or at least that it should be offered as a regular part of an elective security course. At first, I was taken aback by the suggestion. You don’t want …
Continue reading ‘“The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware”’ »
Short, sweet, and very amusing. If you don’t read this one, you’ll regret it.