Includes stuff about anything where feedback causes the system to adapt, including the systems of nature, those that are man-made or cultural, and those of the human mind.
Good God… someone actually advocating an intelligent solution to movie piracy, in a mainstream business magazine?! Unbelievable! Listen up, Hollywood. As an independent software developer, I’ve been dealing with Internet piracy for longer than you — without a single lawyer, let alone an army of them, and often on a shoestring budget. The facts in …
Continue reading ‘“You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You”’ »
I’ve often wondered if there might be a way to harness the placebo effect to actually help people get better. It seems that I’m not the only one, either.
“US, UK research: Thick kids more likely to become bigots“. Ouch. I’ve often thought that today’s conservatives weren’t the brightest bulbs on the whole, and wondered whether there was some causal link there, but to have it bluntly spelled out like that is pretty damning. Maybe these studies should be publicized a lot more. Nobody …
Continue reading ‘“Study links dim wits to conservative ideology”’ »
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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘“Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon”’ »
Long ago I came to the conclusion that the best investment strategy is to invest only in things that you know very very well, and a close second is to invest in a market index fund. As I don’t want to take the time to study stocks and companies, a large part of my money …
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.
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 …
Continue reading ‘“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”’ »
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 …
Wow. I didn’t expect anything like what happened, and apparently neither did anyone else — including the MPAA. From the e-mail I received from FightForTheFuture.org: The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA …