Somehow I suspect that Zynga, the company behind the popular Internet game Farmville, might have sponsored this story. 😉 In any case, it’s certainly true for me, and at least a few other people I know.
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »
The record labels have been making a big stink for at least a decade about how file-sharing is driving artists to the poorhouse, but I’ve always been skeptical of that. The most popular ones might be suffering — maybe — but the vast majority of artists (I know a few) could only benefit from more …
Continue reading ‘“Artists Make More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It”’ »
This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine, and of my wife’s. We’re both avid readers, and she’s the daughter of a teacher as well; we know how these phrases are supposed to be spelled, even if we don’t know the background of them (I never knew where “beyond the pale” actually came …
Continue reading ‘“Commonly Misheard Expressions to Avoid (or Fix) in Your Writing”’ »
My high-school best friend and I both ended up in Virginia in the very early nineties, a few years after we graduated, he in the Air Force and I going to tech school. We decided to make a trip back to Connecticut to meet up with the old gang. Among the people we met were …
Continue reading ‘“Human hive-mind game whups computer boffinry ass”’ »
Before the Internet became widespread, AOL made money by charging ridiculously high rates to access the content on their network. Afterwards, their content was worth less every day as web sites sprang up everywhere, so they reinvented themselves as an Internet Service Provider (a pretty slick move, in my opinion, not that they had a …
Continue reading ‘“AOL sales drop by a quarter, reports billion dollar loss”’ »
It’s a good concept, but is it going to catch on? […] the question remains, will consumers care about not possessing the files? There are clear advantages in not doing so: you don’t need buckets of local storage, and you don’t have to fear losing your collection to burglars or housefires. There are clear advantages …
Continue reading ‘“Movie, tech giants prep universal online media store”’ »
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, …
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)
In my family, I’m likely to actually need this. And maybe a score-card too. 😉 DARK HELMET: Before you die, there is something you should know about us, Lone Starr. LONE STARR: What? DARK HELMET: I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room-mate. LONE STARR: What’s that make us? DARK HELMET: Absolutely nothing. Which …
Continue reading ‘“Use Wolfram Alpha to Figure Out Confusing Family Relationships”’ »