Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
Unbelievable. After 150 years of steadily-accumulated evidence in favor of evolution, we’re still getting garbage like this Expelled movie? Expelled expresses the opinion that the universal support of evolution in the scientific community is the product of some sort of bias or ideological inflexibility. It is, on the contrary, the result of decades of hard …
I’d like to be the first to congratulate my friend Ploni Almoni (on the Recyclosphere blog) on his new Mac Mini. Have fun with it, Ploni!
I had been trying to get a look at one of these for months, but no place around here seemed to carry them. I wasn’t too concerned, because I’d planned to wait for a later version of it before I took the plunge. Ah well, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry…” …
I don’t know what it is about people that makes us enjoy watching a disaster, but here’s a doozy. Note that that turbine measures sixty meters in height. Must have been quite a sight in person. Okay, so I’m a few weeks late on this. Give me a break, I’m catching up. 🙂
Surprise, surprise. 🙂
Microsoft finally woke up and realized that people aren’t going to pay their usual rate for OEM copies of Windows when the PC itself is under $200, so they’ve decided to allow those computers to run Windows XP — the previous (and in many peoples’ opinion, better) version of Windows — instead of ceding the …
Continue reading ‘“Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP”’ »
Speaking of Microsoft’s arrogance when it comes to following existing standards, the results of the ISO vote on their unnecessary OOXML have been leaked, and it looks like they won approval… though a number of people in the know are saying that they played fast and loose with the rules to do so. No surprise …
Continue reading ‘Microsoft’s OOXML Now An ISO “Standard”’ »
Politicians that back biometrics (as a way to thwart crime and terrorism) now have reason to be a little terrified themselves: a hacker group has copied the fingerprint of a German politician who has been pushing that technology, and published it in a form that can easily be used to fool fingerprint readers. Fun, fun, …
Continue reading ‘“Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here”’ »
It seems that Microsoft has realized the foolishness of last year’s unsubstantiated assertion that Linux “violates 235 of [MS’s] patents.” Failing to scare corporations away from Linux, and failing to scare Linux distributors like Red Hat into paying them extortion money, they’ve backed away from that claim and are making friendly overtures to the open-source …
Continue reading ‘“All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft’s Thunder”’ »
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. In my work with compression theory, I learned a lot about probability. If any of these doomsday scenarios were possible, they would have happened somewhere in the universe already — probably a lot of somewheres — and science would have seen some evidence of them. Like most good scientists, …
Continue reading ‘“Doomsday fears spark lawsuit over collider”’ »