January 2002
Wednesday, 30 January 2002
Hailstorm here night before last. My winter coat is my new best friend.
Tuesday, 29 January 2002
Gravity’s quantum leaps detected
Artificial black holes: “the boundary where the light has stopped will resemble the event horizon of a black hole if the pulse of light travelling through the condensate is tuned to take the shape of a […] a parabola. The tip of the parabola will, mathematically, be a singularity. Light of certain frequencies will not be able to escape this apex.”
Tech downturn doesn’t slow H-1B visas: “Program supporters say it helps companies find qualified workers.” - H1-B = INDENTURED SERVITUDE
Terror resurrects support for separation plan: “We will have to carry out this plan. The question is how much time will take place and - to my great sorrow - how much blood will be spilled, until then.”
Sharing your cable modem: “The FCC has not yet decided whether Internet access service is a telecommunications service.”
Today I had brief moment where I was sufficiently distracted as to think I was in DC. I was driving up 101 and for a second I felt I was going East, and the Mormon Temple was just over the hill. Only it was just a billboard. I guess it’s a good sign that I’m paying more attention to the cars around me than the billboards in the distance, but it was eerie. Especially given that California temperatures need to be measured in Kelvin lately while it’s apparently quite summery in the DC.
Monday, 28 January 2002
Sunday, 27 January 2002
Toys
Toys:
Danger Hiptop: I played with this, and it’s possibly the most interesting consumer electronics device since the Pilot. It’s a phone and a PDA without suffering from the “it’s a phone that can fake being a PDA” or the “it’s a PDA that can fake being a phone” comromise issues. It uses GPRS as a way to do something more interesting than deliver more WAP. It does SMS and IM and automatically synchronizes itself over the net.
Electric tootbrush: They do not lie. I feel like I just got back from the dentist.
Wednesday, 16 January 2002
The android’s nightmare: “Quis custodiet?”
Tuesday, 15 January 2002
Bride of UCITAstein: “the drafting committee was not totally enthusiastic about all of the changes that it nonetheless adopted unanimously”
Sunday, 13 January 2002
Amazon.com: buying info: McDonald’s Barbie and Kelly: “Burger-flipping, teenage mother barbie?”
Sunday, 6 January 2002
The Trouble with the CIA: “Do you know how many Pashto speakers the CIA has got? … The agency will tell you some imaginary number but I am telling you none. Do you know how many were sent to learn it after the embassy bombings? None.”
Plane Crashes Into Tampa Skyscraper: calling Malcolm Gladwell
The 70 Percent Solution: “XML is real, security is real, but rich media is not real”
Flynt: Pentagon rules restrict war access: “if ‘people are sending their sons to fight and die in a war, they have a right for this war to be documented by a free press.’”
Friday, 4 January 2002
The Big Bang burger bar: “The Judeo-Christian creation myth begins with a void - that is, with empty space. The modern theory does not even go that far. According to the version of that theory put forward by Andrei Linde of Stanford University and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts, it begins with nothing whatsoever, not even space itself. That is a difficult idea to grasp, made even more difficult by the fact that it requires the sum total of the stuff in the universe to be nothing as well. Obviously this raises a problem, since observation suggests that the universe does actually contain things. But the problem is not insuperable.” - note the seven other articles in the survey, listed in the right-hand sidebar.
The Universe Might Last Forever, Astronomers Say, but Life Might Not: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Press release: QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies-Enabled 3G CDMA2000 1X Handsets Shipping to North American Operators
Thursday, 3 January 2002
MIME-RPC: advantage: can be easily called from a browser.
John Gilmore on Ukraine doing the right thing, fighting RIAA: “Most of that is pretty straightforward censorship of the press, the kind that our own Constitution would not tolerate, we hope.”
Dunkin’ Donuts Redux: “Dennis Tournas, who bought the franchise in 1983, prefers not to hire high school students anymore. … So who’s making the coffee? Immigrants.”
Wielding a Solomonic sword: READ THIS
It’s Jedi Justin: “N SYNC star JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE and his boy band pals are to hit the big screen as Jedi knights in the new Star Wars movie. … But unfortunately for fans they are all bumped off within seconds by savage androids.” - unfortunately? that sounds like the best part.
Too many standards spoil wireless LAN soup: “Buyers have been looking for Wi-Fi logos on hardware boxes to assure compatibility. Wi-Fi5 is 802.11a, not 802.11h. But, adding to the confusion, 802.11h is likely to replace 802.11a and become Wi-Fi5” - This is a total mess, and if it does not get resolved (which presumably means going to 802.11h in the US) by the time 802.11g arrives, it will probably be irrelvant, since the latest 802.11g spec provides a/h’s bandwidth but with 802.11b compatibility.
Wednesday, 2 January 2002
MS struggles to discredit Linux: “How Valentine knows this is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he has a mole in the Brown organization as good as the one we have in his. Or perhaps MS simply paid for it. We don’t know.”
A Frustrated A.C.L.U. Tries to Guide Consulates Through a Thicket: “The consulates seemed confused by the letter from an American organization offering to challenge its own government in court and were uncertain whether that was permissible in this country.”
New UCITA revisions – first reactions: “By defining consumer purchases of software as licenses, rather than sales, UCITA pulls consumer software out of the scope of all of the consumer protection statutes that protect buyers of ‘consumer goods.’”