October 2007
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Lords debate airline liquids ban
The Register: “‘Does my noble friend agree,’ she inquired, ‘that one of the best ways of avoiding the problems of security at airports is not to fly at all? Perhaps his department might discourage people from flying rather than encouraging them to get round the security problems.’”
Sorry PR people: you’re blocked
Chris Anderson: “Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers (that’s editor@wired.com).”
Java Crybabies
Griddle Noise: “The last Java application I ran was Eclipse, months ago, just trying to see what life in a fancy IDE would be like.” – BlogSpot is written in Java?
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons
New York Times: “Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term ‘terrorist’ has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to ‘Islamofascism.’ A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.”
Monday, 29 October 2007
The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007
PC World: “The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. […] but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.”
Sunday, 28 October 2007
Patriots bring cheating in the NFL into the modern era
SI.com: “Here’s a hard question. How tainted does Tom Brady now become, as the quarterback who was the recipient of stolen goods?”
Friday, 26 October 2007
One Outcome of High Insurance Rates
Balloon Juice: “Kind of interesting that one of the outcomes of private health insurance is that your private employer is concerned with your private life.”
Thursday, 25 October 2007
Appeals court rubber stamps FCC’s DSL (de)regulation
The Register: “The 3rd Circuit also agreed with the FCC’s contention that the deregulation will lead to an increase in products and services by removing barriers to the adoption of new equipment. The FCC averred that telecoms companies had previously avoided upgrading their equipment because of the cost of offering independent ISPs nondiscriminatory access to that equipment.”
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Facebook’s Minority Report
New York Times Blog: “Facebook is a valuable property, by itself, or within a bigger network. No one knows how valuable yet because no one knows how sticky the application is and what value is created by its platform, other than, say, those virtual vampires biting Facebook friends.”
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Google is destroying the web and you don’t even know it
Alex Bosworth: “Now the most important thing to you is no longer, ‘how can I make my site better to use’. If your basic idea stays the same, the new features you make for the maybe 20% of people who will use them might bring in 500 new people a month. Also you will look at your previous marketing efforts: a week working on a story for Digg that you got lucky on and brought in 50k new visits. Hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars on Google Adwords for 1000 visits. Compared to those 450,000 Google search visits over the month, all of those other priorities shift. Now you will read about SEO. The hundreds of crazy rules that Google uses to determine whether your site is good or not”
Friday, 19 October 2007
Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
Airlines squeeze fliers as profit soars
Los Angeles Times: “I try not to get upset if there is nothing I can do about it”
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Retailers look to exorcise credit-card data
SecurityFocus: “The risks of identity theft are not going away with credit-card information. I don’t think that they are recognizing that data as a security issue as well.”
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
The land of optimism is in the dumps, but refuses to accept how it got there
The Guardian: “Americans are more wary of political happy talk than they have been for a long time. But that doesn’t mean they want to hear sad talk instead, even if it happens to be true.”
Cynical
I’m getting a bit cynical here: Apple suddenly changes its story about iPhone development and announces a (not entirely unexpected) future iPhone SDK within an hour of Nokia’s announcement of the N810. Concidence?
Friday, 12 October 2007
Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child’s Cognitive Abilities?
New York Magazine: “Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.”
Sunday, 7 October 2007
Pittsburgh 21, Seattle 0
Yahoo! Sports: “The Pittsburgh Steelers didn’t have their two best defensive players, their two starting wide receivers or much offense for the first half.”
Friday, 5 October 2007
The Era Of Free Music Is Upon Us
The Seminal: “In short, nobody has a use for albums anymore besides the record companies.”
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Software Is Hard
Kyle Wilson: “Software construction is the most complex endeavor ever undertaken by mankind. It makes building things like cathedrals and space shuttles look like child’s play, and it strains our little monkey brains to the utmost. If we’re ever going to make building software any easier, we’re going to have to build a machine that’s smarter than we are. At the moment, even weakly superhuman AI is looking a long way off. And when we get it, the smart money says that it’ll be late and over budget.”