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Archive for August, 2009
London bus with 16 CCTV cameras inside
It's Bank Holiday today, in the UK, so this morning we took the kid to the zoo in Regent's Park on the 205 bus. The bus we got was quite a new one, and right by the driver was a screen showing the feed from the sixteen CCTV cameras on this one bus. How much of that footage to they actually archive? For how long? And how much of it do they lose [...]
Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists
A California court has issued a subpoena demanding Google reveal the IP addresses of journalists writing for a corruption busting journal from the Caribbean. The August 28 subpoena, issued by the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara, as part of a "libel tourism" action taken by non-US property developers, demands detailed information about the [...]
Apache.org hacked
Yesterday the official website for the Apache Software Foundation (of the Apache web server fame) was offline for several hours. When it came back online, it briefly showed this message: (more...)
Mac OSX Snow Leopard now available
Starting today, Mac OSX Snow Leopard is available for shipping at Amazon.com. Current Mac OS 10.5 Leopard users are eligible to upgrade to Snow Leopard at the very low price of $25 (and free shipping). Even though Apple suggests Mac users without Leopard buy the $149 Mac box set to get Snow Leopard, anyone can purchase the $25 Snow Leopard disc [...]
Prostitute Warning Sign
"Excuse me is there anything I could do you would pay me for?", "No, come on in"
Great Firefox Tweaks
1) Adjust the Smart Location Bar’s Number of Suggestions In Firefox 3, when you start typing in the location bar, a drop-down list of suggestion URLs will be shown. If you want it to show more than 12 suggestions (12 is the default), you can adjust the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults keys and get it to show the number you want. Config name: [...]
New bill would give president emergency control of Internet
Autos, banks, energy, medicine, the airwaves, the census, the internet, the paycheck of anyone trying to work for an honest living... There is nothing the Chicago thugocracy won't seize control of. Omnipotent government is the common thread here, and instead of fearing it like the Founders, people are sprinting toward it hoping for [...]
Assault weapon ban for Pittsburgh G-20 summit?
Pittsburgh's short-lived ban on assault weapons, quashed by the General Assembly in 1994, is still on the city's books, and it may get new life under legislation driven by next month's G-20 summit. A little-noted clause in a proposed ordinance written by Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's administration to keep protesters from thwarting police crowd [...]
Man spent $7 million in bogus currency made with cheap inkjet printer
Details has an article about a guy who lived like a high roller by printing more than $7 million with an ink-jet printer and supplies from Staples... When Talton set out to circumvent the U.S. Treasury's security measures, he had no experience in counterfeiting, printing, or graphic design, and he didn't even own a computer. His first attempts [...]
Music downloading penalties are harsher than arson, theft, or starting a dogfighting ring
Let's take a look at the $1.92m fine Jammie Thomas faces for downloading 1700 songs and compare it to the penalties for other crimes in America (valuing jail time at $50,233, the median US household income in 2007): Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the [...]
Bash script to use a cd-rom to rock your baby to sleep
This enterprising Linux user wrote a bash script that rhythmically opens and closes the CD tray on a tower PC; the CD tray is connected to the baby's rocking seat. As the tray cycles, the baby rocks. Lovely.
I didn’t realize this was such a commonly used size in GIMP
The question is, do any modern printers support that format? Seriously. I think that it would be cool to print some novelty toilet paper.
Breast implant serial numbers used to identify murder victim, Playboy model, Jasmine Fiore
The body of a mutilated murder-victim was positively identified by matching the serial numbers on her breast-implants: Fiore's body was found last Saturday in a Dumpster behind an apartment complex in Buena Park, just outside Anaheim, California. Her teeth had been extracted and fingers removed in what police said was an apparent attempt to [...]
Placebos Are Getting More Effective… and Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Wired explores the fascinating and increasingly important placebo effect, which appears to be getting stronger... The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox [...]
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
Gary Wolf's feature on the idiosyncrasies of craigslist.org, its founder Craig Newmark, and its CEO Jim Buckmaster perfectly captures the thing that makes the site so wonderful: the quirky, zen character of its executives who love the heroically ugly, creaking beast and refuse to change it. But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the [...]
Coin-tosses aren’t fair
Many statistics examples start with "assuming a fair coin-toss..." But it turns out that coin-tosses aren't fair; depending on your toss, there's a small-to-alarming bias in the result. 1. If the coin is tossed and caught, it has about a 51% chance of landing on the same face it was launched. (If it starts out as heads, there's a 51% chance it [...]
The Ron Paul Book Bomb
603 copies pre-ordered as of Monday, August 24, 2009 -- pre-order your copy on Amazon now! Help give Ben Bernanke nightmares by pre-ordering Ron Paul's next bestseller, End the Fed, for just $13.19, in a handsome hardback edition. This important work can strike a moral, economic, libertarian, and constitutional blow at the central government, [...]
