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Archive for December, 2009
Bruce Schneier on this week’s air-terror-scare and TSA’s response
Bruce Schneier... A voice of reason, as usual. Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear.The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency [...]
Chart compares price of inkjet ink to other liquids
ReflectionOf.Me posted a graph that shows how much HP printer ink costs compared to human blood, vodka, crude oil and other precious liquids. Lets skip the obvious intentions and instead curry the most outlandish counterarguments possible. As a FORMER inkjet user, I CLEARLY understood the point of this graph: Print 40-80 pages, spend $45 on a [...]
Odds of being a terrorism victim on a flight
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com collected the data for this handsome infographic designed Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo. It shows your odds of becoming an airborne victim of terrorism. Maybe the new TSA rules will decrease the odds of being a terrorism victim from 1 in 10,408,947 to 1 in 10,408,948. Let's hope so! (more...)
Inside the kinda secret world of Facebook Community Council
I have newfound respect for online moderators who slog through potentially problematic user content all day. They get a real glimpse into the downside of humanity. Facebook developers recently initiated me into Facebook Community Council, a secret shadow organization of vigilantes who destroy the content of ne'er-do-wells and miscreants. Our [...]
Hamburger, or $115 seafood platter? How restaurants use marketing psychology to make the sale.
New York magazine breaks down the menu at Balthazar, with help from author William Poundstone, to show you how tricks of typography make a difference in what you choose to eat (and pay for). Columns Are Killers According to Brandon O'Dell, one of the consultants Poundstone quotes in Priceless, it's a big mistake to list prices in a straight [...]
Top Gear does a “sensible” roadtest
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Chinese pirates launch Ubuntu that looks exactly like Windows XP
From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes... Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release, a pirate version of Windows XP itself, is being cracked down [...]
New annoying restrictions added for airline passengers
God bless these brave men and women for keeping our planes safe. I always knew the secret to defeating terrorism was to introduce minor yet irritating inconvenience. But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain [...]
Original blueprints of the Eiffel Tower
At the Eiffel Tower's official web site, you can check out scans of the original blueprints created by Gustave Eiffel in preparation for the 1889 World's Fair. The famous tower in Paris was the source of much controversy (many thought its skeletal design ruined the classical cityscape) and remained the tallest structure in the world until the [...]
HOWTO: Stir natural peanut butter easily
You know how a jar of natural peanut butter separates into two layers: a rock hard layer of solid peanut particles on the bottom, and a liquid layer of oil that splashes onto the kitchen counter and your clothes when you try to stir the two layers together? John Falk Kelly didn't like it when that happened, so he came up with a way to mix peanut [...]
Dear Google: You keep using that word…
Google's Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a paean to 'open,' in which his company's commitment to 'open' is pitched at great length. The most remarkable paragraph, however, is the one dealing with things that Google keeps closed: While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to [...]
Microsoft loses appeal of XML patent
Microsoft has lost an appeal in a patent case that will force it to alter Microsoft Word to avoid an injunction on sales of the product. Microsoft lost a patent case involving a company called I4i in May, after a jury ruled that Microsoft infringed one of i4i's patents with a custom XML feature found in Word. In August an injunction was placed [...]
Botnet runners start their own ISPs
Botnet and malware creeps are setting up their own ISPs, with their own IP blocks, so that spamfighters don't have anyone to complain to when they run them to ground... "It's gotten completely out of hand. The bad guys are going to some local registries in Europe and getting massive amounts of IP space and then they just go to a hosting provider [...]
The EFF ebook buyer’s guide to privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has pored over the terms of service for several popular ebook services and devices and come up with "An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy," a handy chart that tells you what information about your reading habits you "agree" to send to these companies by simply standing in the vicinity of the device, clicking a [...]
BlackBerry data service issues being reported by users
Lots of reports have been coming in over the past few hours of BlackBerry Messenger service being on the fritz. You'll sometimes get a check mark on a sent message, but not the D or the R signifying that the message has been delivered and read. Some users seem to be unaffected. For others, some of the messages are getting through and others are [...]
Prisoner excapes prison, creates Facebook account
Craig "Lazie" Lynch vanished from Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk in September this year close to the end of a seven-year sentence for aggravated burglary. Instead of hiding away from police Lynch has set up a Facebook account complete with a photograph sticking his middle finger up and boasts about eating 12lb steaks and his home being so warm it [...]
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: explaining quantum physics through discussions with a German shepherd
Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the [...]
