Filed under: lulz, offtopic, photo/pics | No Comments »

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 response. But even [...]

Filed under: tsa sucks | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: offtopic, ugh, wtf | 1 Comment »

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!

Filed under: tsa sucks | No Comments »

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 Council’s blood oath: “To harness the [...]

Filed under: myspace facebook twitter | 3 Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: books, con, offtopic, wtf | No Comments »

Filed under: FTW, cool, lulz, offtopic | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: copywrong, linux, micro$oft, pir8, pwned, ubuntu | No Comments »

Get ready for air travel to suck even more: Passengers on international flights coming to the US will have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without access to any personal items. Overseas passengers get just one carry-on bag.

Filed under: tsa sucks | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: cool, offtopic, photo/pics | 1 Comment »

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 [...]

Filed under: howto | No Comments »

You know what a Snuggie really is?
A bathrobe worn backwards.

Filed under: lulz, offtopic | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: codemonkey, free open source software, google | No Comments »

Microsoft is going to have to pay some obscure company $200m, who patented custom xml, which Microsoft uses in Word 2007

Filed under: copywrong, micro$oft | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: hax, malware, spam | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: privacy | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: crackberry | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: myspace facebook twitter, offtopic, pwned, wtf | No Comments »

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 [...]

Filed under: books | No Comments »

Filed under: offtopic, ugh, wtf | No Comments »