Sep. 20th, 2006

Yaaaaaar!

Sep. 20th, 2006 12:37 am
silveradept: A plush doll version of C'thulhu, the Sleeper, in H.P. Lovecraft stories. (C'thulhu)
Yes, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day, landlubbers. So we'll talk about distributing illegal copies of media at some point in the entry. Also, it was [livejournal.com profile] tinchen's brithday, either today or yesterday, so be sure to wish her a happy birthday.

Super Mario Brothers Wedding Cake. Despite what it looks like, the cake is edible. My jaw drops at such a lovely artistic sight. (Wowed by the design? Check out some of the other cakes this company has done)

USB-rechargable batteries. Now this is an interesting idea. I wonder how well they work. These seem like the perfect batteries to have with you for peripherals and computer-related materials. The question is, of course, whether they have good life and are inexpensive, relatively.

The world's first penis transplant receiver has had it removed. Apparently, there were mental problems that could not be overcome. Science proceeds apace, but this might be one of those times where we truly aren't quite ready for it. I wonder whether it's a matter of the trauma etching a memory onto the body and mind that says "This is gone now" and not being able to resolve that there is something there again. Were that true, though, artificial replacements should have a similar effect, but they don't seem to. Maybe it's because they're obviously unnatural, so the body still knows that there's not a regular limb there, but something they can use in its place instead?

Hearing voices may not be a universally bad or insane thing, at least for researchers at the University of Manchester. They're trying to figure out whether hearing someone when there's nobody there is just a normal part of our lives, perhaps as a reaction to stress or significant events in life.

Predicitons made on another attack sequence by Al-Qaeda. I'm not sure whether this is a threat or blowing smoke. We'll see, one way or another, I suspect.

Are the poll machines ready for Nov. 2006? If glitches, gaffes, and bugs dominate, there's going to be very little confidence. If you add on top of that maliciousness and vote-changing done by election officials or other hackers, then there's not only no confidence, but no point in voting, as the numbers will say whatever they have been programmed to say. It would give the illusion of legitimacy to any number of things.

Empathy with people, actions, and things, might turn out to be due to the firing of mirror neurons in the brain. Apparently, there's a spectrum of empathic response, depending on whether those mirror neurons fire or not.

Cereal On-the-Go container design. Perfect for taking your Chocolat Frosted Sugar Bombs into work with you when you're running late. Or when you just need sugary pick me up in the middle of the day.

A bad day for an Australian man - charged with having sex with a corpse, he also confesses to drunk driving and arson. Something must have pushed him over the edge.

And the last mark... showing that it's been a ways since the 50s, but that there's still a lot of work to be done. At least these days, when we hear of homosexuals, the reaction isn't like Greensboro, North Carolina, 1957: the "gay scare". Where the judge was biased, the jury was likely biased, the black mark has stuck, and nearly everything about it was wrong by today's standards. I just wonder whether we still have gay scares, even in this day and age.

Also, because I suspect someone will notice, on piracy: the DeCSS algorithm was developed as a way of playing protected DVDs on a computer without using proprietary software. I believe it was for a Linux environment, for which such official things had not been released, nor were likely to. Thus, while the reverse-engineering of the protocol was illegal, likely, under a license that one supposedly implicitly agreed to by buying the media format, it was also a technical achievement. Perhaps much like the Linux kernel itself. DeCSS also made it possible for movie ripping and other such wonderfully piratical acts. Ah, well. In this case, sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.
silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
Mrrrrrg. Absentmindedness flared up again. This time, I got so pissed off about it that I've started setting alarms to appear and asked whether I could get a cheap PDA. Something needs to chirp at me, I guess, to remind me of anything happening. I even wrote this one down and still forgot it. Hopefully, they're not too mand, and I'll be able to make it up on Monday. It wasn't anything significant or important, but it shakes my confidence in being trusted with anything that actually is. I think I'd forget my own birthday, if it wasn't on an important day for this country.

Tomorrow is an international day of Peace. Would that it were truly so, and that the day after was another day of peace, and so forth, and so forth.

Are the first Turing-capable entities going to have the majority of their data from call centers? It's certainly a way to mine things and extract conversational data. Maybe next year, the programs will be that much bigger and better.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll make better decisions than Fox. Fox has decided to lauch FoxFaith, a film unit devoted to making up to 12 films a year aimed for the religious crowd. So we might see a Mini-Passion every month. Doesn't that just make your heart sing?

The Attorney general is asking Congress to require ISPs to save records. "Wont they think of the children?" is his justification.

Speaking of stupid things, the U.S. military is delaying the purchase of a working RPG point-defense system because they'd rather have their contractor develop one. They are playing with lives here, and the dicking around is really a bad thing. Body counts down is good, and this tech might actually help the soliders make some progress towards the objectives of having a peace to keep.

Things you may have never seen on the news or the Internet news - Project Censored's list of the 25 most censored news stories for this year. Headlines like "Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran" that you might not have seen in the NYT. Again, I'm not sure whether these are just overlooked or actively squished, but they may be interesting to peruse. #24 says that Cheney's Haliburton stock went up more than 3000% the last year. Public trust, yes, but are the pols manipulating things so that when they get out, they'll have made significant money?

Anyway, that's all there is from me tonight. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel able to take the day on again.

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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