US urges scientists to block out sun - instead of reducing CO2 emissions, simply reflect part of the sunlight. Another stupid idea of the Christianist mullahs in the US of Absurdity ...
Linkblog - 11.1.2007 - 31.1.2007
Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before - fascinating!
Yes - in 10 years we may have no bananas - it is a freakish, doped-up, mutant clone which hasn't had sex for thousands of years.
Off to the surveillance state - a chronology.
'Hobbit' human 'is a new species' - Pendulum swinging the other way this time. Well, there will probably be a lot of discussion, but my money is on "own species" and not on "sick individuals of known species".
Legal wrangle puts India's generic drugs at risk - Novartis is trying to influence patent legislation in India to prevent the production of generics. This would affect millions of Africans suffering from AIDS, as the costs for the necessary medicines would suddenly skyrocket. Profit before human lives, that is the motto of the pharmaceutical industry.
Microsoft copies BlueJ, admits it, then patents it - rip off ala Microsoft. That's probably what they call development work and why they think only Microsoft is capable of innovating - funny twisted vocabulary at Microsoft ...
Life Is Complicated - Tim Bray on the OOXML vs. ODF discussion regarding Wikipedia. And he draws a nice comparison to the XML Working Group and how Microsoft reacted to him: "Netscape hired me to represent their interests, and when I announced this, controversy ensued. Which is a nice way of saying that Microsoft went berserk; tried unsuccessfully to get me fired as co-editor, and then launched a vicious, deeply personal extended attack in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there.".
Minimum wages in Europe - except of course in our country, because it's supposed to ruin the economy. And the union's demand is even below many European neighbors.
Music industry: Government wants to turn copyright into a "toothless tiger" - the stupid wailing of the music industry - especially their stupid babble that they represent the interests of the artists, these lying crooks - really gets on my nerves. And has led to the fact that I now only shrug at the possible closure of iTMS (as possibly upcoming in Norway). Thanks to Jamendo.com, Magnatune.com, Garageband.com and other netlabels ...
Willard Wigan :: Micro Sculptor - wow. just that.
Exotic deep-sea shark caught in the net - interesting, this is a living fossil that I didn't know about yet.
frozen waves - wow!
Interview with muslix64, Developer of BackupHDDVD - "With the HD-DVD, I wasn't able to play my movie on my non-HDCP HD monitor. Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad... After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-ray too. "
"Münstersche Zeitung": Publisher puts entire editorial staff on furlough - yes yes, the Münster local press. The MZ was at least somewhat usable - at least compared to the Westfälische Zeitung, which only passed on DPA reports and whose local editorial staff was simply terrible. And now the MZ has simply fired the entire local editorial staff, because you don't need such things. The difficult market situation? Well, that was simply the stupidity of management. As everywhere in the field. The arrogance and stupidity of the store is one reason why I never subscribed to the paper - the "better than Westfälische Nachrichten" is just a relative quality statement ...
Reddit.com User Agreement - "You agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication (including your identity and information about you) in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes". Web 2.0, my ass.
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast - why grep and awk match faster than Perl or Python.
The Text Editor sam - interesting historical document. Some ideas are still brilliant today - the integration of text commands and mouse operation is much better than in many other editors.
The truth about working in the IT industry - just like a prostitute.
Literature and Latte - Scrivener - interesting concept for an editor specifically designed for authors. Convincing features and nice interface.
Pando (tree) - Aspens form colonies through offshoots. Actually logical, many plants do this, only I was not aware of this in trees so far. The collection of aspens under the name Pango is currently considered the largest living organism (and the oldest living organism with over 80,000 years), although it is suspected that there are larger and older colonies.
Bundestag: Eavesdropping devices in MP's office? - only concerns an MP from the Left Party. Will probably fizzle out or be covered up ...
macfuse has received a small enhancement. There are simple installers and two ready-to-use filesystems for easy use: sshfs (with a small connector GUI and command-line tool) and SpotlightFS. The latter offers trivial simple ad-hoc Spotlight searches even on the command line. Genius!
.NET Languages - Programming languages that work under .NET (if it has to be .NET, you can at least take a human-worthy programming language)
News -Anfängerfehler in Mac OS X - I think it's good that the Month-of-Apple-Bugs is running and Mac OS X is being looked at more closely. Because a company that develops its software outside of external control will always make mistakes like the one linked.
Beef roast and rolls - to warn. Aaargh.
identicon - small graphics, generated from recurring identification data. For example, IP addresses. Makes optical recognition of recurring identities much easier, especially with very similar identifications (e.g., something like this would be great for GPG fingerprints or SL UUIDs).
M is for monkey - Mono on Maemo. That would be exciting - with the efforts to also support the Mono GUI classes on Linux and the connection with libSL, you could possibly get Sleek (Text-Mode SL client) to run. And thus have a mobile chat solution for SL.
History since 1945 - brilliantly summarized by Spreeblick.
Pointless Sites - Useless Sites - when you want to waste some time again.
Polyglot - yet another person with too much time. A Hello World program that can be translated into various languages without modification (and also represents a directly executable .com version). Freaks. All freaks.
Tupper's Self-Referential Formula - ok, someone definitely had way too much time.
User data to be released for danger prevention - sounds nice, doesn't it? But in reality, it means that every police officer can now more or less arbitrarily access customer data from providers. Because prevention and danger prevention - there's no need for any control. Then it goes quickly like stepping on cats ...
Python for Maemo - playing with Python 2.5 on the Nokia Tablet.
Take The AQ Test - Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults.
Entity Crisis: Unity3D Evaluated. Wow. - I'll definitely have to check this out soon.
General suspicion against all credit card holders - Udo Vetter on the credit card dragnet. He complains. Good.
The Jaquet-Droz androids, three extraordinary automatons - historical robots from the 18th century. Yes, spring mechanisms. Something like this can still fascinate me.
XO Wave - I'm actually quite satisfied with Amadeus II, but maybe I should still check out this sound editor.
2006 Darwin Awards - the Brazilian with the grenade would have been my favorite.
macfuse - FUSE for OS X. Useful - sshfs or gmailfs, anyone?
More pigs than people in Lower Saxony - some headlines just have to be left as they are.
Robert A. Wilson passed away - read the Illuminatus trilogy again. Fnord.
soviet roadside bus-stops - fascinating images.
Valleywag - far right.