Jake0748 — your wife must visit this site.

The main thing that sucks about the new license is that there doesn't appear to actually be any open content anymore — just pointers into the proprietary core books. So we can't have this anymore.

Sounds like someone at the Pentagon watched the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

Huh. I guess the only thing I'm surprised by is that the figure is so low.

Hyperbole, much?

The third paragraph — and also the third sentence, so it's not like this is buried — reads:

Most of the meat is to be used for pet food or otherwise disposed of, but up to 25 per cent of it will be made available to Canadian food banks.

So, assuming that 150,000 pigs yield more than 4 oz. of ham, it's pretty safe to say that this will indeed yield a single oz. of it. Probably more.

I mean, I even agree with the anti-pig-farming / anti-extra-slaughter point of view, but, c'mon.

Err, yeah, and thank goodness. Because otherwise, it wouldn't be a tax deduction, it'd be we bought it for you. And we've already got this three trillion dollar war to pay for, so....

Bugs: even if one grants that software patents might be sometimes valid, the sheer timeframe involved is a problem. A good engine design will be useful for a long time. A new drug requires so much testing and development that there's only few years in which to reap patent-protected profits. But look at the mp3 patents: even though better formats have already been developed and mp3 is basically obsolete, the patents are still good till, what, 2015? The patent protects them for longer than their entire useful life. That's clearly broken.

Teresa -- if you're a restaurant employee, you don't need one of these, because you can just copy numbers directly the old-fashioned way.

Ditto to #12.

But also, they make good stuff. My daughters have the wooden peg people versions of these sets (got recently, but maybe no longer in production 'cause I can't find them on the web site), which have a really simple-but-ingenious angled cut which makes it so you give their legs a half-twist and they're sitting. Hard to describe, but really cool design.

Hmmm. The two "all planets..." marks against Solaris (1972) are dead wrong. I give this chart a C-.

Wait, hold on.

People Prefer Non-Boring Pictures; Film at 11!

At our former apartment, I had every light on X10 low-cost home automation switches (high-quality Smarthome-brand, not the evil pop-under ad people), and by the front door, we had exactly what Scott Adams is talking about: the "All Off" switch. It really was very handy and one of the things I miss about our new place, which is enough bigger that it's going to need a more high-end (and therefore much, much more expensive) automation system.

You're so not getting that through the airport screeners. It's exactly the kind of non-dangerous but threatening-looking implement that they're great at "catching".

I don't think you'd be running Photoshop on this thing, or any other big proprietary apps for that matter. What else is there that keeps you to Windows?

Nice -- which category does the previous story go into?

I gotta defend Boston a a little bit. Who says that something that blinks and looks like a cartoon logo isn't actually a bomb? Who knows what wacko sense of humor someone planning to bomb a bridge might have? Even if you're 99% sure it's just a prank, there's a lot of lives to risk for that one percent.

What was stupid was persisting in calling it a "hoax device" after it was found out to be no such thing.

I don't get it -- what's naughty about "Best Tux"?

It all comes down to: does the treadmill go at a fixed speed inverse to the plane's normal land speed (resulting the situation described in #18), or do they accelerate to compensate? In the latter case, you get a feedback loop which jumps to infinity and then depending on how theoretical our setup is, maybe the plane catches fire or maybe it takes off.

Unfortunately, the MBTA (which is what runs by/through Harvard) is rather often in the allegedly "extreme" case where the interval between buses is longer than an hour, even when the schedule says twenty minutes.

Sounds to me like their model is too simple to be helpful in the real world, even assuming a value of "Cambridge" for "real world".

Wow, it's like a flashback to 1999 with the "open source doesn't work" comments. Clearly, one half-failed project proves it.

I suspect "thermal electric technology" means "a fan".

How can I get someone to buy my cd if most people think paying for it is a silly idea and they can rip it instantaneously from friends?

Those people were going to do that anyway -- and 90% of them would never have heard of you otherwise. Now you have the chance to make new fans who might go to one of your shows or buy a CD to show support.

Sonicare is nice, but the brushhead-brush interface is so much more complicated the thing becomes a nightmare to clean. If you don't want nasty gunk building up, you have to spend more time cleaning your toothbrush than cleaning your teeth with it. No thanks.

Yeah, the Eye-Fi Card is unfortunately not the answer. It's basically a (questionably-useful) replacement for USB cables, not the magical device we're looking for.

Also, must make Futurama reference:

Leela: Didn’t you have ads in the 21st century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree.

This seems obnoxious and all, but not having experienced it, I have to guess that the whole thing is overblown. (That is, hype, of the all-publicity-is-good-publicity variety.)

That's because I've heard these things in museums, and it's not really all that. The sound isn't really "contained within your cranium". It's just only easy to hear if you're within the target area and fades out really quickly if you move away.

The other "Stephen Bury" book, The Cobweb, is also well worth reading. And it has a nice, satisfying ending.

The quotes belong around "weather" because airlines will take care of you in the event of delays due to anything other than those due to weather. Since if you trace back in the right way, any event in the world can be said to have been affected by weather, airlines give *that* as the reason not because they're oversimplifying but to dodge responsibility.

As Patrick Smith also notes, the real problem is that airlines are cramming more small commuter flights into increasingly tight schedules and into limited space at airports. No wonder that when they do that, "weather" suddenly keeps getting in the way.

Hmmm. For some reason, pressing down doesn't get me anywhere. I can move up and down a little bit, but I run against a solid line -- no "maze" or anything.

Holy crap that's some bad science reporting. A quote from the article:

"I did not mean to imply causality - namely that our measurement itself reduces the lifetime of the universe [...]" — Professor Lawrence Krauss

Followed immediately by:

This is not the only damage to the heavens that astronomers may have caused.

Sheesh.

Tipping in restaurants is a bizarre holdover. ("Mwwhaha! I am the rich patron and you are the underclass! Dance for my money! Dance!") Why can't we just have the waitstaff paid a decent amount to start, with good service as a basic expectation instead of something to bribe for?

Note that this product is sold with various different branding and packaging for prices ranging from $20 to $50.

Gracenote is the company that took the previously open source cddb program and all of the user-contributed data and said "Surprise! You thought this was an open project, but really it's our way to get rich off the dot-com boom, suckers. Thanks for all the data -- now, you get to pay us licensing fees to use it!"

I suggest everyone use FreeDB, http://www.freedb.org/ instead.

Mac -- if everyone involved refused to cooperate, fascism wouldn't work, which is surely the best outcome for everyone.

And Delta -- reasonably enough -- wants the routing number of a package, not a flight number.

Yeah, seems unlikely to catch terrorists, but really likely to catch me looking for an open power outlet next to the soda machines so I can recharge my laptop when stuck in the airport for hours.

An important factor here is Facebook's really poor interface for browsing applications. You can search (ineffectively), or you can browse in vague categories with hundreds (or over 2000 in "Just for Fun") of entries each. When browsing, you can sort by Recently Popular (the default), Most Activity, Most Active Users, or Newest.

As with search engine results, I bet 90% of people never go off the first page of any category, and all but Newest of the sort orders reward being already popular.

Heh. He said "mome raths".

As I understand it (heard on NPR, maybe? [citation needed]...) Richard Scarry chose to make these changes himself, not due to pressure from the publisher or editor.

Many of the changes are simply updates -- milkman and cowboy are replaced by taxi driver and scientist. Some of the gender balance changes seem good (father is now helping in the kitchen) while others (need women? add ribbons!) are kind of silly. And some things are just altered for no apparent reason.

We have both versions, which is particularly cool because it'll be interesting to talk with my daughters about the differences when they get a few years older.

I will probably also eventually let them see the "Han shoots second" version of Star Wars.

Eventually.

The Colour of Magic and to a lesser degree The Light Fantastic have a different feel than the later books. There's a great deal of world-building-on-display -- slower than sound light speed, the mystical eighth color, and even the way trolls act. This stuff provides background in the later books, but except where it's important for a particular story is mostly left precisely there -- in the background. The more recent Ankh-Morpork books and especially the Tiffany Aching young adult series (kicks Harry Potter's butt, by the way) take place in a world which feels much more like our own than not.

"They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This online cat-and-mouse game means Dark Web must be constantly vigilant against these and other counter-measures deployed by the terrorists.

Someone's been reading too much William Gibson. This thrilling black ice / warring code cyber-talk must bring in the funding, but clearly either 1) it's a bunch of impressive sounding bunk or 2) they know so little of what they're doing that they really are at some sort of risk.

I kind of suspect option #1, but I guess I shouldn't underestimate the possibility of incompetence.

The tabletop model will also be useful for gom jabbar tests of humanity.

Don't underestimate the average child. Check out the Hole in the Wall Project for a small but encouraging precedent.

To the first commenter: trademarking "Mark Twain" seems perfectly reasonable, as of course it wasn't actually his name but rather something he used as, well, a trademark.

The keyboard looks to be only slightly smaller than that of my Vaio U101, which has a lot more keys. And I'm touch-typing on that right now.

It's a real disappointment that they opted to cram in the 12 megapixels. The previous models, the F20, F30, and F31fd (which all share the same basic internals) are already legendary as the best low-light point and shoot digital cameras ever. (In fact, they're in a class by themselves -- there's seriously no competition that comes close.) Unfortunately, the F50 gives that up. It's still good, but no longer great.

The "wisdom" is that they have no choice but to chase the higher megapixel numbers or else fail in the market, and maybe that's true, but it's a shame.

Seriously, the 95% claim seems highly suspect. If anyone could do anything close to that, Google search results would be approximately eight million times better than they are.

We stayed at a hotel in Manhattan a few years ago (can't remember which; one of the big mid-range chains), and the second morning we woke up to a very similar thing in our bathroom -- except even larger than that.

The bathroom ceiling was apparently covered with a white rubber sheeting, and it had filled with the output of an overflowing shower (um, I hope) on the floor above. We called maintenance right away, and they acted as if it was the most normal thing in the world, which I suppose it was to them.

Why not let the market settle it? I know I would pay extra for a neutral ISP. -- Anonymous

How's that gonna work, exactly? How much is your "neutral" ISP going to pay in order for your traffic to be treated neutrally by the bigger providers?