Okay. Wrong question.
Holidays are a good excuse to donate to charities and causes, which help us affluent white folk feel like we’re zomgactivists while sipping overpriced lattes and complaining about politics / poor service / lousy sex / etc. The internet makes this easy (both the donating and the complaining) and provides a plethora of wells in which to vomit disposable income. I think of it as part of the new years hangover recovery process.
Absent other ideas, it’s hard to feel bad about supporting wikipedia / wikimedia foundation, IMO.
This is about as preachy / disgustingly self-righteous as I get for the year (not counting spaces v. tabs debates … I wonder if there’s some way I can donate toward making everyone use tabs for indentation), so feel free to condemn / ignore.
I don’t know who else has seen this, but Canabalt is the most entertaining Flash game since Nanaca Crash. With which it has basically nothing else in common.
Seriously, though, kills hours, tons of fun, very simple. And turn the volume up.
Microsoft comes out with official OS-tan for Win7. She’s got a wallpaper and sound set in Win7 Ultimate (though I’d assume only in Japan) and she’s voiced by Nana Mizuki.
This (Cable Surfing Commando) might be an ongoing series, as I continue to explore cable TV (we only had poor people TV when I was a kid). More likely I’ll forget about this idea within the week…
Since rationalism already means rationalism, what do you call a prejudiced attitude toward the rational?
Read the rest of this entry »
If this review is even close to accurate, the Palm Pre is the smartphone I’ve always wanted.
And lo and behold, my contract is up in July. Win.
A new flavor of wargames. The glorious cyberpunk future comes ever closer.
(Via Balloon Juice.)
This is a slightly refined version of a tangent-rant from my anime blog.
Read the rest of this entry »
So, Congress decided it needed a YouTube channel so that we could all watch the Congress going about their business.
Or, so we could watch Nancy Pelosi’s Cats
If you only have time for a brief viewing of that video, the fun part starts about 30 seconds in…
All I want to know is who sold this shit to Corporate.
More under spoilers cuts.
Read the rest of this entry »
A while ago Warren Ellis (Internet Jesus) wrote a nice post on his website basically about how much he loves his daughter who is a teenager now. The scary internet took this and did what the scary internet does.
Here is Ellis’s response.
Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the new internet, featuring Barack Obama.
You’re Welcome.
Some of you may remember that I had a plan at one point to make a decentralized bittorrent client which would mesh features of Bittorrent with features of DC++.
Well, so did a bunch of researchers from Harvard and some European universities. They wrote tribler, which sounds like it has essentially the same goals and methods.
I might have to give this guy a try.
EDIT: Changed tribbler to tribler. This makes it much less likely they were making a reference to Tribbles, which is sad.
In lighter news, the U.S. DOD has put out a contract for “develop[ment of] a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject … Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.”
In other words, do you remember how back in the old south when a slave escaped, the Sheriff and his team of bloodhounds would comb the woods for them?
The ACLU has been sounding the alarm about a unique kind of constitutional erosion recently. It’s been the opinion of the US supreme court for a long time now (since the 17-somethings) that the 4th amendment does not apply at the US border, because the US has the right to know what’s coming into and going out of the country.
The interesting news is that the Border Patrol has begun redefining the US border to be a 100-mile strip of land from the border inland. Thus, the Border Patrol has taken it upon themselves to, for example, set up checkpoints on highways in California, where people who have been nowhere near the US border are being stopped and asked about their citizenship.
Technically, according to the ACLU, the Patrol is not allowed to use these as legal enforcement stops, for example to look for drugs in your car without a warrant. The actuality of whether they are doing this or not is much less clear.
There’s some pretty scary statistics involved here, such as the claim that “…fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone” and “Nine of the top 10 largest metropolitan areas as determined by the 2000 census, fall within the Constitution-free Zone. (The only exception is #9, Dallas-Fort Worth. )”
While i think that the ACLU may be a bit alarmist here, there’s no question that this is some funny business.
I’m back to obsessively counting electoral votes.
My current prediction:
Obama: 271
McCain: 267
but with a lot of marginal McCain victories
Do you guys remember the “installing linux on a dead badger” article?
Here’s one on a casemod to turn a dead beaver into a PC.
