February 2012
4 posts
1 tag
Crackpot Scorecard →
3 tags
You Can Make SOPA and PIPA Irrelevant (But You're... →
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McKinsey: Working out of debt →
Good article on how reduction in household debt is affecting economic recovery, including comparisons of US, UK and European progress.
In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, all of which experienced significant credit bubbles before the financial crisis of 2008, households have been reducing their debt at different speeds. The most significant reduction occurred among US...
"Humans May be One of the Early Advanced Species... →
Science fiction is full of stories of old races - the Ancients, Progenitors,
First Ones and the like. Well, the scary yet inspirational thought is that we may be one of them - which helps explain the Fermi Paradox.
January 2012
7 posts
Forbes throws flag on WSJ accuracy citing... →
Northeast Carbon Trading System a Startling... →
Study finds that RGGI has saved customers money and created jobs while Northeast carbon emissions cut 30%.
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Squeezed between Windows Mobile rock and iPhone 4s... →
Android loses share for the first time as some leading handset vendors announce bad quarters.
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GODIN: Average Worker Going Straight To The Bottom... →
Godin says:
We’re in a “a forever recession” because it’s the end of the industrial age, which also means the end of the average worker.
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Key Takeaways From Apple's Monster Earnings →
The post-PC era in numbers: iPads outsell all desktop PCs; Apple profit > Google revenue; Apple world’s largest consumer of semiconductors.
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Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks... →
A well-considered analysis of the risks of SOPA.
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Global unrest: how the revolution went viral (via... →
Best article I’ve seen on the historical roots of hactivisim.
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Signs of the Apocalypse: The 27 worst nativity... →
“The annual, growing list” of really amazingly bad nativity sets. The full range from simply tacky to the bizarre.
The edible ones will give you theological fits - what would Deuteronomy or Leviticus have to say about a nativity scene made of bacon and sausage?
November 2011
3 posts
2 tags
The SPAM Spring
The 419 scams in my SPAM-box have taken a darker turn:
———
From Ashraf El Baroudi .
C/o Aisha Gaddafi.
My client is presently on the run but may be subsequently arrested and tried in the world court in Hague ,if she is tortured in any way she will have to reveal where diamond, gold and cash deposit’s are located and everything will be turned to present government’s...
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Clarifications on Flash Player for Mobile... →
Mike Chambers talks about Adobe’s motivations in dropping Flash for Mobile in favor of HTML5. It starts off as a rationale but turns into a valedictory for Flash:
“A lot of the things that you have done via Flash in the past, will increasingly be done via HTML5 and CSS3 directly in the browser.”
Adobe is taking a lot of heat for this, but backing the HTML5 standard is the...
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You can't turn back the clock →
Brilliant episode in Bill Amend’s Foxtrot today. Amazing how much emotion Amend packed into three lines.
October 2011
3 posts
1 tag
“The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is...”
– The Book of the Way, verse 50.
In memoriam Steve Jobs.
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Chinese rocket successfully launches mini-space... →
China takes another step towards a permanent presence in space.
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Fermilab's Tevatron shut down today →
The Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab in Chicago shut down today, ending experimental particle physics in the United States.
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
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Masochist me? An Ars writer's iPad-only workday →
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Astronomers Discover 16 Super-Earths →
European astronomers announced Monday they’ve discovered 50 new planets, including 16 so-called Super-Earths, one of which is potentially habitable. The existence of the exoplanets outside our solar system was reported at the Extreme Solar Systems meeting at Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Par…
4 tags
The end of Android as an open system? →
Electronista is reporting that Eric Schnidt has said that the Motorola Mobile acquisition was not just for patents, but also to give Google an organic ability to make its own Android phones. As you can imagine, this suggests the brief era of Android as an open and vendor-neutral phone platform is going to end; Moto Mobile would have a clear inside track over other Android licensees like Samsung...
July 2011
2 posts
2 tags
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Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the Email Charter! →
Everyone is drowning in email. A lot of this is the result of people not using the medium effectively. The email charter has the most concise definition of the problem I’ve seen, along with a set of very actionable rules for fixing it:
The relentless growth of in-box overload is being driven by a surprising fact: The average time taken to respond to an email is greater, in aggregate, than...
June 2011
1 post
4 tags
May 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Space Junk Threat to Triple by 2030 →
An article in space.com presents a scary picture of the future of near-earth orbit satellites:
The buildup of debris is not a naturally reversible process. If we are to clean up space, it will certainly be complex and very expensive. If we continue, as we have, to use these very popular orbits in near-Earth space, the density of debris and collision events will surely increase.
The good news...
April 2011
1 post
5 tags
March 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Alex on professionalization →
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IMF Rankings of Developed Countries →
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Obama’s 2012 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent -... →
February 2011
1 post
2 tags
XKCD explains why we can't have Flying Cars →
January 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Evidence points to decline of sea level →
Not quite sure what to make of this evidence of sea level decline. It would be good to see some alternate data sources.
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So you got an iPad? Some recommendations:
A number of my lucky friends got an iPad under the tree (whatever denomination your tree is.) First, congratulations, and I hope you find it valuable. For me, I’ve found my iPad has significantly changed the way I work: I rarely take my work laptop home anymore, and I have now made several short laptop-free work trips. So, it seemed useful to pass along some experiences and tips - the world...
December 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Cascading failure of old clients caused Skype... →
As many suspected, the extensive Skype outage last week was a result of instability in Skype’s P2P network. What’s a bit of a surprise is that the instability was caused by a cascading failure resulting from the large number of out-of-rev Windows clients on the network, many of which were running as super nodes in the P2P network. From the Skype analysis:
“On Wednesday,...
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Many iPhone App Downloads Jumped 2-3X On Christmas →
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SORCE's Solar Spectral Surprise →
NASA’s Solar Irradiance Monitor is showing the Sun is having slow recovery from the last solar cycle, with output shifting towards the cooler end of the spectrum:
Between 2004 and 2007, the Solar Irradiance Monitor (blue line) measured a decrease in ultraviolet radiation (less than 400 nanometers) that was a factor of four to six larger than expected (black line). In the visible part of...
November 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Cable subscribers flee, but is Internet to blame?... →
We knew this was coming:3Q subscriber losses were 275,000 from Comcast and 155,000 from Time-Warner. The cable companies say they aren’t sure whether it is cord-cutters moving to the internet, or people who took low-end subscriptions to replace analog TV after the shutdown. However, correlate this with netflix becoming the dominant source of Internet traffic on weekends, and you get a...
October 2010
3 posts
3 tags
How Long is "Goodnight Moon"' or, A Cautionary... →
delbius: Dir. of Trust and Safety, or: How I... →
delbius:
When I started working at Twitter in October of 2008, my assigned territory resembled nothing so much as the proverbial Wild West of the olden days — lawless, sprawling, and full of tumbleweeds. As the only person at Twitter solely focused on the problem of spam, I had free rein to develop…
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Tablets hurt PC sales →
Gartner Data shows tablets are causing a slowing of net book sales: “Part of the challenge for the sector is tablet devices, such as the Apple iPad. Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said most of the PC weakness in the third quarter came from low-end notebooks and netbooks — categories believed to be most vulnerable to consumers switching to tablet devices.”
This is the difference...
September 2010
1 post
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Tornado made of fire (via Bad Astronomy) →
August 2010
3 posts
1 tag
A bank run in reverse →
“The United States is flush with low-interest cash from the Giant Pool of Money. Yes, that cash will one day have to be repaid, but right now what it means is the government has the opportunity to invest it in ways that will help to generate future revenue, which is to say in ways that create jobs. And if it does so, if the government invests this money in job-creation, then the future...
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July 2010
2 posts
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Brands under assault from Digital Natives →
It’s probably an over-generalization to think of an entire generation this way, but this is still pretty intreating news from the standpoint of brand identity and brand management:
“According to the study, brands face a serious challenge from the Digital Native. Not only does he gets a kick out of triumphing over the brand, but he is not deceived by the marketing pitch. To make...
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Dell’s Trouble Kicking the Intel Habit - Bits Blog... →
Wow:
“At the heart of the S.E.C.’s complaint against Dell was the claim that Dell hid its reliance on rebates from Intel from investors. Intel rewarded Dell for not using A.M.D. chips, and Dell became more and more dependent on payments from Intel to meet quarterly financial targets, according to the S.E.C.”
June 2010
1 post
1 tag
In Suit Over Faulty Computers, Window to Dell’s... →
Unsealed court testimony shows impact of PC commodity pricing on Dell’s quality and support.