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A whole ball could actually hold at least a few thousand digits if not more. In a lot of places in China (usually near tourist attractions), there are artists who write your requested messages on rice. After some googling, I could only find these two pretty bad photos. The first seems to be not as good as most I've actually seen, the second just shows an artist working. Another one can give one a real idea of what the masters can do: 42 US presidents on rice.

The snoop part is nothing to laugh about if it's in the hands of say a government who wants to know who attended a rally

This is Singapore we're talking about. :-) We've got more cameras than any city other than London. We also outlaw outdoor political demonstrations with more than four people involved, and yup, we aren't afraid to clamp down.

So yeah. Civil society has a lot more to fear in Singapore than compromised ez-link cards. Big Brother is already here, and advertises himself quite freely.

some enterprising individual should be able to bump into you in line, clone your card, and be riding the train on your dime.

Well, it wouldn't be under my dime, seeing as it is that the EZ-link card is not linked to anything else. You "top-up" value into a card upfront; when you pay for a ride, the price of that ride gets debitted from your card.

But yeah. If all that you want to do is to beat fares in the MRT, you don't have to clone cards or anything. There is a very, very low-tech, but highly successful, way of doing it. ;-)

Sometimes it's as easy as walking by to get all the info you need.

http://flickr.com/photos/reboof/259086845/

I've been spending the last year photographing Kabukicho at night and I must say I am very impressed with the street shots.
I could tell exactly where the second and third were shot from. The detail is very good and most importantly, the scale is right.

Take a look at this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimoconnell/173639850 /in/set-72157594278554257/
or the whole set, if you're interested: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimoconnell/sets/7215 7594278554257/

I may have to buy my first console and game to check this out.

I've been spending the last year photographing Kabukicho at night and I must say I am very impressed with the street shots.
I could tell exactly where the second and third were shot from. The detail is very good and most importantly, the scale is right.

Take a look at this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimoconnell/173639850 /in/set-72157594278554257/
or the whole set, if you're interested: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimoconnell/sets/7215 7594278554257/

I may have to buy my first console and game to check this out.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=258726098& size=o&context=photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77014820@N00/25883676 2/

It all seems pretty cool when they end up on a spit, but when they start rampaging through town, it seems a bit less cool (unless you are watching on TV from thousands of miles away).

Here's some more information showing what a good job they've been doing keeping us safe from terrorists:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meta404/252520628/

"However the small packaging for the nano is a good first step."

This is a not even a first, they already did this months ago for iLife '06 (New Apple software shipping in mini packaging), the MacBook Pro (pict), Mac OS X Tiger (Apple to update Mac OS X Tiger retail offerings), etc. This is not to say Apple is eco-friendly, I don't know, but the new boxes have been around for some time now.

I germinated some alfalfa this year - just because - and there must have been some(a) dodder seed(s) in with it. I thought it was just part of the alfalfa at first until it went after some basil growing on my window sill.
Here's a pic and here it is flowering
Good stuff.

I germinated some alfalfa this year - just because - and there must have been some(a) dodder seed(s) in with it. I thought it was just part of the alfalfa at first until it went after some basil growing on my window sill.
Here's a pic and here it is flowering
Good stuff.

In another 2 to 4 years SCOTUS will *probably* overturn this version of the bill, should it become law, just like they did in the Hamdi case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaser_Hamdi

I only say "probably" because now we have Alito and Roberts instead of O'Connor and Rehnquist, with Alito being decidedly more conservative than the swing vote that was O'Connor.

Then, if this happens, we'll be right back where we started, with two changes:
1) Bush will no longer be in office.
2) Likely, the House or Senate will be in Democrat majority.

The fact that the House, Senate and Presidency have been in fairly consistent GOP control since 2000 has made for some pretty lopsided legislation and judicial appointments, with this bill being just one more sorry example.

Hopefully this will change on Nov 7th, but I'm not holding my breath; it is said that in life we should *Hope* for the best and *Prepare* for the worst. It's just too bad we've been doing so much preparing for 6 years straight: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianlloyd/42959310/
http://hnn.us/articles/5019.html

Those who are bit curious. You can find photos of a Fios installation on Flickr Also, They are upgrading select areas in my city to Verizon Fios. Mostly the newer neighborhoods that are on the beach.

Me too. So I started a group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ansi/

You might find my little graph amusing, in a sick kind of way.

I only drink Fat Free Water. I expect my electricity to be the same. It should be free range electricity and not contain any animal products or extracts!

People and their wimpy hypoallergenic cats. Me, I have giant (12-17 lb) hair and dander machines. Give them a good brushing and you've got enough hair to knit another big cat.

These 2 are super frendly and leave you covered with a thick layer of hair after a few minutes of petting. If you are allergic these pictures could make you sneeze.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webweasel/6022722/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webweasel/127260496/

People and their wimpy hypoallergenic cats. Me, I have giant (12-17 lb) hair and dander machines. Give them a good brushing and you've got enough hair to knit another big cat.

These 2 are super frendly and leave you covered with a thick layer of hair after a few minutes of petting. If you are allergic these pictures could make you sneeze.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webweasel/6022722/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webweasel/127260496/

"selective breading"?

Maybe it has something to do with catbread?

(more, originals)

I, for one, welcome our new exploding laptop overlords...

In fact, the story behind lutefisk is less impressive.

Most likely, there was a fire. And then lye was created by combination of ashes+water, and the lye damaged the fish. But throwing away the fish was not an option, so the hungry folks did their best with what they had - and hey presto! Lutefisk was born..

But yeah, only crazy people eat lutefisk. And crazy people are not to be messed with!

And while we're at nasty Norwegian food, check this out! Yep - baked sheep's head.

This might help (grabbed from article before it got slashdotted):

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

And the really scary one mentioned earlier.

This might help (grabbed from article before it got slashdotted):

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

And the really scary one mentioned earlier.

This might help (grabbed from article before it got slashdotted):

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

And the really scary one mentioned earlier.

This might help (grabbed from article before it got slashdotted):

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

And the really scary one mentioned earlier.

http://static.flickr.com/29/44753311_a9270c41ac_o. jpg

The Pope is "a well-known Catholic".

The point is, if you're going to use the road, be it in a car or on a bicycle, obey the rules and use common courtesy. If you're unable to pedal hard enough to go the speed limit, get off the road and use the designated bike paths or use the side of the road, not the middle of the lane. And don't get pissed when I honk my horn at you because you're holding up traffic by being an idiot.

I completely agree with your first sentence, and disagree vigorously with the rest. Slower traffic, be it car or bike, should absolutely yield to let faster traffic pass. But cyclists are still traffic, and in places without good bike paths, the safest place to ride is often in the middle of the lane. Speed comes second to safety. At least in California, it's the law, and you see signs like this to remind impatient drivers of that.

Wow, what a stupid thing for advertisers to do.

If you want to target the DVR audience, do what the "Daily Show" did - Rob Cordry had a hilarious skit that included a list of all the people he hates. The list zoomed by so fast that only DVR-capable viewers could watch it. The list of people he hates included an email address: listpausers@yahoo.com - so we emailed it, and got this in reply.

Totally awesome.

In May of this year, GE's "ecomagination" campaign had a very clever TV ad that included a spoof of the commercial itself. The neat thing was that this segment, embedded into the ad itself, was compressed into 1 second of footage that could only be watched by stepping through it frame-by-frame via a DVR.

The "mini-ad" began with a red stage curtain drawn back to reveal the title, "1 Second Theatre", and then featured a little slideshow featuring short (and very funny) biographies of all the animal characters from the "main ad".

Apparently, the show "Lost" has done similar things to augment the show in some ways, but I haven't confirmed this.

These examples are hilarious, innovative, and totally directed to DVR users. It made us pause and watch the content, even when we were used to zooming past the usual mindless, mass-targeted crap that television ads favoured back in the 20th century.

The whole "stretching into a 30 second slide" is totally regressive and proves the advertiser is totally clued out of this fangle "new media" thang. Oh, and will piss off more modern television viewers, not because it's a pain to hit the 30-second advance, but because it's an obvious and badly implemented ploy to get me to see more mindless, mass-targeted crap.

/K

If you were a good geek and went to dragoncon this year, you would of had the chance to meet Kari. And hear about the Myth (not shown on TV) that involved her underwear.

Photos ;)

It just doesn't fit in the case anymore... http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/169885320/ (mouse-over image)

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

Well check that out. I found it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/52819048@N00/16320528 0/ (Not Safe For Work! Cartoon pron! Sorta.)

Thanks for the info!

It would even be easy to skew the results simply by dumping a load of pictures up on the site from a certain brand and make it appear that it is more popular than it is.

Flickr gets over a million new pictures uploaded on a good day. I really don't think skewing the results is that easy (assuming the 'periodical' sampling is not predictable).

I also think that people who spend a fortune on a digital camera are the pros buying a D2Xs or a 1D Mark II, and those are much less likely to upload pictures. Low-end DSLRs definitely count as "casual" in my book.

After a clean reboot, I get:

"The iTunes application could not be opened. There is not enough memory available."

screenshot here: http://flickr.com/photos/ghort/241816410/

It's a 1GB MBP. My itunes library file is 60MB.

A quick response/overview from someone who is actually working with more or less all of these technologies.

The AJAX vs. Proprietary Debate
Isn't really a debate, which the article kind of notes but doesn't really state. AJAX doesn't compete directly with any of these tools... Asynchronous Javascript and XML is a data delivery mechanism, NOT a presentation layer (if I hear one more person use AJAX to refer to DHTML I'm gonna scream). Flex, Lazlo, Nexaweb, etc. have aspects that compete with AJAX (Real-time Push in Flex/Flash being one that competes and bests AJAX), but drawing them in parallel is misleading. With SVG more or less dead in the water (yeah, AdobeMacromedia doesn't have much of an interest in further developing an OSS competitor to Flex) and no SVG support for IE 7.0, there is no viable presentation component for AJAX to make this argument viable.

What the article gets right is that future application solutions are a combo approach that leverage a number of different technologies. For example, portals leverage AJAX/DHTML where possible to reduce page refreshes and increase basic interactive behavior (maybe with a framework to do the heavy lifting, though that has its own drawbacks) and something like Flex to supply visualization tools and whiz-bang interactive components on a more selection "superportlet" basis.

Cost Effectiveness of Proprietary Solutions
This is right on the money and a BIG reason to favor things like Flex. You'll actually spend more money developing and debugging tools in javascript and html than you will implementing with a robust end to end solution like Flex. From a UE perspective you're married to certain interactive behaviors the components you leverage (Flex isn't very good at exposing the underpinnings, read "Gold Support" here), but you get the benefit of tested methods and basic patterns that are generally at least "acceptable" from a usability perspective.

Java for Visualization
God help us all. I went there once on a trip... lost my granny, my dog got run over, and I came back with only 8 fingers.

Plug-in Limitations of Approach
Here we're mostly talking about Flash/Flex. I did an analysis not too long ago when I led a project doing a Flex 1.5 implementation (which sucked btw... don't even consider 1.5, not that Adobe would sell you on it anyway). What it comes down to is that Flash 9.0, which is the latest plug-in required to drive Flex 2.0, is at the beginning of its adoption, making this argument somewhat ligitimate. However, typical adoption patterns are a STEEP yield curve... you get to around 80%-85% within a year, get the next 10%-15% shortly thereafter (4-6 months), and pin down the final %5 over the next 5 years. Flickr has a good graphic to illustrate this.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mannu/148867953/

The Flash 9.0 plug-in came out a couple months ago. What this means is that if you were to start developing an application now you'd likely launch with 80% adoption. So is it REALLY an issue right now? No, not unless you're developing a very targeted application on a very short timline. Additionally its worth noting that the generally plug-in updating architecture has improved dramatically after 6.0, so most users are now able to seamlessly update their players when prompted.

Basically I would say this is a legitimate concern if you're audience profile/segmentation indicates very old hardware/software with virtually no technically ability (and I mean NONE here, even more than a web neophyte) then you may need to reconsider your approach.

Application Accessibility
This subject is left only partially discussed, and its the real 800lb gorilla in the room. Last week a US court handed down a decision against Target.com (it was on Slashdot). The gist is that Target was found to be inviolation of the ADA for their use of non-accessible content formats in their web site. This was the first t

People are making a lot of cool high-dynamic-range digital photos using multiple exposures with bracketed settings. With software, you can stitch together small pieces of the shots made at different exposures, saving just the bits that have meaningful data. Here's a gallery from Flickr.com. I don't know how it relates to TFA, and I won't say the display shows everything the eye might see, but these images are pretty cool to look at (kinda hyper-realistic and sci-fi):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/automatt/sets/7205759 4079498133/

This is not meant as a flamebait or troll, I hope it is not taken as such. Why is it that every time I read about a new technology from some american source there is some prominent mention of military applications? Why? Is it me being naive and thinking that you can do cool tech just for tech's sake? Is it just a convenient way of getting investment into new technology? Or are Americans just obsessed with eberything defense related? (And yes I realize what the date is today.)

Now back on topic this technology does not look really impressive. What it appears they have done is make some sensor that has a larger dynamic range than your average camera sensor and applied some software tone mapping. Sensors are moving to higher dynamic range anyway. Look at a DSLR camera like the Fuji S3 Pro that contains what Fuji calls a super CCD, basically a CCD that has 2 light receptors per pixel, one that is a lot less sensitive than the other. This increases the dynamic range with 2 stops over the usual 5 stops that a photographic sensor reaches nowadays. Really not that far out advanced at all. You can do this on the cheap with any digital camera by exposing several times at several intensities and sticking the exposures together in for example photoshop. If you're curious just look up HDR images on for instance http://www.flickr.com./

Ok after having read the article, maybe they found some new way to read out the photoreceptors on the chips. (In a CCD there is a linear ADC that basically loses you a lot of information in shadows.) Still whatever, wake me when I can buy a nice new Canon camera body that has increased dynamic range over what is available now.... :)

On the same blog, Alan Levin asks how such entrepreneurs can change the world. It is hard to give - sometimes harder than taking. In Africa, it is about transfer of ownership - can you persuade the recipient that you are not wasting their time ?

• Picture of Jim Fowler with girls in bar.

Not only is a Window a chick, but she's hot! And funny! http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200550 /

One can only hope she lets in all kinds of Trojans. Or at least the lambskins.

this one better:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200550 /

I like this photo of her.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200550 /

She doesn't seem to be a Windows fan either. Proof:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200550 /
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/43132485 /

She doesn't seem to be a Windows fan either. Proof:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200550 /
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/43132485 /

So now there's a girl that know s more about comp. sec. than I ever will... Another reason to feel intimidated by the fairer sex.

She's nice, but her friends are a little bit special...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/58200265 /

Window Snyder is a woman.

http://www.dec.net/ws/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windowsnyder/

An interesting point is that the base 17-inch model no longer comes with an Apple Remote by default, you have to cough up another $29 to get that bit of Apple goodness. Fine for those of us that have quite a few of them lying around, but not so good for people buying their first iMac. An odd choice for Apple IMHO.

Five years into the craze that’s sweeping the nation, I finally saw some in real life recently. I was on vacation in Hawai‘i and some tourists had rented a few to roll around the grass in Kapiolani Park.

I though briefly about finding out where to rent them just so I could try one, but we had better things to do so we kept walking. I’m all for putting pedestrians on wheels and accelerating them to three times their natural walking speed, but I prefer getting some exercise out of the deal. I guess I’m just old-fashioned.