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At his blog he talks about watching all the Star Wars movies again, and wrote up an article for this week's Geek In Review at Suicide Girls called Han Shoots First

• It will probably contain some concepts based on the design for the movie
  
• It will probably contain voice acting from some major stars who are probably TBA right now
  

Indeed, there are some applications that allow you to send SMS messages wrote in Morse code, like Morse Texter (http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/morse_ texter.html).

Also, seems that Morse is actually quite faster than regular text messaging. An article about it can be found at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-2- 1571664,00.html, and there was a "competition" between two text messengers and two Morse coders in Jay Leno's show some time ago, where Morse coders where MUCH faster than their text message writers counterparts.

Levitt's Freakonomics does a nice piece on these same Chicago public schools studies. Here is a discussion of Levitt's ideas

Scott Adams was able to outdiagnose his doctors using Google.

The gains they made were from moderate Democrats, not the raving liberals who seem to have directed the party for a while now.

For those unfamiliar with Flickr, it's owned by Yahoo, who just loves them some patents.

Scott Adams made a blog entry regarding the whole "civic duty to vote" business. His view is that the only reason people have that opinion is because it has been drilled into their heads from an early age.

Don't blame me, I voted for Turd Sandwich.

Well, it's something to consider (first amendment and such), but let's not lose sight of the big picture here.

For example, I don't care if Rick Santorum backs the ESRB or not, his voting record (and general asshattery) is more than enough to dissuade me from voting for him.

I mean seriously, the man is against gay marriage and gay rights, tried to slip Intelligent Design into the No Child Left Behind act, has said that he doesn't belive in privacy rights, and is anti-abortion. If you have an opinion on any of those issues, then his stance on the ESRB is probably irrelevant when you decide whether or not to vote for him.

You won't because iTunes is the easiest to break. You just have to burn it onto a CD.

Peer reviewed by who exactly.

The original study:

Slate's review.
Another useful breakdown of problems with their methods.
Just one more for flavor.

Their latest study:

The Wall Street Journal's take. This covers the main problem with both studies, ridiculous clustering methodology. It also points out another important aspect as to how poorly the respondents were documented.

Iraq Body Count's review.

A little on the political bias of the 'impartial' researchers:

The Political Pitbull.
Lancet editor at an anti-war protest. Notice his circular reasoning that since his new report using the same flawed methodology confirms his original report that he is completely vindicated.

And that was just from the first page of my Google search.

Sorry, mind fart. I didn't mean to say GDP, I meant to point to the federal tax revenues (2.15 trillion as of 2005) which is the money from which the federal debt can be paid.

Reference here.

It can do a lot more... http://productionblog.typepad.com/pov/images/ps3bb q9xa.jpg

Terry O'Reilly and The Age of Persuasion is an excellent radio program about advertising. O'Reilly tracks the evolution of advertising into the internet age and talks about the implicit bargain that there has always been between advertisers and audience: that the audience gets something of value in return for the message, and how this is in danger of being broken in some internet models (popups etc) and has been broken (by e.g. highway billboards which most advertising professionals loathe) in the past.

Well worth a listen, produced to a very high standard, good writing, entertaining anecdotes.

As regards your claim in that Debians patches are more significant in scope than Ubuntus in the question "I understand that Ubuntu is based upon Debian. Is that the same or different than the IceWeasel browser that Debian is shipping with their latest release?" on your blog, and in light of the response at Glandium.org, did you lie about the scope of the patches applied by Debian, or were you merely misinformed?

Alternatively is Mike Hommey incorrect in his analysis, and if so, how?

Because Ubuntu has approval to use the trademark. See Chris Beard's blog post about the subject Mozilla and Ubuntu

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don't get me wrong - there's a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged. But that doesn't mean we'll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement? Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let's say for example, science.

I don't know what started companies down this path, but the ones who follow it should be shot. I've gotten calls from HR people who see my resume online, contact me, and then decide I'm not a match because I haven't made a program that interfaces with a particular database or because I don't use the same IDE that they do at the company. Come on, people, an IDE is not something that's really that difficult to get the hang of.

The problem is that no-one is willing to train anymore. Even things that aren't really training, or training that will take all of 2 hours for a good candidate are discounted. I think that it's they make a skill list for "the perfect candidate" and aren't willing to take anyone who is missing a single one of those check-boxes, even when that check-box can be filled in after a couple of hours of training, or even a day of two of playing with the product and conducting research.

Companies say that they want bold, creative, passionate, smart, and independent people, but they only hire robots. See Knocking the exuberance out of employees.

here's a decent look at it

Unless you're a solar-panel inventor from South Africa who's name is Vivian.... then your groupies will arrive somewhat confused. :)

In all seriousness, the above article is highly recommended. Germany and SA are already jointly manufacturing a CIGS cell that is a direct competitor to the one mentioned in TFA.

Adorable Kittens
Adorable Kittens
Adorable Kittens
Adorable Kittens
Adorable Kittens

\begin{obligatory_overlord_quote}
I, for one, welcome our new furry and cuddly overlords
\end{obligatory_overlord_quote}

Here's a blog about Firefox/Ubuntu topic.

I say, here's fun! Official word from Mozilla on why Ubuntu shipped with Firefox branded Firefox, rather than Iceweasel.

Plaudits to the Ubuntu guys for getting this release out so quickly. Wonder if I should stick with 6.06 and its LTS or upgrade?

It was in The Dilbert Future. He had a recent blog entry about it too.

You might find this interesting:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/20 05/12/humor_formula.html

"Recognizable situation" is only one out of six!

It's bad enough to find out that I'll probably never speak normally to another person for the rest of my life. But to make things worse, my notorious cleverness makes people think I'm joking when I explain it.

Fellow Dilbertites,

It seems the great overloard Adams was in fact inflicted by the great malady. Rejoice at his miraculous recovery!

PS - I was quite confused at first as to the authenticity of this until I got goog-learned. It seems it really does exist, he very well may have had it, and if he recovered was indeed a miracle. However, it could also be an elaborate ruse, as I would expect from a satirist of his pedigree. :)

Think again... apparently you get a one-time get out of jail free card.

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2006/09/a pple_gave_me_b.html
http://digg.com/apple/Itunes_Lets_People_Re-Downlo ad_all_Your_Music_Once_

A call/e-mail to apple's tech support may be in order for you.

Note that I've not verified this but I'll take Wil's word on it. In any case it's worth a try.

Sounds like someone at 20th Century Fox has been listening to George Lucas. $200 million dollar movies just don't make sense these days. There was an interesting writeup about a related topic on Techdirt this morning too, here. Wil Wheaton also had some interesting comments about Lucas' comments on his blog awhile back here.

The reality is, there are many more distribution models than there used to be, meaning that you don't have to take a chance with a huge budget picture to get a hit/return on investment. In fact, if you have a really good product, your fans may very well prefer that you not make a big budget blockbuster movie and instead release a series of smaller, less expensive "films" distributed through an alternative medium, because they can get more content.

Now whether that was Fox/Universal's thinking on this, or if they just got cold feet due to the dollar signs, either way it is pretty strong evidence that we are standing on the cusp of a potentially huge paradigm shift in the way that movies are made and distributed. I suspect that all it would take is one big name hit to be released in this fashion to get the snowball really rolling.

Scott Adams did an experiment on his blog in which he asked the readers for stock advice and came up with a small portfolio based on the results. The portfolio did pretty well at first, before plummeting.

No more increasing capacity = peak oil. It's as simple as that. We now have nine and a half months of "rearview mirror" action to look back and see that world oil production has retreated from its all-time high of just over 85 million barrels a day (m/b/d) achieved in December 2005 (just as geologist Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton had predicted). For 2006, production has remained in the 84 m/b/d range every month reported so far, while demand has exceeded that. (Source)

I don't think self esteem is in danger here... the Californium will just inject a more Calcium atoms here and there, and BAM! Instant confidence.

The problem after that was twofold. One, W-Hat didn't handle their public relations well. We tried to explain what had happened, but people automatically assumed the worst because the grid being down was in some cases putting a strain on their income, so of course they were being defensive. After seeing that our pleas for sanity were hitting a brick wall, we just stopped trying to save face altogether. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the very first 'grid attack' nobody in W-Hat or Voted 5 from that point on actually organized a grid attack. Note that in every press release on the subject, Linden Labs has never come out and fingered W-Hat or Voted 5 specificly, people just ASSUMED that.

Two, I don't suppose it helps that our sense of humor doesn't really jive with the general population, having pulled stunts such as remaking Luskwood in the Voted 5 sim (At that point we weren't making fun of Luskwood for being furry, we were making fun of Luskwood for being Luskwood), putting giant prims in the air with dirty pictures on them, and making a huge replica of Porkfry Neva's (aka batshit insane bag-lady) ugly fucking face. Also, long ago, goons used to make fun of the furry population at Luskwood. Nowadays, making fun of furries is really 'played out' and in fact the two goon groups had furries in them. However, idlers who had monitered the second life IRC chat room had noted that there were some Lindens who were going to rain down hell upon us filthy vile goons for making fun of their subculture. And honestly, you would be amazed at what some people call 'greifing'. Does dressing up as a dozen agent smiths and going into a nightclub classify as 'greifing'? What about flying around various (mature) sims in a giant flying penis? Serisouly now.

The banhammer fell shortly after the Prokfry stunt, when pretty much everyone who was above a peon in Voted 5 was banned without explination. No transparency, an appeal process that assumes guilt until innocence....too much to deal with. Also, apparently there was a lot of sour feelings by the linden who reclaimed our property, because the description was something to the effect that it was "liberating the land from those evil goons" or something to that effect. What the fuck?

I don't post anonymously because I have nothing to hide. I personally didn't take part in any of the asshole things my goon friends did, I simply laughed at the war stories about how they were booted out of yet another club for another agent smith invasion. I enjoyed the company of my goon friends, and they were the only reason I continued to play. When half of them got banned (hilariously, some of them hadn't even logged in in weeks or months), that was pretty much the last straw. I know you want to feel like you have the moral upper hand here, but there are two sides to this story, and our side is that a lot of innocent goons got banned because people don't have a sense of humor.

The peak was December 2005 @ 85 mbd. It's been decreasing since then. We are on the bubble and it will only get worse. http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck _nation/2006/10/swan_dive.html

Read all about it

I haven't looked into windmills myself as I'm still living the apartment life, but I've a friend who has read up on the matter some and raves about the vertical axis windmill and all the benifits thereof. Were I in a position to consider it, I'd start with these.

I can understand that a law exists that prevents items that violate US patent law from being exported

Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.

271(f) comes in two flavors. 271(f)(1) basically says that you can't ship parts overseas for assembly if you couldn't legally assemble them in the US. 271(f)(2) basically says that you can't make in the US and ship overseas any items which have no use other than as part of a patented invention.

The Supreme Court is trying to figure out two things: whether object code counts as a 'component part' that can be combined with other components overseas in violation of 271(f), and if so, whether copies made overseas of object code originating in the US count as 'made in the US' for the purposes of assembly overseas. The image on the Patently-O blog shows what's going on.

Umm.. yes?

In absolute terms, the richest 1% pay nearly 37% of all personal federal income tax. That same centile earned about 19%. They earned 19% yet paid 37%.

IMHO we should burden the poor with more taxes, since the more you tax something the less you get of it.

-1 Redundant(on my part)

• It is a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric.
• It claims that it can make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries.
• As of last year selling price would start at $3,200 and fall to $2,100 in high-volume production
• The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.
• The batteries fully charge in minutes as opposed to hours.
• The EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation compared to lead acid batteries that optimistically have 500 to 700 recharge cycles,
• Because it's a solid state battery rather than a chemical battery, such being the case for lithium ion technology, there would be no overheating and thus safety concerns with using it in a vehicle.
• With volume manufacturing it's expected to be cost-competitive with lead-acid technology.
• As of last year, EEStor planned to build its own assembly line to prove the battery can work and then license the technology to manufacturers for volume production
• EEStor's technology could be used in more than low-speed electric vehicles. The company envisions using it for full-speed pure electric vehicles, hybrid-electrics (including plug-ins), military applications, backup power and even large-scale utility storage for intermittent renewable power sources such as wind and solar.
• They have an exclusive agreement with Feel Good Cars, a Canadian manufacturer of the ZENN, a low speed electric car, to to purchase high-power-density ceramic ultra capacitors called Electrical Storage Units (ESU). FGC's exclusive worldwide right is for all personal transportation uses under 15 KW drive systems (equivalent to 100 peak horse power) and for vehicles with a curb weight of under 1200 kilograms not including batteries.

I have reviewed the Sony GPS-CS1, and I also have an extensive webpage on geocoding photos using GPS or manually.

Funny you should mention that bit about 145Kwh as the first thing I was interested in when I saw this article was just how much energy it can actually store up. I started searching around for info on this "stealth company" (what a pain!) and came up with an interesting piece from bacn in January on The Energy Blog where in their sleuthing they determined the thing holds 52Kwh and weighs 400lbs.

Now call me crazy, but when run a quick transformation of 52Kwh to horsepower I'm only seeing just under 70 horsepower. So... 70 horsepower for an hour, or 140 horsepower for 30 minutes? Obviously either:

* It's more than the 52Kwh mentioned in the link above, or
* This thing won't remotely make a four-passenger sedan drive like a Ferrari

Just interesting...

For some actual facts see: http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01/ eestor_ultracap.html They answer a lot of the questions raised. Also,Kleiner Perkins a respected venture capital company has invested in them, so they are not complete quacks.

According to this link "The most obviously interesting thing in the application is that compared to other ultracapacitors, this one has relatively small capacitance (31 Farads) but very high voltage (3500 V)".

No word on the size/weight of this 31F 3500V capacitor.

More info on ESS, and ultra-capacitors in general.

81% of respondents report that their organizations have experienced one or more lost or missing laptop computers containing sensitive or confidential business information in the past 12 month period...When asked how long it would take to determine what actual sensitive data was on a lost or stolen laptop, desktop, file server, or mobile device, the most frequent answer was "never"...On average, 64% of respondents admit that their companies have never conducted a data inventory to determine the location of customer or employee information contained in various data stores.|Ponemon Report PDF|(emphasis added)

81% of respondents report that their organizations have experienced one or more lost or missing laptop computers containing sensitive or confidential business information in the past 12 month period...When asked how long it would take to determine what actual sensitive data was on a lost or stolen laptop, desktop, file server, or mobile device, the most frequent answer was "never"...On average, 64% of respondents admit that their companies have never conducted a data inventory to determine the location of customer or employee information contained in various data stores.|Ponemon Report PDF|(emphasis added)

81% of respondents report that their organizations have experienced one or more lost or missing laptop computers containing sensitive or confidential business information in the past 12 month period...When asked how long it would take to determine what actual sensitive data was on a lost or stolen laptop, desktop, file server, or mobile device, the most frequent answer was "never"...On average, 64% of respondents admit that their companies have never conducted a data inventory to determine the location of customer or employee information contained in various data stores.|Ponemon Report PDF|(emphasis added)

Right here.