What is a terrorist? A terrorist, according to the dictionary, is someone who kills or destroys in an attempt to exert political influence. According to the media and almost all of America’s politicians and police forces, it’s pretty much anyone who’s ever had a seditious thought. Ever. And why is every one of these potential terrorists treated like the most capable evil mastermind to ever walk the earth? A thirty second sound byte is usually more than enough to show that the person (or people)... [More]

The release of Safari for Windows seems to be the only issue worth discussing for most of the technology world. Whether it’s the horrific zero-day exploits (already patched, but still a rocky start), the crashing bookmarks for non-US English-speaking users or the ridiculous amount of effort put into making Safari exactly the same on Windows as it is on OS X—including all controls (scrollbars, buttons, etc.), behavior (can only resize from the bottom-left) and, last but not least, the... [More]

The following 3-minute video shows US traffic patterns as they ebb and flow throughout the day. The data is from March of this year and is real, spiking from a low of about 4000 flights to over 16,000 flights in the air at peak travel periods. There are so many that the flight paths actually acurately delineate the shape of the continental United States.

Found on US Air Traffic by Brad DeLong (Grasping Reality with Both Hands).

Or “Benito Giuliani”, if you prefer. That’s how he was known to the denizens of the fair city over which he ruled with an iron fist, using and abusing his beloved black-booted police squads to do so. It’s this same Rudy Giuliani—former mayor of New York City and proud owner of an elaborate back tattoo depicting himself holding a bullhorn, an American flag and a New York hot dog while simultaneously digging a fireman out of the rubble of the World Trade Center on which he stands, illuminated... [More]

Keeping it short and sweet, Discrimination by Scott Adams throws out a few observations on paradoxes in our society’s of valid and invalid prejudice. For example, though most prejudices aganst traits people can’t control are regulated, “it’s totally legal for an employer to reject a stupid person” who applies for a job. To the hypothetical argument that this is a worthwhile exception, he retorts:

“You might argue that it is in society’s overwhelming best interest to discriminate against stupid people because... [More]”

Lucky Stars (Time) is an interview with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon. The interviewees literally have no interest in promoting the movie, unless you count them parading their hilarious camaraderie that undoubtedly features heavily in the film as promotion. At any rate, it seemed incidental to just having a whale of a time.

The first question asked them how they kept their cool and turned out a quailty product—according to general opinion, the best of the series— instead... [More]

Khalilzad replaced John Bolton as the American ambassador to the United Nations.

The article, What Do States Owe The Exonerated? (Plastic), poses an interesting question. Almost everyone will have a knee-jerk reaction to it—evincing either a gut feeling that an exonerated prisoner is an innocent man and therefore has been treated unfairly by society or a kneejerk reaction that anyone who the courts saw fit to send to jail must be guilty in one way or another. There are those who view every exoneration as the result of a sly criminal’s—and a liberal lawyer’s—machinations of our... [More]

There are all sorts of sites that produce content meant to be funny, like The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Something Awful or a Pointless Waste of Time. Whether or not you think the invidual attempts at humor are successful or not, that is their purpose to at least some people. The Internet offers humor in unlooked-for places as well, like this collection of Cool Cybersex Logs, in which one or more users troll chat rooms to prank unsuspecting partners with frustrating experiences. For... [More]

This article addresses a very specific problem involving people matching the following criteria:

1. You live in Switzerland.
2. You are a Cablecom customer.
3. You send mail using their SMTP relay.

If any of the conditions above fails to apply to you, there is really very little need for you to read further, unless you wish to be bedazzled by scintillating prose unlike any you have likely ever seen. If so, by all means, read on.

Rejected!

If you do match all of the conditions above, you have... [More]

Another game that’s been in development for a long time is Crysis. Earlier this year there was a pretty good review of it, Crytek’s Jack Mamais on Crysis by Chris Remo (Shack News), where the reviewer noted that “running on a beefy DirectX 10-capable NVIDIA 8800, the game was never short of gorgeous.” Granted, an NVidia 8800 is no shrinking violet of a graphics card—with the top-of-the-line version weighing in at $600+ and 177 Watts—but still, it was running the game “at a fluctuating framerate in the 20-30fps range” at... [More]

“It’s better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often credited with the blustery threat to “wipe Israel off the map”. Though the mainstream press is pleased as punch to press this citation into service again and again, in myriad forms, it was noted in more responsible circles quite some time ago that the president of Iran had said no such thing. As meticulously documented in ’Wiped off the Map’ – The Rumor of the Century by Arash Norouzi (AntiWar.com), the statement he made, translated directly and faithfully from the Farsi, was:

“The Imam said... [More]”

The first screenshots of Halo 3 are floating around, showing it to be a next-generation game ready to squeeze every drop of performance and visual effects out of the graphics horsepower found in the X-Box. One in particular (shown below), reveals an impressively cinematic quality, with good material detail, reflections and very natural depth-of-field effects. Notice how the focus is on the right knee, with everything else appropriately softened. It’s not clear how well this level of detail... [More]

The annual chance for Europeans to embarass themselves in a no-holds-barred music contest finished up on Saturday evening. Ukraine and France were clearly having the most fun, with France entering a band singing French in a horrible British accent and English in a horrible French accent while a very bald guy ran around with a stuffed cat attached to his neck. The Ukraine was led by a transvestite in mirrored silver with awesome Boogie Nights sunglasses who sang in several languages—though... [More]

This marvel of technology is only about a year and half old, so it had at least a decade of cell phone software to build on when it came out. Still there are enough usability problems in the software—which, honestly, doesn’t have to do very much other than send bits of text to peopel—to frustrate even the calmest person. Some say that the iPhone has nothing to offer a market already saturated with hundreds of models; that the big touch screen and other hardware doodads aren’t enough to... [More]

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The term DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself—has become more and more popular lately as a design principle. This is nothing new and is the main principle underlying object-oriented programming. As OO programmers, we’ve gotten used to using inheritance and polymorphism to encapsulate concepts. Until recently, languages like C# and Java have had only very limited support for re-using functionality across larger... [More]

Street Installations has a list of pictures of street art involving mannequins posed in realistic & strange positions.

The one below—with a walker kryptonite-locked to a parking sign—is probably the best of the bunch.

Locked-up Walker

It is not difficult to find patterns in small data-sets. In fact, one can see patterns in any amount of data—the trick is to find patterns that are useful in predicting the future. For example, the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, conquered it, installed a government, then proceeded to lose any semblance of control over the next four years. 16 months later, the United States invaded Iraq and repeated the pattern. The State department has not yet given up on Iraq in the same way that... [More]

Soldiers involved in America’s imperial maneuvers throughout the world have the heretofore unknown privilege of making their voices heard in real-time on the Internet. Their blogs are in a variety of styles, covering a variety of topics, revealing both remarkable sensitivity and ignorance for that which is not American. There is naturally a lot of filtering going on—this is, after all, the US empire’s military—but some really good stuff does get through. On Being Home by SGT Derek McGee (The Sandbox) is the most recent... [More]

According to MacBook Battery Is Toast After Being Fully Drained by Dan Benjamin (HiveLogic), Apple brings a whole new meaning to the term “dead battery”. According to the article, OS X can sometimes drain a battery so irrevocably that it can never be charged again. It’s a hardware problem that affects a small percentage of users. What’s interesting is the reaction to the problem by Benjamin, one of the Apple faithful. Instead of tearing Apple a new one for not addressing this clear software/BIOS/whatever issue, he lamely... [More]

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the ripe old age of 85. Despite explicitly asking for the following epitaph, “the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”, bloggers around the Internet are tossing around his catchphrase, “and so it goes…”, ad nauseum instead. He made the request in his most recent book, a slim volume of thoughts he published after returning from retirement in a fit of pure frustration at the way the Bush administration was sullying America and doing such a crass,... [More]

If you’ve ever thought that PHP was too fast or used too little memory or that Java’s class encapsulation was too restricitive, boy has Quercus: PHP in Java got the solution for you. At last, PHP developers can enjoy the benefits of enterprise computing complete with abominable startup times, appalling refresh speeds and PermGen errors every 15 minutes. And Java developers can finally leave their half-assed web frameworks behind and get behind the ultra-organized global namespace with a little... [More]