Blogmarks
Human nature
I watched one of the Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days documentaries, which involved an atheist woman (Brenda) staying for 30 days with a devoutly Christian couple (Michael and Tracy). Actually, it was pretty interesting for the most part. The Christian couple were intelligent and reasonably open-minded [...] When Brenda’s husband and children came to visit her, Tracy commented - with palpable shock and surprise - that Brenda seemed to really love her children and be a good mother.
What did she expect? Did she think that atheists neglect and beat their children and feed them crack? Did she think that without a belief in God, people must be immoral? Other conversations with people in Michael and Tracy’s church revealed that this was quite a common belief. I find that frightening and sad. Frightening for obvious reasons, but sad because it implies that people like Michael and Tracy are infantilized. It seems that they believe they need a higher power (or his representatives in the form of the clergy) to tell them how to behave properly, and that if they did not have this, they might behave badly.
Sad indeed; religion can be a good thing: giving hope in hard times, providing moral guidlines etc. However, grown people should be able to cope with day-to-day things without having some higher guide to hold their hands...
Drivl Answers Slate Magazine's Unanswerable Questions
Thoroughly funny :) See also Boingboing's "The Unexplained Explainer" about the same list
NASA's Space Gallery of Printed Works
Good stuff; the site is almost as ancient as the works on it :)
Ren and Stimpy in Life Sucks Animatic- Nick Cross - Eric Bauza- Direct To video
Now this would be an interesting episode! I hope they produce it
A Google Treasure Trove
I have recently discovered a treasure trove of Documentaries on Google. No, not Documentary clips, but full length quality Docus. If I may bring your attention to two of my absolute favorites.
Configuration: the forgotten side of security
Because, when you start out with a securely set-up machine, there are already a lot less things that can go wrong [the attack vector becomes a lot smaller]. Do you really need that web service enabled? Did you switch off remote logging in for root? Et cetera.
How long in the freezer to chill a Coke from 89F to 35F?
That would be about 20-25 minutes in a freezer. If you put it in a bucket of ice, that would halve that time. If you put water in that ice, it'd be cold (+- 5c) enough to drink in about 4-6 minutes, if you put salt in that water, you'd reduce the chill time to just over 2 minutes. Agitating the can in the water, rolling it around, reduces the chill time even more.
The fastest possible way is to grab a CO2 fire extinguisher and unload that sucker on the can.
Whatever you do, do NOT bury the can in sand, pour gasoline on the sand and set the sand on fire. That won't do anything.
This is all empirically gained evidence, not third party.
Oh btw, 89F and 35F is 31.67C and 1.67C respectively
MySpace users have stronger passwords than corporate users
Bruce Schneier analyzes the data from a successful phishing attack on MySpace and compares the captured user-passwords to an earlier data-set from a corporation and concludes that MySpace users are better at coming up with good passwords than corporate drones. The article is a great state-of-the-password address, with lots of fun nuggets like "We used to quip that 'password' is the most common password. Now it's 'password1.' Who said users haven't learned anything about security?"
Aight! Internet is a fun place...
Pirates of the Caribbean: behind the ILM digital effects
Wow, quite a lot of effort went in that [like we didn't know already]. Nifty see-through movies showing what ILM had to start with
Vintage "Guide to PCs": computer ad from 1982
Wow, a personal PDP11 with a personal terminal :) [Images start here]
Sonic art weapon: Ravezooka
"The Ravezooka is a musical weapon that shoots powerful "hardcore" sounds based on your target's distance from the instrument. Squeezing the trigger handle initiates sound and a beam of light. As the user moves the Ravezooka around, the frequency range being played changes based on the distance of the person or object in front of the instrument. The closer the target, the lower the frequency range."
Newcomb's Paradox: what would you do?
A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.
Read on for more, or read the rest of Kiekeben's essay before offering your reasoning first
Bill Gates: Don't buy DRM music, rip CDs instead
He concluded by advising everyone to just skip the DRM on music by buying CDs and ripping them (presumably as opposed to buying your music from the new Microsoft Zune music store, which sells thoroughly crippled tunes).
1000steine.de - a lot of [cool] Lego
Be sure to check his space city, with a story about a space factory [English translation]
Sincere Choice
Today's software market does not provide a level playing field upon which all software producers can compete fairly:
- Vendors use deliberately incompatible intercommunication and file formats to lock out their competition.
- The customer is often locked into a particular product due to the need to interoperate with other customers who have selected that product.
- Legislation tends to favor proprietary software over Open Source, since Open Source has only recently attained a significant role in business.
We seek to provide a fair market in which Proprietary and Open Source software can compete solely on their merits.
YouTube - 0.02 cents, or 0.02 dollar
Minddumbingly stupid people with Verizon not getting the difference between 0.02 cents/KiB and 0.02 dollar/KiB...
Frozen beer tricks (kottke.org)
Neat! Also check the movie links at the end
The Consequences of Mobile Computing
Ubiquitous computing is creeping into our lives. What do we do with the massive amount of portable storage, computing power and those nice colour screens? Will our social lives vanish, or will our lives be enriched?
Scaling Enterprise Java on 64-bit Multi-Core X86-Based Servers
Some good notes on how to deploy Java the right way on your shiny new server
Blogmarks by month
2006
- December (31)
- November (40)
- October (39)
- September (40)
- August (16)
- July (22)
- June (14)
- May (28)
- April (36)
- March (46)
- February (6)
- January (49)
