This is because you -- yes, you -- are a terrible person.
So here, I hope this is what you were looking for:
Or maybe this:
If that was not what you seek then what you seek is not here.
nipple raider
There used to be a marginally-amusing post here about something stupid that an actress said about a movie that you've already forgotten. However, this innocuous post led to 9+ years of the top search term bringing people to this web site being "Angelina Jolie boobs".
this concludes our test of the anonymous poster system
I think in the last two weeks or so, I've unscreened about 1/3 of the anonymous posts here; the rest were mostly worthless, though a few were merely boring. But today I got spammed by some all-caps dipshit saying "CHECK OUT MY CRAPPY HOUSE MUSIC PORTAL" or something (forgive me for not taking the time to investigate it thoroughly, but it did not appear to be a joke.) So, goodbye Anonymous Masses. It's been swell, but the swelling's gone down.
So if you want to post here, go get yourself an LJ invite code. I have a bunch, but if you want one of mine and I don't know you, I'll first be needing you to send me 100 words explaining how you are funny and clever and not at all a dumbass.
Tags: fanboys, firstperson, security
Current Music: Johnette Napolitano & Holly Vincent -- Dinosaur ♬
cry me a fucking river
Parasitic nuisances sue over do-not-call list:
"The telemarketing industry estimates the do-not-call list could cut its business in half, costing it up to $50 billion in sales each year. Implementing the list could also eliminate up to two million jobs, the ATA said."
"The free government registry for blocking telephone sales pitches has grown to more than 28 million numbers since it was opened June 27. The FTC has predicted registration to grow to 60 million numbers by next summer."
DNA Lounge: Wherein I give you a tour of the blistering power buried inside my phone.
In case you haven't seen it yet, last month the SF Bay Guardian ran an article about life as a club bouncer entitled "These Aren't My Pants!" It's hilarious and you must all go read it now. I'll wait.
Just for laughs, I tried visiting the DNA Lounge web site on the web browser built into my cell phone. This was pure comedy, I'm telling you! We are so totally not living in the future yet...
It started out ok, aside from being insanely slow (I think it might have actually been dialing a separate call for each pixel). I saw the DNA Lounge logo come up right away, but then it sat there and wouldn't let me scroll for several minutes while it loaded the rest of the page. I had plenty of time to meditate on the fact that the text that I could see was overlapping in a classy way.
Then boom! "Insufficient memory." I hit OK, which I assume "restarted my browser", but really what it meant was, now I was able to scroll around in the page.
After scrolling down, I noticed something else odd. The table of future events seemed to only have column 3 visible: the "buy" link and the text of the date didn't show up at all...
Scrolling more, I was able to see the first two of the six thumbnails (the others hadn't loaded.) The text at the bottom of the page was even readable... But something important was missing. The left-side menu wasn't there at all, meaning there was almost no navigation available. Oops. Well, the link to the Calendar was there, so I clicked on it.
404? WTF? (I guess the gag 404 message that I use is strangely appropriate when being viewed on a phone, huh?) Anyway, some digging around shows that the 404 is because the phone's web browser is buggy: it doesn't understand anchors, and when it sees a URL that ends in "07.html#28", instead of loading "07.html" and scrolling to the "28" anchor, it tries to load the file "07.html#28", which of course doesn't exist. This is a seriously rookie move, and I can't imagine how anything works at all in their browser. Oh wait, I forgot: nothing actually does! Silly me.
Anyway, moving right along, I typed in the calendar URL by hand, which only took me about ten minutes. It looked, uh, arty? Certainly somewhat less than completely legible, as you can see. But at least this time I got overlapping text instead of big chunks of text being just totally missing. It's unclear whether that was an improvement.
In conclusion, I have found that my phone does not make a good web browser, and that we are not yet living in the future. Thank you and good night.
pill robot
Dubbed the Intelligent Pill or iPill, the new drug-delivery system packs a micropump and sensors that monitor the body's temperature and pH balance into one pill. If the body's temperature and pH reach certain levels, the iPill responds by pumping out more or less of its drug payload. It could be used to treat many ailments like AIDS or diabetes. [...]The iPill's electronic gadgetry, 400 square micrometers in size, fills a space smaller than the area of 10 blood cells. It is encapsulated in a penny-size plastic casing that is resistant to stomach acids. Keeping the iPill small does, however, mean the device can only store one milliliter of drugs in its internal reservoir. But that should be enough for many drugs. [...]
Badawy's prototype iPill has an ARM VII microprocessor, and silicon-oxide sensors. The sensors feed information about the patient's body to the iPill's chip, which in turn controls the micropumps that squeeze out a drug dose. "When an electrical voltage is applied to the smart material of the pumps, the pumps expand and force the drug down a channel and out of the pill," Badawy said.
The system is powered by supercapacitors -- layers of metal that store up to four hours of power. Once the device does its work, it goes out the way of all solid human waste products, usually within one to three days. [...] "We are looking at ways to prolong the working time, and this is one of our biggest problems. We are looking for an alternative power source so it will last for 12 hours or one day," Badawy said.
micro-motor
Physicists build world's smallest motor using nanotubes and etched silicon:
"It's the smallest synthetic motor that's ever been made," said Alex Zettl, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Nature is still a little bit ahead of us - there are biological motors that are equal or slightly smaller in size - but we are catching up." [...]
Because the rotor can be positioned at any angle, the motor could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. The rotor could be rapidly flipped back and forth to create a microwave oscillator, or the spinning rotor could be used to mix liquids in microfluidic devices.
The motor is about 500 nanometers across, 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. While the part that rotates, the rotor, is between 100 and 300 nanometers long, the carbon nanotube shaft to which it is attached is only a few atoms across, perhaps 5-10 nanometers thick. [...]
The team's scanning electron microscope (SEM) can take pictures every 33 milliseconds and no faster, so they can't tell whether the rotor spins or flips faster than 30 times per second. "We assume you could go much, much faster than that, probably to microwave frequencies [a billion cycles per second]," Zettl said. "There's no way we can detect that right now, but in principle the motor should be able to run that fast." [...]
Interestingly, the rotor does not continue spinning for long once the electricity is turned off. It is so small that it has little inertia, so any tiny electric charges remaining on the device after it's turned off tend to stop the rotor immediately. "The nanoworld is weird - different things dominate," Zettl said. "Gravity plays no role whatsoever and inertial effects are basically nonexistent because things are just so small, so that little things like residual electric fields can play a dominant role. It's counter intuitive."
three fisted phone madness
I finally learned how to reliably get WAVs into my phone to use as ringers. Here be monsters!
voting fraud
"Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program" dissects the Diebold voting kiosk software (used in 37 states) and presents some evidence that it intentionally keeps two sets of books -- one in which the votes are recorded, and one from which the results are generated -- in order to intentionally facilitate fraud.
You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.
You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.
You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.
"The Truth About the Rob-Georgia File" (same author) has an interview with one of the folks who was responsible for deploying this system, who tells a story that lacks basic security measures in just about every way you can imagine. This story pretty well undermines the first story, since clearly this company couldn't find its ass with both hands: they don't sound smart enough to rig an election.
It is somewhat suspicious that the author of these two articles is also hyping his own book on the topic. But here's the (less accusatory, but also far more vague) take on it from EFF and NYT.
Tags: big brother, computers, conspiracies, diebold, security
Current Music: Ruby -- The Whole Is Equal to the Sum of its Parts ♬
interesting article on Mad Scientist Stephen Wolfram
The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything
He invariably introduces each topic in a similar fashion: Curious to know about _______ [CHOOSE ANY SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE] and how his new theories might apply, he decides to take a look at the history of the field. Amazingly, he concludes, for hundreds of years so-called experts have failed to answer key questions that should have been easily resolved centuries ago. (Wolfram's disappointment in his predecessors is bottomless.) But when Wolfram applies the ideas from A New Kind of Science, he begins making progress and expresses the hunch that not long after his ideas are understood, the biggest problems will quickly be resolved, transforming the field.
To list only a few examples: Wolfram finds an exception to the second law of thermodynamics; conjectures why extraterrestrials might be communicating with us in messages we can't perceive; explains seeming randomness in financial markets; defines randomness; elaborates on why the "apparent freedom of human will" is so convincing; reconstructs the foundations of mathematics; devises a new way to perform encryption; insists that Darwinian natural selection is an overrated component in evolution; and, oh, theorizes that there's a "definite ultimate model for the universe." What might this be? The mother of all rules; a single, simple "ultimate rule" that computes everything from quantum physics to reality television.
