This is one of the funniest and geekiest things I've seen a while. Chances are less computer oriented people won't enjoy it as much, but I thought it was hilarious. I needed after the last post.
Tags: Funny, Geek
This makes me sick. Bush has tried to attach a provision to a bill that would allow him to escape prosecution for his war crimes. How’s that for an admission of guilt?
Tags: Bushiness, War Crimes
As with most new search engines, it's not that impressive out of the box. It doesn't seem to return much in the way of more relevant results than any other page, but the makers of Cuil (pronounced COOL) are saying that they index more pages than any other search engine. Because their algorithms analyze the content of the pages and categorize that way, in theory, they should return better results.
Their advantages are a clean, simple interface (like Google), but unlike Google, they don't keep logs and records of your searches to track you. As this is my only real complaint against Google, if they could just do as well as Google with the search results, but have better privacy, then perhaps Google's time is done.
Source article
Tags: Google, Search Engines
I have always said that the more someone knows about you the easier it is to destroy you. Hence we have an example of people defrauding lonely love seekers through e-dating sites.
It’s easy to manipulate if you know a few personal details about someone. Salespeople have been doing it for as long as there’s been salespeople.
Tags: If You Only Knew
From Ars Technica:
Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008.
Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn’t download it illegally or just buy it on CD!
Here’s a brilliant spoof of the Yahoo announcement that was sent to subscribers that I found at Digg.com:
Dear Consumer
We would like to thank you for being a customer of the DRM Clothing Store. Unfortunately, DRM’d clothing has not been as successful as we hoped, and we will be discontinuing service effective as of noon today. At the time that we suspend operation, all the DRM’d clothing that you have purchased will spontaneously cease to exist. We appreciate that this may be inconvenient to many of you, particularly to those of you who are currently wearing our DRM’d clothing at, say, a business meeting, a funeral or a formal dinner.
The DRM features in our clothing primarily affect the seams and stitching. If you use a sharp knife to separate your DRM’d clothing into separate fabric pieces, and then re-sew the clothing using your own needle and thread, the clothing will continue to function much as it did before. However, you must do so before noon today.
We regret the inconvenience caused to our loyal customers and thank you for your custom. We trust you will look back on your time as a customer of the DRM Clothing Store as an exciting adventure in digital living. And to those of you who don’t receive this message in time, and find yourselves standing stark naked in a crowded subway car, trying to protect your modesty with an empty Starbucks cup and a day-old copy of the “New York Post”, we’d just like to say “DRM Clothing – life on the digital edge!”
Yours sincerely, DRM Clothing
P.S. No refunds will be issued.
Tags: Yahoo
Warning! Warning! You have found a RANT. Articles in this section are sounding boards for my frustrations. They usually (more like always) lack impartiality and may include arguments and "facts" that may not be supported. With time I may calm down and make this a real article, but for now, you have been warned...
Originally, the bankruptcy laws were a catch-all for handling aggressive and dishonest lending allowing people to completely remove their debts once every 7 years. That way, even if someone made mistakes or was suckered in by bad credit deals, they could escape them under some circumstances and start over.
Lenders weren't happy with this and wanted it to be much harder for people to get out of the credit programs they carefully lured you into. They scored victory in 2005 by managing to secure a new law that made it much tougher for people to file bankruptcy, but didn't do anything to help curb the massive lending abuses by credit grantors. Now it seems the one-sided bill may have hurt lendors as much as it's helped them.
Tags: Money, Utter Failure
The Consumerist is having a contest for “Worst Company in America” and the top contenders have come down to Comcast and Countrywide Home Loans .
The winner will receive a “golden poo” award which they can proudly display in their central office or on their website. Get over there and cast your vote!
They sent out mailings that had the SSNs on the outside envelope. But don't worry! They're offering a free year of credit monitoring!
Whee.
Instead, do something useful and take advantage of Maryland's Credit Freeze law to actually protect yourself rather than get ripped off by credit monitoring
Tags: Schools
Some DNA lab workers have found that, while DNA is truly unique, the process of looking at only a small set of "loci" to make a match between people has flaws. In one case, a match was made in DNA testing between one person who was black and one who was white.
Not surprisingly, the FBI has been hard at work to cover up these finding:
In July 2006, after Chicago-area defense attorneys sought a database search on behalf of a murder suspect, the FBI's Callaghan held a telephone conference with Illinois crime lab officials.
The topic was "how to fight this," according to lab officials' summary of the conversation, which later became part of the court record.
Callaghan suggested they tell the judge that Illinois could be disconnected from the national database system, the summary shows. Callaghan then told the lab officials that "it would in fact be unlikely that IL would be disconnected," according to the summary.
(H/T to slashdot for the link)
Tags: DNA Testing
|
|
