Posts by Petrea Mitchell

Best SOPA protest online today is...

Over at this site: http://thedailywtf.com/

If they're going into the vanity press business...

...how long before this hits them?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/16/us-amazon-kindle-spam-idUSTRE75F68620110616

I guess it depends on whether people can sell their self-created textbooks for money. If not, maybe their competition isn't Amazon, but Khan Academy and (as noted above) Wikipedia.

>5000 years of human practice?

Clearly a statement from someone who's never heard of the Egyptian civil calendar (365 days and never mind the astronomical discrepancy because it was easier for bookkeeping), the Mayan calendars (3 of them, none synchronized with the Earth's orbit), the Jewish calendar (Metonic cycle), the Islamic calendar (strictly lunar)...

Good neologism

I would just like to say that the term "bonk-banking" has me giggling. I'm not sure why.

Pleistocene rewilding, here we come!

I look forward to the day I can see megatheria wandering the outskirts of my town.

Before everyone starts complaining about mail/post security...

...I'd just like to point out that the "vote-by-mail" system here in Oregon does not, in fact, require the Postal Service to be involved in any way. Lots of us just drop our ballots off directly at the county elections office. Some counties make additional dropoff points available near the deadlines for major elections.

Asking for ID is unusual?

Pardon an easily confused Yank who may have missed some sarcasm, but is it really that unusual in the UK to be asked for ID when buying beer?

I really enjoyed this travelogue. Oddly, I've wound up with a feeling that the Land Down Under isn't such a foreign place after all. Now I feel that when I need to provide a concise description of what my part of the world (western US) is like, I can confidently say, "It's like Australia, only with guns."

Houses? Pfaugh

You do in fact see those all the time out here in Portland, Oregon area.

Biggest thing I can think of being moved around on wheels around here would be the Spruce Goose, being transported to its current home at the Evergreen Air & Space Museum (and waterpark and winery... and no, I'm not making that up). I was unable to locate photos, but perhaps these attestations from mainstream media will do:

http://web.newsregister.com/ss/goose/StaffCoverage/RollHome_091900.html (where the promised photo gallery has unfortunately vanished)

http://articles.cnn.com/2000-09-18/us/spruce.goose_1_spruce-goose-plane-aircraft?_s=PM:US

Bad car metaphor alert

“These cybercapabilities are still like the Ferrari that you keep in the garage and only take out for the big race and not just for a run around town, unless nothing else can get you there,” one Obama administration official told the NYT.

I was under the impression that the reason most people with Ferrari racecars don't drive them around town is most of them aren't street-legal. So I think they're saying these capabilities are being kept under wraps because they can't handle real-world conditions.

He's almost right, actually...

“Google and Facebook would have you believe that your online personality is a mirror of who you are,” Poole said. “In fact it’s more like a diamond; you show difference facets of your personality to different people."

The mistake he's making here is assuming an invariant set of personality attributes offline. In fact, most people will behave in consistent but consistently different ways in different offline settings as well (e.g., the person who keeps their head down and makes no waves at work, but is the life of the party at NFL night at the local bar). When people want to present different personas (that's the technical term) to different sets of people online, that's merely an extension of how they already behave away from the computer. It's more noticeable in an online environment because you notice the lack of tools for it.

And yet, a less-revered part of the legacy...

Allow me to be the first pedant to point out the sub-headline should be using strncat, to guard against buffer overflows.

What about the robots?

I wonder if they're looking at this sort of thing at all:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

Here are some of the attempts to explain what's going on:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/explaining-bizarre-robot-stock-trader-behavior/61028/

Hurrah for light opera

Anything containing a reference to the D'Oyly Carte automatically has my approval.

They're missing a couple

I don't see the primitive joysticks I used for years as a kid with a Tandy Color Computer 2 and 3, nor the big, impressive, but horribly unreliable grippy things that I later played a few Amiga games with.

NOW I'm worried

Now the SFPD says "assisting" private investigators in this manner is routine:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/03/BA781L00L1.DTL

Could work out well...

...or there could be a reason the words "Snakes on a Plane" keep occurring to me when I think about this.

Bad week for geeks

I wonder if that's what happened to Anime News Network (and its various international incarnations, including ANN UK) too. Allegedly its hosting provider was down for emergency maintenance and everything would be fine in a couple hours... that was the night before last. Everything but the root page currently redirects to a message that the head of the site is flying from Japan to Texas to personally oversee getting it back online.

Try this, for instance, which should lead to the forums if everything were working:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/

That's probably "Nagini"

Unless that was another of those systematic word changes in the US editions...

Free the pianos!

Wow. My favorite Top Gear presenter is the pianist, and I never realized before that he would be considered more of a threat to public order for his musical inclinations than anything that actually happens on the show.