One more cup of coffee

Linux car crashes

Sometimes the headlines just write themselves.

Engadget: '"Linux car" first to crash at Indianapolis 500'

Force Send (iWars -- iPod v. Zune)

This is funny...

Bad news for Dads

"In the study, child care was defined as care by anyone other than the child's mother who was regularly scheduled for at least 10 hours per week." (from an MSNBC article on a study of day care)

So if I stayed at home full time to take care of Nathan, that would count as him being in day care.

You can trademark anything now, I guess

"The [Mormon] church informed Beazer that the angel's image is a registered trademark."

Wikipedia: The Encyclopedia that anyone can edit...

Wikipedia: The Encyclopedia that anyone can edit, as long as they don't actually know what the fuck they are talking about.

Bumper Cars video

http://www.king5.com/sharedcontent/VideoPlayer/makeASX.php?title=www.king5.com/kiraw_011607portlandhomevid.wmv

The first person showcased in this is just an idiot. Why s/he kept gunning the engine is beyond comprehension.

Why I hope to never live under a Homeowners Association

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/28/peace.wreath.ap/index.html

Zune web site live

At http://www.zune.net

12 days until it's in stores.

Now I can start sleeping again :)

Babies as finite state machine

This is awesome: My baby, the finite state machine.

GOP fundraiser: Dove Shoot on 9/11

Boing Boing: Shoot doves with Republicans!

The Onion: "My Adopted Daughter Is The Most Beautiful Child In The Third World"

The Onion: My Adopted Daughter Is The Most Beautiful Child In The Third World

(Link found on Birthmother; Reprise)

(And please remember that The Onion, if you haven't seen it before, is satire. But funny satire...)

Hmm

Space Invaders live action

This is awesome: http://www.notsonoisy.com/spaceinvaders/video.html

(Thanks to meriko for the link.)

University of Tennessee parking flashback

I saw this story about a woman who, while her car was parked, had the space marked as a handicapped spot, and was then ticketed.

Things like this happened all the time at UT when I was a student there. One time, over a break, they reversed the traffic flow of a one-way street – then ticketed all of the parked cars for having parked the wrong way on a one-way street. Another time, during the middle of a school day, they redesignated part of a commuter parking lot as staff parking, then wrote tickets to all of the student cars parked there for parking in a staff-only area.

Sony's new DRM: a rootkit

A few years ago, Sony released a version of DRM that could be blocked by use of a magic marker.

It seems that they’ve now gone to the other extreme. New Sony CDs install hidden software onto your machine to protect their content. If you try to delete the code, it disables your CD drive. Mark Russinovich writes about his experience finding this and the pain of removing it from his PC.

The music industry really is just completely out of control.

Court rules that MGD is not actually beer

From News of the Weird:

Judge Jeffrey K. Sprecher of Berks County, Pa., dismissed charges against a man in August for buying beer for his underage neighbor, ruling that the prosecutor hadn't proved all of the elements of the crime. Specifically, said Sprecher, there was no evidence offered that Miller Genuine Draft is "beer." (Prosecutors usually submit a government-created listing of beers as proof but failed to do that.)

I knew it.

Judas is teamkilling again

I love Penny Arcade.

Republican Senators and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night

http://democrats.senate.gov/bedtime_story.pdf

(thanks to Russell for the link)

If only Frodo had had a net connection...

Maps can be helpful when you're trying to save middle earth.

I was wondering when...

I was wondering when this would happen. Apple Records is suing Apple Computer for trademark violation -- again.

I have GOT to get me one of these

Check out the Philip Stein Teslar watch -- it's engineered to protect your body from those "harmful electromagnectic frequencies". It notes the "extremely low frequencies (ELF) caused by cell phones ..." (1,900,000,000 Hz is extremely low?).

How does this technological marvel protect you? It's "engineered to produce a non-Hertzian/scalar wave shown to shield the body from extremely low frequencies (ELF). It emits a specialized signal that surrounds the body within a bubble or cushion, so the harmful frequencies cannot enter."

Non-Hertzian????

I haven't laughed this hard in a week...

This is a sport??

This, I believe, may be one of the most retarded "sports" I've ever heard of.

People with too much time

The funniest commentary I've seen on the recent news about a group of X-Box hackers trying to blackmail Microsoft into releasing a signed Linux loader for X-Box is here.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Hatch

Wired News reports on the fact that Orrin Hatch, who this week advocated "destroying" computers of persons engaged in copyright violations, is, in fact, a software pirate.

Hmm...

More fun with al-Sahaf

An entire site dedicated to the (former) Iraqi mis-Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf: http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/

The site was down for a few days after getting linked to by everyone (even cnn.com), but now it's back up.

Spam

Recently, Meredith and I have been getting more and more spam. Last week, I ran across an amazing solution -- well, for me, at any rate. It works only with Outlook right now, but if that's what you use, go get Spamnet. The way it works is: when you get a message that is spam, you click a button on your Outlook tool bar to block it. That action reports the spam to a central list. When other users get that same message, the server sees that it's already been marked as spam, so it gets filtered away.

So far, I've had it block all the spam I've received, with just one false positive (oddly, updates messages from our hosting provider).

Now if only I could find a way to block Meredith's spam...

Avoiding telemarketers

The FTC is launching a national 'Do Not Call' registry later this year. You can add your phone number to the list, and businesses are not allowed to call any number on the list. Finally, a way to avoid all those telemarketer phone calls.

If you're a California resident, the state has put up a web site allowing you to pre-register for the list for free. Once the FTC starts accepting numbers, California will give them the list of people who have pre-registered.

Yay!