Views Archive
Bipartisan Bowling
Meetup.com was created as a site for the exchange of Beanie Babies. It became a central resource for political campaigns. Joe Trippi writes about the importance of Meetup in his recently published account of the Howard Dean campaign, The Revolution…
The Allegedly-Faked Bush Memos
Daily Kos has an in-depth analysis of the typography of the recently-uncovered Bush Vietnam-era memos, explaining that even though the document is set in Times New Roman with a proportional font that looks like it was created with a copy…
The Chronicle on Nanotechnology
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special report on nanotechnology’s benefits and risks (subscription required). The take-home on toxicity: yep, these things seem to be toxic. The toxicity appears to be proportional to surface area, not weight. They cause…
Spammers Using Sender ID
Spammers have started publishing their own Sender ID records, allowing their email to speed through anti-spam filters, according to this IDG News Service article. Sender ID works by providing out-of-band notification of what IP addresses are authorized to originate email…
Wi-Fi Wars
A battle over Wi-Fi rights is being waged at the University of Texas in Dallas. This week, the university banned students at the Waterview Apartment complex from installing their own 802.11b or 802.11g wireless access points. The reason? The university…
Fly-Powered Robot
If this is what autonomous robotics has come to, count me out. The robot known as Ecobot II will generate its own energy by catching and digesting flies in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. The robot’s energy source…
Vonage Falls Down on 911
Ben Smith writes in Slate about a problem he had when he dialed 911 on his Vonage phone.What’s surprising here, though, is that Vonage makes a big deal about its 911 service. When I got my Vonage phone, the company…
Singularity
Bruce Sterling writes in Wired about the Singularity– that hard to imagine sci-fi future event that is supposed to be a sort of boundary between the human and the transhuman, a time when ever accelerating change overtakes everything and, some…
NASA Probe Crashes in Utah Desert
The planned recovery of a capsule carrying solar-wind particles from NASA’s Genesis deep-space mission went awry this morning. The capsule failed to deploy its parachutes and slammed into the desert near the Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range at…
California Sues Diebold Over Voting Machines
The San Jose Mercury News and various other sources report that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has joined a false-claims lawsuit against Diebold, the manufacturer of a touch-screen voting system purchased by several counties in the state.The civil suit was…