General

Wi-Fi is wild.  You’d be suprised how many times each day I pull out my laptop just to look out some factoid. Now I need a tablet-pc 😉

It’s just freaking cool. The most compelling effect in Minority Report, for me, was the visualization of active paper. Last night we watched it again, and later some friends dropped by. To put this in context, I live in smalltown New Hampshire, not Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. There is lots of dialup Internet happening here, and DSL is growing, but Wi-Fi households are rare. When a topic came up in conversation, and I flipped open the TiBook to check it out, I had an epiphany. The future really is here, albeit not evenly distributed. I didn’t mention, and I’m sure it didn’t occur to my friends, that I was connecting wirelessly to the Internet. It seemed completely natural that “the Internet” would be “in” this little box, whether or not wires were running to it. The technology is disappearing into the woodwork, as it should. It is becoming a small-i internet. … [Jon’s Radio]

Biology’s Chernobyl. Chernobyl proved that a badly designed and badly managed reactor could cause an accident capable of killing a small number of people and slightly increasing the cancer risk in a large area nearby. The worst nuclear power could do was thereby proved to be modest damage compared with the safety and environmental record of coal, oil and wind. Yet Chernobyl instead left the impression that all nuclear power was unsafe. Likewise, the Raelians may have just made it more difficult for science to convince a skeptical public that reproductive technologies and genetic engineering can deliver benefits. No matter that they have already begun to deliver magnificent benefits: fertility for the infertile, safe insulin for diabetics, new drugs for cancer victims, individually targeted drugs for mental patients, vitamin-A-rich rice for poor children in poor countries–even the promise of stem cells to repair the damage wrought by Parkinson’s disease. Against these benefits, the disaster of one sick child produced by the premature use of reproductive cloning might seem to be a small setback. But public debate does not work that way. It takes benefits for granted and makes a massive fuss of costs. The principal victim of the backlash to Eve will be stem-cell research. [Mobilog]

E-Mail Newsletters and RSS. If you ask me (you didn’t), both Scott and John are letting them off the hook too easily. I want my e-mail newsletters to be available as RSS feeds. I already have too many daily and weekly newsletters cluttering my… [Jeremy Zawodny’s blog]

Freed From Prison, but Still Paying a Penalty. Many ex-convicts face penalties, like bans on living in public housing, that do not begin until the prison sentence runs out. By Fox Butterfield. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Anne Bradstreet. “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

New Phrack [Slashdot]

Ebay to RSS. Georg Bauer, the other active PyCS developer (the guy behind most of the recent changes) has hacked up a Python script (download) to search Ebay and generate an RSS feed from the results.

Read more (if you can understand German) on Hugo’s House of Programming Error.

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