babbledog: User Profile

Posted 5 days ago

the watchmen truly is one of the great graphic novels of all time. and the movie *looks* at first glance to capture a lot of what is great about the look and feel and vision of the novel. what worries me more is the deeper texture of the story--the concern about vigilante/freedom/fascism/safety issues and the way that we all struggle with tradeoffs among them. our political climate is ripe for such a story, but movies are bad at making textured, difficult characters and stories.
in Here is the ‘WATCHMAN’ TRAILER! - GeekTyrant

Posted 5 days ago

i thought profit was step 3. this really needs to be streamlined.
in Step one: torture foreigners. Step two: torture your own citizens, but only the criminals. Step three: widen the definition of 'criminal' to include "hostile intentions" toward the state.

Posted 8 days ago

terrible UI but very nice machine animations if you can find them.
in Kinematic Models for Design (Geometry of Pure Motion)

Posted 8 days ago

I read that this list was leaked. Does anyone have a reference to the FDIC problem list of likely-to-fail banks?
in Back in business: IndyMac reopens Monday - CNN.com

Posted 8 days ago

arkansan: what don't they get? that this goes too far for satire? that this will be damaging to obama because americans actually think obama is a terrorist or a muslim or something?
in Obama slams Muslim portrayal - Mike Allen - Politico.com

Posted 8 days ago

"war of northern agression" my ass.
in i don't expect anyone but me to get this, but it's brilliant.

Posted 8 days ago

colby: price will probably go *down* given the exchange rate. :-)
in Anheuser-Busch no longer American owned. What are we gonna sell next? Freedom?

Posted 8 days ago

i guess i'm just not a radiohead fan. this song is seriously boring and that overwhelms the value of a gimmicky music video + gimmicky online release.
in Google -- Yes, Google -- Premiers Radiohead's 'House of Cards'

Posted 13 days ago

i cannot, for the life of me, figure out why people watch golf on TV. at least when you play it you get to walk around and be frustrated. when you watch it on tv, you're just frustrated at home on the couch. (insert joke about teenagers dating here)
in Woods will become world's first billionaire athlete by 2010

Posted 13 days ago

i guess i don't understand why it's a problem.
in Hairy hybrid: Half grizzly, half polar bear

Posted 13 days ago

donkeykonguk: about 0.04 euros
in Spying on the World's Largest Power Utility

Posted 13 days ago

i thought this was going to be left-wing anti-mccain kookiness. instead i get a well-reasoned, sensible, intelligible legal argument why mccain just was not a natural born citizen and cannot be president legally. they even acknowledge that due to politics that an inelibible candidate might become president anyway, but that does not change the law. it's interesting to see the contradiction with lawrence tribe's opinion.
in Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship

Posted 13 days ago

no. i disbelieve.
in Teenager finds baby bat in her bra

Posted 13 days ago

i was hoping to download this now that i missed it, but i can't find a good torrent. anyone?
in Click & Clack's As the Wrench Turns

Posted 14 days ago

i must just be ignorant. i don't understand how any of this invalidates the 'no ex-post-facto law' part of the constitution.
in Senate Joins House in Caving to White House Immunity Demands

Posted 14 days ago

that is most excellent
in The Treadmill Desk: Exercise for the Sake of Hacking

Posted 16 days ago

http://jwz.livejournal.com/883988.html
in What kind of bike should I buy?

Posted 16 days ago

oh, interesting. i did think that that was turned off a long time ago. it was a weird business model for sprint. i wonder how this dovetails with sprint's odd dalliance with 802.16 (wimax)
in Sprint Broadband Direct Goes Offline July 31 - Service you thought died long ago finally does...

Posted 16 days ago

i have to admit that i am baffled by the whole "speculation driving prices" meme. it's incoherent on its face. speculators take contracts that have risk based on price moves. if they are right they make money. if they are wrong, they lose money. the provide valuable indicators of risk in the market. russ nelson did an excellent write-up of this issue years ago.
in Let's Tell the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Where to Go

Posted 20 days ago

I have been running gentoox with mythtv on my xbox for a few years. i'm interested to see what i might do with this distro. the main issue is: i'd love to see this work on my xbox. probably not going to happen. :-(
in See what LinuxMCE can do for you.

Posted 20 days ago

jessica: no. they sent out reports about it but they have not arrived yet. :-)
in Real Snail Mail

Posted 20 days ago

or just for some?
in "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." YouTube error

Posted 20 days ago

chuck: doesn't nvidia have closed source drivers? ati has been a bit crap but amd bought them and they recently announced a completely open source driver (no binary firmware anything) that they contracted suse (novell) to write for them. that's not available yet, but it is v. interesting.
in I hate Linux Graphics (Linux Hater's Blog)

Posted 22 days ago

jessica: why does that make a difference? why did the guy have to go outside at all?
in Want to get away with shooting 2 people because you think they are doing something wrong?? Move to Texas!

Posted 22 days ago

this is actually interesting. for those who don't read french: teleatlas and google entered into a 5 year deal that gives google the right to use the teleatlas geographic information, but licenses *back* to teleatlas the geographic modifications that googles users produce. google has been rapidly rolling out the ability of people to 'mark-up' maps with information about points of interest and with personal photos taken at various sites. now all of this will be licensed back to teleatlas. wikimaps are clearly the future. this centralized stuff is not tenable.
in Accord strat gique entre Google et TeleAtlas (TomTom)

Posted 22 days ago

no soy borinquen, pero fui criado en puerto rico (de familia norteamericana y argentina)
in The Evolution of Fear

Posted 22 days ago

the clinton camp have been ranting about conspiracies this whole primary season. it's so annoying.
in Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers - New York Times

Posted 22 days ago

what a bizarre and intriguing idea. now i want to see the documentary. baseball never really caught on outside of the US, japan and parts of the caribbean. it's interesting to think about why that is and whether baseball makes any sense at all in israel.
in Holy Land Hardball

Posted 23 days ago

tornado lover: you still alive?
in When Tornadoes Attack: What a Tornado Taught Me About Our Stupid Obsession With Gadgets (And Why We Still Love Them)

Posted 23 days ago

They went through 50 prototypes. This has got to be good.
in The Brown Corporation

Posted 23 days ago

gothicnation79: what?!?! if you think that there really are women with teeth in their vaginas you may need to do a little bit more biology and anatomy reading. either that, or i'd like to see a reference cited to support your claim that this is real.
in Myth of 'Vagina Dentata' Becomes Horror Film

Posted 23 days ago

i've never seen this before. at first glance it's beautiful and compelling.
in Mr. Fooster – Travelling on a Whim celebrates its launch at Art of Navigation in San Francisco!

Posted 24 days ago

quebec's system is very different from the rest of canada's, chuck. overall, the canadian system works very well and *much* better than the US system. the quebequois system did, indeed, have a prohibition against all private health insurance that was struck down by the canadian supreme court last year. since then it has been getting better, too.
in Second Thoughts About Socialism

Posted 25 days ago

things are going to be so great when we have no idea what valid domain names are. reminds me of the clownpenis.fart skit on saturday night live.
in New Rules Could Mean Hundreds of New Domains

Posted 26 days ago

The evidence of the failures of the justice system seem to be adding up. When the republican governor of illinois pardoned all death row prisoners you know that the system itself is indefensible.
in Artificial brain predicts death-row executions

Posted 26 days ago

yeah. dirty sanchez. that's what we all come to babbledog for.
in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy : Sexual hypocrisy and the Internet.

Posted 26 days ago

i think this is a terrible idea. it's going to make the internet dramatically more difficult to use for most users and increasee the power of google, as users give up completely on trying to remember domain names other than a select few.
in Internet overhaul wins approval

Posted 26 days ago

this story about civet coffee makes the rounds every year or so. i'm not sure why it's such a compelling idea, but clearly it is.
in Weasel Coffee

Posted 26 days ago

you're not a kindle or sony reader fan?
in Dual-Screen Ebook Developed, Navigates in Real Page-Turn Style [Ebooks]

Posted 28 days ago

Laura Esquivel wrote a truly mediocre book a while ago called La ley del amor that included a CD of opera music. It wasn't just that the book was kind of bad. it was that the music was weirdly disconnected and irrelevant to the story. Also the music was opera, a genre of which I am not fond.
in Neal Stephenson's new book, Anathem, will come with a CD of music.

Posted 29 days ago

intersting. i wonder why this "bump" from winning the primaries has taken so long to show up in the polling.
in Who Do You Believe: CW Or The Polls? Obama By 12 in The LA Times Poll

Posted 29 days ago

We've been waiting for this to happen for some time. It's painfully obvious that the only reason for google to do the analytics product is that they wanted the http logs of all those sites. And this is probably only the first product that they're going to build with them.
in Google Sells Your Analytics Data (finally)

Posted 29 days ago

heh. what is the connection between the segway and medical marijuana? i don't think i'd like to ride a segway stoned.
in NY Assembly Passes Medical Marijuana Bill

Posted 29 days ago

totally worth watching. the cop one is the funnier of the two: "people are inherently stupid."
in Don't Talk To The Police

Posted 29 days ago

chuck: anytime someone says that i'm thinking something through too hard, my reaction is usually that they're not thinking about it hard enough. :-) this is about art. and what's the basis for the art? a tag cloud. and what is a tag cloud? a really, really bad user interface design practice that is confusing and hard to use.

the art is *designed* to evoke reactions based on the idea of tag clouds. so it is totally appropriate for amand and me to talk about our reactions to tag clouds.
in Cryptonomicon via tag cloud

Posted 29 days ago

mabrown: the article fails to deliver. in the end they decide that the idea isn't that feasible at all.
in Victoria's Circuit: Harnessing the untapped power of breast motion

Posted 31 days ago

harsh!
in Tried to make me go to rehab and I should have Gone Gone Gone

Posted 31 days ago

did this guy go through with it? i read about this a while ago and never saw the end of the story.
in Markets in everything: lives for sale

Posted 31 days ago

It's not that god was mad so he sent floods. It's that he is merciful so he sent volunteers and made the floods end. Clearly.
in Midwest Worshippers Hear Good News: River Cresting

Posted 31 days ago

this is actually a nice writeup of citizenship laws in the context of another stupid internet rumor. the meta question is: 'are human beings just too stupid to use the internet?' since we seem to just believe any crap we read on it, it's possible that the memes have won. they have created a meme propagation facility without precedent and the truth doesn't matter any more. cable news is a joke compared to the internet's ability to spread lies.
in Native Son

Posted 32 days ago

questions: 1) why would anyone buy any telco in this day and age?; 2) why would they do it in a *leveraged* transaction? 3) *especially* why would a teachers' pension fund buy a telco in a leveraged transaction; 4) in Canadia? that is all. :-)
in Canadian court lets pension fund buy Bell Canada

Posted 32 days ago

what qualifies this as "odd news"? this probably happens 5000x per day across the US.
in Ex-cook pleads guilty to putting hair in steak (AP)

Posted 33 days ago

Interesting history of the andre the giant and obey giant art phenomena of the 90s. And it's also a really well done documentation of what looks like an obvious case of plagerism.
in Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey

Posted 33 days ago

yeah, i'm not sure. in particular, the thing that people *really* use flash for is streaming video (youtube, et. al.). i don't see how srpoutcore does that. http://vaughanknight.com/blog/2008/06/sproutcore-vs-silverlight-vs-f.html even says "Sproutcore might have some shiny features out of the box, but true open standards are already being offered in many forms, including Google's GWT. How one would do video streaming via Javascript starts to hurt my brain."
in Apple looks to SproutCore to kill Flash

Posted 33 days ago

What do babbledoggers say? Do y'all care if we drop support for IE6?
in Movement in the death of old browsers and IE 6

Posted 33 days ago

is this the third sign of the coming apocalypse?
in Cubs, White Sox putting Chicago on top

Posted 33 days ago

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Oscar Wao. It was, quite possibly, the best book i've ever read. It has a particular and hilarious mix of "modern decent literature", latino magical realism, sci fi themes, historial fiction, and modern urban experience. I hear that even non-spanish speakers have loved it, in spite of how much spanish is in the book. Also notable: i believe this book will be the definitve historical novel on the subject of trujillo, the infamous dictator of the dominican republic. and on that subject, the novel is devastating.
in Authors@Google: Junot Díaz

Posted 33 days ago

arkansan: that may be where we diverge. i thought that one was funny, too :-). but i have family from the southern midwest and south ('bama, arkansas, the state of misery, KY) so i guess i would find it funny. they're probably all cousins. :-)
in 6th foot found on B.C. south coast

Posted 34 days ago

the answer of the article: "it depends". shocking. i should really go into the personal financial advice business. i think i could do a really nice job.
in Should You Pay Off Your Mortgage Before You Retire?

Posted 34 days ago

I love the related link: "should you pay off your mortgage before you retire." mostly babbledog has really good related links, but sometimes they are hilariously bad. was it the "off" (as in the foot was cut off, the mortgage was paid off ?) i supposed we'll never know.
in The Canadian Severed Foot Mystery

Posted 34 days ago

that's a funny typo. :-)
in Mother pleads not guilty in cyber-bullying suicide test case

Posted 34 days ago

I found absolutely nothing new in this piece.
in A little bit of Google's secret sauce

Posted 34 days ago

Nice to see a picture of what the cars actually look like. It's funny they're using a prius in this case.
in Google Street View Car Stopped By Police

Posted 34 days ago

neat idea, Ren.
in Carnegie Mellon system estimates geographic location of photos

Posted 34 days ago

ac: problem with what? i don't have a problem at all. i was just curious. i know almost nothing about archicad and am surprised to constantly see so many people finding this post.
in ArchiCAD 12 - Sneak Preview

Posted 35 days ago

i predict this will be a very short-lived cause. What more is there to say? stinkhorns are scary, stinky things.
in No Stinkhorns

Posted 35 days ago

this has a very chuck norris feel about it. i'm looking forward to what else people can do with it.
in Rumors the Obama campaign shouldn't try to correct.

Posted 35 days ago

I don't really know why i think it is awesome. I just do. Sulu is gay and getting married. I feel really good about the way that things are going in this respect in the US. I will admit now that I *totally* underestimated the importance of legalizing gay marriage. I thought it was kind of dumb and I was totally wrong.
in Sulu to Marry His Boyfriend

Posted 35 days ago

Ummm. Ummm. OK. You have now reached the end of the Internet. There's nothing more to see here.
in Little Girl Defines YouTube

Posted 35 days ago

this is fascinating. computer security people all deride security through obscurity, but they frequently ignore the fact that it works really, really well. it cannot save you against a concerted attacker, but it can prevent a concerted attacker from focusing on you in the first place.
in Security through obscurity

Posted 35 days ago

i'm starting to think this makes sense, given some of the other names that have been floated.
in Why Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as veep

Posted 35 days ago

race is more textured and more complicated on a global basis than one might expect.
in S Africa Chinese want black rights

Posted 35 days ago

13 things i learned about reading american sports coverage: it's jingoistic. From the lead: "Europeans are weenies. The play of Gasol, Vujacic and Rachmoninov was softer than John Tomase's muffin tops. Collectively they played like the kind of worthless, slimy Eurotrash that only gets aggressive with drunken American tourist chicks. They showed all the willingness to help out defensively that their countries showed in Bosnia."
in 13 Things I Learned From the Celtics Championship

Posted 35 days ago

the planet for the win.
in The Earth Always Wins

Posted 35 days ago

chuck: you should take the badass recommendations system from babbledog and bolt it onto reddit.
in Reddit releases source code?

Posted 35 days ago

I *hate* it when people get 1970s art deco confused with 1930s art deco. It's just such a classless mistake to make.
in Mark Simonson notes that the period typography in the Indiana Jones...

Posted 36 days ago

Only unedited mail headers will suffice. This is clearly just another instance of the Obama campaign exagerating his credentials. Now we're supposed to believe that he is some kind of a computer genius, too? Sending email by himself without help in the middle of the night. Come on! It's just not credible.
in Barack Obama Can Use a Computer

Posted 36 days ago

Any volunteers?
in Obama Campaign Seeks Web-Site Security Help

Posted 36 days ago

Gore is just the guy to say "elections matter". :-)
in In Endorsing Obama, Gore Says, "Elections Matter"

Posted 36 days ago

Quoting wikipedia: "In October 2002, Hagel voted in favor of authorizing the use of military force against Iraq."
in And Obama's veep is ... a Republican?

Posted 36 days ago

nice. classy. seriously, though, it will be interesting to see if the obama camp has the kind of manipulative, devious, backstabbingness that seems to be required for modern politics. the clintons certainly do.
in Obama hires Patti Solis Doyle

Posted 37 days ago

and the complaint is that he should have wanted to be ordinary? i don't even understand what some of the complaints about politicians are these days.
in The Trains, The Trains

Posted 37 days ago

hilarious.
in Delegate to Democrat Convention: I’m Voting for McCain!

Posted 37 days ago

zimbabwe is a catastrophe in progress and it's getting insufficient coverage in the US-based media.
in Manipulation of Poll Result Under Way

Posted 37 days ago

obama as a feminist. nice spin. not clear that he's not.
in Obama as the feminist son.

Posted 37 days ago

In this election, "different" == "black" and is code to bring out the racism in white people. the flag lapel thingy, the focus on his middle name, the reverend wright stuff was all about that. unlike previous politicians in a similar situation (jess jackson, e.g.), obama has been extremely successful at convincing white voters that he is not completely different from them.
in Mitchell Bard: The Media Is Already Demonizing Obama as Being Different

Posted 37 days ago

"i am not in favor of privatizing social security but i would like younger workers to be able to put a few of their tax dollars into an account with their name on it." heh. a private account? :-)

i do worry that we will never find a way to get out of this retirement/pension mess. it's clear that the benefits are not sustainable given current population trends (people living longer, the size of the baby boom generation compared to the younger generations after them). so without a significant reduction in benefits or increase in taxes, it just ain't gonna happen.
in John McCain ...

Posted 37 days ago

david, i could almost agree with that. but i'm just not a fan of manufactured holidays, i guess.
in What's the best thing to do for Dad on Father's Day?

Posted 37 days ago

that video is wonderful.
in Why isn't the media reporting the fact that John McCain called his wife the c-word?

Posted 37 days ago

sam brownback is appearing lots of places recently. i heard him talking about his appology to native peoples bill recently. and now this. i see more coverage of brownback now than when he was running for president. any theories about what could be going on here?
in Brownback: We Depend on Dads

Posted 39 days ago

even swimming is getting easier for muslim women. the new style is head-to-ankle body covering and long sleeves because the new synthetics have lower resistance then skin. women obviously wear swim caps, so i think except for the most extreme societies (those that require full face covering), this should work.
in Saudi women vie for Olympic rights

Posted 39 days ago

i'm sharing this story with the 'internet memes' cause. support the internet meme cause!.
in Things that are younger than John McCain

Posted 40 days ago

$500 ethernet cable? why are audiophiles so stupid.
in The World's most expensive Ethernet cable?

Posted 40 days ago

monsters!
in jwz - "Then you and the chicken die like one."

Posted 40 days ago

i'm pretty cranky about the way that people have cross-contaminated my veggies with all their animal-based bacteria. veggies would be safer if they'd keep the poop off of them!
in Rooting Out the Rotten Tomatoes

Posted 40 days ago

baseball? :-)
in Celtics take control with huge comeback

Posted 40 days ago

nokia 6310i for those who don't want to bother to click through to the site.
in Best mobile phone ever made

Posted 41 days ago

my (somewhat evil) friend jason's comment: "do you think the school would have minded if they had had a fake columbine?"
in School defends drunken driving hoax - CNN.com

Posted 41 days ago

"A 15-year-old has been charged as an adult for bringing a gun to his Southeast Side elementary school on Monday. " wth?!? 15 year old in *elementary* school.
in Eighth-grader charged as adult for bringing gun to school

Posted 41 days ago

Yeah, looks really reasonable, chuck. nice find!
in Is your mechanic telling you the truth?

Posted 41 days ago

this whole series of discussions is interesting.
in Why They Skip Photoshop

Posted 41 days ago

Hulk Woman vs "I got a crush on Obama" lass. It's really quite wonderful to have pure spoof, now that we don't have to watch the Democratic Primary anymore
in McCain Gets Hulking Girl to Do Battle With Obama Girl

Posted 41 days ago

Moving the center of politics to the midwest is powerful and interesting. Never before have we seen such a move away from the coasts' role as political/economic leaders of the country.
in Obama moves DNC operations to Chicago

Posted 42 days ago

this story is wonderful and rich. the battle inside a rational economist between reason and sentimentality. i laughed. i cried. love it. thumbs up. :-)
in How to Get Hannah Montana Tickets (Freakonomics-style)

Posted 42 days ago

why do we have to go to china to get our football on the web? why do advertisers not see this as just one more distribution medium, especially for live events where the adverts aren't easily avoided?
in Live European Cup Soccer

Posted 42 days ago

david, yeah, even with air travel i came out below average. weird, eh? i guess i just don't travel that much. or these estimator tools aren't that great.
in Compute your carbon footprint

Posted 42 days ago

the brits are obsessive about pint size and fullness. pints in britain are marked with a special seal indicating that they are manufactured to contain 20 imperial fluid ounces (568ml). beer inspectors (i kid you not) roam the country with rulers, ordering rounds and then measuring whether the head on the beer is disallowably large or not. the guy in this article who says that brewers want 1 1/2 inches (almost 4cm!) of foam is full of crap.
in A Pint-Size Problem

Posted 42 days ago

jerry: that post came to babbledog from craigslist san diego and it was over two months ago. my guess is that the seller already sold that some time ago (and wouldn't want to ship it to colorado). sorry!
in GRAVE DIGGER 12 VOLT POWER WHEELS RIDE ON CAR (SAN ELIJO HILLS) $100

Posted 43 days ago

thinker: newstin does look interesting. the news in different languages is cool, but the navigation all stays english, so i don't think this is going to catch on much.
in Newstin - Global Social News Platform

Posted 43 days ago

who the hell is jordan?
in Jordan's Sister Goes Topless

Posted 43 days ago

this is basically unusuable on linux as far as i can tell.
in Robokill

Posted 43 days ago

Or rather: "Oz is a multi-paradigm language that is designed for advanced, concurrent, networked, soft real-time, and reactive applications."
in Tutorial of Oz

Posted 43 days ago

well, clearly it buys them the information about who is getting what information from what sites and putting it where.
in Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool

Posted 43 days ago

i have seen this same clip used to make fun of other subjects. i wonder if this is a proto meme. i haven't yet figured out the source of the clip.
in Hillary's Downfall

Posted 43 days ago

Well, that is progress. Now if only they would turn on bash by default and ship with the necessary gnu tools.
in "What Is a Linux Guy Doing at Sun"

Posted 44 days ago

i totally agree, jhota.
in MacRumors.com : Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 Keynote Live Coverage

Posted 44 days ago

seriously cool. this is a really nice web interface to a very complicated data exploration problem. programming to the linux kernel is tough and this would make it easier.
in The Interactive Linux Kernel Map

Posted 44 days ago

i haven't used fedora in a long time. is it as annoying as it always was? :-) i got frustrated by the 'upgrade every 6 months' character of it. that's useless for servers. centos on the server makes way more sense, to me.
in Upgraded to Fedora 9 and Samba broke.

Posted 44 days ago

i'd like to see this updated to include more information about kernel development outside of the US and western europe.
in A Tale of Four Kernels

Posted 44 days ago

So, I guess he did it, after all. Weird to think about a high-profile kernel programmer killing his wife. I wonder what happens to Reiserfs now.
in Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina's Body

Posted 44 days ago

amanda: in a fit of hilarity, i read that as "librarians", too. so i was trying to think about what country librarians would be tortured in.
in Liberians tell stories of torture, pain to special commission

Posted 45 days ago

i don't atually know anyone from Penza Russia. Anyone else?
in Reply to I Love PINK..

Posted 45 days ago

i'm hoping you trade longer life for steadily decreasing cognitive function. that way i can be old but not really know it. score!
in Red Wine Straight from Fountain of Youth

Posted 46 days ago

what an awesome story of science
in Heartwarming Family Tradition Illustrates Heart Wrenching Global Trend

Posted 47 days ago

a better link at the associated press tells the story: "Water distorted preflight readings in three of the plane's 24 sensors, making the aircraft's control computer force the B-2 to pitch up on takeoff, resulting in a stall and subsequent crash."
in B2 Stealth Bomber Crashes Video

Posted 47 days ago

this is clearly the better thread about the $100 hamburger. the other thread is nonsense.
in $100 Hamburger Bites the Big One

Posted 48 days ago

more than half of what is funny about these comments is how painfully british they are. :-)
in spEak You’re bRanes

Posted 48 days ago

this just points out how badly unrepresentative alexa's sampling is.
in Left-right asymmetry in the online world?

Posted 48 days ago

we should submit this page to reddit so that we can get people to reddit up a babbledog link of a asylum inclusion of a revision3 story about an asylum homage to bacon. then maybe someone can digg that.
in Asylum Gives Props to Rev3 Giving a Shout-Out to Asylum's Collection of Bacon Pictures

Posted 49 days ago

tiger's right. no one watches hockey anymore. :-)
in Penguins steal amazing victory from Detroit in triple overtime

Posted 49 days ago

mccain has his work cut out for him. perhaps turd blossom can help him out.
in TPMtv: McCain Leaves Fox Speechless

Posted 49 days ago

OTOH, youtube cannot be expected to try to figure out who is the copyright owner in all cases.
in Radiohead to Prince: Hey, that's OUR song

Posted 49 days ago

I really enjoy the smug mug blog. they do so much writing about the amazon infrastructure, challenges and approaches, that it's the best resource for someone curious about using ec2 or s3.
in SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug)

Posted 49 days ago

They are divorced from reality, but they have legitimate beef and if you were on the other side, you would be cranky. media coverage of and influence of all campaigns is troublesome. the coverage of the campaign is always all about the race and never about the substance which is interesting.
in HillaryClinton.com - blogHillary

Posted 51 days ago

i thought this was going to be the gun or the woman flashing her boobs, but this is much funnier than either.
in Weirdest google maps image I've ever seen. What do you think??

Posted 52 days ago

Dustin: I haven't used newsgator. is it worth trying out? what do you like about it?
in Integration with RSSMountain.com

Posted 52 days ago

That's wacky, for sure. My guess is that such a pregnancy would never have gone to full term in an environment with better prenatal screening. The medical care in the Northern Territory of Australia must not have been very good.
in Miracle Baby

Posted 52 days ago

This story is still poorly understood by technical people that I talk to. The attitude seems to be: Manning is a good guy and wasn't doing anything wrong. That misses the point badly. If it were not manning and it were a bad guy, no one *still* would have noticed and they could have done really, really bad things. No one is watching this stuff closely enough.
in Renesys Blog: Securing the Root

Posted 54 days ago

This thing is frickin fantastic. Anyone who was ever an Iggy Pop fan will love every page of this thing.
in Iggy Pop Concert Rider

Posted 54 days ago

and the shy bladder syndrome link. that one's on target. so to speak.
in The Lady Urinal with a Splash of Gold

Posted 55 days ago

it's a nice ad and his spanish is pretty good for an english speaker.
in Barack Obama To Puerto Rico: I'm Mexican, Too! [Campaign Ads]

Posted 55 days ago

cross platform. or more specifically, it's a vulnerability in the flash VM that works on IE/FF and on windows/linux/mac/everything is my understanding. cool, eh?
in Flash 0-day vulnerability

Posted 56 days ago

we're trying it out for a couple of days to get some data and then we'll probably roll back to think about it for a while
in What do you think of the new babbledog landing page?

Posted 56 days ago

weird. i wasn't able to source that definition in any of the online dictionaries i looked at. i need better online dictionaries, clearly.
in RoyalTournament.org

Posted 57 days ago

it's amazing to me just how little coverage hockey gets these days. run-of-the-mill baseball games are getting more coverage than the stanley cup. did they kill the league with the strike and the skipped season? did the fans go away never to return?
in The 2008 Stanley Cup

Posted 57 days ago

heh. i'm not getting one mostly because... i don't have a wii. :-)
in the ad for the Wii Fit that Nintendo wisely rejected...

Posted 60 days ago

how the hell do you hit a building in montana with a plane? the place is empty! this is a spectacular failure.
in Plane crashes into Mont. building, kills pilot

Posted 61 days ago

this is the best comment about this incident: "Hillary says all kinds of crazy things and that's why people don't like her." heh.
in Waiting For Somebody To Get Shot Is Not A Campaign Strategy

Posted 61 days ago

i've been watching this become a broader meme from the jezebel site. it's rare to see a spreading meme on the internet that is substanceful and positive, but this is one of them.
in The Rise of Bodysnarking

Posted 62 days ago

although ostensibly about the democratic primary, this article has the best, concise history of puerto rico for a north american audience i've ever read.
in Puerto Rico’s Moment in the Sun

Posted 62 days ago

nice thinko there, colby. a thinko is more interesting than a typo because it reveals normally hidden mental structure.
in David Cook wins American Idol

Posted 62 days ago

my coworker, earl, has a $10k bicycle built partially out of titanium. this will cause its value to plummet down to $9.2k.
in New Process Could Cause Titanium Price To Tumble

Posted 62 days ago

those ads always seemed so dumb to me. the service requires that you *not* purposefully disclose your SSN to anyone and yet, the dude did. so moronic.
in Fraud-prevention pitchman becomes ID theft victim - CNN.com

Posted 62 days ago

*snorts* coffee out his nose. this may not be as funny to those of you who haven't spent time in puerto rico, the dominican republic and new york. there are hilarious rivalries between boricuas (puerto ricans) and quisqueyas (dominicans), exacerbated by the fact that puerto rico is part of the US and its citizens have US passports, whereas dominicans have to take crappy boats to mayaguez and fake their accents to catch flights to new york. dominicans tend to be blacker, too, and shadism is a real thing in latin america. this is a wonderfully rich smear campaign.
in Obama: Too Dominican [The Campaign]

Posted 63 days ago

It really does seem sort of around-ass-to-get-to-elbow. on the other hand, it's certainly true that bridge/interface technologies like twitter make implementation and integration much easier.
in Software: Using Twitter for Home Automation

Posted 63 days ago

The Things younger than john mccain blog proves that this meme is powerful. Mccain is really, really old and it's going to be a serious issue in the election.
in Did McCain screw himself when he promoted speedy adoption of HDTV?

Posted 63 days ago

mksmith prediction is on course!
in Gas at $5.00 in the U.S. - betting pool open

Posted 63 days ago

where do you get a projector with decent resolution for sub-$300, gregg (given the cost of other components, like cables and a screen would be ~$100 or more)?
in TG Daily - Samsung demos 82” 2160p HDTV

Posted 63 days ago

i don't understand why the debian maintainers didn't try to push their patch upstream for *two* years. You don't maintain a local patch to security-critical software for any amount of time without getting it thoroughly vetted by experts in that software. this is a major failure for debian, in my view.
in Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco

Posted 63 days ago

(i don't speak or read any korean but google translates (badly) lots of languages into english.
in 김인호돼지박사 한국형우주관 응^응=응 우주화시대 응원해주세요

Posted 64 days ago

No!
in They Might Be Giants in Time Magazine

Posted 64 days ago

truly creepy pictures. but compelling as hell.
in Man + Animal = "Manimals" = Eerie Portraits

Posted 64 days ago

barcamp boston sounds like it was a lot of fun. i'm sorry i missed it.
in At Least One Librarian Attended BarCamp …

Posted 64 days ago

what does this mean? adekosis: very mysterious
in User talk:김인호돼지박사

Posted 64 days ago

wow! what a geogeous photograph of a georgous man. Here is a detailed account of Bowie's arrest on marijuana charges in Rochester, NY in 1976.
in David Bowie Mugshot

Posted 64 days ago

sure, that's a facile (and probably not innaccurate) explanation. but people are *buying* macs over $1k and they're really not buying many wintel machines over $1k. remember also: this includes *gaming* machines (which are 100% windows boxes). so the stat is even more impressive.
in NPD: Apple corners premium market; Apple’s market share of PCs over $1,000 hits 66%

Posted 64 days ago

when will clinton drop out? seriously. this is getting painful and stupid.
in Obama to reach delegate milestone today (AP)

Posted 64 days ago

best quote from that article amanda linked to: "“I wish you would come at this with a little bit of reality,” said Sen. Rick Olseen, DFL-Harris. “If you don’t want people to have sex until they’re 35 or 40, just say so.” " heh
in How do you fix a broken school district?

Posted 64 days ago

dammit. i'm supposed to be a royals fan, having gone to high school in kansas city. still, a no-hitter is cool.
in Jon Lester No Hits the KC Royals.

Posted 64 days ago

There is clearly more backstory here than is being discussed publicly. I don't understand (1) why ICANN didn't get the existing L-root address/prefix from bill manning when they took it over; (2) why bill would actually provide *answers* to dns queries to the old L-root address when he says he's just studying how many people are asking.
in Ghosts of Root Servers Past--ICANN Responds

Posted 65 days ago

over at the renesys blog, bill manning says that the reason to operate a name server at the site is to collect data for DITL-2008. seems plausible, but still disconcerting.
in Identity Theft Hits the Root Name Servers

Posted 65 days ago

This surprised me. Obama may actually be able to carry off his image of a 'post-racial' candidate if he can get Byrd's endorsement
in Incredibly Racist Senator Endorses Obama [Exalted Cyclops]

Posted 65 days ago

nice, zippy44. :-)
in Chuck Norris Jokes

Posted 65 days ago

but do you *want* to be in touch with them, gregg? the people i went to college with don't really like me that much.
in What the hell is the point of Facebook?

Posted 65 days ago

Heh. Obama raises the libertarian, southern ire in Jim.
in Obama: An End to All-You-Can-Eat?

Posted 65 days ago

(unless, of course, they agree to a revenue sharing arrangement (also spelled "B R I B E") with us.)
in Facebook CEO Wants to Talk With Google on Friend Connect

Posted 66 days ago

why is this a headphone debate and not a helicopter debate, though?
in Death spurs headphone debate

Posted 66 days ago

jim: m thoughts exactly: insects of some sort. although with mumified flesh, maybe not.
in Blue whale, buried since 1987, exhumed in eastern Canada for move to Vancouver museum

Posted 66 days ago

I commented on this very same article in another babbledog thread.
in A tale of four kernels

Posted 67 days ago

I heard this interview. It was great. She talked about how a whole generation of women athletes are now growing up with the idea that they *can* be professional players. This just wasn't true 20 years ago. Progress happens. Slowly, but the times, they are a changin.
in Candace Parker, top WNBA pick, goes to the Los Angeles Sparks

Posted 68 days ago

i can't keep track. is this the 'beautiful' guy or some other dude? :-) what's so special about the bold? small screen, same form factor as previous blackberries. doesn't look like an iphone killer to me.
in John Mayer secures a BlackBerry Bold, makes world envious - Engadget

Posted 68 days ago

gay icon on icon action. hot.
in California Supreme Court overturns law preventing same-sex couples from marrying

Posted 68 days ago

Birth of a new trend! They'll all be wearing this at the prom.
in Jay's Caption of the Week Contest

Posted 68 days ago

It's unclear to me whether three barrels of dead monkeys are more or less fun than a single barrel. hrm. math is hard. let's go vote.
in Hillary Is Too Boring to Be President

Posted 68 days ago

how can there *possibly* be inconsistencies? jim: you much just be misunderstanding.
in Reward of reciting Surah Ikhlaas 3 times equal to whole Quran?

Posted 68 days ago

this would be a catastrophe for new hampshire. new hampshire has precious few advantages over massachussets other than our low tax structure. this would result in long-term economic damage to NH. the good news is, it's never going to happen. massachussans *love* them some taxes.
in Activists push to repeal Massachusetts state income tax

Posted 68 days ago

tamponrolled
in vaginal simulator - SFW

Posted 68 days ago

i don't think that this can possibly be true. but it's intriguing to consider.
in Huckabee reenters the race?!?!

Posted 68 days ago

shopped. clearly. :-)
in Geeky pants

Posted 68 days ago

this is really impressive and cool. i love cases where people take tons of old, wonderful material and put it online. what a set of riches!
in Gramophone archive going online

Posted 69 days ago

I'm troubled by the way that Google treats their employees like children. They try to exchange the infantilizing atmosphere of college for an infantilizing relationship with an employer. It's exploitative. I'm all in favor of a more relaxed workplace, but given Google's profits and their salaries, I'd say there's a misalignment somewhere.
in Profile of Google's Cambridge, MA, office

Posted 69 days ago

for those who cannot tell that jim is being sarcastic: it's clearly impossible and this was an obviously fraudulent election.
in Myanmar new constitution ratified - People's Daily Online

Posted 70 days ago

impressive and interesting design.
in The Zero-Emissions One-Wheeled Motorcycle

Posted 70 days ago

woohoo. polar bears are listed as "threatened" because their habitat is rapidly disappearing. the administration has cautioned, though, that this is *not* to be used to actually protect their habitat by taking any action on global climate change (which is the main cause of their habitat disappearing).
in Polar bears to be protected species (AP)

Posted 70 days ago

i cannot make this, sadly. i will never be able to go to a barcamp, it seems. i'm thinking about going to pod camp pittsburgh in the fall.
in BarCamp Boston

Posted 70 days ago

the last time i was in turkey i was *shocked* at the degree of hero worship they give to ataturk. it is an attitude without parallel in american or european attitudes towards our historical heroes. they jailed a politician for chewing gum at a ceremony for ataturk because they said that that was disrespectful to him. this attitude and set of beliefs is so profound and broad across turkish culture that i do not believe youtube will be able to effectively operate in turkey as long as there is a single video criticizing this turkish national hero.
in The Cat-and-Mouse Game in the Turkish Cyberspace

Posted 70 days ago

yeah, i don't understand it, either. but i don't have a wii.
in WiiWare goes live today!

Posted 70 days ago

this event was fantastic. brady had some really interesting things to say about the challenges faced by news gathering and distributing organizations.
in Meet NHPR's Brady Carlson during WebNOB, Tuesday (5/13), Jillian's in Manchester, 6-8 p

Posted 71 days ago

Two things worth noting here:

1) I still find it shocking that white people will admit to their racism on national tv. clearly we haven't come as far as one might hope;
2) damn these people are fat. we are becoming a seriously fat country and wv is leading the vanguard.
in West Virginia Voters Speak Out

Posted 71 days ago

This is interesting, given our previous discussion about whether it is good, or bad, for Obama that the race continues. It's surprising (to me) that a majority of democrats seem to think that the race is good for their eventual nominee.
in ABC/Wash. Post Poll: 64% of Dems Say Hillary Should Stay in Race

Posted 71 days ago

when a man is not free to wear a banana-hammock at the beach, none of us is free!
in Florida Man Ticketed For Wearing Speedo On Beach

Posted 71 days ago

Race is interesting in this primary, and fascinating that it has played more strongly than gender.
in Clinton Backers Predicting 90-10 West Virginia Blowout

Posted 72 days ago

i hear that, smckenzie: i, too, am sick of this primary. god, let it be over.
in Bill Clinton earns a "Monica"

Posted 72 days ago

kinda funny. a little long. i did just find a stack of several hundred 5 1/4" floppies the other day as i was packing up the house.
in Retrolutionize the way you tranfer data

Posted 72 days ago

processing is v. v. cool but it needs a non-common-noun name. it will never google well.
in Javascript and Processing (visualization language)

Posted 72 days ago

how does hillary clinton understand the needs of working class women? she's a wealthy politician. not that there's anything wrong with that.
in Quitters Never Win

Posted 72 days ago

this article disgusted even me.
in

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