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Tomorrow Prince William will marry Kate Middleton. If we don’t change anything he will probably become the King of Australia at some future time, so I think that now is the time to start discussing the options. Walter Block makes some interesting points in favor of longer terms for politicians and for having a monarch […] Sebastian Thrun gave an interesting TED talk about the Google driverless car project and explains how his main aim is to avoid all the needless road deaths that are due to human error [1]. Finally a good use for the Google street-view type data! AnnMarie Thomas gave an interesting short TED talk about using play-dough […] Virgin Mobile Excessive Billing In my previous post about the Xperia X10 I mentioned being billed excessively for bandwidth use [1]. On Friday when I phoned Virgin I was repeatedly told that there was nothing that could be done about the bill. I demanded to be transferred to someone with authority to change my bill, […] I’ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn’t allow replacing the kernel. I’m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for […] TED is offering an audition for future TED.com talks in New York on the 24th of May [1]. It would be good if we could have someone advocate Free Software there. The audition is a 1 minute talk, the speakers who pass the audition may be offered full ~17 minute lecture slots at the next […] Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about Harper-Collins attempts to make self-destructing books [1]. They claim that a traditional book falls apart after being read 26 times (a claim that Cory disputes based on personal experience working at libraries) and want ebooks to be deleted after being borrowed so often. Really the […] A meme that keeps going around is that Asperger Syndrome (AS) is somehow universally good. The DSM doesn’t list things that are beneficial, so any diagnostic criteria has to be for something that has some serious down-sides – even if there are positive aspects to it. Of course on the Internet the debate won’t just […] I’ve just written some small scripts to help me manage spam emergencies on a mail server. I’ve been doing this thing with a bit of manual effort for a while, but after having done it once from a phone I want to optimise it a bit to reduce painful typing. My observation is that when […] Sam Varghese has written an article that is very skeptical of the educational value of the OLPC project [1]. Are Laptops Any Good for Schools? Sam cites an article in the New York Times by Winnie Hu about schools removing laptop programs due to a lack of success [2]. Winnie’s article gives an example of […] There have been ongoing news reports about the nuclear power plant problems in Japan following the earth-quake and tidal-wave. The Wikipedia page about the Fukushima I nuclear accidents seems to have the best current summary of the situation [1]. I think it’s worth noting that Potassium Iodide can be ingested to reduce the incidence of […] |
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