Kotaku reports that a Korean brokerage firm wants to hire professional Starcraft players as day traders. The argument being:
The mastery of professional gamer’s hands and their familiarity with the Internet environment can be good qualities to become day traders. […] The hitch is that the professional gamers have no knowledge in finance or investment. We […]
Saw the following on the back door of a small van on the way home today.
First, the head of a Greek warrior in helmet.
Then, the words:
“The Spartan Man Sewer Raider Inc.”
“Plumbing, heating, and air conditioning”
“A woman owned and managed business”
Hilarious.
Chevrolet is releasing a new model of its Tahoe SUV, and as part of the publicity campaign, allowed all website visitors to put together a Chevy Tahoe ad by combining several clips of stock footage with custom text. Needless to say, the results weren’t quite what they were expecting. My favorite is this gem. I […]
The Guantanamo Bay facility and the rest of CIA’s secret jails are mostly outside of any normal Western judicial system. There are no juries, no judges, no lawyers, no witnesses, no appeals. There is only a (hardly impartial) military commission which may hear your case years after you are detained or kidnapped. Yet some people […]
I open my university’s newspaper today and see the following advertisement (and yes, the ad gave two distinct spellings for “cell phone”):
TEXT AND THE CITY
TEXT MESSAGE LIVE SINGLES with YOUR CELL PHONE
LIVE TEXT CHAT 24HRS
TEXT MESSAGE LIVE SINGLES with your CELLPHONE
Text: RAVE
Send To: 36999
ONLY 99c PER TEXT MSG RCVD. MUST BE 18+
Plus, naturally, a photo […]
I am back from the dead — due to exams and other work, didn’t have time to post anything for the entire month of January. Updated Wordpress to version 2.0.1; the admin interface is now much spiffier, and it’s a bit faster (but that could also be because my host got a hardware upgrade). There […]
On July 22nd, Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician living in London, put on a light denim jacker, left his flat, entered the Stockwell Underground station, bought a newspaper, and calmly descended the escalator to the platform. Apparently, Mr. Menezes looked similar to a terrorist suspect who lived in the same apartment building. […]
Many websites allow visitors to write posts and leave comments. Sometimes the visitors are assholes, and leave comments that are (in the relevant jurisdiction) illegal speech — warez, libels, plans for a terrorist attack, that sort of thing. At which point someone (typically a company that is losing money due to the forum post) will […]
(there are almost no English-language resources on this — only an incredibly inane /. discussion — please disseminate this information)
DADVSI (Droit d’Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Société de l’Information) is a French bill that was intended to destroy fair use. Think of it as DMCA on steroids. Can’t make or distribute a program […]
It’s 1 am. I am driving; almost empty street, four lanes, no streetlights. Still, there are occasional headlights and neon signs in store windows, so there is a nice pattern of occasional light amid deep shadow. It’s cold; I have my windows closed; the (rather noisy) heating fans are on. Suddenly, I notice a guy […]
Finally, a piece of good news on “anti-terror” laws: the proposed British law that would have allowed detaining terrorist suspects for 90 days has been defeated in the British Parliament. Notably, 49 Labour MP’s voted against Blair’s bill, despite intense pressure from the Labour party’s leadership. The Parliament instead passed an alternative bill to allow […]
Literally seconds after I put up a post, some loser writes a spam comment advertising some kind of Polish gambling site. As far as I am aware, almost nobody actually reads this blog. The only explanation seems to be that the spammers are mining the major aggregator sites…
Good thing I installed Spam Karma 2. It […]
(Via Ars) René Weber of Michigan State University, Klaus Mathiak of RWTH Aachen, and Ute Ritterfeld of University of Southern California claimed to have found a “causal link” between a violent video game and brain activity indicating aggression. Their study has not yet been published. However, the press release indicates that the researchers performed fMRI […]
Some people have recently been proposing for software developers to be held legally liable for bugs in their products. They claim that until programmers know that they can be sued, they will continue to write insecure or unreliable code.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a given company choosing to accept legal liability for […]
I was reading one of my favorite tech sites when I noticed an unintentionally hilarious Google ad at the bottom of the page:
My free technical advice: get a bloody spell checker for your “plain English” creations before unleashing them upon the Web.
(Via a Machall rant) On September 11, 2005, there was a march from the Pentagon to the Mall, sponsored by the Department of Defense, to show support for victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks and for the US soldiers currently fighting in Iraq. The march had extraordinarily restrictive security — quoth the Washington Post […]
Now that some massive homework sets are over with, can post again.
First, Firefox (at least versions 1.0x) has the unfortunate tendency to take up all the memory on one’s computer. I have seen instances of Firefox taking up more than 512M. Apparently, this is due to a memory leak in the Flash and Java plugins […]
Ogio Metro is a nice backpack that usually costs ~ $70US, which is (IMHO) far too expensive. However, Amazon recently had a sale and Ogio Metros were going for half-price (much more reasonable) with free shipping. Since I needed a new backpack, I bought a black Metro (it also comes in “indigo” blue and […]
A fascinating article in the Guardian (May 5, 2005; Now that’s what I call democracy) about the difference between American and British elections. The anglophile author convincingly argues that while American election campaigns are cheezy, carefully and artificially orchestrated affairs, British ones are calmer and more honest. British politicians are willing to handle tough questions […]
A few days ago, a character of the Diesel Sweeties webcomic couldn’t figure out how Michigan sucks. Had he waited a few days, he would have had no such difficulties: today, Jennifer Granholm, the (Democratic) governor of Michigan, has announced that she will sign a new bill regulating video games. The bill will make selling […]