It’s a great cartoony design that was done by an 11-year old. Right on!
Someone Needs a Hobby
A Singaporean woman has set a world record for mobile-phone texting, keying in the benchmark phrase “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.” in 43.24 seconds, without the benefit of any predictive text utilities.
I tried it on my phone, and it took me about 1.5 minutes — to get through the first three words.
A Novel Idea to Combat Spam
It’s a well known fact that quite a bit of spam comes from the Comcast network. Now that Comcast has blocked TCP port 25 (the port used for e-mail sending), spam from their network has dropped 35%. Now if we could just convince other gigantic ISPs to do the same, life would be good. I know that geeks sometimes run SMTP servers on their home servers, but if they’re smart, they’ll just change the port used and they won’t have any trouble. I know Bend Cable (oh, sorry, Bend Broadband) blocks at least ports 21 (FTP) and 80 (HTTP) so the server I have at home that I backup files from work to runs on different ports so I can still access it. Geeks are smart — common users that have their computers zombied for spam are not.
Drunken Flash Fun
In this game, you try not to fall over while stumbling home drunk. Via Waxy.
Wired finds origin of the “Bill Gates” e-mail hoax
Just saw this in this month’s Wired magazine, and the article’s now online. Thanks to some excellent detective work, the origins of the infamous “Bill Gates is going to give you money” e-mail hoax has been found.
“How to Avoid Flamewars” by Dave Winer
Winer would be the last guy I’d picture writing this article considering how many he’s started. I think this MeFi comment pretty much sums up why people hate Winer, as do many of the comments here as well as this diagnosis. The guy has started or extended more idiotic flame wars than anybody, so you can see the irony in him writing this.
Before you know it, we’ll see “Eloquent Speech” by Mike Tyson, or Courtney Love’s “Guide to Responsible Parenting” (thanks Waxy for that one).
I won’t need a vasectomy
I’ll just keep my cell phone near my crotch.
On a side note, is it me, or do they seem to come out with a study like this every year?
Too Much Time On Their Hands
Somebody obviously has no life at all when they decide to create a PC case shaped and painted like an anime character. It’s nice work, but why?
Microsoft Awarded Ridiculous Patents
From the Raw Feed:
Microsoft was awarded a U.S. patent Tuesday for a “Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.” That’s right. If you want to use human skin as a data bus or muscle tissue as a conduit for electricity, you may need to pay Microsoft a licensing fee.
It may sound farfetched, but it’s a near certainty that eventually all kinds of gadgets — wristwatches, glasses, hats, etc. — will communicate with each other via electrical impulses sent through the body.
You’ll even be able to exchange contact information with someone by shaking their hand. Microsoft will get a penny every time that happens.
This wacky sounding patent comes on the heels of recent reports that the company had received patents for the ideas of double-clicking on a PDA, and a method for programmers to keep a running “to do” list in code comments. Very recently, Microsoft has been granted patents for a “Hand-held personal computer,” a “multilingual user interface for an operating system,” “thread-based e-mail” and even “one-pass greedy-pattern-matching finite-state-machine code generation.”
I don’t know what that last one is but it sounds difficult and painful.
The U.S. Patent Office even accidentally granted Microsoft a patent for a new variety of Apple tree — the Burchinal Red Delicious — earlier this year.
OK, it’s official: The U.S. Patent Office needs to be blown up. Thankfully there are groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that are trying to fix and shoot down the worst of the bunch.