Mars Climate Cycles Discovered

Space Fellowship via Slashdot.

Those poor Martians couldn't prevent climate change either...

Study Shows Smoking Bans Improve Public Health

Duh.

At least the true motive comes out near the bottom of the article...

At a time of great concern over the financial sustainability of our healthcare system, smoke-free laws represent an inexpensive approach to reducing heart attacks, and, probably, other cardiovascular conditions.

...which could also have been written as...

It's not that we give a flying fuck about you or anything.... it's just that if we're going to finance your health care, we want to protect our investment, you know?

What Star Trek Predicts About The Future of Information Security

Interesting article from RSnake.

Gizmodo Misses the Point on Skimmers

Outcry on this stuff for sale.

What next? Ban Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, or Guns?

Oh. wait.

The Perils of the Cloud

You've got mail! But is it yours?

Personal GPS Data to Get Out of Speeding Tickets?

Seriously?

1. What's to say he didn't tamper with the data? He certainly has a motive to.
2. While working for a car magazine a while back, I had the opportunity to test one of these GPS tracking devices... They don't work worth a crap. I got my Tahoe up to its 98mph limiter on numerous occasions and the device never noticed as long as I didn't cruise at that speed for long stretches at a time. Digging into the cited article, we see that even the makers of the GPS unit only claim it gets speed samples every 30 seconds. Slightly better than the 60 seconds of the unit I tested years ago. But that still gives my Z06 enough time to accelerate from 60 to well into the triple-digits and slow back down before getting clocked.
   
3. If this defense succeeds, how long till somebody comes out with a fake GPS service?

Interesting defense... Hope it works. :-)

Blood Draws: Goodbye Fourth, Fifth Amendments

• Awesome article by Eric Peters @ the National Motorists Association.
• PogoWasRight: articles on this stuff
  
• The Newspaper: articles on this stuff

Have Programmers not Learned from 640K, Y2K, etc?

A few days ago my iPhone seemingly quit storing pictures to the camera roll after snapping them using the built-in camera. Especially irritating while on a trip to Europe.

Get home, do some research, and find out Apple screwed up and only allocated four digits for the image counter / filename. I guess I've taken more than 10K pics since I got my first iPhone a couple years ago... Took me four hours from getting on the net to having a fixed & rebuilt phone. That's for an IT professional. And I'm still irritated that the workaround involved deleting everything off my phone and starting from scratch, but fuck it.. it's better than having an iPhone crippled with no camera. That'd be like, ugh, no MMS or something.

At least I probably won't hit the 10,000 pictures mark again for another two years...

Apple Googles "Apple Tablet Proof"

From this blog's viewer logs:

Sep 3 09:44:49 AM Safari 4.0 MacOSX unknown United States Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, United States Apple Computer [IP redacted]
blog.andibaritchi.com/2009/07/finally-proof-of-apple-tablet-on.html
www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=apple tablet proof&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2

...more proof? :-)

UT Decides to Dumb Down its Campuses

WSJ: University of Texas Drops Merit Program for Need-Based Aid

Helsinki and Tallinn Pictures

From Helsinki August 2009

From Tallinn August 2009