” The proof required analyzing 500 billion billion checkers positions — 5 x 10²⁰ — a computational process that began in 1989 and has been running on hundreds of processors almost continuously since.”
…Well I’ll be damned.

(thx salon.com)

Well they use it to track what people are playing and rank music using it.

It seems pretty cool, so I’m not totally against it, but I bet a lot of people don’t know this is going on. And it’s important to remember that this user information is turned directly into money by companies like google.

I didn’t see them mention this to me when doing the software update. Software license agreements are all hocus pocus….click here and we’ll make the hundreds of pages of nasty legalese go away so you can just use the damn program. At least google’s got some blurb up about how you opt-in and opt-out. They’re pretty cool about that.

This device looks more and more appealing, but the price of $390 is a bit too high for me, I’m affraid. Maybe I’ll splurge and give it a shot.

Another interesting thing I found in the discussion of this tread is that Tapioca allegedly works with google talk’s VOIP in linux. I’ll give that a try when I get a chance.

To read up on the history of goatse check it’s wikipedia article.

A Snippet:

“The milk from the villages gets tested for radiation levels. If the radiation levels are too high the milk is mixed with uncontaminated milk until the radioactivity is below a set limit”

Found via boingboing.

For all those sites which don’t work, its nice to know that there is a way of downloading the media to play locally. You can also store copies of your favorites. Use lawfully, you crazy kids.

Thanks Layer8.

*referring to an MC Chris Lyric…not trying to repress robo-women.

Similarly disgusting is the music industry, with the example standing out of Michael Jackson outbidding Paul McCartney for the rights to most of the Beatles music.

As an American, especially as an engineer, you get fed this story that you can make it big by inventing something, patenting it and selling it to everyone over the television late at night. In a simplistic view, the patent system seems great and would be the “ticket outa here” of many aspiring home inventors. Practically, though, the situation is much less rosy as Don Lancaster eloquently explains in his article “A Case Against Patents”.

Snip:
“Finally, be realistic. You don’t create things to get filthy
rich. You create things because you like to create things
and have some compelling desire or need to do so. As long
as there are enough nickels to keep going, that is all that
should really matter.”

It doesn’t bother me, but spam does. I’ve been getting comment spam from assholes trying to sell pills. I installed SpamKarma2, a plugin to WordPress. Installation was painful, but it’s too early for me to judge the product.

This issue is going to come up over and over in the near future so we need to be very diligent and ensure that correct precidents are set. The nature of software nowadays is that many people will be concurrently developing just about everything. If it doesn’t exist yet, wait a little while and it will. With this amount of development, patents just stifle innovation. Keeping in mind that patents were meant to encourage innovation by providing a timed monopoly to the pating party in exchange for showing how something is done.