When algorithms control the world
When was the last time you tried to remember something before going to Google?
BBC News - When algorithms control the world:
There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.</p>
Chinese Couple Sells All Three Kids to Play Online Games
(DONGGUAN, China) -- A young Chinese couple has sold all three of their children in exchange for money to play online games at Internet cafes, reports a southern Chinese newspaper.</p>According to Sanxiang City News, the couple met in an Internet cafe back in 2007 and bonded over their obsession with online video games. A year later, the parents -- who are both under 21 -- welcomed their first child, a son. Days after his birth, they left him home alone while they went to play online games at an Internet cafe 30 km away.
In 2009, Li Lin and Li Juan welcomed their second child, a baby girl, and came up with the idea to sell her for money to fund their online game obsession. They did so, receiving RMB 3,000 (less than $500), which they spent entirely shortly after. The couple then proceeded to sell their first child and got 10 times as much for him -- RMB 30,000, or about $4600.
NHK Disaster Reportage
Japan had the best coverage of the disaster, and I don't mean quantity, I mean quality. Everywhere you looked, even BBC, news was exaggerated.
As a basic rule, we don’t use adjectives, just stick to the facts.</p>
How to build Apps
The ‘Facebook Class’ Built Apps, and Fortunes - NYTimes.com:
The students ended up getting millions of users for free apps that they designed to run on Facebook. And, as advertising rolled in, some of those students started making far more money than their professors.
They had stumbled upon one of the themes of the class: make things simple, and perfect them later.</p>
`Keep things simple, and perfect them later,` but don't you need perfection to some extent not to bum out your users?
Obama Speech Photographs
Obama Reenactment of bin Laden Speech for Press Photos Stirs Controversy:
As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us. </p>
I didn't know about this practice and kind of makes sense. I also see the point why people might disagree with this. The practice of not taking pictures during the address also illustrates the between Japanese and American news.
Linux PC the size of a USB stick
Provisional specification:
700MHz ARM11
128MB of SDRAM
OpenGL ES 2.0
1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
Composite and HDMI video output
USB 2.0
SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
General-purpose I/O
Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python) </p>
Find a terminal with a keyboard and the place is yours.
via. Slashdot
Atari SD Drive Replaces Floppy Drive
A Little Atari 810 Disk Drive - rossum's posterous:
Overwhelmed by a recent wave of nostalgia from playing Zork for the first time in 30 years I have built a working model of an Atari 810 that uses 8Gig microSD cards instead of 5 1/4 inch floppies to emulate up to 8 drives. </p>
Wouldn't be nice to have Apple II SD drive like this?
Copyright laws prevents release of historic jazz recordings
No logic to this. New creations should assume Creative Commons by default and if you want copyright, then you'd have to spend some cash on it.
1930s an audio engineer named William Savory (above) made a lot of high-quality recordings of live jazz performances of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, Coleman Hawkins and others. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the collection after Savory died.
via. Boing Boing