A large percentage of marriages fail
Apparently that applies to marriages involving goats as well. Such a shame. Who will think of the kids?
Australian Health Insurance
It sounds to me like it's time for some sort of wiki-based health insurance comparison service. As someone who has recently been insured in Australia and the US though, I should point out the Australian system is way less confusing than the US one.
Australian teachers advocate a China style firewall for Australian internet users
SMH article and the actual site It's logical really: Some Australian teachers are perceived as sucking by their students The students rate them on line, thus exercising free speech The teachers can't face a life of people knowing that other people think they suck Teacher's federation proposes some crazy firewall scheme Hurrah! Censorship is always the answer.
What do you do when the users who generate your content revolt?
Digg's answer was to attempt to censor the users -- they ultimately failed.
I imagine this is pretty much the worst case they design for
A major freeway interchange in Oakland (that's a large dormitory town north of Silicon Valley) just had a oil tanker roll under it and catch fire. The road way basically melted. I imagine this will take months if not years to fix.
Nerd link of the day
If you're an ACM member, or read ACM transactions on computer systems, or have a corporate membership to the ACM portal, then you really should checkout Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity. It's a surprisingly simple method of determining how common denial of service attacks really are on the Internet. Like all good ideas, it's also really obvious once it's been pointed out. @article{1132027, author = {David Moore and Colleen Shannon and Douglas J. Brown and Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage}, title = {Inferring Internet denial-of-service activity}, journal = {ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.}, volume = {24}, number = {2}, year = {2006}, issn = {0734-2071}, pages = {115--139}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1132026.1132027}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, }
Air America drug smuggling
Just saw a documentary about the Air America drug smuggling operation. It's really interesting -- modified light planes, flying into storms to avoid detection, basically not being as dumb as your average smuggler. There is a New York Times article online about the gang.
Mark is right
Mark Pilgrim is a smart guy, and he's right that the correct time to start writing is while you have that sense of wonder. That was the big difference in the approaches I took with the ImageMagick book (an attempt to be definitive and therefore boring to write), versus the MythTV book (a cleaned up version of my lab book notes from when I installed Myth and got it working nicely, with some other stuff added for completeness). The MythTV book was a lot more fun to write, and I don't feel nearly as burnt out at the end. Read more about Mark's burnout theory. So, I wonder what is next for me?
You are bidding on social justice
You are bidding on social justice... oh, and a broken crappy MP3 player. Ebay censored the page. Cached version here.
I don’t claim these are new
But they're still funny... As sent to my wife in IMs this evening: (23:08:06) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ (23:18:43) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/testy/AdventCalendar/day19.html (23:20:16) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/demolition+squid/ (23:22:28) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/mango/ (23:23:37) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/cucumbers (23:26:07) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/dear+weebl/ (23:27:13) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/giraffe/ (23:28:52) mikalstill@gmail.com/Gaim: http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/space+is+fun/ Ahhh, flash. Reminds me of papal wackamole.