Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles.
After a book burning, there is no book. After this "digital equivalent of a book burning", you have the article here (as you pointed out).
I don't know if a crowd of people were behind the "deletion" (in one sense of the word). I do notice that the page was "deleted" (turned into a redirect) by one New Age Retro Hippie (his/her self-description), whose activities at Wikipedia suggest no interest in musty old matters like Ima Hogg [I like this one] etc but rather an infatuation with electronic games for young folks.
If the page had been deleted (in the normal Wikipedia sense), you'd probably be able to read it at Deletionpedia . An irritating detour from Wikipedia perhaps, but again hardly the equivalent of a book burning.
Just cook the drive on the grill for 15 minutes or so. The heat should demagnetize the drives. You might want to watch out for toxic fumes though.
Mmm, data smoke!
Yes, put your drives into a Blendtec.
NewsPapers need to die.
The newspapers that I choose to read don't need to die. By comparison, AOL's "idea of how to handle the internet" seems to be "news lite", flooded with as many classifieds and the like as possible. Thanks but I'll take the Guardian and when I want to read more about the US I'll get it from Wonkette.
For years, people have mailed me with offers to increase my penis size. I've never believed them. But now I know that my biometrics can be changed. This must be so if the Daily Mail says so.
I want one of these cards. Yes, I'll take it in gold, with diamonds.
Toward the end of a long and witty demolition job on the Kindle 2, Nicholson Baker describes the pleasure of reading kindling and much else on his iPod Touch. Going back from that to the Kindle 2 "was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks". Baker's article is as informative as you'd expect from the poet of the card catalogue and miscellaneous lumber; it discusses Sony products too.
(Me, I don't own any of these devices. I read books, which long outgrew available shelving and are now stacked on the floor.)
The hell with projection. One great feature is the Smile Timer. The press release enlightens us:
Smile Timer automatically releases the shutter when the subject smiles
I'm British (a limey, a whingeing pom), so that's something that never happens. This Smile Timer technology should spread to areas where cameras really matter: I'd like to break into some ATMs.
The report does tell us:
Make no mistake; the live music industry grew in 2008. More events, more bands, more tickets and importantly, higher ticket prices. Breaking it down to basic supply and demand economics, and given the scarcity embedded in its model, the live music industry is somewhere you really want to be right now.
My emphasis.
Perhaps the figures include all the tickets all those suckers bought for the triumphant London return of the "king of pop".
Or maybe this year's new music isn't as boring as last year's (I pretty much gave up buying CDs when I found they were all bland and soporific).
That's quite a report, in its gushing marketingese. I note with delight that "heritage act" has supplanted "senior citizen" as the euphemism for "old age pensioner" or "old geezer".
University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account.
The Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, and department heads of my institution are concerned that they can get and send email, that neither the administration stuff nor the website is hacked, that no screw-up risks escalation to a PR disaster, and that it doesn't all cost too much. And that other people don't bitch about it, and all in all that it can be left to run itself -- because they have more than enough other, IT-unrelated concerns of their own. As long as they can plug their own laptops into the LAN they don't care what hardware or software the masses are using.
In the relevant committees, you're likely to find deep conservatism, even from people who themselves use Gentoo or whatever. Elementary classes in "computer literacy" are likely to be in mere secretarial skills, and their teachers can argue for MS software on Windows as they can truthfully say that this is near ubiquitous in the corporate world. Students and staff want to use software with which they're already familiar, which for the huge majority will mean MS software. Staff find it easier to tell people who are mystified by spreadsheet problems to look up the matter in an actual book on Excel than to do so in a non-existent book on Gnumeric. Still, there's no reason not to install FOSS in addition to the shrinkwrapped stuff, and so my institution has OOo, Gimp, etc sitting unopened on just about all of its computers.
PLA Daily ("China Military Online") is brought to us by Apache, so it would appear that at least one military has already got on board with free and open source software. I'd guess that the PLA could deliver better coding value for money to the Pentagon than could KBR.
your average laptop has considerably more computing power than the first shuttles had
Unless the talented Mr Cheney has yet again kept something from us, the shuttles aren't expected to run MS Office, Photoshop, World of Warcraft, Conficker, etc under Vista. So perhaps they have enough oomph as it is.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
