Ghosts With S*** Jobs. It's quite a brilliant movie.

A few thousand years from now, archaeologists will make the same observations about collections of quaint crude programming languages (the ones we use today) that they find in "digital caves"...

So now the *good* guys will no longer track you. I don't get the logic.

Good luck reading it for less than several thousand dollars. And I thought my textbooks were expensive.

I always wondered with fines imposed by the FTC, ITC, FDA etc. -- where does the money go? Is there any incentive for govt regulatory bodies to make sure they hit a quota of fines each year so they can keep up with their budget?

We are not alone

I read elsewhere that they can't block tethering apps, but they can continue charging for tethering.

An Internet news addiction is far, far worse. I would be interested to know how many million person-hours of lost work productivity are spent on the Web per year.

A couple of years ago, I tried photographing the menu board in a McDonald's in Beijing, because so many items on the menu were so incredibly bizarre. A store manager came over and was very unfriendly to me about it, asked me to delete pictures from my camera, and basically told me he would throw me out of the restaurant if I kept trying to take pictures. I wonder if there is some corporate policy that inspires this sort of behavior?

You're right on the list of four languages. But Gmail (at least the frontend) is written in hand-coded Javascript. The whole point of the Closure javascript-to-javascript compiler was to optimize and obfuscate hand-coded Javascript for Gmail.

Google cars were all on public roadways. If it's not encrypted, you don't own it once you broadcast it. The only legally interesting part of this is to figure out how screwed up the legal system is in this area: if you're standing on public property but look in through the window of a private house and see a naked woman, you're a peeping tom. If you look in and see a naked man, he's an exhibitionist.

I have a Pulsar Y911 watch. This is my favorite watch ever despite its simplicity. It has four killer features: (1) it is 100% titanium, so it's very light. (2) It's cheap (got mine for $57 new or something). (3) it has a "white-on" display, which is a cool LCD technology that appears over the analog watch face in *white*, but only when you push a button. The watch doesn't have a backlight (the only real downside IMO), but white-on is just cool. (4) with two pushes of the top-right button, it enters "1-AL" ("Single-time alarm") mode. Every subsequent push of the same button sets a one-off alarm one minute further in the future from the current time. This makes it really easy to set a reminder alarm for something, at any small number of minutes into the future, without even looking, by pushing the button (2 + the number of minutes) times. I use this feature *all* the time, and in fact it is the best feature I have ever found in a watch. I have looked all over for other watches that have this feature, and failed to find one. Does anybody know of other watches with 1-AL mode?

Belize is a great place to host a shady site. I was scammed as a seller on eBay by a Russian reshipment fraud circle that operated a fake storefront website in Belize and recruited reshippers via monster.com, then used stolen PayPal accounts to deposit actual payment in sellers' bank accounts followed by having sellers ship to the reshippers, who then on-shipped to Russia. Anyway, the short story is that probably these guys didn't like the fact that McAfee was blocking some of their scam websites...

I'm sick of reading this sort of thoughtlessness describing evolutionary biases. If you're going to say that an adaptation gives a reproductive or predatory advantage, then fine, you're talking Darwinian evolution -- survival of the fittest. If you're going to say, "Everybody in chummy societies had the same handedness so they could share tools", then please tell me how the heck that weak-sauce tiny (or effectively zero-magnitude) biological fitness bias is supposed to have produced a genotypic change to an entire species within the known anthropological lifetime of the species. Remember that Darwinism requires that for *your* random trait variation to survive and thrive, at a minimum you have to pass your genes on while somebody else does not.

Cue a comment about Bolivian tree lizards.