Questions about Robots

In the future, when you have your first humanoid robot servant and you decide to have some fun with it, and you tell it to do something stupid and arbitrary like go stand in the corner for no reason, put itself in embarrassing poses, or anything generally “abusive”, will you feel bad afterwards? Should you? [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Installed Vista SP1 - no problems

I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 this morning. It took about 45 minutes, two reboots, and afterward I had no problems. It never showed up in Windows Update for me so I used the standalone installer (linked to above), fully prepared to reinstall some drivers. But afterwards, no drivers seemed to have any problems–Device [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Dear Spammers…

Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too!
Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will ever [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Amazon Kindle + Audible = Killer-app?

My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, “Have you heard of this? what do you think?” I think she wants one.
I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other than [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Infinity - Infinite Energy

Power. Electricity. The Holy Grail of modern technology.
I say this because the information revolution completely depends on electricity, whether it’s batteries, hybrid motors, or the grid. Everything we do depends on converting some naturally occurring resource into power to drive our lives.
I was thinking about power recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Infinity - Infinite Storage

Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html]

Ok. it’s ugly, but notice [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Benefits of Having Too Much Processing Power

Do an experiment: keep Task Manager or any other CPU activity monitoring program up on your screen for a few hour or days, glancing at it every so often. Do you see it EVER above zero (other than momentary spikes)?
Here’s mine, from a Google sidebar gadget:

I’ve got a Dual Core and 2GB RAM. Currently I [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Thoughts on Writers Guild of America Strike

This strike is a big deal, but it’s much bigger deal for Hollywood, the producers and writers than for the rest of us. I think they are facing some specific dangers that they had better think about before they drag on too long. The actual points the union and producers are arguing about are probably [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Cell phones, water and wireless mice

I’m embarrassed to say that the link took me a long time to figure out. If you’re wireless mouse or keyboard is having connection problems, signal weaknesses, or similar signs of problems, make sure your cell phone isn’t anywhere around them!
I did this at work for a long time–it screwed up the signal strength, and [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

The War on Being Different

Bruce Schneier has a wonderful essay on his site today about how our culture of fear of harmless people and objects is being propagated. I think this is my favorite essay of his.
I really like this paragraph about how this happens:
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]