Is Karma Catching Up With Microsoft?

John C. Dvorak questions if Microsoft will bleed dry from lawsuits...

Years before any of these lawsuits developed and during the OS/2 wars, when Microsoft was playing as nasty as it could, a scion of industry and friend of mine was laughing about how amateurish Microsoft was acting. He predicted back in 1992 that the company would regret its actions. "You cannot be a big corporation and act like a small feisty company doing whatever you want to get ahead," He told me. Microsoft was already too big in 1992 to be acting like a struggling little firm stretching the rules at every turn.

Though this activity did result in the creation of the world's richest man, it has created a situation that makes Microsoft a huge target because of its past bad behavior. Of course, some of the bad behavior still exists in lesser forms, and it's perceived as a continuation of a pattern.

I don't see how the company is going to get out from under these suits. First, the suits will come from state after state. Then certain cities will find a way to soak the company. Microsoft will fight the first few, but then a cookie-cutter template and precedents will emerge, making each case easier than the next. Then Microsoft will get out the checkbook, and it will become a money-grab.

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Art as Science as Art

In the spring of 2006 we again asked the Princeton University community to submit images—and, for the first time, videos and sounds—produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science. Out of nearly 150 entries from 16 departments, we selected 56 works to appear in the 2006 Art of Science exhibition.

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Super Flying Saucer Gun

Imagine a gun with no recoil, no sound, no heat, no gunpowder, no visible firing signature (muzzle flash), and no stoppages or jams of any kind. Now imagine that this gun could fire .308 caliber and .50 caliber metal projectiles accurately at up to 8,000 fps (feet-per-second), featured an infinitely variable/programmable cyclic rate-of-fire (as high as 120,000 rounds-per-minute), and were capable of laying down a 360-degree field of fire. What if you could mount this weapon on any military Humvee (HMMWV), any helicopter/gunship, any armored personnel carrier (APC), and any other vehicle for which the technology were applicable?

According to its inventor, not only is it possible, it's already happened. An updated version of the weapon will be available soon. It will arrive in the form of a tactically-configured pre-production anti-personnel weapon firing .308 caliber projectiles (accurately) at 2,500-3000 fps, at a variable/programmable cyclic rate of 5,000-120,000 rpm (rounds-per-minute). The weapon's designer/inventor has informed DefRev that future versions of the weapon will be capable of achieving projectile velocities in the 5,000-8,000 fps range with no difficulty. The technology already exists.

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Sexy & Nerdy

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100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year

1. Pele has always hated his nickname, which he says sounds like "baby-talk in Portuguese".
2. There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts.
3. Urban birds have developed a short, fast "rap style" of singing, different from their rural counterparts.
4. Bristol is the least anti-social place in England, says the National Audit Office.
5. Standard-sized condoms are too big for most Indian men.
6. The lion costume in the film Wizard of Oz was made from real lions.
7. Fathers tend to determine the height of their child, mothers their weight.
8. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet.
9. The Pope's been known to wear red Prada shoes.
10. Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up.
11. Donald Rumsfeld was both the youngest and the oldest defence secretary in US history.
12. Coco Chanel started the trend for sun tans in 1923 when she got accidentally burnt on a cruise.
13. Up to 25% of hospital keyboards carry the MRSA infection.
14. Sex workers in Roman times charged the equivalent price of eight glasses of red wine.
15. More than one in eight people in the United States show signs of addiction to the internet, says a study.
16. Just one cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 litre bottles.
17. More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors.
18. The brain is soft and gelatinous - its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta.

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iTunes Store Crashes From Too Much Sales

Swarms of online shoppers armed with new iPods and iTunes gift cards apparently overwhelmed Apple's iTunes music store over the holiday, prompting error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads of a single song.

Frazzled users began posting urgent help messages Monday and Tuesday on Apple's technical forum for iTunes, complaining they were either not allowed into the store or were told the system couldn't process their request to download songs and videos.

It was not immediately clear how many people were affected by the slowdowns, and Apple Computer Inc. would not immediately comment Wednesday on what caused the slowdown and whether it had been fixed.

Analysts said the problems likely were the result of too many people with holiday iPods and iTunes gift cards trying to access the site at once.

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Best Buy Arrests Customer For Using Legal $2 Bills

On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher's car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bolesta's idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too.

For this, Mike, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest.

Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons.

Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he's handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service is called into the case.

Have a nice day, Mike.

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The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006

This past year has been — like most are — up and down for science in general and astronomy in particular. We’ve had stunning successes and heartbreaking setbacks, all of which seem huge when dealing with them at the time. But while the science of astronomy is many things, one of the more subtle yet deeply profound aspects of it is its ability to provide a sense of perspective.

With all this in mind, I decided to create my list of Best Astronomy Pictures of 2006. I went through hundreds of images (maybe thousands), checking NASA, APOD, the ESA, BAUT, and a few dozen amateur and professional sites featuring pictures as well. The criteria I kept in mind were beauty, of course, but also scientific value. But both of these could be trumped by the coolness factor. All three are subjective, but what the heck. It’s my blog. So here is what I came up with.

All the images below are hosted at Flickr, and they link to the original sites with higher resolution images (many of the pictures are suitable as wallpapers).

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Males and Females Write Differently

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more at nature.com.

Test it out here.

Math Jokes

Judging by the facebook group "I Wish I Were Your Derivative So I Could Lie Tangent To Your Curves!" with 42,000 members, everybody loves a math joke.
(...)
"A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician were sitting in a street café watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a woman entering a building. Ten minutes later they reappeared together with a third person. “They have multiplied,” said the biologist. “Oh no, an error in measurement,” the physicist sighed. “If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again,” the mathematician concluded."

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