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The Baby-Eating Aliens
(Part 1 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide") • This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, bio…
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If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
A man accused of a crime is brought into a police interrogation room and sits down at an empty table. There’s no polygraph equipment in sight, and the typical two-cop questioning team isn’t in the…
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Why boycotting Whole Foods is Stupid
I’ve been forwarded a few emails about the Whole Foods Boycott, a movement in response to Whole Food’s CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal article. I’m tempted to find the…
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Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?
I spend far too much of my life daydreaming about scenarios like this: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random locat
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Corrupted Word Files for Sale
On one hand, this is clever: We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g…
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Why charging for access to news sites won't work
I wish them good luck with this, and I mean that sincerely, but I believe this is a fundamentally flawed strategy.
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Palm Pre Privacy Invasion
I've been taking a closer look at the WebOS side of my Palm Pre tonight, and I noticed that it periodically uploads information to Palm, Inc.
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A Week in Hacker News
I started posting to Hacker News recently. The rise and fall of submissions through the rankings is really hypnotic. I wrote a screen-scr...
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The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…
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I really want to like Apple (but they don't like us)
I loved my Apple IIs passionately. I love my Macintosh collection (from SE to Bondi-blue iMac). While not being a heavy Mac user, I keep a Mac on my desk as a second computer to my main computer (a netbook running Linux because I like carrying it around, because it's cheap and because I like Linux better than OSX for…
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Developers: You Are What's Wrong With the iPhone AppStore
instapaper for iphone is $5. I've bought a bunch of games for >$3. It is addicting.
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Richard Dawkins: Viruses of the Mind
Center for the Study of Complex Systems at U-M LSA offers interdisciplinary research and education in nonlinear, dynamical, and adaptive systems.
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WTF is up with Dell?
[Update at end of post] I love Dell servers. In fact I even love their network hardware. I’ve spent 0000’s (yeah that’s four zeros) with them during the last 2 years and Mick my old sales guy rocked! As did his hardware team.
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z/OMG
Two weeks ago I was on a Project Management course at work, which was highly enjoyable and very involved. Project management for a company this big is evidently a very complex and rigorous process involving all kinds of procedural steps and checks and formal presentations of stuf...
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Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book
Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is...
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