Speaking of privacy violations, Caltrans is expanding the use of Fastrak, their automatic toll collection system. They’re adding antennae along the highways, to collect realtime traffic info. This makes tracking individual drivers that much easier — another step down the slippery slope.
“According to Square Enix, Bakusou Yankee Damashii will be the first online MMORPG that will let players enjoy the world of Japanese motorcycle delinquents.” Via Dispatches From Revland (original), which has a link to the trailer. It seems to be 2D isometric and I want to play it very badly.
Peanut butter isn’t naturally sweet. Not that I dislike sweet peanut butter, but there it is. That does have certain implications regarding peanut butter possibilities, however. I badly want to try, oh, at least seven or eight of those.
Explosion at Yale. It was in a mail room at the law school; Bush was in Connecticut today to speak at the US Coast Guard Academy graduation, but that’s a fair ways away. This has been your alarmist news post of the day. I’m just edgy because the DPS says Boston’s a target over the weekend.
TPB, a lawyer specializing in family law, got jury duty recently. I found his thoughts on jury duty from the lawyerly perspective to be particularly interesting. “There’s nothing like using fear as a motivator for people who were kind enough to show up for their civic duty.” From my experience, his suggestions on getting removed are not entirely accurate. “Act like you’re reasonably intelligent, have a decent income, and a clue about what the hell’s going on, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get removed from a jury.” Didn’t work for me, alas. But the bit where he debates with himself as to whether he can put aside his interpretation of the law… that was the hard question for me, too, and I’m just an opinionated potzer.
Coolest random name generator ever (original). It uses the US Census as the data source, and you can tune the commonality of the names. Set the obscurity factor to 1, and you get names like Jesse Hagler and Hannah Walcott. Set it to 99, and you get names like Palmer Glimp and Harland Arrindel. The big bonus utility factor is that each name links to a Google search for that name, so you can find out if it’s already been used in a way that would screw up your story.
When I get spam that says “Copy Anything!!!!”, I kind of expect to be able to buy a product that will copy anything. I mean, what good is a universal copier if you can’t use it to produce more Winona Ryders? Apparently they were talking about CDs and DVDs. Feh.
It’s kind of a frothy story, but the friar who invented cappucino was just beatified. Not for his caffeine-related efforts, mind you. However, cappucino is indeed named after the Capuchin order to which he belonged. You learn something every day.
Short-take Wednesday, that’s what today is. Anyhow, I am enough of a geek to be deeply amused by this meditation on redundant stateful load balancing.
How’s the world going to end? Find out here. Or, at least, read a cross-section of theories. Amusing stuff.