Isotropic

A day or so ago I ran across John Levine’s “What are TLDs Good For?” and wanted to share it with you. In preparing this post I discovered that exactly a year ago today I posted “The TLD Mint” — at least that made choosing an image and title easier, ha.
Anyway, Levine says

Yesterday [...]

In desperate times …

While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn’t have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons. –Michael Thompson, Universal to bring Asteroids to theaters

image: NASA, (253) mathilde.jpg, Wikimedia [...]

I was browsing around Netflix and ran across this review, by ‘SK 1596697′, of “The Invasion” (yet another remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, this time with Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, et al):

I’m a research psychologist who studies alexithymia, which is a personality trait that involves difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions. This [...]

Wow! Would you really want to work for these people?
The city government in Bozeman, Montana, isn’t content to cyberstalk its potential employees—they’re now asking applicants for their login information for any social networking sites. –John Timmer, City to job applicants: Facebook, MySpace log-ins please, Ars Technica, 2009-06-18
According to the article, a waiver form asks [...]

I prefer “real” books over electronic ones.
So much of what I do is intangible: mere transient electromagnetic disturbances in a wire or chip, displayed on a glowing screen, precariously stored on whirring platters, streaming tape — all susceptible to destruction by emp, power failure, careless shell commands, or obsolescence of technology…
In contrast, a book has [...]

Thanks to Mark Dominus for today’s wonderful title, scarfed from the punchline of his post “A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds…“.
Postal Bulletin 22258, in a section about dog bites, says “Children are the majority of victims and are 900 times more likely to be bitten than letter carriers.” However, according [...]

“IE8 is pretty reliable. It finished downloading Firefox without a single crash.”
– a comment on Lifehacker’s Microsoft’s Browser Comparison Chart Offends Anyone Who’s Ever Used Another Browser

According to a media release, “Mississippi has reached a multi-million dollar anti-trust settlement with software giant Microsoft [...] worth up to $100 million”. The article goes on to say that “This is the largest cash payment made to a state government.”.
The state gets $40 to $48 million directly, while vouchers to just about any [...]

It must be grouchy old man week at Isotropic. Anyway …
One of my favorite bloggers has this to say about the expectation of instantaneous response to text or email messages:

First: If you are the sort of person who believes that all your e-mails/texts must be responded to instantaneously or sooner, you may be a [...]

That’s the tagline of Corrupted-Files.com. Yeah, right. All you students wanting to scam your professors should immediately go there and buy a document of the appropriate type and size. They guarantee that it won’t open on a PC or Mac. Riiight — if all you know is “double-click to open”. [...]