State of the Art - With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:25 pm EDT, May 20, 2009
What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?
Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.
YouTube - Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:25 pm EDT, May 11, 2009
Another terribly unfortunate aspect of our education system in the hands of conservative Christian activits. This video is the best example grammar school teachers have of the wasteful ways of American consumption. What's even more unfortunate is how shamefully bias the video is, so much so that it can't possibly achieve a very wide audience (especially, ahem, in Georgia where I live).
In particular, she demonizes (among other things) landfills and incinerators as if operators of those facilities created the problem of restricted disposal area in the first place. She fails to mention other important aspects of dioxins, such as how barrel burning contributes significantly to the problem.
At any rate, if you're a newbie to sustainability, it's a great intro to a fascinating topic.
Privacy, Scalia, and the best class assignment ever
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:10 pm EDT, May 7, 2009
Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.
This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.
His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.
I've been giggling in my cube for the last half hour! This site rocks!
In the early days, white people joined a social networking service called Friendster where they could connect with old friends and make new ones. Eventually, white people started to notice more and more of their friends on MySpace, so they closed their Friendster accounts and migrated to the new service. It was like living in a neighborhood that was pretty good but kind of far away, so you might have to miss out on a few parties. Needless to say, this was unacceptable.
For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profile and managed their friendships. But soon, the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project. All which strike fear in the hearts of white people.
White people were nervous but had nowhere else to go. Then Facebook came along and offered advanced privacy settings, closed networks, and a clean interface. In respective real world terms, these features are analogous to an apartment or house with a security system/doorman, an alumni dinner, and a homeowners association that protects the aesthetics of the neighborhood. In spite of these advances, some white people still clung to their old MySpace accounts. That was until they learned that Facebook started, like so many things beloved by white people, at Harvard.
Within a matter of months, MySpace had gone from a virtual utopia to Digital Detroit, where only minorities and indie bands remain.
If you plan on befriending white people, it is essential that you join them in the digital suburbs and open a Facebook account immediately. It’s also a good idea to make up a story about how someone from high school sent you a friend request and after accepting you discovered that they were fat and unsuccessful. White people love these stories.
Court Says File-Sharing Site Violated Copyright - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:03 pm EDT, Apr 17, 2009
PARIS — A court in Sweden on Friday convicted four men linked to the notorious Internet file-sharing service The Pirate Bay of violating copyright law, handing the music and movie industries a high-profile victory in their campaign to curb online piracy.
LOL! No shit...a pirating site with "PIRATE" in the name. Ha!
Well - Stomach Bug, C. Difficile, Crystallizes Antibiotic Threat - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:02 pm EDT, Apr 14, 2009
The public health community has been sounding the alarm for years about the overuse of antibiotics and the emergence of “superbugs” — bacteria that have developed immunity to a wide number of antibiotics. But the C. difficile problem shows that the threat is not generalized or hypothetical, but immediate and personal.
“One of the things that we counsel consumers about is to make sure that an antibiotic is really necessary,” said Dr. Dale N. Gerding, an infectious disease specialist at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago. “There are many good reasons for taking an antibiotic, but an illness like sinusitis or bronchitis winds up being treated with antibiotics even though it will go away by itself anyway.”
Even appropriate use of antibiotics can put a person at risk. Dr. Gerding said his own adult son came down with a C. difficile infection after taking antibiotics for tonsillitis.
The typical treatment for C. difficile is another course of antibiotics, typically the drug vancomycin. But the situation can quickly turn tragic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported on several cases of pregnant and postpartum women who developed life-threatening C. difficile infections after being treated for minor infections. In some instances, a C. difficile infection can be treated only by emergency surgery to remove the patient’s colon. Doctors say many patients report that they continue to suffer from regular bouts of diarrhea even after the infection is gone. About 20 percent of patients with the infection suffer a relapse, and C. difficile support groups have emerged on the Internet.
Holy shit. We were warned about global warming and are now deep in the middle of its effects. We were warned about over-prescription of antibiotics and now the effects are here.
Luckily, the next thing on my list is flying cars. Take that, Apocalypse!
