Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.
Ryan and his girlfriend (who is awesome) went with me to Old Town earlier today, where I took a picture of this NO STOPPING curb painted on the corner of Colorado and de Lacey.
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Ryan looked at the picture on my phone before I sent it.“That looks like “No stop ping, like it’s all, ‘hey! You can’t stop ping!'”
Read the rest of the post and the freaking awesome punchline at WW:iX
The Blue Angles are in town for Seafair. In preparation for tomorrow and Sunday’s air show, they have two days of practice over Lake Washington.
Unfortunately, their performance zone violates FAA flight regulations and so they have to obtain a waiver so they perform their crazy cool acrobatics.
What is also unfortunate is that this waiver forces the closure of the I-90 floating bridge for about two to three hours from Thursday to Sunday.
Even more unfortunate is that this continues to backup traffic into my commute back home home. That, however, is not the point of this posting. This is:
What if I have a medical emergency and I need to get to Harborview Medical Center or Children’s Hospital?
The center roadway of I-90 is reserved for this purpose. Contact 911 and Washington State Patrol will escort you to the hospital.
Having to go up I-405, across at SR-520 (which also has less capacity), and then down I-5 to Harbor View Medical Center can take up to 50 minutes with traffic (according to Google Maps). Being able to go straight across I-90 takes up to 15 minutes with traffic (again, Google Maps). That’s a pretty significant delta time*.
And no, they won’t let you cross if you just need to go pee. Even if you need to go real bad.
*Boeing^ lingo for difference in time.
^Yes, I realize that Boeing is probably not the only company in the universe that uses that phrase. It’s just been used a lot lately, so that’s where I’m attributing it this time.
For as long as I can remember, corporations such as the NFL and MLB have always had very harshly worded copyright sanctions forbidding viewers for rebroadcasting games and such. The intent seems to be the result of some poor economists pet project gone horribly wrong. Take, for example, the latest round of NFL foolishness from the LA Times:
THE NATIONAL Football League is famously protective of its teams’ intellectual property, especially their lucrative television broadcasting rights.
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Now the league is expanding its control beyond the gridiron. It’s limiting what news organizations can do on their websites with recordings made at team facilities between games. In exchange for credentials to cover the sport, newspapers, local TV stations and other media have to agree not to post more than 45 seconds of audio or video a day (or 90 seconds in markets with two pro teams). The snippets they offer online have to be removed within 24 hours, and they can’t combine the recordings with advertisements.
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The NFL’s goal is to make midweek footage more valuable by making it scarce.
So it was pretty much music to my ears when I heard via the grapevine (i.e. BoingBoing) that The Computer and Communications Industry Association who is made of – get this – Microsoft, Red Hat, Google, Yahoo, et al “have filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that the copyright warnings in books, DVDs, movies, and sportscasts materially misrepresent the law, giving short shrift to fair use and other user rights in copyright” and are “…asking for an injunction banning rightsholders from using this kind of intimidating warning.”
To me, this is great. Some weight is finally getting thrown around the entire fair use thing. I think many people don’t actually realize the economic harm of locking down goods, both to themselves and to the world.
There was an article in Ars Technica a few weeks back that was reporting on the conclusions of Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock’s research on optimum copyright length. Ready for the answer?
14 years. Just 14.
Pollock designed “a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).”
For works created in the United States post 1977, the length of the copyright (which is granted automatically by the way) is 70 years post mortem auctoris. That’s a fancy (and legal) way of saying, the copyright lasts for the life of the originator plus an additional 70 years.
What does that mean? That paper I wrote in 2nd grade (in 1993) could be copyrighted until 2136 (assuming I live to be 80).
Kind of scary when you really think about it.
via BoingBoing
Jeff Towne told me about this video:
In a world where most of the emails one receives are junk mail, full of scams and phishing attempts, how good are you at distinguishing the bad sites from the good?
McAfee SiteAdvisor has a Phishing Quiz where you can try out your skills at recognizing phishing sites. I was able to correctly get 10 out of 10, making me a Safety Guru with “practically clairvoyant knowledge of the Web.” The cool thing about McAfee’s test is that they show you how they know it’s a fake.
Give it a shot and see how you do. Here are my top three tips:
http://paypal.com.fergcorp.com/cgi-bin/update=_account. Real or fake? Why?via Lifehacker
As Ben might say in that ever so slightly condescending tone, “Really?”
Personally, I think they should have just let show stop.
Read more at the Seattle Post Intelligencer
A while back, I wrote about a dense gas called Super Hexaflouride.
Drugs and Poisons, one of my favorite blogs, has found a cool video demonstrating another anti-helium effects of SF6. The fun starts 1:08 minutes in:
Am I naïve when I think that racism to this degree doesn’t happen in the United States? I know that racism still exists and will for many more years. Yet, when I read this story, I feel transported back in time to world I’ve only read about.
In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a ‘whites only’ shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.
via Kottke
Read more:
Thanks to Quinn for emailing me this:
If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this.
*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Read More »If WWII Had Been an Online RTS Game