The Gocho looks pretty neat, if you ignore the dippy name. It uses 802.11b wireless ethernet to transfer files from your PC to the car unit, which broadcasts via FM to your existing car stereo. Personally, I like the model number: “E-1337”. That’s totally k-R4d, M4n.
What do you get if you couple ignorant journalists, spurious correlation, and research that has yet to undergo peer review? Bingo, kids! More fake science that belongs in the annals of Skeptic Magazine: according to some ”scientist” in a curiously ”foreign” country, modern ”technology” has been proven by some ”research” to cause memory loss.
I’ve owned perhaps two pairs of Nike shoes in my life, and both pairs fell apart within two months of purchase. It’s nice to know that Nike is such a big proponent of “freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” that they refuse to deliver requests for personalized shoes bearing the word “sweatshop.“
Oh my God.. it‘s full of monkeys.. and robots!
From Slashdot comes the article in the LA Times about how the Tampa police scanned the faces of SuperBowl-goers to see if they matched against images of known felons.
As you can expect, there is the usual hand-wringing and hyperbole on Slashdot. Since even fingerprinting is inaccurate, how can we trust this? How do we know the false positive rates? After the cops use it, who gets it?
I personally think this is a great idea, with the caveat [And there’s always a caveat, kids] that this type of surveillance be made available to everyone. Now that I think of it, it is available to everyone who can afford it. So take up a community collection and invest in some video cameras, folks! Stake out the mayor’s house, videotaping his every coming and going, and turn it into a public-access TV show. Bug your city councilperson’s phones, plant cameras in their toilets, and run streaming live webcams on a server hosted in a non-extradition-treaty country! Hey, public servants don’t have anything to hide —at least, they’d better not.
It’s sad, completely forseeable, but true: the Dreamcast is dead.
For all this doom and gloom, though, I doubt that the Dreamcast is just going to go away. There is a growing enthusiast development scene, and Sega has apparently decided to license the hardware to third-party vendors. I, for one, would love to see a PC video card with Dreamcast graphics capabilities.
Metal Business Cards, for enterprising robots.
VisorCentral has a nice article on PalmVNC. That’s right kids, add this to the list of unholy things you can do with your PalmOS handheld: controlling your desktop PC. Granted, this sounds a lot silly if you don’t have a wireless Palm, but it can act as a quick fix if you need to work on monitorless servers, or your screen locks up due to an ornery video card.
New favorite curmudgeon: Fred on Everything.
I’m completely with Sydney on this one: boycott Valentine’s Day.
Well, I’ll probably burn some games for my little brother, but I don’t forsee myself doing anything remotely interesting on V-Day. I’m not bitter; I’ve just not met anyone new in a while. Part of this I can confidantly blame on my work schedule, and the rest I can honestly blame on my own hermitlike laziness. I’ll just sit around and goof off and if something nice happens to fall into my lap, great! Hey, it worked for Kevin.