Author: BillSaysThis

Human “Mad Cow” Incubation Period Could Be 30 Years

This Reuters article sends a scary early warning on a potential plague that wouldn’t hit for 15-30 years. On the other hand, maybe this will give scientists enough time to find a cure beforehand. Scary!.

Non-competes more applicable in high tech

High tech companies have become much more aggressive in preventing employees from moving to the competition (including when the competitor is a startup of which the departing employee is a co-founder) and the courts are giving them an edge: Companies crack down on loose lips.

Note that courts are curtailing employees’ rights to take new jobs even when they have not signed any type of non-compete clause or agreement, relying heavily on the theory of inevitable disclosure of trade secrets.

Amazoning the News

Are the current models for web-based news delivery effective or just a minimalist port of USA Today? Check out this gif of an alternative, part of a very interesting whitepaper by By Ellen Kampinsky for The Editor & Publisher Interactive Newspaper Conference, Feb. 21, 2001.

Fucking Wall St. Bastards

Well, three cuts in the discount rate aren’t enough so Stocks Tumble As Fed Disappoints. Of course, the Fed historically hasn’t been too interested in the stock market; many observers have pointed out that the Fed’s move on rates are generally intended to put money in the pockets of the bond markets.

Record Reviews like you’ve never seen before

Steve Albini’s an English record producer who clearly has little or no concern about the reaction his Eyewitness Record Reviews will have from the bands with which he’s worked. You and I, on the other hand, get to enjoy his nasty little writeups. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of most of the bands, just enjoy the nastiness.

Clocks? We don’t need no steeking clocks!

Who says Sun Microsystems isn’t doing leading edge CPU development? We have Ivan Sutherland, father of computer graphics, who’s been working for the last decade on asynchronous computing. Of course, the work is “still five years away from commercialization,” he told his conference audience, but the prototype chip “shows how to eliminate system clocks and get much faster chips than are possible by just increasing system clock speeds.”

Math is based on certainty, right?

Everyone knows that mathematics is based on the pure rock of certainty, right? Sorry guess again: Gregory Chaitin, New Scientist: The Omega Man, a mathematics researcher at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can’t actually prove very much at all.

Waiting for the brainiacs to publish the oh-so-close Theory of Everything? Don’t hold your beath because until this gaping hole can be closed there ain’t no such thing.

Not an energetic weekend

A laidback weekend due to illness and lethergy but I did get out with a friend and her daughter to see Disney’s new flick Recess: School’s Out which had a reasonable story and animation. Also caught a little of the NCAA tourney; only two big disappointments–North Carolina lost to Penn St. and (F)UCLA won. Go Trojans, and wouldn’t that be a monumental set of upsets!

Webcasting the new baby

The Mercury News reports on an amusing new consumer-focused web company, BabyPressConference.com that allows parents to set up a webcast for distant relatives to see the newest little addition to the family directly from the hospital.

Note: due to Mercury News policy, this link may not work after 3/24/2001.

Stock market crashes and stock option exercise and holds don’t mix well

The Mercury News has a so-so article (Many running out of options) today on the problems of “little people” here in Santa Clara county who’ve run into big money problems after exercising, but not selling, options they were granted at work. Having this problem, though to a much lesser degree, myself, I can sympathize with the trouble. AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) was supposed to make sure the wealthy paid their fair share to Uncle Sam but the law was passed long before tech employees were getting options across the board.

Unfortunately, AMT doesn’t impact George W.’s pals, so no changes to it were included in the proposed tax reform bills under discussion in DC. Bummer.

You knew it was coming (1): AmIAMoronOrNot.com

Hot on the heels of HotOrNot (the original) AmIHotOrNot and AmINakedOrNot.com comes the (apparently) anti-religious AmIAMoronOrNot. The Web really is becoming a place where anyone can publish anything. Heck, even this weblog is essentially free.

By the way, HotOrNot is turning into a matchmaking service too, with its MeetMe feature. To use it, though, you have to post a pic of yourself.

Even (Disney’s) ESPN wants a piece of (AOL TimeWarner’s) Sopranos

Help A.J. Get Game allows anyone to provide advice to further Anthony Junior’s football career. Of course, filming is complete by now for the current season, so what use this “advice” might be put is a good question. Or just maybe the purpose is to show a few extra ESPN banner ads?

Descrambling CSS w/ 7 Lines Of Perl A DMCA Violation?

From SlashDot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/06/1954213&mode=thread

“Dr. David Touretzky has done it again, posting a 7-line 526-byte Perl VOB descrambler on his ever-growing Gallery of CSS Descramblers. ‘qrpff’ was written by MIT Student Information Processing Board members Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz for a 6-hour seminar on ‘Decrypting DVD’ taught at MIT in January-February.”

Code takes awhile to read and understand but clearly shows the power of Perl.