“Archer” Season 2 Beings January 27th
Phil Nelson My favorite new show of last season comes back, and I am happy. The DVD of Season 1 would be a great thing to add to your post-Christmas list, as it releases December 28th.
A Waste of Money and Time
Of course not. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one. What works is investigation and intelligence: security that works regardless of the terrorist tactic or target. Yes, the target matters too; all this airport security is only effective if the terrorists target airports. If they decide to bomb crowded shopping malls instead, we’ve wasted our money.
Cargo Collective’s 4th Amendment Wear
The 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink on shirts, underwear, and socks, to make your TSA encounters more interesting. Just to refresh your memory, the full text of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Can you imagine a modern government writing down anything even remotely like this? THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE doesn’t seem to be a phrase modern politicians understand.
iPhone and iPad now support TrueType font embedding
About which your humble narrator is extremely excited. iOS has supported SVG fonts for awhile, but SVG fonts are much larger in filesize and lower quality as of yet.
Scott Wilson’s iPod Nano Watch Kits Raise $350,000 on Kickstarter
Obviously crowd-sourced patronage will never work. The project still has 3 weeks lefts to go, too.
Warren Ellis Recieves A Case of THE BLACK BLOOD OF THE EARTH
The nature-defying science coffee mentioned previously on Extra Future is now for sale, and Warren will surely wind up in hospital later today. My jealously is palpable.
Doctors Save Girl’s Hand By Grafting It To Her Leg For 3 Months
This is exciting and very future:
In July, nine-year-old Ming Li lost her hand in a tractor accident. Her arm was too damaged to reattach it, so they grafted it to her leg instead. Three months later, her hand’s back on her arm and regaining function.
The Case Against COICA
The Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is bad mojo that will not only limit creativity but stifle business. It will unconstitutionally restrict freedom of speech, raise the cost of doing business on the internet in a time when the economy is already in the toilet, and create an internet blacklist in America.
The EFF has a larger look at the bill, and none of it is good.
Aspyr Thinks This Is A Totally Reasonable Way To Treat Paying Customers
Aspyr, who are publishing the Mac OS X port of Civilization 5, have a page linked in their primary navigation for their store entitled “About DRM”. The contents are remarkable for how not-a-big-deal it is written:
Customers may download the game up to 10 times. This includes if you mess up and “re-download.” If you run through those 10 downloads, call our customer service folks (support.aspyr.com/ 512.708.8100) and they’ll help you out. Impatience and a poor network connection could lead to using up more than a few.
They admit that the odds are high their YOU ARE A CRIMINAL lockout system will kick-in for no good reason at all, and they’re pretty ok with this, so why aren’t you?
Flying Meat, Inc. T-Shirts
Flying Meat, makers of fine Macintosh softwares such as Acron (the image editor for humans), are selling t-shirts. A Flying Meat t-shirt is your ticket to me buying you a beer.
The Road Printer
A new street-printing device—unfurling a geological substrate known as Tiger Stone, as orderly and as easy “as laying laminate flooring”—can neatly place brick roads where there weren’t roads before.
Rapportive
A Gmail extension that grabs useful information from the public domain on people who send you email. Works for Safari, Chrome, Firefox.
The Globe And Mail’s Coverage of GamerCamp
Being a 2-day event run by two friends of mine, which has been, thus far, absolutely wonderful. The level of games talent in Toronto is exciting.
Regularly Scheduled
After many months of being inactive, I’ve turned the Extra Future twitter bot, @extrafuture back on. It will now post each time I update this very website. Adjust your entire lifestyle as you see fit.
BlackSheep, the Firesheep countermeasure tool
Like the thing it acts against, it is a Firefox plugin. Were Firesheep a serious malicious tool, the race between BlackSheep countermeasures and Firesheep countercountermeasures would be endless, and Firesheep would always “win”. You can’t develop countermeasures until an attack has been successful. This was and is the message of Firesheep to begin with: The only solution to this kind of attack is to use HTTPS.
HTML5 Audio Safari Extension
Another in the recent line of “replace Flash whenever possible” Safari plugins, which replaces popular Flash-based audio players with the HTML5
“Copyright Infringement and Me”
The Editor of the magazine Cooks Source prints the entirety of an author’s article without clearing it with her. The author asks why this happened, and the editor tells her that she should be glad it got printed at all. The editor’s response is batshit, and actually contains this sentence:
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!
Cooks Source, predictably, has a Facebook page. Let them know how you feel about this.