Now here is an interesting idea. Why not select a Unity Ticket for the U.S. Presidential elections in 2008 – that is, a Democrat and Republican running together for President and Vice-President? As the Washington Post notes today, the idea has influential figures behind it.
Except, of course, that it won’t work. The [...]
I’ve always liked the aesthetics of the pilchrow. (The look of the section sign also appeals.) Until Wikipedia informed me of the correct name, I’d tended to call it the “Paragraph mark”. What I hadn’t realised, but what the good folks of Wikipedia tell me, is that it is derived not from [...]
With Congestion Charging in London driven by a system that recognises number plates, and the Police in the process of building a database of all car journeys in the country using a similar system, secure number plates seem a sensible idea. Of course, it still doesn’t stop someone from having false number plates made [...]
Podzinger is a search engine with a difference – it searches audio files. Specifically, it is set up to search “podcasts” for words and phrases, so that if, for example, you were seized by a sudden urge to hear someone talk to you about Tony Blair you could do so.
So far so useless. [...]
Computers are designed to do sums. They can do sums very, very fast. Some can even do more than one sum at the same time, provided you know how to ask nicely and want to do particular types of sums. Computers are just the right tool if you would like to do [...]
Some time ago Bruce Schnier was moved to ask readers of his blog if they had a snappy answer to question (in re surveillance cameras and the like): “if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?”
His question provoked many interesting and some very humorous answers (the kind of outraged-geek humour [...]
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is interesting to see how different individuals and different societies go about it. America and Britain are, the the words of that most famous of statesmen, “divided by a common language”, and it is often instructive to note speeches that succeed in one country that would not have [...]
As Bruce Schnier notes, NIST have produced a guide to log files – those records of what has happened on computer systems that are invaluable for helping to track down all sorts of problems, and (far more rarely but more importantly) for detecting and proving illegal activity.
The standard in the Linux world, and [...]
This idea is superbly silly, but slightly interesting, more for its lack of success than its ability to revolutionise how we see the world. It is, of course, entirely redundant – since many more useful ways of representing time exist. At its core is the idea of giving an instant impression of how [...]
An interesting piece of technology made it onto the web this week. I’ve thought for a while that Google employees must have a fair amount of fun watching what the world is searching for, and they are probably not the only ones. Being levelling types, though, as well as masters of the slick [...]