Lifehacker mentions what seems like a great little tool for private browsing.
After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface.
Monthly Archives: October 2008 - Page 2
GPass. Anonymous browsing doohickey.
Posted by Dustin
on October 10, 2008
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Sharks and Mary, Mother of Christ. What do they have in common?
Posted by Dustin
on October 10, 2008
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Sharks own. I would like to see a ninja, a pirate, and a shark battle it out. I think that even if the shark lost the battle, it would win the war because it can have children without having a mate!
Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.
Quantum Mechanics tomfoolery.
Posted by Dustin
on October 10, 2008
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Quantum mechanics is weird. One of the attempts at explaining how come it is so weird is the Many Worlds Interpretation, which states that every possible way history could have turned out, actually has in seperate parallel universes.
The problem between all the interpretations of quantum mechanics is that no one has been able to determine which one reflects what actually happens.
Now Frank Tipler, a physicist at Tulane University in New Orleans says he has hit upon a way in which these interpretations must produce different experimental results.
Embryo development video
Posted by Dustin
on October 9, 2008
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Wired has a neat time-lapse video showing a fish embryo developing during it’s first 24 hours. I’ll post the video below. If you want to read more about what’s actually happening head on over to the brief description they provide.
With a newly developed microscope that uses a sheet of light to scan a living organism from many different dimensions, scientists were able to track the complex cellular organization of a zebrafish embryo as it grows from a single cell to 20,000 cells.
Time-Lapse: Zebrafish Embryos Developing
User Account Control
Posted by Dustin
on October 8, 2008
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I’ve really been enjoying the Engineering Windows 7 blog. The latest post is by Ben Fathi, the VP of core OS development for Microsoft. He talks about all the reasons the much-maligned User Account Control of Vista is the way it is, and what they’ve taken away from the tons of feedback they’ve gotten on it.
In the first several months after Vista was available for use, people were experiencing a UAC prompt in 50% of their “sessions” – a session is everything that happens from logon to logoff or within 24 hours. Furthermore, there were 775,312 unique applications (note: this shows the volume of unique software that Windows supports!) producing prompts (note that installers and the application itself are not counted as the same program.) This seems large, and it is since much of the software ecosystem unnecessarily required admin privileges to run. As the ecosystem has updated their software, far fewer applications are requiring admin privileges. Customer Experience Improvement Program data from August 2008 indicates the number of applications and tasks generating a prompt has declined from 775,312 to 168,149.
eSkeptic: Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth
Posted by Dustin
on October 8, 2008
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Acupuncture. Ha. (Scroll down a bit for the acupuncture article.)
In this week’s eSkeptic, Skeptic magazine’s very own Skepdoc, Harriet Hall M.D., punctures the acupuncture myth and tells you why “almost everything you’ve heard about acupuncture is wrong.”
DNA could reveal your surname
Posted by Dustin
on October 8, 2008
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This seems quite crazy, but if it works it seems like it would be quite a tool for law enforcement.
Scientists at the world-leading Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester – where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone’s surname from the DNA alone.
The Cold, Hard Data of Soda Ice
Posted by Dustin
on October 8, 2008
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I’m a cup-1/4-full-of-ice kinda man myself, and the data shows I’m right!
Depending on whom you ask, either ice-fiends are suckers who pay for frozen water or ice-avoiders are cheapskates with a perverse attachment to warm fountain syrup. To settle this once and for all, we went to a local cineplex and bought three Cokes with varying amounts of cubes at 4 smackaroos each. Then we broke out our thermometers and measuring cups. The cold, hard data says it all.
The Ridiculous History Of The Job And Dollar Loss Numbers Cited By IP Proponents
Posted by Dustin
on October 8, 2008
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The industries throwing hissy-fits about intellectual property (software industry and record industry, mainly) have managed to get multiple laws passed in their favor. When they’re out fighting their favorite fight, one number brandished about quite often is that IP theft costs 750,000 jobs. This number is apparently gospel not only to these industries, but now to various government agencies as well. Where did this number come from? Ars Technica did some research on this magical number.
The 750,000 job number actually dates back to 1986, when then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, in promoting a stronger copyright bill from the Reagan era