Results tagged “Large Hadron Collider”

It used to be thought that health care reform in the United States would happen when pigs flew.  Well, this is the sound of one ham flapping.  The United States still has a long way to go before they have the level of health care that I have as a Canadian, but it's a start.  The bill itself is long, very long, and apparently getting longer (mentioned at about 4:12 into part 1 of the episode).  If the biggest complaint you have is that it's big, then that must mean that War and Peace, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Bible are the worst books ever.  Kinda kills your enthusiasm for NaNoWriMo, doesn't it, when an entire party can enter and already be over 1900 pages ahead of you?  I'm only at 13054 words for the month.  Stupid Democrats, showing off.

This week has been a week of milestones.  Sesame Street has celebrated its 40th anniversary, and at the same time, Wallace and Gromit has been around for 20 years.  In fact, if you go to the official Telltale Games web page, you can download a Wallace and Gromit PC game for free!  Hope you hurry, though, because the special offer ends very, very soon.  Within hours of this post, in fact.  Also, speaking of special days, November 5th was Flux Capacitor Day.

There is some good news for injured or crippled pets: they no longer have to fear for their future.  Just ask Andre the dog.  All it takes is one person (or team of people) to decide that something's possible, and something like this can happen.

Flash was never, in anyone's wildest imaginations, the best thing to happen to computers and the Internet.  And when Windows Vista came along, it really showed how awful such an idea was.  Well, welcome to the future.  If such an idea catches on, I hope one day that Flash will go to the same technological graveyard as the Geocities school of web design and the Zip disk.

COFEE has apparently leaked all over the Internet and despite one site's efforts to keep the mess from spreading, by now it's available for pretty much anyone to download.  What this means, of course, is that a piece of software that can break passwords and check your on-line activity has not only been given to regular users such as you and me, but it has also been in the hands of police for quite a while now.  I hope the police haven't abused the power of the software, because I'm sure the rest of the world certainly will.  But it's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to break passwords these days.  A lot of people don't bother changing the generic password they're given when they start using a service or a piece of software.  Take iPhone users, for instance.  If they jailbreak their iPhones, many of them make themselves vulnerable to attack.  iLaugh.

It's never too early to learn, as a baby's cry can tell you.  Apparently, you can cry in French and German, depending on where you were born.  I imagine this means you can cry in other languages as well.  (And no, I'm not kidding, despite the presence of this on the Internet.)  Myself, I remember recently hearing the cry of a young kid who couldn't get their way, and it sounded a lot like an ambulance.  I'm still not kidding.  But even after leaving the womb, a child doesn't stop learning.  Apparently, this is because of the presence of comic books in their lives.  I believe it.  I used to read Tintin and Asterix a lot and look at how I turned out.  But, and this is the important thing, you can't own me.  I'm sorry, but it's true.  And don't bother asking Google this, because I don't think they know either.  (Bonus material: read this.)

Sony finds itself in a lot of legal hot water, lately.  First of all, blind gamers want to enjoy games, too.  And although "visually impared" can mean a lot of things, it makes me think of all those people with no eyesight who can't enjoy games in the first place.  Unfortunately, visual media doesn't come in braille or large print editions, and this means that it's very hard for the visually impared to enjoy a game.  And increasing font size on the screen will do nothing more than overcrowd an already overcrowded menu system on most modern games.  I know I have a hard time seeing the font on some games, but that's because I'm stubborn: you can't really use a 20-year-old television to play a game like Final Fantasy Tactics without being directly in front, squinting at the horrible translation so that I can read it.

Second of all, Sony was finally sued over their firmware updates, and I have to say, it's about time.  An interesting thing to note is that one of the things they're being sued over is the fact that they require certain firmware updates to be present in order to play games you've purchased for your system.  It used to be that you could buy a game and it would run automatically, no extra stuff needed.  Not now.  For those of you who still haven't purchased a current system, here's how it works: when you purchase a PS3 or PSP game, if your system doesn't have the most up-to-date firmware, you might be prompted to update before you're allowed to play the game.  Also, you're not allowed to access certain functions of your system once the new firmware is available, which forces you to download and install it if you still want to use your system the way it was designed to be used.  It's possible, as has been demonstrated, that a system update will brick your machine.  It's worse when it's a required update and it feels like your console is being held hostage until you install it.

I'd better get back to my NaNovel before the day's completely done, but before I go, I wanted to mention that the Large Hadron Collider is still not going to destroy us.  This time, it's because a bird dropped some bread on it.

It's relatively geeky to build your own weather balloon, but an entirely different thing to accidentally let it loose with your son inside.  The nightmare unfolded Thursday and the world watched as the weather balloon sailed through the sky, the status of the boy inside unknown.  Would he be alive?  Would he be dead?  Would he have turned into a cat?  But seriously, since the safety of a child was at stake, naturally every single media outlet was scrambling to be the first to report more details about the story.

Eventually, the balloon landed, and it was found that the kid was not, in fact, inside the balloon.  So did he fall out somewhere?  It turned out that the kid was hiding in the attic.  He feared his father's famous wrath, so he was hiding there for five hours.  His father gave a heartfelt apology for that in front of news cameras.

That would be it, if not for the revelation that the police were working behind the family's back, and behind the back of the news media as well, to investigate whether it was a hoax or not.  While the news media were falling over themselves trying to drum up ratings by reporting everything they could about the real life Hot Air Henry story, police interviewed the husband separately from his family, and got enough to issue a warrant.  Apparently, the family were hoping this would help their goal of being reality TV celebrities.  Well, staying true to crime show tropes, the family has now lawyered up.

But the news didn't have its head completely in the clouds this week.  In an update to a news story we touched upon last week, Microsoft had originally reported that they lost all the data that Sidekick users had entrusted to them, but now it seems they took a peek in the lost and found box, because they've revised their statement significantly.  Considering this is Microsoft we're talking about, people who supposedly should've known what they were doing in the first place, this kind of miracle isn't even in the same ballpark as, say, feeding five thousand people with five loaves of barley bread and two fish, or getting eight days of use out of one day's worth of oil.  Also interesting is the timing.  They announced their miracle right when Windows 7 is launching.  Hmm.

Apparently, Nintendo is the best company in the world.  BusinessWeek magazine used factors such as sales growth and value creation over the past five years.  In other words, to be listed as the best company in the world today, you have to have been the worst company in the world, five years ago.  Or close to it.  If my impressions of the list are correct, then if Nintendo had constantly been at the top of the video game market since it hit a home run with the NES, it might not have even been mentioned in the magazine.

And in other news, Eugene Kaspersky wants to end anonymity on the Internet, and is willing to cut off any country that doesn't agree with him.  Obviously, this guy wouldn't get my vote for President of the Internet, even if he thinks, in his mind, that he is President already.  While he's rubbing his hands together greedily at the thought of all that personal information being available, Google is rubbing their hands together greedily at the thought of their Street View expanding further.  A couple weeks ago, they finally added Canadian cities, and now they're calling on Americans to choose where their Street View Trike goes, since there are so many notable landmarks and other such destinations that cannot be visited by car, but are interesting enough to be documented.  But the quest for more information may become pointless if doomsayers are correct, for the Large Hadron Collider, that machine that was supposed to suck the Earth into a black hole last year but broke before anything could really happen, is finally repaired and cooled back down to operating temperature.  Cue the doomsday warnings in 3, 2...