The Quantum Mechanic

Interesting post at Marginal Revolution on how eBay-bidders will prefer a $6 item with $5 shipping over a $10 item with free shipping.

Why am I not surprised?

…the wizard of Hollywood.

I’ll prefix this by saying I believe pirates should be dealt with very harshly and that I view most of the “information wants to be free” crowd as lamers trying to develop a high-falutin’ rationalization for their thievery.

Despite all that, Sony has gone way too far. They are putting out so-called “copyright-protected” CDs which can only be played on a computer if you use the player that’s on the disc. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the player patches the Windows kernel to hide itself from spyware programs and disables your optical drive if you uninstall it (looks like you’d need to reinstall Windows to fix the damage).

Here’s the Washington Post blog entry on it and here’s the excellent forensics at the Sysinternals blog.

UPDATE:
You don’t need to re-install windows. You can delete the driver filter (see the Sysinternals blog) and get the optical drive working again.

While trying to figure out the name of the nameless toy mentioned in my previous post (still no luck with that), I discovered that Hasbro has done an incredible favor for nostalgia freaks, retro-toy enthusiasts (and anthropologists? :) It has placed many (I’m not going to claim all) of its manuals to board games, electr(on)ic toys, etc. online. I’ve seen some going back to the 1940s. This is fabulous!

I never had anything as interesting as CARDIAC, but I do have fond memories of a few old computer-y things I’ve owned.

• A Radio Shack 4-bit microcomputer trainerwith around 64 bytes of RAM. Oddly, it had the usual springs-and-wires of a typical RS electronics kit, even though there was only one way to wire it up. Input was a hex keypad in the form of a matrix of cheap pushkey switches and output was some LED dots and an 8-segment display. The manual was pretty interesting and was not very dumbed-down. You really could learn some good assembly language concepts from it.
• I had another computer-y toy whose name has sadly completely slipped my mind. It was pre-fabricated and like the one above also had a simple keyboard — pushswitch keys (so a step up :-) that were at least a hex keypad, but maybe more additional keys. Output was a speaker, either one or two 8-segment LEDs and, fascinatingly, a 4×4 (or maybe 5×5 or 6×6) LED dot array. The keypad was on the main body of the thing and the output unit (speaker, array, 8-seg displays) was a separate piece that attached to the main body via a short stalk. I don’t recall the manual being as technical as the Radio Shack trainer was (this one was marketed more as a toy than as a trainer). I don’t even remember if it gave you enough information to write your own programs. But because of the LED array, the programs that the manual had you key in were much more interesting :-). There were programs that would draw moving patterns. I think there was a “don’t let the snake eat its tail” game. There was even an animation program — you could “draw” (by using keys to set/reset dots) five or six or so animation frames. I really loved this toy and wish I could just remember the name of it.
• Somewhere over the years I picked up an AMD microcontroller trainer. It has a 1969-era microcontroller on it, a few hundred bytes of RAM, some LEDs, and a set of toggle switches for toggling in bytes, single-stepping, etc. It’s all mounted on a one-foot-square PCB. You have to supply the 5VDC yourself. The manual even comes with instruction coding sheets so you can hand-assemble your program.
• I had the Radio Shack Digital Computer Kit which was a set of eight quintuple-pole double-throw switches and eight light bulbs, each in its own compartment. There was a set of opaques (well, they weren’t transparent :-) generally organized with input labels to the left and output labels to the right that would slide into place in front of the bulbs. The idea was that you’d slide the switches that lined up with the inputs to light up the inputs you wanted to activate, the “computation” would be performed courtesy of the particular wiring pattern you had been instructed to wire up for that particular “opaque”. Ironically, the kit really was more of an analog computer. The manual/opaques had instructions for the basic logic gates and then a bunch of trivia, etc. quizzes. You couldn’t do any real programming since it had no state at all (other than the state of the switches).

What do you know? transparent aluminum.

http://www.cathnews.com/news/510/56.php

A pocket-sized book published by the Catholic Truth Society in the UK addresses Catholic attitudes to extra-terrestrial life. Independent Catholic News reports that with increasing numbers of people believing not only in the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, but even claiming encounters with aliens, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church is beginning to explore what effect the discovery of sentient ETs might have on Christian theology.

In: Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, author Guy Consolmagno SJ, asks:

• Would humans recognise intelligent life if we saw it?
• Could we communicate with it? Should we even try?
• Is Original Sin something that affects all intelligent beings?
• Is Jesus Christ’s redemption valid for intelligent beings throughout the universe?
• or would other worlds have their own version of Jesus?
• Would the Church send missionaries to ET planets?

[snip]

Brother Guy has advanced degrees in planetary science from MIT and the University of Arizona. He spends his time observing comets and asteroids, and does experiments with the Vatican’s vast collection of meteorites one of the largest in the world.

And just what is the Vatican doing with those meteorites, anyways? :-)

But seriously — those are eminently reasonable questions for an organization like the RCC to be pondering.

Great disclaimer in the insurance that NAR (no typo) offers its members:

NAR insurance does not cover any activities which involve use of alcoholic beverages, criminal assaults and batteries, nuclear accidents, or sexual abuse.

In another stunning display of FEMA idiocy, registering for disaster aid through the internet requires you to use IE6 as your browser and to have JavaScript enabled. See eWeek’s article about it. I just checked the FEMA site in question myself and that really is the case. Un-be-lieveable.

And even if IE6 weren’t required, why the heck are they requiring JavaScript to be enabled? Sure, it might make things look slicker, but is it really needed for what, ultimately, is going to just be a form submission. Sure, JS can do client-side input verification, but it wouldn’t be hard to have the server do it and come back with an appropriate error page. I concede it’s a fair point that that would put more load on the servers. So you have the slick page that you figure most people use and then an alternate page (something that can be used by lynx, say?) for others.

And how much do you want to bet the FEMA page doesn’t follow the government’s own 508 standards?

This guy, who has too much time on his hands, knows. :-)