Blah, Blah, Blahg

Can’t really say it better than this, by Chris Mooney.

A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.”

Full link.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

Technorati Tags: EFF, Wiretaps, NSA, Bush

Coming this spring, the new LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Robotics Toolset.

More in the “I’m a big geeky loser” category – a quilt I’d love to have, just to show how much geekier I am than everyone who visits me (well, they actually visit my wife – I have no friends in the real world).

Technorati Tags: Pacman, Pac-Man, Quilt

Just because I am a big, geeky loser.  I want some of these.

Technorati Tags: Q-Bert, QBest, Earrings, Ear Rings

Sure, it’s almost $300, but that price will come down, and rather quickly, I bet.  It’s a 5.6 inch color LCD and phone that works over IP.

Technorati Tags: VOIP, Video Phone

So, if you work for Domino’s Pizza and get robbed, you lose your job?  It sure seems that way.  Sounds like a sucky way to deal with your employees, if you ask me.  But then, no one did.

Technorati Tags: Domino’s Pizza, Boycott

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

Technorati Tags: Poetry, magnets, Cool

Ahhhh, when the scammers get scammed.

Technorati Tags: Scam, Nigeria

The opposite of super-mega-ultra-extra precision watches so many watch makers are advertising now.

Technorati Tags: Watch, Approximate

From the golden days of BBSes.

Technorati Tags: Ascii art, BBS

Over at EFF (support this group if you don’t already – they work to protect our digital rights), there is an article about how some Senators are turning against the broadcast flag. The reason for this is they now see that the broadcast flag would make Senator Stevens’ ipod fairly worthless. This matters, because Senator Stevens is one of the original proponents of the bill.

Technorati Tags: Broadcast flag, EFF, Digital rights