Category Archives: technology

vote with your tectonic plate

GPS sparks boundary wars. New measurements tell Rhode Islanders that they live in Connecticut, and so on. (Thanks to Monty Solomon for the link.) If it were a question of private property, I believe the rule of adverse possession would … Continue reading

Posted in history, politics, technology | Leave a comment

Tranquility

Today is of course the 33d anniversary of Apollo XI. Have there been any soft landings on the Moon since Apollo? Update: One Russian landing in 1976. I’ve misplaced the link to the list where I found it.

Posted in sciences, technology | Leave a comment

calling all Blue Blaze Irregulars

New Scientist: Spy planes feed satellite, unencrypted. Think of it as a new field for those who like to play with police scanners. (Link from Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram.)

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a limitation

One thing I haven’t managed to find with Google is the source of a cliché.

Posted in language, neep-neep | Leave a comment

the eight-track web

ObsoleteHosting.com: State-of-the-art drive units insure your pages get served eventually. We have staff on hand in our NOC 8 hours a day to flip tapes. If your visitors want to see a page that’s on side 2, just give us … Continue reading

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paperless MMF

A first! Got a spam today of the classic chainletter type (send $5 to the first name on this list . . .) — using Paypal rather than snail-mail.

Posted in economics, technology | Leave a comment

the fragile infrastructure

BART was stuck for about half an hour this morning when its master computer crashed. If the crash were unrecoverable, I wonder how long they’d have waited before cobbling up a way to run a limited schedule by hand (or, … Continue reading

Posted in California, technology | Leave a comment