In George Orwell's famous distopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most oppressive features of his totalitarian world is the ubiquitous surveillance. Every public place---and every private room as well---is always being monitored through a massive network of two-way video cameras called telescreens. Do anything that angered the tyrannical regime of Big Brother and a … [Read more...] about 1984: Social Media Edition
Story of a Photo – Texting While Driving
The New York Times has up a story about distracted driving and cell phones. I only skimmed the story---I'm skeptical about the issue, but I don't know enough to really have an opinion---because I was looking at the picture. Radley Balko had pointed it out in a passing comment: I'm trying to figure out how the photo for this NY Times scare story on distracted driving was taken. … [Read more...] about Story of a Photo – Texting While Driving
Scattershot 2009-07-20
Random shots around the web: Obama cuts major weapons system from military budget! Robots that can feed off of humans. That never ends well.* I'm a libertarian, but...uhh...too weird. Ouch. Ouch. A billionaire who wants to control the weather. That never ends well. Cool interview with Adam Savage of MythBusters. *Update: As my coblogger Gary points out, the robot story … [Read more...] about Scattershot 2009-07-20
Chitika
In my latest attempt to make blogging pay well enough to afford new camera equipment, I've started displaying Chitika search-targeted advertising. The cool thing about this is that all of you who read my blog regularly won't be seeing any additional ads because of it. When somebody out there clicks on a link to Windypundit in the result set from a search engine like Google, … [Read more...] about Chitika
Another Fight With Movable Type
So there I was, writing a short post about something, when I needed to embed an image. I cliecked the "Insert Image" button in my Movable Type blogging software, uploaded the image, and...it wouldn't let me create a thumbnail image. Thumbnailing is done by the Perl Image::Magick module and, sure enough, when I checked Movable Type's listing of the status of Perl modules, it … [Read more...] about Another Fight With Movable Type