Writing about or pointing out something amusing you saw in the craigslist personal or classified ads is stupid, and you should stop doing it. And if it’s a typographical error that you think is hilarious, please take a leave of absence and think about what you’ve done.

That is all.

Godwin’s law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

and:

Moore’s law: At our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, will double about every 24 months.

clearly:

At our rate of technological development, the speed at which an online discussion races towards a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis doubles every 24 months.

People making guesses about Apple’s Intel strategy have focused on two possibilities for OS X on Intel:

One, that third-party application vendors would have to re-compile their code for the new architecture. Two, that Apple has developed or will develop a reasonably fast PPC emulation layer.

I think there’s a third possibility: that Apple has developed a layer which will, upon the first attempt to execute an incompatible application bundle, dis-assemble, roughly translate, re-assemble, and save the binary for the new architecture. Admittedly, I’m not really qualified to assess how impossible a task this is. Since we’re looking at a pretty constrained set of binaries, compiled for known APIs, and with known toolchains, it seems like writing a really smart disassembler wouldn’t be quite as difficult as writing a really fast emulator.

A fourth possibility: some kind of internet-based distribution mechanism for binaries. Vendors supply Apple with new binaries, or Apple builds new binaries itself, somehow. Since the binary itself makes up such a small chunk of the application bundle, why not a mechanism which checks for a simple hash in an online database, downloads, and updates the relevant bundle?

Just throwing it out there.

On OSX, you’ll want the path /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/clivlc instead of just vlc.

#!/bin/sh
mimms -o /tmp/news.asf "mms://216.35.221.84/newscast/newscast.wma" 
vlc -I dummy /tmp/news.asf \
  :sout='#transcode{acodec=s16l}:std{access=file,mux=wav,url=/tmp/news.wav}' \
  vlc:quit
lame -S --preset phone /tmp/news.wav /tmp/news.mp3
rm /tmp/news.wav /tmp/news.asf

Coming soon, an AppleScript that will pause iTunes at or near the top of each hour and play this (or another) mp3.

The article goes on to suggest darkly that Google hasn’t acted against comment spam because of their financial stake in Blogger, but I think this is unlikely — I think it’s just a very hard problem. Staying ahead of a motivated attacker is nearly impossible, as countless computer security experts will attest — close one hole and a motivated attacker will just find another. I looked for a reference to this idea on Bruce Schneier’s site, but I couldn’t find one.

It’s the evil-Universe doppleganger of Open Source software development: not only do we have “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” but also “given enough spammers, all opportunities will be exploited.” It’s the same everywhere — a truly determined attacker, no matter how many holes you plug, will find a new hole.

It’s not enough to blacklist commenters, to bayesian sort your email, to digitally-rights-manage your music, to X-ray every bag at the airport. Motivated parties will find a new way, a new method, a new weakness to exploit. There just isn’t a long-term technical solution, as far as I can see.

I shrugged it off, back in 1994, but maybe spam is going to turn out to be a big problem.

Here’s the thing: it’s not. The “nonplayable demo” isn’t even really a demo — it’s a DVD. And the controller is so awful, just holding it in my hands makes me feel like a loser. And the coupons are all for XBox titles from two years ago. So yeah, I got ripped off by Best Buy.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — this may be the best video game since the Wind Waker Zelda game. There are a few things about this game that I find really enjoyable. Firstly, the graphics (at least on the XBox version) are fantastic, and the huge areas and vistas are beautiful. The way the prince moves is so fluid and natural, I find myself stopping to marvel at it, even halfway into the game. Second, the gameplay is really well designed and fun. Nothing seems hard exactly, but there is just enough challenge to keep me interested, but not so much that I’m losing patience with the game, like in Splinter Cell, where things were either ludicrously easy or insanely difficult (for me, anyway). Also, the designers built the levels in such a way that new puzzles and types of actions are constantly becoming available to maintain interest, in contrast to games like, say, Deus Ex 2, where the only things that revealed themselves over the course of the game were lame new type of guns and enemies that were harder to kill.

Gamefly delivered Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to me yesterday. So far, it’s pretty great. It turns out that I’m really into RPGs. Must have been my nethack upbringing. Oh, for a crysknife!