Bill Whittle’s latest Firewall is up. Yours truly is paraphrased.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Treat Every Firearm
…as though it’s loaded. A safety tip.
Is Your Network Safe?
Here’s an interesting article on cracking WPA. Bottom line, WEP is worthless for wireless security, and WPA is pretty good, if you use good passphrases and aren’t a high-value target.
Backslash
Some thoughts from Eugene Volokh. I didn’t know that people were confused on this issue. But it is irritating that Microsoft screwed things up with DOS (as they did many other things).
Restaurant Web Sites
Why are they so awful?
I suspect that some of them have the attitude with regard to posting their prices that, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
[Via Geek Press]
Space Elevator Update
Here’s a report from the conference. There are still a lot of issues to work out. The smart money is on (reusable) rockets, in the near term, I think.
A Primer For Rioters In Texas
…but probably not in London. Yet.
It’s an oldie, but worth a read: six non-lethal weapons that you’ll wish had killed you.
More Bloggiversary Celebration
Ed Driscoll writes about ten years of Instapundit. So does Bryan Preston.
My recollections are here, at an interview I did with Pundit Press a few weeks ago:
When and why did you start Transterrestrial Musings?
It was October 2001, a few weeks after 911. But it wasn’t a result of 911 — it was a result of something that fortuitously happened a week or two earlier. Glenn Reynolds had started a blog, and a mutual friend of ours (Jim Bennett, who would later write The Anglosphere Challenge) emailed me with a link, writing, “Hey, look what Glenn is doing.”
A few days later, 911 happened, and the rest is history for his blog, but I saw him doing the kind of “letters to the editor” thing without needing an editor, and said to myself, “I could do that, too.” So I found some blog software (Graymatter), installed it on my server, and I was off to the races. Unfortunately, due to some glitches in software changes/updates over the past decade (frightening to think that it’s coming up on both Glenn’s and my tenth bloggiversary), I’ve lost the very earliest posts, but most of it is still there in one form or another. I’ve been on WordPress for the last two or three years after giving up on Moveable Type.
Interestingly, if you look back through his archives, you’ll note that his posts used to be a lot longer when he first started, because he didn’t have as many outlets for his writing. The same has happened to me over the years. I now only write long blog posts when I don’t think I can place them somewhere else where they’ll find a greater, more appropriate audience (e.g., Pajamas Media, Popular Mechanics). I won’t deny that knowing him before he was Instapundit probably helped me get started, because he was probably more willing to link my stuff in the beginning, but he’s always been very much about introducing new voices to the blogosphere, regardless of whether he knew them or not, if he found them.
And still does, I think. I would also note that before there was the blog, I had been on an email list with Glenn and several other libertarian types (including Bennett). Starting the blog was probably just a natural extension of that.
Biofuels
This looks like a pretty big breakthrough:
Just how fast are Rice’s single-celled chemical factories? On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, a biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.
“That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts,” said Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study.
Gonzalez’s laboratory is in a race with hundreds of labs around the world to find green methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.
“We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products,” he said. “That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”
I wonder what the catch is, if any?
[Update a while later]
The man-made miracle of oil from sand. And as Glenn Reynolds points out, it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.” And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.
Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.
The Jokes Write Themselves
This really is a potentially big breakthrough for people with continence problems, but the commentary on it is entirely predictable:
OMG they’re cloning Barney Frank.
See?