Spotted in a Metro parking lot: a Maryland vanity license plate reading “GODSLAW”.

Jeff reaction: “I wonder if that tastes like cole slaw?”

Amusing blog post from a developer who created an app primed for rejection, which was subsequently rejected:

‘Buy Money’ allows you to spend from $1 to $1000 on credits. $1000 dollars buys you a million credits. Once you’ve got credits, you can burn them.

Pressing ‘Burn Money’ shows you a pile of dollar bills, and burns them with some quite nice fire and smoke effects courtesy of Particle Candy. The more credits you’ve got, the longer it burns for. Although not that much longer… fire’s like that.

Need to get some metal objects onto your next flight? Easy peasy, but only if you’re at a checkpoint with a pornographic millimeter scanner.

The method relies on the fact that the scanners show subjects’ bodies as light objects on a dark background, and also render metal as dark objects. If an object is off to the side of the subject — in a side pocket, say — it shows up as black-on-black and is thus invisible.

Gruber on the decision to run normal Windows 8 on tablet/phone hardware:

Count me in as one who suggested they go Metro-only on ARM. I truly believe this is a grave error on Microsoft’s part, and they’re ceding the future of personal computing to Apple and the iPad by doing this.

Sometimes a story makes a snarky comment superfluous, as in this story from Boing Boing:

An undercover police officer in Sussex, England, shadowed a suspicious character through the streets a small market town for 20 minutes, following directions passed to him by a CCTV operator who guided him towards the suspect. After 20 minutes, the CCTV operator realized that the “suspicious character” was the police officer himself.

I’m surely not the only guy who gets chills reading this story about US-airspace drone flights:

The US Federal Aviation Administration will have until the end of 2015 to open national airspace to unmanned civil and commercial craft. The bill, which granted funding to the FAA, requires the agency to draft a plan for licensing remote-piloted drones to operate in areas that were previously reserved for manned planes. Currently, drones can be used in certain parts of military airspace and at low altitudes or isolated areas; this bill will let them occupy the same space as passenger planes and other traditional aircraft.

The ACLU is already preparing a lawsuit concerning how cheap drones open the door to wider surveillance by government and private companies, but honestly, my other concern is sticking these into already crowded airspace. My question: considering that the FAA still uses antiquated 1980s technology (the GPS in your phone is better than what the FAA uses, which is to say, none), is this really the priority Congress should be focusing on?

Update: apparently $11 billion of the $63.4 billion authorization passed by Congress is dedicated towards GPS upgrades for the FAA. So that’s good news. No link available, as I can see it in Google Reader but the original page isn’t coming up on The Verge.

I installed Path a few months ago to figure out what it was all about, but hearing that it’s up to some data shenanigans, this was an easy choice for deletion.

Boffins at the University of York have come up with a hard drive read/write method that could increase speeds to terabytes per second, using much less energy than current magnetic methods. The hard drives still use a magnetic platter, but the bits are flipped using heat to harness some internal property of the magnetic media to get much more bang for the buck out of the energy and speed.

Considering that we appear to be at the beginning of a headlong rush to SSDs, and also that hard drive capacity will be a lot cheaper than SSD for the near future, I wonder if this will prolong the argument.

From the HBR:

The good news, Harvard Business Review says, is we can train our brain to be more focused and productive—by improving our emotional balance.
Dr. Paul Hammerness and Margaret Moore write that negative emotions sabotage our brains’ ability to solve problems and ignore distractions, while positive emotions and thoughts actually improve the brain’s executive function.

More to the point, the takeaway lesson of pretty much all of the recent research I’ve read: even mild chronic depression can really fuck up your life, and it would be nifty if there was broader societal recognition that this is an illness.

Ladies and gentlemen: the bacon milkshake. I was in the vicinity of a Jack-in-the-Box last week, and let me tell you: I would have tried one, out of pure morbid curiosity.

Next time your airplane does not experience “controlled flight into terrain”, thank this guy.

Every once in a while, Twitter provides a little bit of perfection.

Standing question: why don’t we care whether an expert is right about predictions he makes? According to Krugman, economists are just as bad at paying attention to such things.

Only species happy with this forecast: the Haroldcampingites. Via George Takei.

The glasses looks similar to Oakley’s MP3-playing Thump line — somewhat of a departure from the “normal-people” eyewear that had been initially described — and incorporates a front-facing camera and flash. The on-board hardware is said to be in line with a “generation-old” Android phone, and while it’s claimed that the glasses will operate as a smartphone, it’s unclear if a cellular radio is integrated or if pairing with an Android device will be required.

According to the tip, the glasses aren’t transparent… but if there’s an onboard camera, presumably the front view could be provided in real time so you don’t walk into things. I think it’s self-evident that this technology will be ubiquitous someday, and the only question is how soon. Sign me up for the beta as soon as one’s available.

Update: something similar to my proposed HUD display is already available for Android.

Picked up from Macworld:

Launched four years ago, the use of Wi-Fi on U.S. airlines has yet to catch on, with estimates that the wireless technology is still used by only 7 percent of the flying public.

There are a number of reasons: With Wi-Fi cropping up for free in many airports and public locations, passengers don’t want to fork over as much as $10 for a flight of a few hours. Passengers also may not know when Wi-Fi is available on a flight since the airlines provide the wireless service on only a small percentage of their planes.

Having just gotten off a flight where I was gaming the system to determine whether I’d want wifi, I have a few perspectives on this.

There’s no question that wifi would be a no-brainer for handheld devices at the right price point. Regardless of whether you view a flight as uninterrupted work time or uninterrupted leisure time, I doubt anyone except the “thank God I’m unreachable” crowd wouldn’t see value in connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and email from the air. I thought it was truly nifty to use Flightstats as an in-air GPS telling me where I was midflight, and being able to tap my flight number into Google for minute-to-minute updates on arrival time and gate was especially useful for planning my connections.

Still, the main issue for wifi uptake is the horrible ergonomics in coach. This is where you both have people who are trying to make maximum use of their 21 inches of space, and the people whose in-flight expenses probably aren’t paid for by their businesses. You will probably see this ameliorated somewhat–with a corresponding upswing in wifi usage–as more people use iPads as work machines and don’t need the full space a laptop requires. But until an airline figures out how to make flying more comfortable, then you’re less likely to see widespread uptake of in-flight Internet.

Beyond that, price sensitivity is the main issue. On my last flights, Gogo was $8 for a single flight and single device, or $13 for a day pass that I could use on any device, one at a time. It jumps to $40 for a monthly pass–which means, obviously, that if it’s the beginning of the month and you’re flying more than two roundtrips, it starts to get cheaper. I suspect that the 7% correlates to people who are on airplanes more than once a week. Gogo needs to start looking at the economics of App Store pricing if they want market penetration; drop your prices significantly, and the new users are likely to be low-bandwidth users compared to the early adopters… plus you’ll start locking in more casual flyers who will see in-flight wifi as a casual expense, similar to the need to buy a sandwich before boarding a flight.

Harrison Ford in talks to reprise Rick Deckard in a Blade Runner sequel. Please, God, let it suck less than Crystal Skull.