flickering pictures

At least in South Africa.
Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and […]

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From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault […]

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Smacker: “May I just whack you on the head with this shovel?”
Smackee: “You may.”
A new orange goo called D3O remains soft until you smack it with something (a shovel, say) at which point it becomes extremely rigid — hard enough to protect your head from a tumble over your handlebars, or from a good smack […]

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From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ […]

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So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of […]

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It’s a sign of time times — the economy’s in the toilet, America lost 694,000 jobs in March, and a three-bedroom bungalow in Detroit will set you back a cool $500. The natural response to all this? A reality show, of course.
And no, Donald Trump isn’t in it.
Proving yet again that America will […]

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Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.”
Here’s an excerpt:

On television, for every 10,000 murders, we see one […]

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Remember Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who last December threw his shoes at George W. Bush, yellng “this is from the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq”? That gesture just earned him three years in prison, and something tells me that if he’d been a white guy tossing shoes at Bush […]

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To voice its displeasure about joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, North Korea is threatening to shoot down civilian airplanes that venture near its airspace — even if they don’t actually enter it. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan may have something to say about that.
From the BBC:

In the latest of a series of bellicose […]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
The BBC reports:

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.
[…] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide […]

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