Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• MS has apparently got some kind of robo-scanner looking for porn on its SkyDrive service (even folders that are completely private) and if it sees an image it thinks shows too much skin, you could lose your account. If I wasn't suspicious of cloud storage before (and I was) well, do the math.
• Speaking of clouds, here's the latest manifestation of Climate Weirding: No hurricanes and almost no tornadoes.
• A study on music buying (and non-buying) habits suggests that P2P file piracy accounts for only about 15% of music acquisition. Sneakernet, by which I mean the trading of files in person and not over a routed network, accounts for 46%. No mention of Usenet, which is something of a wildcard in the piracy scene.
• More on the pirate wars: I am not a big fan of the Olympics, but man, their Wi-Fi cops have cool warwalking gear. (As the article says, it should be fairly easy to see them coming...)
• And to round out this entry's pirate news, we have Sweden's scurvy Waffle Pirates.
• I'm trying something new these days: Shut the quadcore down early, then sit quietly and read a (paper) book until my abominably early bedtime. Quite apart from the well-known issues with late nights full of artificial light (hamsters exhibit more distress when placed in water!) I'm wondering if staring at flickering rasters of TV/PC gadgetry could be a particularly short path into clinical depression.
• Guldurn. I did not learn about this kind of bond when I had a chemistry set.
• I was always fond of the Venetian Blinds school of aviation. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Damn, I'm dense sometimes. I startled myself today by looking up from other work and realizing that OWS is gone. It didn't fade out. It vanished. The most interesting piece of mass psychology in decades walked around a corner and never came out. I have no theory, and nobody online seems to know why either. Wow.
• While checking to see if I was the only one who'd noticed Cooking with Pooh , I came across this compendium of the 25 worst book covers of all time, nearly all of them SF. I'd quibble with a few (of all time?) but the comments are worth the price of admission.