Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• This item may not be visible after a few more days, so catch it now: A very weird "hotspot" turned up in the satellite water temperature record at the far eastern end of Lake Superior. For a short while, water temps excursed from the 30s up to the 60s F. Instrument Error? Cargo ship on fire? UFO exploding? STORMY baiting and then rounding up firenados? No one can tell me, though I suspect that the truth is out there.
• The FCC is trying to redefine "broadband" as 25 Mbps down / 3Mbps up. The big carriers are livid. And what are they saying? "Nobody needs Internet that fast!" Just like Esther Dyson said that no home computer user would ever need a CPU as fast as the 286.
• The dropoff in some ebook author revenues this past fall (which many blamed on Kindle Unlimited) may have been a sales cycle thing, unrelated to Amazon.
• Dare we hope that this new Facebook feature will be the end of hoaxes and hate memes? Be on notice that I intend to use it a lot.
• Slashdot inadvertently invited all the Pascal-haters out of their caves for one more hatefest. Heh. Maybe not a hatefest. The emotion I pick up when C partisans' eyes roll back in their heads over Pascal is not hate, but...fear.
• Angry Twitter posts are harmful to your health. Duhhh. Angry anything is harmful to your health. Anger is jack-in-the-box suicide: You can't tell quite when, but the more you turn that crank, the sooner the thing's gonna pop.
• The Pirate Bay has a phoenix logo and a countdown timer on their old site, suggesting that they're coming back online on February 1. I consider this unlikely, but I've been surprised by these guys before.
• From the same site: Dozens of Pirate Bay clones are not nearly as useful as the real thing.
• And while we're talking about (if not like) pirates, whatever happened to Antigua's blanket permission to distribute copyrighted files? Lots of news about that in midlate 2013, nothing since.
• The highest-paid YouTube video author films herself unwrapping Disney toys. That's it. And for that she earned $5M. I think I'm in the wrong damned business.