Well, that was an interesting coin trick that Derren Brown showed, and the reason it works is mathematical even if the rest is bullshit. Blue's odds are 1 in 8, while Red's are 7 in 8. Why? Well, think about what they're doing ( Read more... )

I swear that GNOME and Novell are trying to make desktop Linux Microsoft's bitch. Using the Silverlight Declarative UI stuff in Banshee? That's Microsoft patent central, and it's not covered by Microsoft's covenant not to sue, or even its agreement to license its patents under RAND terms. Microsoft could sue users and distributors of software using ( Read more... )

Hmmm... looks like the Max Mosley case is more interesting than it first appeared. For example, the story was offered to the Mail on Sunday out of the blue by the husband of Woman E. As far as I can tell, it turned out that he was working for MI5 at the time. Of course, they've denied all involvement and forced him to resign, but it did generate a ( Read more... )

First part of Kill Bill was on BBC One last night. Quentin Tarantino really went for spurting blood in a big way. Violent but often silly, however the animated sequence was just really, really unpleasant - probably because Tarantino couldn't do anything that bad in live-action. (Wikipedia suggests there's a nastier uncut version out there; then ( Read more... )

Due to, ahem, slightly stalkerish usage of LiveJournal event subscriptions I have over 10000 of the things. The limit is now 1000, which means I need to delete some. Thanks to the Web 0.1 design of the Manage Message Settings page, this means clicking on the link to delete each one individually, then waiting for the entire large page to reload ( Read more... )

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Ouch. Apparently, the FBI deliberately delayed a supposedly-important anti-terrorism investigation so that they could use the delay to persuade Congress to grant them more powers. (Specifically, they told the person investigating it to give back the documents they'd already obtained via subpoena and demand them again through a "national security ( Read more... )

The Windows port of WebKit that Apple did apparently depends on some non-redistributable closed source libraries (Windows ports of CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics, by the looks of it). Richard Stallman would not be happy. (I'm pretty sure that it's also a LGPL violation, and anyone who contributed significant code to KHTML before Apple forked it ( Read more... )

Well, I think may now have officially stood as a candidate for the LANMA secretary and lost. (Or possibly not - they may have fudged the official report to save on bureaucracy.) Of course, it would've helped if I hadn't voted for the opposition ( Read more... )

So, you know Webkit, Apple's fork of the khtml HTML rendering library, and how it's supposedly open source? It isn't, at least not in its MacOS X form. It includes binary blobs for various bits of functionality that, according to a comment by Dave Hyatt, one of the Webkit developers, use internal MacOS X APIs and data structures ( Read more... )