24 Nov 2007
Loose Bull

Well, we had some excitement and no mistake last evening - we had dinner with Mom and got home about 7:30pm, full of pizza. I had stopped by the mailbox on the way in, and there was a letter for Kris in there, so after I did the evening chores, I decided to run it over to her. Fed the cats, gathered eggs, filled up the stock tank and came back in to get the letter and go. I hadn't actually opened a gate to the paddock in all of this - just the one to the pasture to close the chickens in for the night. But when I came back out ...

Chip, our 2000+ pound Highland bull was gently grazing - behind the driveway! The paddock gate had popped open, probably after being butted by something, and both he and Maeg (the herd cow) were loose, in the dark, and headed for Mitchell's corn stubble field! Yikes!

Dashed into the house, got Lorraine and dashed back out, pausing only long enough to grab the stock stick. Lorraine got down to the gate and kept Hammer from escaping as well (that would've been a true disaster) and I got west of Chip and Maeg and started moving them back.

All in all, it went remarkably smoothly and took very little time - perhaps fifteen minutes. After we got them back, I rehinged the gate (temporarily - I'll take a better look this morning), and drove a barn nail into the gate post and chained it shut as well. But I can assure you that for those fifteen minutes, my heart was pounding faster than it had for quite a while ...

09:16 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Apple pays $10m to end iTunes patent clash

Somebody, somewhere has to stand and make a fight over transparent blackmail like this - I thought maybe IBM had done so with SCO, but that case was too narrowly focused (and dealt more with copyright).

As long as companies like Apple and M$ just roll over and surrender to these demands because the cost of coughing up the extortion is less than the cost of beating it in court, we'll continue to be plagued by patent trolls and other con artists.

Apple has agreed to pay Burst.com $10m to settle the patent infringement challenge the smaller US company launched against it in April 2006.

(link) [The Register]

07:57 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Open Source Warfare

It seems to me that this is a case of the State no longer having a complete monopoly on warfare - indeed, the State itself is morphing into a new institutional form (the terrorist cell).

In any event, if you're looking for a reason to doubt humanity's survival capability, look no further. The idea of basement nukes should scare the living daylights out of anyone.

Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3. Need satellite photos? Download them from Google Earth or Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Need to know the current thinking on IED attacks? Watch the latest videos created by insurgents and posted on any one of hundreds of Web sites or log on to chat rooms where you can exchange technical details with like-minded folks.

(link) [IEEE Spectrum]

via Slashdot

07:52 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Have we sealed the universe's fate by looking at it?

Ah, the arrogance of humanity! If the quantum 'Zeno effect' is in fact operational here (and there's a good reason to doubt that it is - see the quip from Max Tegmark near the end of the article), then why are humans the ones who've reset the clock, and not some alien species from another galaxy?

The real reason this isn't even mentioned is, of course, that it doesn't make nearly as good a headline.

Have we hastened the demise of the universe just be looking at it? That's the startling question posed by a pair of physicists who suggest that by observing and measuring dark energy we may have accidentally nudged the universe back to a point early in its history when it was more likely to end. The researchers in the US came to the conclusion by calculating how the energy state of our universe might have evolved.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

07:37 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link