(via xkcd)

Playing Sisyphus is only fun for the first million or so grains of sand.

Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, finally unveiled the Apple iPad during an event today. The name of the new tablet was revealed only a few days ago, and aims to separate itself from tablet computers such as Microsoft’s new Slate PC category. Leaks have prepared us all for an “iPhone on steroids” and we recently estimated the release date to be April 2010. The “iPhone on steroids” has turned out to be a good description of the new Apple iPad, and the release date will indeed be April 2010.

Presumably with the different versions, there will be a mini and a maxi iPad. With any luck, the product will have … wait for it … wings.

bada boom!

Stupid name for a tweener product (doesn’t do what your laptop does, barely does more than the iPhone and still can’t make calls, too expensive, and yet another gadget to carry … yeah, not seeing the utility of this one).

Just sayin.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.

The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.

Figures that would happen 2 weeks after I think of it. Boo.

If I was using anything besides my laptop, I’d jump all over that deal – great size, good brand, great response time and specs. You could even get two and dual screen them. That would be awesome.

Sure, Mondegreen is available for free download … but it’s also on the eye-music even without any videos! Isn’t that cool?

I gave it a look and it’s $1/song and $10/album (roughly). The best part is – you won’t get sued by the RIAA! Sweet!

Namely, the Braun KF600!!!

It’s got all the features of the Capresso MT500 (vacuum carafe, stainless steel, timer, gold filter, water filter), without the ridiculous $170 price tag and complaints about constant overflowing onto your floor. Braun it is. Woo!!

Being the communitarian that I am, this decision leaves me a little torn. Then again, all those teenagers on myspace hoovering my bandwidth for the FU baby can suck it.

BH’s implementation isn’t the greatest (you have to refer to the server it’s hosted on rather than your own domain name, and the redirect link does not appear to work and the blocking seems intermittent, though it could be a cache issue on my side)… but it seems good enough in general. The BH implementation also overwrites my WordPress .htaccess file, so I have to rebuild the .htaccess file every time I add a new domain.

Webmasters with special needs can contact me if they want some hot lovin’ linkin’ action

In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

Seriously, people. Encryption + obfuscation == you maintain your privacy

Philip R. Zimmermann created a program to encrypt e-mail. His Zfone will do the same for Internet calls.

He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

Now he is again inviting government scrutiny. On Sunday, he released a free Windows software program, Zfone, that encrypts a computer-to-computer voice conversation so both parties can be confident that no one is listening in. It became available earlier this year to Macintosh and Linux users of the system known as voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP.

I’m not sure what I think of Prosper.com.

On the one hand, I would love to send those execrable payday loans out of business and make the personal lending and credit rating markets transparent. I also like that it leverages group and personal identity power, a la eBay, for trustworthiness. It takes a village, and on the internet your village reputation can go a long way.

On the other hand, this is about as risky of an investment vehicle as I can imagine, with the added benefit of religious prohibition (for the orthodox) and an extra feeling of sleeze.

From a lender perspective, these are unsecured loans to people you don’t know (but are at least somewhat vetted by Prosper), many with a history of bad judgements. You do have a 3-year contract, but enforcing judgements for delinquent payees is going to spawn a whole ‘nother industry (or reinforce the existing ones. See sleeze, above). Actually, after reading the FAQ, if you don’t get paid, you’re SOL as you don’t know who the lendee is personally. My guess is that Prosper has an enforcement arm where they’re getting more income (other than the .5% loan interest they take off the top. Damn, I need to think of these online database-charge-me-to-use-them things. Best business model ever, outside of religion.). Actually, on further review, it looks like you get to choose from among a few different collection agencies. In any event, Prosper’s still taking a cut from the referral.

So I’m torn. On the one hand, it could be a great way to help people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get help. On the other, it looks like an ideal fraud and criminal (organized or not) environment. I debate linking to things that I’m unsure of, such as this, on the grounds that though I treasure information and sharing, I’d like to avoid advocating for shady or false things as much as possible.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw it out there. I think their FAQ page may have a little matharoni problem, though, but let’s talk about that below the fold.

From the FAQ (for lenders)

The way to ensure a good return on your investment is to diversify your lending�create a standing order to place bids on many listings, and spread your risk across many borrowers. If you make 100 loans to B-rated borrowers at 8%, and B-rated borrowers have an expected default rate of 1.8%, then you might have 2 borrowers default, which would lower your return by 2%. After annual lending fees of 0.5%, this would give you an annual 5.5% return overall.

I think that 5.5% number is wrong. Here’s why:

Say you make 100 loans of $1 @8%, compounded monthly (from their sample payments, this is how they appear to be compounding the interest). They take 0.5% off the top as the house vig their fee, so your rate is really 7.5%, and 7.5% is an APR of 7.76% (P(1+r)^n). Now, if 2 people out of 100 default, your rate of return should be ((loans – defaults)/(loans))*APR. Here that would be .98*.0776, or about 7.6%, NOT 5.6%, which their math would lead you to believe. Even ignoring compound interest, you’d be getting .98 of your .075 loan, or 7.35% effective rate. To lose the amount they’re talking about would take a 25% default rate (i.e. 2%/8%), not a 2% (actually, whomever was writing probably just thought “2/100 = 2%, therefore you are losing 2% on your investment of 7.5%.” Blinded by the percentage signs, probably).

Needless to say, this does not inspire confidence in their lending tools. Of course, I could have made a big, obvious mistake here. If so, let me know.

Update: 5 months in, no problems whatsoever. No nonpayments and only 2 people were slightly (sub-15 days) late. I think Prosper has intentionally slow transactions so they clear a bit extra in interest while they’re holding or “transferring” the money to your accounts, so it’s not 100% efficient for the end lender as an investment vehicle. I’m sure there’s a class action in there somewhere over those lost days of interest payments.

In any event, it’s going well. No complaints. Good ROI if investing is your thing and you’re not afraid of illiquid unsecured loans.

Sounds like some sort of medical procedure, no?

In any event, as soon as my contract is up, I’ll be moving this site to a dedicated hoster and switching ISPs. I may even go for cable + broadband, since that will get me the fast download speeds that I want and I won’t have to worry about running a server. Then again, fuck the cable companies. I’ll see what kind of deal I can get on a Working Assets land line + DSL package from a local ISP v. the cost of monopoly cable + broadband. It’s got to be cheaper than the $150/mo I’m paying now for this crapfest.

My position on open standards, neutrality, and fairness have been discussed here quite a bit, and this is no different. The internet has been one of the greatest forces for change and democracy in a long time; at the very least, it has been a catalyst for the explosive growth of knowledge and information sharing (not to mention giving The People a voice that they haven’t had – ever. A necessary voice that is the only thing currently safeguarding our democracy on the popular front). There is a slight argument toward a capitalist solution (i.e. neutral providers will attract more customers), but in a monopolistic situation (at best, most people in America effectively only have a duopoly of ISPs from which to choose), I do not think this applies. See also, Wal-Mart).

Without net neutrality, the inernet as you know it will likely die. Many scenarios have already unfolded, such as Comcast Cable blocking Vonage packets… and then rolling out their own VOIP solution a few months later. As things stand, even with the many to many access model, ISPs are our gateways, and are still subject to control from the anticompetitive, antipeople corporations. If the internet had not been developed the way it had and been nurtured via universities, we would currently have a “net” of walled communities, to which we would have to pay to access. Think this wasn’t what the Suits wanted? Imagine a world where the “internet” are competing AOLs.

That’s the future we are heading toward, and the Suit lobbyists from AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, in coordination with the corrupt GOP Congress are trying to turn back the clock and destroy the internet as we know it. For the businesses, it makes sense to try and control content. For the government, it makes sense to try and control information, and there has not been a governmental body in history that has not tried to coopt and control any and all technologies that increase the amount of information available to the people.

We must not allow the internet to become a series of walled gardens, run by warlords, robber barons, and tinpot dictators. Let your Congresscritter know how you feel.

If nothing else convinces you, imagine how much the temperature in hell dropped when they realized that Instacracker and MoveOn were on the same side of this issue. And if that inbred, mouthbreathing, genocidal racist twit can come around to the correct viewpoint… hell, everyone should.

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Again, I still don’t see why you would want to pay a boatload extra cash for the hardware design, then use an inferior OS, but hey, that’s just me. Apple had to do this after gorn and that other guy did it independently.

Up next: how to mod your Jaguar into a Toyota Camry

Why pay $16/mo? The daunting part is the setup, but tinkering is in a monkey’s nature, no?

Samsung is first to announce a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8″ form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives. Best of all: The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive.

The power consumption part is huge. You know how much longer our laptops can run without having to churn their harddrives? If the SSDs can replace the HDDs, this will be huge. Huge!

Ryomei Engineering (a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries), in cooperation with two other Hiroshima-area engineering companies, has developed a robot resembling a koi carp. The robot was demonstrated at a pond on the grounds of Hiroshima Machinery Works.

The robot is modeled after a Nishiki koi carp as a form of tribute to Hiroshima Castle (whose nickname Ri-jo means Koi Castle). The 80-cm (31-inch), 12-kg (26-pound) fish has a white body with bright red spots. Though the tail movement is very smooth and lifelike, the remote-controlled koi is capable of moves that a genuine koi is unable to perform, such as swimming in reverse and rotating in place.

Don’t lose hope, Dad! There’s always father’s day!

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. The new results are described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Cold fusion, baby! We’re gettin there.

That’s when the Kama Sutra computer worm will begin destroying critical files on infected computers. And hundreds of thousands of machines may have the worm lurking within their Windows operating system, ready to be unleashed on February 3 and the third of every month thereafter.

Experts say Windows Office documents, Word documents, Excel spread sheets, and PDFs (portable document format) are among the files that will be “overwritten.” That means the data will be changed and corrupted, and the original information will no longer be accessible.

While files that have simply been deleted can sometimes be recovered; overwritten files are usually lost for good.

Then again, that’s what you get for using a proprietary OS.

Nothing sinister here according to Microsoft. Microsoft Web Log Hosting simply terminated Chinese user Zhao Jing’s Web Log account for violating Microsoft’s code of Conduct. Microsoft’s Code of conduct says that you have to be in compliance with local laws. Local Law in China says you can’t speak out against the party line.

Microsoft says they are following the rules just like every other country that does business in China.

Yeah. Wouldn’t want to give up your market share just standing on democratic principle would you?

GNU developers have released a telephony stack, an open source alternative to competing proprietary VoIP solutions. The GNU telephony stack provides a sacalable environment for building and deploying enterprise level VoIP solutions compatible with current standards and hardware. With an emphasis on modularity and extensible functionality, the GNU telephony stack can be integrated with other systems and services like web servers and databases.

I maintain that open source is the greatest force for democracy and enrichment of the commons currently extant. I’m all for anything that strengthens or improves that, and innovative solutions that allow people to both increase their knowledge and avoid proprietary solutions is a Good Thing.