Look at my works ye mighty and despair

What I found most interesting about this CNN piece is that the author is not making it up. There really is a National Republican Victory Monument.

And if you become a Platinum donor, your name can be inscribed on it!

The triumphal arch is more generally associated with the military victories of dictatorships and kings than electoral success in a democracy.

iPod Touch mounted on M110 Sniper Rifle | The Firearm Blog

The Firearm Blog shows an interesting twist on the development of the iPod. It is no longer an autonomous mobile device, it is a component in other devices.

The iPod touch is actually a pretty cheap package for a battery, computer and display.

Better DRM = cheaper software?

I have been interested in 3D-Modelling, 3D Design and most recently small scale CNC for some time. But as anyone who has tried to work in that area knows, professional software costs a huge sum - thousands, cheaper commercial products tend to cost in the region of $500 and lack necessary features and open source software tends to be works in progress.

Looking at the features of IronCAD it is exactly what I need. It allows 3D objects to be built from acfurately dimensioned 3D models. But even the lite version still costs thousands.

What I need is really a limited time usage license. Instead of buing a seat I want a fraction of a seat, a few hours a month at most.

If we had decent DRM technology it would be possible to support this type of use. Software vendors could expand their market and avoid competition from below.

Gratuitous use of technology part 1.

Leap second - Just say no.

Over the course of a year solar noon varies by as much as quarter of an hour. From 12:00 (by definition) on midsummer's day and 12:15 around beltane at Greenwich.

'The astronomers' are apparently worried that solar noon must exactly accord with noon according to our clocks everyone else uses because it appears that they don't know how to correct for such things without changing the time table for everyone else. The rotation of the earth is not exact and not exactly predictable.

So what they do instead is they install a leap second once a year or so, giving only six months notice. This messes up no end of computer programs as it means a vast amount of rarely tested code has to be written to deal with the edge cases.

And so there is a US proposal to stop the idiocy and abolish the leap seconds. There is simply no reason to introduce regular corrections of the order of a second to a quantity that varies of its own accord by fifteen minutes over the course of a year. That is three orders of magnitude more than the corrections being made by the astronomers.

Unless you are an astronomer there is no particular reason to care which particular day of the year 12:00 corresponds to solar noon.

So the response of the astronomers to the proposed change is classic agenda denial. 'There is no publicly available documentation that adequately or consistently justifies the proposed re-definition of UTC' In other words we are going to keep meddling with the clocks because we don't know what might happen if we stop doing it.

This is really about power. The astronomers get a feeling of importance from being responsible for proposing their little corrections. They should be told firmly that this is going to stop.

The US should stop piddling around negotiating a change to UTC. Just define a time scale without corrections and announce that that is now official. Job done.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Bringing up Dalek

Did Blu-Ray kill Playstation?

What is notable about this report on video game console sales is the fact that the once dominant PlayStation brand is no longer worth a mention.

Other reports state that sales of PlayStation consoles are down 19% year on year, XBox and the mighty Wii are both growing.

It is not hard to see the reason, Sony's decision to use the PlayStation franchise as a launchpad for their Blu-Ray format is going to be seen as one of the biggest and costliest blunders in the history of technology marketing. Even though Blu-Ray has defeated HD-DVD, the cost of the battle is is already greater than the potential patent revenue before the value of the PlayStation franchise is considered.

Comcast wants to charge me $5 for not violating my privacy

I just got a letter from Comcast telling me that they want me to pay $4.95 a month for not having my telephone number listed in their directory. Something that takes absolutely zero effort on their part should not cost $60 a year. Companies should not reveal or sell the names and addresses of their customers without their permission.

Yes, I know that this is standard practice in POTS world. But this is VOIP service and until recently my Vonage alternative was working just fine. Now it is cutting out repeatedly and the cause appears to be Comcast dropping packets. In other words it does not seem to be a coincidence that the extortion demand came right after they shut out the competition.

I don't believe Net Neutrality is the solution. That is an attempt to regulate Comcast's behavior and will only work so long as there is an administration willing to regulate. As we have seen in the finance world, from time to time we get a government that would rather not bother with regulating and then pretend that nobody could have foreseen the entirely predictable consequences of not doing so.

The answer here is competition: Force the telcos to open up the local loop as has been required in Europe.

Oh and if anyone else wants to complain about this to Comcast here are their internal numbers.

So does anyone know a good residential DSL provider in the Boston area?

Limits of digital photography

Reading the constant complaints about the need for fast ISO speed on the camera forums, it is time to ask, what is the maximum useful ISO level anyway?

Well one way to decide would be to look at the light levels for the most extreme photographic condition, moonlight is 0.27 Lux.

The other two factors in the equation are film speed and lens speed. We might in theory want to take pictures at 1/8000th but this is not very likely. A more sensible limit would be 1/50th, the longest exposure for which we might take a hand held shot with a 200mm focal length lens with optical vibration reduction.

Lens speed is also somewhat arbitrary. Lets pick f/2.8.

So what ISO speed allows us to take pictures at 1/50th and f/2.8 in 0.27 lux?

Well doing the math from Wikipedia suggests that this would take ISO 174,000, or three stops higher than the top, pushed ISO speed on a Nikon D3.

In other words it should be just about possible today with a D3 at the absolute maximum ISO setting if you have an f/1.4 lens and are willing to accept a bit of noise and do some post processing.