Read it.

And that’s the important thing, of course.

The Guild does for online gaming what Galaxy Quest did for Star Trek. Herself and I watched the first season during Date Night last night and enjoyed it immensely.

Do you want to date my avatar?

Game on!

If you ever hear anyone complain about ‘no women in tech’, point them to Felicia Day (accepted at Julliard but went to UT Austin instead, double major in math and music, National Merit Scholar, class valedictorian, etc.). She was homeschooled, of course.

Read it. And watch the video.

This is creepy and cool at the same time.

Read it.

We have the technology.

The Midnight Rider.

Representative of the luxury days of railroad travel, she is classified as a “Tractor-Trailer Limousine”, and is the only one ever built.

At 50,000 pounds, it still weighs less than a Sherman tank.

Read it.

College has changed since I went there.

Read it.

What he said….

Watch it.

Just helping the Melting Pot along a little.

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One of the coolest apps we’ve seen at CES 2011 this year has to be Aisle 411, an iPhone app which will help you find out which aisle the grocery item you are looking for is located in. The App is available for the iPhone and will be coming soon to Android and will also be available as a mobile web page.

There’s an app for that.

Read it.

More signs the incoming House Republican leadership gets it. Even before the new Congress took power today, the power of congressional appropriators had been circumscribed, as Republicans forced the committee to surrender its power to place special interest earmarks into the 12 annual spending bills under its purview.

Woo-hoo!

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I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

Read it.

Much of my library consists of paper books — 4000 at last estimate. They take up a lot of the space in my house; if it weren’t for them, my wife and I could survive in half the space. If I want to find one, good luck; I know roughly where it ought to be, but there are no guarantees.

The files in my LIBRARY directory (28,704 as of this minute) include full books, short stories, articles, and literally anything I can download from Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or print from the Internet through the Mac’s built in PDF printer driver; they occupy 37 GB on an external drive attached to my Mac Mini that is about the size of a Happy Meal. I keep them classified by LC number but with Spotlight I don’t even need that.

Consequently I am rapidly turning the Real Books into PDFs (what I don’t just buy in MOBI or EPUB format to begin with); they then go to the local public library, where I’m sure they’ll find a loving home.

We live in amazing times.

Read it.

Considering that their government is composed of the PlayStation’s target demographic, what could be more appropriate?

Watch it.

Scott Joplin played by the St Luke’s Bottle Band. This has to be seen to be believed.

God bless America.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Watch it.

Who knew Steve Martin could sing?

Read it.

I love old catalogs.

Charles Murray is a brilliant man.

Read it.

Arkansas Peppered Bacon, Sam Edwards Virginia Breakfast Sausage Links, Broadbent’s Kentucky Smoked Sausage, La Quercia’s Prosciutto, 2 Bacon Cheddar Scones, Zingerman’s Peppered Bacon Farm Bread. To round things out, Mo’s Bacon Chocolate Bar packaged in a Zingerman’s bag.

Read it.

Read it.

A gun-wielding woman burst into a North Carolina television station in America on Tuesday forcing the evening newscast off the air, though no one was injured, the station said.

And who hasn’t wanted to do that?

Read it.

Last month, Iowa voters ousted three of the seven justices on the Iowa Supreme Court – a move that was widely recognized as a referendum on the court’s decision to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage last year.

Apparently the ouster of the trio wasn’t enough for some new members of the Iowa House. Three freshman Republican members are drafting legislation that would begin the process of impeachment for the remaining four justices on the state Supreme Court.

According to this story in the Iowa Independent, the trio is working on the legislation that could result in the removal of the four justices — Mark Cady, David Wiggins, Daryl Hecht and Brent Appel.

Democracy! Such a deal!

“Are Republicans really considering shutting down state government to pursue an extreme, partisan agenda that will do nothing to help middle class families?” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Democrat, said to the Iowa Independent. “The House has no business spending weeks on impeachment proceedings instead of putting Iowans back to work and growing our economy.”

Same old tired Democrat talking points! How stale! Note the tired hack phrases ‘extreme partisan agenda’ and ‘middle class families’ … as well as the standard socialist agenda that it’s the government’s business to ‘put Iowans back to work’ and ‘grow the economy’, when it was the government that caused the problems in the first place.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Yup, women men do not want to see are bitching away about the women men do like to see. Hey, I wonder if that simple statement just sums it all up. Ya think?

Read it.

Kickstarter is an amazing idea that may just represent the future of technical innovation.

The watch is pretty cool, too.

Watch it.

Read it.

A look into a geeked-out Brooklyn office reveals the beginnings of a product that every nerd in America would buy: a front door that unlocks when you check in.

Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their handful of underlings enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.

Read it.

The Kitara discards old fashioned strings and has you strumming along on a multitouch display instead, populating the fretboard with a litany of buttons that modify the aural output from your digital input. It has an onboard synthesizer, but the real magic will happen once you plug it into your own audio equipment and start experimenting. Basically, it’s like the Kinect of electronic music….

We have the technology.

I received this in an e-mail from my mother-in-law, attributed to Leslie Durham:

I do not like this, Uncle Sam,
I do not like the health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan,
I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree —
I’m smart; I know that nothing’s free!
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of “hope.”
I do not like it — nope, nope, nope!

Read it.

Because you just don’t have anything more important to do today.

Read it.

Retail sales are up this year, and that’s good. Right? No! People going into debt for stupid things they don’t need! It’s wrong and you’re all sheep and I’ll be sitting here in this dark corner writing a 40,000-word post on the Internet about the pagan origins of Christmas, because that’ll show ’em, and — say, this ad says it’s 97 percent off on solar-powered nose-hair trimmers. OK, off to the mall.

The sign said Santa would be taking pictures with pets tonight, and you wonder how far people take that. Santa, his once-ruddy face as pale as his beard, holding a 6-foot snake with tongs. Santa caught with that look of surprise that only comes when the ferret disappears down the trousers. Santa, with another dog wondering why this big man smells of so many different animals. For a dog, that’s like meeting a guy who speaks four dozen languages.

And that about sums it up. But read the whole thing.

Bryan Caplan points out that, yes, Jonah is a really good writer.

Read it.

The free market works, even when you don’t want it to.

Over at the White House, a farmers’ market has sprouted, a garden has been cultivated and holiday guests are being offered poached fruit. But the area surrounding the Capitol is awash in milkshakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and mildly baroque pizza.

That’s because the White House is out of touch with Real America. Duh.

Mr. Mendelsohn has worked with Michelle Obama extensively on her anti-obesity campaign. But that didn’t stop him from starting a Capitol Hill-area burger spot, Good Stuff Eatery, and We, The Pizza, which opened four months ago.

Heh.

Read it.

… winds up speaking with an Irish accent….

Read it.

They wanted me to go to jihad, but I said no, no, no….

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

No, ‘killed’. The target — a sniper — would have been ‘killed’. C’mon, New York Times, use the word. I dare you.

Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Gee, isn’t that what jihadists are doing right now? Except that they aren’t part of the Blame America First crowd, which I suspect Wendell Wallach is.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

No, it will be easier, because a commander won’t be hesitating to do the right thing because of the prospect of some bleeding-heart Cincy Sheehan back home raising a stink because her widdle babykins got killed doing his duty.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

But it’s not ‘nations’ that are the problem; it’s two-bit terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who one doubts are spending a lot of their R&D dinars on robot fighting vehicles.

“If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. “What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn’t reassure me.”

Hate to break it to you, Tom, but your reassurance isn’t a high priority with the people who actually have to face the murderous swine of the world. (I love that: ‘… Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes’ — but only when they aren’t committed by Muslims. You Can Look It Up.)

Read it.

This is huge.

(And, once again, mice get all the good stuff.)

Read it.

Reason magazine is having entirely too much fun with the Theater of Security Administration.

Read it.

One guess as to whether an Iranian naval vessel would have rendered equivalent assistance to two American mariners in distress.

Eric Raymond sees the light.

Welcome ashore, Eric. It’s pretty amusing to see all the Big Name People come to the same conclusion I came to ten years ago.

Megan McArdle sees the light.

In fact, I’ve already left.  My cousin’s wedding in Buffalo in October?  Drove eight hours each way.  Going to visit Dad in Boston over Christmas?  We’re taking a slow train from DC rather than subject ourselves to the increasing indignity of flying.  If it’s under 500 miles, I’ll do anything rather than hop on a plane.  And if it’s over 500 miles, it had better be way over . . . or I’d better be carrying a cooler with a still-beating heart in it.

Read it. And listen … if you dare.

You know you want to.

Read it.

Zuckerberg told the audience: “The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell Farm subsidies.”

I guess he’s not the semi-autistic jerk that everybody pretends he is.

Read it.

Of course, it’s not a real AK-47, which is a fully automatic weapon that is illegal to own for almost everybody these days. It will probably be a semi-automatic version.

Lileks on preventive medicine.

Have you experienced an adverse reaction to the flu vaccine previously? Yes, I developed a sudden taste for the “Real Housewives” series. Ran through them all on Netflix. Felt dirty. Do you currently have a fever, rash, or the sensation of a million spiders running beneath your skin? Yeah, but in college we called that “Saturday morning.”

Watch it.

Watch it.

Lynn Viehl enjoyed this conversation entirely too much.

Now he stared at me. “You don’t have any apps on your phone?” In the same tone someone might ask, “You don’t have any panties on?”

To show him I wasn’t lying, I took out the disposable cell phone I’ve been lugging around for the last four years. It still has nearly all of the 1300 minutes I got for free when the disposable phone company forced me to give up the original phone I bought (seven years ago) because their equipment no longer supported the clunky old thing (they also gave me a newer, slimmer phone for free.) P.S., it also has another 1200 free minutes I’ve collected over the last four years when I renew my airtime.

The nice young man examined it with the awe of an Egyptologist discovering a lost king’s tomb. “What does it do?”

“It sends and receives phone calls.” I thought for a minute. “And it rings. That’s pretty much it.” Before he could launch into the “But don’t you want a phone that can take pictures, check the internet, play music, access Twitter and Facebook, realign the Hubble” speech I added, “That’s all I need it to do.”

Read it.

Back in April 2009 a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was a constitutional right in Iowa notwithstanding law, and several millenia of human tradition, to the contrary. In one fell swoop seven justices used the brute force of their office to intervene in what was clearly a political decision. Unfortunately for three of their number Iowa is a state in which at least some judges remain accountable to the people. Last Tuesday the voters of Iowa created a shockwave by dismissing three Supreme Court justices, Chief Justice Marsha Ternus, Justice David Baker, and Justice Michael Streit, via a retention election.

By investing any group of people with near absolute power and absolute unaccountability you end up with the Ninth Circuit. You end up with the mind bending experience of constitutional amendments being declared unconstitutional.

Read it.

It don’t take long if you’re good.

Read it.

Democracy works every time it’s tried. That’s what drives the Crust insane.

Three Iowa Supreme Court Justices were tossed as a result of their votes mandating that same-sex couples be allowed to marry.  They are the first Justices who failed to be retained since 1962, when the current system was implemented.

Although I don’t understand the complaint of Drake University Law School Dean Allan Vestal that this was a “misuse” of the right of voters to vote on judicial retention.  Isn’t this exactly what the retention power is intended to do?

Heh. Would that the U.S. Supreme Court had the same system.

Read it.

Supposedly every issue from May 1872 to March 2009.