I have an ugly tendency to blame all my failings on others. It's something I picked up from my parents.
"Has That Been Photoshopped A Lot?" →
Ben Long, CreativePro.com:
"Image editing" starts as soon as you lift your eye to the viewfinder. What you choose to include in the frame is a massive edit of the scene before you, and it's important to understand just how powerful this "cropping" of the real world can be.
MPEG LA: 12 Companies Own Patents Essential to Google's VP8 Codec →
MPEG LA, the self-styled one stop shop for motion video patent licenses, says that 12 different companies have come forward with patents "essential" to the VP8 algorithm championed by Google as a royalty-free compression standard.I assume Google will start whining about these patents soon, too. So much for being patent-free technology...
Proposed W3C Web Standards Pose 51 Security Threats →
As do all web technologies, if used the wrong way and without mind for security.
Serious Security Holes Found in Siemens Control Systems →
A security researcher has uncovered a slew of vulnerabilities in Siemens industrial control systems, including a hardcoded password, that would let attackers reprogram the systems with malicious commands to sabotage critical infrastructures and even lock out legitimate administrators.Stuxnet apparently didn't have to work too hard. There's also a easter egg HTML page with dancing monkeys. Gotta love the Black Hat security conference.
Andy Rutledge - News Redux →
A lot of people have already seen this, but Andy Rutledge presents a fun thought experiment critiquing news and news websites from the context of design:
In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise…which they call content.
What Happened to Obama's Passion? →
Widely quoted article on Obama's showing in the last year. Whether you like his policies or not, he doesn't seem to be fighting for them well anymore.
How to Respond to Rick Perry's 'Response' →
Religion plays too important a part in many people's lives to be denied a role in the public square. To be sure, there are some things the state can't do, like demand that schoolchildren pray each day. But elected officials, like other citizens, are free to have and express religious views. And voters are entitled to support or reject public officials for all kinds of reasons, including their religious views. To hold that elected officials can't publicly invoke their religion won't help a country of believers, agnostics and atheists reach any kind of consensus. It will only impoverish the conversation, depriving many citizens of the ability to make, and judge, arguments that reflect their most cherished views.
Acoustic Diode Only Lets Sound Travel in One Direction →
The technology has several potential applications. In the case of soundproofing, the technology could enable true one-way transmission of sound (rather than the simple dispersion and muting performed by "soundproofing" foams). But perhaps more interestingly, the material could be used to harvest energy from sound waves.
