As posted on Slashdot, there is an interesting article on a few products that have TiVo-like functionality but for radio.
I was looking for a product like this back when Opie and Anthony were on the air, but now I’m not so interested. If I had sucessfully recorded a good chunk of their shows back when they aired (I was only able to get a few) I wouldn’t be so bored in the car all the time today.
Just today I remembered one of the Onion articles I forgot when writing this post a few weeks back. This is one of The Onion’s all time funniest:
Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids
This article introduced a new word into my vocabulary at the time: “un-fucking-believable.”
Business 2.0 had an article about the Nissan Murano in the last issue. It’s kind of interesting, because magazines like this don’t usually do car reviews. The particularly interesting part is how they came up with the design:
Nissan spent five years and shuffled through dozens of iterations to achieve the look of the vehicle, knowing full well that some people would instantly hate it (e.g., Mrs. Foil), while others would quickly like it (e.g., me). Such aesthetic tightrope walking is scientific these days: Nissan tweaked the design until it arrived at a point where opinion diverged neatly into thirds. That is, a third of the people who saw it hated it, a third loved it, and the final third could possibly warm in their ardor at some future date.
With so many bizarre looking cars out there these days, this sounds like it could be a pretty common practice. You have to admit, those cars are fairly memorable. If you happen to fall into the 1/3 that likes the appearance, it probably beats looking like everyone else driving around in a Saturn or something.
I didn’t notice this article back when it was written, but it’s making news again because the flight is finally happening.
A Houston travel agency specializing in clothing-optional vacations is organizing the outing, which it claims is the first nude flight.
Once they reach a cruising altitude, they can disrobe, Bailey said. Each will be given an embroidered beach towel to sit on.
Go ahead and book your trip now at their website.
Now here‘s an interesting bit of legislation.
The Problem: The cost of providing Medicaid is growing
The Solution: Impose a fee on drug stores for every non-Medicaid perscription they fill, to help subsidize the cost of Medicate perscriptions.
The Catch: Drug stores can’t pass this cost along to the consumers.
Most pharmacies immediately added the charge onto customers’ bills, sparking citizen outrage that quickly made its way to the ears of legislators. Lawmakers lashed out at the pharmacies, arguing that they had never intended to tax citizens.
What the hell is that all about? Where the hell did the lawmakers expect the money to come from? Where do the drug stores get their money from? Do lawmakers have even a fundamental understanding of economics before dishing out policy?
Of course it’s clear what they intended. They decide the state needs money, and are simply going to take it away from businesses. The difference between a law like this and outright stealing isn’t clear to me. The profit margins of a business are no longer up to them – they’re up to the state. Hey, imagine if a drug store (in competing with other stores) offered a product with only a $1 markup. This rule would mean that such a store would be required to lose money on every sale. Of course, it’s not like we actually have a free market in medicine anyhow, so the odds of us getting drugs at reasonable prices are fairly slim to begin with (which is what caused this problem in the first place – thanks Uncle Sam).
Anxiously waiting for the new computer to arrive, I go to fedex.com and type in my tracking number (273314610000034). Today is April 27th (almost April 28th).
Status:
“We are unable to connect you with our server. Please retry later.”
That was actually unexpected. When I checked the status earlier today, the best they could do was tell me where it was on the morning of April 23rd (4+ days earlier). Thanks FedEx. This online tracking “service” you provide is fantastic and informative. Even when it works, it gives me old news.
During the trip to Florida I was able to get some reading in and finally finished Capitalism and Freedom. All in all, it was quite good and very interesting. Nearer to the end, he actually had a section where he talked about the dividend tax. I thought this was pretty interesting considering the book was written in 1962, and this particular topic is pretty popular today. The excerpt is from page 130, and is included below.
Continue reading
I’m shopping around for a new desktop PC. Ideally it has to be really fast, and really cheap. I can pillage hard disks and possibly (if the motherboard supports it) older memory. Any suggestions? I was looking at the AMD barebones PCs here and they looked pretty cheap (especially considering the free shipping).
This article is pretty interesting, it’s about a project called Grub.
“It will be the first comprehensive index (of the Net),” said Kord Campbell, the programmer behind the Grub software. “We can conceivably crawl every Web page, every day.”
By contrast, today’s fastest search engines, such as Google or Inktomi, crawl about 150 million pages a day. Google indexes about a third of the Web, and refreshes its index every 30 days, according to LookSmart.
Google does make some good points, however:
Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, said while the Grub project is topical and interesting; improving Web searches isn’t a problem of widening an index, but narrowing it.
“It isn’t a problem of computing resources but deciding what parts of the Web should be updated more frequently than others,” he said.