From the New York Times:

The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes. [
No Joke, Bulb Change Is Challenge for U.S. ]

Good news for the environment, I suppose, but really bad news [...] Read more »

Posted in Technology 9 Comments »

The Sony Rootkit debacle of 2005 (discussed
here and
here) now has a full-length analysis which you can read in draft form. In a paper about to be published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Deirdre K. Mulligan and Aaron K. Perzanowski examine what happened, what the rootkit did, and why Sony BMG apparently went [...] Read more »

Posted in Technology No Comments »

At Population Statistic, CT talks about the revived idea of forcing cable companies to sell access to individual cable channels rather than a large package of cable channels, a plan often called a la carte. We’ve only been asking for this for decades, but cable companies — secure in their local monopolies — haven’t seen [...] Read more »

Posted in Infrastructure, Politics, Technology 3 Comments »

I just wanted to mention that my Windows PC running Vista has been pretty solid for the last few days. I haven’t seen a BSOD in awhile, and can leave the machine on all day serving media to me at work or crunching numbers at night. That’s a big improvement.
Leopard is still causing me grief [...] Read more »

Posted in Technology No Comments »

I just installed OSX Leopard and one of the first things I did was open a directory window and option-click in it to get my context menu. Bless you, there’s now a “new folder” in every possible directory view. I have several irritations with OSX, but that one thing — the difficulty of creating a [...] Read more »

Posted in Technology 3 Comments »