azz: "After the 7 July London bombings could growing a beard completely change the way people treated a British Asian? There was only one way to find out."
David: "What I'm trying to say is this: It costs £350 to legally test Microsofts shit software in a safe testing environment."
azz:
A $7 system-on-a-chip processor that'll run Linux (presumably given some external memory, since it's only got 64k onboard).
Especially cool is that it's got an '"ultra-low-power" 0.9V mode' -- I have to wonder how they can build a useful processor that runs off a voltage that low...
azz:
A talk about the perceived "liberal bias" in American universities, and why it's essentially a load of rubbish.
"And I can assure you that even in English, with all our registered Democrats, no faculty-meeting debate -- about the direction of the graduate program, about the finalists for a new assistant professorship, about a new initiative from the dean's office -- gets resolved when someone stands up and says, 'people, people -- why are we arguing about the staffing of undergraduate courses and the desirability of hiring a medievalist?
Surely we can all find common ground in hating George Bush.'"
azz: "Plextor does obviously not tolerate that anyone can use the PX-755 drive on Linux, or that anyone uses alternative scanning applications. Plextor has introduced "protected commands" into this drive."
"Commands like enabling/disabling Bitsetting, GigaREC or SilentMode, as well as all quality check commands, now require to retrieve a code and send another one that is calculated from the received one back to the drive, otherwise those commands will be rejected by the drive."
Another company to boycott. Why the hell do companies do this? What possible purpose could it serve, selling hardware that you actively prevent people from using?
(Not that I'd buy from Plextor anyway, but now they're downright evil rather than just overpriced.)
And, in fact, Plextor have threatened legal action against people developing open-source software for their hardware.
David: boggle