CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), is a successor, of sorts, to the loathesome SOPA legislative proposal, which was shot down in flames earlier this year. EFF’s chilling analysis of the bill shows how it could be used to give copyright enforcers carte blanche to spy on Internet users and censoring the Internet (it would also give these powers to companies and governments who’d been embarrassed by sites like Wikileaks).
Apple’s iPhone is so popular in China that even the dead want one! It’s the latest trend in burnt paper offering, a distinctly Chinese tradition where Hell Bank Notes, and paper items resembling cars, luxury villas, computers and so on, are burnt to send to the deceased…
Last night saw the announcement of the 2012 nominees for science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award. It’s a particularly fine ballot, reflecting a record number of nominating ballots (wisdom of the crowds and all that). Included on the ballot are our own moderator Avram (as part of the team that publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction) and one of my all-time favorite books, Among Others. Also noteworthy: the much-deserved John W Campbell Award nomination (for best new writer) for the fabulous Mur Lafferty, a nomination for the indispensable Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Third Edition, a nomination for IO9’s Charlie Jane Anders’s story Six Months, Three Days, and a fourth nomination for much-favored Fables graphic novels…
Distances are typically documented using specific measurement terms like inches, feet, and even miles. But when someone asks you how far it is to the mall, you’ll usually respond with a measurement of time instead of an exact number of miles…
Most of our childhoods were spent alternatingly dressing up like superheroes and playing with action figures in their likeness. Now you can combine the two by actually getting your own head on the body of your favorite superhero, like Batman or Superman, on one of these custom action figures.
All you’ve got to do is send Personalised Superhero Action Figures two photos of yourself—one portrait and one profile—and the company will use them to make your noggin into an action figure…
Optimus Prime sent me to inform you that we have arrived.
Chinese artist Kefeng Zhu and his team of artists use heavy metal as their medium, and the results are pretty darn neat. His unofficial Transformers theme park is calledMr. Iron Robot, and it’s a big hit with kids from throughout the Zhejiang Province and beyond…
If you can’t code, you are a prisoner to those who can.
Mexican entrepreneur Cristian Castillo thinks avoiding investors is important.
Castillo, co-founder of instaDM, a messaging service for Instagram, doesn’t consider himself a coder, but can hack his ideas into early-stage products.
He already has made a few apps that have gained traction…
The worlds biggest mouth doesn’t hold a candle to some of these crazy sex world records.
From an 82-year-old prostitute to a 500 people orgy and the world’s gang bang record, meet some of the weirdest sex world records you may not see in the Guinness Book…
This song does what it says in the title, and will make you laugh. It was meant as a study aid, but it didn’t help me memorize the elements at all. How about you?
Vietnamese architect Dang Viet Nga wanted to create a house like no other on earth, and she did it. The Hang Nga Guest House in Da Lat, Vietnam, is more often called the Crazy House. No single picture can do justice to even just the exterior, so you should go see more of them at Kuriositas…
It looks like simple mounds of earth from ground level, but when archaeologist Robert Benfer looked at Google Earth images of Peru, he discovered that they look like orcas, condors, and even a duck.
Archaeological evidence at the sites pegged the mounds at more than 4,000 years old – making them the oldest animal-shaped structures made by man…
At five years-old, it’s no fun getting interrupted while you’re focused on something. As a parent, I compensate for that by employing a series of intricately planned measures to guide my son from whatever he happens to be doing towards whatever it is that I want him to do instead.
The extremity of these measures depends entirely what’s being interrupted. If he’s playing outside with his sister, the steps I take are fairly mundane. I give him a few, gentle time checks (“five minutes until dinner” … “3 minutes until dinner” …), and then offer something enticing enough to make putting down the ball seem like less of an intrusion (“Tonight’s chicken has both teri and yaki on it!”).
If I need to transition my son from building a cardboard village with grandma to going to bed for the night, I need to combine my time checks with some subtle threats and an Obi Wan Kenobi-like response to his three hundred or so repetitions of some variation of, “No. I don’t want to. But you said. Why are you doing this to me?”
The techniques are all pretty simple and effective. Until it’s time to get him to put down the iPad.
