About the Murthy vs Missouri decision...

Regarding Murthy v. Missouri: the Supreme Court decision yesterday about government coercing social media companies to censor users' activity based on political content.  SCOTUS decided that the plaintiffs had no standing and dismissed the lawsuit.This seems like a colossal victory for the government and social media companies.  HOWEVER...The case was *not* dismissed....

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Last batch of AI-generated pictures that I'm posting

Here's that previous collection of artificial intelligence-created images that I prodded a computer to produce.  But it's time to move on.  ChatGPT has its fun uses but it's a tool, not a toy.I would be lying if I said that I haven't had fun though.So, here is the final bunch of artificial intelligence generated "art" that I'm putting on this blog.  Be sure...

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First images I'm generating with ChatGPT

Still playing around with AI, for the first real time ever.  Consider it research.  I'm getting professionally involved with an endeavor that is heavy on artificial intelligence so I'm having to see what the thing is capable of doing, exactly.(I'm adamantly sticking to my policy of NO writing blog posts with AI.  If you see something written here and it's not...

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My first foray into using an AI chatbot

No, I am still not going to "write" a blog post using artificial intelligence.  I'm sitting in front of a keyboard composing these words.  If you ever do see a product of AI being displayed, it's going to state as much.  Which is what I'm doing now.  What you are about to read is definitely the product of artificial intelligence.  It also represents...

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DOOM is thirty years old today!

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release. It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game - the shareware version - to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be...

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Dear Elon Musk: Make Twitter usable again

This line from the 1983 movie WarGames has come to mind in the past couple of days:Except right now it's Elon Musk instead of Dabney Coleman.  And instead of the WOPR computer the problem is that Twitter is, at the moment, complete junk.A few years ago I embedded the timeline of my most recent tweets on this blog, in the right-hand column toward the top of the page. ...

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My solemn word that anything you see posted here is genuine

You might have noticed a slight addition to this blog.  It's on the header, toward the right of the screen.  There now appears the following label:  I have heard all kinds of insane stories about people using ChatGPT and other "artificial intelligences" as something more than a curiosity.  Students have begun having AI write papers for classes. ...

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A federal judge just turned Twitter and Facebook into public utilities

In what might be the most hilarious case of unintended consequences in recent memory, today Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled that President Donald Trump was wrong to have blocked users from his Twitter feed... which inadvertently has officially designated Twitter (and by extension Facebook and...

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Retro-Internet on an iPad Pro

For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the "classic" Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro... Turns out: quite a bit! Here's...

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Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, has passed away

Unless you're reading this on a mobile device (and even that owes a lot to him) you're enjoying this blog and practically everything else on the Internet because of this man: Douglas Engelbart. While working at SRI in the 1960s, Engelbart was struck with the idea of humans interacting with computers by manipulating on the screen with an intuitive interface.  He called...

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"Weird Al" Yankovic's next album to be his last

Musical parody pioneer "Weird Al" Yankovic is working right now on his next album.  And he's not planning on making another. Yankovic confirmed it with journalist John J. Moser of The Morning Call in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania... There's no question about it, parody singer "Weird Al" Yankovic says. A world where virtually everyone has access to YouTube or other Internet...

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STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC comes to the iPad!

When I first heard about it this morning, it was only from a report and there had been no announced availability but my first reaction was already "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!" Guess who just spent ten bucks on the App Store? BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, deemed by many to be the greatest Star Wars video/computer game ever and one of THE best games...

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Department of Defense has 3D printed gun yanked... but I got it anyway (and so can you!)

The Liberator: Coming soon to a desktop near you! Defense Distributed has made a lot of headlines lately about the Liberator: a firearm which is completely fabricated by "3D printing", apart from the firing pin.  I think the success of this gun already is that it's got politicians like Charles Schumer and Steve Israel all steamed-up about it.  Schumer wants 3D...

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Internet sales taxes: Does the United States Senate NOT understand the Constitution?

A short while ago the members of the United States Senate voted 70 to 24 to pass the "Marketplace Fairness Act": AKA "Internet sales taxes". The Senate has approved collecting taxes on goods sold on the Internet.  We'll examine that in just a sec. ("Marketplace Fairness Act"?  God, I hate how these people try to govern by emotion instead of intelligence...) Anyone who voted for this bill should be removed from office at the earliest...

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Don't want to marry your sister? There's an app for that!

Incest is a terrible thing.  But when you're one person among a population of 300 thousand, your odds of contributing to genetic bottleneck go substantially up.  That's the problem in Iceland, where just about everyone is related to everyone else and some downright... creepy... marital relations have inadvertently come about. (I'm assuming those were inadvertent...

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Towns Without Pity: Modder proves EA is LYING about SIMCITY always-online!

So... that whole thing about Electronic Arts' new SimCity requiring a constant Internet connection to play?  EA told us that it was needed because most of the game's processing takes place on EA's own servers.  In other words: the official company line is that it is not possible at all to play SimCity locally on your PC or laptop.  And despite the horde of connection problems that players were made to endure throughout the past week,...

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I just downloaded a functional .22 pistol

In two months' time DEFCAD has garnered more than three thousand visits an hour and nearly a quarter-million downloads.  What makes up the bulk of that traffic? Guns, guns, guns.  Parts for guns.  Accessories like suppressors.  Ammo casings for NATO and Warsaw Pact small arms and rifles.  Even combat munitions like hand grenades. And they all work...

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"Hitler did nothing wrong"

Worst. Wi-fi network name. Ever. That is a screen capture I made of my iPad this past Friday when I was at Mysticon at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood in Roanoke.  The hotel itself deserves bigtime props for opening up its own wi-fi network to all of the convention goers.  That's what I was doing when I was inside my iPad's network settings and saw... that. ...

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A-maize-ing: World's biggest QR code

On the fertile green plains of Alberta, Canada, the Kraay Family has engineered the world's largest QR code into a cornfield.And yes, the code works! Hold your smartphone outside the window of a hovering helicopter and when you point it at the code you'll be directed straight to the Kraay Family Farm website.The QR code takes up about 1.1 square miles of land and has just...

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The Knight Shift has QR code!

Simply aim your smartphone's camera at this QR code and it will take you right to this blog! Of course, since you're already looking at this blog, that kinda defeats the purpose of the QR code to begin with...

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