There are already ways for police and intelligence agencies to snoop on suspected criminals; they get a warrant, by justifying the need to snoop.

The government is looking to make it easier to snoop on suspected individuals, with less oversight. That in itself is scary, because we are supposed to able to live our law-abiding lives without scrutiny.

It’s also scary, because more data will be held about us in central locations, making ripe targets for criminals to harvest.

Sign this petition to object to the surveillance laws.

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Yeah, right. I’d much rather be in my controlled-environment cocoon.

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This video is great. Great CGI and tracking, and pretty funny.

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Sounds like this new SimCity has everything you’d have wanted in the old SimCities, but were limited by technology.

The look/feel style is a model town. Everything is fully simulated (i.e. your town is full of simulated families and individuals, going to work every day, turning to crime if opportunities are poor etc). And it’s a persistent online world; your neighbors are other, real players.

Despite the big advancements you might imagine big changes to gameplay, but the game seems faithful to the originals; you can’t jump into a version of The Sims and interact with the people directly, and the interactions with player-neighbors is similar to the interactions with CPU-neighbors of old.

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It looks spectacular. This is the view from Earth in 3.75 billion years. The Milky Way (our galaxy) on the right, and on the left: Andromeda – a whole other galaxy – on a collision course. Apparently we’ll be quite safe from the collision, though there’s plenty of other ‘disasters’ to survive before then.

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Pretty interesting outcome to a fairly controversial experiment.

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Don’t just backup, verify your backups, keep old backups, keep other copies. Make redundancy.

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Boggles the mind.

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HTC was doing great, but isn’t anymore.

They tried to make their devices more open, and it looks like the carriers’ sales-strength caused HTC’s profits to dwindle. The result is HTC starting to lock up their devices again.

It’s sad that carriers have more strength than consumers, and that consumers don’t care about openness enough to encourage it (even though that’s pretty hypocritical coming from an iPhone owner).

A big reason I have an iPhone, is because I trust Apple more than any mobile carrier. And no other phone maker has the power to serve the consumer.

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