Book Review: Freedom (TM), by Daniel Suarez

By Eric Pettifor
FreedomTM is the sequel to Daniel Suarez’s book Daemon which I reviewed previously, giving it four stars out of five. The sequel likewise is a very good read, progressing logically from the foundation laid in the first novel.
The reason I didn’t give Daemon a full five stars is that towards the end [...]

Tired of Twitter

By Mark Evans
Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter as a way to share and consume information but I’m tired of the coverage lavished on it as a revolutionary entity.
The latest breathless article appeared in The Toronto Star recently in which the author, Antonia Zerbisias, talked about how Twitter was used during the G20 meetings, [...]

Book Review: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

By Eric Pettifor

Reading Daemon, one can’t help but compare it to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, perhaps because both deal with rogue artificial intelligences (AI) and can probably be considered science fiction. If I sound a bit tentative about that, it’s because, while Neuromancer neatly fits the mold, set in a time at least some distance [...]

Bionic Kitty

Poor Oscar got his back feet chopped off by a combine harvester! Did farmer Coates say “Now, Travis, Oscar’s your kitty. You’ve got ta shoot him clean through the head so he don’t suffer none.” Nope. Instead Oscar got prosthetic feet, and not just any prosthetics, but a revolutionary new variety which [...]

Lessons not learned: deep water drilling post-Ixtoc

By Eric Pettifor
On more than one occasion watching American news coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’ve heard it referred to as the greatest disaster of its kind in US history. One might think it is the worst in world history. One would be wrong.
Reuters has published a piece by Robert Campbell providing [...]

Copyright bill gives big media control

By Eric Pettifor

A new copyright bill has been introduced into parliament today, Bill C-32. I nearly wrote “anti-copyright” bill because, while I like the original idea of copyright, most of what governments have done to it in recent decades has been to its detriment.
The idea behind copyright was that all creative works [...]

Don’t Copy That Flop

By Eric Pettifor

 
Q: How difficult would it be for the copyright holder of a film to get the IP addresses of people sharing that film over bittorrent?
A: Easy as pie. Here’s a portion of a screen capture from my bittorrent client, ktorrent, showing the ip addresses of people sharing a popular file on my [...]

No alternative to Facebook. . .Yet.

Personal web pages started for the most part at universities, because students and profs all had accounts, so why not? Then the internet opened up to mortals, and a lot of them put up web sites, though often on their own dime. Then along came Geocities, which provided free hosting for people’s web [...]

U10 pocket camcorder: pretty vids, lousy interface

I’ve been taking violin lessons for over a year now. Back at the 12 month anniversary, I thought it would be cool to create a vid of my playing to look back at on the second anniversary, to measure my progress.
My first attempt was with my Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ll [...]

Blippy: too much information

By Mark Evans
Confession: I’m a social media junkie – an enthusiastic blogger, active Twitter user, reluctant member of the ever-growing Facebook empire, and YouTube watcher. I like to share my thoughts and interesting content and online services.
The chances, however, of me using Blippy are zero, nil, nadda, nunca.
Why anyone would give a third-party their credit [...]

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