Features
Lone Frank's genetic journey
Alzheimer's Disease was listed as a sub-acute factor on my mother's death certificate. My aunt, her sister, lived to be 103, but spent much of her last five years telling and retelling the same stories every few minutes to familiar people of whose identity she was uncertain. My grandmother died, mentally non-functional, in a nursing home after her care became too difficult for the staff of the retirement community she lived in. Even before I knew its name, I knew to fear that Alzheimer's might be lying in wait for me.[more...]
net.wars: Searching for reality
They say that every architect has, stuck in his desk drawer, a plan for the world's tallest skyscraper; probably every computer company similarly has a plan for the world's fastest supercomputer. At one time, that particular contest was always won by Seymour Cray. Currently, the world's fastest computer is Tianhe-1A, in China. But one day soon, it's going to be Blue Waters, an IBM-built machine filling 9,000 square feet at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.[more...]
net.wars: Applesauce
Modern life is full of so many moments when you see an apparently perfectly normal person doing something that not so long ago was the clear sign of a crazy person. They're walking down the street talking to themselves? They're *on the phone*. They think the inanimate objects in their lives are spying on them? They may be *right*.[more...]
net.wars: How open do you want your technology, exactly?
This week my four-year-old computer had a hissy fit and demanded, more or less simultaneously, a new graphics card, a new motherboard, and a new power supply. It was the power supply that was the culprit: when it blew it damaged the other two pieces. I blame an incident about six months ago when the power went out twice for a few seconds each time, a few minutes apart. The computer's always been a bit fussy since.[more...]
net.wars: Brought to ebook
JK Rowling is seriously considering releasing the Harry Potter novels as ebooks, while Amanda Hocking, who's sold a million or so ebooks has signed a $2 million contract with St. Martin's Press. In the same week. It's hard not to conclude that ebooks are finally coming of age.[more...]
net.wars: Government blockheads
It is very, very difficult to understand the reasoning behind the not-so-secret plan to institute Web blocking. In a http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussionsletter to the Open Rights Group, Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture, communications, and creative industries, confirmed that such a proposal emerged from a workshop to discuss "developing new ways for people to access content online". (Orwell would be so proud.)[more...]
