Casiello Family Weblog

You’ll have to get up early, 1 1/2 hours before sunrise, to catch a glimpse of Comet Pojmanski: Sky and Telescope – A Surprise Comet in the Dawn

According to Nature magazine, researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have designed a quantum computer where you don’t have to run a program for it to give you answers.

Does this mean Quantum Windows won’t crash? Probably not, but at least it may be crashing in somebody else’s universe.

theoneillbuilding

Oh, wait…

“Joke” Conversation Thread in which the 🙂 Was Invented

Cook an egg with two cellphones.

(from EFF via IP)

RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use

RIAA filing to Copyright Office:
“Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.”

(via Rocketboom)

Ostrich Rap

Need I say more?

These guys have made a 45-minute fan movie – STAR WARS REVELATIONS which you can download for free.

(via Fark)

From Roll Call: The House Republicans are re-taking a vote for majority leader since more votes were cast than there were voters present at the meeting.

Gotta stop using them Diebold machines, guys!

A solar flare kicked off some awesome southern lgihts last September captured courtesy of the IMAGE satellite

Massively Multiplayer Personal Productivity
– a productivity method for the next generation!

(via boingboing)

Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate) from MERD Pharmeceutical Group

appeared in 1958, a two-player tennis game using an oscilloscope as a display!

(via Rocketboom)

Sony is allegedly paying kids to spray PSP-related graffiti on walls all over the country.

More: Wired reports that Sony is paying the building owners for the use of their walls.

Check out the Electron Microscopy Snow page, especially the stereo images.

If hackers ruled the world.

For you young ‘uns, the original box.

(via rocketboom)

Best Christmas Lights Display Ever

Snopes is cautious, calling its status ‘undetermined’, but it seems like something that would be doable with a few thousand dollars worth of light-o-rama boards.

Okay, I’d like to be their across-the-street neighbor for maybe one day. After that, not so much.

(via Drawn!)

Time-lapse figure drawing

and an online app that lets you do your own.

Remember the Sony ‘CD’s that installs a trojan horse program (rootkit) on your PC?

Well, it turns out these bastions of copyright protection (Won’t somebody please think of the content creators?!?) may have used copyrighted code in violation of the license.

As slashdot author CmdrTaco puts it “So apparently Sony violates your privacy to create a backdoor onto your machine using code that violates an Open Source license.”

In the meantime, virus writers found out about the trojan’s file-hiding capabilities which now infects computers on a href=”http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69573,00.html”>a half a million networks. Sony issued a patch to remove the trojan – the patch stays on your computer, allowing any website you visit to download and run code on your computer. Sorry, pal, you don’t own your computer anymore.

Lovely. Just lovely.

They’ve even

Slashdot | Bad Day To Be Sony

Sorry, aluminum make make things worse.