Neat Net Tricks

Until now, if you had asked me what is the only feature on Earth that can be recognized from outer space, I would have answered “The Great Wall of China.” Now I’ll have to add one, a beaver dam in Canada that spans 2,788 feet and has taken 40 years and several generations of beavers to construct.

But don’t take my word, look it up here; otherwise, as Rhett Butler said in Gone With The Wind, “frankly my dear I don’t give a dam.”

At least the UK courts are getting it right. Software developers have for too long now believed they are immune from liability when they crank out poorly performing programs. Not so, said his honor, as he stuck it to them. Here’s the details.

Something smells about Broward County’s new policy accommodating those who are sensitive or allergic to “chemical irritants”.

Did you know that on March 22, 1989 we were only six hours away from being struck by an asteroid that would have released energy comparable to a 600-megaton atomic bomb? And that it’s going to happen again in 2189? Details are here and just something else to keep you up at night.

Are you in the market for a good used copy machine? With it, you can get a lot more than you bargained for. It seems there’s 6,000 of them in a warehouse in New Jersey and each one of the digital copiers built since 2002 has a hard drive storing every image of every document it has copied, scanned, or emailed.

That means for about $300 you can get social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms, all an identity thief’s delight. It’s just one more worry in this technological age and you can read about it here.

Magnify is a new application that analyzes conversations between a customer service representative and the customer, then identifies the customer’s emotions, then tells the service rep how to deal with that customer, depending on his or her current frame of mind. The computer is correct about 80% of the time. I wonder if this is something we could use at home, in analyzing our spouse’s frame of mind?

Anyway, you can read more about this nearly creepy innovation here.

Chicken Little cried that the sky is falling. Somewhere in every big city we will see some kook carrying a sign that the end of the world is near.

Well, you might be interested to know that the Internet may fail on May 5. You can read about it here . And remember you heard about it here first. Or last.