Gizmodo reports: “Whirlpool’s latest tech for their refrigerator line is based on their ‘centralpark’ feature, which is a essentially dock that lets you plug in a bunch of different gadgets into the big gadget that holds your food.” Such gadgets include digital photo frames, tablet computers and the Brandmotion iPod speaker system.
50 hours of Techmeme in 50 seconds: Amit Agarwal created a video made up of screenshots of the Techmeme front page taken every of 5 minutes from midnight January 3rd to 2:00 a.m., January 5th. It’s interesting to see how the page changes as stories — and stories that comment on those stories — appear.
From the New York Times: “Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.”
Move over, Asimov! Warren Ellis, master of the “decompressed” style of storytelling in comic books, has come up with his own Three Laws of Robotics.
I like the second law: “Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan?”
In Robert Downey Sr.’s movie, Putney Swope, there’s a scene in which the title character meets with photographer Mark Focus (great name!). Things go badly for Mark when they start negotiating price…
As the blog Photo Business News & Forum puts it, it’s “further evidence of the negotiation axiom “whoever speaks first loses” after price is discussed.
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Gag Orders in a Facebook Age
“For 24 hours, newspapers, TV and radio stations were legally forbidden to release Stefanie Rengel’s name [a teenage girl in Toronto allegedly murdered by a teenage boy, allegedly at the request of his girlfriend, also a teen], but on the Internet tributes to the slain teen – and the names of her accused killers – sprang up almost immediately, including on the social networking site Facebook.“
My favourite line from the O’Reilly OnLAMP.com article What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on their Christmas Vacation: “A running joke in the Perl 6 world is that we’ll release a stable Perl 6.0.0 by Christmas. We just won’t tell you which Christmas.”