Haibane.info — a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture

I love @Target – here’s why

February 16, 2012

The New York Timaes has a fascinating article on how Target does datamining on its customers: For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that [...]

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Amazon can out-Apple Apple with video

February 16, 2012

I’ve written a guest post for Forbes magazine on Erik Kain’s blog, in which I speculate how Amazon could pull an Apple by focusing on video the way Apple did on music. Check it out!

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is nothing sacred? scaremongering about Ramen noodles at TED

February 12, 2012

This video is as misleading as it is disgusting: The basic premise is that they had someone swallow a small pill containing a tiny camera, and filmed the digestion process for instant ramen noodles, gatorade and gummy bears versus more “natural” versions of those foods. And shocker, the processed foods did not seem to digest [...]

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Transparent aluminum? That’s the ticket, laddie

January 27, 2012

So, it’s actually a thing – called ALON. It’s not so much a metal as an aluminum-based ceramic called aluminum oxynitride, but the point is, it’s aluminum, and it’s transparent: and this stuff is strong – 1.6″ is enough to stop a .50 AP bullet that easily passes through twice that thickness of laminated glass [...]

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the singular implication of uploading one hour every second to @youtube …

January 25, 2012

This is an astonishing statistic: Youtube users now upload one hour of video every second: The video (and accompanying website) is actually rather ineffective at really conveying why this number is so astounding. Here’s my take on it: * assume that the rate of video uploads is constant from here on out. (obviously over-conservative) * [...]

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Feeling Blu, more on SOPA, DRM, blah blah blah

January 23, 2012

It looks like VLC media player will soon support encrypted Blu-rayplayback. This seems relevant to the discussion started by Pete and continued by J (hardware) and Steven (software). I’d just like to add that AnyDVD HD should be legal to own in the US as far as I know, since it allows you to backup [...]

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it’s SOPA day on the Internet

January 18, 2012

anyone else see any irony in this? Google.com, Wikipedia.org, WordPress.org, and hundreds of other websites large and small are going all-out against SOPA. Google has the logo censored by a black bar, and Wikipedia is actually offline. Lots of other sites and blogs are following their example. The idea is to symbolically register dissent against [...]

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MAGNIFICENT – string theory FTW and loop quantum gravity FAIL

January 13, 2012

I’ll freely admit that I am comprehending only about 10% of the argument, but this is still a magnificent post about why string theory is right and why loop quantum gravity is wrong. And incidentally also reveals that the science writers on Big Bang Theory really are on top of the game. Sheldon’s snort of [...]

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Why SOPA might kill commenting, and is that such a bad thing?

January 9, 2012

UPDATE: I think the anti-SOPA blackouts at Google, Wikipedia etc are a gigantic wasted opportunity to educate people about DRM. And I’m skeptical of Google putting money where their mouth is. I get it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad because it doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy. There are various screeds [...]

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