thoreaulylazy's blog, page 1

Last login: 3 days agoThoreaulylazy: thoreaulylazy is a 28 year old guy from New York, New York, USA.; Likes 863 pages, 125 videos, 10 photos • 26 fans • Received 3 reviews; Member since Feb 25, 2007

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AnnualCreditReport: Jan 2, 4:23am 32 reviews consumer-info
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp; As per the Wikipedia entry for Credit Report: "In the USA, federal law mandates that a person may receive their credit report free of charge. The only official free site is annualcreditreport.com [annualcreditreport.com] . Each of the three bureaus must provide one free report every twelve months. You may request all three at the same time or spread out your requests over the twelve month period. This site is maintained by the three credit reporting bureaus, and the service must be free and available online. It takes no more than 5 minutes to obtain an online printout of your credit history report. You are required to answer several personal questions for identification purposes only. The profusion of websites offering credit reports have one thing in common - they all obtain the information by using the AnnualCreditReport.com information that you can get for free in five minutes. Your credit score is determined by each separate credit bureau and may differ with each one. You do have to pay for a credit 'score' from each bureau and they may be different with each bureau. (reference USA Today, November 28, 2007.)"

http://www.mufor.org/nmachine.html: Sep 4, 2007 8:54pm 16 reviews science-fiction
http://www.mufor.org/nmachine.html; It's a rather fun read, more so than anything from the likes of Agatha Christie, so long as the reader understands the article is science-fiction and not science.

Right fights back: Aug 31, 2007 7:48am 1 review movies
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id...; The article talks about the political machinations being hatched to deliver right-wing movies in a bid to combat Hollywood's predominately liberal outlook. "Americanizing Shelley" - a movie loved by Republicans for its pro-American theme and deplored by everyone else for its one-dimensionality and caricaturization - is a product of Namrata Singh Gujral and her husband Lt. Cmdr. Joe Cooper, both staunch conservatives and GOP spokespersons who together founded American Pride Films Group with a mission to answer Bush's general plea to filmmakers "to help with America's image", a euphemism for propaganda.

Crows are the Einsteins of the avian world - Telegraph: Aug 20, 2007 1:06pm 11 reviews birds
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/200...; Crows are indeed clever creatures. There's an old story in India about a thirsty crow who encounters a pot with water inside. The crow is initially puzzled over how to obtain water from it - the pot is heavy and tall with a small neck and the water is shallow. Then the crow figures it out, and plops pebbles into the pot until the water rises high enough to drink from. It sounds simple enough, yet Archimedes discovering the same principle was so amazed by it that he jumped out from his bathtub and ran into the streets shouting "Eureka!", all the while still naked.

Computer program can learn baby talk| Technology| Reuters: Jul 25, 2007 10:01am 1 review computers
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2419932120070724; I could've sworn Homer's half-brother came up with this invention... and patented it to boot!

NPR : You Can Play the Record, but Dont Touch: Jul 19, 2007 4:00pm 1 review recording-gear
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11851842; The beauty of an object's surface is that it can be photographed with relative ease. Yes, through as simple an act as photographing, we may gaze at the very soul of a surface, every nook and cranny bathing in the ethereal glow of a standard house lamp, the naked microns of texture bombarded by photons at 120 joules per second. We may extend this simple act by giving software access to the image. If we do, if we allow a virtual reality to harbor the soul of a surface, we can reincarnate what had lain dead on shattered, decrepit, unplayable vinyl records into a new life of accessible mp3 music.

http://www.weeklyscript.com/Princess%20Bride,%20The.txt: Jun 29, 2007 4:58pm 1 review movies, satire
http://www.weeklyscript.com/Princess%20Bride,%20The.txt; Man in Black: All right. where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You've made your decision then?
Vizzini: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows. And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Vizzini: Wait till I get going! Where was I? Yes--Australia, and you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You're just stalling now.
Vizzini: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong. So, you could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you've also bested my Spaniard which means you must have studied. And in studying, you must have learned that man is mortal so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You're trying to trick me into giving away something--it won't work--
Vizzini: It has worked--you've given everything away--I know where the poison is. [looks afar] --what in the world can that be? [switches goblets while Man in Black has his head turned] Oh, well, I--I could have sworn I saw something. No matter. Hehehe.
Man in Black: What's so funny?
Vizzini: I'll tell you in a minute. First, let's drink--me from my glass, and you from yours.

[And he picks up his goblet. The Man In Black picks up the one in front of him. As they both start to drink, Vizzini hesitates a moment. Then, allowing the Man In Black to drink first, he swallows his wine.]

Man in Black: You guessed wrong.
Vizzini: You only think I guessed wrong. That's what's so funny! We switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Ahaha- [dies]
Buttercup: And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.
Man in Black: They both were poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.

Cre-Lox recombination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Jun 29, 2007 3:25pm 1 review biotech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cre-Lox_recombination; Site-specific recombinase (SSR) technology is amazing -- it's a fairly new topic in genetics that allows one to algorithmically modify DNA in living cells, which is something that comes naturally to retroviruses like HIV and certain enzymes like Cre ("Cyclic REcombinase"). The Cre-Lox recombination, discovered by Prof. Brian Sauer and patented by DuPont in the '80s, is a powerful tool in the biotechnology landscape, much like the unix tool `sed` in a landscape that only has `ls` and `cat` otherwise. It's amazing how this enzyme, Cre, can hone in on loxP sites in a DNA helix with the precision of a machine and delete the bounded subsequence - and it's just as amazing how new researchers have selectively mutated from it a strain called Ter designed to delete HIV-inserted subsequences from human DNA despite the absence of loxP site boundaries around the malignant subsequence. In many ways, biotech is entering an era where both it and computer science fall under discrete mathematics. With such algorithmic definitiveness now lording over the destiny of genetics, the same sort of magic which allowed computing to evolve from flickering bulbs on a vacuum tube system to full-fledged simulated universes should allow our simple `sed`-like tools of biotech to similarly evolve into something fantastical, limited by only our imagination. Rue the day our servant-Gods in the form of machines and enzymes no longer act at our behest.

YouTube - Fair & Lovely Ad - India: Jun 28, 2007 5:41pm 1 review consumer-info, video
http://video.stumbleupon.com/?p=9j0izcj0id; What a terrible ad, and the entire Fair 'n' Lovely campaign teeters between the abysmally shallow and the disgustingly offensive. It's shameful to think that such ideas can be positively received by a mainstream audience watching prime time television, but it's even worse to see the seeds for inferiority complexes sown by corporate interests using social engineering as a means to hype up demand for needless cosmetics.

Intel Core 2 - MARC: Jun 28, 2007 7:31am 1 review science
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631; Theo de Raadt, that occasionally irascible OpenBSD founder, exposes the details of Core 2 Duo bugs, and analyzes which of them can be patched up, at which layer (bios or os kernel). His comments on whether the unpatchable bugs can be exploited from userland are an ominous harbinger of blackhat revelry. It doesn't help any that Intel is only sharing measures to patch against these Core 2 Duo spasms with commercial os vendors like Microsoft, Apple, and Sun. Ye poor ol' open source communities are left to reverse engineer it all, as usual.

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