Here it is, a full three days since Firefox 3 launched, and still the following result, and no amount of Nuke Boost will change it.
Oh what a feeling. Sorry Toyota! NOT.
Meanwhile, Guinness World Records is still verifying the attempt. I hope Firefox 3 gets it!

At 1000 hours Pacific Time (just over two hours ago), Firefox 3 was officially launched. They’re going for a world record in downloads of a single application in a day. I managed to snag it. And believe it or not, I’m pleasantly surprised at its performance. It’s a lot faster than the previous version. I even ran an Acid3 Test and it scored 71; according to the result, everything looked in place but with no color rendition.
On the downside, most of the extensions I had in 2 aren’t updated, so it’ll be a matter of time before they are. The Official Roommate also has legitimate concerns about Firefox 3, mainly in the interface and engine. That’s no big deal either; besides, I use Safari and WebKit to verify improvements in this site.
In short...the REAL browser war is now on!

Quick! Someone dig up André the Giant...he’s as good as anyone (or anything) else to fill in the title of Bigfoot. Bushnell and Field & Stream Magazine are offering $1 Million for anyone who can:

“...provide an unaltered photograph/video, verified and substantiated by a panel of scientific experts [including a zoologist and biologist], the evidence required to prove a Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti exists.

But hurry! This offer good until December 15.

In light of the recent landing of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission, let’s take a look at the eventuality of sending humans to the Red Planet. Half a century ago we looked to the military for our first group of astronauts (and yes, I’m sure the Soviets did as well).
It is time to look to them again for our first group of colonists to send to Mars. This time, however, it won’t be the fighter pilots like the Mercury Seven...but instead, the battle-hardened combat veterans:

“Here is an idea: Send battle-hardened, strong-minded soldiers and marines on the long trips into space. We are conditioned to live with the bare minimal (of) life’s necessities and are trained to be prepared for…the worst conditions that any environment could throw at us. Hell, me and my men will go, set up a colony somewhere and await colonists to arrive.”

And we don’t need to wait until the fight against Islamofascism to end to prepare these men and women for Mars. Doing it now would send a message to them that we will transcend their 7th-Century ideas on Life, the Universe, and Everything and move the Human Race forward.
A message they will, sadly, ignore only too happily. 

Has the One Laptop Per Child non-profit organization sold its noble cause (and consequently, its soul) to The Devil? The group announced that their XO laptops can now run a modified version of Windoze in addition to the standard Sugar GUI, which is based off Linux. For an additional $10 of course.
What I have to wonder is: will 256MB of RAM and a 1GB flash drive be enough to handle the additional resource requirements? And will they also have to put on Internet Exploder? God, I hope not; Windoze is bad enough.

Last night the Official Roommate worked on a friend’s PC luggable. It was not just a laptop, it had a built-in keypad, which made it luggable! But I digress.
Anyway, he said there were 135 virii and 21 spywares which had infected the darn thing and the scan took just under an hour and a half to complete. So of course he did a complete wipe and reinstall. The final report was supposedly ten pages long; I looked at it, and it was ten pages due to spreadsheet formatting. Still, it was bad enough. I sure hope the owner of this luggable did some type of backup, otherwise, they’re hosed.
Even the Official Roommate was tearing his hairs out over this one. Careful, you don’t want to go bald before it is time.

More apologies to Stephen Sondheim, Judy Collins, and all amorous couples:

Not from a bitch,
More than a pair.
Superior drug-sniffing dogs
They do declare.
But where are the clones?
Quick, send in the clones.
Don’t bother...they’re here.

It’s not what you think.
If you’ve noticed a change of typeface in the headings and sections on this blog (and of course, can’t miss the banner!), there’s a good reason for this. A very interesting article showed up over at the Los Angeles Saddam Times about the three campaigns’ typefaces and how people relate to them:

Typefaces with big round O’s and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of “rigidity, technology and coldness,” according to British psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman who published a 2001 study, “The Psychology of Fonts.”
With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lowercase “a,” serif styles “conjure images of trustworthiness,” whereas uncluttered sans serif styles “carry less emotional baggage,” he says.

It turns out Clinton’s main typeface is New Baskerville; Obama’s is Gotham (with his logo rendered in Requiem), and McCain’s is Optima, which turns out to be very significant in that Optima is the typeface used on the Vietnam Memorial, and it makes perfect sense, given his military service. The article is indeed interesting to consume.

Talk about nostalgia! When most countries die, they lose their top-level domain. Not so with the Soviet Union; their .su domain still exists...and registrations have gone up 45% in the last year alone.
Sure enough, it’s ripe ground for cybersquatting:

Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought “microsoft.su” last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for his e-mail address.
While Khramov insists he “did not buy it for reselling,” others are out to make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile addresses, including “ussr.su,” “stalin.su” and “kgb.su”—he’s asking for $30,000 each, but stands ready to haggle.

I’ll bet Comrades Marx and Ulianov are spinning in their graves...at very high RPM mind you.

I’ll bet you’re wondering how something so geeky as an atom smasher can have some bulls**t story about it. Well allow me to tell you. It becomes bulls**t when some Hawaiian nut (NO, not a macadamia) sues the Feds, CERN and the National Science Foundation for their participation in a European project which, he says, could end up destroying the world! I have no idea what this guy is smoking, and I won’t be asking for this stuff any time soon.
Therefore, in the spirit of Charles, click the sound file for a dramatic reading of the headline.

I remember reading Mechanix Illustrated when I was a kid...ooohing and aaahing at the articles dealing with future technology. Here’s a peek at Life in the year 2008...as envisioned in November 1968.
Imagine that.

As much as I dislike Microsoft, they have the right to compete on the worldwide market as much as anyone else. Of course, the European Union doesn’t think so. Perhaps WriterMom has the right idea as to the operating system the EU should be forced to use:

Wow. Truly a Vile Interface Sure To Agonize!

The Official Roommate hit me with this, from a mailing:

Someone call the APC advertising department....

While I was poking around at this hour on one of my friend’s Facebook site (I have to admit, Facebook is a little bit more mature than MySpace, although it still has some sophomoric stuff on it, such as Werewolf Fighting..."See you next Tuesday"), I found this ad in a sidebar.
Now who in their right mind would blow $250 on Vista? Granted it’s the Ultimate Edition, but dang, Mac OS upgrades go for half that!

It’s been proven time and again that wartime brings forth mighty technological advances which ultimately disseminate down to peaceful applications. Next on the list is one which has been part of science fiction for a long time...the railgun:

The system, when fully developed, would send an electric current along parallel rails to shoot a shell more than 200 nautical miles, or 230 miles, at seven times the speed of sound and within five meters of the target. Conventional guns, by contrast, rely on chemical powders to launch projectiles.

You know what they say: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.