It has been ten years since Sanford Wallace first burst onto the Internet. Since then he has gone offline and back online again at least twice, and repeatedly changed the city in which he does business. He stays on the move, presumably to prevent attempts at reprisals against him. The reason is that his business efforts make people angry. Wallace calls himself the original 'spam king.' Others call him 'Spamford' and much worse.  read more »

As Steve Wozniak has been to personal computers, so was Arthur Andrew Collins before him, to ham radio. Using crude materials largely created for other purposes (a cylindrical oatmeal box, a lump of coal, a glass rod from a towel rack, a coil from a Model T), he and his childhood friend
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The Inupiaq village of Qikiktagruk (named Kotzebue by a Russian sea captain in the nineteenth century) is thirty miles above the Arctic Circle, 200 miles from Siberia and 1,000 miles from the North Pole. Not surprisingly, the town is over 75% Eskimo. More unexpected is that 40% of the population is under 18. Kotzebue, Alaska has one of the highest incidences of
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Mark Zuckerberg"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." ~ Victor Hugo  read more »

In 1564, the year Galileo Galilei was born, Michelangelo and John Calvin both died. The Renaissance was well underway by then, and the royal courts of Europe and the Catholic church were becoming accustomed to bestowing favors upon individuals in return for deeds or cash. The Middle Ages had been marked by pestilence and famine.
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Voice Commands in the New Millennium

By now most of us have encountered speech recognition systems on the phone. I am not vehemently opposed to the use of speech recognition in messaging systems, but I have very little patience with systems that fail to get it right the first time. Nothing reduces me to quivering fury like experimenting repeatedly with an automated phone receptionist or phone banking system, trying to find that one perfect combination of volume and pronunciation that will allow the system to recognize my voice in a quiet room saying the simple word 'yes.' “You had no problem with “Courageous George's Corgi Kennels,” I explain loudly to the heartless machine. “So why is 'yes' a problem?”  read more »