There's an article on The Daily Galaxy about how Hawking says time travel might be possible, Clarke's law, etc. Even if it were possible though, the Earth would be so hopelessly far away, you'd have a hard time getting to it. Our galaxy is moving at 552 km/s against the CMB. We orbit the center at something like 220 km/s So, ok, you go back in time a year. How many kilometers do you have to go to get back to earth?

Best case: 10,469,952,000 kilometers. Mars is only 54 million km away and that still takes like a year to get there. Still, if you go back in time, the Earth would be headed right at you, or nearly so. You just have to decelarate from 500km/s or so to like 0 and wait and then not die when it hits you.

I wonder how flawed my analysis is.

-Paul

I used to really love Google's search pages. They were role models and changed the entire Internet over from noisy crapy web designs (remember background images?) to clean elegant designs that just do what they're supposed to, and nothing else.

So what's up with all this crap all over the search results now? There's little things popping up and crap blinking and all sorts of distracting shit happening while you're trying to just read the fucking search results. It's like they're going for the Lucas Google Special Edition version.

I have found a few ways to disable some of it. It's worth doing so the results are readable again. Personally, I'm most fond of the stylish solution, but it's not awesome to install because you have to cut and paste. I need to find (or publish) a one click way to install it.

-Paul

I bought an audio book from audible.com, but it won't work on my phone. I bought an ebook from books.google.com, but it won't work on my kindle. I got refunds in both cases.

DRM is a problem. I'm willing to buy things, but only the stolen content works on all my devices. I really hope publishers figure this out some day. I spent about $500 on Amazon MP3s (and other sources) in the last year. And guess what? DRM free music plays on all my devices.

The only competitive advantage the legitimate content sources have is convenience (er, and legitimacy). So be convenient!

I guess these publishers don't want my money.

-Paul

I finally thought of a way to prevent angband from breaking the audio on my desktop. I've never heard angband make a sound, but it was still connecting to pulse audio. Pulse has a hard time doing its thing anyway, having something connect to it for no reason apparently breaks it completely. There are switches and configuration options that don't work. I considered recompiling it to prevent it from loading the pulse libraries; but the below is even easier.

Plus, I get an entertaining permission denied error when it tries to open the pulse socket. Hehe.

/etc/apparmor.d/usr.games.angband
# Last Modified: Fri Jan 21 07:01:13 2011
#include <tunables/global>

/usr/games/angband {
  #include <abstractions/base>

  deny /etc/pulse/** r,
  deny /dev/shm/** rwk,

  /etc/nsswitch.conf r,
  /etc/passwd r,
  /etc/angband/** r,
  /var/games/angband/** rw,
  /var/run/gdm/* r,
  /home/*/.angband/** rw,

}
     

-Paul