Somethings that have struck me from the headlines…
Identity Theft– Surprisingly, the Internet isn’t actually the major cause of this. “Identity thieves aren’t making a killing electronically — they’re picking through trash and thumbing through lost or stolen wallets.” In fact, the Internet with readily available access to your account information can be used to detect ID theft fast (instead of having to wait for your bank statement every month). Also, complete strangers aren’t robbing you build most of the time, but “Friends, family members and neighbors account for half of all known thieves, and on average cost a consumer $15,607. That compares with $2,320 for an online huckster.”
(Source: article entitled More Identity Theft Offline Than Online-Study –found via /.)
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Evolution-“Back in 1999, a conservative state school board attempted to downplay the importance of Darwinism by removing from the required statewide science curriculum references to dinosaurs, the geological time line and other central tenets of the theory.” (Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1019856-1,00.html)
You mean to tell me in Kansas that kids don’t know about dinosaurs? Something we have a lot of bones of and can prove existed?
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2004 in Music–Entertainment Weekly declared the best album of 2004 DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a mash-up of The Beatles’ The White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. Interestingly enough, it was never released in stores and was pulled from its website after the owner’s of the Beatles’ song collection told him to take it down. Just goes to show how far Internet distribution as come.
Finally, it’s not news, but it’s news to me. Guess who said this and what invention it was about?
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”
That was a quote made by Socrates, written in Plato’s Phaedrus, that described, believe it or not writing. He then went on to say “Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Just goes to show that even the wisest men feared change.
(The last two tidbits of information were proved by my Information Systems GSI)