Liberal Talk Radio

This is awesome.

The first mention of the “World Wide Web,” from a 1993 article in the newly-liberated New York Times archives: Making all this information relatively easy to retrieve is a system known as Wide Area Information Server, or WAIS. More than 300 WAIS data bases are now accessible without charge, and a standards committee is finishing [...]

A profile of new Columbia Records honcho Rick Rubin has spurred quite a discussion in the blogs over the future of music. In particular, this paragraph: “You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere [...]

Can it be? Can the world’s most famous BlackBerry addict — Karl Rove himself — really be using an iPhone?

We’re one step closer to robotic limbs: …to actually control the hand, the researchers relied on neural activity recorded from a monkey’s brain. According to MIT’s Technology Review, that resulted in the fingers on the hand performing their intended movement about 95 percent of the time. While the system doesn’t currently work in real time, [...]

The “paperless office” hasn’t worked out so well, has it? At work, the guy from the copier leasing company and I joke about this as I write him checks totaling tens of thousands of dollars a year (yes, yes… I have a humorless office). Anyway, it turned out that computers made it really easy to [...]

Google’s roving band of video-equipped Beetles is pulling up some funny stuff: Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of [...]

In the future, robots will be everywhere: Long Island Jewish Hospital patient John Hevrank was able to tell his doctor he was feeling better after bladder cancer surgery last week, even though his physician was in another building. Hevrank was actually speaking to one of three 5-foot tall robots that the hospital is testing. The [...]

It’s been a bad week for Wikipedia, folks. First, Middlebury college’s history department bans the collaborative encyclopedia after several students get the same question wrong on a history quiz (all got their info from Wikipedia). Then, Andy Schafly, son of conservative gadfly Phyllis, launches Conservapedia, which is just like Wikipedia, except without all the liberal [...]

New York State Senator Carl Kruger wants to fine you $100 for distractedly crossing the street while listening to your iPod. Awesome. But why stop there? The real killer, in my mind, is electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius. With their internal combustion engines switched off, these things appear by stealth. You can barely hear [...]