Traffic Cameras Too Successful For Their Own Good
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
The city of Dallas, TX installed traffic cameras at major intersections, to catch people running red lights. The cameras have been so successful at reducing infractions that they’re no longer generating enough revenue to cover their operational costs. So now Dallas is considering shutting down the cameras. This is a common governmental misconception, viewing tickets as a source of revenue rather than a punishment. It reminds me of municipal water boards that had to increase their prices, because their conservation campaigns reduced water usage to the point where they were losing money.
Link: http://www.dallasnews.com/…
(via Engadget)
No official numbers are available yet, but the Nikkei business daily estimates that Toshiba will book a $986 million loss in its high-definition business. This is due to Toshiba’s HD-DVD format losing out to Sony’s Blu-ray.
The linked article has some statistics on just how much information is collected by Yahoo!, Google, etc on our browsing habits. Very sobering. I run all of my email through Google, which means I can’t complain if they use it to compile statistics.
The linked article is about a phone booth in the Mojave desert that became famous for its remoteness. People around the world would call, just to see if anyone would answer, and others would hang out by the phone, waiting to answer incoming calls.
The 
Ars Technica has a review of the new features in the beta version of IE8. The primary change is better adherence to web standards, which really only matters to developers—the other features are pretty minor.
When she does a full pirouette while standing tiptoe on his head—that definitely put me in “jaw dropped to the floor” mode. The part at the beginning, with the frogs, is just a warm up for the main act. Absolutely amazing.
Allowing firewire controllers to have 
In light of the upcoming switch this weekend, it’s worth noting that a recent study definitively shows that daylight saving time does not save energy—at least not in Indiana.
I did instant messaging “back in the day” with ICQ, but it’s only in the past year or so that I got serious about it. And what a mess! Because the people I chat with are on different networks, I had three IM clients running at the same time. But there is a solution. Pidgin is a free, multi-platform IM client that can simultaneously connect to 16 different IM networks, including Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and, yes, ICQ.
The video in the linked article is a time lapse movie of a morning glory. It shows how the vine finds stuff to climb.