“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Archives for August 2004
'Irish coffee' injection prevents stroke damage
New Scientist brings word of a new drug to prevent brain damage in stroke victims. The experiments made us of a combination of two of my favorite substances – caffeine and alcohol, to cut brain damage in rats and later in a small pilot study of humans. A short excerpt from the article:
> A caffeine and alcohol cocktail similar to an Irish coffee could prevent severe brain damage in stroke victims, new research has revealed.
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> The experimental drug, called caffeinol, has the potency of two cups of strong coffee and a small shot of alcohol. When injected into rats within three hours of an artificially stimulated stroke, brain damage was cut by up to 80 per cent.
EFF Wins Grokster Appeal
Great News! The EFF won a major court case today:
> California – Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made a crucial decision (PDF) in support of technology innovators by declaring that distributors of the peer-to-peer software Grokster and Morpheus cannot be held liable for the infringing activities of their users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued on behalf of Streamcast, the creator of the Morpheus software, in a case that pitted dozens of entertainment conglomerates against two small software companies.
Score one for innovation. Well, until the ruling is appealed…
Folks who have no vices…
“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
Abraham Lincoln
Samba Configuration Via Webmin
After spending far too many hours trying to recall the way to set up Samba on a Linux box – so it can resume its role as a fileserver – I found a detailed walkthrough, listing the steps to configure Samba via Webmin on the Webmin site.
Capitalization of Internet and Web
Wired has announced that they will no longer capitalize Internet, Web and Net in their stories, stating “there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”
Capitalization, or rather, the lack thereof, of these specific words has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. Frankly, I think Wired has it wrong. Their reasons appear to be soundly justified, as they label the Internet as “another medium for delivering and receiving information”. But they seem to have forgotten one key point, the Internet is a proper noun. Unlike television, radio, newspaper…or hell even intranet (A private network, typically secured for a specific company or group) there are not multiple copies or versions of it. The Internet has been hard to categorize from the get go, it is both a medium for information dissemination and a location or destination. The ‘Web’, is no different. Their choice to capitalize ‘World Wide Web’ illustrates the point all the more.
While I thoroughly respect Wired, they have made a poor journalistic decision, based on a misunderstanding of the words and their definitions.
Though it is good to see that they still follow proper conventions by hyphenating the shortened form of electronic mail: e-mail.