Blayne Sucks

As a former member of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers Rube Goldberg team, I was extremely pleased to see that they recently won the national competition! If you have never heard of the Rube Goldberg competition before, then you’ll definitely want to check out this summary page that describe the history of the […]

I just ran across a post on Concurring Opinions that rocked me back in my seat. The full text of two of Dan Solove’s most popular books are now available online for free. The Digital Person and The Future of Reputation are both fantastic books. I have been meaning to reread them […]

Last weekend I was able to see a documentary called Helvetica. Although most people I’ve recommended it to this past week have been less than enthusiastic in their feelings towards watching a documentary of a typeface, I strongly urge anyone reading this to give it a fair shot. It is a short documentary […]

Although Ed Felten has recently gotten tons of press about his research group’s recent analysis of breaking hard drive encryption, I wanted to talk about some research that he’s done previously on electronic voting for several reasons. First, I mentioned voting in my last post. Second, I have blogged about electronic voting here […]

One of the most highly charged pieces of legislation that has been passed by Congress in recent years is the Protect America Act. Probably the only good thing about it is the sunset provision that ensures it will expire in its current form unless Congress acts to renew it or make it permanent. […]

I have talked about some of the things I would like to see in electronic book readers before. I have a feeling that this is a list that is fundamentally incomplete simply because I haven’t sat down and actually analyzed the problem from an engineering standpoint. However, I read something on Cult of […]

In a recent IBM commercial, the company implies that virtual worlds are a fad and, as a result, a waste of both time and money. For those who haven’t seen it, the commercial starts with an employee showing off his avatar to someone else, presumably a boss. The employee is all pumped about […]

For many people the idea of reading a book about a mathematical proof right after finishing a semester in a Computer Science graduate program would be an apt definition of torture. First, I am not one of those people. Second, Fermat’s Enigma really isn’t a book about math so much as […]

I have been meaning to post my thoughts on the book Inequality.com: Money, Power and the Digital Divide by David Stevens and Kieron O’Hara for a while now. Despite the hokey name, the book is rather thought provoking. Essentially it is an attempt to discuss the social and political impact of information communications […]

One of the latest gadgets to hit the market with massive fanfare is the Amazon Kindle. It was on the cover of Newsweek, where it was hailed as the future of reading.
It hit Slashdot twice. The first time was as a part of the initial hype wave. The second time […]