Stoss Blog

The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”
Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more [...]

Pretending is ingrained in us from the very beginning. As a child, we would sit Calvin & Hobbes style in a box and blast off to space, or watch the Muppet Babies invent crazy worlds and adventures, or turn a sandbox into a Jurassic playground.  Imagination is one of the very components which make us [...]

I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:
1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.
2)      Employees in a [...]

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.
There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted [...]

Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…
With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder [...]

Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!
First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are [...]

So I am told that 27 years ago today I was born into this world.  I say “I am told”, because who knows if I can trust my parents… They lied to me about Santa and the Easter bunny for years.
This really isn’t a milsetone, but then again milestones are arbitrary anyway. If we lived [...]

As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.
The show [...]

The other day in the paper there was an article about a 22 year old English man who died due to liver failure. The doctors were quoted as saying “He had the worst case of cirrhosis they have ever seen”. In fact his alcohol consumption was so bad that he was denied a liver transplant on the [...]

I hate “Top” lists. I do. All of them. I’ve hated them since before Letterman tried to make them his own, and I hate them even more now when webpages take 10 links to show 10 pictures of the top 10 potentially homophobic animated characters as judged by someone with the television knowledge of my [...]