Last week in the news there was a lot of news around the government trying to strong-arm Apple into breaking into the iPhone of a terrorist shooter (the San Bernadino shooter), a device they have in evidence but it encrypted.  It seems that the government IT folks created this mess for themselves and now the government is looking for an excuse to have backdoors into our computing devices. 

Last week on "last week tonight with John Oliver" the main investigative segment of the satirical news show was on voter ID laws. For those of you abroad, in the US you don't have to prove you are who you say you are in order to go vote. You can just go, give the person your street address, and your name, and they'll cross you off as having voted.  I've always found this a little odd, that

A find on Facebook this week. An interesting animation of getting sucked into a game (Tron-style) and escaping from it ;-)  The music needed a little better intro, but the visual synched pretty nicely with the audio once things got going!

Recently I finished watching the show Quantum Leap. The show ran from 1989 to 1993, which means that I barely missed it when I returned to the US, and no television channel was showing it in Greece prior to that. However, it was one of those shows that was referenced by the teachers when I was in high school, and by others in general society. This means that I also missed any references made to

This comic strip of Jurassic Trek .... well... just facepalm... (original archive here)

I came across this comic last week...but I am not sure I get it.  I do play hearthstone (casually), and I've unlocked all classes, but not quite sure what this means... Thoughts?

It is really nuts to think that this is a man-made disaster. This drone aerial footage shows the devastation in just one Syrian city (Homs). It would be sad enough if this were the outcome of some sort of natural disaster, something like an earthquake, but to think that this is totally preventable and that fellow humans enacted such violence on other humans in our day and age is despicable.

ROFL - "bring me my precious!!!" ;-)

Well... that was... interesting to say the least! Just yesterday I was writing about Lore going away...it seems that Pearson is also getting out of the LMS business as well.  I noticed this on Pearson's OpenClass website: OpenClass will retire on January 1, 2018 On January 1, 2018, OpenClass will no longer be available to faculty, students, or administrators, and as of today, no new accounts

Well, I guess the free LMS/social network Lore is going away soon!  I just got this email message the other day from the folks at Lore: I had joined Lore back in the days when it was called CourseKit.  The product, and the company, was created by a bunch of undergraduate students who wanted their face to face professors to use technology in the classroom - at least that's what the