While professional journalism strives to be objective and unbiased, it is difficult for professional journalists to be unbiased.  After all, they are not monks.  But it irks me that they have financial and professional incentives to hide their biased viewpoints leaving their readers exposed to bias leak and slip between words.  FYI, I am biased on this issue.

Scott Rosenberg's piece about the Davos reporter who got caught saying what she really thinks. [Scripting News]

Many have written about how cellphones might be used as a universal remote, controlling not only everything inside the house, but outside as well.  This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was actually using my cellphone as a universal remote, changing traffic lights and such.  I had similar dreams before as results of impatient creativity, but this time there was a difference.

I was in France and sitting inside my car in front of a restaurant (hey, its a dream).  When I pointed my cellphone at the restaurant, I was given a menu (I think it was in Flash).  What surprised me was that it was in English and prices were in dollars.  I then woke up and tried to make sense of the dream.

It must have been that when a menu in French was received on my cellphone, the menu was forward to a specialized translation service that returned a menu in English with prices converted to dollars.  Hey, its a smart webskin of sort.  Smart webskins filters and modifies the user's view of the web as well as offering missing features such as search and sortable tables.

While Mark is fighting his battle against what I call A-bots (A as in A**hole), not everyone can do what he does nor afford the time to maintain it.  What we need is something similar to Micrsoft Update that will allow average people to pick and choose individual filters as well as filter packs.

How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell. I fight back against telemarketers who abuse my phone, and now I'm fighting back against robots who abuse my web site. (1716 words) [dive into mark]

Nanotech suit of armor with airconditioning for American GIs.  Cool.  Whats next?  Bullets with spent uranium core to pierce nanotech armor suits?  It would be more practical to develop exploding bullets that can kill or wound everything within six feet.  Most soldiers have terrible aim under pressure, wasting most of the bullets.  Sure, they call it suppression, but why suppress when you can destroy?  With enough force, tiny fragments of the bullet will go right through a human body, leaving tiny holes that cause internal bleeding.  It will also pop eardrums and knock enemy soldiers down.  Less mess and more prisoners.  With exploding bullets, each M-16 will turn into a Bazooka.  Hmm.  Wasn't there some research done on ways to turn chips into bombs?

Check out the RSS 2.0 feed for job information.

Looking for a job in Spartanburg, South Carolina? It's now a weblog with an RSS 2.0 feed, a first, as far as I know, and a very valid application of RSS. [Scripting News]

While I am very happy with new application of RSS like this, it is disappointing to see all the key information crammed into <description> tags.  Best solution is to add more details to input forms, but this is not always possible because most people zone out when are faced with a complex form.  With complex forms, there must be a compelling reason to fill it out, like getting tax refund for filing out the tax form.

Textual search technologies, often used with monolithic text, can easily handle seaching with time and location parameters.  Does Google search engine know that San Francisco is 1 hour drive away from San Jose?  Does my RSS reader know?  We'll see a lot of interesting future development in this area.