This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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December 2009
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Bad Year for Pirates

A nice little summary of this year’s action in the Content Industry vs Pirates battles (at least the BitTorrent part of those battles).

Top Tier BitTorrent Sites Suffer Pain in 2009
(enigmax, TorrentFreak, 29 Dec 2009)

By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.

Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.

Bye Bye Naughties

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Underpants Bomber
  • Security Overreactions
  • Missed Warnings
  • Apple Tablet Rumors

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20091228.mp3″ text=”Recorded 28 Dec 2009″]

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Pre-Human Alien Things?

Actually probably just a big headed early human. But still fun!

Theories on Why Our Bigger Brained Predecessors Vanished
(Sonia Zjawinski, io9, 29 Dec 2009)

What’s weirder is that with further examination, it was discovered that whatever genus owned the skull also had small, childlike features — a Boskop face only takes up 1/5 of its cranium size, while a typical European adult face takes up roughly 1/3 of its cranium size.

Big head, small face? Sounds familiar, eh?

Lynch and Granger, who wrote about Boskops in their book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence note in their Discover article that we aren’t the only ones to think of stereotypical extraterrestrials when we hear about Boskop characteristics. American anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote about this very idea in his book, The Immense Journey in 1958. “Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

More info on the Wikipedia Boskop page of course.