Google Street View is simply awesome

I was talking with a woman about Denver, and about where I lived for 8 months in December 1994 to August 1995. I lived near the corner of Havana and Mississippi. There was a King Sooper supermarket there. I tried Google Maps to refresh my memory and then realized that I could see the street view for the corner. I can see from Google Street View that the King Sooper supermarket is still there. I was just inside Denver from Aurora, as I remembered the location. I could turn around and see what seems to be the mall on the opposite side of the street. The Conoco station is still there, as well.

Neanderthals

I was interested to read what should have been obvious: Neanderthals were part of Homo Sapiens, not a separate species. The fact that they could be part of fertile cross-breeds confirms that fact. I have long suspected, as have many other people, that Neanderthal traits have survived to this day in the general populace. E. M. Smith has a blog post with a photograph.

Bess Levin of DealBreaker

I have been interested in Bess Levin for a few years.

The Observer has a picture and story.

Lost freedom

A striking feature of life in 2010 is the gross over-regulation and criminalization of doing unhealthy things. As recently as 1998, we still have many freedoms left. Now, someone restricts businesses from letting people smoke in separate enclosed rooms, hurting small, locally-owned restaurants, people are required to do all sorts of things in their cars (often observed more in the breach than in compliance), and criminalizing activities that used to be considered to be "fair use" under the old copyright laws. Fines are now usually excessive for traffic violations and local, state, and federal government constantly intrude on our lives (or they want to, at least). The courts have stripped us of our constitutional rights because they figure that some good is accomplished by doing so. In the United States, though, we are in better condition than the Europeans. Britain and the Netherlands seem doomed, if they continue as they are. In the U.S., government risks driving the people into rebellion through repressive laws and enforcement. I find the whole prospect frightening, as I liked our situation even prior to 2001, if not prior to 1999.

64-bit binary news readers?

I wondered if there were any news readers that might take advantage of 64-bit processors and Windows 7 64-bit. The answer is yes, at least with News Bin Pro.

A banned news group?

I had seen a reference to a group in another news group. Neither of my news providers carry the group, so perhaps it is banned. Now, searching with Google, it looks like a news group that I would not want to see anyway, given the topic mentioned. There are several ways to check groups online. One is with http://binsearch.info. There are some other sites that list news groups, at least. The news group I had seen seems to be valid, not carried by my two news providers, and now seems to be a non-interesting topic (although from binsearch, that was not obvious).

How did we do in Cash Five on 12 January 2009?

We didn't do that great, as the winning pick for 12 January 2010 was 5-7-10-12-30. We just won $2, by my count:

1-4-26-30-31
4-8-17-28-30
4-13-19-30-34
1-2-4-28-36
5-6-10-17-33-won $2
11-17-18-33-34
4-17-20-23-33
5-14-15-17-34
5-17-19-23-31