‘For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting critic managed to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines over the internet last month from a government auction site. And now he’s taking them apart.
Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and his students have begun reverse-engineering the software embedded in the machines’ ROM chips to determine if it has any security holes. But Appel says the ease with which he and his students opened the machines and removed the chips already demonstrates that the voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorized modification.
Their analysis appears to mark the first time that someone who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement with Sequoia Voting Systems has examined one of its machine’s internals.’
‘The shy and retiring, softly-spoken CEO of Microsoft, Steve “Sounds of Silence” Ballmer is blaming software pirates for Vista’s poor sales.
Ballmer admitted to financial analysts that the predictions for Vista had proved ‘overly optimistic’ and he blamed the pirates in China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets.
He said his final solution would be to increase the intensity Windows Genuine Advantage as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from developing nations. [..]
Of course he is ignoring the fact that a lot of people are not buying Vista because it does not offer much more than XP and Windows Genuine Advantage makes their lives a misery. [..]’
She gives it a try tho. Parents may be cunts tho, hard to say. [shrug]
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‘Marylynn Aminrazavi was happy. She was on vacation. Decked out in beach casual – oversized white T-shirt, colorful beach towel, hair in a bun – she leaned back in a chair by the Atlantic Ocean, put on her daughter’s iPod, and closed her eyes. Lost in the music, she began to sing along. Loudly.
The song was Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You.” Aminrazavi’s thin, nasal warble – not to mention her physique (she looks like your mom) – was clearly never intended for mid-90s R&B sex-pop. The resulting scene was comic gold: A 46-year-old suburban mother of two, blissfully unaware, belting out “I’ll make love to you / Like you want me to” to the dozens of beachgoers around her.
Had someone not had the presence of mind to capture the moment with a digital camera, it would have been lost forever. [..]’
‘This is it, the opportunity of a lifetime. You can be the proud owner of Britney Spears’ hair, extensions, the Omega clipper used to cut it all off and even the can of Red Bull she was drinking at the time. You also get her blue Bic Lighter and this valuable domain and website to use for publicity purposes. This is the Ultimate Britney Spears Experience! It is a piece of history that can not be duplicated!’
‘Customs officials raided Sylvester Stallone’s harbourside room at Sydney’s Park Hyatt Hotel yesterday, as members of his party were seen throwing objects out of the window.
The Hollywood actor had already denied bringing steroids into the country when he was questioned on arrival at Sydney Airport last Friday.
A customs spokesman said last night he could not confirm the nature of the latest developments, but the Herald understands customs officers visited the 60-year-old about 3pm, when they issued him with a summons relating to prohibited substances. The summons would normally require him or his lawyer to appear in court.
Here to promote his new film, Rocky Balboa, Stallone flew out of the country last night with the blessing of customs, but not before its officers searched his private jet.’
Followup to Stallone detained in Customs ‘misunderstanding’.
‘A Romanian priest has been jailed for 14 years for conducting an exorcism that led to the death of a nun who he believed was possessed by devils.
Irina Cornici, 23, died after being starved and chained to a cross at a secluded convent in the north-east.
The ritual in 2005 was led by Daniel Petru Corogeanu, 31, the priest at the Holy Trinity convent in Tanacu village.
He and four nuns were convicted of manslaughter. The nuns got jail terms ranging from five to eight years. [..]
In 1999, when the Vatican issued its first new guidelines since 1614 for driving out devils, it urged priests to take modern psychiatry into account in deciding who should be exorcised.’
‘Rep. Don Young on Thursday added his voice to the speechifying about President Bush’s Iraq policy and bolstered it with what he thought was the voice of President Abraham Lincoln.
The man who Young quoted, though, was not the nation’s 16th president but a professor at a Washington, D.C., graduate school.
“I’d like to make a quote,” Young began after being granted his five minutes on the House floor. “‘Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.'”‘
‘Guys, I just broke my foot.’
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‘In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page let slip with a truth we all suspected:
“We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”
Yep, you read that right, Google is trying to build real AI. The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to Page it isn’t that far away either. The term Googlebot is about to take on a whole new meaning, and in the not to distant future as well.’
‘It’s still going to be legal in Arizona for trucks to have splash guards with racist terms and silhouettes of naked women.
The state House on Thursday rejected a Democratic amendment that would have banned splash guards with images that are “obscene or hateful.” [..]
“I personally am tired of explaining to my 11-year-old son why they (women) are depicted on mudflaps , but not all women are 36Ds. He’s very confused by that,” Ulmer said. “But seriously, this is about family values — what are we going to send out as a message to our children.”‘
This is quite sad, actually.
see it here »
‘A bill modifying Hungary’s penal code could allow pornographic material involving 14- to 17-year-olds to be made and kept for personal use.
The Justice Ministry said the draft proposal, presented last month by Hungarian Justice Minister Jozsef Petretei, was in line with European Union norms which give members states the right to regulate the issue at national level.
But Opposition lawmakers attacked the proposal as “legalized pedophilia” and a family welfare group described it as “the waiting room of prostitution.”‘
‘What does it take to transform your PC into a teraflop supercomputer? It may be less than you think – two graphics cards and programming know-how are enough to push your desktop PC’s performance into a range that required 10,000 processors a decade ago.
Nvidia today released the first public beta of its CUDA, software developer kit, which so far has only been available to a limited number of developers. The company promises that the software will allow full access to the 128/96 cores of GeForce 8800 graphics cards and leverage their floating point capability, not only for graphics, but other applications that rely on number crunching performance as well.’
Follow up to: Human Slingshot
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‘”We’re going to talk a little bit today about the inevitable zombie uprising, the zombie apocalypse – also known as ‘zombocalypse.'” So begins William Spencer, addressing 150 science-fiction geeks at last October’s Archon convention in Collinsville, Illinois.
Spencer, a 31-year-old body-piercer who is dressed this day like a Commando character, is a founder of the Zombie Squad. A St. Louis-based survivalist group that uses the walking dead as a metaphor for the breakdown of society, the Zombie Squad’s primary mission is to teach disaster-preparation tactics to the public. What unites this quirky mix of tattooed hipsters, role-playing gamers and sci-fi nerds is an insatiable appetite for zombie flicks.’
This is a press conference given by the people behind those ‘Suspicious Packages’ That Paralyzed Boston Part of Cartoon Network Marketing Campaign. It’s pretty funny. 🙂
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‘An elderly woman who had been living without power in her home due to hurricane damage was finally seeing the light Friday night, when power to her home was restored. What makes her story amazing is that the hurricane which put her in the dark was Andrew, almost 15 years ago, and she’s been living without power to her house since August 24, 1992.’
Lots of people trying to sell her hair for lots of money.
This one is at $400k at the moment.
Various different mapping services in a nice little flash application.
‘A dog trying to survive the subzero wind chills froze to the ground, but because of one woman’s generous heart, the dog has another chance at life, KMBC’s Lara Moritz reported Wednesday.
“He had sat down on the ground where the frozen ground was, and his body had stuck or bonded to the ground, so probably when he tried to stand up, it ripped the flesh from his rear area,” volunteer Melissa Zarda said.
The dog was named Shiver, and animal volunteers said it could happen to any dog left outside in the cold without shelter.’
If this is your first night you have to fuck.
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‘Women who claim to be victims of ‘date-rape’ drugs such as Rohypnol have in fact been rendered helpless by binge-drinking, says a study by doctors.
They found no evidence that any woman seeking help from emergency doctors because their drinks were allegedly spiked had actually been given these drugs. [..]
Around one in five tested positive for recreational drugs while two-thirds had been drinking heavily.
The findings further erode the theory that there is widespread use of Rohypnol and GHB, another drug said to be favoured by predatory rapists.’
‘Six blind patients have had their sight partially restored by a “bionic eye” surgically implanted on to their retina. Although it restores only very rudimentary vision, the device has proved so successful that its developers are about to begin a study of a more sophisticated version with between 50 and 75 patients.
If this trial goes to plan the device could be available to patients in two years, and one day it could be used to digitally enhance human sight. The bionic eye works by converting images from a tiny camera mounted on a pair of glasses into a grid of 16 electrical signals that transmit directly to the nerve endings in the retina.’
‘A window said to be the one through which Lee Harvey Oswald shot US president John F Kennedy in 1963 has been sold for $3.8 million on eBay, the Internet auction house says.
The description of the window and frame sold to a person in the Netherlands says it was the one that stood in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, from which Oswald killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
The window had been on display for 10 years at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, until its owner, Caruth Byrd, claimed it back.’
‘For 17 months, Jimmy Earl Adams battled heart problems as he prepared his defense on a charge of sexually assaulting a client at the cosmetic procedures center he owns in North Richland Hills, his attorney said.
On Friday morning, moments after a Tarrant County jury acquitted the 59-year-old, Adams was rushed to a local hospital, suffering what he said was a heart attack.
“My comment … my comment is that I’m in the emergency room,” Adams said in a telephone interview a few hours after the verdict. A woman who took the telephone from him said the family declined to make any additional comments.’
