‘Pirated Microsoft Corp software helped Romania to build a vibrant technology industry, Romanian President Traian Basescu told the company’s co-founder Bill Gates on Thursday. [..]
“Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania,” Basescu said during a joint news conference with Gates.
“It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania’s friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”
Gates made no comment.’
‘Guy uses computer to text his roommate a false message about drunk horny girls. Hilarious reaction from confused roommate when he comes back [..]’
(16.3meg Windows media)
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.. and the real reason for his quick exit.
(22.9 and 1.6meg Flash videos)
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‘An ID badge that Taylor wore when he was arrested indicated that he worked for Microsoft. But that was no more accurate than the two-dozen other employee badges he possessed for E-Trade and AT&T Broadband, or the 15 driver’s licenses from various states that featured his congenial face and a dozen aliases. Nor did Thomas’s California driver’s license help authorities identify him. Although it had his picture, the name and address on the ID belonged to a producer for the A&E channel.
With so many fake IDs in play it was unclear to police exactly who they had in custody. Then as they read Thomas his rights, he told them: “Get me some federal agents and I’ll give you a case involving the Russians and millions of dollars.”‘
This is quite long, but it’s fairly interesting.
`On 27 January, Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) switched itself into a protective “safe mode” after a short in its electronics. NASA engineers believe the fault has killed the camera’s ability to see deep and wide. “It’s really a blow to Hubble science; there’s no way around that fact,” says Holland Ford, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and principal investigator for ACS. He adds that of the roughly 800 current proposals for using Hubble, two-thirds involved the ACS.’
‘We took an industrial robot, strapped a tennis racket and a sword to it, and put it under the control of a WiiMote. We ran very light pattern recognition on the WiiMote, so it would copy our sword swings.’
(4.5meg Flash video)
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‘Portion control is an important part of staying healthy. This ingenious butter cutter delivers one standard pat with each click of the handle. No more messy butter dish. 5 pats equal 1 tablespoon. Slices, serves, and stores one stick of butter or margarine.’
If I had one I’d cut yo momma’s butter. And she’d love it.
`Scores of Sydneysiders who took up Google’s challenge to make a spectacle of themselves in an aerial photo shoot staged over the city on Australia Day are likely to be disappointed.
A plane chartered by Google to take the images never made it over some of the designated areas or arrived hours later than expected by which time, many of those who had been waiting below had moved on. [..]
But the flight plan was hastily changed on Friday morning after Sydney air traffic control denied the twin-engine Aero Commander permission to fly over parks and beaches in inner Sydney and the east due to air safety concerns.’
`Paris-based satellite company Eutelsat is investigating “unidentified interference” with its satellite broadcast services that temporarily knocked out several television and radio stations. The company declined to say whether it thought the interference was accidental or deliberate.
The problem began Tuesday afternoon, blocking several European, Middle East and northeast African radio and television stations, as well as Agence France-Presse’s news service. All transferred their satellite transmissions to another frequency to resume operations.’
‘It said a so-called “open XML” platform file format, known as OOXML, is designed to run seamlessly only on the Microsoft Office platform. It governs the way a document is formatted and stored.
“The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve — or even debug — its monopoly products and of course high prices,” said Thomas Vinje, lawyer for ECIS, in the statement.
Other complainants in the group include Corel, RealNetworks , Linspire and Opera.’
`Apple’s digital rights management lock on its iPod device and iTunes software is illegal, the Consumer Ombudsman in Norway has ruled. The blow follows the news that Germany and France are joining Norway’s action against Apple.
The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerradet, lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman on behalf of Norwegian consumers claiming that the Fairplay DRM system acted against the interests of consumers. It said the fact the technology stopped songs bought from iTunes being played on any player other than an iPod broke the law in Norway.
The Ombudsman has now agreed, according to Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Consumer Council.’
`The sexed robots are autonomous wheeled platforms fitted with nylon genital organs, respectively male and female. They are programmed to explore their environment, occasionally entering a “in heat” mode, where they will try and locate a partner in the same state. If a partner is located, the robots will attempt to mate.’
`The Princeton Diebold Virus Hack, if you’ve been living in a cave, found that a single person with 60 seconds of unsupervised access to the system, who either picked the lock (easy in 10 seconds) or had a key, could slip a vote-swapping virus onto a single machine which could then undetectably affect every other machine in the county to steal an entire election. [..]
This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website’s online store! (Screenshot at end of this article.)
Of course, they’ll only sell such keys to “Diebold account holders” apparently — or so they claim — but that’s hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold’s website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!’
The Ergopod 500 lets you use your computer whilst laying in bed on your back.
If you had a catheter and someone to bring you food, you’ve never have to move. Ha! 🙂
`A Chinese thief has returned a mobile phone and thousands of yuan he stole from a woman after she sent him 21 touching text messages, Xinhua news agency said on Monday. [..]
She gave up hope of seeing her possessions again after sending 21 text messages without a reply.
But on her way out on Sunday morning, she stumbled over a package that had been left in her courtyard only to discover it was her stolen bag. Nothing had been taken.
“Dear Pan: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Please forgive me,” a letter inside said.
“You are so tolerant even though I stole from you. I’ll correct my ways and be an upright person.”‘
`Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.
They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors ďż˝ from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes. [..]
Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.
“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.’
`There are ‘bare bones’ kits from some manufacturers, but you are still expected to pay through the nose. To have one designed around standard Mini-ITX components would be great for the kind of people who do not want a laptop that we can fit in an envelope, rather a unit that we can use all around the house for a decent price.
I decided to create a laptop that at any point, I could upgrade every component as they grew too old. For very little money, I have created a 2GHz processor laptop with 1GB Ram, and an ATI Radeon 9200 128MB graphics card. OK, so it is a PCI graphics card and could be faster, but everything is upgradable – I could slot in a motherboard with PCI Express in the future.’
This guy has had his Xbox 360 break twice. The first time Microsoft sent him out a box to ship it back to them in for repairs. Apparently they’ve changed their policy now and the customer has to provide the box and ship it to Microsoft, and Microsoft will ship it back in the same box.
Unfortunately, this guy isn’t particularly happy about not getting a free box, so he’s soliciting donations to buy the biggest box possible [a cargo shipping container, basically] just so Microsoft will have to pay to ship it back to him.
‘We got activity out here but I don’t think we need to report it.. It appears to be fornication.. We’re taping it..’
Hooray for FLIR, I suppose. 🙂 The guys on the radio back at base seem pretty keen to make sure they get a copy of the tape made.
(11.3meg Windows media)
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`The thing is, if you carefully construct an example document, you can get a compression ratio much higher. How much higher? MUCH, MUCH higher. For example, if you created a PNG image containing just one colour repeated over and over then you could easily get a 1000:1 ratio. For a text document containing 1 character repeated over and over, it’s possible to shrink 100Gb to about 6k. Think about that, it is a huge difference: 1.7e7:1.
That’s all well and good as an interesting experiment, but what does it mean for an average user? Imagine I had constructed one of those zip files that had shrunk 100Gb down to 6k and I sent you that file. If you trusted me, you might try to open it. Therein lies the problem [..]’
Stephen Colbert describes the recent renaming of Cingular to AT&T and gives a summary of the current telecommunications industry in the US.
(3.3meg Windows media)
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`Three thieves who allegedly stole 14 global positioning system devices didn’t get away with their crime for long. The devices led police right to their home.
Town officials said the thieves didn’t even know what they had: they thought the GPS devices were cell phones, which they planned to sell.
According to Suffolk County police, the GPS devices were stolen Monday night from the Town of Babylon Public Works garage in Lindenhurst. The town immediately tapped its GPS system, and it showed that one of the devices was inside a house. Police said that when they arrived there, Kurt Husfeldt, 46, had the device in his hands.’
Some guys change the Windows shutdown sound on their friends lap top, then film him using the computer in a library.
Baa!
(3.0meg Windows media)
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‘Reversing itself, the Defense Department says an espionage report it produced that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters was not true.
The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.’
Follow up to: Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says
This waterfall works kinda like a bubblejet printer. It drops water in a precisely controlled fashion that allows them to spell words and draw pictures in space.
It’s pretty cool. 🙂
(8.5meg Flash video)
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`Sex offenders could be forced to have hormone injections under radical plans to tackle crime being considered by Downing Street.
Strategists think the injections – effectively the “chemical castration” of sexual predators to suppress their urges – would help prevent attacks.
The controversial proposal is one of a number being looked at by Tony Blair’s strategy unit as part of the Prime Minister’s policy review.
Other ideas include installing microchips in the mentally ill to monitor their behaviour and sending text messages to parents to warn them a paedophile is at large in their area.’
‘The pilot of a TV news helicopter used the wind from the aircraft’s rotor to push a stranded deer to safety after it lost its footing on a frozen lake and could not get up.
A small crowd had gathered to watch the deer struggling, its hooves repeatedly slipping, near the shore of Lake Thunderbird around 4 p.m. Wednesday.
With the helicopter’s camera rolling, KWTV pilot Mason Dunn used the wind from the rotor to push the deer, initially sending it into a break in the ice where the animal managed to hold onto the ice with its front legs.’
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`Normally, new weaponry tends to make defense more expensive. But the Navy likes to say its new railgun delivers the punch of a missile at bullet prices.
A demonstration of the futuristic and comparatively inexpensive weapon yesterday at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren had Navy brass smiling.
The weapon, which was successfully tested in October at the King George County base, fires nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity rather than gun powder.
The technology could increase the striking range of U.S. Navy ships more than tenfold by the year 2020.’
