moonbuggy

The Daily Show made this little clip of some funny inventions over the past 10 years or so. The Gaydar guy seems a bit, well, gay. 🙂

(11.6meg Flash video)

see it here »

`Consider the Carrick woman whose cell phone was stolen Saturday from her car by an unknown man who reached into her front seat through an open window.

That evening the man called her other cell phone with the stolen phone and asked her if “the pictures on the phone were of her,” according to a report.

Seems the stolen phone featured naked pictures of a woman. The Carrick victim said the pictures were of her girlfriend and, when the caller asked, told him she was a lesbian.

The next day, she accessed her phone account on the Internet and downloaded a recent photo the man had taken with the stolen cell phone. That picture? A penis.

Detectives were investigating.’

`The investigation into the death of a baby who authorities believe was heated in a microwave oven was difficult because of a lack of research on the effect of microwaves on people, a coroner’s official said.

China Arnold, 26, was jailed Monday on a charge of aggravated murder, more than a year after she brought her dead month-old baby to a hospital on Aug. 30, 2005, police said.

“We have reason to believe, and we have some forensic evidence that is consistent with our belief, that a microwave oven was used in this death,” said Ken Betz, director of the Montgomery County coroner’s office.’

`Yes, Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”

But there it was, right on the Zune’s tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning?’

`U.S. Coast Guards have seized a submarine carrying 3.5 tons of cocaine in the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica and arrested three Colombians on board, the Costa Rican Coast Guard said on Sunday.

The submarine appeared to be a makeshift vessel unlike military submarines or those used by oceanographers. It could only submerge 6 feet under water, Costa Rican Coast Guard spokesman Jose Antonio Fallas told Reuters.

The 45-foot-long vessel was found last Wednesday near the remote Coco Island, southwest of the Central American mainland, and had traveled hundreds of miles from Colombia on its way to the United States.’

`Junior Matthew LaClair, 16, said history teacher David Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist preacher in town, spent the first week of class lecturing students more about heaven and hell than the colonies and the Constitution.

LaClair said Paszkiewicz told students that if they didn’t accept Jesus, “you belong in hell.” He also dismissed as unscientific the theories of evolution and the “Big Bang.” [..]

On Oct. 10 — a month after he first requested a meeting with the principal — LaClair met with Paszkiewicz, Somma and the head of the social studies department.

At first, Paszkiewicz denied he mixed in religion with his history lesson, and the adults in the room appeared to be buying it, LaClair said. But then he reached into his backpack and produced the CDs.’

`A new mobile phone available through Japan’s NTT DoCoMo can ring to let would-be mothers know when they reach the most fertile part of their monthly reproductive cycles.

By tapping in data on menstruation dates, the user can program the phone to alert her three days before ovulation and again on the day. The company warns that the calculations are based on average cycles.

The new phone comes after Japan’s fertility rate – the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime – fell to an all-time low of 1.25 in 2005, sparking worries about a shrinking population.’

`A new nano-optical device can focus laser light tighter than traditional optics, which could lead to higher-density data storage.

A computer simulation of the optical nano antenna that Harvard researchers have fabricated. Consisting of two gold-coated nano rods separated by a 30-nanometer gap, the antenna can focus light from a commercial laser to a spot just 40 nanometers wide. It could be used to write terabytes, rather than gigabytes, of data to a CD or DVD.’

`Men who use mobile phones could be risking their fertility, warn researchers.

A new study shows a worrying link between poor sperm and the number of hours a day that a man uses his mobile phone.

Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.’

`Workers at computer factories are at increased risk of dying of cancer. The largest study of its kind published today in the open access journal Environmental Health looks at over 30,000 deaths of workers who had been employed at IBM factories in the USA. The study reveals that IBM factory workers were more likely to have died of cancer, including brain, kidney or breast cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, than the rest of the population.

The author of the study cannot link these deaths to any specific chemicals or other toxic exposures. The current study confirms previous, smaller studies and highlights clear health risks for workers in computer factories across the world.’

`A lovesick 16-year-old girl crashed her car into an oncoming vehicle in a suicide attempt, counting down the moments before impact in text messages sent to the female classmate who spurned her, authorities say. The girl survived; a woman in the other car was killed.

The teenager, Louise Egan Brunstad, was charged Thursday with murder in the Oct. 4 wreck. [..]

Howard said it was unclear whether the classmate the messages were intended for responded to them or even read them, either as they were sent or afterward.’

‘Fun with an old hard drive. Took the platters out of many hard drives and put them into one drive. Spin it up to speed and give it a nudge, then watch the fun.’

(540kB Flash video)

see it here »

`Own the one and only prototype of the Moller M400 Skycar®. This test vehicle has flown repeatedly and demonstrated its hover capabilities in over a dozen flights at the Moller International facilities in Davis, California. It is our intent to offer it for sale by auction on eBay to raise capital for the Company.

This is the Real Deal – A working “Flying Car” prototype!’

At the time of posting, the auction is just above US$2mil and the reserve isn’t me. [sigh] Looks like I can’t afford it. 🙂 [Unless lots of people start clicking AdSense links. :)]

`In this article, we describe the construction of the Ultimate Linux Lunchbox, a 16-node cluster that runs from a single IBM ThinkPad power supply but can, as well, run from an N-charge or similar battery. The lunchbox has an Ethernet switch built-in and has only three external connections: one AC plug, one battery connector and one Ethernet cable. To use the lunchbox with your laptop, you merely need to plug the Ethernet cable in to the laptop, supply appropriate power-even the power available in an airplane seat will do-and away you go, running your cluster at 39,000 feet.’

`A local family is outraged by a school photo. When the pictures came back from the studio, a seven-year-old girl’s image appeared to have been doctored to give her cleavage.

The debate is whether the photo just has a very strange shadow or it’s been digitally altered by someone.

“It’s just bad. It’s horrible. She’s my baby, not for somebody to look at her like that. She’s seven, she’s not an adult,” said the girl’s mother, Jenn Truhe.’

`Three weeks ago, Maryland state Sen. Ed DeGrange was sitting at his desk when the phone rang. The caller was an inmate from a nearby prison with a list of complaints. But he wasn’t calling from the prison pay phone. He was calling from a mobile phone in his cell.

DeGrange says his first thought when he heard that was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“He even went as far as to leave a number,” he adds. [..]

Last month, a warden in Texas also got a call — from the mother of one of his inmates. She was calling to complain that her son was getting poor cell-phone reception inside the prison.’

`An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle accelerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world, suggest the findings of a new study funded by the US air force. [..]

The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30° to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. A rocket at the back end of the cone would be used to adjust its trajectory and place it in a proper orbit.’

‘Sony may be forced out of the battery manufacturing business after today announcing a global product recall for batteries it has manufactured, Dow Jones reports. [..]

According to a statement issued by Sony, “Sony Corporation will initiate a global replacement program for certain battery packs that utilize Sony-manufactured lithium ion cells used by notebook computer manufacturers in order to address concern related to recent over-heating incidents,” the company said in a statement.’

`A pervert who built a ‘super computer’ to store one of Britain’s biggest child porn collections featuring children as young as three being raped by adults, has been jailed for 15 months. [..]

The gay ex-sailor was eventually caught after Italian police, investigating a child porn website, passed his name to British officials.

It took them so long to categorise Ford’s “enormous” archive they had no choice but to call a halt after working non-stop for six weeks.

London’s Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court heard that even then they had only managed to examine just over a third of the material.’

`Hey, I like tiny phones as much as the next guy, but this is insane. Take a gander at the Xun Chi 138, purported to be the world’s smallest cellphone. You won’t here any arguments from me on that front; it’s freakin’ tiny. But the problem is that it’s so small there isn’t even room for a keypad, forcing you to use the stylus and touchscreen to do any input. Plus, there’s the danger that you could accidentally swallow it while making a call. [..]’

`It looks like the new Rolling Stone due out tomorrow will have a doozy of an article by RFK, Jr. whick will look into whether the 2006 election can be hacked. Based on a few blurbs that were “sneak previewed” by Raw Story it looks like there is an even bigger story in that article – an admission by a Diebold consultant that machine software was altered in 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties on the day of the election.

If anyone remembers the 2002 election in Georgia, that is the one where Max Cleland’s five to six point lead was erased overnight to a seven point loss, leading to a miraculous win by Saxby Chambliss, which even describes his come from behind win as “stunning and historical” in his Senate website.’

`A security expert in New York has learned how to get free money from some ATMs by entering a special code sequence on the PIN pad.

Last week, news reports circulated about a cyber thief who strolled into a gas station in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and, with no special equipment, reprogrammed the mini ATM in the corner to think it had $5.00 bills in its dispensing tray, instead of $20.00 bills.

Using a pre-paid debit card, the crook then made a withdrawal, and casually strolled off with a 300% profit in his pocket.’

`As Jill describes it, she heard strange noises coming from her basement last night while Jim was tinkering around. Later he came up the stairs with an invention to help with the fruit fly situation. Using an clunky rotary thing-a-ma-bob from an old Kodak prototype, he crafted a machine he dubbed “The Fruit Fly Flattener.” After 32 years of marriage if that isn’t love I don’t know what is!’

`Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”‘

`The idea appeared in Technology Review citing Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, who says these ideas will show up eventually in real Google products – sooner rather than later.

The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and then shows you relevant content, whether that’s adverts or search results, or a chat room on the subject.

And, of course, we wouldn’t put it past Google to store that information away, along with the search terms it keeps that you’ve used, and the web pages you have visited, to help it create a personalised profile that feeds you just the right kind of adverts/content. [..]’

`Electronic spy ‘bugs’ have been secretly planted in hundreds of thousands of household wheelie bins.

The gadgets – mostly installed by companies based in Germany – transmit information about the contents of the bins to a central database which then keeps records on the waste disposal habits of each individual address.

Already some 500,000 bins in council districts across England have been fitted with the bugs – with nearly all areas expected to follow suit within the next couple of years.’

`Every speed camera fine issued by the Roads and Traffic Authority since 1999 may be invalid, after a judge ruled the photos used to convict drivers were meaningless.

The decision in the Sydney District Court by Judge John Nicholson, SC, could cost the State Government hundreds of millions of dollars, said Dennis Miralis, the solicitor who won the case. [..]

He found that to be given weight as evidence the digital cameras that took the photos had to be calibrated every day. The authority calibrated its cameras once a year, Mr Miralis said.

He said every person convicted on such evidence since 1999 – when digital cameras came in – had been improperly convicted.’

`One of the CIA’s most bizarre Cold War efforts was Operation Acoustic Kitty. In declassified documents from the CIA’s super-secret Science and Technology Directorate, it was revealed that some Cold-War-era cats were surgically altered to become sophisticated bugging devices. The idea was that the cats would eavesdrop on Soviet conversations from park benches, windowsills and garbage containers. The cat was meant to just stroll up to the sensitive conversations, completely unnoticed. The clandestine cat’s electrical internals would then capture and relay the audio to awaiting agents.’

`Out of more than 36 million search queries that hundreds of thousands of AOL users typed into AOL’s Internet search engine from March to May, here is the term most queried: Google.

That so many customers would use one search engine to find another is among the odd truths being mined from AOL’s public release of search data. The company last week called the incident involving 658,000 users’ queries a “screw-up” and apologized. But for better or worse, the data offer the first widespread public glimpse of how people search the Internet, of what they are interested in. Of how people think.’