moonbuggy

A robot you can drive around some guys room. With a webcam so you can see where you’re going.

I kept running into his legs, so I think he might have gotten annoyed. Oops. 🙂 Or, not oops, as the case may be. 🙂

`For three years now you have pursued your lawsuit campaign. Twenty thousand plus consumers, a dozen companies, and several very prominent friends of ours have fallen victim to your charade. We hoped you would see the obvious foolishness of your ways. Now, however, it appears clear that your shenanigans have gone on too long—You have begun deposing bereaved families of the deceased.

This can not stand. This will not stand. You will not stand. And from this day forward, your manipulative copyright claims will have no standing.

Today is the day we end all of your problems with consumer copyright infringement. For from today forward, consumers have no need for copies, infringing or otherwise. One common copy is all that is needed. One copy for everyone. Accessible forever.

Today we announce a massively distributed copy-less file system. A place where all content is available instantly, anonymously and to everyone, without breaking any laws. Today we announce the Owner-Free File System. An island of sanity in your sea of madness.’

Also, OFF System Development.

`It’s not the record that spins. The world’s smallest self running record player doesn’t need turntables but churns out music by driving round the record with a needle that is underneath the car.

If you have this, you can enjoy music whenever and wherever you are.’

`In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn’t understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.’

`No matter how played flying cars, kayaks, and other strange contraptions are, the allure of a jet pack strapped onto your back just doesn’t seem to lose its luster. Rick Herron, creator of Skywalker Jets, has devised a rocket pack that weighs about 90 pounds and can propel a 200 pound pilot around the air for what is likely the most invigorating 5 minutes of their life. The crazy part is this thing actually works, and it doesn’t get your backside all crispy in the process. Rick plans on producing a finalized model that has a range of about 4 miles and includes a GPS unit integrated into a HUD showing flight time and engine information among other things.’

A simple way to get system level privileges on an XP machine.

`The U.S. military has begun developing an ultrasonic tourniquet in an effort to stop life-threatening bleeding during combat.

Called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation (DBAC) program, it aims to create a cuff-like device that wraps around a wounded limb. Rather than applying pressure to the wound to stem the flow of blood, the device would use focused beams of ultrasound (sound waves above the audible frequencies) to non-invasively clot vessels no matter how deep they are.’

`Chris here at work just found this cool bug on all our Dell Optiplex GX520. It was so cool in fact that we decided to capture a video and post it online.

The bug appears when you put your mobile phone close to the cd-rom unit of the dell and then recieve a sms/txt.

What happends is it goes into some sort of suspension mode from which you can’t bring it back without breaking power or holding down the power button for four seconds.’

Microsoft demonstrating the voice recognition software in Windows Vista, or trying to atleast. 🙂

(3.8meg Flash video)

see it here »

`A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members. [..]

Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

“They threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of a investigation. … They said, ‘You were impeding this investigation.’ (I asked,) “By doing what?’ (The officer said,) ‘By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone,'” Cruz said.’

`In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists’ movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology. [..]

“I know it sounds really Big Brother,” Bucholz says. “But it’s going to happen. It’s going to get cheaper and cheaper until they slap them up on every taxicab and delivery truck and track where people live.” And work. And sleep. And move.’

`HOW IT WORKS:

[1] Add me (AlienChat@hotmail.com) as a contact to your messenger account.

[2] Send me a message and I’ll use the EXTRATERRESTRIAL BROADCASTER 3000 to send your message into the cosmos.

[3] Depending on who picks up your message (so far I’ve contacted what sounds like 12 different alien species) you should receive an Audio message within a few seconds.’

‘Heliodisplay images are not holographic although they are free-space, employing a rear projection system in which images are captured onto a nearly invisible plane of transformed air. What the viewer sees is floating mid-air image or video. These projected images and video are two-dimensional, (i.e. planar) but appear 3D since there is no physical depth reference. While conventional displays have the benefit of being attached to a physical substrate, Heliodisplay projections are suspended in air, so you will notice some waviness to the quality of the projections.’

(4.1meg Flash video)

see it here »

`Not long ago, a scene like this would have been incomprehensible. No single slot could pay out $4 million. Not physically, and not practically. Even in constant use, it would be impossible for any single machine to collect sufficient incoming wagers to make such mammoth paydays happen.

What made Budz rich, and what has made casinos even richer in recent years, are new digital networks that connect virtually every slot machine in every casino in the country. Wheel of Fortune, for instance, is part of the MegaJackpots system, a network within 18 states and one Native American reservation that encompasses more than 8,000 machines, about half of them in Nevada.’

`Scientists and science fiction fans alike have big plans for carbon nanotubes; it has been hoped that a cable made of carbon nanotubes would be strong enough to serve as a space elevator. However, recent calculations by Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, suggest that carbon nanotube cables will not work.

[..] Laboratory tests have demonstrated that flawless individual nanotubes can withstand about 100 gigapascals of tension; however, if a nanotube is missing just one carbon atom, it can reduce its strength by as much as thirty percent. Bulk materials made of many connected nanotubes are even weaker, averaging less than 1 gigapascal in strength.

In order to function, a space elevator ribbon would need to withstand at least 62 gigapascals of tension.’

`The computer servers that fill huge data centers are producing more heat with every new generation of processors. It’s a problem that’s sending engineers on a search for cooling fans that are both small enough to fit inside ever-smaller server chassis and powerful enough to dispel increasing amounts of heat. At Hewlett-Packard, they’ve found one answer in an unexpected place: model jet airplanes. [..]

The prototype HP fans are built from sturdier, more reliable parts than today’s computer fans, according to Vinson, and they deliver air with enough force to cool the smaller, denser, and hotter servers on HP’s drawing boards. “They literally blow you away,” he says; “it’s like picking up a leaf blower.”‘

`Japanese students succeeded on Sunday in making a manned flight in a plane powered only by household batteries.

The group from the Tokyo Institute of Technology flew the plane a distance of 391 metres (1,283 ft) at an airfield north of the capital, in what was the first such battery-powered flight, said a spokesman for Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, the project’s sponsors.’

`An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD’s which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data.

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete.’

`More than 20 desperate students in Vietnam paid up to 50 million dong ($3,125) to don elaborately wired wigs and shirts that allowed them to cheat on their college entrance exams, police said Monday.

During a weekend raid, Hanoi police confiscated 50 mobile phones, 60 earphones, 150 SIM cards, eight shirts and five wigs, an officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.’

`File this under “what’s old is new again.” A German company is introducing sails it says may help propel ships across the sea cheaper and faster than modern engines.

SkySails’ system consists of an enormous towing kite and navigation software that can map the best route between two points for maximum wind efficiency. In development for more than four years, the system costs from roughly $380,000 to $3.2 million, depending on the size of the ship it’s pulling. SkySails claims it will save one third of fuel costs.’

`For an aeronautical engineer it was the perfect day and a perfect end to a quest that has consumed his life for more than 30 years.

Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly — a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci.’

`A computer scientist at UCLA has transformed one power-hungry component of a silicon laser into a generator of energy — which could help engineers trying to incorporate faster optical elements into commercial processors.

“Not only are we not dumping energy in, we’re actually recovering it,” says Bahram Jalali, a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science “It sounds too good to be true, but it is true.”‘

`Microsoft has dropped Big Brother-style plans to track down pirated copies of Windows XP, dumping elements of its Windows Genuine Advantage Notification after they ignited a firestorm of controversy.

The stealth application, introduced with auto updates in Australia in April as part of a pilot scheme, “phoned home” every time the computer was booted to confirm that the operating system was genuine.

If the software was pirated it triggered a series of irritating warnings. Now Microsoft has reacted to user anger by switching off the boot-up check.’

`It happens to more machines that it should. I decided to see what the problem might be. I searched google, forums, and newsgroups for an answer. The biggest culprit is a problem unloading the current users profile. [..]

This is why Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service’

`The world’s first teraflop computer has been decommissioned by the U.S. government despite still being among the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers.

Although young in age, the historic supercomputer — based at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and known as ASCI Red — is very old by supercomputer standards. ‘

A US Senator explains why he voted against a net neutrality bill:

`There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.’

`The scenario is you are without Internet connectivity anywhere. You have found either an open wireless access pointed or perhaps you’re staying in a hotel which permits rented Internet via services like Spectrum Interactive (previously known as UKExplorer). You make the connection, whether its physically connecting the Ethernet cables, or instructing you’re wireless adapter to lock onto the radio signal. You are prompted with some sort of authorization page when you open a browser. You don’t have access to it, so what do you do?’

`The Ophcrack LiveCD is a bootable Linux CD-ROM containing ophcrack 2.2 and a set of tables (SSTIC04-10k). It allows for testing the strength of passwords on a Windows machine without having to install anything on it. Just put it into the CD-ROM drive, reboot and it will try to find a Windows partition, extract its SAM and start auditing the passwords.’

`I called Microsoft support to see if there is a hidden option to say, “yep, I’ve got updates turned to manual… it’s okay.” The rep said, “No and why wouldn’t you want to get the latest updates to Windows.”

I responded with the issues relating to WGA. He spent some time telling me that WGA was a good thing, etc. I reiterated that I have accepted all the updates except WGA and just want to review the updates before they’re installed on my machine.

He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”‘

`Wives and family members of soldiers fighting in Iraq have received telephone calls, believed to include death threats, from insurgents, according to military documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

The “nuisance” calls have been made with increasing frequency over the past few weeks after insurgents managed to obtain home numbers from soldiers’ mobile telephones. [..]

It is understood that the threats range from claims that a husband or son is dead or will be killed fighting in Iraq, to verbal abuse. Many of those who have received calls say that they were made by people with a poor command of English or with a Middle Eastern accent.’