`Since the military provides just 6 to 12 computers for every 1,000 or so troops, time limits of 10 to 15 minutes per day are often enforced at Morale Welfare Recreation Cafés (the complicated name for military internet cafés). Anyone who sorts through spam, reads forwarded articles and jokes, then tries to respond to “real” email knows 15 minutes isn’t enough. Josh Hines, a soldier from Conway who recently returned from Iraq , confirmed that the Army lacks internet services and lamented the scarcity of entertainment options.
It should come as no surprise, then, that some enterprising military personnel have engineered an alternative. Hajjinets, the common term for troop-owned ISPs, have sprung to life on almost every base around Iraq. A typical Hajjinet is built and maintained by one or two soldiers and can provide nearly 24-hour internet access (until the region is stabilized and electrical lines can be installed, generators must occasionally be powered down for maintenance). Most Hajjinets are small, serving between 20 and 30 troops, but ISPs serving as many as 300 are known to exist.’
`What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.’
`Firewall Leak Tester, a company that provides tools to test the quality of personal firewall software, has released a utility called RemoveWGA that blocks Microsoft from “phoning home” from Windows PCs on a daily basis.
“Once the WGA Notification tool has checked your OS and has confirmed you had a legit copy, there is no decent point or reason to check it again and again every boot,” the company said in a note explaining its motive for releasing the tool.’
`Ever thought of building your own home made stun gun?
Here are three schematics for those of you who would like to build your own. If you know how to read electronic schematics, the three stun gun circuits on this page include all the information you need to make a stun gun. Personally I have no idea what they mean.’
`An inventor from Bangkok is patenting an outlandish emergency landing system for aeroplanes.
Normally, when a crash landing is inevitable and no runway is in sight, a pilot would make a controlled belly flop to prevent the plane from ploughing into any buildings nearby.
But Polchai Phanumphai’s idea is for aircraft to spin their way down instead. As a suitably fitted-out plane prepares to crash down, an altimeter would trigger explosive charges to make one wing break away from the fuselage and kick the one-winged plane into a horizontal spin.’
`Tokyo’s futuristic image as the world’s most technologically advanced broadband internet-enabled city is under attack from a vicious but decidedly low-tech foe: urban-dwelling jungle crows.
Their destructive and unpredictable behaviour during the annual May to June mating season is always highly problematic for the Japanese capital. But this year the aggressive ink-black birds have created a new headache by developing a seemingly insatiable taste for fibre-optic internet cable.
[..] An initial burst of activity involving a network of traps around the city and a squadron of experienced crow-catchers met with success, with about 11,000 crows captured.
Unfortunately, crows from the countryside around Tokyo flew in to replace their ensnared comrades, and the population remained constant. ‘
`[..] political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet’s electricity, according to America’s Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?’
`It turns out that Microsoft is getting even more from your Windows-powered PC than I thought they were. It figures, doesn’t it? [..]
In short, Microsoft is admitting to pulling even more information from your PCs — such as your IP address and date and timestamp data “relating to systems’ booting and continued operations.” In addition, Jones shows how Microsoft essentially tricks users into agreeing to all this without giving them any chance to say no to the entire process.’
`A computer hacker got into the U.S. agency that guards the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile and stole the personal records of at least 1,500 employees and contractors, a senior U.S. lawmaker said on Friday.
The target of the hacker, the National Nuclear Safety Administration, is the latest agency to reveal that sensitive private information about government workers was stolen.’
`The people in the pictures below have my friend’s T-Mobile Sidekick. Instead of doing the honorable thing when finding someone’s phone in a taxi, they instead kept it. [..]
When my friend realized that she had left the Sidekick in the taxi she asked me to immediately send a message to the phone saying that we would give a reward for the phone. There was no response. After a day of waiting, she had to go to the store and spend over $300 on a new Sidekick. When she put her SIM card in, she saw that the person(s) that had taken the phone had not only signed on to AOL leaving their name and password in the phone, but they had taken pictures of themselves.’
`Microsoft executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.
It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.
Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.
He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.’
`The outsourcing revolution has come to an unlikely place: the drive-through window at your local McDonald’s quick-service restuarant (that’s “fast food joint” in English). No longer just a way for companies to cut costs on their helpline or offer inexpensive tutoring over the Web, outsourcing is now seen as way to make the drive-through experience more efficient, which translates into more cheeseburgers sold. [..]
The system is currently a trial project that serves 40 McDonald’s in the US (including Hawaii). When a customer rolls up to the order board, their conversation is actually routed across the Internet to someone working in a California call center. Call center employees are specifically trained to be fast, polite, and to upsell—or, as Joseph Fleischer of Call Center Magazine describes it, “advising the customer on getting more out of the product.” The employee then enters the order into a computer, which routes it back over the Internet to the local McDonald’s, which assembles the requested items.’
`There is no subtle way to say this: Brian Walker plans to shoot himself nearly 20 miles into the air aboard a homemade rocket launched from what could be the world’s largest crossbow. (Seriously.) [..]
Walker’s idea of fun? Stretch a carbon-fiber bowstring 24 feet along a rail, fire up a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, hit a trigger, and pull 10 gs as his craft, modeled on spaceships from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, shoots to the stratosphere. He’ll plummet back to Earth using hydrogen peroxide rockets (the propulsion system used in 1950s jet packs) to slow his descent.’
`Still, when it comes to grand ambition, the impresarios of the Strip are mere pikers next to Budget Suites owner Robert Bigelow. For his next hotel enterprise, Bigelow is looking beyond the bright lights of Las Vegas—beyond Earth’s atmosphere, in fact. He is actively engaged in an effort to build the planet’s first orbiting space hotel. Bargain-basement room rate: $1 million a night. For its water show, this hotel will have all of Earth’s blue oceans flying past its windows at 17,500 miles an hour. Guests on board the 330-cubic-meter station (about the size of a three-bedroom house) will learn weightless acrobatics, marvel at the ever-changing face of the home planet, and, for half of every 90-minute orbit, gaze deep into a galaxy ablaze with stars.’
`A council planning department was hit by chaos — after computers banned “erection” from emails.
The word is one of the most commonly used terms in applications for building works.
But it was also included in a list of obscene expressions to be filtered out by software used by Rochdale Council, Greater Manchester. [..]
A Rochdale Council spokesman said: “The software is not designed by the council and we don’t control which words are blocked. We will be apologising to the resident.”’
`Police in Germany have charged 3,500 users of a file-sharing network in the biggest single action against the illegal distribution of music online.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) – the record industry’s global body – said each could face five years in prison.
They may also have to pay compensation for offering up to 8,000 files at a time for download on the eDonkey site.
The investigation led to searches in 130 locations across Germany.’
`At its worst, when downloading major copyrighted torrents, as much as a fourth of the peers you are connected to can be attributed to various Anti-P2P agencies. There is also a much more serious side to this. Once you’ve established a connection to one of these fake “peers”, your IP has been logged and will most likely be sent to the RIAA/MPAA!
But there is a way to fight back! [..]’
Time domain nenchmarks of some PHP functions.
`Presenting the world’s first hard drive, first introduced in 1956 — IBM’s 5MB Random Access Memory Accounting: RAMAC®, magnetic-disk memory storage. It stored information on fifty disks, which spun at 1,200 rpm.’
`A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.
ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.’
`Volunteers will test Vista Beta 2, a near-final version of the much-hyped upgrade of Windows. The testing is the last step leading up to Vista’s broad consumer release, scheduled for January.
Beta 2 testers can expect to encounter an obtrusive security feature, called User Account Control (UAC). Designed to prevent intruders from performing harmful tasks, the feature grays out the computer screen, then prods you to confirm that you really want to do certain functions.
In early test versions, the queries crop up so often that they interrupt routine tasks, such as changing the time clock or deleting shortcuts. And UAC sometimes triggers an endless loop of dialogue boxes that can be curtailed only by rebooting, says Paul Thurrott, news editor of Windows IT Pro magazine.
“Microsoft completely botched UAC,” Thurrott says. “It’s almost criminal in its insidiousness.”‘
`Welcome to the LeapFish.com Domain Name Resource Center. At our site, you are able to recieve a free domain name analysis and estimated appraisal. You can also find many other domain name resources and interesting articles worth checking out and if you are unable to find what you are looking for, our forums have knowledgeable people who are willing to help with any of your questions.’
moonbuggy.org is apparently worth $11,616.00. I’m rich. Ha! 🙂
`Transferring music from CDS onto iPods and other MP3 players will no longer be illegal after federal cabinet agreed to make sweeping changes to copyright laws.
But beware the trap of downloading from the internet. The Government will increase surveillance and fines on internet piracy in a package to be announced by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock today.
Once the new laws are passed, “format shifting” of music, newspapers and books from personal collections onto MP3 players will become legal. The new laws will also make it legal for people to tape television and radio programs for playback later, a practice currently prohibited although millions of people regularly do it.’
`Ageing and unreliable office computers are making workers unhappy and more likely to claim sick leave, a new survey shows.
A poll conducted by Tickbox.net of more 2,700 European office workers from Britain, France and Germany found that workplace dissatisfaction increased significantly with the age of computer equipment.
British and French respondents said working on outdated computers was the most irritating aspect of office life.’
`The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine is the most powerful and most efficient prime-mover in the world today. The Aioi Works of Japan’s Diesel United, Ltd built the first engines and is where some of these pictures were taken.
It is available in 6 through 14 cylinder versions, all are inline engines. These engines were designed primarily for very large container ships. Ship owners like a single engine/single propeller design and the new generation of larger container ships needed a bigger engine to propel them.
The cylinder bore is just under 38″ and the stroke is just over 98″. Each cylinder displaces 111,143 cubic inches (1820 liters) and produces 7780 horsepower. Total displacement comes out to 1,556,002 cubic inches (25,480 liters) for the fourteen cylinder version.’
`Dance Dance Revolution. With Flamethrowers. Pointed at you.’
`The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.’
`The advent of high-definition TV has forced technicians and set designers back to the drawing board as the sharper detail in the new technology reveals all flaws.
BBC designers have been forced to rethink how to simulate fake blood and wounds for medical shows such as Casualty, while many TV stars are reported to be fearful of how their imperfections might show up under the unforgiving glare of the HD camera.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “HD-TV picks up red especially vividly and we can no longer get away with the traditional stage blood, using ketchup and the like.”
A Sky TV spokeswoman said: “It is giving rise to all kinds of little things that the industry never really thought about. Even things like cheap cutlery in a supposedly upper class-scene now get picked out.”‘
`Japanese and US aerospace agencies and companies plan to develop a low-noise, fuel-efficient supersonic jet to take off where the Anglo-French Concorde ended, a press report said. [..]
The research and development cost of the Japan-US project is estimated to reach “several hundred” billion yen, the daily added. Currently, one hundred billion yen is worth some 880 million dollars. [..]
The Japanese side reportedly aims to develop a plane that would travel at the same speed as the Concorde but would produce just one percent of the noise.
Japan hopes to put on the market in about 2020 a supersonic jetliner with a capacity of 200-300 seats that could travel between Tokyo and Los Angeles in five hours — about half the current flight time.’
`Here is the Space Cubed which is claimed to be the world’s smallest personal computer. At the size of 2 x 2 x 2.2 inch, it has a 300 MHz processor and 64MB of SDRAM. Shown in the picture, it includes number of ports such as USB, Ethernet, flash memory. monitor port, serial connection and microphone. Pocket PC anyone?’
2 x 2 x 2.2 isn’t a cube, if you ask me. Still, I want one. 🙂
