|
|
|
|
 CNET News.com | Ban 'Second Life' in schools and libraries, Republican congressman ... CNET News.com - Some politicos in the US Congress may be embracing Second Life (pictured here is California Democrat George Miller's press conference in the virtual world last year). Second Life a danger to children? Lawmaker trawls for votes A Second Leader For Second Life |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 GamePro.com | Sony: LittleBigPlanet hitting the PlayStation Store in October Ars Technica - By Michael Thompson | Published: May 07, 2008 - 09:05AM CT Over at the SCEE Playstation Day in London, Kaz Hirai announced that LittleBigPlanet is finally going to makes its way onto consoles in October. Sony: PS3 the New FPS Home, Killzone 2 Delayed Sony PlayStation's 'Home' Delayed Again |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I said then that I would resign my Virgin account over this, and now that I'm back in London, I've been able to look up my account number and send off the following letter (they have 28 days to respond, and I'll post their reply here too):
Complaints,Link
Virgin Media,
PO Box 333,
Matrix Court,
Swansea SA7 9ZJMay 7, 2008
To Whom it May Concern:
We are writing to you today to cancel our Virgin Broadband account, having read the remarks of your new CEO, Neil Berkett, in which he described the idea of Net Neutrality as "bollocks," promising that any Internet service that failed to pay off Virgin to deliver its packets would be put into the "Internet bus lane."
We contracted with Virgin Broadband to provide us with access to the Internet, on the implicit understanding that Virgin would supply us with the packets we requested at the highest speeds it could manage. We did not sign up to be used as tokens in a tawdry game in which Virgin demands back-handers from the world's websites in exchange for access to us. We want to access the Internet, not be traded to another inmate for two packs of cigarettes.
We believe that this is a material violation of our agreement with Virgin, that Virgin has substantially altered the nature of the service we are paying for. Therefore in accordance with your own terms and conditions, para, J4, "If we and/or Virgin Media Payments break the terms and conditions of this agreement, you're free to end this agreement" we would ask you to terminate my contract without any penalties or fees.
Sincerely,
See also: Virgin Media CEO: Net neutrality is "bollocks," promises to breach agreement with customers
 The Money Times | Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto 4 sales top $500 million Reuters - NEW YORK (Reuters) - Software publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday said it sold some 6 million units of its criminal action game "Grand Theft Auto 4" in its first week, with estimated retail sales ... GTA Ads Yanked in Chicago: Game Maker Calls in Lawers Not Thugs  Comment by Gavin McKiernan National Grassroots Director, Parents TV Council |
Sunday night, I fly to Chicago to kick off my three-week US book-tour for Little Brother, my new young adult novel. I'll be stopping in and around Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco and (probably) New York. The schedule's still being firmed up, but Tor (my publisher) is keeping an up-to-the-minute schedule for each appearance. This is my first publisher-financed tour, and I'm incredibly excited! I hope to meet lots of you on the road!
Link
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wyden delivered his ultimatum at a Computer & Communications Industry Association conference in DC, where he cast the entire network neutrality debate in terms of a legislative compromise. Years ago, Congress began protecting ISPs from the twin threats of regulation and taxation; in return, ISPs were expected to deliver an unimpeded connection to the Internet. A move away from a neutral 'Net would undermine the "very philosophical underpinnings of what we fought for for the last 15 years," according to Wyden. If that happens, he sees no reason for Congress to continue sheltering ISPs.Link
Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson recently spent a week in the woods with a backpack full of electronics, to see if he could work on the internet in the wild using only solar power and his bare hands. This video reveals to the world, for the very first time, what happened to all those bears.
Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.
Link
1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they're going, but remember: dandelions don't keep track of their seeds. Once you get past the vanity of knowing exactly how many copies have been made, and find the zen of knowing that the copying will take care of itself, you'll attain dandelionesque contentment.2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.
I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That's because "I should buy a copy of this book" is inevitably followed by, "Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!" and the moment, as they say, is gone.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
During a break in the festivities at this weekend's massive MakerFaire in San Mateo, Boing Boing pal Aaron Muszalski was kind enough to model the stylish Boing Boing tshirt designed by Coop before my phonecam, to remind you that a modest quantity of these tshirts are still available for purchase on ye olde internets. They're still $22.95-$23.95, and they still glow in the dark, and they're still really cool.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stephanie Holinka of Sandia National Laboratories tells Boing Boing,
We are sad to report the death of former Sandia Labs Director Morgan Sparks. He's best known as the Bell Labs researcher who invented the first practical transistor. His work made possible so many other inventions. Without transistors, one cannot begin to imagine personal computers, cell phones, DVD players and the many other electronic devices we rely on daily. His contributions are pretty humbling to mere English majors like me.Link to a news story about his passing; here's a profile on PBS.org for the "Transistorized!" documentary.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I was pleased to see the recent news about alien images appearing on a wall in Canada.
If you haven't seen the story, the upshot is that some reflected light shows up every non-overcast day on someone's house in Calgary, and the resulting image looks something like a cross between Gollum and the Reddit mascot. Thus, aliens.
This is nonsense, unfortunately. I would love for even one of the completely wall-slappingly insane phenomena that bubble up these days to be true.
If even one funnel-shaped cloud or particularly reflective seagull ended up being an actual alien craft, if even one person's Pomeranian really did house the mind of an ancient Egyptian emperor, if even one winged hominid got run over by a meth-infused trucker and examined by reputable scientists, then I could be happy in a world that's even weirder than it initially appears to be. Tragically, though, none of them pan out in the long run.
And yet, people keep devising theories. Some, not content to come up with explanations for unexplained phenomena, instead go to great lengths to come up with bizarre takes on explained phenomena.
On some videos and photos, you can see odd smudges made up of a straight line with a sort of twirly fuzz around it. What are these things? Well, one theory is that they are creatures living in the atmosphere, invisible to the naked eye but for some reason able to be caught on videotape.
This theory is wrong. While I love the idea that your basic handheld Panasonic camera has mystical-vision powers, the fact is that you can capture "rod" video of your own by pointing a camera set to a slow shutter speed at a bunch of insects. The paranormal response? Yeah, those rods are insects, but there are other rods that are visually identical to the insects, but which are actually rods!
If rods are too interesting for you, check out orbs. Where rods take the form of moving blurs, orbs manifest themselves as roughly circular blobs. Spine-chillingly circular!
Here's how it works. You take a photo of something with your cheapie digital camera, and the picture has a translucent gray dot on it. Clearly there's no explicable way for weird little visual artifacts to end up on digital photos, so they must be the spirits of the departed. This one's just sad. It's like you want to see Bigfoot, but you hate camping, so you just classify the dust bunnies under the couch as cryptids and call it a day.
I'm being a bit unfair here, because crowd demons aren't really a well-known phenomenon among the desperately wacky crowd, but the idea is so deliciously stupid I'm highlighting it here in hopes it will catch on.
On the GhostStudy.com website, you'll find a photo that purportedly shows two demons sitting next to each other at a musical recital. The site suggests that if you look long enough you'll see a shadow ghost.
It also says it shows "a dinosaur attacking a man (however, this is most likely an illusion)."
Yeah, most likely. There is less than a 50 percent chance that the photo actually shows a demon dinosaur eating a guy's head. Another guy found a bunch of crowd demons at a Republican rally. I'm not actually seeing most of those, but maybe I just don't have the patience to play a proper game of Where's Weirdo?
As obvious as the rational explanations for all these phenomena are, I'm a bit sad. I'd enjoy living in a world filled with normally invisible creatures that only show their true, blurry forms on discount audiovisual equipment. Kind of like YouTube, only with more flying and fewer anime clips.
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a Jersey Devil, a Dover Demon and a Pittsburgh Penguin.
The Pentagon has quietly been working on a new arsenal of advanced weaponry that replaces metal casings with "reactive materials," normally harmless matter that combines to release explosive amounts of energy on impact, tearing targets apart with violent fury.
In development for more than 30 years, the research is beginning to bear fruit, and may soon spawn more powerful bombs, warheads that tear apart stone and concrete, mines that can be set to stun or kill, and grenades that can swat rockets or mortar rounds out of the sky like flies.
"You can get effects that are more precisely tailored to a particular target," says John Pike, director of Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org. "And you're able to get a greater effect out of a smaller munition."
Reactive materials are combinations of materials that are normally stable, but, when subjected to sudden shock -- such as striking a target -- release a large amount of energy. Depending on the composition and warhead design, the energy can be released as heat, a blast or a combination of the two. Unlike conventional explosives, RMs cannot be set off by fuses. Technically, they are classified as flammable solids, and they are less hazardous to transport and store than explosives.
While they're more energetic than explosives, RMs are not intended to be a substitute. Instead, they will replace warhead components normally made of metal.
An analysis of U.S. military procurement papers and defense contractor presentations, as well as interviews with companies working on the technology, suggests that a wave of munitions using reactive materials may be headed for a battlefield near you.
The material can dramatically magnify the yield of conventional bombs, and do away with the waste embodied by a bomb's inert metal skin. The U.S. Air Force's 5,000 BLU-122 bunker buster, for example, contains just 780 pounds of explosives; the other 80 percent is the bomb's thick steel casing. DARPA's Reactive Munition program (.doc) aims to replace that steel with RMs, to create a bomb with a blast four times as powerful. Alternatively, a new bomb could be half the size of existing weapons but twice as powerful.
Conventional warheads could also benefit from an RM makeover. For centuries, shells have blasted out steel shrapnel, small pieces of metal that cause damage with their high speed. Defense contractor Alliant Techsystems is developing a warhead called BattleAxe for the Air Force that uses fragments made of RM instead of metal. Those fragments will explode on impact, making the warhead far more effective against soft targets like trucks.
RM shrapnel is also being touted as the ideal way of shooting down incoming rockets and mortar bombs (.pdf).
A radar-guided defense pod can automatically engage incoming rockets or other threats using RM-based grenades. Weapons designers suggest that RMs can be five to ten times as effective as the existing inert shrapnel for this task. Moreover, RM shrapnel can be engineered to burn out at a set distance, so there is no hazard to nearby friendly forces.
Bullets can even be made of RM. The Navy's new electromagnetic railgun has been criticized because it can only fire solid slugs, not the usual explosive shells. However, documents reveal that tungsten-based RM rounds are being developed for the weapon. These will explode on impact, making the railgun effective against buildings, ships and vehicles.
Shaped charges are another application where RMs can increase the effectiveness of existing designs. In a shaped charge, a hollow metal cone is surrounded by explosive material, which is then detonated, forcing the blast through the small end of the cone.
"The action is analogous to stamping on an open toothpaste tube, ejecting the liquid contents," says Douglas Millard of British defense contractors QinetiQ.
Replace the metal liner with RM, and the explosive power of that jet will increase dramatically.
"Such reactions are highly exothermic and therefore lead to the release of large amounts of energy, which is in addition to the kinetic energy within the jet," Millard says. "An increase in the energy coupled into the target occurs and this results in the creation of greater damage to the target."
QinetiQ is marketing an RM-based shaped charge called Connex for oil-well perforation in the civil market. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is developing a demolition charge called Bam Bam that blasts a jet of RM deep into stone or concrete, producing massive damage
One version of the Bam Bam charge is intended for demolishing bridges and other structures. An alternative version blasts broader, shallower craters in roads or runways, making them useless.
RMs will also transform another mutation called the Explosively Formed Penetrator, a modified version of the shaped charge. Instead of producing a narrow, short-range jet, the Penetrator fires an aerodynamic slug of metal over a long distance. It's best known as a favored weapon of insurgents in Iraq. Again, replacing the metal with RM makes a much deadlier weapon -- after punching through armor, the slug releases energy like a grenade going off.
If you're a weapons designer, RMs also offer amazing flexibility. Alliant Techsystems is building a variable landmine (.pps) -- a so-called "dial-a-yield" weapon that can produce a range of different effects.
At the lowest setting, most of the output would be light -- a dazzling warning that would be impossible to miss. A higher setting would produce intense heat, creating a "discomfort zone" to drive off intruders. The third setting produces a nonlethal blast, like the concussion stun grenades used by Special Forces. If lethal force is called for, the mine could be set to produce either inert shrapnel or reactive shrapnel that explodes on impact.
RM munitions may face legal challenges. Under the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the use of explosive projectiles with a weight of less than 400 grams is forbidden, as is using incendiary ammunition, like napalm, against personnel. But RMs are not technically explosive or incendiary, and although the effect on human targets might cause protests from some groups, they are likely to be accepted, human rights experts say.
"Like any weapon, it would have to go through a lengthy effectiveness and then legal review, " says Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. "If used in the open against military targets, it does not seem to have any obvious problems at first blush."
However, there may be technology issues too. Although the developers sound very upbeat in all their descriptions of RM munitions, producing material that will reliably release energy only when required is extremely challenging.
"The fact that they've been working on it so long and don't seem to have fielded anything yet suggests that there may be a problem with the technology," GlobalSecurity's Pike says.
Normally new weapons are fielded rapidly if there is a military demand -- assuming they work. So far, RMs have not made it into the field, and the technology may not be as mature as developers suggest.
But Pike also notes that there has been an unprecedented surge in munitions development over the last few years, with "all kinds of weird stuff" being developed.
So after decades of being kept very quiet, reactive materials may soon be making a lot of noise.
---
Check out Danger Room for more on reactive materials.
1895: Otto Steiger receives a patent for his Millionaire calculating machine. It may not have been fruitful, but it multiplied.
The history of calculators stretches back to the invention of the abacus around 2500 B.C. through early attempts by mathematicians like Blaise Pascal and various 19th-century machines, including Charles Babbage's famous difference engine. By the late 19th century, some of these mechanical wonders could add and subtract, but could only simulate multiplication through repeated addition.
Steiger, a German who lived in Munich, invented his machine in 1893. It advanced the ideas of Ramón Verea's 1878 U.S. patent and León Bollée's 1889 French patent. Neither had put his invention into commercial production. Verea just wanted to "show that a Spaniard can invent as well as an American," and Bollée -- who lived in Le Mans -- turned his efforts to building race cars.
The Millionaire used a complicated internal clockwork of carriage, cranks, cams, cogs, gears, levers, pins, shafts and sliders to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. For multiplication, each turn of the handle read a metallic multiplication table in Braille-like fashion to create a partial product. The device could carry 10s, so you turned the handle a second time for two-digit multipliers, three times for three digits, and so on.
Hans W. Egli of Zurich, Switzerland, manufactured 4,655 of the calculators (with the German name of Millionär) over a remarkable 40-year span for customers in Europe and America. Although it was developed for business calculations, scientists also found it very useful, and government agencies became the prime customers.
The price depended on whether you wanted a hand-operated or electric lever, or an upgraded model with a keyboard, which could likewise be either hand-operated or electric. U.S. prices in 1924 ranged from $475 all the way up to $1,100 ($5,900 to $13,750 in today's money).
The inside of the wooden case had extensive printed instructions and a special cleaning brush to keep the works free of dust and grit. At 100 to 120 pounds each, the Millionaire was a far cry from the first Texas Instruments pocket calculators of 1972 or the keychain calculators given away as promotional swag today.
(Source: Various)
 WKYC-TV | The science of cyclones MSNBC - The catastrophic cyclone that hit Myanmar hints at the shape of things to come in a warming world - but probably not for the reason you think. Inside the Burma Cyclone Bay is a focus for devastating storms |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 PSFK | EA launches Steven Spielberg's 'Boom Blox' CNET News.com - 'Boom Blox,' Electronic Arts' first game under its partnership with Steven Spielberg, launched Tuesday. It is a casual, level-based puzzle game. Steven Spielberg's Wii-Inspired Videogame Is a Demolitious Block Party 'Boom Blox' blasts star power |
Chris Tackett of Treehugger.com says: "I recall you doing this post on Isabella Rossellini's bug porn. The videos [called "Green Porno"] are now viewable, so we did a post about that." Link
Link (Thanks, Chris!)(Photo from MyWorldReviews.com) City Café doesn’t have Interac or accept credit cards. Neither will you see a cash register in the bakery. Instead, customers add up how much they owe themselves and drop their money into a fare box from an old bus.
“I liked the idea of simplifying things and ... the honour system made a whole lot of sense,” [owner John] Bergen says. “What irritated me about going into Tim Hortons, for example, was waiting in line for something as simple as getting a donut and a coffee. So the thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent of the transaction.”
Because it is up to the customers to total their purchases, Bergen has simplified the cost structure.
“Everything is rounded off to the nearest quarter with taxes included where applicable,” he says. “So every desert is $1.50 (tarts, brownies, and date squares), every pizza lunch is $5, every beverage is $1.25, every loaf of bread is $2.75 (Italian sourdough, multi-grain, and raisin bread on weekends), croissants are $1 each, and bagels are three for $2 (plain, sesame, and multi-grain).”
The bakery conducts audits every six months and Bergen says only once did things come up short.
“Our theory is that two per cent of our sales are being ripped off. ‘Ripped off’ in the sense that there are people who forget to pay or they make a mistake in paying, and then there are people who deliberately don’t pay. And every so often we have to kick somebody out that we know hasn’t been paying,” he says. “But at the same time we figure we’re being overpaid by three per cent. Some people come in and want a $2.75 loaf of bread, but they see we’re busy so they throw $3 in and walk out. Or, although we discourage tips, some people still give them to us. But because the staff is paid well (the average wage is $15.50 an hour), the tips go into the general pot.”
 CNET News.com | JavaOne: Sun rolls out JavaFX CNET News.com - James Gosling, the so-called father of Java, catapults T-shirts toward the JavaOne audience. SAN FRANCISCO--Following a flurry of T-shirts catapulted by Java creator James Gosling and a hot dance troop performance, 75 hours of JavaOne got under way ... Sun Bids For Rich Internet App Builders With JavaFX JavaFX’s day in the Sun |
 dBTechno | Microsoft Gets More Social With Zune Update InformationWeek - Users of the portable media player can now download friends' nine most recently played songs, as well as nine tunes flagged as favorites. NBC cozies up to iTunes UK and Zune, but not iTunes US Microsoft and Apple compete over TV downloads |
 Ars Technica | 'Consumer Reports': Apple tech support is aces CNET News.com - Apple has the best technical support in the PC industry, according to the most recent issue of Consumer Reports. An Apple customer gets some help at the Genius Bar inside a store in New York City. Apple tech support ranks #1 yet again with Consumer Reports Apple scores high on tech support |
 IT PRO | HP Brings Storage, Servers Into One Rack PC World - To help IT departments prepare for the coming onslaught of data, HP on Tuesday introduced a platform that combines storage and computing in one rack with a single file system and management console. HP strokes web 2.0 with immense NAS HP Unveils Scalable NAS For Web 2.0 |
 Business Wire (press release) | Yahoo Partners With McAfee To Make Search More Secure InformationWeek - The collaboration covers Web site security issues, such as identifying sites associated with adware, malware, spyware, phishing, and spam. McAfee deal aims to make Yahoo search safer McAfee launches web security push |
| World : News Archives | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Technology | Science | Marketplace Audio |
| India : News | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Telugu | |
| Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog |
| Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips | |
