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The Winged Cat Phenomena - Felines with Wings (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Fame can be so short on the Internet. A winged cat has already stolen the thunder of the four-eared cat, Yoda. Meet Tom, the unique winged cat which developed a pair of fur-covered...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 1:58 pm WestWing.com Launches and Debuts Collectible Barack Obama BobbleheadHAUPPAUGE, N.Y., Aug. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- With the presidential campaign in full swing, a brand new website -- WestWing.com -- promises to "bring the White House to...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:45 am Overland Storage Reduces Cost StructureRenews Focus on Execution of End-to-End Data Protection Strategy SAN DIEGO, Aug. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced a...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:30 am YouTube Comment Snob hides badly spelled, profane, poorly capitalized YouTube comments Here's an idea whose time has come: YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin'. It works pretty damned well, too. As XKCD has pointed out in the past, YouTube has the worst, just the worst comment-areas on the Internet. YouTube Comment Snob (via Making Light) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:25 am Hit Man Email Scammer Back With a Vengencecoondoggie writes "The online Hitman scammer, who threatens to kill recipients if they do not pay thousands of dollars to the sender, is still sending out thousands of emails and the FBI is again today warning users to ignore the spam and report any incidents to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Two new versions of the scheme began appearing in July 2008, the FBI said. One instructed the recipient to contact a telephone number contained in the e-mail and the other claimed the recipient or a 'loved one' was going to be kidnapped unless a ransom was paid."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:22 am Mad Magazine's War on Bush collection
Mad Magazine's "The Mad War on Bush" gathers a truly superlative collection of parodical and satirical material from eight years' worth of Mad lampoons between a single set of covers. As Jimmy Kimmel notes in his introduction to the book, there are many things to hate about the Bush regime, but it has been very, very kind to political satirists of all description.
Mad Magazine has had a glorious eight years with this presidency -- see, for example, the Gulf Wars Episode II poster (included as a full-size pullout, suitable for framing -- apparently the White House completely missed the joke here and used the poster internally as a morale booster; Sean Hannity showed it on his Fox "News" show!); the absolutely brilliant Dick Cheney shotgun accident cover, the NSA warrantless wiretapping poster (also included as a pull-out full-size item) and the bang-on "Bush campaign commercial if he was running against Jesus.
Mad's already warming up to have some fun with Obama, but at the end of the day, he's just not mush-mouthed, uncoordinated, and goofy to adequately serve the nation's satirists. Poor bastards.
The Mad War on Bush
Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:04 am Mad Magazine's War on Bush collectionMad Magazine's "The Mad War on Bush" gathers a truly superlative collection of parodical and satirical material from eight years' worth of Mad lampoons between a single set of covers. As Jimmy Kimmel...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:04 am Microsoft to buy Web-comparison shopping sitesMicrosoft Corp. is buying a Munich, Germany-based Web comparison shopping site and its parent company for about $486 million in cash. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker says the...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:03 am Microsoft to buy Web-comparison shopping sites (AP)AP - Microsoft Corp. is buying a Munich, Germany-based Web comparison shopping site and its parent company for about $486 million in cash.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:03 am Industry Leading Entrepreneurs, Investors and Journalists Debate the Tech Industry's Future at DEMOfall 08DEMOfall 08 will be held on September 7 - 9 at the at the Sheraton San Diego. SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass., Aug. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- DEMOfall 08 looks to be the biggest fall...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:00 am Plexus Announces Renewal of Shareholder Rights PlanNEENAH, Wis., Aug. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Plexus Corp. (Nasdaq: PLXS) today announced that its Board of Directors adopted a shareholder rights plan at a regularly...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 11:00 am Dell 2Q profit drops 17 per cent and stock plungesSlashing computer prices helped Dell Inc. boost sales in its fiscal second quarter, but the No. 2 PC maker's bottom line took a hit when efforts to cut costs failed to make up the...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:55 am Judge: Qualcomm violates Broadcom rulingSAN DIEGO - A federal judge ruled that Qualcomm Inc. violated a ban on wireless technology owned by rival chip maker Broadcom Corp., the companies said Thursday. U.S. District Judge...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:54 am Copper Conferencing Extends Free Web and Phone Conferencing to Businesses in the Twin Cities During the Republican National ConventionBROOMFIELD, Colo., Aug. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Copper Conferencing, a leading national provider of teleconferencing services, announced today it is offering free web...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:30 am Steve Jobs Is Alive - InformationWeek
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:28 am BBC Profiles Extradited Cracker Gary McKinnon - Slashdot
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:26 am Nintendo lifts profit, shares soar (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:13 am New Version of CimatronE Previewed at IMTSOffers New Capabilities for Mold, Die, Tool Makers and Manufacturers GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel, August 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- A new version of CimatronE, the leadingSource: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:07 am A worm on the space station - InfoWorld
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 10:03 am VisionChina Media Appoints Christopher Holbert Vice President of FinanceBEIJING, Aug. 29 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- VisionChina Media Inc. (Nasdaq: VISN), one of China's largest mass transportation mobile television advertising networks,...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 9:30 am Two Shuttles delayed by fuel tank questions - Register
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 9:18 am Build Your Own Block LightBy Luke Anderson As a child, many of us spent countless hours as young construction workers. No, we weren’t hundreds of feet in the air balancing on steel girders, but merely snapping together plastic...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:31 am Make Use Of That Old CardBus Slot With The ExpressAdaptBy Luke Anderson If you have an older laptop, there’s a good chance that you can’t take advantage of newer add-on cards. Since the introduction of the ExpressCard slot, many manufacturers have...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:22 am Chunky steel home-built pocket game systemOver on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's found this absolutely ugg-lovely homebrew pocket video-game system: It looks more like a Cold War era device for the remote detonation of nuclear warheads than...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:18 am Chunky steel home-built pocket game systemOver on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's found this absolutely ugg-lovely homebrew pocket video-game system:Meet the Pac-Man Mini, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:18 am BBC Profiles Extradited Cracker Gary McKinnonAn anonymous reader writes "The BBC has published a very good profile of Gary McKinnon. It discusses his motives and methods as well as raising the question as to whether he is a malicious 'hacker' or whether he was simply obsessed with finding info about UFOs and should be praised for finding security faults in what should be extremely secure systems. This should provided stimulus for some interesting discussion on Slashdot especially between us Brits and our American friends following the confirmation of his extradition to the USA."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:11 am Montgomery County's Intermodal SecrecyThe Montgomery County Board of Supervisors this week launched a last-ditch effort to block an intermodal rail yard planned for Elliston. Supervisors unleashed their lawyers, and thanks to a loophole in state law, they did it secretly. The lawsuit didn't come as a surprise.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Friday's Letters to the EditorBudget-savers Long Beach could reduce its budget deficit by eliminating street sweeping, and the personnel involved, including the ticket-writers. Residents could clean up the gutters in front of their homes, and do it better than the street-sweeping vehicles.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Dying Trees Scar Local ForestsBy Crable, Ad Umble, Chad AD CRABLE and CHAD UMBLE At the J. Edward Mack Boy Scout camp near Brickerville, officials this fall will reluctantly cut down trees killed by rampaging gypsy moths to keep the timber from falling on buildings occupied by Scouts. At popular Gov.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Most Turtle Nests IntactBy Teresa Stepzinski BRUNSWICK, Ga. - Tropical Storm Fay destroyed fewer loggerhead sea turtle nests on Georgia beaches than originally feared, state wildlife biologists said Monday. About 8 percent of the state's nests were lost, according to preliminary assessments.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Angling: WE'LL WING ITBy SILVER WILKIE THERE are some reasons why the swallows and their cousins, martins, are my favourite birds. I marvel at the courage of these tiny bundles that fly thousands of miles from southern Africa to spend the summer in the UK.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Development Approval DelayedConfusion concerning some requirements on an Evans property forced the Columbia County Planning Commission to postpone its consideration of the land's plat status Thursday..Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Inches of Rainfall Replenish River FlowsBy Janelle Rucker and Kevin Myatt The Roanoke Times Tropical Storm Fay's remnants dumped 3 to 7 inches of rain on much of drought-stricken Southwest Virginia on Tuesday and Wednesday, increasing water flow more than a hundredfold in one river that had been nearly dry.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Wisconsin Students Are the 2008 Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills Champs; Win a Week With Roush Fenway RacingBy Anonymous Crossing the finish line in 73 minutes and 40 seconds, aspiring auto technicians Paul Bretl and Chris Cheek, 2008 graduates of Grafton High School in Grafton, WI, drove their fully repaired 2008 Ford Focus to victory in the 59th annual Ford/AAA Auto Skills national finals.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Award for CopA POLICEMAN who saved a man's life by using the kiss of life is to receive an award. PC Lee Cockburn, 39, brought Robert Sinclair, 64, back from the brink when he fell unconscious in a car in Edinburgh last December.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Sports KidsFAMILIES are spending almost pounds 700 a year on children's sport, partly to tempt them away from sitting in front of the TV or computer, according to research by finance firm ING Direct. (c) 2008 Coventry Evening Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest LLC.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Rock Favorite, Alpha Rev, Signs With Hollywood RecordsDisney's Hollywood Records, home to The Jonas Brothers, Breaking Benjamin and Miley Cyrus, recently welcomed alternative rock band, Alpha Rev, to its roster. An established favorite in the southwest region, the band made the deal official on August 18th.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am /C O R R E C T I O N -- Real Girls Media Network, Inc./SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- DivineCaroline.com (http://www.divinecaroline.com/), the flagship site of Real Girls Media Network (RGM(TM)) and one of the leading Web sites for women, has launched the Love! This Site Awards to honor excellence in online women's lifestyle content.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Rasoul Will Debate Himself on YoutubeSam Rasoul, the Democratic candidate for Virginia's 6th Congressional District, had a bright idea: Have voters prepare questions on YouTube for all the candidates, select some and then have the candidates answer them on camera.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Next Week's Problem ...By Joan Burnie YOU mention the internet and chat rooms a lot. But you always warn people not to use them to find a partner. But I'm desperate. I have been completely on my own now for nearly 12 years. I left my husband and divorced him when I was 38.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Local Man's Business Allows Community NetworkingBy Neil Nisperos CHINO HILLS - Joe Alagna was born and raised in the Chicago area but has made Chino Hills his home for the past 19 years. A former sales and marketing businessman, Alagna now sells Web site domain names, which he said is a lucrative business.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Editorial: Prioritize Nation's Internet SecurityIF you're wondering why cyber thieves and other jackals have been getting away with their crimes, consider this: Some corporate firewalls are about as effective at stopping Internet hackers as your toy poodle is at stopping a burglar from entering your home.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Social Biochemistry: A Course CurriculumBy Snell, Joel C Marsh, Mitchell The article describes an elementary course in social biochemistry for social science majors. This offering assumes that nature and nurture are intertwined and explain human behavior. It is an upper division undergraduate course or graduate course. 1.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Tiny Triumph is a Big Leap ForwardBy John Ferguson SCOTS scientists have found a way to make tiny devices 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Communication Failure Causes Major Flight DelaysATLANTA - An electronic communication failure Tuesday at a Federal Aviation Administration facility in Geor-gia that processes flight plans for the eastern half of the U.S. caused mass flight delays around the country. The Northeast was hit hardest.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 29 Aug 2008 | 8:00 am Make Your Own Portable Atari GameBy Luke Anderson How often have you been sitting at a bus stop or stuck in line at the DMV wishing you could play some Pac-Man? Sure, if you’ve got an iPhone you could just use that to play. However,...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:55 am YouTube Comment Snob hides badly spelled, profane, poorly capitalized YouTube commentsHere's an idea who's time has come: YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin'. It works pretty...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:44 am Air Canada shaves fuel costs by eliminating life-jacketsAir Canada continues its race to the top of the list of the world's shittiest airlines by removing life-vests from its regional carrier Jazz, saving money on fuel in the process. In the event of a water crash, passengers can use their seat-cushions to float.Come to that, they can use their pillows: the last time I flew AC, you had to buy a "pillow" that consisted of a giant ziploc bag that you were supposed to inflate. Passengers in business class got the same "pillows," but they were "free" (except for the extra thousands of dollars for a business-class ticket). Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stuart said Thursday that Transport Canada regulations allow airlines to use flotation devices instead of life vests, provided the planes remain within 50 miles of shore.Emphasis mine. Airline removes life vests to lighten planes (via Neatorama) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:40 am Air Canada shaves fuel costs by eliminating life-jacketsAir Canada continues its race to the top of the list of the world's shittiest airlines by removing life-vests from its regional carrier Jazz, saving money on fuel in the process. In the event of a water...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:40 am Hanna and Gustav to Get Together Over Florida?Interesting graphic out from NOAA suggesting that, according to some models, soon-to-be Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna will join forces, sort of, over Florida in the coming days. Whats next...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:38 am CC licensed off-the-grid weaving cooperatives up for $1.5M prizeCameron sez, The non-profit Architecture for Humanity and Lulan Artisans are vying for $1.5M worth of funding to build weaving cooperatives in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and India. These centers will...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:35 am CC licensed off-the-grid weaving cooperatives up for $1.5M prizeCameron sez,Vote for Architecture for Humanity and Lulan at Amex Members Project (Thanks, Cameron!) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:35 am Quebec free software group suing over government's no-bid Microsoft contractsKurt sez, "FACIL, the Quebecois Free Software advocacy group, is suing the Quebec provincial government, accusing them of abusing a legal loophole to essentially create 'no-bid' government software contracts for Microsoft. For a province that once considered independence from Canada, never mind independence from indentured servitude to US corporations, this is sublimely ironic."Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software, FACIL contests government practices in the Superior Court Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:33 am Yankees will drag you out of the stadium if you try to go to the bathroom during "God Bless America"The Yankees are serious about their bizarre prohibition on going to the bathroom during the playing of "God Bless America" during the Seventh Inning Stretch: a man was dragged out of the stadium for daring to stand up and move around instead of singing a patriotic, religious song. I really like Tommy Smothers's formulation of the principle at work here: "America, where you're free to say anything you want, and you'd better not say what you're not supposed to!"NYPD Defends Ejecting Sox Fan from Yankee Stadium During "God Bless America" (Thanks, Bill!) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:30 am Bernie Ward sentenced to seven-plus years for child-porn conviction - San Francisco Chronicle
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:08 am Microsoft to buy Web-comparison shopping sitesMicrosoft Corp. is buying a Munich, Germany-based Web comparison shopping site and its parent company for about $486 million in cash.Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:04 am DNA databases blocked from the publicThe National Institutes of Health removes patients' genetic profiles from its website after a study reveals that a new type of analysis could confirm identities. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:00 am Ralph D. Feigin, 70; pediatrician built Baylor and Texas Children's Hospital into major teaching institutionsDr. Ralph D. Feigin, the pediatrician who built the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital into major teaching and research institutions and who wrote the book on children's infectious...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:00 am Blogger Kevin Cogill charged with felony in leak of Guns N' Roses songsThe Culver City man had posted nine songs from the yet-to-be released album 'Chinese Democracy.' He faces up to three years in prison and fines under a law cracking down on individual bootleggers. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:00 am Where technology and politics meetCompanies push their cellphone-related products at the Democratic convention. It must have been tough to be a...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 7:00 am Comcast limits customers to 250 gigs a monthStarting October 1, roundly hated broadband provider Comcast will begin officially capping consumer use at 250 gigs a month, according to the company's recently-updated Frequently Asked Questions about Excessive Use.If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use.Comcast to limit customers' broadband usage (Reuters) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 6:45 am Podcasts' popularity surges in US, says Pew surveyInternet users are increasingly time-shifting their media consumption by downloading podcasts to watch or listen later, according to a US study.A research group looking into the habits of web users, the...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 6:11 am Pystar countersues Apple on antitrust grounds - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 5:20 am MIT Secretly Built Mega-Efficient Nano Batteriesmattnyc99 writes "There was plenty of chatter last week about an MIT announcement that researcher Angela Belcher had developed a way to create virus-based nanoscale batteries to power mini gadgets of the future. In a fascinating followup at Popular Mechanics, Belcher now says that her unpublished work includes full-scale models of the batteries themselves, and that they could power everything from cars and laptops to medical devices and wearable armor. Quoting: 'We haven't ruled out cars. That's a lot of amplification. But right now the thing is trying to make the best material possible, and if we get a really great material, then we have to think about how do you scale it.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 29 Aug 2008 | 5:14 am Judge: Qualcomm violates Broadcom ruling (AP)AP - A federal judge ruled that Qualcomm Inc. violated a ban on wireless technology owned by rival chip maker Broadcom Corp., the companies said Thursday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Aug 2008 | 5:01 am Farm Sanctuary Issues Statement Addressing Russian Ban on U.S. PoultryToday, Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, the nation's leading farm animal protection organization, issued a statement on Russia's decision to ban the import of meat from 19 U.S.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 29 Aug 2008 | 5:00 am Comcast To Roll out Monthly Usage Cap - Washington Post
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 4:46 am Aug. 29, 1965: Long-Distance Calling ... Very Long Distance1965: An astronaut in space holds a conversation with an aquanaut underwater, marking another milestone in human communication. Astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting the Earth with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5, hooked up by radiotelephone with an old pal, astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was living and working 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California, aboard Sealab II. The two men had known each other since 1959, when they were among the seven pilots chosen by NASA to be America's first Project Mercury astronauts. Carpenter, a former Navy pilot, had already been in space, the solo astronaut on a mistake-plagued, three-orbit flight aboard Aurora 7 that resulted in his being effectively grounded. He was on leave from the space agency when he joined the Navy's Sealab II project as training officer. Carpenter eventually resigned from NASA in 1967. He retired from the Navy in 1969. Cooper and Conrad, meanwhile, were nearing the end of an eight-day orbital mission to test human endurance in space. Eight days was recognized as the time needed to travel to the moon and back. (Five days was the longest Soviet space flight before then, and the American record was four days. By years' end, American astronauts would complete a 14-day mission in space.) The radio hookup was partly a gimmick, to take advantage of Carpenter's astronaut status to publicize the Sealab II project. But it was also a method of testing the effectiveness of an underwater electronics lab installed aboard the submersible. Gemini 5 was not the only long-distance call made from Sealab II. The Navy aquanauts also spoke with President Johnson at the White House and with Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf 3 team, French colleagues conducting a similar underwater-habitat test off Cap Ferrat in the Mediterranean Sea. Following their chat with Carpenter, Cooper and Conrad readied Gemini 5 for its return to Earth and splashed down in the very same Pacific Ocean later that day. Thirty years later, in 1995, Carpenter recreated his seabed-to-space call, chatting with astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor while staying at Jules' Undersea Lodge off Key Largo, Florida. Source: Various 
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 4:00 am Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the WorldsTonight's subject at the History Book Club: the Vikings. This is primo stuff for the men who gather once a month in Seattle to gab about some long-gone era or icon, from early Romans to Frederick the Great. You really can't beat tales of merciless Scandinavian pirate forays and bloody ninth-century clashes. To complement the evening's topic, one clubber is bringing mead. The dinner, of course, is meat cooked over fire. "Damp will be the weather, yet hot the pyre in my backyard," read the email invite, written by host Njall Mildew-Beard. That's Neal Stephenson, best-selling novelist, cult science fictionist, and literary channeler of the hacker mindset. For Stephenson, whose books mash up past, present, and future—and whose hotly awaited new work imagines an entire planet, with 7,000 years of its own history—the HBC is a way to mix background reading and socializing. "Neal was already doing the research," says computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith, who used to host the club until he moved from a house to a less convenient downtown apartment. "So why not read the books and talk about them, too?" With his shaved head and (mildewless) beard, Stephenson could cut something of an imposing figure. But his demeanor is gentle, his comments droll and understated. ("He's on the shy side," Smith says. "A strong ego, but nicely hidden.") The session moves out of his kitchen, and a half dozen HBCers—including a litigator, a commercial real estate agent, and a chef/barkeep/PR guy—pull up chairs around the dining room table to talk and compare notes. Harald Bluetooth, Erik Bloodaxe, and Halfdan the Black are dispatched in a couple of hours. But before the members split for the night, they detour to the basement to see Stephenson's workshop, where he has an impressive assortment of metalworking tools to help him on his current DIY project: a scary-looking steel helmet to protect the shiny Stephenson noggin from accidental scalp removal while indulging in his recent passion, Western martial arts. This is the polite term for going medieval with swords and daggers. It's a hobby the author picked up during research for the Baroque Cycle, his three-volume, 2,688-page tribute to 18th-century science, philosophy, and swordplay. (Stephenson owns 12 swords.) He proudly demonstrates his welding setup—a bossing mallet to pound steel sheets and a 5-foot-high metal-shaping device called an English wheel. That particular tool once cost thousands of dollars but, thanks to Asian manufacturing, is now available at Harbor Freight hardware stores for less than $300. Unmentioned is the other work performed in Njall Mildew-Beard's basement, the work involving intense eruptions of imagination that result in books the size of cinder blocks. These have made Stephenson the most avidly followed science fiction writer of his generation. His breakthrough 1992 novel, Snow Crash, has served as a blueprint for real computer scientists attempting the creation of virtual worlds. His deep understanding of not only computers but the people who go nuts over them has made him a god among the geek set. Salon called him the "poet laureate of hacker culture." Fanboys track his movements on blogs and try to top one another with praise on Amazon.com reviews. But Stephenson's sprawling, Pynchon-esque works transcend his cult status and are having an impact on the mainstream literary world. His last four books have all hit the New York Times best-seller list. Only a few months ago, another epic bubbled up from his basement. Anathem, Stephenson's ninth novel, is set for release on September 9. The Nealosphere, of course, is over the top with anticipation. This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely. Oh, and Stephenson manages to do it all in only 960 pages. Set on a planet called Arbe (pronounced "arb"), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avaunt, or "auts," who live a monastic existence defined by intellectual activity and circumscribed rituals. Freed from the pressures of pedestrian life, the avaunt view time differently. Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries. The avaunt are separated into four groups, distinguished by the amount of time they are isolated from the outside world and each other. Unarians stay inside the wall for a year. Decenarians can venture outside only once a decade. Centenarians are locked in for a hundred years, and Millennarians—long-lifespanners who are endowed with Yoda-esque wisdom—emerge only in years ending in triple zeros. Stephenson centers his narrative around a crisis that jars this system—a crisis that allows him to introduce action scenes worthy of Buck Rogers and even a bit of martial arts. It's a rather complicated setup; fortunately, there's a detailed timeline and 20-page glossary to help the reader decode things. Stephenson says the story was inspired by the real-life Millennium Clock, a project thought up by inventor Danny Hillis and developed by the Long Now Foundation. The nub of the endeavor is the construction of a clock that has the mother of all warranties: It's built to last 10,000 years. Hillis conceived it to mitigate the mega-rapidity of the digital world. He was working on a massively parallel supercomputer, the Connection Machine, designed to scale to a million processors, and found himself obsessed with speed, slicing seconds into billions of pieces. "I was going for faster, faster, faster. But something in me was rejecting that," Hillis explained to me back in 1999, when he launched the project. "It wasn't clear that the world needed faster, faster, faster. So I began thinking about the opposite. Working on the fastest machine in the world got me thinking about the slowest." How slow? Hillis' timepiece would tick once a year, its insides would bong once a century, and the cuckoo would appear once a millennium. Building the clock, it turns out, has been an antidote to the toxic fixation on short-term thinking that permeates our culture. Hillis and the friends who joined him—like fellow Long Now cofounders Stewart Brand (who wrote a book about the project) and Brian Eno (who composed a CD of chimes inspired by the clock)—found that its design and construction required recalibrating one's own mental clock to envision what things would be like in the distant future. Ideally, that mindset encourages behavior that tends to preserve the environment for clock customers in the year 12000, instead of gobbling up resources and leaving behind trash that tends to mess things up for those folks. Or so goes the thinking of the project's goofily optimistic supporters. Back at the launch, Brand marveled at the notion of looking so far beyond the temporal horizon. "It's the only 10,000-year-forward thing I know of," he said, "outside of science fiction, where it's fairly common." Enter Neal Stephenson. He first heard about the clock from Hillis and Brand at the annual Hackers Conference, and in 1999 the Long Now asked him and a few others to share some thoughts for its Web site. "In my little back-of-the-napkin sketch, I drew a picture showing a clock with concentric walls around it," he says over lunch in downtown Seattle the day after the book club meeting. "I proposed that you could have a system of gates where it was open for a while at a certain time of year, or decade, or whatever, when you could go in and out freely. But if you were inside it when the gate closed, you'd be making a commitment to stay in until it opened again. And I talked about clock monks who would tend the clock. I put that idea in cold storage because I was working on the Baroque Cycle. When I recovered, I decided, what the hell, I'm just going to try writing this." Stephenson measures his novels not by word count but by visually assessing the printout. "You've got manuscripts that are relatively short, and then you've got manuscripts that are taller than they are wide, and then you've got ones that are taller than they are long." Anathem falls into category three. "I was thinking shorter, but once you've done all the work to build the project and get the reader into it, there's the temptation to keep it going," he says. In a sense, the length of Anathem, as well as its challenges to the reader, are part of its theme. Despite the monastic trappings of the clock-tenders, the avaunt are not driven by faith. What binds them is a commitment to logic and rationality. The robes and rituals, Stephenson says, are not religion but "their way of glorifying and expressing respect for ideas and thinkers that are important to them." Outside the walls ("extramuros," as the term goes—by the time you're a couple of hundred pages in, this language thing begins to fall in place), people zip around in an ADD haze of fast-food joints, persistent gadgets (instead of CrackBerry, they are addicted to handheld "jeejahs"), and evangelical religion. Stephenson sees a parallel to the George W. Bush-era wars between science and religion, made possible because the general population is either indifferent or hostile to extended rational thought. "I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head," he says. "People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart." Hillis is thrilled about Stephenson's choice of subject matter. "One of the more interesting things about the project has been what anybody adds to it," he says. "Clearly, Neal's imagination is extraordinary. He creates a whole world in his mind; he's got every building imagined in more detail than it's described in the book." Long Now executive director Alexander Rose is also delighted but makes it clear that Stephenson's ideas aren't exactly in sync with the foundation's plans, which include construction of the clock inside a mountain in eastern Nevada, where it will draw power from temperature changes and visitors stopping by to wind it. "We're not planning on locking up people for thousands of years," he says. In every Neal Stephenson novel, there are characters who regard the world with an insatiable yet bemused curiosity; they are fascinated with the way things work and are forever eager to lay on hands, tinker, tweak, and obsess. In other words, they're hackers. In Anathem, the narrator, Erasmas, though not a techie, shares this trait. So does the author. Stephenson was born in 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland, a son of academics (his dad taught electrical engineering; his mother was a biochemistry researcher). He grew up in the college town of Ames, Iowa, a self-described theater geek who also had a streak of the hacker in him. "I played the role of Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and on the technical side made a full-size mechanical Kong hand that, at one point in the play, reaches through a window and drags somebody offstage," he says. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 and moved to Seattle with his wife, Ellen, who did her medical residency there. His early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. "We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we'd still be OK." They didn't come close, and in 1991, Stephenson says, his career "was moving along at low rpms." Then he wrote Snow Crash, a book that postulated the Metaverse, an exquisitely fleshed-out vision of a digital alternative world, and Stephenson found himself at the front ranks of cyberpunk authors. "I was sort of going for broke with Snow Crash," he told me a few years back. "I had tried to write stuff that was more conventional and that would be appealing to a large audience, and it didn't work. I figured I would just go for broke, write something really weird, and not be so worried about whether it was a good career move or not." Other triumphs followed—The Diamond Age, a near-future chronicle set in Shanghai in which a young woman owns a nanotech book that puts the Kindle to shame; Cryptonomicon, a multithreaded excursion into the wonders of cryptography; and the ultimate steampunker, the Baroque Cycle, which rocketed the mathematical conflicts between Newton and Leibniz to best-sellerdom. Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there. "In Neal's books, he's been fantastically good at creating scenarios and technologies that are purely imaginary," Myhrvold says. "But they're much easier imagined than built. So we spend a certain amount of our time imagining them but the rest of our time building them. It's also very cool but different to say, 'Let's come up with new ways of doing brain surgery.'" That's right—brain surgery is one of the things Stephenson is tinkering with. He and his team are helping refine some mechanical aspects of a new tool, a helical needle for operating on brain tumors. It's the kind of cool job one of his characters might have. Which indicates that Stephenson's afternoon job, besides letting him get his hands dirty on weird machines, is maybe not so different from the activity he undertakes in his basement. Myhrvold, while making sure his company is decidedly commercial, is still a sucker for big ideas from big brains. He's also a major funder of the Long Now and even has a prototype of the 10,000-year clock in his home. It makes sense that people like Stephenson and Myhrvold are drawn to the Long Now's cosmically improbable but cerebrally galvanizing effort. "It's an insanely ambitious project; it is a total folly," Brand says of the clock effort. "It presents itself as rational, but that's like presenting the pyramids as rational. You can argue with it, but if you put it out there as this gonzo, over-the-top-crazy but weirdly plausible, adventurous thing to do, then people want to be part of it. About two out of 10 light up, and the other eight are going, 'Don't you have something better to do with your time?'" Hey, that sounds like the reaction to a Neal Stephenson novel. This fall, Stephenson will reluctantly break from his cherished routines to promote Anathem. "If I had to do a book tour every day it would kill me. But four weeks every four years isn't too much to ask," he says. The tinkerer in him has stuffed some extra elements into the final package. The book includes three appendices consisting of passages that didn't make it into the text—fascinating digressions involving puzzle-like conundrums (sort of the hard-copy equivalent of the bonus deleted scenes on a DVD). Another subsidiary project is a CD that re-creates the spooky a cappella hymns, based on mathematical proofs and behavior of cellular automata, sung by the clock-tenders inside the concents. David Stutz, a former Microsoft techie now involved in early classical music—and an HBC member—composed and produced the effort, which is being considered for widespread release. "It's a pseudo-liturgical use of mathematics and higher thinking," Stutz says. Actually, to the untrained ear it sounds like the neo-Gregorian chanting that accompanies ritual baby sacrifice in horror films. Anathem asks a lot of its readers, but Stephenson's got a lot of devoted ones. The hardcore (Brand's "two out of 10") will just buy his books no questions asked. It will be interesting to see what the rest will do. "It's really about the difference between people who can sit down and focus their attention for a long period of time on something complicated in a patient and steady way—versus people who never read anything longer than a sentence or paragraph and who get very impatient if you try to go on at any length," Stephenson says. The author himself concedes that's he's got one foot on either side of the Saecular/mathic divide. He's trapped in his own theme, our society's secret war between the Long Now and the now. "When I'm working on a book, I need to be uninterrupted—a long-attention-span kind of thing. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in my life that are important and keep me communicating over email. It's harder for me even to read books than it used to be, and there's an obvious irony there." But after the Anathem tour ends this fall, he fully expects to be back in the basement, using a fine-nibbed fountain pen to fill up another cinder block of paper. Senior writer Steven Levy ( steven_levy@wired.com) also writes about the Chumby in this issue (16.09) of Wired.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 4:00 am Cowboy Upgrade: Welcome to the NFL's Next Flagship ArenaThe Dallas Cowboys are moving house — Texas style. When the team's new arena opens next year, it will be the largest, most tech-laden stadium in the NFL (and one of the biggest sports facilities of any kind on the planet). Its $1.1 billion price includes the most ginormous retractable roof ever built, massive end-zone doors, and the world's biggest hi-def LED screens. The designers, from the firm HKS, say they didn't set out to break any records. But as they studied arenas across the country, their ambition kept ballooning. "It just developed into a 2.7 million-square-foot facility," says Mark Williams, an architect on the project. Here are some of the outsize specs. Exploded View
How Big Is Big?Retractable end-zone doors 
Glass doors at each end will retract completely in 18 minutes, creating an opening 120 feet high and 180 feet wide — almost the length of a DC-10. Center-hung Video board 
The stadium will boast the world's largest hi-def LED displays. Hanging over midfield, the setup will stretch from 20-yard line to 20-yard line. Monumental arches 
The giant arches holding up the stadium will measure 1,225 feet from end to end — roughly the length of the Empire State Building. Retractable roof 
The 410 x 256-foot roof, set on a rack-and-pinion drive system, will retract in just 12 minutes thanks to 128 motors. Opening the roof and the end-zone doors will transform the indoor arena into an open-air stadium suitable for year-round events. The Old vs. the New
Comparisons by Thomas Porostocky
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 4:00 am Bigfoot/atheist t-shirt) Mark F. got me this terrific t-shirt for my birthday. Great tastes that go great together! It's $19 from TopatoCo.Pfft (There Is No God) t-shirt (TopatoCo) Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 3:09 am SSD Won't Make Sense In Laptops For Two Yearskgagne writes "While solid state disk drives can vastly improve random read performance and are perfectly suited to most mobile devices, many operations are sequential in laptops and desktops and involve writes where SSDs most often lose to magnetic hard disk drives in performance. While introducing multi-channel flash memory controllers and interleaving the NAND flash chips increases performance, it will still be about two years before the cost versus benefit ratio will make sense to install SSD in your laptop or desktop PC, according to a Computerworld story. 'I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 29 Aug 2008 | 2:03 am Today at Boing Boing Gadgets Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw new Walkmen from Sony, hoped that Kindle 2 will be less ugly, and praised Fujitsu Siemens' Amilo Mini netbook for its Stormtrooping style.
John found notes on how to port Pitfall 2 to the Apple IIe, gazed upon the beautifully thin Philips Essence, and laughed out virtual at NASA's space virus woes.
There was an touchscreen PC with Netbook-like specs; a Pac-Man Mini which saw Namco in a new box, and a beautiful Haight St. apartment filled with old typewriters and cameras.
We mused at Bloomberg's iMacabre Steve Jobs obit snafu, but nothing reminds us of our mortality quite like a Lego shoggoth-thingie based on the Ohmu from Nausicaä.
Finally, Rob saw some silly cellphone accessories and launched a perhaps ill-advised defense of those terrible Tiger Electronics handheld games from the 1980s.Source: Boing Boing | 29 Aug 2008 | 1:32 am Gallery: American Dreamers Run Free at Burning Man : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comBLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- Wild rides, fireworks and letting it all hang out. That's the updated American dream at Burning Man 2008. The annual desert gathering always celebrates that most-American ideal: freedom. Freedom to ride a giant red, white and blue tricycle across the playa; freedom to blow your mind however you want; freedom to traipse around wearing nothing but body paint. That kind of ingrained whimsy, rather than politics, seems to be the point of this year's American Dream art theme at Burning Man. "What has America achieved that you admire?" is the event's official statement. "What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudable? What is ludicrous?" Groovy, man. Let's get it on. Left: Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.
Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comA stagecoach rolls up the esplanade on Tuesday evening.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comDuane Flatmo from Eureka, California, steers his fire-breathing dragon around the esplanade Tuesday.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comAfter hunkering down during Monday's sandstorm, burners break out their colorful costumes Tuesday -- including some that are just painted on. Robin Bowles, right, and her friend Cowboy Curtis chill on the playa on a "fuzzy bunny." The Man can be seen far off in the distance on the left.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comA group of burners break out a desert "boat" to parade across the playa.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comBlack Rock City is humming Thursday.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comLamp Lighters walk down the esplanade Tuesday.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com> A panel van decked out with a lit-up Golden Gate Bridge makes its way across the sand Tuesday.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comTutu-wearing burner Diana Zanelli of Texas delights in the swirl of lights from inside artist Crispell Wagner's "modern version of the dream machine," an interactive piece of light art.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comHome is where the art is at Burning Man.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comThe Man glows with neon as Helen Corley from San Ramon, California, twirls her flow lights below the festival's namesake icon in Black Rock City.  : Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.comA giant duck lights up the night Tuesday as it rolls across the dusty desert floor.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 1:00 am Obama Address Sets Internet On FireFind out the reaction online to Obama's speech.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 1:00 am How to Download MP3s From Streaming Music SitesYour favorite music sites let you listen to songs all day for free, but only as a stream -- if you want to load one of those songs onto your iPod and take it with you, you'll have to go buy it. But your browser stores streamed MP3s temporarily on your hard drive. Learn where to look and save them for later with our guide.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 12:15 am Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In OctoberJagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 29 Aug 2008 | 12:10 am Arctic Ice on Track for Another All-Time Low - Wired News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 29 Aug 2008 | 12:07 am Novell posts 3Q loss on auction-rate securitiesSoftware maker Novell Inc. Thursday posted a widened loss for its latest quarter due to a loss on securities.Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 29 Aug 2008 | 12:00 am Make Your Own Custom YouTube-Video PlayerPosting videos on your website? Go beyond the basic embed code with the first installment of Webmonkey's YouTube tutorial. We'll show you the ins and outs of YouTube's Player API, including how to embed and resize the player, skin it to your liking, and control the video playback with your own code.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 29 Aug 2008 | 12:00 am Vote for me, Obama says, through text messages (CNET)CNET - DENVER--Delegates squeezing into the stadium hosting the Democratic convention on Thursday are being asked to do what must be a political party first: show their support for their party's nominee through text messages.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:53 pm Magma Design lowers full-year sales outlookChip design software company Magma Design Automation Inc. on Thursday forecast a second-quarter loss of 68 cents to 70 cents per share and an adjusted loss of 18 cents to 20 cents per share, on sales of...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:40 pm Magma Design posts wider 1Q loss, lower salesChip design software company Magma Design Automation Inc. said Thursday its fiscal first-quarter loss widened in a "difficult business environment" that may continue for at least part of its fiscal year...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:30 pm Mazda Building a Volt of Its OwnSuddenly, General Motors has a competitor in its race to wrest the green mantle from Toyota.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:20 pm Quick-thinking flies are one jump ahead of the swatterNew research shows that flies can react within 200 milliseconds in the face of dangerSource: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:09 pm Hashing Email Addresses For Web Considered Harmfulcce writes "The MicroID standard, despite getting thrashed soundly by Ben Laurie two years ago, has since been recommended by the DataPortability Project and published on the user profiles of millions of users at Digg and Last.fm. MicroID is basically a hash calculated using a user's profile page URL and registered email address, producing a token that makes the email address vulnerable to dictionary attacks. To see how easy it was to crack these tokens, I conducted a small study, choosing 56,775 random Digg users, and cracking the email addresses of 14,294 of them (25%) using just their MicroID, username, and a list of popular email domains. Digg has more than 2 million users, and that means half a million of them — mostly people who had never heard of MicroID, and had probably not logged in for a long time — had their email addresses exposed to this trivial attack. I also applied this attack to Last.fm (19%) and ClaimID (34%). Digg and Last.fm have since removed support for MicroID, but the lesson is clear: don't publish a hash of my email address online, guys!"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:01 pm Apple to fix hole in password protected iPhones in September - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 28 Aug 2008 | 11:00 pm FBI: Uploader Confessed to Pre-releasing Guns N' Roses TracksA Los Angeles-area man arrested Wednesday on charges he uploaded nine pre-released recordings of Gun N' Roses tunes has allegedly confessed to the crime, which carries up to three years in prison. Kevin Cogill, aka Skwerl, released the songs to his music-review blog, antiquiet.com, according to court records, the FBI said in court records.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 28 Aug 2008 | 10:45 pm Sprint Names New Partners For WiMAX Service - CRN
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 28 Aug 2008 | 10:41 pm Comcast to make monthly Internet use cap official (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 10:21 pm Black Screens For Unauthorized Copies of Windowsarcticstoat writes "In a bid to deter people from using pirate versions of Windows XP, Microsoft is now updating its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool to introduce a few uncomfortable niggles for users of pirated versions of Windows. These include replacing the desktop wallpaper with a black screen every 60 minutes, although you can still replace it with your wallpaper of choice in the intervening period. As well as this, copies of Windows deemed to not be genuine will also have a translucent watermark above the system tray, which Microsoft calls a 'persistent desktop notification.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 28 Aug 2008 | 10:10 pm 'Babylon A.D.': Add Another Mangled Movie to the ListArty indie directors and Hollywood execs sometimes don't mix so well. These big-budget clunkers didn't pan out, onscreen or in the studio boardroom.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 28 Aug 2008 | 10:01 pm Cost-Effective Server Room Air Conditioning?at0mic26 writes "I am currently tasked with finding a cost effective solution to our 30+ degree Celsius server room. The only air conditioning currently provided is a single duct pipe from one of two air conditioner units. I was thinking of stealing air from the second air conditioning unit with some sheet metal work, but it likely will not be sufficient — and would not have tolerance for both AC units being offline for any amount of time. An ideal supplemental portable AC unit is what I am after, however I'm finding it cost prohibitive, with $600+ humidity controlled AC unit, plus 20 amp socket requirement, plus contract work to make a hole in the wall for outside drainage so that the unit does not flood the place. What sort of successful cheaper air conditioning solutions have you come up with?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 28 Aug 2008 | 9:21 pm Dell 2Q profit drops 17 percent and stock plunges (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 9:00 pm Passcode Vulnerability Returns in iPhone Updates (NewsFactor)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 8:59 pm Sprint Will Launch 4G WiMAX with Localized Features (NewsFactor)NewsFactor - In advance of its WiMAX rollout this fall, Sprint announced Thursday a lineup of mobile partners to localize its customer's 4G experience. In what the company calls "geobrowsing," XOHM users will get local news, weather and many other localized networking features delivered to their laptops and mobile devices.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 8:59 pm Even critics give Apple a pass on iPhone 3G woes (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 8:29 pm Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics ResearchAn anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Wired: "After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab. Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software." Jamie points out this list of Bell Labs' accomplishments at Wikipedia, including little things like the UNIX operating system.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 28 Aug 2008 | 8:19 pm Small GPS devices help prosecutors win convictions (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 28 Aug 2008 | 8:16 pm Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts?dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 28 Aug 2008 | 7:25 pm Subliminal Messages Work, at Least SometimesWe could force you to read this story...maybe.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 Aug 2008 | 6:53 pm Dark and Ordinary Matter Separate in Galactic CrashAs two galactic clusters merge, telescopes capture a unique view of dark matter.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 Aug 2008 | 5:34 pm Teensy Weensy Amp Brings Hi-Fi to the Desktop and BeyondDesktop speakers are not usually known for being particularly high quality. That's because you're not powering them properly. NuForce's Icon Desktop Amp will juice up your desktop audio, be it a 2.1 sound system or a set of high-end headphones.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 28 Aug 2008 | 5:00 pm 6-D Holograms Interact With LightResearchers create a 6-D hologram that responds to light and the viewer's angle.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 Aug 2008 | 2:23 pm 5 Ways Amazon Can Improve the Kindle 2.0Amazon is widely rumored to be updating its popular but flawed e-book reader, the Kindle. Here's a list of ways the company can make the Kindle 2.0 suck less.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 28 Aug 2008 | 1:33 pm Gadget Designers Push the Limits of Size, SafetyAs electronic gadgets get smaller, their designers are forced to make tradeoffs, in some cases coming dangerously close to the margins of safety. Case in point: Exploding batteries.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 28 Aug 2008 | 1:19 pm Sea Sponges Feel the Heat From Climate ChangeAs the oceans warm, it's not just corals that are suffering.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 Aug 2008 | 1:10 pm Tropical Storm Gustav Swamps JamaicaResidents, tourists and oil workers flee as Gustav slams Jamaica.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 Aug 2008 | 12:46 pm
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