`A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that exists only in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers.
The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year.
The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia.
He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island.’
`A new explosive has begun to replace 19th century black powder as Alaska Natives seek more humane weaponry in the traditional hunt for bowhead whales.
“It’s a lot safer,” said Eugene Brower, a Barrow whaling captain who chairs the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission’s weapons improvement program.
Brower trains Native whaling captains to handle a harpoon-launched grenade loaded with penthrite, a World War I-era explosive used in demolition.
“They love it,” Brower said of the whaling captains. “It’s four times the strength of black powder. With black powder, the meat has a gas taste.”‘
`Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.’
`American president George W. Bush stunned the world yesterday by showing everyone that he has an extremely small penis. Though he never actually took off his clothes, the irrefutable evidence of his miniscule manhood was made official when he declared war on the nation of Iraq without any apparent justification.
First lady Laura Bush, who saw the president’s pecker once after a tractor pull in Austin, was on hand to confirm the diagnosis.
Speaking to reporters, she said it was ‘about the size of a hanging chad’, and ‘harder to find than Al Gore’s name on a Florida ballot’.
The historic announcement marks the first time the size of a presidential penis was not revealed by way of a White House intern.’
`With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer — a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system.1The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer’s logbook with the words: “first actual case of a bug being found.”
Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don’t just inhabit our operating systems and applications — today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars.
But which are the worst?’
It’s not every day you see the phrase `largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet’s history’ in a story about computers. :)
`The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday.
The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems, said Bruce Good, a spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line. The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard.’
`One is possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived, and the other is a maverick physicist from Adelaide.
But Reg Cahill says he can prove Albert Einstein and his hundred-year-old theories of relativity are wrong.
The problem for Professor Cahill is that many of his contemporaries line up with Einstein.
“I’ve been treated with utter contempt and hostility,” he told The Australian. “This is pretty shocking stuff — but it’s what you’d expect.”
In 2002, Professor Cahill started to question what he thought were anomalies in Einstein’s theory that time and space are relative.
“They all agreed with one another and they were all indicating a huge speed difference in different directions,” he said. “When you find out the speed of light differs, the whole Einstein theory starts collapsing.”‘
I’ve seen bigger losers in my life. And fatter people aswell. [shrug] :)
(4.7meg Windows Media)
`In the course of studying physics one is officially taught that liquid nitrogen is simply (and mainly) used to cool things down to 77K. But everybody who once has observed students in practical courses “working” with this stuff knows that this is not true.
My intention is now to tell the truth about what is really done with liquid N2 before its remains are taken and used for cooling.
I’m going to have to try some of this at work. :) Fuck cooling the analytical equipment, I have friends who are desperately lacking in shaving cream. Although they may not know that yet. :)
`A Melbourne man is today counting his blessings that he still has a job after inadvertently drawing a diagram resembling a penis and scrotum during a presentation to a major client last week.
Jerry Rouse maintains the phallic nature of the diagram was accidental and that the written warning he received was too severe.
‘I was just drawing a diagram consisting two concentric circles representing disparate production units and drew a large ellipse connecting then to represent a convergent process,’ a slightly embarrassed Rouse admitted to reporters.
‘I really didn’t mean to draw a crude penis and testicles. I was actually just doing my job’.’
`Scientists in US have built a robot that is operating on biological principles and without any pre-specified instruction.
Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in La Jolla, California have developed ‘Darwin VII’ a trashcan-shaped robot that has just 20,000 brain cells.
The infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks, grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind impressionable and hungry to learn, reports New Scientist. ‘
`An Auckland adventurer wants overweight people to have liposuction so he can turn their fat into biofuel to power his boat around the globe.
Peter Bethune’s biofuel-powered attempt at the round-the-world powerboat speed record will run on his own fat, and he hopes, many more well-endowed contributors.
The Dominion Post reports the lean Auckland adventurer has had about four syringes of fat removed by liposuction from his own “love handles”, but needs others to donate their fat for his cause.’
`This ingenious tuning fork dildo brings new meaning to “making beautiful music together.” The dildo has a smooth insertable end that is solid and great for g-spot play, and a tuning fork end that makes bell-like sounds that pleasantly vibrate when struck with the plastic wand. Made of polished aluminum, the dildo end is 5½” long, with a graduated head and is 1½” at it’s widest point. The tuning fork end is 5″ long, with two tines that have rounded balls at the ends. A clever gift for any music enthusiast.’
`President Bush and the current administration have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 presidents combined, a group of conservative to moderate Democrats said Friday.
[..]
According to the Treasury Department, from 1776-2000, the first 224 years of U.S. history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions, but in the past four years alone, the Bush administration borrowed $1.05 trillion. [..]
“No American political leadership has ever willfully and deliberately mortgaged our country to foreign interests in the manner we have witnessed over the past four years,” said Tanner. “If this recklessness is not stopped, I truly believe our economic freedom as American citizens is in great jeopardy.”‘
I should write a script that automatically adds “I’m glad I don’t live there” line to the end of the post whenever the post references America.
Anyways, I _am_ glad I don’t live there. :)
William Shatner is mildly amusing, playing all the roles in the end sequence of Se7en.
I used to play Risk a lot. It’s a fun little game.
It has never occured to me to combine Risk with Google Maps. It did, however, occur to this fellow. :)
`An ingenious US couple is moving to bottle and sell pop icon Michael Jackson’s high-profile child sex trial – in the form of an irreverent brand of wine dubbed Jesus Juice.
A journalist who covered the four-month trial and his actress wife have applied to trademark the name for a full bodied merlot, inspired by Jackson’s teenage accuser’s claims the star plied him with wine decanted into a soft drink can he dubbed Jesus Juice.
In documents posted today on the website thesmokinggun.com, Bruce Rheins and Dawn Westlake sought to register a Jesus Juice logo which featured a photograph of a scantily-clad man in a crucifixion pose, wearing a Jackson-like sequined glove and a black fedora obscuring his face.’
`Angered by subsidies to U.S. cotton growers, Brazilian lawmakers said Thursday that they were considering suspending the intellectual property rights of American products in their country if the U.S. government did not explain how it intended to change subsidy programs by July 1.
The deadline was set earlier this year by the World Trade Organization, which found that U.S. assistance to cotton farmers distorted world prices by encouraging overproduction. If implemented, Brazil’s plan would negatively affect a range of U.S. industries including entertainment, software and pharmaceuticals.
“Essentially, the Brazilian position would be, ‘We’re going to have state-sanctioned piracy,'” said Neil Turkewitz, an executive vice president of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the music industry’s largest trade and lobbying group.’
`Burma has a long history of being a five-letter word for bizarre. Its last military dictator, Ne Win, insisted that every denomination of the Burmese currency be divisible by his lucky number nine.
His successor and current regime leader, Senior General Than Shwe, is known to be equally superstitious.
Many Rangoon-based western diplomats take seriously the urban legend that Than Shwe’s family astrologer predicted an American invasion three years ago, prompting the reclusive dictator to begin building the new capital 400 kilometres inland.
Tough talk from US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who labelled Burma an outpost of tyranny, may have sped the process and the paranoia.
Late last week, after months of dithering, civil servants were abruptly instructed to begin moving north to occupy their new ministries.
The reluctant were motivated by a high level edict that all government workers are henceforth banned from resigning, making them, in effect, slaves to the state.’
Apparently all you need is an old car engine, some rusty steel pipe and a welder.
It’s pretty cool, I s’pose. But motorcycles are death machines even when they don’t have lots of sharp metal corners. :)
`What was long feared by the few military officials in the know had come to pass: Chemical weapons that the Army dumped at sea decades ago finally ended up on shore in the United States.
It’s long been known that some chemical weapons went into the ocean, but records obtained by the Daily Press show that the previously classified weapons-dumping program was far more extensive than ever suspected.
The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste – either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels. [..]
These weapons of mass destruction virtually ring the country, concealed off at least 11 states – six on the East Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, California, Hawaii and Alaska. Few, if any, state officials have been informed of their existence.’
`This is an unacceptable development in digital rights enforcement. I don’t know how to put this any more clearly. Don’t get me wrong–we’ve long since crossed the line. It’s utterly absurd that we accept paying for music that will play on only one or two digital audio players, at best. It’s absolutely insane that anyone ever tried to put out a CD that couldn’t be ripped to a PC at all. It’s a complete joke that we’re sitting around anticipating the day when TiVo comes along to tell us when we have to watch a recorded show, and that it will choose when a recorded show might be deleted. I can’t even believe cell phone carriers think it’s OK to cripple cell phone features in order to protect their own moneymaking propositions. And Hollywood’s proposed new Analog Hole legislation, which would criminalize nearly every digital video activity you can think of, is another column unto itself, and it’s going to be a long one.
But this–using the tactics of criminals to invade our PCs without our knowledge and to expose us to further attack, just so you can keep us from, say, burning a mix CD and giving it to our friends–this is beyond the pale. And as many news sources are beginning to point out, there’s some reason to think it might also be illegal, under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.’
‘Ashlee Simpson continues her quest to become the most ridiculed celebrity ever when she slurs her way through a late night visit to McDonald’s in Toronto.’
`o.k. so i’m no barry white but i did pick up this little gem at a local bookstore on a recommendation from the clerk (thanks nameless clerk) which i wanted to share. it’s a slim but large format volume called the erotic coloring book published in 1975 by berlin & associates out of l.a., illustrated by a guy named craig berlin. it’s high-larious and most assuredly nsfw. possibly nsfpptdhf as well (not safe for people prone to dangerous hallucinogenic flashbacks). you might consider it the companion piece to this earlier post i suppose. see a sampling of the self proclaimed erotic pages below.’
`Sony BMG is facing a cacophony of criticism this week following the revelation that some of its CDs are packed with special copy-protection software that conceals itself with an advanced hacker cloaking technique. We think the company is getting off easy.
The firestorm began when Mark Russinovich, a computer security expert with Sysinternals, discovered evidence of a “rootkit” on his Windows PC. Through heroic forensic work, he traced the code to First 4 Internet, a British provider of copy-restriction technology that has a deal with Sony to put digital rights management on its CDs. It turns out Russinovich was infected with the software when he played the Sony BMG CD Get Right With the Man by the Van Zant brothers.’
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