`As hybrid sales skyrocket, there’s a growing concern that the battery-gas powered vehicles pose a risk because they aren’t as noisy as gas-powered engines. When idling, hybrids run on the quiet electric battery. Most, with the exception of GM and Honda hybrids, can also operate on the battery until the car reaches higher speeds, when the gas engine kicks in.
What follows is silence at locations where drivers are likely to tangle with pedestrians and bicyclists — crosswalks, turning lanes and parking lots.
In Sant’Anna’s case, an elderly man enjoying a morning walk didn’t hear her coming as she backed into the street. She lunged for the brake, stopping just short of hitting him.’
`Facing problems in its efforts to train insects or build robots that can mimic their flying abilities, the U.S. military now wants to develop “insect cyborgs” that can go where its soldiers cannot.
The Pentagon is seeking applications from researchers to help them develop technology that can be implanted into living insects to control their movement and transmit video or other sensory data back to their handlers.’
`Tonight I noticed that mars.google.com now has a CNAME record that points to www.google.com. This usually means that something is about to happen with that subdomain — with the exception of calendar.google.com of course. So I started digging and you will never guess what I found — a Google Maps type application that lets you view Mars. This service is called “Google Mars”.’
`A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at CEBIT in Germany. As we have speculated here, rapid advances in cybernetics are now ocurring, which will eventually change how consumers interface with computers, while the substructure of how people inter-relate online has continued to evolve quickly. Imagine reaction time that is constrained only by the power and speed of thought without any mechanical components. It would seem we are headed towards an always-connected global brain. With complete integration of components, what is the difference between telepathy and let’s say, a WiFi/Bluetooth connection between your computer and your brain, with the computer/device acting as a filter and transceiver?’
`It’s bad enough that they overcharge domestic customers but we have alternatives. The soldiers don’t because, according to The Prepaid Press, AT&T has an EXCLUSIVE contract to put payphones in PXes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, you ask, can’t the soldiers get cheap calling cards to call the US? No! Because AT&T is using (abusing!) its position as monopoly supplier of payphones to block the 800 numbers necessary to use nonAT&T calling cards.
This blocking is illegal in the US but, AT&T told our friend Gene Retske, editor of The Prepaid Press, the rules are different in Iraq. Right.’
`We work in the IT department of the college, and were inventorying equipment in the closet. We ran across a box of USB floppy drives that were just sitting there…looking very sad and lonely. We blew off the dust from them and decided to give them a second life. We also had to test the drives, and rather than waste the time to test each drive individually we thought it would just be easier to RAID them all together and test them all at once. So that’s exactly what we did.’
`Computer technicans are threatening chaos at fast-food outlets, supermarkets, banks and airports unless they get a pay rise.
More than 100 staff from NCR – a company responsible for repairing computer breakdowns at KFC outlets, Aldi supermarkets and Sydney Airport’s baggage handling systems – are planning to to walk off the job on Monday morning.
“In terms of industrial action in the IT industry this is easily the most significant one we’ve had in Australia,” said Australian Services Union secretary Sally McManus. If the strike goes ahead, it might last up to a week, she said.’
`Meet BigDog, a mechanical mutt that does more than snare Frisbees and irrigate fire hydrants. It totes hundreds of pounds of gear so soldiers won’t have to, and it will never spook under fire. Developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the U.S. military, the BigDog prototype is arguably the world’s most ambitious legged robot. Its stability and awareness of its own orientation make it the first robot that can handle the unknown challenges of the battlefield. The Great Dane–size ’bot can trot more than three miles an hour, climb inclines of up to 45 degrees, and carry up to 120 pounds—even in rough terrain impenetrable to wheeled or tracked vehicles. But this one is just a puppy; Boston Dynamics expects the next iteration, ready this summer, to be at least twice as fast and carry more than twice as much.’
`A large “mothership,” closely resembling the U.S. Air Force’s historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter’s engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital. [..]
Exactly what missions the Blackstar system may have been designed for and built to accomplish are as yet unconfirmed, but U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) officers and contractors have been toying with similar spaceplane-operational concepts for years. Besides reconnaissance, they call for inserting small satellites into orbit, and either retrieving or servicing other spacecraft. Conceivably, such a vehicle could serve as an anti-satellite or space-to-ground weapons-delivery platform, as well.’
‘Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.
A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.’
Followup to Molecular Computer Runs a Billion Simultaneous Programs, kinda.
`Residents in Shoreditch, East London, will become the first to test a new advance in broadband technology when they switch on a new set-top box that combines the functions of a television and computer. [..]
Most commercially-available broadband connections operate at a speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mb/s), but the Shoreditch project can access internet images and content at a speed of up to 2 billions of bits per second (2Gb/s).’
`Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.
Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls”, Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.’
`Intel has created a self-contained watercooling unit that will enable the latest Pentium Extreme Edition chips to hit 5GHz with ease.
The cooler has come out of Intel’s engineering department, which is staffed with a bunch of enthusiasts who have been trying to push the envelope at Intel to try and get the firm to move away from its ‘overclocking is bad, mmmkay’ stance.
The team, led by thermal mechanical engineer Gavin Stanley, spent an awful lot of time looking at current watercooling kits and systems on the market. They all shared several flaws, he told us: that they were complex to assemble, had a short life, consisted of too many different parts and used flimsy tubing.
The goal of his team, he laid out, was to come up with a more robust, reliable and efficient way of watercooling the processor.’
`When Cornell physicist Veit Elser attempted to demystify an esoteric imaging problem for biologists, he had no idea his solution would also help subway riders and break room loiterers around the world figure out those challenging, Sudoku puzzles.
While creating an algorithm that could render images of small and delicate biological specimens, Elser inadvertently found a universal solution for the popular Japanese brainteasers.’
`Take one part high-frequency gravitational wave generation, then add in a quantum vacuum field.
Now whip wildly via a gravitomagnetic force in a rotating superconductor while standing by for Alcubierre warp drive in higher dimensional space-time.
So you’re looking for the latest in faster-than-light interstellar travel via traversable wormholes? That’s one theme among many discussed at Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF), a meeting held here Feb. 12-16 that brought together more than 600 experts to thrash out a range of space exploration issues.’
`Vibrators frequently fail, especially with heavy use. But this doesn’t mean you have to give up and buy a new toy every time your vibe malfunctions. We took a few broken vibrators from our test lab and did some troubleshooting to show how you can fix your own sex toys at home with a few simple tools.’
With detailed instructions and pictures. You can’t go wrong.
`A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. [..]
The aim of RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) is to develop a robot capable of walking on land and also crawling up vertical surfaces. And it is funded by DARPA’s Biodynotics Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program.’
with link to video.
`We all know the SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) story — RGB electron guns firing at phosphors to produce image quality as good as or better than that of a high-end CRT but in a package the size of a flat-screen LCD or plasma display and all at one low, low power consumption. Throw in talk of million-to-one contrast ratios and you have the idea. But where are the SED products we’ve been promised by the pioneers, Canon and Toshiba, for so long?
We bet you guessed we were gonna answer that and you’re not wrong — the two companies just announced that they’re starting production in July 2007 and expect to see SED TVs on the market by the fourth quarter of the same year. [..]
`To this end, us, isoHunt.com and TorrentBox.com, are forming a coalition together with other P2P operators being sued and yet to be sued, and if possible with the help of the EFF, we will fight for the right for technological progress and the legality of the search engine itself. It is too early right now to say what we need for help from you, but if the MPAA will not back down, I’m sure we are going to need your help. And no, we will not go the way of LokiTorrent or Suprnova.
Anyways, nobody panic, and let the torrents flow. If you like to talk to us live and chat with other fellows in the community, come chat on IRC on #isoHunt on P2P-IRC (SSL enabled on port 7000, you need a client like mIRC ). We’ll update as we learn more.’
`Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else’s wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America’s popular culture.
“I don’t think it’s stealing,” said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
“I always find people out there who aren’t protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it,” Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger’s network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.’
Makes me think I should buy a wireless card to go with my 13dB antenna that’s been sitting around for years. It’d give me an excuse to learn all about packet shaping and whatnot, and I could afford to let 10% or so of my bandwidth float out the window. [shrug] Why not? :)
Just so long as I don’t end up some sorta anonymous gay porn proxy or something. Hmm. :)
`[..] He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.’
`On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer’s security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications.
Within hours of going live, the “rm-my-mac” competition was over. The challenger posted this message on his Web site: “This sucks. Six hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced”.
The hacker that won the challenge, who asked ZDNet Australia to identify him only as “gwerdna”, said he gained root control of the Mac in less than 30 minutes.’
`Have you ever faced a real challenge whose only solution most people would consider too crazy or difficult? In this article you will learn about one of the most challenging personal projects I’ve done, and it was all in the name of Internet access. The goal was simple: throw away 56k and upgrade to high-speed internet. Sound easy? Think again. [..]
Eventually, I came up with a plan. I would build a sixty-plus foot tower so I could intercept the signal! Well, that’s a simple thing to say, but it’s another story to really to do it. This is the story of how one man got the Internet access he craved, and how others can follow in his footsteps (just in case you ever need to build a sixty-foot tower in your backyard).’
`This is one of the top tutorials on SSH on the Internet. It was originally written back in 1999 and was completely revised in 2006 to include new and more accurate information. It has been used by over 115,000 people and consistently appears at the top of Google’s search results for SSH and Linux.’
Been playing with linux a bit lately. I probably should read rhings likes this instead of randomly changing config files until stuff works.. Heh. :)
`A team of scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magnetic states, known as “displaced vortex states”, that will allow an increase in the size of MRAMs (which are not deleted when the computer is switched off). The research has been published in Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters. [..]
The “displaced vortex states”, first observed by UAB researchers, are small circular movements of just a few thousandths of a millimetre that form in the tiny zones where the data is stored. The information on hard drives has normally been saved by orientating these zones in specific directions. The zones pointing upwards, for example, codify a 1, and those pointing downwards a 0. The smaller and more compact these zones are, the greater the capacity of the hard drive. But if they are too close together, the magnetic field created by one can affect the neighbouring zone and wipe the data. However, if the field is saved in a whirlpool form, in “vortex state”, it does not leave the tiny zone to which it is confined and does not affect the neighbouring data, thus making it possible for a much larger hard drive capacity.’
`It costs more than $900 million and looms more than 28 stories over the ocean — about 10 stories taller than Aloha Tower.
Longer than a football field, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar is a high-tech, fifth-generation semisubmersible oil-drilling platform that is self-propelled and can be positioned any place in the world. [..]
Although much of what the mobile radar platform can do is classified, Pam Rogers, spokeswoman for the Missile Defense System in Huntsville, Ala., said its radar system is so sensitive that “if a baseball was launched on the West Coast, it could be detected on the East Coast by this radar.”‘
`Antig Technology and AVC Corp. will demonstrate a production-ready fuel-cell insert for notebook PCs at the CeBIT trade show next week. [..]
The methanol-powered Antig fuel cell provides 45 watts of power on a single “tank” of methanol, and weighs 3.7 pounds (1.7 kg). In total, the additional power should be enough to operate the notebook for eight hours, AVC said, which was responsible for engineering the fuel cell into the notebook housing.’
`A full 2′ long, this unique robotic shark has a full-range of motion to replicate the smooth, sleek swimming of one of nature’s most efficient predators. It is able to gracefully maneuver up, down, left, right, and even backwards through water, in depths up to 9′. The shark can swim up to 40′ from its handheld remote unit which is also submersible, allowing you to swim with your shark.’
This would be so cool.. For 15 minutes or so then I’d be too lazy to recharge the batteries. :)
`Katherine Albrecht is on a mission from God.
The influential consumer advocate has written a new book warning her fellow Christians that radio frequency identification may evolve to become the “mark of the beast” — meaning the technology is a sign that the end-times are drawing near.
“My goal as a Christian (is) to sound the alarm,” said Albrecht, in a conversation over tea at a high-end grocery store. [..]
If the VeriChip becomes a common payment device similar to the “contactless” payment system in the Exxon Mobil Speedpass, all who wish to buy and sell goods will be compelled “to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads,” as it says in Revelation, the Spychips Threat authors contend.
Another passage in Revelation describes a vision in which “a foul and loathsome sore came upon the men who had the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image.” Albrecht and McIntyre write, “Interestingly, an implanted RFID device like the VeriChip could potentially cause such a tormenting sore if it is subjected to a strong source of electromagnetic radiation,” such as a directed energy weapon.’
`The cone moves 6 inches peak to peak under full-tilt output.
The actual cone diameter is 54 inches, with the 3 inch wide surround on the outside of that. The radiating surface area is 2,290 square inches. That yields a one way displacement of 6,871 cubic inches. That is equivalent to the displacement of 161 ten inch woofers that move 1.5 inches peak to peak.
The motor is capable of producing 6,000+ pounds of linear force, which is necessary when considering the very large surface area and displacement volume required to produce high SPL levels.
The woofer was designed with the capability to produce SPL levels of 188 dB, which are entirely possible, given an appropriately built vehicle. It is simply a matter of displacement and containment.’
