`The best ten stories, according to HumorFeed, are as follows (in alphabetical order, by website):
* Avant News: President Bush Paints Self Into Corner
* BBspot: Microsoft’s Antispyware Tool Removes Internet Explorer
* Brainsnap:Christian Fundamentalists Suspected of Terrorist Bombings
* BSNews: President Bush Sells Louisiana Back to the French
* Confusion Road: Terri Schiavo Dies; Congress Orders Feeding Tube Reinserted
* Department of Social Scrutiny: Government Responds to Charles and Camilla’s Wedding with ID Card Follow-up
* The Fake News: One Hot White Chick Injured in Tsunami Disaster
* John Fanzine: Scientists Discover Most Boring Substance Ever
* Opinions You Should Have: Existence of Poor People A Surprise, Says Bush
* Studio 8 Entertainment: Popeless World Plunges Into Chaos’
An animated GIF of the stabilized bigfoot footage.
`If you’ve been watching TV, the latest political hoopla in Washington involves the NSA. President Bush has acknowledged ordering the NSA to conduct electronic surveillance on individuals inside the US. [..]
Few facts are known about the NSA except for the little bits of information made available to the public from time to time. Even their budget is classified.
One interesting thing about the NSA is Echelon.’
`A mechanic standing near a Boeing 737 at El Paso International Airport in Texas was sucked into one of the engines and killed Monday, officials said. [..]
[The CEO of Continental Airlines] said the incident occurred during a maintenance check in preparation for the plane’s departure.
A spokeswoman for Boeing said Monday’s incident is not the first such accident. “It doesn’t happen very often,” spokeswoman Liz Verdier said. “It has happened in the past.”
Either way, she said, the responsibility lies with Continental: “The airlines are responsible for their safety procedures.”‘
`When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool — LSD-25. [..]
“When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing,” said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.’
`General Ronald E. Keys, Commander of Air Combat Command, has announced that the F-22A Raptor, the world’s only 5th generation fighter aircraft, surpassed a monumental milestone today when the United States Air Force declared that the Raptor has reached initial operational capability. The General made the historic announcement at Langley Air Force Base, VA.
The Air Force is now capable of deploying and supporting 12 F-22A Raptor aircraft anywhere in the world to execute air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. The Raptor is also qualified to perform homeland defense missions when required.
[..] Rated “Overwhelmingly Effective” by the USAF during Initial Operational Test and Evaluation, the Raptor is three times more effective than the F-15.’
Hooray! That means three times as many innocent Iraqi civilians can be killed. And three times as much oil for the US aswell, no doubt.
`The idea for Project Rogue Server A.K.A. Project Silver was started after an interesting conversation I had with a friend of mine. I had this dead ups lying around and didn’t know what to do with it. So we threw some ideas back and forth and the one that stuck was a hidden rogue server. This could be used for both good and awesome. Just think of the possibilities. A hidden file archive, hook it up to your hacked tivo, mess with the RIAA when the come search your house….. (#$))_%$)*@&^( )%^@ (NO CARRIER)’
`One of the last bastions of revolutionary socialism, Cuba is to switch all its computers over to Linux to counter the influence of the Evil Capitalistic American lackey Microsoft.
According to the government daily, Juventud Rebelde, Roberto del Puerto, director of the state office of information technology, said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of Windows through-out Cuba.’
‘If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.
In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us.
Today, scientists are working hard to bring these artificial creations to life. In Japan, fuzzy little real robots are delivering much appreciated hug therapy to the elderly. Children are frolicking with smiling robot toys.
It all seems so innocuous. And yet how could so many Hollywood scripts be wrong?’
`My female housemate is named Snoopy. She’s a five-year-old black domestic cat.
Yes, my cat watches High-Definition TV.
In fact, she will watch for 20 minutes at a time, particularly if the show features birds, fish or animals. If she sees a bird flying on a high-def channel, she will crouch down in the attacker stance as if the winged creature was right in front of her.
The high-def picture is so clear and life-like that Snoopy apparently thinks it’s real.’
What ordering pizza will be like in the future.
`Back in 1985, hard drives were gigantic and not to mention insanely expensive (40MB/$40,000) as shown in the above image. That was coincidentally the same year Microsoft released Windows 1.0 which sold for $100 ($177.47 with inflation) a piece. I like how the display behind it has a huge magnifying glass that almost makes you think hard drives now days (2006) are microscopic which they really aren’t…yet.’
`The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.’
`The industry is honing in on a compromise proposal for the contentious IEEE 802.11n next generation WLAN standard, and a deal could be struck next week at the task group’s meeting in Hawaii. [..]
802.11n is predicated on MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) techniques, and much of the technology developed by Airgo Networks, to boost bandwidth by an order of magnitude above the standard of today’s Wi-Fi networks. The technique makes use of “multi-path” interference that might once have been minimised to drive up the network’s range.’
`A stolen car that had a kidnapped baby and a cell phone inside has become the center of a new controversy.
The parents of the kidnapped baby are outraged that the phone that could have been used to find the baby was not. [..]
When the parents called 911 they also realized that the father’s Sprint cell phone with GPS locator technology was also in the car.
NBC4 reported that Sprint wouldn’t provide a location to the parents or to the deputies.
“The deputies were told that Sprint had the location of the vehicle but that they could not disclose it to them because they needed to pay the $25 fee for a subpoena or fill out some forms,” said Stephanie.
Almost 2 ½ hours later a passer-by spotted the SUV abandoned a mile away.’
`There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching — and at the speed of light, no less. They are labeled “directed-energy weapons,” and they may well signal a revolution in military hardware — perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. [..]
After more than two decades of research, the United States is on the verge of deploying a new generation of weapons that discharge beams of energy, such as the Airborne Laser and the Active Denial System, as well as the Tactical High Energy Laser, or THEL.’
`Norway is planning to build a “doomsday vault” inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world’s crops.
The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.
It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet’s sources of food.’
`Mike @ TechDirt writes “Norton AntiVirus maker Symantec admits that it planted a rootkit in SystemWorks to… pay close attention now… keep customers from accidentally deleting files. Really.
After sysinternals chief Mark Russinovich blew the whistle, Symantec decided that maybe, just maybe, the travesty wasn’t its best idea ever.’
`Apple’s television ads for its new Macs boast that for years, Intel’s chips have been “trapped inside PCs–dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks.”
Now, the voiceover proclaims, the Intel processor will finally be set free.
Of course, that’s not exactly the way Intel would put it.
“Never would we characterize our customers that way,” Intel Vice President Deborah Conrad said in an interview.’
`I am sure that not once in the product testing, and focus groups and marketing meetings did Oral-B ever think that there was a possibility that there vibrating flossier would be the central component of such a potentially questionable project. A very well build and engineered unit, the Oral-B flossier is compact and powerful. Using a standard AAA battery at 1.5 volt battery and a micro vibrating motor. At about 6.00 not to shabby for what you get.’
`The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD “screeners”, but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.
The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. “It’s been quite a cock-up,” said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.’
`The URL is from a company that could make the OLEDs used in the keyboard. The Russian designers recently alluded to the problem. The OLEDs (lots of them) need POWER!!. This means the keyboard may need an electrical connection, as well as a ‘wired’ connectivity to the PC. Apparently the prototypes did not actually address this. Nothing wireless..’
followup to Optimus keyboard.
`These comparison photos having been making their rounds around the net today and they have to be seen to be believed. It just goes to show how much time and care the PGR3 team took to make the city of Tokyo as life like as possible.’
It actually takes a little while of looking at the pictures before you can tell which one is real and which is from the game.
`Following the success of our digital line-up over the last seven years, which has resulted in more than 95% of Nikon’s UK business being within the digital area, Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the demands of an increasingly competitive market place. [..]
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.’
`Microsoft’s relatively quick response to the WMF fiasco may have been a bit too quick. In the midst of a debate at Ars Technica over Microsoft’s personal-best performance in handling the WMF exploit, a few quiet voices popped up. Zakharov:
Is it me or was that patch distributed with some kind of hidden higher priority? I normally leave windows auto-update set to notify me when patches are downloaded for manual installation but the WMF patch took matters into its own hands and installed itself with a reboot. [..]
After Zakharov’s comment, one of our techs concurred. He noticed that one of our XP laptops that was set to simply download updates had restarted… And had the patch.
Meanwhile, astrashe, another Ars Technica member agreed with Zakharov:
I noticed the same thing. I got a message saying the patch had been installed, and that my machine had rebooted.’
`Every year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year’s winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There’s just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious?’
`Some time ago I built a self-balancing two-wheeled scooter. Since then I realized that two wheels are redundant, and only a single wheel is needed to make a ridable vehicle. A vehicle with a single wheel is much smaller and lighter. It weighs under 30 lbs and is easily carried with one hand when going up stairs or on public transportation.
The Electric Unicycle’s only control is the on-off switch. The rider controls everything else by shifting his weight. You lean forward to accelerate, lean backwards to brake, and gyrate your arms wildly to turn. With a little practice you can get more graceful and keep your arms mostly by your side.’
with pictures and video as well as software and construction plans.
`Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil – but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case – or should we say tank – also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.’
`Michael wrote up a special how to and guide for MAKE about a robot you can program and control over the web right now! – “Before you roll your eyes and tell me about all the other robots you’ve seen on-line and at robot shows, let me tell you why this one is different. You have to program it, or it won’t do anything. And by that I mean you ssh into the robot, write a program, compile it on the robot, and run it on the robot.” Here’s how it works and how to try it out…
Log into the robot via ssh. Do this now: it’s live, online. The robot is at robot.linuxrobots.org, user robot, password robot.’
`I did a measurement of everything in my bedroom, and put them into Illustrator to get an idea of how much space I had to work with. I wanted to accomplish a few goals:
+ Hold 3 monitors on a shelf, as big as 21 inches each.
+ Support the weight of three 21 in monitors.
+ Hold a Home Theater Receiver, DVD player, and at least 2 other components (Laserdisc, VCR, PS2, N64 etc) under the shelf.
+ Hold a Mini-Fridge.
+ Hold my printer.
+ Hold at least 3 systems, possibly in rackmount cases.
+ Have enough desk space to rest a book or 3-ring binder.
+ Have enough space to rest my arms when using the keyboard (I HATE keyboard trays).
+ Space to mount 2 UPS units.
+ Fit within the 70 inches available in the corner of my room.
+ Efficiently utilize as much wood as possible while cutting down on waste.
+ Perhaps most important, it has to be easily disassembled since I am moving in a few months’
