Technology
omnibrain | March 6, 2007According to the court:
(The) system touted its offering of legal advice and projected an aura of expertise concerning bankruptcy petitions; and, in that context, it offered personalized -- albeit automated -- counsel. ... We find that because this was the conduct of a non-attorney, it constituted the unauthorized practice of law.
The computer program is now serving time in jail for not being able to pay the fines imposed by the courts. OK just kidding, the creator was fined and forbidden from allowing his computer program to offer bankruptcy advice.
Read the more detailed blog post here
retrospectacle | March 5, 2007Walking around the gym, watching all those people spinning or walking or treading or ellipsing....wouldn't it make good sense to harness all that rat-race energy as power? Could you imagine getting a free gym membership for spending a certain amount of time on power-generating machines? Well, seems plausible enough, and may actually be coming to A Gym Near You.
The California Fitness club in Hong Kong is among the first to jump on the green energy treadmill -- stairmaster and cross-training machines at the gym have been wired up to the building's lighting system. If other gyms follow suit, it…
retrospectacle | March 2, 2007Remember when I asked if evil, evil You Tube was really so evil for broadcasting copyrighted material? Well the kerfuffle was over Viacom pulling their content off YouTube and putting it on rising-star video thingy Joost. I was looking at this new-fangled Joost thing, and it *seems* to be TV through the internet, and they are asking for Beta testers. Well, of course I signed up!
So my questions are these: Someone give me the run-down on this Joost thing (the site FAQ are crappy). And, second, are there any current Joost beta testers out there? Third, if you are a beta tester, give me a token…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2007Tomorrow's lunar eclipse has got the moon on my brain, and I'm not the only one. Washinton Post columnist Charles Krauthammer gets it wrong so often that I rarely bother to even glace at his output, but today he touches on a topic that appeals more to intuition than intellect, one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers. Today he takes on the question of whether we should settle the moon.
Let's cut to the chase. After justifiably lambasting the space shuttle and International Space Station as orbiting white elephants, he argues that a permanent settlement on the moon would be worth the…
retrospectacle | March 1, 2007Maybe I'm just being snarky, but does anyone else find it somewhat amusing that this file photo of the iPhone using GoogleMaps has a big fat Starbucks as the point of interest? Hey potential iPhone users, now you can plan you next trip to Starbucks instead of just tripping over one every 30 feet! Brilliant I tell you!
retrospectacle | February 27, 2007A "study" conducted for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages and this impacting (what else?) their IQ. This came in 2006, but I just stumbled upon it today and became predicably irate at yet another example of terrible science reporting.
The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence.
Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking…
omnibrain | February 27, 2007There are all sorts of remote control rodents and cockroaches out there now - but I guess they've stepped it up a notch and created a remote control flying rodent cockroach hybrid (also known as the common pigeon). Now, not only can they control in which direction the pigeon flies, they can also control when it releases its little whitish projectile. Researchers say they are working on a laser guided shit release system and hope to have it installed in the next version of the robotic mind controlled shitting pigeon machine.
Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling…
jlynch | February 25, 2007Internet users with a home wireless connection check news and e-mail more than users with just a wired broadband connection, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. (source)
omnibrain | February 24, 2007
A new X-Ray screening device that clearly exposes aliens hiding in human bodies is being tried at the Phoenix airport. This technology will clearly protect us from the alien menace as you can surely see in this photo provided by the creators of this alien exposing technology. I wonder what planet these particular aliens are from?
The Phoenix airport started testing the new technology on Friday. It can see through people's clothes and show the body's contours with blush-inducing clarity.
Critics have said the high-resolution images created by the "backscatter" technology are too invasive.…
hrynyshyn | February 22, 2007Texas Gov. Rick Perry is having a bad week. The state House Public Health Committee just voted to rescind the governor's executive order requiring all pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against HPV and a county judge ruled against another executive order requiring the state to fast-track a review of proposed coal-fired power plants. On the surface, the two decisions point to conflicting political motivations, but I see a connection.
Perry's order that all young girls should have the benefit of Merck's new vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer constitutes a nice big Valentine's…
retrospectacle | February 21, 2007Google co-founder Larry Page has some pearls of wisdom for scientists: get off your lazy bums and do something.
Scientists need more entrepreneurial drive and could benefit by doing more to promote solutions to big human problems, Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page told a meeting of academic researchers.
"There are lots of people who specialize in marketing, but as far as I can tell, none of them work for you," Page told researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science late on Friday.
"Let's talk about solving some worldwide problems. Let's get…
purepedantry | February 6, 2007Photons can carry enormous amount of information, but one of the problems in using them to encode information is that they are difficult to store for even short periods (they are moving at the speed of light after all!). University of Rochester scientists have taken a step in solving the practical problems of using photons to store information by creating an optical buffer for photons that slows them to more usable speeds:
Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated that optical pulses in an imaging system can be buffered in a slow-light medium, while preserving the…
sciencetolife | January 30, 2007 The development of hydrogen fuel cells for cars has been described as the "ultimate green dream" in transportation.
But the high expense of producing an efficient cell has waned efforts to transform this technology into a common source of energy for vehicles.
Now, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have put a new spin on some old technology and are making important strides towards building a more efficient and less expensive hydrogen fuel cell.
Hydrogen fuel cells work by converting chemical energy into…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007When I was a kid my Mom would always set the clock in the car forward about 15 minutes arguing that if she did that she would never be late. First of all, we were always early -- sometimes ridiculously so -- regardless of the clock. Second, I was always a bit skeptical of this strategy because you knew how far it was forward, and you could mentally calculate the real time. Furthermore, there are a lot more clocks in the average persons life than just the one in their car.
Anyway, to solve the issue of mental calculation Lifehacker has this web gadget -- a probabilistic clock. The time is…
purepedantry | January 22, 2007I got into science because I like knowledge, but I also got into science because we get the absolute best toys. Railguns, particle accelerators, rapid gene sequencers -- these things still make drool come out my mouth. Anyway, I am almost ashamed to admit it but this sounds really cool:
A demonstration of the futuristic and comparatively inexpensive weapon yesterday at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren had Navy brass smiling.
The weapon, which was successfully tested in October at the King George County base, fires nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity…
drorzel | January 18, 2007Well, ok, it doesn't generally suck, but it's absolutely horrible at ripping CD's. I haven't done much of this lately, but in doing some other stuff, I recently discovered that I never ripped the Death cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism into my collection. So I popped it into the CD drive, and happily added all those tracks to the Music Library.
And now I'm going to delete them all, because the rips suck. The tracks skip and stutter all over the place, as if it were playing on a boom box that was being pushed down a flight of stairs. It's not just this disc, either-- I have this problem…
sciencetolife | January 18, 2007 Nanotechnology is all the rage, it seems. The word 'nanotechnology' has been popping up in news articles and research papers more frequently. So I want to know...
What exactly is nanotechnology and how can it impact your health?
The basic definition of nanotechnology is anything related to the building of materials on a nanometer scale-a scale smaller than one millionth of a meter.
Nanotechnology is a highly interdisciplinary field encompassing elements of colloidal science, physics, chemistry and biology.
While its research has wide reaching implications the specific health benefits of…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007Check this out:
Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body…
jlynch | January 8, 2007This has been doing the rounds but I thought I'd link to it in any case. In January 1995, Internet World published its "Best and Worst of 1994" along with predictions for 1995. You can read the article here. If you remember Canter & Siegel, Gopher, setting up SLIP, alt.rec.somethingorother, cancelbots, or Netcom Netcruiser, this link
is for you.
drorzel | December 28, 2006Word and Excel are both part of the Office "suite" of programs. Like all Windows programs, they open in windows with a big red "X" button in the upper right-hand corner, and a smaller grey "x" below that. In either program, if you click the small grey "x" button, it closes just the file that you're looking at in that window.
In Word, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red "X," it closes just the file you're looking at, leaving the other files open.
In Excel, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red "X," it closes the entire program, and all the open files.
I…