It’s shaped like a basketball. It was inspired by Spock’s tricorder. And, if NASA researchers have their way, it could be helping out astronauts aboard the International Space Station in as little as three years. The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day’s tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right — via boingboing
Spore make affordable, squishy, light-up doorbells. And they’re pretty too — via boingboing
Michael Costa has always been a man with a reverse Midas touch, everything he touches turns to shit. Public transport in NSW is no exception. His ingenious method for solving the problem of trains running late is the use of creative accounting. The definition of a late train will change from more than four minutes to more than ten minutes. Usually this sort of dodgy scheme is done far from the public eye. But rocket scientist Costa, always keen to get his ugly mug on camera, announced his cunning plan to the press
Virtual, moving fences controlled from a laptop could one day herd cattle to fresh fields for grazing. A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game. Although static virtual fences already keep dogs inside yards in affluent US neighbourhoods, no-one has attempted a moving virtual fence before, nor attempted to apply the idea to large herds of animals. Basically we download the fences to the cows,
says Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. We say: ‘Today stay here, tomorrow go somewhere else
Peter FitzSimons has a good write up on how Peter Garrett‘s independent views highlight Alexander Downer’s kow-towing — via GeneWeb.info
Curators at The Museum of Modern Art are looking at adding graphic design to it’s collection. Currently they display works in Architecture and Design, Drawings, Film and Media, Painting and Sculpture, Photography and, Prints and Illustrated Books.
Q: Is Graphic Design, not Simply Posters, Museum Worthy?
A: Super short answer, yes.
Q: Why has it taken so long?
THOUGHTS: Modernising MoMA: Design on Display
The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently reported that a record 55 red wolf pups [BugMeNot] have been born in 11 litters in North Carolina this spring. More than 100 red wolves now roam 1.5 million acres in the northeastern part of the state. This year’s promising wolf census comes on the heels of a judge’s decision that temporarily halted the building of a landing field by the US Navy that Defenders and others charged would be harmful to wolves and migratory birds in the area
Google is considering renewing support for RSS, the latest twist in a standards war that could change how people read the news
An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims’ computers that triggers pop-up ads
Armed police staking out a former nuclear bunker in Fife said they are now talking to a man hiding inside. Firearms officers and negotiators were called to Scotland’s Secret Bunker near Anstruther, which is now a Cold War museum. The man is understood to be Ronald MacDonald, a 39-year-old who had been living rough in the area — via Charlie Stross
The chief of the defence force General Cosgrove has been caught misleading the people [BugMeNot] yet again. He told Senate Estimates this week that Australia had an agreement with the Americans that they would detain POWs in Iraq on our behalf so we could avoid our responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions to ensure they were not tortured
Just when you thought Optus customer service couldn’t get any worse, the cheap bastards have joined the ranks of Australian telecommunications companies using cheap labour in India for some of their call centre operations
A British robber who stole £115,000 in cash from a bank broke back in a week later to give most of it back. The thief got into the Barclays Bank in east London, smashed a window and helped himself to the cash in the ATM machine. A week later baffled staff called detectives to say the robber had returned £104,000
Australia’s overseas aid spending is up, but not all the money goes to worthy projects to alleviate poverty. (Australia’s Official Development Assistance outlay for 2004-05 is an estimated $2133 million.) Increasingly, money is being allocated to beefing up regional security and promoting good governance. Much of what should be pure aid money has gone to managing refugees in Nauru and on the recent Solomons mission. Overseas aid is being redefined to include things such as counter-terrorism measures. The Parliamentary Library has a two-page Research Note that lays it all out — via journoz
The United States is close to deciding whether to spend tens of millions of dollars establishing permanent joint training facilities in northern Australia for its military forces
Apple have just unveiled their latest shiny new thingy, the AirPort Express, a portable wireless base station which also allows you to stream music throughout your home, wirelessly. That’s right, you can hook one of these babies into your stereo/speakers, (and/or it’s sprawled out speakers) and set up your playlists from your laptop from the other side of the house.
The new base station is not like it’s older UFO shaped brother, and fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and uses 802.11g wireless standard, so data rates up to 54 Megabits per second.
Nice. Fucking damn nice. You know what else is fucking damn nice? It is backwards compatible with the older 802.11b wireless cards. Of course this means a new iTunes (AirTunes) with streaming capabilities, and yep, both Mac and PC are invited to this party.
Maria Isabel had been raped, beaten, stabbed in the chest and tied up with barbed wire before a blow to the back of her head finally killed her. Such murders have become common in Guatemala, where there are now daily reports of killings but rarely news of any arrests. Such unchecked misogyny, with no clear motive, is reminiscent of the situation in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city just over the border from Texas where around 100 serial-type sexual murders over the last decade have become an international cause célèbre
Microsoft says it will ask a European court this week to suspend parts of the European Commission’s landmark decision that ordered it to stop business practices that violate antitrust law
NetGear’s WG602 access point has a hidden password that provides remote and local administrative control. Unlike Linksys’, where turning the firewall on (which is on by default, but a researcher found new units in which it was off when taken out of the box), the NetGear hole cannot be disabled. The backdoor seems to have been created by the vendor that packaged the device for NetGear
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