3M has shipped tranparent gaffer tape. Kevin Kelly‘s been playing with it and he says it holds up as good as the silvery stuff, but strong uptake would pretty much kill the old Star Wars joke:
Duct tape is like The Force: It has a dark side and a light side and it holds the Universe together.
I have an overflowing bookcase behind me, but the book with the pretty blue cover called to me: No Shitting in the Toilet by Peter Moore. Aptly enough, the fifth complete sentence on page 23 is:
But then I’m an Australian and our dollar’s about as useful as an Albanian lek.
A family garage and most of its contents have been saved in the Victorian town of Sunshine, thanks to the efforts of the family dog. Hudson, a short-haired German pointer, started barking just before 3:00am AEST and alerted his owners to a fire burning in their Hall Street garage
You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail
The National Australia Bank is shedding its tarnished image from such IT disasters as the integrated systems implementation, with the aim of becoming a world-class technology leader by 2007. In the midst of major upheavals at the bank following its $360 million foreign exchange scandal, NAB is working to wipe away past disasters, and experimenting with new technologies that for the first time will involve sharing innovation across the group
E-mail provider Everyone.net says it has a new program to protect e-mail users from one by-product of the spam plague: bounced messages. The firm is announcing an enhanced e-mail protection service called Total Protection 2.0 at the ISPCon conference in Washington, DC this week. The new service includes a technology called Email Fingerprint that can stop bounce storms
, in which e-mail users who have had their e-mail address stolen by spammers or e-mail worms receive a flood of returned e-mail messages
Sun Microsystems has discontinued development of two planned chips as it retrenches in a difficult era for the company. Santa Clara, California-based Sun has stopped work on the UltraSparc V, a server chip that was supposed to come out late next year, and Gemini, a dual-core chip for Web servers
Remember how online music stores were going to route around the music industry? The pigopolists have barely got their feet under the table and already demanding more. The Wall Street Journal reports that the major five labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song
By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind. This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University‘s Professor Ross Anderson. In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs. They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services
Do you want to create your own crater on the moon? Orbital Development is putting a personalised moon crash for sale on eBay. The bid opens with $6 million which will enable the highest bidder to stuff up to 10kg worth of stuff on a space craft and lob it to the moon. The condition of the cargo is not guaranteed as it crashes on the moon at 4000mph
Scotland’s adoption laws are set to be radically overhauled in a bid to cut the record numbers of children currently in foster care who need a permanent home. Ministers are poised to introduce measures next year which will, for the first time, allow unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt. They are also expected to make major changes to the law in the hope of streamlining the tortuous adoption process, which is blamed for deterring many parents from signing up
Those clever folks at RCA have apparently designed a DVD player that automatically scans movies and censors them to make them kosher, as it were. That means none of the naughty bits and none of those bad words either. It will be sold by Walmart for the price of $79, and what with the recent Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’ this product will likely be lauded by the FCC and moralists everywhere, though Hollywood is already complaining
The video of a man who shot himself after his girlfriend broke up with him has appeared online under the heading of Introducing: The Self-Cleansing Housing Projects
. The report mentions that the police officers receive no training to deal with privacy issues
If you’ve ever hit a crossword question asking for the collective noun for a particular group of animals, the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Centre has a page titled Animal Congregations, or What Do You Call a Group Of…? that may help you.
Worth noting that the NPWRC page is talking through its arse once it gets to the non-American animals — a group of kangaroos is a mob, not a troop, as are sheep if you’re in Australia — so for something a little more worldly try; Scorpio Tales’ Collective Nouns, Fun With Words’ Collective Nouns, and OjoHaven’s Collective Nouns.
For less than 5% of the price of a real Steadycam (the ones made for small video cameras go for about $900), you can apparently build your own SteadyCam for $14 with parts from a hardware store. The sample video makes it look pretty good. Great gift for the amateur videographer in your life who refuses to use a tripod, the bastard
Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology are refining a method that uses the current generation of chip-making tools to produce smaller chips than previously thought possible with those tools. The key ingredient happens to be one of the most commonly available substances on the planet. By running a small stream of water across a silicon wafer as the circuit lines are being etched into the chip, the current generation of lithography tools can produce circuits down to the 45nm level due to the refractive properties of water
A proposed California law that would have significantly broadened the scope of an existing state identity theft law has been quietly amended in what appears to be a concession to groups opposing it
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has unexpectedly suspended plans for a massive dam system on the Nu River in western China that scientists had warned could ruin one of the country’s last unspoiled places. Wen’s intervention signals that China’s top leaders have not approved a plan that most opponents had considered a fait accompli. However, environmentalists cautioned that the dam project could still eventually go forward in some form
I highly recommend getting an RSS feed of Rojisan’s Meta-Roj Blog for updates of his continuing adventures of exposing and dealing with the moronic spammers who foolishly deface his site. There’s currently are rather animated discussion between Roj and a complete fuckwit who seems determined to avoid getting a clue
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader called Tuesday for the retarded monkey boy to be impeached [BugMeNot] for deceiving the American people night after night after night
about US involvement in Iraq. When you plunge our country into war on a platform of fabrications and deceptions, and you bring back thousands of American soldiers who are sick, injured or dead, and that war is unconstitutionally authorised to begin with, Mr Bush’s behaviour qualifies for the high crimes and misdemeanour impeachment clause of the Constitution,
the 2000 Green Party presidential nominee said to applause from about 200 students at Columbia College Chicago. Nader said President Clinton was impeached for far less of an offence
RSS – Posts