Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

…scary!

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/hacker-bricks-cars/#ixzz0mARNoE7J

…is being threatened for no reason?

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/#ixzz0mALU5EeZ

…is doing our fighting for us.

A pilot from Mathewson’s squadron at Creech Air Force base guided his drone over the Ranger position. The Predator had never been used in a hot battle to support ground troops, and the Air Force controller embedded with the Rangers was hesitant to let it fire.

To prove its accuracy, the Predator crew launched one of its two Hellfire missiles at an empty hilltop. The hit was accurate, but it left the drone with only one missile. The pilot steadied his plane and squeezed the “pickle” button on his stick, setting loose his last missile and obliterating the Taliban machine-gun nest. “We would have all died without the Predator,” the controller recalled months later to Air Force officials.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022703754_4.html?sid=ST2010022801204

…NASA would work on this. Serious. Like, NOW!

Now imagine these NASA C-3POs roaming our satellite, controlled by all kind of scientists using telepresence suits down here, all looking for interesting things using high definition visors, and able to move just like they would move on planet Earth. It won’t work for Mars, but with a communication delay of only three seconds, it will work beautifully on the Moon.

NASA Project M Puts Scientists’ Avatars On the Moon

…if this is a glimpse into our future, I may have to drop my cynicism for a while. (…just a while.)

Another gem from Dark Roasted Blend:

Hallucinatory Architecture of the Future

…can we PLEASE just fire this thing up already and quit whining about how some crappy scientist is claiming it’s going to destroy mankind? I want the Higgs Boson found, dammit!

A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world’s most powerful atom-smasher.

The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”

“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court added.

CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

German fails to prove atom-smasher will end world

…that doesn’t involve spinning magnets? Sweet!

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

MIT researchers discover new way of producing electricity

…for electronics!

Pay particular attention to the first paragraph – electronics are becoming more like brains.

In the 18 months since the “missing link of electronics” was discovered in Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in Silicon Valley, California, memristors have spawned a hot new area of physics and raised hope of electronics becoming more like brains.

Now the same team have upgraded a standard silicon chip with a layer of memristors to show that the novel component can play nicely with existing computing hardware.

That suggests it may not be long before they reach the market. And that in turn is good news for manufacturers, who need to find a new way to keep computer power growing: the methods that have shrunk computers in recent years look to have reached their limits.

The rest is here.

…hell if we don’t have computers lodged in our brains within the decade I’d be surprised.

Who’d have thought a decade ago that portable music wouldn’t mean a cassette Walkman or Discman? Or that the VCR would be all but obsolete? That nobody would use fax (or even dial-up modems) any more? Or CRT?

An awful lot has changed over the last 10 years, but what technology of today will become redundant over the next decade?

We got our future-gazing hat on and came up with these eight.

The rest is here.

…is an asshole.

Not every man was born with common sense. And anyone who’s ever seen Steve Ballmer take a stage knows that you don’t want to get in the way of the emotionally-charged big man when the curtain opens. So we’re not terribly surprised to learn that Steve grabbed an iPhone he saw during his big entrance to a private Microsoft company meeting held at Seattle’s Safeco Field. Apparently, the hapless employee (allegedly from the Windows group) was trying to snap a photo of his boss when Ballmer grabbed the device and made some “funny comments” met by boos and jeers from Microsoft’s employees. Steve then set it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it before walking away — later teasing the employee during his presentation by noting that he hadn’t forgotten him. Good times, we’re sure, and nothing rallies the troops like a common enemy… except perhaps the camaraderie that comes in knowing that you’ve created a game-changing device.

We even have a photograph from the actual iPhone supposedly snapped while Steve Ballmer was brandishing it overhead. We can’t say for sure if it’s real, in fact, that could be the guy from Lost. See it after the break.

An amusing picture, as well as the rest, is here.

…is back, with new images!

The rest is here.

…that we waste more time online than on TV these days.

I weep for humanity.

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It’s one quintillion bytes. And yes, “quintillion” is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that’s how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they’re claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.
Mobile Broadband Video Forecast

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

The rest is here.

…are these not sold in stores? Really…

Nearly every household on Earth has a fridge that totally wastes at least 30 kwh of energy every month. Most of the energy is wasted every time you open the door. Cold air is heavier and falls out on the floor every time you open your fridge and warm air rises to fill the space it left. But with a top opening fridge; even if you leave the door wide open, gravity effortlessly leaves the heavy cold air inside.

A clever Australian inventor, Tom Chalko has converted a deep freeze into an incredibly efficient refrigerator that only has to run for a minute or two every hour to maintain normal fridge temperatures, using only about 100 watts of power a day.

The rest is here.

Seems events may be building up to something.

It looks like nuclear fusion is no longer just for precocious teenagers. Among the flurry of experiments going down worldwide, significant work will start rolling at the US National Ignition Facility sometime this June. Under construction for twelve years, the lab will focus 192 giant laser beams on two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Combining these isotopes at high temperatures generates a colossal amount of energy, recreating conditions “at the heart of the sun.” The goal is to find a way to achieve controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain in a lab.

Recall how all this was laughed away by the current scientific establishment? When will scientists learn that science is only as accurate as it’s current theories and equipment will allow. Translated, that means they should keep their mouths shut as to what is or is not possible.

Oh, read the rest here. If you want.

I always thought there was something more going on with this stuff than met the eye…seems I may have been right.

PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting.

“We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring” at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are “the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions,” she added.

Read the rest here.