arthur c clarke usually has good things to say...

OneWorld South Asia - Humanity will survive information deluge – Sir Arthur C Clarke

] Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an
] e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a
] message header. The receiving system would check the
] Internet's Domain Name System for the public key
] registered to the sending domain.

Yahoo Spam PKI

] NORTH BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- In less time than it took a
] North Brunswick patrolman to write a ticket for an
] unregistered vehicle, the driver got his car registered
] online Thursday.

hah!

Motorist registers during traffic stop

] along the southern tip of the continent -- in the shadow
] of an aging, obsolescing water-cooled reactor --
] state-run utility giant Eskom and its international
] partners want to build the world's first commercial
] "pebble bed" reactor.

pebble beds are really cool, and about as safe as nuclear power can be. as usual, i'm concerned more about human factors than technical ones. Such as, secure transport and long term storage for the waste, reactor physical security, etc. These days, i consider dirty bombs more threatening than most anything else, and the more nuclear reactors we have, the more nasty waste is available for theiving.

nevertheless, i still think that unless we get some super-efficient photovoltaics Real Soon Now, nuclear is gonna be the only way we can go, and PBMR are at the top of the list as far as that goes.

Wired News: Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have crossed a robotic arm with the bottom half of a Segway to make a robot named Cardea that can traverse hallways and push open doors.
...
Cardea consists of the Segway base, sonar sensors that help in navigation, a pair of cameras that form a rudimentary vision system, and a single arm capable of five degrees of freedom -- two at the shoulder, one at the elbow, and two at the wrist. It also has a kickstand.

Technology Review: Segway Robot Opens Doors

] With eyes fixed on the burgeoning Linux enterprise
] market, networking software specialist Novell (Quote,
] Chart) on Tuesday announced plans to shell out $210
] million in cash to acquire Germany's SUSE Linux AG.

Novell's still in the game!

Novell Acquires SUSE and IBM Tosses In

] Microsoft on Monday said it would use IBM chips in its
] next generation Xbox game and consumer electronics
] devices, dealing a blow to Intel and providing a much
] needed boost for IBM's lossmaking chip business.

Whoa...

FT.com / Business / US

]] The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke
]] diesel engine is the most powerful and most efficient
]] prime-mover in the world today.
]
]wow... 5,608,312 foot pounds of torque!!! Someone needs to build a ]muscle car with this engine...

holy crap that's cool. i can't believe the normal internal combustion mechanics scale up that well... i would think that when you've got a cylinder that's 3 feet across, the characteristics of the explosion stage would be massively different. man, this fucker must be loud, even at only 100 rpm.

The Most Powerful Diesel Engine in the World

] And those are the people who still dominate the standards
] bodies?
] They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right
] now. It's not OK to say standards are important, unless
] we don't like someone who implemented it. And it's not OK
] to say these services at the core should not be built
] out, unless you're one of the small guys and nobody
] really cares. How do we build a commercial business with
] ground rules that seem to shift based on personal agenda
] and emotion versus any particular logical data set?

More blood boiling commentary from the people who broke the internet.

The cultural divide and the Internet's future |CNET.com

yeah, i imagine one of their lawyers actually looked at the facts and told them how badly they were going to lose.

write shitty software, pay the price. for fucks sake, relying on AUTORUN for what is effectively a piece of security software!? Give me a break.

Sunncomm backs down from shift key prosecution