"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
NASA - Moon Return Video
Topic: Space
5:25 pm EDT, May 15, 2007
This is like a Hollywood movie trailer. This has everything but Bruce Willis and massive explosions.
Acidus saw a rather interesting dirty trick today on a phishing site today. The Favicon for the site was the exact same padlock image that is normally shown for a secure website. While the site couldn't turn the address bar green, it is certainly praying on the habit people are developing with IE7 and Firefox to look for security info in the address bar.
Military puts MySpace, other sites off limits - CNN.com
Topic: Media
1:34 pm EDT, May 14, 2007
Soldiers serving overseas will lose some of their online links to friends and loved ones back home under a Department of Defense policy that a high-ranking Army official said would take effect Monday.
The Defense Department will begin blocking access "worldwide" to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on its computers and networks, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander.
If the restrictions are intended to prevent soldiers from giving or receiving bad news, they could also prevent them from providing positive reports from the field, said Noah Shachtman, who runs a national security blog for Wired magazine.
"This is as much an information war as it is bombs and bullets," he said. "And they are muzzling their best voices."
The sites covered by the ban are the video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, and FileCabi, the social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5, music sites Pandora, MTV, and 1.fm, and live365, and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.
The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
Los Angeles is Burning, Again. (plus theme song!!)
Topic: Travel
6:04 am EDT, May 9, 2007
"This fire has danced around like nothing I've ever seen," Los Angeles City Council Member Tom LaBonge told reporters, adding that the fire had destroyed a terraced garden known as Dante's View.
The park is in the Hollywood Hills, about 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. It includes golf courses, tennis courts, the city's zoo and botanical gardens and the copper-domed Griffith Park Observatory.
The bright orange glow of the fire provided a striking backdrop for the white facade of the observatory into the evening hours.
Visitors and nonessential workers were ordered to leave the zoo when the fire broke out, but none of the facility's animals were being evacuated, spokesman Jason Jacobs told CNN.
Five members of a the radical Islamic "scene" in Jersey were going to attempt to shoot up Fort Dix.
The Ocean and Monmouth area is my turf. I really take personal offense to terrorists wanting to shoot up the place.
The case began to take shape in January 2006, when an employee of a store told the FBI someone had brought a "disturbing" video to be duplicated, Christie said.
The video "depicted 10 young men who appeared to be in their early 20s shooting assault weapons at a firing range in a militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic 'Allah Akbar,' " (Arabic for "God is Great"), according to an FBI affidavit filed with the criminal complaints.
Two paid informants infiltrated the group, one in March 2006 and the other in July. Both of them "consensually recorded" meetings and conversations, according to the affidavit, filed by Special Agent John J. Ryan.
One quote from the alleged recordings was defendant Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer saying, "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers. ... This is exactly what we are looking for. You hit four, five or six Humvees and light the whole place [up] and retreat completely without any losses."
The men are believed to have been "inspired" by international terrorist groups, but not directly linked to a specific organization, he said.
He said defendant Shain Duka was heard on tape saying, "We can do a lot of damage with seven people. We can do big things."
A law enforcement source told CNN the group played paintball and test fired weapons as part of their training.
The men had surveyed a number of bases but settled on Fort Dix because one of the defendants said he knew the base "like the back of his hand" because he had delivered pizza there, Christie said.
The six -- three of them brothers -- were arrested Monday night "as two of the defendants were meeting a confidential government witness to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns, and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006," according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The U.S. Attorney's Office said the three brothers involved, all with the last name Duka, were born in the former Yugoslavia and are illegally residing in the United States. It identified them as Eljvir, 23, Shain, 26, and Dritan, 28, and said the three operate businesses known as Qadr Inc., Colonial Roofing and National Roofing.
The other three men charged are Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan who is employed as a taxicab driver in Philadelphia; Serdar Tatar, 23, of Philadelphia, born in Turkey, whose last known employment was at a 7-Eleven; and Agron Abdullahu, 24, of Buena Vista Township, born in the former Yugoslavia and employed at a Shop-Rite Supermarket.
Johnny Strange | Download these tracks, or rock n' roll gets it...
Topic: Music
6:35 am EDT, May 7, 2007
A number of MemeStreamers will remember becoming acquainted with Johnny Strange several years ago in NYC while HOPE was going on. A gang of us dropped in on him in the studio, hung out for a few, and (of course) caused a bunch of trouble. We wound up getting trapped in an elevator, kicked off the roof of a building by the Secret Service, and completely fucking plastered at the Molly Wee. It was a fun night.
Anyway, some of you are already in tune with The Strange, and some of you are not. All of you need to cruise over to Johnny's MySpace page and download his latest tracks. Otherwise, rock n' roll will die, and it will be all your fault.
Do you want the death of rock on your conscience? I didn't fucking think so... So, go and buy some tracks from an independent artist that doesn't suck, or shut the hell up and stop complaining about the current state of music.
Eventually we will get an Internet radio kinda thing going on that makes it possible to taste bands' music beyond little clips, without having to initially buy whole tracks. It will be recommendation driven, so you can depend on the hip to clue you into stuff. You'll wind up paying for it somehow too, so indie artists can actually make some money. Bands have all kinds of expenses. Stuff like guitar strings, whiskey, condoms, and pot.
In the meantime, while all this is getting worked out, buy some tracks from independent artists occasionally. Seriously.
