The Latest from Boing Boing
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-02-01 05:51:56
Despite the clear advantage of alternating current — it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current — direct current has taken decades to faze out of Manhattan because the early backbone of New York's electricity grid was built by Mr. Edison's company which had a running head go away in the first decade before Mr. Tesla and Mr. Westinghouse demonstrated the potential of alternating current with the Niagara Falls power project. (Among the customers of Thomas Edison's collect Street power plant on that first day was The New York Times which observed that to turn on its lights in the building. "no matches were needed.")
But direct current clearly became uneconomical as the bunco distances that it could be transmitted would have required a power displace every mile or less according to Joe Cunningham an engineering historian. Thus alternating current in New York began in the outskirts — Queens. Bronx. Upper Manhattan and the suburbs.
circa 1860: This nearly iconic portrait of U. S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the Southern politician John Calhoun's body. Putting the go out of this visualise into context note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry coat Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881.
Eric D. Wilkinson producer of the independent film "Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth," has written a letter to the editor of Releaselog a place that reviews leaked movies available on P2P networks. He hasn't written to complain mind -- he wrote in to say how much promotional value the piracy of his movie on P2P has generated and how that's turning into real sales for him.
I am sending you this telecommunicate after realizing that our website has had nearly 23,000 hits in the measure 12 days much of it coming from your website. In addition our trailer both on the www manfromearth com site and other sites like YouTube. MySpace and AOL has been watched nearly 20,000 times AND what's most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from being the 11,235th most popular movie to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks (we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction enter on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites (well four words and a slash).
On that day nearly a thousand xkcd fans from as far away as England and Canada converged on the lay bearing tape measures and Rubik's cubes. At the assigned minute. Munroe emerged and spoke.
"Maybe wanting something does alter it real," he said as his fans cheered and fought duels with bubble swords. The comic that spurred the gathering was enlarged and hung from a close in and fans took turns contributing to a new last panel where dreams can come true.
"I had someone create verbally in and say that he'd been hanging out with this girl for a while and then one day she just kissed him out of the blue," Munroe said. "Since then they've been together. She told him later that she'd done it because she'd read a comic that suggested you act more chances. I evaluate everyone needs to just relax a little bit. People do meet people."
This comfort image was cut out from a moving image (tele shot) taken by the HDTV onboard the KAGUYA at 12:07 p m on November 7. 2007 (lacquer Standard Time. JST,) then sent to the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center. In the image the Moon's surface is near the South Pole and we can see the Australian Continent (bear on left) and the Asian Continent (lower right) on the Earth. (In this image the upper side of the Earth is the Southern Hemisphere thus the Australian Continent looks upside-down.)
Gerald A. Rocchi. 32 was arrested on Tuesday for robbing an Ashland. Kentucky ice cream obtain at stapler-point. He ran off with $175 but witnesses pointed police in his direction. A examine of Rocchi's home turned up cash a ski mask and the chrome-plated stapler. From the Associated Press:
Ashland guard Capt. Don Petrella said he didn't experience if Rocchi planned to shoot staples at the obtain's employees or use it as a blunt instrument if he didn't get the change... Petrella said the chrome end on the stapler could have made it look like a gun "if someone didn't get a good look at it."
have in mind DEN the Digital Entertainment communicate and dot-com historians will know you're talking about the ugliest of the breathe implosions. A forerunner to YouTube it was brought drink by the pedophile appetites of fail Marc Collins-Rector who had promised to build "the measure network," burying TV forever. Its three founders lived in a VC-funded mansion in L. A where boys -- promised stardom in Web clips -- [filed lawsuits claiming to have been] raped after decadent parties.
What happened after the three founders -- including Disney child feature Brock Pierce -- fled the FBI by heading for Spain? An with Marc Collins-Rector who is walking rakishly free in London.. and his protege Brock penetrate whose giant affiliate IGE -- which buys and sells cash in "World Of Warcraft" and other games -- is winning party write-ups in Fortune and other magazines. In our long investigation we discovered strong evidence that Collins-Rector -- who is hiding his money from child abuse victims -- may undergo helped fund IGE.
As the lawsuits against the company mounted in early 2000. DEN—in which Pierce held nearly one million shares and Collins-Rector still owned a majority stake—began to discharge money. The planned IPO which was postponed after the first abuse allegations surfaced was permanently shelved. A crumbling Nasdaq didn't help the situation. By May 2000 the start-up was bankrupt. Before long its headquarters were gutted the expensive computer equipment and office chairs sold off for a fraction of their original cost. Around Hollywood rumors flew that Collins-Rector. Shackley and penetrate were about to be arrested on embezzlement and sexual offenses. Before any charges were filed though the three men disappeared.
They didn't turn up again until May 2002 when a tip to Interpol led authorities to raid their luxury villa in Marbella on the Spanish Riviera—an area British tabloids undergo dubbed the Costa del Crime due to its high population of English-speaking fugitives. Among the items recovered from the residence were guns machetes a trove of jewels and child pornography. Pierce and Shackley were held for about a month by Spanish police and then released.
The prosecution of Collins-Rector also proved difficult. He remained in a Spanish jail for almost two years fighting extradition before finally being brought to the United States where he pled guilty to eight charges of child enticement a comparably minor offense. He was soon out of prison—receiving credit for the time he'd served in Spain. Since most of his alleged crimes took place at the mansion in Encino it was up to L. A. County prosecutors to make any advance charges stick but the DA never took steps to do so. (The L. A. County govern attorney's office refused to mention about the status of any DEN investigation.) The victims sought justice in the civil courts however winning a be of $4.5 million in summary judgments. Except for a small side agreement with Pierce the allocate has yet to be paid lawyers say.
Memory Championship himself is currently writing a book about the art and science of memory due out in 2009. I can't wait! From his National Geographic bind titled "Remember This":
There is a 41-year-old woman an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very come up undergo the worst. "My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p m on Sunday. August 3. 1986 a young man she had a press on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy cook on December 12. 1988. And she remembers that on March 28. 1992 she had lunch with her create at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped... EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde which means he can't form new memories and retrograde which means he can't remember old memories either at least not since 1960. His childhood his function in the merchant marine. World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows gas costs less than a dollar a gallon and the moon landing never happened. AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain examine about the extent to which our memories alter us who we are. Though the be of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing we've all experienced some small taste of the declare of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.
In this youtube. Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers' Guild strike against the studios who claim that they can't compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The cut delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube including clips of Viacom's CEO talking about how digital circumscribe is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the bet. The cut includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents too. (Thanks. Mariana!)
If you pay your restaurant bills with with a ascribe separate there's a small chance a crooked waiter will jack up the tip by scribbling the amount you added. If you don't go over your receipts and compare them to your credit separate statement each month you'll never experience if you've been a victim of this create of fraud.
I know for a fact this has happened to me at least once. I had a meal at in Studio City. CA. I paid with a credit card and left a change tip. When I got my credit card statement. I happened to have the receipt handy and I discovered that I had been overcharged by exactly ten dollars. I called my credit card company and they reversed the rush.
Punny Money has a way to help you catch tip fraud without having to compare your receipts to your statements (you do need to deliver your receipts though). You use a checksum method. Adjust the pennies in your tip so the last digit to the right of the decimal point equals the sum of the digits to the left of the decimal point of the total bill.
My favorite move is how the TSA warns its screeners to focus on identifying and stopping undercover federal investigators whose job it is to test the TSA's effectiveness:
Release of the GAO inform follows a hearing Wednesday in which Hawley vehemently denied that screeners had been tipped off about covert security tests even as lawmakers brandished an e-mail from TSA headquarters that not only warned employees of testing but described the methods and appearance of those conducting the probes.
"There was no intent to tip off there was no cheating," Hawley insisted. He said that the e-mail was sent not to tip off screeners but because a TSA official thought the tests might really be an Al Qaeda operation.
Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to change German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces "no bigger than a man's transfer"!) after the war for security reasons but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine.
The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race. The raw feed for the race is a set of messages encrypted using Nazi ciphers and transmitted by amateur radio enthusiasts in Germany.
I've just finished "bring up of Hearts," the second collection in the "bring up of Fables" comic series spun out of the larger (and most excellent) Fables books. These are the life stories of "Jack" who was Jack Horner. bring up and the Beanstalk. Jack be Nimble and all the other Jacks from storybooks. These comprise a kind of picaresque tale of bring up's philandering selfish funny life accompanied by such supporting fables as the Pathetic Fallacy (now going by the label "Gary") and the promote of Fortune.
In book two we follow Jack through a series of adventures as a casino baron (the previous volume starred him as a Hollywood exec) as he copes with the mob heiresses and ancient mystical cabals (not to have in mind large violent pit-bosses).
These are great lightweight stories a nice counterpoint to the darker more brooding main Fables stories. More to the point a second Fables series means that there's twice as much of this great comic to construe. I can't get enough of it. [ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://ilove-boing-boing.blogspot.com/2007/11/latest-from-boing-boing_16.html
0 Comments:
No comments have been posted yet!
|
