Hats off to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne for his suggestion to use non-lethal weapons developed for the military on unruly mobs here in the United States. Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. […]
Every two years around election time politicians are faced with the question of whether they want to pass a bill or have an issue in the upcoming election. It's cynical, but that's the way politicians minds work. Along those same lines, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist has come up with a relatively painless solution to the […]
Well, my computer's video card, a Radeon X700, started misbehaving a few weeks back, and it got worse Monday night, so yesterday I stopped by Circuit City on my way to work and picked up a new card. I popped the old card out, popped the new card in, and then had to reboot the […]
Last week, federal district judge Richard Matsch ruled that three Utah-based companies that provide PG-rated, edited versions of feature films are an "illegitimate business." The quotes from Matsch in the CBC article are over the top. Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend […]
The whole megapixel one-upsmanship thing is just getting out of hand. Dalsa Semiconductor has fabricated an image sensor with more than 111 million pixels. The company claims the 4 x 4-inch charge-coupled device, configured as 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, is the world's highest-resolution image sensor and the first to break the 100 million-pixel barrier.
Nintendo announced earlier this week that their next-generation console, code-named Revolution, will have a new name when it hits the market. The console will be named the Nintendo Wii. That's pronounced "Wee." Yeah, you see the problem. Player 1: "I've got an Xbox 360." Player 2: "I've gotta Wii." Player 1: "The bathroom's down the […]
I really don't know what to say about the headline in this story from the Washington Post. Embryonic Stem Cell Success In Mouse Experiment, Cells From Testes Are Transformed By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 25, 2006; A11 Scientists in Germany said yesterday that they had retrieved easily obtained cells from the […]
That humongous monstrosity of an airliner that Airbus is selling had a "safety drill" today. The goal was to evacuate 873 passengers and 20 crew from the plane in just 80 seconds. They were apparently successful -- everyone got out -- but there's that pesky problem of 33 injuries (in what would be a best-case […]
The Sony rootkit, for those of you whose only knowledge of computers is how to get here to Hoystory, was a piece of software that came packaged with certain music CDs and was installed on computers without the owners' knowledge or permission. This rootkit was designed in such a way to make it difficult to […]
I guess it really shouldn't come as a big surprise, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that the RIAA -- the record companies' lobbying group -- is floating the legal position that making backup copies of CDs you own or ripping the CDs to an Ipod or other MP3 player is not fair use. […]