Over at the Google Blog today they've announced new file transfer capabilities in iGoogle and orkut. That's fun! But what I'm most excited about is their promise of file transfer in Gmail Chat. More »
Dell's promise: that the Alienware M11x is the "most powerful 11-inch gaming laptop" around. And they're right! It's hard to imagine packing much more oomph into such a portable frame. Then again, there's a reason Muggsey Bogues never won MVP. More »
Hold on to your Spiderman underpants because here's a planetary-sized nerdgasm. NASA's Cassini spacecraft has made the most amazing discovery in the history of science: Pac-Man actually lives on the Death Star. There. Beat that, Large Hadron Collider. More »
High school and college engineers can do a lot with a lawn trimmer engine, bicycle wheels and a few wires—like build prototype cars that get in the thousands of miles per gallon. Here we bring you the best images from this weekend’s Shell Eco-marathon Americas competition.
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A Powerful Prototype
All weekend long, prototype cars built by students around the country and shipped down to Texas battled it out. They ran 10-lap races around the 0.6 course of city streets in downtown Houston, striving to be top dog in miles per gallon.
The cars in the prototype division, like this one from Loyola-Marymount University, didn’t have many of the luxuries of the normal cars driving by and wondering what was going on. But those normal cars also don’t run at more than 1,000 miles per gallon, as many racers achieved.
The winning team in the prototype category, from Universite Laval in Canada, achieved nearly 2,500 MPG. (See a full list of winners here.)
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Through absence of light, the shadow celebrates the unseen. And for this week's Shooting Challenge, 103 of you captured what's so entrancing about photography that looks at what we literally can't see. More »
We've just scored some of the first shots of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, and while they are said to be very early, you can clearly see the progress that has been made in the transition to native Cocoa applications. More »
Hi all,Just want to do a survey about the benefit and the salary range for engineering in japan.How much they usually pay for a Fresh grad? thank you.
Hi! how can I get the Matlab code for the Genetic algorithm for Pick and Place component placement machine to find the shortest path for the cycle.Thanks.
We here at DISCOVER have managed to score 9 Blu-ray DVD copies of the recent Warner Bros production of Sherlock Holmes. (Let’s just say they fell off a truck.) Anybody out there want ‘em? We’re going to post a tweet in mere moments about the giveaway; the first 9 people to comment here or retweet our message will find themselves the lucky—and fast—winners. Here’s the official description of this Holmes re-boot:
The action-adventure mystery “Sherlock Holmes” is helmed by acclaimed filmmaker Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr. brings the legendary detective to life, and Jude Law stars as Holmes’ trusted colleague, Watson. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.
Buy it on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack, DVD and For Download 3/30
Sherlock Holmes © 2009 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.
Posey Highlights Space in Upcoming Local Events
"Congressman Bill Posey (R-Rockledge) has announced a schedule of events he will be attending focusing on space related issues. Below is a list of events, with indication of events that are open to the media. In addition to the events listed below, Congressman Posey will meet with the Space Union Leaders to discuss jobs and the issues currently facing the space industry. He will also meet with Colonel Ed Wilson, the new Commander of the 45th Space Wing."
Below are a couple of articles on Ecosocialism for people who just want to read about it or are interested in it. It’s a new model of solving the climate crisis with something besides capitalism, which is based on selling as many things as possible in order to make as high a profit as possible. Waste is built into capitalism to the point where it is seen as a plus. Anyone who has seen Michael Moore’s movie called “Capitalism” knows this economic system is killing us, and you can’t solve climate change with the free market, while making lots of money. See the video “The Story of Stuff” too, for why it’s impossible to continue on with this model and still stop climate change. We can either have growth and capitalism, many believe, or we can stop climate change, but we can’t do both.
There are many resources online for people interested in ecosocialism that explain why it should be the model of the future. The current model of using our planet to make things that we throw away to make more and more things, using tons of energy in the process, shipping them all over the world — isn’t working anymore.
People should get back in touch with nature and appreciate our planet, basic as that may sound. President Obama agrees with that, and is creating a Conservation Summit. Great idea! Naturally, anti-nature corporate types will ridicule the idea and call it “socialist”. The fact is that eco-socialism might be the best option for a new economic model as we attempt to stop and/or adapt to climate change.
Anti-capitalism and climate justice
by Esther Vivas
Today, climate change is an undeniable reality. The political, social and media impact of the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009 was a good proof of this. A summit that showed the inability of the capitalist system to give a credible response to a crisis that it has itself created. Green capitalism offers a series of technological solutions (nuclear power, capture of carbon from the atmosphere to be stored, biofuels and so on) that will have a major social and environmental impact. These are false solutions to climate change that try to hide the structural causes that have led us to the current crisis situation and raise the contradiction between the short term calculations of capital and the long rhythms of ecological equilibrium.
In this context, a movement able to challenge the dominant discourse of green capitalism, recognising the impact and the responsibility of the current model of capitalist production, distribution and consumption and linking the global climate threat with everyday social problems is urgent. Copenhagen saw the increased expression of the movement for climate justice, precisely to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the mobilizations against the WTO [...]
If you have 4 AA batteries in series and one is weak or dead what is it's effect? Does it act as a resistor? insulator? or does it not affect the output of the remaining 3 good batteries? What about if batteries were in parallel?
Are spring allergies making you feel a little stuffed up? No problem–a small outlay of cash and a lot of faith in crackpot science should soon set you straight. Just invest in one of the new “healing ringtones” available in Japan; then the next time your phone rings, stick your cell phone close to your nose and let the ringtone work its magic.
According to Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, each downloadable therapeutic ringtone can heal a certain ailment. From weight loss to hay fever, creator Matsumi Suzuki is confident that his ringtones can perk you up. (His previous innovation was the “Bow-lingual,” a device that he claimed could translate dog barks into human-speak.)
Explaining how a healing ringtone can fight hay fever, for example, Suzuki said the sound waves produced by the ringing phone dislodge stuck pollen in the nose, thus clearing the airway and making the allergen-crazed individual feel better.
While healing ring tones sound entertaining, it seems pretty obvious that they won’t save you a trip to the doctor. The BBC cautions:
Index, the mobile phone content provider which markets the therapeutic ring tones, admits the technology behind them is perhaps a little unproven but insists the number of downloads suggests they may be working.
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I swear, Zach is reading my mind. Click to read the punch line.
But I imagine what would really happen is that this would only get fully funded as long as the LHC had an abstinence-only provision on daughter particles.
You need insulated gonads of steel to get into a harness and let a helicopter fly you into a high voltage cable to service them. That's precisely what the technicians from Air2 do for utilities companies nationwide. [Air2 via Flightglobal] More »
You could say we've already reviewed the HTC Desire. After all, it's essentially a jumped-up Nexus One with a few minor changes, right? Wrong. HTC Sense, Adobe Flash support and an optical trackpad make it a brand new experience. More »
Curious, possibly weird: ZDNet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan says Adobe and Google are planning to announce tomorrow that they're bundling Flash with Google's "Chrome browser and or operating system." I'm not sure how much it move would really change the current Flash/no-Flash internet calculus, since Chrome still has just a tiny (but growing) portion of the browser market, you can already get Flash on Chrome (presumably everybody with Chrome has Flash already) and there are other forces at work in the internetosphere. More »
According to a leaked Best Buy iPad playbook, each store getting the iPad for D-day is supposed to receive exactly 15—five each of the 16, 32 and 64GB versions. Again, they won't be on the website, and there might be another round of iPads on April 11, if Apple doesn't hold stock back for its own needs. In other words, Best Buy isn't much of a backup plan if you haven't already pre-ordered, and if you're gonna camp out, you're probably better off at an Apple Store. [TUAW] More »
"I want a 9 car garage and be able to enjoy viewing one of them in the living room." And so it came to pass, and the people rejoiced. I love it when rich people go bonkers, don't you? More »
I have many precision measuring tools and a shop that has high humidity, especially in the winter time. I would like to keep my tools in the shop where I have access to them when I work. I presently have to keep them in the house. Can you suggest a way that I can provide protection for my tools from
