College students have long been known to protest against war, racism and other social maladies. But now students at Santa Clara University are taking aim at what they see as a new form of injustice: allegedly poor cell phone reception.
Category: News and Views
How Does the Bloom Box Energy Server Work? | Fast Company
Produce your own energy with out solar!
Bloom hopes that a scaled-down version device can be used in homes. A residential Bloom Box would produce 1 kW of power and cost approximately $3,000.
On the Road – Signs of a Rebound in Business Aviation | NYTimes.com
Check list for fat cats:
Get TARP money
Invest in more junk investments
Make a ton of money
Pay back TARP
Stop flying with those nasty unwashed masses.
Gingerly, some business travelers are venturing back into private aircraft after the battered economy — and a public outcry against that perk of fat cats, the corporate jet — walloped the general aviation industry starting in 2008.
The Rosetta Project | Preserving Our Knowledge for Tomorrow
We are at, arguably, the zenith of the human experience. On every front of art or science, both practical and theoretical knowledge built on thousands of years of human observation has accumulated into massive amounts of information stored electronically, magnetically or optically. Unlike the ancients who preserved their most valuable observations in stone, stable for thousands of years, or in books, which last hundreds, our information is stored in technology such as hard disk drives, compact disks or magnetic tape with typical lives of around 10, 15 and twenty years. In the event of a breakdown in society or technology, this information would be lost to future generations. The Rosetta Project is an attempt to develop storage that will last thousands of years while being compact.
Our first prototype of a very long-term archive is The Rosetta Disk – a three inch diameter nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. Since each page is an image, rather than a digital encoding of 1’s and 0’s, it can be read by the human eye using 500 power optical magnification. The disk rests in a sphere made of stainless steel and glass which allows the disk exposure to the atmosphere, but protects it from casual impact and abrasion. With minimal care, it could easily last and be legible for thousands of years.
School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home | Boing Boing
..the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.
Got Good Credit Score? Prepare for High-End Google Ads
Users with good FICO scores might soon start seeing ads for more expensive luxury goods and services than those with lower scores, as Google has started to experiment with targeting ads based on users’ credit score.
John Thain Makes Bold Promise He Most Likely Can’t Keep | Dealbreaker
This is poetic justice.
John Thain (not in photo) is the former CEO of Merrill Lynch who famously spent millions of dollars redecorating his offices while the firm went down in flames. At left is the office he has sworn not to alter at his new job at CIT Group.
For a man who spent $87,000 on a rug and $1,000 a yard for drapes, this is perfect.
The cardboard cutout in the photo will presumably be removed.
Sweet.
Nike Launches GreenXchange for Corporate Idea-Sharing | Fast Company
GreenXchange, a Web-based marketplace that Nike claims will allow “companies [to] collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.” In other words, it’s a giant think tank for corporate sustainability.
Find Out Where Your Money Goes! | An Occasional Series
I hear nonstop bitching from Democrats and Republicans and Independents about where all the bailout (or stimulus) money is going. This is one of those times in life where the more educated about reality you are, the better.
Click here to be taken to a map that shows which banks received TARP money. This is from the government website http://www.financialstability.gov. At whim or random, we will keep putting information from this site out because it’s important stuff. But really, you should become familiar with it so you at least know what the facts are (or ‘facts’ are, depending 0n your political affiliation).
You know how to tell when a politician is lying, right?
Joe the Plumber Acknowledges His Role as Tool | The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room
“McCain was trying to use me,” Wurzelbacher said, according to public radio correspondent Scott Detrow. “I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy.”
“I don’t owe him s—,”
The comments are hysterical. One commenter notes: “As Bugs Bunny would say: ‘What a maroon!’ It took this caveman almost TWO YEARS to figure out he was being used by John McCain and Sarah Palin to portray middle America?Du-uh!He’s so dumb he shouldn’t be let out of his own house onto the street without permission!”
