I want it!…
and it doubles as a couples robotic love seat:
Bidding starts at 100,000 USD.
As a goof I asked the seller how much shipping would be to Tehran, Iran. I hope they, and the HSA goons which are no doubt tapping this, have a sense of humor. Cheers guys!
Photographer Robert Knoth and reporter Antoinette de Jong have a very powerful set of photos with commentary called “Nuclear Nightmares: Twenty Years Since Chernobyl”.
A Snippet:
“The milk from the villages gets tested for radiation levels. If the radiation levels are too high the milk is mixed with uncontaminated milk until the radioactivity is below a set limit”
Found via boingboing.
I ran into this ass-kicking piece at Gin and Tacos immediate after the 2k4 travesty of an election. I felt that it was dead on in many respects, but I didn’t have this site working back then….So It gets posted now. Here’s a Snippet:
These votes come from the suburbs (tax cuts) and rural areas (abortion, gay marriage). Can you think of two places more insulated from the regressive economic and international policies of this administration? Look at the decision-making process of a suburban voter. The war? Who cares. Junior’s in an expensive private school, and that ACT tutor is gonna make sure he gets into a 4th-rate college with two directional adjectives in its name. The economy? Come on, daddy’s the person who does the outsourcing, not the one who gets outsourced. Terrorism? Those attacks happen in big cities. Cuts to government programs? Well that’s just more urban poor to shuttle into the army. Or prison. Need more of those.
Streaming media is dominated by a bunch of software companies whose products I don’t want on my computer. I’m a user of firefox, media player classic, ffdshow, media player connectivity, Real Alternative, and others. I do not use IE or Microsoft WMP because they sucks and probably report my viewing habits to homeland security.
For all those sites which don’t work, its nice to know that there is a way of downloading the media to play locally. You can also store copies of your favorites. Use lawfully, you crazy kids.
Look into his eyes…
Meet Tom Bearden. He’s the co-inventor of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, or MEG, a device which provides a net positive amount of energy by pulling it out of another dimension. Don’t believe it….Well look here smarty pants a working prototype:
When I get some spare time, I’ve been planning on building a windmill to generate some power convert some wind energy into electrical energy. Maybe I’ll just build one of these instead….wonder if he’ll provide schematics.
I found out about tom after running into his Lecture on Soviet Weather Engineering. Its pretty interesting stuff, especially the pictoral examples; a must for physics buffs and majors. Someone send that man a fisheye! =)
I’d like to believe it and the above stuff about the MEG, but its difficult to be convinced with the small amount of understanding of the items which I have now. But trust me, If I get a MEG to work, you’ll hear about it. Stay tuned.
So the other day was 4/20, and most young people were celebrating the numerical co-incidence commonly associated with pot. Others, including myself, remembered the Collumbine shootings which occurred in 1999 and were orchestrated to occur on 4/20, which was Adolph Hitler’s birthday.
Today I was cleaning my desk of worthless receipts, and I noticed that I bought gas in Littleton, CO while I was passing through Denver on the way back from Vail, CO. I wondered how close I was to where the shootings took place and did a little search for “littleton high school shooting map” which gave me an interesting first result: “SCHOOL SHOOTINGS HAVE A PATTERN THAT IMPLICATE THE PRESIDENT AND HIS GOVERNMENT — GUN CONTROL IS THE OBJECTIVE! BLACK MAGICK WITCHCRAFT IS THE POWER!” They show this nice map:
The site goes on to say that the school shootings have been orchestrated by the Illuminati…and they make the shape of the horns of some beast. In my opinion they missed a few….or cherry picked at least..
With that many points I could probably write my name.
They also say that the results match up to some electro-magnetometer mumbo jumbo meter reading that was measured in Alaska….
The idea of plotting one thing against another is a great way to figure out something….I’d just like to see a more useful plot…of say poverty vs school shootings….or gun population vs school shootings…..cow hormone additives (in milk) consumption vs school shootings…etc.
The weather control stuff which reminds me a lot of a lecture by Tom “I’ll buy a fisheye lens when I can afford it” Bearden. The lecture is fascinating because he explains things in terms of physics that I can’t follow…..talk of a few extra dimensions here and there which energy can be pulled from and pushed to. If you’re in on a rainy day with nothing to do, I highly suggest watching it. I watch it with the hope that he’s not a crackpot and that he’ll prove it to me sometime, but I haven’t been convinced otherwise yet. Oh yea, he also created a machine which creates energy from nothing, breaking the first law of classical thermodynamics….
As a cynic, I’ve developed a certain disdain for the patent system. Mainly because of companies like the new SCO, which is a company that bought the SCO unix rights and makes a business out of trying to enforce patent infringement claims. Sure, if your stuff gets ripped off, and you defend yourself thats ok. But I find it repulsive when people who don’t do the creating, who’ve just bought the rights, start throwing their weight around saying “That’s our idea and you have to pay for it”. I doubt very much that the code monkeys who wrote the products the new SCO now is protecting feel good about accusing the whole linux community of mass patent infringement.
Similarly disgusting is the music industry, with the example standing out of Michael Jackson outbidding Paul McCartney for the rights to most of the Beatles music.
As an American, especially as an engineer, you get fed this story that you can make it big by inventing something, patenting it and selling it to everyone over the television late at night. In a simplistic view, the patent system seems great and would be the “ticket outa here” of many aspiring home inventors. Practically, though, the situation is much less rosy as Don Lancaster eloquently explains in his article “A Case Against Patents”.
Snip:
“Finally, be realistic. You don’t create things to get filthy
rich. You create things because you like to create things
and have some compelling desire or need to do so. As long
as there are enough nickels to keep going, that is all that
should really matter.”
This page is effectively a diary right now because I have very very few non-robot visitors. For instance, the MSN Robot has visited this page 711 times this month. Thats about 7x the amount of IE users. They’re probably robots too.
It doesn’t bother me, but spam does. I’ve been getting comment spam from assholes trying to sell pills. I installed SpamKarma2, a plugin to WordPress. Installation was painful, but it’s too early for me to judge the product.
From the inq, A guy who wrote an open source program to allow a computer to hook up to a model train has been hit with some nasty letters and some legal threats from a Japanese company who claims he is infringing on their patents. The project on sourceforge has not been shut down, so it looks like the author is not bowing to the pressure.
This issue is going to come up over and over in the near future so we need to be very diligent and ensure that correct precidents are set. The nature of software nowadays is that many people will be concurrently developing just about everything. If it doesn’t exist yet, wait a little while and it will. With this amount of development, patents just stifle innovation. Keeping in mind that patents were meant to encourage innovation by providing a timed monopoly to the pating party in exchange for showing how something is done.
