You certainly don’t expect to zoom in on a tabby cat, when you look up someone’s address in Google maps, but recently they have started adding street level photos of the addresses, and in this case, if you zoom in on the address, you can see the owner’s cat in the upstairs window!
(Via Boing Boing)
Remember the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, published in 1972? There’s an interesting article and graphics (subscription required for full article) in the current New Scientist showing what the latest estimates are for how long precious and rare metals will last.
Not just of interest if you are considering buying jewellery – these metals include platinum, used in catalytic converters, and indium, used in LCD screens. The predicted number of years left are surprisingly few for many metals – especially if the rest of the world were to increase their usage to current levels in the USA.
Right now, I’m twenty years old. I am willing to take a large percentage off the top of my salary for the rest of my working life in order to be able to retire very young and live off of the proceeds of my investments and do volunteer work. How many years would I have to work if I saved 20% of my income?Read the rest of this entry »
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It seems a US missile defence system similar to that intended for Poland that is upsetting Russia at the moment can only shoot down modern weapons:
The Pentagon was forced to abort a bid to shoot down a long-range missile over the Pacific Friday when it failed to fly high enough to engage the missile defense system, US officials said.Given that Russia probably has a lot of older missiles lying around, it obviously shouldn’t be a problem for them if they want to pop off a missile or two. On the other hand why any EU country would want to install such a system is a bit of a puzzle. A defence system which consists of a grand total of ten missiles only capable of shooting down high-powered hardware seems a bit pointless, don’t you think?“The target did not reach sufficient altitude to be deemed a threat and so the Ballistic Missile Defense System did not engage it, as designed,” said Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering…
...But Obering said there was “always a risk of this occurrence since we are flying old intercontinental ballistic missile motors in our targets.
“We have initiated a target modernization program within our existing budget, which should mitigate these risks for the future,” he said, adding the agency would try to repeat the test later this summer.
(Yes, I know the US claims the defence is against Iran – I hope they know what state the Iranian rocket motors are in, they didn’t get it right on WMD in Iraq, did they?)
We have external roller shutters on all our outer windows (these are common on Germany, but quite rare in the UK so if you don’t know what I mean take a look here).
They run in a slot which is part of the window frame, and at the top of the slot there is a piece on each side like the photo – it acts as a guide to make the shutter’s slats run easily into the slot without jamming. The guide and the slots are made of polyethelene or some other low energy plastic (low energy plastics are non-stick like teflon, and are correspondingly difficult to glue – super-glue doesn’t stick at all, for example!).
The problem is, that the guides get loose and pop out of the slots, which means the shutters jam. We have had a firm come in, some years ago, who glued them all back in. But the glue didn’t hold and for some months our bedroom shutter has been completely jammed after a long period of playing up on occassion. Now the weather is warmer, we decided to have a go at fixing it ourselves. After some research on the internet, we found that there is only one sort of adhesive for these problematic plastics – 3M’s Scotch-Weld DP-8005. It is pretty expensive – we paid 25 Euro for a 38 ml tube of it, and another 60 Euro for the gun which is neccessary to apply it in the required 10:1 mixture (its a two component adhesive). But it seems to have bonded the guide to slot very effectively and the shutters are now working properly again. We bought ours from shopdepot24, who delivered by return of post and also pointed out that our original order was missing a vital component, so we could change the order before it was shipped. Both the supplier and the product are to be recommended!
You might think that having lobbied successfully over the last 50 years to get the copyright period extended from 28 years in 1964 to up to 90 years today, that companies such as NBC, News Corp., Disney, Time Warner and Microsoft would be happy enough. But no. They have formed a new organisation this week called Copyright Alliance with the aim of “promoting the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs, and growth.”
The focus of the new organisation is clearly going to be on getting existing copyright laws strengthened and supporting enforcement of existing laws, as you might expect. Here’s a quote from their website:
Have you ever heard somebody say, “Of course, we want to see artists get paid,” and then they follow that with a phrase beginning with “but”? Generally the “but” and what follows it, implies a belief that copyright protections are not really important any more. That belief can begin to erode or even eliminate the intellectual property rights accorded to creators in the U.S. Constitution and through global treaties.Come on guys stop trying to fool us. How many artists are still around after 90 years to collect their copyright fees, and how much does a relatively unknown artist get for each copy of a CD sold? So who does copyright ultimately benefit the most?
A British publisher, Self Made Hero, has brought out a series of Shakespeare’s plays as manga comics with abridged texts in the original Shakesperian English. A second publisher, Classic Comics, has gone a step further, producing full colour comics in different versions. You can get them as abridged versions which use the original text, in modern English or in modern English for slow readers (i.e. with much less text).
I have seen several of Shakespeare’s plays in both English and German, and was suprised to discover that I much prefer to see them in German. Why? Because here when the plays are performed, the language is usually modern German. I understand that much, much better than Shakespearian English. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the comics are a big hit, especially with anyone having to study the plays as part of an English course.
The BBC reports:
One in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user’s PC. Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to “in-depth analysis”. About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called “drive-by downloads”, sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user’s knowledge.That is a surprisingly high percentage – much higher than I would have guessed. They mostly exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer (MS IE) and the trend is increasingly to install keyloggers, which allow the bad guys to capture sensitive data such as passwords and banking data.
The website serving the malicious code may be completely legitimate – the malware is often downloaded from banner ads, traffic counters and other applications on the web site, such as calendars, which have not been programmed by the owners of the site.
Bottom line – don’t use an old version of MS IE. Better, don’t even use the latest, fully patched version MS IE - it has around 83% of the web browser market, which makes it a very attractive target for the bad guys. Why waste your time hacking browsers used by less than 17% of the users? So you are likely to be much safer if you use Firefox, Opera, Safari, and co.
If you want to learn more about web-nasties, (such as keyloggers and drive-by downloads) and the defences against them, there is a good short introduction for “non-techies” here. And here’s a report showing how easy it is to get infected if you don’t pay attention properly, just by googling for a plumber and clicking on one of the results returned.
Idstein this afternoon.