Steam Car Breaks World Speed Record Set In 1906!

Prior to smashing the world record set by American Fred Marriott in 1906, the spaceshuttle-esque vehicle was able to reach speeds of 129mph in a single run, but the attempt was cut short when engineers decided to investigate why it was not going even faster. The issue turned out to be an open valve which was allowing steam to escape into the atmosphere from one of the car’s 12 boilers. After repairs the vehicle was fired up again this morning and conducted two official runs where it hit blistering top speeds of 136mph and 151mph, setting a new international record.

Steam-Powered Supercar Shatters World Land Speed Record!

Turn Your iPhone Into a Movie Projector!

"BOISE, Idaho--Imagine you're on a camping trip with your family, and your kids are bored. They want to watch a movie, but you forgot your laptop at home. Hopeless? Not at all.

You pull out your fifth-generation iPhone--yes, this is a story about future technology--power it up, aim it at the wall of the tent, and start projecting their favorite film there.

This is one of the many potential promises of a new microdisplay technology from Displaytech, a recently acquired division of Boise-based Micron. Known as FLCOS, or fast liquid crystal on silicon, the technology is designed to make it possible to project from a relatively small form factor device, and with high image quality and vibrant colors, just about anything you'd want, be it a Disney flick or a complex PowerPoint presentation.

Today, the technology is still in its prototype stage, and when I visited Micron here this week as part of Road Trip 2009, I was shown a demonstration in which things like YouTube movies or ESPN clips stored on an iPhone were projected onto a screen via a small device with a tiny 3M projection engine in it.

Even that was pretty cool, because the little device probably had about the same volume as a deck of cards, and the image quality--in a very bright room--was fairly good, particularly when it came to showing text-based slides. But the most exciting thing to me about the technology is the promise that by late 2010 or early 2011, there's a good chance that the thumbnail-size chip behind the microdisplay could begin to be embedded in commercially available smartphones, like the iPhone."

Read the Full Article Here at CNET

If I was looking for a company to invest a few bucks in, these guys might be near the top of my list. The possibilities of this technology are pretty exciting. Their strategy of selling their technology to a wide range of device makers is sure to make them millions. You can bet that I'll be keeping an eye on this story as the tech hits the consumer marketplace.

$4 Billion in Broadband Stimulus Grants Tied to Strict Net Neutrality Rules

I wonder if the state could qualify as a borrower under this plan? Maybe we could buy out Fairpoint with help from the Feds and take control of our own landlines. As I had stated in my previous post, the state could then pass control to the local municipalities in order to deliver broadband statewide. I still think this is a goal we should work towards before some other teleco comes in and does an even worse job than Fairpoint. Haven't we been screwed with empty promises of statewide broadband long enough?

$4 Billion in Broadband Stimulus Grants Tied to Strict Net Neutrality Rules | Epicenter | Wired.com

Deja Vu All Over Again: More Undersea Cable Cuts

Internet and telephone traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Asia was hampered today after three major underwater data lines were cut.

The cuts occurred between 07:28 and 08:06 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (2:28 a.m. and 03:06 a.m. Eastern) on lines in the Mediterranean Sea that connect Sicily to Tunisia and Egypt.

Undersea cable cuts disrupt Internet access

Ok...I said it once and I'll say it again. It would be completely implausible to believe that three cuts were made in these lines completely by accident.....AGAIN!

If you recall back in January this same scenario played out where three lines were cut simulteneously and it was blamed on ships dragging their anchors. It seems extra suspicious that it has now occurred again and it has severed service to almost the same geographic region. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but there has to be a lot more to this than has been reported by the main stream media.

This has to be a part of some criminal enterprise or perhaps some kind of espionage either corporate or from the intelligence agency of another country. Twice in a twelve month period? No way does that kind of coincedence occur twice in less than a year.

It will be interesting to see if this story gets buried in the media the way it did last time. I'm sure if there is something nefarious going on, the powers that be would want to keep it quiet. Incidents like this, if done intentionaly, could seriously undermine the integrity of the internet as well as the financial and credit markets that depend on a secure environment to transact business.

We'll have to keep our ears open for any more on this story.

Can the Kindle Replace Textbooks?

I've been a strong advocate of eliminating text books for years. Why do people always frame the discussion at the college level? Do you have any idea how much money is spent in our local school districts just buying and replacing textbooks?

The Kindle is a good idea, but it's not much more than an overpriced piece of crap. For $389 you could buy a laptop or tablet that would do all that and more. The Kindle can't highlight relevant text and it also has no means of making notations. It's just not practical for educational purposes. There are better approaches available today, but like the Kindle, they are hampered by outside forces.

One of the problems here is the entrnchment of the publishing and printing industries. Much like the music and movie industry, publishers are very set in their ways. They can see the world changing around them, but for some unknown reason, they are loathe to do anything about it. All one needs to do is examine the decline of the newspaper business and it's easy to see where publishing is headed. The educational publishing segment is perhaps the part of the industry that has buried their collective heads in the sand the deepest. Having a captive audience to dictate terms to, they have become so accustomed to their way they can't envision things working any differently.

I would rather see my tax dollars go to paying for IT employees to run the network at the school than pouring money down the drain on textbooks or useless things like the Kindle. In addition to the obvious benefits of replacing textbooks, every student would be learning valuable computer skills as well. Each school would aslo be perfectly set up to teach IT classes and computer repair classes. Adults displaced from their printing or paper mill jobs could be retrained at the schools to transition to tech jobs.

I'm very suprised that we haven't seen any of the computer manufacturers or software giants (ahem! Microsoft, Google, Apple, Dell etc...) step up to the plate and make school districts around the country an "offer they can't refuse" to put their products in the hands of every student in the country. Wouldn't this be the Holy Grail of marketing coups? Imagine the customer base you could build if you started grooming potential customers when they start school? One could easily envision a business model much like the cell phone industry. They subsidise the initial cost of the equipment to get you under their umbrella and the money is made by offering additional services and upgrades. A shrewd lobbyist could probably get the Federal government to kick in toward the cost of the equipment so the school district and the company aren't stuck absorbing the initial costs. We may have to trim the dfense budget or stop paying midwest farmers to not grow crops, but it would be a good use of Federal tax dollars.

If you want to look at the issue from another angle, consider the environmental angle. Think about the environmental impact of manufacturing and shipping millions of textbooks every year. If you look at the entire process from the lumberjack who cuts the tree to the bookstore clerk that delivers to the customer, there is an enourmous carbon footprint involved to distubute that book. Now consider the environmental impact of digital delivery and susequent updates. There's no comparison.

We can land spacecraft on Mars and bomb the crap out of anyone we see fit, but we're no closer to the promise of an interactive classroom than we were 15 years ago. I'm sure we'll continue on this un-eco-friendly path until we're out of trees and then some genius will come up with an idea to put a laptop in the hands of every student.

Report: A Kindle for college kids? Crave, the gadget blog - CNET

Is Yahoo Crushing the Oldest For-Profit E-mail Publication With Poor Filtering?

I don't make a habit of promoting anything on my blog. But, when something I really enjoy for free is on the brink of becoming a paid service, I tend to cringe. Randy Cassingham has been putting out his "This is True" newsletter since the early days of the web. He is also the founder of the annual "Stella Awards" given for the most outrageous and ridiculous lawsuits.

Cassingham collects and reserches real stories about stupid people and unbelievable series of events. Beyond just regurgitating what is available in feeds around the web, Cassingham injects his own dry wit and priceless sarcasm into the story.

I remember subscribing to "This is True" from my Web TV system (yes, I am a magnet for products that seem like a good idea but just suck and disappear. I also owned a 3DO game system) back in the mid 90's. I was an AOL subscriber then. When I became a real computer user (bought a PC) I switched to Yahoo, Hotmail and now Google. The "This is True" newsletter has followed me with every change and has been delivered every week for free.

Looking back, Cassingham could be considered a web pioneer of sorts. He has managed to turn his newsletter and website into a living by providing quality, verified content. His site has survived through many tech changes over the years. It would seem that this whole scenario (described below) is a huge black-eye for Yahoo. One of the things consumers count on from companies like Yahoo is that they will filter out most of the junk and help us get only the information that we want. Anyone who knows much about content filtering would also know that whitelist/blacklist filtering is the most basic and least effective form of filtering. It would seem that there would be an algorythm that could sort this mess out before it ever happened. A huge company as old as Yahoo should have been on top of this problem.

Read on to get the details in Randy Cassingham's own words:

YAHOO ALERT: I've given up trying to work with Yahoo, which represents the largest domain subscribed to TRUE. There are more than 20,000 addresses within simple Yahoo.com domain on TRUE's distribution (plus a couple thousand more on variants such as yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.ca, etc.) But MOST of them are not getting TRUE anymore: Yahoo has blocked us. Why?

Because of idiots (dare I call them "yahoos"?) who ASK to be put on this distribution, then CONFIRM that request, and ...then click the "This is Spam" button when they don't recognize the mailing or simply don't want it anymore. Yes, those yahoos have screwed thousands upon thousands of others who really DO want this newsletter. Too bad: Yahoo is listening to the yahoos instead: they're blocking it. To them, we're "spammers" and no protestations from "spammers" count. As far as I can tell, there's only one group of people with Yahoo addresses who are still getting their issues: those who have at one time found TRUE in the "spam folder" and clicked the "Not Spam" button. But for the rest it's too late: we're now blocked, and you will NOT find issues there so you can hit that button.

As of now, about 70 percent of the Yahoo addresses are blocked. That's more than 15,000 folks. That's MORE than 10 percent of my entire distribution. And that's catastrophic: it has the potential to kill this newsletter. Nearly 15 percent of my audience, as of this week, which means 15 percent of my revenue, including 15 percent of my ad revenue, has suddenly stopped. It's the biggest crisis in TRUE's more than 14 years online. And it's (sigh) right in the middle of a worldwide economic slowdown. What lovely timing.

Yahoo is over-represented in my distribution because TRUE is so old: We've been publishing since 1994, when Yahoo was a little collection of links. They didn't get their millionth page view until late 1994 (according to Wikipedia), well after I had over 100,000 online readers every week, some of whom had to go through a lot of effort to get their issues (through BBS gateways, UUCP bang addresses, and other now- archaic means). Yahoo mail opened to the public in 1997 (when it acquired Rocketmail). That was AFTER I first editorialized on what a problem spam could become -- what's now http://www.spamprimer.com/ .

I take no solace in the fact that I was right about spam; it has grown so much that the world's first for-profit e-mail publication is having massive delivery problems because its shiny little jewel can't stand out among the garbage. Yeah, I'm mad: it's MY OWN READERS who have done this. Addled idiots can't click "unsubscribe" after they asked to get these issues, lumping the white hat guy who warned them about spam in with the criminals who send spam. But they're gone now: they don't see the carnage they caused, even if they liked, even loved, TRUE. It's like shooting a gun into a crowd of people, then walking away before seeing what happened.

I've had occasional problems with other big mail sites too, like AOL, Hotmail/MSN, and more, usually because of those same false "this is spam" complaints. Currently, I *think* all those other problems are cleared up, but I'm already seeing a revenue slide. It will likely get worse over time. Can I reverse it and keep TRUE going? I'm not sure. It's possible TRUE will become Premium-ONLY (plus the few newspapers who carry it), which would certify you all as victims of the spam war.

CAN YOU HELP? Yes. Complain to your provider EVERY TIME you miss an issue. Tell them you ASKED to get TRUE *and* responded to a verification request, and that no one can get on the distribution without BOTH of those steps. Spammers don't do that: they add you whether you want their mail or not. (And when was the last time you WANTED spam?!) If you complain, maybe they'll get the message that their customers really want TRUE and other legitimate e-mail publications. But if they don't listen, give your business to someone else!

I encourage you to check out Cassingham's newsletter and choose a paid or free subscription and pass it along for your friends to enjoy. The stories will put a smile on your face and give you some interesting topics for conversation....

http://www.thisistrue.com/

Thanks for indulging me on this...now back to our irregularly scheduled programming.

Mercedes-Benz is Going Green By 2015!

In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency. Mercedes is looking into electric vehicles, both battery powered and fuel cell powered. Not only are models in development, but we’ve also seen the company making steps towards their zero petroleum goal right now, from better cabs in London to Li-Ion battery improvements. Commercialy available zero petroleum vehicles will be available starting in 2010.

While this is an impressive announcement, I'll wait until I hear more details before I get downright giddy. I do think we're starting to see a fundemental change in the attitudes of the automakers as a whole. We are starting to see degrees of seperation between the auto industry and big oil. It would appear that a huge lobbying war in Washington is underway as the two industries jockey to get favorable legislation. In one sense, we live in exciting times where the business landscape is changing, but the other side of that is the slow and agonizing process of change, inhibited by the unwillingness of old businesses to sucumb to the new ones. In the end, nothing much will really change. It's just a re-shuffling of wealth and power at the top of the food chain that has no financial benefit for the average person.

EcoGeek - Technology for the Environment

Cool...Mac OSX on a Whitebox Machine!

A MAC vendor's website appears to have had their servers swamped and crashed shortly after their arrival was introduced to the blogosphere. As the news spread around the Internet that they were offering rock bottom deals on an off the shelf machine that would run the Leopard OS from Apple they suddenly disappeared. As of this writing, they seem to be back up and running. The machine they are offering more than doubles the specs of a Mac Mini at $100 less. The systems are also upgradeable. The Open Computer sports a faster processor (2.2GHz vs. 1.83GHz), double the memory (2GB vs. 1GB), three times more hard drive space (250GB vs. 80GB). The "Open Computer", as it is called, even comes with a power cable so you can start working with it out of the box.

Mac enthusiasts have been experimenting on running the new Apple operating systems on commodity PC hardware ever since the Intel-based Apple computers were introduced in early 2006. This effort came to be known as OSx86 Project. The "Open Computer" has evolved from the original OSx86 Project into a working commercial product.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that it is only a matter of time before the lawyers from Apple will have them shut down. Apple, who is notorious for heavy-handedly enforcing their intellectual property rights, is likely filing the necessary paperwork as you read this post. This may be a short lived glory for the folks at Psystar, but they have effectively uncorked the genie bottle and probably cemented themselves into Internet lore. One can assume that somewhere, Steve Jobs is having a meltdown.

Technorati Tags: apple,osx,leopard,OSx86,open computer,Psystar

Should Vermont Schools be Teaching Internet Safety?

Virginia is the first state to put Internet safety classes into action as being mandatory, but Texas and Illinois have also passed legislation to have some form of classes in the near future. Judi Westberg Warren of Web Wise Kids, a non-profit organization providing free lessons to schools to teach 11 to 16-year-olds about Web safety, said that other states are also considering similar legislation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that in 2006, 13% of children between the ages of 10 an 17 that were online had received unwanted sexual advances, and 4% of those children had been asked for sexually explicit or naked photos of themselves.

The Virginia program is attempting to safeguard the children by educating the students as well as the parents. To the children, they are trying to explain never to meet anyone you meet solely online, as well as trying to remember that anything you post today could come back to haunt you years from now when applying to a university or a job. For the parents, they are trying to explain that they should install filtering software as well keeping computers in common areas of the home so they can monitor their child’s activities while online.

Virginia Schools Start To Teach Internet Safety

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I think it would be a wise choice to enact a program like this in Vermont. Kids and parents should be alarmed at the amount of sleaze on the internet. Many kids are exposed to crap and never tell an adult. This makes it difficult to get accurate data. I would bet that the numbers are probably higher. I've seen most everything on the web there is to see, but every once in a while a teenager will out do me with a ..."check this out!". I'm always amazed at the maturity of some of the subject matter, but honestly, it's usually pretty funny...

If courses in school do nothing more than raise awareness of internet safety and security, they have done a great deal. It's amazing how many people are oblivious to any level of protection beyond what came on their computer out of the box. By keeping trends and issues at the front of an educational program, it would help insulate our real world lives from the net world by adding a layer of education to protect us all.

Torrent Freak Kicks Ass!

If I had a mouthful of milk right now it would be shooting out my nose as I laugh my ass off. The great folks at Torrent Freak have pulled off a fine piece of "journalism" on this one. As I was reading this story with great interest, it dawned on me ...I was reading a very nice list of the best places to get torrents!
The way the story was presented, it struck me at first as a educational and well presented look at the state of torrent traffic and an informative overall piece. In fact it really is. Very nice work guys! Its a "twofer"....

BitTorrent Sites Show Explosive Growth - TorrentFreak

Has MediaSentry Been Performing Illegal Investigations?

One of the more recent controversies dogging the RIAA's legal campaign against file-sharing is whether MediaSentry (now a division of SafeNet) needs state-issued private investigator licenses to operate lawfully. It's a question that has been raised in several contested RIAA lawsuits, and now the state of Michigan has told the company that it needs a license to operate there.

Michigan says MediaSentry lacks necessary PI license

This issue could have some serious implications for the investigative arm of the RIAA. If a court finds that Media Sentry has been performing investigations without the proper authority from the states where the investigations occurred, all evidence collected by them could be thrown out. You can be sure that the thousands of people that have written rather large checks to avoid a court trial could ask for the money back in a suit of their own. This would essentially leave the RIAA with no evidence to support their claims. People who have lost court cases, like Jamie Thomas, could have their convictions overturned. It's no suprise that neither the RIAA or Media Sentry officials want to comment on this issue or admit they should have been liscensed. You can be sure that we'll be watching this issue closely...

It's Official, Vista is the New Windows ME...

I remember vividly my thoughts as the hype machine for the next great OS from Microsoft was ramping up. As the details began to leak out, it was very apparent that Microsoft was never going to deliver the features it had initialy stated. One by one the news reports that came out were talking of how Microsoft was going to drop this and that in order to deliver Vista on schedule. As the features that really excited people in the industry disappeared, I instantly became skeptical and had nightmarish visions of the dismal Microsoft ME product launch. It seemed odd at the time, and now seems prophetic, that the exact same scenario was playing out.

When Microsoft replaced the rapidly aging Windows 95, they did so skillfully and thoughtfuly. They actualy listened to customers and designed an OS that got rid of almost all of the annoyances that drove people nuts with Windows 95. They takled hardware and driver compatibility and greatly improved upon the overall user experience. Sure, they had to drag many people kicking and screaming towards the new OS, but most of those people are generally eager to resist change of any sort and would have been completely happy to keep using their Commodore 64. Today, you can find those same people extolling the virtues of unwieldy, non-user friendly flavors of Linux. Microsoft shined through with a new OS that most anyone could use and for the most part worked well right out of the box. The ensuing service packs for the OS actually fixed the bugs and security problems. At this point, Microsoft was listening to users and was actually working with vendors.

After a few years, Microsoft decided that it was time to offer a new OS. Instead of looking at Windows 98 and deciding what worked and what didn't. They decided that rather than submit to the long and daunting task of making a product that was a vast improvement over their current OS, someone decided it would be best to do the bare minimum, in order to get a product to market as fast as possible. To do this, it was decided that they would add window dressing (pun intended) to Windows 98 and launch a massive marketing campaign decrying that the new OS was "feature rich" and everyone should be drooling to have it. Of course, the reality was that they ruined a perfectly good operating system with all kinds of bloat that people didn't want, didn't need and frankly, didn't work. The public and the industry were enraged and people shunned the new OS and rallyed behind the old faithful Windows 98 for many years to come.

Feeling the backlash, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and focused on their core business customers while they worked dilligently to build a new OS from the ground up. The end result, after far too many years passed, was what we now know as Windows XP. Sure, this new OS was resisted at every turn by wary consumers and Microsoft responded fairly well with automatic updates and bug fixes that adressed real user issues. Soon, Windows XP became as well liked and well accepted as Windows 98. It had become entrenched as a well accepted standard, that most people agreed, did what it was supposed to and actualy improved the user experience. Microsoft's dillegence had paid off and they again became generally trusted and entrenched with computer users world wide. Then the wheels came off....

Enter into the fray, Windows Vista. Vista was supposed to be a quantum leap forward in OS technology. Microsoft promised to deliver an OS that would make us forget all the improvements made by Apple and even surpass the expectations of Apple's new Leopard OS they had been working on. Some industry articles even predicted that many Linux users were simply disenfranchised Windows users that would willingly migrate back to the shiny new OS from Redmond. They couldn't have been more wrong.

The first apparent problem was that a majority of computer users wouldn't even be able to run Vista without major hardware upgrades or purchasing new systems altogether. The folks from Redmond did their best to assure us that this requirement wasn't entirely due to their new OS, but more of a convenient convergence of Moore's Law. As it turns out, it was more an attempt to please hardware manufacturers and boost lagging new PC sales. If a user wanted to take advantage of the new "features" of the new OS, they were almost certainly in for a serious (read expensive) upgrade.

As the release candidates became available, it became glaringly obvious that Microsoft had dropped most of the meat and potatoes features from their latest offering. In the end, the only real "advatage" they were offering was something called "Aero". The other distinctions from Windows XP were miniscule at best, and they even managed to bungle up some of the things that worked best in XP. At the end of the day, Aero amounted to nothing more than eye candy layered over XP. Coupled with the cost of upgrading your hardware, Microsoft managed to create the ultimate lose-lose situation for the consumer. To add insult to injury, they decided to offer Windows Vista in more flavors than Baskin Robbins ice cream. This great idea (as we later found out) was an attempt to appease, once again, the hardware manufacturers. The manufacturers were mad that "Vista Capable" certification didn't fit well with the price points they wanted to sell their products. It turned out that PCs that sold at the lower end of the price range couldn't run the slick new Aero inerface. So, Microsoft dumbed down Vista to accomodate this situation by removing Aero altogether. This left the lower end Vista versions to be nothing more than bloated versions of Windows XP with a new color scheme.

Based on the public's reaction, as well as the reaction from the industry itself, Vista has been a miserable failure. The lessons Microsoft should have learned from the Windows ME debacle have apparently been ignored or forgotten. This huge oversight has simply given critics of Microsoft, as well as Mac and Linux fanboys everywhere, more ammunition to begin shoveling dirt on Microsoft's coffin. The failure of Vista, coupled with the spread of virtualization, server side apps and open source software, may have signaled the beginning of the end for Microsoft's dominance of the PC desktop. The reality is, that a premature death for Windows as we know it, may be just that. Premature. Microsoft does still have an opportunity to redeem itself, but they will once again have to first overcome the mess they have created. The next OS will have to be truly innovative and bulletproof out of the box. Otherwise, they will find themselves gasping for air as their competitors continue to bury them alive. Don't think for a minute that the public will feel sorry for them, or that Google isn't watching closely as the jockey themselves into position as the heir apparent 600 pounnd gorilla.

Elgan: Was Windows XP Microsoft's last good OS?

Digg This Story

MIT Panel Trashes Comcast's Network Management

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Comcast has confessed to slowing down certain peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic, but is it being clear enough about what it's doing?
That's perhaps the key question that emerged by the end of a lengthy public forum convened by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday here at Harvard Law School.
While none of the FCC commissioners was willing to solidify an answer to that just yet, two MIT computer scientists on an afternoon panel accused the cable company of behaving badly on multiple levels.

As most readers of this blog know by now, I am in full support of net neutrality. While one has to understand the concept of the need to "manage" network traffic, it is incredibly naive to think even for a second that how to do this should be left to the sole discretion of the ISP's. The internet has flourished thus far as a communication medium that is unfettered by government interference. The ISP's were exstatic that they now had a whole new revenue stream to tap into and they gladly made the investment necessary to profit greatly from it.

With the advent of VOIP, video, bit torrent etc..., the internet has outgrown it's infancy stage and has reached the point of being a young adolesent. The ISP's should have seen this coming when the net was in its toddler stage, but they chose to favor immediate profits over long term viability. They've now come to a point where the existing infrastructure can't keep up with the demand needed for today's services. The ISP's seem to want to punish the consumer for their bad business choices. This stone age mentality seems to mirror the strategy of one of my other "favorite" subjects, the RIAA. Businesses that are unwilling to change, because they refuse to make necessary investments, should not be coddled by the government or further supported by the public.

Net pioneers trash Comcast's P2P traffic treatment Tech news blog - CNET News.com

New Clothes Dryer Device to Make EnergyStar Rating

New energy saving technologies are finally making it to the consumer market. A new device called the Dryermiser promises that it will dry clothes up to 41% faster than conventional gas or electric dryers and conserve 50% more energy.

The new device can be adapted to most consumer brands of dryers. It uses a technology called Hydronic Drying. Instead of usinhg hot air to dry clothes, the hydronic technology heats a specialized oil that enables it to dry faster and more efficiently than conventional dryer technology. This new device claims to be more environmentaly friendly and also will reduce the carbon footprint of your home. It will also reduce the risk of fire and eliminate that "burnt lint" smell emitted by current models. The company claims their amazing new product can reduce fabric shrinkage because of the way it heats. The units allow a consumer to dry their clothes using 110 volts instead of 220 volts.

The units will cost around $300 dollars and can be installed by a technician in about 20 minutes. The inventor of this incredible device invented it in his garage and is set to hit the market later this fall. The copper and aluminum system heats a fluid, which mixes with air that is then blown hot into the clothing drum. Each unit would use about three cups of a nontoxic, hydrocarbon-based oil.

Of course the old-fashioned clothe line is still the most eco-friendly clothes dryer.

Hydromatic Technologies Home

Are Undersea Cable Cuts a Coincidence?

DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--A third undersea fibre optic cable running through the Suez to Sri Lanka was cut Friday, said a Flag official.
Two other fiber optic cables owned by Flag Telecom and consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 located near Alexandria, Egypt, were damaged Wednesday leading to a slowdown in Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and South Asia.

Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez - MarketWatch

I hate to be one to fan terrorist paranoia, but it would seem highly implausible that three undersea cable cuts in two days are mere coincidence. When one considers the areas these cable are laid and the areas they serve, one has to wonder if this is an act of terrorism designed to "cut off" the Islamic world from the west. As the Taliban did in Afghanistan, many of these groups view modern technology as an evil afront to radical Islam. It would make sense to wreak havoc by disrupting modern communications if this was your goal.

In fairness this sort of activity could be used to further any number of criminal activities. The finacial implications alone could rise into the billions. The variety of "reasons" given for this happening, leads to many different scenarios playing out in the court of public opinion. A reasonable person should have a hard time swallowing that three seperate cable cuts were caused by ships dragging their anchors. Why hasn't this happened more frequently before now? Why would it happen on three seperate occasions in the span of two days?

It will probably be quite some time, if ever, that we find out all the circumstances around these incidents. In the mean time it certainly makes one wonder....

RIAA chief: We Would Rather Sue Individuals Than Use ISP Filters

Self-professed ass-monkey Cary Sherman rebutted U2 manger Paul McGuiness' claim that ISP's should be filtering copyrighted material. He went as far as to infer that since McGuiness is European he would naturally prefer a "regulatory approach" to the file-sharing problem plaguing the industry.

It never ceases to amaze me when this sort of beligerant drivel comes from a RIAA representative. In my mind this sort of off-handed stupidity is akin to poking a sleeping bear. Well established super-acts like Prince, U2, The Rolling Stones etc...don't really have any need for the traditional record companies. They could afford to do their own distribution and marketing and keep all of the profits for themselves.

Once again the RIAA is exposing themselves to a huge lawsuit from one of these artists for not doing enough to protect their share of the profits as well as their copyrights. If they are stupid enough to start a public pissing match with Bono and company, and they are also stupid enough to publicly announce that they don't support what might be a viable piece of a multi-pronged approach to the problem of file-sharing, they might just feel the wrath of not just one major artist, but a whole slew of them at once. Suing fans while not pursuing other reasonable alternatives is simply negligent behavior. If I were Bono, I'd be mobilizing my fellow artists against those who do nothing but alienate fans and hurt the artists bottom line. The RIAA is obviously more concerned about how they relate to their corporate buddies the telecos and cable providers than they are about actually protecting the artists. As for the fans....don't get me started...again.

RIAA chief: We don't see a need for mandatory ISP filtering

RIAA's sister organization has a different take on this issue:

http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-476.html

Statewide VT Broadband Closer to Reality

Using Burlington Telecom's municipal broadband network as a model, 22 rural Vermont towns are poised to pool their resources and launch a fiber-optic project that could go online by the end of 2009. Steve Willbanks, chairman of the Strafford Selectboard and a key player in the emerging network, said commercial broadband providers could not meet the needs of rural Vermonters.

"These fiber-optic connections are absolute necessities; not luxuries," he said. "We need them for our economical and cultural development. We've had seasonal residents tell us they'd move here in a heartbeat; they'd telecommute if they had access to broadband.

Read the original article at Burlington Free Press.com

I love it when things I've been saying for years come closer to reality. The telecos and cable companies have been screwing us rural Vermonters for years now. There are many areas of Vermont that still don't have cable television, never mind broadband internet. Any number of utility companies could have invested some of the millions they've made by providing crappy service over the years. Instead they relied on bogus arguments and empty promises to shun people who simply want access to services that so called "third world countries" already provide at a much cheaper cost. The infrastructure is already, for the most part, in place. Verizon could have upgraded their central offices around the state to provide statewide DSL, Green Mountain Power could have rolled out BPL service and the cable companies could have been far more agressive in running the cable to provide broadband service. Instead they've complained about the costs of doing this in the same breath they ask for rate increases.
I think the Public Service Board has dropped the ball in a major way in this regard. It would have been easy for them to freeze rate increases until these companies show some real progress in adressing the issues. Instead, they chose to approve rate increases with conditional empty promisies from theses crooks. Now, we have Verizon pulling out of the land line business in Northern New England altogether, when for years they have been promising to provide statewide broadband services as well as statewide cell phone services. What's their excuse for not investing? "It's no longer profitable" is the answer they give. Sure, now that they've milked every last penny they can out of us and broken every promise made to regulators, they want to get out. As they pass off their crappy, ancient network to Fairpoint, they are delivering fiber optic FIOS service to the rest of New England. I have yet to hear them complain about the cost of doing this. Go figure.
The cable companies haven't faired much better. At the rate they are rolling out service to rural communities, I'll be dead and so will you. Again, they've made broken promise after broken promise. The end result is that there is no competition for them and they like it that way. They continue to fight any stipulation that would require them to lease, at a reasonable rate, their network to competitors. This stipulation has been hung around the neck of Verizon since the break-up of the baby Bells. The end result has been lower prices and competition for our telephone services. Fairpiont has had to follow these rules as well, and they still believe they can be profitable and competitive in the phone service arena, but if deep-pocketed Verizon and the cable companies have been unable or unwilling to make this investment, one has to seriously question the ability of a much smaller company like Fairpoint to make good on the promises to provide statewide broadband. I wish them luck, tempered with a healthy dose of pessimism.
The naysayers that are against municipal broadband always have the same arguments. "This is socialism" and "Let the market dictate who gets broadband". The reality is that we are left without any viable commercial solution. This is not an opinion, it's a fact. The commercial intrests are just not interested in being the savior of half a million rural customers. The state of Vermont needs to be competitive in attracting jobs and agressive in promoting the quality of life we have here. That is an impossible task if we are stuck without a level playing field. If you're looking to relocate your company, are you going to choose a state where the basic infrastructre to run your business is non-existent or are you going to choose the state where your employees can have fiber run to their home. The rural beauty of Vermont is very attractive to corporations who would like to offer this as an alternative to grid-lock and urban sprawl, but moving here is simply impossible to sustain their business. The fact that, in this day and age, we don't have the basics has got to be a major concern as they look to future growth.
I would encourage everyone to support the current program being proposed by the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network and tell your local lawmakers that you would support a similar statewide program. As usual, we are left to solve our problems ourselves. Perhaps some day the corporate bean-counters will realize that there are a half a million customers in Vermont who simply want the same services that are available to people in the more populated regions of the country. What's more, we don't expect it to be free, we're willing to pay for it!

Here is an interesting link that explains some of the technical details as well as some of the costs involved. It also discusses some other places with similar programs already in place.

http://www.dailywireless.org/2007/11/14/city-fiber-networks/

Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling Acceptable? Not Quite!

Comcast, and other ISPs advertise with certain upload and download rates, conforming to simple DOCSIS capacity numbers. However, they miscalculated and found that there is more to the Internet than browsing, gopher, and email. Heavy-users broke their excel return-on-investment predictions and marketing campaign promises. Their flat-rate offers simply became too popular for the capacity that was bought and installed.

Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling Acceptable? Not Quite! TorrentFreak

This really echoes the point I've been making for a couple of years now. Charter also uses bandwidth throttling to cheat us of the bandwidth we pay for. I think a class-action lawsuit is an appropriate response to this practice. There is no other way to describe it, other than simple fraud.

Europe Embraces Decriminalizing File Sharing

The message put forward by the parties is pretty strong: “Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.”


European Politicians Launch Pro-Filesharing Campaign


I'm not sure that this movement is going to gain any traction in the US anytime soon. I like the fact that Europeans are open minded and recognize the flaws in the RIAA/MPAA approach to combating piracy. The "The Genie is Out of the Bottle" line of thinking makes a lot more sense than the "Let's Punish the End-User Approach". I've never seen an industry as a whole adopt an approach that believes alienating the consumer will improve the almighty bottom line. The closest analogy I can think of is the automobile industry. There was a time when, your car needed repair, you were required (By the Big 3) to bring it back to the dealership or void your warranty. This tactic was used to eliminate the little guy by forbidding the consumer to bring their vehicle to the repair shop of their choosing. You would hear these crazy stories of people who were denied legitimate warranty service because they had their tires or wipers changed elsewhere. When the imports became a serious challenge to the Big 3, they were forced to drop this ludicrous position.

Until the consumers revolt and some company comes along with a more reasonable policy, these chucleheads at the RIAA/MPAA will continue to alienate the very people to which they are trying to suck the entertainment dollar from....

P2P Hero Speaks Out at Last

In September 2007, anti-piracy company MediaDefender’s emails went public after a hacker gained access to their systems. The attacks cost the company a huge amount of money, not to mention acute embarrassment. Now the person behind the attacks speaks.
MediaDefender Hacker Speaks Out With TorrentFreak

Sleaze begets sleaze here. Media Defender were exposed as a RIAA/MPAA puppet. At the direction of these organizations, they were engaging in hacking of legal P2P networks and the corruption of files on these networks. As far as I can see they've lowered their ethical standards and severely weakened the credibility of the RIAA/MPAA's war with file sharers. I hope the Pirate Bay folks spank them hard with a lawsuit. My mother always told me that two wrongs don't make a right!