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Transportation

Submission + - Jet Pack Runs for Hours on Water

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "Jet packs have been around for half a century, but there's always been one problem: they run out of rocket fuel very quickly. Now a German company has taken the standard jetpack design, run a fat yellow hose out the back, and connected it to a small unmanned boat which houses an engine, pump and fuel tank that sends pressurized water back up the hose, where it's shot out by two nozzles just behind the wearer's shoulders. Called the JetLev-Flyer, the design can purportedly reach a height of 50 feet, a speed of 45 mph and a range of 300 kilometers based on four hours of flying time. A digital fly-by-wire system is used to control the throttle and future designs may achieve higher altitudes and top speeds, extended range and even travel below the water's surface. The American manufacturers claim it is "amazingly easy to learn and operate" and they're taking orders now at $130,000 each."
Earth

Spiraling Skyscraper Farms For a Future Manhattan 403

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the biomorphic-structures-are-made-of-people dept.
Mike writes "One of three finalists in this year's Evolo Skyscraper Competition, Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City interspersed with elegantly spiraling skyscraper farms. The biomorphic structures harness cutting-edge technology to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source while dynamically altering the fabric of city life."

Comment Re:For what it's worth my soon to be sent letter.. (Score 1) 339

by snicho99 (#26837987) Attached to: Some Of Australia's Tubes Are About To Be Filtered

Furthermore, the technical, financial and freedom of expression (as upheld through our constitution) issues are well documented and those in themselves should be more than enough to kill any further life in this poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly though-out plan.

Constitution fail. There is no such protection under the Australian Constitution. We have no bill of rights. This is not the Almighty US of A. Are you sure you're a politician? If so, that's a bit scary... though not surprising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitution#Protection_of_rights

Comment Makes me think of a story... (Score 3, Interesting) 173

by snicho99 (#25783799) Attached to: In AU, Dodgy Dell Deal Faces Consumer Backlash
A little off topic perhaps... but it make's me think of a story a friend told me once:

Hungry Jacks (Australian version of Burger King) once had a promotion going where if you asked for "Two for One" they gave you two Whoppers (a kind of inedible burger) for the price of one. The only catch was that someone at the marketing company forgot to assign an end date to the promo on all the advertising material. Consequently even now - many years later, Hungry Jacks' still has to honor the "Two for One" deal.

Me and a friend called BS on his story, and he was quite insistent that it was real. We were just on our way from one bar to another at the time (a little inebriated perhaps) so we went into a Hungry Jacks store to test his theory. He ordered a Whopper as a "Two for One", and sure enough they gave it to him!

Mind you by the time he got to the front of the queue he had 16 drunk football (australian rules) players chanting "Two for one" so perhaps they just gave it to him to make us leave....

But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
Image

Russian Town Puts Giant Smiley On Google Maps Screenshot-sm 280

Posted by samzenpus from the working-together dept.
Toramir writes "Citizens of the Russian town Chelyabinsk calculated when the satellite, QuickBird, which takes images for Google Earth and Google Maps, would cross above their city and used people to make a giant smiley face. A rock concert on the main square attracted many people and everyone got a yellow cape. It looks like someone at Google was quicker than usual to put up the new data. Maybe Google likes the idea of an entire town working hard to get its 15 minutes of fame. The article has a screenshot of Google Maps and images taken directly at the event."
Media

Submission + - Polaroid closes it's plant: no more instant film (boston.com)

Submitted by
snicho99
snicho99 writes: "The end of an era, curse these new-fangled digital cameras.

From the Boston Globe Website:

Polaroid Corp., the Massachusetts company that gave the world instant film photography, is shutting down its film manufacturing lines in the state and abandoning the technology that made the company famous.
Any body else as feeling suddenly as nostalgic as I am? I didn't use polaroid film much — but I liked knowing it was around: if I wanted it."
Microsoft

OOXML's 662 Resolutions 166

Posted by kdawson from the sliding-toward-opacity dept.
Rob Isn't Weird writes "Microsoft has finally responded to the resolutions concerning OOXML (or 662 of them at any rate). The only problem? The JTC1 NBs who are deciding OOXML's fate have to download 662 individual PDFs from a slow, password-protected server; and many have had trouble getting the password. Don't misunderstand the ECMA's intent, though: there would have been 662 OOXML files if they had wanted to make it hard for people to read and criticize the responses. Thanks to the Internet, other interested parties have put all 662 resolutions online in a searchable, taggable format and are requesting that everyone interested help examine them. That means you, Slashdot."
Robotics

Submission + - VIPeR: Israel's Killer Robot

Submitted by Guy Yernisberg
Guy Yernisberg writes: Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems has just completeted the final model of its new VIPeR autonomous defense robot. It's armed with an Uzi submachine gun and can throw grenades. It has an onboard camera for aiming and identifying possible targets. The problem is, once armed, it shoots at everything it can see. It's supposedly intended for use against Palestinian and Lebanese guerilla fighters — but they live amongst the civilians and not in "combat zones" as the IDF claims. Releasing a killing machine in the middle of a city might not be such a good idea after all.
Security

Submission + - Some WHOIS servers has been hacked

Submitted by
yohanes
yohanes writes: "It seems a WHOIS server (crsnic.net) belonging to Verisign has been hacked (may be not just one, I can't confirm the others). Try doing whois google.com or whois microsoft.com on your console, and see what happens. If you miss it, you can see my archive at http://tinyhack.com. Please verify this story, as I have tested on three machines on different parts of the world."
Censorship

Web Censorship Proposed For Norway 338

Posted by kdawson from the great-firewall dept.
Aqwis writes "A Norwegian Web filtering system (link in Norwegian), comparable to the Great Firewall of China, has been proposed to the Norwegian legislature. It would, if enacted, block all Web sites and servers that contain hate material (racial hate, pro-Nazi sites, hate towards the government, etc.), most kinds of pornography (not only child pornography), foreign gambling sites, and sites that share copyrighted or other material that it is not legal to share (such as most BitTorrent sites and services such as LimeWire). Reactions have been mixed; however they are mostly negative."

How Do You Know Your Code is Secure? 349

Posted by Zonk from the batten-down-the-hatches-mates dept.
bvc writes "Marucs Ranum notes that 'It's really hard to tell the difference between a program that works and one that just appears to work.' He explains that he just recently found a buffer overflow in Firewall Toolkit (FWTK), code that he wrote back in 1994. How do you go about making sure your code is secure? Especially if you have to write in a language like C or C++?"
Privacy

Acer May Be Bugging Computers 396

Posted by Zonk from the might-want-to-look-into-this dept.
tomjen writes "What if a well known laptop company had silently placed an ActiveX Control on their computers that allowed any webpage to execute any program? Well Acer apparently has and they have (based on the last modified-by date of the file) been doing this since 1998. 'Checking the interface of the control reveals it has a method named "Run()" as shown below. The method supports parameters "Drive", "FileName", and "CmdLine". Isn't it strange for a control that's marked "safe for scripting" to allow a method that is suggestive of possible abuse?'"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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