Once under moonlight my heart wouldn't rest
I found myself wandering already dressed
I slowly peered through a small break in the trees
There stood that young woman whom I'd known from my dreams

And I listened as my love she said unto me,
"I will love you o'er rivers and borders and seas"
And Joy just like an arrow shot straight into me
I gave thanks my God as I fell to my knees

But Beauty she is often trailed by decay
And gardens once sprawled out in colored arrays
Will each in their season then to weeds give way
With abandon I wandered the wild astray...

I often recalled how she said unto me
"I will love you o'er rivers and borders and seas"
And as Joy had once pierced me, so now did grief
I wept bitter tears and I cried "You're a thief!"

And I searched high and low for the love I had lost,
Searching the night sky for stars Time forgot,
To fashion in them my final resting spot
For they gave me this fortune: to be with her not.

But just then a vision appeared in my mind
An image of that woman, arms raised toward the sky,
She said "I think I've come to understand the Lord,
The love that we shared we must give to the world."

And I listened in awe as her lips formed these words
"I will love you even on through the end of the world"
And I prayed unto God that this love may endure,
As a light unto all of the dark on this earth.

-- Thanks go to johndiii for his steadfast devotion to romance on his /. journal. There is always hope...

A group of researchers from UCLA Department of Materials Science and Engineering developed an artificial muscle made of carbon nanotubes, capable of healing itself. From the article: "The researchers used flexible, ever-more ubiquitous carbon nanotubes as electrodes instead of other films, often metal-based, that fail after repeated use. If an area of the carbon nanotube fails, the region around it seals itself by becoming non-conductive and prevents the fault from spreading to other areas." I don't know about you, but whenever I hear stories like these, my first concern is always whether I can use this technology to charge my iPod. Turns out, I can, as evidenced by Discovery Channel news report Artificial Muscle Heals Itself, Charges IPod.

MIT Technology Review describes a new Wi-Fi router from Intel capable of sending Wi-Fi signal at tens of miles away with somewhat decent 6 Mbps performance, which makes it perfect for rural Internet-less areas, and a number of countries interested in developing their Internet infrastructure, but no means to lay expensive cable or fiberoptics. The cost is roughly $500, and you need two such routers to create a point-to-point connection, Intel says: "Intel's RCP platform rewrites the communication rules of Wi-Fi radios. Galinvosky explains that the software creates specific time slots in which each of the two radios listens and talks, so there's no extra data being sent confirming transmissions. "We're not taking up all the bandwidth waiting for acknowledgments," he says. Since there is an inherent trade-off between the amount of available bandwidth and the distance that a signal can travel, the more bandwidth is available, the farther a signal can travel."

Acer is considering introducing an open, or standards-based gaming console into the market, company's sernior vice-president told BetaNews: "Wong said that, beyond "openness," all of the Acer-branded systems being eyed right now, including the game machine, are envisioned as offering new and innovative form factors and applications." Currently global gaming market is dominated by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, with $480 million worth of gaming hardware sold in the United States in a single month, with projected 2008 spending of $6.4 billion just in the US.

ExtremeTech is running a review of 9 terabyte-sized hard drives. They take a look at Seagate 7200.11, Seagate Barraduda ES.2, Western Digital WD10EACS, Western
Digital WD1000FYPS, Hitachi 7K1000, Hitachi A7K1000, and Samsung HD103UJ. The verdict? "HDTach measures raw performance, such as transfer rates, access times, and CPU utilization. It's a very low level test that works best on unformatted drives. As we can see from both the read and write tests, Samsung's higher platter density gives it a substantial edge in raw data transfers. The Seagate drives come in second, while the Western Digital drives, with their slower rotational speeds, take up the rear."

Wal-Mart will discontinue stocking $199 Linux PCs made by Taiwanese company Everex, due to the lack of interest from Wal-Mart shoppers, company said. Company will sell gPCs through its online store at Walmart.com: "Walmart.com now carries an updated version, the gPC2, also for $199, without a monitor. The site also sells a tiny Linux-driven laptop, the Everex CloudBook, for $399."

IDG News reports on new projects developed at Microsoft Research, and presented at company's annual TechFest. Among them - Lucid Touch, a handheld device that responds to the touch on the back of the device, not front, and Blews, a blog tracker discovering hotly debated news items.

Business Week takes a look at BitTorrent, not the protocol, but the company, in an attempt to figure out Bram Cohen's and Ashwin Navin's future directions. Currently the company is in talks with hardware manufacturers, who would incorporate BitTorrent code into home network routers. What's after that? "Next up: the big launch in early 2007 of the company's online content site, a project that's been pushed back since the summer. "The services that have launched are not getting any advantage for being early, in fact they're getting blasted for not getting the product right," Navin says. "We want to do better." He compares it to Apple's strategy with iTunes and the iPod."

eWeek is reporting on a new kind of Trojan horse that self-installs a patched pirated copy of Kaspersky's AntiVirus, which then removes every virus and spyware, except the SpamThru virus itself. From the article: "Stewart also found SpamThru using a clever command-and control structure to avoid shutdown. The Trojan uses a custom P2P protocol to share information with other peers--including the IP addresses and ports and software version of the control server. "Control is still maintained by a central server, but in case the control server is shut down, the spammer can update the rest of the peers with the location of a new control server, as long as he/she controls at least one peer," he said."

Davis Freeberg is reporting from San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting, where Google and EarthLink discussed their plans for free Wi-Fi for the city. It seems that quite a few activist groups were either thinking that public funds were given to Google and EarthLink, or the license to build a Wi-Fi cloud is comparable to Comcast's exclusive license to provide cable high speed Internet, and hence some weird demands ensued: "Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a requirement for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts."

Microsoft is looking into developing its own chips due to challenges presented by the next generation XBox and technologies like voice recognition. NYT reports: "Microsoft is exploring hardware design now in part because of a new set of tools that will make it possible to test ideas quickly, he said. The researchers will employ a system designed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that makes it possible to reconfigure computer designs without the cost of making finished chips."

New Scientist is reporting that stock earbuds and headphones shipped with popular digital music players can be damaging to one's hearing: "They found that all of the music players produced similar loudness at similar device volume settings, but that different headphones altered this loudness. On average, both earbud and canalphone earphones were 5.5 decibels louder than supra-aural headphones."

Libya will buy MIT's $100 laptops to supply every kid in the country with a brand new portable PC. Libya ordered 1.2 mln laptops, and somehow the deal adds up to $250 mln, MSNBC reports. From the article: "Negroponte, a computer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he had met with Moammar Gadhafi and the project appealed to the Libyan leader's political agenda of creating a more open Libya and becoming an African leader."

Nokia expects to sell WiMAX phones by 2008, Reuters reports. The mobile devices could be used with traditional cellular networks as well with WiMAX hotspots. From the article: "Nokia said its WiMAX base stations will be commercially available for broadband operators in the 2.5 gigahertz band at the end of 2007 and for 3.5 gigahertz in the first quarter of 2008."