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The Almighty Buck

Top 10 Things You CAN'T Have For Christmas 230

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-just-want-2-front-teeth dept.
Zothecula writes "It's getting a little late for a last minute Christmas shopping list, but not to worry, most of us outside the Forbes Top 100 couldn't afford any of these anyway! Still, it's fascinating to look at what's possible if the word 'budget' isn't in your vocabulary, so here's a look at what you won't be getting for Christmas (CT: Warning, gizmag features really intrusive advertising) this year – the most outrageous examples of high-end overkill from 2010."
Media

Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player 356

Posted by kdawson from the now-to-optimize dept.
Tumbleweed writes "How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175KB, 8,000-line JavaScript-based Flash player written by Chris Smoak at RevShock, a mobile ad startup, and to be open-sourced 'in the near future.' From Simon's blog: 'It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio, and turns them into base64 encoded data: URIs, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. ... Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter.' Badass!"

Submission + - American Bar Association's Lists Top 100 Blogs (abajournal.com)

Submitted by dpille
dpille writes: The American Bar Association recently listed the editors' top 100 legal blogs, along with a call to "help (them) find blawgs worthy of note." With the notable absence of such slashdot standbys as groklaw or Ray Beckerman's blog, and with a preference for Patently O over my favorite Patent Prospector, the slashdot community might well be able to improve that list. What other law-related blogs do we read?
Japan

"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan 241

Posted by timothy from the fools-the-eye dept.
Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."
Software

Submission + - When moderating, my primary goal is to:

Submitted by VRisaMetaphor
VRisaMetaphor writes: When moderating, my primary goal is to:

* help the best comments float to the top
* make the worst comments sink to the bottom
* up-mod comments I agree with
* down-mod comments I don't agree with
* seek and destroy trolls
* slap moderation critics offtopic
* make metamods go WTF?
* annoy CowboyNeal
The Military

Submission + - Air Strike Tracker, visual record of US airstrikes (ourbombs.com)

Submitted by
Neil Halloran
Neil Halloran writes: "The Air Strike Tracker chronicles every reported U.S. air strike that has affected civilians since September 11, 2001. The visual interface (using Flash 10's 3D functionality) makes information about each incident from numerous sources highly accessible, often providing the ability to view online videos and other relevant media. You can browse incidents by location, date, or tags (e.g. unmanned drones, official investigations, local protest). Note that he Air Strike Tracker is an ongoing project, and we will continue to update the underlying data as new information is obtained."
Image

Powering Restaurants WIth Deep Fried Fuel 148

Posted by samzenpus from the the-power-of-grease dept.
Mike writes "Here's a brilliant idea for biofuels: rather than filtering used fry oil for use in vehicles, why not simplify matters and use it to heat and power the restaurant itself? The VegaWatt turns used vegetable oil into clean heat and energy for restaurants, eliminating the dirty and costly mess of oil disposal while producing 10-25% of the electricity needed to run a small restaurant. It also produces fuel free of chemicals or fossil fuels, unlike standard biodiesel."
Space

Submission + - 50Grand for idea to tag a asteroid

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A $50,000 (£25,000) competition has been launched to find the best way to tag a 400m-wide asteroid, and tracked it with the most precision. The Plantery Society is organising the competition in cooperation with the European Space Agency (Esa), the US space agency (Nasa), the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). The Apophis space rock is set to make a pass closer than the orbits of many communications satellites and scientists would like to confirm that it poses no danger to our world- but it will not hit the planet, that is clear. "The threat of a strike from asteroids is always a very low probability at any given time, and yet bad things will happen," said the Planetary Society's director of projects, Bruce Betts. "We need to know whether Earth's name is on it," he told BBC News. The concern centres on the small chance that its orbit could be perturbed enough in the flyby to put the rock on a collision path for its return in 2036. And the Planetary Society thinks an innovative tracking mission could make doubly sure. Hence, the prize for an individual or team that can put together the best concept for tagging a huge lump of rock. "You could use a beacon; you could put a reflector on it that you ping; you could put a spacecraft in orbit and track that. There are any number of possibilities and ones we haven't thought of, I'm sure," said Betts. The winning entry or entries will be submitted to space agencies to see if they want to carry the ideas through. The Planetary Society competition was launched here at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

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