Comment: Iraq invasion money could've been better spent (Score 1) 555
Since he likes playing dress-up maybe W should go on a "fact finding" mission to Titan.
FBI reopens D.B. Cooper hijaking case->
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Z80xxc!
Z80xxc! writes "The FBI decided to reopen the case on "D.B. Cooper", the unidentified man who hijacked a plane traveling from Portland, OR to Seattle, WA on November 24, 1971, almost exactly 36 years ago. He demanded $200,000 and four parachutes, which he collected in Washington in exchange for the passengers on board the plane, then ordered it towards Mexico. He parachuted out of the plane somewhere over Washington, but despite an lengthy search, no trace of him was ever found until nine years later when $5,800 in bills discovered to be among those taken by him were found by an 8 year old near the Columbia River."
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Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains-> 2
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hairyfeet
hairyfeet writes "OSNews is reporting that after an abysmal showing by Vista SP1 in the latest benchmarks that, surprisingly, Windows XP SP3 showed a marked improvement over SP2, gaining around ten percent in performance in the benchmarks. Considering that Microsoft has kept pushing forward the end of life date on XP due to customer and PC manufacturer demand, one has to wonder how wise it is for them to release a service pack that makes the older XP even faster than it already was compared to Vista."
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Top Intel Official Urges Americans to Reconsider P->
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Mike Kuykendall
Mike Kuykendall writes "A top Bush administration intelligence official declares that Americans must stop equating anonymity with privacy- a quick corrective lesson on the meanings of those terms, and a little legal history behind them."
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Checked out Blender 3D lately? (v2.45 Released)-> 1
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Apollos
Apollos writes "Open source software can be remarkable, and Blender 3D is no exception. This open source 3D modeling and animation package has been around quite a few years, but it is really getting mature; just check out the gallery at http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/images/. Version 2.45 has been released and can be downloaded at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Blender 2.45 contains advanced features such as subdivision surfaces, soft selection, a modifier stack, full skeletal rigging and animation including inverse kinematics and vertex weight painting (there's even a non-linear animation editor, vertex shape keys, and lattice deformations), UV mapping and unwrapping with seam based support and real-time on the fly unwrap editing mode, multiple shaders, a material node editor, a node based compositor that's even being used for keying effects, physics and particle system, raytracing, sub surface scattering (SSS); oh, and did I mention it has it's own built-in game engine? You can find the full feature list at http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/.
Blender uses Python as a scripting engine so you can write your own importers and exporters, as well as extend and customize existing features. It runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
If you're worried about the learning curve, there are loads of helps and tutorials, both web based and video; just search the web and they'll pop up everywhere. Here's a short list of websites featuring video tutorials: http://blender.org/, http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/, http://blenderunderground.com/. There's also the main support site featuring all sorts of tutorial links, http://blenderartists.org/."
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