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Resort Attracts Men With Virtual Girlfriends Screenshot-sm 226

Posted by samzenpus from the all-you-need-is-love dept.
disco_tracy writes "Long a favorite of lovers and honeymooners, a Japanese beach town with fading sparkle has found a new tourism niche in the wired age. A resort based on a game called 'Love Plus,' encourages players to develop long-term relationships with virtual women. From the article: 'Local souvenir shops in the resort town have caught on and capitalized on the love-struck new clientele, selling Love Plus-themed souvenirs, from good-luck charms to steamed buns and fish sausages. The local Ohnoya hotel even offers traditional rooms to the unusual couples, which feature two sets of futon beds and another barcode panel that allows the men to visualize their girlfriends in a flattering summer kimono.'"
Supercomputing

Homebrew Cray-1 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the when-i-was-a-child dept.
egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."
Image

3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away Screenshot-sm 470

Posted by samzenpus from the drink-em-if-you-got-em dept.
Nzimmer911 writes "Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers according to a 20 years study following 1,824 people. From the article: 'But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that - for reasons that aren't entirely clear - abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.'"
Security

The Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-we-have-a-party-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair."
Communications

GMail Introduces Priority Inbox 242

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we-have-priority dept.
jason-za writes with this quote from a Google announcement: "People tell us all that time that they're getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean — here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day — mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that's often not important. It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we're happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta) — an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail."
Transportation

Flight Data Recorders, Decades Out of Date 266

Posted by Soulskill from the jet-lagging-behind dept.
Tisha_AH writes "For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant. Some of the advances of cloud computing, mesh radio networks, real-time position reporting and satellite communications are held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy. Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained, with black boxes lost on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers or with critical information suppressed by government secrecy or aircraft manufacturers. Many devices still rely upon tape recorders for voice and data that only record a very small sampling of aircraft dynamics, flight and engine systems or crew behaviors. Technologically simple solutions like battery backup, continual telemetry feeds by satellite and hundreds of I/O points, monitoring many systems should be within easy reach. Pilot unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew. Accidents may be due to human error, process problems or design flaws. Unless we can fully evaluate all factors involved in transportation accidents, it will be difficult to improve the safety record. Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field, what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"

Comment The posts say it! (Score 2, Interesting) 136

by srees (#31815840) Attached to: Cell Phones Could Sniff Out Deadly Chemicals
Obviously I'm not the only one utterly convinced that the optional part is a complete sham. What a thin cover story for an attempt to embed bomb sniffing devices in something everyone carries, in the name of greater security. Folks at a rocketry convention would see men in black in no time flat if they 'forgot' to register their event with the monitors. 1986.
Displays

Where Are Your Contact Lens Displays? 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we'll-use-them-as-huds-in-our-flying-cars dept.
destinyland writes "'We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today,' argues researcher Babak Parvis, 'with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions.' He provides an update on the contact lens with transparent circuitry that's being developed at the University of Washington. (Its components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs which form images in front of the eye such as charts and photographs). They've already developed a lens-with-LED prototype that's powered by 330 microwatts of wireless radio-frequency power, and believe the lenses could also be used as biosensors to deliver body chemistry readings (including blood sugar levels). But 'What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology,' says Dr. Parviz."
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.
bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."
Privacy

Shedding Your Identity In the Digital Age 138

Posted by kdawson from the under-the-radar-sonar-and-lidar dept.
newscloud writes "Writer Evan Ratliff tells how he managed to hide from crowdsourced searchers for 27 days. The first person to find him and photograph him would claim a $5,000 prize. In addition to hiding out as a roadie with indy band 'The Hermit Thrushes' for a week, Ratliff donned a variety of increasingly impressive disguises. It's an interesting read on how to disappear in the digital age: 'August 13, 6:40 PM: I'm driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I'm reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there's no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught. About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe. What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can't be detected. There will be no digital record that at 4 AM I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile...' Spoiler alert: We previously discussed the denouement of the contest."

Comment Re:Asteroid? Really? (Score 1) 86

by srees (#29643789) Attached to: Algae First To Recover After Asteroid Strike
I don't know...how old the earth is, or how that question relates to my statement. Sounds like bait.

/me bites

I don't appreciate someone telling me it's a fact that the earth is 7 thousand years old, or 7 billion years old, as if it's a fact when no one can prove beyond doubt either way. There are theories of evolution, of creation. Once you write one way or the other as fact, you are telling others how to think, and they tend to cease thinking for themselves. It's a kind of lie, to tell someone that *this* is how something *is*, when it isn't demonstrable fact.

I'll add that personally, I choose to believe in the theory of Creation, the Bible, the Flood, and that the earth is approximately 7-10 thousand years old. But I don't _know_ that, and can't prove it. After extensive reading of both sides of the arguments, it is simply the theory I choose to believe. I like the USA because here I am free to believe that if I want to. I hope this country maintains it's religious freedoms. But if I'm writing a professional publication, I ought to be careful to express it as a theory, as I certainly can't prove it.

So, I'm not complaining that they believe the theory of mass-extinction via asteroid - that's their prerogative. I'm complaining that they are pushing their theory as fact, when it isn't fact, but is still theory.

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