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Lenovo Service Disables Laptops With a Text Message 257

narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."
Medicine

Stretching Before Exercising Weakens Muscles 339

Khemisty writes "Back in grade school you were probably taught the importance of warm-up exercises, and it's likely you've continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes' warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but are actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg's muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements."

Comment Re:Love space, but... (Score 1) 210

If the species was meant to be in space, its fundamental bodily makeup would already be moving toward a form factor befitting a gravity-free, cosmic-ray rich environment, and as we've yet to see such creatures develop, it's plainly evident our species isn't ready for that.

Like rk said - This means that you don't understand how evolution by natural selection works. Evolution is conservative (not a political stab, conservative in the biological sense). There is no planning ahead. It seems you are misunderstanding evolution by natural selection on a fundamental level.

Humanity has a sort of extended phenotype- our technology. Beavers impact and shape their ecosystem, and there are many other "ecosystem engineers" in the animal kingdom. We Homo sapiens just do this on a bigger, more complex scale. We have evolved along with our tools, and will continue to do so. Reaching out into space is just occupying an otherwise vacant ecological niche. Natural selection is about gene propogation, and any species, given the "chance", will exploit everything possible to ensure their genes are more common than others'.

About the claim that humanity is not "worth more" than other species...You say we SHOULD fall victim to an extinction, but why? Sure, we've screwed with the planet and all the other species inhabiting it, but we see other species doing just that, all the time. Species (think ungulate) will literally eat themselves to death, by depleting all the available resources. But wait- one is then tempted to say that since we have a concept of morality, we should curb our destructive selfish ways! Doesn't that imply we are higher than the lowly moral-depauperate species beneath us?

Back to the issue at hand, however. I think space exploration is a good step in getting humanity to colonize other worlds. Sure, we've mucked up our own pretty well, and one lonely dome on Mars with do squat, but it is a small step in the right direction. Baby steps, we'll get there.

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