For the Geek in All of Us: Motorized Office Chairs
August 18, 2008
International, Technology
Three chairs cheers for two German kids who took innovative ingenuity and paired it with a need for all geeks everywhere. According to this article, German police arrested the two teens who had apparently scrapped an old lawn mower to convert a common office chair into a source of transportation. The teens insisted they had only tried the contraption over a distance of a few meters, but witnesses reportedly claim they had seen the office chair motoring around town.
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Do People Explode at Gas Pumps or Not?
July 22, 2008
Business, Technology
Most likely, everyone reading this article has at one point or another heard the horror stories about using a cell phone at the gas pump - for fear that a potential electrical spark could ignite gasoline vapors into a deadly fireball. Most people think it’s little more than a rumor, but apparently a college student near New York City, New York learned the hard way that it isn’t just a rumor. In fact, most cell phone manufacturers include somewhere in the 300-page owners manual, which nobody ever reads, that cell phones shouldn’t be used in places like fuel transfer stations, or any similar place where one would not be inclined to light a match.
So why do gas pumps today house all sorts of electronic gadgets? ABCNews.com ran a story today going on and on about how cute it is that people might not be so disappointed about gas prices when the pump is outfitted with a little TV screen (probably showing news coverage of Obama). The story covered the ins and outs of marketing and profitability, but mentioned nothing about the hazards of operating electronic equipment in the vicinity of volatile vapors.
We couldn’t imagine that some advertising and marketing companies would have overlooked something so simple as public safety - could we?
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Associated Press Praises NY Attorney General for Essentially Doing Nothing
July 22, 2008
Law, Politics, Technology
The Associated Press is reporting that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is fighting the good fight, threatening to file suit against Comcast if the company will not start blocking child-porn sites. This is just another of several recent high-profile puff-pieces touting Cuomo as a pioneering champion in the national clamp-down against pedophilia online.
The only problem with this is that the companies have either already blocked, or were in the process of blocking, access to certain newsgroups and other sites where much of the illicit material is located, as our friends over at DSLReports have been pointing out ever since the AP started stroking Andrew Cuomo.
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EU Looks to Online ‘Pirate’ Technology to Expand Online TV
July 21, 2008
Technology
For many, a torrent is one of those strong rain storms that cause the kinds of damage we’ve seen along the Mississippi River this year.
Online, however, torrents are the technology used by consumers to file-share massive data files like video and audio content. The technology has come under fire in recent years because many of the files being shared by consumers happen to be protected under copyright laws.
In a story covered on DSLReports.com, researchers in the E.U. are looking at the technology as a way to maximize the usage of bandwidth. According to the article, implementation of the technology is not far off, and could result in TV outlets being able to distribute content to thousands of consumers using the same bandwidth it now takes to serve just a handful.
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Congress Pretends to Care About Citizens’ Privacy
July 17, 2008
Law, Technology
In an article from Yahoo! News, we learn of another chapter in the ongoing story of Congressional investigation of NebuAd, a web monitoring service which allows companies to target web-based advertising based on individual users’ browsing history.
Of course, Congress wants to seem as though they care about the privacy of the American public when it comes to businesses making possible violations. However, when government spies on the public, that’s apparently okay as evidenced by the recent vote on the FISA Amendment.
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