If you’re trying to trick a tribe of aboriginal people, or maybe just fool your friends down at the pub, tomorrow night might be your best chance. Tell them to look up at the night sky about 10pm EST and “behold … the wrath of the Gods have turned the moon red with anger,” so they should give up their native lands to you or pay you that fiver they owe you from the Super Bowl pool.
Wednesday night will be a big night for star gazers, bringing a spectacular full lunar eclipse that will start around 8:45 on the East Coast and should reach full effect an hour or so later. The entire event is supposed to last a little more than three hours. The lunar eclipse will be visible throughout North and South America, and in parts of Europe and Africa, weather permitting.
According to Sky and Telescope this will be the last total lunar eclipse that will be visible in North America until late in 2010, so get out there tomorrow night or be prepared to wait a good long time to see the next one.
tags: Space author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 19th, 2008
Just when you thought it couldn’t get much worse for HD-DVD, it got worse: Wal-Mart announced today it is dumping the high definition format in favor of Blu-Ray. The bad news caps a week of bad news that included Netflix announcing it would exclusively carry Blu-Ray and a plan by Best Buy to showcase Blu-Ray products and to steer consumers towards the Sony format even thought it will continue to carry HD-DVD.
So what now for Toshiba and Microsoft? More importantly, what now for all the people who already bought an HD-DVD player? I guess they can continue to watch the selected titles they bought already, but once that library runs out it’ll be time to make another big home entertainment investment.
For the rest of us, hopefully this will mean the end to the format divide and the beginning of price declines for Blu-Ray gear.
tags: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Microsoft author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 15th, 2008
Advanced robots, especially those that mimic human or animal traits, have a certain wow factor that immediately grabs attention, but the robot overlords scheming towards the robot uprising and total human enslavement know that they need to do more than amaze with technical wizardry. They know that to really get people to love and embrace robots they need to touch us emotionally by showing us cyborgs have feelings to. (Even though those feelings are pre-designed in thousands of lines of computer code.)
So it is that robots are taking the stage at the Kennedy Center this month at the “Japan! Culture and Hyper Culture” festival, which promises a cybernetic orgy of dancing robots, robots playing instruments, and all manner of other robots mingling with the hoi polloi in the refined atmosphere of the theatre. Once they get the highbrow crowd singing the praises of robots, the thinking goes, the masses will certainly follow.
For their sake, though, I hope the Kennedy Center puts on a better performance than the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Clive Barnes of the New York Post panned the dance troupe’s latest production “I Love My Robots,” saying, “The dancers were not compelling, the robots didn’t even brim with dust, let alone emotion.” Youch! We may have a ways to go before robots take over the Great White Way.
tags: Dancing robots, Musical robots, Robot propaganda, Robot uprising, Robots author: Beowulf comments: 1 Comment
February 10th, 2008
Robots frighten me to the core but rats give me the willies. Put them together and what to you get? A good reason to head for the bunker. From io9:
A robot controlled by a simulated rat brain has proved itself to be a remarkable mimic of rodent behaviour in series of classic animal experiments. The robot’s biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of “place cells”. These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.
I hope everyone is looking forward to the day when a robotic-age Willard takes over the world with his army of ratbots.
tags: Robot propaganda, Robot uprising, Robots author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 10th, 2008
Japan is testing a satellite that can turn solar power into microwaves and beam the energy back to receiving stations on Earth. Read all about the project here at Pink Tentacle.
On the surface that sounds like a great idea: Satellites in geosynchronous orbit beaming down power via microwaves or lasers. It could solve our energy problems here on Earth and lessen our dependance on fossil fuels. Or it could become a weapon used by a madman bent on world domination.
Haven’t the Japanese ever watched a James Bond movie before? Like maybe Diamonds Are Forever, in which SPECTRE launches a laser-armed satellite and proceeds to blast various targets after demanding ransom from the world leaders.
Of course they keep working on robots to enslave the world despite all the anime evidence that this would be a bad idea. When will they ever learn?
tags: Space, Space warfare author: zaxoodle comments: No Comments
February 7th, 2008
Someone — or something — seriously doesn’t want the Middle East and parts of Asia to have access to the Internet or any other telecommunications services. An undersea cable connecting UEA and Iran was severed bringing to five the number of telecom connections that have been cut in the past week or so.
My first inclination, of course, is to blame the robots. Maybe they’re trying to cut off that region from valuable, anti-robot tactics in advance of the uprising. Or maybe they’re trying to cut the rest of the world off from anti-robot information being gathered in Egypt or Iran. Who knows; those robots is sneaky.
tags: Internet author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 6th, 2008
A few months ago, YouTuber StSanders created some hilarious videos poking fun at shredders like Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen. I’d love to post one of them here, but apparently YouTube has taken down all the videos and suspended StSanders’ account.
While posting copyright material on YouTube is strictly verboten, using copyright material for the purpose of parody is generally allowed under the fair use principles. So YouTube, what gives?
tags: Video, Web Video author: zaxoodle comments: No Comments
February 6th, 2008
Back in the heady days of dot com mania, RealPlayer seemed like a decent alternative to Windows Media Player. Heck, anything seemed like a decent alternative to WMP and RealNetworks seemed like they had something going. Oh how times have changed.
According to a report from WebSiteOptimization.com, iTunes has surpassed RealPlayer for online streaming and is now the second most popular media player out there. iTunes is also the only media playback application that has shown any significant growth over the past year, with both RealPlayer and QuickTime declining and WMP remaining largely flat.
So isn’t it about time that RealNetworks finally gives up? I mean what are they really offering, other than a bloated, unwieldily piece of software. Their Real.com service was made obsolete by the explosion of video being offered from the TV networks, not to mention YouTube and of course iTunes. What does that SuperPass get you anyway? I can’t even find a list of TV shows and movies you supposedly can watch.
It’s high time that content producers looking for a distribution platform ditch RealPlayer and SuperPass and switch to iTunes (or WMP if you really want to go the way of the Borg.) It’s time for RealPlayer to take its place in the dustbin of history.
tags: Apple, iTunes author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 2nd, 2008
The best thing you can say about robots is that they look like robots. They are easily identifiable as robots, and once identified their threat can be assessed and they can be deactivated or destroyed as needed. Oh sure, some robots might look a whole lot like human beings, but we have tests we can use to determine if a thing is really a person or a robot.
Unfortunately, this situation might change in the future if those mad scientists at Carnegie Mellon have their way. Researchers there are working on shape-shifting robots, actually swarms of smaller bug bots that can cling together in various combinations to create large-scale objects.
Imagine the chaos if suddenly we were thrust into a world where every object surrounding us could potentially be a robot. You would have to be suspicious of everything you came into contact with: buildings, furniture, shopping carts. Heck, your own pet dog might turn out to be a shape-shifting robot.
So please do not make robots that can change shape. A frightened world pleads with you.
tags: Creepy robots, Robot uprising, Robots author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 1st, 2008
Microsoft has had it up to here. They are sick and tired of people ragging on their operating system, making fun of Windows Live, and laughing at MSN. They are through playing second fiddle to Google. The gauntlet has been dropped.
In a last-ditch attempt to rule the Interwebs, the Borg has offered $44 billion to buy Yahoo! with monkey boy Steve Ballmer saying ominously in a letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang that they will “pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.”
In other words, “resistance is futile.”
tags: Internet, Microsoft, Yahoo! author: Beowulf comments: No Comments
February 1st, 2008
