These glasses can show where your veins run, and shade your hemoglobin levels to show the affective state a person is in.
These Awesome Glasses Will Make Your Veins Glow So Nurses Won't Have to Keep Stabbing You.
BAE systems has developed a system based on radio frequency systems to position itself. It’s a learning system that uses GPS to track it’s own location whilst reading the unique RF signals strength and ID.
One Per Cent: TV and radio signals take over when GPS goes wrong.
These guys have developed a screen which is projected on a bubble. The bubble is flexible and can be controlled using vibrations, allowing the membrane to be changed in transparency and roughness.
There will be no Flash for Android 4.1 devices, unless your manufacturer allready packaged it with the device. It won’t be available from the Google Play store either.
An Update on Flash Player and Android « Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog.
It turns out that most people can’t tell the difference in sound quality above 160 kbps. So having a raw CD doesn’t make the sound ‘better’.
Concluding the Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment.
A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government. With just around $1,000 in parts, Humphreys’ team took control of an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the US Department of Homeland Security.
They used the same technique the Iranians claimed to have used to force the US’ latest and greatest stealth UAV to land on their territory: spoofing the GPS signal of the drone, lending a lot of credibility to that claim.
Texas college hacks government drone — RT.
Using lasers, they guide lightning to their targets:
“For very powerful and high intensity laser pulses, the air can act like a lens, keeping the light in a small-diameter filament,” said Fischer. “We use an ultra-short-pulse laser of modest energy to make a laser beam so intense that it focuses on itself in air and stays focused in a filament.”
To put the energy output in perspective, a big filament light bulb uses 100 watts. The optical amplifier output is 50 billion watts of optical power, Fischer said.
“If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma,” said Fischer. “This plasma is located along the path of the laser beam, so we can direct it wherever we want by moving a mirror.”
“Air is composed of neutral molecules and is an insulator,” Fischer said. When lightning from a thunderstorm leaps from cloud to ground, it behaves just as any other sources of electrical energy and follows the path of least resistance.
“The plasma channel conducts electricity way better than un-ionized air, so if we set up the laser so that the filament comes near a high voltage source, the electrical energy will travel down the filament,” Fischer elaborated.
A target, an enemy vehicle or even some types of unexploded ordnance, would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on. Since the voltage drop across the target would be the same as the voltage drop across the same distance of ground, current flows through the target. In the case of unexploded ordnance, it would detonate, explained Fischer.
Picatinny engineers set phasers to 'fry' | Article | The United States Army.
These will only set you back around $100,- and will run quietly, much less noise than a fan system.
The Flynano is a one man electric amphibious aircraft that costs only EUR 32.000,- and a trailer costs EUR 5.300,-. It files from moderate water and wind states and goes 140 kph. Very basic but looks like fun.
Here is a theory that says that some fraud perpetrators are not actually evil, but they don’t see that they are being evil, depending on the frame of mind they are put into.
Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things : NPR.
Apparently they profile tourists and then force them to open their email on their own PC (which means basically you’re giving them your email login through a keylogger) and they look into it.
If you disagree you’re hiding something and not allowed into the country.
Besides using profiling, which is innefective, it’s a huge invasion of privacy. Not even the USA goes this far.
Israel steps up email border checks | The Australian.
The world of robotic pets is a large and varied one. The central place for finding out about them is here:
ElectronicPets.org – The Complete Database of Interactive and Robotic Pets.
There are a few that stand out, however:
Wowwee, makers of the robosapien have two lines that are very interesting:
The Alive baby animals are beatifully made and have a pretty wide range of functions.
Alive animals also come in ‘mini’ versions which are don’t have as many features but are still very cute. Watch out when buying though!
They also have a Perfect Puppy line (as well as many others) which are very cuddly.
Keepon is my favorite, he’s a dancing robot. The professional version costs $30,000 but there’s a smaller version available for around GBP 40,-
One of the most intelligent learning and evolving robots is PLEO rb (which stands for reborn). Unfortunately it’s insanely expensive ($469)
The fuel nozzle drip retainer is a simple yet innovative way of saving millions of litres of fuel on a global scale. Anyone who has pumped fuel before has noticed the drops that fall to the ground after you’ve removed the nozzle from the vehicle. We’ve designed a method of retaining these drops, which initiates a recycling process whereby the next customer in line receives the fuel that would have been otherwise wasted. These drops may not seem like a significant amount, however when taken into account globally, these drops amount to approximately half a billion litres of fuel that falls to the ground and is evaporated into our atmosphere every year. Our drip retainer mesh design utilizes a combination of pressure differentials and surface tension to retain fuel within the spout.
Peter Jennings is an inventor who has built loads of stuff for the Go Pro Hero camera’s, such as a programmable time lapse controller, panoramic mounts, external power using the back door of the casing and DIY wireless remote controllers. Very worth looking at the hacks he has if you own a Go-Pro.
GoPro Camera Tips and Techniques.
Burgemeester hackt kritische site | Webwereld.
He used the data he gained to strong arm political opponents.
So if your elected mayor is capable of doing this, then what makes you think all the drones and other political forces sitting on top of huge centralised databases won’t be capable of this… to much larger effect?
Britain’s largest force says it has distributed 350 of the cell phone-sized devices to officers across various parts of London, part of a nationwide rollout championed by Britain’s National Policing Improvement Agency.
via Scotland Yard deploys mobile fingerprint devices.
So will they store all precessed fingerprints? How quickly will they be removed from the physical device?
NASA has contracted this rocket to very carefully approach the ISS for resupply runs. Well done Elon Musk!
SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully • The Register.
It turns out that not only is it a massive privacy invasion, but has a 20% (!!) error rate. Besides that it’s useless, because no border guard system can read the fingerprints on the passport.
Tweede Kamer wil af van vingerafdruk in paspoort – update | Webwereld.
The boat is 39 feet long and can reach a top speed of 28 knots. Using a modified version of the unmanned Shadow surveillance aircraft technology that logged 700,000 hours of duty in the Middle East, the boat can be controlled remotely from 10 to 12 miles away from a command station on land, at sea or in the air, Haslett said.
Farther out, it can be switched to a satellite control system, which Textron said could expand its range to 1,200 miles. The boat could be launched from virtually any large Navy vessel.
Using diesel fuel, the boat could operate for up to 72 hours without refueling, depending upon its traveling speed and the weight of equipment being carried. The fuel supply could be extended for up to a week on slow-moving reconnaissance missions. the boat could be operated in as little as 5 feet of water because of its shallow draft
The CUSV would be hard to sink by accident.
If the boat overturns, it shuts down its engines, rights itself, restarts the engines and resumes the mission. Should the boat lose contact with its command, it’s programmed simply to return to its launching point or another pre-determined location.
It’s not the first unmanned boat. But Haslett said others generally have been boats simply refitted with remote control equipment. The CUSV was designed from the first step not to have a crew.
Phys.Org Mobile: Unmanned vessel could soon be working for Navy.
Wait – what? It BROKE an insulin pump? And it’s supposed to be safe for people to go in? Really?
Not using a credit card is becoming a much more viable method over the internet (22% of the overall e-commerce payments), with iDeal and Paypal, but also many other methods used to pay for porn or gambling. Worldpay has made an interactive map showing the predominance of specific alternative currencies per country.
This is based on this report by worldpay.
Melville ten Cate of ECA, housed in Schiphol, claims to have secured EUR 283 million to finance the business plan I have been harping on about for the last 25 years: he wants to buy 24 light combat aircraft to start an Integrated Opposing Force (IOPFOR) which will be used as an agressor training service for NATO. Eventually he wants to add surface and naval assets to the force.
Melville ten Cate
via ECA secures funds for NATO aggressor aircraft purchase.
Their corporate website is here, where they state they’re looking for EUR 448 m to finance all the aircraft, so he’s a bit short, but able to pay for 14 aircraft.
The Financial Times ran an article which was picked up in august 2010 by other media. In the FT article he is in discussion with Iceland to use an airbase there. In this article he talks about using Sukhoi’s, in other articles he talks about using MiG 35’s, Chengdu J-10’s, Saab Gripen’s.
A Dutch paper that picked up the article and wrote its own tried to contact the company, but the contact address on the old website led to Fokker Aircraft Services, where no-one knew of the company.
In January 2011 it turned out that the Icelandic government had denied permission to use the Keflavik base. Jobs for 45 pilots at EUR 160K per year had been posted, but ECA was unavailable for contact. It turned out that the company wasn’t registered in the Netherlands. No one could contact the ten Cate brothers and no-one knows anything about their financers.
Melville ten Cate has an empty LinkedIn page.
Pprune has picked it up again here but not much activity in that thread.
Scramble has an old thread on the subject here which has been picked up again.
So it’s a mystery.
It turns out that there are pleny of studies out there that debunk the “facts and figures” the industries throw about when talking about IP theft and the costs of piracy. Here is a selection of some interesting other studies.
What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing – Slashdot.