A busy week for US military adventurism

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The US is having a busy week!

In Iraq they’ve stormed an Iranian consulalte

They’re also sending in a ‘surge’ of troops – 21,500 – which is half the troops their generals think they need for the surge tactic to work. This will bring force levels to around 150,000.

A reinforced squadron of F-117A’s (15-20 aircraft) is being deployed to South Korea.

4 places were hit by airstrikes in Somalia

Allthough the US is denying it took part in the bombings there amid international criticism.

Art or Porn?

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This is a question that seemed to come up in the 70s a lot more than it does nowadays, but I guess what with people putting great white sharks in formaldehyde and chopping up cows and putting them in formaldehyde, the art world has other things to think about when it comes down to what is art or not.
Anyway, I was looking though a comprehensive gallery of “erotic art” when a few things took my attention:
The subjects of the drawings displayed were almost all women. There is a certain cartoony air to the works, and most of the bodies represent a perfection even supermodels can barely attain – large breasts, or at any rate sagless breasts, flat stomachs, and tight asses. Hardly any fat, hardly any humanity to the pictures. I could be wrong, as some were obviously modelled by real people, but is this stuff really art? There are 52 x 16 pictures on this site to view, but I chose a few which kind of represent both sides of the arugment IMHO.





Razer desktop speakers

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Razer has released the first set of desktop speakers to feature THX. The speakers are specially built to rest on tables and other surfaces, ensuring sound quality isn’t lost when the sound waves hit the surface to give you awesome THX sound. There’s a headphone slot in the system for when you need to tone the volume all the way down and they’ve released a superb quality soundcard to go with it. If it compares to the 32 channel Gravis Ultrasound I don’t know (probably not – damnit Gravis, why did you stop supporting that?!), but it’s about time that real sound output came back on the agenda – all the emphasis has been on graphics improvements in the past few years.

Linx Audio Clear Harmony

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If you’re hearing impaired, this may be the thing for you – wireless stylish earbuds with award winning quality and noise cancelling technology so that voices come out crisp. clear and loudly without having to up the volume too much. You can switch between mono and stereo sound depending on the environment you’re in and what you want to hear of it. Excellent technology for the (slightly) deaf.

Invisible Things

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Invisible things is the website of Joanna Rutkowska, who is very interested in stealth malware insertion into kernels. She came up with the ‘blue pill’, which is a stealth VM in the kernel running side by side with the normal kernel and is pretty much undetectable. A whole load of different attack vectors are explored in the site, as well as a taxonomy for stealth malware – a sector virtually ignored by the anti-virus community.

Hollywood OKs DRM solution

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The Qflix system developed by Sonic Solutions Inc works by putting a content scrambling system lock on the burnt DVD. Each DVD player has a key to unencrypt the DVD. Or at least, they will have. Maybe.
How you’re supposed to match your DVD player key to a DVD burnt in a kiosk is still a bit vague, but the studios have approved the technology. Wonder how long it will take for this to be broken?

Storm Trooper Parade

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Indeed the biggest nerdfest ever! DragonCon 2006: The 200 StormTrooper March. Find more on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kK4vUMQH0k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E94R8K-MsaU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veIifNiD1DY&mode=related&search=

And of course “StormTroopers gone Wild!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjQCO-RZ-0s&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81aPYBmTYWA&mode=related&search=

SkyTag™ – Green Laser Aircraft Tracker

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Bored using your advanced green laser for traditional spreadsheet pointing techniques? Why not kick up your skills a notch and start using green lasers to track aircraft? With beams visible in daylight that extend for miles, green lasers are ideally suited to track objects in the sky. Stop worrying about things like mandatory jail time and social isolation and play the intriguing game of SkyTag™ today.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/tracker.shtml

Britain finally pays of WWII loan

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One of the reasons that Britain has been running behind the U.S. arse is that they owe the U.S. a huge amount of money for saving the rest of Europe from Hitler. Not that the rest of Europe is helping GB to pay it off. Now the interest on that loan is very very small indeed, but the U.S. has always had the option of raising that if GB didn’t toe the line. Tomorrow, the loan will be repaid – what effect will that have on the face of British foreign policy.