M&M’s World Headlines: Feb 3, 2009
WarCloning, the New WarDriving? SlashDot
ChrisPaget writes “After my legal skirmishes with HID a while back, The Register has coverage of my latest RFID work — cloning Passport Cards and Electronic Drivers Licenses from a moving vehicle. Full details will be released at Shmoocon this weekend, but in the meantime there’s video of the equipment and articles all over the place.”
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Fossil discovery sheds new light on Arctic’s past Montreal Gazette
The discovery of a 90-million-year-old turtle fossil in the Canadian Arctic — thousands of kilometres from the ancient reptile’s original freshwater habitat in Asia — is shedding new light on the temperate past of the polar north and the trans-Arctic migrations of prehistoric creatures.
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Don’t piss off the snowplow guy CBC
Montreal snowplow driver suspended for burying car. A Montreal snowplow driver has been suspended after he dumped a whopping pile of snow onto a car after a dispute over a parking space. Now the couple who found their car looking more like an igloo than a sedan want an apology from the driver.
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Protester throws shoe at Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Britain News Au
A PROTESTER overnight threw a shoe at Chinese premier Wen Jiabao as he was giving a speech at Britain’s Cambridge University, just missing him. “This is a scandal” he shouted before security staff bundled him out of a concert hall at the university, where Mr Wen was speaking on the last day of a five-nation tour of Europe. The premier appeared unruffled by the incident and resumed his speech before taking questions.
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Graffiti girl Cheyene Back jailed for first offence Daily Telegraph
An 18-year-old girl with no prior criminal history has been jailed for writing her nickname on the wall of a Sydney cafe. Cheyene Back, who turned 18 last month, wept as she was sentenced to three months full-time custody for graffiti on the public wall at Hyde Park Cafe. She was convicted of intentionally destroying or damaging property in Downing Centre Local Court this afternoon.
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30 lashes for smoking on plane Daily Telegraph
A Sundanese man has been sentenced to 30 lashes for smoking on a domestic Saudi Arabian Airlines flight. The unnamed man had refused to put out his cigarette on the flight to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah from Qurayyat in northern Saudi Arabia. He was arrested by police when the aircraft landed in Jeddah and sentenced to 30 lashes by a local court on Sunday.
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Sewage yields more gold than top mines Reuters
A sewage treatment facility in central Japan has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world’s best mines. An official in Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, said the high percentage of gold found at the Suwa facility was probably due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the yellow metal. The facility recently recorded finding 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash from incinerated sludge. That is a far higher gold content than Japan’s Hishikari Mine, one of the world’s top gold mines, owned by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd, which contains 20-40 grammes of the precious metal per tonne of ore.
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Students call space station with home-built radio Globe and Mail
Four Toronto college students have accomplished a technological feat that their teachers are calling a first. The Humber College seniors made contact with the International Space Station Monday with a radio system they designed and built themselves. School officials say that, to their knowledge, that’s never been accomplished by students at the college level. The project got off the ground about a year ago as the students looked for a way to apply knowledge gained from their radio communication courses.
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Hash brownie impairs bus driver Ottawa Sun
A 27-year-old man was charged with poisoning a Greyhound bus driver after the driver fell ill while driving the bus southwest of Cornwall on Friday. Police charged one of the passengers, a Whitby man, with possession of drugs and administering a noxious thing with intent to annoy.
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Pong turns 40, gets own museum Beta News
A site celebrating the 40th anniversary of the invention of Pong, pongmuseum.com, has opened. With the museum comes a video directly from inventor Ralph H. Baer and engineer Bill Harrison playing a demonstration model of their invention.
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French court fines Google over trade marked keywords The Register
A French court has fined search engine giant Google €350,000 and said that its search advertising business has infringed on two companies’ trade marks. Google allows anyone to pay to have their adverts appear beside certain words. Trade mark holders have argued that allowing other people to buy an association with their brands constitutes trade mark infringement. French courts have previously agreed, upholding complaints by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy and Meridien Hotels that their trade marks were infringed by the system. Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris has ordered Google to pay €200,000 to Voyageurs du Monde (Travellers of the World) and €150,000 to Terres d’Aventure (Lands of Adventure), despite the judge saying that the commercial harm to the companies was marginal. The company has also been ordered to pay €60,000 in costs. Google said that it has already appealed the case to the Paris Court of Appeal.
»»»Sleep on the job and get paid Toronto Sun
Find it hard to stay awake at work? Maybe it’s time for a new gig. The New Museum of New York City is looking for women between the ages of 18 and 40 to be a part of an art installation where a woman sleeps in a bed in the gallery, according to newsday.com. Oh, and they pay $10 an hour — as long as you’re asleep for your six-hour shift.
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Iran launches first home-made satellite Reuters
Iran launched its first home-made satellite into orbit on Tuesday, state television reported, displaying progress in space technology at a time of persistent international tension over its nuclear program. The Omid (Hope) satellite, launched as Iran marks the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution this month, was designed for research and telecommunications, said the television, which carried footage of the launch.
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Ten new amphibian species discovered in Colombia Reuters
Ten new species of amphibians — including three kinds of poisonous frogs and three transparent-skinned glass frogs — have been discovered in the mountains of Colombia, conservationists said Monday. The new species discovered in Colombia include three poison frogs, three glass frogs, one harlequin frog, two kinds of rain frogs and one salamander. The expedition that turned up the new amphibians also recorded the presence of large mammals like Baird’s tapir, which is considered endangered in Colombia, four species of monkeys and a population of white-lipped peccary, a pig-like creature.
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IBM computer will have power of 2 million laptops Reuters
Seven months after IBM delivered the world’s fastest supercomputer, it has announced an even speedier one with the computing power of 2 million laptops. IBM said on Tuesday it is developing the technology for its new Sequoia computer, with delivery scheduled in 2011 to the Department of Energy for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia will chug along at 20 petaflops per second and is one order of magnitude quicker than its predecessor. The earlier machine, delivered in June to the Energy Department, broke the 1 petaflop barrier. Peta is a term for quadrillion and FLOP stands for floating point operations per second.
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Majority of vulnerabilities go unpatched, IBM Report ZDnet
More than half of the security vulnerabilities disclosed during 2008 had no patches available from the vendor by the end of the year, according to a report released on Monday by IBM’s X-Force research group. Meanwhile, 46 percent of vulnerabilities from 2006 and 44 percent from 2007 still had no patch by the end of 2008, the 2008 X-Force Trend and Risk report said. X-Force documented a record number of 7,406 new vulnerabilities last year.
February , 2009
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February 3rd, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Pong was first available in 1972, which makes the game 37 years old and not 40. What Baer did was post a video from 1969 where he played video tennis with a colleague. The problem is, a) it was not named Pong, and b) it didn’t have the use of English on the spin based on where on the paddle you hit it, a feature of Pong. Also, c) it wasn’t commercially released until 1972 in any form (arcade or home).
If we want to say that instead, pongLIKE games are 40 years old, we have to bring up Mr. Higginbotham of Brookhaven Labs who made a ponglike game on an oscilloscope in 1958. See http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3468302109.html