coondoggie writes "A European consortium has come up with a high-speed digital forensic computer dedicated to the task of quickly offloading and analyzing computer records. The TreCorder is a rugged forensic PC able to copy or clone up to three hard disks simultaneously, at a speed of up to 2 Gb/min., far faster than alternative equipment. The PC not only provides a complete mirror image of the hard disk and system memory — including deleted and reformatted data — but also eliminates any possibility of falsification in the process, meaning that the evidence it collects will stand up in court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba has unveiled a ground-breaking technology that boosts recording density by 50% on an 80-GB, 1.8", single-platter drive. Using what it calls Discrete Track Recording technology, Toshiba was able to pack 120 GB storage on a single 1.8" platter. The new development will hugely benefit media player, UMPC, and ultra-portable laptop segments where 1.8" drives with maximum possible capacity are in great demand."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This time-lapse video depicts 35 years' worth of construction in Tokyo's fashionable (and vertical!) Shibuya Shinjuku district in ten seconds. Link (via Digg)

The latest IT Crowd -- season two, episode three -- aired last night, and featured a milk-nose-snortingly funny parody of the pre-show anti-piracy ads you get in movie theatres. I'm downloading the torrent right now (they don't air The IT Crowd in China, where I am this week, and Channel 4's streaming service won't run on Linux, or to IP addresses out of the UK), and can't wait to see it.

The IT Crowd is my favorite new TV show -- barring The Daily Show -- of the decade, brilliant geek humor that rewards multiple viewings (as I discovered when I bought the Season One DVD and checked out the leet subtitles). Torrent link, Link to anti-piracy PSA parody on YouTube (Thanks, Justin, Ryan, and Iris!)

(Disclosure: I was an unpaid consultant on season one of The IT Crowd)

See also:
IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 2 -- keyboard-destroying nerd sitcom
The IT Crowd -- season two, episode one

hgerstung writes "This weekend the NTP Pool Project reached the milestone of 1000 servers in the pool. That means that in less than two years the number of servers has doubled. This is happy news, but the 'time backbone' of the Internet, provided for free by volunteers operating NTP servers, requires still more servers in order to cope with the demand. Millions of users are synchronizing their PC's system clock from the pool and a number of popular Linux distributions are using the NTP pool servers as a time source in their default ntp configuration. If you have a static IP address and your PC is always connected to the Internet, please consider joining the pool. Bandwidth is not an issue and you will barely notice the extra load on your machine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fred sez, "To kick off the start of the academic year, Free Culture @ NYU has posted a Free Culture 101 guide with some helpful links to blogs and readings for those wishing to educate themselves about the movement to learn from. Check it out and suggest some sites of your own in the comments."

FreeCulture.org : This is the "National Organization" as we refer to it. It's basically a good place to see who is doing what else in the Free Culture world. I'm on the board, but it's just a title -- local chapters are really where the action is at.

Free Culture Chapters Around the World : See all the other schools where chapters are located.

FreeCulture.org has a discussion e-mail list, and an announcements list.If you're looking to debate and talk about Free Culture and these issues on campus, the discussion list is probably the best place in the world for that. Sign up for the announcements list as it's a good place to learn about Free Culture news before it hits the media.

Creative Commons, EFF, The Free Software Foundation, and Public Knowledge are the big institutional players in our world, and many people working in the free culture movement either work with them, for them, or around them. Check out their sites for more information about what they do.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Tay sez, "This is a pair of steampunk longboards that I have created. They are complete with etched brass graphics, dark-stained wood, and topped off with some useless gauges too." Link (Thanks, Tay!)

Dear sirs: Please find, hereunder, an exhaustive list of many novel and creative steam-punque artifacts. I remain, your humble servant, CE Doctorow, esq.

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: remixed propaganda posters. Link

Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón (Children of Men) have created a short film to accompany her latest book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," whose thesis is that present-day global capitalism took hold when its advocates learned to exploit disasters. After a disaster (war, tsunami, terrorist attack), you can push your agenda for worsening labor conditions, looser regulation, and pocket-lining exercises (Enron, Halliburton) while the reeling, disaster-struck population of the world has its attention elsewhere.

Klein attributes this technique to Milton Friedman, who is reported to have said that "only a crisis -- real or perceived -- produces real change." She connects this idea to the fundamental notion underpinning CIA torture techniques (as reported in CIA interrogation manuals from 1963 and 1983) -- to produce a state of shock in which the victim is out of control of her faculties, a "suspended animation" that can be exploited to get victims to do things that violate their own ethics or beliefs.

The Cuaróns' filmmaking is superb, as is Klein's writing. This is a chilling and powerful 7-minute film, and it made me want to pick up the book as soon as possible. Link to video, Link to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Thanks, Csims!)

Hugh Pickens writes "Almost thirty years ago I worked in the Middle East helping install a nationwide communications system and had the opportunity to be part of a team doing microwave link tests across Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter. Something I've never forgotten were the astonishing nights I spent in the desert hundreds of miles from the nearest city where the absence of light made looking at the sky on a moonless night feel like you were floating in the middle of the galaxy. In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9 and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. Read a story from the New Yorker on what we have lost to light pollution and how some cities are adopting outdoor lighting standards to save the darkness."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader invites us to join in the hunt for the missing Steve Fossett using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. DigitalGlobe, one of Google's imaging partners, has acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where Fossett disappeared on Monday. The public can now go through this imagery and quickly flag any images that might contain Fossett's plane. Flagged images will receive further review by search and rescue experts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keri_Love writes "Cablevision and Verizon are in the middle of heated battle trying to sign up customers for the coveted 'triple play': it's fiber-to-the-premises vs. cable for broadband, television, and phone. Cablevision is slinging lines like 'We're not afraid of your fiber!' Tech blogger Mike Murray discloses evidence that Cablevision's CEO may be enjoying FiOS at home. He writes: 'Click the picture to the right showing a Verizon FiOS can and drop directly above Cablevision's CEO Chuck Dolan's Oyster Bay, Long Island mailbox.' He's not scared! He's a customer!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Still got the bug.

Doing a little coding, reading, TV watching, not much else.

Even talking on the phone is a struggle, too much coughing and wheezing.

I've gotten email from people who are concerned. Thanks for the concern. Yes, I have seen a doctor, even went to the hospital to get chest x-rays. I don't have pneumonia. Just a realllly bad cold. A monster proportioned cold. It attacks everything but my sense of humor.

Image: a 15-year-old Inca girl who died in an Andean human sacrifice ritual around 1500 AD, in Argentina. Indigenous groups unsuccessfully tried to stop the exhibition of her corpse and others, arguing they should instead be reburied or kept away from public display:

Scientists believe the so-called Children of Llullaillaco were sacrificed more than 500 years ago in a ceremony marking the annual corn harvest. Dressed in fine clothes and given corn alcohol to put them to sleep, the victims were then left to die at an elevation of 22,080 feet. (...) Seated with her legs bent and her arms resting on her stomach, the Maiden's remains are still adorned with a gray shawl and bone and metal ornaments. Scientists say her face was daubed with red pigment and around her mouth they found flecks of coca leaf, which is chewed by highland Indians to blunt the effects of altitude.

Link. Here's a Wikipedia entry on the volcano in Argentina where her mummified remains, and those of two other children, were found: Link.

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press is reporting that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs. A series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices. To date, about 2,000 RFID devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp." We recently discussed the California ban on companies requiring such implants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt writes "Northrop Grumman, best known for missile systems and other military gear, has for years been selling the TouchTable as part of what it calls an ' integrated collaboration environment.' They delivered their TouchTable to the US Federal Aviation Administration last month and will showcase their technologies next week at a defense conference in London. There are two versions of the TouchTable; one with an 84-inch screen (1600x1200 resolution), the other with a 45-inch screen (1920x1080 resolution). Moving a hand across the surface pans the display' two fingers moving apart zooms it out; and two fingers moving together zooms it in. This simple interface allows users easily to change a view from miles above the Earth to a detailed layout of a single city block."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Polar bear photo ganked from ucumari's photostream on Flickr.)

Here are some fairly terrifying news articles out in the past few days on the subject of global warming:

"Ice-free Arctic could be here in 23 years," Sep 5, in The Guardian. Snip:

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low, scientists said last night. Experts said they were "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as Britain disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the north-west passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the north-east passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.

"Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears," Sep 7, New York Times:

Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will disappear by 2050, even under moderate projections for shrinking summer sea ice caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, government scientists reported on Friday.

"Arctic ice cap to melt faster than feared, scientists say," Sep. 7, Seattle Times. snip:

About 40 percent of the floating ice that normally blankets the top of the world during the summer will be gone by 2050, says James Overland, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Earlier studies had predicted it would be nearly a century before that much ice vanished. "This is a major change," Overland said. "This is actually moving the threshold up."

See also this Google News comment by Kassie Siegel from the Center for Biological Diversity:

All of this is indeed horrifying, but it is not cause for despair, but rather a call to action. The good news is that there is still time to save the Arctic, though the window is closing. Our hope lies in a rapid response including both deep and immediate carbon dioxide reductions, as well as a full-court press on other greenhouse pollutants such as methane. While carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere for about a century, and therefore commit us to long term warming, methane is more powerful but remains for only about a decade. Opportunities to reduce methane from sources like landfills, mining, and agriculture abound, and such reductions would also directly benefit air quality and human health. With such reductions we can still buy ourselves some time.

But we cannot "stay the course" of our current energy consumption, land use, and transportation patterns, without losing the Arctic sea ice, polar bears, and the quality of life we have enjoyed.

More background: here's the National Snow and Ice Data Center -- Link.

(All of these found on Ned Sublette's mailing list)

Unicorn crossing! Link.

Project on Government Oversight (POGO) slams US Department of Energy (DOE) over repeated computer security breaches at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), gives the federal nuke site a "failing grade" on security matters. PDF Link.

Video footage of Chewie, stormtroopers, Leia, Boba Fett and a few Rebels invading the Oakland airport to hand off Luke's Return of the Jedi movie lightsaber prop to NASA, en route to the Houston Space Center. Link.

Utterly over-the-top fake nails to be worn with fancy kimonos. Link (via).

An oral history of Nerve, the online "literate smut" nexus: Link, appears as part of their tenth anniversary feature: Link.

Newspaper in Sri Lanka hates on The Gays: Link.

Italian motion picture actress Asia Argento wants to make porn for women: Link.

Tentacle hentai burfday cake: Link.

Images of wind turbines on the Bahrain World Trade Center, a twin tower construction with three turbines on the struts between the towers. Link.

Stephen Hawking in legos: Link.

Miss South Carolina "maps" t-shirt: Link.

"My other house is a yurt." Link.

Cat Laine says, "I met this Australian artist, Stephen Ives at this year's Burning Man and he had the most beautiful steampunk goggles and face mask. I especially appreciated how the 3M logo is still prominently visible."

(Thanks, Susannah Breslin, Samantha, Rufus Griscom, Ange, Leo, Philip Proefrock, Jon, Bonnie)