TechNudge

I hadn’t heard the UPS truck approach when the dog first started barking
But by the time he’d reached a fevered pitch the truck was parked outside.
The UPS guy carried a box up the driveway and placed it at my door.
“Go away,” the dog barked. “I’ll howl and bite you if you try to come in!
I’m the guardian of this house and I am fierce and mean!”
Wisely, the UPS driver walked back to the truck, started it up, and drove away.
As he did, the dog gradually calmed to a dull roar and then stopped barking altogether.
“Good boy!” I called down to the foyer. “You saved me from that evil man! Good boy!”
Obviously he’d done no such thing, but, approaching his 12th birthday,
It was good that he could still puff out his chest and feel proud about something.

He raises his arms to the cheering multitude below and begins to speak –but before he can, he lowers one hand to his mouth to suppres a spasm of coughing. Once he recovers his composure, the Pope lowers both arms, looks around, and says, “Che cosa è con tutto il fumo?”

The Curiosity rover has answered a key question about Mars: The red planet in the past had some of the right ingredients needed to support primitive life.

The evidence comes from a chemical analysis by Curiosity, which last month flexed its robotic arm to drill into a fine-grained, veiny rock and then test the powder.

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On Sunday (March 10), the Comet Pan-STARRS is expected to make its closest approach to the sun, potentially making the comet shine even more brilliantly when it appears at twilight low in the western sky, weather permitting. But stargazers will need a bit of preparation (not to mention a clear sky) to see the comet.

“There is a catch to viewing Comet Pan-STARRS,” Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NASA’s near-Earth object hunting NEOWISE mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Thursday (March 7). “This one is not that bright and is going to be low on the western horizon, so you’ll need a relatively unobstructed view to the southwest at twilight and, of course, some good comet-watching weather.”

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Cassidian has introduced a multifunctional jammer that can explore the electromagnetic spectrum, while simultaneously countering radio-controlled improvised explosive devices, the company said March 8.

The jammer analyses the signal spectrum around a vehicle and, through that process, is able to jam the radio signals intended to set off a roadside bomb in a targeted manner, the defense and security division of EADS said.

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A new study has confirmed that at the time of the Pharaohs the world’s climate was significantly hotter than it now is for thousands of years – and yet the seas don’t appear to have risen, nor did the various other doomsday scenarios foretold by climate alarmists take place.

“Am I hot or what?!?”

The new research, funded by the US government’s National Science Foundation, seeks to pull together various different measures of what the temperature might have been in the distant past. Methods included analyses of ancient pollen, deep ice cores, shells from marine organisms etc. The project was led by Shaun Marcott of Oregon State uni.

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Windows 8 46V6N-VCBYR-KT9KT-6Y4YF-QGJYH
Windows 8 Professional V7C3N-3W6CM-PDKR2-KW8DQ-RJMRD
Windows 8 N 7QNT4-HJDDR-T672J-FBFP4-2J8X9
Windows 8 Professional N 4NX4X-C98R3-KBR22-MGBWC-D667X
Windows 8 Single Language (Emerging Markets) NH7GX-2BPDT-FDPBD-WD893-RJMQ4

Could a tax on email help save snail mail?

Berkeley, Calif., city Councilman Gordon Wozniak is floating the idea of taxing email, the very technology that hastened traditional mail’s downfall, as the beleaguered Unites States Postal Service trims its home delivery service to five days a week to deal with its massive $16 billion deficit.

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The United States Postal Service just announced that it is cutting Saturday delivery in August, moving to a five-day schedule as part of a multiyear effort to reduce costs and remain viable.

That’s not the only change coming down in 2013. The USPS will close half of its processing centers, shutter more than 3,000 local branches, and eliminate about one-third of its workforce — nearly 220,000 employees. It won’t surprise you to learn that these moves will slow the delivery of first-class mail (i.e., letters) by one to three days, making citizens less reliant on the postal service and hastening its demise.

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In a sign that solid state drives have become the go-to storage for higher-end laptops, Seagate has disclosed that it plans to end production of faster-spinning 7,200rpm notebook hard drives sometime later this year.

A marketing director for the drive manufacturer told X-bit Labs that the company will cease production of the drives “at the end of 2013.” Seagate will continue to produce 5,400rpm drives, which are used in most mainstream laptops.

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A 24-year old college student in Bologna, Italy was arrested by Italian postal police after attempting to sell a drone that had emergency-landed on his apartment’s terrace last October. The student had posted the drone, a privately-operated Microdrones quad-rotor helicopter owned by Italian startup Eye Sky, on Subito.it, an online auction site. The asking price for the $40,000 drone: 1,000 euros.

“The drone is almost brand new,” he claimed in his auction posting. “The only flaw is that it lacks the remote control: I dropped by great height and it broke.” Unfortunately, he included Eye Sky’s name along with the make and model number in the description of the drone—which identified it to police. He has been charged with misappropriation of lost property, which could result in up to a year’s jail time and fines.

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Glad he got caught! The SOB tried to scam the buyers on the auction site. “I dropped the remote,” my arse. He should get 30 years!

It’s an Amateur Radio communications receiver that operates from 50MHz to 905 MHz in the following modes: AM, AM-W, FM-W, FM-N, USB and LSB. That’s precious, isn’t it?

The real concept here is how old it is. Look at some of the options:

FIF- 65A The FIF-232C CAT interface to the Apple II computer
FIF-80A The FIF-80A CAT interface to the NEC PC8001 computer
FIF-232C The FIF-232C CAT interface to the RS-232C port of a PC

That’s some capability for a 37 year old receiver. hihi

Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to help him with his craft.

Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and a gun using its lower can seemingly fire for quite a while. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.)

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Kaspersky has discovered a malicious spy program dubbed Miniduke that the firm claims has been used to attack governments and institutions across the world during the past week.

According to Kaspersky’s analysis, MiniDuke is a fresh bit of espionage software designed for spying on, and has compromised, a number of high profile targets including research institutes and healthcare providers in the United States as well as government units in Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Ukraine and the Czech Republic.

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