Bizzaro Pic of Iranian Policewomen

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20010930/wl/1001877697iran_police_women_teh103.html

Blade 2 Pictures

In french, but still shows the pics.
http://www.premiere.fr/portfolio_film.php?id_film=4099

Mass Produced Fuel Cell Generators for Sale

Ballard Power Systems announced Thursday the commercial launch of its Nexa portable hydrogen fuel cell, designed to be used as a pollution-free power source for industrial and consumer uses.Ballard, best known for developing automotive fuel cells, calls Nexa the "worlds first volume-produced, proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell system." The power module generates up to 1,200 watts of electrical power. Because it only emits heat and water as the byproducts of its power generation, the equipment the fuel cell is installed in can be used indoors.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010927/10/ballard-power-systems

More Eros Data

The first detailed global mapping of an asteroid has found that most of the larger rocks strewn across the body were ejected from a single crater in a meteorite collision perhaps a billion years ago. After flying by the asteroid Mathilde in 1997, Near-Shoemaker became the first space probe to orbit and land on an asteroid when it flew around the asteroid Eros earlier this year. Then, although it was not designed to land on Eros, it was commanded to touch down. Images were returned during its descent but ceased when the probe hit the surface. However, data continued to be returned from the gamma-ray spectrometer for several days, revealing the surface composition of Eros which seems to be covered with sediment, forming striking flat "ponds" within craters.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space09270101.html

Good Enterprise Review

Saw it last night. Really, really good.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/tv/2001-09-26-enterprise-review.htm

Deep Space 1 Commentary

"This was sort of like a Dove Bar the size of Mount Everest," said Don Yeomans, a comet expert at the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where results of the flyby were displayed at a news conference Tuesday.The three jets of dust are thought to emanate from deep, well-like structures located in bowl-shaped depressions in the nucleus.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010926/10/close-up-pictures-of

Hilarious Onion Today!

http://www.theonion.com/

Deep Space 1 Survives Comets Tail

Deep Space 1s risky encounter with comet Borrelly has gone extremely well as the aging spacecraft successfully passed within 2,200 kilometers (about 1,400 miles) of the comet at 22:30 Universal Time (3:30 p.m. PDT) today. "The images and other data we collected from comet Borrelly so far will help scientists learn a great deal about these intriguing members of the solar system family," said Dr. Marc Rayman, project manager of Deep Space 1 at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Its very exciting to be among the first humans to glimpse the secrets that this comet has held since before the planets were formed."
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/release_2001_189.html

Ontario Refuses to Honor Gene Patent Rights

Excellent move... a company shouldnt be able to patent human DNA...Ontario is defying an American companys demand that the province stop funding a cancer-screening test, arguing private patents on human genes that are used in such tests put Canadas health-care system at serious risk.Ontario has no intention of following British Columbia by excluding the predictive test for ovarian and breast cancers from the provinces health plan, Premier Mike Harris said on Wednesday. Moreover, Harris told a gathering of geneticists, Ottawa has to seize the initiative and look at how Canadas patent laws are applied to the rapidly advancing field of genetics."The frontier of gene patenting has been treated like the Wild West for too long," said Harris."The benefits of a worldwide effort such as the human genome project should not be the property of a handful of people or companies."
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010919/13/ontario-defies-us

Cryptography Controls Wont Help Fight On Terrorism

Law enforcement groups have suggested that the terrorist groups associated with devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon used encryption to communicate securely over the internet.Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has already called for the government to be given backdoors into all encryption products. In a speech just days after the strikes, Gregg said that software companies "should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include backdoors in their applications.But experts say that trying to control encryption may be a waste of time and effort. Terrorists are, they say, far more likely to use steganography, which involves obscuring messages from detection in the first place, as well as straightforward codeword-based messages."If I was a terrorist, the last thing I would do is use encryption," says Brian Gladman, a UK computer scientist. "We need to find out whether encryption was used in these events at all."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991309

Hackivism Going Strong

Hackers in the US are taking down Afghanistani web sites, and posting wanted posters for Bin Laden.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/630310.asp?0si=-

Bitchin Little Gamers

Remeber this Seanny Ray?
http://www.little-gamers.com/daily.gamer?date=20010919

Ultima 1 Reborn!

Remember the ancient PC game Ultima? Its being remade in 3D -- Cant wait to see this one. Staying true to the origional rules and story line as well...
http://www.peroxide.dk/ultima/

One of 2600s Staff Comments on the WTC

One of the first thoughts that went through my head after it became clear that this was the work of terrorists was that we would no longer be living in the same country as we were the day before. What little innocence we had left had been wiped away like a stain. From this point we would be hardened, suspicious, vengeful. How could it be any other way?
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=716

Excellent Rant by the Origional Writer of AI

But consciousness and its lower strata of unconscious awareness yield not only pleasant imaginings. I mentioned the faultiness of humankind. Other bizarre kinds of life or non-life persist, inimical to our peace of mind. Take the androids of AI, Blade Runner and other science fiction movies. Such impossible beings are the inheritors of a long ancestry of chimeras plaguing our imaginations. Goblins, gnomes, fairies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, leprechauns, dragons, water sprites of various kinds, nameless things that go bump in the night: they haunt us. Above them sits a bewildering and unending hierarchy of gods and goddesses: Baal, dusky hags like Ishtar and Astarte, Zeus, Hera, Nemesis, Isis, Mithras, all the way to old Silenus, Lucifer and Satan, the Hitler of the Underworld. Such preposterous gubernatorial creatures have been and are all-pervasive. They permeate our vocabulary. Nemesis lives on. Even the word "galaxy" is named for the milk spurted from the breasts of a goddess. Thousands of these spectres have governed human life since human life began and someone lit a fire. Senior bogeymen still determine what we should eat or not eat, which way we should face when abasing ourselves to them, with whom we may or may not sleep, and against whom we should go to war. Faulty? Id say. A definite genetic misfire.
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/likehuman.jsp

Senate OKs Increased Use of Carnivore And Wiretapping

A dark day, not only for civilization, but civil liberties as well... The U.S. Senate has just approved the FBIs use of the Carnivore email surveillance system to investigate terrorist acts and computer crimes in response to Tuesdays terrorist attacks. The Senate also approved broader "wiretapping" of the Internet by law enforcement, and is urging the government to "make better use of its considerable accomplishments in science and technology" to combat terrorism.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/paranormal09170101.html

Natural Networks

Now ideas for advances in data routing are beginning to emerge from a surprisingly simple model: the ant.Indeed, applying the study of ants to complex engineering problems is something of an intellectual trend. The topic drew attention at a recent international conference on artificial intelligence in Seattle. It has been discussed in a variety of scientific journals. And a new book by Steven Johnson, "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" (Scribner), points to ant behavior as a way to further, among other things, understanding of the World Wide Web.What makes ants worth studying, if not emulating? For one thing, they exhibit something called swarm intelligence. That is, the teamwork of social insects is decentralized. Individually, an ants actions are primitive, but collectively, they result in efficient solutions to complex problems like finding the shortest route between the nest and a food source.
http://nytimes.com/2001/09/13/technology/circuits/13ANTS.html?pagewanted=all

Ancient Black Hole Speeds through Suns Galactic Neighborhood

Astronomers using the National Science Foundations Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope have found an ancient black hole speeding through the Suns Galactic neighborhood, devouring a small companion star as the pair travels in an eccentric orbit looping to the outer reaches of our Milky Way Galaxy. The scientists believe the black hole is the remnant of a massive star that lived out its brief life billions of years ago and later was gravitationally kicked from its home star cluster to wander the Galaxy with its companion.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space09120101.html

6000 Year Old Scottish Farmhouse Found

A farmhouse which was built 1,000 years before the pyramids has been unearthed in a Scottish field.University researchers found the 80ft long and 30ft wide house complete with living rooms, bedrooms and a kitchen.Archaeologists say the 6,000-year-old structure suggests Neolithic people were engineers as skilled and intelligent as modern man.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_392300.html?menu=news.scienceanddiscovery

Viking Data Still Causing Debate

Gilbert Levin was involved in the design of the LR experiment and the analysis of the results. For 25 years he has labored to show that the best explanation for the results is that they were produced by Martian organisms. He has collected microbes from Alaska and Antarctica and subjected them to the LR experiments with results that match some of the Viking results. He has experimented with a range of non-biological chemicals see if they can produce the same results. He has questioned assumptions about the absence of liquid water on Mars and the chemical effects of bombardment of the soil by ultraviolet radiation. Levin has made a tremendous contribution to the study of extra-terrestrial life and he has designed new experiments for future Mars missions that could resolve the ambiguous Viking results. Unfortunately his enthusiasm for the issue has put off some scientists who regard his claims about the Viking experiments extravagant and unfounded. Levin has pushed the pendulum towards a biological explanation for the Viking results but, as Klein pointed out, this as a long way from unambiguous evidence of life on Mars.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/space/20010906/sc/viking_data_still_cause_stir_about_mars_life_1.html

King Conan?

News on a possible new King Conan: Crown of Iron... basically an arguement about script decisions, but a new Conan movie nontheless!!
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1520

NASA spacecraft limps to a close encounter with distant comet

A battered NASA spacecraft will attempt to fly within 2,000 kilometres of the heart of a comet this month to give scientists only their second glimpse of the dark heart of a glowing space snowball. The Deep Space 1 spacecraft will swoop past the comet Borrelly on Sept. 22, snapping up to 32 black-and-white images of its nucleus.If it succeeds in sending back close-up images of the nucleus during its approach - and the odds are slim - it will be the first to examine the dark yet dynamic core of a comet since the Giotto spacecraft flew past Halley in 1986.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010909/22/nasa-spacecraft-limps

Amazing Arctic artifacts discovered

Primitive stone tools and other artifacts discovered close to the Arctic Circle in the desolate far north of European Russia indicate that a band of hunters set up camp there almost 40,000 years ago ? far earlier than previously thought, researchers report.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/arctic010905.html

Researchers create human blood cells

PRIMITIVE HUMAN blood cells, known as hematopoietic precursor cells, were produced from human embryonic stem cells by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, led by James A. Thomson. Similar work has been done in mice, but this is the first time human blood cells have been developed from embryonic stem cells, said Dan S. Kaufman, one of the authors of the study appearing in Tuesday?s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Embryonic stem cells are the basic building blocks for the 260 or so cell types in the body. During development, stem cells transform into heart, muscle, brain, skin or other tissue.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/623437.asp

Shitty Beer

Even the keenest beer drinker may hesitate before sampling the latest beverage on sale in the Orkney islands off northern Scotland -- a "Stone Age" beer flavored with animal dung.
http://news.excite.ca/news/r/010902/07/odd-dung-dc

Excite@Home Commentary

This week, more than three million Internet users who get their high-speed cable modem connections from Excite@Home watched their ISP struggle to survive. On the surface, it was a simple matter of a $50 million loan being called due, but underneath, the real issue was the very viability of broadband Internet access. With DSL companies failing one after another, and now the number one cable Internet provider apparently about to go under, is broadband, itself, in trouble?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010830.html

Millionaires on Mars?

Several dot-com millionaires have formed a foundation to bankroll space shots aimed at putting humans on Mars, a founding member tells MSNBC.com. Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk says the first mission should get off the ground as early as 2003. That mission could involve putting mice in Earth orbit to test an artificial-gravity system.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/621237.asp?cp1=1

First controllable 2D nanopatterns imaged

The first vision of a peaceable kingdom in which deposited atoms form orderly, controllable 2-D nanopatterns has been observed by researchers at the Department of Energy?s Sandia National Laboratories. Pattern control at this level means that nanotemplates could be formed to fine-tune the device characteristics of self-assembling nanostructures. Possibly, characteristics could be tailored for devices like photonic lattices, an advanced method for controlling light and of wide interest to the huge telecommunications industry.
http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/dotbar.htm