Lego Enterprise - D

Alright, Im a dork. By sticking this project out on the Web Im coming out of the closet, so to speak. Im a classically trained geek-boy who has only enjoyed the company of women by the sheer grace of God. I might not be willing to touch a sci-fi convention with a 10-foot pole, but this work of dork-art more than makes up for it. But Im not here to tell you about my psychological issues. Im here cause of this beauty. The Concept Having perused LUGnet and Brickshelf many times in the past, I was very, very surprised to find that not a single person has ever completed a project quite like this. Legos? Star Trek? Hell, it was a matter of time. I guess I was the chosen one. The idea itself was not all that revolutionary. One day, bored, I asked myself: "If every floor of the Enterprise were one Lego-plate high, how big would that model get?" The answer was Pretty big, though as fate would have it, not so big that I was deterred from attempting the feat.
http://homepage.mac.com/happywaffle/enterprise.html

Test Your PC For Parasites

There are a lot of dodgy programs out there that may get installed on users computers without their knowledge or consent. Many applications described as "freeware" come infested with parasitic software that latches onto the web browser, provides little or no benefit to the user and can:

plague the user with unwanted advertising (adware);

add advertising links to web pages, for which the author does not get paid, and hijack affiliate-program payments (scumware);

watch everything the user does on-line and send information back to marketing companies (spyware);

leave security holes whereby arbitrary code can be executed on the users computer (typically this is used to allow the program to update itself);

if the software does not make proper use of cryptographic authentication, it could be possible for hackers as well as the responsible company to execute arbitrary code;

degrade system performance and cause errors thanks to being badly-written.
So be careful what you install - you may be getting more than you bargained for!
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/

Financial Trends For Next 5 Years - Maybe

Weve talked to some of the worlds brightest economists and forecasters to isolate the trends that can make you money ? or save you money ? over the next five years. Forecasting, of course, is a notoriously tricky business (who, back in 1997, could have foreseen the rocket-like ascent of the Nasdaq or its subsequent sickening plunge?) and we dont pretend our crystal ball is infallible. But what this five-year outlook can do is to provide you with a way of thinking through some of the major themes of the years ahead.
http://www.moneysense.ca/investing/stocks_markets/article.jsp;jsessionid=MNFGMEHFPJGI?content=20021111_132331_3296

File-Swapping Will Rule

In essence, say the researchers, file-swapping systems have already won. The only way for music companies to compete is on the same terms by making music easy to get hold of and cheap to buy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2502399.stm

Fractal Nature Of DNA

The second stunner was how much human genetic material -- more than 90 percent -- is made up of what scientists were calling "junk DNA." The term was coined to describe similar but not completely identical repetitive sequences of nucleotides (the same substances that make genes), which appeared to have no function or purpose. The main theory at the time was that these apparently non-working sections of DNA were just evolutionary leftovers, much like our earlobes.
But if biophysicist Andras Pellionisz is correct, genetic science may be on the verge of yielding its third -- and by far biggest -- surprise...
...Rather than being useless evolutionary debris, he says, the mysteriously repetitive but not identical strands of genetic material are in reality building instructions organized in a special type of pattern known as a fractal. Its this pattern of fractal instructions, he says, that tells genes what they must do in order to form living tissue, everything from the wings of a fly to the entire body of a full-grown human.
Another way to describe the idea: The genes we know about today, Pellionisz says, can be thought of as something similar to machines that make bricks (proteins, in the case of genes), with certain junk-DNA sections providing a blueprint for the different ways those proteins are assembled.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/11/21/jnkdna.DTL

Nemisis Preview Online

iFilm has a preview of Star Trek Nemesis in WMP, Real and Quicktime formats, it is also recommended you view with a broadband connection. [ed. snip] All in all a nice piece of eye candy until the films release on December 13th." This is a long trailer with lots of spoilers - youve been warned.
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_multimedia/0,4470,2446644,00.html

Test Your Retro-knowledge

How good is your retro videogame knowledge? Ive taken screen captures of portions of classic arcade games. Some are easy, some are pretty obscure. If you can name all of these, you are a super videogame genius! Mail you answers to me at gamechallenge@retrocrush.com! And Ill mail the answer sheet back to you so you can see if youre right!
http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2/arcadepix/index.html