An upcoming product called the Golden Shellback (they couldn’t come up with a better name? Sounds like a new type of tortoise) appears to defy the laws of…well, everything we know about water and electronics. It is able to completely waterproof any electronic gadget — from cell phones to laptops — with no ugly plastic shells or annoying rubber membranes. In fact, the devices look 100% normal, except for being underwater. The only thing known about the process is that it’s done in a vacuum; beyond that, the company is being tight-lipped about what exactly they’re using to perform this miracle (understandable — they’re going to make millions from this). Pricing isn’t set, but is estimated to be a relative bargain at $50-$75 per device. If nothing else, I would consider doing this to my DSLR.
A demonstration video is below, with a foreword from TekZilla’s Patrick Norton. In it, you’ll see horror-inducing clips of water being poured on laptops and cell phones and iPods being submerged in buckets of water.
Have you ever finished a great book or film and enjoyed it so much that you wished that there was a sequel you could sink your teeth into right away?
Now imagine a movie so good that you almost don’t want there to be a sequel because you couldn’t bear the disappointment when it doesn’t measure up to what you just witnessed.
Batman: The Dark Knight has left me with that feeling. It has been called the “Godfather” of its genre, in that it will likely be decades — if ever — before anything tops it. It is a film of stunning writing, acting, and directing. It is epic in its emotional magnitude — you will want to laugh, cry, gasp in fear, cheer, cringe in horror, lose hope, regain your faith…it grabs you from the minute it starts and does not ever let go. The story between Bruce Wayne, the Joker, Harvey Dent, and Rachel is so perfectly woven that not once do you feel like anything is being forced, like anything was being written down to the lowest common denominator of movie-goers. It is complex and richly detailed, gritty and dark — so dark, in fact, that I’m sure it had to be close to an ‘R’ rating. You definitely feel the evil and chaos pervading Gotham City.
The whole cast is great, but of course, as we’ve all heard by now, Heath Ledger as the Joker was undeniably fantastic. It will no doubt go down as one of the greatest film performances of all time, made all the more poignant by Ledger’s death just over six months ago. He created a character that was simultaneously funny and bloodcurdlingly creepy. You could feel the menace and the psychosis through the eerie face paint, with every smack of his lips and flick of the tongue. It is something I will never forget.
Go see this movie. I don’t remember the last time I could give such an unequivocal recommendation. Everyone needs to see this movie (except for young children — it could seriously be very disturbing for them); this is a landmark film. I’m listening to the Batman Begins soundtrack as I write this and am still occasionally getting the chills thinking about what I saw last night. Go see this movie while it’s on the big screen. You won’t be disappointed.
Karl Rove, Bush’s former longtime political adviser, architect of numerous questionable election victories, and runner-up to veep Cheney in the Be as evil and manipulative as Darth Vader pageant, is under investigation for his role in the firings of US attorneys whose political views didn’t jive with the president’s. In a nutshell, he was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and he refused to show up to testify, citing “executive privilege” that makes him “immune” from such things like “the law.”
This is just disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. It literally makes me feel a bit sick. Once again, a member of the Bush gang has decided they’re magically exempt from the rule of law, and is trying to get away with it.
Guess what, Rove? You’re not the executive. You don’t even work for him anymore. And even if you did, “The courts have made clear that no one — not even the president — is immune from compulsory process. That is what the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez, California-D and chairwoman of the subcommittee on commercial and administrative law. And she’s right. This is just another example of how the Bush administration clearly thinks it is above the law, no matter what the Constitution states or how the Supreme Court has previously ruled. Yet while Rove refuses to obey a legal order to testify under oath, he gladly goes on Fox News and runs his mouth about this stuff for as long as they keep writing him checks.
No one — no one — is above the law. If we allow this kind of crap, there’s little point in our country existing at all. The “executive privilege” clause needs to be defined a little more carefully, it seems, because the Bush administration has used it to varying extents to spy on Americans without warrants, to protect telecom companies who illegally setup wiretaps, to prevent intelligence officials from testifying before Congress about what they really knew before the Iraq war started, and now to cover up political firings. It has unquestionably been abused, and little has been done about it because the administration just says “Terrorists!” and half of the country falls meekly into line and lets these people continue to trash our laws, our Constitution, and our very way of life in the name of “security.”
There’s been endless and increasing debate over the last several years about just how safe Google’s proverbial vaults are. The world’s largest Internet company has been stockpiling mountains of data for years — on our search habits, email usage, ad-viewing statistics, etc — and countless Google Labs projects aim to expand its scope even further. There’s even one that is intended to archive your complete personal medical history.
Naturally, this has many people concerned about the security of their data. Privacy advocates in particular are very wary of the sheer volume of information that Google collects and stores on each user. That being said, the general consensus (and please note I said “general” — there are of course dissenting opinions) is that in today’s world your life is online (in some form) whether you want it to be or not, and Google is a pretty friendly company that tends to do its damndest to protect its users. In other words, it’s widely believed that in general Google adheres to their “do no evil” policy, and consequently enjoys a rare level of likability for a company of its size.
But however careful and diligent Google is about protecting all that data from theft, abuse, exposure, and misuse, they can’t avoid overreaching judges and politicians who engage in practices of questionable constitutional merit in the interest of “protecting” someone from something — though they never seem to be protecting you and me, but more typically large corporations and/or “national security” (which has, in my opinion, become one of the most disgusting phrases of the decade for how often it is used to toss the Constitution and Bill of Rights out the window).
Today, a federal judge ordered Google to turn over trillions of Youtube access logs to media giant Viacom (which owns Comedy Central, CBS, Nickelodeon, and dozens of other properties). The logs show which videos are viewed most on Youtube by which users, which Viacom is particularly interested in as part of their $1 billion lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant built a business by willfully infringing on copyrighted works. Although it appears that Google is asking to be allowed anonymize the logs before handing them over, I think the real danger here has become clear. The problem isn’t that Google might do something misguided with all this data; the danger is simply that they have the data, which gives other companies the opportunity to acquire it through (shadily) legal action. Even if you trust Google, you can’t trust the government very much these days.
The lawsuit is crap, of course, and the reality is that the execs of these huge media corporations are too outpaced by today’s technology trends to adapt to the market, and they think they can still control every last frame of video they produce. What they simply don’t get is that once they put it out there for consumption, the game’s over. They need to stop trying to control people’s lives and refocus on the quality of content and how they deliver it. Their current strategy, rather than improve their own offerings, is just to continually sue everyone they see, but that doesn’t solve the problem. If these companies put half of the energy into building new business models that they do into litigating, they would solve their own problem overnight. But I could go on about that for hours…that’s another post entirely. It’s amazing how people who get paid millions of dollars a year can be so short-sighted.
I realize this is the Internet, but this is a whole new kind of stupid.
Someone over on the CobaltSS.net forums, a web site for car tuning enthusiasts, posted the following:
So we all know that the supercharged engines need the intake bypass valve so they work in reverse. Otherwise the supercharger would just suck all the air out of the cylinder. So knowing that, how does the turbocharged version work in reverse? The engine is trying to suck air backwards, yet the turbo wants to spin forward so I don’t see how it works. Is there some sort of exhausting intake bypass valve on the turbo version? Also, if it does have the valve, does that also mean that it can make boost in reverse? Like how much boost? Like 5 psi or does it go over 20?
Can anyone help me sort this out?
For real entertainment, feel free to read some of the replies on the subsequent 20 pages of comments.
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Karl Rove, Bush’s former longtime political adviser, architect of numerous questionable election victories, and runner-up to veep Cheney in the Be as evil and manipulative as Darth Vader pageant, is under investigation for his role in the firings of US attorneys whose political views didn’t jive with the president’s. In a nutshell, he was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and he refused to show up to testify, citing “executive privilege” that makes him “immune” from such things like “the law.”
There’s been endless and increasing debate over the last several years about just how safe Google’s proverbial vaults are. The world’s largest Internet company has been stockpiling mountains of data for years — on our search habits, email usage, ad-viewing statistics, etc — and countless Google Labs projects aim to expand its scope even further. There’s even one that is intended to archive your complete personal medical history.