"It's dead, Jim."
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"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
Read the requirements to get that 'free lunch'.Read more...
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US Army worries more about bloggers than leaks back home.
Since almost the beginning of Iraq II, the US military has been concerned about bloggers leaking information about upcoming operations and situations in the field that hadn't been cleaned up yet. Lately, they've been commanding troops to police their weblogs and clear all posts through a superior officer before actually posting in the hopes of minimizing the amount of sensitive information that gets out, which makes sense when you think about it. Remember what Geraldo Rivera did back in 2003? URLs and names of blogs have to be registered with the chain of command so that they can keep an …
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Genetically engineered 'queen' cancer cells.
Geneticists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new cell culturing medium that does something amazing: It allows human cells to transform into so-called 'queen' cancer cells, cancer cells that reproduce rapidly and produce mutants that become the actual tumours. Think of them as stem cells that specialize in producing cancers as we normally think of them. Not all malignant cells are capable of doing this, most just sit there and use up resources and oxygen and reproduce, but don't actually break off and spread to other parts of the body. This germ line of cells came about …
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High school freshmen pick their college majors; students, parents puzzled.
High school freshmen in Englewood, New Jersey will begin a puzzling new programme this fall, which will require them to pick their majors in college their freshman year, an act that will then dictate their primary classes and electives for the next four years. The programme was begun as an experimental effort to prop up falling test scores and help the students focus upon their eventual goals (aside from getting the hell out of high school, which is everyone's imperative at that age). Not all of the parents are convinced that it's a good idea, and that it smacks too …
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Bioengineered strain of e.coli produces fuel-worthy hydrocarbons
A bioengineering firm called LS9 has done something remarkable with the bacteria e.coli (the Swiss Army Knife of gengineering) - they successfully engineered a strain to produce arbitrary hydrocarbon compounds in addition to the usual fatty acids that life on this planet uses to store energy. Specifically, the bacterial strains almost produce the hydrocarbons that are normally pumped out of the ground in the form of crude oil and then fractionated ("cracked") into different substances. Mix the right hydrocarbons together and you get gasoline. Or diesel fuel. Or the raw materials needed to make plastics.
I say 'almost' because the …Read more...
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Joe Engressia - RIP
People who remember the phone phreaking scene of the 1980's will no doubt be saddened to hear of the passing of Joe Engressia, who used the name Joybubbles toward the end of his life. Engressia, who was blind since birth, was famous for his sense of perfect pitch that let him whistle a 2600 Hz tone that was used to denote a usable telephony trunk during the days before electronic telephony switching. Playing this tone into a phone line at the time would allow someone with a blue box to manipulate the telephone switching network manually. Engressia was also known …
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Situation report, or, "What blew up this time?"
Between getting back home from a field assignment late on Friday night, recovering from two weeks on the road eating way too much takeout, and stuff happening at home, I haven't had much time to do anything in the way of writing. I can honestly say that it hasn't been a boring couple of weeks, but there's a lot to be said for sitting at home engaging in a high impact workout (read, my glutius maximii striking the couch at -9.8 m/s^2 once a night for five nights) to unwind.
On Monday night after work and dinner …
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Pre-order for the new InSoc album announced!
It's official - the new release from Information Society, entitled Synthesizer will be released for general sale the first week of October, 2007. However, there is a limited edition of the album available right now, and like before there are only 1000 copies being made. Once they're gone, they're gone, and you'll have to wait two more months before you can buy it.
Price? $14us.
So... who just got paid?Read more...
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Restaurant review: Jerry's Seafood
Last night was another small-group-dinner with the guys from work, meaning that we had a fairly easy time of deciding where to eat. With some trepidation we asked the front desk of our hotel for advice about where we should get dinner, because lately we've gotten bad advice from them. To be accurate, we got bad directions from them. The woman behind the front desk dug around in one of the three-ring binders behind the counter and fished out directions to Jerry's Seafood (9364 Lanham-Severn Road; Lanham, MD, 20706; phone 301-577-0333; fax 301-577-5926), which happened to be as few exits …
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