The United States military is planning to launch a communications satellite that is a dedicated Internet router by the year 2009. The way the Net works right now, some communications satellites are involved in handling net.traffic but there are two major differences from how they want to start doing it: First of all, net.traffic goes from the ground up to a comsat and then is retransmitted to another downlink on the ground; the IRIS project will route traffic from comsat to comsat, something that hasn't been done before. Secondly, traffic is transmitted on fixed communications channels; the IRIS …
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the Tamil Tigers, is a group of rebels active in the country of Sri Lanka who demand the formation of a separate state for the Tamil majority in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, or a terrorist group, depending on who you talk to about them. They're pretty nasty customers as sepratist movements go, even having separate strike and black ops teams. They also have an unusual degree of technological sophistication - they have their own television station, a bank, a customs service, and it's been discovered that they can …
The literary world is diminished somewhat <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/308ee984-e8e9-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html".with the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose works were rife with social commentary and lines that gave conservative high school English teachers fits since the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, the story of a war veteran whose timeline comes loose and snarls itself around parts of history that it wouldn't otherwise be touching.
Vonnegut got his start in journalism, but wound up writing fiction when it didn't pan out in Chicago in the late 1940's. His early stories didn't get much press time but were …
At least, until I go in for a routine cleaning next Monday.
I left work early today to clean up a little before driving out to the dentist's office to have the temporary crown removed from the molar from hell and have the permanant one cemented into place. It's taken about two weeks to fabricate the crown, so I've had a lot of time to get used to the temp. A temp which was even better than the one that had to be cut away, incidentally, because the last one had been damaged during installation. Dr. Nguyen took the needle …
Let's see how the Gnome blogging panelapp works...
In West Chester, Pennsylvania someone has taken it upon themselves to show drive-in movies from a 16mm projector mounted in a BMW sidecar, with audio courtesy of a short-range AM transmitter. John Young, the guy behind the scheme, gets permission for the locations ahead of time though he keeps them secret until just before the showings. The trick is that you have to find another AM transmitter called the MacGuffin and figure out what frequency it's transmitting on - write down the password it's transmitting , enter it on the website, and it'll tell …
In an earlier entry I pontificated about a number of things, among them not feeling very comfortable using a web browser for some weird-reason to write posts, as I much prefer a dedicated application of some kind.
Sure, it feels weird, but I'm one of those folks who uses the right tool for the right job - I don't use a screwdriver as a can opener, nor do I use a hammer to perform brain surgery (because I don't work helpdesk anymore). So, I've decided to try out a couple of dedicated applications to see if it makes a difference.
