Now for something completely different
-
26 things I bet you did not know!!!
- Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.
- Coca-Cola was originally green.
- It is impossible to lick your elbow.
- The State with the Highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
- The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28%
- The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
- The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $ 16,400
- The average number Of people airborne over the U. S. In any given hour: 61,000
- Intelligent people Have more zinc and copper in their hair..
- The first novel ever Written on a typewriter, Tom Sawyer.
- The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
- Each king in a deck Of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades – King David Hearts – Charlemagne Clubs -Alexander, the Great Diamonds – Julius Caesar
- 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987, 654,321
- If a statue in the park of a person on a horse Has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, The person died because of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes
- Only two people Signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn’t added until 5 years later.
- Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what? A. Their birthplace
- Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested? A. Obsession
- Q.. If you were to spell out numbers, How far would you have to go until you Would find the letter ‘A’? A. One thousand
- Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, Windshield wipers and laser printers have in common? A. All were invented By women.
- Q. What is the only Food that doesn’t spoil? A. Honey
- Q. Which day are there more collect calls Than any other day of the year? A. Father’s Day
- In Shakespeare’s time, Mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattress tightened, Making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the Phrase…’Goodnight , sleep tight’
- It was the accepted Practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride’s father would supply His son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, Which we know today as the honeymoon.
- In English pubs, ale Is ordered by pints and quarts… So in old England , when Customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them ‘Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down.’ . . . It’s where we get The phrase ‘mind your P’s and Q’s’
- Many years ago in England , pub frequenters had a whistle baked Into the rim, or handle, of their ceramiccups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. ‘Wet your whistle’ is the phrase inspired by this practice.
- At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow!
Viewed 17163 times by 1868 viewers
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Coca-Cola, Father's Day, Intelligence, John Hancock, Julius Caesar, San Francisco, San Francisco cable car system, United States
Why SOPA and free knowledge are necessary.
What would you say if I told you that life is easier now than it was back in the 1970′s! If you lived back in the 70′s you would totally agree. Think back to 1978. There were no cell phones, their was no internet, the video game that I grew up with was called pong! Wow at the time it was so cool.. Calculators cost 600.00 andand college was hard. Really hard. Think about writing a term paper for an english class and n ot having wikepedia or Lexus-Nexus to help you. Instead you had was World Book Encyclopedias that we outdated as soon as they were published.
Free knowledge is so necessary just to maintain our college graduation rates if nothing else.
I had the privledge of going to college in the late 70′s and then going back again in the 2000′s to
finally graduate, with a BS and also an MS. It was so much easier in 2007 versus 1979. Why?
No more all night library sessions to get that paper done. Now it could all be researched on the internet.
While it is easier to graduate it is also in different ways harder! Harder to cheat, which is a good thing.
All that information (free) is also available to the professors and while we all have MS Word, the professors have programs to catch plagerism.
Keep SOPA away from internet.
Viewed 7499 times by 1357 viewers
Could Your Car Be Hacked?
As soon as things get smart, something stupid also happens: they become vulnerable to attack. This was the case (though over-hyped, perhaps) of printers that cybersecurity researchers warned could be hijacked and theoretically set on fire. And now, argues Willie D. Jones of IEEE Spectrum, it could be the fate of our latest smart devices: our cars.
Cars are dangerous enough, without the problem of a cyberattack thrown in the mix. But unfortunately, researchers are coming up with several ways cars could be vulnerable to hackers. Wi-Fi, cellular, and Bluetooth connections exist in cars to help us communicate or be entertained as we drive, but a few research groups have already shown how these channels can be hijacked by someone with malicious intent.
One research team at UC San Diego and University of Washington demonstrated it was possible to do an absurd attack that could allow criminals to locate cars’ GPS coordinates, override their security systems, unlock their doors, and start their engines–in other words, a carjacker’s dream come true. A even worse scenario envisioned by one researcher: a hack that would disable your breaks while you’re driving on the highway.
All this doesn’t merely exist in the academic journals of a few university white-hat hackers. Some of this stuff has already happened. Jones points to a September report from McAfee that spoke of an instance where a disgruntled employee at a Texas car dealership was able to shut off the engines of 100 cars at once. A recent blog post from McAfee goes into detail on several other hacks, most of them white-hat, that would seem like the purview of science fiction, were it not for the fact that they’re real. Fiction has already been made fact, per McAfee: “In the movie ‘Live Free or Die Hard,’ actor Justin Long portrays a computer hacker who social-engineers the call center agent into remotely starting the car. That was Hollywood; yet at the recent Black Hat USA conference, security researchers Don Bailey and Mat Solnik expanded on earlier research to locate and attack car telematics systems.”
As in so many things, if Hollywood has imagined it, some clever hacker is already probably making it happen. Says McAfee’s Jimmy Shah: “As devices get smarter and more connected, we’re going to see more attacks targeted at them.” Let’s just hope we get smarter, too–smart enough to guard against these attacks before they happen.
Viewed 6094 times by 1198 viewers
Al Gore: SOPA Is a Threat to the Internet
ss
During a speech at a CareerBuilder event last night Al Gore voiced his concerns about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Responding to a question from the audience, the former US Vice President said that while content creators have legitimate concerns, SOPA is not the right answer.
“In our world today there is hardly anything more important [...] than to save and protect the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet,” Gore said.
“The Internet is bringing life back to democracy.”
“Anything that would threaten the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet and the future, I’m against.”
Viewed 3165 times by 808 viewers
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Al Gore, CareerBuilder, Gore, Inconvenient Truth, Ron Paul, SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, United States
International Police Operation Targets Movie Piracy Release Groups
Police in three European countries have carried out an operation to disrupt two scene release groups said to be responsible for pre-releasing thousands of movies onto the Internet. The action, which focused on datacenters and home addresses across Germany, Switzerland and Hungary, targeted the leaders and equipment of CRUCiAL and iNSPiRED.
Following years of investigation into online piracy, in September 2009 the German Federation against Copyright Infringement (GVU) filed a complaint with the prosecutor in Frankfurt, Germany.
Their complaint centered on a pair of movie-focused release groups known as CRUCiAL and iNSPiRED. Following their creations in 2008 and 2006 respectively, GVU claimed that together the groups had released as many as 2,600 DVD and Blu-ray ripped movies online, many of them in advance of their street dates.
The GVU now say their investigation has borne fruit, with the initiation late last month of an international police operation against the leaders of the groups.
Under the control of police headquarters in Frankfurt, on November 29th raids were carried out against several private homes in Germany and computer datacenters in Switzerland and Hungary.
GVU said that pinning the groups’ servers down had proven problematic, since they had been supplied through resellers and rented under false names. Nevertheless, a 180TB Swiss server and a 30TB Hungarian server were both seized along with various computers and hard drives from locations in Germany.
According to the GVU complaint, CRUCiAL were responsible for running the server and obtaining source material from, among other places, two other Scene groups based in the United States.
Back home in Germany, the group was affiliated with 10 other groups who released the same movies online in different file formats.
The GVU investigation is said to have concluded that CRUCiAL were the source of the first DVD-quality Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince leak which had been ripped from a forensically-watermarked copy intended for Scandinavia. GVU say the DVD was physically stolen from an Austrian pressing plant at the behest of CRUCiAL’s leader. Copies of the movie then reportedly turned up on Kino.to, the now-defunct streaming movie portal raided earlier this year.
According to Scene records, both groups stopped releasing in an official capacity in 2010, iNSPiRED in May, CRUCiAL in September, with the former handing the ‘rights’ to their TV show releases to a pair of other groups. Both these new groups made their latest releases just today.
Viewed 3125 times by 724 viewers
Categories: Piracy Tags: Copyright Infringement, DVD, Frankfurt, Germany, GVU, Harry Potter, Switzerland, United States
New Xbox 360 Dashboard Update Goes Live Tomorrow, Here’s What To Expect!
If you’re an Xbox 360 owner then you’re probably acutely aware that Microsoft
has a brand new, completely revamped version of the Dashboard is on the way. Being the main interface into
everything that goes on inside an Xbox 360, the Dashboard is an integral part of
the experience, and this upcoming update is the biggest change it has undergone
in quite some time.
Testers have been using the new Dashboard for a few weeks now,
but tomorrow, December 6th is when everyone else can get their hands on it.
Expect your machine to inform you of an update when signed into Xbox LIVE once
the new Dash has been made available. Microsoft has not given a
specific time that the new Dashboard will go live, other than to say it will
happen on the 6th. Patience, apparently, is a virtue.
So what can you expect to see from the new Dashboard tomorrow? If you’re in
the United States especially, your Xbox 360 could well become your entertainment
box of choice, with video services being the biggest change beyond the
new Windows Phone 7-inspired interface.
Microsoft clearly believes that the future is very much a ‘one box’ affair,
with one machine under our TVs playing host to our gaming and video-watching experience.
We think you’re going to use one device for movies, music and games in the
future,” said Ross Honey, general manager of Xbox Live entertainment and
advertising, in an interview. “We want to make the content accessible and
enhance the actual experience. We think you will will want to watch it on Xbox
as it is more social and more personal.
New streaming video and ‘Video on Demand’ services will be made available via
the new update as part of Microsoft’s vision of making its Xbox 360 that one,
irreplaceable box under our big screen televisions. There will be a total of 40
entertainment services which would accompany the new Dashboard update, which is a screamer in a tech junkie’s
dictionary. Some of the services are as follows:
4 on Demand (C4) in the U.K.; ABC iView (Australian Broadcasting Corp.);
AlloCiné. France (AlloCiné); Germany (Filmstarts); Spain (Sensacine); United
Kingdom (Screenrush); Astral Media’s Disney XD (Astral Media) in Canada;
Blinkbox in the U.K.; Crackle (Sony Pictures) in Australia, Canada, U.K. and
the U.S.; Dailymotion in 32 countries; Demand 5 (Five) in the U.K.; iHeartRadio
(Clear Channel) in the U.S.; Mediathek/ZDF (ZDF) in Germany; MSN om Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the U.K…
The full list is however, a huge one, so we would suggest you jump over to
the source link to see what is being offered in your country
and what isn’t.
More Video on Demand services will be added to the roster in 2012,
so hang in tight, Microsoft is doing their best to push out entertaining content
to all Xbox 360 owners out in the wild.
The new Dashboard will also feature Bing integration, allowing owners of the
Xbox Kinect accessory to search the entire Xbox LIVE market of
games, movies and music using the power of their voice. It is an interesting
take on the hands-free approach to gaming that is currently the ‘in’ thing for
Microsoft, and could perhaps be a similar thing to what Apple is reportedly working on with its Apple TV and Siri.
The Xbox 360 has come a long way since its initial release back in 2005.
Then, the console was simply there to play games on, but as the years have past Microsoft has
turned it into a media consumption machine that could become the heart of many
people’s home entertainment experience.
Last but not the least, the Xbox Companion app for Windows Phone 7.x will go live tomorrow
in the Marketplace. The aim of the app is downright simple; to give users
complete control over their Xbox 360 right from the comfort of their smartphone.
The app will allow users to search for content right from their smartphone, and
once they’ve chosen what they want, they can just select and watch it on their
big screen TV, all cable free. The price? Absolutely free, after all, Microsoft
has to keep those diehard gamers happy somehow don’t they?
Viewed 3107 times by 715 viewers
Categories: Microsoft Tags: ABC iView, AlloCiné, Iheartradio, Microsoft, United States, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE
