How to Properly Benchmark Your PC – “To casual observers, PC builders who fixate on benchmarks are geeks unable to see the forest from the trees. “Why,” they ask, “can’t you just enjoy your new computer and let it be?” Our answer: the difference between a person who cares about benchmarking and one who doesn’t is how much that person values their free time…”

Faster than the speed of sound: the man who falls to earth – “Daredevil Felix Baumgartner, who made the first unpowered flight across the English Channel in 2003, now plans to skydive from the edge of space. Tony Paterson reports…”

Busting an iPhone thief – “The whole thing started when my plane landed in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon at 2:55pm coming from Cabo San Lucas. The guy sitting next to me on the plane asked me to loan him a pen so that he could fill out his customs form. I watched him fill out the form and clearly remember his birth year of 1984, but am a bit unsure about his name. I think it was —–, but in this story, we will refer to him as Pinche…”

The light bulb goes digital – “And the Department of Energy has initiated the L Prize, a contest aimed at finding ways to replace the nearly 1 billion 60-watt bulbs now installed in the U.S.? Among the submissions: a Philips LED replacement bulb that shines like a 60-watt incandescent but uses 80% less energy and lasts for 20 years. Philips’s bulb exists: An example recently was displayed in its San Jose Lumileds subsidiary and could reach the market by the end of 2010…”

Apple talks about the new iPad tablet computer:

Also:

Details: The new Apple iPad tablet computer – What do you get?

Life, but not as we know it – “What would aliens look like? Our psychological set-up is so egocentric that we find it hard to relate to creatures that don’t resemble ourselves: the common octopus rarely stands alongside monkeys in animal rights campaigns despite similar sentience. Not only do we look for Earth-like planets, we think of aliens in humanesque form. The “grey” alien of science fiction, with its frail body and enlarged head and eyes, plays to our evolution away from animal ancestry and towards our cerebral tendencies…”

Willpower And The ‘Slacker’ Brain – “Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Professor Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation…”

How ‘The Hidden Brain’ Does The Thinking For Us – “After making a silly mistake, it’s not uncommon for a person to say, “Oops — I was on autopilot.” In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there’s actually a lot of truth to that…”

No More Roving for Spirit; Stationary Science Ahead – “The Spirit rover’s driving days are likely over, as efforts to extricate the rover have been curtailed. “We do not believe that Spirit is extractable,” said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. But mission managers stressed that today is not a day of loss at this point, as they hope to continue to make some exciting scientific observations. However, the rover needs to be tilted to gather as much sunlight as possible in order to survive the Martian winter. John Callas, project manager for the MER mission told Universe Today at today’s press briefing that time is short. “We estimate about three weeks of driving activity, and we can’t drive every day,” he said. “So there are just a handful of drives left before there is insufficient power to continue.”"

Hacking Network Printers – “I’m here to tell you, there’s more that can be done with a printer to compromise network security than one might realize. In the olden days a printer may not have been much of a concern other than the threat from folks dumpster diving for hard copies of the documents that were printed from it, but many modern printers come network aware with embedded Operating Systems, storage and full IP stacks. This article will attempt to point out some of the more interesting things that can be done with a network based printer to make it reveal information about its users, owners and the network it’s part of…”

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld – “Prison officials said they had banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape. Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said…”

Behind the scenes of the Schematic multi-touch wall – ” Remember the Microsoft Surface table? Forget about that. Here’s the multi-touch wall! It runs on Flash and is built on top of the Flex 4 framework. In this video I interview John Barton, Senior Solutions Architect at Schematic NY…”

Coke’s New Bottle Is Part Plant – ” Coca-Cola Co., under fire from environmentalists for using plastic bottles, has introduced a new packaging material made partly from plants. The container has “the same weight, the same feel, the same chemistry, and functions exactly the same way” as a regular plastic bottle, a Coke spokeswoman says. ..”

Alan Rusbridger: ‘By having a paywall, you are cutting your journalism off from the world’ – “Guardian News & Media editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, who today gave the annual Hugh Cudlipp lecture, talks to Matt Wells about the future of digital journalism…”

After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday’s Web Site – “In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?”

Pick locks like a pro

7 Free and Super-Cheap Ways to Have Fun with Your Family – “From Divine Caroline, here are some wonderful ideas that can help you save money, get back to the basics, and relax with your kids…”

White House won’t fund NASA moon program – “President Obama’s budget proposal includes no money for the Ares 1 rocket or Constellation program, sources say. Instead, NASA would be asked to monitor climate change and develop a new rocket…”

Windows 7′s XP Mode: what it is, how it works, who it’s for – “The bespoke line-of-business application is a common feature of the corporate world, and a thing that has been instrumental in cementing Windows as the corporate desktop OS standard. These applications—I’ve worked on a few myself—are typically crummy affairs. The foundation of such applications is typically some combination of Visual Basic 6 and obsolete versions of Access and Excel. On top of this mound of [redacted], these apps usually contain one or more third-party components to draw graphs or something, from vendors that have long since gone out of business…”

New technology gives 3-D views of arteries – ” Cardiologists could soon have 3-D images of patients’ coronary arteries at their fingertips and better treat heart disease thanks to a new software unveiled by researchers on Tuesday…”

As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go – “In fact, many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In “rewarming shock,” the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim’s heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them….”

Top 10 Most Annoying Things About Facebook – “Once upon a time, the sentence “Everybody and their mom is on Facebook!” would have been gross hyperbole for the fact that the social networking site started allowing non-Ivy Leaguers to sign up. Now, everybody. And. Their. Mom. Is. On. Facebook. Yes, even your mom, who’s probably not as tech-savvy as my very tech-savvy mom, who’s also on Facebook. Many people find this annoying…”

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