Zephyr Solar Plane Lands After Over 2 Weeks (!!!) in the Air, Setting New World Record – “A week ago we wrote about the Zephyr “Eternal Aircraft”, an unmanned solar plane that had just broken many records by staying up in the air for 7 days. Well, the Zephyr has finally landed at the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona after 14 days and 24 minutes, setting a new record that will no doubt be broken the next time the Zephyr decides to take off (at this point, breaking records seems to only be a matter of being patient enough, since the solar plane doesn’t need refueling anyway)….”

Should you worry about the tags on Wal-Mart underwear? – “The retail giant Wal-Mart will place radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on underwear, jeans and other consumer items, according to several news reports, including one today from the Wall Street Journal. Companies have long used such “smart tags” to keep track of the inventory of goods going through the supply chain, but the move by Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, to put them on individual consumer items marks a (not unexpected) shift toward something that privacy advocates have long feared….”

Samsung and Toshiba commit to some really fast NAND – “SSDs are a great example of the need for faster memory. The best 2.5″ SSDs available now have read/write speeds around 275MB/s. The way they achieve this is through sophisticated memory controllers using RAID and various other techniques to surpass current speed issues. In theory, the same drive could see read/write speeds of around 825MB/s…”

FIGHTER JET CRASHES IN LETHBRIDGE, PILOT EJECTS SAFELY

Firefox Just Perfected Tabbed Browsing. It’s Like Apple’s Expose Plus Spaces For The Web – “If you’re anything like me, at any given time you have a dozen to two dozen tabs open across multiple web browser windows. It’s great to have all these webpages open and ready to click on at any second, but it’s a nightmare to try and remember where each is with so many open. I shudder to think how much time I waste on this each day. Luckily, Mozilla is working on a solution…”

Americans Predict Life in 2050 – “Within the next 40 years, most Americans believe, the United States will get the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil. Computers will converse like people. Cancer will be cured, and artificial limbs will outperform natural ones. Astronauts will land on Mars, and ordinary people will travel in space….”

Sony, Tohoku University develop blue-violet laser with 100 watt output, eyeing 1TB optical disk future? – “As much as some would like to envision a world entirely bereft of disk-based media, with Blu-ray being the medium’s swan song, that ain’t happening. Sony’s already looking to the future, and in cahoots with Tohoku University, it has developed a blue-violet laser capable of 100 watt output….”

1996

I’ve Always Thought 3D Was a Fad and The Studios and Manufacturers are Starting To Agree With Me – ““3D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension and Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal,” says Roger Ebert. Despite the fact that 3D is in it’s third rendition of the “It” thing, studios, hardware producers, and domainers are still getting caught in the 3D trap…” See also: 3D TV – the next big format ripoff

American-Bred Terrorists Causing Alarm For Law Enforcement – “Zachary Chesser, 20, is accused of trying to join Al-Shabaab, a Somali-based Islamist militant group suspected in the recent bombing attacks in Uganda that left 73 dead and dozens more injured as they watched the World Cup final. “I’m shocked—I’m just surprised,” said Yvette Deale, Chesser’s former neighbor. “It’s not the kind of thing I would have expected in this neighborhood.”"

Amiga: 25 Years Later – “Twenty-five years ago today, a new personal computer was unveiled at a black-tie, celebrity-studded gala at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. It debuted to rave reviews and great expectations–heck, InfoWorld said it might be the “third milestone” in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC….”

HP’s Windows 7 Slate is not dead yet – “The bumpy saga of the HP Slate took another turn this week with the revelation that the product is still destined to launch with Windows 7, albeit with a focus on the enterprise market…”

How to Save the News – “Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright….” See also: Google’s campaign to save the news — can it hurdle the paywall problem?

Chrome 6: What made the cut–and what missed it – “Want the ability to print preview in Chrome? Me, too. But we’ll have to wait, because it’s one of the features that didn’t make the Chrome 6 cut….”

How Computers Work – “If you are wondering how microprocessors work, you have come to the right place…”

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’ – “This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching…”

Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It – “The members of Task Force 373, a troop of US elite soldiers that includes Navy Seals and members of the Delta Force, receive their orders directly from the Pentagon and are independent of the chain of command of the international ISAF Afghanistan security forces. Their mission is to deactivate top Taliban and terrorists by either killing or capturing them…” See also: Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

The war logs – “Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert…”

Massive Green Roof Helps Postal Service Deliver Big Energy Savings – “The USPS said Thursday it is more than two thirds of the way to reducing energy use by 30 percent by 2015. An impressive component of the agency’s multi-pronged energy strategy is its green roof topping its Morgan mail processing facility in Midtown Manhattan. Covering nearly 2.5 acres, the year-old green roof is the largest of its kind in New York City…”

Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years – “By using the sun’s visible light and heat to power an electrolysis cell that captures and converts carbon dioxide from the air, a new technique could impressively clean the atmosphere and produce fuel feedstock at the same time. The key advantage of the new solar carbon capture process is that it simultaneously uses the solar visible and solar thermal components, whereas the latter is usually regarded as detrimental due to the degradation that heat causes to photovoltaic materials. However, the new method uses the sun’s heat to convert more solar energy into carbon than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes alone….”

It’s time to end the excessive subsidies for corn ethanol – “WHEN WASHINGTON starts handing out cash, it can be hard to stop. See, for example, the decades of subsidies the government has showered on the corn ethanol industry. The fuel was supposed to free America from its dependence on foreign oil and produce fewer carbon emissions in the process. It’s doing some of the former and little of the latter. But corn ethanol certainly doesn’t need the level of taxpayer support it’s been getting. Lawmakers are considering whether to renew these expensive subsidies; they shouldn’t….”

WPA2 vulnerability found – “Perhaps it was only a matter of time. But wireless security researchers say they have uncovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 security protocol, which is the strongest form of Wi-Fi encryption and authentication currently standardized and available…”

Cyberbullying On The Rise – “Being a bully back in the day used to be simpler. A big kid cornered someone smaller than himself and demanded their lunch money. With the advent of cell phones, instant messaging and social networks such as Facebook, a new form of intimidation and harassment called cyberbullying has entered the teen landscape…”

How profits, stocks can rise as economy stumbles – “With earnings season in full swing, bulls and bears are combing through reports to arm themselves in what’s become the mother of all stock market debates: Does the recovery gain steam, sending shares aloft? Or does it remain sluggish, or even stall, and push them down further?” See also: What Earnings Say About the Economy

[[[Jump to - Interesting Reading #536 – Food printer, Facebook contract, earthXplorer, Neuron computers, $200 PC and much more…]]]