Eden.fm

So here’s what happened:

Today some water accidentally poured down on my keyboard (first time in my life this has ever happened to me), and some keys stopped working. So I opened it and to my surprise, the plate holding the inner membrane and keys together has no screws, only some plastic bits that have been melted through some holes on the other side. The membrane inside (3 layers) was wet so I needed access to it to properly dry it and had to break those plastics.

Result: keys “work” again, but the plate is a little too far from the keys so you need to push the buttons really hard, which makes it kinda useless. I tried to glue it but it didn’t help much. If it had screws instead, there would have been no problem at all.

Wishful thinking, but I hope the designer reads this post someday (in the extremely rare event that he has any English skills), and commits Seppuku ??, Seppukuout of embarrassment for his stupid design.

Neko Healing Gallery | Sankaku Complex

Love cats? (I do!) check this out. Click the source for all the pictures.

DailyTech – New Mexico Spaceport Plans Continue, Despite Vote Outcome

Spaceport America will continue construction even though another county has chosen not to support the company with tax dollars

Officials expect construction to begin shortly, with initial plans to open it up sometime in late 2010 or early 2011.  Spaceport America’s presence in New Mexico should help boost the state’s economy, with thousands of jobs that need to be filled.

Spaceport America is working with Lockheed Martin, Virgin Galactic, ROcket Racing, Micogravity Enterprise and other aerospace companies as it moves forward.  Sir Richard Branson chose Spaceport America as the location where he hopes to launch Virgin Galactic spaceliners, which will offer tourists an opportunity for a suborbital flight for a mere $200,000.

Commercial space ventures continue to explode in popularity, as companies continue to receive funding for private space research.  Space Adventures, a space tourism company, works alongside the Russian space agency to send space tourists into orbit, earning around $30 million per trip.

DailyTech – New Toshiba Gaming Notebook Uses Three NVIDIA GPUs

Toshiba introduces new X305 gaming notebooks with three NVIDIA GPUs

NVIDIA’s 9400M GPU is rather new itself and is the GPU used in the newly revamped MacBook notebooks. The Qosmio X305-Q706 features an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 4GB of PC3-8500 RAM, and a 320GB HDD. Both machines use a 17-inch WSXGA+ TruBright display with a resolution of 1680 x 1050. The X305-Q706 retails for $1,999.

The high-end X305-Q708 carries a much heftier retail price of $4,199.99. For the extra money you get 4GB of PC3-8500 RAM, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU, and a 128GB SSD in addition to the 320GB HDD. The onboard sound system of both machines is a four speaker Harman Kardon stereo system with a subwoofer.

DailyTech – NVIDIA Launches 4GB Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card

In addition to the massive amount of RAM, the FX 5800 offers up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores. The card supports interactive 4D modeling with time-lapse capability. Memory bandwidth is up to 102 GB per second and fill rates exceed 52 billion texels per second. Geometry performance is reported to be 300 million triangles per second. The card also features 10-bit color.

The Quadro FX 5800 is available now at an MSRP of $3,499.

DailyTech – “60 Minutes” Catches American Tech Trash Firm Red-Handed

American firm found to be illegally transporting tech trash to China, transforming a town in southern China into a toxic wasteland

It turns out many recycling companies are shipping the trash overseas to make a quick profit, at the expense of polluting the environment, and exposing people in countries like China to deadly health problems.

The show tracked the electronics to a town in southern China known as Guiyu, which CBS calls a “sort of Chernobyl of electronic waste”.  The town was overrun with corrupt officials, who tried to fool the reporters with a faked shop and then forced them out of town with a police escort.  Risking life and limb and returning to the town, the reporters found people melting boiling lead off components, inhaling massive amounts of lead vapor.  Others were using a gold-extracting acid recipe not used in the western world since the Middle Ages, due to its toxic effects.

After getting jumped by thugs, hired by the local mayor, CBS narrowly escaped with evidence of the dire situation in hand.

We followed this container to Hong Kong.”

Mr. Richter responded, “Ok.”

CBS followed, “And I wonder why that would be?”

Mr. Richter responded, “Hmm. I have no clue.”

Several emphatic denials later, Mr. Richter stated, “I know this is your job.  But, unfortunately, you know, when you attack small business owners like this and you don’t have all your facts straight, it’s unfortunate, you know?”

The facts remain indisputable, though — CBS had solid video evidence that Executive Recycling was illegally smuggling tech trash overseas for a quick profit.

DailyTech – Update: AVG Virus Scanner Accidentally Removes Critical Windows Component

The world of computer security can be a scary place for friends and foes alike.  This weekend users’ found their AVG software updated with a new virus definition file.  Then they quickly found their computers crashing.

What was discovered was that the new virus definition file mistook user32.dll, a critical Windows component, for a container for the Trojan Horses PSW.Banker4.APSA or Generic9TBN.  When the scanner went active, it deleted this critical file, thinking it contained a virus, causing the system to crash.  AVG recommended users whose definitions auto-updated delete their virus definition file and cancel any scans they have running.

If your computer is affected, it will either stop booting or go into an endless reboot loop.

@ AnandTech

.. in many cases even tens of of spindles will not be able to beat one SSD as each individual disk spindle has a relatively high latency.

DailyTech – Miniature Nuclear Reactors to be on Sale Within 5 Years

Hyperion, Toshiba, others, race to produce “personal” nuclear power.

Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, the Hyperion design uses no water for cooling, meaning it can be sited anywhere. It is designed to be covered in concrete and then buried while in operation, to reduce the risk of tampering. The reactor must be excavated every 7-10 years for refueling, but can otherwise be left entirely undisturbed.

Since power is produced 100% of the time, the total energy output is more than 15 times what the world’s most powerful 400-foot tall 5 MW wind turbine will produce. The total cost is estimated at $25 million USD. It generates no greenhouse gases while in operation and, when one takes into account the total amount of resources used during manufacture, is said to have much less of a carbon footprint than even wind or solar power.

The Phoenix > Lifestyle Features > Space cowboy

For more than 50 years, UConn physics professor Ronald Mallett had a secret. Now that it’s out, we may be one step closer to traveling back in time.

Traveling into the future is easy. Anyone familiar with Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity knows a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. So it’s simple, really: all you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a long — long, long — round-trip voyage, and head for the stars. By the time you return to Earth in, say, five years (as marked by you onboard your light-year-traveling spaceship, of course), you’ll have aged half a decade while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

..

For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past.

Mallett is convinced that time travel will become a reality sooner rather than later. “What I’m doing, I like to think of as analogous to the Wright brothers,” he says. “They sent this rickety craft across a few hundred yards of beach. But with the technological acceleration that happened after that, by the middle of the century we had intercontinental air travel. This is only the beginning. Once it can be shown to be done, even in the simplest case, then what we learn from that will be incredible.”

..

If that experiment succeeds, then it would be on to the next: trying to confirm that that twisting of space leads to the twisting of time. The idea is to drop tiny neutrons into that tortioned space. If Mallett’s theories held water, the subatomic particles would travel fractions of a second backward in time.

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The actual science behind all this is dauntingly complex. And —though he once took out a provisional patent for what he called a LOTART (Laser Optical Time Machine and Receiver Transmitter), an early-warning device that might allow the reception of signals from the future that could warn us of disasters — Mallett concedes that any practical implementation of his ideas is a ways off.

Click the source for the article

DailyTech – Researchers Crack WPA, No Brute Force Needed

A pair of security researchers claim to have partially cracked WPA encryption, with an attack that takes around 15 minutes.

The technique relies on an undisclosed “mathematical breakthrough,” say researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck, and breaks the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key used to encrypt data between a wireless router and its clients. Currently, the attack works only one way: data traveling from the access point to its clients is vulnerable, while data traveling in the opposite direction is not.

DailyTech – Sea Ice Growing at Fastest Pace on Record

Rapid Rebound Brings Ice Back to Levels from the 1980s.

An abnormally cool Arctic is seeing dramatic changes to ice levels.  In sharp contrast to the rapid melting seen last year, the amount of global sea ice has rebounded sharply and is now growing rapidly. The total amount of ice, which set a record low value last year, grew in October at the fastest pace since record-keeping began in 1979.

Riken researchers make brain tissues from stem cells › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease. Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.

The research was led by Yoshiki Sasai at Riken Center for Development Biology in Kobe.

DailyTech – NASA Launches Probe to Explore Solar System’s Boundary

The IBEX probe launched into orbit over the weekend to help scientists learn more about solar wind

NASA successfully launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) probe over the weekend into orbit so it will be able to research solar wind that helps protect planets from cosmic rays.  The probe launched aboard a Pegasus rocket over the Pacific Ocean.

IBEX was launched into high-orbit and is scheduled for a two-year mission to help researchers learn about solar wind that is now at its lowest pressure in the past 50 years.  The solar system’s interstellar boundary is when particles from the galaxy meet with particles that are emitted from the Sun, which helps create a large buffer zone able to help protect the solar system from the majority of cosmic rays.

If I were a woman… » ?? What Japan Thinks.

That’s the question posed by goo Ranking for this Sunday’s silly survey, a look at what Japanese men would want to do once if they were female

Between the 24th and 26th of September 2008 1,044 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.8% of the sample were female, although in this case it was of course the other 49.4% males only who answered, 5.8% in their teens, 12.7% in their twenties, 32.3% in their thirties, 27.6% in their forties, 12.3% in their fifties, and 9.3% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.