I come from a reasonably frugal family. We don't enter into big-ticket purchases lightly. As many of our friends have slowly begun acquiring HDTVs, my Mom and Dad have been patiently waiting for prices to come down ( Read more... )

You know the story: Dad has a gun. Dad leaves the gun in a place where Junior has easy access to it. Junior finds the gun, plays with it, and ends up killing himself or one of his buddies ( Read more... )

Auntie Beeb is carrying a story about the U.S. Army's proposed Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR). Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's how the guy looks:

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Amid all the continuing hype that continues to surround the internetsone thing continues to amaze me--the sheer number of ways that we can ( Read more... )

It appears that scientists in New Zealand have mastered a way of using sewage to make biodiesel fuel The method actually involves processing the algae already present in sewage-treatment pools, and they expect at least a million liters of biodiesel a year from one sewage treatment plant ( Read more... )

Bush to Move G'vt Servers to "Faith-based" Firewalls

In the "stating the bleedin' obvious" department today, we have a report from the New Scientist suggesting that chronic video game playersshow all the hallmarks of drug addiction. Ominously, the article suggests that, since computers are such an integral part of our lives today, it is impossible to get fully "clean."

Public Service Announcement:

If you have sensitive data, and must carry it on your person, please, please take proper steps to protect it.

Finally someone has decided to do the hard econometric number-crunching on whether getting a hybrid car saves you money.

The conclusion, surprisingly, is not really:

it is painfully obvious that existing hybrids lack the ability to make up for their steep prices with gas savings. While a hybrid would present significant savings over something like ( Read more... )

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