Corvus Crow
The Fireraven
Tuesday, 07. September 2010, 6:42
Wednesday, 01 September 2010
Hardware You'll need the code, a PlayStation 3, and a USB microcontroller in order to open your system. Oddly enough, sales of such devices seem to be in the middle of a spike.

Once the PlayStation 3 was hacked it was only a matter of time before the software was made available free of charge; there are simply too many risks involved with selling this sort of thing via a standard storefront, and too many people more interested in the software's spread than profit.
It's amusing to see how much effort the industry puts into a technology that gets broken sooner or later anyway.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Nature The Indonesian mimic octopus has the extraordinary ability to pass itself off as many of the toxic fishes or sea snakes that share its habitat.

By flattening its head and arms, using a bold brown and white colour display and adopting an undulating swimming technique T. mimicus can fool predators that it is, in fact, a poisonous flatfish rather than a tasty meal.
In the human world, this would probably attract a lawsuit about copyright infringement.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Miscellaneous The foundation recently bought about 500,000 shares of the giant biotech company, according to another financial website.

Civil society is worried that Gates' interest in Monsanto will worsen the conditions of small farmers in developing countries, and might represent a conflict of interest, according to the Community Alliance for Global Justice.
Worst choice ever. Monsanto is known for shady business practises and bullying those who refuse to buy their products.
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Miscellaneous Claiming public safety benefits, the National Association of Broadcasters is proposing a new federal law that would force manufacturers to implant FM tuners in all mobile phones.

What Wharton didn't add, probably because it was obvious enough, is that giving radio stations a way to expand their audience--as more Americans turn to the Internet for news and iPods for music--also could yield a welcome increase in audience and revenue.
Since this is for public safety, I'm sure that the NAB will refrain from demanding any fees. The FM implementation would be for emergency noticifactions, so charging money would it would be really greedy, would it not? The NAB can be sure that, together with the proposed broadcast flag, nobody will be able to listen to music illegaly.
Saturday, 28 August 2010
Nature Environmental and animal-welfare groups are urging the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to persuade the World Health Organization (WHO) to act over fears about eating whale meat.

The groups say whale meat is highly contaminated with mercury and should not be eaten.
This has been said for quite some time now; however, those countries who still hunt whales ignore it. On the other hand, this will all sort out due to natural selection: those eating whale meat die sooner.
Random quote from Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available for storage