Old Li2-Crystals

I just ran across an article on PC Pro news that shows Microsoft taking a giant step backwards on the issue of music downloads and DRM .

Then there’s the other side of the coin, support bots and phone droids that are good for little more than wasting your time and raising your temper to the boiling point. I’ve spent a serious amount of time over recent days dealing with a collection of them gathered at the Centurytel Internet support desk.

A Quantas Airlines plane had a sudden 300 foot drop in altitude recently and now Quantas is investigating the chance that laptops and other electronics being used by passengers could be to blame for interfering with the plane’s avionics.

A tech company called Verayo has announced a new flavor of RFID chip, one that they say cannot be cloned. It uses a Challenge / Response technology called “Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF)”.

Concerned about “Identity theft”? Maybe you should be if you’ve got one of those new credit cards that has an RFID chip in it. If so, here’s a video you should watch.

Contrary to what a lot of people will say, life out here in the sticks is actually pretty good. Everything is on a slower pace and there isn’t nearly as much traffic and pollution as you have in just about any larger city.

There’s actually a small but growing group of people, amateur scientists, that are working on building fusion reactors. Quite a few of them have actually built working fusion reactors in their basements and attic labs.

Picture this: Joe Sixpack needs to check in on his fave blogs and online news but he hasn’t got the time to wait for Windows to boot. He flips on his computer, five seconds later he’s got a browser running and is getting up to date while the guy next to him is still looking at the Windows logo, waiting for his machine to boot.

I just read a story that’s going to be of interest those who like to be on the bleeding edge of speed capacities… Some physicists at the University of Sydney have come up with an optical chip that’s reportedly capable of speeds up to a hundred times faster than Australia’s current networks are doing.

Recently, as part of my never ending effort to keep from falling behind on things technical, I find that the Cat5e cables that I’ve been using for so long are no longer the standard and haven’t been for quite a while now.