mordant wit

http://nfader.z-host.ru/

This site will generate a master security code for your nokia cell phone provided you have the serial number.

SURGEONS may soon be able to operate on a beating heart. Motion compensation software that synchronises the movement of robotic surgical tools with that of the heart will make it possible to operate without stopping or even slowing the heart down. The software, developed by George Mylonas at Imperial College London (ICL), has been designed for use with a type of surgical robot called da Vinci to perform procedures such as arterial bypass surgery.

In traditional bypass surgery the heart is stopped and an artificial pump is used to keep blood flowing around the body. This is highly traumatic as it involves open heart surgery, and means the blood flow is re-routed through a machine. Alternatively, some surgeons now prefer the less drastic approach of slowing the heart down by cooling it. However, even when the heart beats more slowly it is still a moving target, says Rajesh Aggarwal, a surgeon and specialist in minimally invasive procedures at ICL, whose department has been working with Mylonas. "It's a difficult procedure on a stationary piece of tissue, let alone when it is moving," he says. The new system would allow the procedure to be carried out with the chest closed.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?

~ Jean Kerr

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

If you wanted to catch a few particles of comet dust speeding through the vacuum of space at 6 kilometers per second -- without damaging or destroying those particles -- how would you do it?

Faced with exactly this problem, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory focused on aerogel -- an extremely lightweight, porous material that is chemically identical to glass, but weighs only a little more than air.

Aerogel is the lightest solid known to science. It's also one of the most insulating materials on Earth, the most porous, and it's nearly transparent. Those last two properties made it an ideal choice for catching flecks of comet and interstellar dust on the recently-returned Stardust mission launched by NASA and JPL.

The Scribbler

The news on Monday that an Austrian court has sentenced crackpot British historian David Irving to three years' imprisonment for having denied the Holocaust seventeen years ago should have alarmed free speech advocates--particularly at a time when Muslim fundamentalists are being lectured as to the freedom of expression that should be afforded cartoonists. In the event, however, a lack of noticeable outcry has exposed a longstanding double standard in the West about who is entitled to free speech and why.

To be sure, Nazi propaganda is an extremely sensitive issue in Hitler's birth country, which for the most part endorsed the madman's vision of the Third Reich. But the repression of the free marketplace of ideas is an endorsement of tyranny rather than its repudiation. And it is not just Austria, and Germany itself, that have banned the views of Holocaust deniers: Eight other European states have joined in. Muslim fundamentalists outraged by the cartoons that have appeared widely in the European media thus have the right to question the conflicting standards of what is considered worthy of censorship.

3D Sidewalk Art

Appeals for calm fail to halt reprisals.

Iraq's political and religious leaders were engaged in a desperate effort last night to stop the country from sliding into civil war after a huge bomb shattered the golden-domed mosque in the city of Samarra, one of Shia Islam's most revered sites.

At least six people were killed as demonstrations and armed clashes erupted across southern Iraq, and there were retaliatory attacks on Sunni mosques in Baghdad as thousands of furious Shia Muslims took to the streets. In an apparent reprisal attack, gunmen in police uniforms seized a dozen Sunni men suspected of being insurgents from a prison in the mainly Shia city of Basra and killed 11 of them, police and British forces said.

There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is.

Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven.

Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.

Random quantum fluctuations mean the behaviour of particles and photons of light cannot be predicted exactly. The quantum equations that describe them contain a variety of different - and opposing - outcomes in their solution, such as a particular particle causing a bell to both ring and not ring in an experimental setup. Physicists then have to use an equation called the Born rule to calculate the probability of the bell ringing, and countless experiments have shown the rule works.

GOT some public speaking to do? Here is a tip to keep stress at bay: have sex beforehand. But make sure it's penetrative sex - the magic vanishes if you pursue other forms of sexual gratification.

Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, UK, compared the impact of different sexual activities on blood pressure when a person later experiences acute stress. For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), masturbation or partnered sexual activity excluding intercourse. After, the volunteers underwent a stress test involving public speaking and mental arithmetic out loud.

Is the Pentagon building U.S.-based prison camps for Muslim immigrants? Evidence points to the possibility.

Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration's domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy.

"The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements," Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.

"I stand by this president's ability, inherent to being commander in chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you need a warrant to do that," Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.

Who could be upset by a scheme that allows free use of software? Well, Gervase Markham has found one Trading Standards officer who is

Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser?

One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions.

Most of the time, this job involves helping people who want to use our code in their own products understand the terms, or advising project members who want to integrate code from another project into our codebase. Occasionally, however, something a little more unusual comes along.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

LOVERS know only too well that men usually need a "recovery period" after orgasm, and that sexual intercourse with orgasm is more satisfying than an orgasm from masturbation alone. Now scientists think the two phenomena might be linked.

Following orgasm, the hormone prolactin is released into the bloodstream in both men and women. The hormone makes us feel satiated by countering the effect of dopamine, which is released during sexual arousal.

check this crazy ass accord out...

its done by a jeddah guy

By combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found an exotic way of determining an answer to an algorithm – without ever running the algorithm.

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of "counterfactual computation," inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run. The researchers report their work in the Feb. 23 issue of Nature.

Quantum computers have the potential for solving certain types of problems much faster than classical computers. Speed and efficiency are gained because quantum bits can be placed in superpositions of one and zero, as opposed to classical bits, which are either one or zero. Moreover, the logic behind the coherent nature of quantum information processing often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects.

"It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer," said Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois. "But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible.

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

A boycott of Danish goods called by Muslim leaders over the publishing of cartoons of Prophet Mohammad is dealing a blow to the nation's businesses.

Oil giant Iran became the latest nation to impose penalties, saying on Monday it would cut off all trade ties with Denmark. Reuters reported that Iran imports $280 million worth of goods from Denmark a year.

A report on the state-run news agency IRNA said Iranian Commerce Minister Massoud Mirkazemi had stopped trade with Denmark, but certain types of machinery and medicine would be allowed in for another three months.

Iran has withdrawn its ambassador to Denmark as well.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

~ Douglas Adams

A man has won the annual Man versus Horse race for the first time in its 25-year history.

Crowds of spectators at Llanwrtyd Wells in mid Wales saw Huw Lobb pick up the £25,000 prize - until Saturday, one of the biggest unclaimed prizes in British athletics.

He completed the 22-mile course in two hours, five minutes, and 19 seconds.

Bookies William Hill had to pay out on scores of bets struck at odds of 16/1.

Nighttime!!!!

A minister in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has offered a £6m reward to anyone who beheads one of the Danish cartoonists who outraged Muslims by depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of minority welfare, said the killer would also receive his weight in gold. He made the offer during a rally in his constituency in Meerut, northeast of Delhi. Protesters then burnt an effigy of a cartoonist and some Danish flags.

One day, a student of Mullah Nasrudin went to visit him. He happened to sneak up from behind, intending to surprise Mullah, when he noticed that he was sprinkling bread crumbs around the perimeter of the garden.

"Mullah, what on earth are you doing?"

"Oh, this? It's my technique for keeping the tigers away."

"But Mullah", the student replied, "there are no tigers for miles around here!"

"Effective, isn't it?" said Mullah.

The technology is multi-touch screens, developed at NYU (as per post on the Cult of Mac blog). And the interesting part is that Apple has patented these interactions, which means... a TabletMac?

Eidos has plucked a shop assistant out of obscurity to make her the next face of Lara Croft.

The unknown 20 year old model from Bethnal Green, London, Karima Adebibe, according to Eidos is to be sent immediately on a gruelling training programme which includes an SAS survival, combat and semi automatic weapon firing course in Eastern Europe and a crash course in world archaeology, deportment, elocution and etiquette lessons in order to portray Lady Lara Croft, the 11th generation Countess, archaeologist and action hero.

Once completely trained in the ways of video gaming's leading lady, Karima will be lining up a host of international modelling assignments, starring in TV commercials, appearing on chat shows and is set to be travelling the globe for the next two years.

"Karima has all the assets needed to accurately portray the world's favourite female action hero" said Matt Gorman, Brand Controller for Tomb Raider.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Holocaust cartoon gets entries
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An Iranian newspaper's contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, launched Monday in response to a series of caricatures about the Prophet Mohammed, has already drawn at least two entries - one from Brazil and one from Australia, the paper said. Hamshahri, one of Iran's top five newspapers, said its contest was a test of the Western world's readiness to print cartoons about the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews in World War II. It called for cartoons under the title: ``What is the Limit of Western Freedom of Expression?''

Israel Launches SEO Contest Against Iran Holocaust Cartoons
In response to Iran's best-selling newspaper announcing a competition to find the best cartoons about the Holocaust, the Israel News Agency launched an SEO - Internet search engine optimization marketing contest to prevent Iran news Websites from reaching top positions in Google. "When I heard that a newspaper in Iran was now holding a cartoon contest on the Holocaust, I knew that SEO would be the most potent tool in combating it," said Joel Leyden, publisher of the Israel News Agency. "That 12 winners in Iran would have their Holocaust cartoons published and would receive two gold coins (worth about $140 each) as a prize, I donned my SEO Israel Defense Forces uniform, cocked and loaded my keyboard. There is no way that Iran will spit on the graves of over 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

India's most famous artist has apologised for a painting in which he represented the country as a nude goddess.

Maqbool Fida Husain also promised to withdraw the controversial painting from a charity auction.

The US Navy Special Forces will have a new high speed experimental craft with a very small wake. Great photos.

Thirteen months ago, M Ship Company was commissioned by the Office of Force Transformation to produce a US Navy Special Forces sea craft capable of high speeds with a low footprint. The boat contains no rivets or screws, and is constructed from a composite hull 80 feet in length.

Latest in the realm of free messages like free Google SMS, we have L-Mail. L-Mail lets you send any message, anywhere, through snail-mail, for free.

With 20 overseas printing locations L-Mail is often faster than traditional mail...by days! Keep in touch with friends or family without e-mail. Its easy to use.

* You can write a letter from any web browser or your email account worldwide.
* Simple secure payment by credit/debit cards.
* They print and post your letters for you.
* Say goodbye to standing in line at the post office.

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was among the very first computers—some say it was the first, though there are competing claims. Built at Penn from 1942 to 1946, its work was the most prosaic imaginable: calculating missile ballistics and later helping with the design of the hydrogen bomb. Looking back from today, with every facet of society permeated by super-fast, ultra-miniaturized, all-but-invisible computers, the ENIAC seems ludicrously clunky and primitive. But this is where it all began.

The US military is considering testing the principle behind a type of space drive which holds the promise of reaching Mars in just three hours. The problem is, as New Scientist explains, it's entirely theoretical and many physicists admit they don't understand the science behind it.

Nonetheless, the so-called "hyperdrive" concept won last year's American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics award for the best nuclear and future flight paper. Among its defenders is aerospace engineer Pavlos Mikellides, from the Arizona State University in Tempe. Mikellides, who reviewed the winning paper, said: "Even though such features have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique."

The basic concept is this: according to the paper's authors - Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter and Walter Dröscher, a retired Austrian patent officer - if you put a huge rotating ring above a superconducting coil and pump enough current through the coil, the resulting large magnetic field will "reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free".

Sometime around dawn on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, Ted Molczan was woken by a mysterious phone call. Molczan had been up until 3:30 am in his Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang. A male voice with a thick accent said: "I know you're involved in satellite tracking. I'm interested in doing a trade." The caller offered Molczan information on the orbiting patterns of a constellation of eight US satellites. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA's KH-11 "Keyhole" satellites - from space they can discern an object as small as a softball, and they were sending US forces hi-res digital imagery of Iraq and Kuwait.

The man made no apology for the early hour and wouldn't say why he wanted the information. But one thing was clear: He had found the right guy.

Molczan, an energy conservation consultant, was just becoming known for his skill at a most unusual hobby. In his spare time, he likes to take binoculars and a stopwatch onto the balcony of his high-rise apartment and track clandestine US spy satellites. There are thousands of amateur satellite observers active today, but Molczan is a leader of an informal group of 20 or so who specialize in so-called black satellites, the orbits of which are not disclosed, and the existence of which is often classified. Molczan and his band of associates monitor some 140 classified US satellites, like the Lacrosse radar imaging satellites, which can see through cloud cover and darkness and produce photo-quality images of targets on Earth.

We've heard of radar assisted cruise control, that has certain luxury cars running at set speeds on the highway, but slows them down or speeds them up when they get too close to a car in front or behind. Well now Honda UK is taking it to another level with their Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that not only regulates your speed, but manages the turning, allowing you a full auto-pilot system for your Accord when you're out on the freeway. The Adaptive Cruise Control is your regular radar variety, but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. Honda was quick to point out that their system isn't exactly set up for you to take a nap, since the ADAS system will beep every 10 seconds to make sure you're paying attention, requiring you to touch the steering wheel to inform the car you're still in charge, but we're sure someone is going manage an accident and an ensuing lawsuit or three out of this "convenience".

MICROSOFT founder Bill Gates, the world's richest man, said today the tax office in the US has to store his financial data on a special computer because his fortune is so vast.

"My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers," he said at a Microsoft conference held in Lisbon.

How to Make a Flapping Paper Airplane

Track your airline flights with this (unofficial) Google satellite hack.

Children who play the violin are three times more likely to become millionaires than children who don't. However, being a millionaire does not increase the likelihood that someone played the violin as a child.

100 Best First Lines ... no not for picking up girls at a singles bar, but the best ones from novels.

I'm currently in the planning stages of building a hosted Java web application (yes, it has to be Java, for a variety of reasons that I don't feel like going into right now). In the process, I'm evaluating a bunch of J2EE portlet-enabled JSR-compliant MVC role-based CMS web service application container frameworks.

And after spending dozens of hours reading through feature lists and documentation, I'm ready to gouge out my eyes.

Oscar winning actress Charlize Theron has revealed she often gets turned down for parts because her tits are too small!!!

Never judge a book by its movie.

I've been trying to learn Haskell lately, and the hardest thing seems to be learning about monads. "Monads in Ruby" and "Monads for Functional Programming" helped me finally to break the ice, but more importantly, they gave me a glimpse behind the veil. I finally began to understand something that is trivial to people such as Philip Wadler, but something that never had been explained to me so succinctly. In computer science, we enjoy using mathematic models, but the science still works if you violate the math. And, much to the dismay of purely functional programming enthusiasts, we almost always do. However, when we embrace the math, sometimes the loss in flexibility is more than compensated for by the increase in functionality.

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software.

A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as 'Goobuntu'.