Instead of instantaneous communication, sent messages will travel at 0.03mph (0.05km/h) and could take days, weeks or even months to arrive.

It is part of a “slow art” project called Real Snail Mail at Bournemouth University in the UK which will be showcased in Los Angeles in August.

…

Each snail is fitted with a tiny capsule which holds a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip. RFID allows objects to communicate over short distances.

Users of the service send a message via the Real Snail Mail website which is routed to the tank at the speed of light to await collection by a snail “agent”.

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An article on the Guardian website asks whether collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch the guilty.

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your

calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow’s weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don’t get tomorrow’s forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

Look, I’m against this over-surveillance of the government as much as the next guy, but I don’t think Cory Doctrow’s argument is very good. To me, most of the talking points revolve around two key points:

1. All the extraneous information makes it harder and slower to process in order to uncover the desired results.
2. Becoming overwhelmed with information leads to more false accusations or findings.

Point 1 can be countered with the old adage “throw more hardware at it!” This is a solvable problem assuming there is room in the surveillance budget for technical equipment in the backend.

Point 2 is also a technical problem. Falsehoods can be reduced by properly structuring your search queries or parse routines. While not a trivial problem, time can be spent to improve the efficiency of this process - given great speed and storage of course.

The concern here is that both of these points accentuate the point that existing surveillance is not “good enough”, therefore it should be junked. That’s fine to have that argument, but what then if those issues are addressed? Is it suddenly justifiable? I suspect many would still have issues.

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Please don’t read into the sudden infatuation with bovine technology. It’s just that it sound so preposterous that it deserves to be passed on to the masses. I do suppose that as technology becomes more and more fundamental in our daily routines, these types of applications are inevitable. Nonetheless,

Australian scientists have launched technology that uses video cameras to

differentiate between species. They say the “cowcam” will keep unwanted animals out of remote watering and feed points in the Australian outback and allow farmers to monitor their stock from home or office.

“We use the unique side profile that every animal has and a software program similar to facial recognition technology that allows us to identify animals to a species level,” said Neal Finch, the joint inventor of the product.

“The camera can tell the difference between sheep and cattle and feral pests such as goats, horses, pigs, kangaroos, camels and emus.”

For about $9,600 you get a lane that narrows the animals down to single file so they go through one at a time in front of the camera, the computing hardware, an electronic gate, weatherproof boxes and all the solar energy apparatus to run the system.

Seems cheap enough to catch on in my mind!

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Authorities can now put the brakes on terrorists who hijack New York buses.

Like something out of the movie “Speed,” a new GPS device enables authorities to remotely control a bus - slowing it down to 5 mph and preventing it from restarting once it has stopped. The device has been installed on thousands of local commuter and tourist buses.

The technology is designed to prevent a terrorist from ramming a bus filled with people and explosives into buildings or tunnels.

Private bus companies have received millions of dollars from the Department of Homeland Security for the security systems. It costs $1,500 to equip each bus, with $50-per-bus monthly maintenance costs.

Nice to see that Bus 2.0 has arrived, solving problems no one knew we had in the process. You are still out of luck if you happen to be a passenger on the bus at the time of the jihad though. I guess that is where Keanu comes in?

Woah!

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The same Global Positioning System (GPS) technology used to track vehicles is now being used to track cows.

But Agricultural Research Service (ARS) animal scientist Dean M. Anderson has taken tracking several steps further with a Walkman-like headset that enables him to “whisper” wireless commands to cows to control their movements across a landscape—and even remotely gather them into a corral.

[...]

The commands vary from familiar “gathering songs” sung by cowboys during manual round-ups, to irritating sounds such as sirens and even mild electric stimulation if necessary to get cows to move or avoid penetrating forbidden boundaries.

How long before this technology migrates from our bovine friends and into our friendly government’s mits? It’s probably not as far-fetched as you’d think. When I was a child, my parents had my fingerprints taken and put into a database, in the name of child safety should I become lost or kidnapped. It sounded like a good idea at the time, whatever parents could do to help protect their child right? Even today, not many would blink at the thought of this but that’s really how things start. Before we know it, all our children are walking around with an embedded GPS chip. It would not even surprise me if it was the parents making overtures for this technology. All in the name of safety right?

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Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III was in custody Thursday on charges that he slipped ecstasy into the drinks of technology executives, maintained a warehouse to store cocaine and tried to conceal his illegal conduct with bribes and death threats.  [...]

The 18-page indictment on drug charges alleges that Nicholas kept four properties in Orange

County and Las Vegas, including a warehouse in Laguna Niguel, Calif., where he stashed and distributed cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy.

He later remodeled the warehouse with private rooms and furnished it with art and high-end electronics.

The court documents also claim Nicholas hired prostitutes and escorts for himself, his employees and customers and conspired to get illegal prescriptions for drugs such as Valium.

In 2001, Nicholas smoked so much marijuana during a flight on a private jet between Orange County and Las Vegas that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask, the indictment states.

Another example that proves the tech world is just as seedy as the rest Clearly this explains their shoddy support of Linux. You can’t be aces ten at everything!

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If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for

Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.

For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when — according to Christian end times dogma — Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.

“You’ve Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ,” reads the website, which is purportedly run “by Christians, for Christians.” The domain name is registered through an anonymous proxy service, presumably to protect the proprietors from the Forces of Darkness, and not because they’re up to anything shady.

I should have paid more attention in Sunday School because at no point do I recall good Christian values incorporating a little “neener, neener, I told you so!” Also, what is the significance of the number 62 in the Bible? That strikes me as an odd limit for the service, but maybe that is on me for thinking everything should be nice and round and quaint. I’m not sure who will keep the servers running and going post-rapture seeing as this is “by Christians, for Christians” and they’ll all be upstairs. Anyways, if this tickles your faith, why not look into Jesus Pets?

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What’s your carbon footprint? Not that there is fundamentally anything wrong with it, but the cult like status of the carbon neutral crowd is amusing to say the least. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Planet Slayer website undoubtedly takes the cake for lunacy. You see, one section of the website invites children to take a greenhouse gas quiz to determine how much of a pig they are. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!

Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield today questioned the accuracy and appropriateness of some of the imagery and content on the website.

“I know there’s a little bit of goth in all of us, but this might be taking it just a little too far,” Senator Fifield said of the quasi life-expectancy calculator.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC portray the average Australian as a pig and is it appropriate for a website obviously geared towards kids to depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?”

Incidentally, after taking the quiz it was determined I should have offed myself before the age of 5. The big detractor? Eating meat it appears!

“The site has been developed to appeal to children and its been done in an irreverent way … to make it engaging,” [ABC managing directory] Mr [Mark] Scott said.

“It’s not an attempt to write public policy … it’s an attempt to educate school students on the impact of the modern Western lifestyle on carbon emissions and the whole issue that we are dealing with.”

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The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal

electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices.

The deal could also impose strict regulations on Internet service providers, forcing those companies to hand over customer information without a court order.

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement.

I don’t see how this will get very far. The Canadian economy is very much dependent on traffic flowing more or less smoothly across the border. Even that is ignoring the most immediate reaction, by what mechanism will copyright gestapo determine which material is illegal. As it is, all of my music is stored in digital form on my laptop and iPod. Should I be expected to carry receipts or other forms to verify my music was legally obtained? Maybe I should just care my CDs around. Moreso, it is often trumpeted how Canadians pay a levy on blank media that entitles them to make digital copies of music. Where does that fit in here?

I guess you should be leaving the iPod at home - travel with the Walkman, it’s hip and retro you know?

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Shit is about to hit the fan, literally.

Just days before the planned delivery of the international space station’s largest laboratory, its crew is facing a much more down-to-Earth problem: a stopped-up toilet.

[..]

Long a subject of bathroom humor, these high-tech commodes must use fan-driven air flow instead of gravity to transport human waste away from a crew member’s body and into a sanitary receptacle. Early spaceflights didn’t even have this method, but relied on bags with sticky openings — and an emergency supply of such bags is indeed aboard the space station.

The current round of trouble started last Wednesday in the Russian-built Zvezda service module, the station’s main living room, as noted in a NASA status report: “While using the toilet system in the Service Module, the crew heard a loud noise and the fan stopped working.  After some troubleshooting the crew reported that the air/water separator was not working.”

I find it interesting that the space race between US and Russia ended decades ago yet NASA and the media never waste a chance to point out Russia’s failed technology - the toilet in question here. When the Columbia space shuttle blew up it was never referenced as the “American built Columbia space shuttle.” Growing up, all any of us heard as how fantastic the Apollo program was - and it was, don’t get me wrong. No one ever heard about the Russian probe to Mars or their space stations. Actually, further proving my point, the only time we heard anything substantial about MIR was when the problems started happening - well after it’s projected usefulness.

Anyways, I hope the plumber doesn’t gauge them on this service call, I’d like to see people on Mars in my lifetime and all.

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