From BBC NEWS.
UK ISP TalkTalk has staged a wireless stunt, aimed at illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect filesharers is “naive”.
TalkTalk has long been an outspoken critic of government plans to cut off persistent file-sharers.
The hack demonstrates how innocent people could be disconnected from the network if the plans become law.
Good stuff. Time to change my ISP, maybe.
Could it be that they’ve just seen a version of Windows that boots up in less than, say, two minutes? More enlightenment here.
Lovely animation using Flash which shows what the map of the world looks like in terms of per capita income. Offline versions available from here.
One of my colleagues has estimated that our university department could save nearly £17,000 a year on toner if we all simply used a special font for our laser-printed documents. He’s probably right, but it sure brings on a tussle between one’s aesthetic sensibility and one’s environmental ‘conscience’. But maybe it’s not so bad in small sizes. Only one way to find out…
This is just one of a series of interesting pics of a document obtained under a Freedom of Information request in the US. More details here.
Last May, the Economist carried an interesting report (now hidden, alas, behind a paywall) about technology developed by a Cambridge company.
TOUCH screens, once the preserve of science museums and ticket machines, have become commonly available on mobile phones thanks largely to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone. Now a novel hand-held device has been developed that can turn an inert tabletop into an interactive touch-screen. It could even end up being projected from a mobile phone.
The device developed by Light Blue Optics, a company spun out from Cambridge University in England, embodies a tiny projector and sensors that allow it not only to cast an image onto a flat surface but also to detect when the image is being touched. This makes it possible to press buttons, move and manipulate virtual objects such as photos and navigate between different screens, all just by touching the projected image.
Today, there’s a piece in Technology Review which shows how Light Blue Optics is finding ingenious applications for the technology, like this:
The new projection device, developed by Light Blue Optics, based in Cambridge, UK, uses a technique called holographic projection that allows it to be far smaller than current in-car HUD systems. “We can make an HUD so small you can put it into a rearview mirror or wing mirror,” says Edward Buckley, Light Blue Optics’s head of business development.
Details of Light Blue Optics’s prototype were presented today at the Society for Information Display’s Vehicles and Photons 2009 symposium, in Dearborn, MI. The prototype projects an image through a two-way wing mirror so that it appears to be about 2.5 meters away, superimposed over the reflected road scene. The picture appears to originate from a point in space in front of the mirror, only from a narrow perspective.
Existing HUDs require relatively large liquid-crystal arrays and optics to generate an image, says Buckley. “In a BMW 5 Series, the size is about five litres,” he says. “We can make it about one-tenth of the size. This means you can start to put these virtual image displays where you couldn’t previously.”
According to Engadget,
Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with creating the World Wide Web, recently said that his only real regret about the whole shebang is forcing people to type out the (essentially unnecessary) double slash after the “http:” in URLs. Speaking at a symposium on the future of technology, he noted (in reference to the dreaded marks) the paper, trees and human labor that could have been spared without them.
To which Engadget responds:
Hey Tim: don’t sweat it! You’ve done us enough good turns that we’re willing to overlook it.
Amen.