Why Didn't I Think Of That?

2006-11-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

Green Cars Can Be Cool, Really

Not long ago my father was looking to pick up the eco-friendly Toyota Prius. It came with a hefty wait time - two months to a year. As of this November the waiting is over. Toyota's production has finaly outpaced consumer demand. Yuppie/hippies everywhere can finaly go to a dealership, and drive away with their midlife crisis statement wrapped in an ugly, ugly rotten-egg-shaped box.

No, I don't like hybrids.

Maybe I'm too hard on all the hybrid-lovers out there. They are trying to save the environment - even if they're doing it in the most uncool way imaginable. Car companies everywhere are bringing out their own hybrids. But most are just their standard models with a hybrid power plant dropped under the hood.

If you're going to make a statement about the future of transportation, make it something new. Make it something bad ass.
In steps one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions 2006 - the Tesla Roadster.

This little baby is the first line to roll out of Tesla Motors. It's a fully-electric vehicle that runs on rechargeable Lithium-ion batteries.

Check out some stats:

250 mile range on a single charge (that twice as efficient as the Prius)
248 hp with a squealing 13,500 rpm redline
A top speed of over 130 mph
0-60 in about four seconds
It looks like a sports car, and it's hard not to when you're designed by Lotus.

Great looks, breakneck speed and no gas. Does this thing have any draw backs. Well yeah, the $100,000 price tag.

It may be expensive, but it's about time someone built a eco-friendly car that was made to be driven, not suffered. And that is what its going to take to get everyone into a enviromental vehical. Saving the environment can be cool.

2006-11-02T10:18:00.000-08:00

Spam Spam Spam Spam

No, I'm not talking about Monty Python. Though I too hate spam, it's the the spam that plagues my inbox that really gets me.

Spam is the perfect example of technology used for Evil. Spammers make money by turning my email account into a sinkhole of crap that I dread to check. Most of us use some sort of anti-spam software in the hopes of holding the barbarians at the gates.

But the fact is, these barbarians out think, out class and out gun us at every turn.

Spammers are using new tools and techniques to sneak into more accounts than ever before.

Island Hopping:
Anti-spam software does a decent job catching most popular domain names - .com, .biz, .net, .info - within emails. So spammers are routing globaly. They are using domain names from small islands like the America Samoa (.as) and Sao Tome and Principe (.st).

Image Spam:
Most anti-spam software is set up to scan text within emails for often-used spam keywords. Image spam looks much like a normal spam email, but contains no text to scan. This allows them to easily bypass blockers.

Botnets:
Most frighting of all may be Botnets. If spammers sent all their messages from their own computers they would be quickly be shutdown by their ISP. But by using trojans and other malware they can literaly conscript your personal computer into a spam wielding army. Taking control of it, and thousands of other computers, to sling spam under your very nose.

Botnets are not only used for spam, but are rented out for electronic espionage, extortion and gorilla warefare. These networks of thousands of computers can be used to attack, or even destroy, entire web sites or corporate infrastructures. Wired Magazine resently published a great story on Botnets - lengthy, but worth the read.

Scary stuff!

Spam Spam Spam Spam, LOVELY SPAM!

2006-10-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Save the World or Get Off! - Virgin Will Do Both

So, Sir Richard Branson has pledged $3 billion to fight global warming. But he could shell out $3 billion for a burger and not feel buyer's remorse. Anyway, we should all be greatful that a man of such means really cares about all of the little people stuck on this world. Cause the fact is Branson doesn't have to be here.

Branson has teamed up with Burt Rutan, winner of the X Prize for the first privately funded resusable spacecraft. Branson has founded Virgin Galactic (pretty cool website) with the hopes of being the first commercial spaceline. What does this mean? Well, Branson's got a spaceship and if it gets too hot in the kitchen he can move to Jupiter.

I'm on to you buddy! Branson wants to save me from global warming so he can take my money on my first space vacation. Well, there better be more up there than space that smells like burnt cookies.

If NASA and Silicon Valley have their way there will be. The Space 2006 conference brought together techies, businessmen, entrepreneurs and government officials to talk about the most important need of space tourists. Coffee. "Starbucks will be in space," said one of the speakers.

A new space economy may be springing from the minds of future astronauts. It could be you. And for $200,000 it could be you by late 2008.

With just 15,000 passengers Branson will have covered his $3 billion pledge to fight global warming. Save the world, and make money doing it. Now thats a businessman.

2006-09-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

Warheads, Video Games and Supercomputers

The US, UN, IAEA, EU and ICUP (spell it out loud… I’ll wait) are all deciding what to do after Iran ignored a UN deadline for halting all uranium enrichment, what would have effectively stopped their nuclear program. They didn’t listen, and everybody is pissed. So what does this mean? Are we lacing up our nuclear boxing gloves for the next rumble in desert? Nope, we’re going to talk some more… some other time.

Anticlimactic as that is, what I really want to get to is how video games are polishing up nuclear arms. Video game technology is now playing trainer to the world’s nuclear Bruce Lee, and creating the world’s smartest thinking machine at the same time.

Say hello to The Roadrunner. Actually it doesn’t exist yet, but when it is completed it will be the world’s fastest supercomputer. The Roadrunner will be built and used at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It will run at a record breaking Petaflop – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, for the tech jargon impaired. The National Nuclear Security Administration has pinned a deal with IBM to use their new Cell Processor to power The Roadrunner. The Cell Processor was originally designed in partnership with Sony for use in their next-generation video game console, the Playstation 3.

“We could not begin to leverage the kind of technological advances that we’re seeing without the lucrative videogame market,” said John Hopson, the Laboratory’s head of Advanced Simulation Computing.

“Game environments, more and more, mimic real life, in real time,” said Hopson. “This means their processors are doing many, many calculations also in real time. We thought, why not tap into that research and development, modify it to work a more technologically advanced problem, and bring it here.” – from a LANL newsletter, 9/11/06.

So what about the nukes? Well, Los Alamos was the town where the world’s first nuclear weapon was designed and built. It’s also my hometown! The Roadrunner will be tasked with a nuclear stewardship project. It will help scientists improve the reliability of our current nuclear stockpile (It’s big), and ensure they are still safe while we are not using them.

The same technology that will let me jack cars from my living room is going to make the world safe for MAD for years to come. Sweet.

2006-09-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

Save The World With Oil

Alternative power. Everyone wants it. But making your own biodiesel is a serious pain.

Lets face it, the oil infrastructure is here, and it is not leaving anytime soon. And besides, I love oil. It's getting cheaper, and there is more of it than we thought. But there must be a way to get oil and save the enviroment at the same time. Right?

I wish I had thought of a way, but someone beat me to it. Enter Thermal Depolymerization. TDP (for short) is a process that can turn almost anything we throw away into oil. It combines heat, water and pressure to emulate the same processes the earth uses to create oil. But where dear mother takes her sweet time (ya can't work faster than millennia?) TDP takes mere hours!

Perhaps the best part is that the first TDP plant is pumping out custom crude as we speak. You'll never guess what they're turning into black gold... chicken guts. Actually, quite a bit of all that stuff filling our landfills can be put through the process and made into oil. And it's remarkably efficient.

Clean up our garbage and make oil? Too good to be true. Wait! There's more! TDP can breakdown many types of hazardous materals (not radioactive) and destroy Prions - the tough-to-beat biological agent responcible for Mad Cow Disease.

Breakdown some of that garbage we create, dispose of dangerous hazardous waste, quarantine and kill dieases, and make sweet sweet Texas tea. Environmental oil? You better believe it.