17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.
“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.” Continue reading “Boy regrets selling his kidney to buy iPad”
The decade long development campaign could not possibly be amortized effectively across just 500 cars – the LFA Nurburgring is a bargain, even at this price. To which my wife, who loves a bargain, reminded me that her Birthday was coming up soon… 
via The US$465,000 Lexus LFA Nurburgring – the most expensive Japanese car ever.
Unless the Unions in the “Rust Belt” will allow efficient factories, like this one, be built, they will never be able to globally compete.
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.985897&w=425&h=350&fv=file%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fdownload.gannett.edgesuite.net%2Fdetnews%2Fflvfiles%2F2007%2Fautos%2F0821camacari.flv%26autostart%3Dfalse%E2%84%91%3Dflvdefaultback.jpg%26stretching%3Dfill]
Windows version 1.0, which did not set the world on fire, is now 25 years old this month, and I’d like to share a few remembrances of the OS.First of all, it was useless. Like, seriously useless. But it was strangely interesting at the same time. You had to have a special graphics card to run the thing, and when compared to DOS, it did look better although it was not as attractive as the Mac OS or anything done today including Linux GUI’s. I wonder if there is a machine in existence that still runs it.Steve Ballmer made a hilarious video promoting Windows 1.0 like a used car salesman.
At first, Microsoft called it “Interface Manager.” Later, a marketing guy in the company came up with the name “Windows.” The thing wasn’t originally designed as an OS but as a shell program with a zippy GUI that could manage all of the device drivers through a common API. People forget that by the mid 1980’s device drivers for peripherals were a nightmare. Interface Manager, now Windows, would take care of this problem.
All of the instruments used are iPhones plugged into a sound system. The performance was on Friday October 8, 2010 aboard the New York City B Train, over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn and edited from 3 iPhone cameras.
A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.
A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.
It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.
3-D Printing Is Spurring a Manufacturing Revolution – NYTimes.com.
Stuxnet works by exploiting previously unknown security holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It then seeks out a component called Simatic WinCC, manufactured by Siemens, which controls critical factory operations. The malware even uses a stolen cryptographic key belonging to the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer RealTek to validate itself in high-security factory systems.
The worm then takes over the computer running the factory process – which for WinCC would be “mission-critical” systems which have to keep functioning under any circumstance – and “blocks” it for up to a tenth of a second. For high-speed systems, such as the centrifuges used for nuclear fuel processing being done by Iran, that could be disastrous, experts suggested.
“This is a very sophisticated attack – the first of its kind – and has clearly been developed by a highly skilled group of people intent on gaining access to SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems – industrial control systems for monitoring and managing industrial infrastructure or facility-based processes. In contrast to the bulk of indiscriminate cybercrime threats on the internet, this has been aimed at very specific targets. It’s different also because there’s no obvious financial motivation behind the attack – rather the aim seems to be to sabotage systems.”
via Stuxnet worm is the ‘work of a national government agency’ | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
Mark Zuckerberg, The C.E.O. of Facebook, wants to create, and dominate, a new kind of Internet. The link below to a rare interview, before an unflattering movie gets released.
via Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg opens up : The New Yorker.
It would take Gear Head Carlton Palmer to find the link to some Russian ingenuity. Click on it to see more.