Scientific American talks about the changing nature of constants and recent attempts to decode them.
Posted in News at May 24th, 2005. No Comments.
Scientific American talks about the changing nature of constants and recent attempts to decode them.
It’s quite ironic that with all the effort the banks are putting into fighting fraud, checks still display the bank routing number and checking account number - precisely the information a scammer would need if she were to print checks in someone else’s name. This type of scam is on the rise, MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan says, with local and international scammers printing checks aggressively. If you know the routing number and account number, there’s even a way to print the check online - MSNBC points to Qchex, who in their security policy advises checking account owners to register the accounts with them - otherwise no one knows what might happen.
iRobot, the company, behind Roomba, the vacuum-cleaning robot, has introduced Scooba, the robot that mops the floors. Picture available from CNET.
Conan O’Brien has a great piece of satire in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine. The Future of Television talks about the next frontiers for the industry:
Screens so small they fit inside coffee cups. Marriages arranged by TiVo. Production facilities on Mars. The king of late night peers into his plasma crystal ball.
You keep hearing about FBI, Secret Service or other law enforcement authorities involved in pursuing international cybercrime gangs, but who are those people and how does the cyberlaw enforcement work? Business Week talks about hacker hunters and people they’re after. Large portion of the article is dedicated to describing the global scope of such activites with Russia, Eastern Europe and China leading the ranks for criminal hideouts.
For 40 years that Intel has been around it had a CEO with background in engineering. CNN asks whether things will change with Paul Otellini as the company leader. Otellini’s background is in sales.
US retail giant WalMart is turning its DVD rental business to Netflix. No word on how much money the deal is worth but Netflix will feature promotional WalMart links for the 100K customers it gets from the retail chain.
ArsTechnica takes a look at the history of graphical user interfaces.
While dot-com bust at the beginning of the millenium took out quite a few companies, some survived. With venture capital levels falling, other startups going out of business and negative public attitude towards all dotcom businesses in general, how did some companies still survive? Internet Week magazine profiles some companies that lived through the dark ages and are still around.
Does the world really need real estate agents and hasn’t the Internet replaced the sweet-talking middleman yet? Wired Magazine asks a question of whether your regular homeowner/homebuyer can beat the pros. According to the studies, cited in the articles, real estate agents will hold out for better deals when selling their own houses, and will advise their customers to sell their property as soon as decent (but not necessarily the best) offer comes around. The article also provides an insight into wording of the real estate ads:
“Fantastic,” meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is “charming.” These words, it turns out, are real estate agent code for a house that doesn’t have many specific attributes worth describing. “Spacious” homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. “Great neighborhood” signals to a buyer that, well, this house isn’t very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.