Streetview 2.0

Looks like those painstakingly modelled 3D buildings are about to be made obsolete!

I'm guessing he's funding it with Japanese war gold

what with the laying cables to Pacific islands & the encrypted data hosting, Mr Dotcom seems to have stepped out of the pages of Cryptonomicon (Googling the two I'm not suprised to see I'm far from the first to see a similarity here).

A big gap between '82 & '92

I offer you Mercenary by Novagen Software, circa 1985, which I remember on the C64 & Spectrum, and was on other systems too. 3d wireframe graphics, not too much shooting but there were underground bunkers that I spent hours trying to map, and flight above the planet to a space station, sometimes in a giant cheese, to deliver "Vital 12939 Supplies" (use a mirror on that)! I really enjoyed this game, despite never figuring out how to save my progress.

Another that springs to mind was Driller, which used a 3d engine called Freescape, from 1987. I never played this because I found using the Spectrum to be such a hateful and rage-inducing experience that I gave up gaming at home till my parents bought us an Acon A3000 (I wanted an Amiga).

The Masterplan

by Heather Pringle contains good information about the Nazi expeditions to Tibet.

Thin is out

This screen tech sounds excellent and will allow more space for other technogubbins, but the persuit of over-all thinness has gone too far in my humble opinion. Half of today's anorexic phones end up in protective armour that makes them 1990's thick. The other half end up broken. It's time to bulk up again for the sake of robustness and battery life.

Inglorious Basterds rebooted...

...in Gulf War 1.

Esentially the same script, with Nazi changed to Ayrab and Hitler to Hoosain. Col Hans Landa becomes Osama Bin Laden AKA " The Woman With Uncovered Hair Hunter", who is in persuit of renegade Saudi princess Shosanna Al-Dreyfuss. The other half of Branjelina plays Lt Alda Reine, who heads up and all-female multi-ethnic commando team whose characters are all based on their ethnic stereotypes. Bin Laden's survival at the end, albeit with a cock carved into his forehead, leaves the door open for an explosive sequel in New York and Afganistan.

But as this is all more believable and historically accurate than the Tarantino version it may not be bad enough an idea.

Moles have bad eyesight and dont generally use computers anyway

so i'd take what they say with a pinch of salt.

Pedoplanet!

Transporting undesirables to Mars reminds me of Brass Eye - but it will be very important to make sure an 8 year old boy doesnt accidentally get loaded into the spaceship...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRw1ERj2Gc

Seems like a reasonable excuse to big up The Amature Transplants classic:

http://www.lyriczz.com/lyrics/adam-kay/18187-london-underground/

Highlights Plus

Essentially most of what is left out of the highlights is cars going round without incident or overtaking. We can think of this as liberating a couple of hours during the best part of Sunday to do something more constructive. But if you really want to watch nothing much happening then maybe it could be recreated in CGI with videorealistic pre-rendered tracks onto which CGI cars are rendered, tracking their positions throughout the race, and spliced inbetween the real highlight footage to recreate the full-length race.

Hit the Red Button and you get to morph the CGI cars into alternative rides eg dragons or flying carpets, and change the setting of the track to the Moon or Shanghai in the 1920s...

Or you could just find a website streaming the Sky feed.

Did somebody shoot the one-eyed ghost sperm thing?

It seems to be shaking its fist in rage at its mortal chest wound.

First they came for the pedophiles

and I did not speak out --

Because everyone hates pedos

Then they came for the Islamic Fundamentalists, and I did not speak out --

Because they were almost as bad as the pedos

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for the Socialists, which was funny because it was the Socialists that started this process in the first place,

Then they came for the photographers in public places and the Wikileakers and the Playstation hackers and the iPhone jailbreakers and the filesharers and the fans of music "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" and the people who put their bins out on the wrong day, etc... and me,

So I blew them all to hell with IEDs I constructed by following instructions in The Anarchist's Cookbook, which was ironic because I only downloaded it and subsequently got blacklisted because I wanted to arm myself against further errosions of freedom.

If you use mobile phone, any mobile phone, you can be tracked.

All phones can be tracked to within a few meters by triangulating their emissions. If this was not done it would not be possible to move between cell towers while on a call. This data is logged by the networks and those logs can be accessed by the authorities if they obtain authorization, or if they just do it anyway.

Also the web pages you browse are logged by ISPs, so if you look at location-specific content on your phone there is another record of where you are, along with the web history file in the phone itself.

So this new tracking file is simply another way for a third party to establish where you've been, seemingly less accurately than methods that were already available. Admittedly access to the logs of service providers is restricted, but anyone who has access to the phone can look at its browsing history.

Its not that there is nothing to worry about, but I don't see there is much new to worry about.

Opt-in alert service?

It will be hard for a Facebook admin who does not know the poster to determine whether they are serious or what they can do to help.

Facebook could offer an opt-in service whereby the user can nominate a trusted friend or family member to be notified by the Facebook admin if another user (or monitoring AI) flags that they have they posted something out of character or suicidal. The trusted friend would be better at determining whether there is a genuine problem and better placed to take action.

It is true that users with no prior history of suicidal tendencies or other mental illness would probably not sign up to such a service, but those diagnosed with bipolar disorder for example may well welcome this as an additional safety net.