Archive for September, 2007
Author: Dave Lewis
September 12, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under The Idiot Box
From CNN:
The Federal Communications Commission approved rules Tuesday night that it says will ensure that millions of cable subscribers will still be able to watch broadcast programming after the digital television transition in 2009.
The FCC says approximately 40 million households are analog-only cable subscribers. Tuesday’s ruling will require cable operators to guarantee analog cable customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.
Meanwhile, on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, the commission also approved new rules that will allow police and firefighters to better locate cell phone callers who dial 911 in an emergency.
The meeting, originally scheduled for 9:30 a.m. EDT, was delayed for more than 11 hours as commissioners and staff hammered out compromises to the cable order and other items.
While the greatest impact of the digital television transition will be on viewers of non-digital televisions who receive their signals over the air, non-digital cable subscribers have also been a concern to the commission.
Beginning February 18, 2009, broadcasters will stop transmitting old-style analog signals to over-the-air customers and to cable companies. Over-the-air customers will have to buy a converter box.
As for the nation’s analog cable subscribers, cable operators must either convert the digital signal to analog at the point where the cable signal originates or supply customers with a “down converter” device that will change digital signals to analog at the TV set.
Article Link
Tags: FCC, Digital TV, Analog Phase Out
Author: Dave Lewis
September 10, 2007 at 5:05 pm · Filed under Google Et Cetera
Steve Fossett went missing almost 2 weeks ago. Now you can help in the search.
Thousands of concerned web users are poring over recent satellite images of western Nevada in the hope of finding missing adventurer Steve Fossett, and an aviation website claims to have found a lead.
With the search for the 63-year-old soon to enter its second week, his friends have set up a page on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website.
The page contains satellite photographs of the search area, taken after Fossett went missing, which anyone can analyse square by square.
Sections of the images, provided by Google Earth image supplier DigitalGlobe, can be flagged by online users as containing “foreign objects that should be looked at more closely” or “nothing of interest”.
The hope is that someone will come across Fossett’s small white Super Decathlon plane in Nevada’s mountainous terrain and desert wilderness.
The same tool was used as part of a massive online search for Microsoft researcher James Gray in February, who failed to return home from a sailing trip. Gray, also 63, was never found.
Article Link
Video Link
Tags: Steve Fossett Search, Google Earth
Author: Dave Lewis
September 10, 2007 at 8:41 am · Filed under RFID, Risks
Here is some bad news for those techies out there who thought it would be a good idea to get “chipped”.
From the Washington Post:
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients’ medical records almost instantly. The FDA found “reasonable assurance” the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005’s top “innovative technologies.”
But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.
“The transponders were the cause of the tumors,” said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.
Article Link
Tags: RFID, Chip Implants. Chip Implant Cancer Risk
Author: Dave Lewis
September 9, 2007 at 6:42 pm · Filed under How To, Windows
Mark O’Neill has an interesting post on how to run multiple instances of a program on your windows machine.
From Makeuseof.com:
With the Windows operating system, everything runs under a user account which you log into when you boot up the computer. Say for the purposes of this discussion, my main default user account on my PC is MARK_1. Well when I boot up the PC in the morning, MARK_1 will load and all programs I subsequently use will run under MARK_1.
For the full post read on.
Article Link
Tags: Windows, Multiple Windows Apps, Run As
Author: Dave Lewis
September 9, 2007 at 1:27 pm · Filed under Administravia
Hi folks, Dave Lewis here. More often than not I have found an urge to write about tech topics on Liquidmatrix Security Digest. And time and again they have little if anything to do with security. So, as a result I have set up this sub domain to handle that part of my brain. I will continue to have Security Digest as my primary site.
Feel free to send in tips to (tips AT liquidmatrix DOT org)
Thanks!
Tags: Dave Lewis, Liquidmatrix, Geek Tech Love, Blogging
