Quanetic Software

An anonymous reader writes "Paypal has quietly killed the Paypal plugin and the related virtual-card service. The service generated on-the-fly, one-time-use credit card numbers. When I called in and inquired about the service, I was told that the service has been discontinued, but may be relaunching something similar depending on interest. They are treating inquiries as a sort of petition, taking down names and contact info. The forums seem to be a lost cause, as no Paypal reps have replied to the numerous posts regarding virtual cards being discontinued. Does anyone know of a good alternative source of one-time-use credit card numbers?"

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An anonymous reader writes "Imagine technology that allows you to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when, and where the next attack will occur. In the Northwestern study, when researchers knew in advance specifics of the planned attacks by the make-believe 'terrorists,' they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab, said J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences."

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oxide7 writes "Starting from August 1, Chinese Internet users will have to register using their real names for playing online games, China Daily reported on Saturday. The regulation, issued by the Ministry of Culture on June 22, is said to be part of a nationwide campaign to improve management of the virtual gaming industry and protect minors from unwholesome content. It applies to all multiplayer role-playing and social networking games."

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theodp writes "Remember those old Lifecall commercials? Well, you've come a long way, Grandma! The NY Times reports on a raft of new technology that's making it possible for adult children to remotely monitor to a stunningly precise degree the daily movements and habits of their aging parents. The purpose is to provide enough supervision to allow elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home. Systems like GrandCare, BeClose, QuietCare, and MedMinder allow families to keep tabs on Mom and Dad's whereabouts, and make sure they take their meds. Perhaps Zynga can make a game out of all this — GeriatricVille?"

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An anonymous reader writes "At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors — the same sensors currently added to the iPhone 4. No more blurry low light photos!"

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pitchpipe writes "A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. ... It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another." The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.

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wooferhound writes "Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they're especially popular with provincial or touring companies. But until mid-July — when 'West Side Story's' producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra's string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend. There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players."

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hasanabbas1987 writes "It's just been a few months since a 45-gigapixel panorama of Dubai claimed the title of world's largest digital photograph, but it's now already been well and truly ousted — the new king in town is this 70-gigapixel, 360-degree panorama of Budapest. As with other multi-gigapixel images, this one was no easy feat, and involved two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters, a robotic camera mount from 360world that got the shooting done over the course of two days, and two solid days of post-processing that resulted in a single 200GB file — not to mention a 15-meter-long printed copy of the photograph for good measure. Of course, what's most impressive is the photo itself [Note: requires Silverlight]."

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astroengine writes "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from its low-energy hibernation mode, mission control is beginning to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again. After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely. In a statement, NASA said: 'Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.'" Related xkcd strip, in case the headline wasn't anthropomorphic enough for you.

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An anonymous reader writes with news that security experts from Spider Labs released a kernel level rootkit for Android devices at DefCon on Friday. "As a proof of concept, it is able to send an attacker a reverse TCP over 3G/WIFI shell upon receiving an incoming call from a 'trigger number.' This ultimately results in full root access on the Android device." The rootkit was developed over a period of two weeks, and has been handed out to DefCon attendees on DVD.

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destinyland writes "For the first time, the majority of cell phones are accessing data services — 53 percent, compared to only 42 percent last year, according to a new study by Validas. And each user downloads an average of 145.8 MB per month (the average was just 96.8 MB per month in 2009). The heaviest users are Verizon smartphone owners, averaging 428 MB per month (338 MB on average for iPhone users). In fact, Verizon users were twice as likely as iPhone users to exceed both 500 MB and 2 GB each month."

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josath writes "Texas Instruments' flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware."

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eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."

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TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008. "The BNEF preliminary analysis suggests the US is the top country, as measured in dollars deployed, in providing direct subsidies for clean energy with an estimated $18.2bn spent in total in 2009. Approximately 40% of this went toward supporting the US biofuels sector with the rest going towards renewables. The federal stimulus program played a key role; its Treasury Department grant program alone provided $3.8bn in support for clean energy projects. China, the world leader in new wind installations in 2009 with 14GW, provided approximately $2bn in direct subsidies, according to the preliminary analysis. This figure is deceptive, however, as much crucial support for clean energy in the country comes in form of low-interest loans from state-owned banks. State-run power generators and grid companies have also been strongly encouraged by the government to tap their balance sheets in support of renewables."

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Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware. The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer."

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Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.

Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting.

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why.

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

You may remember when JavaScript was a dark art. It earned that reputation because, in order to do anything with even the teensiest bit of cross-browser consistency, you had to fork your code for various versions of Netscape and IE. Today, thanks to web standards advocacy and diligent JavaScript library authors, our code is relatively fork-free. Alas, in our rush to use some of the features available in CSS3, we’ve fallen off the wagon. Enter Aaron Gustafson’s eCSStender, a JavaScript library that lets you use CSS3 properties and selectors while keeping your code fork- and hack-free.

Years ago, CSS browser support was patchy and buggy, and only daring web designers used CSS for layouts. Today, CSS layouts are commonplace and every browser supports them. But the same can't be said for CSS3 and HTML5. That's where Faruk Ateş’s Modernizr comes in. This open-source JavaScript library makes it easy to support different levels of experiences, based on the capabilities of each visitor’s browser. Learn how to take advantage of everything in HTML5 and CSS3 that is implemented in some browsers, without sacrificing control over the user experience in other browsers.

Everything you wanted to know about web fonts but were afraid to ask. Richard Fink summarizes the latest news in web fonts, examining formats, rules, licenses, and tools. He creates a checklist for evaluating font hosting and obfuscation services like Typekit; looks at what’s coming down the road (from problems of advanced typography being pursued by the CSS3 Fonts Module group, to the implications of Google-hosted fonts); and wraps it all up with a how-to on making web fonts work today.

User research doesn’t have to be expensive and time-consuming. With online applications, you can test your designs, wireframes, and prototypes over the phone and your computer with ease and aplomb. Nate Bolt shows the way.

Designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Ethan Marcotte advocates we shift our design thinking to appropriate these constraints: using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, he shows us how to embrace the “ebb and flow of things” with responsive web design.

We have the power to bestow our abilities onto the things around us. By being conscious of our tools, habits, and spaces, and actively conditioning them to help us behave the way we want to behave, maybe we can more efficiently tap into the thousands of hours of creative genius embedded in our everyday objects. Maybe we’ll be able to maximize the capabilities that new technologies afford us without being overwhelmed by the distractions. And, just maybe, we’ll remember what it feels like to be utterly engrossed in our daily work.

"There's a tremendous amount of anxiety among religious traditionalists that when you take one step toward egalitarianism, the floodgates are open and everything that seemed self-evident will no longer be. Men go to work, and women raise children. If you undermine that, you have lost your whole universe."

The Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism have been ordaining women as rabbis for decades, but the religion's most traditional sect, the Orthodox, remains a lone, minority holdout against egalitarianism. Last year, Orthodox Rabbi Avraham "Avi" Weiss (political activist and founder of the controversial, liberal, "Open Orthodox" Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Yeshiva in New York) tried to shake things up by ordaining the first female American Orthodox rabbi.
Weiss ordination of 'Rabbah' Sara Hurwitz has led to a statement from the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America accepting an expansion of leadership roles for women in their synagogues. Related: This week, Rabbi Weiss was one of about 100 moderate Orthodox rabbis and teachers from North America and Israel who signed a "statement of principles" outlining a tolerant, open, accepting approach to gay men and women who want to maintain ties with their Orthodox community, family and friends. The statement says that "although [Orthodox] Judaism 'cannot give its blessing and imprimatur to Jewish religious same-sex commitment ceremonies and weddings,' communities must still accept 'practicing' gay couples and their children into synagogues, schools." Homophobia is not uncommon in Orthodox communities.

This year, for the first time ever, the U.S. included itself in the State Department's annual report on human trafficking. Most Americans associate human trafficking with sexually exploited women and children, but the definition includes guest laborers who have been trapped into indentured servitude as well. "More investigations and prosecutions have taken place for sex trafficking offenses than for labor trafficking offenses, but law enforcement identified a comparatively higher number of labor trafficking victims as such cases often involve more victims." The full report--with victim stories, "TIP Heroes," methodology, definitions, etc.--is here.

"I never know what to call myself really. I call myself a cartoonist because it's what I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember, it's what I always return to, and it's how I think. But I don't really work in that field. I think I'm an artist and a writer, or more appropriately, an artist who writes."
Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee is a curious commixture of poetic text and architectural drawings, in the guise of a comic strip. It has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle since 2004, and anthologized, with a second anthology forthcoming. The drawings for All Over Coffee are usually drawn from life, as you can see in this short video from Spark. Madonna also produces Small Potatoes for The Rumpus, where he is a comics editor. He was recently interviewed for the site about a new book project, Album. The artist's website includes a sketchbook blog. The quote at the top is from this interview, but the site seems to be down at the moment.

Cat, cat, cats on a treadmill. Cats vs. a treadmill. Dog, dog, dog on a treadmill. Ferret on a treadmill. Horse on a treadmill. More about horses on treadmills. Horsing around on a treadmill. Kiwi on a treadmill. Turtle, turtle, sea turtle on a treadmill. Vampire bat on a treadmill. Shrimp on a treadmill.

Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard introduced the Maximizing Optimal Maternity Services (MOMS) for the 21st Century Act on July 21st. This legislation proposed by Congresswoman Roybal-Allard of California is aimed at improving maternal and infant outcomes in the US.
The bill will create a Center for Excellence on Optimal Maternity Outcomes and calls for greater research on maternity practices in the US. A national campaign on evidence-based maternity care practices will be issued, and an interagency committee comprised of members of all government agencies involved with the delivery of health services will be established. Amie Newman of RH Reality Check notes the bill's language includes support for birth attended by Certified Nurse Midwives and Certified Professional Midwives. The American College of Nurse Midwives applauds the bill. Amnesty International USA supports the bill as a product of their report Deadly Delivery that found maternal mortality has increased from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13.3 per 100,000 in 2006. The bill is numbered H.R.5807 and has been referred to committee.

What's the easiest way to learn about a state? Watch the California Gurls parody made in that state's honor! [41LYT]
Warning: Some of these videos may be offensive to the states they "honor". * indicates videos of people dancing to the original song. These videos included for notability Arizona Arkansas California California Dorks California Gays* Colorado Connecticut Washington D.C. Florida Georgia Hawaii Illinois Indiana Indiana (Lower production value, truer to the original.) Iowa Kansas Kansas Boiz Louisiana Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Missouri Nebraska New Jersey New York North Carolina (Same as SC) North Dakota Ohio Ohio (Better production, much more offensive.) Oklahoma Pennsylvania South Carolina (Same as NC) Tennessee Texas Texas (Audio Only) Vermont Virginia Washington* Wisconsin

With "support for the death penalty in excess of 85% [of the population]", there is normally little fuss in Japan each time the announcement is made that convicted murderers from death row have been hanged (such announcements are only made after each execution.) But last Wednesday, the disclosure that two executions had taken place early that morning did raise eyebrows - for two reasons. Justice Minister Keiko Chiba held a press conference to make the announcement, and added that - in a 'first' for a Japanese Justice Minister - she herself had attended the execution as a witness, after signing the authorization for it to proceed. But what has really caused a firestorm of protest is the fact that although she lost her Parliamentary seat in last month's election, she "has remained in her ministerial post at the request of Prime Minister Naoto Kan". She is a private citizen.

Pop music in the '60s ran the gamut from Bobby Russell's "Saturday Morning Confusion" to "Come Saturday Morning" (from the soundtrack of "The Sterile Cuckoo"* and performed by the same guys who sang of "Guantanamo -mera"). And they still write songs today about "Saturday Morning" (with pancakes! and vampires!).

The first thing Disney did when it took over ABC was "One Saturday Morning"**. But then there are the "REAL Saturday Morning Watchmen" (remixed from previously on MeFi). (other Saturday Morning video posts)

*yes, that is a very young Liza Minnelli
**I'll never forgive them for canceling "Reboot" and "Bump in the Night", the only Saturday toons I still enjoyed, because they weren't produced by Disney

A lawyer is secretly a stripper. Detectives look for a racist. Radiation kills a tormented scientist. Briscoe and Green search for lost customer. Homeless men are murdered. A complicated murder case. These Are Their Stories: Art based on one-line summaries of Law & Order episodes.
via Wondermark.

The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition.

Puberty Blues - Hayley Smith started developing breasts when she was five. A year later, she had her first period. "It was awful," her mother says. "There was so much ignorance. People treated her differently—Hayley didn't really have a childhood. You just don't expect to have to talk to your six-year-old daughter about having periods." The evidence from Denmark suggests that Hayley's experience could soon be commonplace. Most paediatric endocrinologists now agree that the age of puberty is falling fast in developed nations. But there is no consensus on why.

Remembering Anchorage in the Seventies.

The Internet Animal Orchestra [SLYT Saturday]

Romania's Tirgsor Prison (for women), as photographed by six inmates. (mild nsfw content)

Man, Some Kittens Just Love Broccoli. But is it good for them? [MLYTP]
via Think_Long

There's something about this box of Fortune Cookies... [SLYT]

The Sample Story of Rush by BAD II (with Pig Meat Markhum)
Pig Meat Markham was a comedian who performed in blackface on the chitlin circuit with bits like "Have You Seen My Wife?", "Open The Door Richard," and "Here Come The Judge." (Pt. 1, Pt. 2). Introduced to white audiences by Sammy Davis Jr. on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a novelty single capitalizing on the new-found popularity was released by Shorty Long. Pig Meat then released one of his own, what some consider to be a sort of "proto-rap."

Sisyphean box [SLYT]

The Broken Window Fallacy. [SLYT]
Obligatorily, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg explains:

[closes office door, places an empty glass on desk] Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene and boring. But if it is... [Pushes glass off table and crashed.] Destroyed! [robot cleaners move to clean broken glass] Look at all these little things. So busy now. Notice how each one is useful. What a lovely ballet that ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who'll be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny weeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain... of life.

Washing machine self destructs [SLYT]

High-speed railroading
America's system of rail freight is the world's best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it
NB: could; I would think that with proper implementation both passengers and freight should be able to peacefully coexist (despite the objections of big R.R. ;) that is all!

Flushing 32 glowsticks down the toilet. (via)

Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine.