The Rigged-Up Net

Watch out, Apple, another microcomputing pioneer from the 1970s is moving into the digital music business with a portable, hard drive-based music player.
Commodore challenges Apple digital music dominance

The health risks of passive smoking may have been substantially underestimated, according to the first large-scale study looking at tobacco-derived chemicals in the blood of non-smokers.
Passive smoking danger was underestimated

A colorful new $50 bill with touches of red, blue and yellow will start showing up in banks, cash registers and wallets this fall.
More colors to be added to $50 bill

An extract of prickly pear cactus could herald help for hangovers, quelling some of the wretched symptoms that strike the morning after a night out.
Cactus extract offers hangover help

Women on a high-protein diet, including those following the Atkins regime and some sportswomen, could be significantly reducing their chances of conceiving, a study involving animals suggests.
Atkins diet could lower female fertility

For the first time a woman has become pregnant after having thin slices of her ovaries removed and frozen during cancer treatment, and then re-implanted.
First pregnancy from frozen ovaries

So what’s a smart businessman to do to cash in while the market is hot for all things Trump?
If you’re The Donald, you relaunch Trump World, a slick, glossy, bimonthly vanity magazine that he has tested twice with clients in his hotels and condos.
It’s Trump’s ‘World’; we’re just living in it

It’s the road sign in every trucker’s dreams: “No cars allowed.” And as much as John Golka likes the idea of driving his 18-wheeler on highway lanes free of cars, he sees a problem with a proposal to create such lanes
Truckers leery of toll-lanes idea

Supply of flat-panel TV sets and computer monitors is finally catching up with demand — which could mean big price drops.
Prices of flat-panel TVs, monitors could drop more

Children who watch a lot of television produce less melatonin, new research suggests - the “sleep hormone” has been linked to timing of puberty.
Television watching may hasten puberty

Magnets are big-time materials, finding roles in products ranging from motors to medical-imaging systems. Now, a team of engineers’ improvement of a custom-made magnetic material increases the odds that refrigeration will soon join the roster of magnet-based technologies.
Cool Magnet: A little bit of iron gives magnetic refrigeration a boost

802.11i is officially done! w00t!
Wi-Fi security standard sealed and delivered

Using electrodes to create pockets of plasma in an aircraft’s exhaust plume could reduce noise during take off, say aerospace engineers at Ohio State University in Columbus, who recently applied to patent the idea.
Plasma pockets could reduce aircraft noise

Distributed denial-of-service attacks can paralyze even the most well-structured networks for days, costing millions of dollars in lost sales, freezing online services and crippling a company’s reputation.
How to defend against DDoS attacks
(Written by Paul Froutan)

So, everyone knows that I find both eating and cooking boring and otherwise a chore. Turns out, its not that I don’t enjoy eating, but I don’t really typically understand what I’m looking for when I’m tasting something… furthermore, cooking is boring becuase I was always told that it was an art… well… no [...]

By studying the genes of an unusually muscular child, scientists have identified a gene in humans which has also been used to create “mighty mice” in the lab.
“Mighty mouse” gene found in humans
You can see a picture of it here at yahoo news.

KEO is a satellite built to return to Earth 50 000 years from today. It shall bring back to our far away descendants every message that each and every one of us is invited to put on board
KEO space odyssey
Basically, its a high-tech time-capsule… go put your message in it via their website.

Get The FUD: in which we consider the implications of Microsoft’s laughably misnamed Get The Facts roadshow.
Halloween XI

“Sony has developed a new projector that can give a bright, unfaded picture without the need to eliminate ambient light. The secret is that they project onto a black screen instead of a white one. Their screen uses species filters so that white ambient light is absorbed, but the red, green, and blue light from [...]

Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year, a victim of the growing interest in shows emphasizing consumer electronics and specialist IT gear.
Organizer cancels Comdex 2004

Microsoft will sell a version of Windows for high-performance computing–a niche in which rival Linux is blossoming–with a first version planned for the second half of 2005.
Microsoft confirms supercomputing plans
From what I saw at LCI this year, this is going to probably be one of the toughest markets that MS is going to try [...]

So it looks like the dot-com bubble is officially over.. Saleforce’s IPO looks very “normal” from their chart today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=CRM&t=1d

While not actually teleporting matter from place to place as in Star Trek, physicists have now plucked a quantum property from one atom and transmitted it to another. That feat of quantum teleportation, reported independently by teams in Austria and the United States in the June 17 Nature, moves scientists nearer to building a class [...]

Full-size, four-door sedans are considered about as hip as leisure suits. But the new Chrysler 300 is surprising everyone, including Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche
Chrysler 300’s sales are as hot as its looks.

San Antonio-based Rackspace Managed Hosting on Tuesday announced a new application platform service level agreement for its Intensive Hosting customers.
Rackspace develops new application platform service agreement

“What we’re doing today that we weren’t doing two years ago is we’re running more and more highly critical applications that are Web facing, but they’re not Web sites,” says Graham Weston, CEO at the hosting firm Rackspace that saw revenue jump 54% in the past year. “Really managed hosting has grown up to where [...]

Rackspace gets super-sized line of credit from Comerica Bank
Rackspace, a privately held managed hosting provider, continues to show profitable and significant revenue growth across all three of its business lines (including ServerBeach and Intensive Hosting). While the company assembles its own servers for a large part of its customer base since it finds the practice [...]

Just as Dell started off in a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, Rackspace Managed Hosting began in a dorm room at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Rack and reign