Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

Perhaps not too far off base. In each case, an FBI informant is part of the group, difficult to say how much the informant is steering a group of relatively harmless bunglers into an FBI bust and media event. Classic case: the London liquid bombers. I've heard that most of the charges related to terrorism have been dropped and they're being held mainly on immigration violations.

The first link may pen your printer interface. Otherwise it's two pages with a weird little statistical gathering in the middle.

http://www.nj.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/columns-0/1181194104176640.xml

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/06/securitymatters_0614Not too

How a motherboard is made

This guy got a tour of a Taiwan electronics manufacturer. A surprising amount of work is still done by hand. They are capable of cranking out:

"1.5 million motherboards, 600,000 graphics cards, 300,000 desktop PCs, 20,000 notebooks, 30,000 servers, 20,000 mobile phones, and 100,000 PC chasses, all per month."

Per month.

http://www.extremetech.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=1670&a=209248&po=32,00.asp

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/16/1245250

Virtual hallucination device!

Wow. This would be interesting to experience. Its intent is to give people a glimpse into what life is like for a psychotic.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-06/st_insane

Man ticketed $2,000 for using biofuel

$1,000 from the state of North Carolina, and probably a corresponding amount from the Feds. I've always thought that vehicle tax should be based on the number of miles you drive: have a safety inspection every year, mileage is recorded, a tax bill is sent out. This is definitely going to be a problem for biofuel users bcause those gasoline/diesel tax dollars are very important to the state coffers and highway maintenance funds.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/599471.html

Inkjet printers wasting 20-64% of your ink

Basically there's usually plenty of ink left when it reports a cartridge is low. Epsons clocked in with the lowest amount remaining, 20%, a Kodak printer was apparently down only 36% when it reports itself low! These results need to be taken with a wee pinch of salt as Epson commissioned the study.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070618-study-inkjet-printers-are-filthy-lying-thieves.html

Movie trailer: 3:10 To Yuma!

Yay! More westerns! I firmly believe that Hollywood needs to make more good westerns. I haven't seen the original, so no idea if this follows the older story. Starring Russel Crowe, Allan Tudyk, Peter Fonda.

It looks pretty good to me, we'll see how they pull it off. I couldn't find a trailer on the Apple site, and either this Yahoo site doesn't stream well or I'm seeing how truly sucky my ISP in Cloudcroft is.

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809781728/video/3053783;_ylt=AueBxGtElmlbwYRzkpH_HuRfVXcA

I hate having missed Blog Like It's The End Of The World day!

Trust me to fall behind on my flist! I'm thinking that I may go ahead and write a zombie story anyway and post it on July 13, which is a Friday. Much more appropriate than June 13 IMESHO.

A musical tesla coil

Just watch the video.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/06/resonating-tesl.html

I'd love to see how this thing is wired to be able to modulate it.

The CIO of Homeland Security entertains Congress!

No, we've never been hacked! Look at my shiny pen... *flash!* The Zotob worm DID NOT circulate throughout the US VISIT system, halting processing of people at passport check points.

This guy is an utter tool. How someone with a Masters in Plant Science can be in charge of computer security for DHS is unfathomable. I wonder how much money he contributed to various campaigns?

The second part of the article is great: "Keith A. Rhodes, the director of the Center for Technology and Engineering at the Government Accountability Office, seemed to be waiting for this one:

Security issues are pervasive. As matter of fact, I realize that there was an earlier statement that our audit was a year old, but actually our audit started a year ago. As matter of fact, we curtailed our assessment since we kept getting more and more findings. If we continued to this day, we would still be finding problems. The problems are pervasive and systemic."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/breaches/index.html