VT's Little Cybertron

在 OpenOffice.org 的十岁生日的同时，OpenOffice.org Conference 2010 于当地时间 8月31日至9月三日在布达佩斯举行。

会议的主办方为 ODF Alliance Hungary 和 OOo 欧洲社区以及 Oracle。从会议日程看，此次会议的重头戏是OpenDocument Format (ODF)，一直可以称此次会议为 OpenDocument Conference。用与会者的话来说，这是OOo下一个十年发展的基石。更多详情请参见会议主页上的链接。此篇与会者的blog亦可参考。

2008 年的 OOo Conference 是在北京举行的，主办方为中科红旗。

P.S. ApacheCon 2010 将于11月3日至5日在亚特兰大举行，现在已经开始报名。 消息来源

分类: News, Office Suite | 永久链接 | 收藏到 del.icio.us | Email 给好友 | 1 评论 | 捐助本站

Readers offer their best tips for phones that keep searching for signal, a new iTunes mini-player, and cheap gaming mousepad solutions.

Don't like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, share it here, or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Switch in and Out of Airplane Mode to "Reset" Smartphone Network Searches

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano.

Envador lets us know a quick way to solve smartphone signal problems:

Sometimes the iPhone falls into "Searching..." mode for a cell signal and NEVER finds it, forcing you to restart your iPhone. If you don't want to wait for a reboot, you can also go into Settings and turn Airplane Mode on, then off. That's always fixed the problem for me.

Of course, if you really don't have reception, this isn't going to solve anything, but if you're driving down I-5 and KNOW you should be getting signal to make that quick call, this can be a real time saver.

Use iTunes 10's Album Art Viewer as an Alternate Mini-Player

Artblanc shares a hidden feature in the new version if iTunes:

In iTunes 10, you can control your tunes from the previously useless artwork windows, and after a few moments the window's chrome will disappear and only sports the artwork. Cool but kinda redundant, cause it duplicates the function of mini-player. But I love this better than the mini-player.

Use a 3-Ring Binder as a Gaming Mousepad

Bryan.a.kendall tells us about a good, cheaply available mouse surface:

I went to the store today to look for gaming mouse pads. I found one by rocket fish for $20, but it didn't have any special features or secrets, just a plain black mouse pad. The front of the package had a place where you could feel it, so I did, and it instantly reminded me of a matte 3 ring binder (the ones without the glossy, clear cover sheet protector on the front).

Knowing that this rocket fish surface was supposed to be good for laser mice, I grabbed a binder from my supplies, and taped one flap down to my desk so it wouldn't move. Using this for my mouse pad has been the best experience I have had with the mouse, and I plan on taking the cover off the binder so I can preeminently affix it to my desk (and use the other cover as a travel gaming mouse pad!). Just something that I found today, and wanted to share! Made my life easier while gaming and I hope other people looking for high mouse control can try this out!

Use Department Store Samples as Travel-Friendly Toiletries

Monsterblues shares how he saved space while vacationing:

On a recent weekend trip, instead of using the hotel's low quality soap and shampoo, my wife packed the samples of the good stuff she get's while shopping. The samples took practically no space to pack, and all fit in a Ziploc bag.

Mission Blue supporter Richard Rockefeller reports: Light winds, clear skies, a leisurely agenda and frequent laughter belie this group’s intensity of purpose. We are a collection of TEDsters, Bermudian government officials, scientists, media folk, and of course, Dr. Sylvia Earle, 2009 TED Prize Winner — spending a few days in the azure waters of the Sargasso Sea, the “golden floating rainforest of the sea,” as Sylvia has called it. On a mini version of April’s TED Mission Blue Voyage in the Galapagos, we are here to learn about the mysteries of the Sargasso Sea — another of Sylvia’s “hope spots” — and its critical value to life on earth. And we are here to help protect the entirety of it — more than a million square kilometers — if we can.

We motor out over the shallow — and healthy-appearing, I’m happy to report — reefs of the Bermuda Bank, through islands and strands of viscid, exotic smelling, light grey and pink coral spawn, which we photograph and collect in paper cups for closer examination. The spawn is often clumped together with lacy yellow Sargasso weed, or Sargassum, which spawns, in turn, endless puns about the ocean’s “sargasms,” etc.

Sargassum is named for the Sargasso Sea, a huge gyre created and bounded by the four great currents of the Atlantic Ocean. The weed often appears in patches as large as football fields, but the ones we encounter today are much smaller -– squash-court sized, at most — as the tail of Hurricane Danielle disrupted the big ones a few days ago. It looks pretty from the deck of our boat, truly golden against the deep ocean blue, but from this distance, not so very interesting after the first few patches. It is only when you get up close that the intricate structure of pea-sized air sacs on top, which keep it afloat, combined with a complex web work beneath, begin to suggest deeper secrets. ‬

Sargassum, and the enormous sea from which the name derives, comprise an extraordinary and unique ecosystem. It not only harbors many creatures found nowhere else, it serves as an essential breeding ground and nursery to many of the species — eels and bluefin tuna, among others — that grace the waters and shores of the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Snorkeling among the weed hints more clearly at this diversity, as baby flying fish skip away across the water’s surface and comma-sized items zip among the weedy strands, too fast for these aging eyes, at least, to follow. We get a clearer view when Chris Flook, Collector of Specimens and Bermuda Lionfish Project Coordinator at the Bermuda Aquarium Museum and Zoo, comes alongside our boat and gives us a close-up view of the astonishing variety found in only a few scoops of Sargassum: baby puffers, needlefish, triggerfish, bonito and the well-disguised and rather cuddly-looking but voracious Sargassum fish. Each baby Sargussum fish, or “critter” as Sylvia calls them, is a little fingernail-sized but completely recognizable version of the adults we know.

We need to protect this incredible resource from harvesting, overfishing, dumping and other human abuse and negligence, and we need to do it soon. Compared to other large, high-seas protection efforts, this one may be relatively easy.

And as such, we hope that the completion of this conservation effort will set an example for others to follow in short order.

On Monday here in Bermuda, we kicked off our Sargasso Sea expedition by celebrating Sylvia Earle’s 75th birthday. You don’t need to know Sylvia personally to know what she wished for as she blew out the candles on her cake (a flour-and-sugar diorama of the Sargasso Sea, of course) surrounded by friends and colleagues. The wish is one that TED seeks to grant in honoring her with the TED Prize, a wish big enough to change the world.

Join us in granting Sylvia’s wish through the Mission Blue campaign -– and do your part to save the seas.

These gorgeous photos come from Look Bermuda

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Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent.

When the super-Earth COROT-7b was discovered in 2009, it was heralded as the rockiest, most truly Earth-like exoplanet yet. But a new study suggests it’s more like a comet.

In a paper to be published in the journal Icarus, an international team of astronomers led by Alessandro Mura of the Italian Institute for Interplanetary Space Physics in Rome argue that, given the planet’s likely composition and distance from its star, COROT-7b probably loses its surface elements to space in a long, comet-like tail of charged particles.

COROT-7b is less than twice the size of Earth and about five times Earth’s mass, and orbits a sun-like star about 390 light-years away. Because COROT-7b’s density is similar to Earth’s, astronomers hailed it as the first rocky exoplanet discovered and one of the best candidates for hosting extraterrestrial life.

But the rocky world also sits almost 100 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun, and it orbits its star once every 0.85 Earth days. The temperature on the daylight side of the planet is a scorching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough for minerals on the rocky surface to break down and release charged particles into space, where they would be picked up and blown away by the stellar wind.

“We expect that the stellar radiation pressure and the plasma environment will cause the build-up of an elongated comet-like exosphere,” the authors write. Depending on what the planet is made of, and whether it was once the rocky core of a “super-Neptune” as some have suggested, the tail could be composed of elements like sodium, oxygen, magnesium or silicon oxide.

The researchers compare this vision of COROT-7b with Mercury, which has a similarly antagonistic relationship with the sun and also leaks charged particles in a long tail.

“The planet appears to be more like a ’super-Mercury’ under much extremer environmental conditions,” the researchers write.

The team suggests that a tail composed of sodium or calcium could theoretically be detected on COROT-7b from ground-based telescopes. Although detecting such a tail would probably eliminate COROT-7b as a candidate habitable world, “this project would be the very first attempt to learn something of the mineralogy of a rocky planet orbiting another star.”

Image: 1) Artist’s impression of COROT-7b, ESO/L. Calcada. 2) Model of COROT-7b’s proposed sodium tail, assuming the planet is 4000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface. A. Mura et al, Icarus 2010. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.015

See Also:

• Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet
• At Last! First Real Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet
• Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet ‘Holy Grail’
• Mercury Flyby Maps New Territory
• This Just in: Mercury More Exciting Than Mars

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00usb

# Support Wpa_Supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y

# Support Native WpaSupplicant for Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y

make -C tools
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/tools'
gcc -g bin2h.c -o bin2h
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/tools'
/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/tools/bin2h
cp -f os/linux/Makefile.6 /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/Makefile
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.32-24-generic-pae/build SUBDIRS=/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-24-generic-pae'
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/crypt_md5.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/crypt_sha2.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/crypt_hmac.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/crypt_aes.o
...
....
..

  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/rtusb_io.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/rtusb_bulk.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/rtusb_data.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/cmm_data_usb.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/ee_prom.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/rtmp_mcu.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../common/rtusb_dev_id.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../os/linux/rt_usb.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../os/linux/rt_usb_util.o
  CC [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/../../os/linux/usb_main_dev.o
  LD [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/rt2870sta.o
  Building modules, stage 2.
  MODPOST 1 modules
  CC      /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/rt2870sta.mod.o
  LD [M]  /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux/rt2870sta.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-24-generic-pae'

make -C /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux -f Makefile.6 install
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux'
rm -rf /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA
mkdir /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA
cp /tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/RT2870STA.dat /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/.
install -d /lib/modules/2.6.32-24-generic-pae/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
install -m 644 -c rt2870sta.ko /lib/modules/2.6.32-24-generic-pae/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
/sbin/depmod -a 2.6.32-24-generic-pae
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1/os/linux'

Bus 002 Device 007: ID 0411:00e8 MelCo., Inc. Buffalo WLI-UC-G300N Wireless LAN Adapter
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 05ac:0220 Apple, Inc. Aluminum Keyboard (ANSI)
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 05ac:1006 Apple, Inc. Hub in Aluminum Keyboard
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 413c:8160 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 413c:8162 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 413c:8161 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046B1 USB 2.0 Hub (part of BCM2046 Bluetooth)
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:5800 Broadcom Corp. BCM5880 Secure Applications Processor
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

SSID=nixcraft

CountryCode=IN

AuthMode=WPA2
EncrypType=TKIP
WPAPSK=YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE

ra0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:73:bc:e4:6e
          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:73ff:febc:e46e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:5157 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:206 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1093810 (1.0 MB)  TX bytes:16772 (16.7 KB)

ra0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:73:bc:e4:6e
          inet addr:192.168.1.103  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:73ff:febc:e46e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:6711 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:271 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1420879 (1.4 MB)  TX bytes:22312 (22.3 KB)

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Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent.

[Harvey] wrote in to share the Spindicator with us. The spindicator is a hard drive activity activity indicator built in a ring to resemble a dekatron. Using the pulses from the hard drive activity LED, [Harvey] tested several different methods of interpreting that data for display. The final version, negative edge triggered with a lowpass filter can be seen after the break.  It is nice and smooth and vaguely reminiscent of many programs’ loading screens.

He has pictures and tons of detail on the project including videos of previous versions that acted quite erratically.

Netflix lets its staff take as many vacation days as they want, and they can take them whenever they want, and according to news site The Telegraph, it works. Now we're wondering: How much vacation time do you get every year?

With a long weekend ahead here in the States, everybody's gearing up for a little government-sanctioned R&R. But how about the rest of the year, when it's not a government holiday?

Regardless of how many vacation days you get, it's also worth keeping in mind that you still need to, you know, use them—something Americans are particularly bad at doing. Photo by biker germany.

The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.

“A glinting planet looks different from a non-glinting planet, and it’s detectable with current technology,” said Tyler Robinson, a graduate student at the University of Washington and lead author of a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is one step toward proving there’s liquid water at the surface of an extrasolar planet.”

The proposed technique for finding wet worlds takes advantage of the same effect that makes sunsets on the Pacific coast so spectacular. The idea was suggested by Carl Sagan in 1993, and has been used to confirm the presence of liquid lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan.

“The oceans do a really good job of reflecting light like a mirror,” Robinson said. “Especially when you have the sun really low on the horizon, most of the sunlight comes reflected off of the water towards you. The same thing happens on the scale of a planet.”

Robinson and his colleagues showed that when a planet appears crescent-shaped to an Earthly observer, starlight reflecting off oceans can make the planet appear up to twice as bright as a planet with no oceans. They also showed that the sparkle of starlight off oceans looks different from light scattered through clouds.

Most other proposed techniques for finding water on an extrasolar planet rely on taking its spectrum, or detailed measurements of the planet’s atmosphere, and looking for the chemical fingerprint of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. But this strategy would show only that the planet hosts water vapor, not liquid oceans, and the technology is still a long way off.

“To get a good spectrum would require a big telescope that is still 10 or 20 years away from being designed or launched,” said exoplanet expert Darren Williams of Penn State University, who has also studied ways to search for exo-oceans but was not involved in the new work. “That’s really becoming a long-range, futuristic sort of thing.”

Robinson and his colleagues proved that the glint effect could be observable with the telescope touted as the successor to Hubble: the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2014. If the telescope is accompanied by a shield to block starlight, as suggested in the New Worlds Observer mission concept, it will be sensitive to the light glinting off extrasolar oceans.

To test whether the glint would be visible to the new space telescope, Robinson imagined he was an alien observer looking back at Earth. He used data from weather satellites and NASA’s EPOXI mission to build a computer model of what Earth would look like to a distant observer, including weather patterns, seasonal changes and wind speeds over the oceans that would influence the height of waves.

The model “does explain what we can observe on our own planet from other spacecraft in the solar system, so you can trust the model that they’re using to do these calculations,” Williams said.

Unfortunately, even the James Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to take sharp enough images of exoplanets to tell whether the planet is in a crescent phase, much less directly see a glint. The telescope will just see a dot of light getting brighter and dimmer as it circles its star.

“We have to look for evidence of this glint when we just have this pale, tiny speck of light on our camera,” Robinson said.

So Robinson and colleagues added up all the light reflected by the model Earth to see if the glint would light up the whole planet enough to be seen from space. They found that Earth in the crescent phase would be twice as bright with a glint as without it. “That’s significant,” Robinson said. “A factor of two is a really big deal.”

The researchers also found that the glint effect is strongest in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what the human eye can see. These wavelengths of light are not as badly scattered as they pass through a planet’s atmosphere. Conveniently, they are also the wavelengths that the new space telescope will be most attuned to.

“The James Webb Space Telescope is really well suited to do this,” Robinson said.

Looking for the glint would not be the first line of investigation, however. Rather, Robinson imagines the technique could confirm that a good exo-Earth candidate, a plant that is about Earth’s size planet and lies the right distance from its star to support liquid water, actually does have oceans at its surface.

“We would first worry about whether the planet is even remotely Earthlike before looking for the glint,” he said.

“What’s nice about this result here is that we have a chance of doing interesting things with Earthlike planets with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is basically sitting on the hangar waiting to be launched into space,” commented Williams. “We can do that in our research lifetimes. That’s the most exciting thing about this.”

Image: 1) Astrophysical Journal Letters/Tyler Robinson. Left: NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. Right: Earth and Moon Viewer. 2) NASA

See Also:

• The New Exoplanetology: ‘I Learned It by Watching You, Earth
• Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door
• Kepler Shows Exoplanet Is Unlike Anything in Our Solar System
• Photo: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan
• The Lagoons of Titan: Oily Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Human growth has strained the Earth’s resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine “planetary boundaries” that can guide us in protecting our planet’s many overlapping ecosystems. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:11)

Watch Johan Rockstrom’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

之前我们曾报道过 Kontact 和 Akonadi 合并 的消息，这一说法是有欠准确的。确切的说，是 Kontact 移植到 Akonadi 框架上来，以便应用程序之间通过在线服务实现同步。在 Kontact 4.4 初发布时，KAddressBook 就开始和 Akonadi 整合。现在 KDE PIM 开发组发出了帮助新版 Kontact 测试的邀请（下载），这一版本的 Kontact 的大部分组件都已经是 Akonadi 版了，包括新的 Email 客户端 KMail2。为了保证今年内正式发布，开发者极其需要社区的反馈。请试用者积极向 bugs.kde.org 汇报bug。

这一测试版——KDE PIM Beta3——目前还不能用于生产，非测试或尝鲜者建议使用随 KDE Applications 4.4 (最后一版为 4.4.5) 发行的稳定版 KDE PIM。本测试版更多的细节、 Akonadi 的简介、以及关于如何迁移到或迁移出 Akonadi 版 Kontact 的方案，请参见这篇 blog 和  Akonadi 项目页面。     消息来源

分类: Apps, Email Client, News | 永久链接 | 收藏到 del.icio.us | Email 给好友 | 无评论 | 捐助本站

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Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent.

If you need to edit some video away from your home, free web-based video editor JayCut will likely get your project going, whether you need simple cutting and pasting or text, transitions, and impromptu audio recording.

Click on the image for a closer look.

JayCut is a remarkably full-featured video editor for the web, comparable to something like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker (as opposed to the more advanced Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut). You have two tracks, to which you can upload and add video clips, audio, and add text and transitions. You can also record audio straight from the webapp with your microphone, as well as video from a webcam. After you're done, you can publish your video to YouTube or export it to your computer as H.264 Flash video, H.264 MPEG-4, or an Xvid AVI.

There are definitely a few quirks that threw me off at first—for example, transitions need to be placed between videos on separate tracks overlapping one another, and you can only preview your movie from the beginning instead of placing the playhead somewhere—but overall, it's pretty incredible for something that runs in your browser. If you want to save projects and come back to them later, you need to create a free account, but for one-shot video edits you just need to fire up the demo. Also note that I had some weird issues in Firefox trying to export my video—it wouldn't let me input my information—so you might want to run a quick test in your browser of choice before editing a 3-hour masterpiece. Hit the link to check it out.

[Dave] over at the EEVblog did a review of the kindle 3 recently, but never got to the good stuff, the guts.  He is now rectifying this with a full video dissection of the eReader. Full of details on how to open it up as well as specifics on the internals, this is a fun video to watch. One thing that caught our attention was the RFID tag on the inside of the case.  It is probably for inventory tracking, but we can’t help but have a few tinfoil hat type thoughts. You can watch the video after the break.

[thanks Julius]

Hurricane Earl is waning as it moves northward up the east coast of the United States. Some of the first researchers to notice the weakening had front row seats, watching the eye of the hurricane via drone flights.

In addition to the usual cadre of satellites, NASA is using a small fleet of unmanned aircraft into, over and around the hurricane as it tracks north from the Caribbean. While flying into a hurricane is nothing new, Earl is the first hurricane that NASA has observed using their unmanned Global Hawk observation aircraft (pictured above).

The aircraft are giving researchers a 3-D view of the temperature, waver vapor and cloud liquid water in the hurricane. Using a High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer, or HAMSR in official NASA acronymese, the Global Hawk is able to look down into the eye of the storm to the sea surface and compare different layers in relatively high resolution and in real time.

The unmanned aircraft left the Dryden Flight Research Center in California earlier in the week and spent all day Thursday flying over Earl at an altitude of about 63,000 feet. Along with HAMSR, the Global Hawk also carries an HD camera, giving hurricane scientists new capabilities to watch the storm strengthen or degrade in real time.

In addition to the Global Hawk which flew over the top of the hurricane, a NASA DC-8 is flying researchers through the eye of the hurricane and the high flying WB-57 is also participating in the research flights. NASA used images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station as their orbit took them over the storm as well.

Temperatures across the eye of hurricane Earl using HAMSR aboard the unmanned Global Hawk (pink crosses mark lightning)

The observations and measurements are part of the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Process experiment NASA is conducting during the 2010 hurricane season. New instruments such as HAMSR, as well as a weather radar aboard the DC-8 capable of creating 3-D images of precipitation from inside the hurricane are helping researchers gain a better understanding of the rapidly changing nature of hurricanes.

Hurricane Earl from the International Space Station taken the morning of Sept. 3

High resolution maps and images isn’t the only information available to the public. Hurricane researchers inside the DC-8 were also sending out tweets as they flew into and out of the hurricane. One of the tweets sent out Thursday mentioned the degradation of the eye wall at the center of Earl, an early sign of a weakening hurricane.

NASA plans to continue using the aircraft through the end of the month as more hurricanes line up in the Atlantic.

Images: NASA

原作者：
来源Than Shwe Seen Following in Ne Win\'s Footsteps
译者blackgoat-bj

 丹瑞欲重走奈温之路

据报道，昨天丹瑞辞去了缅甸军队最高领导人的职务，但是缅甸国内很少有人认为这一举动是与过去的彻底决裂。这更像是一个花招，让人想起前独裁者奈温的伎俩。

 虽然目前仍不确定丹瑞是否确实向平民化迈出大步过渡，大部分资深政治观察家说这个消息并不令人震惊。根据官方消息和媒体报道，星期五丹瑞辞去了军事力量总司令的职务，但是仍然是执政的国家和平和发展委员会的首脑。

国家控制的媒体没有提到高层的变动，但是有消息来源确认了军政府的三号和四号成员，瑞曼中将（Lt-Gen Shwe Mann）和丁昂敏乌中将（ Lt-Gen Tin Aung Myint Oo）都辞去了军队的职位，尽管丹瑞和他的副手貌埃（Maung Aye）还没有做出相似的举动。

 缅甸政坛普遍认为这标志着丹瑞决定重走另一个军队强人的老路，以脱掉军装的办法使自己的权力苟延残喘。

 民主党（缅甸）的主席杜维（Thu Wai） “没有任何迹象表明丹瑞会放弃权力。我认为他将继续以非军人身份统治缅甸，就像奈温那样。” 缅甸民主党是一个以仰光为主要活动基地的反对党，该党将参加今年11月举行的大选角逐。

 在通过政变从民选政府手中夺取权力12年后的1974年，奈温将军从军队退休，宣布自己成为缅甸联邦社会主义共和国的总统。虽然后来放弃了总统的职位，但直到1988年辞职他一直掌握着最高权力。

 据推测丹瑞也将成为缅甸联邦共和国——这是缅甸这次选举后的正式国号——的非军人总统，以保证其亲信下属，不管是军队中的还是民选政府里的，仍然执掌国家权力。

 作为总统，他还是国防与安全委员会（NDSC）的首脑。新宪法创立的这个委员会将在选举后生效，作为最有势力的实体操控执行权力。处于监禁中的民主领袖昂山素季最近说未来的民选政府无法对抗拥有广泛权力的总统。

“代表人民的议会“委员会秘书长埃塔昂（Aye Thar Aung）说： “我认为丹瑞眼盯着NDSC的领导权。”—— “代表人民的议会“委员会是在1990年举行的缅甸最后一次选举中赢得席次的政治团体和民族团体的联合组织。

埃塔昂把最近对的军队辞职热的报道斥为毫无意义——即使这些辞职行为都是真的。他说：”这些军队的人变动不会为我国创造任何有利条件。“

但是全国民主联盟的高级干部温丁（Win Tin）说，对丹瑞辞去军职zheyi，时间检验会让他露馅。——全国民主联盟是昂山素季领导的政党，对这次选举进行了抵制。

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Five Filters featured article: "Peace Envoy" Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent.

iOS 4.0 was so slow on our 3G, we promptly downgraded after updating. Earlier this week, Apple announced, among other things, that iOS 4.1 fixed performance on the iPhone 3G. We put their claim to the test.

In the video above, the iPhone 3G battles itself in an epic speed test to find out if Apple's claims are true: Is iOS 4.1 faster than 4.0, or is it just a wash?

Music by Julian Wass

Note: This is far from a scientific examination of both versions of iOS 4. We only had one iPhone 3G to work with and couldn't run through the trials at the exact same time. As a result, some of the actions are not perfect, but they nonetheless demonstrate some performance differences between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.1.

Double note: To clarify, iOS 4.1 isn't yet available through iTunes; what you see, however, is the final 4.1 release running on our iPhone 3G.

The video demonstrates the results, but here they are in all their glory:

• Messages: iOS 4.1 Wins (By a Little)
• Maps: iOS 4.1 Wins (By a Lot)
• Photos: iOS 4.1 Wins (Just Barely)
• Safari: iOS 4.1 Wins (Just Barely)

While the speed advantages ranged from marginal to significant, iOS 4.1 clearly outperformed iOS 4.0. It's still significantly slower performance than you'll get from a 3GS or iPhone 4, and we're still not sure it's a big enough improvement that 3G owners will want to ditch iOS 3. The most obvious difference was UI responsiveness. The UI didn't get stuck nearly as much on an interface element or when trying to enter text. If you are set on using iOS 4, the upgrade is worthwhile for that alone.

The Smithsonian National Zoo has just launched a live webcam of the zoo’s four new baby African lion cubs and their mother. The cubs were born during the late night and early morning of Aug. 30 and 31 and will remain indoors until late fall.

The litter is the first for 5-year-old mother lion Shera, and the first surviving litter for 4-year-old male Luke. The new batch of cubs is part of an effort to develop a lion pride at the zoo, which has involved many years of planning.

Luke, Shera and her 6-year-old sister Nababiep started spending almost all their time in the yard together as a group six months ago. Shera and Luke bred in the second week of May. Over the past few weeks, the keepers started separating Shera to give her privacy and emulate the natural process.

In the wild, lions may wait up to six weeks before introducing their cubs to the rest of the pride.

Nababiep gave birth to a single cub in May, but it died when a straw seed got lodged in the lung, causing pneumonia.

“Since the unfortunate death of Naba’s cub, we’ve investigated various alternative bedding options,” lion-and-tiger-keeper Rebecca Stites said in a press release Sept. 3. “The use of bedding is imperative as it protects the cubs from trauma during the first fragile weeks of their lives. We’ve provided Shera and her cubs with shavings and soft hay with as few seed as possible.”

Keepers suspect that Nababiep is pregnant again.

The formation of prides makes lions unique among the great cats, many of which are solitary animals. In the wild, African lions are threatened by hunting, disease and habitat loss.

Image: Smithsonian National Zoo

See Also:

• Gallery: Robotic Sub Installs Deep-Sea Webcam
• Space Station Webcam Goes Live
• California Sea Otters Mysteriously Declining Despite Protection
• Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail
• DNA Testing Finds Endangered Whale Meat in Restaurants
• Oil Disaster Shows Need for Endangered Species Act Overhaul

A few of this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter.

jasonfried: The reason you can’t get it done in one day/week/month is because you’re making it take two days/weeks/months.

rjs: For fans of Christopher Alexander’s recent books, Nikos Salingaros’ “A Theory of Architecture” is a must read http://amzn.to/cGOdBg

longstride: Calling in GMail is pretty cool. Add it as one your Google Voice lines and you get inbound calls, too.

mattlinderman: Sparklines:Graphic designers = Windmills:Don Quixote

dhh: The Ruby future goes through 1.9.2 and you come along. It’s never been easier to work with multiple versions w/ RVM: http://bit.ly/15h0ax

sstephenson: I wish more Mac utilities used prefpanes instead of menu bar icons.

Whether you're trying to increase your security at an internet café, tunnel your way to your home computer from your cubicle, or leave no trace on your friend's borrowed computer, a flash drive turned portable privacy toolkit is invaluable.

Photo by Dave Boyer.

Flash drives are enormously handy for carting around files, taking portable applications with you, and serving as a mobile computing base when you're away from home. They're also excellent tools for increasing your privacy when you're away from your home computer. Below I'll point you toward methods of setting up secure connections with SSH and round up a few of your best options for SSH-friendly applications; then we'll look into encrypting data, permanently erasing data, and otherwise covering your tracks on any machine you're using.

Before we begin, a big fat disclaimer is in order. Working from a flash drive privacy toolkit, in most situations, is rife with compromises. There is no way to, for example, set up a totally bulletproof system for browsing privately and anonymously from work. You can dodge IT, you can encrypt and tunnel, you can worm your way around security measures, and you might even be able to do it without getting caught. Doing so is grounds for termination at many company, however, and the IT admins frown heavily on users who punch holes in the firewall. If you absolutely must alleviate the boredom of your workday by streaming music from your home PC or browsing "off record" from your office, your best bet is to bring a netbook and tether it to your cellphone so all your activity occurs completely off the company networks and remains undetectable by your corporate overlords.

All of that said, the following tricks and applications push the limits of what the humble flash drive and non-administrative rights can do. We know you'll find more than a few tricks that will make life from your flash drive toolkit more secure and your computer activities more private.

Down the Rabbit Hole We Go: Everything via SSH

Whether you're trying to get around a pesky firewall or you're trying to secure your laptop's wireless connection against sniffing at the local coffee shop, Secure Shell (SSH) tunneling is your friend. If you're unfamiliar with SSH tunneling, it's largely what it sounds like: A secure "tunnel" is formed from the client machine (the remote terminal you're working at) to the host machine (your server) and everything that passes through that tunnel is hush-hush to observers on the surrounding network. Observers with proper access to the network can see the tunnel, they can see that data is being transferred, but they can't get at the contents. Whether you're streaming high quality audio, high quality video, or just performing a remote disk backup, the specifics of your activity remains unknown to anyone watching the transfer. Photo by vkramer.

We're not going to rehash setting up a personal SSH server and how to encrypt your web browsing session with an SSH SOCKS proxy in this guide because we have two excellent prior guides on the topic. Check out how to set up a personal, home SSH server to get started, then take a stab at encrypting your web browsing session with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Those two guides will get your home server setup and show you the basics of setting up Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy server. That knowledge will come in handy for configuring the proxy servers in some of the later apps we'll be looking at.

Once you have a server setup, you'll need some way to connect into it remotely. Our prior guide discusses clients, but we're going to highlight some flash-drive-friendly examples here.

KiTTY: Kitty is a feature-packed branch of the well-known PuTTY line of SSH clients. It's portable, supports drag-and-drop file transfer using SCP, and supports scripting. PortaPuTTY was our previously recommended portable PuTTY client of choice, but KiTTY supercedes it with more features and easier setup.



Web Browsers: Once you have your SSH tunnel set up, picking your portable browser is largely a matter of preference. Always, always, configure your portable browser ahead of time so that things are running smoothly by the time you need to securely browse from your remote location. As we noted in our guide to setting up encrypted web browsing sessions, you must configure your web browser to send DNS requests to your proxy server to bypass the local DNS server. Not only does sending DNS requests to the DNS server used by the local machine often lead to errors that render your proxy-driven-browsing impossible to use, but it defeats the whole purpose of setting up a SSH tunnel if you're broadcasting all your DNS requests to the local host and network. You can find portable versions of your favorite web browsers here: Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

Thunderbird: If you conduct all your email and contact management through a web-based email service like Gmail, then your browser+SOCKS proxy setup takes care of your email needs. If you require a desktop client to access your email, however, you'll need a proxy-friendly client on your flash drive. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open-source and feature-rich email client you can take with you, set to use your proxy server, and enjoy robust and secure email management away from home. You can read more about Thunderbird in our previous guides to making Thunderbird your ultimate messaging hub and upgrading it with extensions.


Pidgin: Pidgin is a lightweight, open-source, and proxy-friendly IM client. At this point you've already set up your SSH proxy, so to IM with a little extra privacy, you can hook any proxy-friendly application into it—including Pidgin. Even if Pidgin isn't your first choice for a desktop IM client, it supports 15 chat protocols, packs light on your flash drive, and is easy to set up for proxy routing and encrypted chat.

Selecting Additional Communication Apps: Regardless of what kind of applications you're adding to your flash drive tool kit, if they need to communicate with the outside world, they need to be proxy-friendly. If you can't configure the application you need to use your proxy then you'll have to accept that its transmissions will be occurring outside your secure tunnel. Thankfully SOCKS proxies are an old—but dependable!—and incorporated in many applications.

Encrypt, Erase, and Cover Your Tracks

Encyption on portable media is tricky. The most comprehensive encryption tools require administrative access, which is rare when you're using a computer at work or away from home. This rules out powerful tools like Truecrypt out for inclusion in a portable toolkit—yes, Truecrypt has a traveler-mode, but it's a poor compromise given what Truecrypt can do with full administrative powers. With the restrictions of portable drives and non-administrator privileges in mind, we've put together a grouping of applications that are still functional even if you're sitting on a guest account. (If you're still interested, here's how to encrypt your thumb drive with Truecrypt—you'll just require admin access to get to the data, which most of the time isn't an option.)

FreeOTFE Explorer: FreeOTFE (on-the-fly-encryption) Explorer is a free and portable application that allows you to create encrypted containers with on-the-fly-encryption for easy drag and drop file management. It has limitations—for example, you can't run portable applications from within the container without extracting them first—but it offers a huge number of encryption techniques and it's a great way to keep your data locked up tight until you need it.


LockNote: If you're primarily concerned with locking down notes and not as concerned with running an encrypted volume, LockNote is a lightweight and open-source text-encryption tool. LockNote is great because the application and the text are bundled together—negating the need to run the app and mount an encrypted file—just click on the portable app, enter your password, and work on your notes.


KeePass: KeePass is one of the most popular password managers around. Choosing strong passwords is critical to good security and having a solid keyring tool like KeePass makes it all the easier to generate, store, and use long and complex passwords. If you're not using some sort of password manager you're really missing out on some great features and increased security. Check out eight great KeePass plugins here to supercharge your password keyring. On the flip side, if most of your password management is web-related, you can also install LastPass with your portable, SSH-proxied browser for one of our other favorite password-management solutions.


Neo's SafeKeys: Neo's SafeKeys is a secure on-screen keyboard that provides protection against hardware and software key loggers, including protection against screen logging, key logging, clipboard logging, and more. You can read about the technical aspects of how SafeKeys protects you in their extensive FAQ file here. Ideally you'll never be on a machine where you feel the need to resort to spy-vs-spy virtual keyboard tools, but it's lightweight and worth adding to your toolkit if you need it.


Eraser: Encryption is great, secure browsing is awesome, but sometimes you just need to nuke a file or two to ensure anyone that comes after you won't be snooping around in them. Eraser Portable is the portable version of the popular Eraser tool. Eraser is extremely simple to use, but don't let the simple interface fool you; its ease of use conceals a comprehensive overwrite tool that ensures nary a trace nor write-cached version of your file remains when the erasure is completed.

原作者：
来源3 Ways It\'s All in a Name | Money Jokes | Reader\'s Digest
译者jack1tony

如果你的名字刻在建筑物上，你是个有钱人；如果你的名字摆在你的桌上，你是个中产阶级；如果你的名字印在你的T恤上，你是个穷人。

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Still hotter than you'd like this late in the summer? We're serving out scoops of your favorite productivity ice cream in this week's open thread.

Same drill as always, open-threaders: You can chat and ask questions with your fellow readers all week long at the #openthread hashtag page, but our weekly open thread post is your opportunity to reach the most people. Ask questions, offer advice, discuss productivity tips, or just chat about whatever's on your mind. You'll need a commenter account to participate, then you're ready to roll.

One extra reminder this week: If you're not quite satisfied with the interaction in the weekly open thread or in #tips, remember that you can also share your expertise every day on our Expert Pages. Happy Friday! Photo by glacial23.

Playlist from MixTape.me.

原作者：
来源The Irish Brigade — Historycom Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts
译者daiwq

More than 150,000 Irishmen, most of whom were recent immigrants and many of whom were not yet U.S. citizens, joined the Union Army during the Civil War. Some joined out of loyalty to their new home. Others hoped that such a conspicuous display of patriotism might put a stop to anti-Irish discrimination. As the war dragged on and Irish casualties mounted, however, their sympathy for the Union cause began to flag, and by the end of the war many had abandoned the Northern cause altogether. But between 1861 and 1863, the soldiers who fought in the all-Irish units that made up the “Irish Brigade” were known for their courage, ferocity and toughness in battle.

超过15万爱尔兰人在南北战争时期加入联邦军，大部分是新移民，还有不少尚未成为美国公民。其中一些人（参战）是出于对他们新家的忠诚，另一些则希望这一不言而喻的爱国行为有助于平息对爱尔兰人的歧视。然而，随着战事的绵延和爱尔兰人伤亡的增加，他们对联邦事业的同情心开始衰退，战争末期，许多人完全脱离了北军。但是，在1861年至1863年间，全部由爱尔兰士兵组建的“爱尔兰旅”亦因其作战时的勇猛强韧而闻名于世。

The Irish Brigade

爱尔兰旅

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, thousands of Irish and Irish-American New Yorkers enlisted in the Union Army. Some joined ordinary—that is, non-Irish—regiments, but others formed three all-Irish voluntary infantries: the 63rd New York Infantry Regiment, organized on Staten Island, and the 69th and 88th New York Infantry Regiments, organized in the Bronx. These units would form the core of what would come to be called the Irish Brigade.

1861年内战爆发时，成千上万的爱尔兰人与爱尔兰裔的纽约人应征参加联邦军。其中一些人加入了一般兵团——即原本没有爱尔兰人的部队，不过其他人组成了三支纯由爱尔兰人构成的志愿步兵团：在斯塔顿岛（Staten Island）编成的纽约第63步兵团以及在布鲁克斯（Bronx）编成的纽约第69及第88步兵团。这三支部队形成了将来被称作“爱尔兰旅”兵团的核心力量。

Ethnic units were a way for the Union Army to help win Irish support for its cause. This support was not guaranteed: Though most Irish immigrants lived in the North, they were sympathetic to (as they saw it) the Confederacy’s struggle for independence from an overbearing government—it reminded them of their fight to be free of the British. Also, many Irish and Irish Americans were not against slavery. On the contrary, they favored a system that kept blacks out of the paid labor market and away from their jobs. As a result, Union officials had to promise many things in addition to ethnic regiments—enlistment bonuses, extra rations, state subsidies for soldiers’ families, Catholic chaplains—in order to assure that the North’s largest immigrant group would be fighting with them and not against them.

组建单一民族的部队是联邦军用来赢得爱尔兰人对其事业支持的一种方式。这种支持并非牢不可破：虽然大部分爱尔兰移民居住在北部，但是他们对邦联从一个专横的政府手中争取独立这一点颇具同情（从爱尔兰移民的视角来看即如此）——这使得他们联想起自己为从英格兰独立而奋斗的经历。同样地，许多爱尔兰人和爱尔兰裔美国人并不反对奴隶制度。相反，他们更赞成一个能将黑人自有偿的劳动力市场及自己的工作岗位中排除出去的制度体系。因此，联邦官员不得不在编成单民族兵团之外许下重诺——入伍奖金、额外的给养、提供给士兵家属的国家津贴、天主教随军牧师——以此来保证这个北部州郡最大的移民群体会为联邦而不是针对联邦作战。

In February 1862, an Army captain named Thomas Francis Meagher became the Brigadier General of the nascent Irish Brigade. Meagher was born in Ireland, where he had been active in the “Young Ireland” nationalist movement and exiled as a result to the British Penal Colony in Tasmania, Australia. He escaped from Australia in 1853 and came to the United States, where he became a well-known orator and activist on behalf of the Irish nationalist cause. He joined the Army early in 1861. Meagher was ambitious, and he knew that if he could raise an all-Irish infantry brigade, Union Army officials would have to make him its commander. He also hoped that an Irish Brigade in the U.S. would draw attention to the nationalist cause at home.

1862年2月，陆军上尉托马斯·弗朗西斯·米格尔（Thomas Francis Meagher）成为爱尔兰旅（初期）的准将。米格尔在爱尔兰出生，在民族运动“青年爱尔兰”（Young Ireland）中表现活跃，因此被放逐至英国的罪犯流放地澳大利亚塔斯马尼亚。他于1853年从澳大利亚逃亡，前往美国，在这里他成为了爱尔兰民族主义的鼓吹者和实干家。1861年初米格尔加入陆军，他野心勃勃，并且明了如果他能够组建一支纯爱尔兰人的军队，联邦陆军将不得不使自己成为指挥官。他也希冀美国的爱尔兰军团能够吸引人们对家乡民族主义运动的关注。

In the spring of 1862, Union Army officials added a non-Irish regiment, the 29th Massachusetts, to the Irish Brigade in order to beef up its numbers before the Peninsula Campaign for the capture of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. In October, another Irish regiment, the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment from Philadelphia, joined the brigade in time for the battle at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The next month, officials swapped the non-Irish 29th Massachusetts Regiment for the Irish 28th Massachusetts.

1862年春季，联邦军部向爱尔兰旅增加了一个非爱尔兰团——马萨诸塞第29步兵团，意在目的为攻取邦联首府弗吉尼亚里士满的半岛战役（Peninsula Campaign）发动前为爱尔兰旅补充兵力。10月，另一个爱尔兰团——来自费城的宾夕法尼亚第116步兵团——及时加入了爱尔兰旅，参加了弗吉尼亚州哈珀斯渡口的战斗。次月，联邦军部将非爱尔兰人组建的马萨诸塞第29步兵团与由爱尔兰人构成的马萨诸塞第28步兵团做了交换。

“Fearless Sons of Erin”

“爱尔兰无畏之子”

Thanks to their toughness and bravery, the five-regiment Irish Brigade led the Union charge in many of the Army of the Potomac’s major battles. This meant that they suffered disproportionate numbers of casualties. At the Battle of Antietam, in September 1862, about 60 percent of the soldiers in the 63rd and 69th New York regiments, almost 600 men in all, were killed in battle. A few months later, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, 545 of the brigade’s 1,200 men were killed or wounded. “Irish blood and Irish bones cover that terrible field today,” wrote one soldier. “We are slaughtered like sheep.”

由于强韧和勇猛，五个团编成的爱尔兰旅在波特马克兵团（Army of the Potomac）的大部分主要战斗中都冲锋在前。这意味着他们承受了大量伤亡。1862年9月进行的安提耶坦战役中，纽约第63和69步兵团减员60%，大约600人在这场战役中战死。数月后，在弗雷德里克斯堡战役中，爱尔兰旅的1200名士兵共计伤亡545人。“爱尔兰人的血与骨今天覆满了惨烈的战场，”一名士兵写道，“我们仿佛被屠杀的羔羊一般。”

（安提耶坦战役中北军人数占优，而且事先获知了李的战略，但由于指挥官麦克莱伦未选择集中兵力一点突破，而是分兵“添油”，给了李死战喘息的机会，最后双方伤亡近似，都宣称自己获胜，南军撤出马里兰州，而北军丧失了这次围歼李的良机——译注）

In July 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, about 320 of the Irish Brigade’s remaining 530 soldiers were killed. (There is a monument to the Irish Brigade on the battlefield there: a green malachite Celtic cross with a trefoil, an Irish harp and the numbers of the three New York Irish regiments rendered in bronze on its front. At the cross’s feet lies a statue of an Irish wolfhound, a symbol of steadfastness and honor.)

1863年7月的葛底斯堡战役中，爱尔兰旅残留的530名士兵中320人阵亡。（战场上竖立起了一座爱尔兰旅纪念碑：翠绿的凯尔特十字上镌刻着三叶草，爱尔兰竖琴以及属于三支纽约爱尔兰步兵团的战士的铜浮雕。十字架脚下卧着一尊爱尔兰猎狼犬的雕像，这是坚韧和荣誉的象征。[见右方图/wiki]）

（译注：关于葛底斯堡战役中有名的皮克特冲锋[Pickett’s Charge]。皮克特冲锋是南北战争中南军发起的最为惨烈的一次冲锋，罗伯特·李在两翼攻击北军防线毫无收获后孤注一掷准备进行一次中路突破，其中皮克特将军率领的冲锋距离、时间均最长，战况也最为惨烈。南军的九个步兵旅计12500名士兵冒着北军的强大炮火前进了3/4英里，最终在付出50%的阵亡后只得撤退。这次作战李再次犯了指挥不灵的错误，他原先分兵前去攻击北军后方的骑兵部队并未与前线发起冲锋的步兵形成协同，投入战场的步兵也是疲惫之师；而南军在发起步兵冲锋前进行压制的炮火也聊胜于无，导致冲锋开始后南军步兵不得不顶着联邦军的猛烈炮火前进而丝毫没有本队火炮的支援，堪称一次完全的死亡冲锋。而北军指挥官米德开始即对主攻方向作出了正确判断，后在数位勇将的率领下屡次打退南军进攻，其中爱尔兰旅伤亡占北军总伤亡的五分之一。左为冲锋示意图/wiki）

The New York City Draft Riot of 1863

1863年纽约征兵暴乱

Many historians say that the Battle of Gettysburg was the Civil War’s turning point toward Union victory. It was also the turning point for the Irish Brigade. By the summer of 1863, the tragically high numbers of casualties in the Brigade led many Irish soldiers and their families to believe that the Union Army was taking advantage of their willingness to fight by using them as cannon fodder. They were further infuriated by the National Conscription Act, passed in March of that year, which made every unmarried man in the Union between the ages of 21 and 45 subject to a draft lottery unless he could hire a replacement or pay a $300 fee. As many working-class Irish people saw it, this was discrimination: They were poor men being forced to fight in a “rich man’s war.” At the same time, many Irish people had come to believe that the government’s reasons for fighting the war had changed: It was not about preserving the Union any longer but about ending slavery—a cause that most Irish people in the U.S. emphatically did not support.

许多历史学家都说葛底斯堡战役是南北战争时期联邦军走向胜利的转折点。同样地，这也是爱尔兰旅的转折点。到1863年夏季，旅团惨重的伤亡使得很多爱尔兰士兵和他们的家人认为联邦军把爱尔兰旅当作炮灰，利用着他们的战斗热情。当年3月通过的《国家兵役法》更是火上浇油，法令要求全联邦凡21至45岁间的适龄未婚男子都要参加（兵役）抽签，除非他们能雇人代替或者缴纳300美元的庸费。在大多数工人阶级的爱尔兰人民看来，这无异于歧视：他们都是一些被迫为了“富人们”的战争出力的穷苦汉子。与此同时，许多爱尔兰人开始相信政府打这场仗的理由已经发生了变化：它不再是为了保全联邦，却是为了结束奴隶制度——这是大多数在美国生活的爱尔兰人所断然拒绝支持的。

These tensions boiled over in New York City on July 13, about a week after the Battle of Gettysburg, when thousands of Irish immigrants took to the streets for five days in violent protest against the draft law—and, more generally, against the black people they blamed for the war. Mobs assaulted any black person they saw on the street, ransacked and burned homes in African-American neighborhoods, and looted stores owned by blacks and “sympathetic” whites. Federal troops arrived in the city on July 16 to quell the disorder. At least 120 people, most of them African-American, died in the violence.

7月13日，这种不安态势终于在纽约爆发，葛底斯堡战役后大约一周，成千上万的爱尔兰移民冲上街头进行了对《兵役法》为期5天的暴力抗议——而且动乱更大程度上是针对黑人发动的，爱尔兰人将战争归咎于他们。暴徒袭击了他们在街上看到的每一个黑人，洗劫并烧毁非洲裔美国人社区的房屋，抢劫黑人以及“抱有同情”的白人拥有的商铺。联邦军队于7月16日开进纽约平息暴乱。至少120人——大多是非洲裔美国人——死于暴行。

This outburst of racist violence marked the end of organized Irish participation in the Civil War, though individual Irishmen continued to serve as soldiers in the Union Army. The Irish Brigade diminished greatly in size and disbanded for good in 1864.

这场种族主义暴行的爆发标志着爱尔兰人有组织地参加南北战争的终结，但是个别爱尔兰人仍旧继续加入联邦军。爱尔兰旅的规模极大地削减，并在1864年彻底解散。

（注：文中所附链接均为【美国历史】项目相关译文）

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原作者：
来源The Science Of \'Inception\'
译者若离wakari

作者：奥利弗•蒋（Oliver Chiang）
发表于2010年7月29日

窃取你的思想和梦境并非完全遥不可及。

旧金山――新上映的电影《盗梦空间》中有这样一个场景：莱昂纳多•迪卡普里奥扮演的主角以梦的形式进入另一个角色的思想中，告诉对方：“我知道怎么样找到你脑子里的秘密，我清楚你所有的把戏！”

迪卡普里奥的角色能这样放话到不困难。毕竟，他处在好莱坞电影业大制作的科技环境下。有了适当的特效处理，人物在电影里就可以为所欲为。可现实生活中的技术也能表演这些读心术的“把戏”吗？我们还不能运用一台设备再现电影中精密又可共享的效果。但你也许会惊奇地发现，不少现有的科技已经能解读梦境和思想。

加州大学伯克利分校的神经学家杰克•格兰特（Jack Gallant）是奋战在这类技术前沿阵线的一位研究学者。过去15年间，他在伯克利领衔的神经学与心理学实验室致力于深入人类思维，了解具体思想。格兰特向实验对象展示了以功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扫描他们大脑中形成的图片和影像。他分析了这些人大脑的成像图形，并运用电脑计算方式分析fMRI扫描结果，建立了这些实验对象的视觉系统模型。通过这一模型，格兰特能让这些人观看一部全新的电影，重新生成了他们了如指掌的画面。换句话说，他拍出的就是我们脑海中的画面。

格兰特说，用同样的技术再现人大脑中的梦境是可能实现的。而既然只有做梦者本人才“见过”那些景象，那么就难以核实它们是否确切。

在日本的另一个研究团队从不同方向出发，解决了解读梦境的问题。国际电气通信基础技术研究所（ATR）的计算神经科学实验室也用fMRI扫描了实验对象所见的内容。不过这个科研团体并未建立视觉系统模型，而是将fMRI的扫描结果输入电脑，让电脑“学习”如何将大脑活动的变化与不同的图像联系起来。通过分析大脑视觉皮层的血液流动，实验室的科学家能就重组实验对象见到的简单黑白图像。ATR表示，重构梦境比这难度更大，因为睡眠时的大脑信号“更嘈杂”。该机构目前正研究如何从睡眠者的大脑中获取更有意义的信息。

ATR的神经信息学负责人神谷之康博士说：“如果要用fMRI测试睡眠中的大脑信号，环境就太吵闹了。我们现在试着要从睡眠者的大脑信号中得到更有意义的信息。”

运用fMRI的大脑图像分析也用于研究其他应用技术。德国马克斯普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所的高级研究员约翰•戴伦•海恩斯（John-Dylan Hanes）可以在人们行动以前预测到将出现的行为。具体说来，他是在用fMRI扫描探查大脑激活模式与现实生活中的行为之间有什么关系。在一项关于自由意志的研究中，海恩斯向人们展示，他可以在实验对象实际按按钮前七秒钟就凭分析扫描结果准确地预测出对方用左手还是用右手做这个动作。

《盗梦空间》导演克里斯托弗•诺兰（Christopher Nolan）拍摄影片所依据的又一理念是“清醒做梦”。在这种情况下，睡眠者会意识到自己在做梦，甚至还能控制某些梦境。有些人自然而然就可以进入清醒做梦的状态，还有些人就必须通过学习掌握，有种设备据说可以为他们提供帮助。这台设备名叫NovaDreamer，是一个睡眠面具。它可以探测出睡眠者何时给出信号，测到信号就闪亮灯光，以此既能刺激睡眠者的意识又不会让对方从睡梦醒来。NovaDreamer的开发者是心理生理学家斯蒂芬•拉伯格（Stephen LaBerge）。这位科学家已在斯坦福大学执教25年，其间始终在推广清醒做梦这一概念。

解读思想的技术在向前发展中也存在极限。在《盗梦空间》中，迪卡普里奥扮演的角色能探测出内部对话或者决策这种较高指令的想法，甚至可以“窃取”它们。格兰特说，大脑处理信息的方式还未能完全“解码”获“阅读” 思想。科学家们由此无法仅仅以探索人的思维来重现和捕捉诸如“我想去跳伞”这种明确的念头。

最后，正如片名所表明的，“盗梦”有没有可能发生，能不能将一种新的想法植入人的思想？目前有一种方法能将非常原始的信号注入大脑，它通过一台名为“大脑起搏器”的设备植入脑细胞，向大脑具体部位发送电脉冲信号。这样的方式类似于心脏起搏器的做法，医学上也有实际应用。大脑起搏器以脉冲影响特定的神经元，用于减轻类似帕金森氏症这样的症状。

但至少在现今阶段，植入真正的较高指令思想还纯属虚构杜撰。

“你必须有办法以特定的方式操纵具体的神经元和突触。这确实困难，不可能很快做到这点，”格兰特说，“我觉得，有些人对解读大脑的技术有顾虑，担心会会有人用它做坏事，这样想合情合理。可是，谁都不必心烦这些坏事会写进自己的大脑。”

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Dedicated to finding lasting solutions for complex social challenges, the Case Foundation supports the TED Fellows and their big ideas that draw upon leadership, collaboration and entrepreneurship to change the world. As a new feature to help other up-and-comers and social citizens, every Friday the Case Foundation asks the featured Fellow to share his or her answer to the following question:

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

The TED Fellows’ answers to this question will be posted on the Case Foundation blog.

Describe yourself and what you do.

It’s hard for me to articulate because I’m in the middle of a transition. I’ve been producing documentaries and launching this company called Good for the last seven years of my life. Now I’m moving in to directing. I’m starting to direct what I’m calling “commercials for ideas.” It’s trying to sell ideas like you would products but it’s really about the ideas. Ideas like self-empowerment, self-reflection, perspective.

This Friday I’m doing a shoot for this concept I have of  “What do you bow to? What is the thing you have reverence for?” Whether it’s to your coffee cup, to a baseball team, to a religious icon, or something else. It’s a photo series but I’m going to turn these into commercials eventually. The idea is to start building a directing reel.

I’m also starting to do what I’m calling “personal producing.” I’ve worked with social entrepreneurs and CEOs and directors in helping them fulfill their visions. It’s like life coaching — consulting with people on making their dreams happen.

It’s a work in progress defining myself right now. I’m a producer-director and writing a feature for my directorial debut while making these commercials and building my reel.

Your undergraduate degree is in International Relations. How did you get started in filmmaking?

I took a semester during undergrad and went to NYU. I shot and directed short films there for a semester and realized that’s what I loved. But I didn’t want to stop studying International Relations. I really couldn’t get enough of learning about different parts of the world, especially peace and conflict resolution. I thought these were the kind of stories that I’d love to see films about. I went and did the hands-on work and realized that that was what I wanted, but I also really wanted to keep studying what I was studying and tell these stories.

The whole mission of Good and what I’m doing now is taking relevant stories and make them something that are accessible and move people. That’s what I’m hoping to do with these commercials for ideas.

Tell us more about your commercials for ideas. What is being bought and sold with them?

Well, right now, they don’t exist. I’m basically trying to make something between art and advertising. I’m beginning work on them just as my own passion project. I’m building a portfolio and looking for collaborators, but I want to define what the voice is and figure out my process before I start working with ad agencies and corporations.

Eventually a person I’m interested in reaching out to is Alex Bogusky. He’s a creative director that has made a ton of money working on campaigns for Burger King and so on. He’s left advertising, I believe, to make socially relevant media. I want to work with people in advertising who have been selling products for years and now collaborate with them to sell ideas that empower people.

How are your “commercials for ideas” different than anti-smoking ads or public service announcements?

I find that PSAs are usually issue-centric. For example, the issue may be smoking or that smoking is bad for you. They use body bags and images like that — which I think are great to trigger a response — getting people to respond in any way to any kind of media right now I think is a real challenge. But what’s interesting for me is, what is the level underneath why people are smoking? That’s where I’m trying to dig into.

For example, one idea I have is basically anti-littering and anti-smoking wrapped up into one. When people are smoking they throw cigarette butts on the ground. There’s a disconnect between themselves, this piece of trash, and the Earth. So I’m going to be focusing on that moment where the cigarette butts leave the hand.

Instead of just focusing on the addiction and making people feel bad about themselves, there are a number of levels to what we’re looking at, a number of ways to approach it. We’re leading with the idea, not the issue. Instead of doing a PSA that says stop smoking, I’m going to focus on the amount of cigarette butts that have accumulated and what it’s doing to the environment. So it’s a backdoor into an old argument and it’s trying to find fresh ways of approaching something that helps people to reflect on the issue in a new way.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

The Case Foundation is committed to giving a voice and platform for social entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers like the TED Fellows who are coming up with big ideas that can change the world. Read this Case Foundation/Fellows Friday question and answer every week on the Case Foundation’s blog.

I think for social entrepreneurs the definitions of success are still under construction, which is what makes it so exciting. It is up to us to define what “success” is.

On the film side I have experienced some incredible critical success, which for me was important because I wanted to make things that moved people. And if it moved people then they would show up to see it, I reasoned. But really it was only a few people that would show up to see some of these movies. That wasn’t considered in the industry — or by any standards — a financial success.

And that was a lesson I had to learn: letting go of the result and the expectation that things are going to be a certain way, and that it wasn’t a success if people didn’t show up. It’s more important to recognize what is it that I love about this, which is storytelling and filmmaking. And that’s what’s going to continue motivating me.

In your recent “Approaching 30 … Spiritually” article on The Huffington Post you said this transitional period in your life feels like “adult puberty.” What would you say about your life right now — are you still in the awkward stage?

In that blog I was saying that I was experiencing growing pains. It’s different now. I’m definitely still in a moment of transition, but instead of feeling this awkward fear of the future, I’m feeling newly motivated by a new energy. Basically, I’ve spent the last year and a half healing and becoming more aware of what motivates me from my center, from the core. And trying to recognize how much of that is ego and how much is really following what I love. So now I have a sense of direction in a way that could easily do a U-turn or change, but feeling less anxious about that.

You co-founded a company, your documentary film Racing Dreams won the jury prize for Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, and you’re are a TED fellow. How can you feel like you’re floundering?

When I turned 27 and was starting to have this sense that my identity isn’t completely equal to what I do for a living, I became motivated to figure out why I didn’t feel fulfilled.  It took me going through the pain of leaving the job that I always thought I’d have and the company that I thought was my baby, to recognize that I’d built myself a trench.

It was a beautiful trench and I loved it and we had such a great time in it. But the trench was a belief that this was the only place for me and this is where I’m meant to be. When I recognized that I was in this trench I realized, “Oh! I see that there’s this whole world out there full of opportunity. But I need to climb my way out of this trench.” The trench was this belief that this is what I was meant to do and if I can’t make this work then I’m a failure.

So once I was able to climb up out of that trench I could then see all around me all the trenches that I’ve always had which are the beliefs that I’ve had about myself and the world and how I’m supposed to make a difference because of the opportunities that I’ve been given. So now it’s kind of recognizing which of these beliefs are ones that are serving me and which ones aren’t. Now I’m taking time to figure that out — I think you’re always kind of figuring that out — and recognizing trenches of beliefs.

Helping people out of trenches where they hold on to beliefs so strongly that no longer serve them is something that I’m really excited to do. I can do it for other people. I’ve established the success of doing that. Now I’m thinking I have a few visions of my own to fulfill. What do I need to do to really believe that and then go for it?

I had thought the job I had was the only thing for me. When I recognized that that couldn’t be right because it no longer was fulfilling me, then I was floundering. Floundering has a negative connotation but it’s more like figuring out that you can do anything. How do you let go of the idea that your value is tied to a specific organization or company? I find that most people go through that when they leave a job or are fired from a job — especially something that they care about.

Do you have advice for people who are looking for the passion and maybe feel like they’re floundering?

I think people tend to know what they’re passionate about. Knowing exactly what that looks like in the world or the workplace — that’s a different story. That comes through following a lead. If you feel that you enjoy something you should follow it, take a step in that direction and then sit there patiently for just a little while and things will start to happen.

I’m finding that people who haven’t taken the leap to follow their passion are battling with a sense of unworthiness. One idea I’m dying to sell is: dig into your own shit. Dig into the parts of you that limiting you. Whether that’s through therapy or yoga or any kind of healing. Opening yourself to healing. That to me feels like a really radical step in believing that you’re capable of going after whatever it is you want.

How will your TED experience impact your next steps?

TED was totally awesome. TED embodied for me in a clear way how people from diverse backgrounds coming together to approach something is when incredible things can happen.

Sitting at a table at TED were a composer and a lawyer and a geneticist and an actor and we were all brainstorming how to tell the story of TEDPrize winner Jose Abreu — the way to market his idea. Totally awesome.

The idea of bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to approach a problem is how I want to make everything.

Lifehacker reader HeadsetChatter was tired of forgetting mail that needed to go out, so he turned some cheap office supples into highly visible front-door reminder.

I used to have a lot of trouble remembering to leave the house with envelopes to mail (like my rent!). I got a cheap clip with adhesive on the back from some office supply store and affixed it right next to my front door. When there are envelopes in it, it makes it nearly impossible to open the door without removing them (and if you really want to be sure, put the envelopes horizontally!)

If you live in a newer home or apartment there is a good chance you have a metal fire-door and can skip having to adhere anything to the wall by using a magnetic clip right on the door above the handle. Have your own hack for making sure you never leave the house without mailing our your bills? Let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks HeadsetChatter!

For those who do fancy photography, setting up the lighting ends up being one of the larger tasks of each session. There are flashes out there that can be controlled via a remote control to help ease the process, but they can cost a considerable amount more. [Dsvilko] shares with us a fairly simple circuit that allows you to use a tv remote to control your flash. He’s using a picaxe 08m and he states that before this project, he had never messed with microcontrollers. We say great job on your first microcontroller project. You can catch a video of it in action after the break.

[via Makezine]

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让电脑说一声：I IOVE YOU，看看它是你的哥们还是你的娘们！

步骤1：

点“开始”，在“所有程序”里找到“附件”，点“记事本”新建一个记事本文件

步骤二：

在里面输入 CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak "I love YOU"

步骤三：

保存扩展名为 .VBS 文件 如：我爱你.vbs

双击运行这个"我爱你.vbs"文件，电脑就会说 i love you 了　　
你听到的是男声还是女声呢？

试验过了，我的是小蜜！哈哈哈

================================

很久没转垃圾贴了，特地火星一个。。。。我发现Win7的SpeechAPI比Vista有进步，没有那个SB的控制条了。

uTorrent 正式发布了名为 uTorrent Server alpha for Linux 的产品。

之前本站曾报道过µTorrent 将推出 Linux 版本。现在这是该产品的第一次公开发布，版本号3.0 build 21701。有 Web 控制台，但无原生 GUI ，以后版本将会加入。安装方法见此。

消息来源1 2

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2010 September 3

Explanation: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two celestial wonders easily visible for southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan. These cosmic clouds are now understood to be dwarf irregular galaxies, satellites of our larger spiral Milky Way Galaxy. The Small Magellanic Cloud actually spans 15,000 light-years or so and contains several hundred million stars. About 210,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana, it is more distant than other known Milky Way satellite galaxies, including the Canis Major and Sagittarius Dwarf galaxies and the Large Magellanic Cloud. This sharp image also includes two foreground globular star clusters NGC 362 (bottom right) and 47 Tucanae. Spectacular 47 Tucanae is a mere 13,000 light-years away and seen here to the left of the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Google的HTML5 demo

Apple的HTML5 demo

HTML5这傻不拉叽的玩意儿还是各大厂商用来争地盘的工具。

以下是一些浏览器相关消息：

Net Applications发布八月浏览器份额排名，Mozilla Firefox 22.9%，Google Chrome 7.5%，Safari 5.1%，Opera(& Mini) 3.3%， 微软仍占60.4%的大头。消息来源

Mozilla Firefox 4.0将没有 PowerPC 版，同时 Opera 10.70 的 最新Snapshot 9036 也已去除了 PowerPC 版本。考虑到包括 Ubuntu 在内的许多发行版和 Abobe Flash 都将去除 PowerPC 支持，这一架构处理器的桌面应用历史看来即将完结。它现在的最著名的应用在游戏机平台上，目前Xbox360、PlayStation 3、Wii 三大平台都使用这一架构的CPU。

Google Chrome 系：

• Chromium 的 Win/Mac 开发版中添加了名为 Google Chrome Labs的功能，只要在地址栏输入about:labs，就会出现某些特殊功能选项。Linux 版目前尚未引入，但其中包括的两项功能——左侧标签和标签页概况（类似于 Mozilla 的 Panorama）可用 "--enable-vertical-tabs" 和 "--enable-expose-for-tabs" 启动参数激活。消息来源
• Chromium 改进硬件加速图形系统，引入了 WebGL 方面的支持。该功能可用"--enable-accelerated-compositing"启动参数激活，之前 IE9 和 Firefox4 beta5 已经引入类似的功能。据测试，三者中Chromium最快但最费资源 消息来源1 2
• Google Chrome 两周岁生日。Chrome迷相关文章。
• Google Chome发布6.0正式版，主要修正了一些bug，UI、自动填表、同步等方面的功能亦有所改进。此版本支出了4337美元予以bug汇报者。
• Chrome Dev 分支升至 7.0。细节可参考Changelog。 消息来源

• Firefox 4.0 年底即将发布，时间已经不多，故 Firefox 4.0 将于9月10日特性冻结，目前已有数千扩展可用于 Firefox 4.0。由于时间紧迫，某些特性如 indexedDB 、websockets 和一些 UI 特性以及Account Manager将在4.0的首发版本中被去掉。对于可以实现和不可以实现的功能，Mozilla给出了一份清单。
• Firefox 4.0 将采用的新 JavaScript 引擎 JaegerMonkey，根据 JaegerMonkey 开发团队测试，JaegerMonkey 的 Sunspider JavaScript 积分接近475 ms,较 Firefox 4 Beta 4 采用的TraceMonkey快20%左右。不过，它要比 IE9 PP4 慢8%，当然它也落后于Opera 10.7 (350 ms)和Chrome (305 ms)。 消息来源 开发者Blog上的介绍 hack.mozilla.org 上的介绍

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Ubuntu 团队已发布 Ubuntu 10.10 的 Beta 测试版本。Ubuntu 10.10 的开发代号为“Maverick Meerkat”，计划今年 10 月 10 日正式推出。

根据 Ubuntu 10.10 Beta 发行注记，该版本主要包含以下亮点：

• Linux kernel 2.6.35
• 允许在安装时选用 btrfs 文件系统
• Software-Center 新增“Featured”、“Whats New”、及“History”功能
• GNOME 2.31
• Shotwell 取代 F-Spot 成为默认的照片管理器
• Sound Indicator 得到增强
• Ubuntu One 与桌面集成更紧密

Ubuntu 10.10 Beta 的 Desktop、Server 及 Netbook 版本可从此处下载。

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You have until December 1st to get your entry into the Trossen DIY robotics contest. Unlike the last Trossen contest we told you about, this one has no clear theme. The goal is simply to make an awesome robot. Registration is free, and entries will be judged on Ingenuity, Originality, and presentation/documentation. There are prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, with the 1st place prize being the Interbotix Hexapod. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is a kit of a hexapod that is pretty quick on its feet. You can catch a video of it after the break.

[via botjunkie]

Unlike infectious diseases and news, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it.

“There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading,” said economic sociologist Damon Centola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the study published Sept. 3 in Science. “We’ve assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced.”

The research has important implications for people designing online communities intended to change or maintain a behavior, like weight watchers or online health communities, Centola said.

To do the experiment, he created an internet-based health community and invited people already participating in other online health forums to join. Over 1,500 people signed up to participate, and they were placed anonymously in one of two different kinds of networks: a random network with many distant ties (above left), or a clustered network with many overlapping connections (above right).

Users in both networks had the same number of assigned “health buddies.” They couldn’t contact their buddies directly, but they could see how their buddies rated content on the site, and could receive e-mails informing them of their buddies activities. Centola said he deliberately didn’t pay the volunteers, so they would participate out of legitimate interest in the site’s content.

In six different trials over a period a few weeks, Centola seeded the site with information about an online health forum and tracked people as they signed up and participated.

In the clustered network, 54 percent of the people signed up for the forum, compared to 38 percent in the random network, and almost four times as fast. Not surprisingly, Centola also found the more friends people had that also signed up, the more likely they were to return to the forum to participate.

“I feel that the greatest contribution of this study has to do with the very unusual social experiment that it relies on,” said economist Tomas Barrios of Stanford University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Usually experimental data for social experiments comes from hard-to-swallow lab settings, or if not, very low tension, low risk social situations that can be ethically intervened by experimenters.”

Barrios also said many researchers have made mathematical models to understand the spread of behavior, but that the models have have little application in predicting what will actually happen in the real world.

These studies cannot be done yet using data from Facebook or Twitter, Centola says, because the network is constantly changing and too gigantic to download all at once.

Image: Damon Centola

See Also:

• Gene Makes Some Drink More When Other Boozers Are Around
• Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
• Circuit-Tweaking Reverse Engineers a Gene Network
• Network Theory Could Regulate Human Reproduction
• Magnetic Nanoparticles Can Remotely Control Worms
• Kindness Breeds More Kindness, Study Shows