Team Xecutor gives you a way to hook up SATA hard drives to your PS3 (via Engadget)
Israeli military: D&D = t3H weak-willed
I thought this kind of thinking went out of fashion 15 or 20 years back, but apparently the uppity-ups at the top of the Israeli Defense Forces think fantasy gamers are automatically suspect for security clearance.
Does the Israel Defense Forces believe incoming recruits and soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons are unfit for elite units? Ynet has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.
“They’re detached from reality and suscepitble to influence,” the army says.
Although that is annoying, I must say that looks like a way to reduce your risk in the military. After all, who wants to send a security risk out on the dangerous missions? On the other hand, I guess the folks who don’t want to risk losing a soldier with high security clearance might see the weak-willed gamer losers (like me) as more disposable. Hmmmmm. Impass. Never mind.
[tags]Israeli military is anti-D&D[/tags]
Satan is after your children
This is really stupid. You don’t want to read it. I’m writing this completely for my own entertainment. It’s really stupid, even given my low standards on t3H Blahg.
Back in 1971, Pastor Jack Hyles laid down this exceptionally important message concerning the welfare of your children. Satan is assualting our culture’s values by starting at the root of our future – the children. Ohhhhh, won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?
Pastor Hyles got really upset after seeing how schools were corrupting our children. Someone, perhaps one of his delicate flock, had her delicate sensibilities affronted when she visited one of the local public schools.
I thought “No!!!” was the key
According to the January 1959 issue of Sexology magazine (sadly, no longer published – I learned of it from the always wonderful Modern Mechanix blog), the key to a mutually happy marriage is The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex. Thankfully, you can order it from the fine folks at Cadillac Publishing Company in New York.
Here are some of the things you can learn from this book, along with my guesses for the answers:
The climax in women
Typical male: They can do that?
The sex drive in women
Moderate to high when single. Non-existant after marriage.
Frigidity, its cause and cure
Survey says…
Condoms designed to meet international size specifications are too big for many Indian men as their penises fall short of what manufacturers had anticipated, an Indian study has found.
The Indian Council of Medical Research, a leading state-run center, said its initial findings from a two-year study showed 60 percent of men in the financial capital Mumbai had penises about 1 inch shorter than those condoms catered for.
. . .
“One of the reasons for a failure of up to 20 percent (of condoms) is the association of the size of the condom to the erect penis,” the council’s Dr. Chander Puri told Reuters, adding another reason was couples often put them on in a hurry.
Sometimes, the news you have to pass on just needs no introductions, does it? I think Bill gets the reason right, too:
Listen, I totally know how that happened. “Manufacturers” just took a survey of men in India and asked them how large their penises were.
[tags]Indian men can’t fill their condoms[/tags]
Find a good mechanic
Cartalk has a Find a good mechanic area, with user comments available (via The Consumerist)
Code is law
On the Internet, Code is Law. This book is a guide to regulation of and in cyberspace – ultimately, what is allowed online is controlled by the code running everything. While available in dead-tree format, it is also avaible via bitstream for local viewing or (soon to be available for) reading and updating via wiki. The digital version is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License, so you can redistribute it modified or unmodified, provided you give proper attribution and release with the same license. (via boingboing)
[tags]Code is law, Lawrence Lessig book[/tags]
LED booklight
This is a slightly cooler than normal booklight, I think. It might be a hassle to switch sides of the page a lot, which appears to be necessary based on how it is built. I can see this light illuminating a page more evenly than any other booklight I’ve seen, though, which makes it totally worth having. It’s in the mid to upper $20 range, depending on which version you get. Geek-boy (yes, I stopped maturing around the age of 7 – that makes me still a boy, at least inside) that I am, I think I’d like the Harry Potter version.
[tags]Cool booklight, Better booklight[/tags]
Yahoo top searches
OK, since I have nothing better to do with my life than track down useless stats, I decided to check what the most searched for phrases or words are on the top search engines. I just find the results interesting to check on some times. As of the time of this writing, here are the top Google and Yahoo searches. There are tons of search stats on these pages. This is just a glimpse of what you can find.
So what does this all mean? Nothing really. I just find in interesting. Note that Google does their searches week-by-week (although you can also check out a monthly top searches, and even a full year once the year is complete) while Yahoo seems to just do a “to-date” top searches, with no obvious starting date for that. Perhaps they track top searches since the inception of Yahoo?
I do wonder about all the people travelling to France, looking for a hotel. But that’s just my curiousity, I suppose.
[tags]Top searches, Google and Yahoo top searches[/tags]
Don’t open Microsoft Word documents
News of this vulnerability is available in many places. I’ll point to the Secunia posting about the latest announced security vulnerability in Microsoft Word. Opening Microsoft Word documents with Word can lead to your computer being taken over by hostile programs – almost assuredly without your knowledge. Until a patch is available from Microsoft, do not open documents unless you know and trust the document creator.
A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft Word, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in the handling of Word documents and can be exploited to cause a memory corruption.
Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.
I’m not even going to do my standard Microsoft rant here. Designing security into a program as complex as Word is hard. Going back and trying to add security to a finished application which wasn’t designed with security tenets in mind is almost impossible. I am almost certain Word was not designed with security as a key component, which means there will probably always be problems like this. And consumers are to blame, as they don’t demand secure applications by withholding money from vendors who don’t design for security. In other words, the buying public is largely to blame for this – Microsoft is just doing what the customers indicate they want with show of dollars.
Microsoft has additional details on MS TechNet and on TechNet blogs.
[tags]Don’t open MS Word documents, Latest big security vulnerability news – MS Word[/tags]
Boost your remote’s range
A how-to on boosting the range of your remote
Hacking Vista’s registration lock
Thanks again to TimG for the heads up on this one. I didn’t figure it would take long, but I hadn’t paid attention to find out when Microsoft Vista’s activation check so anyone can fake a valid Vista installation. Using the newly released crack, anyone can install an enterprise copy of Windows Vista and have it function as a valid installation.
Hackers are distributing a file that they say lets users of the corporate version of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system get around the software’s anti-piracy mechanisms.
. . .
The software Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activation.Server-MelindaGates lets users spoof that KMS process, allowing them to activate copies of the enterprise editions of Vista, its creators say. The hacked download is available online on sites including The Pirate Bay and other file sharing sites.
An article on Yahoo including a link to The Pirate Bay is just an extra touch of funny, to me.
[tags]Vista activation hack, Vista enterprise installation hack[/tags]