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Total Information Awareness is Too Much Information!

Turns out us geeks aren’t the only one who caught on to the now-removed CafePress Total Information Awareness store (previously blogged here on ST). According to the Washington Post, Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU was given a TIA thong as a gag gift…

“Yesterday at the National Press Club, Strossen held up her thong — emblazoned with the logo of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Total Information Awareness program — to lampoon what she considers the government’s sinister intrusion into personal privacy…” – full article

Gotta love that. The Post actually has a picture, but it’s not available online.

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Samsung Palm/Phone

Samsung has announced a new phone at CeBIT — the SGH-i500. It’s a Palm OS 5 based smart phone/PDA with 300 MHz processor, a whopping 32 megs of RAM (that’s huge for a Palm) SD slot for expansion, dual color screens (inside and out) and an integrated 640×480 camera. The inside screen is also high-res by Palm standards at 324×352. More specs and pics at Brighthand.
Price is unknown, but I’d guess around $700.

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Vespa Gear

Spring is almost here, and for scooter afficiondados that means it’s time to ride — and just in time, Vespa has introduced a whole line of riding gear. Most of it’s pretty tacky retro junk, but the inclusion of the Vespa version of the Boblbee hard backpack means that someone at Vespa’s got some geek. Available in-store only for a whopping $215, you may need to think hard if you can justify spending the extra $45 or more just for the Vespa logo on your colormatched hardpack.

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Solid-State Video Camera

The Pretec DV-4200 is a solid-state video camcorder that records to Secure Digital cards rather than videotape. It’s also a 2.1 megapixel digital still camera with a 1.8″ preview screen. The DV4200 records direct to MPEG4 compression at 30 frames per second, with audio in AAC. It can also handle other video input sources, such as “home movies” and record direct to the SD card. While this sounds pretty cool, limitations in the size and price of the SD cards make them a questionable choice for video cameras, though Pretec claims that up to 20 minutes of video can fit on a 64 meg card.

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More Cool Phones

Two new phones are on the way to the US from Sony Ericsson. The T606 and T608 feature 128×128 16-bit color screens, J2ME (for downloading Java based games and programs), polyphonic ringtones, integrated PIM features and, in the case of the T608, Bluetooth. Both phones will be for CDMA networks.

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Linux Phone

A German company, Invair, has announced the introduction of a Linux-based smart-phone. It’s one of the uglie…most utilitarian looking phones I’ve ever seen, but certainly has its upside; Tri-band GSM and GPRS for worldwide phone and high-speed wireless data access, an integrated GPS module for figuring out just where in the world you are, infrared and bluetooth connectivity, USB/RS232 i/o, 64 megs of RAM (32 ROM) and an SD/MMC slot for memory expansion. The Linux-based OS includes all the basic PIM functions and email and web browsing (on the “optimised” [sic] 160×240 16-shade grayscale screen). Price is expected to be around $700, US release date unknown. The company already sells a similar PDA (no phone function) from their website.

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Xeno’s Paradox Solved?

“Physicists have worked out how to look at the smallest sizes and shortest time that some of them believe can exist.

On a human scale, an atom is inconceivably small. But size is relative. On the Planck scale—the smallest that physical theory recognises—atoms are huge. At this scale, named after Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, many physicists envisage space and time as being grainy, rather than continuous.” – The Economist

Thank goodness. Xeno’s Paradox had always bothered me, but now it seems there is no “half-way” at some level. Somehow that’s reassuring.

Read the full article .