The Nightly Quill

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher at a middle school in Norwich, Conn., said she had simply wanted to e-mail her husband. The authorities contend that she was — purposely or, perhaps, carelessly — exposing 11- and 12-year-old students to pornography rather than teaching them English.

Last month, Ms. Amero was convicted in Norwich Superior Court of four counts of risking injury to a child and faces up to 40 years in prison at a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 2. She has insisted on her innocence, refusing to accept a plea bargain that would have allowed her to walk free. She portrays herself as a hapless technophobe too clueless to unplug a wayward computer.

Ms. Amero, 40, a longtime substitute, contends that when she arrived that day in October 2004, she asked the regular seventh-grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School if she could use his computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she says, she went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the teacher was gone and students were gathered around the screen, watching a hairstyle Web site.

When she tried to close the site, what she got was an endless barrage of pop-up ads for pornography sites. The images continued all day, since “I absolutely have no clue about computers,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Amero plans to appeal, and she says lawyers have offered to handle the appeal free. Read the rest of this entry »

Eye opening video on the pace of the expansion of knowledge and information.

The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications, landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the laws ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?

On the first Saturday in April of 2002, the temperature in Washington, D.C., had taken a dive. Tourists were bundled up against the cold, and the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin were fast losing their blossoms to the biting winds. But a few miles to the south, in the Dowden Terrace neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, the chilly weather was not deterring Royce C. Lamberth, a bald and burly Texan, from mowing his lawn. He stopped only when four cars filled with FBI agents suddenly pulled up in front of his house. The agents were there not to arrest him but to request an emergency court hearing to obtain seven top-secret warrants to eavesdrop on Americans.

As the presiding justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, Lamberth had become accustomed to holding the secret hearings in his living room. My wife, Janis has to go upstairs because she doesn’t have a top-secret clearance, he noted in a speech to a group of Texas lawyers. My beloved cocker spaniel, Taffy, however, remains at my side on the assumption that the surveillance targets cannot make her talk. The FBI knows Taffy well. They frequently play with her while I read some of those voluminous tomes at home. FBI agents will even knock on the judges door in the middle of the night. On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3:00 a.m., recalled Lamberth. From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden, and the surveillances I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York.

The FISA court is probably the least-known court in Washington, added Lamberth, who stepped down from it in 2002, at the end of his seven-year term, but it has become one of the most important. Conceived in the aftermath of Watergate, the FISA court traces its origins to the mid-1970s, when the Senates Church Committee investigated the intelligence community and the Nixon White House. The panel, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, exposed a long pattern of abuse, and its work led to bipartisan legislation aimed at preventing a president from unilaterally directing the National Security Agency or the FBI to spy on American citizens. This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The courts job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright. Read the rest of this entry »

A hard to find documentary about Tetris and its creator Alexey Pajitnov. Also covers the rivalaries between Nintendo and Atari and the absurdities of buying copyrights for software from a country that doesn’t believe in property, much less intellectual property. Ultimately, a great documentary about a very important game.

Want to cancel your AOL account? Hopefully you are not easily intimidated. This phone conversation reveals the dire and desperate desire of one man’s need to keep his company’s customer.

Here we see Steve Jobs delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. In it he talks about getting fired from Apple in 1985 and life & death. Fantastic in its simplicity.

Ahh………….the power of photoshop !!

Read the rest of this entry »

Capable of processing 1 trillion calculations a second, Intel’s latest test chip, when used commercially, will revolutionize computing.

Computing took a leap forward when chipmakers started putting more than one core—or central brain—on a single chip. It was a way to make machines work harder even as they consumed less power. Just wait until a single chip can sport 80 cores.

The wait won’t be long. Chipmaking giant Intel (INTC) on Feb. 11 said it has successfully produced just such a chip, the size of a fingernail, capable of processing a mind-boggling 1 trillion calculations a second. The chip, which Intel claims is the fastest ever made, could start being used commercially in “in five years, if not sooner,” Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner says.

Rattner has reason to crow. The massive processing power each chip would provide will dramatically change the way consumers and businesses work and play. Financial analysis that takes days to perform in back offices could be done in seconds at a trader’s terminal on Wall Street. Real-time physics calculations could let consumers create on-the-fly games that make even the cutting-edge motion-control techniques in Nintendo’s Wii game console seem like child’s play. Read the rest of this entry »

Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes. Excellent video on what the “web” has evolved into.

Like the “10 Minute Disposable Email” email service link I posted , detailing disposable email addresses you can create and dictate when they expire, Craigsnumber is a disposable telephone number service.

And it’s free..

Basically, all you do is go to Craigsnumber, click the link, and you will be instantly assigned a telephone number. This is your ‘disposable’ number.

Enter the length of time, from one hour to one month, you want this number to exist. Then enter your real telephone number in the appropriate box and all phone calls to your assigned number will be forwarded to your real number for the designated length of time.

Want to use a phone number in a newspaper ad, but don’t really want to use your real number? Create a disposable number to publish in the paper (or online), and it will expire at your chosen time.

What about all the web forms that want a telephone number, won’t complete your request without one, and you don’t want to give out your ‘true’ number? Use a Craigsnumber…

Personally, I can think of a dozen different uses for a disposable number.

Check it out…

http://www.craigsnumber.com/

Bill Gates makes a TV appearance the night before Windows Vista is released. Today, 01/30/07, is the official public release of Micrsoft’s new operating system “Vista”, which is the first “major” release from Microsoft in 5 years.

“60 Minutes” story on Google:

Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu:
Engineer, Design Engineer, Inventor, 2,300 Patents, 3,218 Inventions
Invented the floppy Disk, the CD, Digital Watch

Yoshiro Nakamatsu makes many bold claims to fame. His resume lists him as one of the five greatest scientists in history, alongside Archimedes, Michael Faraday, Marie Curie and Nikola Tesla. But he prefers to be known as the inventor of the floppy disk, the CD, the digital watch and a grand total of 3,218 inventions at last count.

Such a feat would make Nakamatsu the world’s most prolific inventor, well ahead of Thomas Edison, who logged 1,093. Nakamatsu’s unconventional mind has made him a celebrity among tinkerers, academics and bureaucrats alike. Dozens of awards from such sources plaster the walls of his office, situated in Akasaka, one of the most expensive office districts in Tokyo, and conveniently located a short walk from the Japanese patent office.

A visit to Nakamatsu’s “laboratory” begins with a video pastiche of his achievements, honours ceremonies and television appearances, played on a giant flat screen set among a jumble of inventions in one corner. One sequence shows him welcomed to the United States by President George Bush. Squashed under the documents, diagrams and models stacked deep on his desk lies his latest award, the Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition, awarded for outstanding service to the community. The sprightly 73-year-old’s inventive streak showed itself when he was 5 years old. He created an automatic gravity controller for a model plane that he says makes autopilot possible. His parents took up a family friend’s advice to patent the device. The patent has expired, and he earns no royalties from autopilot systems. But subsequent patents have made Nakamatsu a wealthy man. Read the rest of this entry »

Cooling Chipset Using Liquid Nitrogen At -196 C
5525MHz-FSB Clock 309 MHz-System bus 1237 MHz-Memory clock 206 MHz-CPU core voltage 1.88 V-Heat sink temp -196 degree C-A NEW WORLD RECORD!!!