Category: News

Remember the frenzy stirred by former Toyota attorney and his lawyer, Todd Tracy back in September, when they accused the Japanese carmaker of covering-up roll-over accident evidence and threatened with re-opening several suits against it? Well, forget it.

Todd Tracy, the man who in September said Toyota’s "cover-up of serious safety problems makes a ‘chump’ out of the American taxpayer," had a long few months and a sudden change of heart.

"I did no… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Kenneth P. Green

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

Source: calgaryherald.com

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Faire une promo.pour la 147,descendre le prix au plus bas,faire une affiche et se rendre à la fosse des Mariannes dans le Pacifique pour la faire plonger au point le plus profond des océans,volià le buzz proposé par une équipe d’Alfa Romeo Belgique.Mouais…

Le slogan: « on ne pouvait pas descendre plus bas ».Et du coup,il en va du prix de la voiture comme du tableau supportant l’affiche.Si l’équipe qui s’est chargée de la « besogne » a du se prendre apparemment un peu de bon temps,on ne peut pas dire que l’idée soit lumineuse,même si le but,faire parler,est atteint.

A chacun de se faire son opinion…

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Joseph A Olson

We still do not know the back story to today’s greatest headline. The whistleblower and/or hacker who dropped the CRU email pebble may not have even realized the magnitude of the resulting tsunami. We must pray that this act of heroism goes unpunished. By threatening the current annual carbon exchanges of $125 billion, which were expected to rise to a trillion, there are plenty of upset money changers turned scalp hunters in the temple.

The “Blessed” thing about the Hadley hacking is that it has eliminated the eye glazing minutiae of science from the debate. No longer do we have to discuss the correct proxy value for cosmically irradiated isotopes of Beryllium and Chlorine atoms trapped in ice core samples. There are those who claim that this blessed event occurred due to respect for scientific purity.

The real reason for the event may well be the whistleblowers recognition of the underlying threat to humanity. Regardless, the debate has shifted. The layman has a good general knowledge of the concepts of lying, stealing and taxes. We can now discuss what this issue has secretly always been about: the theft of your nation, your assets, your freedom.

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The Armed Forces Foundation (AFF), with the support of Oshkosh Defense announced that the Rumble With a Cause sweepstakes has kicked-off, with entrants getting the chance to win one of two custom-painted Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycles. The two motorcycles have been donated to the AFF for the sweepstakes by Oshkosh Defense.

Through April 15, 2010, donations raised from this sweepstakes campaign will support active and retired members of the US Military and their families.
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Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it’s less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening.

LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported.

There’s No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ”

Discuss

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CarMax, a used car retailer from the United States, decided to present this year’s top ten most searched used vehicles on their website, which gets more that 5.5 million visits per month.

This year’s list shows the variety of makes and models our customers are considering when shopping online for a quality used car. Every car in our inventory can be found on carmax.com and it will show the same no-haggle price you’ll see at your local CarMax store, said Ann Yauger, director of car… (read more)

We’ve written in the past how Thomas Edison — who is often held up by patent hoarders as the perfect example of why patents are necessary — didn’t actually invent any of the stuff he’s famous for “inventing.” Instead, he’s most famous for taking the work of others and innovating around it just slightly, to find a good market — but then also patenting the work of others and blocking anyone else from entering the market. I admire his innovative side and his marketing prowess, but find his abuse of patents to be unfortunate. Reader Michael points to a recent story in Wired which highlights how this worked with the incandescent lightbulb.

The story highlights how the incandescent lightbulb was really a function of progressive innovation, with different people adding little bits here and there:

English chemist Humphry Davy connected two wires to a battery in 1809 and inserted a charcoal strip between the other ends of the wires. The strip glowed, making it the first electric lamp.

Inventor Warren De la Rue about 10 years later enclosed a platinum coil in an evacuated tube and passed electric current through it to make it glow.

From there, it details how Joseph Swan built the first real “electric lamp” building on those concepts. Swan did get a patent on his work, but it didn’t actually work all that well. Edison’s revelation was to make a minor tweak to Swan’s work, making the incandescent bulb last much longer. It wasn’t an “invention” at all. It was a minor tweak on top of it, and then a massive promotional campaign. Of course, Edison originally couldn’t do as much with his better lightbulb, because Swan held that patent… so eventually Edison ended up merging with Swan’s company… and took all the credit for the incandescent bulb. And from then on, he used patents to keep everyone else out for as long as possible.

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Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force — they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association — which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators — has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl’s intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It’s important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications — but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don’t be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mitsubishi is currently selling both the old and the new Outlander in its domestic market and, although it might sound a bit awkward, the company recently upgraded both ranges with a new entry-level 2.0-liter gasoline engines. The new version of the revised Outlander is called Roadest and also incorporates the EVO front fascia plus a sporty body kit, according to Carscoop, while the old edition just comes as is.

The new 2.0-liter engine develops a maximum power of 148 PS at 6,000 … (read more)

Even if the echoes of the Car Allowance Rabate System have long died out, there are still some who are punching in numbers to see how one of the most successful scrappage programs of 2009 influenced the US auto sector and not only. According to the United Recyclers Group (URG), for instance, CARS did much for the industry overall, but the federal government failed to capitalize on the green advantages of the program.

"Cash For Clunkers (C4C) created some much needed green awa… (read more)

The 2009 Australian Grand Prix was a success from a sporting standpoint, as it set the base to Brawn GP’s domination in the Formula One Championship against big guns like Ferrari and McLaren. However, from a financial point of view, the event at Albert Park caused the taxpayers no less than $40 million (in losses).

If many of you are thinking that this is as bad as it gets, find out that the Aussie fans are in for more. As reported by the media, and confirmed by race organizer’s c… (read more)

Brian Sweeney, Buick-GMC’s new chief has a new purpose in (professional) life: to dramatically reshape the Buick brand image.

That is because the current average age of a Buick sedan buyer is 70, a figure well above the present U.S. average car buyer’s age, which is 52, according to Craig Bierley, the company’s product marketing director. To be clear, "younger" doesn’t mean people in their 20s, says Bierley. Younger, he says, means people in their 40s and 50s.
… (read more)

Eco Factor: Concept low-emission vehicle powered by a hybrid engine.

The Expedition Vehicle Concept or E.V.C by designer Prodan Dragos is a versatile and adaptable vehicle that can be configured to suit the requirements of the user. The concept vehicle can be changed from an enclosed camping vehicle to an open-top cruiser in minutes.

(more…)

We are days away from a final decision on Saab’s future, but sources close to the matter are already hinting that General Motors is going to wind down the business. Unfortunately, killing this iconic brand will actually lead to the anger of millions of fans around the world who have already started an online campaign to save Saab.

Basically, Saab’s fans are claiming that selling the brand rather than killing it is a smarter decision as the Swedish unit already owns the base requir… (read more)

Motorcycle apparel and accessories retailer Hot Leathers was recently signed as official representative of the Harley-Davidson Footwear products, which will be brought from now on at all major motorcycle rallies. Harley-Davidson Footwear is manufactured by Wolverine World Wide, under license from Harley-Davidson Motor Company. 

Any enthusiast knows that genuine biker style isn’t achieved without premier footwear from Harley-Davidson Footwear or the bold and original apparel availa… (read more)

Folks in Europe, Africa, and Asia can say goodbye to 2009 by viewing a very slight lunar eclipse on the last day of the year: Thursday, December 31. The event lasts for about an hour starting at 18:52 UTC, with deepest eclipse, such as it is, at 19:22.

Only a small part of the Moon will be in the deepest part of the Earth’s shadow, so this is nowhere near a total eclipse, when the Earth fully blocks sunlight from reaching the Moon. However, if you go out and take a look you’ll see the full Moon looking distinctly flattened on one side, and perhaps the rest of the Moon’s surface will look dusky. I’ve made a little image here to show you about how much the Moon will be covered, and approximately where. Like I said, only a small part will be darkened.

Not everyone will see this; North and South America are basically shut out of this event since it happens on the other side of the planet and the whole thing’s over before the Moon rises. The image of the Earth here shows where the eclipse will be visible: if you can see where you live, then you can see the eclipse. The closer you are to the center of the map, the higher the Moon will be in the sky at midpoint of the eclipse.

The next lunar eclipse visible will be in June 2010, but it’s partial and will only be visible in Australia. After that, there is a full eclipse in December 2010 which will be seen by North and South America — though the farther west you are the better as far as decent viewing times go (it’ll be around midnight for me in the Mountain time zone).

Anyway, if you want to learn about lunar eclipses (like what I mean by partial versus total, and what an umbra and penumbra are) then take a look at the Mr. Eclipse site, which has great info.

I’ll note that this last eclipse of 2009 is also a so-called Blue Moon: the unofficial term for the second full Moon in a single month. There’s no real significance to it — the Moon ain’t blue, folks, despite a bunch of news sites already posting pictures of the Moon Photoshopped to look that color without explanation. But the real thing here is that celestial geometry is putting on a small show for you, and what better way to ring in a new year?

Tip o’ the umbra to AstroPixie for reminding me about this!

The new Opel Astra now has a new bodykit from Irmscher, which was originally presented at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show. The German tuning company has always specialised in Opel models, and has changed the look of the new Astra, without modifying the technical or mechanical aspects.

The Irmscher Astra kit includes 20-inch wheels, or an 18-inch option is available if you want something smaller. The front of the Astra takes on a different grille design, and new look spoiler and side skirts. The rear now includes a spoiler on the roof, and a redesigned rear bumper to accommodate the diffuser and the two or four exhaust outlet. The Irmscher kit lowers the Astra by 30 mm, and on the insider we get leather seats, door panels and central arm rest, with the final touch of aluminium pedals.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released yesterday the new and improved boosters ratings (devices which elevate children so belts will fit their small frames better), in an attempt to "take the guesswork out" of the selection of the devices. According to the new ratings, 9 belt-positioning boosters will got the Best Bets title, while 6 are Good Bets.

The IIHS tested 60 models, finding that 11 boosters aren’t recommended at all because they do such a poor job… (read more)