If you are looking for the epic motorcycle journey blog that I've written, please see the Miles By Motorcycle site I put together. 
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  • Earth-like planets may actually be common
    09/10/2006 6:56PM
    According to CCNews:

    "More than one-third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside our solar system may harbor Earth-like planets covered in deep global oceans that offer abundant potential for life, according to a new study by two scientists from Penn State and one from the University of Colorado associated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute."

    You can read the full at ccnmag.com
  • More on Compact Fluorescents
    08/29/2006 5:35PM
    According to slashdot:

    "if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."

    Read the full article at Slashdot.org.
  • USB drive security vulnerability
    08/29/2006 1:19PM
    Something to be concerned about if you ever plug your USB drives into a foreign computer:

    "A perverse hacker friend of mine has written a clever yet scaring Windows utility. Each time a USB key is inserted into his computer, the whole content of the key is silently dumped and stored on the machine. It doesn’t copy the existing files; it makes an image of the key."

    Read the full article at this blog.
  • Blackboard Inc patents concept of E-Learning
    08/28/2006 12:53PM
    At least the fiasco is making the main stream press more and more. This reporter seems to get it to some degree.

    "It may seem self-evident that virtual classrooms should closely resemble real ones. But a major education software company contends it wasn't always so obvious. And now, in a move that has shaken up the e-learning community, Blackboard Inc. has been awarded a patent establishing its claims to some of the basic features of the software that powers online education."

    You can read the full article at CNN.
  • "Tiered" domain name pricing?
    08/25/2006 1:21PM
    Firmly in the doom and gloom category, as reported by Slashdot.org:

    "As reported on CircleID, Vint Cerf has confirmed that ICANN's new contracts for the .org/.biz/.info domain prices can be tiered, so that google.biz could cost $1 million per year, while sex.biz could cost $100,000/year. This is very similar to how the .tv TLD already works. The domain registrar could also could also use pricing for political purposes, claiming that pricing sex.biz high would be to 'protect the children,' while icann.org could be priced at $1/year. Verisign's contract for .com and .net have recently been renewed, so those domains are safe for now, but I'm sure they would want similar treatment."