Apple just launched its new 3g I-phone. It comes with plastic back, new edges, Iphone 2.0 firmware, and a SIM ejector in the box. The best part of the story is that the new I-Phone, unlike the old one, won’t cost you your entire paycheck. The 8GB version of the new I-phone sells for $199 while the 16GB sells for $299. Thats quite trim compared to the $600 price tag that the first I-phone carried when it first came out. I guess the competition with the new smartphones made apple realize that people had more than 1 cool phone to choose from.

However, the release of the new Iphone did not help Apple’s stock which fell 4.03 points today down to 181.61. Investors quickly sold the stock after it had gained nearly 50% in the months leading up to this release.

I’d say at this point the apple stock is at a buy as these new I-phone are sure to sell well and inflate profits.

Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest computer today that cost $100 million and took six years to make. This computer can sustain 1,000 trillion calculations per second over long periods of time. Its primary use is nuclear weapons work, and if my guess is right, countermeasures and nuclear defenses in case of an attack. The computer will also be used in other purposes such as engineering, medicine,science, and even in the production of more fuel-efficient cars.

The computer has a whopping 80 tera-bytes of memory and consists of nearly 7,000 dual-core processors. It has over 57 miles of fiber optics and takes roughly 6,000 square feet. Another important thing is that it is energy efficient, performing 376 million calculations for every watt used. To put the speed in perspective, it would take six billion hand-held computers working 24 hours a day for 46 years t o achieve what the supercomputer could achieve in a single day. However, lets not forget the first computer back in 1945 was nearly just as big and would a little more than a calculator when compared to the desktops and laptops of today. I figure we’ll have this kind of computing power on our desktops in another 20-25 years or so.

A Cell phone GPS tracking system has been tracking over 100,000 individuals in their daily activities. The study is aimed at tracking the movement patterns of individuals so emergency situations can more easily be prepared for. The study has surprisingly found that most people generally do not travel outside a 37-mile radius very often and follow expected patterns of behavior, even in the long term. This is actually not surprising to me, but it is different from earlier studies that showed people behaving randomly.

I’m not sure why they are so surprised, common sense should dictate that most people follow expected patterns of regular behavior. We get up every day, go to work, go to lunch and then come home and maybe go out. Unless I am on a vacation or a business trip, I usually do the same routine every day and do not go outside a 37-mile radius.

Besides the technological implications, there is a very controversial matter is this study. 100,000 people were being monitored without their consent, which is illegal in the United States. This is a clear breach of privacy. Even though the technological implications of this are huge and could help us in the future, privacy rights cannot be violated in this instance. There is no dire or emergency need to track civilians without them knowing. Any research in this manner would have to come from volunteer users who know the full extent of the research and who have consented and signed a form stating that they understand. You may even have to compensate some people for participating in this project. I probably would not volunteer for this research myself, as I do not like the feeling of having people looking over my shoulder at my everyday activities.

For all you firefox lovers, the good news has finally come. Firefox 3 is about to come out. With over 14,000 improvements, it promises to be faster, smarter, and safer than before. But, there is another gimmick to this. Firefox wants to break the world download record and is asking for your help! Go to the Spread Firefox site and pledge yourself now. Hundreds of thousands have already pledged to help break this world record and you could join them and own a piece of history. So go, pledge, and sign up for this cause. Hey, it might even get your name in a book.

As for practical purposes as a web designer and web publisher, I will download Firefox 3 on that day but continue to run Firefox two until a majority of users have upgraded to FF3 and my add-on plugins are ready to go for FF3. It will probably take a few months at least. I really hope Firefox 3 fixes a lot of the problems like tha memory leaks that have plagued Firefox 2. There were more than a few instances where I had to go back to IE 7 because some plugin didn’t work or Firefox just froze for no reason and drained all my system memory.

A Japanese Scientist has made software that may make it much harder for students to copy and paste things from the internet. Kazunari Sugimitsu has written software that divides a paragraph into clauses and groups and then checks the internet for similar clauses and phrases and informs the instructor if there are such similar clauses and phrases. It also checks whether the copy and paste functions have been applied to the passage. While I believe this is a great technology and may help to improve academic integrity, especially among college students, I have many doubts that it will work. There are too many factors that a good copier could exploit that could effectively render something like this completely worthless.

First of all, instead of using the copy/paste function, you could just type in the word or phrase manually. It takes a few seconds but it easily doable. That would completely circumvent that part of the check. Second, it would take forever to search the entire internet for such phrases that the program would take forever to execute. Also some phrases are used so often that they would be found thousands of times. For some professors and teachers, it may be more trouble than its worth.
The third and most striking reason that this won’t work is because good copiers never copy word for word phrases that aren’t common. They improvise and re-word things. They piece bits of parts of many writings together to make a complete coherent piece for themselves. They also put the pieced together parts in their own words so a program like this will never be able to tell. How do I know? Because I’ve done it in the past many times. The essays were my own but much of the material in them came directly and if read correctly could be seen as a mirror image of where they originally came from. But the writing and the words used were so completely different that a program like this would never be able to pick it up. I also never used the copy and paste function either as I wrote most of my essays out by hand first before typing them on the computer.

With this software, you may be able to catch some of the lazy copycats who do nothing except cut and paste. But for the ones that actually put time into it, you’ll probably never catch them.

According to This article, Japanese scientists have made an amazing microscopic Ramen bowl with a diameter of 1/25,000 inch, complete with microscopic noodles. Now this is all amazing and all but it begs the question: Why the hell did you make a microscopic Ramen bowl? In what way does this help society? Do people plan to eat microscopic Ramen out of Microscopic Ramen bowls or something. Why did you waste money on creating this thing?

I understand the usefulness of nano technology and I congratulate you if this was a breakthrough, but seriously, couldn’t you have made something a little more useful to humanity with the nano technology. I enjoy Ramen as much as the next Asian guy, but microscopic Ramen is just not very filling.

For women who don’t want men touching them, this may be the perfect thing you are looking for. Self-defense classes and being watchful only get you so far, sometimes you need something more — like a taser jacket. This no-contact taser jacket is a great inhibitor to would-be assailants as it will give a shock to them when activated by the wearer. It is armed with 80,000 volts of low-amperage electric current, enough to keep anyone away for some time.

Obviously you can’t wear it all the time and there would be issues with people using these things as weapons so there will be some obstacles as far as selling these things go. But as a first and last line of self defense against the overly-touchy, its a winner.

Check it out