Apparently TiVo has been giving up some details about the Series 3 today—no official announcements, but the writer at Megazone has somehow gotten the scoop. It’s an HDTV unit with two CableCARD slots in back, and a window that shows what you are watching/recording while it’s at work.

Finally! Of course, I'll believe it when it's sitting in my living room, since they've been 'announcing' HD Tivo for 3 years now.

TiVo Series 3 - Yes, It has Dual HDTV Tuners - Gizmodo

About 400 people were evacuated from an office complex at The Mall at Green Hills yesterday after a fire swept through a restaurant kitchen near the shopping center, fire officials said.

One way to drag productivity down at work. I wish the Bistro would've burned to the ground. It would've brought a Biblical ending to the wretched place.

Fire at Bistro 215 forces 400 from offices

There is no other industry in the world that uses so many different approaches to the same thing and in which these differences don't relate to better results.

Actually that's not true. The IT industry is another shining example of this. Enter any IT shop, big or small, and you will see a dizzying distribution of techniques and methodologies used to attempt an outcome, including (and usually) no methodology at all.

This is a really great article on what the opportunities are in the health care space that most IT players (and VC's, and entrepreneurs) are for the most part completely missing.

IT remedies for US health care: An interview with WellPoint's Leonard Schaeffer

Beautiful.

ashes and snow Portfolio - ashes and snow

I was so busy with my book, I completely missed this news as it went by . . .

November 8, 2005--A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number

310 7418240490 0437213507 5003588856 7930037346 0228427275 4572016194 8823206440 5180815045 5634682967 1723286782 4379162728 3803341547 1073108501 9195485290 0733772482 2783525742 3864540146 9173660247 7652346609
known as RSA-640 (Franke 2005). The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 (MathWorld headline news, December 5, 2003) and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200 (MathWorld headline news, May 10, 2005).

RSA numbers are composite numbers having exactly two prime factors (i.e., so-called semiprimes) that have been listed in the Factoring Challenge of RSA Security®.

While composite numbers are defined as numbers that can be written as a product of smaller numbers known as factors (for example, 6 = 2 x 3 is composite with factors 2 and 3), prime numbers have no such decomposition (for example, 7 does not have any factors other than 1 and itself). Prime factors therefore represent a fundamental (and unique) decomposition of a given positive integer. RSA numbers are special types of composite numbers particularly chosen to be difficult to factor, and they are identified by the number of digits they contain.

While RSA-640 is a much smaller number than the 7,816,230-digit monster Mersenne prime known as M42 (which is the largest prime number known), its factorization is significant because of the curious property that proving or disproving a number to be prime ("primality testing") seems to be much easier than actually identifying the factors of a number ("prime factorization"). Thus, while it is trivial to multiply two large numbers p and q together, it can be extremely difficult to determine the factors if only their product pq is given. With some ingenuity, this property can be used to create practical and efficient encryption systems for electronic data.

Gotta go update my "Unsolved Codes" webpage . . .

Elonka

MathWorld News: RSA-640 Factored

Today, Clark believes the elephants are upon us. Yes, the Internet has wrought wonders: e-commerce has flourished, and e-mail has become a ubiquitous means of communication. Almost one billion people now use the Internet, and critical industries like banking increasingly rely on it.

At the same time, the Internet's shortcomings have resulted in plunging security and a decreased ability to accommodate new technologies. "We are at an inflection point, a revolution point," Clark now argues. And he delivers a strikingly pessimistic assessment of where the Internet will end up without dramatic intervention. "We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls -- and perhaps turns downward."

The Impact of Emerging Technologies: The Internet Is Broken

Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach -- and discovering that his on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!

Excellent!

MAN DATES GAL ON INTERNET FOR SIX MONTHS -- AND IT TURNS OUT SHE'S HIS MOTHER!

New Windsor - What, some might ask Jessica Sherer, is with the giant snow penis she built on her boyfriend's lawn this week?

I had to meme this because of the title alone. The rest of the story is mediocre at best. But the end has one last quote that is meme worthy.

Biasotti worries the display might give others ideas. "Now we're going to get snow penises popping up all over town," he said.

Police whack giant snow penis

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

First open salvo in this war.

Telecoms want their products to travel on a faster Internet

Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes can be evoked in most sighted people. The vOICe technology may now build on this with live video from a head-mounted camera encoded in sound.

Hmm... this could be fun to play with from a musical perspective. What 'music' does this space sound like?

Seeing with Sound - The vOICe