Softsqueeze is a music player for your PC that works with the Slimserver software. It complements the Squeezebox2, Squeezebox and Slimp3 hardware music players developed by Slim Devices. Softsqueeze supports synchronization with hardware players and remote streaming over the Internet using ssh tunneling. It has been developed in Java, allowing this useful application to work with Windows PCs, OS X and Linux systems.

Softsqueeze 2.0

Two master entertainers from England, and the line connecting them is palpable.

Hitchcock studied four Dickens novels at school: 'Bleak House', 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations', and 'Our Mutual Friend'. His favourite was 'Great Expectations', which may have inspired a theme of 'growing up' found in several of his 'picaresque' thrillers (such as North by Northwest). But it was 'Bleak House', notes Donald Spoto, which 'seems to have engraved itself on Hitchcock's memory. More than a simple treatment of political corruption and the injustices of the legal system (which the young Dickens and his family had experienced firsthand), "Bleak House" details a grim distrust in any public institution. This same sort of cynicism informs Hitchcock's films, where statesmen and judges and lawyers and policemen are venal, small-minded, driven by the most intense lust and greed, and not much better than the apparent villains.' (Donald Spoto, 'The Life of Alfred Hitchcock' [1983], p. 28. Spoto perhaps underestimates Hitchcock's personal detachment, but cynicism is certainly present in a work like The Paradine Case. See, for example, the note below on the sadistic, and lustful, Judge Horfield.)

Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Dickens

If you want some more in-depth reading jump on over here...

MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday:
From Dan Kaminsky, a senior Senior Security Consultant for Avaya, and a part of the DoxPara Research team...

http://www.doxpara.com/md5_someday.pdf
http://www.doxpara.com/research/md5/...ful-slides.pdf
http://www.doxpara.com/research/md5/confoo.pl

Stach & Liu have some well document information on MD4/5 Collisions...
http://www.stachliu.com.nyud.net:809...ollisions.html

We live in a world that has to much "security via obscurity" or a "don't ask don't" tell policy on security problems...

Even back in 2005 MS and Big Bill's Boys banned the use of DES/MD4/MD5 on their projects, but even SHA1 and other systems they have chosen are still looking to be prone to attack.

I dug up a little info for this reply to someone... Can anyone provide some more input on the problems with MD5

Just how secure is MD5?

Seventeen piconewtons: that's the force required to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface.

It takes 210 piconewtons to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface, according to a new research paper from IBM's Almaden Research Center and the University of Regensberg.

A piconewton is a trillionth of a newton. A newton is the amount of force required to accelerate a kilogram one meter per second squared. Lifting a penny weighing 3 grams takes about 30 billion piconewtons. The atoms in IBM's experiments are moved with atomic force microscopes. (Andreas Heinrich, lead scientist in the scanning tunneling microscopy lab at IBM Almaden and the lead author of the paper, recently let us move some atoms with a scanning tunneling/atomic force microscope in his lab.)

The breakthrough marks the first time anyone has been able to measure the force required to move individual atoms around, according to IBM, and helps the company move toward its goal of molecular computing.

IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms

As structures made of metal get smaller — as their dimensions approach the micrometer scale (millionths of a meter) or less — they get stronger. Scientists discovered this phenomenon 50 years ago while measuring the strength of tin "whiskers" a few micrometers in diameter and a few millimeters in length. Many theories have been proposed to explain why smaller is stronger, but only recently has it become possible to see and record what's actually happening in tiny structures under stress.

Read on the post is very detailed ... Does this apply to humans too?

Smaller is Stronger -- Now Scientists Know Why

Energy now lost as heat during the production of electricity could be harnessed through the use of silicon nanowires synthesized via a technique developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. The far-ranging potential applications of this technology include DOE’s hydrogen fuel cell-powered “Freedom CAR,” and personal power-jackets that could use heat from the human body to recharge cell-phones and other electronic devices.

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Rough silicon nanowires synthesized by Berkeley Lab researchers demonstrated high performance thermoelectric properties even at room temperature when connected between two suspended heating pads. In this illustration, one pad serves as the heat source (pink), the other as the sensor.

“This is the first demonstration of high performance thermoelectric capability in silicon, an abundant semiconductor for which there already exists a multibillion dollar infrastructure for low-cost and high-yield processing and packaging,” said Arun Majumdar, a mechanical engineer and materials scientist with joint appointments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, who was one of the principal investigators behind this research.

Feeling the Heat: Berkeley Researchers Make Thermoelectric Breakthrough in Silicon Nanowires

TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half‑angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom — has been installed at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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TEAM 0.5, the world's best transmission electron microscope, is being assembled at the National Center for Electron Microscopy. (Photo Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab CSO)

"We have beam down the column," announced Uli Dahmen of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who is head of NCEM and director of DOE's collaborative TEAM Project, when the TEAM 0.5 microscope first delivered its ultrabright electron beam at Berkeley Lab in late December.

The TEAM Project (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) is led by Berkeley Lab in a collaboration with DOE's Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and two private companies specializing in electron microscopy, the FEI Company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and CEOS of Heidelberg, Germany.

Now that TEAM 0.5's basic systems are operational, additional components and facilities are being completed and tuned, including a state-of-the-art control room display that shows the sample under the microscope on a flat panel resembling a wide-screen, high-definition TV. After a long series of rigorous tests and adjustments, TEAM 0.5 will become available to outside users by October, 2008.

Research News: Debut of TEAM 0.5, the World's Best Microscope

The consequences of quitting exercise may be greater than previously thought, according to a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that determined that the weight gained during an exercise hiatus can be tough to shed when exercise is resumed at a later date.

The study, conducted by Paul Williams of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, found that the key to staying trim is to remain active year-round, year-after-year, and to avoid seasonal and irregular exercise patterns. Most of all, don’t quit. Failure to do so may be a contributing factor in the nation’s obesity epidemic.

“The price to pay for quitting exercise is higher than expected, and this price may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic affecting Americans,” says Williams, whose study is published in the February issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise

Quit Jack and Get Fat! :P

Irregular Exercise Pattern May Add Pounds

It's the astronomers forecast. It shows at a glance when, in the next 48 hours, we might expect clear and dark skies for one specific observing site. There are many, but the example above is for Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania.

It's is specifically intended for amateur astronomers. The forecast data comes from a numerical weather model run by those very cool guys at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.

Read from left to right. Locate a column of blue blocks. That's when the sky will likely to be clear and dark. A more detailed explanation is here, which also links CMC's original forecast maps.

We had cloud cover here but here is something for the next go around of lunar things...

Clear Sky Clock ...

An eight-year old typographical error listing Laura Todd of Nashville, Tennessee, as ‘dead’ continues to causes her unending problems, her attempts to assert that she is alive, not getting through the bureaucratic undergrowth.

Laura Todd says the error in an official form is affecting everything from her credit to her income-tax return. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be dead when you’re not,” she says. Her problems started when someone in Florida died and it was Laura’s Social Security number that was accidentally typed in against the dead woman’s name. She thought the problem had been straightened out, but when she went to refinance her house in 2002, the mortgage company called and said, “Your credit report says you’re dead.” In 2006 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) refused to process her return. “The IRS says I’m dead. Everybody says I’m dead,” she said.

According to a report run by CNN, Laura said being dead off and on has made everyday life a hassle. Her bank closed her credit card account, while not forgetting to attach a note of sympathy: “Please accept our condolences on the death of Laura Todd.” She says the last straw came recently when the IRS once again refused to let her file her taxes electronically because she’s “dead.” She no longer finds the situation funny. “I’m tired. I’ve been fighting this for eight years, and it never ends,” she says. “I’m very much alive, and would like to live out my life in peace without having this problem.” The IRS has said it will research the problem and try to get it straightened out. Social Security claims to have updated its computers, but as for Laura Todd, she is not so sure her “death” is behind her.

Being dead is no fun, says undead woman