The Null Device

2001/12/25

Iceland is set to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen, by installing fuel cells on vehicles (starting with the Reykjavik bus fleet, and continuing on to its fishing trawlers). This will not only reduce Iceland's greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, but also (it is planned) make the state independent of foreign imports for its energy.

environment hydrogen iceland tech 5

Homeless in America? Dress up as Jesus. You'll get more sympathy, or at least, some heart-warming human-interest puff pieces written about you. (via rotten.com)

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Convicted cyberkleptomaniac and h4x0r-d00d poster boy Kevin Mitnick is likely to lose his amateur radio license. He has held the license for some 25 years, and it has come up for routine renewal, with the FCC bureaucracy making noises about pulling it because of Mitnick's unredeemably corrupt character. Mitnick has not been accused of actually committing any crimes involving amateur radio, but licenses, it seems, double as a badge of good citizenship. However, the FCC declined to pull his license when it came up for renewal two years earlier.

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I just got my Christmas presents from most of my immediate family, and they amounted to two items: a dressing gown, and (from various people together) a kitten and various related paraphernalia. It's currently lying on my lap, for the moment having given up on attacking the keyboard or trying to climb on the desk (which is off-limits).

As yet I don't have a name for him; had it been a female cat, I'd probably have named it Olympia, after the song by Lush. However, I've no idea what to name this little rascal.

(And yes, the pronoun thing is a bit confusing. I'm a bit hesitant to refer to cats as "he" or "she", as that would seem a bit anthropomorphic (I know that cats are male and female, but they're also asocial solitary predators (at least in the wild), and thus don't have the sexual division of labour, as it were, to differ much. I love cats, but I don't categorise them as people (or mentally story information about their sex), so I usually find myself referring to them as "it". However, giving a female name to a male cat (or vice versa) would just seem wrong.)

(He's a Burmese, in case you're wondering.)

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Biologists in Singapore are working on fish which change colour when exposed to pollutants, or changes in temperature. This could lend itself to new advances in novelty thermometers.

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Singapore Government-owned Australian ISP Optus deliberately throttles traffic on file-sharing ports, such as the old Napster ports and Carracho.

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