The space agency is looking into creating a massively multiplayer online game as an educational tool.

NASA considering making a virtual world

Posted by Daniel Terdiman

There are all kinds of virtual worlds these days: Those for kids, for adults, centered around fantasy battles, and even those centered on space.

But no one has a better hold on space than NASA, and that agency is now considering creating its own virtual world, according to the BBC.

"The virtual world would be aimed at students and would 'simulate real NASA engineering and science missions,'" the BBC wrote, adding that the space agency has put out requests for vendors interested in producing the virtual world.

The idea behind the so-called massively multiplayer online game would be to help train future scientists and foster a broader interest in space among students.

Already, NASA has a presence on an island in Second Life.

"We at NASA are working hard to create opportunities for what I might call participatory exploration," the BBC quoted the director of the project, Simon Worden, as saying. "We are looking at how this island can be a portal for all to fly along on space missions."

Cnet.com

Judge: Mobile phones in tiger attack may be inspected

Calif. judge says that the San Francisco Zoo may look for incriminating photographs on cell phones owned by two men who were mauled by a tiger last month.

A California judge has said the San Francisco Zoo may inspect the mobile phones of two brothers involved in a deadly tiger attack on Christmas Day.

Superior Court Judge Socrates Peter Manoukian in Santa Clara County ruled late Friday that the city and the zoo can review the devices for photographs that might provide clues about what happened that day, and for logs of conversations near the time of the 911 call.

He wrote: "Under the maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words the Court believes that the allegation of existence or nonexistence of any photographs is specific enough to justify an attempt to perpetuate them."

The defendants in the civil lawsuit are brothers Kulbir Dhaliwal and Amritpal Dhaliwal. They were mauled during the tiger attack and their friend, Carlos Sousa Jr., was killed. The tiger pen's wall was only 12.5 feet high, 4 feet below generally accepted safety standards. The Siberian tiger, Tatiana, was shot dead by police that day.

Manoukian said, however, that the city and the zoo could not inspect the contents of the car. (There have been reports that a bottle of alcohol was present.) Their attorney has called these efforts a fishing expedition.

It's unclear what the real impact of this ruling will be--that's because the San Francisco Police Department has obtained a search warrant allowing them to examine the car and mobile phones in conjunction with a separate criminal investigation.

Cnet.com

&lt;strike&gt;Steal</strike> Download Music From Any Shared iTunes Library with OurTunes [Featured Download]

Windows/Mac only: Freeware application ourTunes downloads music from any shared iTunes library on your network to any folder on your computer. There's a good chance you've heard of ourTunes (or a similar app, myTunes) before, as it used to be the go-to app for sharing music with your peers using your iTunes library, but every time Apple updated iTunes, ourTunes would die another death. Well, it's back, and it works with iTunes 7. I hadn't used ourTunes in a while, and things seemed to be working differently, so to get you up and running, here's how it works.

First you'll want to download the ourTunes.jar file from the Save OurTunes web site. If it's not already installed, you'll also need to download and install Java on your computer.

Now fire up iTunes and ourTunes on your computer. Before you go any further, I'd recommend choosing a download folder for all that music you're about to download. Done? Then let's move ahead.

If there are other computers on your network, you'll see them start popping up in the ourTunes (and iTunes, for that matter) sidebar. In ourTunes, click on the name of the library you want to download music from. ourTunes will work a little magic, creating a duplicate entry for this shared library in your iTunes sidebar. Click on the duplicate library in iTunes, let it load the library, and then you're ready to go.

So how do you download songs? Easy—just play the song in iTunes and ourTunes will start sucking down the file to the folder you chose above. It downloads quickly, so you don't have to listen to the entire song before moving to the next. Generally songs just take a few seconds to land on your desktop.

Problems?

I only ran into one problem testing ourTunes, and it only appeared on my Mac (Windows tests went without a hitch). When you choose the download folder, for some reason ourTunes was incorrectly saving the folder with a weird sort of duplication. That is, if I chose ~/Documents as my download folder, ourTunes tried saving to ~/Documents/Documents. The way I got around this was to create a second Documents folder inside the original Documents folder, then choose ~\Documents as my download directory. I'd assume this bug will be addressed eventually, but in the meantime that workaround should do the trick.

If you're sick of the restrictions Apple places on iTunes music sharing on your local network, ourTunes will do the trick. ourTunes is freeware, Windows and Mac only, requires Java. Thanks EricTJ!

ourTunes [Save OurTunes]

Silence Your Xbox 360 with a New Fan [Hardware]

Whether you're using it for video games or as part of a media center powerhouse, all of our Xbox 360s have one thing in common: They're loud. Hardware site ExtremeTech walks through how to replace the stock fan unit (which screams like a 747) with a whisper quiet, $25 alternative. This is one of those warranty-voiders, so you'll have to decide whether or not a little peace and quiet is worth it.

Hacking Your Xbox 360 Fan [ExtremeTech via Lifehacker AU]

Learn Online: Access Free University Lectures at LectureFox

LectureFox is a cool resource if you have an interest in academic subjects and want to kill some time. The LectureFox site contains a growing catalogue of links to lecture materials (video, audio, and notes) from distinguished universities such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford.

The lectures are skewed towards the sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Math, and Computer Science) but they also have a section with all sorts of subjects from copyright law to modern poetry.

5min - The Deadliest Display of Nuclear Power - Video

5min - The Deadliest Display of Nuclear Power - Video

Stream Music from BitTorrent Downloads with WeStream [BitTorrent]

BitTorrent applet WeStream plays individual songs from a BitTorrent stream in your Java-enabled browser. Brought to you by BitLet, the in-browser BitTorrent client, just give WeStream the URL of the torrent file to get started. WeStream is a really interesting idea, but it's currently got a couple of restrictions. First, it only works with OGG- and MP3-encoded music. Second, it can really only work on well-seeded torrents, meaning if you want to listen to something with just one or two seeds, you're probably out of luck. But if you can get a good speed (like this), WeStream is a perfect tool for previewing music before you download it.

WeStream [BitLet via TorrentFreak]

The Ultimate PC for Aunt Lili: Daniel Sellers gift.

Check out these specs!






Processor

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor.
64 bit Support: Yes
FSB: 1066MHz
Hyper-Threading Support: No
L2 Cache: 4M shared

$279.99



Case
Antec Sonata III Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply.

$129.95


Heatsink

ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler

$21.99


Memory

Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

$129.99



Graphics Card

ASUS EN8800GT/G/HTDP/512M GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

$279.99



Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFDRTL 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive

$259.99




Motherboard

ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

CPU Type: Quad-core / Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo / Pentium
FSB: 1333/1066MHz

$179.99


Total = $1281.89

RIAA: Personal Use is Stealing

We couldn't bid 2007 a proper farewell without one last bonehead move by our friends at the major labels. For some time now, it's largely been considered legal to rip electronic versions of music that you purchase, so long as they're for your own use. When you buy a CD, that music becomes your personal possession.

Desperate times, however, call for desperate shifts in litigation. According to The Washington Post, the RIAA has sent a letter to an Arizona-based music fan, accusing him of "illegally" transferring his CD collection to his hard drive.

During the trial of Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman who was ordered by the court to pay $220,000 in damages for the 24 songs she was sharing online, Jennifer Pariser, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, testified, "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." He added that when one makes that copy, it's "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy.'"

While recent consumer wins with regards to technologies such as VCRs and DVRs may set a precedent on the matter of copying your own entertainment, the RIAA just wouldn't be the RIAA if it backed down. Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the organization, told The Post that it would continue to bring on the suits: "It's not our first choice, but it's a necessary part of the equation. There are consequences for breaking the law."

The Ultimate Toilet for Troubled Butt Wipers

Have trouble wiping your butt? Or maybe you're just lazy, or think it's unsanitary. Whichever the reason, the Ultimate Solution ComfortSeat (SCS-5000) can help you conquer your worse toilet nightmares. It's a special kind of toilet seat that cleans your butt with the touch of a button. That's right folks: a self-cleaning nozzle extends from the bowl and washes your butt with a sweeping motion. Best of all, the wash motion, nozzle position, water pressure, and water temperature are all adjustable. Because, well, we only deserve the best when it comes to the potty, right?

The SCS-5000 works with the included remote, which is attached to the side of the toilet seat. It's color-coded, making it easy to remember which button does what, such as pink for front wash and yellow for air dry. The system is so advanced that it even remembers your preferred settings. For instance, after a good pee, you might like a nice, frontal wash with low water pressure.

The ComfortSeat also features a heated soft-closing seat, a user sensor (so that you don't get accidentally sprayed if you're not sitting on the toilet), a warm air dryer, an automatic energy-saver mode, and an antibacterial plastic construction.

Just for the ladies, the SCS-5000 has a rear and feminine frontal wash that features a back-and-forth sweeping motion for, according to the site, a "wider and more effective cleaning."

You can get all of this loo luxury for $1,099.95. Make sure you select either an elongated or round toilet seat style.