Alleged PSN Hackers Claim To Have Stolen Over 2 Million Credit Cards

So we all know that the PlayStation Network has been hacked and PlayStation loyalists have been unable to play their beloved games for over a week now. We also know that these hackers had access to pretty much all of our information should we have provided to Sony at any time. However, Sony claimed that credit card information was encrypted and it was highly unlikely that it was stolen as well. We all know that was probably a lie. If the hackers managed to do enough damage to keep the network down for over a week, then something big has happened. Reported by NY Times, some security researchers have uncovered some chatter on underground websites and message boards that state that the hackers made away with just over 2 million credit card...

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Posted in: Knowledge,News,Technology,World News

Super Lazer In Production - Creates More Power Than All Of Civilization

 Firstly, I would like to apologize for lacking in the post section for the last week. My whole world became engulfed by my University finals weeks. It's nearly over though! At any rate, here's the story: The European Commission has given the go ahead on funding from the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania for three "ultrafast" laser laboratories in each respective country providing funding. The project between the three countries is called the Extreme Light Infrastructure Project(click the name for their website, pretty interesting). Each of the three countries will contribute about $400 million to the project. The Extreme Light Infrastructure Project plans to create many new powerful lasers, the first of which will fire at 10 petawatts,...

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Posted in: News,Technology,World News

New HP TouchPad May Automatically Download Songs You May Like

 To be honest, I haven't really been that interested in Hewlett Packard's upcoming tablet, the TouchPad, until now. This tablet has a 9.7 inch screen, runs webOS and has a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon tucked inside of it. It honestly isn't really anything too astounding and really isn't even that eye-catching. However, according to the guys over at PreCentral, HP plans to incorporated a cloud-esque music syncing algorithm that caches the type of music you like to listen to and will automatically download more music that it thinks you would enjoy. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this yet. I don't know if I'd want my tablet independently downloading music for me. What if I don't like it? What if my tablet offends me? What if my...

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Posted in: Knowledge,Reviews,Technology

NASA's Shuttles Could Fly Again!

I know I wasn't the only one devastated when I learned that NASA's space program would be discontinued with their last mission later this year. I was heart broken. As a kid I visited the NASA visitor center countless times, I even wanted to become an astronaut. I still am heart broken that NASA's shuttles are scheduled for discontinuation. However, the shuttles do have a slight chance to see the outside of our atmosphere again. According to SPACE.com, United Space Alliance (USA) wants to fly two shuttles (Atlantis and Endeavour) commercially after building new fuel tanks for them. Apparently NASA is working on some new orbital spacecraft, but those won't be seen for some time. USA's vice president Dan Brandenstein (who is a former NASA...

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Posted in: Knowledge,News,Technology,World News

New Idea: Off-Topic Saturdays

RZ8RH5QRJKHJ (Don't mind the code above, it's just a technorati claim code. Nothing to see here. Move on down for the actual post.) Okay, so as my wonderful followers know, my blog usually stays focused on World and Technology news. However, I often find other interesting things I would like to share with you all but they just don't fit the focus of my blog. So I decided I might try to take one day out of the week(Saturday) to spotlight something other than world and tech news that has caught my interest and would probably catch yours too. Enter: Off-Topic Saturdays. So, what do you guys think? 1. Would this be something you'd be interested in? 2. or should I just stick with world and technology news? Also, lets try it out with something...

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Posted in: Fun,off-topic

Scientists Plan To Program Computers With Regret; Google Funds Research

Seems pretty accurate, am I right? Every human being is programmed with an emotion called regret and the ability of hindsight, which is directly related to regret. By definition, regret is a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened or been done. And, hindsight is the ability to understand, after something has happened, what should have been done or what caused the event. Example: You came upon a bear while hiking in the forest, instead of walking away from the bear you pull out a leash and try to harness the beast. The bear then tears your face off before chewing your limbs to pieces. Somehow you make it out alive, but while you're sitting in the hospital bed you think of how stupid you...

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Posted in: Knowledge,News,Technology

Water: How The World Is Taking Advantage

Since you're on the internet reading this blog post, odds are you live in a developed country. Odds also favor that you rarely, if ever, think about your personal water consumption let alone your countries water consumption. Many people believe that the world has an unlimited supply of water, clean and ready for the taking at their very need. However, this is not the case. Water is a natural resource just like any other on our planet, and our planet can and will run out of water supply sometime in the future. How? You may ask. I can't possibly use enough water, nor can others, to cause a world shortage of water. Well, that's where you're wrong. In a class of mine today, my professor was talking about this very issue and mentioned an author...

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Incredible Rap Remix of Rebecca Blacks Friday

Alright, so I already had a post lined up and written for today, but I found this video and decided to bump that post over to tomorrow because it's so awesome. You know I think something is awesome when I go completely off topic. This is an incredible rap remake of Rebecca Blacks hit song "Friday". This kid has a lot of talent and I would definitely like to see more like this from him. At any rate, check the video out: They go by the name Sex Ray Vision. Look them up, subscribe to them, make them famous. Okay, its not really a remix, but rather a remake. Insane. FOLLOWERS: I'm waiting for this video to explode, bets on when it goes viral? I say within the next few weeks. Also, I think he looks like an Asian Harry Potter when he's at the m...

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Posted in: Fun,Videos

New Acer Tablet Costs $50 Less Than Ipad: But Is It Worth It?

Alright, so Acer came out with the all new Iconia Tab A500 priced at $449.99, which is 50 whole big ones less than the lowest priced iPad 2 at $500.  The question is:   Is it worth the $50 dollar savings? With all of the new wanna be iPad killers hitting the market, it's hard to tell if the tablet you're looking at really does stack up against the big daddy of them all. So far, most of the competitors have been...lackluster.  However, the new Iconia, which is set to be released later this month, brings big promises. (but haven't we heard them all before?) Lets do a quick comparison of specs between the two. First up: The Iconia Tab A500 by Acer Well this sleek thing looks quite alright in my opinion. Do a quick Google...

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Posted in: Android,News,Reviews,Technology

Funerals Of The Future: Webcams and Woolen Coffins

 Get buried, son. Traditionally, most of us typically don't think about the end of our lives until, well, the end of our lives. Often times, the deceased have no say in how their funeral is held aside from a few small requests like clothing, open or closed coffin, etc. After we pass, we don't usually have control over details like who's invited to the funeral, where we're buried, or what kind of coffin we're buried in. Usually that is all organized by the people we leave behind. Well, now those people have a few more options to consider. I was reading my local newspaper a few days ago and stumbled across an article about a funeral that was broadcast via webcam to friends and family that couldn't make it to the real deal. At first...

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Posted in: Fun,Knowledge,News

Smartphone Apps May Be Violoating Your Privacy

 Alright, lets face it. How many smartphone users actually read the user agreement when downloading a new app to their phone? I know I don't and Android usually spells it out for me in black and white right before I hit "allow". As I said before, when using an Android device to download new apps, the phone alerts you of permissions that you are granting the app to have.(I'm not sure how the iPhone or other devices go about telling you this information, but I'm sure they do.) Many times these permissions include access to GPS, phone records, contacts list, etc. But why does an app need to access all of that? According to the app, it's essential to the performance of the application. However, most of the time it's not. In the last couple...

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Posted in: Android,News,Technology

Richard Branson And Google Set Out To Chart The Depths

While reading through a fellow bloggers post, YouTube TV, I came to the conclusion that Google is indeed changing the world in many ways. As you can read in Profusely's post about Google's new endeavor, YouTube TV, they are stepping their worldly presence up a notch. I decided to see what else Google is diving into and came up with this: What you see in the picture above is the Virgin Oceanic. It's a deep-water submarine owned by billionaire Richard Branson (the guy who founded Virgin Records, Virgin Galactic and much more. Click the link for his wiki page, he's a pretty interesting guy). So it looks pretty futuristic, but in all honesty, there is nothing really interesting about some billionaires toy submarine, right? WRONG. Branson...

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Posted in: Fun,News,Technology

Texting From Desktop via Wifi or USB: Multitasking Triumph

Imagine being a complete master of multitasking. You have your tabbed browsing, bluetooth headset(well maybe not), and anything else that allows you to do a millions things at once. You're in the zone; doing homework, playing COD, surfing the web, writing a book, riding a bear, and then...beep beep, you get a text message and everything comes to a screeching halt so you can look away from your desktop to answer the text. Well fear that no longer! Texdro is an app that allows you to connect your Android device and computer wirelessly. On your phone you get a simple app that allows you to turn the feature on and off. On your desktop you get a contacts list and a whole list of settings allowing you to change notifications, etc. Now, I'm sure...

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Posted in: Android,Knowledge,Reviews,Technology

Are News Headlines Becoming Too Misleading?

It seems to me that nowadays more and more news agencies and reporters are pumping up their stories with headlines that are either biased or subjective. More likely than not, you'll be drawn in by an interested headline, read or watch the story and then realize that the headline was only slightly connected with the story. I've seen many of these interesting yet misleading headlines in the past few days, but one stuck out to me for more reasons than one. This story was posted to the "HealthLand" portion of the Times website. In the times Twitter feed the article link is preceded by an eye-catching and even heart-wrenching line: "Did veganism contribute to the death of this baby?" However, once you get to the actual article the story is...

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Posted in: Fun,Knowledge,Opinion

April Fools' Joke "Gmail Motion" Comes To Life

So I'm sure many of you caught wind of Google's April Fools Day Joke, Gmail Motion. I'm also quite sure many of you probably wish it was a reality. I mean come on, it looks quite silly, but who wouldn't want to mess around in the office with something like that? Though I wish it were real, I still knew it was a hoax while watching the introduction video to Gmail Motion. I don't know how I did, but it probably had to do with the fact that it was April 1st and everything must be questioned on that day. On a side note, the video also looked quite satirical and that raised some flags for me as well. Anyways! For those of you who were disappointed that this wasn't a reality(myself included), you have no need to be disappointed any longer! After...

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Posted in: Fun,Knowledge,News,Technology

Blackberry Playbook Not Playing By The Rules?

Not many of us have been anticipating the release of the Playbook, Blackberry's new tablet. I guarantee it won't even make a dent in iPad sales. I'm sure most of you didn't even know it is set to be released in a couple of weeks. I'm not even going to post the specs and details of it, because I know most of you just aren't that interested. WHAT IS INTERESTING though, is the fact that Blackberry is opening up their device to Android apps. Developers will have to work with Research In Motion(RIM) in porting the apps to work on the Playbook. It seems that because RIM slowly lost its power to the iPhone and Android phones, they are trying to make up for lost ground instead of wasting time further developing the Blackberry App World. That just...

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Posted in: Android,Knowledge,News,Technology

Top 100 Toys: 1920s Through 2000s

I was recently browsing through Time Magazine's website and came across an article that really brought me back to my childhood. The article is titled All-Time 100 Greatest Toys and covers toys from every decade from the last century starting in the 1920s. You can find the original article by following the title link. I've chosen my favorite toy from each decade and will share them with you in this blog post. While I wasn't alive when the majority of these toys were released, I still played with some form of them when I was a kid. Prepare for nostalgia blast off....5....4....3...2....1 edit: having a little issue with my layout. The "read more" link is hard to locate. Click that, the title of the post, or this text link to get the whole...

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Posted in: Fun,Knowledge,News

Sunk Cost Fallacy: How Companies Sell Using Your Emotions

 haha get it? Sunk Cost. Yeeaaahhh. What is "sunk cost" and the "sunk cost fallacy" exactly?   Well, literally a sunk cost is an expense that has already been made and cannot be recovered. Basically money you spend that you cannot get back.   The sunk cost fallacy is basically a play on your emotions. You pay for something you either didn't want in the first place or found out after the purchase that you didn't want it after all, but still use the service simply because you paid for it. You feel you are emotionally tied to the purchase because you paid for it and feel the money would go to waste if the service goes unused.   Lets say you spent $90 on a non-refundable ticket to a concert only to find out shortly after...

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Posted in: Knowledge