It might be time to start that 'Second Career'!
Thought this was interesting... :)
The City of Edmonton is moving forward on its crackdown on aggressive panhandlers.
These are a group of about 20 or 30 people who police estimate were responsible for 90 per cent of the complaints they received last year.
"I know of one individual that lives in a high-rise downtown," Edmonton police Insp. Brian Nowlan said Monday. "He makes about $400 a day panhandling, so this is a way of making an income." 
From the Adobe video editing 'skunkworks'
You can do some of these things with
Apple's 'Motion' and Adobe 'After Effects' but we're talking technology here that is much more intuitive to use. Very cool stuff here.. no 'keyframing' required!
Intel's i7 "Nehalem" release event Nov. 17th 2008
With all the bad news about Cali. fires, the tanking economy and such.. here is some good news for us tech-heads, who seem to spend much of our working hours sitting in front of, using, or *waiting* on a computer. It's been on the drawing boards for several years now as many of us that work as suppliers have known. But these are the sorts of things you dont really talk about in your day to day blogging, discussions etc: (nda's and all) if you want to remain gainfully employed :-)
It's also not really a secret that Intel uses software from Synopsys to help design and verify these sorts of ICs.
When will this sucker show up in a Mac Pro Tower system? Jan. @ MacWorld would be my guess? although those machines already have some pretty fast Xeon chips in them.
The guys/gals at ARS technica have the breakdown here:
The Microarchitecture
The Core i7
The making of the i7
Does a Chinese Pirate say Arrrrgh? or Alllllgh?
Blu-Ray bootlegs.. it was only a matter of time!
As noted in this WSJ story.. pirated Blu-Ray discs are showing up in China.
Law enforcement in Shenzhen, China, raided a warehouse last month that contained HD copies of a number of popular movies. Over 800 discs in fake boxes, and holograms to make them look legit. The Chinese Blu-ray knock-offs run as little as $7 apiece (compared to the typical Blu-ray disc at $30+).
The process involves ripping high-def movies (cracking Blu-ray's AACS and BD+ encryption in the process) and re-encoding them using AVCHD, which offers a 720p picture. 
Because of the reduction in resolution, files can be burned to regular DVDs instead of the more costly Blu-ray discs, can you say profit!?.
Interesting, the BD+ encryption scheme has only been out a little more than a year and a half. BD+ is the DRM protocol used to protect Blu-ray discs. It makes use of a small virtual machine environment to enforce compliance. BD+ was considered much harder to crack than the encryption used on HD DVD discs.
Some crafty programmers at work here. Wont bore you with the technical details, but if you're a code/hardware person you'll find the comments in the Slashdot URL thread an interesting read!
