Welcome to another installment of Awesome Squishy Eyeball Pulsating Superfood and these are the things that caught my attention today.
The U.S. military industrial complex wants to keep building tanks for the army even though the army doesn't really want any more tanks because the future of warfare seems to be more nimble, using drones and long range missiles. It seems the U.S. congress is going to have the army buy more tanks it doesn't need under the pretense of keeping employment up. If they're looking to employ people maybe they should get some people to work on rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure all around them.
Speaking of not wanting to upgrade crumbling infrastructure, AT&T has filed a patent to detect what type of traffic you are using and charge you more for it. This is not unlike what AT&T has been trying in the past, but the FCC really needs to get on the ball and re-classify ISPs as common carriers. Can you imagine if the phone company charged you more based on the types of words you used? Hopefully, concepts such as net neutrality fight back from being killed off.
In other undead technology news, Windows XP still refuses to die and the portion of people using it actually increased slightly during January. This wouldn't be anything new to anyone following technology news, but it's interesting to see Microsoft competing against itself. When you have 'partners' who create corporate solutions that require a specific version of a runtime (like .NET) or specific version of IE, you lock out other competitors, but you also lock yourself out when you want to upgrade everyone. It doesn't help that businesses would be resistant to upgrading as well purely from the if-it-ain't-broke argument. Only when XP is officially unsupported and malware destroys the machine may it start to actually die until then, we might find more IT support staff deciding to drink to handle the user complaints.
On the topic of drinking, it seems that on average South Korea has fallen off the wagon and drink more than the Russians and the Americans. The phenomenon is so common there is a blog dedicated to pictures of people who have passed out from being drunk. I can only imagine what the alcohol poisoning death rate is like in South Korea. Too bad we don't have something that isolates alcohol in the body and kills it off, like cancer cells in our next story.
A little further south, in Australia, some researchers have found a way that the body naturally kills off cancer cells in the blood stream. It seems T cells sort of eat the cancer it finds and could even keep it from developing as quickly. One more bullet in the fight against cancer. In other science news, it seems those smart guys from Harvard have found the 'on' switch for cells that tells them how to move and re-organize. From what I understand, this seems to apply only to cells that are in early development to 'nudge' them along to create more complex structures, but the potential for growing new organs or bones or anything really is immense.
Finally, I came across this neat little e-reading web app that tests your reading speed and tells you how you compare to the U.S. national average. While the test is not particularly scientific (or even that accurate) anything that gets people to think about reading and reading more is good in my e-book.
That's all for now, hope you enjoyed reading and remember to keep those eyeballs squishy!
