NASA nearly parks rovers for good, then realizes that that would be dumb.

NASA nearly parked the Mars Exploration rovers for good, telling the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that it needed to help NASA with its budget cuts by taking $4 million away from the rover missions. This would have meant shutting off the two rovers, which are still functioning perfectly despite having exceeded their design lives several times over, for the long Martian winter and possibly forever. Today NASA retracted that statement as it realized that sacrificing two on-going missions that have stayed in the public eye so long to fund future missions which might fail in space or never get to launch would be a bad idea.

But technology does march forward. Up next: a phone you can swallow. Or might swallow by accident, like in that episode of Futurama.

And finally, Quebec is trying to ban fighting in junior hockey after a high-profile goalie fight a couple of days ago. When it became the business of governments to change the rules of sports, by legislation no less, is completely beyond me. In any case, this would be difficult jurisdictionally as the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League has teams not just in La Belle Provence, but also in all four Atlantic provinces and the state of Maine.

Gaak! Is it Monday already?

Wow. Lack of updates, much? It has been a very slow week what with the Happy Spring Totally Non-denominational Happy Happy Fun Day (or whatever the crap I'm supposed to call Easter now). There certainly not as much to bitch about when most folks are away on vacation. Speaking of which, I'll be taking my little road show to New York this Friday through Sunday. Since I'm leaving Thursday night and have only two more nights to pack and eat the perishables in my kitchen, it might be another week before I get around to writing an entry. I'll have my laptop on me when I go, but I might just not have time to deal with you people.

The US Justice Department has ruled that the merger between XM and Sirius Satellite Radio is no big deal, really. The merger was approved by the shareholders last November but it took until now (5 months on, speaking of vacations) for the rubber stamp to come out. The next stop is the FCC. Maybe sometime after that someone will figure out that both XM and Sirius have wholly-owned subsidiaries in Canada that will have to be cleaned up (or out, if you work for XM) and what that does to service here. I know we're easy to forget, there's only 32 million of us.

It seems that ze Germans have broken all your graphics cards (muhahaha!). Okay, that's a stretch, but Crysis, a first-person shooter developed by Germany's Crytek has become the benchmarking tool of choice for graphics cards since its release in November '07 (a good month!). This is primarily because, on maximum settings, the game is so processing-intensive that no graphics card on the market at the time could give the 60 frames-per-second considered adequate for smooth gameplay. Gamers are a strange bunch and have always pushed computer graphics technology, but what would possess a game developer to make a game that basically brings every graphics card on the market to its knees seems a bit silly. How do you test it? Maybe if you daisy-chain a half dozen cards together like in that episode of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles which eventually brings about Skynet and therefore Judgment Day... but I digress. Way off. The point is that even Nvidia's new hotness can't get the coveted 60 fps. And the thing costs $700. Maybe by the time the sequel comes out?

And finally, the New York Times reports that the British are actually deeper in dept than the United States, sub-prime mortgage crisis and all. Britons have racked up more dept than the country's gross national product. Ouch.

The future is bright if only we can figure out how we're going to afford it.

The late, great Douglas Adams once described the human search for happiness as a curious exercise in moving around little green bits of paper. From this perspective, a business that owns nothing and produces nothing but instead specializes in the movement of little bits of paper and bases its existence on abstract and changeable value seems a bit dumb. But that's what an investment bank is when one applies a little logic, and in a growing economy the going seems easy. But a slowing or *gasp* a shrinking of the economy can make such a company worthless overnight, as the meltdown of Bear Stearns demonstrates. The US Treasury has temporarily averted the crises and the NYSE was one of the few markets in not to end the day in a deep hole. Having said that, don't expect me to act surprised if over the next few weeks panicky investors create the very recession they've spent months trying to avoid. It would hardly be the first time.

One thing that is always worth a lot is gold, after all it is the physical wealth that used to be money, would later underpin and standardize the value of money, and today acts as a back-up plan for many central banks. The CBC reports that Torontonians are all to happy to dump expensive jewelry for the promise of $1000 an ounce. As the story notes, most jewelry is far from pure gold and fetches much less, but neglects to explain that the rest is mainly copper that must be seperated melting the metal down. Maybe that was a little too technical for people.

Anyway, as much as money is a fantastic exercise in abstraction, let's talk about something free. Ars Technica reports that Firefox 3 Beta 4 has shed much of the bloat observed in 2.0.0.12 and may just be the fastest and least memory-intensive browser available, at least according to Mozilla. The biggest pig? Opera? Nope. Safari? No. Okay, I know most people would guess IE7 and if you did, you're right! Unless of course you count IE8 or Safari 3, both development versions that crashed during the test.

Apple has been busy at the patent office. Following on a filing for what appears to be a DVR version of the Apple TV, the less immediate future may see transparent touch-screen panels that can use both sides to display information. That would make for one heck of a laptop / tablet PC. Other parts of the filing show an application of the same technology to mobile phones. It's all very Star Trek.

The Obvious: The Leafs Will Miss the Playoffs

I once heard one wag on TSN state that the Leafs eliminating the Sens from the playoffs was a sure sign of spring in Toronto. Truly, at that point it had happened four or five years in a row. But now it seems like a moot point because the Leafs are now not going to make the playoffs for the third year in a row. There is, of course, a lot of denial going around not just in Leaf land but also on the aforementioned network and even NHL.com, with the bold headline "United Maple Leafs refuse to surrender." The line probably derives from Manchester United, another team that can seemingly do no wrong. The Leafs sit 6 points out with 9 games left, which I realize is not mathematically eliminated. But they found themselves in the same spot this time last year, and guess what? There was no miracle comeback, no Hollywood ending. And as usual, the Leafs blamed everyone but themselves and drove out to the golf course. Now that's a sure sign of spring.

Public Service Announcement

This PSA is for the motoring public in the City of Saint John and surrounding areas.

(1) WAKE THE FUCK UP!! If you are tired or having trouble concentrating, get a cup of coffee or go home and have a nap. You will feel much better.

(2) GET IN YOUR GOD DAMNED LANE!!! Do not under any circumstances straddle two lanes. Doing so endangers you and the drivers around you and is a particular problem at busy intersections. When you make a lane change, proceed quickly and in an orderly fashion.

(3) GET FUCKING GOING, YOU STUPID BASTARDS!!!! When the roads are clear, please proceed at a reasonable approximation of the speed limit. Going too fast increases the risk of an accident, but going to slowly also can lead to problems due to increased congestion.

(4) PUT EVERYTHING DOWN, YOU IDIOTS!!!!! Talking on your cell or trying to open a bottle of water makes you less able to control your vehicle. I'm not going to insist on the 10-and-2 position, but keeping at least one hand completely on the wheel at all times for your own safety.

This concludes the PSA. Thank you for your time, and have a pleasant evening.

Never a cop when you need one.

Police in Couquitlam, BC are still taking calls after more than 100 cars were vandalized in a 24 hour period. It seems that the cars were scratched up in the parking lot of a local theatre and in the surrounding residential neighborhood. What blows my mind is that a person or persons unknown committed the same crime 100 times in a small area in 24 hours and not one cop saw them! Just further proof that the rare times when you need a cop, they're nowhere to be found.

Then of course there is the problem of people with enough wealth and influence to attempt to change the law as they see fit. The Irvings are challenging the constitutionality of the Migratory Birds Conservation act, which is intended to protect Canada's endangered birds in an attempt to weasel out of charges of intentionally destroying great blue heron nests near Cambridge Narrows, 80 kilometers north of Saint John. The situation in New Brunswick is such that the Irving family can make policy here (mainly by threatening to move large industrial facilities out of the province), we can only hope that their bullying will not succeed at the Federal level.

It seems that some companies do care about the environment. Several companies have introduced computers with aluminum casings, which are easier to recycle and can be recycled more times than conventional plastics. Asus has gone one step further by offering laptops and a monitor partly encased in bamboo. Since bamboo is such a fast-growing plant, this might even put them close to being able to offer a carbon neutral laptop.

SXSW, sleep deprivation, and another great way to punch your ticket to hell.

The fine folks from the South by Southwest (SXSW) music conference/festival/coolest thing on Earth want to give you 764 free mp3s. Again for 2008, the organizers have put together a little sample of the up-and-coming artists that will be featured in Austin, TX next week. Part 1 went up today, you can stream it here or here or get the whole shootin' match via BitTorrent (legally!). The whole package is 3.42 GB so it might take a while, but your ears and your iPod will thank you.

The Center for Disease Control has confirmed that 30% of Americans are sleep deprived. Another unsurprising result is that folks in New England had the biggest bags under thier eyes, while Hawiians were feeling just fine, thank you. What is surprising is that the CDC did not seem to realize how counter-intuitive an event called "National Sleep Awareness Week" is, as Ars Technica points out.

Just in case you wanted a quick and easy way to punch yourself a ticket to hell (not to mention jail) a Vancouver man has come up with maybe the fastest way to do it. A man in his 40s is wanted for stealing three rings from a 91-year-old woman as she lay in hospital recovering from surgery. Let's all take a minute to appreciate just what a disgusting crime that is.

Tax Reform Goes Backwards and Blu-ray Eats Your Battery

Canada's Conservatives have fallen into an all to common Tory trap, that of "why should my tax dollars pay for art I find offensive?" An amendment to a routine update to the Income Tax Act allows the government to withhold the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit for films and TV shows deemed to be offensive. And, let's face it, it doesn't take much to offend a conservative. The decision would be made by a closed-door committee with little or no oversight, nor would artists have an opportunity to plead their case. The cries of "Censorship!" are already going up, but this amendment snuck through pretty much unnoticed and is already before the Senate.

There is already speculation that this move could destroy Canada's indie film scene. If you watch TV here in the great white north, you realize that a lot of productions depend on the CFVTC to go ahead, as evidenced by a logo which is placed in the end credit. In theory, even more mainstream shows like CBC's riotous comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie could find itself in trouble. The show draws heavily on the cultural friction between Muslims and Christians and could be seen as offensive depending on one's sense of humour.

After all that, it is nice to know that some things in life make sense. There was quite a lot of head scratching when the new MacBooks did not include a Blu-ray drive. After all, HD DVD is dead and Apple has backed Big Blu since the beginning. Well, Crave comes to the rescue with this report that Blu-ray would eat your laptop battery for breakfast, probably draining it in less time than it would take to watch a feature-length film. So mayhaps some more engineering time is needed on this one to get the power requirements down or for a higher capacity class of batteries to come along.

Crave does not always come to the rescue, though, like in this report on a headset that sits around the throat and picks up sound through body conduction. Portrayed as the somewhat frightening wave of the future, this technology actually dates back to the late thirties. They where used by German tank crews as the commander had to make himself heard over the noise of the engine and anything that might be blowing up in the vicinity. Today there's a few floating around as collector's items.