Amazing miniature midtown Manhattan

via MAKE Magazine by Collin Cunningham on 02/10/08

Wow. Now that's impressive!

Michael Chesko built this scale model of NYC's midtown using balsa wood and a love for detail -

This scale miniature of Midtown took 2000 hours to complete. As reference, he used blueprints, old photographs, digital reproductions, and satellite images. On a good day, he'd work his way through four city blocks. The entire model is 36" x 30"... a good deal smaller than most office desks. At the 1:3200 scale, the Empire State Building Chesko's favorite skyscraper) roughly reaches the dizzying height of a Campbell's Soup can.

- Check out Tinselman's blog for more pics and info - Stop and Smell the Miniatures

Dolphins play with bubble rings

Wow, now that's seriously cool!

Pussy versus Printer

Cats are funny.

McCain will be such a refreshing change from Bush

Amazing hypocrisy

The US election is frustrating to watch

How is it possible for these two stories to appear in the BBC RSS feed at the same time? People in America would rather entrust their struggling economy to a man who can't answer a question about how many homes he has? Are people really that convinced that only a Republican can possibly know what's good for the economy?

At least we now know that McCain's grasp of his personal finances is no better than his grasp of America's.

I'd be content to sit back and laugh if the American economy wasn't so likely to drag half of Europe down with it. As it is I feel like screaming at the stupidity of it all.

Obama camp ponders its man's slipping poll lead

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has attacked his rival John McCain for not knowing how many homes he owns.

Why is DRM bad? Here's why.

Yahoo has just announced that they are going to take their music store offline. That's not a huge issue as it was never very popular to start with, but they are also shutting down the DRM license servers.

This means that if somebody tries to copy their music to a new device it will no longer play.

Now imagine that Apple has to shut down its iTunes license servers for some reason. Maybe they are found guilty of fiddling the books and go bankrupt in 2010. Not terribly likely, but who knows what the future holds? It would basically disable millions of dollars of purchased music overnight. Most people probably don't realise that a track purchased with DRM is actually only rented.

Obviously, if you had just downloaded the track illegally, without paying the rights owners a penny then you wouldn't have any problems at all. And the music industry STILL can't understand why piracy is so popular. If you want to fight something that's free you have to do it with a better product. Trying to make people pay over the odds for something that is massively inferior to the free alternative is never going to work, no matter how many people you threaten to sue.

News on the Yahoo thing is here

Your Sith Lord killed his Sith Lord!

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1879.html

The Scourge of Violent Video Games

Facts are great. We need to get more of those. Maybe if we collect
enough we can send some to the media.

http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/violence_and_videogames

'Rubbish' golfer hits hole-in-one for £15,000 prize

You know it's time to start playing the lottery when...

'Rubbish' golfer hits hole-in-one for £15,000 prize

via BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition on 7/8/08

A self-confessed "rubbish" golfer flukes a shot that wins a £15,000 car during a round where he lost 23 balls.