Monday, April 21, 2008

Warfare in the 21st Century

Russia has shot down a Georgian unmanned recognisance drone over the Georgian side of the Georgian/Russian boarder. Which isn't necessarily interesting unless you are surprised that Russia would do such a thing despite signs for months now that they want to be see as a strong global military power again.

Anyway the BBC has some News Footage On The Incident which shows the attack from start to finish from the perspective of the drone and a radar station.

This is interesting because the Georgian military has two different records of the same attack and thus know precisely what happened. I see this as significant because when The Bomb Was Dropped On Hiroshima the reason why communications with Hiroshima was cutoff was only discovered three hours after the attack, and the real truth of what happened was only learned sixteen hours after the attack, in a WhiteHouse press release. So this is why I feel the incident in Georgia has some historical significance and is a sign of things to come.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Plasma Speakers

I thought Musical Tesla Coils where cool, but the sound quality from Plasma Speakers is so much better.





Apparently you still need a traditional subwoofer for low amplitude sounds, but Plasma arcs are brilliant for higher tone sounds. Unfortunately microphones don't seem to be able to record the audio well, I don't know if this is because they are effected by the plasma's electromagnetic field or if they just can't record higher pitched sounds.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Buyer Beware of TeleBid

There is a new auction site in town called TeleBid. The idea is that all the products on the site are new and that each time a bid is placed just 7p is added to the total cost of the item and a few seconds are added to the auction end timer. When the clock on the auction reaches zero whoever is the winning bidder gets the item.

On the surface it seems too good to be true. Yet the auction system is clearly designed to make you place many small bids instead of allowing you to place an initial maximum like on eBay. TeleBid will even give you £20 when you register to use on auctions.

The thing that makes the site profitable and which isn't stated dearly enough is that although winning an item requires you to be the last person to have pressed the Bid button when the auction timer runs out, you are charged 50p everytime you press the Bid button. I hesitate to call the site a scam because the 50p charge is very clear on the help section, but it a scam and people are getting very burned by it.