Ask yourself this: Are you a statistic or a specific example? That’s the question being raised in the aftermath of a study in which researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people to determine their movement patterns. Such studies are considered invasions of privacy — and illegal — in the United States, but this one was done in an undisclosed industrialized nation. The subjects were chosen at random out of a pool of 6 million from a mystery wireless provider and tracked based on cell tower triangulation and other “tracking devices.” Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo at Northeastern University promises that researchers didn’t know the individuals’ phone numbers or identities, and offers that the results are a major advance for science. The study found that people are homebodies — most stay within 20 miles of their home and are rather habitual. Scientists say the findings — to be published in Nature on Thursday — can help improve public transit systems and even fight contagious diseases.

[Thanks, Doug]

[Via MSNBC]

We can’t say we’re terribly saddened that this riveting caper has finally ended — after all, the poor crew needs a reliable place to unload, right? Shortly after the space shuttle Discovery delivered a new pump for the jury-rigged commode, Oleg Kononenko — who we hear is now widely regarded as a galactic hero — spent around two hours installing the hardware and running a trio of tests. After everything was tightened up and functioning as advertised, the crew presumably relieved themselves just before carrying on with the installation of the recently acquired Kibo lab. Crisis averted.

Now that is the question… And a good question indeed.  I have answered it not to ReadyBoost any longer.  The REAL thing that I wanted to see major improvement for was boot times… and in all honesty I didn’t really notice much difference.  I hear a lot of people saying ReadyBoost made their computer start up 40% faster and some claim even more than that.  I never saw it myself, maybe they’ve got 1gig or less of RAM I don’t know, but it didn’t seem that amazing to me.  Plus, sometime here in the somewhat near future I do plan on making the move to a 4 HDD RAID 5EE array which should take care of any sluggish load times.

Another thing that I HATED about ReadyBoost was that when it cached items… I don’t know what it was caching, but it must of been big, about three times a day (at least every day as I noticed) it would start to cache (I could tell because the HDD light would come on, and the light for the flash drive would freak out) my computer would come to a halt, using 75% of my CPU and sucking down every bit of resiliance my Hard Drive had it would try to make things easier for Windows to find IN CASE it might need to be loaded… And then inevitably it would do it in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep, although a relatively silent process the wildly random blinking lights were always annoying when trying to fall asleep.  Because I have so much open all the time (Firefox, Games, Thunderbird, etc.) any time I closed anything it seemed to want to cache that item right away.

I will give ReadyBoost credit though.  It did seem to make game map loads much quicker for certain games.  Ones such as Half-Life:2 and a few others that would pre-cache maps it made the loading screens few and far between, which I was very happy about.

We didn’t think it’d take too terribly long to make it happen, but Albatron is taking Microsoft’s heed and is already demonstrating a prototype 22-inch monitor with multi-touch, intended for use with whatever Windows 7 will eventually come to be called. The early verdict on the 1680 x 1050 display? TG Daily says it “works much better than we expected,” but we said the same thing about Surface when it debuted last year — so maybe it simply works as well as it should.

It’s gone by a couple names since we first heard about it two CESs ago (Zink, Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer, etc.) but the first Zink-based product is finally on its way to buyers as the Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer. It’ll run you $150 for the unit (and $10 per pack of 30 sheets), and can print up to fifteen 2 x 3-inch photos on its rechargeable battery from any PictBridge capable camera or over Bluetooth. PC Magazine took a peek and found each print took between a minute and a half to two minutes (the latter over Bluetooth), and felt the quality was adequate at best, albeit sufficient for such small prints. Still, it’s no secret that your options are extremely limited when it comes to pocketable printers, even of the dye-sub variety (which Zink-based devices like the PoGo hope to put out to pasture).

For the folks that just can’t let go, JVC is introducing a new duo of recorders that handle VHS, DVD and HDD-based logging. Predictably, the DR-HX500 holds 500GB while the DR-HX250 gets a 250GB drive, and outside of that, both units are identical. You’ll find a built-in analog / digital TV tuner, an HDMI socket and all the dubbing features you (or your grandmother) can handle. It should be noted that digital TV recordings can only be stored on the HDD, but it is possible to capture a digital show there while copying an analog broadcast to VHS / DVD. The pair is all geared up to land in multi-generational homes this July, with prices being pegged at ¥95,000 ($906) and ¥75,000 ($715), respectively.

[Via Pocket-lint]

The pre-WWDC Apple rumor mill has finally churned out something that doesn’t have the words “3G” and “iPhone” involved — sources have told both Ars Technica and our friends at TUAW that Steve will also use his keynote to introduce the next major version of OS X, codenamed “Snow Leopard.” As the derivative release name indicates, there aren’t many changes in store from 10.5 Leopard — Apple’s said to instead be focusing on tightening up speed and stability as it starts producing more mobile devices. What’s more, this could be the end of PowerPC and Universal support in OS X, as Snow Leopard is said to be Intel-only. That’s bound to ruffle a few feathers, but things could get even more heated if Carbon is deprecated as is also being rumored. We’ll see when we see — Monday can’t get here fast enough.

Read – TUAW post
Read – Ars post

Here is the plan: 400 AMPS OF MEGA POWER!

Can you say OMG! Thats the plan to put another 200 amp panel in that room so we can feed all the hungry children of the world…..lol! Want some serious gaming? Well this will give us all the power we need to run not only our LAN’s but power up for anything we can throw at this power grid. Now what I need from you is to get registered so I can pay for all this! lol!

After meeting with the staff at American Inn we determined that we just weren’t getting enough to eat at our last event so we decided to beef up the power to keep us happy! The plan is to keep us coming back for more events and why not invest in our future by giving us the only place that can handle an event like ours. Much to my delight this will supply us with more than enough power.

ELKC 34.0 will be a celebration of our 4th year in providing the metro area with the finest in pc and console gaming. I know sometimes its rough getting power running right, tournaments on time, or just things go wrong. However, how many of the events do you remember that went perfect? Thats right you don’t because most only remember the ones where problems arose. Why? Memories, thats why. LAN parties are notorious for problems because things happen that are out of your control. You deal with them and then you go on. Thats why we are on our 4th year! As a special we are charging half price on entry for female gamers for ELKC 34.0.

Hope to see you there! For more info go to our website: www.extremelankc.com

The YBox was pretty much destined to become a hit with the DIY crowd just as soon as it was handed 15 spectacular minutes at last summer’s Maker Faire. For those who reckoned the project would fade into the sunset as quickly as it arrived, we’ve got news proving your assumptions wrong… dead wrong. YBox2 has at long last arrived to the party, ready to serve up widgets and all sorts of pertinent information on your television screen. The new kit boasts an 80MHz Parallax Propeller chip and functions with any NTSC / PAL TV and any DHCP-compatible router — and yes, it still all fits within a flashy Altoids tin. Score!

[Via MAKE]

We have a date for MidWest LAN War 2008 and its August 2nd! This has really been a hard task to find a location that would fit 250 participants, provide enough power and have enough bandwidth. I know there are lots of other sites but most are just built for seminars, conferences and banquets. There was no thought to putting a couple of hundred computers or consoles in the room. This location is in Kansas City Kansas in a dance hall called The Rainbow Center. Its in the industrial part of southern KCKs located at 6220 Kansas Ave Kansas City, KS 66111 if you want to Google it. There is a map on our main page and all the information about the event is now listed.

It meets our power requirements, has Time Warner Cable and will seat more than 250 if needed. I was glad to have found this place as we were running out of time since I wanted this years event to be during the summer. Please tell your friends and post on other forums about our event. We have several banners on our website that you can use to post and link them to our site if thats all you can do. The more teams we get to this event the bigger cash prizes that will be offered. As it is we are going to match the prize pots up to 10 teams so each tournament has the ability to be a $1,000 prize pot! Counter Strike Source, Call of Duty 4 (PC), Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) are the Featured Games for this event.

Please check the website for more info: www.extremelankc.com