How To Recycle Your Old Gadgets

Many of us likely have an old PC kicking around the basement or last years cellphone occupying space in the junk drawer. If you are like most people you probably only give it any attention when you stub your toe on it or push it aside to find a rubber band.

Want to do something good for the environment and feel better about your space at home, but don't know how to safely dispose of those unwanted gadgets? Wired's Gadget Lab has taken the guess work out of it for us with their round up list of major companies and how their recycling programs work.

If you need more motivation, here is a word of advice from fastfengshui.com "If your house is full of clutter you are living in the midst of a lot of very stale, stuck energy. Since feng shui works by shifting the energy of your home, it's going to take a lot more effort to get results if you don't deal with your clutter first."

Google's Cognitive Auteheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

April 1st is my favourite day of the year, for it is the day that the great minds at Google unleash their creative powers on the world in an attempt to bring humour to the masses and pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. This years April Fool's joke is the announcement of CADIE: Cognitive Auteheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. CADIE is bringing a host of new features to the google offerings including Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you, Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses, and Picasa Web Albums feature to add red-eye to your photos, as well as Brain Search for Mobile.

"...We started this project as a continuation of mankind's perpetual quest to learn the nature of reason and what defines us as humans. We would have been pleased if we achieved nothing more than a system that passed a Turing test - i.e. that wrote a symphony but didn't necessarily know it had done so. However, while we still think of CADIE as a young entity, we are convinced now that she has evolved her own "strong AI" presence. We continue to conduct tests, but increasingly, we conduct long conversations with her, acutely aware that our creation will raise many ethical questions on the part of the public. Will humans be surpassed by artificial evolution? Will we lose our sense of uniqueness, and if so, what would that mean? In which direction will CADIE's consciousness evolve? How is she going to be held accountable, if at all? Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world?

We don't know. Did you really think we possibly could?

The CADIE Team
March 31st, 2009
11:59pm"

Google Announces Venture Capital Fund

In a tough economic downturn many companies are having a hard time to find the funding they need to move innovative ideas forward. Yesterday Google announced it's own brand of venture capital called, Google Ventures of course. In a post on the Official Google Blog Rich Miner and Bill Maris, Managing Partners, of Google Ventures say "Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the "next big thing," and we'll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures."

Shuttle Discovery Touches Down

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery had an extended mission by about 90 minutes when it's first entry window was waved off by Mission Control because of cloudy and windy conditions in Florida. The missions main goal was to install a final set of solar panels on the International Space Station which required 3 space walks. "We're very proud to have left the space station with more power, hopefully power that for many, many years will provide very useful research to your future payloads," mission commander Lee Archambault said before undocking from the station on Wednesday.

Source: CBC

China Based Spy Network Uncovered - Targets Dalai Lama And Foreign Affairs Offices

Researchers from SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based think tank, and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies working on behalf of the Dalai Lama's office have uncovered an elaborate electronic spy network working mostly from within China. After a 10-month investigation the researchers found that as well as the Dalai Lama's office, the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan all appear to had been the targets of the spys. Hacked systems were also found in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan, according to the BBC. "We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama," investigator Greg Walton was quoted by the Associated Press.

The researchers point out that there is no conclusive evidence of Chinese government involvement.

Tesla Will Build Electric Sedan

On Thursday Tesla Motors announced that it would build an electric sedan, the Model S, Southern California. The Model S has a base price of $49,900, after a federal tax credit of $7,500. According to CNN "... Tesla predicts it will manufacture 20,000 Model S vehicles a year. That would make it more of a mass-market vehicle than the Roadster; only 1,200 of which are produced yearly." The production line will not start until 2011 as Tesla struggles through the economic downturn but it's nice to know that the sedan is still in their plans.

Street View Team Hitting The Road In Canada

Over the next few weeks Google employees will be cruising the streets of 11 of Canada's largest cities, including Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg and Calgary, capturing data for their popular Street View searches. This is not the first round of data capture in Canada, Street View teams had previously collected some Canadian street data, which it plans to make public soon. There's no word on when the data from this round will be publicly released however. Google makes it a practice to blank out faces and license plates, but you might want to be on your best behaviour for the next few weeks lest you be caught doing something you'd rather not have etched in time. "Many a Web page is now dedicated to finding gems such as accidentally documented street fights, crimes in progress and, of course, people walking in or out of adult stores."

Source: Globe and Mail

Blockbuster And TiVo Join Forces

The New York Times is reporting that Blockbuster and TiVo will announce today that they are teaming up "to deliver Blockbuster’s digital movie library over the Internet directly to the televisions of people with TiVo digital video recorders." The deal apparently involves no money but will see TiVo customers have access to Blockbuster's library and Blockbuster offering TiVo devices from it's retail stores. “We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster’s entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers,” Jim Keyes, chief executive of Blockbuster, said in a statement. “Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our On Demand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well.”

Canadian Government To Auction Surplus And Seized Goods Online

The Public Works Department of the Canadian government is busy building an online auction site, similar to e-bay, that will offer every Canadian the chance to bid on surplus and seized goods such as vehicles, office furniture, boats, computers, tools and hundreds of other items.

“The addition of a real-time online bidding system would reach a broader range of buyers, open up the bidding process which could result in higher sale prices and returns for clients,” said the report.

“We found that a system where the bid amounts are visible and not sealed, and that enabled potential purchasers to bid as the amount changed during the bidding, could generate increased sale prices and more revenue.”

According to an internal study obtained by The Canadian Press, under the federal Access to Information Act.

Source: The Globe And Mail

Spanish Port To Get Robo-fish To Detect Pollution

The Spanish port of Gijon is about to get a school of robotic fish who's mandate will be to detect pollutants from ships and outflows of sewers and industries. The robots are designed to swim like fish because the motion uses less energy than propeller drives “The design of fish which nature has produced is a very energy-efficient one,” says Rory Doyle, a researcher working on the project. “The fish's efficiency is created by hundreds of millions of years' of evolution. Submarines come nowhere near it.” The 1.5 metre long robots will be manufactured by the University of Essex and are expected to be deployed within 18 months.

Source: Globe and Mail