Obama just won Iowa ahead of Edwards in second and Clinton in third (!) position.
The speech he gave was pretty nice in my opinion. The best line is around 13:30: “…we are not a collection of red states or blue states. We are the United States of America.”
Today I’ve been to the movies again after quite some time. According to the date, I went to watch the new Halloween directed by Rob Zombie.
I’ve kind of liked the other Halloween movies, especially because in my opinion they are almost a must see for the genre and because the title music has become the embodiment for creepyness. Now the new one is a whole different story. Because it is about the childhood of Mike Myers, I should have known that it would not be as good as the others. The problem with the movie is, that you actually see to much of Mike for it to be creepy. Instead of other people being the main characters of the movie, this time it really is Myers and you follow him from the start until the end. This robs the movie of all its tenseness because it is, even for a horror movie, too predictable.
I guess the idea was to really give the viewer some insight into Mike Myers’ head, but in my opinion this turned out completely wrong. The movie is a mixture of lame and boring horror movie and cheap softporn. (I always ask myself, where they get all these starlets that are willing to show themselves naked and full of blood and mud?) It is absolutely not creepy. Don’t watch it!
While I like Rob Zombie’s music, his movies definitely need some help. Towards his defense I have to say that camera and effects were good.
Wow! This video just leaves me awestruck. You can see South Koreans cheering for their school soccer team. They wear colored jackets and generate moving pictures by turning around. See for yourself.
I usually don’t like Mashable’s lists too much, but this one seems to be a perfect fit for me. They assembled the top 10 eBooks that help you get started with your blog in terms of search engine optimization, monetization and gaining traffic in general. I will dig through them and follow up with a post that recapitulates the essence of all these eBooks.
Here is the list:
As Mashable and Techcrunch report, YouTube had a page up which showed a new embeddable player with ads around it. They have since pulled the page and you are redirected to your account page (or the start page if you’re not a registered user). It seems as if this was not meant to be public just yet. Hopefully we’ll see this come soon, it might be a big chance to make some additional revenue for many people.
I’ve written about this technique at the end of August and Mashable now brought my attention to the first product that popped up , which lets you easily use the feature. (There was a demo before, but you could not save the images.) Rsizr is a flash online image utility like every other, but this feature makes it truly stand out. What lacks for me though, is that you can only make the picture smaller and not size it up. Hopefully they integrate this feature in the near future. (Before it will be integrated into Photoshop?)
The worthy iTunes competitor we’ve all been waiting for just launched. Amazon introduced their DRM-free music store, which they announced a few months ago, today with 2 million songs priced from 89 cents to $1. Most of the songs are cheaper than they are on iTunes, but obviously the newly opened store can’t keep up with the diversion of the offerings the iTunes Music Store has right now. I found the address, which is quite obscure at the moment, over at GigaOM. Techcrunch is reporting too.
As Techcrunch notes, costs for solar cells are steadily coming down so maybe after all it won’t be that long until we see the solar roadway? The good thing with this announcement is that its not about a new invention that was just made, but rather about its soon start of its mass production. Colorado State University has developed cells that only cost $1 per watt to manufacture and will be available to the the customer at $2 per watt, which is roughly half of todays prices. The new cells are made from cadmium telluride rather than silicon and there is less waste in their production.
The production of the panels, which have a efficiency of about 11-13%, will begin at the end of next year. The factory will initially produce panels with a capacity of 200 megawatts.
Because of the information in the leaked Media Defender email conversations, ThePirateBay is suing several companies in Sweden. Media Defender is a company hired by the entertainment industry that is supposed to fight legally against P2P sites and users. As the emails suggest, Media Defender was also ordered by its employers to hire hackers that attack, namely DDOS several sites including ThePirateBay.
AutoBlogGreen has a story about a nice idea developed by Scott Brusaw and his wife. The idea itself is pretty simple and tries to solve several problems at once. We all know solar energy is good, but there is also the problem, that it uses a lot more space than its ungreen counterparts like coal plants et cetera. If we would put solar cells into our roads under a translucent layer, the deserts would remain a free habitat for wildlife. The potential space to use in America is huge. There are 65′000 square kilometers of roadways and parking lots that could be used as space for solar cells. Of course this makes only sense if we manage to produce cheap solar cells, and even better organic cheap solar cells. That these cells only come at an efficiency of about 4% is no problem, if we consider the huge amount of space that could be covered with them.
Another interesting possibility of this type of road would be the possibility to include LEDs to show all kinds of signs, including warnings from accidents. The problems to solve are, as mentioned above, the production of cheap solar cells and to find a material that is translucent and hard-wearing. It would probably also make sense if the parts would be reusable, because roads get rebuilt quite often.
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