Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Senate Approves $700 Billion Bailout - 74 to 25

Our Senate has failed the average American Taxpayer today on a bipartisan basis. The Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have voted for the $700 billion dollar bailout this evening.

Harry Reid spoke of a talks on a "Bipartisan Basis" helped form the agreement. What happened to the other parties? Both the democrats and republicans love to just say they are the only choices. The fact is there are many other parties in our system that could possibly hold better solutions to problems that our nation faces. There should be more open minded choices when selecting not only senators and representatives, but also the presidency itself.

Harry Reid must have said Bipartisan Basis over 10 times in his promotion of the latest try of passing the 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street. Also, talking about "all" of his colleagues right before the vote, Reid said, "...both Democrats and Republicans..". Not a single mention of the Independents or other smaller parties that help run our Senate. It just goes to show that these people only want a two party system, even if they always go after one another. It takes all the attention away from other parties that might have better answers.

Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent, showed no support for the bill and called on those who caused the problem to pay up for the bailout, not average citizens. He also came with over 48,000 signatures of Americans who do not support the bailout and do not want American Taxpayers to foot the bill. Check out his website:

http://sanders.senate.gov

You can sign the petition there and read more about how he does not support the Bush Administration bailout plan.

Make note that both of the current Presidential candidates, McCain and Obama voted for the bill as well as Joe Biden.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Radiohead Albums Available on Napster and iTunes

After years of chomping at the bit searching on the new Napster subscription service waiting for them to add one of my favorite bands, Radiohead, the wait is finally over. This week, Radiohead not only released all of their old EMI albums onto the more popular and promoted service, iTunes, but they also released them onto the originator of all digital music downloads, Napster. It seems they planned these digital releases around their new hits album, "The Best Of", which was released yesterday. Not bad idea guys.

I am currently listening to the "Kid A" album which is fully available to download on as a member and listen as much as you want online.

Other Radiohead albums available on Napster are:

In Rainbows - 30 second previews for each song. Hopefully that changes!
The Bends - All songs are available for members.
Amnesiac - All songs are available for members.
Pablo Honey - All songs are available for members.
I Might Be Wrong - All songs are available for members.
Knives Out (Domestic Only) - All songs are available for members.
Hail To The Thief - All songs are available for members.
OK Computer - All songs are available for members.
Best Of - All songs available for members.

I know that you can access Napster.com and listen to some songs directly without even having an account, but I think most are 30 second previews unless the artist specifically requests. There is also a 7-day trial available which is how I originally tried it out after they went legit.

Yeah, Napster had a bad rap for a while, but they cleaned up their act and pay the royalties just like anyone else now. Most of the albums are available to download if you are a subscriber and some you can listen to even if you are just checking out Napster.com. I have been a member of the new Napster service for a few years now and it works pretty darn good and has a huge library of music and also some videos now. They are always expanding the titles as I have just mentioned, but they also add a ton of new features for the software itself every update.

The latest feature to the Napster service itself actually allows it to be used with an iPod or iPhone now. This was not possible a few months back which should really start expand the user base of the Napster Music service as it can handle all mp3 players now. I have the Napster-To-Go package which actually allows you to download as much music as you want to your media player of choice all month for only like $14.95. It is a great deal if you really like to listen to music. There is one drawback where you have to reconnect and basically sync with the software to keep the DRM up to date on the files on the player.

Once they can get the content DRM-free like iTunes, Napster will once again be the choice for online music that it once was, but by playing by the rules this time. Not too bad for some 16 year old kid if you ask me. Watch out Apple, Napster is on the comeback!

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Google Turns the Lights Off

Google has made their homepage black today to heighten awareness to Earth Hour. Earth Hour is a worldwide energy conservation effort that Google has partnered with recently. The idea is that today from 8pm to 9pm local time to turn out your lights. It is nice to see some companies looking out for the environment. Even though they use a ton of power, they are one of the leaders in renewable energy usage also. They already have a huge solar panel farm on the roof of the Googleplex and it is said to only get bigger in the future.

I turned the lights out on my blog a while ago in efforts to save electricity. It turns out that on most CRT monitors this is true, but on LCD monitors the opposite applies in most cases. Google had a few links to other studies from within the turn the lights out link on their homepage. One of those reports stated that around 75% of computer users today run LCD monitors, so I might have to rethink my layout. I use a CRT, so it works for me, but it will only work if it helps save electric for most.

I can say that most of the lights in my house were off except for the room I was in. I did make sure that all other lights in the house were off and I use those nice low wattage florescent bulbs which all of the bulbs used in my house only add up to 1 - 60W incandescent bulb. I should have probably made this post earlier in the day, but I was out enjoying some of the nice weather we had today.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Firefox 3 Review - Looks Promising

After reading an article over at Ars Technica, I decided to give the new Firefox 3 beta a try. According to their article the speed gains and memory usage benchmarks were very impressive, so obviously I wanted to give it a try.

Before installing I wanted to make sure that the install would not overwrite my current install. Just in case I hated it or something, I wanted to make sure I could still run my old Firefox. Once the precautions were made and I made sure it was installing to a totally different directory, I made the install.

I would have to say that out of the box, so to speak, I was pleased to see that it kept my current Firefox bookmarks and I did not have to import them. I was even more pleased to see that some of my Firefox add-ons still worked and as they were imported also. As I started to browse the web I noticed that pages that normally loaded in a second or so, were almost instant. Many of the sites that I tried out were big sites that were generated by code like PHP, MYSQL queries, and some Java. It seems like they have made some major improvements in code parsing for pages and they load much faster than IE7. I have not tested it against Opera or Safari myself, but I plan to soon and run a follow up report.

Overall, I would have to say that Firefox 3 is looking to be a powerhouse browser with security and speed in mind. I did not even have time to check out the security features before wanting to write this post, but they are said to be just as robust as in the past. I will probably run another follow up on the latest security features as well. Ars Technica had focused on the fact that the new browser uses so much less memory than other new browsers, so maybe that is part of its overall new blazing speed. I am impressed and look forward to the final release.

Below is a picture from the Ars Technica article. Read their full article here.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

I thought Schuylkill was hard to spell...

Well I was doing some surfing tonight and came across a picture that I was amazed by. I live near the Schuylkill River, and for the longest time that was very hard for me to spell. I have no problems now, but I know many people who still to this day cannot spell it. I would think that the people around this area just mumble things that might sound like this lakes name and perhaps end up with the right number of syllables. Anyway, here is a picture of the sign and man is it a tongue twister like 3 times over.



I found this over at Dave Ex Machina's photo gallery.

Here is the original picture from his site.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Amazing Backflip Wrestling Move FTW!

I wrestled in high school and this was an actual wrestling move that my friend Geoff used to practice all the time. He was never actually able to pull the full move off in a match, but he used to pull of a variation of it sometimes that was still fun to watch :) This guy seems to have practiced it a bit more or something as he nails it and actually pins the other guy in the end.


Amazing Backflip Wrestling Move - Watch more free videos

Badass move in my book and I am sure the other guy is on his back wondering what the hell just happened! This is why I liked wrestling, as you never really knew who was going to win. It was always up to who brought their best skills, who was conditioned the best, and who was ready to go when the whistle blew. From the looks of it, this guy has at least one of those covered, he brought his skills!

Let Me Go! - Attempted Empire St. Bldg. Jump

This is a very intense video! I saw this after I found the Clinton post. This guy was very close to jumping off the Empire State Building. I have to give him some props this was very well planned and he almost made it. Perhaps it would have been cooler if he would have just jumped and flipped them the finger as he did it. Then again, you might have ended up paying to see the video from the camera on his head on a DVD or something. Unfortunately for all of us, he is nabbed by building security before he releases and ends up having about 5 other guys hands on him within a matter of about 1 minute.



Jim Corliss is a brave man for trying this that is for sure, but why not just jump when you get on the other side of the fence? I guess he would have been known as Superman after that stunt, sort of like the Spiderman guy who climbs buildings all the time.

Clinton Has a Dream

Below you can see Bill Clinton coming back into the spotlight a bit. Hillary has been most of the talk lately and perhaps all the traveling has Bill a bit weary. At least when I fell as sleep in church I was smart enough to sit in the back.



I got a pretty good laugh as it almost looks like an old episode of Americas funniest home videos or Candid camera. You might have thought that Ashton Kutcher was going to pop out and yell you got Punked!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Nintendo Syndrome?

Half Of 26-Year-Olds Memories Nintendo-Related

The Onion

Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related

BROOKLYN, NY—According to an fMRI of Philip Jenkins' brain during memory recall, his parietal lobe is activated equally for the words "mother" and "Banjo Kazooie."



I will have to say that until recently I have also experienced the onslaught of the up+up+down+down+left+right+left+right+b+a+select+start in my daily life and would like to sit down with this guy to figure out some of the other codes that I cannot remember anymore. I have bought some nice games over the Wii and cannot remember the codes for the life of me. He may have the missing link I am looking for. I just turned 27, so perhaps this is a real epidemic and Nintendo is to blame for thousands, if not millions of people from being able to process any more information than their video games.

Power Saving Color Scheme?

I was reading an article the other week on this new search engine that uses Google's custom search to create a search engine of your own. Pretty cool, right? The owners of this new search website claim that their site is using less energy than Google's own website because they are using a black background. I think that it might be true, so I am going to give it a go here on Spaced Out. I have not researched this too much yet to see if displaying black on a monitor is less than white, but I will surely follow up this post with some more info. If in fact the pixel does not even light up, that would be great. However, if the pixel needs to display all colors to achieve blackness, that would probably be a different story. Check back soon to see if the new dark layout will stay or be sacrificed to mother nature.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Im Back!

I took a long break from updating this site as I have been working on some other projects. I plan to start posting some more spaced out news in the near future. Stay tuned for more great gaming news, technology news, and more news about the latest gadgets, trends, and current events.

Peace