Iceland For Sale on Ebay!

With the recent collapse of Iceland stock market, it may seem that they are trying to sell part of their country to gain money and use it to try and restore their economy. They have also asked Russia for money to help save their economy.

Iceland will provide the winning bidder with a habitable environment, Icelandic horses, and a unstable financial situation. Read more

Venezuela Closes McDonald’s for a Week

Venezuela’s government has shut all branches of restaurant chain McDonald’s for 48 hours, citing tax irregularities, officials have said.

The head of the country’s tax agency, Jose David Cabello, said the chain had inconsistencies in its accounts. Read more

World’s Largest LED Screen Meet Dubai

By this point, you should fully understand that “Dubai” and “world’s largest” go hand-in-hand, so it’s quite fitting that said city is receiving the planet’s most humongous LED screen. Designed by UAE development company Tameer Holding, the 33-story high display will reportedly be “embedded on an intended commercial tower in the Majan district of Dubailand,” where it will stand tall and blast out advertisements to onlookers some 1.5-kilometers away.

Dubbed Podium, the building will also house 33 levels of “premium commercial office space, two floors dedicated to retail and four floors for parking.” There’s no word on when the project will be completed, but we don’t suspect Tameer will be dragging its feet in getting this up.

Holographic Television to Become Reality

Picture this: you’re sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the “Sex and the City” movie and you’re watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.

It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don’t be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.

The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.

Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university’s Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.

“This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images,” he said.

The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.

To create television sets the images would need to be changing multiple times each second — but Peyghambarian is very optimistic this can happen.

He said the University of Arizona team, which is now ten-strong, has been working on advancing hologram technology since 1990 — so this is a major step forward. He believes that much of the difficulty in creating a holographic set has now been overcome.

“It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly,” he said. “What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we’re going for something at least as big as a computer screen.”

There are no more great barriers to overcome now, he said.

The breakthrough has made some long-time researchers of the technology believe that it could now come to fruition.

Tung H. Jeong, a retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago who had studied holography since the 1960s told NJ.com; “When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV … It has now been shown that physically, it’s possible.”

And what might these holographic televisions look like?

According to Peyghambarian, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath.

So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall.

Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found.

However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian.

Justin Lawrence, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales, told CNN that small steps are being made on technology like 3-D holograms, but, he can’t see it being ready for the market in the next ten years.

“It’s one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it’s another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market,” Lawrence said.

Yet, there are reasons to be optimistic that more resources will be channeled into developing this technology more quickly.

The Japanese Government is pushing huge financial and technical weight into the development of three-dimensional, virtual-reality television, and the country’s Communications Ministry is aiming at having such technology available by 2020.

Peyghambarian said there are no major sponsors of the technology at present, but as the breakthroughs continued, he hopes that will change.

Even if no major electronics company commit themselves, there is hope that backers could come from outside of the consumer electronics industry, he said.

“It could have some other applications. In training it’s useful to show people three-dimensional displays. Also it would be good to show things in 3-D for defense command and control and for surgery,” he said.Source:CNN.COM

Google’s New Satellite Released

Above you can see the first image taken by the GeoEye-1, Google’s very own satellite. They don’t own it outright - they share it with the American National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyses geographical data for national security purposes.

It’s got a whoppingly good resolution - it can read car number plates from orbit, but reassuringly Google won’t have access to images that good. This is due to US governmental restrictions and the fact the Google is sharing the satellite.

Most low-down imagery on Google Maps is currently sourced from aerial and satellite photography - something that isn’t widely available in many areas across the globe. The new satellite will allow Google to spend less on buying up that sort of imagery, as well as increasing the resolution of more rural areas across the globe.Source:Techdigest.tv

Dow Below 9000 Points First Time in Five Years

Markets tanked Thursday - with the Dow falling nearly 700 points during the session - as panicked investors dumped stocks across the board.

Bank lending remained tight as nervous institutions continued to hoard cash. Treasury prices fell, raising their corresponding yields. The dollar gained versus the euro and the yen. Oil, gas and gold prices fell. Read more

Opec Members Seek Emergency Meeting

Almost half the members of the Opec oil cartel are considering an emergency meeting in Vienna next month as oil prices dropped to their lowest level in nearly a year.

Almost half the members of cartel have in the past few days called on the group to act to halt the slide before their next official meeting scheduled to take place in Algeria in late December.

Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Iraq, Venezuela and Ecuador, whose economies tend to be most dependent on high oil prices and whose ministers are among the most hawkish of the 13-member group, have all lobbied for the cartel to drop output.

Their calls came as oil consuming nations moved to bolster their economies in a co-ordinated interest rate cut.

Oil prices on Wednesday resumed their slide towards $85 a barrel, a level last reached in December last year.

Nymex November West Texas Intermediate fell $3.06 to $87 a barrel, while ICE November Brent slid $2.96 to $81.

Opec’s next meeting was scheduled for December 18 in Algeria, but ministers are now saying they could meet on November 18 in Vienna, site of the group’s headquarters.

Opec controls nearly 40 per cent of the world’s oil supply, and at its meeting last month pledged to reduce its production by about 500,000 barrels a day in an attempt to boost prices. So far the group’s reduction has fallen far from that mark, but slowing production often takes more than a few weeks.

The world consumes about 87m barrels a day of oil.

FEMA Sources Indicate Martial Law Coming Soon

WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country. Read more

Iceland On Brink of Bankruptcy

The days grow ever darker in Reykjavik. Gone is the almost eternal daylight, which washes across Iceland’s capital in the height of summer. A darkening gloom arrives earlier each day now. An icy wind blows in from the east. Darkness will be a constant presence here soon as winter sets in. Read more

Google Earth’s Introducing Underwater View

Google Earth will be adding a new feature - undersea landscapes. These will include the habitats of threatened species that everyone with the program will be able to look at and explore.

The new project will encompass video streams, photos and stories from marine protected areas all over the world.

Natural England has contributed information from about 43 marine sites around the UK, that offer protection to endangered species, such as the basking shark, seahorses, corals and algae.

Lundy Island will be a big feature on the new system. The island, off the North Devon Coast, is England’s only statutory marine reserve, where disturbing the marine life is banned and it is somewhere all marine life have the chance to thrive.

Dr Helen Phillips, Natural England’s chief executive, said she hoped the new Google Earth feature would bring the marine environment to life and raise awareness of the need to conserve and enhance it.

She said: “There needs to be a change in attitudes towards protecting our oceans. The diversity of marine wildlife around England’s coastline is exceptional; we have everything from whales through to microscopic phytoplankton.

“But we need an enhanced marine protection system to help conserve our undersea environment.”Source: telegraph.co.uk

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