ARNEWS reports:

Liquid armor for Kevlar vests is one of the newest technologies being developed at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to save Soldiers’ lives.

This type of body armor is light and flexible, which allows soldiers to be more mobile and won’t hinder an individual from running or aiming his or her weapon.

The key component of liquid armor is a shear thickening fluid. STF is composed of hard particles suspended in a liquid. The liquid, polyethylene glycol, is non-toxic, and can withstand a wide range of temperatures. Hard, nano-particles of silica are the other components of STF. This combination of flowable and hard components results in a material with unusual properties.

“During normal handling, the STF is very deformable and flows like a liquid. However, once a bullet or frag hits the vest, it transitions to a rigid material, which prevents the projectile from penetrating the Soldier’s body,” said Dr. Eric Wetzel, a mechanical engineer from the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate who heads the project team.

This morning Alexa opened its Alexa Web Crawl to the public, offering all comers the chance to create their own customized search engines. “Anyone can also use Alexa’s servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things – perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example,” John Battelle, who broke the story, explains. “Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or … well, whatever creative folks can dream up …

George Will exposes another spectacular waste of federal tax money: subsidized television upgrades:

Feeling, evidently, flush with (other people’s) cash, the Senate has concocted a novel way to spend $3 billion: create a new entitlement. The Senate has passed — and so has the House, with differences — an entitlement to digital television.

If this filigree on the welfare state becomes law, everyone who owns old analog television sets — everyone from your Aunt Emma in her wee apartment to the millionaire in the neighborhood McMansion who has such sets in the maid’s room and the guest house — will get subsidies to pay for making those sets capable of receiving digital signals….
Remember, although it is difficult to do so, that Republicans control Congress. And today’s up-to-date conservatism does not stand idly by expecting people to actually pursue happiness on their own. Hence the new entitlement from Congress to help all Americans acquire converter boxes to put on top of old analog sets, making the sets able to receive digital programming. All Americans — rich and poor; it is uncompassionate to discriminate on the basis of money when dispersing money — will be equally entitled to the help.

The $990 million House version of this entitlement — call it No Couch Potato Left Behind — is (relatively) parsimonious: Consumers would get vouchers worth only $40 and would be restricted to a measly two vouchers per household. The Senate’s more spacious entitlement would pay for most of the cost — $50 to $60 — of the converter boxes. But there is Republican rigor in this: Consumers would be required to pay $10. That is the conservatism in compassionate conservatism.

The NY Times reports on Chinese workers paid for playing online multiplayer games in 12 hour shifts in order to accumulate early level advances in rank, wealth, skills, weapons, and artifacts for people in more affluent countries who prefer to skip the slow and laborious process of developing an advanced player persona. The practice is known as “gold-farming,” a name referring to the accumulation of imaginary on-line currency used for purchasing training and items within the universe of the game by repetitive tasks.

There have got to be worse jobs.

Some poltroon lawyers nixed airing it, but this ad is a hoot. (Warning: Politically Incorrect imaginary violence!)

MeaninglessHotAir (must be John Cole‘s cousin) at YARGB has compiled a terrific collection of Google links, including a link to a disgruntled Google employees’ blog. Those of us with lives connected to the Tech Industry love this kind of stuff.

Right now in Times Square.

Photoshop contest.

US Patent No. 6,960,975 B1
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Boris Volfson, 5707 W. Maple Grove Rd., Apt. 3046, Huntington, Ind. 46750 (US)
Filed on Mar. 14, 2005.

Full text.

It certainly looks like a joke, but the patent can be found by the search engine on the US Patent Office site.

Science Daily is not pleased.

Nature comments.

The BBC fawns over a looterfest in Tunisia, to which 15,000 delegates, and more than 50 heads of state, are gleefully converging (likes ants to a picnic) to panhandle their way into control of at least a slice of the world’s most important information technology delivery system. It isn’t fair, you see, that

The net’s infrastructure has been managed in an informal way through collaboration with businesses, civil society, academic and technical communities.

Many developing countries have felt left out of this process.

A private, not-for-profit group, formed by the US Department of Commerce, called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), currently supervises the net’s infrastructure.

Its oversees domain name and addressing systems, such as country domain suffixes, and manages how net browsers and e-mail programs direct traffic.

Developing nations want the net and its domains shared more equally, so that everyone can benefit from the web’s economic, political, social and cultural advantages.

The US is reluctant to relinquish its grip, arguing that UN proposals would shift regulation from private sector leadership, to government, top-down control.

WSIS takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, from 16 to 18 November.

Possible US sell-out to European plan.

11/15 Follow-up on OSM

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links Michael S. Malone’s wildly optimistic, but probably spot-on accurate, predictions of a media future in which blogs rule the world.

It can be argued that most of these bloggers aren’t making much money. But then, they don’t have much overhead either — and they are slowly groping their way toward workable revenue models. Once they do, the venture capital industry is ready to swoop in. With the Huffington Post and the soon-to-be-announced Pajamas Media, we are also seeing the birth of the first larger business structures in the blogosphere — and the first serious interest by major advertisers. That will be the key: when General Motors takes out an ad on Instapundit, the blogosphere will ignite so fast that it will make the dot-com buildup seem like slow motion…

Let me make a prediction. Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news, and has created a whole new group of major companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. At this point, the industry will then undergo its first shakeout, with the loss of perhaps several million blogs — though the overall industry will continue to grow at a steady pace.