Bili Buzz - Popular Science, Nature, Medicine, Archeology, Future & Myths

This is the newest online tool you will find. It’s called Dodo, the Time Machine, by Aviary. All you have to do is to upload an image, adjust the time (future or past) and you will see how a face or an object look like at that time

An innovative plan to bring high-speed Internet through electrical outlets may not see the light of day

Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, is a technology developed to send data over lines also used for electric power transmission. Simply put, it’s high-speed Internet through your electrical outlets. Right off the bat, the appeal of a system like this is attractive for a lot of reasons. It could provide broadband service to rural areas without the physical infrastructure for DSL or cable and would require only minimal hardware installations by the power utilities. It would also pave the way for Internet-enabled appliances in that end users would be able to connect any device to the Internet simply by plugging it into any electrical wall socket.

It’s of course not without its downsides, the most significant of which is the lack of standardization across the national electricity network. Another is the issue of managing the noise on power lines, which are already a noisy environment from a transmission perspective.

All this speculation may be moot, however, as the largest planned U.S. deployment of the technology has been scrapped by Oncor, a Texas utility company buying out the network. The system was poised to offer Internet service to 2 million electricity customers, but Oncor has decided to use the wires for power only. Without this new launch, the number of BPL subscribers in the U.S. remains under 5,000. In the business of high speed data delivery, that figure spells almost certain future demise.

Via PhysOrg

The social-networking site may have to give up the identities of some high school jokers who impersonated a dean online

This probably seemed really funny until they heard about the court order.

A few anonymous Facebook users—most likely students—created a fake profile for the dean of Roncalli High School, a Catholic prep school in Indianapolis, then sent out messages and images from the account to other students. The profile has since been pulled down, but the dean sued Facebook to find out who created it.

Facebook refused to give the information up, but now a judge has ordered the social-networking site not to destroy data pertaining to the identities of the jokers. The dean and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, which administers school, are currently deciding whether to pursue the case further, and ultimately hold them accountable.

This is hardly the first time something like this has happened. Ars Technica reports that students have created fake profiles that present school officials as addicts, alcoholics and more. At odds here is whether the students’ prank profile page can legally be considered defamation or an act of free speech.

[Via Ars Technica]

Blogging in your sleep and other signs that you may be too connected

Spending a little too much time on the Web? Now there are a few movements afoot to encourage the tech-obsessed to take vacations from connectivity. Here’s Ariel Meadow Stallings, a blogger and Microsoft part-timer, on realizing that she’d become a little too hooked:

“I love technology. I’m not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube . . . I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk.”

Stallings now unplugs one night each week, and has recruited thousands of others to do the same. Meanwhile, a pair of developers in Canada are trying to get people to shut it down for a single day next month.

Via Reuters

The founder of the popular online world says technology will drive a jump in the number of regular visitors

The knock on popular virtual world Second Life has been that it’s a little slow, and not entirely easy to use. Sure, it has roughly 13 million registered citizens, but only a few hundred thousand are actual devotees who spend a fair amount of time in the alternate universe.

Part of the reason Second Life hasn’t gotten to that level yet, says Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab founder and former chief executive, can be attributed to the popularity of laptops, most of which don’t have the kind of 3-D graphics chops to properly render his virtual universe. But Rosedale believes that improvements in computers and connection speeds in the next decade should produce a boom in the game’s popularity. If Rosedale is correct and Second Life is merely ahead of its time, it’s unclear whether the promise of future improvement will be enough to keep the virtual world afloat in the present.

Via Reuters