Come one, come all to Big Kyle’s Discount Auto Sales lot to see the newest in stock PAVs! These babies come fully loaded with room for 4 people! They have a sleek, shiny, stealthy coat and did I forget to mention? THEY CAN FLY! That’s right, folks! No more waiting for a train to pass. Buy today!

Now, many of us can remember sitting down in front of the television and watching The Jetsons. And we all remember the ‘Aerocar’ that George Jetson drove to his tedious job every day. And now over 46 years after the original release of the Jetsons, The Pentagon hasnow approved their "Personal Air Vehicle" (PAV) for military purposes.

So, how does it work? The PAV is driving steadily and them vrooom it flies into the air like an Apache helicopter just cooler, because it’s a car.

Yes, yes, flying cars have been around for years! I know, I know. But this one is different! It is made by the crazy mad scientists in the Darpa project. You know Darpa? The "Kill-Proof" soldiers, military laser gun and other crazy military projects people?

Darpa says that what they need now is "morphing wings", "optimized disk loading" propulsion, and strong flight control software. But they are forgetting something. A cup holder.

But don’t get me wrong. I would definitely buy one of these when I get a few billion dollars to blow. I could finally catch up to those damn birds after they poo on my windshield.

Tighten your seat belts. Data transfer is going into overdrive as the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus, better known as USB, prepares to make a tenfold jump in speed.

That means the vast sea of USB devices — from HD camcorders to hard drives and music players — will be able to transfer music, video, photos and other data much, much more quickly.

The new standard, the first update to the USB specification in eight years, will also deliver greater power efficiency and the ability to recharge a wider variety of gadgets — and it will most likely mean the death of the competing standard known as FireWire.

To get a sense of the speed increase, consider this: Transferring high-definition video of 27 GB, the amount on a standard Blu-Ray disc, takes about 10 minutes with the current USB 2.0 standard. With USB 3.0, it will take just about a minute.

"What the user will see is really a much faster response time, less waiting, more productivity," says Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD, one of the supporters of the USB 3.0 standard.

The USB Implementers Forum, a non-profit group founded by companies to promote the standard, will announce Monday the final set of specs that will clear the way for the adoption of USB 3.0 by device and component manufacturers. It’s the first major update to USB technology in nearly eight years.

"USB 3.0 will take USB 2.0 to the next level and take away performance as an issue for data transfer in many devices," says Brian O’Rourke, an analyst with research firm In-Stat. "USB 3.0 will make it even more pervasive across devices than it is today."

Since the USB specification was first introduced in 1996, it has changed the way we interact with our computers. USB has allowed everything from keyboards, mouse, PDAs, printers, digital cameras and personal media players — pretty much the entire spectrum of consumer electronics — to be connected to a host PC using a single standardized socket.

Read more @ Wired

Wikipedia is very popular in Germany. With some 825,000 articles, it is the second biggest edition after the English version. However, this weekend started with a shock for all German Wikipedia lovers.

Those who typed in www.wikipedia.de were redirected to a Web site which read:
"The county court of Luebeck (North Germany) has issued an order in the name of Lutz Heilmann, Member of Parliament (left party/post-communist) that the German Wikipedia (Wikimedia e.V.) must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the Web site wikipedia.org, as long as the German language version of wikipedia.org makes certain statements."

The county court of Luebeck has announced that wikipedia.de will be inaccessible for about four weeks.

The controversial statements include Heilmann’s past as a member of the infamous East German Secret Service — the Stasi — and allegations that he has threatened an ex-boyfriend.
The irony is that the servers of wikipedia.org , in all of its many language versions, including German, are hosted in Florida under United States law. The constitution of the US grants freedom of speech. The controversial article is still accessible to anybody who wants to see it, and has received many more clicks due to the publicity that the decision of the court of Luebeck has caused.

Clearly, these days attempts trying to hold back information from the Internet community by taking legal action seems to backfire.

Part of Heilmann’s legal studies were conducted at the Luebeck court, so some bloggers speculate that those judges wanted to do him a favour. Heilmann could have tried to solve his case the "Wikipedia way" by appealing to Wikipedia admins or by starting an edit war.

Continue reading @ ohmynews.com