Can you read out this license plate of the person who hit me?

I got this email from Amazon:

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk
On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

Through the generous efforts of individuals at several organizations, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

HITs have been created to ask volunteers to help review these images and flag potential areas of interest which will be instrumental in the search and rescue efforts.

If you are interested in helping, please click here to participate in the search effort.

This is a race against time and any help you can provide will make a huge difference.

Friends and family of Steve Fossett would like to thank you for helping them with this cause.
Amazon Mechanical Turk Team
http://www.mturk.com/

I have to hand it for Amazon…they are using an awesome technology to help find Steve Fossett. Now if only we can adapt this technology to help identify illegal aliens at the border.

TheRecord.com - Business - Meet IvanAnywhere
It’s the next best thing to being there; He’ll write software, attend meetings and even chat with co-workers. Just don’t expect this digital marvel to share a cup of coffee during your next break

September 01, 2007

MATT WALCOFF
RECORD STAFF
WATERLOO

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.

About the only thing he can’t do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks — or touch anything, for that matter.

It’s not that Bowman doesn’t have hands or a mouth; they’re just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.

In fact, it’s not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It’s IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.

“Robot” is a bit of a stretch, actually. IvanAnywhere is basically a coat rack on wheels with attached speakers, camera and touch-screen computer.

The computer screen displays a live shot of Bowman’s face from his living room in Nova Scotia.

But in the three months since IvanAnywhere first went online, he has become such a normal part of the third floor at iAnywhere that co-workers barely even notice they’re talking to a machine rather than to Bowman’s human form.

“We are all so used to Ivan, they don’t even give it a second thought,” says Glenn Paulley, Bowman’s boss and the originator of the IvanAnywhere idea.

When Bowman has a question for a colleague, he doesn’t pick up the phone; he uses his joystick to drive his doppelganger to the team member’s office.

If Paulley needs Bowman’s time on a software issue, he calls IvanAnywhere to his office, just as he would with any other employee.

Bowman uses IvanAnywhere to take part in meetings, even giving presentations with the help of a projector.

Every once in a while, he’ll motor to the floor’s lounge area to look out the window and chat with passersby, much as he would if he were in Waterloo.

Bowman has worked for the database software company since 1993. Five years ago, when his wife got a job in Halifax, his employers allowed him to follow her east and telecommute.

While Bowman could type out code as well in Halifax as he could in Waterloo, he was missing out on the personal give-and-take essential to the flow of ideas.

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This is awesome. Is this the wave of the future, being able to work from home while having this thing be your doppleganger?

The Daily Gut
Saddam Hussein had been gone just a few weeks, and U.S. forces in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, were already being called unwelcome invaders. One of the first big anti-American protests of the war escalated into shootouts that left 18 Iraqis dead and 78 wounded.

It would be a familiar scene in Iraq’s next few years: Crowds gather, insurgents mingle with civilians. Troops open fire, and innocents die.

All the while, according to internal military correspondence obtained by The Associated Press, U.S. commanders were telling Washington that many civilian casualties could be avoided by using a new non-lethal weapon developed over the past decade.

Military leaders repeatedly and urgently requested-and were denied-the device, which uses energy beams instead of bullets and lets soldiers break up unruly crowds without firing a shot.

It’s a ray gun that neither kills nor maims, but the Pentagon has refused to deploy it out of concern that the weapon itself might be seen as a torture device.

Perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, the Active Denial System gives people hit by the invisible beam the sense that their skin is on fire. They move out of the way quickly and without injury.

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Get this in the field now.  If anything this will be scary to the insurgents because they can’t use their ‘hide in crowd and shoot back’ technique.

Working Hard While Pushing Hard

Windows Repair Truck

See Thru Playing Cards: Never Win A Hand Of Poker Again

Warning: Jumping Into Toxic Waste Does Not Give You Super Powers

I was bored again and made this PHP Preg_match, Preg_Replace Tool.

Here are some samples:

United States Currency (USD)

Email Address - Loose TLD

Full Name with Salutation

Strip HTML Tag (I know you can just use strip_tags)

Phone Number - US (United States)

Trim Whitespace

Trim Whitespace - Left

Trim Whitespace - Right

Zipcode - Canada (Canadian Zipcode)

Zipcode - United States (US)

Zipcode - United States (US) and Canada (Canadian Zipcode)

Airic’s_arm is inspired by nature. Based on a combination of mechatronics and the biological model of a human being, it opens up new possibilities for future automated movement processes.

The Airic’s_arm is a robotic arm fitted with artificial bones and muscles. The bone structure, consisting of the human bones such as ulna and radius, metacarpal bone and finger bone, shoulder joint and shoulder blade – joints that do not occur as such in the technical world – is moved via 30 muscles.

The muscles are Festo products, which are already put to extensive use in industrial practice and known as Fluidic Muscle. Using this technology, in conjunction with Festo’s tiny, highly innovative piezo-proportional valves, it is possible to precisely regulate the forces and rigidity within the construction. These actuators can be coordinated using state-of-the-art mechatronic systems and software.

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Interesting to say the least.