Loaded Couch Potatoes

Last month Gizmodo interviewed the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, and he dropped word of a Blu-ray add-on coming to Xbox.

When asked about putting Blu-ray drives in the consoles he said:

Well I don’t know if we need to put Blu-ray in there—you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories.

You can see the interview here.  Where he also talks about plans for Project Natal.

Let’s hope he wasn’t just throwing out his own thoughts on the subject, and knows for sure it’s coming.  If Microsoft wants to keep calling the Xbox 360 a media center, and not just a gaming console, Blu-ray is a must. Unfortunately I think Microsoft is a day late and a dollar short on this.  Many people have already gotten a stand alone Blu-ray player, or even sprung for a PS3 when Sony dropped the price.  I wonder how much money Microsoft could have made if they would have released an external Blu-ray player last year around the holidays.

As for me, since they have no official word on a release date for the Blu-ray add-on, Microsoft has already lost me as a potential Blu-ray customer.  I plan on buying a player in a few weeks for less than $100 when black friday hits.

The European space telescope COROT has discovered an astronomical first: a planet outside of our solar system with a rocky surface.  All previous planets discovered by space telescopes have either been gas giants or too distant for astronomers to ascertain surface details.

The planet orbits a star over four hundred light years distant from Earth, and has been named COROT-7b.

COROT-7b orbits its sun so closely that Artie Haztes, director of the Thuringer Observatory and co-disoverer of the planet, says that some colleagues are calling it “the lava planet” due to the resultant surface temperature, which is somewhere in the vicinty of 3600° Fahrenheit.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what some believe to be an image of the surface of the planet:

(continue reading…)

This story is already a bit of old news by now, but it’s just too awesome to not post about.

An expedition to an isolated pocket of New Guinea has uncovered a “Lost World” of never-before-discovered animal and plant species residing in a crater.  The newly-found animals include “giant” rats, fanged frogs, and grunting fish.  No word on whether house-sized gorillas with an affinity for blondes were on the list.

Go here to listen to a podcast about the discovery.

How cool is it that scientists are still turning up pockets of the world nobody knows about?

Is your soul weighing you down?  Store it!

Everyone should check out the website for The Soul Storage Company.

While you’re there, check out Paul G’s testimonial.

Or find out How it Works by looking over the Frequently Asked Questions.

You can even find out what your soul looks like if you store your soul online.

Don’t Wait!  Store your soul now!

According to a blog at The New York Times, Amazon.com recently remotely deleted digital copies of the George Orwell novels 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle devices.  Customers who had purchased the novels were refunded the price of the downloads.

The action was taken by Amazon.com as a result of a dispute between it and the company which provided the digital novels.

For any readers who are confused by the title of this article in relation to the story, I highly suggest you find yourself a copy — preferrably one printed on good old-fashioned paper — of 1984 and stay up all night reading it.

If you are still confused once you’ve finished, please purchase some Drano, pour it over ice, and take yourself a big ol’ swig, as this is a fool-proof solution to the problem.

Only if science was intent on creating a full-size black hole could I be more aghast.

As much as I hate to link to a Fox News story, here is one you ought to read.

For those of you unwilling to click, here’s the short version of the story via a key quotation:

“A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.”

That’s right, science, in tandem with the military, is developing flesh-eating robots.  How long until these robots start raiding cemeteries to satisfy their cravings for mouldering skin?  And how long then until the dead, as a response, start rising from their graves with a need to replenish their ranks any way they can?  And then, once the zombies have cut the robots off from their preferred means of sustence, how long until the shiny metal bastards decide that eating flesh raw off of the bones of the living is an acceptable substitute?

Fuck, man, there’s no way this leads anywhere good.

ESPN and Disney will be building the “ESPN Innovation Lab” at  the Wide World of Sports complex in Walt Disney World.   The new facility will allow ESPN to test new virtual graphics and other developments.  ESPN considers this an ideal spot to try out new broadcast technologies because of the amount of activity and year round use the facility has.  You can read the full article at Orlando Sentinel.

Sounds like a good idea to me.  I’m surprised someone hadn’t already thought of it.  I’ll be interested to see how much of it they will let guests see.  I’ve heard private schools have even rented out the facility for their events – that would be pretty cool if high school students got to see new graphics being developed in games they’re playing.

HBO will begin airing a five-part documentary series about Alzheimer’s Disease on May 10.  The Alzheimer’s Project is a public-service health campaign miniseries which HBO will make available to all cable subscribers, and will support extensively through digital outlets such as YouTube.

The New York Times has an article about the miniseries.

CNN reports that astronomers have discovered the oldest-known object in the universe: an exploding star over thirteen billion light years away, and hence over thirteen billion years old.  That’s about 200 million years older than any celestial body previously discovered.

The star was at least thirty times the size of our own sun, and possibly as massive as a hundred times larger.

In other astronomical news, New Scientist reports that new analysis of infrared and radio data has yielded “the strongest evidence yet” that a black hole lies at the center of our galaxy.

There is no word on when, exactly, you can expect to be captured by the singularity’s gravity and then pulled into taffy over what might well seem to you to be eternity, but this is, of course, brown-up-your-shorts news for anyone planning a vacation to Sha Ka Ree.

According to an article at Signs of the Times (sott.net), the government in Kazakhstan is prepping to build the world’s first landing pad for alien spaceships.  The government is also planning an embassy for extraterrestrial travelers.

There is no word on what role the nation’s superior potassium supplies played in this decision.