Free Vista Ultimate

It seems that Microsoft has decided to give away free copies of Vista ultimate and Office Ultimate amongst others (Only one can be selected per participant). Although it sounds very peachy and innocent, it does have a price. MS want to be able to monitor your every move on PC and your time to fill in some surveys. Although the monitoring is not that long - only 3 months... I am not that sure I am that excited about it... If I had a spare computer and I lived in US, I surely would go for this .... just boot up the PC every day or every other day for couple of hours... check you mail and watch some stuff online and after 3 months Vista Ultimate is yours... pretty sweet eh?
On the other hand if you do this on you main machine it might be a bit annoying knowing that someone is looking at everything you do on you computer... Not sure on how deep they are planing to look, but I would say unless you have backup PC to put this on... better stay away...

spy with chewing gum

A new micro camcorder has come out see some sunlight and it is dubbed the smallest camcorder around. It is small enough to fit nicely into an empty pack of chewing gum. Only problem is that it costs almost 300 USD and it not a cheap price by far... but on the other hand you can get quite nice quality videos and best of all tape them well.. very discreetly.. ;)
On the technical side it is stated that the 1GB memory will be sufficient for 33 hours of video only with a slight problem of only 2 hour battery life. Uses 3gp encoding and can be played on phones as well as PC. Uses of course USB interface for file transfers and charging.
All this gadget reminds me a lot of one I read about earlier - 0.3 Mpixel camera hidden in lighter (link).
I hope they make good on this and to be hones I would love one as well... as long as the video quality is not too disappointing.
More info and purchase info can be found here.

Shoot 'em up cameras....

DARPA apparently have developed a some cool kind of cameras which can withstand high velocity impact on deployment effectively meaning that they can be shot from a gun.. well shotgun to accommodate the size I would imagine. Also planned to be shout out from an aicraft if not possible to get in shotgun range.
These cameras are expected to be used to create as hoc networks for surveying an area for an attack and or better coordination. I would also expect these to be good way to gather information for surveillance. Unfortunately there is no word on how long the battery holds up on this little gizmo. For some reason I would imagine it is not too long but it still seems very neat if it can be adjust to be easy to use in combat conditions.
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