Wired has an article about a system that prints subliminal messages on your glasses, to remind you appointments, shopping lists, etc.

DeVaul said subliminal messages aren't powerful enough to stimulate action; rather, they act as prompters -- they fill in the blanks that the wearer is already searching for. The fact that the wearer is unconscious of them is, according to DeVaul, the key to his system.

"We can never precisely know what the wearer needs to know, or when he needs to know it, and this is why the fact the messages are subliminal is so important. If the information given is not helpful at that time, it's not important because it isn't noticed," DeVaul said.

Sounds pretty cool! If it works...

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Macworld has an article about a new cooling technology developed by Cooligy in cooperation with Apple, Intel, AMD and DARPA.

[The new system] collects heat using a thin layer of micro-machined silicon that sits on top of the microprocessor. "A very dense area of Micro-Channels etched into the silicon enables fluid to circulate through the heat collector and efficiently absorb and take away heat," the company explains. A tiny solid-state Electro-Kinetic pump circulates fluid through the cooling system and to a "heat radiator", which transfers the heat to air. The solution makes no noise, has no moving parts, and is reliable in the long-term, the company said.

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New Scientist: A report published on Wednesday by the Computer and Communications Industry Association says that MicrosoftÂ’s dominance in PC operating systems has created a 'monoculture' that allows viruses to spread like wildfire over the Internet. This lack of diversity allows even simple viruses, created in minutes by so called 'script kiddies' to wreak havoc within hours of creation.

"Nature does not put up with monocultures because they are too easy to attack," says Daniel Geer, one of the paper's authors and chief technology officer for the security company AtStake. "If everything looks just alike . . . it will promptly be punished."

The security problems created by Microsoft are a direct result of the company's business practices, claims the report. The companyÂ’s systems are designed to keep out competitors rather than intruders, say the authors.

To which, a spokesman for Microsoft replied: "No other company in the world is more committed to providing its customers with more secure software than is Microsoft."

This reply gave me a good laugh. But when I thought about it, I realized that he was certainly right... in one sense: I guess no company releases more patches than Microsoft!

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