AT&T said this morning that it will soon make available a music service from Napster, allowing its wireless customers to download more than five million full-track songs on their mobile devices.
AT&T customers will have a choice of downloading five tracks a month for $7.49 with the Napster Mobile Five-Track Pack plan or purchasing songs for $2 each without the plan.
Napster Mobile will come with a feature that sends a music track to a mobile device wirelessly and at the same time makes a duplicate copy available for download to a PC.
AT&T claims it is the only wireless carrier in the United States that will let customers buy full-track songs wirelessly from both Napster, a mainstream nationwide provider of digital music, and eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music.
The carrier was the first to offer the iPhone, which has a built-in iPod for listening to music and watching video. iPhone customers can purchase music from Apple’s iTunes store.
As a comparison, songs on iTunes cost 99 cents each. Apple last week slashed prices on copy-protection-free songs from $1.29 to 99 cents.
It’s said that Japan has some of the fastest elevators in the world.
Apparently it has something to do with different cultures having differing comfort and tolerance levels.
Even so, the Yabafo might test the mettle of even the craziest of our Eastern speed loving friends.
Designed by Shin Takamatsu, the Yabafo is part of a new amusement complex in Osaka, called NamBa HIPS, and is the first freefall ride to be built into a building.
During the 74 meter (243 feet) drop, the six person casket will hit 22 meters per second (50 MPH).
The crazy part of this is that the world’s fastest real elevator isn’t far off this speed at 17 meters per second (38 MPH), and that’s on the way up.
The park is due to open in December 2007. If you visit, I suggest not eating beforehand.
The crime scene investigators of CSI: New York go into Second Life to catch a killer next week, and the preview is up on YouTube:
The video shows Detective Mac Taylor as he reinvents himself in Second Life customizing his avatar and then goes into some kind of gladiator battle in-world.
Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.8 late last night and it’s highly recommended that you upgrade your install right away because of a nice list of security fixes.
The following security issues were fixed:
URIs with invalid %-encoding mishandled by Windows
XPCNativeWrapper pollution using Script object
Possible file stealing through sftp protocol
XUL pages can hide the window titlebar
File input focus stealing vulnerability
Browser digest authentication request splitting
onUnload Tailgating
Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.8)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 is also compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), although there are some known issues affecting some media plugins.
Sony Computer Entertainment America today cut the price of its PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console in the U.S. and announced an even cheaper model that will arrive before the holiday shopping season.
The top-line PlayStation model, with an 80 gigabyte hard drive, now costs $499.00 USD, down from $599.00 USD.
That effectively eliminates the lower-end model, which has a 60-gigabyte drive and has sold for $499.00 USD.
A new low-end model with a 40-gigabyte drive will go on sale November 2 for $399.00 USD.
Unlike the other PlayStation 3 models, the new one won’t be able to play games made for the PlayStation 2.
October 18, 1945: Klaus Fuchs passes U.S. atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for the first time.
Between 1945 and 1947, working with a courier known only as Raymond, Fuchs delivered high-level information on the atomic bomb, then later the hydrogen bomb, to Moscow.
Fuchs was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, fleeing to England in 1933, where he completed his doctorate in physics.
At the outbreak of World War II, Fuchs, still a German citizen, was interned as an enemy alien but soon released through the intervention of Max Born, a professor at Edinburgh University and another German refugee.
Fuchs was recruited as a theoretical physicist for the British atomic bomb project, and became a British subject in 1942.
The following year, he was among several British scientists sent to the United States to collaborate on the Manhattan Project.
After being sent to the weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Fuchs spent his time devising a method of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb.
He was present at the Trinity test in July 1945, where an atomic bomb was successfully detonated for the first time.
Through it all, however, Fuchs remained a committed communist. He had joined the party while still living in Germany and fled the country for his political beliefs, not his religion. He was a Lutheran.
Consequently, he had tremendous sympathy for the Soviet Union and its life-and-death struggle with Nazism.
He also had grave misgivings about the United States being the only power on earth to possess the bomb.
By 1948, the Americans were aware that the Russians had people inside their nuclear program but Fuchs eluded suspicion until the following year, by which time he had returned to England.
Confronted by British intelligence, which identified him after cracking a Russian code, he eventually confessed and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Following his release in 1959, Fuchs went to East Germany and lived there until his death in 1988.
Historians on both sides of the Cold War have long debated the actual value to the Russians of Fuchs’ information.
Asked after Fuchs’ death about the importance of what he had given the USSR, Edward Teller said:
“Oh, not very important. I’m sure the Russians knew how to build a bomb without Fuchs’ stuff.”
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It’s said that Japan has some of the fastest elevators in the world. 
Sony Computer Entertainment America today cut the price of its 
October 18, 1945: Klaus Fuchs passes U.S. atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for the first time.