Author Archive

Autopilot 10 – Life on Mars (US)

Life on Mars is a science fiction crime drama television series which originally aired on ABC from October 9, 2008 to April 1, 2009. It is an adaptation of the BAFTA-winning original UK series of the same name produced by the BBC. The series was co-produced by Kudos Film & Television, 20th Century Fox Television and ABC Studios.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 2012 season of the FSL is mere weeks away. You can feel the excitement in the air. THREE new teams compete, and with realignment, one of them is guaranteed to make it to the postseason.

In addition to welcoming Winterfell, Rivendell and Lannisport to the FSL West, fans will get to see how Mordor does when they have to face Serenity Valley and Vulcan twice in a season.

The website will shortly (if it hasn’t already) feature updated rosters and schedules for 2012.

We’ll preview all the action June 9th on Dragon SportsTalk Radio with Tom and Justin, so get your shields polished and your laser guns tuned. FSL action is on the way!

Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell

Facebook making a phone…. still? Worst malware ever attacks the Middle East, new Google Chrome machines, and more.

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Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com.

We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes at wiki.twit.tv.

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Running time: 45:11

In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

In 1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

In 1996 – AT&T announced they finally had a system that would allow computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines. It was not called Skype. It did not catch on.

Hosts: Brian Brushwood and Tom Merritt

Ad-skipping DVR targeted, more Apple TV set chatter, Tron: Uprising, and more.

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We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes at wiki.twit.tv.

Thanks to Cachefly for the bandwidth for this show.

Running time: 1:14:57

In 1919 – The observation of starlight bending as it passed through the sun’s gravitational field during a total solar eclipse allowed the first experimental test of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The test was later used to confirm the relativistic effect.

In 1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

In 1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

In 1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

In 1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

In 1971 – The U.S.S.R. launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

We set out to interview author Todd McCaffrey at BayCon 2012, but it ended up turning into a wonderful conversation about dragons, bacteria, space travel, and big ideas. Veronica also gets very flustered when asked to describe an “Anne McCaffrey dragon.”

In 1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man’s first trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurised cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

In 1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

In 1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combines the the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell

Guess who’s buying Opera, Google buys Palm sort of, an 80-inch Windows tablet, and more.

Guest: Darren Kitchen

Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/tnt.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com.

We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes at wiki.twit.tv.

Thanks to Cachefly for the bandwidth for this show.

Running time: 42:55