NeverThat.com

One of the teenagers who urinated on the National War Memorial on Canada Day showed up Friday at the head office of the Royal Canadian Legion in Ottawa and tearfully apologized for his actions.

“The young man apologized to the legion, the veterans of Canada and the citizens of Canada,” Bob Butt of the Royal Canadian Legion’s headquarters told the Canadian Press.

“The apology was definitely heartfelt. I know that it was real, and I know it was heartfelt and I know the young person was definitely sorry.”

He added that the apology was accepted.

“The actual act is inexcusable, but that doesn’t mean that if someone wants to come and make amends that we would turn that down. We’re not ogres, we’re not vigilantes,” Butt said.

Another teen photographed doing the same thing has passed on an apology through the Ottawa police.

The two young men won’t face charges because they have agreed to make apologies and do community service.

Meanwhile, 23-year-old Stephen Fernandes of Montreal has been charged with mischief on Friday after he was photographed allegedly urinating on the National War Monument during Canada Day celebrations.

Independent programmers have made available a program that downgrades PlayStation Portable security software to a more tinkering-friendly version.

The handheld video game system requires constant upgrades from Sony to play the newest game releases, and the updates often come packaged with security features aimed at preventing modifications and piracy. However, a program making rounds on the Internet allows PSP users to downgrade version 2.6 software to the far less secure version 1.5, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

The downgrades allow those in the “homebrew” scene to modify their equipment to run homemade and pirated software, the Post said.

The newspaper reported that programmers have also been working on cracking Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The system follows the original Xbox, which was subject to widespread modification and piracy. However, Microsoft has claimed the 360 is secure from modification. The company has a strict policy of banning modified hardware from its online gaming service.

Anyone whose garage is so packed full of junk that getting in and out of the car is nearly impossible will appreciate a new feature set to debut on future BMW models that allows you to stand outside while your Bimmer parks itself (as well as unparks itself, we assume, or this tech wouldn’t be very useful).

The German manufacturer recently released a video of this self-parking wizardry — you can catch it by following the Read link — which shows a happy homeowner simply pushing a button on his keyfob to fire up the motor, retract the side-view mirrors, and send the car on a controlled journey to its home just inches from another luxury ride.

The system leverages distance-sensing technology that we’ve seen before from Mercedes, Toyota, and the like, but requires a reflective lens on the garage wall to operate, which unfortunately precludes its use in public parking lots. Still a pretty useful feature, but if it takes three years to find its way into commercial vehicles as BMW anticipates, we’ll probably already have the parking covered with those self-driving models we’ve been promised.

Fifteen dollars can get you a lot at The University Center. You can shoot pool with a friend for three hours at the Side Pocket game room, or you can drop your pants and receive oral sex from a stranger in the bathroom.

The black Sharpie written messages on the walls of the second and third floor men’s bathrooms tell the story.

The messages offer oral and anal sex to “straight, curious or married guys, (ages) 18-37, anytime, white or Hispanic only.”

Also within the stalls, the message, “1st floor bj,” has been written in numerous places in similar handwriting. After a visit to the first floor, which is on the basement level, it is clear why.

There is a “glory hole” drilled in the wall between the two stalls in the first floor men’s bathroom in The University Center. And it has been there for a while. “Glory holes” are fist-sized holes, through which people anonymously perform various sexual acts.

“I noticed it last September,” said a student, who asked to remain anonymous. The junior English major said that while he was using a urinal in the first floor men’s room, a man in the first stall slipped him a note, asking if he wanted oral sex. “I thought it was a joke, until I read the writings on the walls and saw the hole.”

He decided to look into what was going on. He remembered the man wore New Balance shoes, and the next time he went in the bathroom he saw the same pair of shoes in the stall. He waited outside in the hall until the person left. During this time, he saw other men go into the bathroom, each staying about 30 minutes.

“I think those were his customers,” he said.

Two hours passed and the student was tired of waiting for the man to exit, so he left The UC

MATTERIS is developing a novel, removable, high speed – high capacity Holographic Storage System (holographic media and a recording/reading driver) for the enterprise archive and backup market.

The Holographic Storage reaches high capacity by utilizing the volume instead of the surface of the medium. Using NST’s Holographic Storage Technology, CD-ROM sized media can store Terabytes (=1000Gigabytes) instead of a maximum of 27GB as in Sony’s blue-ray DVD.

For these huge capacities, there is a need of high speed data transfer, or it will take days to back up a system. By writing in parallel millions of bits grouped in holograms (a hologram is a picture of 1000 x 1000 bits each), at the rate of every millisecond (1/1000 of a second), the Holographic Storage system is reaching writing/reading speeds of Gigabits/
sec.

MATTERIS has developed a proprietary holographic material with an entirely different concept than that of the commonly used photo-polymers. This novel material, based on nano-materials, is far superior to photo-polymers, offering no need for development (process-less material), no shrinkage, reading between recording sessions, daylight safety, higher capacity and many others.

The enterprise high-end archiving and backuping generate and store digital data at an estimated rate of over a billion gigabytes per annum and it is doubling every year. Data is stored mainly in hard drives or archived using tapes. Both magnetic (hard drives, tapes and removable disks) and optical (CDROM, DVD) storage technologies suffer from inherent storage density limitation, which impedes these technologies from keeping up with the exponential demand for data storage.

The enterprise archive and backup equipment and media market is estimated at tens of US $ Billions, with a double-digit annual growth. The consumer market for the material and system is even higher.

MATTERIS focuses on the enterprise archiving and backup systems market. Then, it will expand its high capacity-high transfer speed drivers and media into the consumer market for HDTV recorders/players, video on demand, portable digital video cameras, game consoles, etc.

The company developed also the concept for a new Holographic Driver and a new removable Holographic Media which will allow a capacity of Terabytes at transfer speed of Gigabits/sec.