According to Reuters, cable companies are secretly discussing plans that’ll let customers choose what channels they want. Content providers won’t like this “a la carte” arrangement, but who cares. This is something customers wanted like yesterday. [Reuters via Tech Crunch; Image from IKO/Shutterstock] More
Because it’s surrounded on all sides by water, it makes sense that much of what the Japanese eat comes from the sea. We all know they eat whales and dolphins, but how about fish sperm and poisonous puffer fish? The short list below also includes a few specialties found on land that I just had to include. As always, if you’ve tried any of these, please let us know how they taste in the comments below.
Zazamushi isn’t just one kind of insect; rather, a catch-all name applied to the larvae of insects that live at the bottom of rivers. The name “zazamushi” literally translates to “insects (mushi) that live in a place where the river makes the sound zaazaa as it flows.”
The Japanese have been eating fugu for centuries, which means they’ve had plenty of time to figure out HOW to eat this poisonous fish. Fugu flesh is edible, but the skin, liver and ovaries contain lethal amounts of the poison tetrododoxin. If any of these elements are consumed, then the poison paralyzes the muscles while the victim stays fully conscious, and eventually dies from asphyxiation. Good times. For this reason, it’s imperative that a special, qualified fugu chef prepares your meal.
Shirako, a common item found in most Japanese pubs consisting entirely of the male genitalia of fish still fat with seminal fluid.
While Japan isn’t the only country that eats horse meat, I believe it’s the only one that eats it raw, as sashimi.
This crunchy, maggotty bee larvae is served in pubs the way we serve beer nuts. Yum!
Shirouo are very small transparent fish that are eaten alive. They dance in your mouth – or rather do the odorigui (dancing while being eaten).
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6 Odd Things Eaten in Japan
About one-third of sun-like stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial planet in a habitable zone, says California Institute of Technology astronomer Wesley Traub after studying data from the Kepler orbiting observatory. (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)
(Also, as Rob previously pointed out, astronomers recently found more than 50 new exoplanets including 16 super-Earths, one of which is near its star’s habitable zone!)
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(Lots of) Earth-like planets are very likely
Firefox 7 now officially available, promises ‘significantly’ reduced memory usage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Firefox 7 is set to be released today, and with a big focus on performance, we thought it time for another round of browser speed test. We pitted the four most popular Windows browsers against each other in a battle of startup times, tab-loading times, JavaScript powers, and memory usage, with some surprising results. More
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The first major update to Windows Phone, version 7.5, codenamed “Mango,” is finally nearing its consumer release, two months after being released to manufacturers and networks for testing. Microsoft is now delivering the update to every handset on every carrier in the US and the
It’s easy to shrug off technical achievements like this while real-world data speeds still lag so far behind. Nevertheless, the adrenalin junkies at Nokia Siemens Services insist their latest HSPA+ platform will be commercially available to carriers by the end of next year and, to prove it actually works, they’ve been demoing at PT Expo Comm in Beijing. The technology uses the latest 3GPP standardization to hog eight 42Mbps frequency channels at the same time, delivering a peak throughput of 336Mbps. Sure, it doesn’t come close to the 1Gbps speeds we’ve seen from Ericsson with LTE-Advanced, but if it gets here first we’ll have it.
[Thanks, Alan]
Continue reading Nokia Siemens makes multi-carrier HSPA+ hurtle at 336Mbps
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Nokia Siemens makes multi-carrier HSPA+ hurtle at 336Mbps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Thunderbolt ports on the latest Macs already support optical cabling, according to Intel. New fiber optic cables, which will allow connections as long as “tens of meters” instead of the current three meter limit for copper cable, should be available in 2012.
Thunderbolt started life as an optical interconnect codenamed LightPeak. Developed by Intel with input from Apple, it was designed to ramp from 10Gbps to as high as 100Gbps using silicon photonics. Several factors—in particular, costs associated with fiber optic cabling—resulted in the initial version using electrical-only copper cabling.
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Current Thunderbolt ports will support optical cabling next year
Win/Mac/Linux: Firefox 7 surprised us in our latest round of browser speed tests, and this morning, Mozilla transitioned it from beta to official release. The new version’s biggest improvement is in memory handling, which the Mozilla team hopes finally puts some of the biggest complaints about the browser to rest. More