mining

Virtually everyone who's ever used a computer has played Minesweeper, the classic Windows game in which users must strategically locate and mark mines hidden on the board. Mines-Perfect Portable is nearly identical to the original Windows game, but it's made to be portable and has a few cool extra features.

Mines-Perfect Portable is indeed meant to be installed on mobile devices, and the installation process reflects this; users have to specify the installation location, and there are no desktop icons or Start menu items. The game's interface looks almost exactly like that of the Windows version, and … Read more

Vector Tanks Extreme is a tank combat game that is obviously inspired by the classic stand-up arcade game Battlezone. In the original you used two joysticks to move your tank, with one controlling the left track and the other controlling the right. In Vector Tanks Extreme you use up and down motions on either side of the screen to simulate the two-joystick control method, and touch the middle of the screen to fire your weapons. As you blow away tanks, you'll find powerups that give you new weapons, add to your shield supply, and give you rapid-fire guns for … Read more

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust takes the old arcade classic Asteroids and mixes in some RPG elements and a sense of humor to create a truly entertaining game. Most of your time is spent mining different sectors of open space, using an onscreen joystick to turn and buttons for thrust and fire. By itself, blowing away the asteroids is pretty fun, but there's much more to Space Miner than a simple arcade shooter. Your base camp is your Uncle Jeb's mining facility, which also has a store to buy new ships and ship components and your apartment where … Read more

Unnamed intelligence agencies and certain academics have yet to give up on data mining to identify terrorists and predict attacks, despite a 352-page tome published last year pronouncing the practice a waste of time.

The U.S. is spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to develop techniques to mine the mountains of information gleaned from e-mails, telephone calls, interviews with suspects, and now social networks to build-up Facebook-style databanks on international terrorists, according to a recent piece in the British newspaper, The Independent.

The result has been the arrest and interrogation of "many thousands of innocent people&… Read more

CASPER, Wyo.--I come from California. In California there are almost 37 million people. We have several cities with more people than some states. So when it comes to things like getting vanity license plates, you've got a lot of competition if you want something good.

But over the last few years, I've been to a lot of states with far smaller populations. Idaho, for example, has 1.5 million people. Nevada, where I've spent more time than any other state besides California, has just 2.6 million. And Wyoming, where I am right now, has just … Read more

BUTTE, Mont.--When you visit a town whose current (though not historical) claim to fame is hosting one of America's biggest Superfund sites, it's hard to know what you're going to experience when you get there.

But when I was planning Road Trip 2009 and discovered that this Continental Divide city had once been known as the "richest hill on Earth" due to monumental mining wealth, but was now a city trying desperately to recover from the poisons the mining left behind, I knew I had to check it out.

Instantly, upon reaching the historic … Read more

Has it finally arrived, the post-advertising age? Advertising Age, nomen est omen, recently ran a story on the blurring line between commercial and editorial content, as media companies are facing a fiercely competitive marketplace amid declining advertising budgets (according to the Newspaper Association of America, advertising revenue in 2008 decreased by 17 percent, to $38 billion), and the looming crisis of the news industry as a whole (see Clay Shirky’s seminal essay on "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable").

As if to further prove the point, the Los Angeles Times carried a Page 1 advertisement on Thursday that … Read more

Landmine "contamination" continues to plague developing countries, where more are laid every year than are cleared, according to a UN estimate. Now, a company promises a new technique to locate and map landmines from the air-three times faster and at half the price of conventional detection methods.

A Canadian company, Mine Clearing Corp (MCC) has acquired licensing to the latest in radiometry technology; technology so sensitive it can pick out the tiny electromagnetic reflections emitted by buried objects from as high as 200 feet in the air. MCC plans to incorporate this technology into a landmine detection and … Read more

Americans leave behind countless digital footprints from everyday activities like making a phone call or using a credit card--footprints government agencies regularly track as part of their counterterrorism efforts.

The collection, retention, and dissemination of this information has dangerously escaped public oversight and congressional scrutiny, public sector experts warned Congress on Wednesday. If the next Congress and administration do not take steps to rein in these programs that are bloating the federal government, they said, it will come at the expense of both civil liberties and national security.

Policy experts laid out their concerns to the House Homeland Security Committee … Read more