It appears almost inevitable. When some thing becomes popular, such as obtaining a tattoo, a particular percentage of tattoos will inevitable grow to be undesired by people who got them. Just as there are quite a lot of belly-button, nose and lip rings today being placed in a waste can or even landfill someplace, a lot of people who opted that they really wished a tattoo of their chosen cartoon character or worse yet, another person’s name have become frantically looking up tattoo removing alternatives. The everlasting characteristics of tattoos implies that you’re tied to them permanently after getting one though, right?

Maybe not. Today, there are only a few ways that you can go about removing that unpleasant tattoo. If you would like to take it off because it looks like it was done on a bus, or even because you’re no more into your old favorite group, or because you’ve determined that a butterfly does not really signifies you, you can surely find several way of eliminating it for good.

Obviously, it may perhaps charge you to get rid of the unpleasant tattoo! As you may expect, tattoo removal is not fully easy, and can sometimes be really high-priced subsequently. In a perfect world, the removal would be the cost of the tattoo itself or something similar, but regrettably, reality doesn’t work that way.

The most common kind of removal, laser removal, is also the most expensive type that is generally utilized. We will not enter into so many specifics, however it simply functions like this: pulses of light are sent through the laser to your skin, where they break up the ink, allowing it to be harmlessly absorbed into your whole body. This certainly eliminates the looks from your skin in the process. The downside is that this can take various therapies, at anywhere from a couple hundred to many hundred dollars for every treatment.

An inexpensive way is removal cream, but it’s not nearly as powerful or quick to work as laser treatments are. Tattoo removal by using a removal cream is a dicey topic, as many are skeptical as to how well it functions. Evidently though, lots of have had accomplishment with it, mainly because it absorbs into your skin and breaks up the ink, equally as laser removal does.

WEB/TECH: 21st-Century Technology Has Caught up to ’70s-Era Quadraphonic Recording
Hear and Now: “Dismal failure” may be the kindest way to describe quad. To music fans for whom even cassette tapes are a quaint throwback, here’s a real obscurity: Quadraphonic sound systems were an experiment launched in 1970. Music came out of four speakers spread around the room–guitars over there, vocals over here, drums all around. In a perfect world, the listener would hear what it was …
Read more on All About Jazz

Tech: As if viruses, spyware and the like aren’t bad enough
If you go online, it’s a certainty you’ve faced some sort of online threat — viruses, spyware, adware, etc.
Read more on The Capital Times

Imagine punching the boulder in 3D!

Surely you’ve heard of Shinji Mikami, right? He’s basically “the Resident Evil guy,” and he’s got 3D on the brain. He told Famitsu, that famous Japanese video game magazine, that he wants to disband his current studio (Straight Story) and form a new one, one for creators, by creators (as opposed to one by run by know-nothing businessmen). This new studio, in a perfect world, would create a 3D horror game.

There’s a few obstacles. One, pretty much nobody owns a 3D TV yet—didn’t they just come out the other day? That, and they’re a little on the expensive side. Your average gamer, who only just recently embraced HDTV (though I got my first HDTV in time for World Cup 2006, and I have no such desire to upgrade to a 3D TV for World Cup 2010), is a little while away from shelling out the dough for 3D.

Plus, there’s that small issue of actually forming the studio.

Now, about that 3D horror game:

When it comes to my personal desires, I’d like to make a true-3D horror game, something where you’d use glasses like in the Avatar film. It’s been my goal since the original Resident Evil to be the first in the industry to make a 3D game. There needs to be a large 3D television-owning userbase before that can happen, but I always like trying out new things first.

My only experience with 3D gaming was at some EA event two weeks ago, playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It was just OK, nothing to freak out over.

The convergence of sportand technology! I don’t know, I think it’s cool. So, here’s another. This is the Finale Madrid, and it will be used at the UEFA Champions League final in Madrid this May. In a perfect world, the game will be played between Real Madrid and Barcelona—I will lose my mind if that happens.

Like other soccer balls (the Adidas Jabulani and the Nike T90 Ascente), there’s a lot going on in here. You see the stars? Somehow, Adidas has managed to make that completely inseparable from the ball itself—it’s not just painted on there. That helps ensure the ball’s flight is as unobstructed as possible. The ball keeps the PSC Texture as seen in previous balls. It’s the golf ball effect: golf balls have dimples in order to steady the flight, and so does the Finale Madrid.

Again, the UEFA Champions League final will be played in Madrid (Real Madrid’s home stadium, the Santiago Bernabéu, to be exact) on May 22. I will be completely unreachable during the game.

UPDATE Oh my God, Real Madrid has been knocked out of the Champions League by Olympique Lyon of France. Can anyone give me a ustream link to La Rambla in Barcelona? I can only imagine they’re partying like it’s 1999 in Catalunya right now.

Whoa. It seems that our amigos over at Laptop Magazine had a bit of a run-in with an iBuyPower laptop, and that nasty little cut was the result. IBuyPower’s response? “Yikes, we need to look into that, one moment please.”

So the deal is that the “W” in the word iBuyPower peels off in less than 1 percent of Battalion Touch CZ-10 gaming laptops. The logo, which is aluminum, was able to slice right through Laptop’s skin, leaving the battle wound you see there. It’s not something you’d want to deal with, no.

If there’s a silver lining to this story, it’s that, after some digging around, iBuyPower was able to identify the defect, and has gone ahead and fixed it. In a perfect world that means, should you decide to plop down the $999 for the laptop, you shouldn’t have to worry about walking away with needing to go to the emergency room.

And if you already own one of these laptops, it wouldn’t hurt contacting iBuyPower to see if they can replace it with a new, less dangerous one.

Windows 7 users would be well-advised to block outgoing ports 139 and 445. Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a vulnerability that affects SMB in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 RC2. Worst case scenario: you connect to a malicious server then it crashes your PC.

The beauty here is that, in a perfect world, these ports would be blocked by default, making the exploit much less troubling. Let’s say you’re messing around on your computer, and all of a sudden Windows (or your firewall of choice) prompts you to open port 445 for a connection. So you say to yourself, “Hmm, I’m pretty sure my game of chess doesn’t need to access an SMB share to work properly, so I’m going to go ahead and deny that port-open request.”

But that’s now how the real world works.

It comes down to this: block those two ports when you’re not actively using them. No problems.

I could make some sort of snide remark about this being the first of many (maybe!) Windows 7 exploits, but let’s face it: when you’re dealing with so many lines of code, you’re bound to find a few bugs in there.

Oh, and Microsoft hasn’t said when it plans to patch the exploit. Presumably it will do so with its next big first Tuesday of the month patch day.

via Slashdot