Douglas “Ask a Ninja” Sarine has declared December 5th Ninja Day! He’s asking people to plan Ninja Day activities with a wiki, and encouraging photo sharing with the unique tag “NinjaDay2007.” So go out and enjoy death-tivities near you!
1776
Phi Beta Kappa, America’s first academic honor society, is founded at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Organized by a group of enterprising undergraduates, members meet regularly to debate, socialize, and write. They institute an oath of secrecy, a code of laws, mottoes in Greek and Latin, and an elaborate initiation ritual. When the Revolutionary War will later forces William and Mary to close in 1780, newly-formed chapters at Harvard and Yale direct Phi Beta Kappa’s growth and development.
1879
The first US patent for an automatic telephone switching system is issued to Daniel Connolly of Philadelphia, Thomas A. Connolly of Washington, D.C., and Thomas J. McTighe of Pittsburgh. (US No. 222,458) The system consists of a single-line wire, a battery of cells located at each telephone, and a dial switching mechanism for each line.
1893
The first electric car is built in Toronto, Canada. It can travel fifteen miles between charges.
1926
Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin premieres, but is initially seen only by small audiences of film aficionados and trade unionists. Battleship Potemkin will later become one of the most renowned films in the history of cinema. More than eighty years after its making, the “The Odessa Staircase” sequence will remain the best known and most studied sequences in the medium’s entire history. The film can be downloaded as a 64Kb MPEG4 (83 MB) or a 256Kb MPEG4 (190 MB) format from the Internet Archive. 64Kb MPEG4 (dialup) or 256Kb MPEG4 (broadband) streaming videos are also available.
1932
German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
1941
Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 computer, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer.
1951
The first push button-controlled garage is opened in Washington, DC by Parking Services Inc. at a cost of US$325,000. A single attendant, without entering the vehicle, could automatically park or return a car to or from the “Park-O-Mat” in less than a minute. The apparatus’ two elevators can park up to seventy-two cars that occupies a lot twenty-five by forty feet with sixteen floors above ground and two below.
1964
Dutch regulations governing pirate radio come into effect.
1965
Richard L.Wexelblat becomes the first candidate in a computer science program to complete a doctoral dissertation. Many doctorate candidates had previously performed computer-related research, but Wexelblat’s diploma, presented by the University of Pennsylvania will be the first to carry the designation “computer science”.
1988
The last known reliable Atari Software ROM Report is generated; thought to have been originated on an Atari 8-bit computer. The nine-page report comes from a database maintained by Larry Brown, the “Purchasing Guy” at Atari Corporation and itemizes 425 cartridge-based video games and applications for Atari 8-bit game consoles and computers. It begins with CX2601, a 16K ROM cartridge named Combat for the Atari 2600 video game system in 1978 and ends with RX8114, a 256K ROM cartridge named Into the Eagles Nest for the Atari 8-bit computer series.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Elementary, Dear Data” first airs. (No. 203) In it, the Enterprise computer creates a sentient holodeck character inside Data’s Sherlock Holmes program. Memory Alpha entry
1994
The Walt Disney Company creates the Disney Interactive division, to develop and license interactive multimedia products on CD-ROM for computers, and cartridges for Sega and Nintendo video game systems. The products will be distributed by Buena Vista Home Video. Visit the company’s official website.
1997
Fastcomm Australasia is hacked by “Magica de Oct”. View an archived version of the webpage here.
Texas Instruments announces that it has developed a manufacturing technique to create integrated circuits using copper wiring made of a material called “xerogel” rather than the traditional aluminum to connect transistors in chips. The company predicts that the approach could lead to processors that are ten times faster than current chips, while using less power. The announcement comes just weeks after International Business Machines (IBM) announced the development of the first such technology and Motorola announced a similar, competing technology.
Tourne.com is hacked by “Claire Danes.”
The Sydney University of Technology’s physics server is hacked by “Magica”.
1999
The Financial News reports that the Yangzhou Intermediate People’s Court in the eastern Jiangsu province of China has rejected an appeal of Hao Jingwen and has upheld his death sentence. Hao and his brother, Hao Jinglong, hacked into Industrial and Commercial Bank of China computers and transfered 720,000 yuan ($87,000) into accounts they had set up under phoney names. In September of 1998, they withdrew 260,000 yuan of those funds. Hao Jinglong’s original sentence to death was suspended in return for his testimony.
Reuters news agency reports that the first of an anticipated wave of Y2K worms and viruses has been discovered. The W32/Mypics.worm is passed along unbeknownst by unsuspecting e-mailers. It is designed to entice recipients to open the file and instructs infected computers to disable themselves.
2000
Amazon.com crashes for forty minutes as a result of an “internal software mix-up.”
Apple Computer announces that slow holiday sales will contribute to its first quarterly operating loss in three years.
HarperCollins Publishers publishes The Ethics of Star Trek by Judy Barad Ph.D. as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 0060195304) Length: 384 pages
2001
The US Federal Trade Commission issues a statement saying the games industry has “made substantial progress in ending the marketing of violent content to children”.
2005
Nintendo releases the simulation game Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS in North America. It is the sequel to Animal Crossing. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: E (Everyone)
Nintendo releases the soccer game Super Mario Strikers for the GameCube in the US. ESRB: E (Everyone)
Play It Ltd releases the platform game James Pond 2 for the Nintendo DS.
Using nanotechnology, scientists at Bar-Ilan University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology produce a polyyne comprised of acetylene units, which is forty times harder than diamond, which was previously the hardest substance known to man.
2006
Apple launches iTunes in New Zealand.
Bethesda Softworks releases Star Trek: Legacy for personal computers in the US. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: E10+ (Everyone)
Konami releases Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin for the Nintendo DS in North America. ESRB: T (Teen)
Konami releases the stealth action game Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (MPO) for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) in Canada and the US. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M (Mature)
Midway releases The Ant Bully for the Wii in the US. It is based on the animated movie of the same title. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: E (Everyone)
NASA announces that it plans to build a permanently occupied station on the Moon, and shuttle persons to it regularly by the year 2020.
The Penguin Group publishes the fantasy novel Cursor’s Fury by Jim Butcher as a hardcover. (ISBN 0-4410-1434-8) It is the third book in the Codex Alera series. Visit the author’s official website.
Version 1.2 of the Pandora FMS (Free Monitoring System) is released. It is a free set of programs, licensed under the GNU General Public License, that analyzes the status and performance of several parameters of various applications, hardware systems, operating systems, and servers, such as databases, firewalls, proxies, routers, or web servers. Visit the application’s official website.
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