Record diamond to go under hammer
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The biggest colourless diamond to appear at auction for 20 years will go under the hammer later this year, officials said as it was unveiled in London Tuesday.
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Attention all top-flank recording artists: One of music&#39;s top-flank producers needs a little help for a great cause; he wants to make history - again.
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Going, going, gone. The massive 46-ounce Louisville Slugger used by Babe Ruth to drill the first home run in Yankee Stadium history was sold for a record $1.26 million Thursday to an unidentified private collector.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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The diamond industry hits back ahead of the release of Blood Diamond, a film about illegally traded diamonds.
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At a bend in a tributary of the Congo River, dirt-poor villagers pan for the shiny stones that have proved as elusive as they are rare -- diamonds. Hundreds stake claims hoping to strike it rich in this, the fourth-largest diamond-producing country in the world. But what these villagers may not know is that diamonds, according to experts, have indirectly fueled some of Africa's dirtiest wars.
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A company that sells ripping software for high-definition disks operates through a corporate maze reaching from Ireland to Antigua. Good luck, MPAA. In 27B Stroke 6.
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In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.
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A global diamond trade organization   embarked on Wednesday on a campaign to counteract any negative   publicity stemming from a new Hollywood movie and a rap song   about conflict or blood diamonds.
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Record di nomination per 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee'
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The famed Hope Diamond glows a mysterious red when exposed to ultraviolet light, a finding that scientists say can help them "fingerprint" blue diamonds and tell the real ones from the artificial.
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DURHAM, N.H. -- Maybe someone will ask him how the foliage is going to be up country. Or what he thinks of his home state's artisanal cheddar. Anything but the two queries that David Ball has been hearing for weeks now: How will you feel when you break Jerry Rice's records? When is it going to happen?
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InfoWorld - Sanyo Electric has built a 1-inch hard-disk drive into a voice recorder, the company announced Friday. The gadget will become the latest in a growing number of portable electronics products to feature a miniature hard drive. The company is using a 5GB capacity drive from Seagate Technology in the HDR-B5GM to give the device a maximum recording time of 693 hours in the lowest quality MP3 recording mode. There are four quality modes and recording time drops to 57 hours when using the highest quality, Sanyo said. The device also supports Windows Media Audio and MP3 playback and can double as a music player. In addition to the hard-disk drive, there is an SD card slot and the recorder can copy files from the card to the hard disk and thus free up the card for re-use. Sanyo draws a distinction between music players and voice recorders, which it says have built-in microphones, speakers, and a microphone input socket, and is claiming a world first with the HDR-B5GM. It will go on sale in Japan in early March and will cost around &#165;53,000 (&#36;507). Sanyo will sell the HDR-B5GM overseas, although no plans have been set.
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Getting involved with a cheater spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e. (27 points!)
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By Anonymous  ANCIENT TEMPERATURE DROP M
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Business & money: Bob Diamond receives payout despite Â£1.6bn sub-prime hit as bank beats forecasts
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