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Given that he was able to set a rag on fire, I'm guessing that the Mythbusters team did something incorrectly regarding the focusing of their mirrors. And your link says they used a circular configuration which is only good in limited cases since the light is focused in a line (which isn't really focus) rather than a point. This was parabolic setup which is why he was able to melt plastic and set a rose on fire.

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Since the second link is down: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/dc606edf5dd2111cf fb4c2925123d784/index.html

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It's not (primarily) the web designers' fault that they use flashy designs. The people who get design contracts aren't the ones who use well-formed, W3C compliant XHTML that is functional even in text-based browsers. The people who get the contracts are the ones who have a 500KB Flash animation on every page and poorly coded Javascript rollovers because clients and PHBs see these things and go "Ooo! Shiny!"

The whole point of modern XHTML and CSS is so that web designers can seperate the function of the webpage (deliver content via XHTML) from the form (the particular layout using CSS) and let end users choose the CSS that they want. In theory this should have a minimal XHTML with just pure text and all the glitz should be added in via CSS. FF and similar browsers support switching between multiple stylesheets by defaul, but IE requires webdesigners to allow it via a Javascript widget. Thus, the designers just stick with the flash. Maybe IE7 will help change this if it doesn't suck as much as the previous versions or maybe not given the amount of glitz in Longhorn.

In an ideal world, one CSS would have the glitzy flash animation and postneoantimodernismdeco-that-will-win-art-contest s design for when I first visit the page and am sucked in by beauty. Another CSS would have a minimalist UI that allows me to find the information on that site as fast as possible. Then handheld users would just use this latter lowbandwith UI by default instead of the flash hog. The web designers can just show the PHBs both versions so it is their fault that modern websites suck. They're making websites with 5 year old technology and the users are suffering for that.

If you really want to see the power of proper XHTML+CSS, look at the CSS Zen Garden. The entire site uses a single XHTML file but each version of the main page has a different CSS file. If you didn't know this, you would think that each page was individually coded. And the site is still usable if you strip out the CSS and view just the plain XHTML file.

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Of those reasons, willful ignorance by the parents and stupid morality are the most evil in my opinion. Particularly when virginity pledges by themselves don't cut down STD infections because the people making the pledges have unprotected oral and anal sex to keep their virginity and they never bothered to learn about condems. News article on the topic

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The point of contention in this case isn't the actual censorship of pornsites but rather the sites that get blacklisted just because they give information about sex. I bet that Wikipedia would be blacklisted since it talks about sex and probably has some sexual images on there. The courts have ruled in the past that teens have a right to access medical information about sex including such "deviant" (remember that this is Utah, Morman capital of the world) topics as homosexuality. Some lists would also ban things like nudity in general including classical paintings and sculptures similar to what Ashcroft did.

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Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union go further and warn the bill violates the US Constitution's First Amendment on free speech and the Commerce Clause. Six other states have had similar legislation ruled unconstitutional, resulting in huge legal bills for residents, Media Coalition director David Horowitz told the Salt Lake City Tribune.

You would think that they would learn not to mess with the free speech rights of adults and children here. The main objection to these kinds of bills is that the block access to sites giving medical or social information about topics like teen sexuality, pregnancy, and homosexuality. This is due to the fact that the blacklist is drawn up by a bunch of conservative idiots rather than people that know the difference between Debbie Does Dallas and Gray's Anatomy. The laws prevent teens who have a right to know this kind of information without the consent of their parents (the ACLU has defended teen medical rights before) which is stupid since most of the problems with teen sex are due to ignorance on the part of teens about sexuality. Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection. And because of the lack of communication between parents and teens in this case, the teens won't tell their parents nor will they get medical help which just makes the situation worse. One of these days they'll figure out that teaching children proper morals and letting them deal with the dangers of the world regarding sex is better than just blindfolding them and threaten them with eternal damnation if they have sex before marriage.

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So, don't attack my analogy, tell me why it was OK for him to lie to Apple and say that he WOULD respect their DRM and then turn around and crack it

Maybe he didn't read the click-through agreement? Or maybe he just doesn't like the inability to play the music on his non-iPod mp3 player even though he legally acquired the music and considers this fair-use (like using a VCR to record a movie) as long as doesn't redistribute the music to random people? Or maybe he understands the entire futility of trying to create an audio DRM system when the audio analog hole is currently (and probably forever) unpluggable so he doesn't see anything wrong with a digital hack compared to hooking speaker output into his line-in and pressing record? Or he could just like the challenge of being a hacker in both meanings of the word. Unless he is distributing the cracked music to others, I see no moral crime here even if he is violating laws.

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It just wouldn't be the same without them. However, imdb doesn't show them as being part of the cast. Hopefully, this show will help cram some science into kids again, but who wants to take bets as to how long it will be before Creationists or other anti-science conservatives attack the show for claiming that Earth is 4 billion years old, we evolved from rodents, and that the Sun is the center of our solar system? I'm betting it will happen in the first season given the bad state of science today. Maybe this will even prevent the next generation from turing into a bunch of New Age hippies wearing crystal and Kabbalah threads.

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You need a $40 3rd party extension, but that's still cheaper than the PSP. And it has good reviews too. This was an SP product that happens to work on the DS due to backwards support. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.

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You need a $40 3rd party cartridge, but you can play divx movies, mp3s and read text on the GBA and DS off a flash card. It's an import called Movie Advance There is a good review on Lik Sang but that site seems to be having troubles so here is a Google cache. Another review is at PlanetGC. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.

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The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.

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Given the problems with getting children that are good enough actors, I'm guessing that there is no way to stay accurate to the book and pull off a good movie. If you stay accurate to the book, the bad acting will weaken it and American audiences (cause no moviehouse cares about anyone else for big movies) will freak out over the use of children. It might be better to wait for Final Fantasy level rendering to jump up a few steps and use that for the children. Then use adults who can play children for the voices. Assuming the rendering is good enough to not be distracting, there is still the question of whether moviehouses will think that Americans will like the plot and themes in the book. If that's the case it might be better to try to pitch it to a Japanese anime company rather than an American one. It would be similar to Now and Then, Here and There which was an anime about children being used for war with some similar themes.

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Just so the rest of the world doesn't think that it's a small minority of Americans who are doing this, a set of polls on evolution vs Creationism. The majority of Americans believe that we were created by a god in 6 days 10,000 years ago. The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. The same scientific ignorance causes Americans to abhorr homosexuality as a sinful path chosen by evil people rather than realizing it's a natural mindset encoded into the brain before birth. My only hope for the science in this country is that someone in the government will realize that we should spend money on education instead of war before the median scientific knowledge of our "first world" country falls below that of "third world" countries.

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I actually first heard about the slashdot story about the magic sticker when I was reading one of Randi's weekly commentaries where one of the readers comments about certain Slashdotter's inability to seperate reality from fantasy. BTW, the sticker qualifies for the Million Dollar prize along with evidence of psychics, homeopathic medicine, or other bullshit.

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It should be noted that the claim about whether life on Mars exists is not without contrevery. Levin contends that the Viking probes did detect evidence of life on Mars based on biochemical signatures. This past evidence is now supported by the belief that Mars might have an organic methane source. There is also some evidence that Viking detected a circadian rhythm, but like all conclusions draw on such a limited data set, there are a lot of interpretations.

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While I understand that Joe Six Pack wants plug and play functionality without configuring, it is really that hard to add in another layer? When the AP is running on factory settings, it can just cause all Web requests to route to the configuration page along with an easy to explain set up about passwords. AP passwords aren't hard as normal passwords since many APs are in a secure building so writing the password on the AP and locking it in the closet would work half decently.

While the user has to take some blame for technical ignorance, the AP makers also have to take some blame here since they have the tech people to implement better security.

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This isn't as obvious as it sounds. The sites that the article talks about are not the Gratis (e.g., freeipods.com, freegamingsystems.com, freeMiniMacs.com) sites. They are the sites that have the "Hit the target to win an iPod" ads, and then ask you to complete a survey. From what I have seen, it is so obvious that those sites are a waste of time and money, I can't believe anyone tries them.

The Gratis sites are completely legitimate, and it is actually beneficial to complete the offers to get the iPod. I actually got the shipment of my free 1GB iPod Shuffle today (for my fiancee; she was thrilled), and by doing a $1/month trial of Great Fun (I think), I ended up with $20 in Circuit City gift certificates to boot. Hardly a waste of my time, since all I had to do was take 5 minutes to fill out the sign-up form, and then take 5 minutes to call in and cancel (literally, 5 minutes). So in the end, my free iPod Shuffle cost me negative $19 and 10 minutes. Not bad at all.

We need alternative forms of distribution too. I'm not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players' hands. If any of you bought Half Life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room.
This is one of the major gripes that people have about games. Acquiring a publisher just adds another person in the contract which brings about more legal hassle (remember Valve delaying HL2's Steam release to match the hardcopy release?) and more overhead. Given the nature of software, physical copies are completely overrated unless they have interesting bonus material. It would be much nicer if companies who make games that are primarily online (Q3, CS, all MMORPGS) just dropped the whole physical aspect. They could just tack on a BitTorrent client to a lightweight download/install program and just send it out to everyone. Then encourage people to make copies of the data files and distribute it to friends (since this is impossible to stop) and just sell the CD keys online. This would be just as effective for games that already require an Internet connection. They could also just give out the installer on DVD for free in stores and sell the CD key online or sell physical cards in stores that contain a CD key.

One of these days, the companies will catch up with the state of technology.

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You can also use a temporary credit card if you're really paranoid. These function as debit cards so you only risk the amount of money you put it. This might be useful if you're ultra paranoid and like to limit the number of people you give your credit card to. You still need a real credit card for WebCertificate but it is an extra layer of protection.

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Likewise for me with a Mac Mini. I did have to pay $0.99 for one of the offers, but the key is to sign up for an offer that's actually worth it rather than one of the crazy ones like diet pills.

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The output system will be the same as normal 3d films since 3d movie tech hasn't evolved that much. I'm guessing a pair of polarized lenses in the standard cheap paper glasses. The interesting part is generating 3d images from 2d data. Since Lucas didn't film all the scenes in 3d, he has to use postproduction tricks to extract 3d info. This is mainly done using parallax shifts which is when the foreground and background images apparently move at different speeds during a pan. Static shots would probably have to be 3d'd (or whatever buzzword) in a semi-manual fashion with people telling the computer which parts are at which distance. This also means that certain objects like a person sitting still at a table with a gun won't have enough information to be 3d'd and will either be done manually or left in 2d. It also means that the final movie won't be full 3d since there probably isn't enough parallax data to extract depth information about a person's face in most cases. So you'll have 2d foreground images moving in 3d in front of 2d background images. I'm not sure how good this would look in a full motion sequence.

I'm guessing the software will be similar to this with some changes due to the limited motions of normal cameras. That's the only intersting part about this whole venture.

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I can't seem to find any evidence that it's been discredited yet (Google keeps giving me the quack sites rather than trustable responses) but I did find this.
Since it was a news program, it can't be considered too credible. (Though, this might just be an American bias since we've had major news networks show "proof" of faith healing and the Apollo moon hoax) However, it seems to have been conducted by credible scientists along with Randi himself. As expected, it showed no statistical deviation.

Since 4 other studies seemed to support the orginal one, but no mention was made of how many contradicted it, I'm going to guess that all 5 studies supporting it were due to statistical or human error.

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While the idea of a 3D printer cheap enough for personal use /is/ going to revolutionize the world by making certain real items as cheap as software, the part about it being a von Neumann machine is overrated. The article just mentions it in passing and there is no evidence that he's actually figured out how to do that. That's been one of the holy grails of engineering since it was proposed. The article doesn't mention whether the materials used will be recyclable. Since everyone and their grandmother will start spitting out objects if they have this and since it would probably be cheaper to build a new object rather than repairing an old one, mass use of UCs will produce tons of waste. Imagine if you could never delete any file on your computer but could create more easily. You would run out of space very quickly.

BTW, for a good book on the social implications of cheap universal constructors, I suggest the Stephenson's book Diamond Age.

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Link It should be noted that this isn't an atmosphere in the common sense. The air is continually created and lost due to internal sources and weak gravity.

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Hmm...I can still outrun that so I guess I don't have to welcome our new robotic overlords for a couple more months. We'll only have to start worrying if the robots can actually move fast enough to catch and enslave us.

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The article says "Reynolds said... that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products." That sounds like its just a comparison of the 27W to 35W specs of the processors. However, since both companies have their own systems to dynamically scale back power by slowing down the CPU like SpeedStep and PowerNow, could the power labels be inaccurate as a measure of battery life in this case? Just like how clock-vs-clock benchmarks are no longer valid, could the same now be true about Watt-vs-Watt measurements?

*shrugs* Then again, AMD might just be flat out decieving on the benchmarks because they are thinking of their shareholders rather than their customers.

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In order to clear up the confusion about performance, the FPGA company involved here has decided to drop the 90MHz from ads and just call the FPGA 75000 ultra-uber-extreme edition.

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They're still Not Good Enough. FPGAs are faster than running software on a normal CPU, but they're still not as fast as running on pure hardware. While modern GPUs are programmable, they're still dependent on extreme hardware which is basically tons of simple circuits doing the same few operations. FPGAs are used when the system has to be more flexible than just 1) get vertex 2) transform 3) paint. Places like ATI do use FPGA systems when they are designing the hardware since it has faster turnaround time from design->test->debug than real hardware. However, these FPGA implementations of GPUs tend to be 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than the final hardware.

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Anyone remember that PR nightmare a couple years back when people found out that using the IR (marketed as a nightvision) system on a certain Sony handheld cam would allow people to see through thin layers of clothing? A Google search for Sony x ray should give the results for anyone who is interested. And on the topic of cheap IR gear, http://www.amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html. It's effectively the same thing as this story but it's about what happens if you just stick the filter on a pair of goggles and use them during bright sunlight.

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Virtual museums are overrated. When VRML became The Next Big thing about 10 years ago, I looked into creating virtual museums, and we're still not at the tech level that we can pull them off. 2D objects look bad when they're distorted into a 3d projection on such a small screen. The best way to view virtual paintings is just as a normal bitmap on a large enough screen. 3D objects like vases and small sculptures do work well in VRML since you can rotate them and view them from any angle. Large (with respect to the virtual user) sculptures and architecture tend to look boring on a screen compared to the real thing and aren't worth it unless viewed in 3D googles to get a sense of the depth involved.

And the whole walking part in a virtual museum is completely worthless unless the museum's architecture is artistic by itself since walking is slower than the "teleportation" available with normal hyperlinks.

BTW, this technology doesn't really compare with QTVR since QTVR is an output system and this technology is an input system to generate 3D models. You would still need a 3D renderer with texture support to view the data produced from this system.

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From one of the links: The SIFT algorithm is restricted by patents in the United States and hence this software is not completely free to use. For details see the LICENSE file included in the distribution, before you start to use this software.

Hopefully, they're liberal about the patent and will let noncommercial nonresearch applications use the algorithm. Otherwise, we would have to wait for the really interesting software to come out.

A C# implementation with support for Mono is available to play with for anyone who is interested: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/libsift/
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Since slashdot will probably burn out the web server hosting images: http://www.mdrobotics.ca.nyud.net:8090/ism/behind. htm

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The problem with that metric is that SETI@home has such as high lag time between nodes (data gets sent every few hours or so) that you can't really compare it with a supercomputer for most tasks. It would be better to say SETI@home is running at N*X where N is the average user count and X is the FLOPS/user. Other companies are already selling distributed computing time.

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He was also part of the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 80s

Given how much of a waste of money the SDI program was (or should I say is), I hope his work at NASA is better. Otherwise, we might end up with an planetary defense system on the moon to protect us from Martian terrorists.

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If it does stop, here is the mirrordot link.

That said, what impresses me is that they pulled it off with an A64 3200.

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I was getting excited since I thought they had actually created a practical reversible computing hardware system. The idea behind true reversible computing is that information flow in computation is linked to the energy lost as heat during computing. Von Neumann showed that there was a hard limit on the amount of energy needed everytime a bit of information is lost dependent on Boltzmann's constant and temperature of the system. The ultimate goal is to have a computer that looks a lot like particle physics where the rules are completely time-symmetric. I.e. if I reverse the flow of time, the laws of physics will still run properly and allow me to reconstruct all the previous states from the present one. While the principle of quantum reversibility (sometimes called the "conservation of information law") you can't do the same with most binary operations since all the common ones except NOT take in 2 bits and output 1 bit. Thus, it is impossible to run the system in reverse and reconstruct those two bits from that one bit. This has the adverse effect of wasting energy as heat into the environment.

It's and interesting field that's going to take off as Moore's Law slows down due to wasted heat. A good starting page with links for the interested is here.

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The problem with ebooks is still a matter of viewing technology rather than distribution technology. People don't like reading from the computer screen for long periods of time and e-paper has been Just Around the Corner for a while now. However, DVDs are displayed on the same media technology as MPEG4 (or whatever the top of the line is) but the problem has always been distribution since it is still expensive to download DVD quality video in terms of the bandwith needed. As bandwith increases, this problem disappears and downloaded media (via legal Bittorrent or whatever method) will be easier than physical media. The same will only be true for ebooks once epaper becomes efeasible.

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Shouldn't that be generalized to include other things like TV and radio? Radio is currently being replaced by webcasts for those who listen to it at work and home. If enough major metro areas implement WiFi access (which they will eventually) then people would be able to get radio that way too. The Internet and distributed communications technology in general will pretty much be the end of all classic media delivery systems once broadband really takes off and people can stream near realtime HDTV level video.

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If Google continues to support Wikipedia or even acquire it, then they might increase the support for Wiktionary. However, the answers.com thing they have set up is pretty nice since it brings a bunch of dictionary and similar references together.

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If Google continues to support Wikipedia or even acquire it, then they might increase the support for Wiktionary. However, the answers.com thing they have set up is pretty nice since it brings a bunch of dictionary and similar references together.

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If they want to really open it up, they should combine their efforts with that of Wiktionary

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... the First Amendmentment gives us. As much as I despise some the the conservative laws in the US, I'm still proud of the fact that we support freedom of speech in some of the most extreme cases.

In Australia it is illegal to commit, or attempt to commit suicide.
Suicide and sedition: the only crimes where those who suceed aren't prosecuted.

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My main gripe with the default BT client is the lack of per file settings. BitTornado allows the user to download specific files in the torrent. This is useful since people can post aggregated torrents and the user can just select the files that he wants.

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It's a flag at the IP level which routers use to handle different traffic classes (realtime, low-bandwith/low-lag, etc. In particular, bulk data is high-bandwith and lag tolerant so that someone using a high lag system like a sat. connection can route the packets in a manner that improves overall performance. This normally involves allowing for bigger chunks of data at a time with less feedback (the ACKs) for each chunk.

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My main gripe with the default BT client is the lack of per file settings. BitTornado (site's down at the moment) allows the user to download specific files in the torrent. This is useful since people can post aggregated torrents and the user can just select the files that he wants.

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Has anyone found pictures of the lava flow?

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Unless whatever contract the person signed when then applied for the university prohibitied this behavior, isn't this just good business sense? All businesses twist the laws and contracts to wring every bit of usefulness out of them. In that sense, wouldn't finding out information ahead of time be a wise business tactic? Or would it be a better business tactic for the 119 applicants to get together and hire a lawyer sue Harvard for this?

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I would think that the people designing the bots would test them first. Or did the bots beat all of the designers in arm wrestling? If they did, I wouldn't be too suprised.

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I don't think there is any implication in the leaked information that Apple was doing something the least bit wrong with the mini. I'm guessing that fact that the leaked information revealed good things that Apple was doing (and that others can copy for profit) had a large part to play in the decision. If Apple was using young children to build the products, then the blogger might have a case.

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Given the speed at which the industry moves, I'm guessing yes. Intel quickly created a Mac Mini clone so having extra time to figure out how to copy Apple could result in a nice chunk of sales. This is also more important for Apple since a lot of their high profile innovations (nothing high tech about a 10GB MP3 player by itself) aren't based on strange tech which makes it easy to replicate once you know what's happening. Ideas are worth big money in the design market.

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