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Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.

You mean like arresting young chemists because their equipment serves a dual purpose and could be used to create something illegal like meth?

Sorry, home science is now an arrestable offense.

Some think so. Icelandic volcanoes seem to go through cycles, and a high activity one could be starting. Maybe this volcano alone could not be so bad, but more and for long time could have severe consequences, in economy and maybe global climate.

It's a black guy!

As anyone who has ever watched Max Headroom in the 80's knows these things need to be kept separate by separate companies.

You might be interested to know that Max is apparently finally being released on DVD. I have a bootleg set of DVDs which are obviously (quite reasonable) copies of tape from some commercial station in Kansas made in the '90s, but I'm very tempted to stump up for better copies.

But to return to the topic, Apple's current "walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers" (as Tim Bray so succinctly put it) approach is going to come back to bite them on the ass at some point. Apple won over a lot of support when OS X was first introduced, opening up the platform to developers and users of FOSS projects built on other Unices. In fact, I was one of those thus attracted.

However, Apple seems now to be doing everything in its power to drive independent developers away, and this is leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many who have never written a line of code in their lives.

Oh, and even if there is, you can be SURE that Apple will never REMOVE (and secretly, too!) books from your iPad, UNLIKE SOME 'bookstores'.
 

How on earth can you be 'SURE' of that?

I suppose it's unlikely that Apple would put themselves in that position, because providing a self-publishing platform like Amazon's Digital Text Platform isn't really Apple's style.

Amazon found themselves in a tricky situation. Due to a DTP user who'd (knowingly or unknowingly) published material that was neither licensed nor PD, they had sold a load of copies of 1984 that they weren't entitled to sell. They handled this badly. But, pretty quickly, they apologised, said it would never happen again, and gave every affected user a legitimate copy of 1984.

Having made a mistake, they cleared it up in an exemplary fashion.

You're saying Apple would never make a mistake?

A quick Google search turns up this. DRM here,

The linked-to article is nothing BUT baseless speculation. How can ANYONE know that there is DRM on the bookstore?

Oh, and even if there is, you can be SURE that Apple will never REMOVE (and secretly, too!) books from your iPad, UNLIKE SOME 'bookstores'.

So, is that the BEST you can do to PROVE there is DRM on iPad?

Not to give this POS film any credit, but they used CGI (and some makeup) to make Bruce Willis look young in his "surrogate" form. Details here: http://io9.com/5366325/how-to-get-your-future-robot-self-high

Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old.

Bingo - which is why I oppose long copyright terms.

I think publishers also want to hang on to works for hundreds of years because of the "ruby in the dust" effect. Since it costs them nothing to keep a work under copyright, if the long tail effect means that it suddenly becomes popular again a long time later (stand by for the resurgence of works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example*) then they can let the money roll in rather than see it all go to other people. Of course, in the case of sound recordings and some other works, the original media won't last more than about 50 years anyway before all known copies vanish through age.

* - Sherlock Holmes is not in the public domain until 2023. Ah, the estate of Conan Doyle. How lovely to have a nice fat income from the works of your great, great grandfather for no other reason than the sheer accident of your birth.

No indicators, no action, as the number of indicators goes up, raise the response level to the appropriate level for the individual at hand. In other words, ACTUALLY USE THE RESULTS OF INVESTIGATION AND INTELLIGENCE IN A TIMELY AND APPROPRIATE MANNER. . .

This presupposes that the indicators are accurate. The TSA "threat levels" are nonsense. People get put on the TSA's lists simply because their names are similar to other people's names. People get beaten by border guards, or detained and interrogated for no apparent reason; want to know the reason, i.e., the "indicator?" -- you're not allowed to, because it's a secret.

I'm not criticizing you for disagreeing with Schneier. He's not a god or an oracle. But when you say "Bruce is only pointing out the obvious...," and then go on to contradict everything he says in the article, it does seem a little odd. Maybe we should check what he has to say about the "indicators" you want to put so much faith in -- "indicators" such as the TSA threat level and the no-fly list. You seem to be advocating strip-searching people because they show up on lists like the no-fly list. Schneier says the no-fly list is bogus.

I was thinking "Dances With Wolves."

Or "Little Big Man."

Or even "District 9."

There's a lot of this kind of plot. By some accounts, this is all about white people's inability to honestly discuss race.

Although -- there's similarities to "Dune" as well, which isn't racial.

Wired copied this story from io9, who originally brought attention to this blog 4 days ago.

http://io9.com/5429963/know-your-nuclear-reactors-with-illustrated-wall-charts/

If I remember correctly, and it is a little fuzzy, I almost fell asleep 20 minutes into the 4th film. It was poorly plotted, full of massive plot holes (why do terminators need hundreds of LCD screens and why not have the terminator kill Kyle as soon as he met him?). The Christian Bale part seemed shoehorned into the film in the extreme (born out by reports that came out afterwards). There was no sense of jeopardy for the characters and the ending was telegraphed a mile off.

The real problem is radiation exposure. 6 months there, 500 days on the surface, 6 months back... The only known solution to this is to make the habitat module more massive.. which of course requires more fuel...

It wouldn't take 6 months to get there if you went a bit faster. Of course you'd need more fuel, or lug a nuclear reactor around with you http://io9.com/5323516/earth-to-mars-in-39-days either way you don't exactly save money in the process

If only Japan could somehow magically create more open, unfarmable, and uninhabited land where the turbines could be placed without taking away already scarce farm land or slowly deafen anyone within a kilometer!

Unlike nuclear power land for wind turbines can be used for food farming as well. Here in Minnesota many corn farmers site wind turbines on their farms. Platforms for towers don't take much space. And wind turbines aren't as loud as some make them out to be. All those who say they take too much land or are too loud are doing is spreading FUD and lies. And saying they kill a of birds is also FUD. Buildings, cars, and cats kill many birds. If you're worries about birds being killed by wind turbines then complain about birds being killed at airports. Here is a list of "9 Human Activities That Threaten Birds".

Falcon

It isn't sweating NOW.

After days of anticipation they have failed spectacularly.
Instead of seeing it exclusively on Apple's site the internet got the first look at the trailer from France's MSN portal.

I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture.
On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl. [...]

I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.

Everybody seems to be hating on the new Transformers movie, but really, the critics have it wrong. In actuality, Michael Bay finally made an art movie.

I wonder how all those science fair projects and high school chemistry labs sneek by under the nose of these government watchdogs?

Sometimes they don't.

It's an OK movie. If it weren't "Star Trek", it would probably rank with The Chronicles of Riddick.

Annoyances:

• Way too much lens flare and depth of focus manipulation. Even indoor scenes have lens flare. Somebody spent too much time pushing the buttons on the editor.

No joke. I saw it on a pretty decent screen with a DLP projector and I thought I had temporary blindness from the flashes of light on the bridge. You know it is bad when JJ himself admits it is too much. http://io9.com/5230278/jj-abrams-admits-star-trek-lens-flares-are-ridiculous

Somebody likes plumbing too much. Most of the interior scenes have vast amounts of piping and tankage. It looks like some of the shipboard shots were filmed in a modern brewery.

Okay, I'm totally with you here. Is this ship steam powered? Do I need to go to YouTube and look up Steam Trek for inspiration?

How did the Grand Canyon move to Iowa?

Okay. I'll give this one to wild rain patterns in Iowa causing massive soil erosion. I can handle that.

OK, the bad guys are attacking populated planets that are members of a military alliance by hovering in one place over the planet and lowering a drill? And nobody does anything about this? Even when they try it in populated areas? You'd think somebody might have something around that could fly and shoot, and with their planet being threatened, might use it.

Yeah, I see this too. No planetary defenses? Not even a random Vulcan with some rocks to throw even? How about Kirk collecting together materials from a nearby planet to create gunpowder to shoot at them? But the story must go on, so I'll have to give that one to story.

If you thought close-range ship to ship marksmanship in Star Wars was bad, here it's worse. Nobody can hit consistently at point-blank range. It's 1880s gunnery technology. But they can latch onto an individual falling to the planet and beam them up.

Apparently, we need Chekov at tactical...

Kirk's attitude wouldn't survive the first year at any known military academy. No matter who his father was.

No joke again. Where was Mrs. Kirk? It's called your hand, hit your kid with it a little more, Winona Kirk. That kind of upset me like watching the recent "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and having to deal with that kid.

Having escaped from a big ship under attack using a bunch of little shuttles, the crew would be POWs or dead. The shuttles can't fight and can't run.

I'll attribute that to Nero being an idiot tactician.

Time travel. Bad time travel. The deus ex machina of bad SF.

I'll give this up just because they needed a good reason to mess up the timeline.

Okay, I'll admit it, I'm a continuity nerd. I'm hardcore and get itchy when they start throwing the baby out with the bath water. But being as much of a continuity nerd as I am, I really enjoyed this movie. I'm not like all the other Trekkies who pick their favorite series out and bash others. I'm accepting of all, including Voyager and Enterprise, even for all their faults. I own them all and watch them all. I really will enjoy watching this two more times before it hits DVD and adding it to my collection.

I do recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it and wondering. If you are on the fence, go watch it and make your own decision for yourself. The story needed some work, but I'll accept the fact it was a bit more action centered in to grab people in. Hopefully the next installment will go deeper into story.

Of course this never happens in western comics at all, it's a uniquely Japanese phenomenon not found in comics produced
by such reputable companies as Marvel, DC and the like.

I could go on... in fact, I could probably just make every letter a link and it'd still work.

Special bonus: http://forums.comicbookresources.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=31045&d=1167172520

Your typical author doesn't spent $180 million to write a blockbuster book.

I actually liked the couple of episodes I watched but what put me off was that I thought it was going to be dragged. Cancellation was reported on io9.com but it seems I may have picked a bad example, as they are planning on ending the series properly within the remaining episodes.

That said, if it came to the choice between a very short but challenging and satisfying series versus one drawn out on promises for ratings (read:Lost, Heroes) I know what I'd pick...though like a sucker I'm still watching those two sinking ships!

http://io9.com/5165227/the-version-of-watchmen-the-studio-wanted

Great jumping cats! Someone made an animated "Saturday Morning Watchmen" cartoon and it is seriously funny. It's at the end of this article, but here's a direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

steveha

Teleportation device with bug reports? Lets hope, for all that is good and well, that the bugs are just software and not, for example, flies, making it into the teleportation system.

Too much unpleasant prior art for that.

As for the device featured, I definitely want some!

Gel electrophoresis using drinking straws:
http://maradydd.livejournal.com/417631.html

DiYBio Club:
http://io9.com/5014059/a-homebrew-club-for-biogeeks

Home-brew science is becoming more possible.

io9 has been reporting on Caprica since at least January, if not earlier. The real news here is that SciFi's ordered up a full season, even though it hasn't aired the pilot yet.

This could be a rash decision on their part - the series pitch is loudly devoid of anything that's made the rebooted series interesting (namely, spaceships and explosions), instead loudly billing itself as Dynasty in spaaaaaace.

I don't know about you, but my gut reaction to this is a bored "next!"

If the story gets over its pretentious pretext and goes somewhere interesting - like, say... the first Human/Cylon war, then I'm in. Otherwise... what's to distinguish it from the umpty other dramas out there, aside from (one would hope) an sfx budget?

Me neither, but what they are saying seems rather counter-intuitive because the (at least current!) understanding is that evolution is a mechanism based around generations of organisms, so to claim they've found evolution in a single organism - a single cell even - surely must be, simply put, wrong. It might well be something really exciting, for sure, but evolution it isn't!

From the Princeton Article: What they are saying is that evolution is not entirely random, as Darwin believed.
WA WA OOOPS! Not only is Evolution not entirely random, but Darwin didn't believe it was! - and you're waving their (apparently quite impressive!) credentials at me?

You know what, if it turns out they're right I'll be as happy about the advance of knowledge as the next guy, but whatever it is they think they've discovered, the articles I've looked through certainly don't suggest it might be some extension to evolution.

I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations -- so common and multiform with organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree with those under nature -- were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation. Some authors believe it to be as much the function of the reproductive system to produce individual differences, or slight deviations of structure, as to make the child like its parents. But the fact of variations and monstrosities occurring much more frequently under domestication than under nature, and the greater variability of species having wider ranges than of those with restricted ranges, lead to the conclusion that variability is gneerally related to the conditions of life to which each species has been exposed during several successive generations.

And so on. Yet, as careful as Charles Darwin was to not overstate what he knew, and not to exaggerate his confidence in his own hypotheses, each new insight into genetics is announced in the same arrogant tone of condescension, like an underachiever turned schoolteacher, with an overactive red pen:

What they are saying is that evolution is not entirely random, as Darwin believed.

... said the flat Earth, Creationist, mouth-breather. In fact, Darwin never asserted any such thing.

Their work seems to confirm ideas held by Darwin's colleague Alfred Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of evolution. Wallace believed that life forms undergoing natural selection could adjust their evolutionary course "exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident."

"Exactly"? What part of the Princeton team's report says that this mechanism depends on rotation or angular momentum of the newly-discovered proteins?

In other words: Wallace believed that organisms had a kind of evolutionary feedback control mechanism.

Oh, "in other words," nice try! See how the paraphrase supports the Wallace-was-right-and-Darwin-was-wrong editorial bias of the author, but the direct quote does not? Disgusting.

Yes. That is my reading of TFA too. Any improvements made asa result of this homeostatic mechanism can only affect evolution if they directly and appropriately change the coding for the electron transport proteins, in mitochondrial or nuclear genes. I don't see any mention of this in the article.

Also the the io0.com and princeton.edu
articles seem to interpret Wallace's Steam Engine regulator metaphor differently The latter seems to refer more directly to what they actually found.

There seems to be confusion between phenotypic expression (what gets manifested in the organism's body) and genetic information (what's actually in the genes).

My $0.02.

I listen to TWIT (This Week In Tech) regularly, mainly for Leo Laporte and any guest who isn't Dvorak. I don't find Leo to be particularly techy, but he's quite entertaining and controls the flow of the show well.

They mention Rev3 alot and also a new site called GDGT (GaDGeT) which is supposedly good - I must admit I haven't found time to check it out yet.

Okay no excuses, subsribing to an RSS feed is dead simple, so I'm going go ahead and subscribe to GDGT and check it out. - Oh and IO9 while I'm at it.

EJACULATE EJACULATE EJACULATE
Flamin' fuckin' fishy fagot. Fisting feisty fox? Furfag!

No one is forced to use it, but things like genetic screening will be used by parents who must protect their little snowflakes at all costs. Which is sad because what may cause you to abort today might be easily treatable tomorrow. Just check out the strides we're making with autism.

If you want something that will actually get them thinking about science, but fluffy enough for pre-teens, I'd recommend A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Does a great job of introducing the concepts of multidimensional space to kids.

Heh... if you want something that is "sexy" in the same vein, The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker sure blew my mind when I was a kid. Having seen the latest Futurama movie, I'm betting Matt Groening was a fan as well...

What could possibly be lost?

All of us! You fool.

Comix:
Ctrl-Alt-Del http://www.cad-comic.com/
Diesel Sweeties http://dieselsweeties.com/
Questionable Content http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/
xkcd http://xkcd.com/

Blogs:
Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/
Thighs Wide Shut http://thighswideshut.org/
Kids with Guns http://patrickben.livejournal.com/

Geeky Blogs/Mags:
Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/
Cool Hunting
365 Tomorrows
Grinding.be http://grinding.be/
io9 http://io9.com/
Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/
Slashdot
Wired http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
AppleInsider http://www.appleinsider.com/
Macenstein http://macenstein.com/default
The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/
Macworld http://www.macworld.com/

Dirty Stuff:
Fleshbot http://fleshbot.com/tag/straight
FlickrBabes http://flickrbabes.com/
UseMyComputer http://usemycomputer.com/
Homocidal Insomniac http://homicidalinsomniac.blogspot.com/

News:
Salon http://www.salon.com/

The director has already said that it's a three-hour movie, although he's in a fight with the studio to keep it that long.

As for the story of the Black Freighter, it will be released in its entirety as a separate DVD-only animated film, released along with the Watchmen's theatrical release. More on that here.

I think they are taking extreme steps to make this movie faithful to the comic, and I'm heartened that it will be entertaining and true to the original. But we'll see....

Anyone mentioned this sci-fi blog yet? http://io9.com/361597/the-twenty-science-fiction-novels-that-will-change-your-life

not according to Scientology:
http://io9.com/assets/resources/2008/03/scientime-long.png

If this somehow gets tied in with a Google Brain Implant, and someone decided to scam/hack players..... total Epicness would ensue!

Imagine that some player developed a scam similar to the Steam scam (The "Send me your user/pass and I'll unlock all the games for you" scam) and mentally posted a link online. All you would have to do is mentally post a message online and wait for some poor sap to Google/stumble across it. I'm sure that someone ::cough-noob-cough:: would be stupid enough to fall for it. Instead of scamming an account, you are effectively scamming their brain. Imagine the possibilities! :)
Now if only someone would get brain implant technology to that point....

"D00d, I juzt pwned yur brainz. LOL kthnxbai."

Sorry if my thoughts are incoherent - I'm hungry. :(