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If you're getting involved in any patent litigation, chances are that you already have a lot of money (or are making a huge mistake). It's not called the "Sport of Kings" for nothing, you know.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/04/wo_ kline042804.asp?p=1

12V is no longer standard for cars

Nominations are now open for the TR35, Technology Review's selection of 35 top young innovators whose contributions to emerging technologies will shape the world. Nominees can work in any area of technology, including computing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, energy, medicine, telecommunications, and transportation. Nominees must be under 35 as of October 1, 2005. Technology Review will showcase all 35 in a special October 2005 issue and recognize them at a gala awards ceremony at the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT on September 28-29.

Read without 10 adtastic pages of distraction.

Ooh I feel dirty and dumb now

.

Ooh I feel dirty

In 2004, MIT's Technology Review picked meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman as innovator of the year (article text conspicuously absent - some detail here. At the time I couldn't believe he was picked over the accomplishments of so many others. Sure he was able to get 1.4 million users, but that was because the service was free! Sad to see it happen to them; I have always, and always will, question the process by which TR came to their decisions (something to do with the 2004 election hype I'm sure).

In 2004, MIT's Technology Review picked meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman as innovator of the year (article text conspicuously absent - some detail here. At the time I couldn't believe he was picked over the accomplishments of so many others. Sure he was able to get 1.4 million users, but that was because the service was free! Sad to see it happen to them; I have always, and always will, question the process by which TR came to their decisions (something to do with the 2004 election hype I'm sure).

In 2004, MIT's Technology Review picked meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman as innovator of the year (article text conspicuously absent - some detail here. At the time I couldn't believe he was picked over the accomplishments of so many others. Sure he was able to get 1.4 million users, but that was because the service was free! Sad to see it happen to them; I have always, and always will, question the process by which TR came to their decisions (something to do with the 2004 election hype I'm sure).

Why don't they give in and just switch to blipverts already?

Check out the sidebar to that article, printed back in February. You know you're doing a bad job if your ex-employees open champagne upon hearing of your leaving. Wow.

I don't think it works that way.

"Two entangled qubits, meanwhile, can simultaneously evaluate four inputs. Put another way, a traditional memory register with eight bits can store only one of a possible 28, or 256, digital "words," but a quantum register with eight qubits can represent and compute with all 256 words at once."

link

If you could have 32 entangled qubits, you could simultaneously evaluate 2^32 inputs, which is more than 4 billion possibilities.

ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.

As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now).

What bothers a lot of people is the linking of this warming cycle to the efforts of man. It hardly seems logically to convict the human race of a warming trend that began thousands of years ago.

Question: Why haven't the inherent safeguards of the scientific method prevented the nearly wholesale adoption of such a ludicrous thesis as the theory that man ended the last ice age?

Answer: Peer review is not working.

Over the past 40 years the colleges and universities have been overrun by people who teach well to the left of common sense, vote well to the left of john kennedy and are never burdened with the consequences of their agenda.

From alar in apples and wolves in yellowstone the establishment scientific community ruin the lives of ordinary people and then runs quickly to the next vogue crisis without so much as saying a single sorry to their victims.

Are the scientists who 'get it wrong ever' held responsible by their peers? Never.

So here we are with the present intellectual fiasco: Man is the inexorable reason we are experiencing global warming. Anyone who offers a differing opinion is either a fool or in the pay of Exxon.

This walks hand in hand with the larger progressive scientific rule: Any thesis that imagines a cause for any problem observed on planet earth that doesn't originate with man is quickly attacked as the ranting of horrible neocons.

The real question is how much of the present 'science' is contaminated by popular political 'progressive' fashion.

At the very least let us recognize there is the need to offer culturally acceptable (vogue) thesis to make sure one receives plenty of grant money.

The skepticism demonstrated by the 'earth first' crowd in respect to scientific research funded by industry is intense. This skepticism would be best spent turned towards itself.

Indeed,

The problem with nuclear power isn't the threat of meltdowns. It's the waste that's produced. No, Yucca Mountain won't solve the problem permanently. If you think that you're just ignorant.

First of all we're not sure how safe it is. There's a moderate seismic activity in the area. There's also more water seepage than previously thought. Have some goddamn responsibility and think of this in the long-term; the casks have to maintain integrity for 10,000 years.

MIT's Technology Review had a good article about this recently. The article's main point is that we DON'T need to think about storage in the long-term -- at least, not in terms of 10,000 years. Why should we? 100 years from now, heck, 50 years from now, we'll undoubtedly have far better technology for storing nuclear waste than we do currently. Why not design storage to work extremely well for, say, 100 years, and then revisit the problem in 50 years? Our ability to design a storage system that will work almost perfectly for 100 years is certainly vastly better than our ability to design such a system that will last for 10,000 years. Plus, in 100 years the nuclear waste will be cooler and easier to handle and store, AND we might have better technology to reuse or reprocess the waste, both of which would address your fears about running out of waste storage space.

Our focus on such long-lasting solutions is really preventing us from moving forward on nuclear power in the nearest-term and wasting time and money in the process.

And nuclear is the answer

Certainly not until waste disposal and security issues are dealt with. The Yucca Mountain plan is a technological and political failure, and the more fissionables are around the more likely they are to fall into the wrong hands.

And we can't sensibly say to the developing world, "We're building fission plants, but if you start building any you'll get bombed."

Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar, and the mechanisms for extracted energy from them, are NOT ENOUGH to sustain any semblance of the current lifestyles, right or wrong, without drastic and dramatic changes that would have far-reaching economic and social implications.

Sticking fission reactors everywhere also would have far-reaching economic and social implications. And military and environmental ones too.

Resources would be better spent on efficiency, and fusion and renewables research, than on building fission power plants.

It's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people are so caught up in the Gernsbackian romanace of "man has harnessed the power of the atom!". (And yes, it's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people have an irrational fear of anything involving the world "nuclear".)

Focusing on current technologies, it would appear on the surface that 1TB is going to take seem unnecessary to the average user. Even with HD content it still seems a bit excessive for those outside of the "power user" group.

But what about technologies that are still in the labratory development phase? Such as 3D Holographic Video? (You know, Obi-Wan style) Surely they are going to need storage in sevral orders of magnitude over what we've got now?

I'm sure they're are many other projects in the pipeline, in labratories across the world, that are going to lap up that 1TB like a hungry puppy, and your average user is going to inherit those storage needs...

Photoshop Sleuths

Source: Popescu, A. C. and H. Farid. 2005. Exposing digital forgeries by detecting traces of re-sampling. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (in press).

Don't push your luck. Look at today's article in Technology Review: "The Ascent of the Robotic Attack Jet" O.o

Schrage quotes a couple of security experts as being of the opinion that passwords are useless, with many negatives [the tougher rules only make them harder for users to remember, not harder for hackers to guess] But the suggestion that system security admins and developers need to make deeper security mechanisms such as "suspision engines" that compare traffic on your account against profile of "normal" usage strike me as both an invasion of privacy and a sure fire way to multiply calls to the help desks when a false alarm tosses out a legitimate user.
The timing of the art. is unfortunate as noone is going to be reading comments this late in the posting cycle.

All models that are capable of reproducing the last 1000 years or so of climate fail to reproduce the recent global temperature increase (the 'hockey stick') unless they include the effects of human CO2 emissions.

It has been shown that all it takes to produce a graph similar to the famous hockey-stick graph is random data because the mathematics used in that analysis are flawed. I believe this was even mentioned on /. earlier, but here is the article.

That the recent uptick is due to human CO2 is no longer an area of dispute (amongst those researchers with some grasp on reality, who actually know something about the subject, and are capable getting published in respectable peer-reviewed juornals, anyway. Supermarket tabloids and AM radio shows may not agree...)

This also is simple bullshit. The so-called consensus is a political invention. There is a great deal of debate over whether or not global warming is caused by human activity. Unless of course you want to tell me that the staff of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is not qualified on the subject. Here's a summary report that contradicts your assertions pretty nicely. Some quotes:

There has been no certain demonstration of global warming due to accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Rather, the entire subject is on the political agenda because scientists have forecast that there will be warming if gases produced by human activities are allowed to continue to accumulate...

...the evidence is not clear-cut. There are large uncertainties in the interpretation of the evidence, first of all about the basic conclusion of a demonstrable anthropogenic "fingerprint"...

Thus, both the evidence of change and the risks involved are characterized by high levels of uncertainty...

Note that this is not a paper simply bashing the claims about human activity causing global warming. It is an excellent paper discussing the theories, the uncertainties, the political process in the U.S., and the international process. I simply lifted the above quotes out of context to highlight the uncertainty. Yes, the paper is a bit old--but since then there have continued to be highly-distinguished scientists pointing out that science has in fact not established that human activity is causing global warming. It is a leading theory, but there are alternative theories that are also very viable.

Let me just get in one last dig at the hysterical greens on this. Here's an article about an incident where an MIT professor of meteorology and atmospheric sciences disputed the conventional opinions we all read in the papers. Now check out this hilarious quote:

Oliver Bernstein '03, student chair of the Environmental Conservation Organization, was not convinced: "It was upsetting to see someone who is that qualified using pretty advanced science to try to disprove global warming..."

Think about that for a minute. It is "upsetting" to hear a highly-qualified scientist use "advanced science" when discussing our knowledge of global warming??? Are you familiar with the meaning of the word "dogma"??? Think about it!

• MIT Technology Review Not Up To Reviewing Healthy Life Extension Technology
• Aubrey de Grey responds
• Technology Review editor responds
• The TR forum for this article - lots of good comments

Cancer is directly dealt with on at least two points in his theory. Page three of the article briefly mentions them.

They're either running out of news, or some editor over there is getting a bit old and wants this research pushed...
From April 2004, a QA session with "Methuselah Man" Aubrey de Grey.

Doesn't correlate with here or here

today an article appeared on Technology Review about the LokiTorrent site fighting back in court after the MPAA sued the owner. $40K in donations from its users (for legal fees) so far.

Since the html-ized article is spread across 9 whole page ad-filled pages, maybe you should read the printer friendly page instead.

The article is the thing that's linked to. A link to the name should be to a bio, not the article.

I haven't seen anybody arguing that global changes in climate aren't occuring. The arguments come about the actual cause of it, which have been found to correlate with several external factors, like the solar cycle.

Study by Swiss and German scientists shows Earth is getting warmer because Sun is burning brighter
"Global Warming Bomshell"
Global warming or lack thereof
The Real Cost of Global Warming

It's definitely not proven that we're causing anything. Many scientists argue that it's a natural cycle. I've never understood why so many people, including Slashdotters, are so quick to accept absolutely everything that comes out of environmentalists' mouths. But then they start bashing George W. Bush, and then I see why--the issue is now a political issue, not a rational one based on actual facts.

I read the diamond dust article at NanoInvestor News, and frankly it still seems mid to long term.

If you want a WORKING flat display, check this out this experimental flat display (picture) using carbon nanotubes as the electron emission source. I just glimpsed over it, but I think this was done by Motorola. At least, the dates fit (2003).

Recently, Samsung's Korean research achieved the same goal, and apparently they're ready for mass production. I told this in an earlier post elsewhere. They plan to distribute their nanodisplays around 2006.
Here's a PDF about Samsung's nanotech displays.

(Unfortunately for me, on the very same day, some guy posted a story about a _DIFFERENT_ kind of "ultra-flat" displays, also by Samsung, that would be available in 2005. I guess the mods confused the articles - bad luck, heh).

Anyway, the diamond dust tech seems too young for now. Samsung's nanotube displays already exist (at least experimentally).

I know you are telling a joke, but I'm not sure whether it is more humorous or innacurate.

I suggest reading a nice summary over at MIT Technology Review.

But since you obviously don't read the articles, let me cover it for you:
- Zigbee is power efficient. A ZigBee switch should be able to run off watch batteries for years. Bluetooth - HA!
- Zigbee stack is a small 28k. Bluetooth's stack is 250k.
- Zigbee networks can support up to 255 nodes, and can be switched to 16 bit addressing to support 65,000 nodes. Bluetooth can have 8 active nodes, 255 total.
- Zigbee range is around 30 meters. Bluetooth is 10 meters.
- Zigbee supports three network topologies (star, mesh, cluster tree). Bluetooth supports a dynamic piconet topology.
- Zigbee enabled devices can be built cheaply. Bluetooth was *supposed* to be cheap. This is due to the short stack.

And the list goes on. See the ZigBee FAQ.

Zigbee is designed for a very specific application (switching, censors, controllers, etc.). And by this list, you can see that it was specifically designed to meet the needs of that application. Bluetooth does not and cannot support that application, just like Zigbee cannot support the application Bluetooth was designed for (cable replacement).

Think about 10,000% faster, or even more.

Strained silicon is just one of the last tweaks of the silicon era. The future is either carbon, or optics.

I'm not saying that 24% isn't good (it is). But rather that it's just a short-term achievement.

Well, accoring to Jamie Kellner (CEO of Turner Broadcasting : "Anytime you skip a commercial ... you're actually stealing the programming.".

Not counting such propositions ...
it'll be there before you'll be moderated as funny.

One thing that is pretty clear in recent years is academia has become a vast echo chamber where only people who agree with each other are allowed in the club. Anyone who disagrees is simply labeled a crackpot and dismissed. You don't hear about contrary ideas because even if the science is good, papers that disagree with THE CONSENSUS simply aren't published. The fact that they could or did pass peer review is irrelevant.

I believe the reason people are closing ranks on global warming is they perceive the need to do something now, without waiting for a firmer foundation in the science. I think that's a mistake, though. They lose credability for everything if they turn out to be wrong on anything when they have so few facts to work with. Also, they could very well be wrong. How many times has the consensus on infinitely expanding vs. collapsing universe flip-flopped in Cosmology?

I'm disinclined to support major government-mandated structural changes in society without some kind of proof. The science on this is considerably muddier than the article implies, and until the theory is better supported I don't think it's prudent to make the kind of changes the activist community is seeking.

Well, there's at least this one. It was rejected because it wasn't important enough... Right...

The data showing the hockeystick temperature rise, on which all of this global warming hysteria is based, has been shown to be wrong.
The consensus is therefore based on flawed data.

The original writers have also admitted to flaws in the data.

Good article on this
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_ muller101504.asp?p=1

The reason is that not everybody agrees. For instance, the ozone hole that has been growing and shrinking every few decades. As kids, we were all told the hole's expansion was caused by greenhouse gases. But it actually grows and shrinks, and the cycles correspond with solar cycles of the sun. That's just one of many reasons there is disagreement; here are some others:
Study by Swiss and German scientists shows Earth is getting warmer because Sun is burning brighter
"Global Warming Bomshell"
Global warming or lack thereof
The Real Cost of Global Warming

Not saying I agree with everything stated in those articles; I'm merely pointing out that there is another side to the issue. I'm sure there is an effect that our manmade chemicals are having, but the fact that there is a despute over the extent of its effect (despite what Michael seems to think with his "heads-in-the-sand dept." quip...) or its permanance means there are plenty of scientists who disagree that humans are the cause any more than natural climate cycles of the Earth are. Studies show the ozone is a lot more self-maintaining than you and I were raised to believe, and that most of the chemicals we hear about that are so damaging never even reach the altitudes necessary to do damage to the ozone.

To sum it up--there is disagreement because there is little proven evidence either way (think of it as similar to brain tumors and cell phones), and the studies that are out end up being contradicted by another. Simply looking at percentages of scientific papers published in the last decade doesn't necessarily prove much more than a general published consensus in the last decade in those specific science magazines.

Didn't we already dismiss these models recently?

2004.11.01: Robot ears for urban violence
Technology Review's Prototype column reports an improved acoustic recognizer intended to function as ears for the police in bad neighborhoods. "Software developed by Ted Berger, director of the University of Southern California Center for Neural Engineering, can be trained to recognize and distinguish sounds that are indicators of a security breach or a safety hazard, such as a gunshot..." Though Berger's innovations lower the rate of "false positives", other countries have already developed and deployed such systems for defense purposes. The grunts in Iraq could sure use one of these. If you invert the math for the acoustic beam-forming, you get a nifty intelligent buildings kind of application.

releasing carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to climate change

Trading one serious problem for another is not smart behavior.

This is about labelling printouts, so that an individual document can be traced back to a printer, if necessary. There's a big difference between that and "tracking everything you print," which would imply spying on your printing activities.

In the old days police could often trace documents to individual typewriters because of small defects like nicked or misaligned characters. I have read that a similar technique even worked with some dot matrix printers. What modern printer manufacturers have done is to artificially create this same level of individuality. Nobody is "tracking everything you print." So how about we put away the foil hats and get upset about the truly bad stuff.

These "ultra-thin" CRT's are not THAT ultra. And they're not the bleeding edge technology that Samsung has been working on.

According to Technology Review (pdf; Google HTML Version here), Samsung plans to start distributing nanotech (yes, you heard it right, nanotech) based displays by the end of 2006.

Replacing the bulky CRT with an array of millions of carbon nanotubes, these displays will require much less energy to work, and will be as thin as LCD-based displays - and hopefully will be much more eye-friendly than their CRT counterparts.

Now *THAT* is Samsung's secret weapon. Don't be impressed by a substancial, but still incremental improvement such as adjusting a CRT to be thinner.

My opinion is that this advancement in thin CRT's is just a preparation for what's coming.

I think http://www.technologyreview.com/ will work a little better...

The envisioned weapon. also uses chemical lasers, so you have a very limited number of shots. I'm guessing here, but I'll bet that it would be cheaper to put everyone into a M1 Abrams, which are effectivly invulnerable to RPG, than to build this sort of laser weapon.

There is no way that a system designed to shoot SAM missles (that have flights of kilometers in open air) are going to shoot down an RPG with a range of a few hundred yards.

This is no more effective at winning the war on terrorism than dreaming about 'real' Starship Troopers. Both are just fantasy, but at least Starship Trooper has Denise Richards as an added bonus.

At technology review they have an article about a similar device.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/12/dem o1204.asp?p=1

BTW, it's the MiG-25 FOXBAT that can reach those altitudes, not the MiG-29 and,

*scratches head* Now how the heck did that happen? I was looking at the Mig-25 specs, intending to type "Mig-25", and somehow typed "Mig-29". Hmm... Freudian slip? Anyway, thanks for the correction. :-)

I Know! We could use "Nucular" Zepplins! They could stay aloft for as long as a submarine can stay under water. They could launch cruise missles and control battlefield information.

Well, if the power is necessary, that's a viable option. But then you'd need a Zepplin with lifting power somewhere near that of the CargoLifter.

We could put squads of HILO jumper Marines on them to hit trouble spots and drop pallets of food on indigenous people to win hearts and minds. We only crushed a few when we did that..

Am I getting the impression that you're making fun of me? No matter. A dirigible offers distinct advantages over planes. It can stay up longer (nothing forces it to come down), fly out of enemy attack range, provide advanced communications relays (cell phones? :-)), and hover over a battlefield area.

So, fighting insurgency starts at home and it is just an insurgency. No need to spend any more money there than we do on the LAPD.

Insurgency is a whole different issue. I'm more concerned about the issues they had during the war itself.

Since the author didn't link to the actual registration required article , here's the text:

Auto Animator

Prototype
November 2004

Animating a person's movements for a movie or video game can be costly and time consuming, requiring that actors be filmed with special cameras for every step and shrug. A new tool created by Zoran Popovic at the University of Washington and Aaron Hertzmann at the University of Toronto, however, can extrapolate a person's movements from a single sequence of motions. First, the sequence is used to train the system. Then the animator picks a new movement for the digital character by, say, changing the position of its hands and feet. The system then calculates the most probable corresponding positions of the rest of the body. Popovic says that a clip of only 20 or 30 frames is enough information to give the system a good sense of how a person tends to move. Popovic imagines that the technology would be particularly useful for animators who make sports video games based on actual players. In fact, the technology is currently licensed to Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts, a maker of video games.

(There are three stick figure images of a simple comuter model of a pitcher pitching with the path of the ball shown as a line.)

...from the last page.

"And so at a critical juncture in space (a key Euphrates bridge) and time (the morning of the day U.S. forces captured the Baghdad airport), Marcone only learned what he was facing when the shooting began. In the early-morning hours of April 3, it was old-fashioned training, better firepower, superior equipment, air support, and enemy incompetence that led to a lopsided victory for the U.S. troops. "When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in human life the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I will never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down the road that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk without stepping on a body part."

Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the bridge fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi shells, Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly: "If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armor, but armor itself."

• a fuel spill will dissapate very rapidly
• the byproduct, in answer to the questions posted re pollution is just water.

1000000*60*2*pi*0.6/(12*5280) = 3570 mile/hour

Can we please stop posting directly to stories on this guy's weblog? It's embarassing for Slashdot. The real news link you're looking for is:

here

write code with subtle errors in it, you might want to study the methodology used in Prof. Mann's paper proving global warming The paper has been gospel for about a decade...but its bad code and it took a couple of Canadians to notice it. Once you master that example, you are sure to wind the prize for bad voting software.