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Sometimes, your side is the one that's wrong or lying...

in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis that our global climate system may be in some sort of collapse or runaway condition. Its JUST NOT THAT SIMPLE. The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may be more illusory than previously supposed

mod me down for growsing but when I submitted an earlier Yahoo/AP story and the more informative article in Tech Review to /. it wasn't my turn I guess.
And yes, the "subject" is my answer to all this e-voting crap.

Swimming Sentinels - February 29, 2004
David Talbot
Fish enlisted in protecting water supplies from toxins

I have a good friend doing graduate work in machine learning, she recently presented at that robot conference in Japan, I believe about task recognition. I myself am a lowly undergraduate in Informatics, and am thus perhaps a bit more concerned with the practical than some in the Semantic Web community ;) .

The dairy part would be taken care of because the milk (and its size, and such) would be discussed using common low level vocabularies (which reminds me, someone needs to come up with a units vocabulary for discussing units of measurement. note to self: do so, and gain fame and fortune ;) ), but I wholeheartedly agree that matching semantic web information to loose queries and judging trustworthiness are prime areas where machine learning techniques will come to the fore.

Also, it is important to understand that the direction of the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and others closely involved in its creation does point towards a lot of knowledge synthesis and extension through inference, it still leaves doors open for machine learning-style inference (TBL somewhat seems to shy away from this, but I think in part its his background in classical logic that creates that impression. He does make it very clear the methods used to do things like infer trust are not set or even partially determined, but that he's just speculating on possible ways).

Many of the possibly application of the Semantic Web that he points to are very possible (and closer to what I characterize the Semantic Web as than many university researchers ;) ), here's a good article (the seminar example is what I'm specifically referring to): linky

You know, if you wanted to cache in on the big research bucks, you could always come up with a way to combine machine learning and Semantic Web technologies (*hint hint* ;) ).

Covered not long ago - an interview with Berners-Lee regarding the Semantic Web.

So you're saying we're no longer using ants.

Actually, I believe when MS flew Miguel in for his job interview, he used the opportunity to tell them how flawed their business model was and why open-source is a superior approach. You can read it here . (registration required though) So no, from that article, my feeling is that Icaza does not have a "hardon" for microsoft but actually hates their business model and all that they represent.

Carver Mead would say Moore's Law is at an end.

It has been said before:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

I would not be surprised in the least if that article was literally a Microsoft-sponsored advertisement.

It has been said before:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

I would not be surprised in the least if that article was literally a Microsoft-sponsored advertisement.

I don't understand the Open Source Sizzles graph. It looks to me like market penentration, if I can call it that, goes from 2.8% in 2002 to 3% in 2003, after nearly doubling in the prior year. Doesn't that mean that market penetration is levelling off? I would think the extrapolation would put it at something like 3.5% in 2006, not 6%.

Got Those DVD Blues

Let's put the puzzle together. We have:
an autostereo display
a potential 3D input device
and now some desktops (Metisse and Looking Glass) that would actually benefit from this technology.

It seems like everybody is saying (moreso in the last story than this one) that this 3d desktop "would be cool if it had better i/o" and everyone is saying autostereo displays and gesture input devices "would be cool if there were something to use them on." The future is now, my friend! Soon we'll all walk in to CompUSA and pick up a 3D interface kit for $200, then hook them up to our already bug-free and feature-rich window managers compliments of Metisse developers. Well, maybe not soon. We can dream, though.

It's not that hard, people!

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040308/040308-10.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_04120 4.asp

And just for karma's sake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

I think they'd be more likely to release the search algorithms. Almost nobody can handle giant clusters like they can...Akamai is one of the few exceptions...and that power base is a huge advantage for them. Here is a great article about all this...soul-sucking free registration required unless you use BugMeNot.

Check out some of these sites:

Nano Dot Article
Tech Review
A neat simulation
WordIQ

These all do a good deal to help explain / show you some interesting things. Give them a look-see.

According to this article (free registration required), Microsoft Research in China is working on realistic voice synthesis, with the explicit goal of creating a completely virtual actor. Soon we can outsource Hollywood as well...

tradesports.com has a futures market on the relative price of the IPO. There is another futures market for the time of the IPO

There is an article in the alumni section of Technology Review that describes a bit of thinking behind the design for that building. Having walked through parts of it myself, I can say it's not as bad as it looks. Really.

There's an interesting article comparing Google and Akamai which talks about that as well, since they have technical similarities, but are strategically very different -- Akamai does massive web hosting, while Google does massive web applications.

These two articles seem really similar. The article at Technology Review has a bit more detail, and also covers Akamai well. Interesting as heck. But is the first page copied a bit, or plagiarized?

I'm going to go Google for some of those same sentences. ;-)

Akamai?

"When I visited the company in January, the screen said that Akamai was serving 591,763 hits per second, with 14,372 CPUs online, 14,563 gigahertz of total processing power, and 650 terabytes of total storage. On April 14 [2004], the number had jumped to a peak rate of 900,000 hits per second and 43.71 billion requests delivered in a 24-hour period."

From this article.

Recycling without attribution is the first casualty of bad journalism.

I thought I had read this article before, and then I realised, I had read it before...
(although I now realise that you are not supposed to read the linked articles before posting comments - sorry)

The short answer is "yes"

The long answer is "yes, but it's proving to be very difficult."

It used to be that the primary cause of (commercial) jet noise was the engines. Manufacturers have managed to reduce the acoustic output from the engines (somewhat :) through engineering and operation changes (see here for example).

Other challenges include aerodynamic noise and structure-borne noise. Aerodynamic noise reduction can hopefully be achieved through shape changes. Structure-borne noise is a little difficult because it's difficult to mitigate without adding weight to the plane.

My personal feeling is that structure-borne noise reduction can be accomplished using active-vibration reduction, but then again, I'm more of a surface-transportation noise-guy than an aero/astro noise guy.

"the article links to another, which says the satellites can only detect temperature on land, but not over snow covered land."

Guess what? Alaska is melting. Its permafrost is not so permanent lately, and that's wreaking havoc with (among other things) the roads and buildings there. This is serious economic impact due to global warming. The longer we wait to do something, the worse the economic impact will be in ten or twenty years.

I'd rather spend $3 billion now, probably creating a lot of jobs in new energy industries and saving billions in energy costs over the next decades, than lose trillions in 20 years when our coasts flood. I plan to live for at least 50 more years and would love to see public policy focus on a future past November. But then, I'm not an apocalyptic evangelical like G.W. "History? We'll all be dead" Bush.

From the last time I posted:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

Besides that, Technology Review is twice removed from MIT. They are run by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is loosely associated with MIT.

I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.

From the last time I posted:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

Besides that, Technology Review is twice removed from MIT. They are run by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is loosely associated with MIT.

I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.

Or, you could actually read the article, wherein lies this quote:

Akamai's cofounder and chief technology officer Danny Lewin was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11 and was killed when the plane was flown into the World Trade Center.

Like many people, Garkfinkel is proposing a legislative solution to something that'd be better handled technically.

(Legislative solutions are suboptimal/dangerous for many reasons. They are over-broad, in that they apply even to consenting adults who wish to engage in the behavior without meddlesome government oversight; cf prostitution. And they're too-narrow, in that they can by necessity only apply within the country's legal jurisdiction, whereas software distribution is an international operation)

Turn now to the second page the Pure Software proposal. The list of potential warning-labels it suggests is: Hook, Dial, Modify, Monitor, Popup, Remote Control, Self-Updates, and Stuck.

All of those things are basically technical features which a well-designed operating system could prohibit programs from using, without permission. The root of the problem is that even after 30+ years of software publication, most programs are still just completely arbitrary lists of instructions: once they're executing, they do whatever they do, and nothing can stop them.

The big exception there is that most OSes, at least, restrict programs on a per-user basis. A program cannot read or edit files to which the executing user has no permission. That's an important step, but one that Unix has had firmly in place since the 80s. As time passes, we need to go further: program priviledges should be restricted not just at the per-user level, but also at finer granularity.

When I download and install a program, I don't want just the option of "run it or don't". I should be able to run it, but without it being able to read any files except those it came with. Or being allowed to read files, but only if I pick them from a system-supplied dialog box. Or read any files, but not write to them, except in a directory I've chosen (and that it can't override). Or write files, but only in specific approved formats (such as those which can't possibly contain executable code). Similar kinds of restrictions suggest themselves for GUI and network areas (including the important points of "phone home" and "data tainting")

To a small extent, Java frameworks (like "Web Start") have attempted to do this, with a list of features the user can individually permit a program to execute. Microsoft .Net also makes overtures in this direction. It will be a challenge for OS vendors to allow users to have this amount of control, without overwhelming them with so many choices they'll give up and just give full permissions to everythig (in the pattern of "I always run as administrator, because it's the only way to get stuff done"). But those challenges can be surmounted with skilled interface design.

The best way to prevent software from doing something is to use software that prevents it from doing it. (As Lawrence Lessig said, the best and most effective laws for code are more code)

Sounds very much like the Medical Mood Ring.

NYTimes article TechnologyReview article

The cover story of the March issue of Technology Review is "Search Beyond Google" (click CURRENT ISSUE, privacy invasion required). Like the Salon article, they mention Dipsie, but they also cover a search engine (Mooter) that uses a MindMap style interface.

Not! This isn't about manned spaceflight, more about national prestige, anyway, if you really want to feel sad today, read this.

Just last night I was reading this article in Technology Review. It talks about the up-and-coming competitors to Google. A little light on the technical details, but a good read none-the-less.

Technology Review has a discussion of the coming rivals to Googol in this month's issue. One of them is an Australian outfit called Mooter which does some nifty clustering of results (somewhat familiar to those who remember Northern Light, once a web search engine, now a provider of enterprise search engines). They discuss several others, including efforts by Microsoft, but the general point is that Googol (and Yahoo and Alta Vista etc. before it) have shown the search business to be a very profitable area if you are the leader, so there are a lot of eager pretenders to the throne. Competition is good, web users will end up with better searching, whether from Googol or another provider.

This was suggested in an old issue of Technology Review

That's the beauty of the plan...

To make the transition now from gasoline to hydrogen not only improves emissions from vehicles, but creates a powerful demand for more hydrogen. The process that extracts hydrogen from refined oils doesn't have to release the pollutants into the atmosphere, I'm sure that it could be used elsewhere.

Besides, once the infrastructure is built, there are several alternatives to getting oil from the ground.

There is another interesting article about this on Technology Review written by Simon Garfinkel which covers possible security risks of early IPv6 software routing as opposed to hardware routing as the technology becomes widely used. In addition to that, he predicts that p2p will actually increse due to the fact that NAT troubles disappear.

German version
English version (free registration, blabla)

Also, for some more recent studies ...

check out this

And if you'd like to see Six Degress of Kevin Bacon in action ... see the
oracle of bacon

Seems to me that they are saying much the same thing. Walker:

There are powerful forces, including government, large media organisations, and music publishers who think this situation is just fine. In essence, every time a user--they love the word "consumer"--goes behind a NAT box, a site which was formerly a peer to their own sites goes dark, no longer accessible to others on the Internet, while their privileged sites remain. The lights are going out all over the Internet.

For all of its apparent utility, NAT is really the devil. It's a Faustian bargain (...) Getting everybody's home machine out from being a NAT box should make possible a lot of interesting applications that are either very difficult or downright impossible today. And in all likelihood, some of those applications will not be popular with the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

Besides that, Technology Review is twice removed from MIT. They are run by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is loosely associated with MIT.

I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

Besides that, Technology Review is twice removed from MIT. They are run by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is loosely associated with MIT.

I would really like to know why Slashdot keeps posting fantastical stories from that ratings-driven rag.

Please cite your references or evidence to this statement if you wish to be taken seriously.

Several companies are currently working on complex and high-performance designs using asynchronous techniques. It's true that it is currently more difficult, predominantly because current design tools are all geared towards generating and testing "standard" clocked logic, but it is being done and it does not by any stretch "blow".

It will be quite some time before all of the components on a motherboard are asynchronous, but groups -have- designed processors, memory controllers, and other components in asynchronous.

For but the briefest of examples... check out this article or this article. No, it isn't the answer to everything... but it's much farther along than you seem to realize

Ok, I started on this page, which was linked in the story. I found this link, which is presented as a link to registration in the section labeled "How can I get x$ to start playing?". Interestingly, this link is to an outside domain, nf4.newsfutures.com. More interestingly, nf4.newsfutures.com presents a self-issued SSL certificate with a common name of www.snakeoil.dom and issuing CA of Snake Oil CA.

Ok, so I start to think this is all an elaborate hoax. However, when I click through the link at the top of the left-side navigation bar labeled Trading Account(s), I get sent to a Technology Review registration page, after which I am asked for a trading name in order to setup a trading account. It appears that it is not a hox after all.

So WTF is this link to nf4.newsfutures.com? It's obviously not a placeholder, as it points to an existing domain with a joke certificate. I don't get it.

Ok, I started on this page, which was linked in the story. I found this link, which is presented as a link to registration in the section labeled "How can I get x$ to start playing?". Interestingly, this link is to an outside domain, nf4.newsfutures.com. More interestingly, nf4.newsfutures.com presents a self-issued SSL certificate with a common name of www.snakeoil.dom and issuing CA of Snake Oil CA.

Ok, so I start to think this is all an elaborate hoax. However, when I click through the link at the top of the left-side navigation bar labeled Trading Account(s), I get sent to a Technology Review registration page, after which I am asked for a trading name in order to setup a trading account. It appears that it is not a hox after all.

So WTF is this link to nf4.newsfutures.com? It's obviously not a placeholder, as it points to an existing domain with a joke certificate. I don't get it.

Drug detection will be just first (commercial?) use of Terahertz rays..
Actually T-Rays are so useful your mind would explode if you even... err.. ok here it goes..
Different kinds of molecules absorb T-Rays of different frequencies.. you could tweak t-rays to actually pass right through metal or whatever you wished. First use of T-Rays was planned to replace X-Rays (which aren't really healthy). They were also meant to be used by airplanes. With T-Rays you could see through fog, clouds,.. anything.. even clothes.
However, there's big problem with creating a camera that detects T-Rays..

This is a true revolution..

link 1
link 2
link 3

According to MIT Technology Review (wonderful mag!), there are exciting developments on the horizon:

"Today's coal-burning power plants are among the dirtiest sources of fossil fuel power. Gasification power plants--huge pressure cookers that convert coal into a stew of superheated gases that power a turbine--release fewer pollutants than conventional coal plants but still emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. Research on cheap carbon dioxide removal, though, is gathering steam--and could make coal gasification a nearly zero-emission fossil fuel power source."

Researchers at the University of Texas have created a process where they can create nanotubes at 70cm per minute. Once a bunch of good production engineers get their hands on it, I could see them uping that figure to 10 or more meters per minute. Plus, once researchers figure out how to "knit" nanofibers together, then the benefits of parallel production come into the fold.

Here's a link to that story: link