Slashdot Mirror

Coming soon to a camera near you.

FWIW, there's an exhibition in Mayfair, London at the moment of manga-like photography/art. It runs until the 5th March, so you'd need to be quick to see it... (website).

The BBC have some pictures, so do Wired.

I went last week. It wasn't really worth it -- the best pictures were the ones on various news sites, and I didn't feel I gained anything by seeing them in a gallery. I enjoyed wandering round Mayfair looking at the pretty buildings more. After 10 minutes I went and found a museum -- there are lots of good free (and pay-for) museums and galleries within walking distance.

This has been written up in the Toronto Star, Wired UK, The Australian and a few others.

Interesting, and saddening, that overseas media has picked this up and US media doesn't seem to be terribly interested. From one of TFAs,

But why has Nasa taken the day off from searching the galaxy to try its hand at movie criticism? Well, the agency argues that bad flicks can worry viewers. In fact, so many people wrote in to the agency, worried about potential 2012-related catastrophes, that Nasa had to publish a special website just days before the film's November 2009 release.

The myth debunking page reads "Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."

Scientific illiteracy is becoming a big problem in the US. Kudos to NASA for tackling it.

Well if you don't want to donate your body to medical science...

The Japanese have come up with some ideas:
http://www.pri.org/world/asia/japan-high-tech-graveyard-in-sky1680.html

Others are taking the family heirloom idea to another level:
http://www.lifegem.com/

Many others prefer sea burials:
http://www.suite101.com/content/burial-at-sea---funeral-choices-for-an-ocean-grave-a305707

Others are taking a sea burial more literally and discovering a way to preserve full body burial without using up more land:
http://www.nmreef.com/memorial+reef.18.lasso

And still others are making records out of corpses:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-08/27/and-vinyly

And the point of burying a body is based on religion, culture and tradition. There are countless points and reasons for burying a body, some we would consider good reasons, others we would consider superstition and/or ridiculous. You obviously lump most of funeral tradition in this second catagory. Personally, I don't have many memories of my grandfather, but I still go to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to visit him. I like the solitude and cold contemplative beauty of cemeteries, I also like reading gravestones and imagining the lives behind those names and quotes.

But just because I like them, doesn't mean that I believe cemeteries are a sustainable method of burial or corpse disposal. But as my links point out, this is being addressed in many, many different ways. Cremation is becoming more popular, but something about creating a product out of my body after I die appeals to me. Personally I want to use my ashes in making whiskey for all my friends and relatives.

What about you?

Funny you should make that crack about googling because if YOU had googled around a little bit then you would have found this recent article which goes into detail about how Kinect came together and shows that Microsoft did a lot more than just buy the PrimeSense technology and repackage it. The PrimeSense hardware alone was not enough to do what the Microsoft researchers envisioned.

The reason a lot of people are excited about this is because Microsoft did something truly innovative here. Try to be mature enough to admit that.

Maybe the secret documents on how to stitch photos of a swiss valley together are stored there too. http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x281/s_v/Terabytes.jpg

Since the U.N. already named an Alien Ambassador it seems logical that there should be some sort of organization to track all the visitors - besides the Men in Black, that is.

I found a link to David Bismark's home page here. He is explaining how Pret a Voter works. This is related to the punchscan system, although it works by randomizing the order of the candidate list instead of introducing an indirection symbol like punchscan does.

Odd that the wired article would not give credit where it is due and mention Pret-a-Voter.

BTW, everyone, this is not an electronic voting system, even though it is uses computers if various ways, it is an optical scan paper ballot system.

This sounds a lot like the punchscan voting system. I am at work and not able to see the video right now, but I googled bismark and found this article, which has some details.

Punchscan and its variants do allow you to be able to prove to yourself (with a 50% probability) that your vote was counted as you intended. That might not sound like much comfort (only 50%?), but if the election authority tries to change 2 votes, their probability of getting away with it falls to 1/4, then to 1/8 with 3 votes, and so on. So stealing more than one or two votes becomes infesible pretty quickly.

However, I do believe that in all such schemes, the possibility of large scale vote buying becomes a real threat that has to be managed carefully, since the election authority has the keys that allows the all the ballots to be decoded. So if the Election Authority shares the keys with, say, the autoworkers union, or with GM, then those orgs would be in a position to decrypt the votes and thus coerce their voters. Of course, large scale intimidation of that type would be hard to hide from investigators. For this and other reasons, I think the threat of large scale vote buying is managable, and well worth the accuracy and accountability these systems provide.

The 2 key ideas that makes these schemes work are "cryptographic commitment" and the "cut and choose" protocol. If you are insterested, I've written up a detailed explanation of these concepts, and how punchscan like systems work, here.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/02/printed-car
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/02/1359248/Car-Produced-With-a-3D-Printer

Tired Magazine blows it again.

The article from Tired is bogus. The "remote generation of terahertz radiation" is described in this paper. They generate terahertz radiation at the target by hitting it with a big enough pulse to heat it up into a plasma. This is a classic spectroscopy technique; hit something with a big laser pulse and look at the spectra coming back.

Nobody is going to look into pockets that way, unless they burn through first. It may be useful for analyzing toxic and hazardous materials from a distance. A possible application is something that first responders point at a spill from a distance, and it comes back with an analysis. Assuming the energy transfer can be made small enough so as not to ignite anything.

http://www.wired.co.uk/videos/wired-things/2010-05/07/volvo-accidentally-smashes-new-s60-car

Want to jump in front of this??

It was microsofts attempt to woo the facebook generation. The fact you have never heard of it probably means the targeted marketing was done competently.

Please better define the term "facebook generation". I barely use it myself; yet I have family and (real life) friends ranging from ages 12 to 80 that use it. While there might be a predominant age, there's no single generation.

It was microsofts attempt to woo the facebook generation. The fact you have never heard of it probably means the targeted marketing was done competently.

The real question is why to the Russians want it?

Its because ICQ is the most popular IM program used in Russian speaking countries.

Warren Ellis: "The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species."

Although I'm pretty far from the Navy or marine technology in general, I find this topic quite fascinating. If you're interest in how such salvage operations are approached, I highly recommend reading this Wired article from last year, called Cowboys of the deep, which details the operations of Titan Salvage, as they recover a cargo ship full of new Mazdas. It's much more detailed than any news article, and generally an excellent read.

...there is a very interesting article in this UK Wired's issue regarding how the Heathrow air-traffic controllers are going to use the McLaren's proprietary software to simulate air-traffic like an F1 race...

Sorry to the rest for feeding a troll, but let's have some facts:

A month ago from today, mozilla didn't have any info on the vulnerability:

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/02/22/secunia-advisory-sa38608/

neither did secunia:

http://blog.psi2.de/en/2010/02/20/going-commercial-with-firefox-vulnerabilities/comment-page-1/#comment-666

“This particular report is a bit special because of the lack of information available. Normally, we do not write about vulnerabilities unless certain details are available and / or we can test it. () and previous vulnerabilities reported by this company / person has proved to be reliable.

Mozilla posted was contacted by Evgeny Legerov on the 18th:

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/18/update-on-secunia-advisory-sa38608/

So the response time is well under a month. now compare that to the time it took Microsoft to release the patch for the Aurora exploit:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-01/22/microsoft-learned-of-ie-zero-day-flaw-last-september.aspx http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9147058/Microsoft_patches_IE_admits_it_knew_of_bug_last_August?taxonomyName=Security&taxonomyId=17

From this evidence I can not come to the conclusion that slashdot is reacting fanboyishly when criticizing microsoft on security. Quite the opposite. I can however say that you're quick at defending microsoft without investigating the whole story, much like what you criticize slashdot readers of doing. I don't know, but in my book that is a fanboyish reaction on your behalf. =]

Nate here from Wired. Somehow the URL Slashdot's pointing to has been truncated. Correct one is: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/10/future-police-meet-the-uk's-armed-robot-drones.aspx

The fascinating thing that we're only just beginning to learn is that there is a measurable *physiological* placebo response.

If you'd read the recent Wired article (which is, admittedly, simply an accessible summary of the current state of things), you would not be so hasty to discount the real, measurable response to placebo.

The placebo problem Big Pharma's desperate to solve

Cue UK government announcing multi billion plan to make the internet 'safe' with new content filtering, anti-filesharing and communication logging schemes in 5... 4... 3...

Someone obviously does not keep up with current events. Most UK ISP's already filter content to keep the world safe from kiddie porn and 70's album covers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/07/brit_isps_censor_wikipedia/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/05/features/the-hidden-censors-of-the-internet.aspx

Couple that with Libel laws that are routinely used as a method of silencing what should be protected as free speech:

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/334
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/14/law.unitednations
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/29/1411207

This results in a country where they have no need to bring in any draconian laws, since they have been here for some time.

(Full Disclosure - I am a British citizen and resident)

There's a good article in Wired UK ish 1 (online at http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/04/features/the-man-who-saved-the-bbc.aspx) which covers some of the internal culture change that happened around when the iPlayer got revamped and lost its windows-only roots.