Slashdot Mirror

why do they insist on likening anything with a display and controls to playing a video game?

Seriously, The Path Intelligence guys use, or at least got started using, the GNU Radio platform(which, incidentally, is really really cool and you ought to check out). http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/70933?currentPage=2 http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6124/1637/1600/path_intelligence.jpg http://handcircus.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-brother-in-wired.html

Here's a story on this from earlier this year:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/clinton-slams-o.html

You can imagine govememnts using it matrix style "What good is a phone call if you can't speak, mr anderson?"

It pretty much already happens. You get a National Security Letter gag order, and you are threatened with five years of prison for even trying to communicate the fact that you are under a gag order, let alone trying to address what the gag order is about. The FBI now issues 30,000 National Security Letters a year.

One good place for algae to get carbon is from the CO2 emissions of coal and other combustion plants. Burn more coal to make more electricity. Use that excess electricity to electrolize H2O for hydrogen fuel. Capture the plant emmissions to grow pond scum for fuel.

Why take all the extra steps when you can have the algae produce the hydrogen for you? No dirty, polluting steps needed.

Algae farm != traditional farm. Hell, algae grows GREAT in the desert or plains, in greenhouses. Land that gets a ton of sun, but the soil is basically unusable for any kind of farming.

See this link for more details on an algae farm

For instance, one of these but with a human-readable bar code along the left side.

Autoconfig, extended range wireless adaptors, bittorrent 24x7 from every network you can get connected to; you know, for the children.

on a more serious note, I used to work at a place where we were required to take "retired" laptops to the dumpster, somehow they ended up in the trunk of my car more often than not...
NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) runs a laptop loaner program, where people without regular access to a computer can borrow one for a month for free in order to write a novel. It isn't exactly charity, but self-motivated intellectual persuits need all the support they can muster in our society. Most of the laptop loaners work fine but the batteries are shot (aka most used laptops).

I have "fixed up" (clean install with no bricking garbage on it) several and given them to family members at various times.

I have installed one with win2k+remote desktop client and NOTHING else so I could VPN + Remote in to our wintel machines at work without having to worry about work's big brother software locking me out because I have skype installed...

Finally, you could work on some decorative case mods, such as a Steampunk Laptop

Nothing beats using an Ikea filing cabinet as a super cool / super cheap cabinet.

They're looking for terrorists, remember? Anyone can be a terrorist. Engineers are terrorists. World of Warcraft players are terrorists. Heck, anyone who has committed the crime of not being a white christian who votes republican seems to be a terror suspect these days.

All customs has to do is say "I think you're a terrorist. Prove to me you aren't." I'm pretty sure none of the idiots in DHS grasp the concept of proving a negative.

CNet has been struggling recently and that valuation seems too high, but traditional media have a bad habit of paying too much for aqcuisitions of tech companies.... Comcast Acquires Plaxo, even though nobody can figure out how to make money AOL Acquires Bebo (popular, but not enough to justify almost a billion dollars) CBS (again!) Acquires last.fm (popular among bloggers but eclipsed by other sites in the real world) the only big media deal I can think of in recent years that was a good bet was Newscorp's undervalued' acquisition of myspace.

Isn't this initiative similar to that launched by Chris McKintrey and Pushpinder Singh, both of whom created databases where questions used to aid in trying to give robots personality?

Didn't both of these projects fail for the same reason?

I'm sure that Slashdot actually covered this story, but for those interested, the link is here.

Before UNH caught on, the school's entire email directory was publicly accessible. Obviously the work of Wallace, there were a bunch of spam emails poorly disguised to look like some girl's conversation about the club that she mistakenly forwarded to the whole school.

Harvard has yet to see a single take down notice or legal action seeking the identity of someone on the Harvard network as of 5-02-2008. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/riaa-says-harva.html

To anyone concerned about frying the microbes, Wired had a very readable story on what can happen sometimes when the ballast is handled the conventional way:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all

*spoiler* essentially current cargo ships headed to the U.S. have to flush their ballast in international waters and refill with local seawater. The Cougar Ace somehow managed to screw up this step and went askew (see pic). There were many quite grave consequences.

Granted, it's not standard operating protocol to end up with losses like this just too keep out invasive species, but it does illustrate some of the challenges and extent of trouble people go to to comply with this kind of ecological directive. Plus it was a damn well-written story I enjoyed reading.

gotta love javascript. It automatically brings up a print dialog. Here is the more cumbersome original. Impressive pictures and a very interesting way to capsize a boat.

If you've seen pictures of the Fail Boat around the internet, you might be interested to know the story behind it (link is to printer version). In short, the whole ordeal happened as a result of the requirement that they dump ballast water before entering US waters. The story on Wired covers the accident as well as the salvage operation and is an excellent read.

It appears that this is a dangerous enough process that it was worth eliminating it. That, or they're just trying to cut down on travel time by not having to stop - but that's just the cynic in me talking.

dallas isn't the first with this idea..nor will they be the last, so long as the technology remains unregulated...

2004 in spring, texas:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/technology/17tag.html?ei=5006&en=edeb6cd5169d554b&ex=1101272400&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=
alt summary for nyt article: http://www.rfidupdate.com/articles/index.php?id=652

2005 in brittan, california:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/02/66554

later dropped in brittan:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/2341200&from=rss

and just so our good friends over there on the camera-happy isles don't feel left out, here's a test program at an edenthorpe, england school last year:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/06/2223218&from=rss

The actual article can be found here...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/the-first-genet.html

No, I don't want to be preaching "gloom and doom," but it does raise ethical questions. The biggest question: are the ethical questions that such an act raises actual issues of right and wrong, or are they simply the products of Western culture and my own philosophical prejudices? Here's the corrected link.

I'm sure it can't have been slashdotted already. Alternate source here

Yeah, because we all know the Canadians would never pass a stupid law at the behest of certain industry lobby groups or one that eliminated your ability to criticize certain groups because they might be offended by your criticism. And even if such stupid laws were passed they would be ignored by the provinces.

I know its on display at the LSM, but it was built and owned privately. It's just being displayed at the LSM.

Who owns it? According to the LSM site they built it. Are you thinking of the copy they made for Nathan Myhrvold

I agree completely, Mr. Romero.

And for what it's worth, I for one am completely against the hypothesis that, Samson-like, you lost your powers when you cut your hair. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for your inability to successfully program a computer with more power than a 486. Buck up, kiddo! I mean, look at someone like Levelord, who apparently spends his days trading child porn on Freenet. You're doing better than him, right? And he doesn't cry himself to sleep every night; he's proud of the choices he's made. I think it would be cathartic for you two to grab some beers some time. Look at how much you have in common---not just the failure, but the Russian mail-order brides, the shitty blogs, the jobs writing games for TI calculators... he's your brother from a different mother, man. You can down some brewskis and laugh---it really could be worse, John. I seem to recall another shitty programmer with an overblown ego and a Russian wife who would trade anything to be in your shoes.

A five year prison term might be preferable to experiences like this, especially when ratting out the FBI can save hundreds of thousands of innocent people from further constitutional abuse. I can not demand heroic action by others but I wish there had were more than three in the hundreds of thousands of abused citizens so far. Innocent people going to jail for protecting privacy of other innocent people would shut this monster program down fast.

Vote for anyone but Republicans in 2008 and vote out everyone who had anything to do with the poorly named Patriot act.

A five year prison term might be preferable to experiences like this, especially when ratting out the FBI can save hundreds of thousands of innocent people from further constitutional abuse. I can not demand heroic action by others but I wish there had were more than three in the hundreds of thousands of abused citizens so far. Innocent people going to jail for protecting privacy of other innocent people would shut this monster program down fast.

Vote for anyone but Republicans in 2008 and vote out everyone who had anything to do with the poorly named Patriot act.

Suuuuuuuure they will... just like US baseball did, right?

Ten years is WAY too optimistic... Try August.

So if we wanted to power say, California, which as of 2006 has 36,457,549 [census.gov] people we would need something around (36,457,549/4=28044 so 28044*4=) 112,177 wind turbines. That is stupid ridiculous!

Yea it's stupid to decentralize power generation when you can concentrate all that power into a few hands instead. Fact is is a farmer can have wind turbines on the farm while still growing food, and they will supplement farmers' income. Wind farms can also be located offshore. Then there's solar and geothermal. Tidal power can even be used.

Wind power 'feels good' but when you start running the numbers it gets dumb real quick.

In what way? If wind were given the same subsidies as nuclear power the math would change. As it is now nuclear power is a form of corporate welfare.

While I absolutely and desperately want an electric car, I'm trying not to get too excited about anything that's not already on the market after the whole Zap Car debacle.

When did I say that Apple makes touchscreen notebooks? "Multitouch" simply means that a touch-based input system (in the case of Apple notebooks the trackpad) has suport for you using more than one finger/stylus/whatever to make inputs. My Santa Rosa MacBook Pro uses the trackpad as a two-dimensional scroll wheel when I use two fingers - that would be the rudimentary approximation. The MacBook Air (and, as far as I know, newer MBPs) allows stuff like resizing windows by performing a pinching motion on the trackpad.

Before you tell me that "true multitouch requires a touchscreen": I'm certainly not the only one who considers this to be multitouch.

No one is deprived of property, due to the nature of the beast.

The term "stealing" is used here for good reason — it explains, what's happening perfectly well. The "Occam's razor" principle says, we don't need a new term...

Someone might be denied a small portion of their revenue stream though.

My point exactly. Whether the portion is "small" or large is really irrelevant — the deprived will try to inflate the figures, the depriving will aim for the opposite. The fact remains — somebody (the victim) is getting deprived of something valuable by others (thieves).

My original post is now "-1 Troll"... Apparently, grasping the parallel between stealing music and stealing source code is too difficult for most Slashdotters...

There is no reason why artists can't self distribute, and maintain control of their IP now.

Some of them can — but it is their decision and is nobody else's business. If a musician (or any creator of something hard to create but easy to copy) wants to be able to sell their creation via an intermediary (rather than directly to the public), they ought to be able to do so. Treating such intermediaries as somehow undeserving of legal protection simply debases the original creations... It does not change the immorality and illegality of unauthorized copying one bit (pun intended) — Metallica, for example, which owns its own distribution AFAIK, has been quite outspoken against piracy. So let's not change the subject.

This is all plain and simple. The Slashdot groupthink (muzak — kooool, RIAA — baaaad) is simply clouding the judgment... Once again, had this been about, say, Linksys and their use of GPL code, the term "stealing" and the appropriate indignation would've been everywhere — and highly moderated — without anybody even being deprived of any revenue.

And that is exactly where the problem is. Anything that has been CREATED by a computer can be reverse engineered by a computer. I know that there were some really HUGE databases created a few years ago that were trying to create artificial intelligence (one of them was called CYC, another was called GAC, there is a wired article about them here) the idea was that people would answer hundreds of thousands of questions like "are purples round?" or similarly silly questions. The hope was that we could programs some sort of "sense" into the computer. As far as I know it failed horribly. BUT!, maybe we can resurrect it for captcha use: "Answer these 8 questions" or "which one of these questions is true"

You should have read the blog more carefully it was mentioned in the 16th paragraph of the blog covering the guilty verdict, together with a link when it was previously covered it in the court case in January

Wired had a really great article on some of the entrants a few months back.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-01/ff_100mpg

This article indicates that not everything is correct. http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/04/ironman_physics

Iron Man's Suit Defies Physics -- Mostly

By James Kakalios

Tony Stark's amazing suit is a long way from realization, mostly due to practical energy constraints.

As a comic book fan and physics professor, I am looking forward to the big screen debut of Iron Man. This is due, in part, to the fact that instead of getting belted with gamma rays or being born a demon from hell, industrialist and scientist Tony Stark got his super powers by means of his engineering genius.

But just how realistic is Stark's amazing suit?

Sadly, nearly all of the features of the Iron Man suit, with one important exception, are not likely to be realized anytime soon. Let's look at each of the suit's major elements in turn.

Jet boots

The reason that we don't fly to work using boot-mounted jets as Iron Man does has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with energy. We know how to achieve thrust and propulsion using personal jet packs, and a person can indeed fly from home to their place of employment like Buck Rogers or Adam Strange -- provided they live 30 seconds from work.

The problem is that lifting a full-grown person 100 feet into the air considerably increases their potential energy, and that gain in energy must come from the stored chemical energy in the jet pack. Ditto for the energy required to zip around once airborne. You just can't store enough energy to make long flights without making the suit too big to wear. So jet boots alone don't make Iron Man an escapist fantasy, but the idea that Stark could store enough energy in his suit to fly for more than half a minute does.

Repulsor rays

Similarly, the directed energy weapons Iron Man uses, such as the "repulsor rays" built into the palms of his gloves, should require that Stark drag along a large power generator whenever he faces off against the Mandarin or Titanium Man. I'm not exactly sure what a "repulsor ray" is, but if it's anything like a high-power laser, then the energy demands are considerable.

Even assuming that Iron Man can convert any stored energy in his suit into laser light with 100 percent efficiency, then to generate a beam powerful enough to melt a fist-size hole through a half-inch thick steel plate (which any comic book fan can tell you is well within Shellhead's capabilities) would require an energy pulse of more than 2 gigawatts of power, greater than the output of a nuclear power plant.

Cybernetic helmet

There is one aspect of Iron Man's armor that is not only scientifically sound, but may be available for our use someday soon: the "cybernetic helmet" Tony Stark uses to control the devices within his armor. When Iron Man wants to discharge his palm-mounted repulsor rays, he does not have to manually release a safety switch, enter a firing sequence code or even pull a trigger -- he just tells the supervillain to "talk to the hand" and fires!

In fact, Bin He of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota has already created a helmet much like Iron Man's. It works on the principle that neurons' electrical currents create electric and magnetic fields, which can be detected with devices such as the electroencephalograph, or EEG. While the EEG has been around since the 1920s, recent advances in signal processing have enabled scientists to isolate and identify the firing signatures of neurons associated with particular motor-imagery tasks.

Professor He identified the specific firing pattern that arises when a person, watching images on a computer monitor, tries to mentally move a cursor to the left or right. These detected frequencies can then be amplified and, when suitably modified, can instruct the computer to move the cursor in the same direction.

Of course, He is not int

This article on wired's site talks about that: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/scientists-prov.html

In short - it's going to be a while

While ARINs web site indicates they were formed in December of 1997, IANA indicates that ARIN was delegated the 134/8 subnet in May of 1993.

IANA is responsible for global coordination the Internet Protocol addressing systems, as well as the Autonomous System Numbers used for routing Internet traffic.

RFC1466, section 4.2.1, states: Organizations applying for a Class B network number must submit an engineering plan that documents its need for a Class B network number. This document must demonstrate that it is unreasonable to engineer its network with a block of class C network numbers. The engineering plan must include how many hosts the network will have within the next 24 months and how many hosts per subnet within the next 24 months. I really doubt a marketing company could honestly come up with such a plan. In addition to this, RFC1466 has many other guidelines regarding allocation of IP addresses -- too many to mention here.

This Wired article says that Mr. Medin served at NASA until 1995. As such, policies enforced by the above mentioned RFCs were already in place, regardless of whether ARIN was conceived in 1993 or 1997. There's a good chance that the 134.17/16 network block was most likely still allocated to his research team up until 1995.

RFC1166, in its Introduction section, states: This Network Working Group Request for Comments documents the currently assigned network numbers and gateway autonomous systems. This RFC will be updated periodically, and in any case current information can be obtained from Hostmaster at the DDN Network Information Center (NIC). It looks like someone has forgotten about this RFC or it's been superseded by another RFC that I'm not aware of, as it has not been updated, as they still think that the IP block is still allocated to BAY-PR-NET. While it may still be allocated to "BAY-PR-NET", it's not the same BAY-PR-NET. There may also be a communication gap between IANA and ARIN, as ARIN is responsible for tracking network block transfers.

In summary, Trudy's shit is looking pretty weak.

Q: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
A: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
— Tim Berners-Lee, Wired, 1997

OK, let's ignore Twitter's use of sockpuppets (which has gotten so blatent, it hardly needs to be pointed out) and focus on the more serious issue, that he like to throw out anti-Windows and pro-Linux cliches without regard to context.

Here the context is a bunch of missing emails. There's no evidence that they were lost due to a Microsoft screwup. Officially, federal IT screwed up. But given the Bush administration's previous attempts to avoid archiving incriminating emails (such as relying on outside mail servers, which is not just illegal, but really horrifying in terms of national security) it's not impossible that this "mistake" was deliberate. Somewhere Rosemary Woods is smiling.

So shut up Twitter. The whole world doesn't revolve around your Linux obsession.

Thirty years in the IT industry, and my fallback career is cattle rancher. My in-laws own a small ranch where I work from time to time. If peak oil predictions prove to be optimistic, I'll still be able to put food on the table.

People will always need to eat, so in that sense you're right. However, while cows are ruminants and are natural grass eaters, today cattle eat mostly corn and it takes a lot of petrochemicals to grow the corn. Even more important is the water the cattle need, and they need a lot of water. Forget about peak oil, we're heading into peak water. "Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry."

Good job, Special Operations Command!

Mod parent up! Let's not forget that Reiser believes in being ready for combat at all times. Now's his chance to put all those combat-rehearsal activities (videogames) to work!

The real classic symptom of Asperger's syndrome is posting on Internet message boards. It's a convenient excuse for nerds to say "I'm not socially incompetent - it's a disease, OK!"

Yes

What history of violent behavior?

On December 22, 2004, the dispute intensifies. Reiser arrives to pick up the kids at the house Nina is renting, and, according to Nina, he shoves her to the ground. The next day, she files a request for a restraining order against Reiser quickly granted and reports that he threatened to "make me hurt for the rest of my life."