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I agree. The clincher for me was his lawyers closing argument, when he asked the jury to consider a sentence of voluntary manslaughter if they felt that Hans was guilty. Why would he do this if he really felt his client was innocent? Whatever chance he had of getting acquitted, it was pretty much blown at that point. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/attorney-declar.html

I see your power glove an raise you a Tactical Telehaptic Communication device http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/04/darpa-wants-sol.html

It works fine with my wifi and laptop's sleep mode. Wait, what's that you say? Microsoft has a stranglehold on hardware manufacturers so that their specs and drivers are often only available to Windows? I say!

If you use well-supported hardware, Linux works very, very well. Or do you think that Vista needs to work on usability because it doesn't work right with Creative's X-Fi sound card, which works fine under Linux?

I did not realize open-source firmware available was available for certain Canon cameras. That's cool. Unfortunately the link you provided was broken, but I googled for it:

Wired article

link to CHDK from above article

The system can be scripted to do things such as time-lapse and very long exposures.

First Question: Well considering that the record companies were trying to get a jury to basically charge someone $150,000 per copyright violation on 24 songs. it does not seem too unreasonable to pose this question in the blog. That question is DIRECTLY based off the crap that the RIAA have pulled and if you think the Canadian version of the RIAA is any better you got another thing coming. They wanted the Levy on blank media but now they realize that by doing that they shot themselves in the foot and want to keep it and get more punishment for copyright infringers *OR* get rid of it so they can make it more draconian and compatible with the US version of the DMCA/Copyright Acts. Remember that all those 'settlements' they've been offering college students have been approximately $2000-3000 hit on their pocket books. It is not out of the realm of possibility that they would ask for a $5000 'settlement' which is a fancy name for 'extortion fee'

Second Question: See first question + All the Slashdot stories about John Does being sued as a collective to get the names then breaking the cases up and suing them all individually or offering the 'extortion package'

Third Question: Basically a plain jane DRM question. Nothing controversial here. The question he's trying to ask is do you buy the physical media (in which case its subject to first sale doctrine) or do you buy 'listening rights' which means you should be able to transfer your purchase between different media and different devices you own.

Maybe there is a bit of vitrol in there, but it is ALL based on facts that have already happened in the US. If it can happen in the US it can happen in Canada too. Its our job as Canadians to keep ourselfs The true north strong and free instead of reversing that position like the US did with the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave when they kept bending over in the name of terrorism. The RIAA is effectively committing domestic terrorism, you cant goto a college without worrying you're gonna be targeted for 'extortion fees' infact you probably have to budget for it at the rate they're suing people.

Well, my 7105t runs a few handy applications that I like:

- Google Mobile Maps 2.x,which BTW sucks bigtime. My Location has improved nothing, but I digress.

- MidpSSH, a clever and useful SSH client. I can work with my Fedora box quite nicely, though it does have its drawbacks. Much better than nothing!

- Gmail. Almost as cool as push mail. In fact, I may ditch BlackBerry and use Gmail as a semi-push client. It runs background and pulls mail as it appears.

- Texas Hold'em King II, which isn't oficially on my BlackBerry of course.

Apps do exist, though most are Java apps.

Now, the iPhone will have lotsa apps. How many will be business-centered? A push/pull email client, reasonable mobile mapping app, and VPN, as many point out. The challenge will be for Apple to accomodate the secure corporate server attachment.

Most importantly, however, is making deals with carriers, cause carriers LOVE BlackBerry business. Less churn, less pressure on pricing, and less trouble, since the email servers for a BES subscriber aren't even the carriers!

The iPhone will need to do things either like the BlackBerry (patent smackdown guaranteed) or similar enough to be indistinguishable.

If I'm RIM, all I want to do is deploy a touchscreen model and add features. And be prepared to defend patents.

Oh, and be sure RIM is part of the NYCWiN. Important market, proof of concept, model for other cities, etc.

The difference is, of course, that we're on to them now. Although the scenario you describe may have used to work, the 'net is putting a crimp in such plans. The web allows "regular people" to interact and organize at almost no cost. We can share information via blogs like Slashdot, p2pnet and Recording Industry vs. the People. The article says that Anderson "searched the Net for a case like hers." Her lawyer can use the 'net to find and communicate with other lawyers who are fighting the same fight to share advice and strategy.

The 'net helps even the playing field. Think about Sony, still recovering from getting their asses handed to them over the rootkit debacle, backing off on their plan to charge extra for a crapware-free PC http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/sony-pay-an-ext.html within a day of the news hitting the intertubes.

Go read the stories on the Consumerist http://consumerist.com/ about customers using the 'net to get refunds on bad deals and real service from fake "service departments" from the likes of Sears, Citibank, and Comcast. (Well, maybe not Comcast.)

The Internet, like the printing press, is a transformative technology. That means nothing is ever going to be the same. You and I already know it and sooner or later Big Business will, too. For an excellent book on the power that the 'net brings us, check out Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Anyone else feel a little sad for the yellow-fatty-cell man committing suicide by jumping of a celery stick? Now Toribash that's a real nano-manly way to die!

The page for the last image is broken.
Here is a direct link to view final image.

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• The games are cheap or free
• It's all legal
• They're usually easy to pick up and play, with a focus on fun game mechanics over action-movie style production
• You find new, creative ideas all over the place

And how long did it take after 9-11 and the Patriot Act before the U.S. government was data-mining every single citizen?

They always start with the "lowest of the low" precisely because they know no one will object to it. But they NEVER stop there. The next step is "Well, since you gave us information on these really bad guys, you can't object to giving us info on these *sorta* bad guys" which snowballs to the point where the government eventually just has its own monitoring room at your facility to watch *everyone*.

Speaking of discounts, students now pay full price for iPods. You used to be able to save $20-$30 on them.

I don't care if the discount on iPods were $100, I still wouldn't get one. I last got a portable player, a cd player, several years ago for Roller Blading.

One good thing Scully did was push the Newton, which was spun off into a (profitable) subsidiary before Jobs came back and killed it.

According to Wiki the Apple Newton wasn't successful. "Wired" magazine says "Early models were bulky, expensive and bug-ridden. Apple marketed the Newton poorly, and it was widely ridiculed; a memorable Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau effectively doomed the device." In "Apple scraps Newton" C|Net News says the Newton was not historically profitable (dated 27 February 1998).

"embedded computer" from 1983 sounds like a real advance vs punch cards
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/punchcards.html

Neal Stephenson's non-fictional account of the laying of FLAG is pretty interesting too.

Neal Stephenson's brilliant essay has lots of detail on submarine cable construction, including the "different types of cable installed in 'benign' and 'aggressive' seabed conditions" TFS considers unique to this blog.

Interesting, yes. Unique, no.

I'm a vegan and if someone offered me a delicious cloned steak, I'd eat it in a heartbeat. And yes, even if the cloned meat needed original animal tissue to start off with, I'd be OK with it. In fact as early as 2003, the Australian research group SymbioticA, made cloned frog steaks from a still living frog. So animals, theoretically, could be donors to cloned meat projects without even having to die. Here is the link to SymbioticA and a link to an article about those delicious frog steaks... mmm... http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/welcome http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/02/62385?currentPage=all

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

Here's the link:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/15-12/ff_genomics

I thought it was interesting then. It's also important to point out, Anne Wojcicki's husband's name is Sergey Brin. Having access to massive amounts of computing power makes sense for a genetics company.

27000 reasons for a start

On a serious note, anyone think this might be Blackswift we're seeing? Of course, Blackswift, AFAIK, wasn't supposed to be orbital. I'm noticing that it looks awfully similar to parts of their Space Launch Initiative proposal. Long, fat fuselage, so it's probably burning hydrogen, whatever it is.

Anyone know what exactly we're looking at here?

Okay, so apparently (if anyone else cares) there are 'trials' of the service going on in my fair city...but the launch has been delayed. Again. So I'm not totally convinced...but its more than I thought was going on.

For those who are completely blind, the research in the Brain-machine interface may allow them to 'see' artificially. In fact, this has already been done and will only get better with progress in technology http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html

The lunar surface is not composed of the same materials as the "dirt" that one finds on Earth.
It is entirely composed of pulverized rock that has been pounded into very fine particles over
many billions of years. While lunar "dirt" has a chemical composition, it lacks the organic matter
that soil here on Earth possesses. One very interesting finding in lunar dirt is the presence of
structures called 'agglutinates'. They are essentially 'bonded' shards of glass and minerals that
were formed in meteorite impacts. They are extremely small -on the order of a few microns in size- and
very sharp, like clumps of little glass daggers. These could present a hazard to the growing roots
of plants that have been planted in 'raw' lunar dirt, shredding the roots as they attempt to grow through
this material. They also present an unknown hazard to the humans who will be living and working within
this lunar 'terrarium'. An interesting article http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/04/67110
appeared on Wired a few years ago that spoke about this issue.

Bell Labs is gone. I'm glad you brought up its accomplishments, because AT&T Labs developing a bloated browser when we've got several and don't need more divergence from the standards compares very poorly with the old Bell Labs. This new lab doesn't get credit for the old one. To the contrary, getting rid of the old one shows what AT&T is not interested in: science in the public interest.

I'm going to leave out how your admission that you have no gripes with AT&T's treatment of privacy reflects on your judgement. But it's relevant to privacy, and to AT&T's proper mission.

AT&T is busy researching how to snoop all over the Internet, on the pretext of "copyright police". It's already censored for its corporate political agenda some early TV broadcasts it's carried on its network, while it works on a fully declared agenda to hold routes over its backboes hostage from different content providers (and, we should now expect, depending on the political content). And of course AT&T is guilty of violating the Constitution repeatedly for years by spying on us without a warrant (not even the trivially dispensed FISA warrants), as revealed in specific operations the company has tried to suppress. It's even trying to get retroactive amnesty for its many crimes in this area.

AT&T has to clean up its act on its basic service provision. Even apart from its untrustworthiness not to spy on us, its markets still don't have anywhere near the broadband connectivity, speed or pricing that its many foreign competitors provide, even to people with a lot less money to spend on it. AT&T is trying to get into TV broadcasting over its network, by forcing down the few remaining constraints the people have in ensuring that vastly powerful weapon is not used to further abuse the public in the media market.

That fat browser is the kind of bundling that locks people into services and out of choices. It's designed to be a SW "set top box" so AT&T can compete with cablecos in TV as well as phone and Internet. All of which services AT&T is doing an inadequate job providing now, even before it spreads its quality thinner by expanding its reach.

You might be happy with AT&T, because you're paying attention only to your mobile bill (but not comparing it to, say, European bills for the same service). And because you're giving it credit for the extinct Bell Labs that had little or nothing to do with today's AT&T Labs. And also because you're turning a blind eye to how AT&T is spying on you and everyone else.

But that doesn't mean I have to trade all that in exchange for a fat browser that runs only on an upgraded Windows machine.

Some advocate stealing Wi-Fi links http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/01/securitymatters_0110 but only with the knowledge of the owner and besides the chances of being caught by the RIAA if a guest downloads something they should not is after all rather small.

> What is needed to make your case is a statistical analysis that says C.S. majors earn less and are unable to find work.

Actually no, becuase that was not my case. A BSCS may be employable, but he or she would have been better off to have chosen a different major.

BSCSs may earn more than IT workers who have no degrees, in some cases. But, often there is little, in any, difference. Employers want experience, not degrees, look at the job ads.

Unlike doctors, lawyers, engineers, CPAs, nurses, or many other professions; a BSCS is not a hard requirement for most IT jobs. The degree has very little value relative to it's cost and difficulty. Add that to the aggressive offshoring of IT professionals, and it seems to me that a students time, effort, and money, would be better spent elsewhere.

And here is some data to back that up:

> "According to the AeA Cyberstates yearly reports, "High Tech" employment experienced job losses of 945,000 in the 2001 recession. Since this drop in employment, the "High Tech" sector has recovered about *300,000* jobs, but during the period in question, a probable *669,681* H-1B and L-1 computer-related workers were added to the workforce."

http://tinyurl.com/3pj2c3

> "Job security for IT professionals plummeted more than 10% from January to February of this year, far surpassing the average job security declines seen nationwide in a rigorous analysis of U.S. employment patterns."

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/edu/2008/033108ed1.html

> "Gates claims that Microsoft needs more H-1b to hire new foreign graduates. But there are many U.S. graduates with several years of experience trying to find work at Microsoft and other employers - but Gates does not open these "entry level" positions to these Americans. Why? Experienced Americans are only considered for the positions that require an arbitrary 3 to 7 years of experience in several specific skills - then the Americans are summarily rejected for not meeting all of those arbitrary qualifications."

http://tinyurl.com/358alw

> "Dell Job Cuts to Top 8,800 as U.S. Spending Slows"
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aEO1GX_CC.8U&refer=us

> "Motorola to lay off 2,600 workers"
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-motorola-8k-jobcuts-motapr04,0,4870738.story

> "Chrysler Slashing Tech Jobs - The latest cutbacks affect 400 technology workers"
http://www.thecarconnection.com/blog/?p=1095

> "AMD axes 10% of its staff"
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36823/167/

> "Yahoo Profits Slip; To Cut 1,000 Jobs"
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/yahoo-profits-s.html

> "Google lays off about 300 at DoubleClick"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/03/BUA2VUNAO.DTL&tsp=1

> "EBay Cuts 125 Jobs in Europe, North America"
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080320/ebay_jobs.html?.v=4

> "CNET to Lay Off 120"
http://www.redherring.com/Home/24032

> "At least 160 employees at CBS Corp. . . were let go"
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-stations9apr09,1,7495348.story

> Applied

Wired article on the Netflix challenge. Netflix has a benchmark dataset that they run the competing algorithms against to judge improvement.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix?currentPage=all

The algorithm wants to analyze your habits and then recommend the best movie for you. The interest to netflix is if you can get more people interested in movies that they haven't seen then they will rent more movies.

The link in the story is a bit misleading:
"Developers have access to the iPhone's sensors, its location capabilities, the OpenGL graphics engine..."
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/03/apple-delivers.html

Actually, the OpenGL isn't actually implemented on the emulator, and given that they aren't giving out certificates to most of us, that makes it quite impossible to write any Opengl apps.
Having said that, you have to consider that this sdk is in beta

True but not really relevant. Unless the readership of Slashdot is wider than I'm aware of the only frame of reference of relevance is that of the Earth. Hence that is the only frame you need to concern yourself with is that one.

Remember that the Earth frame is arbitrary. Although relativity stipulates that there is no privileged frame, strictly speaking there is only one intertial frame which is at rest with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation; if the Earth were at rest in it then we would see a sky with a uniform temperature in all directions. Instead we can observe a dipole moment in the sky's CMB spectrum consistent with motion at 380 km/s toward the direction of Virgo. The inertial frame of the black hole would also be worthy of consideration. But of course this is all just Slashdot nitpicking, you do your calculations in the Earth's frame because you want your result to come out in Earth proper time, and realistically this means you don't do anything different.

Not actually true: they are larger at those relative speeds but are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc.

Those effects are negligible with this level of approximation. Basically everything can be considered to be at rest; you guys are making this way harder than it is. This is a simple problem of geometric optics. We're seeing this glowing cloud, with a region 10 light years across, brightening and darkening within the space of 5 light years. That's very hard to explain as anything other than a light echo from a source nearby that must have been bright, and small, and rapidly varying in brightness. And look, there's this supermassive black hole sitting here 300 light years away. You don't have to be Einstein to figure this one out.

The star V838 Mon is a good example of a light echo. This star emitted a huge flash in 2002 that made it the brightest star in the galaxy for a couple months. Then it dimmed to a normal brightness. Once it did, starting in mid-late 2002, we started to see a huge reflection of the flash begin to expand out from the star as it lit up the gas and dust in the vicinity. At any given time we see a glowing sheet of gas shaped like a paraboloid open towards us with the star at its focus, and every year this paraboloid gets bigger. Now that it's 2008 this thing has become a Firefox logo 12 light years wide that continues to expand outward in all directions at the speed of light.

Some C_Os don't know a lot about technology but have privileged access to secured resources so they're a valid concern for breaches. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/08/60052

"It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of explosion, and then it opened fire uncontrollably, killing and injuring the soldiers."

But the brave, as yet unnamed officer was unable to stop the wildly swinging computerised Swiss/German Oerlikon 35mm MK5 anti-aircraft twin-barrelled gun. It sprayed hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells around the five-gun firing position. By the time the gun had emptied its twin 250-round auto-loader magazines, nine soldiers were dead and 11 injured.

According to this article (which also contains more detail on building and shipping the Engine), the machine will be on display for 6 months, then it will be moved to Myhrvold's home. So if you want to see it, don't wait too long.

(I found another article which claims the Engine will be at the museum for a year. The CHM website doesn't have definitive data.)

I saw the one at the Science Museum a few years ago, and it's awesome. Well worth a trip.

I keep hearing people saying this, where's the proof? People just make up stats on the fly and like to blame kids -- there's PLENTY of adult players who act like complete asshats.

Here's some actual stats --
"Also of note is the fact that the average age of the typical gamer is 33."

"...female gamers over the age of 18 make up 31 percent of all gamers, a larger percentage than that of male gamers under the age of 17 (20 percent), a group traditionally seen as the majority."

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/03/38-percent-of-g.html

I will say I've seen my share of immature players in WoW - BUT that doesn't mean I actually know they're age. Also, WoW is also just ONE mmorpg, albeit the largest.

I've played mmorpgs for about 9 yrs starting with EQ. Currently, I play EQII as well as WoW -- and the maturity level is vastly different there. Played AO, DAoC, CoH, GW and generally had good experiences with the player base. Anonymity is really the big issue with mmorpgs, it let's some people (mainly adults) act like idiots without any real repercussions.

Most of my WoW guild is 30 and 40-somethings. One however is a 12 year old boy, and his online behavior is often much more mature/conservative than the adults.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538

In the immortal words of Scott McNealy, "Get over it."

"I'm already doing deals to sell your personal information to the highest bidder."

Only in Scott's case, he wasn't *quite* stupid enough to say that out loud.

Two blow hard members of the fait accompli / might-is-right crowd, deluding themselves into thinking they can pull off the "we're already in Iraq" card.

Wait a second there, guys. Neither of you can fill the pants of the loser who pulled that off. Dream on.

The "genie out of the bottle" argument was just as strong on the side of p2p as it is on the loss of consumer privacy. Yet in both cases, there was a loud "we'll see you in court".

It goes without saying that any content provider who finds it necessary to buy their content an express lane isn't competing on quality.

I was just viewing Ikiru, pausing at the end of the first act when my housemate had to run out.

In modern society, the 30 years of perfect attendance as a civil servant with no real purpose is replaced by 30 years of consuming bad content (television), because the average consumer is too lazy to walk an extra block or two to a video store that stocks movies more than a week old.

One of the symptoms of terminal stomach cancer in the movie is diarrhea. There's a good metaphor for the typical content delivered via the fast lane.

"We humans are so careless. How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death."

That's what's this ISP basshole is counting on: that his consumers will choose instant drivel, rather than wait for the good stuff.

It always happens this way, because too few of us care until sake is suicide.

Nonsense...there's no good reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that the problem mentioned in the study isn't a major or even dominant factor in colony collapse disorder.

I don't see how you so easily can say "nonsense". I see it differently - that there is no good reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder is caused by pollution. Colony Collapse Disorder seems to happen in sporadic bursts, whereas I believe pollution can be graphed with long graceful curves.

Wikipedia says "...late in the year 2006 and in early 2007 the rate of attrition was alleged to have reached new proportions, and the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances." To me, that implies that there is no correlation between Colony Collapse Disorder and pollution, since I don't think there was a sudden spike in pollution that corresponds with declines in bee populations.

Interestingly, I was just reading Boeing 787 Dreamliner Delayed Again, which links to a Wired Science article, which points to a Dan Rather video, which has a segment at the end that states that the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder has been determined to be caused by some Israeli bee virus. First time I heard that. I am certainly no expert, nor do I pretend to be. I was merely stating that for me, on the surface, the conclusion does not bear up to close scrutiny. In fact, I was implying that one doesn't need to be an expert, or even to RTFA to formulate a plausible critique.

White house email, for instance. (And yes, the link references "lost" email by both Bush and Clinton).

.... [the X-Prize winner] never came close to leaving Earth's orbit

They never came close to being in Earth orbit either. That requires 20 times the speed and 60 times the energy than they achieved.

Rich.

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14

'Is there anyone dumb enough to still believe the romantic portrayal of the young valiant American heros defending liberty and freedom from the vicious hordes that everyone else refers to as "the rest of the world" ?'

Yes but only if Hollywood makes a movie about it and shows it world wide.

I debate with people from all around the world on Internet forums, most of them cite examples from Hollywood movies. Then they think that the USA must really be like what they keep seeing in movies about the USA. Like Forrest Gump was a real person, all of those Tom Clancy movies really happened, the Borne Identity and spinoffs are true stories, etc. Then they have the nerve to call US citizens as idiots? I keep telling them that what they saw in a movie is fictional and never really happened. They are the same people who watch US Cable TV news channels and yell at the TV screen about how wrong they got it, because of what they saw in movies.

I'm just glad that not everyone outside of the USA believes everything they see in Hollywood movies.

I guess they're the same people that think that The Davinci Code was a documentary and really happened. I can't seem to convince them that it was written as fiction and followed a script.

We know that some nations like North Korea have Hacker Colleges to train in cyber warfare and other nations like China, Russia, etc do as well as they have groups that use a lot of phishing websites and phishing emails to fool people into thinking they are logining into ebay or their bank, and steal their account information. That is a way they can steal money from other economies, using that form of cyber warfare on nation's citizens. The next step up from that is attacking government systems as well as military systems.

Yeah the USA doesn't do cyber warfare because we see it as unethical and illegal and immoral. But other nations have a different viewpoint. Not the entire "rest of the world" but some nations like North Korea, China, Russia, and even now in the middle-east Iran, Syria, etc are developing their own cyber warfare divisions. A lot of pro-Radical Islamic terrorist material was put on P2P file sharing networks for example as a way to recruit more people into their networks. I'm betting that a lot of "warez" that they upload are loaded with malware to turn systems into bots so they can launch attacks from zombie infected systems.

Of course Hollywood cannot make Radical Islamic Terrorists as the bad guys anymore because they don't want more Theo van Gogh incidents from Radical Islamic terrorists murdering artists, writers, film makers, etc who show Islam in a negative light. So they instead choose the CIA or the US government to be the new bad guys. Which only fuels more Anti-American viewpoints from people who watch those films, and like I said, cannot separate reality from fantasy.

Old news. Wired magazine already covered the abundance of oil shale in the US.. Funny that they mention this as a viable source of oil once the price per barrel hits $70.