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For those that missed out on the 2005 article, Mighty Mice can regenerate organs too when an inactive mouse gene is activated. There are possibilities that Humans have a similar dormant gene also.

The "shortage" is getting ridiculous.

• Wii : 432,000
• PlayStation 3 : 280,800
• Xbox 360 : 254,600

Here is what Wikipedia said:

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I would have a hunch, that the "Church" itself is causing the problems on the page. First The war starts. They impose there beliefs and pull web pages from Google. I have seen a few things that they have done to try and put "Anonymous" in a bad light. I wish I could find the link, and maybe someone out there knows it. It is of a group of protesters getting arrested. The "Church" said it was "Anonymous". This was quickly debunked they the comments around the article, and found that the pictures where taken from a real protest elsewhere, and not an "Anonymous" protest. All and all i think the "Church" is a bunch of bull and don't play fair with others.

I'm now prepared to get buried by the "Church" for my negative comments against them.

Here is what Wikipedia said:

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.
It needs sources or references that appear in third-party publications. Tagged since February 2008.
It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Tagged since February 2008.
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I would have a hunch, that the "Church" itself is causing the problems on the page. First The war starts. They impose there beliefs and pull web pages from Google. I have seen a few things that they have done to try and put "Anonymous" in a bad light. I wish I could find the link, and maybe someone out there knows it. It is of a group of protesters getting arrested. The "Church" said it was "Anonymous". This was quickly debunked they the comments around the article, and found that the pictures where taken from a real protest elsewhere, and not an "Anonymous" protest. All and all i think the "Church" is a bunch of bull and don't play fair with others.

I'm now prepared to get buried by the "Church" for my negative comments against them.

The irony, of course, is that at least one major telecom company stopped allowing the FBI to eavesdrop using their equipment when that agency stopped paying its bills. They can wrap themselves in the flag as much as they want, but it's still all about the bottom line to them.

The scary thing... They might think of using it for themselves to boost their own deployment. Why not?

"Millions of intelligent people took it as a reminder that GoDaddy should be avoided at all costs."

I'm shocked anyone uses GoDaddy after the last time they took down a website because Myspace asked them to. Then GoDaddy says they gave the admin a hour notice and the admin revealed evidence giving him only one minute notice. GoDaddy's response? "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous". Tank-ya masta! Tank-ya masta GoDaddy for the 1 minute notice!

"Millions of intelligent people took it as a reminder that GoDaddy should be avoided at all costs."

I'm shocked anyone uses GoDaddy after the last time they took down a website because Myspace asked them to. Then GoDaddy says they gave the admin a hour notice and the admin revealed evidence giving him only one minute notice. GoDaddy's response? "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous". Tank-ya masta! Tank-ya masta GoDaddy for the 1 minute notice!

A whistleblower recently (this last week) reported that he worked on a direct link from Quantico (either Navy or FBI... take a guess?) directly into his un-named "major wireless provider" servers. Complete access to data packets, billing records, full read/write access.

The employee was turned down flat when he wanted to install access controls on the connection. He was turned down when he wanted to install loggers.

An eerily similar lawsuit names Verizon as the defendent with pretty much identical allegations.

lol... top google news for quantico and verizon is slashdot 9 days ago. Wired broke it, I think.

Slashdot... http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/03/05/234203.shtml?tid=172
Wired... http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/whistleblower-f.html

There must be a very high bar to urge the House into a secret session for the first time in 25 years

The more my colleagues know, the less they believe this Administration's rhetoric. As someone who has chaired classified hearings and reviewed classified materials on this subject, I believe the more information Members receive about this Administration's actions in the area of warrantless surveillance, the more likely they are to reject the Administration's scare tactics and threats. My colleagues who joined me in the hearings and reviewed the Administration's documents have walked away with an inescapable conclusion: the Administration has not made the case for unprecedented spying powers and blanket retroactive immunity for phone companies.

Whether this is a worthwhile exercise or mere grandstanding depends on whether Republicans have groundbreaking new information that would affect the legislative process. There must be a very high bar to urge the House into a secret session for the first time in 25 years. I eagerly await their presentation to see if it clears this threshold. As someone who has seen and heard an enormous amount of information already, I have my doubts.

[House Minority Leader] Boehner's spokesman, Kevin Smith, derided the secret session proposal as a stalling tactic.

"There are clear rules and procedures for how Congress handles classified information," Smith said. "This nonsense is nothing more than another stalling tactic from a bunch of liberals who don't want to give our intelligence officials all the tools they need to keep America safe."

Wireless infrastructure is a completely different and much less expensive matter. Cell towers aren't cheap, but compared to running cable to every residence they're practically free.

And that's why landline companies are fighting attempts to offer Muni WiFi. Small city X has no provider of broadband services so they decide to setup their own wifi. When they do they end up fighting commercial businesses trying to stop them. These businesses are concerned about compeating against government, which I understand, but then they won't buildout themselves which is why the munis decided to themselves. Being libertarian I don't particularly like taxpayers being stuck with the bill myself, I do however like what a group of communities in northeastern Utah are doing. There they are creating a "Broadband Utopia". While the communities own the infrastructure access by any entity that wants to provide a service it is capable of can use it. Because of the competition almost 2 years ago Comcast was forced to offer a triple play of cable tv, net access, and phone service (landline) for $90 in the area.

"The moment a big gov't contractor (or the gov't itself) gets burned by a patent troll, we have a chance of change."

It already happened:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68894?currentPage=all

The government just used "state secrets privilege" to prevent the lawsuit from occuring.

Sadly, most other victims of patents can't change the law to suit themselves (like the government with the Blackberry patent) or shut-down the courts (like Lucent in this case)

If ever an article needed a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. Turing Test AI's combined with holodecks? All we need now is to pair it with those carnivore hunter-seeker robots that power themselves with fermented slug-flesh and just wait for them to figure out humans have more meat.

Indeed. For more on the subject (and a pic of those cool giant trucks) see this Wired article.

> Thanks for taking the time to write this.

You're very welcome. It's something I needed to do, a sort of
professional-piety response, perhaps, giving credit where due.

> I enjoyed it very much. I never stop to think about how my affinity
> for Perl might be related to imagination then related to AD&D.

Adam Rogers of Wired Magazine wrote convincingly in the NY Times that:

        GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse.
        This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I strongly encourage you and all programmers and gamers alike to check out
what Adam has to say there about our world being one that Gary built.

Adam also has a 17-minute segment on NPR:
      http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88062853

D&D promotes open, imaginate thinking and problem-solving ability.
Consumerist alpha-state zombies entranced by the bube tomb do not
develop these skills. From the moment I took up D&D in 1975, lo these
33 years ago, I never again watched TV with any regularity, racking up
fewer hours per year than the average American does in a single week. I
later became convinced by Postman's position, and his take on Huxley's
_Brave_New_Word_, and so came to see television as modern-day soma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_1984

The crossover between gamers and programmers, especially but apparently
not uniquely those of us of a certain age, is remarkably high. For it's
still going on as young players, often social outcasts looking for a safe-
space for nerds or geeks or whatever outsider term you care to apply to
them and us, are always coming into the gaming world.

The imaginative, creative, problem-solving ability essential in any good
admin or programmer is not nurtured by couch potatoes in trance state
worshiping their false idols of TV and spectator sports, wasting away
"Amusing Themselves to Death" per Postman. That ability is stifled, quelled,
stanched, nipped in the bud before it can even develop. Instead, these
abilities are much better fed by interactive challenges, and this is why
good gamers make good sysadmins, and good programmers sometimes, too.

Gary also helped plant the seed in me of being a word-guy, something of
a vocabulary antiquarian. He would plumb older sources for words in
English that in modern times were either unused entirely, or used
quite differently. A brief list of these might include:

        adamantite, aegis, cantrip, cuirass, curate, drow, durance vile,
        dweomer, electrum, glaive, habergeon, lich, morningstar, myrmidon,
        panoply, rune, sigaldry, sigil, thaumaturge, theurgist, and wight.

I should really write these all down some time. I'll bet even such words
as apothecary and dwarves owe much to Gary for their modern currency.

For a while, Slate had the best Gary Gygax article at:
        http://www.slate.com/id/2185914/pagenum/all/#page_start

But I think now that the Wired treatment is most impressive:
        http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax

--tom

There's more similarly structured stories starting to appear. Check this tagline...

What's your point, that the iPhone doesn't represent a monopoly? That's obvious and irrelevant. MSIE started with a 1% marketshare. That didn't stop the DOJ from filing a complaint seeking a one million dollar a day fine a year later. Why? Because MS was abusing their OS monopoly to give their browser an advantage. You've conceded that iTMS gives iPhone an advantage. Unless you're arguing that iTMS's 90% marketshare in online music sales does not represent a monopoly, which you do not seem to be addressing, the debate is over. Assuming iTMS is a monopoly, then Apple's refusal to deal on Fairplay is clearly illegal under antitrust regulations. Stating I've won based on that assumption is perfectly valid as long as you continue to fail to refute that iTMS represents a monopoly.

I thought it was me providing you information to help you figure out your problem. If it's occurring only on your machine, that sounds like it's the number (2) situation I describe. If you still think it's the number (1) situation, it's still up to you to write a useful bug report. You can read what folks are saying about Firefox 3, and I don't see any hint of it having any memory problem. In fact, they seem to be saying there isn't one.

This is an interesting idea that has probably been already investigated by many marketing corporations.

That seems notable, from the discussion page:

This page has been cited as a source by a media organization. The citation is in:

* "Lamest Technology Mascots Ever", Wired News, April 25, 2007. (details)

Just how many women do you think would pick up a pair of Privacy Britches (TM) to go through the check process? I am betting 99.9999%, with the very small percentage being nymphomaniacs, exhibitionists, and freaky sadistic grannies.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/sxsw-mark-zucke.html

I hereby certify under penalty of perjury that the information in this notice is accurate...

Nobody says that because the law doesn't require it. The law only requires the lawyer to state under penalty of perjury that they represent the person/organization they claim to represent. The rest of the notice only has to be made with a good-faith belief that it is accurate.

She also states:

I have a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above has been authorized by the U.S. Air Force, its agents, or the law.

The Air Force actually asked Wired to publish the video. Their own website even claims it may be copied and distributed. The takedown notice was supposed to go through the Air Force marketing cheif's office but never did. I suspect Ms Pikser isn't the most qualified of lawyers.

For those who didn't RTFA, here's a link to the actual takedown notice, and here's Reed Smith's website (the law firm that sent the notice on behalf of the Air Force).

Actually, the argument goes: Transparency of party A with respect to party B gives B power over A. The amount of power is greater if B already has some power over A.

Your employer already has a lot more power over you than you do over them, in most circumstances. At the same time, too much information from them to you gives you too much power over them (I could burn the whole building down!)

I'm not sure what metric we use to determine who should have how much power, though. And there's also the eternal value of privacy to consider.

When you see that http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki.html/, which are armed robots firing when they "feel like" it'a an enemy target, you start wondering how evolved is the AI... Having an open-source project will certainly help to create better AI. Please use Asimov's 3 laws of robotics! (are those 3 laws just perfect btw?)

1. to destroy microorganisms in or on, usually by bringing to a high temperature with steam, dry heat, or boiling liquid.

I'm sure of it. Despite the media portrayal of it, real world investigations of *organized crime* (not the same thing as "all criminals") over the last decade plus has shown them to be eager to adopt technology that furthers their interest.

It's no suprise really. One could even say it is eminently logical. Organized crime is the black market version of the corporation, indeed they are often "fronted" via legal corporations. If you think industrial espionage is something in the legal world, you should see what goes on in the underworld. I would suggest that most of the drive to higher technology among organized crime is to counter each other more so than to avoid government visibility. One could argue that the mafia's use of odd physical items to "send a message" is a form of message hiding.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/mafia_pr.html is one example.

The government (US and others) has been talking about this at least as far back as 1993, remember Clipper?

Do all "mobs" use encryption and/or have IT? No. But the larger more successful among them certainly do. This is increasingly so with former KGB members becoming more common in the global organized crime environment. Those guys, however, are more likely to extend their capabilities with dead drops and steganography.

First thing I'll buy: a rotary-dial interface that uses gestures to dial! No cop-out touch-sensitive numbers. It has to rotate with my finger as I pull it around, then snap back and enter that number.

Everyone always jokes about this, but it would be so frickin cool. Retro is the new black.

an excerpt....
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=2
"WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN
Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel's latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors."

Point me to a listing of top downloaded songs, videos, or games which contains *one* work created prior to 1997. Go on, I'll wait.

The mass entertainment industry produces disposable culture and markets to create a perpetual demand for the new culture. That is what the pirates pirate, because that is what the pirates (and essentially everybody else) wants.

Let's look at the data:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/12/YE_best_of_p2p

Top Songs of 2007
1. Shop Boyz, "Party Like A Rock Star"
2. Akon, "I Wanna Luv U"
3. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls"
4. Mims, "This Is Why I'm Hot"
5. Akon, "Don't Matter"
6. T-Pain, "Bartender"
7. Soulja Boy, "Crank Dat Soulja Boy"
8. Justin Timberlake, "My Love"
9. DJ Unk, "Walk It Out"
10. Jim Jones, "We Fly High"

A shocker! Long copyrights cause piracy of songs out less than one year! Clearly the public domain is being impoverished by being denied the heartrending artistic stylings of Justni Timberlake, forever locked up by the evil copyright lawyers!

If you look at movies, you'll find the same thing: piracy is very much a recent-blockbuster phenomenon.

Top Movies of 2007
1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

This from the mighty mighty Air Force which banned blogs, which accidentally flew nukes cross-country, which wants to start a "Cyber-Command." Not trying to flame, but why do they insult their own intelligence by banning the viewing of blogs while allowing this sort of crap to happen?

I can never understand how programmers stand to watch their creations being usurped for commercial purposes

They are acting out of charity, and simultaneously driving down the value of their own work and that of their peers. There *can* be some kind of business motive for this, as illustrated in http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
so long as there something that the programmer can profit from (ala the razor blade model, but in software it equates to
having to deal with the *suckage* tech support service business model), if not, it is purely a race to the bottom.

It's hard to not believe: "Hurrah for the companies that wish to exploit these misguided idealists!"

Newsflash: any undersea cable damage that causes a partial or complete outage is called a "cut". Most undersea cable "cuts" are not caused by ships, and most don't represent a cable being completely severed. They're caused by water currents, age, underwater pressure, kinks, geologic movement, natural phenomena, power failures, equipment outages, and a whole host of other issues. That's why there is an undersea cable failure, or "cut" in industry parlance, once every three days, on average, and why there are a fleet of 25 ships that do nothing but repair undersea cables.

Okay...

"Cable cuts happen on average once every three days," Beckert said. There are 25 large ships that do nothing but fix cable cuts and bends, [Stephan] Beckert [of TeleGeography Research] adds. [...] "Only the first two cuts had any serious impact on the internet." [...] Once those failures sensitized a conspiracy-happy net, it was natural that other cable failures would be found to feed the frenzy, because they occur all the time. [...] "Its difficult to tell what the motive would be: is it just to annoy people?" [Todd] Underwood [, a vice president at internet analysis firm Renesys,] said. "If it were targeted, the targeting is bad. The loonies on the American left say this was us targeting Iran. If this is us targeting Iran, we are much worse than I thought we were. [...] Are we really targeting India or Pakistan?" Underwood asked incredulously.

I love how conspiracy theories can explain away everything. If oil traders were really afraid of using the Iranian bourse because they think they're going to get on the US's bad side, and have made that decision because of the cable failures, you'd be able to find at least one person -- indeed, many -- saying that. Also, even though it would be in Iran's interests to finger the US for trying to stop the bourse, you claim that Iran is instead trying to hide that, because they are afraid it would scare people away from using the bourse. Iran was barely affected by this, so how can they be assumed to be the target? Even that can be explained away as, "Well, the US didn't want to make it too obvious, and knew that potential bourse clients would 'get the message'," all while everyone remains miraculously silent?

Look, I know you and others may want to believe this was deliberate US action against Iran. Unfortunately, the facts just don't support that claim. Even the fantasies people have come up with don't support that claim. This whole Iranian Oil Bourse plot is nothing more than a figment of the blogosphere's overworked imagination. The bourse is here, and, as everyone except Iran's state-run press predicted, it has been met with a lukewarm reception.

Except that any disruption was very temporary, and the Iranian bourse opened as planned.

So what's the explanation, again...?

And there has been an explanation for the FALCON cable failure.

Please provide references for your claims about Russian military exercises to "protect" undersea cables, and Egypt's "claims" that the cables were cut.

I don't expect there will be a response, given that it is the cable operators, not the Egyptian government (since it is not their cable), who would be "examining the damage", and no cable operator has said any such thing. In fact, numerous experts have dismissed such claims.

Apple delivers on features in spades with their OS and hardware. They are, more often than not, delivering features years before other hardware and software vendors. Take a look at the Mac Mini, released in July of 2005. It's now March 2008 and there is FINALLY a comparable PC and it still looks like something out of the 80s. I'm a hardcore Apple fan, but you are making excuses for a lousy, rushed product. A glass phone? WTF were they thinking? And we're STILL waiting on a real SDK even though that was due "by February."

A fine novel by a fine SF author (review: http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2006/11/vernor_vinges_r.html) He forecasts (probably tongue-in-cheek) the end of paper-book libraries when a private company gets the contract to digitize all the remaining paper books by the equivalent of the Human Genome Project "shotgun" technique. Their quick and efficient method of digitizing is to throw multiple copies of the book into a shredder, blow the fragments down a tunnel lined with scanning cameras, and fast computers piece all the fragments together to make a 99.99% accurate representation of the original text. Naturally they are opposed by book lovers who consider this horrifying - but it's all incidental to the main story line. I love Vernor Vinge's ideas!

Have you ever actually read the constitution? It borders on paranoid as to the extent to which it goes to ensure that the government doesn't become too powerful. America's worst infractions have been a result of directly and blatantly violating the constitution.

I think, the GP's point was, Americans today don't care as much — we don't share the Founders' paranoia. Probably, because we have not seen the problem firsthand in too many generations — thanks, no doubt, to the Constitution.

The First Amendment itself is getting chipped away — you can't fake e-mail headers (there goes the anonymous speech, deemed precious on this very forum every time some asshole tries to get away breaking copyrights), and you can't be helping a political candidate too much.

But Americans welcome these laws, because they seem to address an acute problem (spam, lobbyists with too much freedom of speech, etc.). We clearly lost most of that paranoia of 200 years ago... Don't even get me started on the Second Amendment...

Actually, German researchers have reported that DNA vaccines may be deliverable via a tattoo gun. Whether they use a plasmid or a virus of whatever sort (not that deadly really) to deliver the DNA is still another question, but doing it effectively on a rather large scale would become feasible with this technique.

Superworms such as Storm represent perhaps the greatest threat to the internet becasue their stealthy natures allows the organization of millions of computers into a covert zombie botnet before their true exploit is finally launched. Will Cyber Command launch offensive operations to hunt down and destroy superworms already imbedded in cyberspace civilian computers, or create supermilworms (new word for CC use if you wish, with zero Google hits) that covertly draft millions of civilian cyberspace computers as secret War Reserve resources available for future callup and deployment in a future cyberspace battle?

But, you know, RTFA, and all that.

I did RTFA, and found no mention of

Now the Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read. [emphasis mine -mi]

There is nothing wrong with such limitations per se — controlling, what information gets out of the military, is perfectly legitimate.

"The military's war on blogs, first reported last spring, is picking up. Now the Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read. One senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so 'utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.'" (emphasis added)

"The military's war on blogs, first reported last spring, is picking up. Now the Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read. One senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so 'utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.'" (emphasis added)

>It would only work if we ... use prison labor ... US companies take advantage of the low cost labor.

They already do. Some states employ inmates in for-profit call centers. Others in factories. Some inmates only get paid 12 an cents hour.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/02/62430

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/2002-03-28/curr2.html

The only time a licensing request should be denied is in the case of gross misconduct of the licensee or if the licensee is a direct competitor to whom providing the patent would materially damage the patent holder.