Slashdot Mirror

Ellen Heber-Katz, a professor at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was working with mice that had been genetically engineered to develop lupus when she noticed that some of their ears looked weird. She had punched holes in them so she could separate her control from her treatment groups in an experiment. But the holes quickly grew shut without a trace -- not even a hint of a scar.

The missing ear holes confused her research at the time, but the phenomenon launched a whole new career for Katz.

She and her colleagues wanted to find out if other parts of these mice, known as the MRL strain, would also regenerate. So they performed some tests: They snipped off the tip of a tail, severed a spinal cord, injured the optic nerve and damaged various internal organs.

All of the injuries healed, even the severed spinal cord. The results caused Heber-Katz to shift her research from autoimmune disease to regenerative medicine.

Now, thanks to Darpa's call for grant applications in regeneration, scientists all over the country from various disciplines are working together on the MRL mouse...

More at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,718 17-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

cisco IOS is proprietary and doesn't have a great track record with security

If, by "ex-cons" you mean "felons," then you should understand that allowing them to vote is election fraud. Until the law changes in most places, activists trying to get felons somehow into a voting booth are the ones committing the crime.

"Most places" allow "ex-cons" to vote once their prison sentence and any attached probation is up. Florida, however, is not among "most places", but using an incorrect felon vetting list even after you've been notified that it's wrong is certainly not ranked up at the top of the guide to running a clean election.

Shame the thousands of people who were disenfranchised because they were incorrectly labeled as felons didn't all get up and sue the living daylights out of them for slander. Terrible shame we have to whip out the lawyers to get anything done right these days.

Sometimes I wonder whether the head knows what the body's doing at all with MS. Ballmer's attitude consistantly seems to contradict MS' as a whole recently.

It reminds me very much of Steve Ballmer as presented in this hypothetical memo.

Botnetted to death?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/botnet.ht ml?pg=1&topic=botnet&topic_set=

From Wired (http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.htm l):

Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time
- Alan Moore

TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! ... nobody there ...
- Harry Harrison

Osama's time machine: President Gore concerned.
- Charles Stross

So, who gets the power next?

The machines of course. Humanity will be reduced to the status of domesticated animals.

Our robot overlords would have you know that we taste like bacon and prosciutto.

This might be the most expensive boondoggle, but a disaster is where peoples lives are lost. There are better examples of computer disasters.

What the article actually said was

1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine

Also, I have to call shenanigans on your claim that 3 grams of morphine will stop one's breathing. Did you just pull that number out of your ass? Here's some real info from the MSDS for morphine sulfate, which says

Morphine sulfate anhydrous: Oral rat LD50: 461 mg/kg; oral mouse LD50: 600 mg/kg

In other news, I wonder why I haven't been hearing more about tetrodotoxin (from pufferfish) which is a highly effective pain killer in basically homeopathic doses. Maybe the small dose is the reason we haven't heard anything--hard to make a profit on microgram quantities of an easily obtained natural product.

As for the proportionality of the punishment: well, that's a matter for the sovereign nation of Singapore and its citizens to resolve.

Heck, even the economic growth rate is a state secret!!!!

Feh. Singapore: Disneyland with the death penalty (William Gibson)

It uses the Authentec chip which is in many readers. It is extremely difficult to fool because it scans below the skin level. Some jello mold finger isn't going to work with this.

It uses the Authentec chip which is in many readers. It is extremely difficult to fool because it scans below the skin level. Some jello mold finger isn't going to work with this.

That's not really true. Solar power can be practical, and even profitable. Here's an article from wired last year that talks about a family in Illinois (not too far from you with a similar climate, I think) who paid only $3,625 after rebates and grants for their solar grid. After six years with the current energy prices, the investment will have paid for itself. I'm not sure how you want to define "practical", but that seems like a pretty good system to me, and the cost of initial investment should be lower after a year and a half.

There was a good Wired Article on a startup company developing a solar cell product using a concentrator back in June of 2005, which included good coverage of the reasons behind using concentrators, as they're much cheaper than silicon, and solar cells can handle much more intense light than plain sunlight.

Why did they get somebody to draw this little beauty, instead of taking a picture? Or is this one of those new-fangled pixel-per-pixel cameras? ;)

Oh, don't mind me, I'll go back to my corner.

what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

How will we feed it? Read the article about the robot that identifies human flesh as bacon and see if that answers your question.

What are the odds that Microsoft has language in the contract of the deal which allows them to break/undo/shift blame if Novell can't stay clear of GPL legal issues? Anyone who thinks Microsoft is really interested in helping out Linux is forgetting that MS is a company that has been found guilty -- as a point of law -- of using their monopoly position to hurt other companies. Do you think Balmer had a change of heart or something, or that The Microsoft Memo was real and not make believe? Microsoft cannot be trusted -- end of story.

Here's a story about a Tranax ATM being hacked: ATM Hack Uncovered. They discussed this on Digg: ATM Hack Uncovered.

Diebold voting machines are certainly not secure: Insecure voting. Be sure to watch the HBO Special, "Hacking Democracy", linked there and mentioned in an earlier Slashdot front page story.

It's not that there is specific information about hacking Diebold ATMs. It's that there is so much information indicating that Diebold is not interested in security.

They were Triton and Tranax ATM's - http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_ id=1561329 - which are usually operated by small businesses, not banks.

Actually, the US is way ahead of them on this one. How can you beat citizens banging on your door and asking for an implant?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(hu man)
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=487 60
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,50187,00. html

I agree it can't be long until governments and employers everywhere encourage people to "voluntarily" get chipped.

The problem most states have is that they do not have a large pre-existing and non-partisan based bureaucracy in place with a tech background, that possesses an understanding of the potential pitfalls with electronic voting machines, along with vast experience in enforcement. These States should look for help from one that has a long history of dealing with honest and transparent auditing from electronic devices.

In Nevada, Dean Heller, the Scretary of State, decided to tap the knowledge of the Nevada Gaming Control Authority when deciding upon a system to choose. They rejected Diebold machines, judging them to be easily tampered with, and instead went with Sequoia Voting Systems, but only after a paper trail model, which was satisfactory to the state had been implemented. Sequoia's name for this version seems to be, AVC Edge® with VeriVote Printer.

Nevada was the only state in 2004 to require a paper trail in their electronic voting machines, and the election was smooth. Here's the current URL for The Clark County, Nevada(Las Vegas)Election Department's voting machine guide.

Today was my second use of the machine (I didn't vote in the primary-it tends to be pointless for non-partisan voters like me), and I have a fairly high degree of faith in its veracity. This faith is contingent on believing that any tampering from the government side would require too large of a group of individuals to keep it quiet, and that Nevada Gaming Control Authority values its integrity higher than short term partisan interests. The vote begins with signing a registered voter print-out next to my name, then a card with a programmable magnetic strip is given to me whereupon I go to a machine and insert it. Then I make my election choices using a touch screen screen. After finishing those, I am given an onscreen recap of my intended vote, and if acceptable, the vote is then printed on a continuous register tape that can be viewed behind a glass barrier, and if it is the same as my vote, I finalise my vote.

Perfect? Hardly, but it fewer problems than the punch card balloting, and the old lever voting machines that were in use before those.

Here are a few links:

• Rachel Konrad-AP, "'Paper trail' voting system used in Nevada Electronic ballot machines equipped with printers", MSNBC, September 7, 2004
• Marsha Walton, "Nevada improves odds with e-vote: Slot machine experts consulted on voting technology", CNN, October 29, 2004
• Jim Drinkard, "High-tech voting accessory: Paper", USA Today, August 8, 2005
• Associated Press, "Nevada's Seamless E-Vote", Wired, September 13, 2004

There is at least one dissenter in Nevada though:
Martin Griffith, "Citizen activist sues provider of electronic voting machines", Tahoe Daily Tribune, October 30, 2006.
Maybe a grain of salt would be a proper prescription with this link though, as 'activist' does seem to be used properly in this headline, and it is the only complaint of this nature I am aware of.

source one. source two. source three. source four. source five.

One from The Register: http://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/operation_ca rdkeeper_phishing_arrests/

And the Wired article sited by The Register:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72064-0.htm l?tw=wn_index_1

"We had to have him," says Nesson, who allocated half the center's $5.4 million initial budget to support Lessig as the Berkman professor.

Lessig has got pretty wealthy telling everyone else to give away their stuff for nothing.

Try this :

http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,72074-0.ht ml?tw=wn_index_8

Not only he is not part of the solution. He is actively being part of the problem

Go sit in front of your TV. After five minutes or so, look where your hands are. Likely they're just sprawled out at either side of your torso. Where they're likely not is sitting parallel to each other in the middle of your lap, where they'd be if you had a game controller. This isn't an unnatural position per se, but neither could it be called a rest position. Of course it works -- I've been doing it for twenty-odd years and have no problem with it, per se.

But the Wii controller is split in two halves. And you don't need to constantly be pointing the Wii remote half at the TV screen, because it doesn't control the camera and this isn't a first-person shooter. You only need point the remote at the TV when required by the game -- when you're going to shoot your slingshot, or for other purposes (which will be revealed when the final embargo date is up).

Get where I'm going with this? By hour two or so, my remote hand was resting on my right leg, twisted inwards. But my left hand was out of my lap entirely, just hanging over the arm of the chair as if I was holding a Dustbuster and cleaning the rug. And I was playing the game, actively, perfectly.

Had the only innovation of the Wii controller been to split the game pad up into two independent halves, it would have been worth it for that alone. You can't understand this with a five-minute trade show demo. You have to be at home, in your natural environment...

So is this the beginning of an open-source Microsoft operating system kernel, atop which a new (.NET powered, perhaps?) Window manager will run? Did Wired have it right all along -- except the core will be OpenWinCE instead of Linux?

Hey -- if Apple fanatics are right, then MS will do something to further imitate Mac OS X, and OpenWinCE under Avalon 2.0 (et al) and dropping all backward compatibility makes more sense than Torvalds taking over the kernel team in Redmond.

Now, more so than ever, I hope that the PS3 fails! It sickens me to think of wide spread proliferation of this console in home all across the world draining all that power :( Consumer electronics are one of the first things that need to become more energy efficient if we are going to taclke this little problem that we're getting ourselves into...

Attack of the Bots ... a somewhat long, but informative, read.

Maine is trying to.

Much of the criticism against the project has been of the "let them catch up, then give them technology" variety. I think Negroponte's whole point is third world countries will never catch up if they don't have technology. I think he's onto something.

...you forgot the infamous "Sony Rootkit."

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticust omer_te.html
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69601,00. html
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-root kits-and-digital-rights.html
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+will+wipe+Sonys+root kit/2100-1002_3-5949041.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Sony_CD_copy_pro tection_controversy

.... Cisco does it for them: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68326,00 .html

Wright also had an essay in Wired magazine in April explaining why he felt they were important and help to spur our imagination.

Maybe you are saying this because you like your Dell computer. Maybe you like your Xbox 360 or future-Wii. Please realize that getting rid of Sony would only make these other systems more expensive. Your wish for Sony's death is a wish for higher prices for yourself. If the PS3 vanished, Microsoft could charge more for their products, claiming the Wii doesn't compete (which it wouldn't in some respects). So be careful what you wish for. Wired says Sony is betting the farm, I don't see it. The PS sold so much more than the Xboxen and 7th-gen consoles are the same fight as it ever was.

That's fairly bold; you don't even know what regolith is and you're suggesting I should read up on it? LOL! In any case, if you really think this is less of a problem on Mars where they have known windstorms that make hurricans seem like a summer breeze than I'm sorry but you're out of your mind.

Full information about the hazard of lunar dust is here.

The windstorms on Mars are what make its dust less of a problem. Lunar dust is abrasive because there isn't any weather to wear down the particles' sharp edges.

I don't know about 13 gigapixels, but a 4 gigapixel camera already exists.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,66498-0.htm l

P.S. Congressman Markey's response this morning (issued on a Sunday, so he obviously took it fairly seriously) is more like what I would have hoped to see in the first place:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/10/congressm an_res.html

So Markey's initial reaction at least was a kneejerk one in which he didn't have enough information. (He would make a good Slashdot denizen...) Now all that has to happen is for prosecutors and the FBI to back down similarly. I won't be holding my breath...

Edward Markey is your representitive, send him a message: http://markey.house.gov/

Here is a copy of what I sent him:

As a Computer Engineer at the University of Utah, I commonly read articles from technology oriented magazines. I recently came across this article: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72023-0.htm l?tw=rss.index.

I'm also active politically, and a lifelong Democrat. Is the characterization of you in this article fair? Are your positions intentionally being misrepresented to alienate your base? If this is an accurate depiction of your stance--- I feel your position does not in any way represent the spirit of our free society, and the Democratic party. I would hope, upon further inspection, you would have the humility to reverse that position.

Mr. Soghoian may himself be a rather talented computer scientist--- but it would not take a talented, or advanced, computer scientist to forge boarding passes using Photoshop. I think my Grandma possesses the technical expertise to do so. Mr. Soghoian's software only illustrates capabilities enemies to our country absolutely already have thought of, and developed.

Often, security exploits will come out for Microsoft Windows. The discoverer, being a decent human being, would often report it to Microsoft in full. In the past, Microsoft would wait for an inordinate period of time to issue a patch. In the meantime, other more nefarious people would learn about these exploits independently, and use them to their advantage.

Eventually, the initial reporter would become so frustrated about the inactivity--- that it became clear the only way to prod Microsoft to issue some kind of patch to protect its users, would be to fully disclose the exploit to its users. Nefarious individuals, this entire time, exploiting it for personal and financial gain.

Microsoft's initial response to this was to try to silence reporters through threats of lawsuits, or criminal prosecution. This would clearly have a chilling effect on any other potential reporters wanting to deal with Microsoft in the future. Microsoft wasn't as interested in actually securing its operating system, but instead simply giving its users a false semblance of security.

Do you want to make a chilling effect to alienate technologically knowledgeable Americans from the United States Government? Mr. Soghoian's software does not aid terrorists, it reveals nothing that certainly wasn't already known of. It only replicates functionality that could be reproduced by any Grandma with a 40 dollar scanner, and Photoshop.

This is a production of a concerned American citizen, to illustrate to other American citizens a danger we face. It was made to prod an inactive republican majority in congress, and a republican controlled executive, to take 'real' action to protect our airport security. A danger, that so far, our political organizations haven't acted upon.

The current administration seems completely reliant on frightening people, and espousing their supposed commitment to national security to alleviate these fears. In reality, they have done very little for homeland security, and are the most likely to actively support Americans who are experts in these various fields being made criminals, and silenced, for attempting to remedy security issues.

I'm certain you're concerned with protecting the security of American families. The best way to go about this is to rely on the talent, and good intentions of concerned American citizens--- not to alienate and criminalize their free speech.

Indeed. Some interesting articles have been written about how to fly without an ID, including the "Identity Project, asking people to try to fly with no ID and report their experiences.

FBI says they didn't arrest him, but various people have tried to get in touch with him since then, and were unable to.

A similar story appeared in Wired three years ago: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml
and here's some background on De Beers and engagement rings: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

If someone rigs an election this site would in no way be culpable.

Of course it wouldn't. It's perfectly clear to anyone. But, unfortunately, that's completely irrelevant to whether they will be sued into oblivion. For goodness' sake, SunnComm threatened to sue the guy who figured out that holding down the shift key would disable their copy protection system.

I think that litigation, even if frivolous and idiotic, is still something that someone publicising potential election-hacking information needs to be very wary of. Hell, under the DMCA such a suit could even be successful.

Excellent must read article on the matter from Wired some time ago.

Still think DeBeers isn't worried?

Really old news. Wired magazine did a great article about this back in September 2003 titled, "The New Diamond Age." Linky here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml

Since I have read this far down and nobody has posted a decent explanation on the difference between a Debeers mined diamond and a made one I thought I would post some five year old info about where they used to be up to. The most advanced people at making artificial diamonds was a lab in Russia.

As far as I can remember the main problem they were encountering was Nitrogen. In a natural diamond which forms over a long period of time the nitrogen atoms would drift together over time and end up clumped together and form a seperate molecule (N4) of pure nitrogen embeded in the carbon lattice. This nitrogen molecule absorbed some light from the carbon but was otherwise undetectable.

In the early attempts at making artificial diamonds they left the nitrogen in but it did not migrate together so ended up actually part of the carbon lattice. This gave the artificial diamonds a slight yellow tint as the nitrogen also emitted light back into the diamond crystal lattice. The Russian solution was to remove all the nitrogen at the start of the process.

This produced perfect, pure carbon diamonds with a perfect crystal lattice. These diamonds however had a the property of trapping light so that when the light falling on them ceased (you switched the light off) they fluoresced, giving off the light they had been trapping with in the crystal lattice due to total internal reflection. Now this may have made them really cool but it did make them different to naturally occuring diamond.

What the Russian team really needed was a way to leave in the Nitrogen impurity but so that it did not ever interupt the carbon crystal lattice.

At this point De Beers was already shitting themselves and started looking at ways of marking there diamonds to prove they were mined diamonds not some knocked up in a lab. They semed to have a number of ideas such as laser etching the DeBeers trademark on each stone and similar but I dont know what the ultimately chose.

If someone has some more info, please post it but don't start it with your dad, grandad, etc used to be jeweler as this just makes it hopelessly outdated. These new lab made diamonds are not like anything De Beers have had to deal with before (Cubic Zirconia, etc) as they are actually made of carbon which is formed into a diamond lattice using super high pressures but in a lab rather than underground.

This information came from some sort of TV documentary I saw a number of years ago.

I did however just throw some stuff at google and this is what came back -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/diamondl abstrans.shtml - The program I watched on BBC and have summarised (badly) above.

(Please note - my summary is from memory so the info on the above link will be better.)

http://www.russianbrilliants.net/introduction.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/99081 7092046.htm
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml

It's not a good article and it's not something that just happened.

See this for a good article (and it's from 2003).

You can even buy them here or here, or just read the wired article and check up on the companies mentioned in it.

It's true that articulatory speech recognition should be easier than automatic speech recognition (ASR) based on waveform analysis alone. It's massively unfortunate that ASR research has, at least for the past 20 years, concentrated mostly on the latter and not the former. Janet Baker, whose MIT PhD introduced Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based ASR, and opened the door to companies such as Dragon (which she and her husband founded), is herself now saying that HMMs are rubbish for speech recognition. I desperately hope that through this CMU project, and others, that people will start to take note of this.

I think you're entirely correct that the machine translation (MT) stage is a bolt-on in this particular project. This project is I think a vehicle for articulatory ASR rather than MT. But I wouldn't be so keen to dismiss MT efforts altogether. It's true that in some ways the current deployable systems make gross assumptions about language, which may be even worse than the assumptions ASR systems make about speech (that's particularly true of purely statistical MT systems). But Google and others have apparently shown that with a large enough corpus, you can get results that extend beyond simple phrase-book look-up quality.

There's one main question facing the researchers at CMU, I think. That's whether people will be happy to stick a dozen electrodes on their face in order to achieve speech-to-speech translation, or whether they'll prefer to speak into a microphone and have a speech synthesiser (e.g. the open-source Festival, partly developed at CMU) speak the result. I'm not entirely convinced they will, but I'd be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.

I mean seriously, Fedora, Ubuntu, et al don't even come CLOSE in terms of usability compared to Windows.

Mac OS X does.

BeOS did.

Linux still is and always will be a hobbyist OS.

I happened to find out today that the SCTP vulnerability in the linux kernel (back in 2.6.14 days) exists because of lack of standard checks in the kernel that were outlined in the draft proposal

(read: lazy developer let things slide because of the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody mentality).. I mean seriously..

if you fail to see that problem then you're also going to fail to see why X is the worst idea for a desktop environment

(hint: BeOS, heck even SkyOS and AtheOS/syllable have tight windowing systems.. why are we still pushing X?)

I've posted on this topic before here in this article. They can be used as a semiconductor material and achieve speeds of 81GHz. And don't forget the older Wired article about The New Diamond Age either. :) Cheers.