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Now THAT is funny. If anything, I'd be VERY surprised if Vista was not another petry dish for virus's and the likes. But hey, it could happen. After all, the company brought you The Trustworthy Computing Initiative in Jan 2002( http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,49826,00 .html ) and look what that resulted in. And wasn't Windows 2K the most secure Windows ever( or was it XP? ). Don't forget that every OS shipment since Windows 3.1 it was claimed that it was written from the ground up for some popular buzzword of the moment. Yet, we find out that the WFM bug was a hold over from code originating in Windows 3.x...

Denial? I don't think so. Scared? Pleease. Customers, friends and relatives are black and blue from failed Microsoft promises over the years. But hey, the marketing techniques are interesting. Like this PR bit about "black hats" being challenged to find holes in Vista. Funny how the product never speaks for itself.

LoB

No, he means this girl!
 
Just wait til you see the upgraded core duo twins...

I don't know if that is entirely accurate. I just came from the future and found the following memo. Sure, this was meant to be more for entertainment than some deep analysis on the future of Microsoft. But it does make you think that the future of Microsoft is not in doing everything their way and from the ground up, but instead let others deal with the low-level stuff and they can focus on what they are really selling -- a GUI with lots of bells and whistles. Looking at Vista development, how much easier would it have been to use a tried-and-true Unix security and permissions model and focus their attention on how to provide the user with the best interactive environment?

It's important to understand the challenge that NASA is up against: During Apollo, NASA had approximately 2.5% of the national budget. Today, NASA has less than 1%, and they've been asked to do the same job while having to cover the expense of the International Space Station ($4B per year) and the Shuttle (~$2B per year, perhaps more--it depends on whose numbers you believe). That leaves (very approximately) 1/5 the spending power as what was available in Apollo.

I chose to respond to this particular response because I thought it was the most interesting and thoughtful. Here are some more things to think about:

1) You're absolutely correct, and that's why NASA is using as much existing hardware as possible. However, I was in the Air and Space museum the other day and saw folks with NASA badges physically measuring the old Apollo equipment with a 12" ruler. Kind of frightening. 2) Not true. You're forgetting that Mars has an atmosphere and the Moon does not. The Moon's surface is pummeled by asteroids; this liquefies the surface (or so the theory goes) and turns it into something like volcanic glass. The next time that an asteroid strikes the surface, this glass shatters, and the microparticles are very small. They are also very sharp, with edges so sharp that air molecules would break them--but there's no air. So those jagged little crystals get into and on everything. Mars dust isn't nearly as bad, as evidenced by the rovers. There are some excellent resources on the web about the problems of lunar dust. Here's one for your enjoyment.

3) Heat shields are extremely tricky. The center of gravity and the shape of the heatshield determine how large the heatshield can be built. These are lift-producing shapes, so that the capsule can steer a bit while its coming down. No capsule has ever been as large as 5m (Apollo's was 3.9m) and the materials simply don't exist. There are several good candidates, but the best one (far outperforming the others) is made by a small company of ~8 people. Unless that company licenses the material, NASA will never go with it--it would be a real problem if the supplier went out of business. Bottom line is that we can't use the one from Stardust. Not only is it the wrong shape and size, but even if it were, it's not human-rated.

4) I completely agree with you: rocket engine throttling is well known, it's just that a capable has to be developed. That's expensive, and takes time, and NASA has approximately 1/5 the spending power that it did in the Apollo program.

5) I believe that if you check the record, no nuclear *reactor* has ever flown in space. There have been numerous nuclear power generators, such as the ones on Apollo, but they have all been sub-critical. The SP-100 project for having a nuclear reactor in space was cancelled by Clinton in the early 90s, right before they were to build a prototype. Almost all of the development knowledge has been lost from that, unfortunately. Cancelling a project of any sort tends to mean you have to start over (facilities are converted, drawings are lost, people with knowledge and experience go to other fields) but it's very true of technology development. If you stand down a tech development, it's very difficult to start it up again.

That said, I am not a nuke (what nuclear engineers are fond of calling themselves), but I know one, and she tells me that 1/6g is actually the worst case. It's more difficult to get the coolant to flow properly or something, I'm not a nuke. :) Again, let me stress that I b

Also good reading: an old Slashdot article on diamonds, which up until recently was one of the most-read stories.

Hopefully these guys can put an end to the whole fucking mess.

Old news! Wired ran this story three years ago. The technology isn't any more advanced now than it was then. Military.com published an extremely informative guide to invisibility last year. Much better than TFA.

Well, the USA isn't (yet) using this technology, but the Chinese are. Even Toshiba has one of these super-safe "pre-fab" tiny reactors, that are intended for distributed use. By distributing power generation, you eliminate many of the grid effects (like blacking out a significant portion of the country when there's a problem). Oh, and as a byproduct, you also get a plentiful supply of hydrogen. It's a crime that instead we are burning coal - releasing more "natural" radioactivity than any reactor ever has, as well as poisoning our seafood with mercury.

1. Apple is not interested in profit or marketshare (I'm sure their shareholders and board agree with that statement)

2. Apple users are superior to Windows / Intel users (Even when the Apple user boots with bootcamp to XP?)

3. Windows / Intel users are slobs (I suppose bootcamp users are slobs with style)

4. Apple systems are "lovingly crafted" (I can feel the love)

5. Apple knows their users and respects them (They know their users are dirty pirates, so they lovingly protect them with DRM) Let me know if I'm off...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid_pr.h tml

It's a lot cheaper to test drugs on poor Indians than to test them on Americans- all the more so because the Indians have a much harder time suing for negligence.

Like this test on blood substitutes. But I guess we can wear bracelets to "opt out" of testing.

It's already in the works..

"I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners)."

No, they are not. The primary system used to navigate that course was GPS -- there were only three notably short portions where sensors had to be used, and those were tunnels, which could have been dealt with by very simple mechanical feedback systems such as those found in some toys. I'm not saying they _were_ using such systems, merely that they could have used them, so the DARPA challenge did not require a functioning visual system of any sort to complete it.

I don't know much of the details of the race systems but I don't think they had enough time to map out the coordinates of the course with sufficient detail to navigate with GPS only. Also I've been under the impression that even GPS with WAAS is only accurate to within about 10 feet. They could have used local differential GPS I suppose. Also, sometimes the cars had to pass, and GPS would have been no use for that. Carnegie Mellon has been using vision in their vehicles for a long time. Also check this quote from a Wired article about Stanley.

"The lasers were good at sensing ground within 30 meters of the car, but beyond that the data quality deteriorated. The video camera was good at looking farther away but was less accurate in the foreground. Maybe, Thrun thought, the laser's findings could inform how the computer interpreted the faraway video. If the laser identified drivable road, it could ask the video to search for similar patterns ahead. In other words, the computer could teach itself.

It worked. Stanley's vision extended far down the road now, allowing it to steer confidently at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour on dirt roads in the desert. "

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley_p r.html

"I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities"

Then maybe they should...

They don't want to because insect behavior is not valuable enough to expend the resources that are better spent developing other capabilities. Especially since we can't replicate their mechanical abilities.

It is doubtful that individual insects have anything resembling intelligence, because their capacity to learn is extremely limited, and appears to be non-existent in many species.

Extremely limited is more than nothing. I think we should say they have intelligence, just very little of it.

"They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals."

All forms of life are equally expendable...

Some insects hatch thousands of eggs, only two of which must survive on average to maintain the species. Generally a robot with that kind of failure rate would be worthless.

"Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality"

They do indeed, just as logic gates are the beginning of computer functionality. There is however a big difference between emulating some of the hardware, and knowing how the original hardware is configured and programmed. This is one of the areas that's turning out to be far more difficult than people used to think would be the case.

I don't think the credibility of AI researchers is completely destroyed by what they thought all the way back in the 60s. What about 20 years ago when the computational power of the human brain was a little better understood. Were there some forecasters that predicted AI wouldn't fully succeed until computational power reached something like 10^18 ops? Maybe it's not much more difficult than they thought.

"Mathematical computation functionality and memor

"the machine may be ineligible because of its specialized hardware"
What specialized hardware? I would really like to read a more technical article about this machine. I would guess that the Japanese focused on vector processing like they did in the design of the Earth-Simulator.

The best supporting evidence I have for this conclusion is the comparison of Japan's last two supercomputers:
Sun Fire X64 Cluster
Earth-Simulator

Sun Fire has 10,368 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 38,180.
Earth-Simulator has 5,120 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 35,860.
That's 49% less processors with 94% the processor power*.

Here's the original article link:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2 006/gb20060726_150659.htm?chan=topStories_ssi_5/

*Only comparing one aspect of performance.

You seem to be implying a linear progression of state repression of individual rights, which seems off to me. It waxed in the 1950s during McCarthyism, then waned until the end of the 1960s when COINTELPRO et al reared their ugly heads. Then it waned again in the aftermath of Executive, FBI and CIA overreach. The 1970s and 1980s did not see an increase in government intrusion. The war on drugs in the 1990s slowly moved it up, but it wasn't until the reaction to 9/11 that we saw such eggregious violations of basic freedoms.

I think there's a strong tendency when we look at American history to assume that the government has been increasingly encroaching on our freedoms with each succeeding decade, and that this is somehow a force outside our control. But the violations always pop up during wars.

The post-9/11 era was quickly characterized as a "war" than the more appropriate "hunt for pirates" I would prefer to use. It's not too late for Americans to understand that thinking of this as a "war" is a simpleminded and counterproductive way to deal with a complex situation. I would suggest that already American popular opinion is shifting, and the Bush Administration may have already reached the zenith of its Big Brother powers. What the legislature gives, it can take away.

My main point in this discussion is that fatalism doesn't help us make government respect our freedoms. Political action does. It is possible to influence government, but it takes time and effort, and it can't be accomplished with a silver bullet. I think we've grown so used to instant, technological solutions that we're impatient with human political processes, which are inherently difficult and time-consuming.

Covered more thoroughly in Wired last February.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,213507 4,00.htm and http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59565,00. html come to mind, everytime I pull a fresh crisp note from the money machine. In Amsterdam (Netherlands) public transport is switching to a mag-stripe card system. Things are getting worse and worse, every failure of law inforcement results in stricter regulation for the rest of society. Internet, phone, transport: nothing is excluded from spying and prying eyes.

Ira Levin wrote a nice story, This Perfect Day, describing a society in which every action is attached to a person, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day. I said nice, not brilliant, but entertaining.

Tell me about it. Yesterday, I'd hoped to see Raph Koster On Fire, and today I hear about Myspace's servers literally exploding, and the only flames I see are on a message board. At least when Wired promised to tell me about spammer clubbed to death like a baby seal, they delivered.

One outa three ain't bad.

The August 2006 issue of Wired mentions this $100 laptop project The Laptop Crusade. With all of the discussion about the pros and cons of giving technology to developing countries, isn't it a huge value to give these countries an option to use the technology as they see fit for their students? Even at the current low prices of PCs, they are still out of the range of these countries. This new laptop designed by Yves takes into account the high cost of repairs and is designed to be much more resiliant than traditional laptops, making them much more affordable to maintain.

The only party that's going to benefit from this is the music INDUSTRY! The Sony's, Warner Brothers, c.s. The mammoth corporations and fat cats that WE, the consumer, MADE mammoth corporations and fat cats. And they still want more!
Artists will be the LAST to benefit from this. And the consumer keeps on paying through the nose! For instance by ILLEGAL means: INTIMIDATION. Witness the MPAA trying to extort an innocent member of the public: http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/start.html?pg =3

I'm sorry, but Tour-de-France is the anti-technology race. Wired had a photo gallery listing many technologies that are banned from the tour:

http://blog.wired.com/tourtechnology/

Any bicycle which is too light, or which has excessively good aerodynamics is outright banned. There is very little exciting aerodynamics research going on for Tour-de-France. Recumbents were banned by the Union Cycliste International way back in the 30s because they were way too fast. Every bicycle speed record currently held was taken with a recumbent.

UCI basically felt that racing should be a test of the rider rather that of the technology, and so made the diamond frame the "standard". Since everyone else saw people winning races on diamond frame bikes, these bicycles were much more popular than many other technologically superior bikes, which is pretty much why recumbents are hard to find and overly expensive today.

Even this nearly traditional looking Softride pivotless suspension bike (http://www.bronesbikeshop.com/Softride.jpg) was banned because it "could have an aerodynamic advantage".

Umeda is a self-confessed otaku, one of Japan's growing legion of men obsessed with anime, comics, action figures, and videogames. And when Umeda claims otaku status, it's no idle boast. "Here's the real evidence," he says, producing a certificate and ID that confirm his standing as "otaku elite." He earned this rank by getting a very high score on a rigorous National Unified Otaku Certification Test last summer. The exam was something of a Japanese obsession, despite having been available only as an insert in Elfics magazine, which features cheesecake drawings of scantily clad, underage girls on the cover. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.htm l?pg=5

Is corporate espionage actually valuable?

One of the targets of the frame-up was presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, and press reports have linked his rival, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, to the smear campaign. French President Jacques Chirac defended de Villepin from the charges during a nationally televised interview last month, and de Villepin has filed libel suits against four journalists.

Last month, prosecutors formally charged Lebanese-born Imad Lahoud for allegedly creating the falsified bank records. Lahoud previously worked for the French secret service and headed a department of network engineers for Airbus parent European Aeronautic Defense and Space, or EADS.

A £1bn tank bid to supply the Greek government with Challenger 2 tanks has raised suspicions that the French secret services used dirty tricks to scupper the British bid. French and British teams were among four countries in competition for the tender to supply 250 Tanks. The other countries being Germany and America.

During the tests the British Challenger tanks had difficulty with navigation and were unable to work out exactly where they were. The British use the satellite global positioning system, GPS, for navigation, whilst the French had no such problems with their navigation.

The Americans also claimed that their navigation suffered difficulty and it was later alleged that the French were covertly interfering with a GPS signal.

Investigations showed that a signal was transmitted blocking the signal from one satellite. Since the GPS system needs the signal from 3 or more satellites for accuracy the loss of just one signal means errors in navigation in excess of 100 yards.

In 1995 an American Institute think-tank estimated that France was devoting a third of its secret service budget to economic intelligence. This may well be true since agents from the DST, Direction et Surveillance du Territoire, [French Internal Security Service] removed documents from a hotel in Tolouse where British Aerospace executives were staying.

The Greek officials found the whole event to be most amusing and discounted the dirty-tricks in their decision making processes, eventually selecting the German made Leopard 2A5 Tank as their choice.

Well, considering Senator Orrin Hatch wants to destroy my computer, I'm not suprised.

Interesting example-- I agree with this woman regarding pro-life as the trump card!

• Limiting financial assistance for pre-natal care if the organization mentions the option of abortion.
• A stay the course policy in Iraq & Afganistan - resulting in continued military & civilian deaths in both - as well as a continued/accelerated propogation of terrorism supporters.
• Spending cuts on health care & social services - most effecting poor single parents.
• Massive overspending for projects of dubious bennifit - DHS control of airport security comes to mind - From a travel magazine at least it doesn't appear to have a direct bias - Wired tends to be more liberal but check the GAO & DHS papers refered to by PDF links in the 5th paragraph. Which results in not only a huge deficit, but further reduced spending for education, local services (Police, fire, ambulance), and housing.

The ACLU has taken the Specter bill and has modified the FISA act (using "track changes") to show how the law would be changed by this bill. It is available here:


http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/FISA.redline.doc


This is not a compromise and it has no additional restriction on the power of the executive. Every change this bill would make gives more power to the executive. This is potentially more far reaching the PATRIOT act.

It redefines electronic surveillance to exclude routing, addressing, dialing, or signaling which would take the kind of eavesdropping they've admitted to with the phone companies out of the jurisdiction of FISA or any other law. So the gov't would legally and without a warrant be able to constantly track who is talking to whom.

It redefines "Attorney General" to include anyone authorized by the A.G. This is important because it also allows the A.G. to authorized a wide variety of surveillance and allows the A.G. to order electronic communications companies, landlords, and other private parties to aid in the gathering of intel and that private party will have no recourse or right to disclose that the surveillance is taking place. In other words this takes the controversial power that the PATRIOT act authorized to get library records and then gag order the librarians and extends it to your ISP, phone company, and landlord! This power would be held by anyone that the A.G. designates! So it would allow the A.G. to designate Special-Agents-In-Charge in each FBI office to issue their own warrants for domestic surveillance without ever even mentioning it to the FISA court.

It would allow the A.G. to move all lawsuits challenging the legality of surveillance to the FISA court and would allow the feds to introduce secret evidence to prove that the cases should be dropped. The FISA court would be allowed to dismiss such cases "for any reason."

It would give the administration the OPTION (not requirement) to submit entire programs past and present to the FISA court for approval. Note that since it is optional it could potentially give the administration an out for creating domestic spying programs and submit them to no court for approval.

It removes the prohibition against surveilling communications that might include US citizens.

It removes the 15 day limit for unlimited domestic surveillance and physical searches during time of war.

It removes the requirement that the administration tell the FISA court what they are looking for when requesting a warrant, so now they just have to say who, when, and where. Not why or what. How could a judge make a competent decision in a case like this?

It changes the 72 hour emergency grace period to 7 days.

That makes synthetic diamonds sound cooler than natural diamonds...I'd love to avoid the dirty cartels AND have a stone that phosphoresces (granted only with specific light that is probobly dangerous to skin).

They were having a discussion on synthetic diamonds on npr today somewhere around early afternoon and it reminded me of the fantastic wired article on the topic. It's a little dated in terms of the newest cutting edge techniques (both for creation and analysis) but it is very very good.

I was going to talk about how the top of the Washington Monument was made of aluminum because at the time it was nearly as valuable as gold, but it turns out that that's somewhat of an urban myth. Here's a really interesting article about the Monument and the lightning-suppression system they designed for it.

In any case, the price of aluminum and titanium (and for that matter, beryllium, lithium, and other exotic metals) has plummetted as better production systems have come into use.

I've read several essays discussing t-shirts, and how their design echoes manufacturing costs. When the price of a quality t-shirt is maybe double the price of a cheap one, the only way to distinguish a DKNY or Old Navy t-shirt from a cheap Hanes shirt you buy at WalMart is the (copyrighted) image on the front. You're not buying the shirt, you're buying something that bears a copyright which is known to be expensive. So also with diamonds. Wired had an interesting article about synth diamond production a couple of years ago, proposing two to four orders of magnitude cheaper diamonds for fine jewelry usage (meaning: can't be detected as synth by any known tests.) I'd love to have some diamond lenses for some of my projects, so I'm happy with these developments.

BTW, "i love bees" is a reference to another online reality game of the same name. It's like they took all the technology-related pop culture and spread references to it throughout the file.

PS: I think the technik might become more interesting when electricity generation becomes cheaper and less harmfull for our environment one day. Nuclear fusion somewhere in the far future may be?

You could have 99 banks of 69 batteries in series, presumably giving you something like 345 volts. That sounds about right for a DC motor.

It's an AC motor.

According to Wired, the car is equipped "with an accelerometer, smoke detector, voltage meter, temperature gauge, and water sensor" to "detect a crash or other failures and shut the batteries down to prevent fire or explosion."

http://blog.wired.com/teslacar/FF_162_tesla3_f.jpg

I agree--they've done a lot of cool stuff, they've still got some good tech and people, and just like wanting a puppy to find a good home, I think Apple could do a lot of good stuff with SGI's assets.

And on a related note, here's something I wrote last year when they were delisted, which struck me as funny then, and still does:*

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive. The article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change in 12 years. :-)

* in a sad way, of course--I used to drive past all the cool companies along 101 on my way to work when I lived in the Bay Area in the late 90s, and I have fond memories of those days, back when SGI was the coolest thing around.

I agree--they've done a lot of cool stuff, they've still got some good tech and people, and just like wanting a puppy to find a good home, I think Apple could do a lot of good stuff with SGI's assets.

And on a related note, here's something I wrote last year when they were delisted, which struck me as funny then, and still does:*

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive. The article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change in 12 years. :-)

* in a sad way, of course--I used to drive past all the cool companies along 101 on my way to work when I lived in the Bay Area in the late 90s, and I have fond memories of those days, back when SGI was the coolest thing around.

I recall near the begining of the dot.com a guy who was going to spend a whole year in a house living off of stuff ordered from the net. He legally changed his name to DotComGuy. He was going to make living via selling advertising and webcam feeds. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotcomguy http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40940,00. html

Powerpoint is evil and should be a controlled item; like alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.

More stuff to clog those tubes. Better get that two-tiered internet going quick. Otherwise, we will have to dump this stuff into our modems!

Senator Ted Stevens

Because most likely they were stolen by NASA employees/managers, government contractors, or "given" (improperly) to elected officials. There a case within the last few years where someone found a storage room at NASA chock full of stuff including two space suits. The stuff was supposed to have gone to the Smithsonian, but oops, gee, donchaknow, it just mysteriously ended up in a storage room nobody knew anything about.

Rumsfield had a piece of the airplane that hit the Pentagon, as a showpiece- almost like a trophy. There were plenty of other examples of thefts. I doubt any of the victim's families saw so much as a pebble. In the executive branch of the federal government the World Trade Center site was like a free-for-all memento/souvineer stop. I'd be astounded if visiting officials at NASA didn't have the same 'sticky fingers'.

So DARPA's invented something else now. How long before Al Gore goes on CNN to claim he invented this all by himself as well?

[*Sigh* -- not this again.]

Al Gore never claimed that he "invented" the internet. In a March 1999 interview, Wolf Blitzer asked Gore what distinguished him from one of his opponents (Bill Bradley) for the Democratic presidential nomination. Gore responded by describing how he "took the initiative" on a number of issues, including "creating the internet". In context, he was talking about his leadership in developing legislation. Unfortunately his choice of words was sloppy and perhaps smacked a bit of chest-thumping.

It's not hard to find details about the "Gore invented the internet" urban myth. A quick Google turns up lots of stuff, including the following:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39301,00 .html
http://sethf.com/gore/

You don't have to be a senator to know that the internet is, in fact, a series of tubes.

The story about a paralyzed man (Matthew Nagle) controling a computer with his brain is definitely not new. There was a very good story in Wired in March 2005, and much more recently, a piece on NPR's The Infinite Mind. According to the piece, Matthew has since had the implant removed, since the trial has ended. I believe at least one other trial is in progress.

As for bugs controlling stuff with their mind, here's a sciencenews article from 2000 about a lamprey (not actually a bug I guess) steering a computer-controlled robot for no good reason. I saw the original paper in Artificial Life at some point, and it was easily the most ridiculous scientific journal article I've ever seen.

Yeah I know its part of a backbone operation, but some more evidence.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70619-0.htm l

almost all backbone providers already cooperate with the NSA - just as recently it was revealed all telephone traffic is being monitored..

Not sure it's FUD really.. Savvis communications are one of the worst offenders for sharing ALL their data directly with the government, they even advertise how good they are at filtering traffic in realtime.

sorry missed the link for Wright's article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/wright.ht ml

You won't have to wait long, nay, you won't have to wait at all.

There have been e-mail "virii" around for a long time, one of the most famous being the Bill Gates Quick Cash. Don't think that all viruses require an attachment.

And I can do even better: by invoking Lore Sjöberg: "Wikipedia is the largest and most comprehensive collection of arguments in human history... As an unexpected side effect of being the perfect argument space, it's also a pretty good place to find information about all the characters from Battlestar: Galactica."

You guys know exactly where we're headed, right?

I hope you've been reading your Vinge. This is equivalent to homework, if you're a technologist (programmers, that means you.)

Our destination is the Secure Hardware Environment (SHE).

That is, every computing device will have to have a section for the government built in, and the government will require access to just a small part of network traffic.

Further: All manufacturing will be observed. (see: Don't Try This at Home, and Remote Biology Labs -- how could it be allowed to work out any other way?) The US government (not sure which parts) is already rejecting chips for computers where the manufacturing process is unknown or unwatched (link lost; sorry.)

This will be done for your safety.

See also: Big Brother Takes a Controlling Interest in Chips. Rainbows End.

Except the PS3 is just as overpriced in Japan as it is in Europe, and Japanese gamers are mocking it just as hard as the western ones.

http://www.geocities.jp/route_219a/flash/ps3_exp02 eng.html
http://blog.wired.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=14 93740
http://dokoaa.com/ps3wii.html#hikaku

Yet more proof that the technology industry needs Pete Ashdown to counter the asinine positions pushed by Ted Stevens and (Ashdown's opponent) Orrin Hatch. The nice thing is that even if you can't donate to the campaign, you can still help Pete receive funds by casting an email vote.

Yet more proof that the technology industry needs Pete Ashdown to counter the asinine positions pushed by Ted Stevens and (Ashdown's opponent) Orrin Hatch. The nice thing is that even if you can't donate to the campaign, you can still help Pete receive funds by casting an email vote.