Slashdot Mirror

I can't speak to this ES phenomenon, nor your anecdotal argument, but it was documented in 2003 - and hasn't been successfully challenged by any new research, to my knowledge - that cell phone radiation seriously injures the blood brain barrier in rats. This was found to be the case for radiation levels similar to those found in modern cell phones.

http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57488,00 .html

And I believe she's something of a space cadet.

If this Pauline Borsook profile was being written today, Esther wouldn't merit a 100-word sidebar. Old Esthie proves you can be a complete, ditzy bimbo and still get an adulatory press.

Rick Strassman isn't some drug fanatic, he's a lead researcher in the field of psychedelic drugs. And I linked to that webpage because it contained some pertinant excerpts from one of his papers.

Aso, I wasn't "comparing" taking LSD to winning the Nobel prize. I was citing specific instances where Nobel prize winners who've used LSD have actually said that part of their inspiration came from their use of the drug.

And it'd still be nice if you could cite atleast one particular study that supports your claims that LSD causes psychosis.

When Apple introduced the iPod, the company was aware that people might use it to rip off music from the Net or friends' machines. Each new iPod, in fact, is emblazoned with a sticker that warns, "Don't Steal Music."

But it is unlikely that Apple imagined people would walk into computer stores, plug their iPod into display computers and use it to copy software off the hard drives.

This is exactly the scenario recently witnessed by Kevin Webb at a Dallas CompUSA store.

It's this dichotomy in Islam which seems so, well, contradictory.

There are calls within the Koran for the killing of infidels and calls for the faithfull to live in peace with them depending in which phase of the prophet's life they were written. But isn't the Koran the direct word of God? Surely, then, it's immutable? Presumably God does not keep changing his mind?

The Prophet is portrayed as an ordinary man, not the son of God. Yet cartoons portraying the Prophet lead to riots and killings and assasinations. On the one hand, he is a man, on the other it is not permitted to depict him?

On the one hand an Ayatollah can command the death of Salman Rushie and state that it's every Muslim's duty to carry this out, on the other hand every Muslim has the choice to ingore any fatwa he likes.

As for the treatment of women, well that's the most confusing of all.

As for Rumsveld's propoganda requirements, it's like pro-holocaust writings in Isreal.

.....Hell, did I just invoke Godwin?

That is a truely pathetic retort. Why should he have to figure out what you ment? The point of communication, wether verbal or written, is to get YOUR point across not to have people try to guess what you ment. You might want to go back and read The Secret Cause of Flame Wars, if you don't communicate exactly what you want people to understand chances are high that they won't "know exactly what I ment anyway".

Is this the same thing he was talking about 6 years ago? Where's the news?

No, seriously!

years ago there was this device by DigiScent called iSmell that could connect to your computer. By combining a mixture of base scents from a palette, the device could synthesize a number of different scents that would be aerated out. The human olfactory system can recognize far more distinct smells than what iSmell could mix, but DigiScent promised thousands of possible scent combinations.

The product became vaporware sure, but such a technology could increase sensory immersion in video games. It would be fun if different scents could be aerated to match game settings like the smell of a jungle in Splinter Cell. Surely someone at DigiScent imagined synthesizing the smell of gunpowder.

How about games that require players to use different scents during gameplay. For example, in Nintendo's Harvest Moon gamers can buy flowers for some of the game's female characters. One of the games puzzles could be to pick flowers based on scents that would be most pleasing to the recipient. Maybe in a murder mystery game, a player could sniff the scent of perfume and deduct that Ms. Peacock killed Mr. Body in the obvervatory with the new Nintendo controller.

iSmell was discussed at Wired.com too.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that an overwhelming majority of those Internet users are part of the so-called Casual Gaming Market. Which means that hardcore games just won't appeal to them. (Never have, never will.) Many of them may not even have a console system, either.

Nintendo is betting a lot of money on the idea that their DS and Revolution systems will reach that market. Given how busy the current adult generation is (not much time for consoles and hardcore computer games), Nintendo may just hit paydirt.

How many districts have we heard about, where their have been problems with electronig voting machines? Don't get me wrong, I use ATMs all the time, and trust it with my money, so I don't see why it should be so hard to come up with a secure and easy way to use voting machines. Diebold, the same company in trouble in several counties, is trusted for making great ATMs, but their voting machines are notoriously bad and their behaviour not to be trusted http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00 .html. Voting machines's source code should be open to election officials, so that they can take a look at them and make sure that they don't count backwards...

This is essentially marketing copy, but a start:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

Wired had an article back in 2002:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread. html?pg=5

This is probably the source article the parent read:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003999.html

Despite all this noise about peak oil, oil futures remain reasonable, and oil prices are coming down in light of new supplies, suggesting that our access to oil isn't nearly as stripped as doomsayers want us to believe.

China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.

If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.

But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?

It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.

I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system.

To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years.

Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.

Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.

And of course right after I post, I finally find a better link:

Wired News: Making a Living in Second Life

(The article also amused me because I attended Grinnell College -- I wonder if any of the developers did).

ElectroPlankton was by the same guy who wrote "Musical Insects" at the San Franscisco Exploratorium, which got redone by Maxis, called "SimTunes"...
here's a Wired article about the artist and here's a review of the software.

SimTunes was a paintprogram of sorts, except the canvas was transversed by 4 bugs, each could be mapped to a different instrument. Each color then would make the bug play a different note or sound effect, and there were also square modifiers to change the direction or motion of the bug.

It still had a sense of playfulness, you could just focus on making pretty pictures, but could be used as a semi-serious sequencing tool...unlike ElectroPlankton, pretty much any tune could be ported to it, plus there were some interesting tools like limiting the color pallete to a certain scale...

anyway, SimTunes only "kind of" installs these days and runs poorly. I'd love to see a port of it to a game console or better yet as some kind of web app (with a way of SAVING results, unlike Electroplankton...)

ElectroPlankton was by the same guy who wrote "Musical Insects" at the San Franscisco Exploratorium, which got redone by Maxis, called "SimTunes"...
here's a Wired article about the artist and here's a review of the software.

SimTunes was a paintprogram of sorts, except the canvas was transversed by 4 bugs, each could be mapped to a different instrument. Each color then would make the bug play a different note or sound effect, and there were also square modifiers to change the direction or motion of the bug.

It still had a sense of playfulness, you could just focus on making pretty pictures, but could be used as a semi-serious sequencing tool...unlike ElectroPlankton, pretty much any tune could be ported to it, plus there were some interesting tools like limiting the color pallete to a certain scale...

anyway, SimTunes only "kind of" installs these days and runs poorly. I'd love to see a port of it to a game console or better yet as some kind of web app (with a way of SAVING results, unlike Electroplankton...)

> You see, there are tons of news about RFID being broken, but when was the last time you saw that about a smart card?

Using your terminology where these things everyone else is calling RFIDs but you want to call contactless smart cards?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69453-1.htm l?tw=wn_story_page_next1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/dutch_biom etric_passport_crack/
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000434.html
http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/03/dutch-rfid-e-pa ssport-cracked-us-next/

I admittedly have not RTFA, but there are many simulators that are more than just sitting in front of an X-box playing Halo. Even many video games actually simulate uncertainty of target and friendly fire these days, but there are sims made especially for the military that go a lot further.

In particular, there are simulators where you have a large projector screen, and a laser-based weapon similar to the MILES gear that can use blank shots. Some police agencies use such a system, and run scenarios where they show people as a cop would be expected to interact with, and the 'player' has to make decisions on whether to shoot or not based on their actions. It's not just a case of playing 'Duck hunt' on an NES.

I think the Australian Army used a similar system to train for their deplyment in East Timor, and the U.S. is using them to train people on convoy protection. They have sets that have an Humvee with turret, and screens that can simulate nearly any environment. There's a good article on the system at wired.

Not that it would be a complete replacement for actual field training, but sims are faster to set up, take less room than a field, and have advantages that are hard to replicate with large field excercises.

If Apple computer releases this new human interface technology as these patents describe ( http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/ ), this seriously could mean a major change in the direction in the market.

Jobs is scheduled to make a "huge" announcement on April 1st of this year, Apple Computer's 30'th anniversary.

We shall see . . .

My bad, I guess this wasn't really the same thing. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52665, 00.html

Yes, if only someone would develop a standard for devices to discover and communicate with other nearby devices, then integrate this technology into cellular phones. Perhaps some future generation of brilliant engineers will finally solve this problem.

Dr. Strangelet or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang

I guess "screwing over people who watch a lot of movies" is one of their "improvements" that they've made.

I'd like to gently disagree with the article and with the parent poster because this is something, I believe, that Netflix has been doing since day one. I'm guessing, though, that now they either have a auditable trail (e.g. software) or for other reasons they are formalizing throttling frequent renters.

In 2002 I began a Netflix subscription which back in those days came in one all-you-can-watch for about $20.00 (iirc). I watch movies sometimes three at a go because it is a professional interest of mine and, well, I love film. So, for my first couple of months, I was watching maybe 12 films a month.

My third month or so, I stopped getting DVDs. I checked my queue and discovered they'd not received the DVDs I returned. After 2 weeks, I reported the DVDs missing even though, by gum, I knew I had sent them back. My queue resumed and when I returned the 5 DVDs within one week of viewing them the USPS mysteriously failed to deliver those, too. While considering reporting these lost DVDs to the US Postmaster, I came across an article in WIRED explaining how Netflix loses money on frequent renters: "Some subscribers rent twenty or more. (Which is a problem: Netflix loses money on postage for households that rent more than five a month.)" (emphasis added).

That told me all I needed to know and I cancelled my Netflix subscription. Occam's razor is here inadequate since it would suggest that the DVDs were in fact getting lost in the mail. But I had been using the USPS for objects large and small for 20 years by that point and not a single piece of mail had ever been lost either coming to or going from me. And I'm supposed to believe that somehow, of all the mail I send, that only my DVDs to Netflix get lost?

Netflix is a company like any other in that it wants to make a profit. However, in 2002 they engaged (I believe) in unethical business practices to protect their bottom line rather than, for example, simply billing renters for postage overages. Netflix will never get any of my money ever again and when Internet distribution finally kills them, I probably won't care enough to tell this story again.

You've clearly read this in detail:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70124-0.html?t w=wn_tophead_6

One technique that seems to get under spyware author's skin is when you bother them at home or on some other form of their own turf. When my best friend and I were leading the charge against Xupiter we spent countless manhours tracing the network of entities responsible for the software and staged multiple phone calls to the home residences of business partners, requests for information from ad affiliates, etc. Lots of WHOIS cross-referencing and corporate document searches but it was worth it to genuinely make life uncomfortable for these guys. Saied Yomtobian called me every dirty name in the book when all I did was ask a few questions about his son being listed on a corporate document for "Xupiter, Inc." listed with the California Secretary of State. It was common practice for us to track down the responsible parties and publish transcripts of our findings. Would be interesting to know the legality of publishing recorded phone calls between angry end users and spyware authors. I think the path to a spyware-free web is public humiliation of the offenders. A multitude of websites already exist toward this end but I think some good old-fashioned activism should be done and its progress published for the world to see. Another thing I did a year or so back was trace the money trail of a piece of spyware that hijacked Google search results. Upon infection I identified the ad affiliate responsible for the hijacked ads inside some source code, documented our findings to the affiliate and got them to terminate their contract with the spyware vendor. It was a good week or two before the vendor (Clientman/Odysseus Marketing) found a new affiliate. I'd guess that that cost them a lot of money in lost ad revenue. I like the idea of a continually updated Wiki where people can collaborate and take action. http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,60694-1. html?tw=wn_story_page_next1

After 500 years! To start with, it's 8 billion tons. From the fine article hosted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory...

Yet, after 500 years of continuous fertilization, the net increase in absorption would be less than 1 billion tons of carbon per year.

if you note that all projections are that we will be INCREASING emissions in the future

Not if we don't find more oil. Oil production has nearly peaked.

Second: We have way more than 100 years of fossil fuels left. Coal reserves are HUGE, plus shale oil, tar sands, maybe methane hydrates...

Yes, but what is the major contributor? What is everyone's favorite fossil fuel? Why do we war with Iraq and Iran and suck up to Saudi Arabia? Oil. Light sweet crude.

Proponents claim that ocean fertilization is an easily controlled, verifiable process that mimics nature; and that it is an environmentally benign, long-term solution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation

Accelerating the process of CO2 -> Plankton -> Limestone might not be as easy as just dumping iron sulfate everywhere, but I haven't been shown how it has cataclysmic effects. In fact, all I've ever heard of the process is extremely positive. More plankton = more fish = more food for top predators, everyone's happy. Until you do it on a large enough scale to find the pitfalls, I seems to me that everyone is ignoring an obvious solution. No major detrimental effects were mentioned in the IronEx II study back in 95. Sure, it turned the water green, but what do ya expect? I'd be interested in hearing what Penny Chisholm finds so environmentally destructive about ocean fertilization. Anything relevant from that Science magazine article you'd like to contribute?

Fertilizing crops in our fields results in a lot of fertilizer ending up in our rivers causing algal blooms that can indeed cause some trouble like sporadic fish kills and pfiesteria, yet we haven't outlawed tillage or fertilizer yet. Apparently the tradeoff to feed humanity is worth the negligible environmental effects. Perhaps ocean fertilization is a limited solution which needs to be complimented by other practices, but all the people waving their hands and yelling the sky is falling is really making me sick. If you're really worried about the problem, fix it. And no, taking all the cars off the road or instituting draconian emission standards is not a solution. People need transportation, and the amount of CO2 contributed to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels pales in comparison to CO2 contributed by the decomposition of soil organic matter. You'd be better off chasing farmers than Ford.

I think they are going after the digital book arena.


Looks like Sony is debut a new "digital-ink" reader in the fall http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70039-0.htm l?tw=wn_tophead_4, which actually looks interesting - minus the tiny memory and the lack of open standards.


Anyhow, if Apple is as smart as I think they are they will go after the entire publishing industry as well as taing on the music and movie industry.


Sound like a plan to you?

Here's real integration of LEGO and computing, the first rev was MIT's Brick, now this...

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69946-0.html?t w=wn_tophead_1

There's other ways to make money in Second Life: Be a Second Life hooker! Make a Second Life porno magazine!

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69946-0.htm l

Lego brought in top level hobbyists to develop the new Mindstorms NXT kit. Brilliant move IMO.

So we don't need to look to the stars to find new life forms after all.

Once again people post crap without looking anything up....aside from being off topic you're wrong. Here are several articles from the cell phone and petroleum industries which are provided below to give you the correct information.

Petroleum Equipment Institute (PEI)-

                        http://www.pei.org/static/

Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) -

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=377

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=407

Urban Legends -

                        http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp

American Petroleum Institute (API) -

                        http://api-ec.api.org/media/index.cfm?objectid=4BB B0597-308E-49BE-9F513DE9A8B0C156&method=display_bo dy&er=1&bitmask=001007000000000000

Wired News -

                        http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58188,00 .html

Just click the Print view link to get it all on one page: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70143-1.htm l

A WIRED article gave a 3-page writeup of the Swiss team developing the robots in November.

See here.

It really is an interesting idea, and the potential is there, but there haven't even been any trials on the efficacy of such a treatment in practice. If someone could point to such a scientific study (controlled trial of phage vs placebo treatment of bacterial infection), rather than anecdotal evidence, I would love to see it.

Even when such treatments actually do come into the mainstream, it's not like they are obviously better than antibiotics -- bacteria can evolve to be come phage-resistant just as easily as they can become resistant to antibiotics. The difference is that the phage can co-evolve to evade the newfound resistance. A word of caution: Using viruses rampantly is just as bad as using antibiotics rampantly... not only is there potential to create super-ultra resistant bacteria, but also hyper-super-ultra viruses.

When ever you're in need of a streaming solution look and see what the Pr0n industry is up to. Awhile back Wired ran an article on an adult site who claim to offer P2P streaming Pr0n...great way to save on bandwidth if it works.

Perhaps a little off topic, but Wired has an interesting article on truly seamless fashion created using newly developed manufacturing techniques.

Interestingly Wired is reporting 'Bush Keeps Privacy Posts Vacant.'

From the article:

"The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But the White House has yet to nominate anyone for the job..."

Further:

"Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies."

It would appear Congress and the Oval Office aren't shy of directing their ire outward while failing to adequately protect the values they pretend to hold so dear to their electorate.

Not just that; they are complaining about Google giving in to China's censorship, when Google have already been censored by the DMCA in the USA at least twice. One. Two.

Make up lots of objective goals and make the prize awards really big because you can afford to since you're paying for results rather than mere proposals to achieve results.

Making the real achievers of objective goals rich beyond their wildest dreams will lead to far more effective R&D spending of those dollars than will handing them over to life-time bureaucrats.

PS: A big problem is exemplified by a USA Today article about prize awards for technical achievement

Last June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put an exclamation point after "grand challenge" when it announced one of the richest in history. The Grand Challenges for Global Health pledged $436.6 million (including $31.6 million from British and Canadian sources) toward solving some of the world's worst health problems. Preliminary funds have been granted to 43 groups attacking 14 challenges.

The fact that no one understands the difference between awarding a prize for achieving X vs awarding a grant for a proposal for achieving X is illustrative of why technology policy fails miserably generation after generation.

Reading John Perry Barlow's extremely optimistic Wired article "Africa Rising" leads us to believe Africa may be able to leapfrog the whole wires-in-the-ground thing. That it will be suddenly a market so large that Microsoft not having its tentacles in it would cause serious economic concern for them is laughable. I hope for the best too, but I don't see that happening in the next ten years. This at least, coming from speaking with people who actually lived in Africa.

Fat's not good for you, but I'll wager it's better for you than sugar.

Right. Additionally, at least one study suggests that it's necessary to eat fat to burn fat, due to the enzymes involved.

Somebody did post it further up the thread. It's from December 2001 and found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers. html and the quiz (which is highly interesting) is found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.htm l

Well shit! According to the test I'm fucked...

Somebody did post it further up the thread. It's from December 2001 and found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers. html and the quiz (which is highly interesting) is found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.htm l

Well shit! According to the test I'm fucked...

The reference is on page 5 of the article:

One Bay Area mother told me that when she was planning a move to Minnesota with her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, she asked the school district there if they could meet her son's needs. "They told me that the northwest quadrant of Rochester, where the IBMers congregate, has a large number of Asperger kids," she recalls. "It was recommended I move to that part of town."

Here is the link to the wired article about Geeky parents and their propensity to have children with Asperger's Syndrome which is classfied by wikipedia as high-functioning Autism.

Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_ pr.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger's_syndrome

I remember reading this article in Wired a number of years ago (I would guess probably around December 2001 from the date on it). Interesting read, especially if you're curious about autism and Asperger's.

Sure, but your friends at the former KGB, and Communist China have an inside perspective. But hey, if you can sell crap like that to places that safeguard your countries most important secrets, why not share it with your enemies? You know they in turn are sharing it with their friends in North Korea, Pakistan and elsewhere. Terrorists indeed. No need to worry about that stuff proliferating because it's already gone. Given such an irresponsible sales record, it's hard to imagine them calling the source code a trade secret.

What could be more important than making a buck? Certainly not the freedom of some poor dope who thought he had something of value in his hands. Why, if he could do it anyone could and M$ would dissapear and the terrorists would win, right?

I can't believe they would try to trot out the terrorist bogey man.

It was late 2001, google to the rescue.

Somebody did post it further up the thread. It's from December 2001 and found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers. html and the quiz (which is highly interesting) is found here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.htm l