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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

There is a similar story in Wired about the rise of Autism in Rochester, Mn (home of a very large number of IBM employees).

Apparently, slight to mild autism is a genetic trait that is good for programmers.

Oh, how original. Taking ideas from Wired now, are we?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.htm l

Use the "F" word: Fraud. Every time an employee quits, it costs the rebate company a lot to hire and train someone new. Minimum wage people don't like to think they are helping break the law. Ask the employee how she or he can justify working for a dishonest company. Tell the employee he or she has the worst job in the world.

Call the manager of the store where you bought the rebate item. Use the "F" word again. Managers have a special number. The rebate company will listen to them. Store managers don't like the word fraud applied to their store; that could cost them hundreds of thousands, if the word gets around. If you don't get satisfaction from the store manager, get his or her name and call the store's main office. The people who work in main offices don't want fraud calls; and they definitely don't like fraud calls in which the name of a store manager is mentioned.

Never let them steal from you. If you ever accept that once, they will know they can do it again. Remember, there are a limited number of rebate companies, and they keep databases on those who apply for rebates.

Apparently almost all rebate companies are involved in fraud. They try to concentrate on the customers that will accept excuses. The stores will tell you they know nothing about the fraud, but that is not true; they know very well.

Be sure to tell the rebate company that you will file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, and with your state's consumer fraud department, and do it. Tell the store that sold the rebate item the same thing, and do it.

Stay away from stores that hate their customers. My experience with Best Buy has been very negative.

Stay away from stores that offer big rebates on items that have defects that aren't obvious.

It has been my experience that Netgear is by far the worst in failing to send rebates. We have had bad experiences with Netgear equipment being buggy, too. Maybe there are companies who can only stay in business because they fail to sent rebates.

Always be kind and gentle with rebate company employees, but very firm. Remember, the employee is not getting any of the stolen money.

Always keep copies of everything you sent when you apply for a rebate. The rebate companies will exploit any weakness they find.

Remember, if you let them steal from you once, you will be in the database as someone who accepts abuse.

I got a Sony rebate 1 1/2 years after it was denied. I would never buy anything from Sony again, of course, even though I eventually got the rebate. Generally, companies that are abusive in one way are abusive in others. Generally, abuse is part of the corporate culture.

The United States is a country that thinks nothing of killing Iraqis to prevent a fall in value of the dollar and make money for weapons and oil company investors; routinely stealing from customers seems mild by comparison.

Read here on Bill Gates' sources of money. Someone brought up a good point on Bill Gates: "So, basically, it's OK to make crappy software, ruthlessly drive competitors out of business and generally screw the public, as long as you're seen publicly giving money to charity and political causes?"

Actually, the U.S. government's balls were TOO big.

Seriously; the original decision against MS was to break up the company.

Why was it reversed?
http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/0,1551,44902,0 0.html

I quote:
In stentorian language seldom heard in discussions of a fellow jurist, the appeals court unanimously condemned Jackson's "rampant disregard for the judiciary's ethical obligations," and said he'd no longer be permitted anywhere near this case. ...
Remaining silent were Jackson's fans in the Washington establishment, who cheered the rotund jurist last year when he was denouncing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates as unethical and compared him to a "drug trafficker" and Napoleon. ...
Jackson repeatedly cut Microsoft attorneys short during cross-examination, while treating David Boies, who argued the case for the government, with visible deference. He appointed Larry Lessig, a prominent liberal law professor and Microsoft critic, as a special master over objections from defense lawyers.

He ordered a dismemberment of the largest software company in the world without holding one hearing on the topic, a move that seemed to shock the appeals court. Most antitrust trials of any substance take years to prepare: Jackson gave Microsoft six months. ...
Microsoft's adversaries were left fuming on Thursday, insisting that if Jackson had held his tongue, the breakup order would have remained intact.

"I wish he hadn't spoken out of turn the way he did because I truly believe that if he had exercised better judgment, we wouldn't have seen his remedies vacated," said Norm Hawker, a research fellow at the American Antitrust Institute, which advocates aggressive use of the antitrust laws.

"He essentially pulled the carpet out from under his own findings," Hawker said.

In fact, the district appeals court said the following:
"Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process," the judges wrote.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/june01/microso ft_6-28.html

Judge Jackson originally tore Microsoft a new asshole. If he had not gotten so caught up in the case, Microsoft would be well on its way to a breakup (or already broken up right now). He was overzealous, and in an effort to restore judicial impartiality, other judges implemented far meeker punishments. The system overcorrected, but make no mistake; the original judge and the prosecutors were out for blood, and they blew it because they went too far.

I'm sure that "The New Boom" is nothing like "The Long Boom" that Wired talked about in 1997. You know, right before the bust.

I remember when Wired reported on this back in the late 90's. They referred to the past few years and next few years as "The Long Boom". I don't think it (the economy) was referred to a bubble until after it had burst. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom.h tml

"Toy Story-rendering anyone?"

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,40970, 00.html?tw=wn_story_related

"Gates said the 3-D chips in the Xbox would be three times faster than anything on the market and offer nearly unlimited graphical visuals. "We're approaching the level of detail seen in Toy Story 2," he said, referring to the computer-generated kids film from Disney/Pixar."

Sony has never in any public statement claimed anything having to do with "Toy Story" level graphics.

Microsoft has. Multiple times.

Time to shutup idiot.

No no. China has the upper hand. They control their own pipelines and can cut off any access to Google if they please. They have done it before.

People buy them because they are expensive.

People buy them because they are expensive because people believe they are rare because everyone who makes money with jewelery diamond makes people believe diamonds are rare. The diamond business is ruled by what might be the most perfect monopoly in the world. I recommend this older Wired article: The new Diamond Age about two companies that employ two different processes to bypass the natural creation of diamond, taking a mighty piss at DeBeer's legs while they're at it.

I thought this was a news about cloning

It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by Italians." The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.

"and a teenager doing drugs that will ruin the rest of his life. "

WTF? thats kinda outta left field dont you think?

let me be the first to say that being a teenager and doing drugs will NOT ruin your life. Infact the oposite might be true. But yeah, some people dont realize the glory of hacking their minds till way too late in life, if ever. Thats how it goes i guess. If you fail at life its not the drugs your taking or not taking, its you.

There was an article in a recent wired magazine about the new voyages episode starring Sulu and they address the apparant dichotomy. It seems that they don't care what happened after the series went off the air. They are trying to make the rest of that origional series episodes. If I recall correctly the original was on for 3 seasons out of a planned 5. This fan group is on the 3rd or 4th episode of season 4 in their mind.

Because they are working on the episodes that should have happened before the current movies they have chosen to ignore any current information about the show and, instead, are filling in the gaps as they imagine they would have been filled in back in the day.

The article is online (though I'm not sure if it is complete) at http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/sta rtrek.html

Article 35. Freedom of speech, press, assembly

Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.

Yet, Google censors Chinese search results.

Funny... I didn't see them kicking any chinese mofos in the teeth.

Wired talked about virtual "rape" in Sociolotron (and whether in has any translation to the real world) back in June 2004.

Neal Stephenson has a hilarious comment on this in "Mother Earth Mother Board", in his description of a big project to lay fiber optic cable in the Pacific Rim.

Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes [for cable from Point A to Point B] over theMalay Peninsula?

A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.

Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?

A: You have no idea.

That is called Domain Hijacking. It is actually a common practice. It even happened to Sex.com

A guy named Gary Kremen was apparently one of the first cybersquatters in the early 90's when domains were free. A guy named Stephen Cohen then hijacked Sex.com, and Kremens sued him:

"In November 2000, at the end of a three-year legal battle, a federal judge ruled that Stephen Cohen had stolen the domain by forging a letter from Kremen's company to Network Solutions. Cohen was ordered to return Sex.com to Kremen and pay him $65 million in damages. (Cohen appealed, and in June of this year, the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case.) In the meantime, Cohen had fled the country, so all Kremen got as compensation was this California mansion and a derelict house on the US-Mexico border. Even so, Kremen figured he'd found his winning lottery ticket. Under Cohen, Sex.com had been taking in $500,000 a month selling banner ads to other online porn sites."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_o rigin

Intriguing ideas no matter if right or wrong and I don't think it truly matters in regard to oilprice in light of these Wired articles:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/gas.html

Can't help thinking about 'oil in space' when reading that wikipedia article though lol :) (there must be at least partial indegrients to a great SF story somewhere in that).

3. The batteries that don't yet exist are being designed for artificial eyes that don't yet exist.

RTFA: "starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California".

And with a little research, you can find reports (here and here, and even on /.) from last May's Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting about six previously completely blind patients have successfully used the referenced retinas to detect light.

Anm

Unless, as I just realized, the digital audio stream is itself encrypted by the player hardware using the key from the DRM-licensed speakers, so that it will only play on that one pair of speakers.

The ultimate bane of existance for a DRM scheme is the analog hole, which (until bionics get a lot better) won't be possible to plug.

The notion of a backdoor in Windows isn't new. Perhaps the WMF vulnerability was one of the vectors used by Magic Lantern, which was the code word for at least one of the FBI's keylogger programs. Magic Lantern was notable in that antivirus providers participated with the Feebs in a gentleman's agreement to not look for it.

It's certainly a dumb enough solution that the IT-challenged FBI might go for it.

On relative dumbness and smartness, I'd expect smart spies, namely those who work for two other notable three-letter-agencies, to use somewhat more interesting techniques. If it were me, I'd take advantage of equipment I had in place at critical infrastructure points to conduct MITM attacks between a PC and Windows Update servers, in order to transparently install my spookware on only those machines that specifically identify themselves - by means of GUID or whatever other stuff I could glean from the Windows Genuine Advantage and other DRM-related bitstreams - as belonging to my target population.

Paranoid? If you're not paranoid, you're not thinking far enough ahead.

The linked blog has no excuse for screwing this up: the designer's name is on the images, and Wired did a story on him in 2002.

Regardless, if you want the absolute best resolution you can get, forget film of any type and use a digital scanning back such as this

ugh here is the link

As far it concerns me I deeply distrust all "security companies" since this little incident.

here's a little history on the naming of the Powerbook

I've had it. I'm through with this whole Internet thing. Limitless porn and amazon coupon codes are no longer worth it. I'm going back to writing checks, using stamps, and gaming using my console.

The first real annoyance was "boxen". Sure, it's pretty gay, but I can live with the occasional geek using it. (Actually, the first annoyance I remember was the green card spam, but that's going back a bit far). Then came "google" as a verb. Such nonsense, but trivial. The rise of the "blog" is easy to ignore - I don't care what most people think in person, so at least if they're busy typing their thoughts they're won't be able to tell them to me.

But now..."blogazine"? Blogazine. Lord, help me.

Now I've got to finish downloading the Internet's porn collection and burning it to DVD. You can't expect me to go cold turkey!

The science of carbon sinks is far from certain.

energy efficiency. The amount of heat energy alone that we throw away is staggering, etc...

This has been true for decades, and it hasn't changed. What makes you think it's going to change now?

Environmentalists have been talking about reducing energy consumption since the 70's. Guess what's happened since then? Huge increases in the amount of energy consumed. What makes you think it's going to be any different going forward. I don't think that "c'mon guys, this time I really mean it!" is going to change anything.

The problem is that you're asking literally billions of people to make sacrifices - sacrifices that mainly benefit everyone else. See Tragedy of the Commons. Guilting people into these sacrifices hasn't worked in the past, and I can't think of a good reason why it'll change in the future.

We need to either give people incentives to do the right thing (carbon tax, which at least in the U.S. has been politically suicidal), or do something radical like switch to nuclear power. Wired Magazine favors the latter.

People keep bringing up the "point" that hydrogen takes too much energy to generate. It DOESN'T HAVE TO BE done with electrocity! There are ways of doing it biologically.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread. html?pg=5

It's basically using solar energy to make hydrogen, but without the trouble of solar cells.

People keep bringing up the "point" that hydrogen takes too much energy to generate. It DOESN'T HAVE TO BE done with electrocity! There are ways of doing it biologically.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread. html?pg=5

It's basically using solar energy to make hydrogen, but without the trouble of solar cells.

I don't particularly want to see more reactors built but it is starting to look inevitable. But if we have to build them at least look at safer designs like pebble reactors which, unless anyone else on the board has more information, look like a better option.

Of course we could drastically reduce the power needs of the populace if we just saved more energy. Leaving computers on all night, and worse monitors, is shockingly wasteful and we need tax incentives to insulate the current housing stock and regulation on new building projects. I'm over in Finland a lot and they are the puppies packet at this sort of thing; the average modern home needs one or two wood stoves to meet most energy needs.

It's also important to remember that the major cost on nukes comes not in building the things, but in dismantling them and storing the waste - something that the pro-nuke lobby often forgets.

and to think the RIAA tried to stop diamond from releasing the pmp300. my fiance still uses it from time to time. they are so short sighted it's amazing. they tried to stop the audio cassette, which later became a huge cash cow. the mpaa tried to stop the vcr, which also became a huge revenue source. they started out with lawsuits as an answer, and haven't change a bit. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,15535,00. html

>I don't think DVDs had any sort of encryption when they were first sold to consumers. It was an afterthought...

DVDs did originally come with the same copy protection they have now. It was a poorly-implemented and weak 40-bit encryption algorithm. See this article in Wired from 1999. (It may be that the original spec as written did not include copy protection, but to my knowledge this was not the case).

I'm quite sure that CDs, on the other hand, were never encrypted.

well I was close. My memory is failing.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/29/spy.ag ency.privacy.ap/index.html

relevant quote:
"The government first issued strict rules on cookies in 2000 after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. Even a year later, a congressional study found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies."

however it still makes my point on one way a cookie can be used for malice.

http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,69945-0.ht ml?tw=rss.index

shows how cookies can be used to trace you through the web, as it were.

http://shns.scripps.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=COOKIES- 06-20-00&cat=AN
"White House ads offering information on marijuana pop up when Internet users search for certain words connected to drugs on Internet search engines like AltaVista or Lycos. The banner ads steer users to the anti-drug site Freevibe.com, which is operated by the White House drug office. A tracking cookie is inserted in the user's personal computer as the site is activated.

Although Freevibe's privacy notice states that "no information, including your e-mail address, will be sold or distributed to any other organization," the site is connected Doubleclick.com. Officials of Doubleclick, a New York advertising firm that is one of the largest companies gathering data on Internet user use, told the Senate Commerce Committee last week it is developing new products that will profile more than 40 million Internet users."

here is an example where your information is tracked and sold.

I won't go into wether or not these particular cases where intended to abuse anyone, but it would be just as easy to use this data for profiling.
Would it be hard to imagine someone thinking "Well, if they are looking for ways to kick a drug habit, then they probable have drugs. Lets go arrest them!"?

oddly, I can't find the story that I heard about it originally.

Anybody else remember this article from Wired about John Piña Craven's work along a very similar line?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.ht ml

"The hopes of many quadriplegics (like me) and otherwise injured individuals have been dashed since Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk, who claimed to be on track for curing spinal cord injuries among other ailments, turned out to be an apparent fraud. But I never hung all of my hopes on Hwang or stem-cell research.

That's because scientists who study spinal cord injury, or SCI, know that it won't be stem cells or any other single therapy that will cure paralysis."

but keep bashing Microsoft as the personification of evil if it helps you forget these things:

Google Bows to Chinese Censorship

How about Yahoo:
Information supplied by Yahoo ! helped journalist Shi Tao get 10 years in prison

and there is this on Cisco and China:
China's Internet: Let a Thousand Filters Bloom

I will give you that the article isn't clear that Lockheed Martin's Aegis system deploys Microsoft components. However, I used to work for Lockheed Martin, specifically *on* the Aegis system components, and I probably shouldn't comment further.

So instead I offer this link to the US Navy deploying Microsoft for critical control systems:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,13987, 00.html

Trust me, they do it.

Not anyone like, say, the US Navy, for example:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282, 13758,00.html

Or air traffic controllers:

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?News ID=2275

Or nuclear power plants:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6767

Regardless of how you rate the intelligence of the parties involved in these little incidents I think you'll find that Windows is very often deployed in mission critical areas.

And yes, often with catastrophic consequences. >)

Already prepared for that one: Shooting, that is.

Yea I wasn't trying to cast aspersions- I just wanted to point out that those didn't appear to be actual photos and that things mightn't be as well on as they first appeared.

Turns out that wired http://wired.com/news/culture/0,69946-0.html?tw=wn _tophead_1 have a preview today.

I wantssss it!

/gollum

Yeah, there is nothing new about this, I think this is some kind of a slashvertisement. The technology that OTEC has been developing in this field is interesting. Hopefully it will ultimately pan out.

Here's where I have seen more about this technology before:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.ht ml

http://www.nrel.gov/otec/

Enjoy :)

I liked the article at Wired about John Piña Craven's plans.

They think it could be used in emergency situations, such as Hurricane Katrina, to transport supplies.

But seriously, I wonder if they have run the numbers to determine whether this is more efficient than trucking. It doesn't seem impossible when you include the cost of roads, and real estate for roads.

Also, a steady stream of payload-moving craft overhead might even be a workable platform for broadband connectivity. There are already several companies working on using airships as wireless relay platforms, but perhaps the idea would be more economically feasible if the airships are making money in two different ways.

To accept homeopathy is to accept the 'law of infinitesimals'...If medication does not follow that, it is not homeopathy.

That's exactly what I mean by setting up straw-men. You're choosing your own defintion of homeopathy that is at odds with what is actually practiced, and then proceeding to rip it to bits.

If "Europe's oldest and the UK's largest manufacturer of homeopathic medicines" is making concoctions with significant concentrations of active ingredients, that's awfully strong evidence that as homeopathy is actually practiced, not all homoepathic remedies are prepared according to the "law of infinitesimals". If you want to argue, I guess you should take it up with the homeopaths who aren't following your defintion. :-)

And it has nothing to do with how you stir it, or how much water you put in it.

According to the theory (which, again, I'm not saying I believe), yes, it does. Adherents claim that the water takes on some sort of "memory" or "image" of the substance; it "clusters" or absorbs some sort of "electromagnetic vibration" at each stage of dilution.

Apparently you don't have TiVo/DVRs, because you do not get the difference in utility.

I cannot pause live television on VCR. I have to grab a tape, put it in, record, and then afterward go back, rewind, try to find where I left off. I also cannot set season passes for my favorite shows to record automatically every time it comes on with a VCR, nor can I just hit two buttons on a VCR and suddenly the movie on HBO that comes on in a few hours will be recorded, no fuss, no Flashing-12.

To complain about subscription fees is equally silly - suggesting that "normal" television is "free" makes me laugh, because you haven't been paying attention. I pay for SIRIUS so that I don't deal with half my time spent on commercials (they have a few on specific channels, but I haven't heard a commercial on a music station in about three months, and I spend at least an hour a day in my car). I pay for HBO to avoid having thirty of my sixty minutes taken up by Levitra.

Is it always going to be commercial-free? Perhaps, perhaps not. HBO's managed to keep it mostly that way for a long time. I don't see why other channels couldn't last, especially with the growing trend in people choosing to subscribe for their television.

Apparently you don't have TiVo/DVRs, because you do not get the difference in utility.

I cannot pause live television on VCR. I have to grab a tape, put it in, record, and then afterward go back, rewind, try to find where I left off. I also cannot set season passes for my favorite shows to record automatically every time it comes on with a VCR, nor can I just hit two buttons on a VCR and suddenly the movie on HBO that comes on in a few hours will be recorded, no fuss, no Flashing-12.

To complain about subscription fees is equally silly - suggesting that "normal" television is "free" makes me laugh, because you haven't been paying attention. I pay for SIRIUS so that I don't deal with half my time spent on commercials (they have a few on specific channels, but I haven't heard a commercial on a music station in about three months, and I spend at least an hour a day in my car). I pay for HBO to avoid having thirty of my sixty minutes taken up by Levitra.

Is it always going to be commercial-free? Perhaps, perhaps not. HBO's managed to keep it mostly that way for a long time. I don't see why other channels couldn't last, especially with the growing trend in people choosing to subscribe for their television.