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Her name is Slave. After I created her I started by hitting her constantly for about 5 minutes. Then I taught her all the words(using the SST) so it would be easier to make her scared of her surroundings. After she knew all the words, I placed her in a small area, surrounded by the FF Cob, with 5 Grendels. I left her there for about 20 minutes, beating her when she attempted to defend herself from the Grendels. After she was sufficiently traumatized, I put her back in the garden. In the Garden I forced her to Get, Look, Push and Pull everything around her, all the time, constantly beating her. I made her fear running so I wouldn't have to deal with that little problem(you fellow torturers out there know how annoying it is to chase them down once they get away). I also forced her to eat weeds, rewarding her when she did so. At the time I exported her, she's a quivering mass of fear. She might eat, if you're lucky, but she probably won't survive long enough for food to do any good.

To Wright, one of the most memorable albums told the story of a woman's abusive relationship and how she eventually got out of it. But a search on the Sims Exchange of the word "abuse" reveals that Sims albums have become a common therapeutic tool. All told, 63 albums deal with abuse issues.

I think that games should be catered equally to men and women. For example, Tecmo's "Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball" featured topless male players right out of the box! Why did it have to take a group of concerned volunteers to develop a patch that made the game fair?

maybe they shoulds spend a portion of the money on cold fusion research...

Assume just a million people pay 10 bucks a piece

Just a million?

Just a million?

I think you vastly overestimate the number of people you could get on board for something done exclusively in the non-advertising, P2P panacea you envision.

Even the article used for this supposedly shining example says:

"Now I have an extra 10,000 hits a week on my website, and I've got to figure out what to do here."

Rogers, who said he had nothing to do with the leak, has already received 350 e-mails from people praising the show. He said he would like to release the pilot as a DVD.

Wow, a whole 350 people emailing praise? Holy smokes! And assuming all those people would pay, only $9,996,500 to go! And 10,000 extra hits a week? How do you quantify all this stuff? More realistically, you've got maybe 10,000 people willing to pay $10/show, lowering your gross by a couple orders of magnitude.

It's easy to lay out a best-case scenario.

What's hard is for someone to actually execute on it. And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done.

I'd love to see it succeed, and I'm sure some will. However, none of this justifies any of the rationalizations used for taking things funded by advertising in the meantime.

This is the end of advertising-sponsored media -- not Tivo or illegal torrent downloading. Advertising-based media, which always must seek the largest audience possible for every program, simply cannot compete once broadcast distribution is no longer a scarce commodity. The larger the target audience, the lower the quality.

The full implications of the long tail are astounding, once you really work them out. Imagine the end of huge movie stars, of "hits", of fame in entirety -- it will simply not be profitable -- imagine what that would mean, in any medium! How will we decide what to watch, listen to, or read when there is nobody who can make money deciding for us?

That almost all of its predictions ever were complete failures does not deter them one bit.

One of my favourites. :-)

You want a diesel hybrid? They could be here soon... http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,66949,00 .html

Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web.

Sure, Wired is full of ads. And some articles weigh heavy on the entertainment industry. But it also provides some of the *best* writing on technology that any magazine has to offer.

Case in point, this article from the April 2005 issue:
La Vida Robot
How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.htm l

Take 15 minutes and read this. It is an amazing story, and extremely well written.

Ah, yes. Wired certainly has a wonderful record at predicting the future. From the Long Boom to Kissing Your Browser Goodbye and a world dominated by Sega, Wired certainly has a fine track record. Keep up the good work guys!

Ah, yes. Wired certainly has a wonderful record at predicting the future. From the Long Boom to Kissing Your Browser Goodbye and a world dominated by Sega, Wired certainly has a fine track record. Keep up the good work guys!

Ah, yes. Wired certainly has a wonderful record at predicting the future. From the Long Boom to Kissing Your Browser Goodbye and a world dominated by Sega, Wired certainly has a fine track record. Keep up the good work guys!

Pictures from the 2005 event.
Information and pictures from the 2004 event.

Pictures from the 2005 event.
Information and pictures from the 2004 event.

Since you asked about something that would phone home I would suggest Timbuktu from Netopia. There was a story a few years ago about how a brother recovered his sister's stolen computer by using its phone home functionality.

from the wired article http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68008,00 .html?tw=rss.POL

"Judges should defer to the expertise of the Federal Communications Commission, which concluded that limited access is best for the industry, the high court said in an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas."

which tottaly reminds me of the scene in the aviator when the big goverment peopel were like 1 airline is the best dont' need more than one!

they keep electing Orrin Hatch. That alone speaks volumes. Among other things, he's the proud author of the DMCA, the INDUCE act, the PIRATE act (Porno Is Really Awesome To Endorse, apparently), he advocated the destruction of PCs belonging to software pirates with some vaporware virus, and then was caught red handed using pirated software. He claimed that was a mistake made by his staff. When he was caught with stolen Democratic party memos, he claimed that (you guessed it) it was a mistake made by his staff. At best, he's a clueless old grandpa that has no business writing copyright legislation.

they keep electing Orrin Hatch. That alone speaks volumes. Among other things, he's the proud author of the DMCA, the INDUCE act, the PIRATE act (Porno Is Really Awesome To Endorse, apparently), he advocated the destruction of PCs belonging to software pirates with some vaporware virus, and then was caught red handed using pirated software. He claimed that was a mistake made by his staff. When he was caught with stolen Democratic party memos, he claimed that (you guessed it) it was a mistake made by his staff. At best, he's a clueless old grandpa that has no business writing copyright legislation.

In 2022, we'll probably have terabyte capacity in our mobile phones. Seriously. In the early 90s, 80 Gb of drive space ran about $80,000 according to this archived historical document. Nowadays, I can get an 80 Gb drive for about $65 according to froogle, and that's without considering inflation. Sure at a conservative $1/Gb were looking at $347 million dollars today, but in 17 years time that'll probably look more like two or three hundred thousand bucks. No biggie for our bloated government.

The real problem/question I wanted to raise is with obvious extensions to prior art being patentable. (see my original post)

Finally, there is ~14 years left to run on this patent. A lot can happen in that time.. I wouldn't discount the possibility of Microsoft beginning to enforce their patents, and hence derive significant revenue if the rest of their business model begins to suffer from the encoachment of open source software.

IBM derive SIGNIFICANT revenue ($US 1.6B in 2000) http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,43186, 00.html
for thier shareholders by enforcing their patent revenue.

Companies are not "good", they just have interests (that of thier shareholders) to serve.
Enforcing a patent portfolio is inevitable for companies. It's just in the nature of the beast.

But don't take my word for it, how about Eben Moglen, pro bono counsel for the Free Software Foundation
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/08/microsoft_ aiming_ibmscale_patent_program/

But critics charge the database will subject the homeless "to a level of tracking that is normally used against criminals," said Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina.

As for the rest of your idiocy, not all sex offenders are pedophiles, released felons have always had to deal with discrimination and longer jail terms will not solve the problem.

A large part of the pedophile problem is tracking them. When these registered sex offenders slip through the cracks, they end up working as ice cream truck drivers, carnies, in schools etc.

Wired carried a story two weeks ago on the army's recruiting shortfall. A lot of different media starting reporting on that then.

So this is not surprising. Now why anyone would want to advertise to the Pentagon that they do not want to join is beyond me. Constituting a separate database of unpatriotic scum sounds rather sinister to me.

To answer my own question...
Apparently, they had insurance for one of their previous launches, so it is a definite possibility that they had it for this one. Of course, given their last booster rocket failure, you would hope they would have insurance for this go around. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45 482,00.html

Reading the article might induce the ideea that AIBO is nothing but a toy for bored geeks. That's not entirely true, I'm thinking that proper software could turn the thing in an aid for blind children.

Let's just hope engadget doesn't get sued first, like that guy from http://aibohack.com/

I'm sure that if Apple did the same thing, that Slashdot would post a story, right?

As it turns out, however, Google has a problem that is nearly as complex as its algorithms. It can't make money from Google News.
So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.

Um, you are aware sys admins at Google are only paid $35,000 ?

That's fucking insane.

No kidding. I don't usually root for Apple's lawyers but at least in this case I hope they crush Contois. Anybody who has the audacity to sue for the sole purpose of generating an income deserves to be crushed! Go Apple lawyers! Sic 'em!

Like Nokia. They started out making rubber boots and toilet paper.

For Apple (and derivatives such as NeXTSTEP), the scolling file chooser interface can traced back at least as far as 1985 or so. Andy Hertzfeld developed an alternate version of Finder for the Macintosh called Servant. Apple purchased the rights from Andy.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64 046,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

It hasn't happened again, but apparently some employees were taking shortcuts on their spare day each week.

I have to say I am constantly surprised at how much people value a company who mostly just copies what other companies do.

Feel free to change the existing copy - it's all editable. At this point, making a phone call in the morning is your best bet. There's a sample script on Boing Boing's entry.

We don't know who will be introducing it. Possibly Senator Ted Stevens, co-sponsor of the Hollings Bill which would have also enforced mandatory DRM.

Ok, so magnetic shielding doesn't appear is will work.

That leaves protection from the sandblasting. If we are talking about robots, we don't need them to last forever, just long enough to do their job. So the outer shell just needs to be made of a tough material. Although, given that we can create diamonds today, why not just give them a diamond coating? That shouldn't have a problem with the sand blasting of the dust. We wouldn't even have to grow a single diamond large enough to cover the entire surface, just overlapping/interlocking plates of diamonds, similar to how roofs/jigsawpuzzles are made. Would that work for armor? Last I heard, a sandblasting wouldn't do much damage to a diamond.

It's because of their position on software patents: they patented 1-Click shopping (Pat. 5,960,411), which everybody sees as trivial, and then starting a turf war by suing Barnes and Noble for it.
Before, when the New York Times had complained that they were infringing on its trademark by offering 50 percent discounts on titles that were on the newspaper's bestseller list, they sued them.

Darn, I was in the middle of preparing a submission on Cosmos 1 when I saw this. Anyways, I have a little more info which people might find interesting, so I'll go ahead and paste it below:

Countdown to First Solar Sail Spacecraft

The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1, the first spacecraft to be propelled by a solar sail, has just been loaded onto a converted ICBM in preparation for its launch from a Russian submarine this Tuesday, June 21. This is the first mission by a non-profit space advocacy group and is being funded by private donations. Project Operations Assistant Emily Lakdawalla is posting a running description of events on the official blog. Videos and animations describing the mission are available, including commentary from the Planetary Society's Vice President, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Downloadable print-out model kits are also available.

One of the many neat things about this project is that if the first phase of regular solar sailing is successful, they'll run a later experiment with focusing a microwave beam on the sail to see how well it propels the craft. I wish the Planetary Society the best in this high-risk endeavour.

Apparently you missed this article [Wired]. This library happens to be down the road from my job, and as youll notice, theyve been doing this for longer than the folks at the NYC Public Library. Id be curious to see which one is actually used more per capita (hint: I think the shuffles are more popular than the protected WMA files for which most people lack the correct player - per capita, of course).

"Actually, the ability for any society to rebel may become limited as its military grows its ability to control more firepower with less people. Just look at where drone technology is already (see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/drones_pr .html [wired.com])"

Oh I figure with my ...err i mean our drone army it will just become all the easier.

Here's the link to the story you mentioned. This story also includes the infamous washing machine interview.

Actually, the ability for any society to rebel may become limited as its military grows its ability to control more firepower with less people. Just look at where drone technology is already (see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/drones_pr .html)

Rebellion in the past has always relied on the fact that the military is ultimately comprised of people that may sympathize with the public.

Don't assume that we'll always be able to overthrow governments like we have in the past.

It's a crime because anyone who knowingly partakes in this sick shit, whether paying or not, is a menace to society.

Look, I don't want to spend any time lauding these people as great folks, but at the same time, I'd like my country to have an orderly set of laws. Hence, please don't take my remarks here in defense of a law as any kind of endorsement of the behavior. (It's such a charged topic that it's sadly hard to even discuss without a prologue of this kind.)

We are a country that is a great experiment in Freedom and a set of laws based on what people do, not what they think. There are many vicious kinds of people who walk the streets--people who would like to kill others, people who would like to take the money of others. People who want to just make each other feel bad. But we don't lock them up for "being bad people".

Should we turn a blind eye to horrible shit because it disrupts soneone's concocted logical view of things?

First, the someone(s) you're taking issue with is not me but Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and others. I didn't found the nation and make up the Great Experiment, they did. I'm just explaining how it works.

Second, I'm not advocating turning a blind eye to anything. I'm advocating that every citizen be offered "due process". To understand why, refer to Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (the relevant scene prominently quoted here, though the whole play or movie is worth a watch).

You're advocating a policy of "prior restraint" and using a certain degree of circular reasoning to get their. The reason you think merely seeing this content is bad is that you think it identifies people who will do other things (and, implicitly, you believe that making a mere guess of this kind won't come back to bite you personally). You seem to want to catch them in time by just proceeding on this guess before they do something concrete. But what if the mere viewing doesn't mean that? As others have noted--should we lock up the judge and jury? They also viewed it.

And what if it were some other issue? Could the government just guess about all things it thinks citizens might do? Should we lock up people who buy certain chemicals because they might be used in the drug trade or the making of bombs? Should we just assume that anyone who ever tells a lie in some venue is willing in some other venue to cheat on their taxes by lying there, too? We could stop a lot of tax cheats that way. Where does this kind of thing end?

By their nature, Free Societies are not Safe Societies. We buy some of our freedom at the cost of loss of safety. We could be a lot safer if we were not so free. You seem to me to be clearly advocating yielding freedom for safety, and I'm merely noting that while this is a possible thing to do, it's got dangers of its own that go far beyond what you're advocating. For a good analysis of this tradeoff, see William Gibson's Disneyland With the Death Penalty in Wired Magazine (Issue 1.04, Sep-Oct 1993). Or see the movie Minority Report. Or read George Orwell's 1984 .

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
--obligatory Ben Franklin quote

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52665, 00.html
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/

Oddly enough, TFA actually has a link that answers your question. IPac, a political action committee focused on consumer-side intellectual property rights, endorsed six candidates in 2004, five of which won re-election. This article mentions them all by name.

But here's the real reason I've never bought a Mac, and will continue to not by Macs: I like building computers.

The G4 motherboards worked great in PC cases, but it's amazing some of the mac casemods out there.

OK OK it wasn't on /., but it was 3 months ago!

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66992,00. html

Looks like someone got assimilated into the Collective. Hmmm... Where do I sign up? :P

Maybe he's just infecting the mothership. Who knows? :)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/microsoft .html remember? OK, not Linus himself, but...

What I find ironic, to say the least, is that the same company that accusse Linux and the GPL of being communist bans the word democracy and freedom across the ocean to avoid offending the most visible Communist Party on the planet.

Now, assuming that the dev kit *will* time-bomb, this would be a brilliant move. Of course, it might still be hacked, but the fact of the matter is that only a very, very small subset of the potential market will bother will figuring out the hack to keep it running.

All it takes is one "forensic programmer" to break any copy protection or time bomb Apple has on this software, and the broken version or the recipe will be all over the place. It's called the "smart cow" problem (eg: last line of this story).

Well. You've obviously never heard of the DigiScents iSmell.

It's true, Sony released firmware update 1.5 in Japan to disable homebrew software. Article here. Forget about open console platforms. The last one was the PalmOS Tapwave Zodiac, an uncrippled PDA with a good game controller. All it needed was better 3D. Unfortunately it never caught on.