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TFA

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It's relevant to note that SpaceX has already announced that they'll be competing for the Bigelow-funded America's Space Prize, for orbital human flight.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66308 ,00.html

With most of the other space entrepreneurs focused on suborbital flight, Musk is closest to the holy grail of manned commercial spaceflight: orbit. Although Falcon I, with its single Merlin engine, will be able to launch only small satellites, five Merlins will be mated to the first stage of the far more powerful Falcon V rocket, perhaps as early as this year. Falcon V, Musk told Wired News, will be able to carry at least five people into low Earth orbit.

Five to orbit is a significant number; it's the number required to win the next big space prize. America's Space Prize is a $50 million purse established last year by Las Vegas hotelier and, yes, space entrepreneur, Robert Bigelow. Bigelow will award the money to the first U.S. company to build, without government funding, a spaceship that can send five people into orbit twice within 60 days. Bigelow has more than an academic interest in commercial spaceflight; through his Bigelow Aerospace, he's expanding his real estate empire off-planet with the first commercial space stations. While he can launch his stations on existing unmanned commercial rockets, he needs an orbital passenger vehicle to succeed in his venture.

Musk told Wired News that he intends to win America's Space Prize, and that he can do it by the Jan. 10, 2010, deadline (that's when Bigelow wants to open his commercial space station for business). The space prize is right in line with Musk's business plan. "We hope to be the company that takes people back and forth from Earth to either the International Space Station or to Bigelow's space station, or to applications we don't know about today," said Musk. Ultimately, though, his ambitions extend beyond even orbit. "I think it's very important that we become a spacefaring civilization, and that we eventually become multiplanetary."

From BoingBoing:

Right wing blogs go ape over George Lucas article in Wired
Steve Silberman's excellent story about George Lucas in the current issue of Wired is inciting a good deal of mouth foaming and carpet chewing on conservative blogs. Says Steve: "My Lucas story has blown up on right-wing blogs like Instapundit and the National Review Online, after being referenced on a conservative forum about film called Libertas. What's strange is that -- with the exception of Libertas -- Lucas' 'statements,' particularly re: Fahrenheit 9/11, are being condemned with no link to the story or the online QA, as if Lucas' supposed opinions are just in the air somewhere. And while Lucas critiqued F911 in the interview, the wingers are characterizing him as a 'Moore-loving liberal.'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:45 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post

From BoingBoing:

Right wing blogs go ape over George Lucas article in Wired
Steve Silberman's excellent story about George Lucas in the current issue of Wired is inciting a good deal of mouth foaming and carpet chewing on conservative blogs. Says Steve: "My Lucas story has blown up on right-wing blogs like Instapundit and the National Review Online, after being referenced on a conservative forum about film called Libertas. What's strange is that -- with the exception of Libertas -- Lucas' 'statements,' particularly re: Fahrenheit 9/11, are being condemned with no link to the story or the online QA, as if Lucas' supposed opinions are just in the air somewhere. And while Lucas critiqued F911 in the interview, the wingers are characterizing him as a 'Moore-loving liberal.'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:45 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post

From BoingBoing:

Right wing blogs go ape over George Lucas article in Wired
Steve Silberman's excellent story about George Lucas in the current issue of Wired is inciting a good deal of mouth foaming and carpet chewing on conservative blogs. Says Steve: "My Lucas story has blown up on right-wing blogs like Instapundit and the National Review Online, after being referenced on a conservative forum about film called Libertas. What's strange is that -- with the exception of Libertas -- Lucas' 'statements,' particularly re: Fahrenheit 9/11, are being condemned with no link to the story or the online QA, as if Lucas' supposed opinions are just in the air somewhere. And while Lucas critiqued F911 in the interview, the wingers are characterizing him as a 'Moore-loving liberal.'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:45 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post

Even more hilarious is the intro to the cover article of Wired

Life After Darth
George Lucas was born to make underground films. Then a little movie called Star Wars lured him to the dark side. Can the father of the blockbuster really rediscover his avant-garde soul?

Comedy Gold!

i wouldn't give the NYT a dime until they drop charges against Adrian Lamo

Tommy John surgery is to fix the elbow of pitchers in baseball. It used to be considered very complex, now days it is like going in for a teeth cleaning, and according to some it can actually make you better than you were before.

This article might be about something similar, incidentally. Interesting stuff. I might have to try and find that television segment you are referring to...

ID has no merits other than being non-Darwinist. There is no evidence supporting a designer being active to generate creatures (interestingly though we still call individual lifeforms 'creatures' even when we claim that they don't have been created by a creator ;) ), there is no conclusion we can draw out of ID that helps us deal with a problem we have with a single or a group of lifeforms.

We all know the problem with antibiotics: If you use them, and you are not reaching every single lifeform you want to wipe out with a deadly dose, some of the lifeforms might survive long enough to have offspring, which in turn might survive the antibiotics too. They even might be able to survive a low dose of antibiotics without any harm, so if you use the antibiotic again, they survive all competing lifeforms, which die due to the antibiotic, making the field free for a growing population of the slightly antibiotic resistant lifeforms.
In the end your antibiotic is not able anymore to harm the resistant lifeform, and all that happens if you use it: You increase the growing of the species, because the antibiotic helps battling all those other lifeforms once competing.
This is evolution at work, and there are enough antibiotics which are not effective anymore, because there are lifeforms resistant to them.

It does not only work for bacterias and other single cell organisms: Exactly those evolutative mechanisms were at work when coca plants grew resistant to RoundUp: The spraying of RoundUp on Columbian coca plantages had a strange effect: Because spraying from an airplane is quite incorrect, and you can't make sure that all plants you want to hit are hit with a full dose, and the one's you don't want to hit aren't, the coca growing pawns in Columbia faced a strange problem after a spraying attack: Most of their crops, coca and other crops, died. Most tomatos, most corn, most vegetables and fruit, and most coca plants.
But some survived, having only got a low dose and were able to survive.

Coca plants are mostly multiplied by the pawns by cutting small twigs and planting them into the earth rather than sowing the coca seeds. After a spraying attack almost the complete plantage of a pawn is destroyed, and only the coca plants which have survived can be used to plant anew, just cut some twigs and regrow your crops. Most cultural plants need to be grown again from seeds, and you have to wait until the RoundUp is washed out of the earth. In the end the whole coca plantages once attacked were replanted with twigs from coca plants that survived a RoundUp attack. And they were growing faster than before because the weed normally growing with the coca plants was suppressed by the RoundUp remains in the soil.

Within four years a coca plant was covering large areas which was completely immune against RoundUp. No genetic engineering (a.k.a. intelligent design) was necessary to outwith the DEA and Monsanto: Just having evolution go its way and taking the survivors of RoundUp attacks and replant the field with them.

You might love or hate Darwinism. But evolution is all around you every day.

Like this guy ! Man was that spam refreshing...

Canadian ban on dangerous gasoline aditives was found to violate NAFTA.

In a reciprocal case a California ban on a gasoline additive was being contested as a violate NAFTA as well. Methanex claims that under NAFTA, it is owed $970 million in profits it will lose if California bans MTBE.

Wired News

It seems to me that were going to spend entirely to much money on something that is old obsolete. Why not replace it with something new and better?

IMHO, we should. A copy from an old post of mine:

Hubble Origins Probe: replace instead of repair?

Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build and launch, less than the estimated cost of a service mission.

well actually, this wired article suggests that they are spending $150 per john doe to file the suit. i'm sure there are some other related legal fees, but the process is fairly automated now.

The US doesn't have a CD-R/MP3 player tax like other countries.

How much you wanna bet?

i will bet you the amount charged on all ipod sales in the US in the past year. which is zero.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,20 235,00.html

Well, not really. It's more like a hash. Unless the people that designed the security sytem didn't have a clue, they wouldn't store reversable fingerprint information at all.

The fingerprint image has to travel from the scanner to the analyses system/software. On cheap scanners this is proven* to be done in plain text. I dont know about the exspensive scanners. The ones with "blowing on the sensor to rescan the previous print" countermeasures. But these need plain text at one point for the comparison to work.

Whether biometric producers have a clue has little to do with it. becouse:
1. To build a working one way-ish hash like system that allows for tens of percents of deviation between scans is very very hard.
2. Visual comparison between a scan and a known scan is a feature most people offer since these systems are not perfect. Also lots of customers like having prints on file, its usefull if the cops come knocking on the door.
3. these vendors tend to be "ducttape salesmen" in it for the money rather then helping people secure stuff. Just find one and ask for random population false possitive rates instead of the irrelevant "no fingerprint is the same" marketing story. There may be trustworthy people in the biometrics busineness, it`s just that I have`nt seen any.

Anyway whether the gym at the corner cares about securing biometric systems is irrelevant anyway. That is, in the USA as at least as uncle sam wants your passport to have remotely radio readble plain text copies of your fingerprints on your passport without the crappy but standardized protection that basic access control offers against unauthorized querying.....

*)C`t magazine about two years ago

Face the facts, we all know which kind of movies you'll be watching on your PlayStation Portable. (Oh, and even which kind of pictures, too.) Though the Nintendo DS will certainly attempt to have its fair share of the cake as well. And at the price of $48, it does seem like a much cheaper alternative for all the perverts out there. ("Masturbators of the World unite!")

you took it out of context... "until recently"

microsoft didn't pay until 2003! and THAT's only after Nader started making noise. Thats over 20 years of no ROI. See wired.

thanks for the shass tho

Open letter to Bill to pay a fekn dividend.

"...combining a pda-style touchscreen with a console is very radical..."

Not to belittle the DS, but: am I the only one who remembers a handheld console by Tiger Electronics in the mid-to-late '90s? It had grayscale graphics, a touch screen, and a bunch of PDA applications (and was a total flop). It was essentially a PDA that looked like a handheld game console.

Granted, the DS seems to me doing a lot more than that console ever did in terms of "innovative" control schemes (see also: Wario Ware: Touched!). But the DS certainly isn't the _first_ console to have a touch screen.

Now if only the game selection weren't so poor! Even a minor fanboy such as myself cannot help but notice that there are only 2 or 3 games worth playing on the DS right now. If they sent me a free DS developers kit, I'd make a cool game for them...

(PS. Here's a Wired article that Google found for me about that old Tiger PDA/console.)

Wired has an article on Drew Endy and Tom Knight: Life Reinvented (Issue 13.01 - January 2005). For those interested the article also illustrates how the parts can be assembled as bio bricks.

Wired has an article on Drew Endy and Tom Knight: Life Reinvented (Issue 13.01 - January 2005). For those interested the article also illustrates how the parts can be assembled as bio bricks.

Wired has an article on Drew Endy and Tom Knight: Life Reinvented (Issue 13.01 - January 2005). For those interested the article also illustrates how the parts can be assembled as bio bricks.

Wired has an article on Drew Endy and Tom Knight: Life Reinvented (Issue 13.01 - January 2005). For those interested the article also illustrates how the parts can be assembled as bio bricks.

More recent, January 2005, about what they are doing at MIT on synthetic biology.

Here.

Interesting stuff

--
Haven't come up with a sig

Wired did an article about a similar notion back in 1995 which was rather interesting at the time.

the big hype was all about superconducting power lines etc...

Don't give up hope, nanotubes are the new superconductor!

The apps install in a minute, they're rock solid, and they're fast. If you need an excuse to move up to Mac OS X, Microsoft Office v. X might just be it.

...the Mac version of Office makes the Windows version look like something designed in the last century.

I remember reading an article in Wired back in 1998 that was fascinating. It talked about Cold Fusion, the historical *ahem* problems with theories, and the current research. I am not a physicist but still found this to be informative and interesting. Thanks to the internet, you can still find it here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion .html?pg=1

or something you can hide in a bag or something

Like a RFID chip? Well, the future is already here

TBS has made a mint on aquiring relatively high-valued IP for relative pennies and then milking it for every cent. It was the essence of Ted Turner's cable TV model -- buy rights to every Western/John Wayne film/WWII drama/Law and Order episode/Walker:Texas Ranger and then spread the content over a massive distribution network. It works sort of like the long tail distribution model -- there are non-trivial markets out there for almost EVERY IP, so if you can get the rights to it cheaply and get the word out to the markets that they can get it from you you can make a killing. This is just them taking the same model into a different medium which happens to be synergistic with their cable providing arm.

"...a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering."

The reason Microsoft only got slaps on the wrist is ironically because judge Thomas Penfield Jackson could not hide his contempt for the defense, and therefore the case was effectively dismissed on the grounds of a biased judge.

That incredible fuckup and all its implications pain me to this day. To think, that the evidence was so clearly not in Microsoft's favor that the judge was openly (and unfortunately, vocally) hostile towards the defendant, so much so that the decision for the plaintiff was tossed out... The landscape of my industry might look a heck of a lot more interesting now if it wasn't for that.

Nature will beat you to it. The Mystery of the Coca Plant That Wouldn't Die

Click here to read it. Same story.

When SJ returned to Apple in '97, there was a big pile of outstanding issues with Apple. One of them was a series of law-suits against Microsoft. Another was securing a viable third-party software future for the Mac (read...like it or not, we need Office). Yet another was that Apple was racking up consistent losses quarter after quarter.

After a series of negotiations, a settlement was reached between Apple and Microsoft....Apple dropped the patent law-suit they had outstanding against Microsoft, and agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser for the OS. In return, Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting stock (that was to be held for x number of years), and agreed to continue development of Office Mac for a further 5 years.

At the time, while Apple was definitely losing money consistently, they were in no real danger of going under....in fact they had roughly $1.2 billion in the bank. While that WAS an all-time low of cash on hand for Apple, the quarterly losses were (with one quarter's exception) relatively small (as were the few quarterly profits). On average, the profits and losses were in the $50-100 million range. The problem was, there were more losses than profits, and Q2 '97 was especially bad....loss of $700 million (that's why the cash on hand was less than $2 billion for the first time ever). Those factors (stock purchase, losses, one really bad quarter) led a bunch of Dvorak-style "journalists" to run around screaming that Microsoft was "propping" Apple up, etc, etc. Unfortunately too many in the Windows world take the word of these "journalists" as gospel. As a result, everybody "knows" that Microsoft owns a part of Apple.

Something that also never seems to get mentioned is that, before Jobs returned, Apple had done relatively little to cut costs back. That is what brought Apple back into consistent profits again...simplifying the line-up, ditching the clones, ditching unprofitable product (Newton, etc). In short, it really was pretty simple for Jobs to staunch the slow leak that Apple was experiencing.

As a final note, as far as I can tell (at least all the reports I've found have said so) Microsoft sold off all that stock the minute they could, and at a healthy profit. I believe the term for those was 3 years, which would make it back in 2001.

Here are some links if ya want..... Cnet story from the time, Wired article from the time. Or......Google is your friend, if ya wanna dig for yourself. ^^

Wired had a cover article about "Open Source Everywhere" in Nov 2003.

Sealands legal status as an actual soveriegn nation is actually debatable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealand#Legal_status
but just to stay on topic. Sealands "Prince" has invited a computer securities company to work from the island to avoid legal hassles(like copyright laws) of being in a real countrie http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html

"Hunkered down on a North Sea fortress, a crew of armed cypherpunks, amped-up networking geeks, and libertarian swashbucklers is seceding from the world to pursue a revolutionary idea: an offshore, fat-pipe data haven that answers to nobody."

You know, like when Hatch's site was found to have incorporated copyrighted code without license?

I mean, god people, isn't there an exception for well-intentioned congressmen? (well-intentioned -> translation -> bought and paid for by corporations) Somehow, I expect there will be when it happens.

Made it illegal for medical doctors and researchers to discuss the use of medications for "off label" use. Many medical doctors will prescribe non over the counter antihistamines to their patients as a sleep aid. If MAPA had passed these MDs could've been jailed for this. Researchers often look at approved prescription medications to see if they can help people in other ways. A few years ago there was talk about some NSAIDs (Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) might be useful in the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease. Researchers would have faced prison sentences for the act of discussing this in an email sent over the Internet.

The discussion of any device that could be used as drug paraphernalia would be illegal. Many US citizens that have their roots from the Middle East still use a hookah for smoking tobacco. Uttering the statement "please don't use a hookah for smoking marijuana" could land them in prison.

Hatch and Feinstein are both evil control freaks. To me to proves the system is broken with both the Democrats and Republicans. They both suck.

Also see: Wired News: Reefer Madness Hits Congress

I was actually interested until I saw A.L.I.C.E. - like that chatbot will ever pass a turing test.

To be fair, this was a high school project and so I can see how a suped up chatbot would fit the bill for this "Turing test".

So no... I didn't RTFA thank you very much.

But for those interested in reading up on Wallace, A.L.I.C.Es author... Well he's a first class nut job

Google uses one cookie that never expires, and it crosses all their services (one cookie for gmail, web searches, image searches, maps, etc.) And then there is google toolbar which is even more viral in nature. Yes, each time you type something into google websearch, each of your queries is stored and associated with your cookie.

They don't know who you are though right ? Well.. maybe not you, but thats where gmail comes in. Most people will enter their real names/addy's/etc ..

One cookie to rule them all.

Wired article on google worries

Go google google :)

Well, I think you're right--all of a sudden you'd have millions of pissed off gamers taking a quick glance at their PC, then looking again, and thinking, "hmm, maybe America's Army isn't such a bad bet after all."

All the army guys would have to do then is promise the XBOX Live outage victims that they could play with something like this, or this, or these or even better, one of these

Conveniently leave out the part about pushups and getting yelled/shot at and you'd have hordes of HALO fanatics breaking down your doors to come join up. So hey, Al Qaeda, if you're reading this, better leave XBOX Live alone!

Let's never forget the people who first brought spam to Usenet, the Green Card Lawyers.

See this article in Wired for more details on how it is created.

Yeah, they're about a bijillion years behind, but http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59043,00 .html

I really wish they wouldn't fill these things with helium, what with the upcoming helium shortage.
http://www.energybulletin.net/3135.html and http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/heli um.html
detail the problem.

Helium should be restricted to uses where there is no practical replacement. Cold temperature research should be the top of the list. Fusion should be next, but this probably won't significantly impact the He market since He-3 is a pretty rare isotope. Gas mixes for deep divers should be somewhere following (commercial before recreational of course). Balloons and Blimps shouldn't even be on the list: Hydrogen is a perfectly accptable replacement, is renewable (can be extracted from water and hydrocarbons) and the danger can be mitigated. hydrogen in childrens balloons would produce a very loud pop if ignited, but you'd have to put a candle to the balloon to do it. Hydrogen in blimps should be safe as long as we don't make the skins out of rocket fuel.

Yes I am aware that divers sometimes replace He with hydrogen, but it has many trade-offs that should not be forced: Under pressure, He/O2 mixes can be explosive, so the mixer must be very careful to limit the partial pressures of each, thermal properties of hydrogen, and the rate of hydrogen take-up in tissues are all factors to consider there.

High volume, low impact uses should at least try to avoid using He, leaving more for people who can get more use out of it.

Darn you hindenburg for creating a huge negative perception of hydrogen. And your crazy announcer too. Think how much cooler our cities would have looked with derigibles floating all over the place.

You're quoting out of context, unlike Softpanorama, which is quite meticulous about revealing their sources and labeling their commentary as opinion. You're trying to do a hatchet job on Softpanorama, but if you provided links to your sources and put the quotes in context, that would undermine your argument.

The quote about hijacking the Minix community is clearly labeled as an opinion about a comment written by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazar. The first person to accuse anyone of trying to hijack Minix was Andrew Tanenbaum himself in 1992. That opinion has been around a long time, and many people agree with it. If it's news to you, then you're wet behind the ears.

Andrew Tanenbaum:

By and large, I agree with what Glen said. A lot of folks really wanted free BSD, and tried to hijack MINIX in that direction. Then they successively tried to use Coherent, Linux, BSDI, HURD, and no doubt more in the future. Fine.

ESR's Cathedral and Bazar:

In fact, I think Linus' cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do." Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein might have said, too lazy to fail.

Softpanorama's commentary:

IMHO the hijacking of Minix community was the cleverest Linux hack (along with the adoption of GPL.). This way he got a lot of skilled developers and the community that can appreciate their efforts. Without them his efforts would probably collapse OSS or no OSS. This argument about invention of the development model does not look realistic...

As you can see from the quotes in context, Softpanorama is actually criticizing ESR, and complementing Linus.

Now we get to the part where you accuse Softpanorama of "bringing up his fathers membership of the communist party". Get your attributions straight. That was a straight-up, attributed quote from Wired Magazine, which you're quoting out of context in order to imply it's something that originated from Softpanorama, when it's not:

Wired Magazine 1.11 Leader of the Free World :

In a way, Linus was born to be a revolutionary. His parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. Torvalds' father was a card-carrying Communist who spent a year studying in Moscow when his son was about 5. He served a stint as a minor elected official (he's now a prominent television and radio exec). Other kids teased Linus about his father's politics. "Growing up, I was terribly embarrassed by him," Torvalds says.

Softpanorama also quotes another source of this information:

Encyclopedia article about Nikke Torvalds. Free Online Encyclopedia:

"Torvalds was active in the Communist Party since he was a college student during the 1960s His political beliefs developed after learning of the atrocities committed against communist sympathizers in Finland. He later charged that his enthusiasm for the Party and its beliefs were the result of naiveté. He met his wife Anna at their university. As the family

Agreed; but with on-line sales, this has the potential to be a major source of revenue. I refer you to Wired's excellent article about the "Long Tail", which was previously covered in Slashdot. Without spending a lot of time, I would trust that the implications of this are obvious to anyone who has read Lessig's discussions of copyright getting "eternity on the installment plan", and Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" : the enjoyment of music in modern society is in for a major change unprecedented in history due to the diminished information costs of modern computer search aggregation techniques.

Adding the ability to have such a "bargain bin" to iTunes might be a good thing for everyone... at least until creativity runs out.

They are not concerned with expanding the volume of music sold. [...] Apple has the right idea, in that they are trying to grow the music market.

Also, agreed. More exactly, I believe that Steve Jobs has a better understanding of the elasticity of the demand curve, and that there will be more money made at lower prices. But you're right, far to many of the studio executives think that "we want to make more money" means "we want to be able to raise prices."

It might be interesting for someone to do a study to actually measure the elasticity of the demand curve, and try to determine where songs "should" be priced. However, doing so would be a non-trivial experiment to design and perfom.