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"The interest [in developing the Blackberry] came through his fascination with ham radio."

"The interest [in developing the Blackberry] came through his fascination with ham radio."

Sorry, didn't have a link handy at the time, I actually read the wired article before I found this thread on /. I also remember reading something about this the day it occurred which also stated that the pilots were "temporarily blinded" though I cannot recall what source, sorry. I think by temporarily blinded they mean an effect similar to when your asshole friend sets off a camera flash in your eyes, rather than something requiring medical treatment or lasting longer than possibly a minute or two. This, at least, is how I interpret it, and given the nature of a being flashed momentarily with a laser, is probably all it amounted to.

Unless the pilots were tripping balls, in which case the laser would have definitely provided a temporary distraction: "dude, whoa, check out that trippy light over there.... oh man, now my mouth is like, totally full of cotton." ;)

First off, they found the man who was in fact shining a green laser at air vehicles, so it's doubtful that the pilots made it up, and what would they stand to gain by fabricating such a story?
Secondly, no one said it was a solid state laser, at least not in the article that I read. His lawyer claims he bought the laser online for $100 and its intended use was for testing fiber optic cable. Granted, $100 for a green laser pointer sounds about right for a solid state job from thinkgeek, but it's possible either he or his lawyer is lying. Maybe he does have a green pen laser and that's what he turned over to police, but the one he used on the plane could have been a 500mW gas laser he bought after he decided the penlight didn't do it for him?

Additionally, the wired article says the incident occured on approach at 3,000 feet, which - if we assume a ground angle of 30 degrees - means the beam could have travelled as little as roughly 6,000 ft, just over one mile. A 100mW laser at that distance would still be enough to flashblind someone for a few moments if it got them in the eyes.

While I agree that all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, and that we're all arguing with too little information, this story is not impossible or even implausible.

Wired article http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66173, 00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

Is "The Netflix Project" affiliated with Netflix (ie aims to rent time limited DRM movie files)

You're thinking of the VOD plans I mentioned.

or a hacking group taking advantage of Netflix's system trying to build up their own collection?

"The Netflix Project" is the name for the warez project aiming to rent and rip every DVD offered by Netflix, which I read about on the third page of the Wired article.

Could the interview be this one? I read that, too. :)

Hmmm, if by "had all the good movies" means shitty grainy CAM AVI's that in no way equal the experience of viewing the movie in theatres, then sure.

TMD had shit quality rips. I could tell you a hundred places to get a shitload of everything and I wouldn't even be scratching the surface. Just because you were stupid enough to put up a DCC server on a channel called #LEETMOVIEZ or something to that lame extent and you were given voice doesn't mean you were the shit.

Wired is running a story that talks about how some files get onto the internet.

In my honest opinion, it is highly skewed. When I was much younger, I
was about 2 steps down from a "Top Level Site" as they are calling it.

Top level site -> Another Level -> My Distrobuter -> Me!

Also, as a result of that article, i'm sure a lot of people will be losing their positions on these sites.

There is some discussion that started from a comment on /. (Where I found this story), located here.

By the way, wondering how I got that lengthy post in before the FP'ers?
Because I'm a SLASHDOT SUBSCRIBER!!!! Highly recommended.

Similar article in Wired a year and a half ago

I know Powerpoint Considered Harmful, but I didn't realize that this was what they meant!

Your confusing people I'd like to have round my house with visionaries.

The Hitler legecy.
Brain sergury, Rockets, the Boy Scouts and about a million other things that you can't see because 'He's a great Asshole!'

Bush.
King of the Christian Democrats, he's a visionary because he has a goal that he want's to achieve and he won't let anyone get in his way It may not be your goal (or mine)

Come on, you can do better.

And if you think Ghandi was great think of salt well how just much salt do they put in things now, enough to kill us. Thanks Ghandi for helping to make millions of people ill.

Out of interest what's your AQ?

This site explains your shortsightedness much better that I can.

"
Villains and Kooks

There are many people wose ideas about the future are reasonable or respected but who are misguided about the subjects of methods of their visions.
Even though they may not lead to constructive results, erroneous visions deserve a special study.
Here is a modest initial selection:
Karl Marx - his main mistakes, in my opinion, were the seductively misleading idea that complex social processes may be explained and governed by a simple set of rules, similarly to those suggested by Newton for mechanical systems, and undue extrapolation of social trends of his time. Something we could learn from now...
Adolf Hitler One of the most successful proponents of nationalism in history, Hitler gave us some very good lessons. We paid too much for these lessons not to learn from them.
Vladimir Lenin did the same thing for communist ideas.
Nostradamus - an author of a set of vast, vague, and unsubstantiated claims about the future, which were less unexcusable in his time than in ours.
Jeremy Rifkin. - In the words of Charles Platt, "I believe Rifkin is the commentator who poses the greatest threat to attempts to transcend limitations of the human condition." Godling's Glossary defines Rifkin's kind of theories as Disasturbation
All religious thinkers that ever lived, for mistaking emotionally charged metaphors for the objective reality?"

Charges of elitism mostly come from people who never liked the Mac to begin with.

Actually, I thought it was the unix hacker with "1337 5k1ll2" who didn't like the idea of anyone joining his circle... that he would feel vulnerable and threatened if anyone else dared to understand the high level black magic he wielded...

I agree with the parent poster: if the Mac crowd were not wanting anyone else to join, why all the switch ads? If they don't want intruders in their O/S, why do they hang out for free in the Mac section of CompUSA and Microcenter answering shoppers' questions (better in some cases than the actual Apple employees who work there!)?

Is there another company that inspires viral marketing quite like Apple? Do you think Microsoft could have made Ellen Feiss a celebrity? (actually, it was complaining about a Microsoft product that was the impetus for her bit -- but that's a whole other topic). Apple xenophobes... yeah right!

This month's issue of Wired has a cover article on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which will be using SpaceShipTwo to run a commercial spaceflight service.

Some interesting quotes:

But look at the upside. The total price tag [of Virgin Galactic] is half the cost of a single Airbus A340-600 - and Virgin Atlantic ordered 26 of those last summer. In return, Branson gets bragging rights to one of the cooler breakthroughs of the early 21st century, with rocket-powered marketing opportunities that could fuel excitement - and sales - in his entire 200-company holding group. ...

SpaceShipOne's "shuttlecock" design adds an extra measure of safety. When the craft reaches its airless apogee, it hinges (feathers, in pilotspeak) into a broad V shape that automatically brakes the descent. "It lets you take an averagely competent pilot - like me - and throw anything you can think of at him, and still have everyone aboard get away safely," Tai explains. "The space shuttle does that with all sorts of fantastically complex systems. Burt's brilliance is that his ship uses smart design and the laws of physics. Which are, in fact, the only ways you can be truly drop-dead safe." ...

Why stop there? "I hope we'll get to the moon in my lifetime. The first baby born there - what country will it be a citizen of? Maybe we can put a Virgin bank in space, or maybe a Virgin tax haven. We could pay for all our people to go up there just by depositing their money." Now, that's adventure capitalism!

The simple fact is that going into space gives Branson a chance to do what a lot of massively successful guys wish they could do: grab the wheel of history and tug. Opening the final frontier to private citizens will ensure Branson's place in the human saga. And if that means fleets of Virgin spaceships soaring through the inky void, serving sip-packs of Virgin Cola on the way to the latest Virgin Clubhouse, so be it. "Space is virgin territory," Branson says, trying out a prospective marketing line and shooting another grin. "Is that 21st-century enough for you?"

In Jan 2005, when this article was posted, they don't consider BitTorrent a major P2P player?

They must, since the magazine article just before the 'dark internet' one is all BT: The BitTorrent Effect

The ideas been spinning around since the early 90s at least.

Actually, I first heard this in the early 80s. It was in Danny Hillis' book The Connection Machine, which was based on his Ph.D. thesis. He said that computer power would eventually become a utility, the way electric power is now.

That doesn't mean there won't be any local computing, after all, we still have batteries and generators, but that the largest portion of it will be handled by someone else.

Once you have fiber to the home, the need for a local box nearly goes away for the average member of the populace.

some parts seem to be copied almost verbatim...

$1,000 as the initial charge for such infections, with further costs/damages being added afterwards seems quite nice. The idea of having Marc Morganstern, Mitch Bainwol and Dan Glickman all fined $1,000 per compromised machine, plus inflated damages and incarcerated whilst waiting for an ever-delayed trial à la Mitnick seems quite amusing.

$1,000 as the initial charge for such infections, with further costs/damages being added afterwards seems quite nice. The idea of having Marc Morganstern, Mitch Bainwol and Dan Glickman all fined $1,000 per compromised machine, plus inflated damages and incarcerated whilst waiting for an ever-delayed trial à la Mitnick seems quite amusing.

There was the Wired article and Slashdot articles about the Wired article talking about a gentleman who has used a system set up by William Dobelle. This system uses a grid of electrodes on the surface of the cortex that generates phosphenes or perceptual points of light. What is not accomplished here is any real correlation with the points of light and the grid of stimulating electrodes. Furthermore, the phosphenes are not consistent among many other problems and potential problems with the Dobelle system. Also, it should be noted that William Dobelle was not granted permission to use this system in the United States and thus had to move to Portugal where he has these systems implanted in patients and he has not been entirely honest with his patients and what they can expect from these systems. Finally, the approach with surface mount electrodes requires significantly higher current to stimulate the cortex (think complications of epilepsy, and his patients have experienced seizures) than with other systems like Richard Normann's system which uses an implantable electrode array.

I seem to remember an article about exactly that last year - but it was still in the research phase. Ah, here's something...

Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster, he says, basing his observation on results of tests using the video game Super Monkey Ball.

They start chatting at the watercooler, and soon after are dating, get married, and have multitasking children, and so on.

Also, you forget that "geeks" who care about DRM are the people who the less technically talented will go to for reccomendations on what consumer electronics to buy. Thus, 1 geek may influence the purchasing decisions of 5 or 10 different people considering something like Microsoft MCE; those people are Microsoft's target buyers and their choice to go with an MCE competitor like Tivo hurts MS's bottom line. When you consider that they're the ones everyone comes to for advice, geeks may have more power over purchasing habits than you thought.

whois popwow.com

whois tmsathai.org

More correctly, possibly a future robot or robotic aircraft might one day feed itself with dead flies, according to the article.

An actual working model that's capable of flight looks to be well in the future. However, another(?) group in England is working on a someone similar design that'll eat garden slugs. That seems far more workable...

Americans have become less loyal. Consumer-goods markets used to be very stable. If you had a set of customers today, you could be pretty sure most of them would still be around two years, five years, ten years from now. That's no longer true. A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later

Also, this Wired article mentions "Although Metro told activists the chips worked only while customers were inside the store, activists discovered that a kiosk used to deactivate the chips didn't completely disable the tags."

Katherine Albrecht of CASPIAN fame has also mentioned that three out of four articles she microwaved in order to destroy their tag caused the articles to catch fire.

freeipods.com has been talked about before. There was even an article on wired about it a while back; http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64614,00.html From everything I have read, it seems legit as far as people getting their ipods.

Do the dark areas in the radar images of Titan's surface signify the existence of lakes?

When radar waves are used to create images of surfaces, areas that reflect more radio waves turn up as bright spots, while those that reflect fewer waves appear as dark spots. Some scientists believe the large, dark patches in the Titan images could be lakes full of liquid ethane and propane, which would absorb radio waves. But if this is true, do the lakes have ripples and waves caused by the wind, or are they completely still?

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65533,00.ht ml

Personally, I do care about privacy. Or rather, I would if it was conceivably possible to have any, but as Scott McNealy accurately said back in 1999, there is no privacy, get over it. He's right unfortunately...

A few years back, Chicago-based conceptual artist Eduardo Kac spliced the green fluorescent protein from the jellyfish into the genes of a rabbit, creating Alba the bright-green glowing transgenic bunny. He was also working with Mexican hairless dogs for a glow unobscured by fur. And I read in a recent ish of Wired scientists are "modifying" misquitoes to actually prevent malaria when they bite, rather than transmit it.

but it sure sounds like an improvement considering the second gulf war was coordinated though.... microsoft comic chat... no really, you cant make stuff like this up!.(search for "alien" in the text... I kid you not!)

IRC, the protocol voted "script kiddies choice" for ten years in a row, is what powered the critical communication infrasteructure. Combined with a microsoft client that adds comic characters. Also the database used for collecting and assigning ground targets for bombers.... access.

I wonder if you could run a stable kernel and debug a new kernel at the same time.

The GNU system (also called GNU/Hurd) is completely self-contained (you can compile all parts of it using GNU itself). You can run several instances of the Hurd in parallel, and debug even critical servers in one Hurd instance with gdb running on another Hurd instance.

You lost that argument a long time ago. Definitions change with usage. Common usage, whether you like it or not, is to conflate piracy with unauthorised duplication. I say duplication, because current anti-piracy music disk mangling is aimed at preventing duplication, nor distribution. The RIAA tried to go further with their lawsuit against Diamond over the Rio just because it played mp3s, but they backed down on that one, so for the moment, piracy == unauthorised duplication, as it's meant by the people who actually use the word the most.

Wired had a great article on something similar a while back. It was the same principle, involving a small unit on a retainer that would "display" images to the roof of the mouth. As far as I've heard, fighter pilots also have similar systems in the backs of their flight suits allowing them to locate other crafts through tactile input (although wording like that makes it sound like it was recently banned in 11 states).

I also rememeber reading (or watching...Big Thinkers maybe) something about a audible display as well. Something that took really coarse images and "played" them from left to right. The tones produced were determined by the rise and fall of lines in the picture. It was a bit rough sounding (it certainly wasn't being developed by those leading the field in sound design), but they showed a few, and after a while you really could start to determine images based on what you heard. It was pretty cool.

k:p

Über-liberal Lawrence Lessig's recent article profiling Powell came to similar conclusions about the guy.

This might be a good place to mention the suspected links between autism/Asperger's and the tech world.

This article in Wired explored the connection, including the explosion of cases of a/A in silicon valley, probably due to geeks interbreeding.

The suggestion is that autism is a spectrum, and a little of it can make you a better programmer, or at least uniquely suited to the programmer's environment. However, the trait is highly hereditary, so when programmers start marrying and having children they have a very high incidence of autism.

Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster, he says, basing his observation on results of tests using the video game Super Monkey Ball.

Cell Phone Damage

Hmmm

Sorry, no. Slashdot tried to fight the scientologists, and found out Real Fast (TM) just how far that disclaimer's protection actually extended. The answer is "not very, even for documents arguably in the public domain".

In other words, the USA is well underway ;)

In the CD's liner notes, you write that you'll be "corrected on the Internet" if you flub some detail telling the Greendale story on stage. Sounds like the Net is a pain in your ass.

When I play a new song in concert, it's immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me. But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.

How do you mean?

During the acoustic tour in Europe, when I performed the show that's on the bonus DVD, I was aware that everything I said would be recorded, transcribed, and circulated. So every night I dumped in different information about different parts of Greendale. If you say something in one town, and the next night you add a little more, the Internet brings together these separate occasions. It makes you look at things as not being separate.

Don't you want to control the use of your material?

I can't control what people do. I don't want to. If they want to sell my music to someone else or send it to their friends, they can just as easily tape it off the radio as the Net. MP3 quality sucks. If they want quality, they can purchase a DVD-A.

In Canada, the rules allow downloading music from a p2p network without permission. Copying a borrowed CD is also permitted. Distributing copies to others is not necessarily permitted. These rules do not necessarily apply to other copyrighted works. Therefore, there might be something to be said for levies on blank media and certain devices used primarily for copying music. Of course, nothing is perfect. Consider someone downloading a song via p2p without permission and burning it onto a CD. On the other hand, consider someone purchasing a CD and making a copy on a CD-R for their convenience. The first situation justifies levies but not necessarily the second situation. It is hard to know what a buyer will use blank media for. There is also the issue of knowing who the levies should go to i.e. what songs get downloaded via p2p most often.

In the USA, downloading music via p2p without permission is not legally allowed. Even so, levies are charged on certain blank media used to record music. Unauthorized distribution of music is much more likely to involve CD-Rs than portable music players. Even so, someone might use a CD-R strictly to copy a CD they purchased. It was ruled that computer equipment and portable music players were not subject to the rules about levies. If someone purchases a CD and copies it to a portable music player, they are not likely to be hurting anyone.

It's a good thing Slashdot doesn't have this problem.

The supposed quote was about 640K, not 64K, and it's a myth

Here is an article that appeared in Wired.
We're All Gonna Die!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday. html/

No, that isn't new, that happened in 1997. Even Slashdot isn't that slow in reporting news!

The historical irony is, however, that as part of the $150 million deal, Apple agreed to make IE to default browser...

Article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml

/. Storyhttp://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03 /08/12/2112237&tid=126&tid=14

'a pension fund is the property'
Only if you spend it.

Anyhow, you failed the lameness test. are you autistic or suffering from aspergers syndrome?

There's a test here. I got a score of 17...

So now we're working towards transmitting internet through our power lines, and power through our internet lines.