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Commercial quantities of helium come out of the ground in Texas. People think the Strategic Helium Reserve was such a big joke. Except for the fact that without helium, we can't make computer chips, can't do inert gas welding, can't do a lot of science and (most important) can't make squeaky voices at kid's parties. So, the government has decided it's in the best interests of all to privatize the collection, storage, and the distribution network for what is a non-renewable, economically critical element.

Even Wired magazine has mentioned the potential helium shortage. We'll run out eventually. The American Chemical Society puts it at around 2015. That's not good. The spring of 2002, there was enough of a shortage that the distributors of air products had to clamp down on helium- there was rationing for a few months. And the government's concept is to *privatize* it. Wonderful.

I submitted this story like 5 days ago but it was rejected, nothing personal, yeah right. Anyway, there's a Wired article talking about this with the creators, here's the link:

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65819,00. html?tw=wn_story_top5

Heh, knew I'd seen something like this in Wired several years back.

http://wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/fetish.html

Cellular Division

Hang ViperCell antennas on the walls of your company's far-flung locations, connect them to the Ethernet, and pow: Your branch offices are now free-calling zones for cell phones. Using cellular voice-over-IP, ViperCell intercepts calls or messages sent with GSM or PCS phones, then routes them via your network - and your regular cell provider will never know.

ViperCell: price TBA. Cisco Systems: (800) 553 6387, +1 (650) 330 2800, www.cisco.com.

Unfortunately, I don't think it ever came to market.

You can get repeaters that get put inside your building or car and run to an antenna outside. The passive ones are super cheap, and would be simple to build, too, but I wonder how well they would work in a situation like yours. There are also active repeaters, but those are targeted toward corporations with big buildings and are priced accordingly.

"The critical question is, How good and different are [the cold fusion researchers'] new results?" says Allen Bard, a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin. "If they are saying, 'We are now able to reproduce our results,' that's not good enough. But if they are saying, 'We are getting 10 times as much heat out now, and we understand things,' that would be interesting. I don't see anything wrong with giving these people a new hearing." In ERAB's cold fusion review in 1989, he adds, "there were phenomena described to us where you could not offer alternative, more reasonable explanations. You could not explain it away like UFOs."

Isn't this basically a smoking gun? New fundamentl physics is often revealed by results that differ by as little as one part in a million from preditictions of current theory, or one part in whatever. If there is any discrepancy, WHATSOEVER, within the statistical and systematic errors, that is enough. Your old theory is TOAST. This is completely bonkers. He is saying that consistent excess heat production is not enough, unless it is bigger than before.

Personally I suspsect the writer of this article, Toni Feder, intentionally tricked Dr. Bard into revealing this on the record. That last bit -- about phenomena that you can't just "explain away" -- seems as though Dr. Bard thinks he is speaking to a member of the group that is sympatico repressing cold fusion research, doesn't it?

There is known to have been disputes between editorial staff and management at Physics Today over the coverage given to less mainstream areas of research. The following exerpt from a letter to the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, protests the treatment suffered by a past editor, Jeff Scmidt:

Indeed, we understand that you were displeased with Jeff's workplace activism and had tried to silence him through a number of very repressive measures short of dismissal.

As you know, Jeff worked with other Physics Today staff members to ... increase staff participation in decision-making, broaden the narrow range of viewpoints allowed in the magazine ... .

By the way, Jeff Schmidt is the author of "Disciplined Minds", and I think this book includes more coverage of this editorial dispute at Physics Today.

Back to the question of how anomalous the results have to be, we move from the comments of scientists to the behavior of the reporters, in this case Gary Taubes, with "What If Cold Fusion Is Real?", Wired, November 1998:

Meanwhile, electrochemist John Bockris announced that one of his graduate students at Texas A&M, Nigel Packham, had collaborated on a successful cold fusion experiment. Packham had even detected small amounts of tritium, a radioactive by-product virtually guaranteeing that fusion had taken place.

A science writer named Gary Taubes, who has written two books and several articles investigating allegations of fraudulent activity in science, went to Texas A&M on a fact-finding mission.

"We thought Taubes was genuine at first," Bockris told me recently, speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before he moved to the U

That has been suggested before I think by Schneier if I remember correctly. One form is called Operator's License

This has come up before- here is a link to a 2001 Wired article about the British intelligence services using laptops with ``a built-in electronic self-destruct mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when a code is forgotten, as well as ``a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." This was after a spate of embarrassing episodes where laptops with lots of important info went missing. I don't know if it's been implemented but this does seem to have some interesting applications, potentially...

This relates to a recent article in WIRED regarding the declining power of name brands in general. Consumer research seems to indicate that more and more people are starting to realize that quality requires more than just a popular name.

There is a Wired article on the Talon here.

I think you're relegated to using elgato's EyeTV and an external device like the plextor pvr convertX (wired news short review)

Although I wonder if freevo/mythtv/etc have an OSX port (or if someone would do one... I think the lack of tv tuners for the mac would be both a boon and a bane)

*Shrug*

e.

In addition to the autopilot already mentioned, he might do well to get his hands on some Provigil.

1. You are correct. Sirius music channels have always been 100% commercial free, while XM's haven't. But that's the past. They're now both 100% commercial free music.

2. Lee Abrams pretty much invented the use of psychographics in radio, which, in a nutshell, is when they tailor a radio station for a specific listening profile. This is EXACTLY what satellite radio specializes in, creating "niche" stations that a small number of people are interested in listening to. See this Wired article for more information. (Oh, and Abrams came most recently from ABC Radio. He might have worked at Clear Channel in the past, I can't find an answer either way. But if he did, it's been quite some time since he did.)

3. Yes, you have to pay more for the premium channels, of which there are only two - Playboy and High Voltage. And yes, you have to pay to access the streaming access. However, the streaming access gets you MORE channels than are even broadcast over the satellite, so-called "micro-niche" stations that don't have a wide enough appeal, so you're definitely getting your money worth on the streaming access.

Additionally, you are incorrect on BOTH counts on the discounts - XM does offer "family pack" discounts as well as multi-year discounts.

4. XM doesn't have Stern. That's actually a selling point... for XM. :)

I think the future of journalism is Wikinews More info

As was demonstrated in Dan Rather's Memo flap, bloggers can sometimes be good fact checkers. In that instance people from all over the Internet scoured over what turned out to be fake documents. One person would offer his expertise and another would do the same. Eventually some people were able to contact real experts in the field and get them to verify that the documents were fake. Eventually the mainstream media took notice and the rest is history.

But bloggers are definitely not journalists. At best they offer their opinions on the news of the day, correct factual problems in news that was reported, and they also serve as a rallying point for other like-minded individuals. At worst though, blogs can be full of rumormongoring, hate and just noise. They won't be replacing any journalists any time soon, though their diligence may get one fired every now and then.

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For an article on how to join a PAC that is concerned with fighting this sort of thing. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65651,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_1

I recently purchased a DVD player for about $60. My old VHS player finally gave out, and I've noticed it's much harder to find new releases on VHS these days. I would have purchased a nicer player, however I found that there is an incredible lack of recording players out there. I couldn't find a player with two DVD decks for making backups. Not that it would have helped much; I also discovered that the blank DVD disks available in stores could not hold the entire contents of a DVD movie disk. Oh yeah, and my DVD player won't let me fast forward through those nauseating advertisements and movie trailers at the beginning of the disk either.

You appear to be taking a gigantic leap backwards in usability in comparison to good ol' VHS. Since DVD's big sell is the improved picture and sound quality, I have to say I haven't noticed any difference on my $200 21" TV set.

As a result, I've been buying and watching a lot fewer movies these days. It's just too much hassle. The disks are just too expensive and fragile to use in lieu of a cheap backup copy. If the next round of players work this way, I won't be buying a new player regardless of format. The pain of rewinding tapes was nothing compared to this. Thanks for wasting my time and money. Oh and before you implore me to try a PVR, I've heard about that broadcast flag thing and TIVO pop-ups. No thanks. Here's an idea: Give me something that works as well as my VCR did and I'll be happy to spend money with you again.

Sincerely,

The Customer

I also recall reading something of one such designer where; not wanting the devices to be used for "evil"; built a very simple but obvious design flaw in to each one.

Leonardo used to do that sort of thing fairly regularly as a medieval version of copyright. Basically he'd pencil a slight flaw into his drawings, so that if anyone tried to build his inventions without permission, they'd fail.

There was an extremely interesting article in last month's Wired magazine about it.

I also recall reading something of one such designer where; not wanting the devices to be used for "evil"; built a very simple but obvious design flaw in to each one.

Leonardo used to do that sort of thing fairly regularly as a medieval version of copyright. Basically he'd pencil a slight flaw into his drawings, so that if anyone tried to build his inventions without permission, they'd fail.

There was an extremely interesting article in last month's Wired magazine about it.

hehe, that "business plan" has already been tried

Corrado told the crowd that they initially had no plans to attend DefCon but decided to enter the contest 19 days earlier after a "business plan" they devised fell through.

"We were going to war-drive around Cincinnati and find unencrypted wireless access points," Corrado said. "We knocked on people's doors and asked if (they) wanted us to encrypt them, and they just got all freaked out. So we were searching for other things to do with the equipment we had just purchased."

A wheel on an axle is notoriously more efficient than these "legs" things.

Until you try to go up stairs. DARPA is working on building dog-like robots with legs to carry a soldier's gear. Wheels are good only on flat surfaces. Ever try to push a wheelchair up a rocky slope? They make wheelchair ramps for a reason. Sometimes nature DOES get it right.

How would it be different than blowing up an oil pipeline?

Well for starters, the nuclear reactor is run by a leading edge PLC which could detect an event like that and shut down the reactor.

Nuclear Reactors have come a long way since chernobyl.

Sure - and Chernobyl was obsolete even in 1986. But you still need some kind of material to "burn" in a reactor - which is radioactive. So if someone blows the whole thing up, I would guess that the effect would be the same as from a dirty bomb.

However, there are other neat reactor designs, like one in China that is helium cooled and also supposed to be idiot proof.

Read the complete article here http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65831,00. html?tw=wn_tophead_4

actually, shoplifters have been using this method (wrapping in tinfoil) for a while now. same kind of concept.

Privacy activists at the workshop also said the companies promoting the new standard for using RFID tags, called the Electronic Product Code, are exaggerating RFID's limitations in order to assuage consumers' privacy concerns.

3D viewing through spinning projections is nothing new. Viewers which utilize an upwards-facing projector and rotating screen in the center of a sphere have been around for a while. I can't find a link at the moment, but the concept is not new. It is cool to see LEDs and fiber-optics used, as well as a new real-time scanning method.

The really cool ones, though, are the hologram techinques that use reflected light to produce an image in space. Here's a short piece from wired and an over view of some other technology.

Wired Magazine (which is normally otherwise techno-fluff) had a story in a recent issue about how Drexler's been pushed to the side with his theories about non-assemblers - I think it's justifiable.
There are those who justifiably challenge the norms of science, and come out winners, and I'm not saying Drexler isn't a smart or educated man, but just because you're flying in the face of the status quo will not mean that your ideas will prove correct (see perpetual motion machines).

Just wait until someone gets in a head on collision with an SUV.

It's easy enough to imagine. The Wired story says this:

Smart designers invented the Fortwo's main style and safety feature: a bulky steel cell, visible inside and out, that frames the passenger compartment like a roll cage and absorbs the shock of a head-on collision. What happens if some Detroit-engineered behemoth plows into the featherweight Fortwo? I got a pretty good idea, watching a Smart-sponsored crash test with a Mercedes E-Class: The big sedan crumpled, and the Fortwo ricocheted.

Ricocheted!

A great venture back about 4-5 years ago was ICraveTV.com (now a dead link). See http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,33093,00.ht ml for an article on it. This was a Canadian company which started broadcasting real TV over the Internet. Of course, there were some legal issues which they failed to work out, and got shut down for it. Nonetheless, this brought legitimate TV with its ads to people around the world. Ultimately, the more circulation of these things the better, as popularity grows through word of mouth. I TiVO a lot of my programs nowdays (HD PVR) but every once in a while can miss a good episode of something that happens to be online (also good for university students without TVs). Viewers are wasting their own bandwidth downloading/uploading, just find a player that inserts ads as you suggest and we'll be set. http://english.aliant.net/home.jsp offers TVonMyPC over their DSL lines, which just rebroadcasts about 20 TV channels into Windows Media and lets local users of their DSL network to subscribe and watch it. Now just to bridge the gap between this and time-shifting and we won't need downloads... -M

I highly recommend picking up an issue of this month's Wired magazine, which hit the shelves the other day. It's guest-edited by James Cameron, and focuses on exploration, from undersea to subterranean to outer space. There's an interview with Burt Rutan, and also an interview with a renown cave explorer/inventor who's designing a submarine to search for life on Europa.

Here's an excerpt from Cameron's intro piece, which I found to be quite powerful:

Space is a vacuum. There is, by definition, nothing there. When we talk about exploring space, we really mean exploring the objects careening around in space - planets, moons, the occasional comet. So space is a hurdle, an ocean that must be crossed to reach a destination. Unfortunately, for three-quarters of the space age it has been treated as a destination in and of itself.

The last time humans crossed space to a destination was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. In the 32 years since, no man has seen, with his own eyes, Earth as that beautiful, solitary blue sphere, and - reality check - no woman has ever seen it at all. We've been only to low Earth orbit since 1972, and from that altitude of 220 miles, looking at the 7,900-mile-diameter Earth is like peering at a basketball with your cheek pressed against it. Yes, you'll see curvature, but you're not seeing the whole thing. We've spent 32 years "exploring space" in low Earth orbit. Exploring nothing. To stay in orbit you have to go 17,000 mph, or Mach 25. So we've spent three decades going nowhere fast.

It's taken people a long time to wake up to this fact, but we finally have. Now Exploration with a capital E is in the air again, in what will hopefully become some kind of renaissance. Eleven billion hits to NASA's Web site during the Spirit and Opportunity rovers' exploration of Mars is an astounding groundswell of support. NASA is still blinking in surprise, trying to figure out why people love the rovers yet care less about the construction of the International Space Station than a new interchange outside Cleveland. It is only now sinking in that one is exploration and the other is, well construction. ...
If the next step is to send humans to Mars, then we must reexamine our culture of averting risk and assigning blame. We don't need any miracle breakthroughs in technology. The techniques are well understood. Sure, it takes money, but distributed over time it doesn't require any more than we're spending now. What is lacking is the will, the mandate, and the sense of purpose.

Something interesting is happening right now as you're reading this. NASA is scrambling, under presidential orders, to prepare for a renewed vision of human exploration beyond Earth. They've generated a plan, and it's a good one. I've sat on the NASA Advisory Council for the past 18 months, which is surely the most interesting period since the Apollo days. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has fundamentally reorganized the agency. NASA is figuring out post-shuttle solutions to get people into orbit, how to do the heavy lifting to get big payloads (like interplanetary vehicles) up there, and all the other critical tasks to create human exploration space-systems architecture.

The public understandably asks how this will be paid for. The answer comes with some good news and some bad. The bad news is that space shuttle operations and space station construction and operations (in other words, current human spaceflight) is sucking up about $8 billion of NASA's $15 billion annual budget. The good news is that when the shuttle is retired (2010) and the space station completes its mission (2014), $8 billion a year will be freed up without adding a dime to the NASA budget. Over time, one funding wedge tapers, and the other widens. From 2014 to 2024, you've got a cool $80 bil to send folks to Mars.

The problem is that government projects are subject

"It all started on October 23, 2001 with the release of one of the most important products from Apple in its history."

Uh, no. It started when Tony Fadell had the idea of creating a digital music player and tying it to an online music store a few years before the iPod came out. Inside Look at Birth of the iPod on Wired News covers the stuff that happened before the iPod came out.

I wonder how many complaints the FCC will get about this. Went way beyond some 2 second flash of Janet's boob.

Discussed in Wired a few weeks back...
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,619 36,00.html?tw=wn_techhead_2

More info there than in this article (linking to blog entries is just another example of how Slashdot has bottomed out in quality)

Then they will see they were wrong for deserting me. Our product is safe: it doesn't explode, give you cancer, or get you arrested. What is security if not safety? I'm the Chief Software Architect, for it, you know.

I'll show you who is right, and then you'll pay -- you'll all pay!

- Bill G

There is also an article on wired about this.

This doesn't happen to Valve for a couple of reasons. Walt Mossberg doesn't review games, but he did review TurboTax. Mossberg's column can propel a product's sales or destroy them; more importantly, he's an unbiased, reputable critic with a massive audience who writes for the most respected newspaper in America. That kind of credibility doesn't come easily, and no game critic has it.

That leads to the next point, which is that the gaming media is an incestuous pool of kick-backs and lame reporting with a generous amount of hype. Without a critical press and sufficiently discerning readers to follow that press, game companies are free to get away with almost whatever they want.

Your answer to your own question is relevent too. In economics, a competitive market often has perfect or near perfect substitutes, such as TurboTax and TaxCut. These products are not precisely interchangable, however, but they are much closer than games. Each game is unique, and as such one cannot find a near perfect substitute for HL2. That means people are willing to put up with Steam and all the rest of this bullshit.

Notice that I say people in general, because there's no way I would buy HL2 because of all the shit I've read on /. about it.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65796,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7/: "A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?"
This is one of those cases, where the name says it all. What were they thinking?

The official name is: Family Entertainment and Copyright Act

How about if we add the fact that this is legislation:
Family Entertainment and Copyright Act Legislation
(FECAL). Guess that is fairly self-descriptive.

This is why electronic voting is such a terrible idea. There is no good way to audit the votes. If you have a reciept that you drop in a box, why not just use paper. If you have some sort of personal identifier, why not just advertise your vote on some website?

Random audits will work if we adopt a voter-verified paper trail. We don't need to be afraid of electronic voting if we just commit to doing it right. Compare our system to Australia's for a good example. http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,61045,00.htm l

And if we do finally get it right and we establish an electronic voting system that we trust, it will offer a clear advantage over paper ballots. And I'm not just talking about speedy results. For example, some machines allow visually impaired voters to cast their vote without human assistance. Keep in mind that while paper ballots may be great in your county (we use an excellent, clearly formatted optical-scan ballot in mine), many paper ballots suffer from problems such as hanging chads in punch-card systems, or confusing candidate layouts. Remember Florida's butterfly ballot of 2000? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/americas/2000/ us_elections/glossary/a-b/1037172.stm

Sometimes I wonder if the editors even read the stuff they pick for the front page. This is one of the most empirically worthless slashdot stories I've seen in a while though.

This "story," submitted by an "anonymous reader" (ie the author of the review), was a complete waste of time. It's nothing but a collection of PR gibberish copied from the product pages of the players being reviewed. There is nothing of any interest in ANY of the blurbs, no evidence that the author has even seen the players he's "reviewing," and to top it all off, no links to the products he's "reviewing." (I googled one of the players he "reviewed" and got a bunch of garbage on the first page.

I don't mean to insult Michael here, but I think he probably picked this one based on the headline (the writeup is better than the "story" linked to, and not supported by the story.)

Obviously, people are indeed hoping to take some marketshare from Apple, but
(1)none of the players reviewed in this story are going to take it (they're all obscure 2-bit companies which will be lucky to move 10k units.) and
(2) Others (http://cnet.com/, http://wired.com/, and (don't laugh) even NYT's Circuits do a better job of reviewing gadgets). My advice though: just do a search for MP3 Player on http://engadget.com/ and http://gizmodo.com/.

I am not trolling here. Please read the story yourself before moderating me.

I want to do something; I'm just not sure what. In fact, I am doing something by referring people to losingnemo.com, which now links to your essay.

I would agree-- I think you are doing something. I found your site to be very well composed and insightful. I've included a link to you in my essay, as well.

Apparently the American Library Association is planning to do something. It's going to be interesting to see what comes of it.

Heck no, I didn't mean that that.

Fair enough-- no offense taken.

... just as fundamentalist Christians have Chick tracts to explain their views conveniently.

You know-- that's actually a pretty interesting idea. It would be really interesting to pick a scenario describing how some "everyday life" type activity is going to be changed by new "protections" afforded to "intellectual property owners", storyboard it out, and get a comic out of it. Perhaps something "broadcast flag"-related. I've always felt like, once analogue VCR's start becoming uncommon, and people start realizing that their DVD-recorder-based recordings of telvision shows aren't going to be "lendable" or, potentially, even playable after a set period of time, that some people might begin waking up-- albeit much too late.

No Life on Mars, But Many Bugs

Three Minutes With Mike Deliman

Out-of-memory problem caused Mars rover's glitch

MarsNews.com :: NewsWire :: Mars Exploration Rovers :: Archives

Red Rover's master coder

The panelists all agreed that the government should fund health campaigns to educate the public about the dangers of pornography. The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting signs on buses saying sex with children is not OK, said Layden.

"I was gonna go fuck the neighbor boy, but the bus sign reminded me not to," testified recovering child fucker N.Curable-Sicko. "Until now, nothing had been able to stop me from having my way with them, not even the prospect of being sent to prison where I'd be raped constantly. Now, with the bus signs, I'm able to control my urges."

We've got plenty of statistical data over the elections of the last 30-40 years (or even over the last century) that we don't even need to have elections anymore. I mean, elections are so expensive and time consuming. Not to mention all the time and money spent campaigning before the election. We can get rid of all of that and just project the winners based on past voting data!

Well, sure people will complain that their votes aren't being counted, but since no one's vote is being counted it is completely fair. The candidates will just tell us what their party is, what their positions are (assuming they can nail them down themselves), and the computers will do the rest.

OK, enough of that. C'mon people get over this. People vote differently all the time. Trying to analyze election results based on past elections is just stupid. Count the damn votes already and let them speak for themselves!

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Bush and the GOP appear to have used Diebold voting machines to steal yet another election

you can make a thousand copies of a digital archive very quick, and store them in geographically distant places for free; the libraries will be happy to keep a copy safe. If you send a copy to every major library in the world, and encourage them to make copies, it's more unlikely for the digital archive to get destroyed

The issues go beyond just destruction of the data, however. NASA's problems included losing the knowledge and/or software to interpret that data. If the library chooses, through misadventure or unscrupulous lobbying, a proprietary or DRM format - even one as apparently harmless as PDF - then we are likely screwed down the track.

Imagine how disastrous it would be if a major digital film archive chose Windoze Mediocre Player as their distribution/archive medium?

But there is plenty to worry about even without meddling monopolists:

'Digital files that were supposed to last for several decades are turning out to have a shelf life of just five to 10 years because of changing formats, obsolete hardware, and deterioration of the medium ... "There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper," noted Stewart Brand, president of The Long Now Foundation (see "Marking Time" p. 41). A book or fine art print set on acid-free paper, housed in the proper conditions, will last half a millennium. A pair of eyes and a knowledge of the text or pictures is all that's needed to decipher the material. ' link

'organizations like NASA are so overloaded with data that the backup backlog is pushing the agency to a state of oblivion. ... in a few years NASA will fall so far behind that it's unable to copy the tapes before they deteriorate. "It may take 20 years to read all that data," Halem says. "But the lifetime of the tapes is less than 20 years." ... Before long, the crisis will hit the next wave of large data-intensive organizations, from the Social Security Administration to banks and insurance companies. ... Weather studies from satellites launched in 1979 were placed onto tape that almost immediately became obsolete. It took two years and what Halem calls "a Herculean effort" to save them. They contained ... evidence of global warming and the first complete measurements of the 1983 El Niño' link

'In 1999 Dr. Miller asked NASA for the original data on the Viking experiments and was chagrined to find the data was missing. After several months NASA finally turned up the data tapes, but found they were "in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died,'' according to Miller. Luckily NASA found printed records of the data' link

You've got to understand that in Japan, the keitai (the web-enabled cellphone) is not just a product, but rather a phenomenon that has given rise to its own user-culture of "thumb tribes" -- eighty percent of the people 1,500 people who walk across Shibuya Crossing at every light change carry a mobile phone. Japan's primary cellular network service was reengineered in the mid-90's to a digital model that freed up so much bandwidth that it left the company with the challenge of coming up with new services that consumers would be willing to pay for. Their target market, primarily young women, were not already Internet users through desktops and PCs; furthermore, the kind of web content that would appeal to this particular demographic was not as readily accessible as it is today. Knowing this, the company opted to actually sell people content such as horoscopes and dating sites rather than advertise keitai as an explicitly technological product. This, in turn, allowed keitai to be viewed as the kind of fun, convenient, and easy-to-use product that can be flipped out of your pocket and used any day, any time, anywhere. The product was a success, because, as one of its designers notes, "Our time is so limited. During the few minutes of waiting for someone or a train, people loved being able to do something - and so much - in that tiny space of time." Hence, while you might use your phone strictly for making voice calls, the advent of new technologies like miniaturized cameras or video streaming only further the ability of the keitai to carry out its particular purpose.

In other news... (From an old Onion article)

REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.

With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.

"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."


Read More.

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If ever there were an example of how completely broken and useless the current patent system is then this is it. This makes you think, what other obvious and trivial functions have been granted patents? Can I get a patent on strcmp? I'll just apply for a patent on my new, special function that I just recently came up with. It's called StringCompare!

As I right this my colleagues are writing up patent applications for the !=, ==, &&, ||, &, and | operators. I expect these applications to be granted shortly, after which we'll own all your code and Microsoft will be my bitch.

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These ipod 'schemes' are actually legitimate

Who would have thought?

NFO files do more than brag or supply installation instructions; they testify that the ware is a bona fide release, guaranteed to work. And this is more than just posturing; a group's reputation is paramount. Each release is painstakingly beta-tested. These are their products now, their labors of love. Nobody wants to find a "bad crack" in his hands after a seven-hour download. Nobody wants to be accused of being "unprofessional." Nobody wants the ignominy of anything like the bad crack for Autodesk's 3D Studio that made the rounds in 1992. For all intents and purposes it ran correctly, all features seemed 100 percent functional. Except that the dedongled program slowly and subtly corrupted any 3-D model built with it. After a few hours of use, a mesh would become a crumpled mass of broken triangles, irrevocably damaged. Cleverly, Autodesk had used the dongle to create a dynamic vector table within the program. Without the table, the program struggled to create mathematically accurate geometry - and eventually failed. Many a dodgy CAD house saw its cost-cutting measures end in ruin. Autodesk support forums and newsgroups were flooded with strangely unregistered users moaning about the "bug in their version of 3D Studio." A rectified "100 percent cracked" version appeared soon after, but the damage was done. The Myth of the Bad Crack was born, and the pirate groups' reputations tarnished.

Well, it looks like the Japanese price is 19,800 Yen which turns out to be about $190. I don't know if that's what Sony will sell it for here and I expect they might sell it for lower considering the Nintendo DS will be selling for $150. But who knows.

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Sounds like a scam, but it works.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo |

Then I might be able to learn a bit more about it on its official website. Does anyone have a translation that isn't taken from BabelFish or some other lame auto translation site? I'd like to know all the official specs and stuff.

--
Sounds like a scam, but it works.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo |

Ever watch that Discovery channel show about this ?. It clearly has a teacher teaching how Fossils came from the Great Flood ... to 5-6 year olds.