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I don't think anyone has suggested that bloggers are going to be replacing journalists anytime soon or that blogs are going to be taking over the media. But bloggers can be very good fact-checkers as was displayed in the CBS/Dan Rather memo flap.

That incident was a great example of a large group of volunteers rallying together experts that could show a news story to be false.

Free iPod Photo|Free Flat Screens|It really works!

Electronic voting, while a neat idea to speed up the vote counting process, seems to have run into a number of glitches (over 1100 nationwide) this November 2nd. In addition to seemingly random problems in Florida [1, 2], Ohio [1], and North Carolina [1], there are allegations of systematic fraud based on statistical comparison of exit polls to final results in precincts with audit trails and those without. It is also interesting that in Florida, the voting patterns do not match the voter registration patterns as they do nationwide. This has attracted the attention of numerous civil rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation that has filed at least two lawsuits since election day, and BlackboxVoting.org that has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain computer logs and documents from 3000 counties and districts across the US. Equally disturbing is the fact that CNN has (since Nov 2) changed its exit polling results to reflect the actual results. This has attracted the attention of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida who have jointly requested that the GAO immediately investigate the efficacy of e-voting machines.

In case you are thinking that this is just sour grapes from Democrats who lost the election, think again. BlackboxVoting.org has been investigating e-voting fraud for years. Likewise, the CEO of Diebold, one of the e-voting machine manufacturers has been quoted as saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." And if that's not conflict of interest enough for you, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (now resigned) is an owner of the largest e-voting machine company ES&S.

Other numerous problems have been found with the machines from nearly every company in the past [1, 2, 3]. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been investigating such machines on his own and has found a number of security issues. Swarthmore students stood up to Diebold in November of 2003 after discovering

Electronic voting, while a neat idea to speed up the vote counting process, seems to have run into a number of glitches (over 1100 nationwide) this November 2nd. In addition to seemingly random problems in Florida [1, 2], Ohio [1], and North Carolina [1], there are allegations of systematic fraud based on statistical comparison of exit polls to final results in precincts with audit trails and those without. It is also interesting that in Florida, the voting patterns do not match the voter registration patterns as they do nationwide. This has attracted the attention of numerous civil rights groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation that has filed at least two lawsuits since election day, and BlackboxVoting.org that has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain computer logs and documents from 3000 counties and districts across the US. Equally disturbing is the fact that CNN has (since Nov 2) changed its exit polling results to reflect the actual results. This has attracted the attention of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida who have jointly requested that the GAO immediately investigate the efficacy of e-voting machines.

In case you are thinking that this is just sour grapes from Democrats who lost the election, think again. BlackboxVoting.org has been investigating e-voting fraud for years. Likewise, the CEO of Diebold, one of the e-voting machine manufacturers has been quoted as saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." And if that's not conflict of interest enough for you, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (now resigned) is an owner of the largest e-voting machine company ES&S.

Other numerous problems have been found with the machines from nearly every company in the past [1, 2, 3]. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been investigating such machines on his own and has found a number of security issues. Swarthmore students stood up to Diebold in November of 2003 after discovering

Well there was an election four years ago where a candidate won the popular vote but didnt win the electoral vote, why should this year be any different? Actually if Kerry wins Ohio OR Florida, he is the new president and we would see a candidate who had less 3.5 MILLION votes and still become president. Then we could hear the Republicans screaming for four years how the electoral college MUST be abolished. Which it should, and that new issue of Wired with the cool CD has a great piece on competing voting schemes!

I've pointed out time after time that Democrats are just as bad if not worse... DMCA was signed by Clinton, after all.

Grrr... that argument is really old. The Democrats differ from the Republicans on any number of issues -- education, foreign policy, preemptive war, abortion rights, prayer in schools, civil rights, tax policy, health care, social security reform, etc etc etc. I'm really tired of hearing about how evil both parties are when it's clear that there are major policy differences between the two parties for anybody that bothers to look past the propaganda of Ralph Nader.

That said the DCMA was written by lobbyists and passed through a lazy Congress that (by and large) didn't even bother to read the bill. I'm sure banning third-party garage-door openers and generic ink cartridges wasn't what anybody (even the Republicans) had in mind. Two other issues that will doubtless be brought up can similarly be explained -- the CDA was one of those "Look -- I'm protecting the children! Re-elect me!" issues that had a lot of public support and the Patriot Act was rammed through a stunned Congress after 9/11. Should the Democrats have had the balls to vote against it? Yes. Are they the same as Republicans? No.

To claim that there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats is to do a huge disservice to both parties. I suspect that most Republicans would agree with me.

Yeah 'cause there is no way that we won't see hacked firmware released for TV capture cards like we do for dvds.

I'm sure we also won't see someone using a felt tipped marker thanks to the wonderful people protecting the world with great laws like this..

Of course all the people using such things will be terrorists, so I guess that's ok. I hear there are other bits of Cuba to fill anyway.

They've already crippled the technology, and hampered the tools.

Go ahead, make a copy of your DVD. Oh wait, you can't

Don't think that for a moment that the movie/music companies are being thoughtful by taking their stand against lawbreakers, it's because they've already written laws (through bribery) and got otherwise-legitimate companies shut down - and in the case of ISPS their hands were tied (common carrier, etc).

Actually, researchers from Plymouth University have already tried that, with little success. Of course, if you don't have live monkeys around, you may have to settle for this.

...is being attempted in Mildura, Australia with a 1km tall 'solar chimney'. The technology has already been operating at a smaller scale (200m tall IIRC) in Spain for some time.

Take a look at this Wired article that outlines COMPLETELY SAFE walk-away pebble-bed Nuclear Reactor technology that is:

1. Ridiculously cheap to build because no cooling towers are needed.
2. Waste problem is negligable in comparison to traditional plants
3. Powerplants scale very well due to small size
4. NO MELTDOWNS - if reactor goes critical, you could hang out for the show and not grow another leg!
5. Offers a reealistic way to produce Hydrogen for our upcoming Hydrogen-based economy.

A GREAT read!

Taken from another post here: Wired article summary: With these small plants you still have the waste issue, but the waste is contained in durable billiard ball-sized chunks. Much safer than conventional nuke plants because you can walk away from the plant and not suffer a meltdown. (So if you put Homer in charge the worst that's going to happen is the plant will stop producing power.) Helium is gas used to transfer the energy to turbines so no containment tower needed, which is the majority of the ridiculous cost!

China is aware of the problems with oil + coal, and one of them being that oil leads to dependence on other countries. China also has a accelerating power requirement, so what is the solution? Burn more coal? (A side note: there are huge natural underground coal-burning going on in China, and afaik they contribute more to global warming than any non-natural coal burning in china).

Well, currently they are starting up 2 new nuclear reactors every year and 30 new nuclear reactors are planned until 2020. They are also planning to massproduce a new kind of safer reactors - pebble bed reactors (see this article for more information about this development). The pebble bed reactor in question is designed in china, with focus on safety and cheap mass production, and can be said to be an "chinese innovation". In the article they are talking about the chinese leadership planning 300 GW of nuclear reactors until 2050, amongst others for generating hydrogen for future hydrogen powered cars. (300 GW requires more than a thousand of these 200 MW pebble bed reactors! :). (on a side note, the newly elected President of China is a former engineer).

SO am pretty confident that china will use innovation and in the future beat us all..

Well, the reason it ended up there was that it was one of the first things to pop on a google search for adult stem cell research. How about Wired.com, the Washington Post?

Now, do you have any reasons for opposing fetal stem-cell research?

I see it as unethical to create human life with the purpose of destroying it, particularly when an alternative exists (they even suggest that adult stem cell research has proven more effective, although I haven't really taken the time to fully explore this claim).

That also doesn't account for the 50+ a day that still get through, which do get reported via Spamcop.

Tired of even 50 spams a day getting through? This post of mine can drop that number to essentially zero. It takes a ridiculed, unpopular, 'scorched earth' approach to spam that I've found to be more effective than the statistically based approaches that are not as effective as they used to be.

They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.

Stop spam and spammers at the TCP/IP connection level.

Directory of IP Based Blacklists

Geographic IP lists

Use an aggressive antispam solution to filter spam out. I wrote one and use it regularly to check my email on my terms and not that of other solutions that use more complicated rule-based or statistical methods to fight spam.

Please keep this in mind should my approach be ridiculed (it has been in the past) by people enarmored by statistical approaches that are not as effective as they used to be.

Nice try but did you stop to think about who would actually buy the thing if it cost $1000? Raising prices on a crappy product only goes so far.

I know this is tough to believe, but $1,000 was a hot deal on a pre-hacked illegal VideoCipher II board and receiver at the time. And that was $1,000 in 1980's $$$.

I don't know what the limit is before people rub their brain cells together and realize it's cheaper to be legal instead of pirating, but it's really high.

There's a wired article all about hacked VideoCipher boards somewhere... hmm... here it is.

I guess it wasn't so clear to me either.

Was it a paid placement? Fark went through a bit of a brouhaha when it turned out some of their stories were paid placements.

You made it into a Wired story.

I fault both sides equally for their lack of fiscal responsibility. Clinton had the Internet Boom to hide the pork and the handouts and result in a surplus. Even then, Congree was talking about how to *spend* the surplus. Tax-n-Spend! I used to look to the Republicans for some measure of fiscal restraint, but that isn't true anymore. Deficit-Spend Warmongering!

Lawrence Lessig's article on Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html ?pg=5 really grabbed my attention...so much so that I can't bring myself to vote for either Bush or Kerry. The future financial well being of this country is clearly in doubt. Whether it lasts 10 or 20 or 50 years, social security outlays and debt interest will eventually bankrupt us. Neither candidate wants to face this. Everyone is focused on "tactical" thinking. "How do I position myself for this election...or this fiscal quarter?" No one wants to think strategically..."How will this effect the next 10 years of productivity and job growth?"

So, I am going to vote Libertarian simply because both major parties are racing headlong down similar paths to financial ruin. I hope that I can become independently wealthy and appropriately tax sheltered before taxes are "adjusted" to account the retiring baby boomers. I might make it...how many of you will?

Some of the posts on this thread disturb me. They imply that people aren't taking intelligent design (ID) seriously enough as a threat to science. The posts say that maybe ID is compatible with science after all: maybe it only applies to speciation; or maybe a god started things off at a certain point, and evolution took over from there; or if you interpret "day" to be some indeterminate length of time, maybe you can make the bible's creation story match facts (hint: you can't -- the creation story has plants appearing before the sun, for example).

The point is not whether it's possible to somehow reconcile ID with fact if you try hard enough. The point is that ID is being presented as a science, when it is clearly nothing of the sort. Are there unanswered questions in evolution? Of course. But saying "god did it" answers a small mystery with an enormous, or even completely unknowable one (god). It explains nothing, and encourages intellectual laziness. If we accepted "science" like this, we'd all still think thunder was the sound the gods make when they're angry.

I don't care if people choose to believe in god or ID based on faith; that's their right. What terrifies me is when it is presented as science -- especially in our schools. There is absolutely no doubt about it: if it weren't for the fact that ID puts a pseudo-scientific face on a certain demonstrably false and contradictory "holy" book, and the fact that proponents of that book fund ID well, it would have long since been thrown out as crackpot nonsense. Instead, it is being accepted by some school districts as science. Teaching ID as science undermines our entire theory of knowledge.

So discoveries like this possible explanation for the eye are important! They can potentially narrow the gaps in our scientific knowledge, which is the only attack against "god of the gaps" arguments like ID (the fact that ID is almost impossible to completely falsify is another big "tell" that it is not scientific).

p.s. [political rant]
Defending science is especially important with Bush in the white house. This is a man who says the "jury is still out" on evolution. This is an administration that approves a National Park Service booklet saying that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's flood. This is an administration with the worst environmental and scientific record in recent memory.
[/political rant]

Here's a very good article from Wired about the debate between evolution and intelligent design. It was the cover story for Oct. One big question: is intelligent design Christian creationism repackaged as weak science?

I picked up a copy of Wired the other day. (First time in years.) It had an interesting cover story on the people and strategies behind "intelligent design".

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65473,00 .html

polls of cell phone users tend overwhelmingly to show a kerry victory. Gallup,cnn etcetera call old white women who are home all day and bored enough to talk to a pollster. Evidently they can't decide between the choices. But factor in people like myself and my roommate (and according to the CEA, there's 8 mil of of us), who use only cells and skype, and you have a kerry landslide.

Anandtech
Ars Technica
BBC Science/Nature
BBC Technology
CNET News
Nature Science Update
Slashdot
Space.com
SpaceWire
Wired News

stop scratching your heads

See here for a funny precedent of a windows system employed in a warship.

Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rigths. Discussing everything from battling with the international pharmacutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is, second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government. Later that week Stallman donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" but was surprised to be upstaged when Gilberto Gil, Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture, said: "this whole process that led to the computer, to the personal computer, to Silicon Valley, this extraordinary degree of cognition that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic structures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." It even has its fair share of MS bashing for those whose goal in life it is.

The story was pending for over five hours. I think they were waiting for someone to submit one that didn't equate drug use to computers! I was merely quoting the Brazilian Culture Minister (p. 4). Just a quick FYI.

Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rigths. Discussing everything from battling with the international pharmacutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is, second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government. Later that week Stallman donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" but was surprised to be upstaged when Gilberto Gil, Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture, said: "this whole process that led to the computer, to the personal computer, to Silicon Valley, this extraordinary degree of cognition that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic structures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." It even has its fair share of MS bashing for those whose goal in life it is.

The story was pending for over five hours. I think they were waiting for someone to submit one that didn't equate drug use to computers! I was merely quoting the Brazilian Culture Minister (p. 4). Just a quick FYI.

"..if there was no Macrovision license, we would run into a lot of copyright problems with things like remote access and "TiVo to Go" functionality."

"That makes sense because e-commerce in the last seven years has boomed," said Gary Price, news editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com, which reports on Internet surfing. (emphasis mine)

Didn't Wired say that they wouldn't capitalize "internet" any longer? Liars!

And interestingly the original story appears to be gone.

Mattel has a reputation for writing blank checks to attorneys who treat litigation as war. One of the common tactics that Mattel uses is to kill forests and try to bury opponents on the resulting paper.

That is why Barbi Leigh surrender her prior domain BarbieFlasher.com. In the Miler case, they spent over a year litigating it, and even made the one of lawyers in the case want to quit law -- because the tactics of Mattel and it's attorneys.

That's the country on the top of the list.

The truth is its worse than in the U.S.

In Denmark you can be jailed
for making a comment online if a judge determines that it is racist.

Makes you wonder what the motivation behind this study is.

I'm against what's happening here, and I doubt they have a legal leg to stand on, but consider what's happening around the web.

It's likely that Nintendo pays these lawyers to look around for their trademark being used to promote pornographic sites. Consider the case of John Zuccarini, who was using domain name typos (like 15 variations of "cartoonnetwork.com) to lure children to porn sites. He got a commission for each "click", although the clicks were cauased by pop-up hell. He brought in around $1,000,000 in his last year of business.

It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes on Google to find someone using Nintendo's trademark to get search engine hits to their porn site. I often hit such sites while searching for information on other famous trademarks. Here's a site which uses "linux" as one of the search keywords, and it has nothing to do with Linux.

Anyway, overzealous lawyers, yes, but they do have a legitimate job.

Perkins Coie is one of Seattle's oldest firms, established in 1912. As I mentioned in an early post, they have been doing this sort of thing for Nintendo since at least 2001. Google searches show that several high level employees including a senior vice president, and Head Legal Counsel have had jobs at both companies. I doubt that Nintendo had direct knowledge of this suit, but Perkins Coie is definately working for them.

Apparently this is not the first time that lawyers from Perkens Coie have sent meritless cease and decist letters to websites on behalf of Nintendo.

It would be interesting to find out more about thier relationship with Nintendo. It doesn't make any sense that Nintendo would actually want to sue it's fans for promoting their games. Almost seems like some lawyer who is paid on commision and got over eager, expecting that it would never garner Nintendo's or the press's attention.

Charge it up again?

troc

Dude. Take a cue from the Japanese and slip on a lenticular privacy screen, and you're all set.

The presumption in these attacks was that Rosen was calling the plays for the music business and not the other way around. She seems to prefer it that way; she gets paid $1 million a year to shelter the executives from criticism. But in fact, according to those closest to her, she's not the hard-liner in the crusade against file-sharing. Yes, she's the frontwoman. But there are five CEOs backing her up - and some of them make her look like Mary Poppins. "They still think they should put teenagers in jail," says technology guru Esther Dyson. In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-'90s, Rosen brought Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

Quote:

Someone - no one remembers who - suggested invading another Usenet group. A Usenet panty raid! The suggestion was well received by other a.t.'ers. But whom to raid? After much discussion, a likely target emerged:

Rec.pets.cats.

Rec.pets.cats, as you can tell from the name, is a Usenet group for serious cat lovers. It's the kind of place where people like to discuss cat health problems and adorable things their kitties did. If you were able to put all of humanity on a giant spectrum, cat lovers would undoubtedly occupy the frequency opposite people who are alternatively tasteless.

I bought a pair of Etymotic ER-4P a few years ago and can not imagine using anything else. The sound quality is nothing short of amazing and I can use them as ear plugs on airplanes (to drown out the screaming kids around me)...and no batteries to worry about either!!

The only bad part is the price ($330) -- they've actually gotten MORE expensive (up $30) since I purchased my pair. Considering how long I've had them (2+ yrs) and how often I use them (everyday) they have been a great purchase.

Besides, the white ear buds not only suck -- they aren't "cool" either (according to Wired)

"Nobody is going to be impressed by your klunky looking Archos but if you whip out an iPod, you know people would be staring."

Really? That's not what I've read. From a personal viewpoint, I've seen the NYC subways litered with these things. They get about as much attention nowadays as a walkman.

Whereas when I pull my "klunky" device out, I get questions like "What does it play? Full movies?!?" and "How much was that? The same price as my iPod?!?" Marketing always plays a role, but competition always wins.

• Your Driver's License - http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65243,00. html?tw=wn_story_top5
• Your Passport License - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/rfid _passports.html
• You - http://www.rfidnews.org/weblog/2004/10/14/verichip -approved-by-fda/

Just who is uninformed here? These data on these tags is not encrytped and would contain Your name, address, DOB, Drivers License Number, SS number, and medical history. Talk about a identity thief's paradise.

NASA plans to test a new robotic spacecraft later this month that can rendezvous with satellites and maneuver around them without human intervention.

If successful, the test will mark the first time NASA has run an entire mission on autopilot, according to DART project manager Jim Snoddy.

It will also bring the space agency one step closer to creating spacecraft that can dock to one another without human help. Doing so would save money and reduce the risk of accidents during dockings, said Snoddy.

During the deployment, IBM consultants have encountered interference from handheld devices such as walkie-talkies, forklifts, and other devices typically found in distribution facilities. And nearby cell-phone towers, which transmit at the high end of the frequency band, sometimes leak unwanted radio waves into the RFID readers. Bug zappers in the grocery sections of the pilot stores also caused interference. "When you have a bug that hits the zapper, the RF power generated by the interaction with the bug produces noise in the coax cables," says Douglas Martin, executive consultant at IBM Global Services.

Now that the upgrade is complete, System X is being used for scientific research. Varadarajan said Virginia Tech researchers and several outside groups are using it for research into weather and molecular modeling. Typically, System X runs several projects simultaneously, each tying up 400 to 500 processors.

"At the end of the day, the goal is good science," he said. "We're just building the tools. The top 500 is nice, but the goal is science."

--Rob

Any comments on the recent news on the artificial hippocampus (link #1 link #2)?

Actually in a similar article, it states that "Released Tuesday, the 12.25-teraflops benchmark would put System X in fourth place in the world ratings, but it will probably be surpassed by new supercomputers from NASA, IBM and others. ".

Srinidhi Varadarajan, System X's lead architect said ""We expect to be in the top 10. Where, we don't know. Top five is not possible, probably".

So, at least that's different from what was stated on the slashdot story.

Currently they aren't doing anything with them except getting them up and running

Now that the upgrade is complete, System X is being used for scientific research. Varadarajan said Virginia Tech researchers and several outside groups are using it for research into weather and molecular modeling. Typically, System X runs several projects simultaneously, each tying up 400 to 500 processors.

currently the ranking seem to consist of a couple of stars, few big ones(this computer among them) and a huge group of third category, and then the "used to be great" computers

Varadarajan said competing systems cost $20 million and up, compared to System X's approximately $5.8 million price tag ($5.2 million for the initial machines, and $600,000 for the Xserve upgrade).

"We will keep the price-performance crown," he said. "We don't know anyone who's within a factor of two even of our system. We'll probably keep the price-performance lead until someone else shows up with another Mac-based system."

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65106,00. html

They've just put up another article now.