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Service. Microchips embedded in fasteners respond only to encrypted signals, restricting access to service procedures Nice... this reminds me of encrypted printer cartridges (http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57907,0 0.html) and encrypted garage door openers (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60383 ,00.html) used as anti-competitive devices.

This is not a new idea. Read this Wired.com piece, Google vs. Evil. Subhead: "Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business." Or anti-Google sites like Google Watch. I'm not saying Google is evil, but they're doing things that start to raise eyebrows.

You've never actually been to the US Mexican border have you? The US has built large walls to keep Mexicans out.
Wired: Beyond the Wall
Operation Gatekeeper

I sent a letter to Wired magazine back in October of 1998, regarding an article they wrote about ebooks. You can see it here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.10/rants.html

Basically, most people don't care about the physical book. They only THINK they care, because there is nothing better at the moment. I LOVE to read, but I care nothing about the romance of the paper, and most other people don't either.

"Farrell Eaves' camera was a perfectly ordinary Nikon CoolPix 990 until he accidentally knocked it into a pond last summer. Now it's a magic camera.

"After the accident, Eaves spent weeks broiling, baking and blow-drying the camera ... but it still sloshed. So he decided to see what a soggy Nikon could do, and soon discovered the resurrected camera was creating curious effects in each image."

Read the full story on Wired http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51205,00. html and see pictures here http://www.brucedale.com/Farrell/default.htm

Check out my rant about Wired's article on ebooks http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.10/rants.html Originally publish in October of 1998.

They'll remind you that you DO NOT save seed corn, lest you be sued into oblivion.

How about the right to privacy, now that the FBI can seize your financial records without a subpoena and without having to prove just cause?

You mean like the voting machines made by Sequioa mentioned in this article.

After the user makes their choices, it shows a printed ballot behind glass, and asks that the voter confirm it. After confirmation, it is stored inside the machine.

Wired has an interesting article on that. Featuring a blind man driving a car using implants that allow him to see. Absolutely stunning.

...Since they shut it down completely.


--LordPixie

What if a terrorist gets a job at a software company? Where's the hope of catching the bugs then? It seems to me that closed-source software is more susceptible than open-source.

What if a cult gets involved with a software company?

The Federal Trade Commission disagrees with you.

DOE is more than capable of doing this and have done so for many years. Admittedly there have been a few problems but it never started a real situation of calamatious proportions.

Last I checked, the DoE ran the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. The same site with some obscene safety issues. Accidentally drilling into the core of a nuclear device resulted in the evacuation of the entire plant. Securing a warhead with duct tape increased the chances of a flat out nuclear explosion. And that's ignoring the clichéd "OMG THREE MILE ISLAND" commentary.

+++Warning to any fool that thinks it's easy to steal radioactive material from one of these teams. You'll die twice before you get to pull your trigger once!+++

Perhaps you reached this conclusion because the security teams were cheating during their security drills ? Cheating. for twenty years. It's not too hard to look impenetrable when you know the exact building and wall where an attack will take place. A DoE whistleblower admitted to a 50% success rate for security tests. Special forces teams were able to penetrate Los Alamos and wander off with enough material to create a nuclear bomb. Even an freakin' journalist was able to sneak into Los Alamos. There are plenty of other issues raised over at the Project On Governmental Oversight. Again, that's ignoring all the major security issues with CREM's going on over the last month.

Now, you're absolutely right in the fact that we need to get that waste cleaned up. But thinking that the DoE, NNSA, or the US government on the whole is "more than capable" is bullshit. We're flirting with disaster. If we take the outlook that everything is fine and dandy, we're going to quickly hit the point where someone will cause a situation of calamatious proportions.


--LordPixie

This device induces experiences that are similar to religious "miracles," where someone believes he or she has seen god. It does this by transmitting signals around your head.

I'm not sure if anyone ever commercialized it.

What the big guys fear is that ANYONE can simply record their music or video's and put it on line and bypass the cartels. In fact, the whole monopolistic industry of entertainment is shaking in their boots.

Why? InternetTV. Forget HDTV, cable TV, DVD and other, I want InternetTV where I get to choose what I watch and what I subscribe to.

The industry pouncing on companies like ICraveTV show how desperate they are to control what we see (and we thought it was just Outer Limits).

See http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,51303,00 .html?tw=wn_story_related for more on icravetv.

On how bad it could be, you may want to read this and then rethink if you really hate glasses/contacts that much.

Do you want to be that one failed surgery.

Source of Los Alamos joke.

And that's the problem with Hatch. He's not an honest politician. And yes, there is such a thing.

An honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought.

Funny, I remember Orrin Hatch was actually a SUPPORTER of the original P2P Napster, to the extent that he actually put some of his own amateur works on there.

See, for instance here

Why the change of heart? I guess sticking to one's original convictions is too much to ask.

In fact, there is a wired mag report on the evil twins behind the whole SCO story.
They cite it as "the new business modell for the new millenium", which is apparently to sue everyone for violating copyrights which doesn't belong to you, and then to wait for the scared little hacks to pay you nice sums, trying to avoid court proceedings.
But it seems that this nice new business modell is going to sink, crashing on the big blue iceberg...

There's a followup to this story on wired in This article.

Fristage postage is mine. I use that postage to mail props to anti-slash, the GNAA, and woja for FAILING IT so that I could SUCCEED IT. But no hard feelings, the editors are the great satan, that apple screenshot troll kicked ass, and woja...is a four letter word, yay.

getting back on topic, the gardner group is clearly highly biased and in the pocket of corporations. care to guess which corporations? I'll give you a clue, it's not the escort service in question here.

Acxiom is certainly not an example of a very good company. Aside from the fact that they were hacked... twice... and had all their data stolen... twice, they are also an unethical marketing company. They purposely ignore opt-out requests from people who want to get out of their lists. In short, their privacy policies suck.

Get out of all of their databases ASAP:
(877) 774-2094
optout@acxiom.com

Bruce Sterling has a good article on why this is a very bad thing

Modern cars are acutally pretty easy to work on compared to the 80's and early 90's cars in my opinion since there are usually fewer vacuume lines.

I'm sorry, but this is crap .

Both Macrovision and Sunncom seem like their on a fishing expedition -- and C|net is playing along.

Apple declined comment and MSFT only says "we don't know what they're up to".

Apple doesn't want DRM anymore than the rest of us -- the first version of the iPod had none. And I'm sure they could really give a crap about physical media when their whole business model is based on networked media.

-ch

Uh, no. We don't yet know enough about climate science. Here's yet another missed detail: Too much UV makes plankton create reflective clouds.

That table looks like something from a pizza parlor circa 1985.

Lot of other stuff on this:
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58193,00. html

and this one which is funny..

Cheers

Well, whether or not you can make THAT up, Amazon says that Microsofties favourite music is Bruddah Iz: "Israel 'IZ' Kamakawiwo'ole", a dead guy from Hawaii that was 1,000 lbs at the time of his death.

Apparently, this dude is one of the most popular artists with iTunes too. So what does that say about Microsofties listening habits? I'm sure his music is OK, but would new age covers of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" help keep you focused if you were busy coding like a fiend in a caffeine-induced fervour?

Most of us were snipped shortly after birth

Fear not... help is at hand!

Sure would hate to see anything happen to it!

RIAA just hit their highest sales, despite these mobster tactics.

lying bastards.

Robertson has seen both good and bad outcomes of lawsuits. My guess is that he saw that this was the best way out of this trademark fight - he probably did the math and decided that even if he'd win in the end, it wouldn't make him more than $20MM.

This is Win/Win for everyone involved. MSFT's trademark on X-windows isn't thrown out yet, and Linspire gets the value they expected.

Many people say you cannot run ASP.NET forms on Apache, yes you can. I do it and many people do it. I found a short little tutorial for you guys. here Here is the announcement from the Apache team that they would be supporting ASP.NET on Apache here OMG, Microsoft actually helped Covalent and the Apache teams get ASP.NET working on Apache 2. Read it This is more Oracle anti-MS rhetoric to get more money in their pockets.

Yes, but that certainly doesn't stop people from trying!

Apocalypse Now: How a hologram, a blimp, and a massively multiplayer game could bring peace to the Holy Land

These people scare me almost as much as these people.

Cameras Have plenty of Tracking Ability

And even in the hands of the "City of Boston" it's not going to be long until a cop can type in your Social Security Number or DL number or Name, have it bring up your Photo ID picture, and then scan archives of these video recordings, and see where you've been. Forget RFID, this is much more dangerous.

Canada still remains a functioning democracy to a large degree, so when ombudsmen like the privacy commissioner castigate the government, public pressure often forces a change in policy.

If that doesn't work, like the Americans, you can always sue.

and now this...

we are talking about graphic violence against humans, especially against law enforcement; RTFA

there are strong links between violent games and agressive behavior

I think I first read about the Williams/Hotwired dispute in Ansible a few years ago, the only thing I can find online is about halfway down the chatlog at, ammusingly enough, Club Wired. Even Paramount reckoned they had to ask his permission to use Hardwired as the title for the Johnny Mnemonic movie supposedly (he said no), but Wired thought they could go ahead and register it as a trademark.

There's an interesting article in Wired (from a while ago), titled "The Pope's Astrophysicist", which touches on extra-terrestial life, and the Pope's belief in evolution.

Link

I'm a techie that has done work for Greenpeace, and I don't see what all the bickering is all about. First of all, Greenpeace is not radical at all. They're a non-profit CORPORATION with college-educated non-hippies and a heirchical structure. In fact, many environmental groups look down on them for being too corporate and too mainstream. They have NEVER done tree-spiking, and they only their primary way of acting as a watchdog group is by bringing media attention to issues at large non-violently. They are not anti-capitalism. Do they break the law sometimes? Yes, but so did Rosa Parks (and for trespassing as well). Are they doing a lot to save our last remaining rainforests? Yes. Sometimes it takes policing the waters when others can't. They call people out when THEY are already doing something illegal. No one seems to complain when it's James Bond or Batman, and Greenpeace does so nonviolently. About their boats. First of all, most of them are VERY ecologically sound even though they are huge and fast (energy effcient, careful selection of paints and materials, etc.) but they need the size and speed in order to compete with the ships of illegal loggers, toxic dumpers, whalers, etc. About GM foods. People forget that companies like Monsanto developed products such as the "Terminator seed" which was supposed to be given as food aid, spread throughout poorer countries and wipe out other crops, and then become sterile after one genereration so those countries would become dependent on U.S. aid provided by Monsanto. It is no secret that they are very friendly to this administration. Also, people have gotten sick from eating GM foods that have been spliced with genes from animals they are allergic too. It is also nearly impossible to keep seeds from spreading in the wild (which has happened) and breeding with natural plants in unpredictable ways. The fact of the matter is, we simply rushed this tech out to the market and more research needs to be done and more precautions need to be taken with our food supply. Besides, in this county, Greenpeace are mostly pushing for labeling of GM foods. People forget that organizations like Greenpeace are working hard to maintain a BALANCE because this world is becoming more and more unhealthy and unliveable every day. Oh, so why did this make it into Slashdot? Because watchdog groups need tech to compete, and it would be nice if more people donated their time to help these groups out. Heck, no one complained when Wired magazine made organic foods their cover story.

Ron Sega
Director, Office of Defense Research and Engineering, DOD

ADVISES: Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld

WHY HE MATTERS: Responsible for bringing the missile shield to life.

TECH CRED: IEEE fellow and NASA astronaut who used to teach electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado.

ON HIS RADAR: Dominating outer space through hypersonics. He foresees superfast missiles and spaceships that can zap any target. His goal is to increase US flight capabilities by one Mach a year until 2012.

The Clock of the Long Now is a clock designed Danny Hillis to last 10,000 years with maintenance using only Bronze Age technology. Ticking will be avoided. The century hand will advance every 100 years, and the cuckoo will come out on the millennium. The first 9 foot tall prototype was built in time for "New Year's Eve 01999" (note extra digit, and the second is under construction now.

One might argue that the clock incorporates firmware, in the sense that there will be relatively complex algorithms to maintain accuracy by comparing different timing signals, and simpler algorithms to decide when to move the century hand, or cuckoo the millennium. It's not a stored-program system though, so it doesn't meet the criteria that the Babbage engines meet. Nevertheless, this is a good example of hardware designed realistically to operate continuously for 10 millennia. For this project Hillis invented a mechanical serial-bit-adder, a mechanical digital logic element, which evidently lacks the "wearing problem" of a standard clock mechanism. The clock knows about leap years and such.

The website has images of the prototypes and the design, but I'm on dialup so I didn't look at them. The Principles Page discusses some of the problems to be overcome. For example, power source - right now Hillis is tending toward a temperature-based power source - and maintaining accuracy, which may be based on a phase locked loop using a mechanical oscillator and solar alignment. There are ways to support the foundation, such as buying Brand's Book, or Eno's tunes

IMHO he might want to use three or four other checks as well. An extension of phase locking can work well with multiple nodes in a network, e.g., the multiple nodes in the human heart rhythm controller. Such networks rapidly converge to a common cycle, and this would provide additional reliability. The NTP network time algorithm is based on multiple sources of the same type, but analogous in concept. Just for fun, it'd be great if the clock also included a display of the 64-bit Unix time, in binary!

This Wired article was written by Danny Hillis about his original idea. The Long Now Website has other interesting links about long term stuff. Hillis has some interesting friends, like Brian Eno who named "The Clock of the Long Now", and Stewart Brand. Other links: Intro to Brand talk, The actual talk. Buy the book, or the Eno CD "January 07003" to support the foundation.

From this article at Wired:

"The Department of Homeland Security and the TSA feel very strongly we should not move forward on any program that in any way infringes on preserving our freedoms," Stone said. "That is first and foremost."

Which really means, "we thought that people would just go along with us because we snuck every other piece of bullshit legislation through without notice but we were wrong."

The system, as originally proposed, would require all passengers to provide extra information when booking a ticket -- information that airlines don't currently ask for, like addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. The system would then check that information against databases of criminals and terrorists and assign each passenger a green, yellow or red score, according to perceived risk.
Civil-liberties groups from the left and right have gained powerful allies on Capitol Hill by arguing the system is both too invasive and ineffective.

Damn straight it's ineffective. The 9/11 terrorists were already in the country legally. What the hell good would this do? They were already flying planes. Would knowing their dates of birth and their addresses have helped? Nope.

Privacy firebrand Bill Scannell, whose DontSpyOnUs website has targeted companies such as JetBlue and Delta Airlines for working with the TSA, welcomed news of changes to CAPPS II, but argued the TSA did not go far enough.

"They should shut down this anti-democratic project and put it into a security system that works," Scannell said. "Instead of retooling, they should junk the entire system and improve physical security."

No way! Improve physical security? You mean like stop worrying about having an algorithm figure stuff out and do it manually? That's work, no way! Plus, we wouldn't be able to create a large database of information on airline passengers that could be easily accessed by other agencies in the on-going fight to end freedom, errr I mean terrorism.

As written up at the back of Wired mag a few years back.

http://www.geo600.uni-hannover.de/

Picture two tubes, each exactly 600m long and at 90 degrees to one another in the horizontal plane. Bounce a laser beam off a mirror at the end of each one. The time should be identical. Unless there is a gravitational pulse, in which case one would appear shorter than the other.

Or maybe this is something completely different =)

There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.

Yes indeed, not only to distribute Linux ISO's which is a common example, but BT usage is popping up all over the place, so I really hope they won't block the protocol at ISP level or try to make the software itself illegal. But then there's those loons that try to illegalize the whole thing, so you never know. :-P

Bill Gates claimed he never said that and, since then, no good evidence has sufaced that disproves this.

but in this case I believe he is at least partially correct.

I think you're right too. If you replace "DVD" with "CD" in his quote you can see that we are starting (albeit slowly) to move away from carrying around a bag full of CD's to a hard disk player than contains many more than we could possibly hold.

DVDs would be the next logical thing and we're starting to see the portal media centres arrive. Like this rather nice looking Archos AV400.

I had posted this two days back.they didnt publish it on slashdot.now they are doing it.! :(
Yahoo escalated its newfound rivalry with Google by acquiring Oddpost, a San Francisco startup known for its innovative e-mail service. Yahoo confirmed the deal on Monday, adding that Oddpost technology would eventually be integrated into more than just Yahoo Mail.Oddpost staff will develop a new Yahoo Mail product .

Umm, I think you are attacking some unrelated generalization you've heard in the past, not the actual poster's comment. He made no statement about hydrogen or solving fossil fuel dependancy.

But, since you are on that topic, there are a number of avenues besides fossil fuel for generating the electricity or heat or whatever for creating hydrogen:

Bacteria. Some scientist at UCLA did some calculations, and determined that a decent sized canyon in the Mojave desert covered 2 feet of water and a sheet to collect the hydrogen produced by the bacteria would be enough for all of Southern California.

Geothermal

Photovoltaics

Tidal

Convection

Fission

Fusion

Biomass Fuels

Solar Thermal

Wind

Hydroelectric

So, who are you swinging your fists at? Certainly not the original poster?

LS