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Some time ago (in 2002) there was a story on /. linking to this Wired article which I remember as interesting. By stimulating certain areas of the brain they were trying to tap directly in to the visual center of the brain and create an image.

I also found this more recent article that predicts the technology to be avaiable in 4-5 years time.

Some time ago (in 2002) there was a story on /. linking to this Wired article which I remember as interesting. By stimulating certain areas of the brain they were trying to tap directly in to the visual center of the brain and create an image.

I also found this more recent article that predicts the technology to be avaiable in 4-5 years time.

I am very suspicious that your comment is knee-jerk based on thinking of people who annoy you, and not actually going to be very helpful.. how many geeks, who whine about women not wanting them, would you want if they _just_ stopped whining about that? I think that this is rarely, if ever, the primary factor that drives women away--more likely it's just one that you mentioned because it annoys you.. not because you thought it through and decided it's actually the primary factor that made you feel a lack of attraction to any guys. (Aggravated by them, sure--but deciding "I would really be attracted to them if it weren't for the whining", I think is extremely rare.)

It surely gets on my nerves when girls whine about how ugly and unlikeable they are, just as it gets on your nerves when guys whine about being undesirable because they're geeks. However I can think of very few women (off the top of my head, only one) where this is actually her worst feature, and where other than the insecurity and whining, she isn't that bad (she's bright and very cute, for what those are worth). Most women I know who whine like that, have many other unattractive features which would continue to drive men away in the absence of their whining. Yeah, I'd feel less irritated if they stopped, so it'd make ME happier, but it wouldn't honestly do a hell of a lot for their chances of finding a mate. And from years of observation of insecure people and how they're responded to by others around them, I suspect it's similar with the guys you're thinking of. They aren't wrong in saying that women don't like them because they're a geek--you just get aggravated by the whining, like almost everyone does, and want them to shut up.

So yeah, if you whine about that kind of stuff, stop whining for the sake of everyone else's nerves.. or at least find a limited forum to restrict it to (e.g. geek communities), rather than broadcasting it without constraints to the entire world. But if anyone tells you the whining is the main reason you're not getting dates.. in my experience (where I saw people saying this to other people, so could be at least somewhat objective about interpreting it), they're usually telling you a line of BS because they're aggravated by the whining and just want you to shut up.

And being a geek, specifically, turns off a LOT of women, all the more so if you have traits of Asperger's, which are common in geeks and more or less defined as difficulty in communicating and relating to people on emotional levels. As far as I've seen from girls, throughout adolesence and into college age, geekisms turn off the majority of women, unless you have a glowing personality to make up for it, although there is a significant minority of women who don't mind so much, which I think grows quickly (the size of that minority) as women age through their 20s and beyond.

Wired has this article describing the hidden pictures on the Windowlicker EP.

This is a funny article that featured on slashdot a couple of years ago. I describes the differences in culture one has to pay attention to while writing technical documentation for international audiences. For instance:

And while Italian and French users were very happy with printer documentation that included pictures of naked women with slim, strategically placed tinted bars showing how colors were reproduced, Esposito doubts that particular manual will be used anywhere else.

It's not actually that bad, if the advertising taglines are always only attached to the mail messages they correspond to - so you'll only see the Google ads for Fake Herbal Viagra if you open the Viagra spams, and you'll only see the Google ads for Nigerian Banking Services if you open the Nigerian scams, the ads for real pr0n sites if you open the pr0n spam, etc., while the email your mom sent you about replacing her old Windows machine with a Macintosh will get ads for Macs, crunchy red fruit, Dell, Microsoft products, glass cutters, and X10 cameras.

I give them less credit for secrecy than you do:
From Wired's profile of Ron Sega:

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.

GADGET HE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT: It's a tie between his cell and his BlackBerry, both government-issue.

IN SUMMARY: Jerf is wrong.

to things they can't stop: here

As it turns out, a litle further research shows that he didn't.

My apologies for furthering an urban legend, I thought I was beyond that.

I guess this is a lot like the George Washington vs. the cherry tree legend. Oh well.

I was thinking of this one.

Templeton's outdates the lawyer one by 16 years. *sigh*

This Wired Article talks about how one company is already using P2P networks for marketing. The article talks about the battle between the RIAA and the Radio Conglomerates. Appearently the RIAA has a hard time getting radio stations to play new/different music. The radio (shocker i know) is at a point where they would rather play the same tired songs instead of risk loosing listeners with un-proven works.

The company in the article, BigChampagne, monitors P2P networks and (secretly) sells the information to the Recording Labels. The record execs then turn around and use the statistics (which are locatlity based) to pressure the radio stations to play tracks more.

"This song that only played 5 times last week had 3,000 downloads in the same area. While this song that was played 100 times only had 500 downloads" .... you get the idea

They don't see this as a tool, only as a threat. They're idiots.

Actually, the real fun with the RIAA and major labels is that they already do such things. Please view the Wired article:
BigChampagne is Watching You.

I say this is fun because the RIAA talks out both sides of its mouth: it wants to limit major expansion of free P2P downloads (control the download market) and simultaneously use the data from such spontaneous sources to make smart investments on marketing.

Of course, when they say "CD sales" have gone down, I'm not so sure they mean all CD-based formats (singles, albums, collections, etc.) or just some sub-categories, like CD sigles. I can believe CD singles have been decimated by P2P filesharing, but I'm more reluctant to agree to a rapid, major decline in album sales without proper evidence. In other words, I don't believe what the RIAA claims is exactly what is happening, merely what they want you to think is happening.

The Artificial high price of diamonds may be changing. Here is an article about quality mass produced diamonds, that I read some time back.

well wired has this article about When Intel saying last week that it plans to stop using gigahertz figures to market its microprocessors ..

(Ain't gonna happen, but well..)

And interestingly enough, in April's issue of Wired there's an article about how battery capacity and power consumption need to be focuses in the future for American companies. I didn't expect to read about some attempts the very next on Slashdot... although granted, Hitachi is Japanese.

As far as I'm concerned they can firewall off the .cx domain behind three feet of reinforced concrete.

Wrong island. Perhaps you were thinking of Sealand. Because that place really is behind 3 feet of concrete.

the technology developed at MS research to get the paperclip (the office help animate hate attractor) to work is based on a bayes net.

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,43065,00.ht ml

As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet

Somewhat ironic given that U.S. companies are profiting by selling censorship software to China. And of course, the U.S. requiring (or trying to require) libraries to censor the Internet, for the children, of course.

Thus I don't expect Microsoft to acquire them for the next few eons.

The formation of diamonds requires both heat AND pressure. Wired ran an article about artificial diamond production. The article mentions that the process requires a temperature of 2,200 F and a pressure of 50,000 atmospheres.

Wired article
"Maybe there are spores in the Atacama after all.

That doesn't mean that we'll find them on Mars. But it sure does suggest that we might want to look. "

Remember these articles?
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59305,00 .html
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/20/0046237.shtm l?tid=103&

I don't know if this was already posted, more than likely it has been, I don't have the time to look for it right now. Orrin Hatch's website was illegal.

I mean, Apple has spent a lot of time and money in perfecting the look and feel of the iPod. And now they want to protect that. How's that a bad thing?

ORRIN HATCH: You, Mr. Kettle, are most decidedly black.
KETTLE: Funny you should say that, Mr. Hatch. So are you.

p

Looks like Senator Orrin Hatch is building himself quite a track record (originally with his bulletproof scheme of remotely destroying illegal filesharer's PCs, and the large amount of stolen JavaScript used on his webpage) One can only wonder how long it will take for the suits at the RIAA to come to terms with how they can't shut down or neuter this "internet" thing, no matter how many potential customers they litigate to poverty. Personally, I'm all for a messy, violent demise of the recording industry (and Orrin Hatch, just to be on the safe side), so that my children (and hopefully my children's children) will never have to be subjected to the absolute horror of hearing an 'Australian Idol' finalist sing ever again.

Actually the music, film and TV business as it exists today was created by breaking or ignoring existing laws. For example see this article by Lawrence Lessing.

The points are aimed at people who actually buy software. The fact that you can write a thesis without using word is not a great surprise. I wrote mine using LaTeX.

The marketting points look reasonable enough to me, OpenOffice does not do everything that Word or Office does, it does provide a clone of the core functionality. But what happened to open source being innovation and Microsoft being only able to copy? Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?

When the VA Linux puts these stories up on slashdot they do so with all the objectivity of a Congressional hit squad. When it comes to Microsoft the editorial line at VA Linux is even less objective than Matt Drudge. At least Slate tells us that it is owned by Microsoft before they comment on stories that affect their employer, heck Slate even bites the hand that feeds it. But not Slashdot, there they stay on message even more comically than a Whitehouse press spokesperson.

Is this the most important tech story going on in the world? I don't think so. The editorial diet today has been pretty thin, recycled stories published a week ago on the BBC, the fascinating news that Mozilla Foxtrot is going to allow the users to choose the name for themselves. Well whoop-de-do, Internet Explorer went through that phase roung about release 3.0, you could download a tool that would let you brand it any way you chose, stupid icon and everything. I used to annoy my Netscape friends by running a version that announced itself as Netscape Navigator complete with N icon. The sometimes took quarter of an hour or more before they realized they were having their chain yanked.

I still think the Wired story on how to get casual sex via bluetooth was more interesting. Oh and that virginity auction in the UK. Or how about Boeing being about to launch high speed internet service via WiFi on planes next month?

Sure the latest discovery of some perfidious Microsoft marketting litterature was desperately more important and interesting. Does it tell us anything new we did not know before?

The points are aimed at people who actually buy software. The fact that you can write a thesis without using word is not a great surprise. I wrote mine using LaTeX.

The marketting points look reasonable enough to me, OpenOffice does not do everything that Word or Office does, it does provide a clone of the core functionality. But what happened to open source being innovation and Microsoft being only able to copy? Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?

When the VA Linux puts these stories up on slashdot they do so with all the objectivity of a Congressional hit squad. When it comes to Microsoft the editorial line at VA Linux is even less objective than Matt Drudge. At least Slate tells us that it is owned by Microsoft before they comment on stories that affect their employer, heck Slate even bites the hand that feeds it. But not Slashdot, there they stay on message even more comically than a Whitehouse press spokesperson.

Is this the most important tech story going on in the world? I don't think so. The editorial diet today has been pretty thin, recycled stories published a week ago on the BBC, the fascinating news that Mozilla Foxtrot is going to allow the users to choose the name for themselves. Well whoop-de-do, Internet Explorer went through that phase roung about release 3.0, you could download a tool that would let you brand it any way you chose, stupid icon and everything. I used to annoy my Netscape friends by running a version that announced itself as Netscape Navigator complete with N icon. The sometimes took quarter of an hour or more before they realized they were having their chain yanked.

I still think the Wired story on how to get casual sex via bluetooth was more interesting. Oh and that virginity auction in the UK. Or how about Boeing being about to launch high speed internet service via WiFi on planes next month?

Sure the latest discovery of some perfidious Microsoft marketting litterature was desperately more important and interesting. Does it tell us anything new we did not know before?

Then what about google?

I think you've misunderstood my points.

I've said the government seems unwilling to blatantly violate the first amendment in the name of preventing terrorism. I suspect this is due to people being mmore familiar with this amendment than with the other amendments, and therefore are more likely to stand up and say no. It doesn't justify violating any part of the Constitution. My point was that I think the government is content with violating other parts of the Constitution for now, and the first amendment is safe for the time being.

The only line the first amendment draws concerning freedom of assembly is that it must be peaceful. In other words, unless there's a very good reason to suspect that a demonstration won't be peaceful, denying anyone the right to demonstrate would be a first amendment violation.

What the hell does this mean? Sounds like a bunch of buzzwords thrown together about a project nobody wants that solves a problem that doesn't exist.

The phrase "island Internet" is already a bit of an oxymoron because most of my use of the internet relies on its sheer size and ubiquity. I use Google to look up things I don't know about, which works because someone somewhere around the world is likely to have an informative page on just about any topic. I use email and IM to connect with people because they don't rely on physical proximity. Google News (and Slashdot!) keep me up to date on news wherever I go. I'm sure others could come up with more examples, but the common theme is that each of these applications relies on the connectedness and size of the net today (Metcalfe's Law, anyone?). The internet, to me, boils down to content and reach -- who'll provide that on your "island"?

That's not to say that there won't be new applications for this sort of device -- I can envision something akin to the iPod jacking phenomenon -- but comparing it to the internet is a misleading metaphor.

An Argentine Judge tried to extradite four IBM execs for bribes paid in 1993 to win IBM a contract for a computer system for state-owned Banco Nacion., but the DOJ did nothing.

OT regarding UID namesake. Seems it's the couch potato of the fish world.

Actually, any self-respecting graphic designer will tell you that PowerPoint and its "colorful template" graphs and charts are the antithesis of communication.

Read here as the information architect extraordinaire, Edward Tufte explains how PowerPoint is Evil .

Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago. The hardware was the limiting factor. Microsoft had nothing to do with it - the state of the semiconductor industry did. We didn't have CPUs that worked withotu sucking *lots* of juice.

do you have a cite for your claim that p 4's have individual serial numbers?

"Companies aren't outsourcing only in order to obtain cheap labor; they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can't find in the U.S.," said Matthew Kazmierczak, senior manager of research at AeA, and one of the authors of the report.

"Companies aren't outsourcing only in order to obtain cheap labor; they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can't find in the U.S. at below-U.S. wages ," said Matthew Kazmierczak, senior manager of research at AeA, and one of the authors of the report.

There are plenty of people with all sorts of skills in the U.S. but companies aren't willing to pay for them.

Only if a significant number of people decide that they are going to stick with the new.net root. Otherwise it is kind of like the philosopher's strike in Hitch-Hiker's guide to the Galaxy.

The laughable counter on their web site asside, I don't think that there is much demand for TLDs that are only visible to part of the net. The only thing that gives them value is the expectation that someday the new.net roots would be made official.

Sure there will be a problem when a new TLD is inserted that has a new.net copy. But that will only affect a small number of web users, mainly those whose ISPs were paid to support the new.net domains with stock, and that only if they are obliged to. Yes there will be the six members of the tinfoil hat brigade who scream on /. but the expression 'get a life' comes to mind

There are circumstances where there could be a root operator revolt, like the US deciding to exclude cuba from the Internet by blocking .cu. But these complaints do not rise to that level. The people making the complaint were told this would happen in advance. There is no way imaginable that anyone could claim detrimental reliance or such.

Slashdot seems to run these stories to show how it is the at the center of fringe net society. They would have done better to have run the stories I suggested if they wanted to do that, like toothing or virginity auctions. Seems that these are a bit too strong for their puritan editorial tastes.

"During mediation, Givens (privacy activist) said that it emerged that Von's had obtained Rivera's supermarket card data that reportedly showed alcohol purchases. Though the evidence was never introduced in court, he lost the case."

"Von's said at the time that the company would never use customer supermarket buyers club information in litigation."

That just got me thinking. When you use kazaa or somethin like it, you are allowing anyone on the kazaa network to download the files. Couldn't kazaa restrict access from those who work for the RIAA or something? I know it sounds crazy, but there has to be a way of legally restricing the RIAA from a network. At the very least it would slow them down. In the mean time I'm experimenting with designing a network with complete annonymity, though its horribly inneficient. I have to do some research into the bittorrent protocol.

Well there's http://www.peerguardian.com/. It's a program that filters incoming traffic by IP. There's a community that add's IP's to a daily list. Most are based on obvious blocks of IP's, for example, paramount pictures, sony records, etc... However, this is far from perfect.

BayTSP, one of the companies contracted by the RIAA and the MPAA to hunt down filesharers, knows about software like this. All they have to do is search from an AOL account, or some other IP when they see their IP's blocked in the list.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58734,00 .html

If you are going to share, don't leave all your files shared or at least don't let 800 songs fill up your shared folder. I use Emule and Bittorrent to share music. I'm a pretty small target compared to Bif the Frat guy using Kazaa. If they search for who is sharing Britney Spears, well they can find me, but they have no idea what else I'm sharing. It's doubtful the RIAA is going to sue me for sharing one song when Bif is sharing over 800 on Kazaa.

My wife and I talked about this and we felt that the risk was minimal, and if caught we'd pony up the $4000 average lawsuit settlement. It would break even for the amount of music I have.

This really aren't new. I mean, they're new to most of the world, but there ARE alternative root servers people can use. Check out open rsc.org they tell you how to change your name server. There was also an article at wired a few years ago that talked about the .biz not really being a new domain. .biz was being used on orsc, and then icann started to use it after orsc. Anyway, just don't think you don't have options.

from the wired article:

"This is a group that does not appreciate as much as the general population that it is illegal to share copyright music on a peer-to-peer network," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "More education is necessary. One form of education is lawsuits."

you know, i bet he goes to bed all fuzzy inside.

Yet another glossy response that doesn't address the underlying problem. Being able to navigate 3D spaces for your files is neat. Maybe we'll finally get those cool file management interfaces that those kids in Hackers got. I want a Gibson too, damn it!

But it's really useless since it won't actually help users to find their files. It takes the problems posed by the desktop metaphor and compounds them. Now my report is lurking somewhere behind me beneath a virtual photo album of my vacation photos or trapped behind a virtual CD rack representing my WMA collection. 3D views of documents add on a spatial property to the data, so I'm left wondering if all documents adjacent to my notebook are related to the contents of my notebook. Now users have to think about boundaries. Anyone whose built a collection of books over the years knows that the moore different types of books you have, the harder it is to create general categories for organizing those books since content often crosses categories.

I think David Gelernter's Lifestreams will do a much better job of making document retrieval and overall information management both efficient and easy. In Lifesteams the accumulation of data, any data, forms a time-ordered stream that can be manipulated and transversed using metafilters, which are basically filters that operate on the main stream. For example, with e-mail, there is a single e-mail stream. I can create a metaphor to pull addresses from the stream, thus created an on-the-fly addressbook that is always current. I can create another metastream to pull all emails after a certain date, thus creating a virtual inbox.

When it comes to papers and reports, I don't have to think about the original filename or location of a document I wrote years ago that I want to include in a document I am writing today. I merely create a metastream to pull the data I want from all documents based on certain content. This always documents to be stored virtually across many different categories at the same time. As of right now, I'm stuck with folders and generic descriptions that become irrelevent as I stored more complex writings.

Lifestreams Homepage
Lifestreams Discussion at ACM
Wired Magazine article on Lifestreams and Gelernter

Weird, there was a story online, talking about a farmer not wanting to give his name to a police officer (wired-reference). I wanted to comment a already given comment and then: Boom, the story's gone. Part of the pay-preview-system? I still have the stuff on cache, so maybe the editors want to check their system for bugs... It is irritating...

I'll post what I got in chache right here:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/14 32224&mode=thread&tid=153&tid=158&tid= 99 was the URL...

"You Have the Right to Remain Silent", or Not

Posted by Hemos on 16:11 23rd March, 2004
from the watching-the-outcome dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wired asks: "Do you have to tell the police your name? Depending on how the Supreme Court rules, the answer could be the difference between arrest and freedom." in an article on their front page."

The comment already there was:

Ok.. (Score:2)

by hookedup (630460) on 16:13 23rd March, 2004 (#8644843)

This is just taking it a bit too far... I mean, if you dont want to give your name to a police officer when asked for it, you should be hiding in your basement with a tinfoil hat on.

weird...

Weird, there was a story online, talking about a farmer not wanting to give his name to a police officer (wired-reference). I wanted to comment a already given comment and then: Boom, the story's gone. Part of the pay-preview-system? I still have the stuff on cache, so maybe the editors want to check their system for bugs... It is irritating...

I'll post what I got in chache right here:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/14 32224&mode=thread&tid=153&tid=158&tid= 99 was the URL...

"You Have the Right to Remain Silent", or Not

Posted by Hemos on 16:11 23rd March, 2004
from the watching-the-outcome dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wired asks: "Do you have to tell the police your name? Depending on how the Supreme Court rules, the answer could be the difference between arrest and freedom." in an article on their front page."

The comment already there was:

Ok.. (Score:2)

by hookedup (630460) on 16:13 23rd March, 2004 (#8644843)

This is just taking it a bit too far... I mean, if you dont want to give your name to a police officer when asked for it, you should be hiding in your basement with a tinfoil hat on.

weird...

You're confusing "as reported in a previous /. article" with fact. Apple has flat-out stated that the iPod will NOT play WMA files (though that could be because as you state it is disabled), and the HP iPod will not play them either. Helpful links refuting your claim can be found here and here.

I'm surprised that this is being offered through the school of Cinema and Television, and further surprised to hear that USC's Anthony Borquez has nothing to do with it. From what I understand, he was pretty active in bringing game development to USC's curriculum, going so far as to establish a minor degree in game development to the USC School of Engineering. Regardless of what the degree will get those who obtain it, (somewhere else in these comments, I believe someone mentioned french fries), I think this is the first step in the right direction.

Remember that Computer Science was once a tiny, poorly-regarded field within EE. It'll take some well-respected work (and maybe a change in title) before a Bachelor of XYZZY in Game Development means anything positive.

Except that W. James McNerney, Jr., a product of the GE management machine, became the Chairman of the Board and CEO of 3M in recent years.

I remember the chills that went through the research department when that happened (I was an intern in fiber optics at the time), and indeed, the writing was on the wall for imminent changes. The traditional "15% rule", whereby researchers could spend 15% of their time on their own research ideas which often lead to very innovative, lucrative new products (e.g., Post-It notes, UV-hardened polymer), was in jeopardy when I left. I'm not sure where that went since then, as I'm not privy to the 3M internals.

Here's an interesting link on 3M research culture, BTW. -- Paul

As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.

We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.

And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.

But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.

There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.