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Luke Stewart makes millions selling this idea to congress
The concept is a bad one. It's impractical. The people who say they have the technology never do.
You've been had.

Well, I hope that they sell the low-power version of the laptop in the Swedish market.

No doubt the temptation will then be to build robotic weapons that take their orders from the fake Earth. That way soldiers can fight from the safety of the fake Earth while real people get killed on the real battle field.

my CPU needs a 600 gram heatsink to run cool. This CPU pen is going to melt it's casing before the OS even thinks about starting up.

Assuming it manages to start, I think this is going to become a lot more common! (Oops! Time for a meeting. Better pocket m' pens. OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!)

Wrong.

Furthermore, there are plenty of "total conversions" of existing video games that involve completely new models of everything.

Yes, let me list a few of the more memorable ones:

* Counter Strike - the most popular mod ever, a counter-terrorism mod ("modification") for the game Half-Life. The developers are now working at Valve Software, having released several commercial versions. Their follow up "Counter Strike - Condition Zero" is due on shelves next month.

* Desert Combat - the premier mod for Battlefield 1942, voted best game mod of 2003 and 2002 by Gamespy. The team (Trauma Studios) just signed a contract worth $.5 million with DICE to develop a commercial project for a future Battlefield product.

* Natural Selection - the #2 Half-Life mod, the Natural Selection team has formed their own studio and are looking for publishers to take Natural Selection to retail.

* Team Fortress - the ancient Quake then Half-Life mod who's employment by Valve meant that TF1 was included with the official Half-Life patch. This project spawned the now infamous (for the wrong reasons) Team Fortress 2.

as open source provides better tools engines and better graphics tools

I don't see that happening. Commercial games typically take 18 months to complete. An open source project will take longer than that if it's worth playing. I can't see unpaid virtual teams sticking together for that long - it's too much effort for too little reward.

And games are much more of an artistic endeavour than a purely technical challenge of writing an operating system where there's often a provable "best way" of doing something. Operating systems are a means to an end - games exist only for the sake of the game, hence everyone wants things to work their way. Expect infighting, splinter groups and a lot of projects not getting finished.

Remember, open-source software is an anomaly in the world of commerce. As a rule, nobody provides work or services for free - at least, no work or services that you'd actually want.

Sorry, I forgot the link. It's The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff, Wired, November 2001. Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article. I quoted only few short fragments.

Sorry, I forgot the link. It's The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff, Wired, November 2001. Everyone who is interested in this story should read the whole article. I quoted only few short fragments.

RWE, one of the big utility companies in Germany, introduced powerline internet in 2001. Read the announcement on Wired.
From the article:

"RWE hopes to have 20,000 subscribers by July and grow that to 100,000 by the end of 2002. Beyond that, the growth potential is enormous."

Right. The last numbers were 15,000 subscribers early 2004 (compared to more than 2 million people using DSL, which by now is offered with 3Mbps).
Powerline internet had technical problems from the start on and came too late.

Yeah, well done there. That single ad in the print version was really burning my eyes out, thanks for taking the hit for all of us. And you never know, Wired could be slashdotted.

It's funny that this article came on the same page: Russia Tests New Wonder Weapon "Short on details but long on hype, a Russian military chief claims the hypersonic prototype maneuvers so quickly that it renders all missile-defense systems 'useless.'"

It's funny how we seem to spend a lot of time and resources on defenses that are either for the last war, or one that's unlikely to happen. We studiously take away anything vaguely sharp from people on airline flights (like anything but killing or knocking out all passengers will work again) when or inspection of incoming shipping is lacking, we spend big bucks on knocking missiles out of the sky, when any nuclear explosion that happens on US soil will have arrived literally Under the US Radar, since any remotely traceable missile launch will be met with overwhelming nuclear response...

About 5 years ago, DigiScents developed a product called the iSmell, which was covered by Wired Magazine. It was even on the memoriable cover. They hired Marc Canter to be their visionary spokesguru:

In Bellenson's apartment, Marc Canter has been lying on a postmodern faux-leopard-skin couch with his eyes half closed, listening as Bellenson and Smith outline their grand vision. He rouses himself now, like a lugubrious guru, a veteran of more than half a dozen projects pushing the state of the art. He wishes to make a statement about trends that lie ahead.

"There is a new paradigm for tools," he says. "In the old days, they were shrink-wrapped pieces of software; you sat down and read the manual and used the tool. Nowadays, the tools are free. And what we need are scalable content tools. Look at Hollywood: They take a movie and amortize the cost among multiple forms, from cable TV to toys. On the Web, we haven't been able to do that, because it's just a delivery medium. But if all the content can be decoupled" - in other words, if it can exist separately from any particular format - "I can output a low-end Web site, a medium-res CD-ROM, and a high-end broadband version, all from the same ideas. In the smell world, this means 16-pack cartridges that do only a few smells, or big systems that do thousands."

"We expect to have low-end and high-end iSmell hardware," Smith agrees. "The low end may retail for under $200. The smell cartridges - even at the high end - will probably cost under $50." With moderate use, he guesses, they should last a few months.

"The key, as always, is the installed base," Canter says. "But there's so many different target markets. It'll be easy to get overwhelmed. You'll need a staff of 15 people just to answer the phones. We'll do the usual things - developers' kits, conferences, seminars, T-shirts, hats, all that stuff." The prospect seems to overcome him with ennui, yet he appears convinced it will work.

[...] "I think aesthetic disclaimers will be more important," adds Canter. "You know, when PageMaker was first released, it created a lot of really ugly pages. I'll be surprised if 10 percent of the first smell output is bearable."

This is, after all, a totally new art form.

"We know when the first visual art was done, in cave paintings," Canter continues. "And the first musical art consisted of tribal people beating drums. Think of all the books written about musical and visual arts since then. Now show me the library on smells."

For some reason, DigiScent's iSmell Digital Scent Technology never took off.

-Don

About 5 years ago, DigiScents developed a product called the iSmell, which was covered by Wired Magazine. It was even on the memoriable cover. They hired Marc Canter to be their visionary spokesguru:

In Bellenson's apartment, Marc Canter has been lying on a postmodern faux-leopard-skin couch with his eyes half closed, listening as Bellenson and Smith outline their grand vision. He rouses himself now, like a lugubrious guru, a veteran of more than half a dozen projects pushing the state of the art. He wishes to make a statement about trends that lie ahead.

"There is a new paradigm for tools," he says. "In the old days, they were shrink-wrapped pieces of software; you sat down and read the manual and used the tool. Nowadays, the tools are free. And what we need are scalable content tools. Look at Hollywood: They take a movie and amortize the cost among multiple forms, from cable TV to toys. On the Web, we haven't been able to do that, because it's just a delivery medium. But if all the content can be decoupled" - in other words, if it can exist separately from any particular format - "I can output a low-end Web site, a medium-res CD-ROM, and a high-end broadband version, all from the same ideas. In the smell world, this means 16-pack cartridges that do only a few smells, or big systems that do thousands."

"We expect to have low-end and high-end iSmell hardware," Smith agrees. "The low end may retail for under $200. The smell cartridges - even at the high end - will probably cost under $50." With moderate use, he guesses, they should last a few months.

"The key, as always, is the installed base," Canter says. "But there's so many different target markets. It'll be easy to get overwhelmed. You'll need a staff of 15 people just to answer the phones. We'll do the usual things - developers' kits, conferences, seminars, T-shirts, hats, all that stuff." The prospect seems to overcome him with ennui, yet he appears convinced it will work.

[...] "I think aesthetic disclaimers will be more important," adds Canter. "You know, when PageMaker was first released, it created a lot of really ugly pages. I'll be surprised if 10 percent of the first smell output is bearable."

This is, after all, a totally new art form.

"We know when the first visual art was done, in cave paintings," Canter continues. "And the first musical art consisted of tribal people beating drums. Think of all the books written about musical and visual arts since then. Now show me the library on smells."

For some reason, DigiScent's iSmell Digital Scent Technology never took off.

-Don

Brain implants to give vision to the blind already exist.

This new tech is basically a way of doing it more efficiently.

I don't know where you've been but that happens all the time... in fact it even happened to me once.

" If the cop wants a reasonable action from the suspect, he must act reasonably himself."

Cops, reasonable? Now you're just asking too much!

I believe police have way too much power and power corrupts absolutely, just watch the nightly news if you don't believe me, but this incident with the cowboy refusing to show his ID isn't a very good example of abuse of power. Requesting someone's ID, in my opinion, isn't a big deal. Police have better things to do then walk down the street and ask to see everyone's ID, but if you give them a reason to do so then I don't think it's unreasonable to let them check your ID.

You want to fight something? How about stopping face-recognition software being used in public places to run a "ID check" on everyone without even their knowledge.

Here is some already formatted HTML you can copy into your email client (preferably Mozilla). Remember to remove the blank spaces Slashdot puts in URLs.

U.S. government corruption: Two Stories

Killing and destroying property
N.Y. Times editorial:
"... Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week and a precious human cost."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/opinion/15DOWD.h tml?ex=1077956111&ei=1&en=a6370df01dc83363

Lying about scientific facts
"The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals..."
N.Y. Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/science/18CND-RE SE.html?ex=1077771600&en=fe9176d8d470477b&ei=5062& partner=GOOGLE
The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,115118 7,00.html
Wired News:
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62339,00. html
Union of Concerned Scientists:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/rsire lease.html

It came out during the investigation into why the USAF bombed a body of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It turned out that one of the reasons the USAF's pilots disobeyed orders was that their judgement was impaired because they were high on "speed". These amphetamines were issued to enhance the pilots alertness on long missions.

The trouble was they were so alert they were trigger-happy.

Here's one on wired. I saw that one before the headline here. As for who to believe, I'm inclined to go with twenty Nobel laureates and 40 other scientists over one Whitehouse full of politicians. No matter what your opinion on politics, don't forget to get out and vote this year and let them know how you feel about this and other issues.

>>I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that
>>it's pretty likely that the p2p users the RIAA
>>chose to sue were actually violating the law.

I wouldn't jump very hard on that limb...

Do you remember the grandmother who thought Kazaa was the name of a clown, or Ross Plank who was accused of downloading Spanish language songs but doesn't speak spanish?.

Not directly related, but it is conceivable that tiny black holes impact earth regularly without much effect. Perhaps they leave a small seismic signature, but that's about it.

Article on linear seismic events

Spammers don't make money by selling their products, they make money by selling addresses to each other.

You mean this space elevator?

I'm so sick of hearing the "nothing to hide" argument. I don't think most people really understand what it will be like to live under constant government monitoring.

In total agreement, the "nothing to hide argument" isn't even an argument. For you people who aren't scared by it or think it "makes sense", ask yourself this: Who gets to decide what it means to have nothing to hide?

From the article: "This is not something that's going to go away. It's only going to grow," [Revenue Department Commissioner Alan] LeBovidge said. "The world is shrinking. There's fewer and fewer places to hide."

If you think it's black and white, try this: I like to use Linux, and I like to use it with my WiFi card so I can surf on the toilet or whatever (I know I'm not alone in this). So far I've got nothing to hide, right? What if a third party with a conflict of interest lobbies hard enough to convice somebody who makes decisions that these activities are suspect, and I can now be held indefinitely, without indictment, etc. Now I most certainly have something to hide, even though I'm doing what any reasonable and free person would consider a legitimate activity.

Don't think it'll happen to you 'cause you use Windows like any red-blooded American should? Fine. Just don't forget to turn off the lights when you leave the country because everyone else will already be gone or imprisoned. Oh, and by the way, once we get rid of all the non whites, we're coming after the redheads next.

They do this by making those that are interested fund the development. For example the Linguistics Institute of Ireland worked on the Irish Gaelic spell checker. The Welsh work was undertaken by the University of Wales and the Welsh Language Board.

I was asked to pose this one to Slashdot readers. Consider it posed. Plenty of Indians would like to know the answer.

And they're asking us... why?

Honestly, why do they want to know what our answer is going to be? If they're asking for advice, I hope that it's realized that for many of us in the US, the last thing we feel like being is charitable with financial advice for a country that is currently one of the beneficiaries of our lost jobs. I could just as easily answer their question with the same comments that appeared in a Wired magazine article a few weeks back, and which I responded to in an open letter in my blog: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own." Not very satisfying advice, is it?

Having said all that, I'll surrender up an observation for the Indian IT force; take it for what it's worth, which might be much or little. One of the major reasons why America got to be where it is today has to do with the spirit of its founding, in that those who came here and spread west did so in the pursuit of that which they couldn't have achieved back in England, or in the more established of the colonies, and then the States. They were willing to throw off virtually everything in an effort to reach for the brass ring, overturning centuries of "that's the way it's done" in favor of "this is what works".

So long as you have your caste structure, so long as you still use your rivers as open sewage culverts, so long as you still engage in the outdated, outmoded cultural imperatives that have made corner ultrasound machines available to women who want to check the sex of their foetus so they can abort girls and give birth to boys... well, let's just say you're going to have a very, very rough time finding the real strength of a nation determined to better itself. Innovation... Trying something new...

When India's people are ready to do that, and stop worrying about what class someone was born in, they'll be ready to "do what it takes". Until then, no amount of money will work.

I'm sure I just ruffled some feathers. Don't worry; they'll smooth back down as soon as you've convinced yourself that I'm just a bitter American watching his livelihood evaporate, who's finally getting what all Americans deserve, after all the years that our government has mucked around with the rest of the world.

$11,000 = a decent middle class life in India.

That's really what it all comes down to. I got that from the recent Wired article and this pretty interesting set of responses confirms it.

That's 1/4 of what I was making fresh out of school in 1996.

I guess I don't understand how in a "global economy", that kind of difference in the cost of living survives, and how it ties in with things like inflation and other economic factors.

Is it basically that there are SO many poor people in India, that that somehow keeps the costs of the basics down? And that the USA couldn't have a similar situation without that level of poverty?

Amazing. I wonder what the future of global living standards is going to look like.

My favorite quote on the topic came from Wired. Marcus Ranum thinks Geer's message would have been mostly ignored by the public at large, except for @stake's "brilliant surgical marketing strike on its left foot by firing Dan".

A long time ago, Woz had a number that matched the Pan Am reservation number. People in Silicon Valley's 408 area code who failed to dial 800 would get him instead - one of those minor miracles arranged by Charles Dickens, or by God. You think you've got Pan Am - but instead you've got Woz, who explored many variants of the special, rare case of the prank phone call initiated by the recipient. In one prank, which has the cruel simplicity of a Zen koan, he would quickly tell the caller that as the millionth passenger on Pan Am, they had won a lifetime of free travel. In the middle of collecting the caller's personal information, he would hang up, leaving them to confusedly call back and attempt to get confirmation of their fabulous and elusive prize.

RTFA's

NASA said NOTHING about the costs... They said it is TOO risky to fix it. Also, they never said there wasn't good science coming from it.

And what are you talking about other crafts? The space shuttles are the main crafts that go to speace.

nasa shuttles
wired article that tells about hubble and reasons its not being fixed.

I don't think it matters though.. Didn't NASA already make the decision to cut Hubble?

wired article

I've honestly wondered about something like this with the advent of self-parking cars. Who is liable if/when one of these cars injures a pedestrian/other car?

On top of that, they say their model had to sit for hours "half-naked and nursing a cold".

DJ Danger Mouse Grey Album .torrent

This is what all the fuss is about from wired.
The Grey Album, which mixes music from the Beatles' White Album with lyrics from rapper Jay-Z's Black Album, is being hailed as a classic. EMI thinks it's a classic, too -- a classic case of copyright violation.

This is a badass album. It is seriously one of the best pieces of music I have ever heard, truly greater than the sum of its parts.

given there was a story on Wired a while back detailing how the synthetic brigade could make large gem-quality diamonds for under $100 each. Whether it's de Beers taking the other $5100 or the synthetic diamond companies taking the other $3900, I'll wait for a few competitors to emerge; then diamonds may become the intrinsically worthless arragements of atoms they are. There are far prettier things than gems.

Here is another terrific article from Wired:

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


--
To search deals from all the popular deal sites, go to dealsites.net

There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.

There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.

Wired Magazine had a cover-story about synthetic diamonds a few months back with some pretty detailed information. Slashdot covered the story here.

Wired had a great article about this in September: The New Diamond Age

The diamond industry is scared. It's interesting.

(Check out the cover from this issue...Damn!)

Wired had a great article about this in September: The New Diamond Age

The diamond industry is scared. It's interesting.

(Check out the cover from this issue...Damn!)

Of course, no discussion of haikus and computers would be relevant these days without mentioning SPAM...
Haiku'da Been a Spam Filter

There was a similar, and very good, article in Wired last November, Open Source Everywhere Software is just the beginning ... open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.

The New Diamond Age

I have to second this - although OSS is free to obtain, doesn;t mean it is free to implement, especially in a large business.

Consider Munich - currently the darling of the OSS community for going with free software. According to this article from Wired News they will end up paying more than if they had stuck with microsoft. They claim that the move will allow them to make future savings.. but I've heard that one before from every business that changes from one platform to another.

Quote: But instead of paying $23.7 million for the Microsoft solution, Munich's city council opted to spend roughly $35.7 million to switch to open source, saying that the higher price would be offset by lower costs and more flexibility in licensing fees and software choices over the long run.

Despite anticipated future savings, financial issues may stall the LiMux Project, according to recent reports in German technical news publication Computerwoche.

The migration plan is more complex than simply replacing Windows with Linux, according to an outline provided by the Munich information department. Studies on open-source security, desktop ergonomics and the software components' stability and compatibility with other applications will be included in the process.

You're not alone.

A while ago, according to this article.

No, I didn't RTFA, too much NyQuil.

From the wired article:

In their fourth and most successful protocol, the researchers got 19 of 66 cloned eggs to develop into blastocysts -- the embryonic stage when it becomes possible to derive stem cells.

This is actually astounding success if others are able to duplicate their process.

"if Fortune 500 CEOs sought it out to feed their children, the world would follow"

To me, it's not about ideology ("free markets" or whatever), it's about worldview. Have you read the Wired article on Indian progammers? It's got both sides of the story. These aren't faceless foreign devils, they're ambitious, well-educated, talented people who are doing a job cheaper than we can do it. Our character will be shown by whether we face this challenge openly, with optimisim, or as defeatist isolationists.

"Buy American" campaigns won't work, whether it's cars, VCRs, or progamming labor. Capital and labor mobility have been the norm for the past couple of centuries. That means that when labor is too expensive, either jobs or workers will move across borders.

The wages some of those unemployed 9% of American programmers want exceed the demand for their labor. Dell sells more PCs than Alienware. That doesn't mean Dell should be restricted from selling its low price PCs so Alienware can sell more of its expensive systems.

I'm not necessarily a total advocate of the way these immigration programs work. But it's better than nothing for foreign workers who get better jobs here. Do you think idle workers in "third world" countries shouldn't be allowed to move to where their skills can be best applied? How can the global economic engine not benefit from India's enormous idle labor pool being put into gear?

It appears this is the first time stem cells have been taken from a human clone, not the first time a human has been cloned. Wired magazine had a cover story recently of a human clone reaching the 16 cell stage, just no stem cells were taken.

Also, there's other layers of complexity in getting the cloned cells to survive long enough to grow into an ebryo and then into a full person. It doesn't appear anyone has tried this yet, or if they have they haven't published anything about it.