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I swear it's more like autism... absolute prodigy at bass guitar. he can hear the most complex song/rift and reproduce it 100% perfectly on his first try. but he is totally unable to comprehend a simple list of 5 items of instructions... is this ADD/ADHD or is it something entirely else.

(IANAP) It's something else. Sounds like savant syndrome to a certain extent. Of course, that could just be because Wired just had an Article on Savant Syndrome, so that's what comes to mind.

I swear it's more like autism... absolute prodigy at bass guitar. he can hear the most complex song/rift and reproduce it 100% perfectly on his first try. but he is totally unable to comprehend a simple list of 5 items of instructions... is this ADD/ADHD or is it something entirely else.

(IANAP) It's something else. Sounds like savant syndrome to a certain extent. Of course, that could just be because Wired just had an Article on Savant Syndrome, so that's what comes to mind.

As a comparison, 3.5 Billion dollars were spent on ring tones last year.. Personally, I think that money would be better spent by NASA.

No, it wouldn't. Pilots will sooner be replaced by unmanned aircraft than be retrofitted with BCI. The human brain & body won't be able to compete with UAVs.

(Sorry Pilots).

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"Please tell me that that IP stack on this thing is not called SkyNET. nah, it's called SkyLAB." When the network crashes, the network really crashes!

For you /. types who need a reason to go outdoors, hook your solar-jacket up to one of these, and you'll never go back inside again!

"If there are individual readers for each one, build a device that incorporates all of them try one at a time until you get an expected result." Sorry, it doesn't work like that. You can't just tape them all together. See, the problem is that they're all emitting and reading RF, and if you have more than one active at a time, you'll get nasty interference. The fact is, it is hard to build a device that does multiple frequencies and protocols.

"But what makes you think anti-collision is even necessary for my argument?" Anti-collision is necessary for any reader on any of the of the protocols you mentioned. Otherwise if you have two tags in the field and your reader tries to read the tags in the field, they'll both try to answer at the same time and interfere with eachother (collide). AC is one of the hard parts of any shared medium communication, be it aloha-net, ethernet or RFID.

Anyhow, you don't have to be an RF engineer to participate in RFID discussions. But if you're completely misinformed about the subject, then you're just spreading FUD, and that's what I object to.

Let's go back to your original post.

"They don't have batteries, which is the only reason for their limited range. They get power directly from the radio waves." Half-true. Some RFID tags are powered or active, some are unpowered or passive.

"They are now weaving them into of clothing, they are inside your tires, and in the handle of your razor." They are not weaving them into clothing. I challenge you to find me one quote where they say they're doing that. I think that rumour may have started when a Wired article claimed that "Prada already embeds RFID inventory tags into its clothing". But a little research shows that is simply a tag that they put on in one particular store, which is probably removed when it is sold, and it is very visible to the customer: "Pick up any pair of shoes or handbag or dress and you'll find a clear RFID tag, with the antenna and chip clearly visible." See, it's the antenna that's difficult. Sure, the RFID chip is tiny, but the antennas are pretty big, normally on the order of 10cm by 3cm or so, so weaving it into clothing just wouldn't work. As for tires and rasors, I sincerely doubt that that's the case either -- see, both of those have huge amounts of metal in them which would interfere with RFID reading. But find me a link that proves that's being done and maybe I'll believe you.

"And almost any RFID tag can be read by almost any RFID reader". I hope I've disabused you of this notion. Most RFID tags can only be read with the associated reader. A small subset of RFID tags follow one of the EPC specs, and can be read by different readers, but very few readers are multi-protocol ones.

Now do you see why I was upset? There's really nothing to your original post other than FUD, and I just attacked the most obvious and egregious instance.

There's no problem discussing RFID, but there is with spreading FUD. If you worry about your boss knowing whether you changed your underwear you can certainly say "I worry that in a few years if manufacturers start embedding RFID tags in clothing and not disabling it at checkout, it might be possible for someone like my boss to know if I changed my underwear". See how that's different from:

The concern is that they don't deactivate themselves. And almost any RFID tag can be read by almost any RFID reader. So your boss can start checking how often you change your underwear, and indirectly can track you around the building by the tags in your clothing.

I agree that there is a potential for abuse of RFID technology. If RFID tags ever start being put on or inside consumer goods, it would be good to make sure that they're either removed or deactivated at checkout. There will p

hey, it sounds kinda nuts the way you put it, but there's been the idea of a "space elevator" that seems to work on similar ideas such as yours.

here's a nice general article on the subject.

According to this article from Wired, "We're not going to be supporting WMA for now," said Muffi Ghadiali, product marketing manager for HP's digital entertainment products group.

Wired News has a comment from a HP-spokesperson saying that Paul Thurrot is Wrong.
Hewlett-Packard: No WMA for IPod

This recalls an interesting 1996 article from Wired Magazine, called "The Electronic Scriptorium". It discussed the efforts of Religious as transcriptionists, and web page designers.

Because the linux watch is a is a prototype that will not be marketed and the PalmOS watch is vaporware.

"We are going to produce a patch that should be up within a week," said Microsoft's David Fester, group product manager for Internet Explorer. "We'll put up that patch as quick as we can."

Internet Explorer Bug Makes a Return Visit

In 1998 he was the management flunky most directly responsible for all those MSIE bugs.

"On the one hand, they say they're pursuing standards, but they're implementing and pushing proprietary technology with their development community," Microsoft product manager David Fester said. "Microsoft has pledged 100 percent standards support for some time. The truth is in the pudding and the products."

Pot, Kettle Black (netscape, microsoft , standards, name-calling)

Wednesday's Windows Media announcements are specific to XP, said David Fester, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media division. "These are companies that are doing things specifically around XP," he said. "As you know, our Windows Media effort is broader than just XP."

Windows Media announced for MAC/Linux/Solaris (not)

"This is unprecedented, but we realized we need to work together [with Netscape] for the common good. We decided we should not propose separate standards for privacy software." David Fester, Microsoft, June 97

More Outright Lies from David Fester

Tell me again why I want to listen to *anything* this man has to say.

Read this.

This was already reported by Wired News: Predicting the Next Big One

Well, sucks for Apple: they're not getting my $400 because they don't support Vinyl, the format in which my 1,200 LP's/14,000 tracks are all pressed in.

FYI:
That is not entirely correct...

-B

How about this? First Lady: Net News Needs Scrutiny

-ccm

• Artport-The Whitney Museum's collection of Internet art.
• Hotwired's RGB Gallery- Been a while since I've been there; it seems a couple of the links are down but it's a good place to start.
• Potatoland- Really neat stuff!! Be sure to check out the p-soup Java applet.

Free market benefits can be very real here. In my area (Eugene, OR), we pay ~$42 for cable access (including a few one- and two-dollar fees), where there's only one major provider. In Tacoma, where competition has forced prices down, Comcast high-speed Internet starts at $20.

To legally broadcast, you're going to have to pay some fees, I reckon. Royalties come to mind first, as the DO in fact apply as my college radio station program manager learned (in fact, royalty fees are being charged in what seems to me to be an ex post facto manner... or at least retro active as I'm not entirely sure on how royalty laws' explicitly applied internet streams), but there are other fees as well. Granted, earlier last year the royalty fees for College Radio were cut a bit, but they're still too much for our little non-for-profit to afford. Also, as we just learned, we cannot even legally broadcast our own athletic events (recorded by ourselves live) or unique, copyright-free content without paying some hideous fees. However, Icecast is a godsend to those of us who may eventually just barely scrape together the fee monies to get some nice audio streaming going.

To legally broadcast, you're going to have to pay some fees, I reckon. Royalties come to mind first, as the DO in fact apply as my college radio station program manager learned (in fact, royalty fees are being charged in what seems to me to be an ex post facto manner... or at least retro active as I'm not entirely sure on how royalty laws' explicitly applied internet streams), but there are other fees as well. Granted, earlier last year the royalty fees for College Radio were cut a bit, but they're still too much for our little non-for-profit to afford. Also, as we just learned, we cannot even legally broadcast our own athletic events (recorded by ourselves live) or unique, copyright-free content without paying some hideous fees. However, Icecast is a godsend to those of us who may eventually just barely scrape together the fee monies to get some nice audio streaming going.

Thanks for the pop psycho-analysis. It was good for a laugh.

Actually, my argument isn't "completely uncalled for". It was central to what I was saying: the plutocratic direction the U.S. is headed in will soon make such lawsuits impossible.

All people are supposed to be equal, but as recent history shows us (be it Microsoft, Enron, O.J., or literally thousands of lesser known travesties) the rich are now far "more equal". Not just because of their ability to afford more effective council, but the deliberate conservative movement to punish judges who dare enforce the law against them.

Judge Jackson learned his to his detriment when he made the mistake of dressing Microsoft down like any other criminal after the prosecution proved its case. No one imagines a bank robber going free because the judge said bad things about him after he was found guily, but for a major U.S. corporation, there's a different standard.

Trademark law makes it so that corporations can just steal domain names from people who have owned and used them, simply on the basis of having more money. (The Onion lampooned this in the hilariously titled: "Tanzania Loses Name to Tanning-Salon Chain")

And patent law is a joke. It is not for no reason that Slashdot's patent icon is a picture of a fork, knife, and spoon.

Now of course Republican moderators can mark this as "troll" too, if they like. But it is patently obvious which political party is behind the subversion of our legal system.

Free dime bag with your MP3 player? Sweet!

Either that or he has becomeAphex Twin.

Linus Torvalds has become a metrosexual!

Yeah, EBN were an amazing band pioneering all this kind of stuff, and still going sadly unrecognised to this day ( tip: Telecommunications Breakdown is probably one of the best albums of the 90's, and had all this k00l multimedia shit bundled with it too ).

The swinging apparatus you described was also at some points mounted on the station wagon - it can be seen configured like this in the documentary Sonic Outlaws, which is awesome, and first turned me on to EBN, Negativland and that style of music in general. Anyone with an interest in fair use rights should view this documentary, as it features extensive coverage of the Island Records / Negativland lawsuit.

P.S. Am very jealous you were lucky enough to see them live.

Just kidding. But this sounds like a the results of a late night drinking session with the engineering and marketing departments. Scratching is 'hot'. And visuals are hot. Scatching (um, jog) videos is NOT.

This is still more interesting to me.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine went to a weird multimedia show at a club where they hung sheets up on the wall and did live video/music mixing. He bought their CD which had video mixes on it for about half the songs, I think.

Anyway they were called Emergency Broadcast Network. The album was Telecommunications Breakdown and it used clips from news broadcasts and infomercials. There's a very small clip from one of the songs one that album here. There also some better resolution clips of some of their other songs here, and a better resolution download of "Rock This Base" here. I don't think any of those sons are as good as the stuff on Telecommunications Breakdown, but check it out, I'm not sure if that album is still available anywhere right now.

Hey All! Have you ever seen Linus Torvald's wife Tove Torvalds? Not to be rude but can't that beautiful baby get a makeover and put on the sexy?! I mean, Linus has become very metro recently and he is a very trendy metrosexal! You see, Linus used to look like a complete dork. But now, if I was a faggot, I would be all over this guy today! In the meantime, I'm sure Linus is getting his share of the booth babes... ;)

Hey All! Have you ever seen Linus Torvald's wife Tove Torvalds? Not to be rude but can't that beautiful baby get a makeover and put on the sexy?! I mean, Linus has become very metro recently and he is a very trendy metrosexal! You see, Linus used to look like a complete dork. But now, if I was a faggot, I would be all over this guy today! In the meantime, I'm sure Linus is getting his share of the booth babes... ;)

"Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has made a number of high-profile wagers on future discoveries. In 1975, he bet Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse (the loser would get it mailed to his home) that a celestial mystery named Cygnus X-1 would turn out to be a black hole. [I'm pretty sure only Thorne wanted Penhouse and Hawking wanted a different periodical] It didn't. In 1991, he again lost to Kip Thorne, betting $140 and a T-shirt "embroidered with a suitable concessionary message" that a naked singularity could not exist." A Brief History of Betting on the Future [Wired]

These web bugs are not just limited to email via Outlook, you can add them to your MS Office documents also. You can track when, how often and from what ip addresses people opened your Word documents from. I do not keep track of MS Office revisions so this functionality and method of deploying these web bugs in Office docs may have changed or be more obvious to the end users but it is/was possible. Someone what to test this on a .doc version of their resume?

This Wired article from this Slashdot article talks about cost, performance, and ease of use. There are also links to an O'Reilly article too.

Finally VT has a page up with PDF slides: page 7 talks about, without proof, it being (at the time) the cheapest at $5.2 million for 1,100 nodes and achieving the highest performance/price.

If you believe their assertion, then if the G5 XServe Compute Node were available at the time, they could have shrunk their facility by three quarters, since 3-4 XServes fit in the space of one G5 PowerMac: 1,100 nodes of XServe == 300 nodes of PowerMac, in terms of volume, so you have a much smaller facility.

Oh! This is an article on the price vs performance considerations VT had to face. Essentially Dell, IBM, and Sun were too expensive with Opteron, Opteron, PPC, and Sparc solutions, respectively. As well as not being able to delivery on a timely manner!

The inevitability of artificial, perfect diamond has DeBeers white in the face. It also provides more fuel for the The Law of Accelerating Returns (rather than "Moore's Law").

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Then he puts porn on the same level as mafia crime, pedophilia, and drugs.

No, he references the scare-mongering media's (and sometimes Justic Department's) "Four Horsemen," not his own. Plus he's being interviewed by his buddy, Mike Godwin (yes, Godwin's Law Godwin), who knows what Bruce means.

There is also Bruce's yearly visit to the Well's Inkwell.vue: The 2004 Bruce Sterling State of the World Address.

And, don't forget Bruce's new weblog at Wired: Beyond the Beyond.

"Grub is a distributed web crawler."

"Last week, LookSmart released a screensaver that harnesses the spare computing power of volunteers whose machines are indexing the Web.
Like SETI@Home, LookSmart's Grub screensaver runs in the background or when the computer is idle. But instead of searching for signs of intelligent aliens, Grub crawls the Net to build an index for Web searches."

Interesting idea indeed.

It's Jon, and he'll tell them that their American threats don't mean jack in Norway.

By the way, I sure hope that he has no plans to visit the U.S..

But thats not my point. Retro games such as the glorious Pacman had lovely sound. This music has now taken a life of its own. Read this Wired Article to see what I mean.

1. You bought a "CD", brought it home and it didn't work.
2. You returned it, got another one and it didn't work.
3. You went back to the store and they told you that they will not give refunds on opened CDs, DVDs, games, etc.
   
   You just spend fifteen buck on something that wasn't what they said it was, doesn't work, and the store is refusing to take it back!

"Hi, I'd like to return this because it's not a music CD."

If the Council of Europe has their way, they'll be banning a wide swath of ideas as "hate speech." This ban would of course apply in Holland too. But it is not simply something they're getting stuck with against their will. The Dutch government seems to be out in front on this one.

Sample quotes:

The Europeans wanted 32-byte payloads, because that would be best for voice, while the Americans and Japanese wanted 64-byte payloads, since that would be better for data. [...]

As the invective became more heated, pressure built to solve the question the diplomatic way: split the difference. And so was born the 48-byte payload, which, combined with a 5-byte header (the smallest that the ITU could agree upon), added up to a 53-byte cell. [...]

It's difficult to convey how insane ATM's cell scheme sounds to anyone in the data community, but it's roughly equivalent to Ford announcing a new car that is shaped like an upright obelisk. Sure, it could be made to work, but it's neither aerodynamic nor practical.

Cheap Champagne. Check.
Cheap diamonds. Check.
Cheap wedding. Check.
Now all I need is a cheap bride.

Isn't this what dude in the twin-cities, MN got caught for? IIRC he modified the blaster virus and re-distributed it.

Wired news article

I just wanted to say that the iTunes Music Store has reinvented how I view music.

Now when I want a piece of music, I have it, instantly. And with my iPod, I can listen to it wherever I go, with no worries!

Of course the player back then would have been a Rio for sure. In fact if you remember, Diamond pioneered the idea not only by releasing the product, but by fending off an RIAA lawsuit that challenged the legitimacy of such products! (Of course the iPod is DRM'd so maybe it doesn't really owe to this legacy).

I always thought you Americans had to show a reasonable amount of documentation when opening a bank account, to prove that you were *you*

I have to say that I am English, not American, so I could be talking rubbish (which is not unknown...)

Wired has a rather old article about this, and i remember doing some project work for a large US bank in London for this. No idea if anything came of it though.

(Of course, by the sound of it, from the parent poster, nothing much did come of it)

Wired? This is the same Wired that gave us 101 Ways to Save Apple, with such great suggestions as "Admit it. You're out of the hardware game," "Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola," "Relocate the company to Bangalore," and "Invest heavily in Newton technology." Hilarious. Although there is one prescient thing in the article, which I'm not sure was intended seriously or was menat to be sarcastic (this was 1997 after all) - "It's Netscape we should really worry about."

Seriously. Stop that. Seeing that the XBox uses PowerPC chips now, you're going to start these Microsoft developers thinking they can port Windows XP to my Powerbook.