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This is interesting, but it sounds as though it is only useful against individual card counters. What could it do against a team of counters like in this older story by wired?

But a funny story none-the-less...

Back during the great auckland power crises of 97, my ISP was Binary Brothers, a now extinct ISP. They were a great ISP, run by a few guys who knew their stuff.

Turns out the owners were physically located on the coremandle peninsula (about 4 hrs drive from Auckland), while their servers/modem racks, etc were located in the heart of auckland CBD.

The power in auckland blinked out, and as did my net connection (I was located outside the blackout area). I rang 'em up and asked if they were out due the the power crises. They replied that they were currently in the wagon driving from the coremandle with a generator in the back, and the ISP will be back online in a few hours.

Well, they were right, it flicked back online in a few hours. Gotta hand it to them, they really did a good job. I just have this mental picture of these two guys in a wagon, speeding down the windy roads, one yelling, drive faster, we need more power!

Anyway, that was those days, these days I'm lucky if my home connection stayed up during rain storm, let alone a power blackout.

So will they be connecting it to the global grid?

Would any reputable company now risk involvement with SCO on any level? Look at it this way. SCO made, in essence, a business deal. They distributed their software under the GPL, in an attempt to receive the benefits that the GPL approach can offer, much like Red Hat did. Now, they want to renege on the deal because they think they've got something more profitable.

You mean, like http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,6548,00. html?

Apparently (judging my what Google turned up) I am mistaken ... but as yet unconvinced. I'll have to do something about that.

At least I'm not trying to get a job at Microsoft.

This problem has been around for some time in the hearing impaired community.

According to this Wired story on the distribution, Extremadura GNU/Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux install.

I'm calling you out, Richard Stallman. You claim that the GNU project website will not link to the Debian project because the Debian project provides for the description and download of non-Free Software. Yet, you can recommend a Debian install?

Most certainly Extremadura Linux contains the standard dpkg/apt facilities. Just like with a standard Debian install, a user must explicitly specify that he or she would like access to the seperate repository which contains non-Free Software, in order to access these repositories with the apt system. This is done either at install (in the case of a standard Debian GNU/Linux install), or after install by modifying the /etc/apt/sources.list configuration file.

The default of a Debian GNU/Linux install is to provide for the installation of only software which is Free Software.

Extremadura GNU/Linux no doubt provides in its package management system to describe non-Free Software, and to provide for the download and installation of non-Free Software. These are the same reasons that you have stated you will not link to the Debian project from the GNU project website.

Mr. Stallman, how dare you take a stab like this at the Debian project.

Here's a question that I haven't seen asked yet... everyone's comparing this whole thing to the blackout of 1965, but what about the backups that were supposedly put in place to deal with the much-feared and hyped Y2K bug?

Wired 7.04 published an issues entitled 'Lights Out' that detailed many problems, including the problem of a single failure spreading across the entire continent.

Billions were spent in the USA and Canada on solving this... so where did that money go?

The author lambastes Apple for putting too much emphasis on the education market, and misunderstanding that the opportunity cost of dominating that market was too high.

Ironic, innit?

hold it right there, bud.

MSFT had never paid a dividend until this year. and even then, it was a miniscule fraction of their actual profits, despite the accounting-foo.

jon

Howdy. URL police here.

Slashdot breaks up long words with spaces, so they don't cause word-wrap problems. This breaks URLs, of course.

Therefore, please take the extra few seconds to make your URLs into links. Please?

Here's the wired article.

Wired explains it all for you.

Seems the programmer who made the character editor was gay, and somewhat miffed that the artists using it were making hot bimbos, but no gay muscle boys, so he added some, and got fired for it once Will Wright discovered it.

The Energy Wed

lots of jokes can be make, but the point is that everyone, including big money eating corps SHOULD USE LESS ENERGY. AND ALSO LESS WATER.

err, i'm getting a littla carried away. Talking about wired, a while back they published a great article [wired.com] about the energy grid.

Maybe they could try some of these ideas in order to get power back temporarily where needed.

The whole East Coast from Boston to Washington was one sprawling, aging megalopolis. A spectacular, dysfunctional mess of regional regulators, profit-crazy power companies, obstreperous, crooked city councils, and snooty, never-in-my-backyard environmental activists. Every Greenhouse Summer since 1999 had sent New York temperatures creeping a degree or two higher. So everybody wanted electricity - because the choice was AC or heatstroke.

It was a vicious downward spiral: more heat, more power from the coal plants; more coal smoke, more Greenhouse heat. New York was a basket case, all band-aids on hemorrhaging wounds. Electric power, steam lines, gas lines, data - the city's vital systems were in lethal proximity, jammed into tight little metal conduits, like linear grenades running into the bowels of each and every building.

Geez... all I need to do to read Slashdot is pick up the latest Wired. I had a profound sense of deja vu: and I just figured out why. It's an interesting story nonetheless... and not everybody reads Wired.

Here's the story, for those interested: 11.08

This was in the last issue of WIRED

over here

As always Google found what I was looking for here.

Johnson & Johnson wants to market the IBot as a physician-prescribed device, instead of a consumer device, so that it can be covered under many medical insurance plans, according to development information provided by the company.

I would love these chips to mass produced for desktops.

There's a good article at Wired about the current state of affairs in the battle against cancer.

The End of Cancer (As we Know it)

Diagnosis. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Slow painful death. No more. A new era of cancer treatment is dawning. Meet three scientists who are using the revelations of the Human Genome Project to reshape medicine.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/cancer.ht ml?pg=2

They talk about micro-arrays, among other things.

damn stop discussing like people with an actual life.
This is /. we don't make compromises we do technical solutions.

here you go.

Pretty? Did you see the cover babe?

Check Kurzweil's web. It talks about the singularity.

Roughly, the singularity is the matter of creating an artificial intelligence superior to ours. Obviosly this superior intelligence would be able to do all the things we are able to do, so it could create even superior intelligences. The result of this would be an ever increasing developement, and the complete change of the world as we know us.

Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems cofounder, argumented in this article that he is scared about the possibility of the singularity making the human race extinct. And well, it could happen. But I would like to tell him and everybody who thinks like him that, if the singularity doesn't take place, we will be extinguish ourselves when terrestial resources are exhausted (very likely) or when a cosmical disaster takes place (sun will expand and shallow earth, 100% guaranteed).

The singularity and his exponential scientific developement would gives us and/or our "singular artificial sons" a significatively better chance of survival.

I've been following his blog since he wrote "The Unreal Estate Boom" for Wired.

I haven't even played Everquest but it still makes for interesting reading.

Well, if we really are going to install cameras everywhere then we'd be wise to heed a 21st century parable and make sure that access to what these things see goes into the public domain and is not exclusively controlled by small groups of quasi-political non-educators.

So, I'm going to do my part and start petitioning my local government. After all, it's the one that made news for installing face-recognition in our public-area camera network.

According to numerouse reports such as this, two Russian cosmonauts got it on in 1995. (Of course, they denied it because they're both married to other people.)

South Korea's Ohmynews(not in english yet) has thousands of contributers whose stories are ranked and polished by seasoned editors. The internet played an important role in electing their progressive president in the last election.

There is a future for independent original news on the web. For now, though, it will remain the province of armchair pundits who sift through dozens, or hundreds, of articles and put them in a context that Google news could never do (maybe with the purchase of Pyra Labs . . . ) They may have other jobs but if they are successful enough to elicit 10,000 people to contribute $5, they are on their way towards financial independence as well.

All of Burt Rutan's designs come from his intuition of aerodynamics. He uses "exactly zero" wind tunnel testing. Makes me think all the time I spent dinking around with wind tunnels back in school was wasted.

Wired Story on Burt Rutan and the White Knight/Space Ship One aircraft/spacecraft can be found here

Someone claimed to have been done it. Wired magazine ran a story.

RPGs: They kill. They ruin lives. Just say no.

Wired magazine did a whole article about this a few months ago. But I don't recall what month. A google search turned up this article, but it's not quite what I remember.

The gist of it was, even though the Everquest license argreement prohibits selling virtual goods for real dollars, people do it anyway. And you can figure out what the exchange rates are. Turns out that the total "economy" of the Everquest world exceeds that of some third-world economies. You even get weird situations where people are clicking their people around very boring jobs, "because their clan needs the money."

Where is the line between game and work?

If a large corporation like ebay can't win a case brought up against them for infringing an obviously frivolous patent then what chance do the rest of us have? Drastic reform in the uspto is necessary. Since the government started cutting federal funding they have started looking at the organization as a corporation in place to serve their "customers." This is a horrible model for a patent organization, their customers should be every citizen of the country, not just those who file patents. The patent clerks are overburdened and they are rewarded on the basis of how many patents they accept and file, which means any patents they find not suitable are not beneficial to their careers.

Also, how does the court system justify an award of $29.5 million? This seems like a huge amount for such a simple patent. Does the defendant own his own auction house? Is ebay's use of buy it now seriously impacting him financially? This is just absurd.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Jerome Friedman said he would not require eBay to abandon the disputed technology, saying Woolston's lawyers failed to show that he would suffer irreparable harm if the court did not issue an injunction.

If they failed to show that there would be irreparable harm from future use than how did they show that there was harm from prior use? I guess they don't need to prove any harm, they just need to show they own the patent and they get a huge sum of money. Wired's article says that both sides plan to appeal, maybe ebay can get a better deal in this process.

According to this story Wired is running today, Diebold got 0wn3d back in March. They were given a nearly 2GB archive of the stuff that was found by a person claiming to be the hacker who got in.

If a company can't properly secure its own network, how can we possibly trust them to create a secure voting system?

~Philly

Nikki would win hands down. Check out the pics of here here. I'd be scared to enter the ring with some who looked like that. And I bet she's farily happy in that picture. Although I wouldn't mind seeing her in a oil wrestling match... :)

Now look at the competition's pic. She looks like your best friends mom for god's sake. She should be baking something. Note: Notice the IPod in the pic.

Nikki would win hands down. Check out the pics of here here. I'd be scared to enter the ring with some who looked like that. And I bet she's farily happy in that picture. Although I wouldn't mind seeing her in a oil wrestling match... :)

Now look at the competition's pic. She looks like your best friends mom for god's sake. She should be baking something. Note: Notice the IPod in the pic.

Yeah, good thing you didn't donate anything, or you might be in jail too. Indeed, a large donation to a charitable organization was what triggered this whole mess.

From http://www.freemikehawash.org/ "On April 28, the day before Mike would have been ordered released, the U.S. Justice Department issued a Complaint, charging Mike with Conspiracy to Levy War on the United States. Mike is being targeted because he is a Muslim. The Justice Department has organized a smear campaign to portray him as a radical."

From Warblogging (a blog about making war against Republicans apparently): "I urge you to write letters to the editors of your local newspapers. Call your senators, call your congressmen. Call into your local radio talk shows. Make a fuss. Tell everyone who will listen about Mike Hawash. He deserves it, and so does the next one who will be dragged into this Kafka-esque nightmare."

From Wired: Ex-Intel VP Fights for Detainee

Oh, let's not forget the ever-accurate New York Times: Terrorism Task Force Detains an American Without Charges

If you browse around and read other articles on many of the private publications that spoke out on this you find constant Bush bashing, comparisons of Republicans to Nazis, an much worse. Liberals figured that this successful natuaralized American of 17 years had a good chance of actually being innocent, so what better way to give the Bush administration grief.

What I don't understand is, why don't the Liberals actually wait till they have some solid information before they bash away? Time after time they just make themselves look like air-heads on things like this.

Here is a clue: What MOTIVE would the current administration or any administration have for falsely arresting anyone on terrorism charges? This notion that the administration hates Arabs just doesn't hold water. They arrested these people because they HAD something on them. Does that mean that every single one will be found guilty? No. But if I let party politics rule my every decision as most of these people seem to do, I think I'd WAIT till one of the innocents had been let go to start my smear campaign. A lot less erroneous web pages to clean up that way. (4000 hits on google to web content proclaiming this guy's innocence).

Have a look at some of the other photos of him hereand here.

Yay Fox!

This goes against an older article on Wired that said that spammers aren't interested in actually selling anything at all other than e-mail addresses to each other.

... who for into Hussein's e-mail box and then invented the cyber jihad? Oh, yeah, it is the same guy. Never mind.

-1: Troll for the whole story.

and what kind of sites were considered to be havenco material?

From another article (old):

For "security reasons," HavenCo will mention the name of only one client: Tibet Online, the Net presence of the exiled government, which is eager to escape the clutches of China.

In Feb Wired magazine had an article, headlined Immortal Code, about how some software survives the implosions of its company. "The CEO goes to trial. The programmers hit the street. And yet sometimes a piece of code is so elegant, so evolved, that it outlasts everything else." The main example was the DragonSoft speech recognition code, but it also goes into "software repo men".

Sometimes I wonder if some of these people have autistic tendencies ;-)

Why wonder, when you can find out right now.

And it's not such a joke, really. There is a surge of autism diagnoses among children of computer professionals in Silicon Valley. The argument is that geekiness and autism have the same genetic root.

A great article on the corruption of the system

What if I bought a CD, ripped it to my computer, then destroyed the CD ?

Most likely that would fall under fair use. But possibly not if you are doing it for commercial purposes. For instance, radio stations have to pay for "ephemeral copies" that they make.

What if I did A and then sold the digital media online and then destroyed my copy of the media?

Unfortunately according to the mp3.com case, this is illegal. It's possible you could structure it differently, though, to avoid liability. Without buying 10,000 CD-ROM drives and letting people burn the CDs themselves I can't really think of one, though, and even that might run into contributory copyright infringment problems.

What if myself and a friend both buy identical copies of a CD, but mine gets lost in a fire.. can I legally make a copy of my friend's CD?

If you use an audio CD-R, you're allowed to make a copy of your friend's CD regardless of whhether or not you had one lost in a fire, under the Audio Home Recording Act. Otherwise, I would guess this would fall under fair use, but there are really only 9 people who can know for sure.

I was wondering when this would come out...

Coleman, who has two children, admitted that he's faced the issue himself as a parent.

"I've had this problem in my family," Coleman said. "I'm sure my children have used file-sharing programs."

"I have confessed to using Napster," he said, adding that he does not use any file-sharing programs anymore.

Sure, Norm. You just downloaded 'Frampton Comes Alive' and 'Thriller' from my FTP server last week....

There is a lot of American involvement in this problem, but it is actually positive. American RFS (river forecast system) technology that is being utilized to manage the flows of the Columbia, the Mississippi, and other large rivers in the states is being utilized to control the flows of the rivers that are draining the Aral. I read a great article about it in the dead tree version of Wired a while ago, the text is available online here.