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The authors of the linked article suggest we'll get the power from nuclear plants: "Nuclear power will serve as a stopgap, enabling the US to achieve energy independence while allowing wind, solar, and hydropower a chance to mature. Given the choice between powering the carbon-free hydrogen economy with fossil fuels or nuclear energy, even Greenpeace might embrace nuke plants as the lesser evil." (See point 4.)

It might have been more accurate for the authors to call their piece "The Nuclear Economy" -- hydrogen is just the storage and delivery mechanism.

Is there a reason it looks like a pelvis? Aren't we obsessed enough about our cars already? Now we have to sexualize the PUMP? Oh -- I get it. Nevermind, carry on...

You know if someone got really smart, they'd use that excess heat from the PC to generate more electricity in the same way a Hybrid vehicle works. If laptops are hot enough to cook someone's privates, maybe we can put that to some good use.

Wow, You are knowing a couple of fancy words. Have you been spending some time with the thesaurus? I'm not being impressed.

By any chance, have you read this? I think you would find it very interesting.

We were past the price part of the conversation. We were on the basic math part of the conversation.
Try to keep up next time.

By any chance, have you read this?

excerpt from wired

"Lighten Up, Carl: Remember when we reported on Carl Sagan's new nickname over at Apple Computer (for your edification, it was "butthead astronomer." Apple developers had code-named a secret new computer "Sagan," only to be threatened by Sagan's lawyers that the use of his name on a product, even in prototype stage, was infringement). Well, ol' Carl's now suing Apple for libel, claiming that the "butthead astronomer" moniker is defamatory and subjects him to "hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy." The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the outcome of the case will hinge on the definition of "butthead." Thanks for helping us understand, Carl. "

Some time ago, I read the most insightful, forward thinking article I've yet seen on the ramifications of advances in technology and their effect on privacy.

It's still up, (after all these years!) The Transparent Society, originally written in Dec 1996.

I can't recommend this strongly enough...

Why so? The lawyers I know are very versed in legal precedent and case law, but pretty light on technical knowledge. For instance; David Boise didn't even have email until the end of the Microsoft antitrust trial he was prosecuting for the DOJ. The "tedious subject matter" is a term I actually heard a lawyer say while a friend was trying to explain some technical matters to an attorney over lunch one day.

I think we're talking about different points here.

Simply that psychologically, seeing a real human bounds us to different and more exacting expectations than it does for a non-human form even if it is humanoid in appearance.

Why should we judge a performance by its adherence to an arbitrary standard of "realism"

This standard isn't a conscious decision, but an innate prejudice. I don't claim to know what this standard is, but I assert that it exists. Your examples of McKellen's nose or Elijah's height aren't valid because they're still human forms. Another reason is that more or less, those actors err... sucked. The day they create a perfectly photorealistic human actor, that day their behind-the-scenes thespians will be unique and critical in their contributions.

Although, that day is pretty close.

Not nearly as interesting as this

I couldn't agree more. It seems very popular in certain circles. By the way, have you read this?

You seem to be missing the letters a and d. By the way, have you read this?

This is the correct link http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,579 55,00.html

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,573 93,00.html

I think this sums it up.

Here is a similar story on CNet.

And, for more on the "cell" technology, check out this Red Herring article from last summer, and this Inquirier.net article that includes a picture from the USPT office.

Given all that, I'd still be surprised if this was in US stores in time for XMas. I just don't think they'll have enough time to hype it sufficiently. On the other hand, if the tech is really almost done, do they want to wait until XMas 2004? Hrm....

I think this sums it up

Watching real fish move gracefully through a tank is one of the greatest pleasures in life. You can easily zone out for an hour or so just staring at the tank. El-Fish was almost as captivating. Cheers to anyone who tries to improve on that early effort.

--madgeorge

At the time McBride said SCO was concerned that programmers who had signed agreements to see proprietary SCO source code had moved on to other projects and might be incorporating his company's proprietary code into other projects.

AT&T's Unix Systems Laboratories developed Unix in the 1960s.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Robert Park's list, but it's never so simple. Much of good science fails some of these tests and much of the bad science passes it.

He puts too much faith in peer review. I realize it's all we've got, but it's failed again and again and again. The other scientists just don't have the time to do a good job and many times they have ulterior motives. That's why the peer review journals have printed so many faked articles recently. (Read here or here for starters. )

I would believe his claim about pitching to the media directly, if he didn't do it himself so often. Was his column peer reviewed? His weekly news summary is entertaining, but his smug sense of superiority really grates on me. How in the hell does he know that cold fusion doesn't exist? You can't prove a negative, but there he goes trashing Fleischman and Pons. I'm not saying that cold fusion does exist, but I think it's more complicated than his sound bite. Let's face it, Park is as much of a media whore as the other scientists and he's just as prejudiced.

His other list items are just as faulty. Most scientists work in some kind of isolation because they don't want others to scoop them. But let me guess, the guys who are friends of Park aren't in isolation because they're hanging out with him.

Plus, new laws of nature are what science is all about. We don't need people dropping rocks all day and then announcing, "Yup, gravity still works." We want people probing the undefined areas of knowledge where marginal results leave us confused. That's the whole point.

The deepest problem is the faith we place in the scientific method. We want those guys in white coats to ladle out pure truth. That's why we spend
so much tax money on them. But it's never so simple especially when the phenomena are new or strange. He says you can always find some scientist to certify anything. So what good are scientists? I know, other scientists are the problem. If everyone would just listen to Park,
everything would be alright.

Park could handle this a bit better if he wasn't so arrogant. A more enlightened stance is to say that the scientific method takes a long time to converge on an answer and even then it may not be right. But it's the best we can do.

[BJH]: Maybe we'll be treated to the sight of SCO becoming the first company to file suit against itself (yeah right...).

Funny thing, this has already happened, with a little company called Sony:
There was an article about this in Wired Mag (click to view entire article)

Quote: As a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, Sony joined the chorus of support for Napster against the legal onslaught from Sony and the other music giants seeking to shut it down. As a member of the RIAA, Sony railed against companies like Sony that manufacture CD burners. And it isn't just through trade associations that Sony is acting out its schizophrenia. Sony shipped a Celine Dion CD with a copy-protection mechanism that kept it from being played on Sony PCs. Sony even joined the music industry's suit against Launch Media, an Internet radio service that was part-owned by - you guessed it - Sony. Two other labels have since resolved their differences with Launch, but Sony Music continues the fight, even though Sony Electronics has been one of Launch's biggest advertisers and Launch is now part of Yahoo!, with which Sony has formed a major online partnership. It's as if hardware and entertainment have lashed two legs together and set off on a three-legged race, stumbling headlong into the future.

A click on the travel.fp3 file listed a couple hundred SSNs. It was completely wide open.

UT made it sound like a deliberate attack, but it looks to me more like administrative incompetence (and cya).

It exists. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,53799,00.ht ml Wired had an article about it a while ago, and so did Slashdot. Here's the download: http://www.hacktivismo.com/news/modules.php?name=C ontent&pa=showpage&pid=19

Maybe you saw this article in wired a few weeks ago about banning cell phones with cameras in places like gyms and theatres. I hadn't thought about it before, but these cell/cam combinations are a little scary. I am now much more aware of people talking on phones in certain places (public restrooms, gym locker room, etc).

Uzi was born with the last name of Nissan and put his computer company's website at the place which made sense nissan.com. Nissan, however was not always Nissan but Datsun. It changed its name to Nissan in 1987.

The full sad story is here.

Other articles are here and here.

Unless the Sony unit has some weird-ass DRM. Its certainly conceivable that they would mark each recorded disc with something that says 'only play in the deck I was made in'.

So, yeah. Once we crack that (is it done yet? huh? is it?), it's all good.

On a slight tangent, I see signs that Sony is backing away from DRM. The system in their NetMD players is a fiasco - especially now that they are actually poised to become popular - and they've pretty much admitted to that. Anyone catch that Wired article last issue? It was quite strange to see Keiji Kimura, head of Sony Electronics, basically admit that they got their asses kicked by Apple. In the Walkman space no less!

I looked it up for my simulations timeline-- it was for Doom II, created c1996: Wired article.

On a seperate note, who gave Vivendi the right to take over lotr.com and lordoftherings.com?

I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.

But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.

If it comes to that though, rather than toss it in the trash, I'd rather pay a service like this to recycle it if I could -- the toxins in modern PCs are *nasty* and worth trying to recycle or dispose of properly. Tossing it in a dumpster really isn't the best idea, as a major recent reports (and several related news articles) have highlighted:

• http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/spec ial_packages/marchmania/4605025.htm
• http://news.com.com/2100-1040-844195.html
• http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50645,00 .html
• http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/technotrash.htm

There's a reason that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has the terms in that order. It's better to re-collect the production materials to be used in new products than to throw things away & need more raw resources, but it's better to stretch out the lifespan of existing products before giving them up for scrap at all. Even beyond that through, it's better to consume less at the outset than to stretch out the life of things that you maybe didn't need *or* recycle.

So yeah, it's better to reuse that old working Mac, but when the time comes to give it up -- and that time *will* come, sooner or later -- then it's better to dispose of it responsibly. Recycling isn't necessarily a very clean option, as the report in that last URL illustrates, so the longer you can avoid that the better.

And if anyone in the Boston area has an old iMac with, say, a dead motherboard, let me know :-)

The Geek Syndrome where computer programmers get their charm from.

aspergers syndrome information

What effect these few changes have had on third party applications? The DRM baked into Office 2003 seems to required purchasing quite a few upgrades. What's are the technical and licensing gothca's?

Microsoft Passport to Trouble
Stealing MS Passport's Wallet

I could go on all day and show you where Microsoft is anything but trustworthy.

The moderators who bumped this post up should be shot. Microsoft is going for the least trustworthy company in history award.

Heck we have the Templeton prize out there (more than the Nobel, no less) for best achievement in religion (christianity specifically, methinks)

Bzzt. Wrong-o. The Templeton Prize is for progress in "Spiritual Realities". While Christians are leading purveyors of the confusion that their religion is the spiritual reality, that's a far cry from what the prize is actually about, which is quite interesting really. Templeton in particular makes it clear that the goals are non-denominational and universalist. Wired had a good article about it a while back.

It's paricularly amusing to compare the relative lack of controversey that Templeton has experienced with the soap opera in the Salon article. Either Templeton was smart enough to keep closer management of the process or religious and spiritual researchers are just more civil than computer scientists.

Please Do: Always put the trademark SPAM in all capital letters. Follow SPAM with "Luncheon Meat" or other descriptor. Remember, a trademark is a formal adjective and as such, should always be followed by a noun.

So in this case, it would seem that Google have a claim to 'Google(tm) Web Searches' or 'the Google(tm) search engine', but not the verb 'to google'.

I never used the verb 'to google' before now, but after this heavy-handed lawyering I just might start.

This same author also wrote an article about the shabby conditions at one of the unclassified Los Alamos sites. It's interesting that the physicist that he was interviewing did not complain about the working conditions. So why did the author make a big deal about it?

After reading both articles, my impression is that the author was expecting the entire Los Alamos complex to be some type of high tech super-secure facility, and when his expectations were not met he decided to write a couple articles blasting the place.

Quality journalism? I think not.

Is run at least as fast as current top-end chips, emulate 32-bit operation successfully enough not to crash current code (read: games), and cost not much more than the most expensive current desktop chip, and it will become the de facto standard.

That's how it works. Intel knows that. They're making a huge mistake not taking on AMD directly in the niche.

Unless they also know that AMD is full of stripped screws and has a buggy, slow, hot, super-expensive productt that will only make them look foolish, even if they are before their time.

I mean, how many Newtons does Apple sell anymore?

Wired Article

Download

I agree that a stable robust and widely used Freenet is what the RIAA fears most (other than a worldwide boycott of their products), and they won't do anything to encourage it.

I'm sorry to be contrarian, but as a reader of both "Shift" and "Wired" (all the way back to issue #1), I couldn't help but laugh at your characterization of "Shift" as "like Wired Lite without any of the insight...".

In the opinion of this random bloke, Shift would be more fairly characterized as Wired-sans-pretension-sans-narcissism-sans-technol ogy-diefication.

In my opinion, Wired's steadfast embrace of the Whig view of history- that the new is inherently better than the old, was always it's Achilles heel.

To wit, Shift never made so bold (and idiotic) a proclamation as Wired's infamous " Kiss Your Browser Goodbye! exhortation, which predicted the imminent death of the web browser and the pending future domination of luminary upstarts like "Pointcast" (dead), "Marimba" (seriously hurting), "Backweb" (reinvented).

I'll miss Shift. And one day I'm sure I'll miss Wired, too, for very different reasons.

What, you can't link to Wired?

What's up with that?

Oh, right. Bad journalism ;-) Hey, at least you spelled Wired right!

-S

I'd like to point out that just saying "it ain't so" is not a valid argument, either. While not anonymous, you have provided no citations either, which hardly lends you credibility.

If you have some information you could show us that would back up your claims that the phone network is not subsidized, please post them. It affects this discussion a great deal.

This wired link indicates a subsidy (the rural-access subsidy, I believe), as does http://www.thedigest.com/111/111-28.html. The second article refers to subsidies buried in long-distance charges.

Neither of these articles is a great source of info, but they indicate *some* subsidies. Finding historical info on the 'net is harder. If you have better sources indicating that there are no subsidies and that there have been no subsidies historically, PLEASE post them. It changes the whole picture.

Subsidies are not the only government benefit. As you point out, tax breaks are not subsidies. But they DO give these companies a financial boost. As do fees imposed on your telephone bill by the government, which aren't taxes because the money goes straight to the phone companies.

Anyway-- post what info you've got! The whole issue is not black and white. There are some subsidies, but how big? There are tax breaks, and grants of right-of-way, but some right-of-way is purchased. Was the purchase discounted? By how much? The CLECs are paying for the lines they use, and the 1996 Act dictates that the price be the same as the telco pays-- but states can change this. How many changed it, and which changed it to amounts below cost? Covad built infrastructure, too-- a huge backbone, and they use their own switches. All we're talking about access to is the unused high-frequency portion of the local loop. NOT telco backbones, switches, or other equipment.

Anyway, show us what you've got!

Yeah, that really makes sense. The damn libs want to strip us of our freedoms!@#! Of course, it's Ron Wyden who is sponsoring a bill that will force the government to explain Total Information Awareness, as well as where money appropriated to it goes.

various references for your amusement:

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,571 32,00.html

http://www.spamhaus.org/newsdog.lasso?article=114

http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/000032.html

the last one is of particular interest because it claims that Hotmail doesn't seem to do anything about these dictionary attacks:

They have discovered that MSN/Hotmail seems to allow spammers to run long-lived dictionary attacks, in one case extending over five months in duration.

as for software capable of launching this type of attack - there are already programs which exist for launching these attacks against authentication systems. those written in scripting languages (many of them are written in perl) are easily altered to attack a mail server.

You mean this bill ?

Google is a company. Repeat with me, google is just a company. OK, right now it is a privately held company, but eventually they are going to go public. When that happens, profits take precedence above everything else. Then you can't be so sure they'll stay on the straight and narrow path.

Up until now, google haven't been evil. Why? Mainly because it was started by geeks (Brin and Page were doing their Ph.D at Stan in '98), and the tradition continues (See this excellent article). But think of 10, 15 years into the future. Totally different people will probably be at the top. They'll see thing different from google does now. For all we know, they'll pull people's pages off the index because "the information could be used by terrorists".

The basic problem is that when a single entity has access to such a lot of information, and so many people depend on them, you can never know what's going to happen.

Note: I'm actually a major fan of google. However, it does not mean that I'll continue to be a google fan tomorrow, or that I don't ask "what if" questions.

Wired just had an article about the conflict within Sony regarding just this topic.

The problem was that they are trying to play both sides of the fence.

wired recently ran an article on this. One key quote is ""Technically it's feasible," said Robert Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. "

a little further on the cost benefits are addressed, "a space elevator could transport materials into the cosmos for about $100 a kilogram. He estimated that sending materials on a shuttle costs $10,000 to $40,000 per kilogram. "

How would the structure stand up to the ravages of time? Has anyone modelled a nano structure to see what the effects of entropy are?

wired recently ran an article on this. One key quote is ""Technically it's feasible," said Robert Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. "

a little further on the cost benefits are addressed, "a space elevator could transport materials into the cosmos for about $100 a kilogram. He estimated that sending materials on a shuttle costs $10,000 to $40,000 per kilogram. "

How would the structure stand up to the ravages of time? Has anyone modelled a nano structure to see what the effects of entropy are?

From this Wired article (posted on Slashdot last month) which is worth a read, because it discusses some of the issues you raise. You may be right about music, but everything else is going like gangbusters (especially movies).

Your original search: hypercopmuter returned zero results.
The alternate spelling: hypercomputer returned the results below.

Here's a Feb'1999 Wired Article that explains what Star Bridge considers a hypercomputer.

--naked