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According to Wired News, the problem is the new linux worm.

they'll be arrested.

Is it biodegradable?

I doubt it. Even worse is the fact that you can't turn it into an aquarium or a bong when you're done with it.

Not in the slightest:
"McCaw...outmaneuvered the competition early on by buying up the high-capacity wireless LAN spectrum that covers Auckland and its waters, leaving Ellison and the other teams with the indignity of communicating by much slower radio and cell phone."
from WIRED

Wired is running an article about Apple's recent actions to disallow OS tweaking. I'd like to congratulate Apple for taking a move to completely alienate a market they have worked for years to please.

To see why Apple's move is wrong, you have to do some thinking on your own. Why did Apple open source their system? They wanted code monkeys to "go ape" with the source, right? They must have wanted that, because their other markets (graphic designers and internet surfing grandmas) don't care.

Now ask yourself this. What do code monkeys want? They want things open. They want things they can change. Code monkeys are never happy with what's given to them. If they were, they wouldn't have bothered to learn a programming language, and they wouldn't spend hours upon hours looking through source code.

So why would you make a invitation gesture with one hand, and push people away with the other?

Apple claims to do it for our own good. They hold the opinion that they know what's best for interface related issues, and that code monkeys should only concern themselves with boring subjects such as how the OS handles virtual memory, how to patch security issues, and why audio sometimes skips on certain multiprocessor machines.

But for God's sake, even Apple can't follow their own guidelines. If you read them, you'll see things saying to only use the brushed steel interface for programs dealing directly with media or hardware. That makes sense. Apple uses it for iPhoto, QuickTime, and Final Cut Pro. They also use it for iChat. Does iChat have anything to do with media or hardware? Absolutely not.

Even a code monkey wouldn't make a stupid mistake like that.

So Apple. I'm begging you. Please don't shoot yourself in the foot like this. You spent so much time creating an open system, and wasting your time closing it again is absurd. Not only is it absurd, but it's driving away the very customers you worked incredibly hard to earn.

Hmm spend $60/month for spotty access to slow, unreliable data networks? No thanks.

"This is a landmark settlement to address years of illegal price-fixing," Spitzer said in a statement. "Our agreement will provide consumers with substantial refunds

No it won't! The suit was filed two years ago. $67.4M divided over all the CDs distributed by the labels ends up being fewer than pennies per consumer. At best, I'd expect little more than a $5 coupon off my next overpriced music purchase. The settlement also doesn't do anything to address future infringement.

and result in the distribution of a wide variety of recordings for use in our schools and communities."

Not under today's Fair Use laws...

With luck, I will even be able to get cool extras along with normal vision. It would kick ass to have night vision and/or thermograph built in!

mmmm . . . cyborgs. . .

But it really was from Jones campaign, and the campaign website, advertised by the spam, got cut off by the hosting company in the last days of the campaign.

A write-up of the incident is on wired.

There's a great article in this month's WIRED about why AOL should re-envision itself as a broadband provider. (The argument largely being that AOL is 95% dialup, and dialup is slowly but surely going the way of the dinosaur.)

An AOL brand of Linux could really complement this strategy. AOL could offer even lower cost computers with a broadband commitment, the same way cellphone service providers offer discounted cellphones when you sign up for a service plan.

For all the grandmas, moms, dads, and technophobes out there, an 800 Mhz box for $100 with a broadband connection could really drive some upgrades, if AOL did it right.

Yep...they had a free tour sponsored by Napster.

And what effect does dumping iron in the ocean have on that biosphere, and by extension, the climate? Killing off the Great Barrier Reef doesn't seem like the answer.

Your first bit is an outstanding question. The second is jumping WAY too fast to a conclusion. For a more detailed analysis of what all is being talked about here, please refer to the Wired article Dumping Iron by Charles Graeber .

More interestingly are the counter viewpoints to the approach be described in this article. First off, the folks who don't think this will do anything but burn dollars. The second group of those critical are concerned with the notion that we're not 100% certain that the globe is warming, or if it is, by how much.

What if we took corrective action to cool things off, only to find that it wasn't as bad as was thought. The cure would definitely be worse than the symptoms.

I do find myself in agreement with Dr. Gagosian's main point from the original article. We need a LOT more data, and a much more complete understanding of exactly what is going on before we seriouly consider corrective actions.

There is and excellent Wired article, that touches the subject.
It gives you the idea of why they had to go with a "low profile" like Eldred and not some one like Michael Hartthe of the Gutenberg project.

Really an interresting read.
Murphy(c)

What needs to happen to avoid the problem here is have many more paths for the data to flow, which requires better hardware and further decentralization

Problem solved

In the past, Passport has been shown to have zero security. See the Wired News article, Stealing MS Passport's Wallet.

On August 8, 2002, the U.S. Government's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered Microsoft to stop lying about its Passport service. The FTC's order is titled Microsoft Settles FTC Charges Alleging False Security and Privacy Promises.

From: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

Whether or not it's censorship, lack of free-speech, whatever. THEY HAVE THE WORK COPYRIGHTED.

Mod me down, but this has to be said.

Copyright laws exist to protect the authors -- they might be using the law pretty heavy-handedly, but it's the law, they can use it.

You are right, the law applies to everyone, including the fair-use doctrine. I have every right to quote parts of a copyrighted, written, work for editorial purposes. As long as I properly cite the source, this is allowed by copyright law. As such, if I put up a web site and slam scientology, using exceprts from thier books, this is allowed, and legal. Just because my site is negitive about thier cult, doesn't mean that they can deny me fair-use.
No, these crack-pots are simply using the threat of lawsuits to silence critics. Almost makes me wish I was German, they recognized the Cult of Scientology for what it was, a huge pyramid scheme that brainwashes people, and banned it. Hell, they even went so far as to force Microsoft to give them a way to strip Diskeeper out of Win2k because the company that made it has strong ties to the Cult of Scientology.

What's even funnier is imaging the thousands of Microtemps caring about their jobs enough to make better software than open source software.

These types of links are called deep links .

There has already been quite a lot of controversy regarding deep links, dating all the way back to 1999.

In fact, one major free website hosting company, whose name escapes me at the moment, does not allow you to deep link to their members' pages. Instead, you are forced to go to that member's home page first (I imagine that they are checking for referers or some such thing).

Clearly, deep linking is beneficial, but some companies just don't get it.

and it is considered good design factor, but it is also of questionable legality, at least in some major parts of the world (the EU, for instance). I still much prefer it, but attempting to make people do stuff that has questionable legality is ... not a good idea.

PS. I know that both the links in my posting are deep links - go figure :-)

Aha, you would think so. But think about it for a minute...Wouldn't such a device, which is designed to convert digital to analog, and thus strip out any "do not record" flags that Hollywood is so fond of, be illegal under the DMCA? You can bet they're going to raise that argument. I really, really hope this happens. Here's why: If such devices are illegal, it would certainly force every couch potato in America to buy new sets. I don't think this will ever happen. If anything, it will bring to light what a horrible law the DMCA is. Hillary, Jack, and their paid off lapdogs in Congress can do as much celebrating as they want. They will sing a different tune when hordes of angry Survivor addicts beat down their doors wondering why they are being forced to buy new TVs that cost three times more than their old ones.
The thing is, the DMCA lives because Joe Average American hasn't been affected by it. Who cares if a few research scientists and hackers get thrown in the can because of it? But having to buy a new electronic babysitter when the old one is perfectly good, well that's another story altogether.

It also supports bi-directional file transfer, so you're not stuck just "syncing" your media when you connect it to the host computer.

And how might you explain this?

I read the exact story on this when Wired first published it, I believe it was called "True Boo-Roo" - a reference to the japanese use of the english language to discribe "true blue" since their word for Blue is the same as Green.

What I don't find amazing is the fact that the company took the right to the Blue Led. In the wired article they talked about how the company funded his research efforts for YEARS hoping that he would develop something. I don't know about you, but if I were to make such a risky investment I'd expect something for it - like what I invested in.

From the article itself, "Nakamura chose to work on gallium nitride not because he was confident of success, but "because I had had the bitter experience that if you do the same as everyone else, when it comes to making products, you can't sell them. So I chose a material that almost no one else was working on ... and our chairman and president let me have the money I needed."

Not only did he let him have the money, he paid his salary as an inventor for the company. This case is rediculous, on this one I'm for the corporation.

Sure, spam's awful, but I find Sorkin's Don't Link cause (promoting the right to link on the net) fascinating. It was discussed here at slashdot last month.

All of this has a lot of common ground with Lawrence Lessig, who was the subject of a Wired article also discussed here. Good to see some law professors pursuing freedom on the internet.

If you're interested in following intellectual property arguments in more detail I recommend Negativland's IP page as a great starting point.

Also found this excellent article on Wired, going over the whole Ellis/CESG thing, including an intriguing meeting between Diffie and Ellis back in the '80s ...

A
Wired article ( Pirates Beware: We're Watching ) from Jan 2001 covers this same topic.

This has been done before. Wired magazine published an article in november 1999 on this. The reshercher (Michael Persinger, neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury) is doing research on using electromagnetic fields to induce feelings directly in the brain. Induced feelings include sensatgion of God's presence, sensation of out of body experiences, etc.

I remember when I read this article, I was blown away. Something to really make you think... :-)

The issue is whether thing like this keep happening:

Caught in the Kid Porn Crusade

From the article:
"One click, you're guilty," says an FBI agent. "A federal offense is that easy"

it shouldn't be that easy you know - I'm all for going for the masterminds and traders, but going after one image in your browsers cache ? c'mon

what's next, having ISP's block objectionable/illegal content ?

Especially when you read this

Read her the story of the MIT Math Wizards who turned the tables on the casinos in Las Vegas.

most probably spend some of it to go into space or to the Moon

After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these and hook them to a few of these. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys.

I'd be a little more creative, like Dean Kamen the Segway guy. Buy your own island, then secede from the union. Boom! your own country!

Last months wired magazine 10.09 had a large article about the researchers who are trying to restore sight to the blind. One guy who has been blind for years has had electrodes implanted into his head which allowed him to see well enough to drive a car around a parking lot. But although the work looks very promising, the medical procedures have to be carried out in Lisbon because they would be illegal in the states.

This is one of those contentious issues where the politicians say, "no experiments on humans", yet the blind guy(or the quadraplegic, take your pic from the range of disabilities and illnesses) cannot get the treatment, however experimental it amy be.

In the past there were relaxations of federal rules to allow AIDS patients to get experimental drugs, why should other medical problems be treated any differently?

And before I am modded off-topic, what difference does it make whether the reasons are political or ethical if a sick person cannot get the treatment they need?

Last months wired magazine 10.09 had a large article about the researchers who are trying to restore sight to the blind. One guy who has been blind for years has had electrodes implanted into his head which allowed him to see well enough to drive a car around a parking lot. But although the work looks very promising, the medical procedures have to be carried out in Lisbon because they would be illegal in the states.

This is one of those contentious issues where the politicians say, "no experiments on humans", yet the blind guy(or the quadraplegic, take your pic from the range of disabilities and illnesses) cannot get the treatment, however experimental it amy be.

In the past there were relaxations of federal rules to allow AIDS patients to get experimental drugs, why should other medical problems be treated any differently?

And before I am modded off-topic, what difference does it make whether the reasons are political or ethical if a sick person cannot get the treatment they need?

Wired posted an article about this in August.

You can also power fuel cells off the hydrogen found in ethanol or methanol, both of which can be produced from biomass. Biomass fuels have the advantage that growing plants actually removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. DaimlerChrysler drove a fuel cell car powered by methanol across the US in June. Wired covered it.

Essentially, because fuel-cells allow a radically different organization of cars' structures, GM is betting it can make cars cheaper. This despite the fact they'd be running on the famously expensive fuel cell. Wired wrote about this"billion dollar bet" in its August issue and quotes a GM exec: "If we're not there by 2010, we'll have dug too deep a hole to recover the time value of that money."

In other words: call us bad businessmen if you can't drive one of these by 2010. This is some good reading for those wanting to know more about what GM's plans to do with its fuel cell "platform" that it hopes to use for virtually every vehicle it makes in the future. Of course, as Wired notes, a fairly heavy dose of skepticism is NOT optional. It's very much required.

---- SNIP ----
oh yeah, hehe

• 2002-08-14 21:28:24 The first pictures of GM's "Billion Dollar Bet (articles,news) (rejected)

Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.

Moderators: Do your worst ;-). But there are some intersting links in there, so be fair!

I've heard that GM will debut this car at this years Paris Auto Show. According to GM the real driver for development on this car is emerging economies like China. Your typical Chinese farmer lives in a house that's miles and miles off of any electrical grid. With the AUTOnomy platform, he can buy one transport that can serve as Tractor, Truck and power generation for his house when he comes home at night. Pretty cool. Of course, where is a Chinese farmer going to get a reliable source or Hydrogen??

Last year, GM acquired 24 percent of Hydrogenics; 20 percent of Quantum Technologies, a hydrogen-storage company; and 15 percent of General Hydrogen of Vancouver [sorry, no link].

here.
...
GM is the only US automaker developing its own fuel cell in-house: at the company's Warren, Michigan, research facility; at a 300-engineer skunk works near Rochester, New York, that recently expanded by 80,000 square feet; and at a third center in Mainz-Kastel, Germany.
...

When you the MP3 of the song in a few filters, it gives the DeCSS source code.

I have done this. Along the lines of what Aphex Twin used to hide his face, I wrote a program that converted a .bmp of the efdtt source code (efdtt is a small DeCSS program, available at the Gallery of CSS Descramblers) into a waveform (using an inverse fourier transform of sorts) and mixed it on top of some song.

Man, if you absolutely must trash a perfectly good Mac, at least make something useful out of it.

They were not rhetorical and I welcome your answers. In fact, I'd still like to know whether you think that the junk fax laws should be repealed and why.

Junk fax laws are valid because the technological solution is too complex. Not that it helped me any -- I get several junk faxes per day, and the "removal" numbers are usually bogus.

You seem to believe that normal citizens should invest tens, if not hundreds, of hours each learning about, installing, configuring, and maintaining spam-filtering software

Not true. I'm talking about technological changes that would be transparent to users, like SSL/SMTP or servers that scan for viruses.

There are thousands of marginal candidates that run for offices all over the country. Does each one have a right to spam you?

This is a perfect example of the problems with your laws. Spam is just one of numerous possible types of "bad" e-mail. Under your scheme, you would have to pass a law for each one. You would need increasingly elaborate conditions to differentiate "good" from "bad" to ensure fairness. It would need to be international, or e.g. people could just do their dirty work from Mexico.

Rule-based filters like spamassassin face similar problems. It is the wrong approach. Complex rules are ever-changing and costly to maintain. When they work, it is always at the cost of false positives (i.e. people's freedoms being tramped upon). The correct solution is the transitive trust model, where recipients can decide for themselves what they want to receive.

Well, that's not how e-mail works and it's not going to be changed any time soon -- no matter what hindsight has taught us. We have standards for e-mail in use by millions of users and computers all over the world.

I think this change is inevitable. It's ridiculous that anyone can trivially forge a message from the CEO of any company, when digital signatures are so easy to implement.

If this technology is not implemented by open groups, I guarantee that Microsoft will solve it for you with something like Palladium. They control a huge share of e-mail accounts via hotmail.com and Outlook, and could easily leverage AOL as well. Of course, MS and AOL would choose the centralized trust model (like Verisign) rather than the distributed trust model.

If you're going to spend your effort lobbying for something, pick the least opressive solution. I choose software. Software is the future of everything.

-Gonz

Anyone remember him he had hacked the a cd reseller website ( cduniverse.com afaik ) and stole
about 25,000 credit card numbers and publish them on the net!
Check here for his page

Though he never get caught....

Related Links :
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/4_ 278091
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,33539, 00.html

A french lab has alread made 'glow-in-the-dark' rabbits (so the ovaries glow, which are used for research purposes). This is done by splicing the protein that causes a jellyfish to glow into a rabbit zygote.

I can't see how glowing hair is going to be useful. anyhow, have a look at this, which covers a bit about it (the article is about an artist trying to get one of the glowing rabbits for an exhibition)

I'm a regular of the #farscape channel on irc.scifi.com, and it has been incredible. Here's a java chat link for the lazy. Random stars and makers of the show have been showing up there at least once a day, sometimes several visits throughout the day, to give encouragement to the fans. The channel grew to consistently hold hundreds of users, maxing out at 700 at a time. Here's a quick rundown of some of the news converage that we've gotten:

Its turning out to be a story not just about a bunch of SciFi geeks crying about a lost show, but a protest against corporations directing culture through actions they don't have to justify. I mean, they killed their #2 show after having already made the commitment to the year. I don't consider myself the protesting type, especially over a TV show... but I wrote a letter, linked to it from my site and sent a few emails because I think the people who make and watch the show aren't out of line to demand what was promised to them.

I think the article you're referring to was in Wired 4.01.

"Squishy" sounds almost cute and harmless, more like "spikey" or "prickley".

I like this bit though (emphasis added):

But it's impossible to put an accurate dollar figure on how much -- or even if -- it's costing the entertainment business.

And for good measure a link to the privacy implications of DRM for the benifit of searchbots, cant have pro DRM propoganda getting listed first in search engines now can we?.

Solar power does not necesarily mean using solar cells. Witness the Solar Tower project in Australia. You can also use concentrating solar power stations to produce energy.

There's been a series of stories about oil wells refilling themselves lately. One of the ideas is that our current source of oil is from methane that was trapped beneath the Earth's surface at the big bang, and from fosilized animals. This story could actually be further evidence of that idea.

An alternate theory is that their is a biomass layer bacteria below the surface of the Earth that is producing methane. That methane is then changed into oil by heat, preasure, and the filtration to the surface of the. Haven't you noticed that most oil well are dug where there is a large amount of sandstone and other porous rock?

<Useful links>
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.ht ml
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/recharging/
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/origins.h tml
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/038798546 8/202-8329969-5193459
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/margins/seeps_worksho p.html

This was covered by Wired Magazine in May. Definitely an interesting read, though the print version also had some nice pictures.

Would not surpise me. Dimunition of copyright protection, coupled with widespread acceptance of his new codec standard , and he becomes the new "owner" of the "new MP3."

...of course, if his clandestine efforts to reduce copyright holders' protection fails, he still profits by having positioned corona or chrome or whatever it's called as a secure industrial-level standard to the Entertainment cabals.

He's no fool, that's for damn sure...