Slashdot Mirror

don't forget ralph nader's suggestion, .sucks.

Sorry but this assumption is not quite valid anymore. Pleae refer to:
"CNN" - FCC to appeal court ruling vacating privacy regulations - August 25, 1999. A court ruling overturning federal protection of telephone customer records puts the interests of phone companies over the rights of consumers, a top federal regulator says.

The Federal Communications Commission("FCC") plans to appeal the decision by the three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which could enable phone companies to use information about customers for marketing purposes without obtaining their consent.

"FCC" Chairman Bill Kennard said the court's decision to reject the commission's rules remove important protections to consumer privacy.

Political News from "Wired News" - Phone Records Up for Grabs?. A court ruling ( 98-9518 -- U.S. West Inc. v. Federal Communications Comm. -- 08/18/1999 ) with implications for the use and sale of private telephone records sets a disturbing precedent for how the courts regard privacy, watchdog groups say.

But the Federal Communications Commission("FCC") will appeal last week's 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which pleased those privacy groups.

The ruling effectively canceled a vague "FCC" regulation that had forced phone companies to obtain customer permission before using or selling call records for marketing purposes.

ACLU Press Release: 10-25-99 - Consumer and Privacy Organizations, Legal Scholars Urge Appeals Court to Protect Consumers' Telephone Privacy. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, 15 consumer and privacy organizations and 22 legal scholars urged a federal appeals court to reconsider a decision that would allow telephone companies to use private telephone records for marketing purposes. The groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the case is of great importance to consumers across the United States. The brief, filed in support of a petition from the Federal Communications Commission, asks the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a privacy provision that was enacted by Congress in 1996 and implemented by the FCC.

The URL in the above post should be http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,35178,00.ht ml. Don't know why it didn't show up properly.

I'm surprised no one cited the Wired artice: Strike 3 for MS Handhelds article.

The legislation and rulemaking for COPPA was quite contentious, and the FTC is probably going to be much more of a stickler for children's privacy than it has been for Net fraud.

michael wrote that "We've already seen that the FTC refuses to investigate even large-scale privacy fraud on the part of Internet companies, so it seems extremely doubtful that they're going to deploy COPPA Vice Squads to go out and enforce compliance. Unless you're a really big company in really flagrant violation of the law, you have nothing to worry about."

But it's not quite that simple. Actually, the FTC has been conducting sweeps for Net fraud, and I expect they will start doing much the same thing for kiddie privacy. However, while fraud-hunting is challenging because you need to chase down elusive "businesses" that change online locations frequently, playing the sheriff for violations of children's privacy is easier: investigating and confirming violations are simpler since the FTC can go after established companies.

Also, FTC sweeps aside, COPPA may open the door for lots of lawsuits, perhaps even class-action suits. (Are your lawyers listening yet?)

COPPA ought to be taken very seriously, and many companies are scrambling to comply. (See, for instance, this C|NET article, Many Web sites will pay high price for children's data , or this Wired article, Time Running Out on Kid E-mail .)

Not complying by tonight is not a big deal. Not complying by early summer is a problem. If you don't have your act together by August, you're in serious trouble.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

I'm a bit surprised that the article on C|Net News.com didn't mention that the format used by many people to post graphics on web pages is NOT .GIF. There's a reason for this: .GIF files tend to download slowly compared to other graphics file types.

When I see pictures and photographs posted on web sites, they're usually in JPEG format. After all, illustration programs and photo-editing programs can output to .JPG format, and nobody has patents on JPEG format, either.

As for PNG graphics, the issue up till now is that older web browsers will not display them. Fortunately, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and later, Internet Explorer 4.0 and later, and the upcoming Opera 4.0 will display PNG graphics files with no problems.

1. HOW can a gif inherently take longer to download than a same-sized jpeg, or any other file for that matter? They are all just bits to the network.
   
2. You see PHOTOGRAPHS in JPEG because JPEG was DESIGNED FOR PHOTOGRAPHS. If you make a text banner, a yellow on black image, you will most likely see errors and artifacts in the resulting image if you use JPEG. Not so with gif. Also, color is unpredictable in JPEG with a limited palette. What you want to be blue may end up violet.
   
3. Plenty of sites use gifs. If you don't see them, you're blind. See this, this, this, this, or this, for just a few examples.
   
4. Any program that can output a JPEG can output a gif. Except Gimp. But Photoshop can, and that's what counts (no, I'm not saying Gimp is in any way inferior, but AFAIAC, there are two graphics programs that matter: Gimp and Photoshop. As long as one of them supports it, everything is fine.).
   
5. You're right on about old browser support.
   

I'm sorry, but compared to some of the childish things that get posted here, a drop like this in the markets is the pinnacle of relevance. For one, there's all the people working for startups who get paid through stock options. If those options become worthless overnight I would think it would be absolutely the most relevant thing in the world to them, since they would not have enough money to pay the rent or buy food, etc. Morale would drop instantly since they would be working for no "pay."

Secondly, if this is a sign of an oncoming recession, many tech workers will likely simply be laid off because down-sizing will again become the corporate buzzword of the month.

I really cannot possibly conceive how you could consider this irrelevant. However, maybe the slogan should be altered so that it says, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters to Rob Malda." Don't get me wrong, CmdrTaco usually does a bang-up job. But to not post something that is so hugely important to so many Slashdot readers (remember, these are the tech stocks that are dragging everything down) seems irresponsible to me, and outweighs any possible cries of "irrelevant" you may hear from the gallery. I'm sure the people crying "this is irrelevant" will change their tune when they get laid off, or try to get a job and find nobody's hiring.

The future of the entire tech industry may be in question, but yet-another-Carmack-interview and ICANN'T leaving a mailing list open are more relevant than discussing it? At times I wonder how the Slashdot administration's thought process works.

PS: The future viability of the Linux Corporations may also be in question if their stock prices keep sliding. Here is a graphical representation. If RHAT ends up with a stock price of $1, what's going to keep MS from acquiring them? They could probably do a hostile takeover now if they wanted.

__________________________________________________ ___

What ever happened to those stories I read in WiReD a few years ago about the guys who were planning on building floating platforms that would hover in place over a metropolitan area and provide high speed wireless voice and data services? They were going to use some new technology to generate power from the atmosophere AND collect ozone-harmful CFCs at the same time.

Seems to me all the problems with satellite-based data services would be solved by something like this. :-)

What ever happened to those stories I read in WiReD a few years ago about the guys who were planning on building floating platforms that would hover in place over a metropolitan area and provide high speed wireless voice and data services? They were going to use some new technology to generate power from the atmosophere AND collect ozone-harmful CFCs at the same time.

Seems to me all the problems with satellite-based data services would be solved by something like this. :-)

Of course, I think being a worker in the computer field isn't percieved as a blue collar job right now because of the potential to make big money. However, it is a blue collar, working class type of job (it is just skilled labor as opposed to unskilled) and will eventually be treated as such by company owners. Organizing now would be creating a union from a position of strength, as opposed to waiting until we are forced into it. I should note that working on forming strong, close bonds with my co-workers outside of work has helped all of us benefit at the place I currently work. Of course, we are a very small group (at the company), and new people are being added all the time. I'd really love to organize a union... I just don't want to use that word in front of management.

Honda Not Fond of Honda.net

Although it is counterintuitive to say that this is about more than money, I think it is. I think it is also about power, and about the people who have it keeping it from the people who don't. People have pointed out that a Sony Playstation emulator would help Sony gain profits, but Sony won't make one or let anyone else do so if they can help it. At some point you have to think that these people are building themselves up by thinking, "Hey! I'm the head of mulitnational_x, I can spit on my consumers and they have to pretend they like it... heh-heh-heh"

At least, that's the way I look at them...

Well, my personal take on the social implications that come with the advancement of technology, in this case nanotechnology, is that as oppossed to (Oh, I dunno..) religion which attempts to explain and "lock" the definition of what it means to be human, technology allows us to expose and whittle away that definition until we have realized that there is no clear definition between human and non-human on a physical level, but rather on a meta-physical level.

Now, if you want additional information for your report; I would suggest checking out Bill Joy's article which appeared in the Febuary (I think) issue of Wired and the sci.nanotech usenet group.

As a general note, I think that many of the posters on /. would have been more receptive to your question if they had perceived an attitude of "Hey, I have a genuine interest in the social implications of nanotech, whats your guys take on it?" as oppossed to an attitude of "Aww crap, I gotta write this big report so that some college will think im tha bomb. Quick, tell me everything you know about the social implications of nanotech".

Angelo Torres

I can already hear the, "Do your own fsking research!" flames... However, I think it is a good topic for discussion.

There was an excellent article in the April 2000 issue of WIRED magazine about this, written by Bill Joy.

I have to admit that I whole heartedly agreed with the passage, "The New Luddite Challenge", and was more than a little freaked out to find that such unsettling words of wisdom were coming from the Unabomber Manifesto.

Also, there are good references to follow in the footnotes.

Good luck with your assignment.

---

I see nanotechnology as the single most interesting/important aspect to the advancement of technology. (yeah, I said it!) If we can create *little* robots that can interact with matter on a molecular basis, what can't they do? Take the atoms from a pile of dirt and make a building with it? Go into our bodies and fix diseases on a molecular level? Create food from useless items? Actually 'hold' out cars to the road? Anyone read the Wired a while back about future technology? There was some very interesting hypothetical inventions in there based soley on nanotech. Boots that turn into a car etc. Personally I'm super psyched for nano, and I hop I live to see high-level implementation.

Of course, I'm a fan, not the man of nano, so please feel free to flame away at my foolishness.

klyX

Wired 8.04 suggests that humans won't be particularily useful in the future, but I think we should assume that we'll want to keep nanobots in our control as long as possible. The question then comes down to our ability to destory them: if nanobots get out of hand, will we be able to guarantee that we can deactivate them? How much should we worry about nanobots getting out of control? (Obviously the media and therefore the general public will worry about it, but should the professionals?)

If you're looking for a more technical paper, talk about how we would go about making a kill switch and how nanobots could be used for evil. If you're looking for something softer, talk about how the public will view nanotechnology and how it might end up causing more subtle problems like an economic divide.

Take a look here at a wired news article all about a silicon valley CEO with a very strong ethical approach - if not the one you might be expecting.

See here

This Wired News item indicates the DOJ might push to open-source MSIE as part of the remedy in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.

It seems to me this would take a lot of wind out of Mozilla's sails. Does the world really need two open-source browsers? And with a majority of the end-user installed base, an open MSIE could very well grab a larger chunk of developer effort.

The controversy over the .tv domain goes back some time. Here's an article published in the September 98 issue of Wired. According to the article, Tuvalu has been a bit slow selling the TLD partly because they've been burned in the past selling phone numbers and passports.

Also, someone at WebTV registered themselves as the administrator for .tv some time before this article was published and rather irritated the officials in the country of Tuvalu. Interestingly, Microsoft has since then been quite prominent in the efforts to propagate the tv: protocol designation.

The controversy over the .tv domain goes back some time. Here's an article published in the September 98 issue of Wired. According to the article, Tuvalu has been a bit slow selling the TLD partly because they've been burned in the past selling phone numbers and passports.

Also, someone at WebTV registered themselves as the administrator for .tv some time before this article was published and rather irritated the officials in the country of Tuvalu. Interestingly, Microsoft has since then been quite prominent in the efforts to propagate the tv: protocol designation.

I'm not a fan (metalhead here..) but I LOVE what's going on!

I'm not a metal fan, but Bring the Noise rules, only reason I have Attack of the Killer B's By Anthrax. I don't find it odd that he supports napster. There is an article in Wired that says back in 98 he had new Public Enemy stuff posted on the PE websitebefore it came out, but the record label(Def Jam, aka Polygram, which got bought out by Universal) got pissed off and demanded that the songs be removed.
Here is the link : Wired Story

Wired Magazine has this interview with him. This is from March 1999. Also, kind of offtopic, but did you know his position on the MS trial "When someone comes along and dominates an industry, of course you get a whole bunch of losers screaming, hoping somehow they can beat 'em down. Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. Bill Gates is Michael Jordan" and on software pirates: "To the pirates, I say the more the merrier. Success comes from the fans first - if someone is going to pirate something of mine, I just have to make sure to do nine or ten new things. I mean, you can't download me" You might want to check Public Enemy's website too.

I know that this might be pressed upon someone like you all the time when you are as involved in the research of AI as you are. But I must ask and I must reiterate; we've all heard the stories, Hollywood has made millions off of it, but could the advent of AI ruin our society and ultimately the human race? The most recent publication I have read about the topic of AI and GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics) technologies has made the cover story of last month's Wired. "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," by Bill Joy, also a not so old headline here at Slashdot, brought up some good points. Those who are in power of the robots or AI would be nothing more than Big Brother was to Winston Smith. Robots as we already know are much better at doing what they do thatn humans. As AI advances, society will not be needed. Let me restate that; it's not that we won't need AI, AI won't need us. We will become so dependent on the machines, that turning them off when they "get out of hand" will be impossible. Therefore, slowly, the machines can just hold our neccessities over our heads. We will have no choice but to obey and then the master shall become the slave. But back to the power of others. If a select few, such as the inner party of Oceania, had full control over the AI, what would become of us, the outer party? Two choices come to mind; 1. The leaders who control the AI will no longer need the majority of society and will not want an uprising. Of course one would be imminent anyway because of the full control aspect of such a powerful thing as AI. The leaders would therefore want that threat gone and taken care of and so they must have the ultimatum to rid themselves of "the outer party." 2. If the leaders of the AI are a little more humane than what was stated above, they might make us live out our lives without working or without any worry of the outside world. Politics will no longer be a problem; democracy will be dead. Instead, the leaders will make us take up "hobbies" if you will, to fill our time and not become restless. Of course, there would always be the few who would not go quietly in the night and would have to go through some "correctional training." That would be the situation if there even was a leader or leaders of the machines. And AI is only one of the three soon to be downfalls of humanity. The Genome is almost done and privacy will no longer be existent. Nanotech could have the potential of destroying the planet. But as I lecture on, I ask you, do you consider these factors of creating AI and do you have any idea of how these events shall be "protected" from happening? I would be more than happy to hear of your response or some websites that could give me some information.

DeCSS was the byproduct of a cracker effort to reverse-engineer the DVD movie player for Windows in an attempt to create a similar DVD player for Linux.

There is also this quote:

Eventually a legal player for Linux came along, but not until after a huge fight erupted between the open-source crowd and the movie studios over content protection.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising coming from a magazine which has the headline, Geeks Protest, Nobody Comes , which is literally untrue. (This is the correct use of the word "literally" in other words, saying "Nobody Comes" is a lie because there were actually people at the protest.)

"..., computer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programers."

Anybody who has ever watched TV would have known to settle a long time ago...

if anyone is unclear on why fighting rather than settling was predictable on MS's part, check out the article prior to the release of the verdict: Why MS Would Rather Fight by Declan McCullagh

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Wow, I feel bad for anyone who had money in MS stock today. Look at the stock price drop in the article. And that was before the ruling. Better pull your $ outta MS, possibly all related tech stocks. This'll be a fun day on Wall Street. Oh, check out this article for more on the stock fall. http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,35364,00.html Sharkey
Badassmofo.com
www.badassmofo.com

HNN is reporting today
"contributed by Brad
It was only a matter of time. After all the bruhaha over DeCSS someone has finally created a legal DVD player for the Linux platform. LinDVD has been created and will be marketed by Intervideo for $29.95 and will be available this spring."Related links: Wired and Intervideo

Nearly all the WW2 german crypto was broken a bletchly, I read a few pages on the NSA site with contradicted this, it's somewhat disheartening, GCHQ even alerted american forces to a batch of uboats which were heading for the east coasts (US), the warnings fell of dear eyes though, and about 160 ships were lost and many lives lost.

Whatever national propaganda portrays I don't think we can turn a blind eye to such minds as Alan Turner who worked at bletchley.

A lesser known fact; Public Key Cryto was also developed at GCHQ too, years before Duffie published his research papers, you can read about it at Wired

And of particular interest, I think, to the Linux community is the last paragraph of that article:

"This is another exciting day for the Linux community," said Linus Torvald, creator of the Linux operating system. "[Linux] continues to attract industry-leading software companies like InterVideo. Their digital video and audio products will greatly enhance the Linux multimedia experience."

There was an article in Wired a while ago which mentions that the reason Iridium was struggling was because they failed to predict how widespread regular cell phone service would become. They had figured (back in the early nineties when they began) that cell phones wouldn't ever be useful outside of major cities, because of how many towers would have to be constructed. As it happens, for whatever reasons, the towers were indeed constructed and so the predicted user base for Iridium (i.e. anyone outside of a city) disappeared.

This will mean no more stupid Iridium flares to get in the way of astronomical observations.

The flares actually weren't the big problem. Astronomers are used to planning around things all the time. The real blow was to radio astronomy.

Iridium was allocated a block in the electromagnetic spectrum contiguous with the block used to detect hydroxide emissions. When the satellites started broadcasting, there was some leakage into the science community's block... at deafening levels compared to the weak signals astronomers search for.

An agreement was worked out involving a time-sharing arrangment, but the fact is it was still an amazing limitation on the ability to conduct science. As Wired says, "Science Versus Cell Phones". Go read that for a good write up, and a google search will get you more.

Aha! I just read the more recent article on Wired, which has a way around this in the future. If you sign over your rights to the FSF as soon as you GPL the software, then noone can buy your rights from you (like Mattel did.) They can then harras the FSF, but the FSF is much less likely to fold, and much more likely to fight and win in court. Unfortunately, the authors of cphack didn't do this, so my point still stands.

In fact, the Wired article states both my point and the way around it very clearly. If you haven't yet, read it.

Yeah, and wired has one here. It's not terribly flattering, though. In fact, it's downright depressing.

Sounds like this is bad news for the programmers. Basically, they avoided any further legal problems by giving Mattel all of the rights to cphack. But now that Mattel has learned about the GPL, the deal with the programmers may be considered invalid since the programmers had promised that they were the only ones with rights to the software.

The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.

Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden. To prove fraud, Mattel would not only have to show that *they* didn't know about the GPL, but also that a mythical "reasonable purchaser" would also not have discovered the GPL even though the source was available.

Finally, if Mattel sues Jansson and Skala for fraud, what can they try to get? Their money back? What financial damage has Mattel incurred? It's not like they've lost potential revenue from being able to sell cphack, since they didn't purchase it to sell it, but to lock it up...How has Mattel, in a legal way that they can sue for, been hurt?

Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?

Jansson and Skala would be in a lot better position if the web pages that linked to cphack had explicitly mentioned the GPL near the link, and if they had included the GPL text in the distro, then Mattel wouldn't have any room at all to argue fraud.

However, for people in similar situations in the future, GPL is probably the wrong tool. GPL is great for releasing code that you want others to build on when you don't want them to lock up their improvements. For fighting with large corporations on social/political issues (as opposed to technical/mindshare issues), release to the public domain might be more appropriate, since what you're trying to accomplish is to keep the original from being locked up, period. This can probably be accomplished by including "This work is hereby explicitly dedicated to the public domain by its lawful author(s)", sprinkled prominently throughout the source. Then (a) the program could be released anonymously and used by the general public (b) nobody could claim to be confused about who owns what. Of course, if it's in the public domain anybody can do anything with it, including modify and sell it, and a corporation can't back down without losing face by "buying" your GPL'd work.

You seem real attached to this perpetual motion machine argument.

Perhaps you should take a look at the Wired article others have been posting links to before being so closed-minded about this area of research. Perpetual motion has been proven impossible (unless some of the free energy guys are right, but I just don't see it as happening). However, our understanding of gravity is as primitive as our understanding of electromagnetism was 100 years ago. Is gravity caused by a heretofore undiscovered particle? Is it a fundamental property of space? Is it a truly instantaneous effect, or does it take time to travel between affected objects? We don't truly know. We can't honestly know yet if gravity can be manipulated unlike perpetual motion because we don't know what it is and what generates it.

I suppose, however, that you will ignore these arguments like the others about side discoveries and tools used before we understood them and respond with another perpetual motion line, or not at all.

The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.

Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden.

Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, claims that Jansson and Skala violated U.S. copyright laws by reverse-engineering the software and then distributing source code and binaries that allow users to bypass CyberPatrol's encryption.

I suggest you read this article at Wired.

What was proposed is not anti-gravity (though astrophysicists are now thinking that this may be a common occurrence). It is gravity shielding. When a correspondent at British Sunday Telegraph received the already-accepted page proofs for the article submitted to the respected Journal of Physics-D, he wrote an article for his newspaper using the word anti-gravity, rather than gravity-shielding.

There was an instant firestorm of ridicule about how anti-gravity was impossible, etc, etc. Podkletnov was let go from his university, his paper was dropped from the journal before it was printed, and he retreated out of the country.

What many people forget is that, "in 1990, a senior scientist at the University of Alabama named Douglas Torr started writing papers with a Chinese woman physicist named Ning Li, predicting that superconductors could affect the force of gravity. This was before Eugene Podkletnov made his observations in Tampere, so naturally Li and Torr were delighted when they heard that Podkletnov had accidentally validated their predictions."

The trick is that Podkletnov was using a very odd combination of materials in his ceramics. This creates an extremely brittle disc that is difficult to spin at high speeds. This guy is an expert in his field, and few have been able to create super-conducting ceramic magnets in this ratio that don't break up at the necessary RPM.

A quick excerpt from the link: True, Podkletnov wasn't a physicist - but he did have a doctorate (in materials science) and he knew how to do careful lab work. When he wrote up his results, his papers were accepted for publication in some sober physics journals, and at least one theoretical physicist - an Italian named Giovanni Modanese - became intrigued. Modanese didn't dismiss the whole idea of gravity shielding, because on the subatomic level, we simply don't know how gravity functions. "What we are lacking today," according to Modanese, "is a knowledge of the microscopic or 'quantum' aspects of gravity, comparable to the good microscopic knowledge we have of electromagnetic or nuclear forces. In this sense, the microscopic origin of the gravitational force is still unknown." At the Max Planck Institute in Munich, he developed a theory to explain the shielding phenomenon.


Oh, and before you go equating this to cold fusion, and saying that it is/was totally bogus, read this article. Read it through to the end, and you will find the interesting results of the experiment, regarding cold fusion.


You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

I suggest you read this article at Wired.

What was proposed is not anti-gravity (though astrophysicists are now thinking that this may be a common occurrence). It is gravity shielding. When a correspondent at British Sunday Telegraph received the already-accepted page proofs for the article submitted to the respected Journal of Physics-D, he wrote an article for his newspaper using the word anti-gravity, rather than gravity-shielding.

There was an instant firestorm of ridicule about how anti-gravity was impossible, etc, etc. Podkletnov was let go from his university, his paper was dropped from the journal before it was printed, and he retreated out of the country.

What many people forget is that, "in 1990, a senior scientist at the University of Alabama named Douglas Torr started writing papers with a Chinese woman physicist named Ning Li, predicting that superconductors could affect the force of gravity. This was before Eugene Podkletnov made his observations in Tampere, so naturally Li and Torr were delighted when they heard that Podkletnov had accidentally validated their predictions."

The trick is that Podkletnov was using a very odd combination of materials in his ceramics. This creates an extremely brittle disc that is difficult to spin at high speeds. This guy is an expert in his field, and few have been able to create super-conducting ceramic magnets in this ratio that don't break up at the necessary RPM.

A quick excerpt from the link: True, Podkletnov wasn't a physicist - but he did have a doctorate (in materials science) and he knew how to do careful lab work. When he wrote up his results, his papers were accepted for publication in some sober physics journals, and at least one theoretical physicist - an Italian named Giovanni Modanese - became intrigued. Modanese didn't dismiss the whole idea of gravity shielding, because on the subatomic level, we simply don't know how gravity functions. "What we are lacking today," according to Modanese, "is a knowledge of the microscopic or 'quantum' aspects of gravity, comparable to the good microscopic knowledge we have of electromagnetic or nuclear forces. In this sense, the microscopic origin of the gravitational force is still unknown." At the Max Planck Institute in Munich, he developed a theory to explain the shielding phenomenon.


Oh, and before you go equating this to cold fusion, and saying that it is/was totally bogus, read this article. Read it through to the end, and you will find the interesting results of the experiment, regarding cold fusion.


You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.

Wired did a feature on antigrav and this russian scientist 2 years ago. It's available online here.

Charles Platt wrote this fascinating article 2 years ago for Wired Magazine. He actually interviewed Eugene Podkletnov, the scientist mentioned on the BBC article and has a lot of information on his experiments and troubles with the press and the scientific community. Platt also talked to people at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center that are/were doing some anti-gravity experiments too. It's a rather long article but it is a very interesting read. Does anyone have an update on Podkletnov and NASA's work on this??

Charles Platt wrote this fascinating article 2 years ago for Wired Magazine. He actually interviewed Eugene Podkletnov, the scientist mentioned on the BBC article and has a lot of information on his experiments and troubles with the press and the scientific community. Platt also talked to people at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center that are/were doing some anti-gravity experiments too. It's a rather long article but it is a very interesting read. Does anyone have an update on Podkletnov and NASA's work on this??

Here's a link to Eugine's paper that created quite a ruckuss in 1996.

Also, here's a 1998 Wired article that gives a good deal of background about Podkletnov, and why his paper was so badly recieved. It does meander a bit. I'd recommend skipping the boring parts where the writer recounts his visit with some other nut who thought he could duplicate Podkletnov's experiment. It is funny though, and it does show a lot about how a bad scientific method can produce erroneous results.

Enjoy!

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Epitaph

Down at the bottom, it says "The seven-page 'assignment agreement' ... gives Mattel 'all rights' to the program's source code and binaries and an explanatory essay he wrote."

Down at the bottom, it says "The seven-page 'assignment agreement' ... gives Mattel 'all rights' to the program's source code and binaries and an explanatory essay he wrote."