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I do not understand why they haven't made a hybrid with a small (1 litre) efficient diesel engine that *only* kicks in to charge the batteries when they hit half charge.

Why a diesel? If you decouple the power source (as opposed to power storage) from the wheels, you don't need torque/rpm flexibility and can switch to an efficient constant RPM engine.

If you like the idea, you could try the Jaguar C-X75, though it only has 778hp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_C-X75

Otherwise, they're looking at developing similar systems for more serious cars: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/02/jaguar-developing-jet-powered-hybrid/

What happens when these vulnerabilities are fixed and the kits become useless?

Then they throw you in the clink until you decrypt it for them.

America! Fuck Yeah!!

According to this Wired article the 7th graders work has been 'debunked' (or rather disproven) due to not actually testing power output but rather the 'open voltage on the circuit'. Unfortunately both the links in the Wired article point to Google webcache results that have expired so it's not possible to verify.

Read on for a less rose tinted view of the state of prosthetic art and the challenges that are holding it back A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out Of Reach. Interesting stuff.

NINETEEN years ago, no less - March 1993, Wired's very first numbered issue, 1.01. His back-page column starts off:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/negroponte.html

"High-definition television is clearly irrelevant.
When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming.
Why is this aspect of the big picture so unclear? "

That said, I've always like more resolution, more bandwidth in every way. I'm with Ebert that higher frame rates are more important than 3D or resolution - very pleased to hear James Cameron proselytizing it and The Hobbit using it. None of that changes that the ideal experience would be good content, in higher resolution at higher frame rates. And, yes, in 3D where it does something useful. (i.e. not at all in Captain America, Thor, or Transformers, where it added nothing but a headache.)

I'm like that guy's dad, posted above, who made his own 3D camera - never done anything that extreme, but I have collected 3D books and viewing devices and so on since the 3D ViewMaster I had as a kid. FWIW, I have seen a couple of movies where 3D was worthwhile. Not just Avatar and Hugo, where the 3D really did enhance the entertainment, but Herzog's "Cave of Forbidden Dreams" where it was truly crucial to the documentary of a place I'll never be allowed to see in person.

So, frankly, I'll buy all the TV capability that they can bring to market affordably. Hoping for good content after that to use it is a whole separate issue. Always a crapshoot.

Warrantless snooping on the Internet

Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/32gb-microsd-card/

weight of a micro sd card :~ .5 grams

capacity of a micro sd card:~ 64 gb
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Mobile-MicroSDXC-Memory-Adapter/dp/B005V7WIA2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332714352&sr=8-1

MATH:~ 1000/64 = 15.6 or 16 cards
https://www.google.com/search?q=1000%2F64&btnG=Search

16 cards weighs 8 grams grams

Capacity of a pigeon:~ 38 grams
http://interbug.com/pigeon/technology/homing_pigeon_with_gps.pdf
"Thirty-eight grams total is still a lot for a pigeon to carry, representing about ten percent of its body weight."

This is my new go-to plane. It has an excellent glide and isn't too hard to make. It also looks really good and has a clever nose design.
It is a variation of the stunt plane I decided was my favourite when I was doing my plane testing in my youth!
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Fold_Your_Own_Sky_King_Paper_Airplane

They'll just spam public internet services to suppress what they view as dissent, ramp up coordinated cyber attacks, make their lawyers swear oath to the Communist Party, force real name registration on internet services, continue censorship of social networks when deemed necessary, and continue to massively build out CNO and espionage capabilities, all while on track to exceed even the United States' defense spending by 2025.

But yeah, no big deal.

Not entirely true. Grains harvested in the Mesopotamian region for the past 20,000 years contain a fungus that produces potent antibiotics. This was discovered by analyzing those who drank beer (albeit over a paltry 8,000 years) and finding the residue in the bones. Once the source was traced back to the fungus, it was obvious that anyone eating grains in the Middle East since the advent of farming (20,000 years ago) will have had "modern medicine".

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/antibiotic-beer/

Before then? Well, honey is another rich source of antibiotics. It's also a hygroscopic material, so applying it to burns will not only kill bacteria but will also reduce inflammation, build-ups of toxins, etc.

It's unclear when Neolithic man first developed brain surgery, but there's no question that he did and that patients survived.

So man has had a LOT of medical assistance for a very long time. Not as much as in modern times, true, but it wasn't zero. Not by a long way.

They need legislation to somehow make this legal.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 ...and the other posters are right...in 5 years they'll make it 10. In 10 years, 15. In 15 years they'll just stop pretending and enslave us all.

It's amazing to me that this corporation keeps breaking the law, yet somehow manages to keep getting away with it. How many people will drop AT&T over this? or this?, or this? Nobody.

The industry itself doesn't even have a clear-cut idea as to what is property and what isn't as concerns digital media.

Take the RIAA, for instance, who in the course of a week or so, argued that an MP3 was merely being 'licensed' in order to prevent the sale of 'used' MP3's in their suit against Redigi, and then in another case, argued that MP3's were actually being 'sold' to avoid being liable for the much higher percentage of royalties due the artist for licensing their music as opposed to selling it.

Obviously a digital file cannot be both owned for purposes of liability and licensed for purposes of use, so the courts need to get on top of this ASAP.

Can your smartphone stand the rigors of launch and lunar environment?

Yes, in all probability.

The $150 Edge-of-Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/

Oh and more sexually active, that probably explains why there seem to be so many Android users on Slashdot.

Wrong,

OK Cupids data only indicates that Iphone users have more sexual partners. Not that they have more sex.

Android user has 1 girlfriend in 3 months, but gets sex four times a week. Iphone user has 7 girlfriends in 3 months but only has sex with each one once.

So instead of concluding that Iphone users have more sex, a more likely conclusion is that Iphone users are sluts who have trouble holding down a relationship.

and awed when I saw this the other day, although I didn't think much about it after the novelty wore off... which happened pretty quickly.

"Kaayak admitted that he didn't expect the media attention his project would generate, with over 8.9 million views across the world."

Yeah, right. I'd dismiss this if it didn't insult everyone's intelligence. You don't put up the video, a web site, fake a press release, and push it out into the public through the media channels if you don't expect it to get attention. F*** 'em.

It was actually a water pump, not an electric utility.

In 1995, Robert W. Bussard submitted this legislation to all relevant Congressional committees, copying all US plasma physics laboratories.

Needless to say, the legislation wasn't passed.

Do you think the time is right?

You forgot richer and better educated. Oh and more sexually active, that probably explains why there seem to be so many Android users on Slashdot.

Re: It will never be true in my house.
Depends who is giving you your computer, device or job?
A school can network to your home with little public comment about camera use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
The background paperwork once needed for high risk, cleared work is now becoming normal
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/job-applicants-asked-turn-facebook-passwords-article-1.1047427
Then you have the CIA hinting at the joy of a fully networked US home
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/

Attitudes in any company tend to trickle down from the top.

Whatever device you use, now or in the future, Windows will be there...

-Steve Ballmer

Does anyone see something of the like on the horizon for Windows 8?

I'm talking about this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/17/metallica.guitar.hero.loudness.war
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/09/does-metallicas/

There is plenty of prior art for the tech of implantable magnetics :

A Sixth Sense for a Wired World

Haptic feedback is probably a candidate for the Next Big Thing in human interface devices, the other being wearable displays.

People have been implanting magnetic stuff for a while...

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

Neal Stephenson's essay Mother Earth Mother Board

You mean like the Nokia magnetic-tattoo-that-alerts-you-to-a-ring patent they just filed? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/03/nokia-files-patent-for-haptic-feedback-tattoo/

"EFI with GPT does solve the problem once and for all"

Well, no, not really.

GPT allows for a maximum disk and partition size of 9.4 zettabytes.

After all, 9.4 zettabytes should be enough for anyone.

according to the World Health Organization, China's average between men and women is 13.9 out of 100,000 or 24.51 times the rate at Foxcon[n].

With the recent crackdowns on behalf of the MAFIAA, and the uncertainty of cloud based storage (see the Jotform debacle) I think that the government is doing far more to advance "digital hoarding" than hard drive manufacturers and the ever-increasing size of hdd's.

I have about 4 TB's of external storage, and I've filled about 2.7 TB's of it so far just with stuff that I could stream or re-download but just don't have enough faith that the ability will be there tomorrow. Outside of my personal documents (which I would never trust solely to cloud storage, that's just begging to be screwed one morning after a bullshit domain name seizure) I have a ton of media I just do not want to lose access to again. Plus, add in the ISPs and their bullshit bandwidth caps and "throttling" these days, and you've got even more pressure to keep things local since streaming eats up so much fucking bandwidth.

I think there's a lot of potential with the cloud and streaming media, but it's being hampered by these 20th century media companies and their out-of-date business model. It's stifling innovation, but it seems our government would rather assist them in propping up their business plan than truly innovate. Probably because the innovaters aren't writing such large checks to make sure the government favors them like the MAFIAA does.

If no one had done it before (for emoticons) then why would it be obvious?

Because noone cared for the extra key before? If someone asks me "how can I design something, say, an input function, on the phone that will quickly write an emoticon in the message they're typing" then an extra key would be *pretty* obvious. Hence, it fails the "obvious" test.

This whole patent was stupid to start with, and now it's been weaponized. Great going.

Relevant article of other person who this happened too: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-baio-yahoo-patent-lie/

In what way is this unique? Are these machines in any way superior to the machines used to bore the tunnels for the 2nd avenue subway in NYC or the ones used in the construction of the LHC at CERN?

Seems like this machine might be larger, but is that it?

I don't think you have a firm grasp of the subject you raised.

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

Here are words that you never thought you’d hear a Pakistani general utter about the drone strikes that batter Pakistan’s tribal areas: “A majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements.”

That would be yawn-worthy if it came from the CIA, which never misses an opportunity to credit its drone strikes with taking out al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But it was the main message of an official briefing from Maj. Gen. Ghayur Mehmood in Miram Shah. He’s the commander of Pakistan’s Seventh Division, charged with leading troops in North Waziristan.

“Myths and rumours about US predator strikes and the casualty figures are many,” Mehmood said, according to Dawn, “but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners.”

He even brought stats. According to the general, “about 164 drone strikes have occurred since 2007 — the New America Foundation tallies 226 since 2004 — have killed “over 964 terrorists.” Of those, 793 were Pakistanis and 171 were foreigners, “including Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Filipinos and Moroccans.” (Filipinos? Huh.) Only “a few civilians” have been killed, he said.

It's a pity you apparently didn't actually read the Wikipedia article you quoted, or you might have thought twice about posting it.

al Qaeda response

Messages recovered from Osama bin Laden's home after his death in 2011, including one from then al Qaeda No. 3, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman reportedly, according to the Agence France-Presse and the Washington Post, expressed frustration with the drone strikes in Pakistan. According to an unnamed U.S. Government official, in his message al-Rahman complained that drone-launched missiles were killing al Qaeda operatives faster than they could be replaced.[434][435][436]

In June and July 2011, law enforcement authorities found messages on al Qaeda-linked websites calling for attacks against executives of drone aircraft manufacturer AeroVironment. Law enforcement believed that the messages were in response to calls for action against Americans by Adam Yahiye Gadahn.[437] . . . .

Reactions from people in Waziristan

Between November 2008 and January 2009 Pakistani Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy conducted a survey of the public opinion about the drone strikes in Federally Administered Tribal Areas. 5 teams of 5 researchers each interviewed a total of 550 people from all walks of life. Most people thought that the drone attacks were accurate and did not lead to anti-American sentiment and were effective in damaging the militants.[399]

Based on the responses the researchers concluded 'The popular notion outside the Pakhtun belt that a large majority of the local population supports the Taliban movement lacks substance'. Most people thought that the drone attacks were accurate and did not lead to anti-American sentiment and were effective in damaging the militants. In addition the locals wanted the Pakistani forces to also target the militants.[443] According to Farhat Taj a member of AIRRA the drones have never killed any civilians. Some people in Waziristan compare the drones to Ababils, the holy swallows sent by God to avenge Abraha, the invader of the Khana Kaaba.[444]

In an analysis published in Daily Times (Pakistan) on 2 January 2010 Farhat Taj, a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Oslo and a member of Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy discussed the issue of drone attacks with hundreds

I mentioned in my comment that group think could be related to both mainstream science and alternatives. As for the rest of your reply, I think you may want to consider a few key ideas;
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have next-to-no training in understanding or discussing that, and they spend little time with patients counseling on those things in practice, and so if an alternative medical care provider like a homeopath spends an hour with someone and talks about those things, that customer is going to be way ahead in health compared to going to an MD in many (not all) situations.
* in practice, the Reagans (US president and first lady) turned to Astrology to set US policies for many years; I'm not saying that made it better, but it is funny in relation to that cartoon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Reagan

To substantiate one other of those points:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

Rossi may indeed have fooled himself (it remains to be seen), but there are many other much more reputable and experienced scientific staffers who have found similar effects. These people are not yet right because the money dynamics of basic research (fraught with much uncertainty) don't work that way. Even Bell Labs probably never made a dollar directly on inventing the transistor. People rarely make money from basic research because any related patents tend to expire before the multi-decade commercialization process for any truly new technology gets going. What is evil about what happened is the way the hot fusion scientists did bad science to discredit the cold fusion ones and keep the public funding for themselves. Yet another LENR claim:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
"Excess heat generation from our gas-loading LENR power cell (Figure 1) has been verified, confirming nuclear reactions provide output energy."
That success is after having skeptics cut his approved funding over a decade ago:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/1999/09/21-03.html

Perhaps the biggest issue is that you are looking at this situation very narrowly -- is there currently a reliable materialistic scientific explanation for a specific practice? Real treatments always exist in the context of a practitioner/customer relationship (or friend-to-friend, or parent-to-child, etc.), which can affect the outcome. I'd encourage you to look holistically at the issue of overall systemic outcomes for homeopathy (including the psychological benefits of people being listened to and informed about some basics by someone who is compassionate, even if that person they are paying may indeed believe in what may be a bunch of nonsense). If you look a bit more holistically, you will have to admit that mainstream MD doctors spending ten minutes with patients with diseases caused by nutritional and lifestyle issues and then proceeding to prescribe some medication as a "permission slip" to keep doing the bad behavior is the worst kind of harmful pseudoscience, and yet, in practice, that is the system you are defending.

Examples:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/BloodPressure.aspx

You would think so, wouldn't you?

I saw it in two different articles: 1 2

Doing a Google reverse image search turns up a few articles on different sites, all around the same time, so I guess it must just be from 2009/10. Not sure where I'd go looking for articles about the campaign from ~1999, but I hope what I found helps your search a little.

I saw it in two different articles: 1 2

Doing a Google reverse image search turns up a few articles on different sites, all around the same time, so I guess it must just be from 2009/10. Not sure where I'd go looking for articles about the campaign from ~1999, but I hope what I found helps your search a little.

My guess is that they are doing this in exchange for something

Given the Obama Administration's involvement, I suspect they're doing it under some kind of threat. It's part of a growing trend: regulation without legislation and enforcement completely divorced from the process of law,

Are you sure it wasn't a nail?

Facebook.... well, Mark Zuckerberg, kind of deserves this. It's well known he stole Facebook from several people. Sure he wrote the code, but he was paid to write Facebook. Yes I know Paul and the twins ended up losing their lawsuit, but just because they couldn't afford to fight a billion-dollar legal team doesn't mean they're wrong. Is Yahoo's lawsuits just karma catching up with Mark?

No, it's a ton of lawyers making tons of money by going after another ton of lawyers. Mark will not give one fuck, he's made his money.

Facebook.... well, Mark Zuckerberg, kind of deserves this. It's well known he stole Facebook from several people. Sure he wrote the code, but he was paid to write Facebook. Yes I know Paul and the twins ended up losing their lawsuit, but just because they couldn't afford to fight a billion-dollar legal team doesn't mean they're wrong. Is Yahoo's lawsuits just karma catching up with Mark?

No, it's a ton of lawyers making tons of money by going after another ton of lawyers. Mark will not give one fuck, he's made his money.

Facebook.... well, Mark Zuckerberg, kind of deserves this. It's well known he stole Facebook from several people. Sure he wrote the code, but he was paid to write Facebook. Yes I know Paul and the twins ended up losing their lawsuit, but just because they couldn't afford to fight a billion-dollar legal team doesn't mean they're wrong.

Is Yahoo's lawsuits just karma catching up with Mark?

Facebook.... well, Mark Zuckerberg, kind of deserves this. It's well known he stole Facebook from several people. Sure he wrote the code, but he was paid to write Facebook. Yes I know Paul and the twins ended up losing their lawsuit, but just because they couldn't afford to fight a billion-dollar legal team doesn't mean they're wrong.

Is Yahoo's lawsuits just karma catching up with Mark?

Governments have a hard time keeping up. Doesn't matter what they do. Military might be an exception only since they spend so much.

And yet...governments want us to believe, yes I say believe that they offer solutions for every problem that ails ye in River City...because they KNOW what is best for you.

To quote George Dyson: unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things.

And by corollary, there are forces exerted by individuals and corporations and other countries that counter the forces of any government.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/2/

"Zero to scream in six seconds"
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/japanese-speech-jamming-gun/

Taking the "scream" out of pain.

who the fuck would register there now?-D for gawker they brought a lot of loss.

I think that ship has sailed with their last breach, so he knows they've got nothing to lose.

There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones that Bret Victor talks about.

This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.

Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!

No. They promised to add native functions only AFTER they were lambasted in the press. They did not initially promise said app.

Please, you are in serious denial. Googling the initial PlayBook reviews from before it was launched is pretty easy to do. All of them including this one from Wired on April 13, 2011 says "If you don’t have a BlackBerry phone, you’re out of luck until summer, when RIM says a future software update will bring native clients to the PlayBook." April 13. That is a week before it went on sale meaning Wired had to have a loaner one for their review. Which means that it was RIMM's plan all along to have email but it wasn't ready by launch.

By your "everyone else had it" criteria then, was the iPhone "incomplete" because it lacked features that every other smartphone had (such as copy/paste, apps, MMS)?

Please. That one has been done to death. Not having email as a major part of functionality is nowhere in the same league as not having cut and paste. Also you seem to forget that RIMM promised to have it "summer 2011" but it wasn't until 2012 that they fulfilled that promise. I don't remember Apple ever saying that they would release cut and paste when the iPhone came out.

This Wired article put's the Pentagon's black budget at about $50B per yer.

I think 2000x GPU power is very much underestimating the potential for a number of reasons:

1: Raytracing / global illumination. In comparison to games with true global illumination, current technology 3D worlds with only direct illumination (or scanline rendering) look crude and unconvincing. Objects appear 'cookie-cutter' like and colours tend not to gel with the overall 3D landscape.

Toy Story 3 took around 7 hours to render each frame. To render in real-time for a video game (say 60 FPS), you would need a processor that was around 1 million times faster than what we have today. And AFAIK, that's mostly using Reyes rendering (which incorporates mostly rasterization techniques with only minimal ray tracing.

2: Worlds made of atoms, voxels or points. This makes a world of difference for both the user and the designer. Walls can be broken through realistically, water can flow properly, and explosions will eat away at the scenery.

2000x? Pah, try 2 TRILLION as a starting point.

Even the Nuclear facilities in Iran were not connected the Internet (it did have an air gap) but the Stuxnet virus still got in.

Getting in is the 'easy' part. It is the getting back out with useful information where the air-gap is useful.

Even the US DoD's air-gap networks were infilitrated but the attack didn't get back out again