Slashdot Mirror

Current Shunts writes "Teams from all over the U.S. and Canada will be competing this summer over a 2,500 mile course from Austin, Texas in the United States to Calgary Alberta Canada for the 2005 North American Solar Challenge. The purpose of this event is to promote renewable energy technologies, integrate science and engineering disciplines, and give competitors an opportunity to showcase their technical and creative abilities." At the same time, zestyalbino writes "Construction on the world's largest solar tower [RMIT] may begin next year in Mildura, Australia. In a nutshell, "An ever present large mass of air under an expansive transparent collector (seven kilometres in diameter) is heated by solar radiation (greenhouse effect) providing a continuous flow of hot air to drive electricity generating turbines located around the base of the one-kilometre tall central tower." There's also an article on Wired."

smack-pot writes "March 2005 issue of Wired Magazine features The 2005 Wired Rave Awards announcements. The 15 categories include Films, Business, Science, Architecture, Medicine, Games etc. Some of the winners are Brad Bird for The Incredibles, Danger Mouse for The Grey Album, Burt Rutan for SpaceShipOne, and Pete Parsons for Halo 2."

smack-pot writes "March 2005 issue of Wired Magazine features The 2005 Wired Rave Awards announcements. The 15 categories include Films, Business, Science, Architecture, Medicine, Games etc. Some of the winners are Brad Bird for The Incredibles, Danger Mouse for The Grey Album, Burt Rutan for SpaceShipOne, and Pete Parsons for Halo 2."

gihan_ripper writes "The BBC has a discussion on the addictive effects of online gaming. Reports come from Liz Woolley of Online Gamers Anonymous, and a gamer, Lynn Hall. Liz blames EverQuest for the 2002 suicide of her son Shawn, noting that game manufacturers hire employees with psychology degrees in order to make their games more addictive."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have genetically modified a common plant, the Indian mustard, to absorb more selenium, a toxic heavy metal found in soils polluted by irrigation wastewater. The transgenic plants were four times more efficient at swallowing selenium than natural ones in a contaminated area of California's Central Valley, according to articles from Nature and Wired News. These field tests are only experiments, but the researchers also want to add genes to other plants to remove different toxic materials from soils, such as mercury. What would happen if such transgenic plants filled with dangerous chemicals start to crossbreed with natural ones? Or if an insect eats these plants before being eaten itself in the natural food chain, leading to some selenium in our food? Read more and tell me what you think."

RGautier writes "Wired News has published that Scientists have successfully modified the AIDS-causing HIV in such a way that it can attack metasticized melanoma (cancer cells). The impact of genetic research on cancer research is in and of itself amazing. To mix this with the strategy of using one strong enemy against another is brilliance! Research will continue, obviously, but they are already reporting success on living creatures." Just think: between HIV and carrots we'll be all set.

Eric Harris-Braun writes "Over at Wired, Bruce Sterling has a story about a new way of looking at architecture and building. In fact, computer sculpting of housing is already being done, and non-planned building as an architectural philosphy, is as old as we are, as you can read in The Hand Sculpted House."

a_d_white writes "The Biological Innovation for Open Society has developed TransBacter, a new technique for creating genetically modified crops, which is being released as a BioForge project. Their license allows anyone to use and improve the technique as long as improvements are shared with everyone, à la open source. Other techniques for creating genetically modified crops rely on Agrobacterium, but this new method allows using bacteria outside this genus. The New York Times and Wired cover the story. The founding of BIOS was mentioned previously. Although the Nature paper is available from the BIOS website, with their emphasis on the free sharing of ideas it's rather ironic that the technique was not reported in an open-access journal."

mithridate writes "The Voice over IP Security Alliance has been formed to "fill the void of VoIP security related resources through a unique collaboration of VoIP and Information Security vendors, providers, and thought leaders." Commentary available on Wired." From the article: "They aim to counteract a range of potential security risks in the practice of sending voice as data packets, as well as educate users as they buy and use VOIP equipment. An e-mail mailing list and working groups will enable discussion and collaboration on VOIP testing tools."

Neil Halelamien writes "Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build, less than the estimated cost of a service mission."

sebFlyte writes "Wired is reporting that scientists have come up to a solution as to where all the matter in the universe actually is. Experiments being done with Chandra, NASA's X-ray telescope have shown up a likely candidate for the solution of the dark matter problem. There are massive quantities of Baryons in a super-heated gas cloud several hundred million light years away."

j_heisenberg writes "Wired carries a story on SEOs or search engine optimizers. Among some bold claims: traffic is up 6 times and sales double, once you hit the first page of results on major engines. The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."

handy_vandal writes "A 16-year-old student has been charged with a misdemeanor for rigging a keystroke-recording device onto a teacher's computer. School district police received a tip from students that the boy was trying to sell answers to final exams. The District Attorney's Office has charged the teen with breach of computer information, a Class B misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and up to 180 days in jail. This sort of thing has happened before. The problem is so pervasive that the GRE board has switched from computers back to paper and pencil."

bblazer writes "Wired is running an article about how despite the displeasure of management, the iPod is the most popular music player on the Microsoft campus. The article states that 80% of those who have digital music players have an iPod. Employees have even started using different headphones to be a bit more stealthy about it."

bblazer writes "Wired is running an article about how despite the displeasure of management, the iPod is the most popular music player on the Microsoft campus. The article states that 80% of those who have digital music players have an iPod. Employees have even started using different headphones to be a bit more stealthy about it."

r.jimenezz writes "Over at Wired there's an entertaining article written by Gary Wolf. It purports to be a memo written by a 2008-Microsoft-employed Linus Torvalds to Bill, arguing against Steve Ballmer's desire to go back to the untenable OS monopoly proposition instead of the 'new order': Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"

hoovernj writes "It seems that O'Reilly is ready to release two books about Firefox in March. The first is Firefox Hacks, which will be targeted at Firefox power users. And the second is Don't Click on the Blue E!, which will be targeted at less-savvy users transitioning from Internet Explorer. Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages? (thanks to mozillaZine for the original pointer)." And reader ledmirage writes "Wired Magazine's February issue on Firefox: 'It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)'."

Stargoat writes "The official mainland Chinese news agency, Xinhau, is reporting that China is banning 50 gaming titles. These titles include Battlefield Vietnam, The Sims 2, and FIFA 2005. A similar game banning event occurred six months ago in China, but not to this scale."

Croaking Toad writes "According to The Register, US-based scientists using stem cells has hit a brick wall. The stem cells apparently have been contaminated for quite a while with animal proteins rendering them useless in the treatment of human illnesses. New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the USA by a 2001 Executive Order from President Bush." To be precise, stem cell harvesting wasn't outlawed; the usage of federal funding was outlawed. Several states and research institutions have been using their own money to undertake research. The AP coverage is up as well. Update: 01/24 19:40 GMT by J : Carl Zimmer has a fascinating description of the sugars we humans lack that contaminated the stem cell lines. What a curious genetic heritage we have...

angkor writes "Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked."

mixter writes "Hi. I'd like to point your attention to Ciphire, a fully free and soon-to-be-audited-OpenSource 'Global PKI' project I've been working on for the last three years. As the first three or four thousand geeks started using Ciphire and seem happy, with some tech articles written, I guess the /. community might find this interesting, too. Ciphire hopes to have solved the problems that prevented PGP from a broader deployment, with even higher security standards - as already confirmed by crypto experts Housley & Ferguson. More useful information, e.g. in Wired or in the Nerd^H^H^H^Hexperts FAQ."

Baldrson writes "Wired News reports that after 2 years of development, Space Exploration Technology Corp ('SpaceEx') successfully test-fired their new LOX/Kerosene Merlin rocket engine for the 160 seconds required for orbit. SpaceEx was founded by Elon Musk from the proceeds of the 2002 sale of his prior start-up, Paypal, to Ebay. According to Musk, 5 Merlins bundled with the first stage of SpaceEx's powerful Falcon V booster will launch 5 people to orbit by 2010, thereby winning America's Space Prize which was endowed by Robert Bigelow."

sebFlyte writes "Since Slashdot readers seem to be interesting in the issues and problems surrounding software patents, I thought they might be interested to see that Wired is running an interesting piece on patents in Biotech and the way that they can hold up important research, and how there are clear parallels with the open source software community with the way that advocates of openness are trying to solve these problems."

Wired is running a story on Delicious Monster, a startup Mac software company whose main office is a Seattle coffee shop. Hope they're drinking decaf.

robotissues writes "Farklempt! is an online video game that challenges its players to manage their emotional-health through the skillful manipulation of feelings against other players trying to do the same. USA Today said: "You will not see another game like this one for many a day, we suspect, unless someone finds a way to squeeze a copy of The Sims until the pure essence comes out". Wired Online also covered the unveiling at Dorkbot NYC last week."

balancedi writes "Should robots eat? Should they excrete? Should robots be like us? Should we be like robots? Should we care? Jordan Pollack, a prof in Comp Sci at Brandeis, raises some unusual but good questions in an article in Wired called 'Ethics for the Robot Age.'"

Nrik noted a wired story about too much gaming and how sometimes a few too many hours of gaming can cause your mind to blur some lines. For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work. Katamari Damacy has been a problem too. I'm fairly certain my car is large enough to pick up the railings on the overpass near my house. I'm even more certain that these thoughts are bad.

Writes writes writes writes "A group of graduate students from the University of Washington have posted a a new independent report about the extent of centralization in regards to BitTorrent communities. The report indicates that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active, even despite their large degree of centralization (and perhaps exposure/liability). Furthermore, the report attempts to determine if the torrent communities follow the 80/20 rule, by measuring the Long Tail of torrent distribution."

Rei writes "Following in the footsteps of Lynn Conway's pioneering work on VLSI that allowed ordinary students to create their own processors, a group of MIT professors have almost completed doing the same thing using DNA, known as synthetic biology. While not all of the components of a basic computer are working yet, there is hope that some day ordinary students may be able to design living computers, producing everything from novel drugs to seeds that sprout into treehouses."

quizdog writes "The latest issue of Wired has a story on Sir Richard Branson and the history of the Virgin Empire, focusing on his latest venture of partnering with Scaled Composites and Burt Rutan to bring the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne hybrid rocket technology to the point where paying passengers can slip those 'surly bonds' of the atmosphere. Starting at just $200,000 a pop - any chance of a volume discount?" We first mentioned this a while back, but Wired's coverage is nice to see as well.

ZephyrXero writes "Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but thought the bandwidth would cost too much? While Wired thinks Peer-to-peer broadcasting, or "peercasting", will be the future of the internet (previously posted); Peercast.org says it's already here today. Peercast's software is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. You can broadcast both audio and video without needing a whole lot of bandwidth since each audience member also uploads back to the network. The Xiph Foundation is also working on a similar project called "IceShare," but it's still in planning. Peercast, still in beta seems to already be fully functional and ready for an audience (even you dial-up guys)."

slakdrgn writes "Wired has an interview with Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com) with some interesting information on how he approaches the market, why they stopped doing TV advertising three years ago and hints at what might be coming in the future."

enrico_suave points out this "PVRBlog post about EFF's Review of Elgato's EyeTV 500, an HDTV solution for the Mac. Well, a very speedy dual-processor G5 Mac, apparently. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing a lot of important work defending our online and digital rights including opposing the dreaded FCC mandated broadcast flag (cue boos and hisses) Elgato and Plextor also have a Standard Definition homebrew PVR solution with an EyeTV and ConvertX PVR bundle (Wired review)." (See also this earlier review from a Slashdot reader.)

l3pYr writes "Based on user submissions, Wired Magazine has posted its 2004 Vaporware Awards. Duke Nukem Forever has garnered the 'Lifetime Achievement Award,' so it doesn't - officially - make the list. Some of the lucky winners this year are: Alienware, Valve, Microsoft, Apple and TiVo."

hexed_2050 writes "Researchers have pin-pointed the reason why some people have a greater immunity, or in some cases, total immunity to the HIV virus. They credit a genetic defect that can be traced back to Europeans in the middle ages."

TopherTG writes "Do cops told to seize computers to return only with monitors, stapling pirated floppies together or arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar? It would in India. Wired is running a rather humorous article on the minglings between cops and techies."

ZP-Blight writes "Wired has posted an in-depth five page interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of the popular Peer-2-Peer software, BitTorrent."

mediareport writes "Science News offers a timely antidote to simplistic mumbo-jumbo about the "mythical power" of animal earthquake detection. Anyone intrigued by reports of possible tsunami-avoidance behavior in Sri Lankan wildlife will enjoy this detailed examination of the latest research into low-frequency sound. Elephant rumblings that produce Rayleigh waves are now under serious study for the first time, while others are designing "highly unusual" experiments to test infrasound sensitivity in humans."

xasper8 writes "First it was the RIAA, now Hollywood is cracking the legal whip on online piracy." There's a better article about this in the recent issue of Wired that gets more in depth on this. Basically, good background on how file releases get made. <update> Yes, we did have Wired link yesterday as well. My bad.

Paladin144 writes "Wired has a report about the mysterious 'pirate networks' that obtain new movies, music & games before they are released and spread them throughout the net. It's not as simple as putting a movie on LimeWire. These people are highly organized and very paranoid about secrecy. They maintain a hidden network of top-level FTP sites that get the best files first and allow them to trickle down the pyramid and into many a slashdotter's sweaty little fingers."

Wired.com is reporting on a Modern remake of classic adventure game Maniac Mansion. From the article: "The new game is almost identical to the original, except for the graphics and sound. Like the original, it has seven characters you can assemble in groups of three to play the game, and the puzzle-filled adventure has eight different solutions, which vary based on which characters you choose."

im333mfg writes "Tonight at 7:08pm PST, the Cassini spacecraft will be releasing the much anticipated Huygens Probe for a rendezvous with the Saturn moon Titan. It will be making a 22 day journey to the moon, and end up entering the atmosphere sometime on January 14th. 'Titan is one of the remaining puzzles of the solar system - while Cassini's imaging cameras and radar instrument have begun to reveal the details of its surface, the Huygens probe will be the first spacecraft to venture beneath Titan's thick clouds.'"

Gamespot's annual awards have drawn to a close, with the Reader's choice awards finishing up tomorrow. Announced on Wednesday, Gamespot's Game of the Year for 2004 is World of Warcraft. Relatedly, there is an interview with the WoW composer at World of Warcraft Guru, and a piece on Wired.com about Virtual Trade and Blizzard's efforts to combat the trend. Finally, Blizzard's annual holiday festivities have resulted in a hilarious holiday mp3 being made available on the official World of Warcraft site.

securitas writes "The Washington Post has bought online magazine Slate from Microsoft for an undisclosed sum believed to be in the millions of dollars. The sale comes almost five months after Microsoft put Slate on the block (Slashdot) in late July. If you're looking for a perspective from someone other than Slate's editor Jacob Weisberg, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes about the sale: 'According to ComScore Media Metrix, washingtonpost.com drew 4.5 million unique visitors last month, while Slate drew 4.8 million.' David Carr reports in the New York Times that Neilsen NetRatings recorded 6 million Slate visitors last month. Either way, Slate's audience is larger than the Post's online edition. You can learn more about the deal from AP via IHT or get streaming audio at NPR (Real|Windows Media)."

cavaroc writes "Wired is reporting that the Australian record labels are now threatening the International Red Cross for being a beneficiary of Sharman Networks. They said they'd politely ask them to cooperate, but that if they didn't cooperate, 'It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue them.' My favorite quote from the article: 'We never take a case against technology, we will take cases against people who use technology to take away our artists' property.' They're expected to sue themselves sometime early next year. ;-)"

Sybelius writes "Wired News is running a story that recommends a half dozen good books as holiday gifts. It's a much more inspired list than the one recently offered by Amazon. According to the reviewer, the books chosen are ones that 'any techno-loving, systems-tinkering, hardware-hacking person would love, but that even those who can't program the clock on their VCR will find quite readable.' Do Slashdot readers have any other recommendations for titles that fit this requirement?"

sushant_bhatia_progr writes "Wired has an article stating that according to a four-year analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers, the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software. The report, set to be released on Tuesday, states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis. Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code."

devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""

ctwxman writes "Sure you've got a Segway - now what? How about Segway Polo from the Bay Area Segway Enthusiasts Group? Yes, they do fall off from time-to-time, though they're getting better! Spectators are welcome for the two events each month in San Fransisco. Be there and be square."

yali writes "A new study shows that Game Boys are better than tranquilizers for calming children before surgery. Kids allowed to bring Game Boys into the OR showed no change in anxiety (compared to a small increase with tranquilizers, and a big increase in a control condition.) Kind of puts a different spin on analogies between games and drugs."