Slashdot Mirror

Spy der Mann writes "Researchers find that men who place portable computers on their laps are inadvertently raising the temperature of their scrotums -- and possibly damaging their sperm. Guess laptops should get a namechange soon... before our fertility does."

Khuffie writes "Wired has an interesting article about how some people have given up to spyware, knowing that the software they're installing virtually takes over their internet connection. What's even more ironic is that they claim it's a necessary evil for free software, when things like the Google Toolbar virtually replace Gator, and there are many spyware-free P2P programs available."

wombatmobile writes "Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open access XML format. Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago.

On December 3, 1984, a chemical plant run by Union Carbide and located in Bhopal, India released about 40 tons of a toxic gas which was an intermediate chemical used in creating pesticides. (That is, the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life.) Safety at the plant had not been a concern of management; numerous safety systems were offline or non-functional. The gas cloud drifted over the city and killed thousands of people, and inflicted permanent injury to hundreds of thousands more. It was the worst industrial accident to date. Today, the site remains a contaminated wasteland, unusable and never cleaned up. The survivors have been minimally compensated, but as time passes, enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works. Update: 12/03 15:51 GMT by M : Whoops, just kidding, the Reuters story linked there is wrong; the BBC was apparently hoaxed into putting a Dow spokesman on TV who wasn't actually a Dow spokesman. Dow has no plans to clean up the facility and no plans to compensate the survivors. Hope this clears things up.

Ant writes "This Wired News article says it seems to take more brain effort to tell a lie than to tell the truth according to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Lying caused activity in the frontal part of the brain -- the medial inferior and pre-central areas, as well as the hippocampus and middle temporal regions and the limbic areas. Some of these are involved in emotional responses. During a truthful response, the fMRI showed activation of parts of the brain's frontal lobe, temporal lobe and cingulate gyrus."

wadiwood writes "Five record companies are suing the makers of Kazaa. Sharman (moved to vanuatu in Feb 2004) say they are not responsible for what their users do with the software. Personally I don't get what Sony is doing selling MP3 players for all your "favourite tunes" and then selling music which they say you are not allowed to copy to their MP3 players, but that's another story."

mkl writes "Yesterday I fantasized about a generator of matter. Not a laser plotter for carving 3d objects, but a device that will assemble any given object from its base, out of atoms. I was thinking about a device that can find its place under the roofs of all the people working on PCs all over the world. So I fantasize about it at work and what do I see in the Wired News newsletter? 'Any product, any shape, any size -- manufactured on your desktop! The future is the fabricator.' Heh."

applemasker writes "Wired says that the Senate heard testimony today that internet porn is 'worse than crack.' Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) called it the most disturbing hearing he'd ever heard in the Senate, saying that porn is ubiquitous now but compared to when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.' Can someone submit a FOIA request for his browser history or cache?"

empraptor writes "Researchers at UC Berkeley have crunched numbers and determined that 130,000-260,000 excess votes went to Bush in Florida. They have held a conference and posted their findings online. You can find articles on their research from CNet, Wired News, and many other sources. While the research used statistical analysis based on past elections and demographics, how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?"

colonist writes "Terminator and Titanic director James Cameron is guest editor of the December issue of WIRED Magazine: 'This special issue of Wired is about honest-to-God, two-fisted, hairy-knuckled exploration.' Cameron worked for nearly a year on this issue, developing stories on the future of exploration in the oceans, on earth and in space. Contributors include Buzz Aldrin, Sean O'Keefe, Burt Rutan, Robert Ballard, Sylvia Earle and Kim Stanley Robinson. (The issue is not online yet.) Apart from making blockbuster films, Cameron explores the depths of the oceans and is a member of the NASA Advisory Council and the Mars Society."

Saint Aardvark writes "As if Wilco wasn't the coolest band in existence anyway, Wired has an interview with them about their relationship with P2P, the Internet, and their fans. For example, they were contacted by fans who'd downloaded A Ghost Is Born before it was released. Lead singer Jeff Tweedy explains, 'They wanted to send money to express solidarity with the fact that we'd embraced the downloading community. We couldn't take the money ourselves, so they asked if we could pick a charity instead -- we pointed them to Doctors Without Borders, and they ended up receiving about $15,000.' Many other choice quotes make this a fascinating read."

iman1003 writes "According to an article on Wired, the Senate may soon pass a bill labeled HR2391, a bill which lumps many other copyright bills. If passed the bill would "would criminally punish a person who 'infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement.'" In addition the bill would "permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited." The bill would also punish people "who bring a video camera into a movie theater to make a copy of the film for distribution" with up to three years imprisonment and fines. If any of this worries you please contact your Senators and Representatives and voice your concern."

interactive_civilian writes "Wired (among others) is reporting that the Transportation Safety Administration plans 'to order all 72 domestic airlines to turn over the passenger records -- which can include credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses and health conditions -- in order to stress-test a centralized passenger screening system called "Secure Flight."' They are hoping to reduce the number of "false positives" in the no fly lists. If the information were to be made available, it would be interesting to see how many names that would not have been allowed to fly were allowed to."

starannihilator writes "Wired News is reporting that NASA is planning on using its new SCRAMJET to break the aircraft speed record (on Earth, anyway) at Mach 10 (7,000 mph or 10-times the speed of sound). Using the hypersonic X-43A, NASA hopes to break the record on Monday, November 15th."

starannihilator writes "Wired News is reporting that NASA is planning on using its new SCRAMJET to break the aircraft speed record (on Earth, anyway) at Mach 10 (7,000 mph or 10-times the speed of sound). Using the hypersonic X-43A, NASA hopes to break the record on Monday, November 15th."

r.jimenezz writes "This month's Wired magazine has a fascinating article about an American roboticist and an Italian scholar who apparently have demonstrated that one of Leonardo's creations, a three-wheeled cart, is actually a 'physically programmable robot'. Very interesting reading."

chuckfucter writes "Wired news writes that soldiers in the battlefield now have their own army of geek advisers whom they can contact whenever they need technical support. The stakes are much higher here, with troops asking about the structural integrity of bridges, roads, dams and airfields: Can this structure be safely used after sustaining damage from bombings?"

Amit Upadhyay writes "Gizmodo is reporting about extra funding for smart guns at NJIT. Few have qualms about it, mostly on the line of: would optical sensor for finger prints work when the hand is soaked with blood? Would you get time to enter the override code in an emergency? But if we remove speculative emergency situations, the technology seems to be interesting. While checking out Fingkey Hamster what struck me was, this is one passkey I will not mind publishing on my webpage, and it can't be cracked, unless hardware tampering takes place. Kind of thing that you can put in all the car ignitions and lockers where password entry using keyboard can become too obtrusive."

goneutt writes "Wired reports that an herbicide resistant breed of the coca plant has been found in Columbia after years of government spraying. It also appears that the process happend via selective breeding rather than gene manipulation, but it's an outside possibility that it was engineered. What does this mean about drug control policy and the extensive use of one herbicide repeatedly. Does this point the way of the future for other weeds?"

tres3 writes "Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rights. It discusses everything from battling with the international pharmaceutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government."

CodeHog writes "Wired has an interesting article on the perceived changing use of the Internet. Perceived perhaps because it appears that these findings are based partly on search topics. What's more interesting is what it means to the tech community at large. Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications?"

TiVo has been in the news recently with a couple of plans to make their service less useful than it could be: first, TiVos will now auto-delete pay-per-view and video-on-demand movies, and second, TiVo is making sure that you can't use a TiVo to view NFL games outside the specified market area. TiVo's lawyer explains.

Icarus1919 writes "A brand-new 10 gigabit per second per user optical fiber network is now available to researchers in the U.S. (compared to Internet2, which offers only 10 gigabits of bandwidth total, regardless of the number of users). The National Lambda Rail, as it is known, is named for the 40 different wavelengths of light it uses to send data within the fiber network. In the past, researchers have complained about the relatively (relative when you're dealing with terabytes of data) small bandwidth they can access to send data, and the addition of the NLR will most likely be a boon to research."

13.7Billion Years writes "Former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen has written a piece in Wired extolling the virtues of Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons licensing, providing such juicy tidbits as 'I'm still cynical about its origins, but I've come to love Creative Commons,' and 'the industry ought to embrace Creative Commons as an agile partner providing tools for new ways to do business.' She's not quite ready to pooh-pooh the current all-or-nothing licensing regime just yet but this sounds like good progress."

Garabito writes "Scientists at the University of Florida made a living 'brain' by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat's brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines to each other, creating a living neural network between them. The dish had a grid of 60 electrodes connected to a computer running a flight simulator. The scientists were able to train the 'brain' to control the plane in the simulator and to react to conditions of the plane. Are we getting closer to create an artificially made conscious being, or perhaps, a living computer?" AlphaJoe was one of several readers to add a link to Wired's article on the experiment.

buzban writes "Wired is carrying a cool story about a solar panel technology with a form factor like roofing shingles. Sort of a beowulf cluster of small, (relatively) attractive solar panels, if you will..."

avi33 writes "Wired has an article on the short list of photographers seeking to capture a shot of the analemma - the sun's figure-eight-shaped declination in the sky over the course of a year. Only a handful of people are known to have done this, and of course the obstacles are many: maintaining the equipment and its positioning, the finicky nature of film, the weather, and the photographer's persistence. Is it just me, or is this crying out for digital automation? Mount a cam to a hardpoint, have it snap a shot every x hours, and overlay them? Why I bet some of you could do this with a perl script in an afternoon. There's a shortage of photos from outside the northern hemisphere, so get busy."

pupkick writes "Wired news has a story about a government supercomputer running Linux that 'pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege.'"

pr1000 writes "Wired is reporting that the State Department is planned on adding RFID chips to new American passports, starting with diplomat's passports in January. Those worried about the privacy concerns of RFID should take notice, as this rollout could set a precedent."

jangobongo writes "The U.N.'s annual World Robotics Survey for 2004 predicts that there will be a seven-fold surge in household robots by the end of 2007. Robots that mow your lawn, vacuum, wash windows, clean swimming pools, as well as entertainment robots such as Aibo are all vying to take a place in our homes and ease our workload. The study says that Japan is the leader in consumer robotics, with Europe and North America quickly catching up."

jcr13 writes "Wired news is running a story about TV-B-Gone, a new weapon in the fight against the pervasiveness of television in our society. With this device, which takes the form of a keychain fob with a single button, you can turn off virtually any TV set. How does it work? By rolling through all known IR power-off codes, one by one, trying codes from the most popular brands first. Personally, I am terribly annoyed by TVs in restaurants and airports: they grab my attention over and over, no matter how hard I try to ignore them, and they distract me from the conversations that I should be having with my human companions. Unfortunately, the TV-B-Gone website seems to have already been swamped by the Wired coverage, so we cannot order these just yet. In the mean time, those of you with DIY proclivities may want to think about wiring one of these up yourself using a PIC chip or other micro-controller." An anonymous reader adds links to mentions at CNET, TV station KESQ and Ananova.

With the gold status of Halo 2, the ILoveBees performance will soon come to an end. Wired has an article discussing the meme in depth, and going into details about what exactly it is. If you haven't had a chance to experience the phenomenon yet, the article does a good job of laying it out. (Though the performance finale doesn't come until Halo 2's launch day.)

CherryBS writes "The CherryOS emulator, claiming that it could seamlessly run Mac OS X at 80% the speed of the host computer on standard x86 hardware (covered here previously), has created some controversy about stolen code. It turns out that CherryOS's emulation engine is nothing more than that of PearPC, an open source GPL project to create a PowerPC motheboard emulator." Read on for more details.

CherryBS continues "PearPC developers who have seen CherryOS have confirmed it is a fraud, while others remaining anonymous have posted the 'strings' output that CherryOS and PearPC share, showing many function names, warning/informational message strings that exist verbatim in PearPC. Additionally, now-pulled screenshots of CherryOS, mirrored in the long thread at pearpc.net, show CherryOS's boot process revealing variable names and missing or incorrectly emulated hardware in such a way as to be specific to PearPC. Arben Kryeziu, the developer of CherryOS, claims that no code has been taken from PearPC whatsoever, and that he will release a trial version this week. However, with the amount of deception on the part of the company, and considering this wouldn't be the first time he's violated the GPL, it's hard to believe they're telling the truth. Additionally, Kryeziu now claims the "trial" may "disable modules like sound or drag and drop"...likely because PearPC itself does not support such features. To further add to the tale, someone who was likely Arben was specifically asking for video server load testing for their vx30.com video codec/server product, even specifically mentioning slashdot as a great candidate, and in the days following the CherryOS story unfolding, went back and deleted the posts. The first day, all that was left online were two videos, one of which was subsequently removed because of PearPC-specific strings in the boot process shown in the video..."

AVIDJockey writes "Wired News has an article about a new science television network. As someone who is a fan of TV shows that lack a shiny veneer of stupid, such as those found on UWTV, UCTV and ResearchChannel, I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public. What do you think?"

AVIDJockey writes "Wired News has an article about a new science television network. As someone who is a fan of TV shows that lack a shiny veneer of stupid, such as those found on UWTV, UCTV and ResearchChannel, I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public. What do you think?"

Illissius writes "Lawrence Lessig has a new article up on Wired, with the title Our Kids Are in Big Trouble. I suck at summarizing, so here's a choice quote: 'Gone is the sense of duty that made so compelling Kennedy's demand "ask what you can do for your country." We don't even ask what we, as a nation, can do for our kids. The rhetoric of self-interest so deeply pervades politics that an ideal as fundamental as building a better future has been lost.'"

Illissius writes "Lawrence Lessig has a new article up on Wired, with the title Our Kids Are in Big Trouble. I suck at summarizing, so here's a choice quote: 'Gone is the sense of duty that made so compelling Kennedy's demand "ask what you can do for your country." We don't even ask what we, as a nation, can do for our kids. The rhetoric of self-interest so deeply pervades politics that an ideal as fundamental as building a better future has been lost.'"

adelord writes "Recently Wired published an essay by Mark D. Rasch describing the need for a 'browser-based automaton that could be adjusted to match your tolerance for legal mumbo jumbo' to help the user navigate the torrent of user agreements most of us click through without reading. Is this a job for Google Labs, and if not, who else would write the software for it? Do you think it is a good idea? While the legal exposure from writing software that partially fills the role of a lawyer could be enormous, I sure that it would have an ironclad user agreement that I would simply click through in my excitement to use it."

colonist writes "Tit for Tat, the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Competition, has been defeated by a group of cooperating programs from the University of Southampton. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game with two players and two possible moves: cooperate or defect. If the two players cooperate, they both have small wins. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator has a big loss and the defector has a big win. If both players defect, they both have small losses. Tit for Tat cooperates in the first round and imitates its opponent's previous move for the rest of the game. Tit for Tat is similar to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy used by the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War. Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect." Update: 10/14 15:08 GMT by J : If anyone wants to try writing their own PD strategy and see how it fares in a Darwinian contest, I'll host a tournament of Slashdot readers. Here are the docs, sample code, notes on previous runs, and my email address.

Doc Ruby writes "Wired reports that the "Senate could pass a bill as early as Wednesday evening that would let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases that hold billions of records on Americans".

RangerRick98 writes "Wired has a story about growing jackets from living tissue. The jacket is grown using "a biodegradable polymer as a base," a coating of 3T3 mouse cells (which apparently continue to grow and split even after being removed from their host), and human bone cells for rigidity. The jacket grown so far is only about 2 x 1.4 inches. The hope is that when the polymer degrades, the jacket will retain its structure. The focus behind this work is 'victimless' leather."

RangerRick98 writes "Wired has a story about growing jackets from living tissue. The jacket is grown using "a biodegradable polymer as a base," a coating of 3T3 mouse cells (which apparently continue to grow and split even after being removed from their host), and human bone cells for rigidity. The jacket grown so far is only about 2 x 1.4 inches. The hope is that when the polymer degrades, the jacket will retain its structure. The focus behind this work is 'victimless' leather."

colonist writes "You are not completely human. You are a superorganism made up of human cells, fungi, bacteria and viruses. That's the view of scientists from Imperial College London and Astra Zeneca, published in Nature Biotechnology. Microbes in the gut can weigh up to one kilogram, forming the second largest metabolic 'organ'. Human cells and genes are outnumbered by microbial cells and genes. 'Understanding the man-microbe interaction is likely to be crucial in realising personalised medicine and healthcare in the future,' says the lead researcher."

tovarish writes "It is nice to see that countries like India are trying to research communication techniques in backward and rural areas. While tech savvy people like us enjoy the latest gadgets it is quite a challenge to develop gadgets which actually help the poor and illiterate. While India's satellite launches and outsourcing news are already covered in slashdot umpteen times, sometimes her sensible achievements should be covered too."

An anonymous reader writes "Well, almost for the common man. This Wired article describes a project of the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis to teach people about the power of radio through the use of cheap low-power FM transmitters. Although each transmitter is limited to a range of about a block, they're cheap enough that I could see them being spread out across a city to cover it with a signal. It'd be interesting to do something like that and feed these inexpensive networks via a netcast. You could use something like this to air programming that commercial stations won't broadcast because it's not commercially viable or because it doesn't fit in with the interests of big media. You can read the above article or go directly to the Radio Re-Volt Web site."

AgniTheSane writes "Most importantly the Smart Car looks cool. It also gets 60 mpg, is four feet smaller than a Mini Cooper (you can park two in a standard parking spot), the plastic panels are easily swappable and one color all the way through (so you can't scratch the paint), the steel frame makes it safe in an accident, and you can get it with in-dash Bluetooth (and in Europe can read and write email via the car speakers and a microphone). The Smart car is coming to the US soon, and will cost as little as $12,000. You can read about it in Wired or on MSNBC, or you can go straight to ZAP who will be selling them in the US soon, or the smart car website in the UK. "

meganthom writes "How would you feel about having an RFID chip in your driver's license? Virginia is considering just such a measure, largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there. Civil rights advocates are obviously unhappy with this turn of events, and it seems the ACLU has already taken the case. Proponents claim it would help law enforcement determine that you are who you claim to be and would make forgeries less common. The Federal government is also considering uniform 'smart card' standards."

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Foresight Institute, the nanotechnology public policy think tank founded way back in 1986, is heading to Washington DC this October with their new event, the 1st Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology. The government's original motivation for funding nanotechnology was in large-part due to Foresight's leading educational role and vision for molecular manufacturing. That vision, led by their co-founder K. Eric Drexler, has now become extremely politicized, as Ed Regis discusses in this month's Wired Magazine feature on Drexler."

Chris Anderson writes "I'm the editor of Wired Magazine and if you'll forgive the autohornblowing, I think you'll be interested in my piece in our latest issue. It argues, with a lot of new data, that the entertainment industry is shifting from an era of hit-driven economics to one of niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences, marking a shift towards the previously-neglected Long Tail of the demand curve."

L1TH10N writes "Wired news has an article on a truely innovative way of analysing network protocol reverse-engineering. Marshall Beddoe, a security analyst, is using algorithms used in bioinformatics to analyse closed-source and secret network protocols which he calls "Protocol Informatics".According to Beddoe, network conversations are full of "junk" -- usually the actual data being sent -- which interferes with the analysis of the occasional command sequence that controls what to do with that junk. This has parrallels with Bioinformatics that has to deal with a similar problem of finding known DNA sequences separated by long gaps of unknown data. Biologists have devised complex algorithms to discover whether DNA sequences are descended from the same ancestors by comparing the genetic differences with the known mutation rates of certain DNA components. Beddoe applied the same principles to mutating network conversations of evolving network protocols."