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Now they just need to do that with CO2. Release the O2 and sequester the carbon to make graphite, graphene, and/or diamond.

The artificial leaf epithet would seem to be a better fit for binding up carbon and producing O2.

Now they just need to do that with CO2. Release the O2 and sequester the carbon to make graphite, graphene, and/or diamond.

Any replacement(s) will be shitty, too. It won't matter who creates them, or how they're implemented. They will be shitty. That's just the nature of any attempt to have the browser host remotely complex applications. The browser is merely a document viewer and navigator; it is not an operating system of some sort. It will always fail as an operating system or an application host.

This is a debate with a long and storied history going back to Andreessen, and probably beyond. Browsers have taken over much of the work done by native apps on many operating systems, and whether you like it or not, that's a trend which is accelerating, notwithstanding the recent trend for mobile binaries. There are a good reasons for the way the web has taken over our computing lives, and also good reasons why binary solutions like Flash are gradually being deprecated - they break one of the main advantages of the web, which is that it works everywhere - even on devices which haven't been invented yet. That is also why various companies have attempted to introduce binary solutions to web problems - in order to gain a stranglehold on the market again, as they can easily do with binary apps (all the solutions you list were attempts to do this, from applets, to ActiveX to Flash).

It's interesting that you focus on javascript as a roadblock and blunder, as javascript is not actually the language the vast majority of the code in web apps is written in - it's used as a simple way to add interactivity and animation to documents, and occasionally to allow requests for page fragments. I suppose it makes a good rant if you can focus on javascript which, if you know nothing about it, seems an easy punch-bag. It's actually quite an interesting language, though I wouldn't try to create something large in it. The javascript involved in creating a modern web application is typically pretty minimal, and often reliant on libraries like query which smooth out a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers, so javascript is not really the question when comparing flash to html development to native binaries. It's not the technology in which the vast majority of time is spent for web app development - on the contrary, it is strictly optional. The languages used for actual web development vary wildly from C variants, perl, PHP (ugh), ruby, python, smalltalk etc etc. You can use whichever language or framework you like when developing web apps, and the beauty of it is, your users won't care, whether they are viewing it on a mac desktop from 2005 or a Windows phone from 2011.

The end result is that the browser should not be used for anything more than displaying and linking documents.

The vast majority of the work many people do all day includes displaying, editing and linking documents - for that the web is a perfect fit - a far better fit than binary apps like MS Word. For something like photoshop editing huge image files, a binary is still the answer, but it does have downsides. The real question is what trade-offs does your app face, and do the advantages of a web app (faster deployment, cross-platform, document based, stateless, collaborative) outweigh the disadvantages compared to binaries (slower performance, non-local, network dependent, limited file access etc). That's not an equation which has the same answer for all apps or all people, but it's clearly one which has worked out in favour of web technology for huge numbers of apps.

This guy explains it far more convincingly then I could

He talks about some great games from years past.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/12/20-best-games-2010/?pid=783&viewall=true

From that list I'd pick out Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, StarCraft II, Bayonetta, and DeathSpank as games I'm familiar with and was impressed by. Every year there are quality games being made.

They never touched, but they did stay intact under stress that would have shattered conventional metal wings.
Old wired article about the test

Believe it or not, the last one. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_milk/

Six for the transistor, plus some for the connections... http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/functional-molecular-transistor/

But then you're at the whim of The People's Republic. Even Go Daddy is no longer a registrar for .cn domains after last December's registry rule change (which caught all registrars by surprise).

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2003/06/59220

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h010v9w83l8j3441/

She has to look into it because iPods are scary. They have batteries and wires in them!

Could it kill 9 people and wound 14?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/

Of course it's not. Not only is it not free in the RMS sense of the world, withholding source is not the openness Google always claimed it was promoting. Android exists solely to get people onto Google services for purposes of web advertising. The only reason it got so much support from techies is because it runs on Linux, and Google's PR department convinced them that it represented the usual unrealistic OSS fantasies about free ecosystems. Most users don't even care about such things. Apple is still the #1 smartphone vendor, and iOS the #1 mobile operating system counting iPads, iPhones, and iPods.

Remember, Google's main business is a closed, proprietary product--the search engine. Web traffic is regulated by a closed product run by an advertising megacorp. They are not some benevolent cheerleader of openness. They won't even implement Do Not Track in Chrome because it would interfere with their ad business.

Wired Netflix Article

Tracking personal vehicles without a warrant? Why not? If it's good enough for one agency of the government, why not for all of them?

You saw this posted on Wired:

September 15, 2011 | 12:07 pm
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/mexican-cartels-hang-disembowel-internet-snitches/

Friday September 16, @08:45AM
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/16/1211253/Anonymous-Kills-Websites-Cartels-Kill-Bloggers

Yes, I believe they do.

Their website is ugly as sin and a mess. They aren't the only the site on the web that does just one thing.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist

No irony there... Other than the slow loading, ugly site, with pop-over adds to close before I could read it. Give me craigslist over wired any day.

Their website is ugly as sin and a mess. They aren't the only the site on the web that does just one thing.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist

so you o and build a mercedes benz that has a star on its front which has a different size?

How could I be so blind, the back clearly has a slightly modified Apple logo. Indeed, anyone would be confused by the shiny plastic back with near identical logo, why it looks exactly like the matt metal of the iPad.

Sadly, thats incorrect, there are cases where people have been tortured and kidnapped for messing with these criminals

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/hacker-reported/ is one such case, another i dont have the link for right now involved a reporters daughter being kidnapped, put on drugs and sent to work in a brothel for 5 years. The hacker con ruxcon in Australia had a talk on it last year, no country is safe when dealing with real criminals. They will find and kill you for disrupting their business.

I'm a naval officer, so my workplace is a ship integrated with all the relevant networks and systems of the US military. Stuff takes forever on the machines on the ship, but it's a different network environment than a typical corporate setup, I imagine. Our networks are under constant surveillance and attack all the time, so there are frequent patches (some which can't afford to be put off until a scheduled time), virtual machines, bootloaders, logins, logins within logins, lots of cross-system connections, etc. Add on top of all that the fact that at sea all of the bandwidth is satcom and a good chunk of it is encrypted and you have a giant tangle of a network to work with. This is something all modern navies deal with, so while I empathize with the general populace and agree that it's silly, it could be worse.

Oh, also, if it is an IT mismanagement you probably have the option of firing your IT staff and/or switching to another architecture. The good ol' US of A no longer has that option: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/

I would suspect that many advertisers will ignore the document because their cash cow is advertising. They want to be invasive.

Google, for example, who is the only major browser vendor not to pledge support for implementing DNT. Gee, I wonder why.

Mozilla doesn't want to fix the problem. 'The Problem' is the reason they exist. Without tracking, Google would be far less profitable and would have far less incentive to pay Mozilla anything. If Mozilla actually fixed the problem, they'd cut off their food supply.

Mozilla, Apple, and Opera have all publicly pledged to implement DNT functionality. It's Google who has so far refused to implement DNT in Chrome because ads are Google's core business.

As usual, Slashdot is a little slow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/books/booktrack-introduces-e-books-with-soundtracks.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/08/bad-ideas-booktrack-adds-sound-effects-and-music-to-books

Have you been living under a rock or something?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/kids/

I'd post more links, but you need to learn how to use Google. :)

Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the DIDO approach (pdf) that Steve Perlman was talking up recently?

I misread that as like the DIDO approach that Steve Perlman was taking up recently!

I'd better steer clear of Freudian anal ists

MIMO uses multiple antennas and the Rice team was able to send two signals in a way that they cancel each other out, allowing a clear signal to go through over the single frequency.

Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the DIDO approach (pdf) that Steve Perlman was talking up recently?

The reason now is "in for a penny, in for a pound." How much of a software company's worth is the value of their patent portfolio?

Let's look at Google, and their project Android. Android was recently attacked by a series of patent infringement suits. These guys, Oracle, a few others.

How do they respond? They purchase Motorola Mobility, for $12.5 billion. Suddenly, bang! They have a gigantic war chest of mobile patents. Now the situation changes. Now it's like the guy who goes to see the dentist, sits down in the chair, and when the doctor comes in with the drill he grabs the doc by the balls and says "Let's not hurt each other." Suddenly these heavy hitters have something to fear.

Now the other side of the coin.

Google just plunked down $12.5B to defend itself from software patents. That's how much it was worth to them. Sure, they get Motorola Mobility as well in the deal. But we all know why they made the purchase. For the patents. Cheaper than going to the courts. How much of that 12.5 do you think the patents were valued at? How much did Google stand to lose fighting Android? Same number pretty much. Probably more than 5 billion. Probably less than 10.

Now imagine if software patents were suddenly made invalid. That is a LOT of money to suddenly go *poof*. And that's just one instance. Think of every tech company that has a patent war chest. How much value they place on it. How much money they make in licensing. Motorola Mobility just was purchased because of their patent "wealth".

If that all suddenly goes away it'll wreak havoc in the tech sector. All patent holding companies will have to be revalued. Expect companies to lose 20%, 30%...50%... What do you think that'll do for jobs in the tech sector? Your job?

I freaking hate software patents, but now that they're here and companies lean so heavily on them for valuation...it's going to be a rough day when they go away. Going to be a *lot* of unhappy stock holders and a lot of lost jobs.

Actually, we're teaching farmers how to focus on renewable crops that don't immediately bleed the soil dry, while also massively increasing productivity. Not bleeding the soil dry is a big part of long-term productivity. And using genetically altered seeds is a big part of increased crop yields.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=ageconfacpub
http://haitirewired.wired.com/profiles/blogs/sri-taught-to-haitian-farmers

Chemistry to the rescue!

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-01/mf_extreme_farming

Actually, we're teaching farmers how to focus on renewable crops that don't immediately bleed the soil dry, while also massively increasing productivity. Not bleeding the soil dry is a big part of long-term productivity. And using genetically altered seeds is a big part of increased crop yields.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=ageconfacpub
http://haitirewired.wired.com/profiles/blogs/sri-taught-to-haitian-farmers

Chemistry to the rescue!

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-01/mf_extreme_farming

I'm not saying there shouldn't be reasonable concern. But we're looking at a very complex problem. For what it is worth, I don't think food will be the issue. We have a handful of farmers who are vastly more efficient than others and people are just starting to catch on.

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-01/mf_extreme_farming

And we've got programs where agriculture experts have been travelling to Africa, Haiti, etc. and doubling/tripling their crop yields by teaching them to farm smarter.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=ageconfacpub
http://haitirewired.wired.com/profiles/blogs/sri-taught-to-haitian-farmers

So I think we have considerable room to grow when it comes to agricultural efficiency. And it isn't like we're currently using every available inch of available land for farming.

The big concern is safe, drinkable water. Because alarmists have been so busy screaming that the world is all going to starve and that we'd all die, it seems like we weren't really prepared for the population to keep growing. Fewer people are starving today. People are living longer. The alarmists were all completely wrong. So we haven't invested in the infrastructure to process drinking water for the exploding population. Thankfully, that is a manageable, if expensive crisis.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be reasonable concern. But we're looking at a very complex problem. For what it is worth, I don't think food will be the issue. We have a handful of farmers who are vastly more efficient than others and people are just starting to catch on.

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-01/mf_extreme_farming

And we've got programs where agriculture experts have been travelling to Africa, Haiti, etc. and doubling/tripling their crop yields by teaching them to farm smarter.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=ageconfacpub
http://haitirewired.wired.com/profiles/blogs/sri-taught-to-haitian-farmers

So I think we have considerable room to grow when it comes to agricultural efficiency. And it isn't like we're currently using every available inch of available land for farming.

The big concern is safe, drinkable water. Because alarmists have been so busy screaming that the world is all going to starve and that we'd all die, it seems like we weren't really prepared for the population to keep growing. Fewer people are starving today. People are living longer. The alarmists were all completely wrong. So we haven't invested in the infrastructure to process drinking water for the exploding population. Thankfully, that is a manageable, if expensive crisis.

What's new is that Google has found success (initially, at least; people seem to be wising up lately) among the self-proclaimed and self-absorbed digerati crowd that heretofore viewed themselves somehow above the Marketing that always suckered in the mere mortal consumers beneath them. The smug, sniffy, MS-hating, open source espousing, latte-drinking, Starbucks-frequenting hipsters with fifty-dollar haircuts all fell for the warm gooey spin that using Google products made them better people -- which would have been hilarious just-desserts if it hadn't had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing their market share so much.

Your post is getting pulled back and forth by moderators because it tells a hard truth. Google fans have become as annoying as hardcore Apple fans. They bought into "don't be evil"--a bit of tongue-in-cheek engineering humor--and built up a religion around the company. Because Google competed with Microsoft, that endeared them to techies who saw themselves as too smart to be using Microsoft products. Because Google used Linux, that endeared them to "M$"-hating nerds who saw Google as part of the open source movement. Android because the rallying cry for cross-armed, anti-social cynics standing in the corner of the party watching the iPhone users socialize.

Finally, people have begun to wake up to the fact that Google is not what they perceived it to be. Their refusal to implement Do Not Track in Chrome, which would negatively impact their core business of web ads, is one example. Another is the fact that they claim to be all about openness yet withhold the source to Android from non-privileged partners, as well as ship Flash and AAC/MP3 playback in Chrome. They're even using Android compatibility requirements as a way to obstruct phone vendors that choose not to use Google services. And the Street View scandal is interesting because many don't seem to realize they were "accidentally" collecting that data for four years before finally revealing it under pressure from German investigators (Google fans seem to believe that Google stepped forward and admitted it on their own as a gesture of good will).

However, for so many years, mentioning any of this on tech sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on would get you voted down relentlessly by obsessive fans who could not accept any criticism of their hero. Google's purpose in appealing to those crowds--and I wouldn't be surprised if Google employees secretly post here and at other sites to help in this--is to win the support of techie communities, who will then defend them and give them a pass for things that companies like Microsoft could never get away with. It's free advertising.

The biggest success story, in my opinion, is convincing techies that they are an open source company and making them forget that their core business is built on a closed source search engine. Google are the gatekeepers of the web, a global megacorp that single-handedly regulates web traffic which makes it enormous profits. It doesn't seem to occur to the open source crowd that the web is tied up behind a closed source product that is as closed and proprietary as Windows. You don't have access to the source; you can't view it and see the algorithms it's using; you can't examine how it's using your personal data. For a crowd that's always so vigilant in attacking other companies for being closed, their acceptance of Google is incredible.

Not sure how this plays into the recent bevy of activity in the CIA's shattershot attempt to sabotage and discredit Wikileaks, but I suspect someone is getting played here. First you have Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a guy with a shady and rather thin past, come into Wikileaks and immediately start stealing documents and attempting to sabotage the operation--later participating in the discrediting campaign too by writing a book bad-mouthing Assange (and starting his own competing honeypot site to boot). Then rape allegations (the same kind that Dominique Strauss-Khan suddenly found himself facing just weeks after he began questioning the value of the U.s. dollar). Now all this recent uproar.

The CIA is really throwing everything at the wall here. Looks like some of it is sticking. Well played.

Some will laugh at me for saying all this. But, let's face it, this is hardly the first time they've used similar tactics.

A Roomba powered by dog hair might be hard, but it would be easy to make one powered by dog(s). In more than one way... Think Slug^H^H^H^HDogBot for the scary version (which *really* gets rid of the dog hair problem) or Cynosphere for a less terminal variety.

For music, Apple is the company that finally ended DRM. For that you should thank and support them, not curse them.

I keep seeing this quoted as gospel. I remember it far differently, in fact Apple publicly complained about DRM for a long time but did very little to leverage their massive buying power (they were basically the only player in town at the time) to rid us of it. It was only when several other big names in the industry started moving towards DRM-free that Apple seemed to realise there had been a sea-change in what customers wanted and, very late in the day, announced that they would follow suit. Of course they did it with the usual marketing elan that made it sound like it was their idea all along, but that's simply not the case if you look at the timelines.

They did this to protect their relevance in the market place, not to give the customer a good deal (look at pretty much everything else they do to see what they really think of DRM), although this is an interesting take on events that suggests Apple's insistance on only supporting either their own DRM (which they were reticent to licence) or DRM-free on iPods is what drove the rest of the industry down the DRM free path. To say they did that to fight DRM would be skewed thinking though, in reality they just wanted to own the distribution model the way they do for Apps (and I'm sure a lot of what they learned with iTunes shaped the Apps model so that it was fully in their favour).

You might want to check out Crowdrise. I first read about it on Wired a couple of months ago.

Evolution is trivial to prove.

We know about genetics. The first genetics experiments on dominant/recessive genes and horticulture that we have on record were done by CHRISTIAN MONKS.

We can easily observe, through plant experimentation and experimentation on shorter-lived creatures (mice and fruit flies are used often, specifically because they have well-mapped genomes and a short enough lifespan to do the experiments without taking decades per generation), the effects of selecting for certain genetic traits. In the long term, we can observe the same being done by farmers, who select certain crop traits to favor for planting and controlled seeding or insemination (Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, and the varieties of wool produced by various sheep subspecies based on the desire for whatever characteristic is needed in the thread produced from it), or even the development of recognized breeds of dog and cat.

It is sometimes hard to see why a particular trait is selected for in nature - sometimes, it's not the specific trait, but merely the fact that it coexists on the same genetic area as something else that was an advantage, and just tagged along for the ride - but it is rather obvious through observations of changing climate and ecosystem that certain animals have developed certain traits, due to their carrying an advantage in lifespan or procreative ability, and that certain other traits have "selected out" of the population. It's even fairly obvious in the other direction, when different species develop very similar abilities because the surrounding environment pushes them in the same direction, a process called "convergent evolution."

If you say we don't "fully understand" evolution, that's fine. Feel free to say we need to study it more. I certainly agree, the more about it we know, the better off we'll be, though we also get dangerously close to the day when people start selecting out the dumbest fetuses for abortion, or even start to try genetic teasing in the womb to eliminate certain traits. Then again, we may finally eliminate the genetic quirk that makes some people so mind-blowingly stupid that in the face of overwhelming evidence, they still can convince themselves that evolution is a "lie" and that we were all put here by some damn critter no more real than the spaghetti monster behind the moon.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619 Old news, but I doubt any lawsuit kept them from continuing the practice. Rather than tap individual lines, they just jumped in and tapped the backbones and peering links. Might not get local inter-co traffic, but a bulk of the data is probably routed off-net that way anyways.

The Wired article on this does a more balanced job at handling the legal ramifications:
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/08/gamestop-onlive/

Basically, Gamestop may be in the right, legally, if Square-Enix has a pre-existing contract with them with a non-compete clause. As the article states: “Existing contracts between GameStop and Square may have barred this kind of promotion, and so GameStop may actually be justified in their action if Square is in breach of some promotion/marketing agreement”

But they can also be in legal trouble over this, as the article also points out, for a number of different reasons.

Nowhere on the packaging does it say "Free OnLive coupon", apparently. I haven't looked at the packaging myself.

Here is an article almost a /decade/ old on this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers.html

Does TFA add anything new?

BBC Article

Having said that, the 45 million year old yeast was a much more interesting discovery (Wired's article includes info on how to extract it from amber) but it hasn't really spawned much of an interest in paleantology. Damn shame.

"just one camera" - wooh

Does anyone else believe that Apple should have put one decent camera in the iPad instead of two crappy ones? Here's a review:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/just-how-bad-is-the-ipad-2-camera/

They're just going after people because they have been granted the authority to do so. I live about 100 miles from a US border (within the 200 mile from any border that the DHS has been granted full authority)

They claim this, but don't believe it. 2/3 of the US population lives within 100 miles of the border - there is no way DHS has full border enforcement authority over that much of the US.

It is a lot. The number is from here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_komanoff_traffic/all/1

On the topic of Perimeter's autonomy, most of the contradictory quotes are from bureaucrats who may have been playing the nuclear deterrent wargame, much like the spooks at the RAND Corporation once did. The Wired article goes on about it at length, and since it's much more recent, I'm inclined to trust it more. It also discusses the self-control aspect of Perimeter.

There has never been a system that can launch nuclear weapons without human involvement. The closest thing to that is Perimeter, which still requires human intervention to fire. The American counterpart strategy was to keep bombers in the air around the clock. Neither superpower ever developed an autonomous launch system.

Generals trust computers to carry out orders, but they don't trust them to make decisions. The design of Perimeter is nothing if not a testament to that. They've seen all of the old sci-fi movies that suggest machines have the potential to go rogue. And every time a story like this happens, they only get more cautious.

Robotic soldiers might be plausible simply because the risk is comparatively small, but handing over power to a machine just ain't gonna happen.

This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/nerds-darpa-wants-your-advice-on-interstellar-flight/

your Wired article: posted June 15 2011
today's date and the date of your post: August 18 2011

ummm....that would be over 2 months ago, no? but thats okay, some of us find counting from 1 to 2 difficult. ;) lol!

This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/nerds-darpa-wants-your-advice-on-interstellar-flight/