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Not only would that require vehicles to be based on a standard plan, but it would also require that plan to be lame. Most EVs put the batteries in locations where they're extremely inconvenient to replace. Nissan/Renault is about to figure this out for us, though; Nissan is releasing a plug-in EV in the US and Japan "this year" and Renault is doing a Megane EV with swappable batteries.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/better-place/ easy

As for Fairplay, its been known for quite a while that Apple didn't want it but it was required in order to get the music industry's blessing to sell their music.

I have noticed that I've only been able to find out Steve Job's not wanting to have put Fairplay on music files was an open letter dated Feb 2007, 5 years later when DRM was being spoken against by the general public. And its a typical PR stunt "Oh we didn't want to... it's the other guys fault. They strong armed us into doing it". This argument has been used by quite a few software vendors. And the big issue I have with it is that Apple as a business shows the opposite. DRM by definition is "a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices.".Look at the DRM on OSX, most notably Snow Leopard. I could buy a copy of Snow Leopard but due to the DRM in it, I can't install it on any other hardware but Apples. While the old versions of OSX needed the special CPU's, Snow Leopard only works on Intel sytle x64 chips. There isn't much DRM on the software side for checking if it's legitimate, but all the DRM is focusing on the hardware. This is a massive limitation of my usability of the software, limiting it to only using Apple hardware. The only problem here is that with Apple doing it, it isn't a limitation, it's a 'value adding function'. I've been told by many Mac users that it's not truly DRM though it severely limits my usage, its a function to 'make sure to have the optimal usage since it was designed for that hardware'. No it isn't, its a DRM to limit my usage to be device locked in. Look at a Hackentosh. It takes a lot of cracks to get it working on non-Apple hardware, and shows it is possible once the digital locks are removed. And Hackentosh's work pretty stable showing it doesn't truly need Apple only hardware. They have some of the most aggressive DRM in usage, beyond the 'calling home' of Ubisoft. The iPhone has the same style of DRM, to limit what you can do with the iPhone. It isn't because it will be unstable if it ran multiple programs or used unauthorized programs, jailbreaking proves that wrong and because jailbreaking breaks the DRM of the iPhone Steve Jobs calls declares that it's pretty much that the sky is falling. It's easy for Apple to claim they hate DRM, but their actions show they not only approve of it, they love it.

Are these deceptive profiles in violation of the Terms of Service for the various social networks?

Wasn't that part of the basis for prosecuting Lori Drew? (I realize they threw that out)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/drew_court/

It wasn't the terms that scared them off (they were more than happy with those terms before), it's when China tried to steal a bunch of their secret source code that did it. Google's famously secret search algorithms and its source code are its entire profit base. When China brazenly threatened that, suddenly Google miraculously developed a conscience.

In theory, this is why China should care about Google:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/china-scientists-google/

Though Google seems to have lost most of the articles, I remembered this from back in 2002, and I was able to find at least a few results such as Eyes in the Back of Your Mouth. It sounds like this article is talking about improvements (more refined matrix, portability) and deployments of the same technology. A quote from the link above:

His latest technology sends visual data through the tongue, which is jam-packed with nerves and coated with conductive saliva. A video camera worn on the forehead sends images to a laptop, which dumbs down the picture to 144 pixels. That signal is sent to a soviet-gray box, called a Tactile Display Unit, which converts the image to electrical impulses. The current winds up on a matrix of electrodes that tingle the image onto the tongue. In lab tests, the system enabled blind people to recognize letters, catch rolling balls, and watch candles flicker for the first time.

At the store, Roark had never been told that his HTC Eris has Android 1.5, nicknamed “Cupcake.” Until told by a reporter, he had no idea what features he’s missing as a result. For instance, free turn-by-turn navigation is available in the latest version, Android 2.1 (”Eclair”), but is only available to Cupcake users for $10 a month from Verizon.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-version-confusion/#ixzz0iJv1DstU

The carriers have been fucking us for years. Half the talk on forums is how to uninstall the shitty bloatware that carriers install on the android phones. Hey, at least with an android phone you *can* do it, unlike every other motorola, nokia slow-fest.

The iphone is the best phone i've ever had. It has an alarm that works, and I can set for only weekdays. How hard is that???? It has a battery life of more than a few hours (I'm looking at you, my Samsung windows mobile phone). It has a headset with a NORMAL HEADSET JACK. It charges by plugging into my USB. How is it that such simple pleasures make this the best phone ever? Because all the others are corrupted bloatware pocket fillers, courtesy of the "carriers".

The iPhone works because Apple took on the carriers. The various Droid market is failing because carriers are worse than M$. Between you and google is a carrier. Good luck with that!

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest

But at least it's the same version of the walled garden for all purchasers/users:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-version-confusion/

Or president... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest

At the moment it is *just* upon arrest... how's that hope and change working out for you?

Why did the NYT publish this? Probably because the President of the US just said that he was in favor of getting DNA from every person who is arrested. Confusing times we live in....

The British Defense Ministry has reported 205 laptops missing since 1997 -- most of which contained classified information. That's an average of 51 lost laptops per year. The latest was reported missing on Monday. This one reportedly contained data about new weapons systems. Its owner left it in the back of a taxi. To combat this spate of missing-in-action machines, the Defense Ministry plans to outfit their absent-minded workers with secret-agent-style briefcases that protect national secrets by automatically destroying the contents of lost laptops' hard drives. Thieves have been blamed for some of the laptop losses, but the majority of the missing machines were simply mislaid by tipsy or distracted agents. Read More http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/04/43088#ixzz0iGiAjJpW

Now Biden has convinced him? What about when he appointed 5 of RIAA lawyers to the Department of Justice?

You think corporations should be allowed to drag people through the legal system and fine them millions for sharing half a dozen mp3s? To drag 8-year-olds out of school for questioning about their parents? Are you happy with laws such as the DMCA which was rushed, ill-worded and is now being used far beyond it's intended scope (to nobody's surprise). ...all in the name of preserving an obsolete business model?

I remember this same story came out about how a growing number of MS employees were using ipods, and apparently it was frowned upon, so they started switching the white headphones for regular ones. Link: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2005/02/66460

Dam, I blew that one.

Here's the link to the Wired article on coronal mass ejection in 2012.

On top of that, Apple will be including DRM on some eBooks and other iPad content.

Oh, that's fantastic! You mean the Linux versions will offer the same books without DRM?

Yes, it's a revolutionary new product called BitTorrent, paired with a service called The Pirate Bay. It's pretty new, so it's not unusual that you haven't heard of it. Unfortunately, no such app exists for the iPhad/iPone

Updated, and more professionally written.

i've always been mostly nocturnal, comfortably going to bed a 7am and waking up around the crack of noon (thank you daniel for the expression), but for the last few years i've been forced into a routine of waking up super-early. about two years ago that finally took effect, and i found myself unable to sleep in, even on weekends.

i recently got an opportunity to relax for a month, and the second i knew that i was out of the routine (that never happened on vacation) i suddenly found myself back in my old habits and sleeping beautifully, correctly keeping my eyes shut in the mornings but viewing the dawn from the other side :)

now that i'm back in a routine, i simply cannot bring myself to give up the best hours of the day: i'm sleeping about 3 hours a night, and i feel physically better off and mentally more alert if i don't get much more than that. i'm incredibly active in addition to my desk job, so either i'm on my way to a heart attack or i'm doing just fine. it's not insomnia, it's a gift.

enjoy it!

Gotta love that the guy who's so stressed his nick on Slashdot is "Zantac" is running around Atlanta with a piece.

Time to reiterate what the other poster said to Grimbleton about dying from a heart attack or stroke, not a home invasion.

Sort of goes in line with this study, doesn't it?

There have been others promising the same thing, but so far nobody has delivered anything close to how awesome this could be.

More importantly, doodling may actually improve focus.

Wired recently had this article on Google's search algorithm, which mentioned how far ahead it was in parsing language for things like bi-grams to figure out what the meaning of the search was by "figuring out" the relationships between related words in a very human-like way. They have also built an impressive synonym system. These technologies, developed for search, strike me as really critical for good translation.

OK, so they introduced contextual knowledge (or "world knowledge" or "semantics" if you will) when they saw, that page rank and keyword based search didn't cut it for many search queries? Shouldn't that have come not as an afterthought but long before? I mean, how can anyone expect, that search would never involve some contextual knowledge to be succesful?

My guess is, that Google of course knows this. What they do is to build up contextual knowledge through their own search engine, how people relate words to each other and not by imposing a predefined rule set or ontolgy beforehand like cyc

.

Where's my god damned flying car?!!

Please, we've had flying cars since the 1930s. Duke Nukem Forever, I can't help you with...

The Hiller Flying Platform was designed in 1955. It was originally an ONR (Office of Naval Research) project to develop a platform capable of carrying one man for short hops.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi5QDHKk9AY
ok, the video's choppy but we speak 1950's goddammit

1997: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI-4ygOrgJ4

2005: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/11/anderson-based/

"People change words in their queries. So someone would say, 'pictures of dogs,' and then they'd say, 'pictures of puppies.' So that told us that maybe 'dogs' and 'puppies' were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance." But there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.

Have you ever seen microsoft.com go down?

Yes, I have.

If you plan to see the 3D IMAX version (seems worth it for this movie), make sure you know whether or not you're getting the huge 72-foot version or the "just a slightly bigger than normal" version (called "IMAX Digital"). Both versions cost extra, but many unwitting customers have been feeling ripped off by the smaller "IMAX Digital" version.

A local (to me) example: the Metreon in San Francisco is showing Avatar: An IMAX 3D Experience on its huge "real" IMAX screen. Just across the Bay Bridge, AMC Bay Street is showing Alice in Wonderland: An IMAX 3D Experience on its smaller "fake" IMAX screen. Note that AMC will sell you tickets online, but they don't clearly indicate which IMAX version is being used.

Nah - it's full color and fast (good for video). If you use it as a drop in replacement for your existing display then what you're getting is the ability to use your laptop in full sunlight where your current screen would be all washed out.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/the-pixel-qi-display/

I guess you missed this story:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/former-teen-cheerleader-dinged-27750-for-infringing-37-songs/

Most specifically this part: " the Copyright Act precludes such a defense if the legitimate CDs of the music in question provide copyright notices."

This, despite her claim that she never had the actual CDs to see the notice.

Quite possibly...
Wired article
A few interesting links in there.

FBI director warns of 'rapidly expanding' cyberterrorism threat

This "there is no cyberwar" business plays right into Singel's agenda that anything related to cyber war is really a conspiracy to kill the open internet.

All the "cyberwar" stuff may be overplayed, and no, we're not in a "war", per se, at the moment, but we are most certainly unprepared, as are many open, information-dependent societies...

Narus products have always been about telling you who is doing what with you, when and for how long on your network. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914 http://www.scribd.com/doc/27629223/All-About-NSA-s-and-AT-amp-T-s-Big-Brother-Machine-The-Narus http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/631feature06.html http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/8/14724/28476 There has even been speculation that their products are at the core of "Carnivore" and/or "ESCHELON" http://www.texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2496 Their primary customers are three letter agencies and the biggest of the big IP backbone providers. If you put devices capable of tracking every IP stream, encrypted or not, with source, destination, duration, size and QOS and you can start associating every stream with an identifiable person, adding to that the ability to extrapolate based upon types of user communities, net anonymity will certainly becaome lless possible. Now the question is, who watches the watchmen?

Fermi Space Telescope deepens mystery of gamma rays. When Inquisitive Hulk get more curious, Hulk get stronger!

The trouble is, that while the threats are real, this isn't an XOR situation.

It is, simultaneously the case that team china loves their espionage and the case that every creepy fossil in the military-industrial complex smells profit and power.

I, for one, find phrases like "More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable." coming out of the mouths of guys like Michael McConnell(formerly director of National Intelligence, now revolving doored to a position with Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the major clandestine contractor outfits) deeply unnerving, no matter how scary the terrifying chinaman menace may be.

Even if it did solve the espionage problem, which is by no means certain, having an internet arranged for the convenience of the NSA and the profit of its contractors would just plain suck.

Its not just the slashtards. Ryan Singel at Wired was spouting this exact same gibberish just two days ago. Of course, these are the same people who are in denial of the Brazilian power grid attacks.

The idea that the US Government would fabricate information to justify a corrupt agenda is ridiculous.

The nerve of some people.

Its not just the slashtards. Ryan Singel at Wired was spouting this exact same gibberish just two days ago. Of course, these are the same people who are in denial of the Brazilian power grid attacks.

The idea that the US Government would fabricate information to justify a corrupt agenda is ridiculous.

The nerve of some people.

Don't be. The only reason they are doing this is because China directly threatened their bottom line by trying to steal some of Google's proprietary source code (their bread and butter). Before China did that, Google was more than happy to censor their search results and hand over dissidents just like everyone else. Google isn't taking on China to protect innocents, they're doing it to send a message to China that if you hit Google's money train, they will hit back.

In the old days, ticket wholesalers would hire hobos to stand in physical line. In the Internet era, is it now necessary for ticket wholesalers to not only put a hobo in front of a computer, but to apply for a credit card for the hobo as well? And this is because Slashdot readers now all of a sudden support click-through EULA's on websites? The crux of the indictment is that Wiseguys defeated Ticketmaster's et al human identification by defeating Captchas and using purchased varied IP addresses.

The ticket windows (Ticketmaster et al) are trying to engage in price control, which never works. Ticket windows had limited success in outlawing ticket brokers. Now in the Internet era it seems ticket windows have discovered a legal avenue to harass the ticket brokers by calling automated Captcha completion "hacking".

Wiseguys never engaged in malware or theft. They merely sought to purchase what the ticket windows had for sale in response to the market distortions -- in the form of price controls -- the ticket windows had set up.

The indictment actually states that, ". . .Wiseguys and its owners made more than $20 million in profits. . ." (p. 2 of the indictment), so let's start with the $20 million number.

Keep in mind that:

(a) The $20 million was made over an eight-year period, 2002-2009, so the average was $2.5 million/year;

(b) The profit of the enterprise was split among the two principals (the CFO received $165,000 and the programmer received $150,000, natch...), so that brings it down to an average of $1.25 million/year for the two principals (I think we can agree that the salaried guys did not do well in their risk/reward ratio calculations); and

(c) The "profit" figure used in indictments is nearly always what a legitimate businessperson would call "gross profit," meaning, to quote Wikipedia, "the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overhead, payroll, taxation, and interest payments." As a criminal enterprise, these guys didn't have to worry about taxation (at least, the correct amount of taxation), but they did have to pay the salaries of the other 10-15 people working for Wiseguys Tickets, Inc., and all the other expenses associated with running the enterprise (computers ... ). All of that would have to come out that $1.25 million/year/indictable person. A quick look through the indictment shows the several persons on staff in the US being paid from $55k to $142k/year each, and the ones in Bulgaria being paid from $1 to $1.5k/month each, so you do the math.

The point being, the retirement plan associated with these types of schemes is typically poor, as it's usually at a federally-funded establishment. These guys ran a small tech company with overseas offices, and could have done the same legitimately at a salary of probably $150k/year which, once benefits were included, would be equivalent to $250k/year in cash (to make a direct comparison to their criminal enterprise). In a legitimate business, the CEO also would have had significant stock options and other perks given to him by the company's board to motivate him to grow the company. With even moderate growth over that period, the CEO could be very well-off. As I say, it's easier to make money legitimately.

And you sleep better.

As you probably already know, there are loads of other more mundane ways to instigate an earthquake. This wired article is quite interesting. To summarise:

* Shut down the last hiding-place. Anonymity be gone.

* Make encryption illegal. No Secrets.

* Make people sign every ip-packet with their government-issued key and make ISPs drop all unsigned packets. Total accountability.

  => Everyone secure beneath watchfull eyes (especially our children)

creepy!

Did they not get caught doing this same crap, and sing the same tune a few years back?
I seem to remember this from 2 or 3 years ago... same tune... do it again and we won't do business with you.
Apple is full of hot air... who will make their Chinese overpriced computers for them if they don't use these suppliers?

Stuff like this: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/06/71138

Ya.. Apple is really going to do something about it this time for sure... mmhmmm.....

Your post is so chock-full of unnecessary hyperbole and alarmism that it's hard to know where to start picking it apart. First of all, you don't need to look to illegal drugs to find something that's insidiously addictive and "freedom destroying"; nicotine, an already-legal and freely available drug, is as addictive as heroin (and I should point out that it's the tobacco corporations, not the government, who are profiting the most from the millions of cigarette addicts.)

Second, you're making the false assumption that everyone who supports legalization of addictive drugs also supports the recreational use of these drugs. This is not the case at all. The philosophy behind addictive drug legalization has two main facets; one is that - yes - we should not legislate what others may or may not do with their bodies. If someone wants to turn themselves into a slave to opioids, they can be my guest. Even though I don't approve, I'm not going to stop them; it's their choice, and even if they might find themselves without a choice to stop down the road, that doesn't change the essential fact that they had the freedom to inflict their addiction upon themselves in the first place. Secondly, and more importantly, it's about harm-reduction. People are going to use drugs no matter what; legalizing them would simultaneously dramatically reduce the health risks (by allowing addicts access to pure, regulated, measured doses) and positively impact society (by cutting out a gigantic source of profit for criminal organizations across the world.)

In fact, on that note, I'll show you the flip side of the situation: By allowing drugs such as coke and heroin to remain illegal, we are handing billions of dollars to Mexican drug cartels, the Taliban, and other major criminal organizations, who then terrorize local populations, bribe and corrupt government/military officials, and generally speaking threaten the very foundation of civilized life in the countries that they operate in. Are you telling me that the bloodbath currently happening in Mexico - which is costing thousands of people their ultimate freedom, life - is less important than some heroin junkie's self-inflicted "freedom destruction"?

Yea, basically the gap between observation and reality is infinite for any individual observer. OTOH, peer review works as a sort of coordinate system where several points of observation allow us to agree on reality.

My philosophy is that for the really big and the really small, we are all viewing it from the same vantage point - no coordinates.

"It's possible that you could imagine universes bumping into each other and leaving traces, observable effects. It's also possible that that's not going to happen. That if they're there, there's not going to be any sign of them there. If that's true, the only way this picture makes sense is if you think of the multiverse not as a theory, but as a prediction of a theory."

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/what-is-time/#ixzz0gifbribG

I'd say we are too darn small to observe one universe bumping into another, but it's pretty egotistical to say that we have the only universe.

There's nothing man has discovered that is individual, nothing that can't be replicated or isn't a small piece of a bigger picture or composed of smaller bits. It's little building blocks all the way down and building blocks all the way up as well. Nothing will always be the gap between two somethings, there is no edge of existence, only an edge of our observable existence. If we can say that nothing is beyond our observable universe, it only stands to reason that something is beyond that nothing.

you're drunk on the kool-aid if you think microsoft is going through all this to give kids their stolen x-boxes back. Read the wired article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/microsoft-cryptome/

And wired.com posted the microsoft document in its entirety in a piece on this situation... nice legs on this. Not having their PR department ready with a release on it also points to it being a flubbed operation by their contractor.

That's not the question. The question is if GoDaddy is trustworthy.

Judge for yourself. Here are some stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)

Those are just the stories until July of 2008.

GoDaddy's reputation is not just one of extremely negative stories. In my opinion, GoDaddy tries to confuse non-technical people by offering services they don't need and presenting them as valuable.

Here are some of the opinions of Bob Parsons, the owner of GoDaddy. He is pro-violence: Close Gitmo? No way!!

He uses women's bodies to advertise: Bob Parson's Video Blog.