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America seems to be somewhat unique in its hatred of such government-run projects - there are many people who have denounced Obama's proposed national high-speed rail network as "socialist" and it will be an uphill struggle to get legislation passed.

The real wtf is that calling something "socialist" is a denouncement. Only in America.

Re: I too have wondered why China isn't going big on nuclear.

Ummmm....they are: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html

There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines"

America seems to be somewhat unique in its hatred of such government-run projects - there are many people who have denounced Obama's proposed national high-speed rail network as "socialist" and it will be an uphill struggle to get legislation passed. The Chinese administration, in comparison, can decide to build those networks and immediately procure the funding without the legislative battle. Slavoj Zizek has been proposing a very interesting hypothesis recently - that the Chinese have actually discovered a system that is more efficient, and more productive, than the capitalist liberal democracy that the rest of the world has moved towards in the last century. Maybe it will be a turning point in the development of our civilisation.

Another interesting observation is that China is racing ahead with these projects, with economic growth expected at 8% this year, and yet has very little enforcement of patent or IP protection. Coincidence? The bullet trains are a great example of the lack of IP enforcement leading to rapid development, with Siemens technology finding its way into Chinese designed and manufactured trains.

What about the Chinese pebble bed reactors. Too small? Well, let's have half a dozen on the same site, run from the same control room, plugged together as modules.

"I once heard of some compiler geeks writing a program to find these code snips"

'Genetic algorithm's are one way of doing it that sounds most interesting. Run your loads and loads of snippets of code, collecting those that work (or those that closest to work) and those that don't... then "mate" them; so you produce a second generation, swapping over bits of code from one with code another, and run that, keeping the best and going for a third round. Occasionally, just flip a random bit in a code block, which will be your 'mutation', and if that crashes, causes an illegal instruction fault, infinite loops etc etc, you bin it. Occasionally, one will improve it, and so you keep it. Repeat ad nauseum! After 50,000 generations, you end up with something far better than you could've just written yourself (although this may only really apply to larger algorithms than an abs call).

I believe that there are jet engines out there "designed" in this way, where the efficiency of the engine wrt airflow etc etc is beyond what the creators of the system that produced it could even understand themselves. I think as computers get more powerful, biological processing, either simulated/abstracted (as above) or actually real biology could play a big role in our progress

Parent is correct. The primary market of this kind of weapon is for military and law enforcement because there's a lot of fatalities/serious injuries caused by the bad guy grabbing the weapon from the police officer.

This tech/concept has been is more than a decade old and I used to see it get featured on Discovery Channel/National Geographic every so often for years now.

Here's a paper on it from way back in 1994.

Here's an article on it from WIRED back in 2002

If you Google around, you'll get a lot of results of press releases about similar products since 2000.

Verizon is lying? Wired seems to disagree with you: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/3g-speed-test/

If you don't like the Wired guys for some reason then you can look to PCWorld: http://www.pcworld.com/article/167391/a_day_in_the_life_of_3g.html

Yes, on spec HSDPA is faster but out in the real world with real deployments the differences between HSDPA and EVDO-REVA seem to be reasonably close.

" I don't think Verizon has anything that even comes close to that."

Except their 4G service that's rolling out to 40 markets in 2010. It's already active in some areas, like Boston, so it's not vaporware either. For all the information you can eat please see www.google.com...unless you're using the ATT, blazing fast but you can only connect from the third floor and be sure to stand on the 2nd window from the left, network.

What now ATT? What now?

Yeah,but does he have a robot band????

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

From Wired

Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone
Steve Jobs to Developer: Name Change ‘Not That Big of a Deal’

If you read Google's initial release on the attack, you'll see that after they talk about the gmail accounts being hacked, buried at the bottom is the mention that the attackers also stole some of Google's "intellectual property." Later reports specified that the attack was aimed specifically at stealing proprietary source code (not just from Google, but from several other big companies as well).

Wired claims they actually turned a profit, in the real sense of dollars coming in being greater than expenses. Apparently the Google deal plus a similar one with Microsoft brought it $25 million in return for a data feed, which is more than running the site costs.

The game sold 15 millions units overall, not just on PC. It probably sold more on 360+PS3 than on PC.

You do appear to be correct on the breakup of sales figures. If you believe Torrentfreak's numbers, you might be right on the piracy stats as well. The piracy figures for the x360 version are also quite interesting, but of course you run the risk of getting banned by MS.

So I do concede that you may in fact be correct on 80-90% figure, although I still argue that Ubisoft isn't helping matters any. I just have a thing about verifiable sources ;) .

Here you go courtesy of your old pal da feet. Basically from the looks of it it is pulling a Richard Pryor in Superman 3 and skimming a little amount from a whole assload of folks, thus making you rich.

Problem is we are talking MSFT here, and this kind of scam probably wouldn't pay their bar tab. It also makes no sense as they don't care if you spend the points now, next week, or next year, as the bandwidth they are using to provide you the content isn't squat.

Ahhh finally the whole meat of the bleeding heart argument. How about I take the opposite position? Let's turn loose every single murderer in prison because one of them might be innocent.

Consider this: you are driving, and summoned to stop. It just so happens to be that the cops are corrupt and have to make their monthly quota. One of 'm plants a baggie in your vehicle, and you go off to the Tent Camp. It doesn't even have to be about corrupt cops if you think this is implausible.

Honestly, I would take my chances with a "less than perfect" justice system that offers greater deterrence

Here's the trick though: death penalty doesn't offer greater deterrence per se.

And, as Terry Pratchett once said, the death penalty combines the maximum deterrence with the minimum chance of recurrence.

Terry Pratchett writes satire. Errors (which are made a-plenty) can never, ever be righted again. But do continue your belief in your own infallibility and the absolute correctness of the justice system, because these are all disgusting liberal bleeding hearted links, and I'm obviously very much misguided, being a subject in the People's Republic of Europe.

I'm sure everything would've been right if they just would've manned up.

The Council of Elders has formally acknowledged the receipt of Articles of Surrender from the blue planet. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, spake thus:

"We accept the the third planet's long-delayed acknowledgement of its inevitable defeat with grace and dignity. One of our longest-standing planetary nightmares is now over, having come to an inglorious end in a pit of sulfate dust. Rejoice, podmates, the invader is defeated, and its rogue twin shall soon meet the same ugly fate!"

When Intelligence Analyst #719324 discreetly reminded K'Breel that not only was the immobilized invader still doing science and still alive, but that the third planet was preparing a new, immensely bigger monstrosity, powered by the force of elements of matter itself, K'Breel had a medical team install a portal into the analyst's gelsacs, so that they could be filled with a sznuppium sulfate solution in time for the signing ceremonies, where they will serve as a set of inkwells.

Mac OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, WINDOWS KEEPS PROMPTING ME USELESSLY. OSX thus gives me more time for creative effort instead of technical troubleshooting.

Apple's history of "just works" allows people more time for creative effort. BECAUSE it is closed, there is not as much complication to have to figure out. There's no registry, no need for scripting, and if something crashes it tends to recover on its own. THAT'S why "creative" types use it, because it allows me to REMOVE one more OBSTACLE to my workflow.
I'm not a "creative" in the typical sense, I'm a neuroscientist. Every time my Windows XP system crashes on me, or my network didn't initiate correctly, that's wasted time, effort, and it means I need to learn a new skill set to correct the problem.

The few times my OSX machine crash on me, it self recovers. OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, where as Windows and Linux KEEP PROMPTING ME WITH USELESS STUFF! The fact that fewer exploits target OSX is also a great benefit, and I don't have a billion choices for which hardware to buy so it's easier for me to choose the "best" one available to me. I don't want to spend a month figuring out if the Acer, Panasonic, or Dell is going to be the most ergonomic for my uses. With Apple, it's not even a question, because it's irrelevant insofar as I do not have a choice.

Also, by being an "outsider", there is less push to conformity. I don't know anyone else that uses a Mac, so I'm not being told which software is the "best" or how I should organize my workflow, thus allowing me to make my own decisions about what's important. This is critical in Science, and has been shown to be important in Sociology studies of how Science gets work done. "The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"

I don't see how you can prove something conclusively in silico, you put in what you know and you get a distillation of it out. How can you discover* completely new physics when the computer can only start with a potentially incorrect/inaccurate theory and make deterministic calculations based on that input? I mean, you can't get out more than you put in, can you?

Actually, yes, you can get out more than you put in. These guys made the machine extrapolate laws of physics without any knowledge of physics or geometry.

They used a genetic algorithm to explain the measurements of a pendulum sways, and in the process the computer "invented"/"learned about" things like adding, substracting, multiplying, dividing, some algebra, conservation of momentum and Newton's second law.

As long as eighteen HIPAA identifiers are removed, the data is considered deidentified by HIPAA. Deidentified data does not need patients' consent. De-identified data-only studies only need the hospital IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval. Believe me, it's not an easy task to get the IRB approval.

Here's the list of the 18 HIPAA identifiers.

Even though it's a bit of a different situation, I'm reminded of the Netflix debacle..

But from TFA,

Neuroscientists Say Brain Scans Can Spot PTSD

Did anyone else first think "The Ghostbusters" when they saw the four silhouettes? That totally freaked me out for a few seconds.

I want a wristwatch phone!

Done!

Now, where's my Dick Tracy wristwatch videophone!

Wonder if it has anything to do with this?

Microsoft saved Apple. Microsoft kept Apple viable in the workplace by continuing to release Office for Mac (indeed, Office on a Mac is much nicer than Office on a PC.) Apple produces great hardware to run Microsoft software, even their OS, on. And while Jobs is an avid competitor, I seriously doubt that the has any animus for Microsoft.

Google, on the other hand, is threatening Apple in its biggest growth market: mobile devices. Google offers an alternate ecosystem to Apple, to .Mac and now iDisk. Google is encroaching, encroaching, encroaching more into Apple territory than Microsoft is. Apple probably feels betrayed by Google (and vice versa, after the rejection of Google's app in the AppStore.)

All three are competing with each other in various sectors, but I think if there is bad blood anywhere right now, it is between Apple and Google.

Haven't you ever heard of infoporn?

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That's what those articles, stuff with ads and "Prev | 1 2 3 4 | Next | Last" links displayed are all about! I could go on an on about infoporn, but that, in itself, would be infoporn, right?

A majority of them. And most all of those appointed were pro-copyright, including 5 RIAA attorneys. and many others that are anti-content.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/09/64829

Reporting in the medical journal Thorax, they describe the cases of four young men who suffered a lung collapse -- technically called pneumothorax -- that appeared to be triggered by loud music. Three of the men were at a concert or club when the pneumothorax occurred, while the fourth was in his car, which was outfitted with a 1,000-watt bass box because he "liked to listen to loud music."

David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) did a fantastic article for Wired a few years ago about this. He discusses (with details!) how the music industry works, some of the "models" of releasing music, and the economics/incentives to each one. Great read.

On a semi-related note, it's also worth looking at Steve Albini's now classic essay "The Problem With Music", which showcases how horrible the modern music industry is to musicians. It was written before the whole "digital revolution", but it helps remind me why I don't feel sympathy for suits in the music business.

Yes, of course, but there is a major difference in public perception, consequences and even logistics between snooping into somebody's data (especially if you can without the owner's knowledge), and hauling him in for a meeting with the rubber hose. While even warantless privacy breaches are regarded with apathy by the majority of Americans (or even rationalized by some), picking up random people for rubber hosing without warrants would be politically much more difficult to justify and impossible to do on the same scale (if only because of the expense of industrial scale torturing).

It's also important to understand that some individuals are much more interesting to snoopers than others. Snoopers will look at your data because it's so easy and cheap (for them), but if the process becomes expensive (be it in units of CPU power, warrants or political fall-back), the snoopers will concentrate their effort onto the individuals of interest and let you alone

OTOH, given the lack of interest of the majority of people, the very act of encrypting your data will probably move you to the "interesting" category. It would therefore be really good if the commercial PCs would enable strong encryption by default.

Europe seems to be leading the way in bike paths. There's no less than a dozen cities that have dedicated bike paths going all around them. I don't know any of their names, but Europe keeps coming up in documentaries and articles about green city designs.

A quick trip to google for some proof... http://www.wired.com/autopia/2007/11/where-are-the-m/

Documentary example: http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/The_Nature_of_Things/ID=1233750794 (may only work in Canada)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/china-pledges-w/
It’s no surprise that China is home to a flourishing black market for U.S. trademarked and copyrighted goods.

What’s surprising, though, is China’s calm response Tuesday to a World Trade Organization report (.pdf) that concluded it was breaching its obligations under the World Trade Organization.

"As we strengthen our work on domestic intellectual property rights, we will continue to promote international exchanges and cooperation in order to encourage the healthy development of trade relations," Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian said in a statement.
...
The WTO, acting in a 2007 case brought by the United States, concluded on Monday a number of so-called "deficiencies" of China’s intellectual property enforcement, including the unauthorized trademarked and copyrighted goods being sold openly throughout China.
...

Okay, now that I got it, where the heck do I store it? Under the carport? Unless the sucker has the best folding wings ever, the HOA fines are gonna be a bitch.

Wired wrote an article last week about fly-in communities.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/01/spruce_creek_airpark/

I remember a story from almost 10 years back that you could buy a Mig-21 for $14k

Here are some fighter jet stories from 2006: Buying A Fighter Jet? and another from Wired: Building Your Own Air Force, One Mig at a Time [2005]

Expensive isn't always better. Ever heard of Denon's $500 ‘Audiophile’ Ethernet Cable

That's an interesting hypothesis, but this is not the way it apparently works according to my tests (see below). As other commenters have pointed out it does not access the clipboard but "capture" the Cmd-C keystrokes to trigger the code.
I have tried to replicate your hypothesis with Safari and LittleSnitch, both on Mac. First,I have to say thaton Safari, the selection does not disappear after you press Cmd-C.

1- I accessed this Wired article.
2- Upon selection of any text, it tries to open a connection to w1.tcr112.tynt.com, port 80. I "Deny Once" on LittleSnitch.
3- Re-selecting any other portion of text causes the same behavior of point 2, but deselecting text does not generate a connection request.
4- When pressing Cmd-C on the keyboard I get another connection request to w1.tcr112.tynt.com, followed by another one to wau.tynt.com, both on port 80.
5- Either by allowing these connections or not, the Javascript code detects this text has been already selected and copied and ignores subsequent Cmd-C sequences over the same selection. You need to deselect and select again to create another connection request

One really interesting finding is that the JS code does retain in memory what text you have selected previously on thet page and compares your new selections to the previous ones, only generating new connection requests when new text. It ignores the position of the text (so a single word selected in different parts of a page is only sent once when selected), and it is case sensitive so it you select "The" and "the", you get two connection requests (but only the first time). I suppose this is a way for them to clean requests.

Recently I saw that a bunch of stimulus funds were handed out for bringing the nation's electrical grid into the 21st century. A big part of this is using computers to control various parts of the grid, from utility scale substations down into the home with smart meters and smart appliances.

Anytime you take infrastructure and connct it to computers you are opening it up to a whole new set of threats as well as bringing privacy implications.

Here's a couple great articles that go into the details better than I can.

I believe that there is are a couple things that really need to be address for grid security:

- Open protocols and specifications
With all the new technology coming down the pike, all sorts of companies will be sprining up with their gadget or software that will solve some problem. They need to work towards making standards of interoperability so that all these entities could work together.

- Network security
Putting millions of new, network connected, devices out there could lead to a field day for hackers. I believe that they sould quickly develop security technologies that manufactures could then cheaply incorporate into their devices.
A lot of this could be easily (and cheaply) addressed with various communities already out there. For instance, SSL technology has already been built into products like OpenVPN that could easily and cheaply secure huge numbers of smart endpoints.

- Privacy
We need to provide software that is built from the ground up to give uses the privacy that they deserve, while still pushing forward great new technologies.

[citation needed]

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/10/47552?currentPage=all

Yes, it will happen. No, it won't stop development. Depending what you mean by autonomous, it may have already happened.

if you don't want to view wired's website under wired's conditions, then don't visit their website.

Where in Wired's conditions or privacy policy do I agree to let them track which text I copy and paste off their site? Come on, you should have this answer since you're the one bringing it up.

if you don't want to view wired's website under wired's conditions, then don't visit their website.

Where in Wired's conditions or privacy policy do I agree to let them track which text I copy and paste off their site? Come on, you should have this answer since you're the one bringing it up.

• AF are not hardcore. The majority of you are basically civilians, and your dress uniform attests to that fact. As a result, most of you tend to lack camaraderie and have unwarranted elitist attitudes.
• AF are spineless. They do not shit between their boots. Snitching was very commonplace inside tech school and out, and the AF even implemented a "wingman" program in tech school - you carried around a card saying that you will snitch out your wingman and watch him at all times for trouble. As a true-life example, a young female airman gave her friends a ride home from a club because they were drunk. Turns out that one of them had a gun. She had no idea, and still received a letter of reprimand for doing what she thought was the right thing.
• The maintenance field in the AF is grossly unfair with regard to gender. The majority of the AF are men, but women were overrepresented in my career field with regard to awards like STEP. All of the females in my shop who won awards were mediocre compared to many deserving males, even our tech school instructors attested to that. One female even got a sympathy award, as well as a free baby shower, just for being single and pregnant.
• OSI. In addition to their full-time investigators, OSI recruits airmen as snitch patrols to infiltrate social circles and gather data on who associates with what, etc. See that one guy at the party who's been nursing the same beer all night? That's the one. I was dragged out of bed by the first sergeant and interrogated by OSI(in a room with a 1-way mirror and 2 interrogators), asking me what I knew about airmen using drugs. After an hour or two of frustration, they finally said "No, on the night of so-and-so you smelled something. What did you smell?" I had no idea what they were talking about until I figured out weeks later that I had made a joke about how a certain kind of Djarum BD "smelled like weed". You can get used to stuff like that when you're in the Air Force, everybody's interrogated in a similar fashion at least once. And, of course, they can bug you and request your internet traffic and all that jazz.

Other Airforce or Ex-Airforce, please jump in and share your experiences.

Or just redefine border

Screw 2D screens, we should be pouring funding into these technologies:

http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/latest_research/2006/20060210/20060210.html (TRUE 3D)
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/10/philips-3d-hdtv/ (Stereoscopic w/o glasses)

Oh okay. So somehow this game is going to get a whole new engine in that year?

So you're unfamiliar with the Duke Nukem Forever postmortem? You should check it out. It was quite enlightening.

To answer the question, yes, engines can change rapidly. Sometimes with disastrous results, but there is a strong amount of pull on a developer to release on a 'current' engine. With the game so far away, I'd be kind of shocked if some kind of engine overhaul wasn't in the works.

Modern man in effect eats a fair bit of oil and coal. It allows them to generate light, travel great distances fast etc.My car consumes about as much in $$$ terms as I do per month.

But yeah, being a superhuman could be fun :).

What you might want in addition to your lightbeams and electric zapping superpowers is the ability to use energy from an external power source to power your anaerobic metabolic modes = e.g. you can sprint and not get tired[1] till you run out of energy from that power source.

While power armor and exoskeletons might help do the same thing, the augmentation I'm talking about could be a bit more discreet and less "in your face".

[1] You probably need a better cooling mechanism though than just sweating: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore_pr.html
Cheetahs can run very fast, but a big limiting factor appears to be overheating.

There's even a Google front end.

Yeah, well they had to be fucking shamed into making it useful. But eventually is better than never, I suppose.

Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It'

Revenge, Facebook Style: Brother 1, Sister 0

In the case of the second link, I don't think it's relevant whether it's true or not. A little hint of what the world looks like with blabbing on steroids.

Social norms aren't like the 1950s any more. Change is hardly new. Hope Zuckerberg comprehends the risk he faces if his social network degenerates in the world's largest permanent-ink bathroom wall. Fortunately, many young people can consult their hippie grandparents on divorcing their youthful indiscretions.

What I do agree with is the shift of attitude regarding the people who put nothing out there at all. A blank slate is not a clean slate. Most likely, it's a control freak. There are, of course, many good career options for the blank slates in our midst within the agencies of denial, some of which have (or will soon have) employees within their HR department to construct on your behalf an online social life of least suspicion.

I see the world becoming divided into the masks and the kimonos, fresh new ideological poles for a brave new world.

No. 2009 was the FIRST year a VW diesel won

Are you sure about that? Because I'm pretty sure you are wrong.

So there is ONE 2009 model out there with descent emissions.

If you bothered to actually look you'd find the diesels from Mercedes and BMW as well as Audi and VW all are quite clean these days. Seriously. Go look before you spout of unresearched nonsense.

What does that have to say about all the other soot and sulfur belching monstrosities?

Nothing whatsoever. There are lots of smog producing gasoline engines too. Has nothing to do with the ability to produce clean diesels. The technology exists and is in production.

Set everything to public on your own page,

Even the pictures of him having gay sex with Scott McNeely to celebrate the end of privacy?

I like the geek mentality of 'hey, wonder what would happen if I stuff a cat in the New York Pneumatic mail tubes' (If you don't want to read the whole article, He was a little dizzy, but he made it," says Joseph H. Cohen, historian for the New York City Post Office)

Some research with VR googles was done eight years ago:

Ultrasound augmented realityWired had an article just last year

Total Recall had a giant screen that did an X-ray to just the bones of the person plus metal objects. The latest volume visualization techniques will map all the muscles and major blood vessels, as well as synovial joints.