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Its construction might have had less to do with Reagan and more to do with the fact that a single moment of restraint two years earlier had stopped a nuclear war. This is exactly the sort of almost-disastrous incident that this system was designed to address.

reminds me of this excellent Bruce Schneier Article:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/03/70357

They're like websites, except there's no video.

But for how long?

Precisely. The Wired post about this hits the nail on the head: -

Arguably, the Netflix Prize's most convincing lesson is that a disparity of approaches drawn from a diverse crowd is more effective than a smaller number of more powerful techniques.

If even Wired can pick up on this, it's kind of embarassing that Slashdot decided to quote the one news source that got completely the wrong end of the stick.

Report: Obama to use NSA to monitor Net (USA Today)

NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says (Wired)

In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.

I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.

Actually, the journalist who wrote this article about Northpaw was the same person who tried that out, too.

So will all the books be $2 plus shipping?

Forgetting the price for a minute, there is a definite "no" on shipping:

Neller said heâ(TM)d love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says thatâ(TM)s a long way off. -- wired.com

Another implication is that this is limited to brick-and-mortar shops where OnDemandBooks have a presence, which in turn means that to use this service you have to be physically present at one of just thirteen locations in the world -- five in the US, four in Canada, two in the UK, and one each in Egypt and Australia. More locations coming soon, none of them in my country. :-(

Thanks for lousy the AP article. Let's see...for a story about a great technology used to print books, I'll submit a link to a website read by those most hostile to science/technology, those who are not to keen about books that cover anything outside their narrow ideological realm. AND it's a friggin AP release. thank you so much for the effort!

Do they realize it could be used to print books about queers and such?!?!? Oh dear god nooooo... /sarcasm

yeah, mod me -1024 flamebait. Or, try this link http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/google-books-publish-on-demand/ or this one http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10355318-265.html

http://www.wired.com/bodyhack/2006/11/you_are_a_cybor/
http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Resources/Hosted/Resource.php?Name=ESP-Magnetic

You are absolutely right. But so it's turning out, they will end up just as close to the truth as anyone else.

The article refers to the FeelSpace project as the originators of this idea. Wired wrote a more in-depth story on FeelSpace back in 2007 that is still available online.

The net of it, which I found fascinating, was the idea that brain is not "hardcoded" to the standard 5 senses of input, but rather can potentially integrate and synthesize additional sensory type data. This idea is at also the root of technologies like BrainPort, "seeing" with the tongue for the visually impaired.

From what I understand, the lifestyle of Aborigines was essentially unchanged for over 40,000 years. In the last 5,000 years things did change. The link from Wired supports this:

"Aborigines arrived 45,000 years ago, spreading across the continent with startling rapidity. Then, in anthropological terms, they cooled their heels for the next 40,000 years: no significant population expansion. No fundamental changes in lifestyle. That changed 5,000 years ago. Populations shot up. Settlements increased in number, and their inhabitants grew more sedentary. Scientists can't explain it."

The Wikipedia article is talking about innovation in the last 3,000 years which is compatible with this view.

Every one of them left an environmental mark on the world around them.

Yes, but the environmental mark was, on average, a lot smaller than modern living. The Australian Aborigines had a way of life that was essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years. The lifestyle consisted of finding water sources, hunting for food, and collecting wild growing berries and fruits from the land (not farming). Everything that they constructed was made from wood and other natural, biodegradable materials, from completely renewable and sustainable sources. Without intervention, they would probably have continued their lifestyle for tens of thousands of more years. Modern living is not sustainable - we are facing Peak Oil in the next few decades, we have an estimated 20 years or so of coltan supplies left, and we are using up many other limited resources relatively quickly. Our current lifestyle is based on consumption of resources that we can't replace. The Aborigine way of life would still be viable in 200 years, our Western way of life may well not be (people will do their best to adapt, but that adaptation may involve going back to a lifestyle of 200 years ago, with a strong focus on manual agriculture and labour).

Native cultures were famous for "slash and burn" agriculture

Many (most?) native cultures did not practice farming, instead living off wildly growing foods and hunting. Some Aborigines practiced "fire farming" in the last 5,000 years (after 40,000 of not farming in any sense of the word). Researchers suggest that this was sustainable "Aboriginal people's use of fire involved developing a self-sustaining mosaic of burnt and unburnt areas that reduced the damaging effects of fire". The fact that it was a stable way of life for 5,000 years suggests that it was more sustainable than the current fossil fuel based lifestyle.

Actually, irrationality in finance is not only prominent, it's rampant. It was certainly at play in this latest bubble and burst. For example, most bankers peddling the toxic CDOs were using a model that relied on only about ten years of economic data. This is the byproduct of the Availability Heuristic. Additionally, their models often excluded the possibility of such a huge decline in housing prices because there had never been one like it before. The Representativeness Heuristic induces this kind of behavior, in spite of the warnings from others.

None of this is rational behavior. The idea you proposed that this is some sort of Prisoner's Dilemma situation ignores the fact that there are two sides to every transaction. Any of the people who rationally cashed out did it with the money of the irrational people buying their toxic instruments. The Prisoner's Dilemma falls short as an analogue because it doesn't require a buyer for the players to make their decisions. No one has to take the other side of their decisions, which is the case in a market.

For a great review of the hundreds of ways we behave irrationally in financial markets, I highly recommend BehaviouralFinance.net.

Seriously ;-) still a great read: The Microsoft Memo

Yep, here's more coverage from Wired: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/03/kids-send-a-cam/ You may need to dig a bit in the Flickr slideshow but the amazing photos are sure there.

It has been in the works- I just believe it will be ramping up now that they are threatening Big Oil.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-08/mf_googlopoly

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/214239

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/1218201

The part where global warming was observed without it's presence?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/solarcycle/

Actually the oldest organism brought back to life but not cloned was 45 million year old yeast fossilized in amber as per this story from Wired

Here is how Bill Hilf explains Microsoft's Open Source Strategy:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203100965&pgno=3
".. our PREFERRED plan is to LICENSE ... versus LITIGATE."

Gee, where have we heard that before? Oh yes. Darl McBride, CEO of The SCO Group:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/07/59701

"We would PREFER LICENSING to LITIGATION,"

Such a nice bunch of guys.

This foyer may look like the entrance to the Control headquarters from an episode of Get Smart, but this is the front door of the Taser plant. The corporation has plenty of reasons for high security. It recently launched an online warehouse for digital evidence, so keeping trespassers out is a top priority.

Looking at the image, my impression is that this is more about appearances than real security. It's all about looking high-tech and security oriented.

Sorry for the double post but I was just going through the photos FTFA. Anyone else notice that the entrance in the foyer is all metallic and the roof is baffled. Also what looks like a giant exhaust fan in the center. I wonder --- if you get the passcode wrong, do you get tazed?

Photo here

Look here for a wired article on a Philips 3D display, the "WOW vx". No glasses or head set required. Just stand there and watch. I have seen it myself last year at SEMICON Europa. One word: impressive.

Previously seen http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/05/31/022226/China-and-Japan-Covet-the-Same-Rare-Earth-Metals as well as http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/defense-geeks-fret-over-rare-earth-metal-supplies/ and http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/china-all-your-rare-earth-metals-belong-to-us/

Previously seen http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/05/31/022226/China-and-Japan-Covet-the-Same-Rare-Earth-Metals as well as http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/defense-geeks-fret-over-rare-earth-metal-supplies/ and http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/china-all-your-rare-earth-metals-belong-to-us/

Then can you explain this?

And that's not even mentioning color electronic ink from other companies.

You know, I distinctly recall them lobbying to make jailbreaking illegal because "jailbroken iPhones can be used to commit terrorism by executing Denial of Service attacks on wireless networks!"

Yeah. They so don't care.

Even that's not right. He only chose to allocate funding to the embryonic stem cell lines that were already being researched. Before he did that, no lines were receiving federal funding. More details can be found here and here. Note that there was never a point during the Bush administration when working on non-authorized lines would have been illegal - in fact, California had a research institute set up to explore them.

"Is all of that really so much easier than attracting customers by having the best product at the best price point?"

The problem is customers are stupid and undiscriminating twits, who will say one thing but do another. There's a difference between what someone thinks they want or says they want and what they actually end up doing. Kind of like how most people believe they are above average intelligence. I agree that to some extent a great product at a great price will sell but it's not always the case. Take the x86 cpu's for instance, there are certain products that are "black boxes" to end users and end users only care about the software, the best hardware in teh world is irrelevant to most people without great software be it entertainment or otherwise they want to use.

This is why console companies can sell crappy hardware and push the software envelope. The PS2 was totally inferior platform for games and it ended winning the console race because 'it was good enough' and thats where developers focused their energies when making games. If developers had abandoned the PS2 for the cube or xbox, the PS2 would have died but the PS1 took advantage of Nintendo's big mistake with the n64 and the limited cartridge based storage and it's clock cleaned.

MP3 players are a case in point, there were better players with more functionality and whatnot but most people are simple minded twits and things like style or image (ipod) can win out over substance. ipod was "good enough", there is a point where people will buy whatever is good enough, but this also has a tendency for companies to target or exploit this averageness or mediocrity, and this is why many products tend towards mediocrity as a whole (see: films like trasnformers 2).

Also see this article on the "good enough" revolution:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

It has a point in that targeting peoples price points for simple to use mediocre products (like video cameras for making home movies, etc). But this goes to prove the adage - profit gives way to medicority, things like planned obselescene, trying to find cheaper (less longer lasting) components for things reducing their durability and whatnot.

"The way I see it, if we pass strong pro-privacy laws that take such data-mining off the table entirely, and companies are instead forced to, y'know, actually be competitive,"

Laws are irrelevant against insiders with lots of money, if you are well off go check out private investigators and see what kind of shit they can find on you despite so called "privacy laws". There are guys that can come up with shit that will surprise the living fuck out of you.

Knowledge about people is a commodity like any other, privacy laws cannot stop the end of privacy since to exist in the world one can deduce your actions through economic transactions and computer camera tracking (i.e. whenever you walk into a store your habits aren't just being taped for anti theft measures, this shit is studied for how to best exploit subconscious processes or flaws in human minds to get them to buy stuff).

Companies with enough cash and political currency basically get to do whatever they damn well please, those that can't get away with it are those without sufficient financial or political currency.

Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.

Okay, how about this one, based on the "failed" design you mentioned earlier... Details here.

Even if the data is completely and unreversably anonymized, it is still invasive. Look at the story yesterday about the marketers data-mining kids' online private conversations for consumer gadget preferences. Even if there's no way from that data to infer the preferences of any particular kid, they should still be able to talk to each other without having their conversation be part of a marketing survey.

Think also of a cafe that sells two kinds of food: apple pie (eaten by freedom-loving patriots), and felafel (eaten by terrorists and their supporters and sympathizers). Of course it would be invasive for the cafe to disclose which of its customers ordered which kind of food. But even releasing aggragate statistics is bad. An increase in felafel sales can led to a bullshit fbi investigation even if individual customers aren't identified.

People sitting on private data constantly search for self-searching justifications to disclose as much as they can without getting clobbered by the sources of the data. It is bullshit. Private should mean no disclosure, not anonymized disclosure, not aggregate disclosure, just plain no disclosure period.

> People are very quick to say "TEACHERS ARE OUT OF DATE!", but that's not necessarily
> a bad thing. The material being taught hasn't changed because IT STILL WORKS LIKE IT
> DID BACK THEN!

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing
Interview by Gary Wolf, Wired Magazine, February 1996.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html?pg=3

Here a link to a related story about suing Google. Interestingly, I actually got the link by Googling "stupid skank got google to release user information court case". Man, I really love Google sometimes.

Thank you kind sir, as I sit here on Labor Day working. Your post made my day :)

I don't agree with their pseudo-science, but to call this "terrorism" dilutes and confuses the term, and pretty soon we'll be calling file-sharing "terrorism" too.

Well, amusingly the RIAA beat you to it pal.
Here is a snippet of this amusement:

Moreover, three of the documented cases provide clear evidence that terrorist groups have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities. While caution must be exercised in drawing broad conclusions from limited evidence, further investigation is a timely imperative. These cases, combined with established evidence for the broader category of counterfeiting-terrorism connections, are highly suggestive that intellectual-property theft â" a low-risk, high-profit enterprise â" is attractive not only to organized crime, but also to terrorists, particularly opportunistic members of local terrorist cells.

Oh, they will at least never stop bringing a grin to my face. God bless em for trying though!

Here a link to a related story about suing Google. Interestingly, I actually got the link by Googling "stupid skank got google to release user information court case". Man, I really love Google sometimes.

The Falcon is a DARPA vehicle that looks a lot more practical.

There is some evidence pointing toward an increased risk of Leukemia for children living near A.M. radio transmitters, but because of the commercial implications, the research is controversial.

Here's the abstract from a South Korean study on the issue from PubMed. Wired did a piece on it in 2004, also.

There are also Indian and Chinese attempts to utilise Thorium as nuclear fuel, which is much harder to weaponise, relatively abundant on the earth's crust, and can be recycled repeatedly resulting in less nuclear waste.

Google Talks: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/11/official-guitar/ PS3 compatability is almost as complete as XBOX. Also, I slightly disagree with the chart, as my PS3 GH3 Les Paul works perfectly on RB and RB2...

.. We need open source software so that the voting process is transparent. I'll stick to any location I can find that still uses paper ballots otherwise. I also seem to remember these machines being trivially easy to tinker with.

I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists. A security analysis (pdf warning) has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.

You should also check out Open Voting Consortium because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.

What ever happened to quality? What ever happened to people, and companies, recognising that lower cost came at the expense of higher quality? What ever happened to production and purchasing being an optimisation problem with price, quality, speed and other factors thrown into the mix?

You might want to take a look at this discussion and this article on the "good enough" theory of consumer behavior. The basic premise is that consumers know that less money equals lower quality, but they are willing to make do or believe that spending more money for higher quality would not give them enough additional satisfaction to justify the additional expense. In other words, they prefer products that are "good enough" at lower prices rather than ideal or perfect at higher prices.

Check out http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough It explains why price has become more important than quality to most people. Even if you don't agree with it, it is a good read.

Where is my flying car?

Honestly, in a few ways we might be considered to be going backwards:
I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight).

The last time man was on the moon was before I was born.

Well, Some people had done great discoveries that could revolutionize our "flying" process.

However, a combination of greed, lack of funds and skepticism have prevented men from continuing the development. I always think were would we be if Tesla or other great inventors had stopped after people laughed at them... OTOH, without money, it is not possible to continue development.

This comment dovetails nicely with a recent article in Wired: how Good Enough is taking over. Call it the MP3 effect - the smaller file size and increased portability of compressed audio won out over fidelity. The sound quality wasn't Great, but considering that you could get your entire collection into your pocket and listen anywhere, anytime meant that it was Good Enough.

Where is the fastest growth in video cameras: the Flip and mobile phones, not pricey 1080p camcorders. Fastest growth in computers: netbooks, not high-powered desktops. Biggest thing in health care: clinics to handle minor ailments, not full-service hospitals. So-so call quality from Skype? No problem. MSWord getting too bloated and expensive by feature creep? Try Google Docs, even if it is slow, requires an internet connection any time you want to do something, and was perpetually in Beta.

I'm not sure I agree with this thesis entirely, but is does make some interesting points.

This is not exactly to say that Good Enough doesn't represent technical progress. Indeed, the ability for Good Enough to be good enough is a testament to technical progress, because that has allowed computer power to become cheap and ubiquitous. In some cases, like the Flip, some might say that creating a simple device that actually does what it is supposed to, simply and easily, is progress compared to a device that tries to do everything, but is a total kludge.

You guys are ten years too late. Back in the 1970s, when computers ran on 8080 processors, the company Micro-Soft (which is what they were called when they were in Albuquerque before the name change to Microsoft and the move to Washington) had an operating system and a basic interpreter that were widely pirated, reverse engineered, and otherwise ripped-off. At the time, I was running an MITS Altair. This thing started with 256 bytes of RAM, but we eventually upgraded it to, I think, 8k bytes. After loading a few hundred bytes of boot code in using the panel switches, it would suck Micro-Soft's "Disk Basic" boot loader in off the first sector of the 8" floppy drive, then load the OS and BASIC interpreter. It was so nice when we finally burned that first boot loader into a ROM! By 1976, Bill was pissed about people ripping his wares, and he wrote a famous letter about it. This may have happened before you were wearing nappies, but you should still be embarrassed about laughing at the author. I now ROFL at your childish and uninformed antics!

Yes, but that wasn't MS-DOS. MS-DOS did not exist until Microsoft contracted with IBM to supply the OS for IBM's new PC (which Microsoft already had a contract to supply a Basic and a C compiler for). Microsoft bought the rights to what would become MS-DOS off of another company that had developed it as QDOS.
So, what you were using was something completely unrelated (except for the fact that it came from the same company) to what would later be MS-DOS. What Bill Gates was pissed about was people ripping off his (and Paul Allen's) Basic compiler. The original posters were correct and you are incorrect.

You guys are ten years too late. Back in the 1970s, when computers ran on 8080 processors, the company Micro-Soft (which is what they were called when they were in Albuquerque before the name change to Microsoft and the move to Washington) had an operating system and a basic interpreter that were widely pirated, reverse engineered, and otherwise ripped-off. At the time, I was running an MITS Altair. This thing started with 256 bytes of RAM, but we eventually upgraded it to, I think, 8k bytes. After loading a few hundred bytes of boot code in using the panel switches, it would suck Micro-Soft's "Disk Basic" boot loader in off the first sector of the 8" floppy drive, then load the OS and BASIC interpreter. It was so nice when we finally burned that first boot loader into a ROM! By 1976, Bill was pissed about people ripping his wares, and he wrote a famous letter about it. This may have happened before you were wearing nappies, but you should still be embarrassed about laughing at the author. I now ROFL at your childish and uninformed antics!

we have a new American President who is not beholden to special interests, especially energy interests,

Maybe not energy interests, but if he wasn't on the take from media interests he would have cut the US out of ACTA negotiations by now, especially since he was talking all about transparency and making himself out to be a technophile during his campaign (so much for that). He's also made a habit of appointing RIAA lawyers to his administration.

we have a new American President who is not beholden to special interests, especially energy interests,

Maybe not energy interests, but if he wasn't on the take from media interests he would have cut the US out of ACTA negotiations by now, especially since he was talking all about transparency and making himself out to be a technophile during his campaign (so much for that). He's also made a habit of appointing RIAA lawyers to his administration.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/files/my_space_lori_drew_indictment.pdf

You can see the 4 counts.

That's it?? That's nothing....when Ginko Financial in Second Life went down, the losses were reported around $750,000. Seven Hundred Fifty Thousand US Dollars.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2007/08/virtual_bank