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If a compnay holding the DRM server goes out of business, then there's not much you can do about it.

But then why sell something you cannot service or maintain for the life of the product. In other industries if a company goes down, sometimes another steps in to offer repair/maintence services. But with DRM, yo have bought the right to use/play something - but are at risk to a 3rd party. If thats the case, you should be able to go back to the record studio as they own the licence!

Also, MS effective withdraw their servers for fairplay. Or Sony?? They are still around, but just pulled the plug.

http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/microsoft-pulli/

Fixed that for you. The USA's policies these days are driven primary by blind, largely irrational fear.

Of course they are. We all know that the USA is pretty far out on the right wing spectrum when compared to most other democratic countries. And we also know that conservatives are more fearful than liberals. Draw you own conclusions.

It's incredible how far off a thread can get over a few posts, I started out by defending what you call traditional genetic engineering as a technology. (The poster I responded to seemed to suggest that it's not.) - For me both technologies can produce benefits.

I only wanted to argued against the benefits brought by the big agribusiness. That is all. I have no problems with genetic engineering (breeding or controlled modification). There are dangers there, as with more or less every technology, and it's not rational to deny that - but the technologies are fascinating.

Genetically modified food brought a bunch of nasty side effects, like DRM-like crops, biopiracy and other problems associated with patents on beings. I think this are serious issues, but this are not problems of the technology, but with our usage of it.

Thanks for making me clarify my position, I got derailed, during the argument. No thanks for calling me stupid.

Wikileaks did the exact same thing. Later someone send the leak to them, and they had to give out those donators info per their rules :)

People working at these positions should really check their emails before they mass send them..

The Wired article http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/bluerats/ notes that they dropped a 10 gram weight onto the backs of the mice while the mice were under anesthesia (it doesn't specify if the weight was made by ACME).

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/greenpeace-hp/ I think I rest my case. While they may border on the side of prank, they are immature and costs companies money. I have respect for them for trying to defend the whales (Sea Shepherd) but at the same time, there are other means of doing it as opposed to attacking and terrorizing other ships. Willing to die for a cause doesnt justify the means.

It appears that you somehow are forgetting the multiple reports that the judge was clearly biased.

...won't investigate to see what is only going on.

Wouldn't dream of it. Nope. Not me. Never never never...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/most-awesomel-2/

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/mabmp/

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/most-awesomel-2/

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/mabmp/

YES. But I'm guessing this is not the whole story:

But now 4chan's founder, Moot, has admitted the whole thing was kind of his fault.

"For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack," Moot wrote in an afternoon update. "We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user. ... Unfortunately, as an unintended consequence of the method used, some Internet users received errant traffic from one of our network switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers."

While you all bask in your nostaliga over here, I'll be over there both watching Olivia Wilde talk about the movie and watching the non-slashdotted trailer.

Bill Joy wrote an essay about this very subject back in April 2000......and he's a much better writer.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

>Russia has a mandatory program for all telecommunication providers (ISPs included), wherein they should have equipment to log all network usage. According to the law, access to that equipment is restricted to law enforcement and intelligence services, and only with court permission; however, they do not have to show the court order to providers, and some parts of the law can be interpreted as meaning that order can be obtained after the fact.

Something about that sounds vaguely familiar.

Check out pretty much any violence statistics. Here's a nice chart from Wired that also shows the release dates of some famous (or maybe notorious?) video games:

Okay ... so what about a taser that works by firing the "head" of the taser but without the trailing wires.

Not what you meant, but you can fire the whole thing. From a shotgun.

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/multimedia/2007/09/gallery_mountaintop_mining

Further, many of the companies engaged in this practice are shells; they are incorporated, do the work, and promptly go bankrupt leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.

Wired magazine wrote a fascinating piece called Hacker Tourist in one of their early issues that described much of this in detail. Including historical cable & society references from well over 100 years ago.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html (same thing, but single page, for printing.)

Wired magazine wrote a fascinating piece called Hacker Tourist in one of their early issues that described much of this in detail. Including historical cable & society references from well over 100 years ago.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html (same thing, but single page, for printing.)

Maybe because the way Windows is used on a nuclear sub (Non-networked, no USB drives, et cetera) leave it pretty much 'unhackable' from somebody who doesn't already have access to that machine?

While Microsoft continues to trumpet the success of its NT operating system over Unix-based systems, the US Navy is having second thoughts about putting NT at the helm. A system failure on the USS Yorktown last September temporarily paralyzed the cruiser, leaving it stalled in port for the remainder of a weekend.

"For about two-and-a-half hours, the ship was what we call 'dead in the water,'" said Commander John Singley of the Atlantic Fleet Surface Force. ...

The warship was testing its new Smart Ship system, which uses off-the-shelf PCs to automate tasks that sailors have traditionally done themselves. "The Navy started the Smart Ship program with three essential goals in mind: improve combat readiness, reduce crew workload and operating costs, and to do it safely," said Singley.
The source of the problem on the Yorktown was that bad data was fed into an application running on one of the 16 computers on the LAN. The data contained a zero where it shouldn't have, and when the software attempted to divide by zero, a buffer overrun occurred -- crashing the entire network and causing the ship to lose control of its propulsion system. Sunk by Windows NT

Seems to me that an Ageis class cruiser would compare favorably to a Nuclear Attack sub security wise

Seriously, you could use an unpatched Windows XP box with all the remote services running and no firewall, and it STILL DOESN'T MATTER SINCE THERE'S NO VECTOR ONTO THE MACHINE.

They use Windows, iirc, because that's where the development tools are. And, since security in this application is basically all physical anyway... why not?

The Smart Ship program is still in development, and officials said glitches are to be expected, but in this case the problem appeared to be more political than technical. Using Microsoft's Windows NT operating system in such a critical environment, some engineers said, was a bad move.

"The simple root of the problem on Yorktown was that politics were played in the assigning of the contract -- there was not a discussion of engineers, it was just a very small group of people pitching for it," said an engineer close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Didn't see anything about development tools mentioned here.

I would not want to be working in IT at Liquid Motors right now. You can blame their problems on them or on the feds, but either way, they're in deep yogurt.

and how much for the insurance in case one of those kinetic bombs decides to go off?

Not much, considering that the ISS runs flywheels naked (no containment).

From a fairly old article on flywheels:

Eric Sonnichsen, who founded Test Devices in 1972, points out that a wheel created from carbon fibers is safer than a steel wheel, because even if a few fibers break, the wheel won't come apart. On the other hand, if a flywheel does disintegrate, says Sonnichsen, "it's more like potentially lethal lumps of coal coming at you, traveling at kilometers per second."

His company helped to develop containment vessels to mitigate this worst-case scenario. Sonnichsen's team has overaccelerated flywheels and dumped them off their bearings; in each case, the wheel skidded to a stop harmlessly inside its container. They finally figured out how to blow a speeding flywheel apart by firing a bullet into it. "I tend to be the Cassandra of the high-speed spin world," he says. "But at this point I am satisfied with the centrifugal safety of flywheels. In fact, they are much less hazardous than other storage methods we have now. A can of gasoline can be dangerous. Even a car battery can blow up, if you reverse polarity."

In space, though, flywheels won't have the same containment structures, because the shielding would weigh too much. A sudden failure could be disastrous. So wheels must demonstrate through cycle testing and spin testing that mechanical components will last many times longer than expected use. The wheels are then derated to - that is, run at - 50 percent of maximum speed.

Wat. Stop making baseless conjecture and passing it off as fact, your post is in no way correct.

Get your head out of the sand please. He is probably correct. The most paranoid conspiracy theorist is the government.

U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft

UK Government Needs $20 Billion for Increased Spying Program

FBI Looking For Moles For GOP Convention Protestors

That commenter on your blog may actually be working for the Israeli government

All the existing studies are biased with the aim of creating or tightening laws and increasing associated fines.

Sweden did a study with the same results and they did not have a handsfree requirement.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/06/59371

Of course that probably won't satisfy you since you've linked "bias-free" with your training scheme, thus any non-training based study must, by definition, be biased. But no matter, you aren't the only audience for this response.

ATC often can't tell what your immediate situation is until you report it.

ATC knows you are piloting and they know not to chit-chat and not to nag you with "can you hear me? can you hear me now?" if you suddenly break communications. It's a spectrum.

You may recall this story about how Apple thrives under Steve Jobs dictatorial and secretive management style.

You may even recall the infamous slashdot iPod launch coverage in which it was deemed "lame" because it was less feature-rich than the competition.

This is the history of Apple: there is a market for simple, well-managed products that work out of the box, and maintaining tight proprietary control over the Apple universe is how this is accomplished. I don't know what this says for openness, but there you have it. So long as your use cases aren't too far out of the ordinary, I guess it's worth it to have the trains run on time.

I believe it was reported that Nokia and Siemens had sold/developed some of the filtering equipment being used by the Iranian government. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/nokia-siemens-boycott/

For young and budding geeks, wired lists 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer. I guess they weren't obsessed with rounding up to a power of 2. Come to think of it, it's been a long time since I wrote code that worried about optimizing usage of memory/disk space to such numbers.

The problem with Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country" is that you can't tell when he's kidding.

He says "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. ... Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

The problem which arises when we attempt to turn the arts into a way of making a living, is that the larger social context breaks down. We make art out of our experiences. If your experiences are effectively owned by another party, you can make art out of your experiences, but then you won't entirely own the end result. Not even enough to give it away.

The soul-growing aspect of art is not its consumption, but the creative synthesis which art inspires. Art consumed is popcorn and butter. Nourishing in a caloric sense, but not nutritious.

At the risk of quoting a spoiler, Vonnegut recites the wisdom of his friend Saul at the end of the book, "what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

Thus, I suppose, breaking DRM is a form of art, and our response is to the plight of the artist's prison term.

But seriously, if you view the creative works of others as fuel for your own soul-growing endeavours, it's not sensible to become emotionally invested in creative works which are militantly encumbered.

Somewhere I encountered an anecdote about children given an amazing toy, but what they end up playing with most at the end of the day is the packaging the toy came in. I don't know anyone who was inspired to a life of artistic expression by the Mona Lisa. For that matter, it's debatable whether sex is improved with skill. Isn't skill mostly a compensation for the fact that the sequel rarely lives up to the original?

We're actually pretty bad at predicting our happiness states. Gilbert says the same thing in his videos at TED.

Why We Suck at Predicting the Future.

What I'm saying is that we too often talk ourselves into needing the latest and greatest (and most encumbered) media, but we don't, and it often defeats the greater purpose.

Lessig has figured out that this quandary is harming our children. Part of his motivation here is that we're making an ass of the law. I guess I have less to lose if RIAA succeeds, as seems likely.

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

The deeper problem here is that many of us believe that we garner status through what we've experienced, rather than what we've created, a sentiment which Twain noted when he observed that "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read."

How much of this stuff are we hurtling through so that we can sit around at the bar or the coffee shop and go "yeah, I've seen that; yeah, I've read that; yeah, I've seen that, too"?

I've been to Holland. I spent two hours in Schiphol. I've been to Tokyo. I spent 12 hours in the Narita complex. We had long enough to take a train into the city and drink one beer.

Sometimes we get a bit carried away with the belief that a gadget from Amazon or an air terminal is the gateway to a life well lived. If you don't stick around and engage emotionally, it's all meaningless. The Kindle model is a form of literary tourism. Hey, if you love airport security, here's a chance to carry it around on your person.

Flash forward to Kubrick's AI when the love of our life disappears in an electronic instant (with full refund) due to a minor copyright glitch on the charming dimple module. I've love to read the verse Shakespeare might have penned concerning that scenario, but as things are shaping up, I'd have to live another 600 years to legally post it here on slashdot.

I understand that it takes significant testing to confirm that the machines are working correctly for each individual. I would bet that many individuals - such as psychopaths - could easily beat the machine if they refused to cooperate/pretened to cooperate with the 'set-up' phase.

Actually, you don't need to by a psychopath to beat it. Being a Mythbuster's host is sufficient.

I disagree. (BTW, you gotta read these funny things on wired.)
Reading your past articles I assumed your were "in the biz", but perhaps I was wrong.
IMHO, police are human. They profile every time they blink. Racial, men/women, bias, looking for work, spotty coverage. Where the police go, white flight ensues.

They[police] need to stay put and let us call them. Have an anonymous iPhone app that citizens use to record crime and submit as evidence. What we do is none of their business. If it ain't bothering someone, it ain't a crime. The police never witness anything except speeding, and that will soon be covered by smart-road technology.

--------------------
Heres a positive step. Submit a speedlimit.
Open speedlimits

IT's kind of expensive to get water into space. [...] Another problem with water floating in space, how would we keep it selective in only de-orbiting what is junk and not what is in use?

MichaelSmith has already provided a general answer, but here's some numbers to go with it.

"Look," Musk says, scribbling equations on a notepad, "the energy increases with the square of the velocity. To go 60 miles into suborbital space, like Rutan and the X-Prize, you need to travel at Mach 3. The square of that is 9. But to get to orbit, you need to go Mach 25, and the square of that is 625. So you're looking at something that takes 60 to 70 times more energy. And then, to come back, you need to unwind that energy in a meteoric fireball, and if there's one violation of integrity, you're toast."

Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth's Orbit

Of course, we don't care as much about the return trip. We don't care at all about the water, and if we want to reuse the carrier, it's falling like SpaceShip One, not a space shuttle.

The iPod sales are what make the iTunes Music Store worth running in the first place.

Not the half-billion in yearly profits?
iTunes turned a profit in 2007 with $1.9 billion in revenue and a 30 percent profit margin
Or just google it yourself.

That's not to say they don't make heaps of cash on the hardware sales; but their iTunes business is nowhere near hurting them and could "survive" adding Palm customers to their customer base.

So you're saying Apple operates ITMS at a (near)loss to support their pod/phone business?
I call shenanigans.

Bull pucky
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/apple-apparentl/
From this Apple makes .29 cents per song and made over 570 million dollars in 2008!
So unless you are a member of the royal family your statement about not making any significant money is just false.

So far I've only heard of one case of this happening, and even here you could argue that his lifestyle was more of a motive for murder than the spam itself. One factor could be there aren't that many of them, most spam is generated by a handful of bot nets which don't require a whole lot of maintenance.

The other factor is that they're just too hard to identify. Or in other countries that make it too hard to track down and make worthwhile finding. Compare that with identify theft / scamming which does far more damage to an individual than spam - but you never hear about identity thieves getting murdered either.

Yeah, I suppose that's true. In the past though companies have used Microsoft's promises as an excuse to stay on the MS upgrade path when they do upgrade, at least in part. This may just be an excuse to not bother with having to look for an alternative though. However, maybe the sword cuts both ways in that now that the economy is down the tubes as it were (and in all likelihood, we're in for at least another year or two of hard times), some companies won't upgrade and it doesn't matter how good Win7 is.

You have to believe that PC upgrades are probably the first thing on the chopping block when it comes to hard times. My experience with the federal government is that computer upgrades don't just happen every few years like they used to, you have to have a more substantive reason than just "it's old" to get an updated computer. E.g., when Obama took over the White House, they found a lot of legacy hardware, including 6 year old MS software, which I presume means they were running XP SP1.

The Wired article also embeds the complete launch video.

This isn't exactly on topic but Wired has a page up with the "top 10 science music videos." Screen them first, obviously.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/sciencemusic/

...here. Finding the tapes seemed nearly impossible at the time (2007) - the old reel-to-reel machines were dead, whole warehouses were being closed, and the people who were actually driving the recovery effort were mostly Apollo-class themselves - well into their golden years. It reminded me of some of the Library of Congress horror stories, only more desperate and with better special effects. If they do have the footage and can actually decode it, this is an amazing find - I wasn't holding out much hope.

Another cool site is Colin Mackellar's Honeysuckle Creek Tribute Site. Tons of info on the recording, the differences in quality, etc.

Really good news.

Edison used to say that Tesla's newfangled alternating current was dangerous, unstable and just plain dirty electricity.

Edison was even cruel to an elephant to prove it.

Falcon

The FBI arrested two procurers in his office for taking a bribe from a contractor (you'd think, him being the boss and everything, if he knew about it it would be HIM getting the bribe, but I digress). He was not implicated. But if you want to go around accusing people of felonies because it suits your politics, get ready for it to be thrown back at you someday.

Umm, go poke around the archives of Daily Kos and Democratic Underground if you want to see people trying to criminalize policy differences...

Or better yet, ask Barack Obama's Attorney General

I wonder if he'll prosecute Nancy Pelosi?

I see you don't like getting criminilization of policy differences "thrown back at you".

So STFU.

The FBI arrested two procurers in his office for taking a bribe from a contractor (you'd think, him being the boss and everything, if he knew about it it would be HIM getting the bribe, but I digress). He was not implicated. But if you want to go around accusing people of felonies because it suits your politics, get ready for it to be thrown back at you someday.

Are they real? I know there's a lot of knockoffs right now that are supposed to be indistinguishable from a distance. Wired ran a story about them very recently.

Is this anything like Dynamic Soaring as undertaken by some sea birds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring and those seeking more speed for radio controlled model gliders http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/dont-blink-400mph-rc-gliders-tear-through-the-air/?

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

Has anyone else noticed how much Vint Cerf resembles the Architect out of the Matrix films?
The Architect
Vint Cerf

I think maybe we should be worried, especially if he's lecturing at "Singularity University".

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-07/st_singularity

Two of the most addictive and dangerous drugs, liquor and cigarettes, are legal, and regulated by the government.

All the other "bad drugs" are unregulated, untaxed, and criminalized.

Why?

Surely it's not to support a massive prison industry, create a culture of fear, prop up the liquor and tobacco industries, or continue to suck tax dollars into a war (one of many) that's been declared lost decades ago.

Per my subject-line, here was my source:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2005/01/66198

(WIRED magazine, reputable)

PERTINENT EXCERPT:

----

"Genetic resistance to AIDS works in different ways and appears in different ethnic groups. The most powerful form of resistance, caused by a genetic defect, is limited to people with European or Central Asian heritage. An estimated 1 percent of people descended from Northern Europeans are virtually immune to AIDS infection, with Swedes the most likely to be protected. One theory suggests that the mutation developed in Scandinavia and moved southward with Viking raiders."

----

LOL, not only did the Vikings spread their great looks to us, but also protection for the rest of all time... thank goodness for those crazy bastards coming around & raping our women (man, ordinarily, I'd NEVER say that - but, in the long haul? It appears to have worked out for the good!)

Thanks for making me curious, reporter... got the answer I was hoping for!

APK

P.S.=> Apparently, & I've seen this spelled 2 ways? The CCR-5 (or CKR-5) genetic mutation works 2 ways: IF you get it from BOTH parents? You are TOTALLY immune it seems... &, if you only get it from 1 of 2 parents, you MIGHT get AIDS, but, the disease progresses way, Way, WAY more slowly! apk

The same might be said for their http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ - has Wired now become Wireless?