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First-world nations had plenty of problems with their space programs at first too. Considering that North Korea has isolated itself, it's not surprising that they're going through the pain everyone else went through 60 years ago.

Like this?

According to this study highlighted on Wired http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/poordevelopment.html?cid=151882641#comment-151882641 poverty goes straight to the brain and the stress of poverty may influence memory.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html

In terms of R&D, certainly, the status quo is cheaper. In terms of actually doing the work, though, I wouldn't be so sure. Much of science involves quite repetitive manipulation of samples, numerous instances of the same thing, tweaked variants in parallel, or both. Huge amounts of labor that is reasonably easy to characterize; but needs to be done precisely and without error.

The case of electronics assembly is arguably analogous. Humans are cheap; but (quite expensive) pick and place machines are ubiquitous. Why? Because they are faster, more precise, and more consistent than humans.

It is already starting. This piece describes a massive robot setup for processing brain samples(cue: whatcouldpossiblygowrong). In high volume gene sequencing, automated equipment is common enough to essentially be a stock photo cliche by now.

"I've made a handful of blog postings recently that have been critical of Linux (in the sense of pointing out perceived failings)", Keir

Well and good Kier, but rather than posting on a public blog wouldn't you have been more constructive in contacting the developers directly. As given the vast amount of anti-Open Source astroturfing that goes on, such constructive criticism would tend to cause damage , as all people would see is yet another 'Linux' controversy. Why, there are even commercial companies who pay people to trash their competitors under the guise of constructive criticism.

'Google settled the lawsuit brought against .. The only obstacle remaining for the settlement to take effect is final court approval .. a number of interested parties might lodge objections .. what does raise an eyebrow is the source of New York Law's funding on this matter: Microsoft'

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change.

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change.

That one's easy.

Absolutely free text messages would result in people using them for everything, including massive file transfers. (hey, people use gmail as a storage drive. I can't wait for textmsg2avi to come out. :P )

Text messages save them bandwidth, but also costs them their bread and butter phone calls, so when you pair that with the huge negative that free text messages would create, it's obvious they have to charge for them.

I still think they charge way too much, though. You should be granted something like 100 free text messages per day - plenty for average use, but not enough to abuse them. Or they could have reasonable rates like $0.01 per 25 text-messages. (clumps, reset daily)

Except that SMS costs the provider nothing, thought we covered that here already. If you don't remember, have a quick refresher here: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/text-messages-c.html

An SMS doesn't even take any bandwidth away from the regular channels which carry calls: That's why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

The space is being used one way or another, it's no skin off their backs to have it carry a message or not. The fact that they charge or limit SMS at all is an insult. MMS are another matter.

Bad form to reply to myself, but I just wanted to add in a link.

Given "Expert" Advice, Brains Shut Down

The nature of the world is such that authorities, by their very nature of being authoritative, are subject to pressures to provide biased or invalid information. Not always, and not even most of the time, but sometimes. That's why one must always maintain a critical attitude.

1st, lo-income housing is usually well-ventilated: leaks & drafts from bad weatherstripping; upscale houses are usually v.tight, ironically leading to poor ventilation, unless u go further upscale & install heat exchangers...

2nd, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html and geeks usually aren't lo-income...

Well that'd explain the other two comments pointing out that this isn't even permanent. It basically means nothing.

Read the wired.com article about the injuction
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/judge-bars-da-f.html

Walczack [legal director for the ACLU of PA] told Threat Level that during the hearing the judge had looked at the two photos in question and asked the lawyers representing the defendant, "I just want to be clear that these are the two photos that are illegal?"

"He had sort of this incredulous tone in his voice," Walczack said. ...
...
[District Attorney] Skumanick was not available for comment. The district attorney is up for re-election in May.

Tell that to any one of these authors:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

Here is an "anthology" of six-word-long short stories; maybe you'd agree that at least a few of them are art?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

(Of course, there might be a problem with "derived works" here - Alan Moore and Darren Aronofsky independently wrote basically the same thing.)

Don't forget that they're sending everything through the NSA. After that breach of privacy to clients AT&T doesn't deserve any kudos.

From the article you linked to:
This is no mere file sharing case, so if you share the odd file now and again, you don't need to worry about facing charges like this.

... which is exactly my point, and the point relevant to this article.

"If that were so, the media industries would call the police and report it, not sue for damages."

Oh, they do. Microsoft works with law enforcement quite a bit. The music industry calls the cops from time to time as well:

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/05/guilty-verdict.html

It's a safe bet that most busts for criminal copyright infringement are the result of a tip-off from a copyright holder.

I think you parsed the sentence wrong.

You are 100% correct. I realized sometime after I wrote it, and decided to just let it go rather than comment if nobody noticed. Unfortunately, somebody did, so here we are.

Now that I have RTFA... heh... I guess this is the relevant passage:

Skumanick told an assembly of students that possessing inappropriate images of minors could be prosecuted under state child porn laws. [...] Skumanick, who is running for re-election in May, also sent a letter to 20 students, including the three girls, who were found in possession of images. In a meeting with the students and their parents, he said he would file felony charges against the students unless they agreed to six months of probation, among other terms. He gave the parents 48 hours to agree. The parents of the three girls in the ACLU suit refused to sign.

This relates to the Tunkhannock School District case where phones containing pictures of semi-nude girls were confiscated; the letters followed. One could conceivably consider them blackmail letters; confess to a fairly serious crime and do probation for it (as noted, election time is coming up; looking tough on child porn is always good political capital) or we'll haul you into a real court. I think the question of whether he would actually have drug them into court at all is a good one to ask here. I think that charging your constituents' kids with serious crimes is not a great way to ingratiate yourself to them, though.

Walczak said that "sexting" is a problem that parents and educators need to address. But felony charges aren't the answer.

"Teens are stupid and impulsive and clueless," he said. "But that doesn't make them criminals."

No, bad laws make them criminals.

I read that it's largely due to the fact that the Japanese like to watch tv on their phones, and they're really into texting, which the lack of a tactile keyboard makes more slower. And so phones TV capability with full keyboards do much better than the iPhone with its total lack of keyboard and apparently an inability to double as a TV.

According to Wired, the Japanese prefer the Panasonic Panasonic P905i.

Nothing to hide? argument again.

"Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect."

Cox is the only provider that is willing to admit that they have a 3 strike rule, that I know of. Other providers may have secret 3 strike lists, but they aren't admitting it for the most part. Comcast has promised to work with the RIAA/MPAA in shutting down "habitual offenders", but they are the only ones I know of with a formal agreement.
According to Wired, Verizon does not have a 3 strike rule.

Everyone is ragging on the OP for cites and saying it can't be true because it would break laws. (As if that means much these days....)

But Bruce Schneier discusses such reasoning in a column yesterday:

It's Time to Drop the 'Expectation of Privacy' Test
Commentary by Bruce Schneier

In the United States, the concept of "expectation of privacy" matters because it's the constitutional test, based on the Fourth Amendment, that governs when and how the government can invade your privacy.

Based on the 1967 Katz v. United States Supreme Court decision, this test actually has two parts. First, the government's action can't contravene an individual's subjective expectation of privacy; and second, that expectation of privacy must be one that society in general recognizes as reasonable. That second part isn't based on anything like polling data; it is more of a normative idea of what level of privacy people should be allowed to expect, given the competing importance of personal privacy on one hand and the government's interest in public safety on the other.

The problem is, in today's information society, that definition test will rapidly leave us with no privacy at all.

In Katz, the Court ruled that the police could not eavesdrop on a phone call without a warrant: Katz expected his phone conversations to be private and this expectation resulted from a reasonable balance between personal privacy and societal security. Given NSA's large-scale warrantless eavesdropping, and the previous administration's continual insistence that it was necessary to keep America safe from terrorism, is it still reasonable to expect that our phone conversations are private?

Between the NSA's massive internet eavesdropping program and Gmail's content-dependent advertising, does anyone actually expect their e-mail to be private? Between calls for ISPs to retain user data and companies serving content-dependent web ads, does anyone expect their web browsing to be private? Between the various computer-infecting malware, and world governments increasingly demanding to see laptop data at borders, hard drives are barely private. I certainly don't believe that my SMSes, any of my telephone data, or anything I say on LiveJournal or Facebook -- regardless of the privacy settings -- is private.

Aerial surveillance, data mining, automatic face recognition, terahertz radar that can "see" through walls, wholesale surveillance, brain scans, RFID, "life recorders" that save everything: Even if society still has some small expectation of digital privacy, that will change as these and other technologies become ubiquitous. In short, the problem with a normative expectation of privacy is that it changes with perceived threats, technology and large-scale abuses.

Clearly, something has to change if we are to be left with any privacy at all...

More at the link.

There is a Wired article that you might find informative. It chronicles a hardware startup. It won't help you with the specifics, but it will provide a heads-up for what you can expect dealing with a manufacturer from China, selling, etc.

They kinda' do. Well, its not quite a 12 hour delay, but it does make an attempt to make sure you know what you're doing:

Google Drunk Goggles

There are a number of congruencies between this and the 1995 raids by Scientology...see Alt.Scientology.War cover story in Wired Magazine December 1995.

In 1995 an anonymous remailer in Amsterdam called anon.penit.fi run by Johan Helsingus was visited by police, who sought the the logs, using an excuse (cover story, shore story, suitable guise) that there was pornography involved...

Johan's remailer had been used backthen, for posting Scientology secret rubbish to the net...by a nickname "scamizdat" which turned out to be an ex-scientologist named Joe Harrington... who admitted this on his death bed.

I believe that complaints about the porno turned out have come from scientology...

I just got raided and sued by the scientologists for posting the XENU story, that you guys watched on South Park a while ago..

Wikileaks has been recently publishing thousands of pages of scientology secrets and internal memorandums...

Perhaps history is repeating itself?

Eugene Podkletnov has been claiming for some time to have produced gravity shielding using levitated superconducting disks. The scientific community has mostly rejected his work, although NASA was for a time attempting to reproduce it. There's an article on it from a few years back on wired:

Actually it's hard to say if anyone was able to replicate the results or not. It turned in a giant witch hunt in the end:

Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly suggested that Packham might have added tritium to fake his results. This reassured many people that cold fusion had been bogus all along. Packham received his PhD, but only on condition that all references to cold fusion be removed from the body of his thesis. Today he works for NASA, developing astronaut life-support systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes wrote what he did," he says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in my experiment." (emphasis added)

People like Taubes went around accusing other scientists of falsifying results even though he had no evidence to back up his accusations. The bolded part of the quote above shows that people were forced to choose between continuing to investigate the phenomenon or keeping their jobs.

As today's news shows, there could be something very interesting worth studying, but people have been so scared away from testing it due to all the "liar liar" shit-slinging that research into the subject has been unnecessarily delayed for decades.

It was Bob Cylon that did it all. Even though BSG is gone now, at least we still have Bob to explain things.

'An operator corrects the telemetry problem but forgets to restart the monitoring tool'

This from conclusions in the report by the investigating task force. This is BS, the reason the 'operator' disabled 'real-time status of the power system' was to 'conduct a manual check of the network' because they were fully aware an incident was in progress, in the middle of which he then .. incrediously ... went to lunch and forgot about it.

"We have no clue. Our computer is giving us fits, too," replied a FirstEnergy technician identified as Jerry Snickey. "We don't even know the status of some of the stuff (power fluctuations) around us."

"I called you guys like 10 minutes ago, and I thought you were figuring out what was gong on there," the MISO technician, identified as Don Hunter, complained, according to the transcripts.

'FirstEnergy's operators were unaware for over an hour that they were looking at outdated information on the status of their portion of the power grid, according to the November report'

'no such call was made or warning given. I have confirmed that by having my staff listen to control room operator tapes'

'At 14:02 EDT .. One of MISO's primary system condition evaluation tools, its state estimator, was unable to assess system conditions for most of the period between 12:37 EDT and 15:34 EDT, due to a combination of human error .. and could not issue appropriate warnings'

I think he means the screen froze ...

I have to agree. i gave my copy of Vista away that I got for beta testing, and last I heard it is still being passed around like an Xmas fruitcake nobody wants. I tried it again when SP1 came out, hoping it didn't suck. Nope, still sucked. While my computer isn't some elite gamer rig it is a hell of a lot closer to what is still out there by the millions in the real world: A 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 2GB of DDR400 RAM, 750GB IDE, and a Geforce 7600GS OC.

Vista ran like a lame elephant with TB. It thrashed my 200GB OS drive to death, crap I hadn't seen since Win9X like network connectivity just dying and needing a reboot(in this day and age? WTF?) hard drive thrashing for no reason, crappy boot times, hell I could go on all day. And yes I tried all the "tweaks", although it is freaking sad that some think you should actually want an OS you have to work like hell on out of the box, but nope, still sucked. The problem with Vista is if you read Gate's interviews before it came out it was supposed to be "a new OS for next gen hardware" which was MSFT speak for needing 4GHz quad cores with 4GB of RAM just to run half as good as XP. After SP2 XP became a really decent OS, not as good IMHO as Win2K Pro SP4, but a decent OS none the less.

The problem was MSFT bet on Moore's law always being there to save their ass. If you think back and remember that Intel was talking about being able to get Netburst up to 10GHz you can understand why they may have thought that. But they didn't see green computing, or the Netbook/Nettop, or the fact that for most homes/SMBs computers passed the "good enough" level a little over 2GHz. From my experience in PC repair I can tell you the current "sweet spot" seems to be a single core between 2.2GHz and 3.6GHz with 1-2GB of RAM and usually Intel or Nvidia integrated graphics. Vista runs like total crap on a machine with that specs.

They also forgot the Joe and Jane Public often buy a PC based solely on price, and both Intel and AMD were happy to sell Celeron/Sempron based single core machines to the Best Buy/Walmart crowd. It has only been in the past few months that I have seen the low end being taken by dual core, and even then they really aren't anything to write home about. Vista was simply designed for a market that they expected to go nowhere but faster in GHz, but instead went green and multicore. while I hope that Win7 is better, from the articles I have been reading it looks like by the time Win7 reaches RTM it may suck just as bad as Vista.

Maybe they will finally fire Mr Steve "We can be as cool as Apple! Really we can! Stop laughing at me!" Ballmer if Vista7 bombs and get someone in there that remembers MSFT is a BUSINESS OS manufacturer, and Windows is not supposed to be OSX. I don't know what it is with his Apple/Google penis envy, but the man needs help. Seriously. But of course I'm not the only one that thinks MSFT would do better if he wasn't there.

whilst it's always good to see genuinely open formats in use, isn't there already an ISO standard document format? If there is, is it better to use the ISO standard or an open standard?

ODF is an ISO standard, as is Microsoft's OOXML format. However ODF is an open standard whereas OOXML is proprietary. As the Star-Telegram article says "If the Constitution was in WordPerfect 5.1 format, it would probably be difficult to read right now", substitute any of MS's formats and it would still be true.

Falcon

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/donutsolar.html

It could be even cheaper. Imagine if he used these!

Reminds me of an article I read in Wired recently: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-02/ff_killgoogle

Two years ago?

That is a funny reply to the Mac ad series, but have people already forgotten the great linux ad which *preceded* either the Mac or PC ad series? Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4 It includes Mohommad Ali, Sylvia Nasar, Penny Marshall, and former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.

Two years ago?

This makes it a much better aircraft, but as always causes HUGE problems on the ground. It causes huge air-drag, even when foled up. They need to do it the other way. Make a good car that can also fly. Why? Because if flight is your major interest, then you always will need.

Specifically, go the powered parachute route. (Basic, non-street legal version here: http://www.easyflight.com/)

Your wing needs to be packable, not merely foldable - once. Once you do that, make it street legal, like this: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/11/the-worlds-firs.html

Yes, it is a pusher prop instead of the more tradional forward based properller. This means the prop is not blocking the driver's view.

But the most important thing is that wing is CHEAP, and when not being used to fly, can get packed away into the trunk of your car.

'Diebold, .. releases its new Advanced Skimming Detection technology for automated teller machines (ATMs). This fraud-deterrence technology .. is the most effective method to guard against card skimming, the act of retrieving consumers' account information from their ATM card magnetic strips via a fraudulent device illegally attached to an ATM'

It would have been more technologically secure to not use magnetic strips in the first place and design a machine that only worked with authorized hardware. Something Diebold don't seem to be able to manage. It should have been foreseen that the crooks would attempt to hack the machines after all they are crooks ...

Lots of private companies have tried to build electric and other high mileage cars, most never succeed.

Several years ago I was closely following a company called ZAP(zero auto pollution). They promised MANY nice affordable electric cars. None have made it or been sold in USA, except one called the Zebra. The one I wanted was call an Obvio.Here is an Article about some of the ZAP stuff. http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/03/the-zap-x-and-a.html

I think its great that innovative people are trying, and we should help them somehow without getting scammed. Because the truth is most models will never see the general public.

Why not use a unfeasibly massive cloud of Internet grid connected next generation aspect oriented sensors instead? Spam everyone on the Internet, and ask them in which direction gravity is manifesting itself in their part of the world. I think most respondents will reply "down."

On the serious side, serious scientists have proposed using laptop accelerometers to detect earthquakes: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/quake_network

Maybe something free on the iPhone App Store could help the gravity folks out? You get a pop-up: "Please drop your iPhone from exactly one meter to the ground. We will now measure the impact time. Thank you."

"The article goes on to outline the physical infrastructure of the Internet, including some of its points of vulnerability"

Sean Gorman mapped out the US fiber-optic telco fiefdoms.
Parts of his dissertation where "removed".
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70040?currentPage=2
Getting back to the popsci 'news'
The part I find interesting is the use of 'hubs'
Are hubs (fiber locations?) for cost savings, lazy design, best design for a shareholder when burning tax payers re nation building, collusion between telcos, easy NSA access ?
What do other parts of the world do ?

...is a cool article up on Wired (look for the printable link option so it's all on one page) detailing an interesting adventure around the world and some of the history of undersea cables. Definitely worth a read.

Just in case some of you haven't yet read Neal Stephensons article "Mother Earth Mother Board" - you can read it here in the archives of Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

It is one huge mother of an article - more like a smallish novel - dealing with the laying of the then longest undersea-cable and the history of cable-laying from the very beginning to 1996, when it was written. It is also a hugely enjoyable and highly fascinating read featuring, among others, some "Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications" (i.e., Kelvin and Graham Bell), a by now slightly nostalgic seeming hacker attitude and lingo and locales ranging from Malaysia to Egypt to Cornwall with general local weirdness included. Plus it answers just about any questions you might have about this whole business mentioned in the original post.

... and the article couldn't even get that right.

Blech. For much more interesting reading, check out this classic:

Mother Earth Mother Board

gigapixels?

In the real world a thoughtful qualitative analysis can be at least as useful as a quantitative one

Thank you. The author of the grandparent post might want to learn a bit about qualitative research before jumping to conclusions ("My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything") in the absence of quantitative evidence that might be impossible to gather and might not be relevant anyway. Social science ain't physics. Those who think it is or should be can do terrible damage, as we have seen with the inappropriate use of economic equations for risk that contributed to the current crisis.

[posting anonymously cuz i'm also modding - cathector]

Another argument in favor of Hydrogen is that Helium is an extremely limited resource. It only occurs in the ground thanks to radioactive decay, and since it's extremely stable it doesn't form chemical bonds with anything so it's not laying around as some sort of salt or something. once it's released into the atmosphere it also tends to just float away. i believe the bulk of the world's helium supply is in limestone deposits in Texas, USA.

yeah, here's an old quote from Wired circa 2000: At our current rate of consumption, Cliffside will likely be empty in 10 to 25 years, and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century.

The article is inflammatory BS. You don't go to prison for misdemeanors. You go to jail for misdemeanors. They are entirely different places and if you had been to either, you would know how different they are. The six months sentence hanging over his head will not be a prison sentence at all and that is half the maximum time which is also the minimum time anyone can face for a class A misdemeanor offense. (1 year for federal misdemeanors and mostly 6 months max for state misdemeanors)

Now according to the original offense which wasn't a misdemeanor, it was a felony charge, he could have been facing 10 years in prison (not jail), because of the supposed retail value of the songs he distributed or caused to be distributed.

The was actually a treated as a mass bootleg case and not a file sharing case because he supposedly "willfully infringed a copyright for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." The problem he laid in front of them is that he admitted to doing it and helped identify where he got the files from. But this case isn't the ordinary "junior put the new album on the lime wire interweb".

His lawyer has a different take on it which would follow the pre-sentencing guidelines that recommended 1 years probation. He makes some pretty good points in it and I think this will probably be closer to what happens.

You have to understand that this case is a big political charade. Obama has brought in some RIAA lawyers to help run the hope and Change you can believe in but I don't think they are the problems here (could be but it's just me). It's more of a- they made a big issue out of his site being a commercial venture in order to force information out of him. They offered a reduced charge based his cooperation in telling them everything he knew to help the government in finding who originally released the songs. (according to his lawyers, it could have been the record industry itself or axel rose himself). He took the deal and now in order for there to be a "deterrent" the government has to appear like they are wanting the most they can get in order to have the deterrent factor be present. The judge will likely claim that his cooperation with investigators and mitigating factors like his actions to prevent down-loaders supersedes the Deterrent factor and sentencing guild lines and either negate any jail time with probation or list his jail time as the time he spent waiting bail after they raided him and credit him with time served. If he spent a week in jail, he would probably get 7 days- time served and 1 year probation or possibly 6 months suspended sentence on the completion of 1 years probation or something of the sort. But the point is to keep up appearances. The judge has quite a bit of leeway on this despite that class A misdemeanors have a minimum of 6 months.

More information via http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/air-force-signs.html

Actually, they could have gone to a MUCH larger diameter fan, with a lower rotational speed, and still moved a lot more air with a lot less noise.

Besides, in 5 years an el-cheapo box will have the same performance. Or for less they could have built 3 supercomputers supercomputer.