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The quote came from an interview in a german magazine, from what I remember Gates didn't say it.

Check this out just for fun :)
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

You know, as a geek and an American who's concerned with his personal privacy, there was a single issue which I really took to heart during GWB's presidency and that was telecom immunity (a retroactive law mind you). When Obama went back and ended up supporting it and then continued to support it even into his presidency, I really had to take the whole "Change" mantra with a big grain of salt.

While I have been watching my Twitter log scroll by with people saying they are in tears over this historic moment and the supposed changing of the guard as President Bush left office, I just have to wonder how much really will "Change". And obviously, at least one very important issue, which should be a priority of all Americans, is being overlooked because someone is promising a whole bunch of shit which probably doesn't matter much.

Yet, something which goes against the Constitution is going to be swept under the rug as not all that important because we have a great speaker who appeals to the masses with his great voice, speeches that blow the out-going fool's away, and his supposed "fit" chest as was shown round the world via the media's obsession with the man.

I'm all for a new leader, God knows we needed someone better than GWB 4+ years ago. But man, "Change" is relative I guess. YMMV.

Some issues are aesthetic. Some, like the failure to support some ancient legacy hardware are forgivable in a forward looking company. Some, like infrequent crashing of Windows Explorer or memory leaks are acceptable under the "all software has bugs" philosophy.

And then there are some that you don't get a Mulligan for. There's no do-over allowed on these because they betray a lack of commitment to good coding practice, validation testing and best network practice that not only has been the industry standard for a decade, but that you committed to years ago and continue to promise since.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/20/1624253

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/21/1543234

It was also on Wired: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/encryption-stil.html

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/cold-boot-disk-encryption-attack-is-shockingly-effective/

Schneier's blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html

Information week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801184

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/cold_boot_utilities/

Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10003167-83.html

PC World http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,762-page,1-bid,0/video.html

Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/19/cold-boot-encryption.html

It was even on reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS163325+27-Feb-2008+PRN20080227

It's not an obscure thing, you are just ignorant of major technology news. Perhaps the summary should define "CPU" and "linux" for you as well, just in case you don't what they are either.

"Although google apps is not perfect, I have never once heard of the kind of issues you are describing. I would posit that the issue is your client."

The reason you are wrong to assume it is my client is that I use IMAP to check my work email and school email, and this problem ONLY happens with Google. I am not alone, either; in fact, it is documented that Google's IMAP implementation is poor:

http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/10/imap

As recently as last night I was receiving an error about my "Sent Mail" folder not existing, despite it having been there a few hours earlier and the error was gone, as inexplicably as it came, this morning. I have also had this error occur with all my mail folders, which made checking my email impossible. As I said, I have never seen another IMAP implementation with these sorts of problems.

Does this story take place in San Francisco, perchance?
if you missed the obscure reference to Terry Childs

This is a great breakdown of all costs involved: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=all

I am speechless at the business acumen behind killing your number one free advertising site

This doesn't make any sense. Why didn't Warner just give the offending parties a "stern lecture?"

RIAA appeals ruling.

For those with a long commute your problems have been solved...

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/17-01/mf_icon_air?currentPage=1

GA might make a comeback if this and similar catch on.

Good wired article on Tim here; http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/meet-tim-cook-h.html

For anyone interested in cable laying, this lengthy article is well worth a read.

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

BTW, I'm disappointed at the lack of conspiracy theory posts. Where's the USS Jimmy Carter nowdays?

according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.

see here (again, one of the best articles I've ever read):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
or here
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html

Those cables must have been laid by amateurs. The lengths cable-layers normally go to accurately chart their cables and avoid areas where people anchor are quite impressive.

You are probably thinking of Guitar Rising. The demo video looks wicked but it smells like vaporware right now.

http://www.guitarrising.com/index.html

But there is a similar game coming out by Disney that will most likely actually be released (summer of 2009). Since it's from Disney I dont think there will be any Slipknot and Slayer songs.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/finally-a-guita.html

Also, why are RGBY Google's colors

How Google Got Its Colorful Logo: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/multimedia/2008/02/gallery_google_logos?slide=8&slideView=8

The reason I don't like this is because of First Sale Doctrine. I should be able to sell these files the same way I'd sell a CD (ie, not keeping a copy). So if I sell them, and delete them, and the person I sell them to decides it's a good idea to Pirate Bay them, now what? My email address is all over the place and I did nothing illegal. Great.

So while I support Apple for going DRM free, for the time being I'll continue to buy from Amazon because they do none of this nonsense. See http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/09/some-of-amazons.html "there is no information on the tracks that identifies the customer".

So until I have a very quick and easy way of removing that info from the iTunes tracks, I won't be buying from there.

-S

So when are they going to finish the job they started with replacing the FAA's 40+ year-old IBM mainframes?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/es.faa.html

the problem is that, today, real conspiracists work in ways to make EVERYTHING that they do that is associated with the conspiracy, even if perfectly leaked and pointed out for what it is, seem outlandishly far from the proposed 'conspiracy'.

I'll give you two examples that come immediately to mind. For years my favorite Linux distro was Debian. Debian is huge. So big, whole niches like Knoppix and Damn Small Linux all are Debian underneath. Well, you remember that between 2006 and 2008 ALL SSL traffic to and from a Debian box used one of some 100,000 possible keypairs.

That source code modification was no accident. No one "accidentally" does conscientous enough work to get the type of status that allows them to make that modification, then makes a specific, "underhanded" change that makes the algorithm handshake to one of 100,000 keypairs (not one of a very few, or always the same one -- one of 100,000, so that even if people actually looked at some of the keys they would assume each one was random), while getting the change approved.

here's my next example: wired reported that Apple developed the iPhone (while denying that they were working on an iPhone) by putting the software engineer to work on a screen connected to a huge box of cluttered wires sitting next to their desk. They put their hardware industrial designers to work with dummy software that did nothing. The hardware and software guys literally never talked to each other, let alone were in the same room.

Now, if someone were to have said what, we now know, is the truth, then even if we had had full pictures of the hardware and software guys, we wouldn't have believed it if someone said "look, this is a conspiracy. They're working on a touchscreen phone. The hardware guy is working with the software guy, even though they, uh, never talk to each other, and the software guy has no idea he's working on a phone. He probably assumes it's a tablet or something, what with a huge box of wires and circuit boards next to his desk. The word phone never enters his mind. The hardware guy probably thought the phone would have a wheel or something in the front panel that he wasn't being told about. Hell, for all he knows it's just an iPod. The word touchscreen never enters his mind."

To make matters worse, Apple didn't even hire phone guys to do the phone work. We learned from this slashdot comment that they retrained a real-time embedded software guy to work on cell phone architecture.

All of this is EXACTLY the behavior I expect from real conspiracies of today. I'll be honest with you: if it doesn't go against the laws of physics, and the supposed conspiracy would actually be in the interests of the entity it is attributed to, then I don't consider the conspiracy-theorist crazy in the least. I consider them a realist.

from The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter. Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/emp-for-navy.html It hasn't been forgotten, just by the public.

Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc?

Yes.

NBC, ABC and CBS filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in California against Sonicblue, claiming the ReplayTV 4000 would violate their copyrights by allowing users to distribute copies of programs over the Internet. The networks also complained that technology in the personal video recorder can automatically strip out commercials. In a joint statement, the networks said the device "violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways" and "deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public."

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48065

The best transport for any recent president from Texas would be the delightful Bell/Boeing V22 Osprey.

Oh... don't you worry.

Movie industry is hoping that 3-D will be the "new colour".
So, more and more movies are getting a 3D treatment.
As for games... they are already 3D - just add a function that will render everything for both eyes and start creating games that rely on the actual 3-D content and immersion.

And then, there is all that old stuff out there.

She's a hardcore DLC [wikipedia.org]er, working tirelessly to pull the Democratic Party to the right (not to mention her bog-standard low-road campaigning).

Yeah, because Obama has never resorted to "bog-standard low-road" campaigning.

Who should you have voted for instead?

In the Democratic primary? I honestly can't say. I've never liked Hillary as I don't think she's been a particularly effective advocate for my state. Everybody else dropped out before it got to New York. In the general I wound up doing a write-in for Ron Paul, mainly because I couldn't stomach voting for Bob Barr.

but, in the end, was by far the best choice.

Voting for the lessor of two evils is still evil. I doubt you see it that way as you seem to be much further to the left than I am (based on your support for Kucinich and complaints about the DLC) but that's how I feel. Obama is going to erode our civil liberties. The only difference between him and Bush is which civil liberties each one will erode.

• 2000: Israel/Palestine: Armed Attacks on Civilians Condemned
• 2001: Israeli Missiles Kill Two Kids
• 2002: Panel to look into civilian deaths in 2002 IAF attack on Shehadeh
• 2003: Secrecy over shoot-to-kill fear in Gaza, Two journalists have been gunned down by Israeli troops
• 2004: TOTALS FOR 2004: Israelis: 8 Palestinians: 188
• 2005: Israeli troops say they were given shoot-to-kill order
• 2006: Teenager killed as missile explodes near school bus
• 2007: Israeli army says three children killed in Gaza were playing
• 2008: Palestinian group says Israelis killed 68 children in Gaza in year
• 2009: Israel Hits Second U.N. School, Blasts Way Into Southern Gaza

That's bullshit. Stating that "It's just the soldier's job" is the same nonsense that it was at the Nuremberg trials. Soldiers are people and they are expected to refuse both immoral and illegal orders.

maybe we shouldn't vote in bloodthirsty psychos

As opposed to the Israeli leadership?
Belgium bars Sharon war crimes trial
The man who would testify against Sharon is blown up. Was this another targeted killing?

I make no claims that the Hamas leadership is a bunch of nice guys, but you may want to do some more reseach on Israel. I'm sure you can find at least as many bad things to say about Hamas, but as the saying goes:
"Two wrongs don't make a right."

The IDF has always attacked military targets

• Here is a cnet news article listing some AAC compatible mp3 players.

From the wikipedia aac article some interesting entries:

• The PlayStation 3 supports encoding and decoding of AAC files.
• The Xbox 360 supports streaming of AAC through the Zune software, and off supported iPods connected through the USB port
• The Wii video game console supports AAC files through version 1.1 of the Photo Channel as of December 11, 2007. All AAC profiles and bitrates are supported as long as it is in the.m4a file extension. This update removed MP3 compatibility, but users who have installed this may freely downgrade to the old version if they wish.[10]
• Microsoft Windows Mobile platforms support AAC either by the native Windows Media Player or by third-party products (TCPMP, CorePlayer)
• Sony Ericsson phones support various AAC formats in MP4 container. AAC-LC is supported in all phones beginning with K700, phones beginning with W550 have support of HE-AAC. The latest devices such as the P990, K610, W890i and later support HE-AAC v2.
• Nokia XpressMusic and other new generation Nokia multimedia phones: also support AAC format.
• BlackBerry: RIM's latest series of Smartphones such as the 8100 ("Pearl") and 8800 support AAC.
• Creative Zen Portable
• Microsoft Zune
• SanDisk Sansa
• Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
• Sony Walkman
• SonyEricsson Walkman Phones-W series, e.g. W890i
• Nintendo DSi To be released in America mid-2009

Back in April 2007, wired magazine said that only 10% of mp3 players supported AAC. Nowadays if the freaking Nintendo DS and Sony PSP even support AAC, it's probably safe to say at least half of new MP3 players support AAC, if not more. It's starting to be come a industry standard along with mp3. Who woulda thunk it back in 2007.

Good enough for Gattaca, maybe? After all, how accurate do you have to be if the only fallout is denying some poor unfortunate soul his rights as a human being?

I'm *really* starting to think maybe Bill Joy was right, and that these technologies are far, far more dangerous than we currently realize. The hearts of men are twisted and dark - technology itself is neither good nor evil, but can be a very effective amplifier of our fallen nature. (Look no further than current events in Iran...)

I wouldn't expect an answer to that. As far as I can tell, it stems from this article by Lawrence Lessig and is apparently meaningless in the contexts in which it so frequently invoked.

> Company founder Stephen Turner estimates that such a chip would be able to sequence an entire human genome in under half an hour to 99.999 per cent accuracy for under $1000.

I think this qualifies as a true 'technological singularity' :)

Fuck you and your shitty wood paneling. Colecovision forevah!

You are correct that an infected wound, caused by a trap, will kill without antibiotics. However, that may not immediately incapacitate them.

An Apache Foot Trap will incapacitate most people. Look at the graphic, many people when they take a step and their foot goes down further than they expected will automatically jerk it up again or they'll trip. Either way those pointy stakes will incapacitate them. And that's only one potential trap. While in the US Army a few of us loved setting up booby traps, usually they'd set off a flash-bang. What I liked to do was to take the casing from a rifle grenade, M203, and fill it with gunpower then tape a flash-bang to it. C4 could have been used as well, or other explosives.

Falcon

http://www.wired.com/culture/design/multimedia/2008/12/pl_create

If Sony can't make it go as a game machine, it turns out it works good as a cluster computer, esp. wrt to cracking keys and finding MD5 collisions:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/berlin.html

And that is what was done.

Link

A powerful digital certificate that can be used to forge the identity of any website on the internet is in the hands of in international band of security researchers, thanks to a sophisticated attack on the ailing MD5 hash algorithm, a slip-up by Verisign, and about 200 PlayStation 3s.

"We can impersonate Amazon.com and you won't notice," says David Molnar, a computer science PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. "The padlock will be there and everything will look like it's a perfectly ordinary certificate."

Young brings up the fact that many of today's games punish failure by wasting the player's time

I hear the Playstation 4 implements dual electric shock controllers, for more direct punishment of failure.

Already been done:

<snip>
The game ends only when one of the players decides that the pain is too much to bear and lifts a hand off the PEU. All of which sounds straightforward, but in truth games often continue long past the point where common sense has given way to stubborn machismo.
</snip>

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2002/03/50875

Even more strange, what if the perpetrator is the 'victim'?

They missed the F3DM plug-in hybrid electric vehicle from China, $22,000, even though they covered it in March.

So, I got PHORM monitoring my browsing habits and Audioscrobble monitoring what I listen to. Does anyone here, apart from me, find that just a little bit creepy ..

'Without privacy, there cannot be freedom. And without freedom, there cannot be personal or social growth'

One of Wired's Tools 2K3 list entries was for a DNA Explorer Kit that was sold by the Discovery Channel. It included the equipment and materials for several DNA sequencing experiments. Equipment included a centrifuge and a gel electrophoresis chamber. You can still find these kits for sale on ebay.

I guess you know more than the artist who drew the graphic novel, and has, you know, SEEN the movie:
Gibbons: I am feeling very optimistic about the film. I have been pleased with everything I have seen, and every successive thing I see makes me feel better. I've seen parts of it now three or four times, and I can still watch them again very happily. Like a graphic novel, there are depths of detail and meaning in film that give themselves up on a first viewing, and I am really looking forward to getting the director's cut of the DVD so I can go through it frame by frame. Which itself is a similar experience some have the first time they read Watchmen, and which the film is cruelly denying me! [Laughs]
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/12/archaeologizing.html

Here is an interesting article about garage economies and why they may become popular again.

Some kind of tap many geeks here would claim doesn't or cannot exist

To the contrary, the existance of submarine taps are very well established.

fruey sends in a New Scientist analysis that questions the Long Tail theory. The theory, first described in Wired, describes how retailers with low stocking and distribution costs can profit by selling a large number of unique products to very small niche markets. But the four studies summarized in the article examine different markets and conclude that this business model may be harder to exploit than originally expected. In fact, the importance of blockbuster products which are sold to an enormous number of buyers may be growing rather than shrinking. One possible reason is that recommendation services, like those provided my Amazon and Netflix, may concentrate interest on a few items and take market share away from the niche items.

Picture a graph: the y-axis is popularity (i.e. numbers sold) and the x-axis is products (e.g. each point is a book). If all the most popular products (e.g. Harry Potter) are closer to the y-axis, and as you move away from the y-axis popularity decreases, you get a long tail on the graph.

The idea here is that stocking, e.g., a few copies of a LOT of relatively unpopular books, allows you to cater to niche markets and can significantly increase profits compared to only carrying products that are in high demand.

Companies like Amazon are masters at exploiting the long tail. Oh, and here is the original article describing this idea.

The original(for me) Long tail article. You can also check out longtail.com.

Or, you know...just search with Google for "The Long Tail".

There was a terrific article written for Wired by Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson!) called Mother Earth Mother Board all about the laying of the longest underwater telephony cable in history. He goes into a lot of details as to how the cable is laid, what happens to the cable when it reaches shore, what is the cable made of, how does it work, etc.

Here's an excerpt where he explains how slack affects the process:

The basic problem of slack is akin to a famous question underlying the mathematical field of fractals: How long is the coastline of Great Britain? If I take a wall map of the isle and measure it with a ruler and multiply by the map's scale, I'll get one figure. If I do the same thing using a set of large-scale ordnance survey maps, I'll get a much higher figure because those maps will show zigs and zags in the coastline that are polished to straight lines on the wall map. But if I went all the way around the coast with a tape measure, I'd pick up even smaller variations and get an even larger number. If I did it with calipers, the number would be larger still. This process can be repeated more or less indefinitely, and so it is impossible to answer the original question straightforwardly. The length of the coastline of Great Britain must be defined in terms of fractal geometry.

A cross-section of the seafloor has the same property. The route between the landing station at Songkhla, Thailand, and the one at Lan Tao Island, Hong Kong, might have a certain length when measured on a map, say 2,500 kilometers. But if you attach a 2,500-kilometer cable to Songkhla and, wearing a diving suit, begin manually unrolling it across the seafloor, you will run out of cable before you reach the public beach at Tong Fuk. The reason is that the cable follows the bumpy topography of the seafloor, which ends up being a longer distance than it would be if the seafloor were mirror-flat.

Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight, as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and true along the surveyed course. As little slack as possible is employed, partly because cable costs a lot of money (for the FLAG cable, $16,000 to $28,000 per kilometer, depending on the amount of armoring) and partly because loose coils are just asking for trouble from trawlers and other hazards. In fact, there is so little slack (in the layperson's sense of the word) in a well-laid cable that it cannot be grappled and hauled to the surface without snapping it.

This raises two questions, one simple and one nauseatingly difficult and complex. First, how does one repair a cable if it's too tight to haul up?

The answer is that it must first be pulled slightly off the seafloor by a detrenching grapnel, which is a device, meant to be towed behind a ship, that rolls across the bottom of the ocean on two fat tractor tires. Centered between those tires is a stout, wicked-looking, C-shaped hook, curving forward at the bottom like a stinger. It carves its way through the muck and eventually gets under the cable and lifts it up and holds it steady just above the seafloor. At this point its tow rope is released and buoyed off.

The ship now deploys another towed device called a cutter, which, seen from above, is shaped like a manta ray. On the top and bottom surfaces it carries V-shaped blades. As the ship makes another pass over the detrenching grapnel, one of these blades catches the cable and severs it.

It is now possible to get hold of the cut ends, using other grapnels. A cable repair ship carries many d

I've given a lot of real thought to this. Vista sucks and the users are revolting (in more than one way). *NIX is taking over. BSD is free and MS has been using some BSD code in Windows since at least 95. There's lots of developer support already out there for OS X.

Wired Magazine thought of it before Vista

Why not make Windows a *NIX window manager? I don't see why MS couldn't make Apple some sort of huge offer to license some of their code and make Mac programs compatible with Windows PCs. In the end any application written for one should work on both, but Apple would still have the cooler user interface, the rabid fans and the more stable known hardware environment behind it while the Windows version would still have more hardware flexibility with the cost savings and problems attached to that. When I say license parts of Mac OS I'm talking about frameworks and libraries, not the whole OS, it would still be up to MS to develop the user environment and utilities involved.

Seriously how bad would it be to have MS throw in the towel and go *NIX? They would still be the dominant party, I have little doubt in that, but they will all of the sudden have a decent OS that works with everything else.

Then SLOWLY over the years, companies seemed to realize that fans on the internet increased buzz, visibility and mindshare for their products. Now they cater directly to the fan base by pandering at Comic-Con and such.

Yep, you've got it exactly right.

I work for a video game company, and our fan community is something that's actively promoted. We provide kits with official artwork, music tracks & sound effects, links to popular community sites from ours, etc. We employ a full-time community manager to provide a communication link between our fans and our development team. This is all outside the scope of our more traditional marketing department or customer support systems. I don't feel this effort is wasted. It's important to make a connection to your customers - that will help ensure your long-term success, along with the obvious: producing fun, high-quality games.

The music biz is part of the old, pre-net generation that's big on control. They fear the Internet because it's something they can't explicitly control (or at least manage) like traditional media. If someone else is using their property, then they should be paying for rights, correct? Then at the same time, they actively pay for promotion of that same property elsewhere. It's this same schizophrenic logic that prompted Toyota to demand fansites cease using company-produced images of their vehicles in wallpapers. At least they eventually figured out it was idiotic to pass up free advertising, especially when they need all the help they can get right now too.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61165

And that's 2003... it's got worse since.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/oct/02/digitalmedia.musicnews

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1666973,00.html

Or look at iTunes. Don't tell me that the stuff there isn't available via bittorent elsewher. People still end up buying from iTunes, despite the "free altrnatives".