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was featured in an article in Wired recently if anyone is interested. For the life of me I can't find the issue on Wired's website so I'll have to leave that as an exercise for the reader. I did find this blog entry though.

You don't need to... just read Wired.
Spoiler: just enter code "OPRAHWINFREY" on Amazon.

Yeah, um, about that: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

The Kirlin family runs one of the world's the largest chains of Hallmark cards and gifts franchises (Kirlin's Hallmark stores, based out of Quincy, Illinois). Two sons of founder Dale Kirlin Sr. (Dale Jr. and Gary) went into the family business.

The other son, Don Kirlin, pursued an aviation career with the US Navy and Us Airways before he started Red Air which is a company also based out of Quincy, IL. Don has lived in Quincy, in Boulder, Colorado, and also in Kyrgyzstan while working on acquiring a former Soviet fighter.

Red Air operates a fleet of Mig, Alpha, and Vodochody fighter aircraft in training maneuvers with US and Canadian fighter groups. Their former USAF and US Navy flight instructors flying foreign-built fighters make for a much more realistic training scenario than simulators or flying US aircraft against other US aircraft.

If you have the cash, the licenses, and the desire then check out his foreign fighter and trainer sales business, Air USA. Weapons systems are not included, of course.

Don's also the man behind the World Free Fall Convention, which brought visitors from every state and 70 foreign countries to Quincy, IL and Rantoul, IL for 17 years and featured during that time over 600,000 jumps. Jump platforms included everything from a B-17 bomber to the Family Channel blimp. Even a Super Constellation and a Boeing 727 have been featured.

So if you really want to talk about privately held air power, Oracle and Google take a back seat to the black sheep son of a greeting card and gift store magnate.

You have a reasonable argument with one small exception. City congestion is a physical problem. Bandwidth restriction is not. A little math problem: The cost of bodacious bandwidth upgrades minus the money spent lobbying the FCC and legislators (or their equivalent in other countries) equals? Take that result and subtract the cost of bandwidth metering and limiting systems. What is the total now? Split dividend payments every quarter for the next two years and apply this to the cost of upgrades. Now what is the remaining cost? Oh, forgot, add back in the additional revenue from new customers who want to pay a few dollars more to have solid Internet service that you are now providing. What is the cost now?

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CMCSA#chart3:symbol=cmcsa;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=VZ#chart1:symbol=vz;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=TWC#chart1:symbol=twc;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=T#chart1:symbol=t;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CHTR#chart1:symbol=chtr;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CVC#symbol=CVC;range=my

Looking at the fortunes of some of the larger USA ISP companies, they all seem to be doing about the same. That is to say that none seem to be suffering all that much compared to any other... in other words, their market share and markets are steady.

From http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/entertainment-l.html

That said, the FCC -- as part of the Comcast order (.pdf) -- sees filtering as an attainable goal. Here's what the FCC said:

"We also note that because consumers are entitled to access the lawful internet content of their choice, providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law. To the extent, however, that providers choose to utilize practices that are not application- or content-neutral, the risk to the open nature of the internet is particularly acute and the danger of network-management practices being used to further anti-competitive ends is strong."

-- emphasis is mine

To be certain, any large ISP's start up costs are huge. Verizon has been investing in fiber to the home (FTTH) to increase capacity for delivering IP based content. If Verizon can invest in bandwidth, why can't any other ISP?

Lets have a look at lobby expenses:
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?lname=B09&year=a

http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

You also realize that the US required these 27 countries to comply with their intent to implement RFID enabled passports, right? Should they decide NOT to implement the passports, they faced possibly losing their visa-free status.

"...requirements under the US Visa Waiver Programme which calls for countries to roll out their Biometric Passport before 26 October 2006."

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/05/67418?currentPage=all

This is the electric-car effort spearheaded by Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP. He was profiled in Wired a couple of issues back.

The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.

In short, the idea is to move away from the Gillette razor model for cars, toward the cell phone model.

We've got plenty data on the athmosphere, climate, radiation levels and most everything else you'd need an explorer for

I wish. We only recently confirmed that there's ice under the dust. We still don't even know if their are native lifeforms.

We may find it easier to substitute robot explorers for human ones before human colonists; but the amount of data we have right now is nothing compared to what would be gathered by a human team in a one month stay.

Kind of like how racially ambiguous videogame characters probably appeal to a wider range of players? Remember Jade is black? and Do You Care About Race in Games?

If the people taking your checks never bother to pay the people actually providing you with bandwidth, that's a perfect analogy.

There are better explanations of the scenario than available in TFS both here and here.

Hopefully, with all of Ray Beckerman's submissions to Slashdot, a decent percentage of Slashdot feels this way; that for every Jack Thompson (who, thankfully, has been disbarred) there are lawyers who practice the law for more noble reasons.

Hopefully Canada doesn't catch the copyright madness the U.S. has; I'm glad to see that the DMCA is finally coming back to bite some of the politicians who voted for it.

Every country needs lawyers and activists fighting for the rights of the consumer; big business should not receive a lot of the special privileges that it receives.

But you forget. It is a voluntary search as you give them permission by boarding. They will say that you did not have to enter the boarding areas that are usually clearly marked.

Oops that still is the rule in Canada but in the US it is no longer the case http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/court-says-trav.html as you pretty much cannot enter the airport without automatically agreeing to be searched at any time.

Oh well, if you drive or take the bus or train you still have some rights that are upheld. But to get people to refuse to fly and hurt the airline industry in a way that makes them listen probably will not happen.

This still leaves private aircraft.

The TSA is moving headlong into screwing around with private aircraft, too (pdf) .

You know. They don't want the guy/girl flying the plane to have weapons to overpower the pilot and take control of the plane. (Chicago actually searched planes and pilots for this reason until Mayor Daley finally took the shortcut and bulldozed Meigs Field to save it from terrorists.)

in the US it is no longer the case http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/court-says-trav.html [wired.com] as you pretty much cannot enter the airport without automatically agreeing to be searched at any time.

I've never had or seen that happen outside of the checkpoint and I fly international a lot.

"Security" in the US is a joke. If they were serious, they would have a checkpoint at the entrance and scary men patrolling the inside with jack boots and automatic rifles as in Singapore and Beijing.

But you forget. It is a voluntary search as you give them permission by boarding. They will say that you did not have to enter the boarding areas that are usually clearly marked.

Oops that still is the rule in Canada but in the US it is no longer the case http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/court-says-trav.html as you pretty much cannot enter the airport without automatically agreeing to be searched at any time.

Oh well, if you drive or take the bus or train you still have some rights that are upheld. But to get people to refuse to fly and hurt the airline industry in a way that makes them listen probably will not happen.

This still leaves private aircraft.

Now when someone figures out the "instant green" gadget to make red lights turn green so you are never stuck at an intersection I will pay any amount!

It's already been done, and use of one of those gadgets by civilians was made a federal crime over three years ago. Sorry.

~Philly

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306

Three words for you (and people in the States, as well): "Making terrorist threats".

It's been used on people of all ages and colors. Yes, even kids:

* Middle School Kids have been threatened with being put on the Terrorist Watch List.
* A student was arrested for "Zombie Fiction" because the story was set at a high school. Not *his* high school, mind you, *a* high school.
* A Chinese student was arrested because he made a map of his school for a video game (probably Counter Strike or a similar FPS)
* Two boys were arrested for talking about shooting up their school, probably jokingly.

I miss the days when there were these petty requirements for things like evidence and probable cause.

You'll be relieved to hear that not only is your idea totally infeasible, but it's already been successfully implemented by someone else:

Hotcaptcha

Just about all of your issues are fully addressed in the WIRED Magazine article about Chrome.

See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome

I too can't exactly recall who thought that up, but there are other references to the spam wars in general leading to the singularity. A few years ago Tim Boucher wrote a blog post jokingly asking if through spam the Internet was trying to communicate with us.

On the other hand, Venor Vinge sees spam as a sign we're not anywhere close to the glorious singularities that he conjured up in novels like A Fire Upon the Deep .

I can't possibly be the only one who remembers A Fair(y) Use Tale can I?

The Government is clearly lying about their intentions with this! They don't want to prevent another King's Cross, or 9/11-type attack through this latest move to enhanced ability to conduct surveillance. They just want to listen in on my phone calls!"

Right. Because governments would never take a law designed to fight terrorism and use it against innocent citizens. Bah.

The people who modded up your post must be lacking their irony detection gene.

well at least it is public here in the US the govt. still says that the NSA is not spying at the "NSA controlled a secret internet spying room in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street in San Francisco" quote from http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/rights-group-su.html see: http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy-program/2100-1028_3-6033501.html

Amends the federal criminal code to expand the reporting requirements of electronic communication and remote computing service providers with respect to violations of child sexual exploitation and pornography laws.

Personally I don't like the sound of that in terms of protecting my privacy.

Obama has already started changing his position on the topic.
Then denied it.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/techies-keep-an.html [wired.com]
Keep a close eye on this one.

Whoa, Nellie! I did take a close look at the archive of Obama's Technology page and compared the only part where "network neutrality" is mentioned on each version.

Before
First version fetched at
2008 Jul 28 19:23 PT

Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

After
Second version fetched at
2008 Sep 17 18:54 PT

Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

right, i'm sure Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cert are just clueless "idealogs" who have no idea how the internet works.

keep living in your telecom/ISP-create fantasy land there, buddy.

anyone who's actually been following the net neutrality debate and looked at who's publicly against or in favor of net neutrality can see that, aside from ISPs/Telecom corporations with clear vested interests in creating a tiered internet, it's only old, completely out of touch conservative politicians who are opposing net neutrality--it's no coincidence that these are generally the same kind of people who think the internet is made of "tubes."

if anything your comment demonstrates your own ignorance about how the internet works if you actually think that a tiered internet is necessary or beneficial. naturally, instead of providing a logical, factually supported argument, you resort to non-sequiturs and immature ad hominem attacks.

Obama has already started changing his position on the topic.
Then denied it.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/techies-keep-an.html
Keep a close eye on this one.

Anyone that makes a claim like that is just trying to get media attention.
Bad science is great at making money. Evolution is never over. If we aren't evolving, then that's because we are currently in the best state for our current environment.
But then there is the study that says we've evolving more rapidly now than ever.

Says brainwaves all over the places, but I wonder how much of the interaction is instead due to muscle movement sampling.

There was a project with the goal to make a mouse that expressed a variety of different fluorophores in it's neurons so that you could tell one neuron from another, watch active processes, and so on.

The best part is the name: the brainbow mouse

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2007/10/gallery_fluorescentneurons

http://bioephemera.com/2007/11/13/the-brainbow-mouse/

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2006/11/06/microscope_renaissance/

I think some of Tsien's work is more interesting, I believe he's made some fluorophores that you can turn on and off, or convert to different colors to identify specific cells, in addition to some dyes which fluoresce only in the presence of calcium.

time article
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1844160,00.html

wired article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-09/ff_starcity

The story's link leads to a blog that does little more than summarize the original story. Why don't we just link to that instead?.

Minus Giving Brazilian police access to private photo albums on Orkut to assist an investigation into child pornography.The lesser of two evils is still pretty lame

If I am reading this right, Lore Sjöberg http://www.wired.com/services/feedback/letterstoeditor is saying that, Google, by allowing police access to investigate child pornography charges, makes Google 'Evil'?!?! If some freak was storing images of someone raping a toddler on hardware my company owned, he'd be lucky if I the only thing I did was allow the police access to his crap. How is this action a 'lesser' evil?!?! If Google turned over every single picture of child pornography from hardware they owned to the police, I'd demand they give Google a Nobel Prize for service to humanity.

Also in Wired two months ago, there's a story on a guy with a company that's building out networks of battery-swapping stations and battery-powered vehicles in Isreal and Hawaii. He has contracts with major car manufacturers to make cars compatible with his system. It has every appearance of "really happening." His background is software- he was a higher-up at SAP - and he's taken a software/networking approach to implementing the electric car. For example, you tell your car where you're going, or it tries to guess, and it books battery swaps and charging stations ahead of time over the network as needed.

One solution is to add speakers.

You mean like this guy: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/12/journeys-replac.html ?

If that isn't cutting out the middleman, then I don't know what is. He didn't have megabucks, whether from riding the corporate engine or otherwise.

I am having trouble jumping from this thought to the thought of the skin resolving those sensations into an image.

As I understand it, that's more of a matter of the brain rewiring itself to interpret the signals coming from that patch of skin differently than any limitation of the nerves in the skin itself. There is an interesting account of what this is like in an old Wired article around page 5 the author experiences a rather sudden shift as his brain learns to interpret visual signals differently.

"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up in a big ball with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...snip...]
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

reference for the above quote

According to an article in Wired, there has already been some Russian research done in this area:

From tfa
There are no dead man's sticks in space. And no matter how stressed anyone gets, they can't even enjoy a little release by manipulating their own joystick: One of the effects of weightlessness is reduced blood flow to the lower half of your body. The rumor in Star City is that many have tried in vain to get it up out there. "There vas top-secret program of this," Driga says. "But the man could not perform. Viagra vill not help."

So it may not be possible to perform in zero g, not enough blood flow to the lower extremities.

Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity -- a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games

TFA is a lie. Iwata stated that the solution would be direct download to SD Card + a solution that will allow users to quickly copy from the SD Card to main memory. Early in the morning, the HOPE was that it was a translation issue and Iwata meant the Wii would cache the game in internal memory before running it.

Unfortunately, Reggie dashed those hopes. He repeated Iwata's solution in plain english. From the Wired article:

9:21: Instead of dealing with the current hassles of Wii storage, you'll be able to download Wii software from the shopping channel to your SD card, and the process of transferring that software will become "dramatically easier."

So don't believe everything you read. Half the stuff coming out of these press conferences is pure malarky. (e.g. 2 touch screens? False. 3 Megapixels? Disputed. New Pikmin? False. Street Fighter IV? False. Launch from SD? False.)

The good news is that the GameCube remakes are going to include Metroid Prime 1 & 2. So if you liked the control scheme in Metroid 3, you'll have a chance to go back and play the previous titles with those controls! (Whoo hoo!)

Yeah, but how much energy does generating one tonne of CO2 give? It still just capturing CO2, they need still more energy to eventually convert it to fuel

Burning a ton of coal for energy generates ~2000kWh of energy, and 3.7 tons of CO2 (since coal is mostly carbon). Using this device to sequester said CO2 is going to use 370 of those kWhs. So assuming there aren't any ineffiencies in scaling up the operation, we've just made coal carbon-neutral at a cost of about 20% of it's usefulness.

Where to start.

None of what you say about US phone call monitoring applies, since Skype is not a phone call, it's an internet transmission. The law on collecting packets is a lot weaker than the law on collecting analog signals.

The point of this is that the "crypto" in Skype can be broken and has been broken per a government request. What this means is that virtually any Skype conversation since 2001 should be assumed to be available for review by the Feds. September 11 2001, the Feds installed packet sniffers at consumer ISPs across the country, and told the NOC staffs "this will only be for a few weeks, while we get the Tier 1 taps in place."

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/09/46747?currentPage=all

On to your trusting lunacy about phones: We don't know what the NSA program does and does not do, nor what it is or is not designed to do, nor what it is doing nor how the data can be reexamined in the future. We know a very small amount about what it could do circa 2004 from good reporting, but no one's ever testified about it in a courtroom.

What we do know is that speaking about it in the past tense is amusing.

The scenario you outline - only targeted calls are intercepted - is the current legal justification for continuing to permit it and for retroatively legalizing it.

Once you have the ability to start snarfing those calls, without a warrant and without asking the carrier for further assistance, you will start snarfing a whole lot more. If you accidentally leave your equipment on, you'll just have collected a lot more. Since there is no oversight, there's no reason to be concerned about being reprimanded.

Actually, people are making money hand over fist with the iPhone app store.

The parent post is just saying what everyone secretly knows is true.

People are making massive amounts of money from the iPhone App Store. There is nothing else out there like it. Google doesn't even have their store up yet, and after their last attempt at something like that, it is not at all certain that they can actually make it work.

Not to mention the fact that Android hasn't so far turned out to be the open-source panacea that everyone thought it would be. You have to program in Java and don't have access to low-level hardware like bluetooth any more so than on the iPhone.

The cellphone industry isn't "rapidly" doing anything other than playing catch-up to Apple. So far they still have a long way to go.

Surface acidification occurs because CO2 is not the limiting nutrient. I think it's ironic that a process which once scrubbed the air of CO2 no longer works due to clean air regulations.

Yeah, but how much energy does generating one tonne of CO2 give? It still just capturing CO2, they need still more energy to eventually convert it to fuel

Here's an older article from Wired about games for the blind.

Let me guess, it was the Beijing Evening News, right?

I actually read this first on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, which cited the AP article, so it appears to also be significant in legal circles, though still noticeably absent from mainstream news sites. There also appears to be an some additional info here.

That's also why Halo 3 was such an amazing game. Bungie spent a huge part of their budget on developing and studying results from a staggeringly complete play testing environment. It was even featured in Wired.

Game companies should really learn these lessons.

If you want a good RPG in the style of the classic Origin games, then you can have it: Eschalon