yahoi writes "A new type of denial-of-service attack, called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS), damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. A researcher has discovered how to abuse firmware update mechanisms with what he calls 'phlashing' — a type of remote PDOS attack."
Oh the heels of some of Facebook's missteps (ahem, Beacon) and the proliferation of a myriad of useless, silly, and time-wasting apps, some former Facebook users decided to quit the site for good this... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 1:00 pm
KentuckyFC writes "Neutrinos are better than photons for communicating across the galaxy. That's the conclusion of a group of US astronomers who say that the galaxy is filled with photons that make communications channels noisy whereas neutrino comms would be relatively noise free. Photons are also easily scattered and the centre of the galaxy blocks them entirely. That means any civilisation advanced enough to have started to colonise the galaxy would have to rely on neutrino communications. And the astronomers reckon that the next generation of neutrino detectors should be sensitive enough to pick up ET's chatter."
By Andrew Liszewski Is this the missing feature that's prevented watchphones from really catching on? While their tiny displays make using a touchscreen interface kind of a pain, I don't think the addition... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 12:47 pm
By Andrew Liszewski Not everything available from Valve's online store can be downloaded. I already knew they sold plush versions of various Half-Life baddies, not to mention the Weighted Companion Cube... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 12:33 pm
mytrip notes a story in Wired's Threat Level blog on the latest boneheaded government moves with redaction. (We've been discussing redaction follies here for years.) This time it's an FBI report (PDF) on implementing CALEA — you can select text from redacted areas, copy it, and paste into a text editor, as University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered. From Wired: "Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl+C keys — and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all... [Among] the tidbits considered too sensitive to be aired publicly: The FBI paid Verizon $2,500 apiece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom — slightly more than $2.9 million dollars — but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid."
Napster launches the largest digital rights management-free music store in the world, with six million songs that can be loaded onto just about any digital audio player. The tracks will still cost 99 cents and albums $10 but Microsoft's Playsforsure-protected format is no more.
By Luke Anderson I'm something of an animal lover. No, not the "save the whales" or "carry my dog in a purse" kind of guy (or a guy that carries anything in a purse for that matter), but the kind that... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 11:56 am
By Luke Anderson I've always wondered exactly what the Swiss Army is like. After all, you don't really hear much about them, aside from their extremely handy knives. Well if you've ever thought to yourself... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 11:55 am
HOUSTON, May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- At their annual meeting held yesterday, the stockholders of Westlake Chemical Corporation reelected Dorothy C. Jenkins and Max L. Lukens as directors, to serve until 2011. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Dan Buglass CROP yields throughout the European Union could be put at serious risk if initial plans to outlaw up to 85 per cent of the chemicals and pesticides regularly used by the agricultural industry are approved. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Jacqueline L. Urgo, The Philadelphia Inquirer May 20--The big reveal is set for Thursday, but the drumroll will be a bit less dramatic now that four South Jersey Shore towns have declared themselves winners in the state's first Top 10 Beaches contest. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
To the editor: Erven T. Nelson's Thursday letter to the editor suggesting that we need to build new oil refineries to lower gasoline prices doesn't add up. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Chad Lawhorn, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan. May 20--In Randy Weldon's world, three fingers are now doing the work of two men. Weldon these days spends his time with one hand on a steering wheel and his other on a video game-like controller. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Mike Belt, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan. May 20--BASEHOR -- His name is Casper, and he should have been served on somebody's dinner plate a long time ago. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Jennifer Smith, Newsday, Melville, N.Y. May 20--Construction on a long-delayed new ferry terminal for Fire Island National Seashore could start this fall, pending approval of various permits, federal parks officials said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By John Myers, Duluth News-Tribune, Minn. May 20--A proposed state park on Lake Vermilion got last-minute approval from the 2008 Minnesota Legislature thanks to a deal that will see local governments receive double the usual payments from the state. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Tim O'Brien, Albany Times Union, N.Y. May 20--ALBANY -- The Common Council on Monday approved borrowing almost $7 million for expanding the Rapp Road landfill. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Laura Barnhardt, The Baltimore Sun May 20--A federal appeals court has struck down a Baltimore County law seen as giving opponents of a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal on Sparrows Point their best chance of stopping the project. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
Jungo Ltd, a leading provider of broadband residential gateway software solutions today announced that its OpenRG(TM) residential gateway middleware and OpenSMB(TM) small and medium business gateway middleware are now available to cable network operators, through an integration with the Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) Puma 5 family of DOCSIS(R) 3.0-based (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) cable modem chipsets. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
INX Inc. (Nasdaq:INXI) today announced that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson recently proclaimed May 12th "CNM Cisco Network Academy Day" in New Mexico. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Joyce Smith, The Kansas City Star, Mo. May 20--Brent Lambi may be starting his own battle of Westport. The owner of Westport Square and other area properties is taking on former tenant Starbucks. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By FROM WIRE REPORTS Wall Street Stocks rebound on news of housing starts jump NEW YORK -- Wall Street pulled off its lows to finish narrowly mixed Friday as investors squared concerns about rising oil prices with a surprise jump in home construction. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
WASHINGTON and PROVO, Utah, May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and The Generations Network, Inc., parent company of Ancestry.com, today announced an agreement that makes millions of historical records more easily available to the American public. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. May 20--RALEIGH -- Anyone planning to rock out with the N.C. Symphony at Thursday night's concert with a Led Zeppelin tribute band will have to wait for a whole lotta months. The show has been rescheduled to Nov. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
Security software and services company Symantec has launched an online fraud consulting service for large and medium-sized businesses with sites that handle large numbers of financial transactions such as banks and larger web retailers. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
By Leigh Somerville McMillan, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C. May 20--The Magnolia Ball, in its 17th year as the annual fundraiser for the Piedmont Opera, might as easily have been named the "Peony Ball" this year. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
Zuora, the SaaS startup run by industry veterans from Salesforce and Webex, and backed by the face of SaaS himself, Marc Benioff, is launching its online billing solution today. As Erick explained in March,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 11:00 am
Rudolph Technologies Inc. , which makes equipment used to manufacture semiconductors, is poised to gain from its strong leadership in many markets, according to one analyst. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 20 May 2008 | 10:30 am
I went to Google Health last night and completed my profile and then I looked for the link to make it public. It wasn't there. So I twittered that I didn't understand why I couldn't make my personal health... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 10:05 am
By Andrew Liszewski I often wonder how many tons of ice I pushed through my Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine as a kid. In hindsight I could have probably started a successful snow cone business on my front lawn,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 10:02 am
By Andrew Liszewski I've been passively looking for a cheap digital video camera for posting the occasional YouTube video. The JVC Everio S Series I wrote about yesterday is tempting, but I think it's... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:53 am
An anonymous reader recommends a Computerworld article on a new report from Australian security vendor PC Tools. The company released figures on malware detection by its ThreatFire product, and in its user base 27% of Vista machines were compromised by at least one instance of malware. From the article: "In total, Vista suffered 121,380 instances of malware from its 190,000 user base, a rate of malware detection per system [that] is proportionally lower than that of XP, which saw 1,319,144 malware infections from a user base of 1,297,828 machines, but it indicates a problem that is worse than Microsoft has been admitting to." Microsoft hasn't responded yet to this report.
WHEELING, W.Va., May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Esmark Incorporated (Nasdaq: ESMK) today responded to the position taken on Friday by the United Steelworkers (USW)... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:05 am
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Equals, Inc., ( href="http://www.equals.com">http://www.equals.com ), a user-centric communications service that enables Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:05 am
WARREN, N.J., May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ANADIGICS, Inc. (Nasdaq: ANAD) today announced that it is shipping production volumes of ANADIGICS' AWT6321 dual-band... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:03 am
PORTLAND, Ore., May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The Agile Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the concepts of Agile software development, today announced... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:03 am
NAPERVILLE, Ill., May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Tim Wiggins, Tellabs executive vice president and chief financial officer, will speak to the investment community at... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:03 am
SAN ANTONIO, May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CS WEEK -- -- Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle(R) Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 1.5, which Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:00 am
LOS ANGELES, May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Vista Partners announced today that it has updated its coverage on Orbit International Corp. (Nasdaq: ORBT) following the release of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:00 am
SAN MATEO, Calif., May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- B2B marketing software firm Marketo today announced the addition of esteemed marketing executive Susanne Lyons to its Board of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:00 am
HOUSTON, May 20 /PRNewswire/ -- visionapp AG, the innovative leaders in application delivery management, today announced the world's first end-to-end virtualized... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:00 am
WALTHAM, Mass., May 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Novell today announced it has received an SAP Pinnacle Award in the category "Technology: Co-Innovation for Core... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 20 May 2008 | 9:00 am
Saiyine sends word that the mysterious code received at Fermilab, which we discussed last Friday, has been mostly decoded, inside of two days, by two separate people. The poster at the second link seems to have constructed a more complete rationale for the message.
Google Inc. opened a free website that manages patients' medical records online, part of a plan to make users more loyal by adding services. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 20 May 2008 | 7:00 am
The Philco-Ford home of tomorrow (as reported upon in the June, 1967 issue of Radio-Electronics) presented a "total electronic concept" for a super-futuristic home where mood walls vied with the holo-TV for your attention, where the scent-organ inserted pleasant smells into the air system, and the dishmaker spat out stoneware on demand.
In the bedroom of the future you sleep in unencumbered comfort. The bed is adjustable, so you don’t have to toss and turn to find the just-right spot for sleeping. You have no blankets; the heat . . . adjusted automatically to compensate for changes in room temperature . . . comes from radiant panels in the ceiling.
The overhead lenticular TV screen allows two people to view separate programs at the same time. The console beside the bed controls TV, music, sleep-inducing sounds and whatever subliminal educational material you want fed into your subconscious while you’re sleeping.
We've just finalized the details for a second NYC appearance on my book tour for Little Brother. On Monday, May 26, I'll be appearing at midtown's Books of Wonder from 5-7 PM for a free reading/talk/signing, complete with cupcakes!
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother. This week, they tackle the all-important skill of lying to authority figures.
There are certain tells that can give away that someone is lying. For instance, when my dad lies he gets all bug-eyed. In fact, many people do that.
To keep from giving yourself away the first thing you want to do is keep eye contact with the person you are talking to. Unless, you are one of those freaks that never make eye contact with anyone. Then, whatever you do, don't make eye contact.
The best way to make eye contact is to focus on an imaginary spot somewhere to the left of their head around their left ear. This will seem like you are looking straight at them.
Keep a neutral and relaxed posture and don't do anything that would make you seem nervous like shake or scratch your neck. I like to stay relaxed by singing Irish folk songs to myself. The kind of song that goes on and on and on.
Tamu sez, "Adrian Sudbury is a journalist and edits the Huddersfield Examiner website in the UK. He is 26 and has two forms of leukemia simultaneously - apparently the only recorded case.
He has already received a stem cell transplant but it has failed.
He has also ended his treatment and will likely die in a several weeks, so he hopes others will benefit.
His last wish is for people to reconsider bone marrow registration and donation and see it taught in UK schools.
Both the Examiner's and Adrian's pleas have been printed on the Examiner website. "
In Germany, sixth form students are educated on becoming a bone marrow donor, why it is important and how they can apply.
As a result, Germany has one of Europe’s highest number of donors.
Adrian believes we need a similar system in British schools and colleges. It would mean more people are informed about becoming donors as standard, lessening the burden of raising awareness for charities such as the Anthony Nolan Trust.
The British government (who lost 25 million families' financial data, repeatedly, over the last several years) are proposing to spy on every single email and phone call placed in the country, but it'll be OK because all this highly personal, warrantless surveillance will be "subject to strict safeguards." This will fight terrorism by making the haystack orders of magnitude larger, which will naturally make it easier to locate the Al Quaeda needles.
Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free -- and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?"
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne called the proposals "an Orwellian step too far".
He said ministers had "taken leave of their senses if they think that this proposal is compatible with a free country and a free people".
"Given the appalling track record of data loss, this state is simply not to be trusted with such private information," said Mr Huhne.
Danny sez, "My pal, Paul Cesewski is "artist in residence"
at the San Francisco City Dump. He's spent the last few months picking through
the city's detritus and turning it all into interactive carnival games: there's
a rimshot bicycle, a human-powered ball run, and more. They're opening up the
dump to show off the giant toys this Friday and Saturday, May 23-24. It looks
like it'll be awesome for grown-ups and kids. How to get to the
dump.Pics
here -- and here's what he gets up to the rest of the time rest of the
time."
Link
(Thanks, Danny!)
An anonymous reader lets us know about a recent analysis of retail computer sales numbers that shines a spotlight on Apple's sales growth as the PC market has flattened. In the lucrative >$1,000 PC segment, in the first quarter of 2008, Apple's retail market share was 66%. This includes a 64% market share for laptops and a market share for desktops of 70%. The article attributes the bulk of this success to Apple's stores. Fortune picked up this report and pointed out the somewhat obvious fact that the >$1,000 PC segment is Apple's by default, since Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell the bulk of their machines in the $500-$750 range, and Apple has only one model selling for less than $1,000. As the analyst said, "If you don't give people a choice [in the Apple stores], people will spend more."
Microsoft Corp. has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc.'s search business and take a minority stake in the Web pioneer, stopping short of a full-out merger, a person familiar with the discussions said yesterday... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 20 May 2008 | 4:00 am
Fidelity Ventures is hunting for the next eBay . The venture capital firm, investing funds raised from affiliates of mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, has been carving out a niche bankrolling Internet... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 20 May 2008 | 4:00 am
The environmental movement has never been short on noble goals. Preserving wild spaces, cleaning up the oceans, protecting watersheds, neutralizing acid rain, saving endangered species — all laudable. But today, one ecological problem outweighs all others: global warming. Restoring the Everglades, protecting the Headwaters redwoods, or saving the Illinois mud turtle won't matter if climate change plunges the planet into chaos. It's high time for greens to unite around the urgent need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Just one problem. Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs.
Some will reject this approach as dangerously single-minded: The environment is threatened on many fronts, and all of them need attention. So argues Alex Steffen. That may be true, but global warming threatens to overwhelm any progress made on other issues. The planet is already heating up, and the point of no return may be only decades away. So combating greenhouse gases must be our top priority, even if that means embracing the unthinkable. Here, then, are 10 tenets of the new environmental apostasy.
No one with any scientific sense now disagrees about the severity of the climate crisis. But some people — and some magazines — believe that climate change trumps every other problem. If we take this argument to its extreme, we should ignore any environmental concern that gets in the way of reducing emissions. And that's just plain wrong.
Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.
Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent. Myopic responses will only hasten its arrival.
Take the proposal that we cut down old trees in favor of new ones. First, I don't buy the carbon accounting presented to advance this procrustean plan: Older trees can absorb CO2 for centuries after reaching maturity, while replanted forests can emit more CO2 than they sequester until the new trees are as much as 20 years old.
But even if wired's math were correct, this would still be a crap fix for climate change. Chopping down forests causes massive soil erosion and leads to desertification, making repeated tree plantings a dodgy prospect. As monocultures, tree farms are far more vulnerable to pest infestations. And batches of trees planted at the same time are more susceptible to wildfires, causing the carbon they're supposed to be sequestering to go up in smoke.
Old-growth forests, coupled with a broad program of woodlands restoration and sustainable forestry, can provide not only climate relief and ecologically responsible wood and biomass harvests but a slew of other essential ecological services, from salmon habitats to flood prevention. It's a heck of a lot more costly — in both money and emissions — to build massive dams and fish farms than to simply protect the forests we already have.
Another example of how carbon blindness leads to counterproductive policies: embracing nuclear power as a clean energy source. This argument assumes that other clean alternatives will not improve in efficiency or affordability during the 10 years it would take to implement a nuclear program. That's short-term thinking. If we invested the money that we would spend on new nuclear facilities more wisely (and eliminated subsidies on fossil fuels), alternatives like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave power could deliver a clean-energy future more cheaply and probably sooner, without any of the security or health risks of nuclear plants. Nuclear power may have a role to play, but it would be far better to create a flexible energy system that draws on many clean sources, instead of on a single panacea. Again, a cut-carbon-at-all-costs approach blinds us to more-sustainable, and ultimately more-promising, solutions.
To have any hope of staving off collapse, we need to move forward with measures that address many interrelated problems at once. We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.
We don't need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits — not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon.
We can build a future in which technology, design, smart incentives, and wise policies make it possible to deliver a high quality of life at lower ecological cost. But that brighter, greener future is attainable only if we embrace the problems we face in all their complexity. To do otherwise is tantamount to clear-cutting the very future we're trying to secure.
Alex Steffen (editor@worldchanging.com) is the editor of the green futurism site Worldchanging.com and of the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.
Look at the environmental protection agency's CO2-per-kilowatt-hour map of the US and two bright patches of low-carbon happiness jump out. One is the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest. The other is Vermont, where a 30-year-old nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, keeps the Ben & Jerry's cold. The darkest area corresponds to Washington, DC, where coal-fired power plants release 520 times more atmospheric carbon per megawatt-hour than their Vermont counterpart. That's right: 520 times. Jimmy Carter was right to turn down the heat in the White House.
There's no question that nuclear power is the most climate-friendly industrial-scale energy source. You can worry about radioactive waste or proliferating weapons. You can complain about the high cost of construction and decommissioning. But the reality is that every serious effort at carbon accounting reaches the same conclusion: Nukes win. Only wind comes close — and that's when it's blowing. A UK government white paper last year factored in everything from uranium mining to plant decommissioning and determined that nuclear power emits 2 to 6 percent of the carbon per kilowatt-hour as natural gas, the cleanest of the fossil fuels.
Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming: Electric power generates 26 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and 9 percent of the United States' — it's the biggest contributor to global warming. One of the Kyoto Protocol's worst features is a sop to greens that denies carbon credits to power-starved developing countries that build nukes — thereby ensuring they'll continue to depend on filthy coal.
1873: Blue jeans assume their distinctive form when a patent is issued for the rivet process used to strengthen the pockets on what were then called "waist overalls."
Jacob Youphes, a Latvian immigrant who changed his name to Jacob Davis (.pdf) after coming to the United States in 1854, was working as a tailor in Reno, Nevada, when he hit on the idea of using copper rivets to reinforce denim working pants (.pdf). Since he obtained his denim from Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, Davis approached Strauss with an offer to file for a joint patent.
Strauss -- knowing a good thing when he saw it -- accepted, and the modern "blue jean" was born.
Levi Strauss (.pdf) -- himself an immigrant from Bavaria -- arrived in San Francisco 20 years earlier, at the height of the California gold rush, to establish a wholesale dry-goods business. From various locations along the San Francisco waterfront, Strauss sold clothing, fabrics and other sundries all over the West, including to miners headed for the gold fields.
The business flourished, but the real turning point in company fortunes came when Davis, a regular customer, approached Strauss with his proposal to form a partnership selling these button-fly, riveted pants, which commanded the then-princely sum of $3 a pair (about 50 bucks in today's moolah). Davis' decision to approach Strauss was a case of simple economics: He didn't have the money to apply for a patent.
Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Blue jeans (a misnomer, since the pants were made of denim and not the lighter cotton textile known as jean) were an immediate success. So impressed was Strauss that he brought Davis to San Francisco to establish and supervise a factory when the demand for blue jeans outstripped the ability of individual seamstresses to make them.
Davis remained at his post until his death in 1908, having sold his interest in the patent to Levi Strauss & Co. the year before he died.
Keeping 6 billion people fed boosts global warming more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes put together. Agriculture accounts for almost 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One response is to eat fewer of the two- and four-legged greenhouse gas factories known as animals. Before you send back that T-bone, though, call in the bioengineers.
Genomics experts have been optimizing food crops for decades, punching in traits for lower herbicide use, less tilling, and higher yields — carbon cutters, all. But the fountainhead of agricultural emissions is nitrogen-based fertilizer, whose manufacture (mainly from natural gas) and poor take-up rates add up to nearly one-third of agriculture's contribution to global warming. Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, along with a flotilla of venture-backed startups, are trying to change that. California-based Arcadia Biosciences is already peddling genes for nitrogen-efficient rice that the company reckons could save the equivalent of 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Arcadia's CEO, a lifelong Sierra Club member, is working to get carbon credits for Chinese farmers who make the switch.
What some greens deride as Frankencrops are also the only serious hope for biofuels. Right now, their net carbon benefit is negligible. Corn engineered for high yields and low fertilizer will help, but even better will be plants under development whose stalks and leaves can easily be turned into fuel.
The plunging cost of gene synthesis should help bio geeks deliver on another big promise: a new economy in which biochemical reactions replace industrial processes. J. Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics is working with BP on microorganisms that produce cleaner alternatives to gasoline. Rival Amyris Biotechnologies is working on bugs that make jet fuel. Meanwhile, the genetic engineers are cooking up climate-friendly meat without feet: The first symposium on lab-grown animal flesh met in Norway in April.
LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."
mishmash writes "The Times of London is reporting a proposal for a massive government database holding details of all phone calls, emails, and time spent on the Internet. This is to be justified as being 'part of the fight against crime and terrorism.' Quoting: 'Internet service providers and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.' If you want to write to representatives to let them know your views, contact details are available at Write to Them." UK telecoms are already required to keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months, accessible by subpoena; the requirement is already slated to expand to records of Internet usage, emails, and VoIP. This new proposal aims to centralize all that information in a single database in the Home Office.
New York magazine ran a 3-page excerpt from de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, describing how a young Robert Rauschenberg asked the middle-aged de Kooning to give him a drawing that he could erase.
In Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Willem de Kooning, they tell the story of de Kooning's 1953 visit from Rauschenberg, a kindred spirit in loving "the rude parodic squawk in the temple of art." But Rauschenberg wasn't stopping by de Kooning's studio to pay homage; he was there to ask for a de Kooning drawing — to erase. In honor of the late Robert Rauschenberg, we're pleased to present the scene in its entirety.
eldavojohn writes "For the processor geeks here, Jon Stokes has an thoughtful article up at Ars Technica analyzing RISC vs. CISC in mobile phones (Wikipedia on Reduced Instruction Set Computers and Complex Instruction Set Computers). He wraps it up with two questions: 'How much is the legacy x86 code base really worth for mobile and ultramobile devices? The consensus seems to be "not much," and I vacillate on this question quite a bit. This question merits an entire article of its own, though,' and 'Will Intel retain its process leadership vs. foundries like TSMC, which are rapidly catching up to it in their timetables for process transitions? ARM, MIPS, and other players in the mobile device space that I haven't mentioned, like NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, VIA, and PowerVR, all depend on these foundries to get their chips to market, so being one process node behind hurts them. But if these RISC and mobile graphics products can compete with Intel's offerings on feature size, then that will neutralize Intel's considerable process advantage.'"
A protestor threw eggs at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during a college lecture in Hungary. According to CNET, "The protester rose to his feet to challenge Microsoft for stealing billions in Hungarian taxpayer money." Link(Thanks, Gabe "TuneUp Media" Adiv!)
Brian "Candykiller" Taylor is selling very limited letterpress prints of his fantastic artwork. His sketchbookpages are mind-blowing too.
Link to Candykiller, Link to Candykiller blog
getupstandup1 writes "Ulteo today unveiled their Virtual Desktop (screenshots, download) which is a free, full Linux desktop that runs seamlessly on Windows. It's interesting because it's not running under Xen or VMWare, but instead uses the coLinux patch, which they claim allows the system to achieve 'great performance, close to a native installation on the PC.' No need to reboot the system anymore to switch from Windows to Linux." We discussed Ulteo when the Ubuntu-derived distro was announced a year back.
We've just finalized the details for a second NYC appearance on my book tour for Little Brother. On Monday, May 26, I'll be appearing at midtown's Books of Wonder from 5-7 PM for a free reading/talk/signing, complete with cupcakes!
