Reuters - In recent months, personal computer
maker Dell Inc., has been testing a digital music player that
could go on sale as early as September, the Wall Street Journal
newspaper said, citing several Dell officials.
AP - Nintendo Co.'s profit for the fiscal first quarter surged 34 percent from a year ago as sales of its hit Wii shot up, underlining the success of the wand-wielding video game console in attracting novice players.
Reuters - International Olympic Committee (IOC)
officials have cut a deal with China to allow the blocking of
sensitive websites from media during the Beijing Games, press
chief Kevan Gosper said on Wednesday.
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"
A Cypriot businessman and his brother appeared in court on Wednesday on suspicion they destroyed scores of pine trees because they were obstructing the view of advertising billboards. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:40 am
Recent dispatches from the outside world... Virtual Goggles Track Real Carbon Emissions Earth2Tech At a recent mash-up challenge in London, Babbage Linden built a tagging system that enables Residents... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:32 am
Recent dispatches from the outside world... Virtual Goggles Track Real Carbon Emissions Earth2Tech At a recent mash-up challenge in London, Babbage Linden built a tagging system that enables users to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:30 am
MySpace COO Amit Kapur apparently meant it when he told me earlier today that MySpace is continuing to hire despite letting 5% or so of staff go in the coming days. He introduced five new senior executives... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:30 am
SHANGHAI, China, July 30 /Xinhua-PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 51job, Inc. (Nasdaq: JOBS), a leading provider of integrated human resource services in China, announced today... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:30 am
Reuters - Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) quarterly
profit rose 31.5 percent on the runaway success of its Wii game
console, but the Japanese video game maker kept its annual
outlook well short of market expectations.
HONG KONG, July 30 /Xinhua-PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GigaMedia Limited (Nasdaq: GIGM) announced today it will report its second-quarter 2008 financial results on Tuesday,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:20 am
PriceGrabber.com's economic survey series reveals 89 percent of consumers are still cutting back on spending LOS ANGELES, July 30 /PRNewswire/ -- PriceGrabber.com(R), a Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:07 am
The selection process for DEMOfall 08 (RWW is a media partner) is coming to a close and Chris Shipley has been blogging her thoughts about it. She's identified a number of trends in the 'class of DEMOfall... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:05 am
MAHWAH, New Jersey, July 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Radware, (NASDAQ: RDWR), the leading provider of integrated application delivery solutions for business-smart... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:00 am
Hiring Managers Share Top Ten Most Unusual Resume Fibs Expert Shares Tips on Making Your Resume Stand Out CHICAGO, July 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Is your resume more... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 9:00 am
Muted Third Quarter Due to Global Economic Uncertainty TAIPEI, Taiwan, July 30 /Xinhua-PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Second Quarter 2008 Overview (Note 1): --... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:24 am
Two NASA astronauts in spacesuits drove their lunar truck up a steep sand dune in a barren, wind-swept landscape so forbidding it was reminiscent of the surface of the moon. Space agency Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:11 am
Nearly 8 inches of rain in the past month has tamped down the wildfire in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and curtailed its vast clouds of windblown smoke. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Ayash, Tarek Gong, Sunling; Jia, Charles Q ABSTRACT Sea salt aerosols play a dual role in affecting the atmospheric radiative balance. Directly, sea salt particles scatter the incoming solar radiation and absorb the outgoing terrestrial radiation. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
SAN FRANCISCO, July 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The James Irvine Foundation announced today the recipients of the 2008 Leadership Awards. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
Two Russian mini-submarines explored the depths of Siberia's Lake Baikal -- the world's deepest lake -- this week, scientists said. Mir 1 and Mir 2 reached depths of 5,184 feet and 5,223 feet, respectively, the Guardian reported Tuesday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Joe Lamp'l Editor's note: This is the third part of a five-part series about common gardening mistakes. This week, we focus on the importance of soil preparation. Among the keys to having a beautiful garden or landscape is great soil. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Samantha Marcus, La Crosse Tribune, Wis. Jul. 30--The ambulance business in La Crosse may soon get more competitive, bringing to a head a public-private battle over who should provide emergency services in the region. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Jerry Siebenmark, The Wichita Eagle, Kan. Jul. 30--The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released wage data for Sedgwick County that appears to contradict a return to income growth for the metropolitan area. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Nick Halter, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Jul. 30--A Milwaukee Common Council committee Tuesday backed the sale of additional Lake Michigan water to New Berlin. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Lawrence Latane Iii, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va. Jul. 30--Regulators moved toward protecting Virginia's expanding aquaculture industry yesterday by seeking feedback on a proposal requiring wastewater dischargers to consider alternative disposal methods on the Eastern Shore. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Joshua Mellman, Philadelphia Daily News Jul. 30--The cleanup of two out-of-service tugboats that sank Monday in the Schuylkill near the Girard Point Bridge was scheduled to continue today. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
WASHINGTON - Northrop Grumman Corp., which makes military aircraft, ships and electronics, said Tuesday its second-quarter profit rose 8 percent as sales jumped 10 percent on strong performance in its shipbuilding and aerospace segments. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
IBM Edward Barbini, 914/499-6565 barbini@us.ibm.com Logo: http://www.ibm.com The IBM (NYSE: IBM) board of directors today elected Taizo Nishimuro to the board, effective September 22, 2008. Mr. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Matt Robinson, The Deming Headlight, N.M. Jul. 30--How do you feel about getting rid of that morning commute and showing up to work at your leisure? Verety LLC hopes to give Deming and Silver City residents the chance to work as a remote order specialist from home. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
Incredibly Sleek Design and Powerful Performance, AOC's 2218Ph Goes Head-to-Head with the Latest and Greatest of Today's Computer Monitors and Comes out Ahead of the Pack For AOC, Fremont Alec Rosen, 305-665-5755 alecjr@ajrpartners.com or David Gil, 305-665-5755 david@ajrpartners.com Logo: http://www.aoc.com AOC announced today the release of their High-Def by Design 2218Ph computer monitor. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Emily Ramshaw, The Dallas Morning News Jul. 30--AUSTIN -- Five men from a West Texas polygamist sect were arraigned on Tuesday, the day after they surrendered to charges related to the sexual assault and "spiritual" marriage of underage girls. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Jul. 30--Nice to see some Democrats in the Pennsylvania Legislature are getting the hang of the Internet. Too bad they're apparently using it to do what so many state lawmakers do best -- misuse public money in pursuit of their own political gain. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com Fax from USA: 646-607-1907 Fax from rest of the world: +353-1-481-1716 Logo: http://www.researchandmarkets.com Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ b9f5c5/philippines_inte) has announced the addition of the "Philippines - Internet Services" report to their offering. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
By Marshall Loeb, MarketWatch NEW YORK - If you're an entrepreneur just starting out, your Web site is your No. 1 marketing tool. It can give potential customers all kinds of valuable information about your business. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
SAP Industry Value Network Collaboration Results in Enhanced Functionality in SAP(R) Environmental Compliance Application to Enable Better Management, Measurement and Consumption of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am
Yesterday, Dolby and LG have announced a partnership to develop LG phones with Dolby Mobile, a set of digital audio processing features designed to improve the audio performance and entertainment capabilities... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:57 am
Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:52 am
Twittering and texting are the way to go in case of emergency, like Los Angeles' 5.4 earthquake which hit on Tuesday. According to cnet news, landline and cellular phone networks were heavily congested... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:46 am
phobos13013 writes "Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the United States Public Law 85-568, National Aeronautics and Space Act to create NASA. In the fifty years since its creation, NASA has made manned missions landing on the Moon, put a space station in orbit, launched numerous unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, and beyond, as well as launching reusable manned spacecraft in orbit. Some of the failures included the loss of two manned spacecraft and their crews as well as the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training mission. Although the future of the organization is in question, Americans, and the world, are looking forward to another fifty years of progress including a return trip to the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars."
CNET - If you've every wanted to live forever, legendary game designer Richard Garriott--also known in the video game community as "Lord British"--may give you the chance. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:01 am
A computer attack on the authorized version of the game deals a blow to Hasbro. Hasbro Inc. to Scrabulous: N-I-X-E-D,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
The L.A. private equity group would run the venture. Each partner pledges $275 million for acquisitions. Gores... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
The pediatrician also served as surgeon general in the Carter administration and pushed for stronger warnings on cigarette packs. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
WON'T POST TO WEB TILL MIDNIGHT. X-rays from a particle accelerator help scientists reconstruct a portrait the artist had covered up to paint his 'Patch of Grass' in 1887. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
Websites will court fans of such activities as surfing, skateboarding, motocross and snowboarding -- sports that don't get carried on mainstream television. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
He cites documents ordering major chains serving visitors for the Games to install a security system. China has... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
Researchers say there is a tangle of small faults in the area and it will take time to identify the one involved. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
New infections in children also declined, a U.N. report says. Greater access to treatment is cited. The number... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
X-rays from a particle accelerator help scientists reconstruct a portrait the artist had covered up to paint his 'Patch of Grass' in 1887. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
Researchers say there is a tangle of small faults in the region and it will take time to identify the one involved. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am
Jetpacks have always seemed extremely cool, even if the prospect of going hundreds of miles an hour with only a set of goggles protecting you from a speck of dust that could gouge your eyes out. Yesterday... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 6:34 am
As of last Thursday, this is all that remains of Zero Point-- a long bench and a broad white sign. In previous years, however, it was a spectacular space of moving light and color, the work of Sabine Stonebender,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 30 Jul 2008 | 5:44 am
McSweeney's Short imagined monologues presents, "Mom, Dad,
I'm Into Steampunk" by Marco Kaye.
No, I won't take off my topcoat. And that's exactly my point. I understand your confusion. The nascent trend I have latched onto is difficult to define. Maybe I can explain it to you with the new mods I've been working on. No, Mom. Not like in Quadrophenia, although I appreciate those mods' fondness for tailor-made clothing. These mods.
This looks like a late-18th-century organette, correct? Look again. It hides the Dell laptop you got me when I went to college. This bronze hand crank turns it on, and I've hidden a miniature photo printer where the tune sheet is supposed to go. I even installed Linux. I've put a lot of time into this since I quit my job at Anthropologie, which is something else I wanted to tell you about. Don't get up and go to Lowe's yet. But when you're there can you get me a two-speed fan capacitor?
A new Rand Corporation report comprehensively surveys the ways that terrorist groups have been disbanded in the past: "Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended." Instead, historic wars on terror have been won with policing and settlements. Rand's conclusion? To defeat Al Qaeda, we need to end the war on terror.
A recent RAND research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By analyzing a comprehensive roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory.
PC World - Nintendo and major Japanese software companies are going after 5 companies they say sold devices to play pirated DS games. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 30 Jul 2008 | 5:30 am
Harriet Burns, the first woman Imagineer, died this week at 79. She was part of the teams that built Sleeping Beauty's Castle, the Matterhorn, Submarine Voyage, Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean. and Great Moments with Mr Lincoln.
She also occasionally filled in for Walt Disney on "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color."
In 2000, the Walt Disney Co. named Burns as a Disney Legend, an honor that acknowledges people "whose imagination, talents and dreams have created the Disney magic."
Walt Disney Imagineering issued a statement this week, calling her "the best-dressed employee in the department."
It also released a quote from Burns in which she described her work for Disney in the 1950s: "I wore color-coordinated dresses, high heels and gloves to work. Girls didn't wear slacks back then, although I carried a pair in a little sack, just in case I had to climb into high places."
Gawker posted this photo of a dead beast of some kind.
This is an actual monster, some sort of rodent-like creature with a dinosaur beak. A tipster says that there is "a government animal testing facility very close by in Long Island[.]"
I went for a walk in Sebastopol CA this evening and took some photos (crappy photos with my iPhone, sorry) of front yards that have gardens instead of lawns. They look much more interesting than grass, and some of them had vegetables growing among the flowers. I'm preparing to kill my own lawn and replacing it with a heavily mulched garden.
I hope more people take photos of front-yard gardens and tag them on Flickr with killyourlawn.
AP - Thomson Reuters Corp. must remove a crucial layer of software from its instant messaging service beginning Friday under a federal court order that threatens to disrupt communications within dozens of stock brokerages and banks.
An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek wraps last week's event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, MySQL's Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft's Open Source Lab. Best quotes: 'We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,' from Shuttleworth; and 'If I would start a business tomorrow I'd do it in the netbook marketplace. I'd build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,' from Zemlin." We discussed Shuttleworth's better-than-Apple proposition while OSCON was going on.
When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent. Along the way, Wall Streeters began pressing Mozilla to go public (it won't) and Mozilla CEO John Lilly wowed scores of suits with his talks about how the open source project became a successful business. Just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June, Wired sat down with Lilly at his company headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Wired: What are the biggest changes in Firefox 3?
Lilly: It's got 15,000 improvements. It's more secure and easier to use. But, most important, it's two or three times faster. Think about all the programs we run in our browser now — like office software. When Firefox 2 was developed three years ago, we ran those applications on our desktop. So in Firefox 3 we improved the JavaScript engine and changed the way the browser handles and allocates memory.
Wired: Why did Firefox catch on in the first place, and how has it stolen users from Microsoft's Internet Explorer?
Lilly: When Firefox came out in 2004, there wasn't much browser innovation happening at Microsoft. People used Firefox, saw it was really fast and liked the tabs, and stayed.
Also, people now understand what we stand for — the participatory and open Web — and they like that. It's why we launched Firefox 3 in more than 45 languages. The idea that people worldwide can feel a sense of ownership about software that's initially only in English — like IE7 — is bogus.
Wired: That's nice, but it's not exactly a long-term strategic plan. Do you worry about competition from Apple now that it has enabled Safari on Windows?
Lilly: I used to work at Apple. I have an iPhone. But there are other ways of developing software. Instead of relying on individual brilliance, we rely on enabling a network around the world, like Wikipedia does. That's a different aesthetic.
Wired: Is it an aesthetic or a rationalization for not producing well-designed products?
Lilly: It's an aesthetic. Apple is great if you like the way it comes. Firefox is great if you like to customize things. The focus is on how it lets you do what you want, not how it looks.
Wired: Roughly 85 percent of your revenue comes from Google. What happens if Google decides to build its own browser?
Lilly: It's kind of a sucker's game to speculate about what Google's going to do. That said, it was the Google guys who approached us — not the other way around — because Firefox was a good browser. Our relationship will be just fine, as long as we build something that people give a damn about.
Wired: Mozilla is a nonprofit foundation but also a for-profit startup. How does that work?
Lilly: We're like a university. We have a public mission — keeping the Web open — that we're supporting with economics. It's just that our competitors are all for-profit companies.
Wired: Does the browser still matter now that users access the Net with different, non-browser- dependent devices, like Amazon.com's Kindle?
Lilly: That's a bogus argument. People have been saying for 10 or 15 years that the PC is dead. Even with a good mobile device, I'll sit at my laptop when I'm near it because it's a better experience.
Wired: But still an imperfect one.
Lilly: There are huge problems left to solve. If your data is in the cloud, how do you access it when you're offline? How do you display video without using proprietary technologies? And then there's the whole mobile Web; I think it's not at all clear that it will look like the actual Web.
Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone?
Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it's because of technical issues — they don't want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That's a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We're focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there's not that many of them. We're part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you'll see more in the next year or so.
Contributing editor Fred Vogelstein (fred_vogelstein@wired.com) wrote about the iPhone in issue 16.02.
We appreciate your submission of your short story, "In the Year 2008," to Astonishing Chronicles magazine. However, we regret to inform you that we cannot publish your story.
As the premier science-fiction periodical, Astonishing Chronicles publishes stories ranging from the merely hypothetical to the completely outlandish, but you should not infer from this that we have no standards when it comes to story settings. To be concise, each story must be internally consistent. Once you establish a facet of your setting, whether mundane or fantastical, you must be true to that aspect of your story, and follow it to its logical consequences. This is where your story falls apart.
Just to point out one glaring example. You suggest that in 1945 -- a mere 15 years from now -- scientists will invent an explosive that can destroy an entire city. This is, of course, entirely unlikely, but that is not the issue here. The issue is this: You postulate that after an initial two deployments of these "atomic bombs," a number of nations build up their own arsenals of these weapons, and yet nobody uses them in the ensuing 40-some years.
How is the reader intended to take this seriously? When in history have antagonistic civilizations stockpiled the most modern of weapons, and then failed to make use of them? At the very least, weaker states without atomic armaments of their own should have long since been absorbed into your so-called "super powers."
On a more individual level, let us take a look at the people in your story. You seem to forget that even in the future, women will remain women. Science fiction is based in science, and there is ample scientific evidence that women are genetically unable to achieve as men do, unless you consider raising a number of children while keeping a home to be an "achievement."
You suggest that in your world of 2008, going to an art gallery or attending a poetry reading will be considered by many to be a womanly activity. This is patently ridiculous, as it is well established that women are not able to appreciate art or literature on the same level that men do. However, it pales in comparison to your casting of a woman as a viable presidential candidate. Even considering that her campaign does not survive the primaries, this is laughable. If this part was intended to be farce, it was ill-conceived and poorly constructed. If it was not, I simply do not know what to say.
Finally, while Astonishing Chronicles does not shy away from frank portrayal of amorous physical considerations, I must sternly remind you that we do not publish smut. In the end, your story seems less like an earnest attempt to explore the future than it is an excuse to depict your extremely unhealthy erotic fantasies.
Your 2008 reads like a sexual maniac's slavering fever dreams: a world where the daughters of prominent families bare their midriffs with no fear of social censure, where unnatural coital devices hang in general stores next to legitimate medical needs and where even more depraved debaucheries are delivered into homes via wire, much like a milkman delivering the day's sustenance.
I have seen many futures in my occupation, but yours has the dubious distinction of being simultaneously the most chilling and the most laughable. I take solace in knowing that a society as degenerate and well-armed as the one you postulate would have blown itself to kingdom come long before 2008.
Yours Sincerely,
Armand J. Quaestor
Submissions Editor
Astonishing Chronicles
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a speculator, a spectator and a spectrometer.
1869: The Charles, generally recognized as the world's first oil tanker, leaves the United States bound for Europe with the equivalent of 7,000 barrels of crude.
The Charles, home-ported in Antwerp, Belgium, carried its cargo in 59 iron tanks below decks. Earlier, oil was transported across the ocean in actual wooden barrels, each capable of holding only 42 gallons, which severely limited the carrying capacity of individual ships -- but also established the "barrel" as oil's unit of measurement.
The Charles' tanks were configured in rows in the ballast to assure the ship's stability. It saw service between 1869 and 1872.
If the Charles was the world's first oil tanker, though, it was not, strictly speaking, the first tanker. Three weeks before the Charles weighed anchor, the British brig Novelty arrived in Boston carrying 84,000 gallons of molasses stored in bulk in similar tanks.
Since then, as the world's dependence on carbon-based fuels has mushroomed, tankers have played a critical role in both war and peace.
During World War II, they carried oil from American refineries to supply the Allied forces in both the European and Pacific theaters. The T2 oiler was the workhorse of the tanker fleet, and a highly prized target for both German and Japanese submarine commanders.
Today, the tanker remains the primary means of transporting oil in bulk, and almost half the ships at sea at any given time are of this type. Overall, as of 2005, oil tankers comprised just under 40 percent of the world's merchant shipping fleet.
The largest modern supertankers -- the biggest ships ever built -- carry in excess of 320,000 deadweight tons (roughly 2 million barrels) of crude, petrochemicals and a variety of other liquid cargo. In 2005, 2.42 billion metric tons of crude oil and refined petroleum were shipped by tanker.
Moving enormous amounts of oil entails obvious environmental risks, and accidents, when they've occurred, have been spectacularly destructive. The Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, resulted in 10.8 million gallons of crude being lost. Although there have been much larger oil spills, the Exxon Valdez incident remains one of the most damaging because of the particularly sensitive nature of the surrounding environment.
Almost Live writes "Oracle has released an out-of-cycle alert to offer mitigation for a zero-day exploit that's been posted on the Internet. The emergency workaround addresses an unpatched remote buffer overflow that's remotely exploitable without the need for a username and password, and can result in compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the targeted system." Whoever published the vulnerability and matching exploit code did not contact Oracle first.
PC World - LG Electronics plans to start adding Dolby Mobile to high-end phones later this year, it said Wednesday. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 30 Jul 2008 | 2:30 am
An anonymous reader writes "I have always been thin but all the sitting in front of the PC is taking its toll now that I'm getting older. I have begun to get a little heavier around the waist. I don't eat a lot but the weight seems to stay on these days. Most of the time I don't have the luxury of just getting out of the house/office. And being an introvert, I'm not enamored of the idea of exercising in full view of *shudder* people. I regularly do press-ups (60 per night) and sit-ups (30 per night) and some fetching and carrying, but that is all and these days it isn't enough. I need a solid and effective routine that will tone all my muscle groups efficiently. Do any Slashdotters have a regular workout routine that can be performed in the privacy of the home to stave off those pounds?"
Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.
Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.
The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi connection. Yet a year after the lawsuit was filed, little else has been resolved -- and legal controversies have multiplied. The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers -- two of whom are now themselves being sued -- are not talking to the press. Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there's any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.
"You have good lawyers putting their time in on the case, and in a policy sense, they are achieving something, says Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "But in a victim sense -- assuming you think of the women as victims -- it's not clear what this is going to achieve."
The AutoAdmit controversy began even before one of the women, identified in court documents as "Jane Doe I," started classes in the fall of 2005, the lawsuit alleges. Doe I was alerted in the summer to an AutoAdmit comment thread entitled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School." The thread included messages such as, "I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly" and a reply claiming "she has herpes." The second woman, Jane Doe II, was similarly attacked beginning in January 2007.
Both women tried in vain to persuade the administrators of the AutoAdmit.com site to remove the threads, according to the lawsuit. But then the story of the cyber-harassment hit the front page of The Washington Post, and the law school trolls became fodder for cable news shows. Soon after, the female law students, with help from Stanford and Yale law professors, filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
The Jane Doe plaintiffs contend that the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.
"We have never had such a way to lie and distort facts about people -- to spread lies and distortions in a way that is attached to them," says Bartow. "And you can game it to come up on the front page of Google."
Bartow believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses. George Washington University Law Professor Daniel Solove, who's been thinking about the issue long enough to have written a book called The Future of Reputation, agrees. He says the law needs to change.
"The internet isn't a radical-free zone where you can hurt people. But on the other hand, we can't have everyone rushing to the court, because the court is a blunt tool," Solove says. "We need something to help shape norms -- there needs to be some kind of push back against the notion that the internet is a place where you can say what you want and screw the consequences. That's not what free speech is about."
Since libel lawsuits are mostly about clearing one's name, Solove finds himself lamenting the lost ritual of duels, which he describes as an elaborate nonjudicial way of settling disputes that rarely actually got to the shooting phase.
"We don't have any middle-ground dispute resolution processes in society anymore, and courts aren't a good way to vindicate these non-monetary harms," Solove says. "I think we need something else."
One idea gaining traction among legal thinkers would be DMCA-like legislation permitting victims of defamation to issue take-down notices, asking ISPs and websites to remove false and damaging user posts. If the service complies, it would be immune to any legal action.
But that regime hasn't worked entirely well with copyright -- false DMCA notices have been used by everyone from the Pentagon to the psychic Uri Geller to remove content from YouTube.
Jason Schultz, the acting director of the Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, says it would be a mistake to bring that regime to bear on controversial speech online.
"I think you run the risk of too much take-down," Schultz says. The hurdles and expenses of a court fight act as useful checks on those who would suppress speech, he adds. "I think you need procedural hurdles in place since we are talking about a constitutional right."
Even relying on current liability law, the AutoAdmit case has trod on dangerous ground.
The lawyers for the two women originally named one of AutoAdmit's administrators, Anthony Ciolli, then a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania, as a defendant -- even though Congress intentionally shielded electronic service providers from responsibility for what their users post online.
Ciolli's former lawyer, Marc Randazza, says Ciolli never wrote anything defamatory, and was named in the lawsuit simply for leverage, in an effort to get the site owner to change how disturbing material was handled on AutoAdmit.
"As an attorney, I found it really offensive that Ciolli was being held hostage to these people's demands on a third party," says Randazza.
Solove is not nearly as sympathetic.
"Part of reason people were so upset with Anthony Ciolli was that he stuck to his guns and defended things on free speech grounds," Solove says. "People want to see some sort of contriteness."
After months, the Jane Does finally dropped Ciolli from the lawsuit, but that did not satisfy Ciolli, who filed his own lawsuit in March 2008, accusing the women and their lawyers of improperly listing him among those who made the rude comments.
The women's lawyers -- Yale's David Rosen and Stanford's Mark Lemley -- declined repeated requests for comment.
A federal judge ruled in January that the attorneys could serve subpoenas on ISPs and webmail providers. Using that power, the lawyers have unmasked some -- though not all -- of the AutoAdmit posters.
Now they're asking the judge to give them additional time to try and determine the identities of the remaining defendants, who are currently being sued under their AutoAdmit handles: among others, PaulieWalnuts, Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey, The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah, Patrick Bateman and HitlerHitlerHitler.
AP - Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. posted a smaller net loss for its fiscal first quarter Tuesday and more than doubled its revenue thanks to soaring sales of games such as "Rock Band" even as it spent more on marketing and development. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Jul 2008 | 11:21 pm
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "I was afforded the opportunity to write for a slightly different audience — the judges who belong to the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association. I was invited by the The Judges Journal, their quarterly publication, to do a piece on the RIAA litigations for the ABA's Summer 2008 'Equal Access to Justice' issue. What I came up with was 'Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless: Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations,' in which I describe the unfairness of these cases and make 15 suggestions as to how the courts could level the playing field. I'm hoping the judges mod my article '+5 Insightful,' but I'd settle for '+3 Informative.' Here is the actual article (PDF). (If anyone out there can send me a decent HTML version of it, I'll run that one up the flagpole as well.)" Wired is helping to spread the word on Ray's article.
Kevin Kelly writes about software created by Dmitri Bitouk and Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University that "de-indentifies" people in photos to protect their privacy.
Face swapping software finds faces in a photograph and swaps the features in the target face from a library of faces. This can be used to "de-identify" faces that appear in public, such as the faces of people caught by the cameras of Google Street View. So instead of simply blurring the face, the software can substitute random features taken from say Flickr's pool of faces. A mouth here, an eye there.
Ifandbut was one of several readers to point out the arrival in Oshkosh of the first practical jetpack. It was invented by a New Zealander Glenn Martin, who has been working on the idea for 27 years. He plans to sell the gizmos for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K. While previous attempts at jetpacks have flown for at most a couple of minutes, Mr. Martin's invention can stay aloft for half an hour. Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however: The device is huge and it's incredibly noisy. And, "It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,"' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. 'This thing flies on a jet of air,' he said. Or, more simply, it flies."
On his blog, Erik Knutzen, co-author of the terrific self-sufficiency guidebook, The Urban Homestead, writes about the ethics of raising chickens in the backyard for eggs.
Eric pointed to "Why I Farm," a Mother Earth News essay by Bryan Welch, with this provocative quote:
I get a lot of laughs watching my animals figure out their lives and I get pretty sad when it’s time to kill them. I have a lot more death in my life than I did before. And, ironically, that’s part of the reason why I feel like I have a lot more life in my life. That’s why I farm."
Both Erik's blog post and Welch's essay are worth reading for anyone thinking about raising livestock at home. I'm almost finished with my backyard chicken coop, so this was especially interesting to me. An Omnivore's Dilemma(Homegrown Evolution)
See the lights flashing. Hear the buzzers and bells. Impress your friends by earning some easy gaming points and score your way to bragging rights. Just use a supple wrist and some crazy flipper fingers. Always get the replay and soon enough, you'll earn the crown of gaming wizard.
Burt Rutan, Sir Richard Branson, and a bevy of space celebs (including Dr. Buzz Aldrin) gathered for the launch of Virgin Galactic's twin-hulled mothership, "Eve," named after Sir Richard's own mom -- who formally christened WhiteKnightTwo with the pop of a champagne bottle. Branson explained that the spaceliner was also named "Eve" because she was conceived as an historic first for humankind.
Over at WIRED: Photographer Dave Bullock and astrobiologist/space evangelist Loretta Hidalgo checked in with images and first-person accounts. She's going on the maiden voyage with her husband, George T. Whitesides of the National Space Society, for their honeymoon. Dude. Tell me that's not cool. Update: More from Bullock here.
Verified Voting is reporting that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT) introduced the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act (S. 3212). While having many commendable features, this bill also has a few stinkers, including language that would exempt from any verification requirement those paperless voting systems purchased before January 1, 2009 to meet HAVA's accessibility requirements. This would leave millions of voters (particularly those with disabilities) dependent on insecure paperless electronic machines for years to come. The Senate Rules and Administration Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow, so if you have an opinion, now is the time to make yourself heard. Rush Holt has a much better bill.
Dettman says: "Some kid dressed up as the Joker was caught stealing movie posters from a theatre's lobby and was consequently arrested for it." Holy hooligans! Phony 'Joker' arrested in Michigan(Comcast.net)
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has released a new document about the ACTA negotiations occurring in Washington over the next three days. This might be the shortest time between authorship of a document and its publication on Wikileaks so far. The brief 3-page memo, dated today, could add quite a bit of oil to the fire of the ACTA debate. It is titled Business Perspectives on Border Measures and Civil Enforcement and it contains a set of proposals to the 'ACTA negotiators' issued by 'Concerned business groups operating in ACTA nations.' Among many highly invasive methods and approaches proposed in this memorandum, the reader can find detailed demands for: full disclosure of relevant information by Customs to trademark holders so that they can mount private investigations; disclosure of identities and other information about copyright infringers; and increased inspection of goods. This document is especially important to raise public awareness on these negotiations and their implications for the future." We've been watching ACTA develop for a few months now.
NASA's heated space race with the Russians resulted in Americans orbiting the Earth, landing on the moon, creating new constellations of satellites and building a space station. And NASA accomplished it all in 50 short years.
But what has NASA done for us lately?
Without the need to protect the vanguard of science and technology from our previous rival, the agency's funding is threatened each year as the inevitable cries of irrelevance push dollars out of NASA's budget and into education, defense or health care.
There is a new challenge, however, that could ensure NASA remains relevant over its next 50 years: global environmental change, primarily human-induced global warming.
Jonathan Trent of the NASA Ames Green Team, a research group trying to bring NASA's expertise to bear on energy and environmental problems on Earth, put it poetically.
"We are the crew of a spaceship we don't understand," Ames said. "The radical technology we need is not just for us, but the life forms on Earth with us."
The agency has a long history of playing a key role in the most important environmental work of our day. It was the images of the Earth from Apollo that are credited with sparking the new environmental movements on the 1960s. It was NASA satellites that discovered the ozone hole and led to the banning of CFCs. It was reams and reams of data painstakingly collected in part by NASA researchers that helped the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists reach their conclusions about global warming.
To remain relevant for another 50 years, NASA has to continue being a leader in this effort. Research centers are working to improve solar panels, batteries and energy systems for space missions, which, like a lot of space tech, could have applications on Earth. Glenn Research Center, for example, hosts a clean-energy group working on aviation fuel alternatives, biofuels that grow in sea water and next-generation fuel cells. The centers are reinventing themselves for a new millennium and this work must be expanded dramatically.
But unlike the last space race, when a mass of young people put themselves in technical courses to ensure that the United States remained at the forefront of science and engineering, American students aren't answering the call for help. The grandeur of NASA could be exactly what's needed to spark interest in the technological challenges that confront our society.
The work NASA does learning to live in space, ultimately in completely bioregenerative systems, can feed forward into technologies that help us decrease our footprint here on our home planet. Space exploration can be the vanguard of closed-loop living: No one in space takes clean water, reliable power or even air for granted, so you have to learn to live in harmony with your surroundings.
Perhaps that may be NASA's biggest spinoff technology of them all.
The new issue of Smithsonian includes a concise interview with avant-garde multimediatrix Laurie Anderson. In it, Anderson talks about pop music, her tenure as NASA's artist-in-residence, Andy Warhol, and some odd jobs she took just for the experience. From Smithsonian:
You've also worked at McDonald's.
Yeah. I began to think, "How can I escape this trap of just experiencing what I expect?" I decided maybe I would just try to put myself in places where I don't know what to do, what to say, or how to act. So, I did things like working at McDonald's and on an Amish farm, which had no technology whatsoever.
What do you need to "escape" from?
At heart, I'm an anthropologist. I try to jump out of my skin. I normally see the world as an artist first, second as a New Yorker and third as a woman. That's a perspective that I sometimes would like to escape. It's why in my performances I use audio filters to change my voice. That's a way to escape as well.
NewsFactor - Industry giants Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced Tuesday a joint project to research large-scale cloud computing, the ability to use applications, servers, storage and other computing services on the Internet without hosting, maintaining or configuring them locally. Early cloud applications include desktop office suites, but have rapidly grown to include enterprisewide services such as storage and network management.
What's in the Cloud? Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 29 Jul 2008 | 8:52 pm
Comatose51 writes "Does the Slashdot crowd know of any software, tools, or even techniques for reviewing the UI of an application? Right now at our company this is a long and arduous task of looking at slide after slide of pages and menus from our UI, and taking notes and arguing over what should go where or how the UI elements should behave and interact with the user. It takes many, many hours to do this and with all our UI developers involved, it adds up. This has to be a common and recurring problem so there must be a better way to do this. If there is open source software to help, great, but any helpful suggestion would be appreciated."
When the silent film star Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, thousands gathered in the streets of New York in such an excitable state that a riot broke out, injuring 100 people. It was a leading indicator that the medium and its stars held Americans in thrall.
Randy Pausch's death on Friday provides an example of how we'll mourn the passing of the internet famous. Pausch gained celebrity with his exceptional and touching "Last Lecture," which he delivered after he'd been diagnosed with fatal pancreatic cancer.
When news of Pausch's passing surfaced, the internet lit up with tens of thousands of Tweets and blog posts. Google even added a small tribute to the man on its main search page. But most fascinating and perhaps heartfelt were the grief-stricken comments that run for pages after every obituary or blog post bearing his name.
This massive outpouring of grief is now inscribed across all media silos and geographies, respecting no particular corporate or institutional demarcations. There is no official place for expressing sorrow, no central control of this mourning. Taken as a whole, it shows that the internet has begun to alter how we mourn the dead, probably the deepest, oldest tradition of civilization. And in the process, it's revealed the extent of the flash-community of Randy-lovers, URLs linked like the arms of the marchers who grieved in the streets of Atlanta in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death.
I had the sad task of writing one of the many obituaries for Pausch. Within minutes, comments started to come in with a curious grammar like this one from Colleen:
I am real sorry for your loss Jai. Your husband have [sic] inspired me to be a better version of myself. After I heard about Randy's passing, I couldn't help but cry. The whole world is mourning with you.
These comments weren't about Pausch's death. They were addressed to him and his kin, as if Wired.com would convey this message to them. It's as if the internet has joined the angels in our collective imagination of heaven, the CAT-5 winding into the clouds like a beanstalk.
This was strange.
I checked other obits, like this random one from the Dallas Morning News metro blog, and found the same pattern: "Your inspiration stays with us, thank you. Peace to your family, Godspeed," commented Joanie Pelsynzka. Tributes.com, an obituary site, has dozens of pages worth of similar sentiments.
It dawned on me that I was witnessing a new form of grieving: the distributed funeral.
Why watch the service on TV when you can comment on the obituaries themselves? As my friend and Dwell magazine editor Aaron Britt put it Saturday, "the internet is an open letter to everyone," and people began using any form text box on any webpage, related or not to the Pausch family itself, to make known their sadness.
At some level, these comments are a bit crazy. It wouldn't make sense in any other context to write or say what people are writing in the comments sections of blogs across the country. You can't imagine telling someone about Randy Pausch's death and them saying to you, "I am real sorry for your loss Jai," because you are not, in fact, Jai.
But given the searchability of the internet, this behavior isn't that nuts. It doesn't actually matter what URL you put your condolences on, it's all part of Googleverse, so Jai could find it if she wanted to find it.
The mourning also mimics the way that people experience Pausch's powerful oration. You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."
This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet.
Still, at whatever scale and medium chosen, all these death rituals retain their universal purpose. They all provide convincing evidence that though the star may die, the universe continues. Though the Marine is gone, the corps lives on.
"The integrity and viability of human society is challenged by every death, some more than others," write the authors of the dryly grisly 1989 tome, The Encyclopedia of Death. "The need to affirm or restore the strength of the community against the force of death becomes especially obvious when a powerful leader dies."
The strength of the internet communities' reaction to the medium's most famous death-defying cancer patient shows how this series of tubes has come of age, not just as a market or a means of distribution, but as a series of linked communities, significant enough to require affirmations in the face of death.
Comments, then, are flowers and wreaths, candles, pictures and prayers, and the Pausch's doorstep is located precisely at any address at which the web's spiders can find their name.
One can only imagine that Randy Pausch's distributed funeral procession would warm the staunch advocate of virtual reality's heart. Right, Randy?
A California judge is ordering Sprint Nextel to pay millions of dollars in refunds to California consumers who paid early termination fees when they opted out of their contracts early. To settle or avoid lawsuits, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have adopted pro-rated early termination fee schedules. The Federal Communications Commission is weighing whether to regulate the fees on a nationwide basis.
There's a new IM client available for the iPhone and it's flexible. Called Palringo, it lets you use clients like AIM, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk. Best part? It's available now, it's free, and it only made our iPhone 3G crash a few times.
Comment by Thomas Murphy
A recent RAND research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By analyzing a comprehensive roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory.
You've also worked at McDonald's.