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First Look: Intrepid Ibex Alpha Points to Ubuntu's Mobile Future

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The newest alpha release of Ubuntu Linux -- codename Intrepid Ibex -- shows enhancements aimed at improving performance on low-power devices like mobiles and mini-notebooks. In Webmonkey.

Inside 'Neopets' Creators' Ambitious New MMO

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:25pm EDT by Game|Life

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The as-yet-unnamed project from Meteor Games creatively blurs the line between massively multiplayer action and social networking.

Rating the Games-on-Demand Services

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:06pm EDT by Game|Life

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Xbox Live Arcade vs. WiiWare vs. PlayStation Store -- it's a three-way smackdown for best digital delivery system.

Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:52pm EDT by Threat Level

Left-leaning opponents of amnesty for telecoms sued for helping the government warrantlessly spy on Americans are turning to Senator Barack Obama's own Web 2.0 tools to lobby him to oppose a pending bill. They wonder if the new participatory politics he's relied on to secure the Democratic nomination can sway him back to his original opposition to the spying bill, or if old-style politics will rule the day.

Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:16pm EDT by Wired Science

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A new experimental technique strips a key gene out of T-cells in mice, blocking their ability to produce a protein that HIV uses to enter and take over the T-cells. The result: cells that are nearly impenetrable to the virus.

What's Inside a Camera? Saw It In Half and See

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Ever wondered what's inside your camera? An exhibit at the German Technology Museum in Berlin shows a variety of cameras and lenses, all sliced neatly down the middle, so you can see their inner workings, in this photo gallery in Gadget Lab.

How to Get a Copy of Windows XP Even Though it's 'Dead'

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Monday, June 30 marks the final day you can buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP from major retail outlets, resellers and manufacturers. But thanks to some loopholes in its retirement plan, you can still get your hands on a copy of XP and avoid upgrading to Vista a little longer. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.

RIAA 'Making Available' Argument: File Sharers 'Freeload'

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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The Recording Industry Association of America told the federal judge in the Jammie Thomas case Monday that file sharers "freeload" on copyrights.

Rhapsody Moves Music Sales to Online MP3 Format

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 11:05am EDT by Listening Post

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The Rhapsody music service abandons DRM on single song downloads and will now sell all of its music in the MP3 format using the web. Its new strategy also includes letting millions of Facebook, iLike, MTV and Yahoo users preview 25 songs each month with the option to buy.

If You Want Windows XP, Better Buy it Today

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

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Microsoft, determined to push its Vista operating system over the objections of significant numbers of PC users, officially pulls the plug on its popular XP OS.

Here's the Lowdown on PS3's Big Firmware Update

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:20am EDT by Game|Life

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Gamers talk and Sony listens: PlayStation 3 will now include support for custom soundtracks, Trophies and, most importantly, the ability to open system menus while running a game.

Preview: 'Too Human' Is Over in 10 Short Hours

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 8:00am EDT by Game|Life

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With this complex action RPG about Norse gods, the makers of Eternal Darkness drive you to the edge of a cliff, then leave you hanging.

Wired.com Photo Contest: Food

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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This week we implore you to deliver a visual feast to our emaciated eyes. We seek gastronomical oddities and excesses, your grossest and most appetizing photos of food.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best food photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. We know this is asking a lot, but please keep your restaurant ads to yourself. Instead, show us unexplored galaxies of grapes shot through with comets of roasting marshmallows. Take us down chewed-up trash shoots and climbing up slimy compost mountains. This is well-trodden territory, so you'll have to go the extra mile to catch eyes and votes.

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.

Vote on food photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your food photo.

Submit your food photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

June 30, 1908: A Very Close Encounter of the Second Kind

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1908: A fireball streaking across the sky and a massive explosion in the Siberian hinterlands marks the largest recorded collision ever between Earth and an object from space.

The Tunguska event flattened 80 million trees covering 830 square miles of sparsely populated (but not unpopulated) Russian outback in the region of the Tunguska River northwest of Lake Baikal.

Whatever it was -- an exploding fragment from a disintegrating meteorite seems the likeliest explanation -- scientists concluded there was no actual impact. The explosion appears to have been caused by an air burst similar to that of an artillery round detonating in midair, rather than on impact with the ground. In this case, the fragment, which is believed to have measured perhaps 100 feet across (although new research suggests it may have been even smaller), was probably traveling at around 21,000 miles per hour when it exploded anywhere from four to six miles above the Earth's surface.

Based on later assessments of the damage, the force of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The remoteness of the blast and the chaotic conditions prevailing inside Russia at the time prevented a thorough examination of the area until 1927, when an expedition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally arrived on the scene. Ironically, a lot of the data wouldn't be clearly understood until the Soviet Union began conducting its own Cold War experiments with atomic-blast impacts during the 1950s and '60s.

Soil samples revealed high levels of nickel and iridium, which are commonly found in meteorites, and the pattern of the forest devastation was consistent with a strong central detonation followed by shock waves emanating outward from ground zero.

Based on eyewitness accounts at Tunguska, a bluish fireball appeared in the sky at around 7:15 a.m. Ten minutes later, there was a flash, followed by a deafening explosion that was heard 300 miles away. The ground began shaking as in an earthquake, and a hot wind blew across the land, singeing crops and shattering windows.

While contemporary accounts refer to many people in the vicinity becoming covered with boils and dying as a result of the blast, that may be better explained by a smallpox epidemic that was occurring at the same time.

The fear, of course, is that the Earth is vulnerable to these meteor strikes. Flying objects enter the atmosphere every day, but the vast majority burn up before posing any real threat. Some meteorites do get through, however, and there have been events similar to -- if smaller than -- Tunguska recorded in the past century.

Here's something to consider: In its 1966 edition, the Guinness Book of Records concluded that, based on the Earth's rotation, had the Tunguska meteorite struck 4 hours, 47 minutes later, it would have obliterated St. Petersburg, then the capital of imperial Russia. Given the events that would shortly torment that nation -- and all of Europe -- for the better part of the 20th century, one is left to wonder how history might have changed in those circumstances.

Sounds like the premise for a pretty good alternative-history novel.

Source: Various

Games Without Frontiers: 'Space Invaders' Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

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This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... Space Invaders.

Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about Space Invaders Extreme -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original thud-thud-thudding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of extreme in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.

But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new Space Invaders is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.

This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. Defender, Asteroids, Galaga: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.

But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?

Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school Robotron 2084, for example, becomes the grindingly unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.

Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original Battlezone, the world was rendered in green, vectorized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!

Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.

This is what's so refreshing about the new Space Invaders. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.

Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.

The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of inverse logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same oh-shit-oh-shit loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.

What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the spirit of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the Space Invaders canon. In essence, Space Invaders Extreme feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.

Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.

So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!

- - -

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Gallery: Top 10 Wired.com Readers' Square Photos, Decided by You

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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If our readers are anything like us, they've probably had the word "square" hurled at them a few times. Fortunately, kick-ass photos are an excellent salve for this particular brand of nerd sting. These 10 readers exercised these demons in our square photo contest, and were voted the top contenders by their peers. Neil Bruder took home the gold with his photo "Office Life" at left. Mr. Bruder will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.

Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Square Photo Gallery.

Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Office life
Submitted by Neil Bruder

Photographer's comment:

"Late-afternoon shadows on an office building in Vancouver."

MAM
Submitted by Evan Stremke

Photographer's comment:

Main atrium (looking up) of the Milwaukee Art Museum."

Windows
Submitted by Andrew Brooks

Photographer's comment:

"Taken in Berlin, 2006."

Blocks
Submitted by Jamei Carl

Photographer's comment:

"Taken on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia."

It wasn't me!
Submitted by Shawn Isaac

Photographer's comment:

"I swear ;-)."

Waiting
Submitted by Eric Cabahug

Photographer's comment:

"Waiting is the hardest thing. Especially if you're in the dark."

OCAD
Submitted by Steven Kamenar

Photographer's comment:

"Ontario College of Art and Design."

Rox
Submitted by Christiaan d'Arnaud

Photographer's comment:

"Scheveningen, Netherlands"

Rolling Hill's Guest House
Submitted by Greg

Photographer's comment:

"Hyundai's guest house near their R&D facility in Korea."

fred & ginger
Submitted by Anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"praha."

Gallery: Top 10 Wired Square Photos, Decided by Us

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our square photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

La quadrature du cercle
Submitted by Alain Tougas

Photographer's comment:

"Not everyone wants to be a square."

Butterflies
Submitted by Peter

Photographer's comment:

"Butterflies at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle."

Old Barn Window
Submitted by John A. B.

Photographer's comment:

"The old barn window on Uncle Harold's farm."

Neighbourhood
Submitted by Ronan Farrell

Photographer's comment:

"Sighisoara, Romania."

Jealousy Windows
Submitted by Hana

Photographer's comment:

"Designed so that you can see the world but the world can't see you."

Tai Chi Squares
Submitted by Matt Kaune

Photographer's comment:

"Man doing tai chi in Denver's Civic Center Park."

Chicago Squares
Submitted by Maurice

Photographer's comment:

"Would you expect anything less interesting from the great architects that have made Chicago famous?"

Squared Circles?
Submitted by Jon

Photographer's comment:

"Polaroid Land Cameras glued to the "Camera Van." Shot at the Maker Faire 2007."

slow worship day
Submitted by axaxaxas mlö

Photographer's comment:

"Temple Mount, Jerusalem, March 2006. Nikon Coolpix L2."

Bricks
Submitted by Maziar H

Photographer's comment:

"Sidewalk bricks, Vancouver, BC."

Video: Lab-Grown Meat's Tough to Swallow

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 11:18pm EDT

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A new public television show, Your Week, asks consumers if they would be willing to eat artificial meat.

Researchers Make Noise About Aztec Whistles of Death

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 8:13pm EDT by Associated Press

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Ancient noisemakers unearthed in Mexico's ruins were once dismissed by museums as toys. But modern-day researchers are using them to discover the complex role that sound played in Pre-Columbian society.

Some Proof That Marijuana Is a Powerful Medicine

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 4:31pm EDT by Wired Science

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Scientists prove that beta-caryophyllene, a chemical found in marijuana, soothes the immune system, increases bone mass, and blocks pain signals -- without causing euphoria or interfering with the central nervous system.

ICANN Gets Pwned

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 10:34am EDT by Underwire

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Not even ICANN and IANA are safe from domain hijacking. Those pesky Turkish hackers strike again.

'Doctor Who' Cliffhanger Teases Endless Possibilities

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 3:59am EDT by Underwire

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If the cliffhanger of Saturday's episode of Doctor Who is legitimate and not some clever, alternative universe, time-traveling trick, Russell T. Davies and his Who crew pulled off one of the truly great swerves in television history.

California Wildfires Threaten Public Health

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:55pm EDT by Associated Press

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Thanks to hundreds of lightning-sparked wildfires in Northern California, air pollution readings in the region are two to 10 times the federal standard for clean air. Some areas are experiencing the worst air quality on record.

Secrets of 'Wanted''s Insane On-Screen Action

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:23pm EDT by Underwire

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When you've got high-priced talent like Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy on the payroll, nobody's going to risk the actors' lives or limbs for the sake of an awesome stunt. That said, superhero-assassin movie 'Wanted' pushed its stars pretty hard to sell the train wrecks and gunfights that drive the action. Here's how they did it.

Prescription Meds: Rock's New Drug of Choice?

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Listening Post

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Rockers from Aerosmith's Stephen Tyler to Hawthorne Heights' Casey Calvert are snubbing heroin and coke. Their new favorite vice is prescription meds. And they're not alone: U.S. teens are currently abusing painkillers more than coke, heroin and meth combined.

UNKLE Goes Widescreen, Remixes 'X-Files'

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Listening Post

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James Lavelle's electronic supergroup has got an ear on cinema of the sci-fi variety. UNKLE's latest effort is called End Titles...Stories for Film, plus its remix of 'The X-Files' theme song touches down with the film on July 25, and on the official soundtrack on July 21.

Scientists: Atom Smasher Won't Spawn Scary Black Holes

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 1:41pm EDT by Associated Press

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The most powerful atom-smasher ever will make its debut in August, and experts say doomsday fears that the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes or killer particles are unfounded.

Tips For Keeping Your RSS Feeds Lean and Clean

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Are your feeds well-formed? If not, maybe it's time you gave them a good scrubbing. Webmonkey offers these simple suggestions for cleaner, faster-loading Atom and RSS content. Follow our tips and you'll be validated, compressed and optimized to rule in no time.

Make Your PC Phone Home: How to Access Your Computer Remotely

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Traveling this summer? Don't lug your data with you -- just set up your laptop to talk to your machine remotely and access your music, e-mail, photos and other files from thousands of miles away. In Wired's How-To Wiki.

Uncle Sam Rolls in a 100-MPG Hybrid

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Autopia

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Tony Markel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, drives a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 mpg and gets its power from the sun. If he has his way, you will too.

California Traffic: Like a Wildfire Every 9 Days

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:59pm EDT by Wired Science

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While this week's wildfires might be more dramatic, California's on-road traffic generates as much carbon dioxide as all of them combined in a mere nine days.

'Dark Knight' Selling Out 3 Weeks Early

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:49pm EDT by Underwire

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Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, and the sad specter of the actor's premature death, are fueling ticket sales and leading theaters to add 3 a.m. screenings.

Review: 'Operation Darkness' Succeeds Despite Flaws

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:41pm EDT by Game|Life

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Nazis team up with zombies and vampires to crank up the freak factor in this World War II strategy role-playing game for Xbox 360.

Video: Bill Gates' Best Bits, From Pies to BSODs

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:15pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Bill Gates retires from full-time work at Microsoft next week. We figured that would be the perfect time to put together a highlights reel showing the most entertaining, goofy and inspiring moments from his 33-year career.

Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 3:44pm EDT by Threat Level

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A 19-year-old hacker is agreeing to plead guilty to launching a botnet attack and stealing financial data from thousands of computers. The malware program installed itself on victims' computers when they downloaded peer-to-peer file sharing software, authorities said. Jason Milmont, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, faces a maximum five-year term.

Q&A: 90 Minutes With Miyamoto, Nintendo's Master of Amusement

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:35pm EDT by Game|Life

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The man who blessed the world with Donkey Kong, Mario and the incredible Wii opens the door to his game-changing imagination. Wired.com interview by Chris Kohler and Clive Thompson.

The Many (Geeky) Faces of Bill Gates, a Capsule Biography

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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The Bill Gates that most people are familiar with is the socially awkward nerd who strong-armed his way into becoming the head of the largest software company in the world.

In reality, Gates is a smooth operator who, despite his uncombed hair, baby face and disheveled appearance, knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way. He successfully transitioned from cocky college dropout to brass-knuckle negotiator to seasoned captain of industry, eventually becoming the richest man in the world and a model philanthropist.

"This is a guy who really morphed over time," says Mary Jo Foley, a longtime Microsoft watcher and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. "When I look at other CEOs -- guys like [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison -- they haven't changed much, but Gates has really changed. I still think he's a hard-charging businessman, though -- I don't think he's gone soft."

Here's a look at some of the tricky transitions that Gates successfully navigated over the course of his career. Each of these changes were necessary and probably inevitable for any ambitious entrepreneur. It's a measure of Gates' business acumen that he successfully pulled these off where many lesser entrepreneurs have failed.

Transition One: Coder to Negotiator

If you told the 20-year-old Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, that he actually pulled off his grand plan he probably wouldn't be surprised. And that's part of his charm.

Back in 1980, when Gates was barely old enough to rent a car, he walked into a room filled with IBM execs and sold them a product he didn't even have. IBM wanted to get into the computer business, and Bill Gates wanted to get into the software business. He didn't have any negotiating skills, but he landed a deal under which IBM licensed MS-DOS from Microsoft. It was a ridiculously advantageous arrangement since it gave Microsoft the freedom to license the operating system to any other computer maker -- which is what eventually fueled Microsoft's fantastic growth.

"He's not a rock star programmer, but he's always had a knack for seeing where the industry is going. He's not always right, but he's a visionary in terms of seeing how markets and industries evolve," Foley says.

Transition Two: Founder to Fortune 500 CEO

Many entrepreneurs are fully brilliant leaders of startups, but they crash and burn when those companies grew beyond the startup stage. There's little overlap between the skill sets involved in running a small startup and those required to steer a major corporation.

Gates is one of the few to pull off both feats with aplomb.

"His management style worked really well when they were a scrappy upstart. He brought in young smart guys like him. But he had to tone it down when Microsoft became a big company. A ruthless management style doesn't work as well with a company of 80,000 people," says Foley.

Gates matured simultaneously with the company. He learned to tuck his shirt in, comb his hair, and make polite cocktail conversation.

"When I was a summer intern at Microsoft in grad school in 1989, he hosted the summer MBA interns to a very nice backyard barbecue at his old house, before he got married. He worked the crowd expertly, despite his reputation for being ill-at-ease with people, and gave everyone their chance to ask him a question or two," says Ted Weinstein, a San Francisco-based literary agent.

Transition Three: Monopolist to Savvy Defendant

His visions didn't help when the feds came knocking in the late 1990s for one of the longest, most drawn-out antitrust cases in U.S. history. In what has been famously characterized as the 1998 "Rainman" deposition, Gates rocked back and forth in his chair, at times snapping at prosecuting attorney David Boies and generally behaving like a temperamental child. The thing is, it worked. Gates didn't give an inch. And roughly 10 years later, even Boies concedes that Gates' performance was spot on, both in the deposition and on the stand in court.

"He was the most potentially effective witness," Boies says. "Nobody knew the stuff as well as he did, and nobody had the passion for it that he did. I definitely would have called him to the stand ... He's a very smart guy."

Gates wasn't the most sympathetic witness, though, and in many ways it was a risk to let him testify.

"If you're going toe to toe with the government, and the message you want to send is, 'Come hell or high water, we're fighting this until the end,' then you do exactly what [Gates] did," says Barbara Sicalides, an antitrust attorney with Pepper Hamilton. "But in any case where you have a client the size of Microsoft, and where you have inflammatory documents, it's the sort of situation where you'd want to think twice about fighting until the bitter end ... For the most part, I think Microsoft's lawyers were exactly right."

Transition Four: Captain of Industry to 'Venture Philanthropist'

It was a peculiar situation, though, when, in his early 40s, Gates found himself one of the richest men in the world and had to start thinking about giving away his money, while he was still hungry to earn more. His initial attempts at philanthropy did not go over well.

The Gates Library Foundation, founded in 1997, was widely criticized for being too modest (he initially funded it with $200 million) and for being self-serving. And indeed it was -- the mission of the foundation was to provide libraries in low-income communities with internet access and computers. While a worthy cause, Microsoft was also a beneficiary of the foundation's work.

"I think he started the library effort because it was related to things he knew about," says Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. "That's pretty typical. I think it was successful, but it was limited compared to the things he's involved with now."

It didn't take long until philanthropy became Gates' full-time occupation. In 1999 Gates folded his various charitable efforts into one organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and in 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO to spend more time on philanthropy.

"He seemed to be really interested in philanthropy from the beginning," says Foley. "He's the kind of guy who doesn't care what other people think of him, so I don't think he was bowing to pressure."

The net effect is that he has shaken up the philanthropy world. In earlier decades, industry titans often gave locally and more or less felt that their work was done at that point. Bill Gates -- and other tech-made billionaires -- have changed the landscape.

"We're seeing a growing emphasis on bringing bottom-line efficiency to venture philanthropy," says Palmer. "It's fairly dramatic -- he's trying to change the face of global philanthropy, but it started in a fairly parochial way."

AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State'

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:15pm EDT by Threat Level

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The whistleblower at the heart of a lawsuit against AT&T for illegal eavesdropping says Congress is set to stage a 'coup against the Constitution' as it nears passage of a new spying bill. Former AT&T technician Mark Klein provided internal company documents that he claims show that AT&T spied on the internet inside the United States on behalf of the NSA.

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Pimp My Smart — And Put 13 People in It

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:04pm EDT by Autopia

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It was only a matter of time before someone made an outlandish body kit for the Smart ForTwo and someone else decided to see how many people you can cram into one.

Declaring Whales Safe, Navy Presses On With Sonar Training

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 11:30am EDT by Associated Press

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The Navy completes an environmental impact report and says it is satisfied that the safeguards are in place for protecting marine mammals while the fleet conducts sonar exercises in Hawaiian waters.

New Rules Could Mean Hundreds of New Domains

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

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A relaxation of rules by the internet's oversight agency means that .com and .net may soon be joined by a slew of new domain names. What's behind it? Like most things, money.

So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Dylan Tweney

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He's a merciless competitor, a shameless "fan" of other people's ideas and an unapologetic monopolist. And because of all that, Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else.

As Gates prepares to retire from full-time work at Microsoft July 1, after 33 years of doing everything from writing code to defending his company's business practices in court, many people are saying 'good riddance' to the man most techies loved to hate. What the critics won't acknowledge is that it was Gates' most obnoxious qualities that made it possible for the tech industry to grow as large as it has.

"In his prime, Gates combined the monomania of the compulsive software programmer with the competitiveness of Attila the Hun," said Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter and The Big Switch.

And that was a good thing. "A lot of people see Microsoft as the enemy of openness and innovation, but it's worth remembering that it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive creativity in both hardware and software and sped the adoption of computers both at home and at work," Carr said.

In fact, the monopoly that Microsoft once had on computer operating systems was essential to the development of the computer industry, enforcing a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom.

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The Microsoft monopoly was one part luck, one part business acumen. The lucky part: When IBM asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for its new personal computer in 1980, Gates got the contract, even though he didn't have an OS to sell.

No problem. Gates immediately bought the rights to another operating system, QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold to IBM.

The savvy part: Gates' fledgling company was able to retain rights to the new operating system, securing Microsoft's place at the hub of the PC industry. Later, Gates leveraged that monopoly into such complete dominance of the PC industry that Microsoft was able to collect payments from PC manufacturers for every PC they sold -- even if those PCs didn't carry a Microsoft operating system.

That monopoly was bad for competitors who had arguably superior operating systems -- including, later, IBM's OS/2. And it was built in large part on appropriating the best ideas of other companies, from Gary Kildall's CP/M to Apple's Macintosh.

But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform.

Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another.

"Unlike oil, pharmaceutical or steel, monopolies are a necessary ingredient in the technology business," Forrester Research founder George Colony wrote in a recent blog post. "It's only when de facto standards like Windows or de jure standards like HTML become dominant that usefulness soars."

Contrast that to the state of the internet today. While the web abounds in standards, a frequent problem is that companies don't hew to them (and since 1996, Microsoft has been guilty of this behavior too). Having trouble syncing your Google calendar with your Yahoo calendar? Wondering why your camcorder won't upload to your new Macbook, your iPod can't share files with your friends' MP3 players and your mobile phone can't display webpages properly? All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.

Just imagine if the same chaos had reigned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardware manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM would still be battling it out with incompatible systems. And software like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and, yes, even Microsoft Office never would have achieved widespread success.

"[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution," said Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. "It's hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn't standardized the OS ... I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn't happened."

Of course, success breeds resentment, and Gates' aggressive business practices -- and less-than-polished personal style -- made him many enemies.

"The problem is when you're the biggest sequoia in the woods, everyone wants to cut you down," said Paul Santinelli, a general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.

Gates didn't help matters by overreaching once his company's monopoly was firmly established.

"Gates became kind of a Godfather figure in the industry, demanding tributes from his partners and whacking those who threatened his power," Carr said. "So Microsoft deserves both praise for stimulating innovation and criticism for stifling it."

And then there was the problem that many of Microsoft's products simply didn't work that well. Indeed, as the chorus of complaints about Windows Vista grows louder day by day, it could be said that Gates is leaving Microsoft at exactly the right time, before the company's long decline sullies his reputation.

"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.

But while technologists may curse Gates' aggressiveness and the buggyness of Microsoft software, they should also raise a glass to toast him as he departs the computer business.

"He didn't have the zest of a Philippe Kahn, or the elegance of a Steve Jobs, or the stage presence of a Larry Ellison. But the guy revolutionized the PC industry, and that's what people need to remember," said Santinelli.

The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:15am EDT by Gadget Lab

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Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' is a clever hack that uses a flashgun, a modified 35mm camera and a special sensor to project secret images onto other people's photos. Wired.com's Gadget Lab scored an exclusive interview with von Bismarck, with photos of his gear.

Review: Wii 'Guitar Hero' Controller Makes You a Rawk God -- Almost

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Gadget Lab

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The Nyko Frontman is a Telecaster-style wireless Guitar Hero controller for the Nintendo Wii. It's a bit cheaper than the standard Les Paul model, and has a slightly different feel.

June 27, 1898: Down to the Sea in Ships, and Then Some

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1898: Joshua Slocum completes a solo voyage lasting nearly three years, becoming the first sailor to circumnavigate alone.

Slocum, born within sight of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy in 1844, ran away from home at 14 and signed on a fishing schooner as cabin boy to begin a lifetime at sea. He later crossed the Atlantic and became an ordinary seaman on the Tangier, a British merchantman. By 18, he had received his papers from the Board of Trade qualifying him as a second mate.

Landing in California, Slocum received his first command there and spent 13 years sailing out of San Francisco, taking square-rigged ships to Japan, China, Australia and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas of present-day Indonesia), as well as engaging in the coast-wise lumber trade.

Several ships, two wives and two sons later -- his first wife died in Argentina -- Joshua Slocum found himself back on the East Coast, in possession of a rotting old oyster sloop called the Spray. He would make history with this boat.

He spent the next few years restoring the Spray and rigging her for solo sailing. In 1895, at age 51, Slocum set out to be the first sailor ever to make a solo circumnavigation. The 37-foot Spray left Boston in April 1895 with her original sloop rig, but difficulties in the Strait of Magellan would cause Slocum to re-rig her as a yawl for the remainder of the voyage.

One peculiarity of Slocum's sailing was his decision to eschew the chronometer -- in favor of using a sextant and the ancient method of dead reckoning -- for fixing his longitudinal position at sea.

It was an eventful passage. Chased by pirates, feted by island kings and almost drowned a couple of times in storms, Slocum sailed 46,000 miles, staying for weeks and sometimes months at various stops along the way. His longest time at sea without making landfall was 72 days in the Pacific.

In addition to his seafaring skill, Slocum was an accomplished writer. His account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, is considered a classic of adventure literature. He begins his story thus:

I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The 12 o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail.

A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood to seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier of East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing her folds clear.

A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood.

Kind of makes you want to dump your stupid computer and run off to sea, doesn't it?

Sailing Alone earned Slocum a lot of money, enabling him to buy his first home on land -- though characteristically offshore -- in Martha's Vineyard in 1902.

Although sales of the book remained brisk during the first several years of the 20th century, they were waning by 1908. Slocum was suddenly hurting for money and decided to sail south this time, to the Orinoco River in Venezuela, with the idea of gathering material for another book. Luck was not with him on this voyage, however, and the Spray, while still seaworthy, was not what she had been a decade earlier.

Slocum set sail for the West Indies in November 1909 and was never heard from again. He wasn't declared officially dead until 1924.

A World War II Liberty ship, SS Joshua Slocum, was named for the doughty mariner.

Source: Various

ICANN and IANA Sites Hacked, Redirected

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level

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A Turkish hacking group calling itself NetDevilz on Friday temporarily took control of the websites of two of the world's leading internet regulatory bodies, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Ambitious California Emissions Plan Could Boost Economy, Chart National Policy

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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California's blueprint for slashing greenhouse-gas emissions could transform the world's seventh-largest economy -- and be a model for a nationwide plan in 2009.

The state presented its plan Thursday morning to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by about 30 percent by 2020. Based on legislation passed in 2006, the state is proposing a slate of changes including a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, a requirement that renewable sources power one-third of the state's grid, and taxes on gas-guzzling cars. The state's approach could become a model for the nation, if climate-change legislation of some sort gets passed by Congress and is signed by the next president in 2009 -- as is widely expected.

The state anticipates that implementing the plan will not only attack climate change, but also provide a net benefit to the California economy.

"Setting California ahead of the curve on global warming will give our state a competitive advantage," said Mary Nichols, chair of the Air Resources Board.

That conclusion flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the costs of combating climate change will be high, perhaps several percent of a country's total economic output. That said, most of the debate over the costs of climate change and mitigation has been until now slightly more sophisticated than back-of-the-napkin calculations.

California's Air Resources Board, on the other hand, undertook a detailed, near-term look at the state's infrastructure to decide exactly how to get emissions cuts without economic pain. It was required to do so by the groundbreaking AB32, the "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006," signed into law in September of that year.

If California's numbers hold up to scrutiny, it could be a major boost for the proponents of fighting climate change.

"The key thing with the AB32 scoping plan is that it really helps California create green jobs, green dollars and a clean environment," said Spencer Quong, a Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.

Quong also noted that consumers stand to economically benefit. The state estimates that car owners will save about $30 per month if all the plan's car regulations are deemed legal.

One intriguing way that California made the numbers look prettier was to include the health benefits of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cutting down emissions could save over 300 lives and up to $2.4 billion dollars, ARB staffer Edie Chang said. The savings would come mostly from decreasing asthma and lost-work days.

Despite the overall triumphant tone that colored the unveiling of the long-awaited plan, there are some areas where environmentalists, green-tech types and old-line industries continue to disagree.

As with national legislation battles, the issue of emission permits is looming large. In a cap-and-trade system, the government sells or gives away permits to discharge a certain amount of CO2 into the air. As you might expect, utilities and industry want to get these permits for free, while most public advocates and environmentalists want the state to sell the permits, then use the proceeds for green-tech investment or taxpayer refund.

"We think that auctioning is a key element of a plan" that maximizes the public interest, said Chris Busch, another Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.

Meanwhile the industry countered that they would need the permits given to them so that they could make the necessary changes to their businesses to keep costs for consumers low.

"Auction revenues, which are a very scary thing for us ... should be left 100 percent in the hands of those utilities," Bruce McLaughlin, representing the California Municipal Utility Association, told the board.

The issue is unlikely to go away, but most seem to expect somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of the permits to eventually be auctioned.

That number could be the standard that John McCain or Barack Obama looks to when he signs a bill that puts a price on carbon, as either is expected to do if elected.

In that way, the nitty-gritty details of a board meeting in Sacramento could end up having a major impact on the entire globe.

"We believe that this scoping plan is going to be an important milestone, an important framework for other states," said Nichols, the board chair.

Get to Usenet Even if Your ISP Blocks You

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 8:20pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Internet Service Providers have started to censor Usenet by blocking it completely and now you are left out of your favorite newsgroups. Don't panic, there are ways to tunnel through the information embargo and get back to flaming discussion boards and citing Godwin's Law in no time.

Mash Your Pics Onto a Map: Get Started With Flickr's API

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:45pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Flickr's dedicated community and slick user interface aren't the only reasons the photo-sharing has earned major kudos from the Web 2.0 set. It's also because its flexible API makes it easy to build simple mashups in a variety of programming languages. Webmonkey shows you how to mash your favorite photos onto a map using a few lines of Python code.

Yahoo Shakes Up Management Amid Shareholder Unrest

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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For the third time in 19 months, Yahoo redraws its management chart as it tries to snap out of a financial malaise that has ravaged its stock price, jeopardized its independence and demoralized employees.

ICANN Has New Domains

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers votes in Paris to permit the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Internet domain names.

Review: Charming 'Wall-E' Sweeps Up Trash, Hearts

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:30pm EDT by Underwire

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Pixar's latest adorable animated creation longs for love on a lonely planet. When a laser-wielding ladybot interrupts his garbage-compacting task, he's off on a sci-fi adventure in an attempt to save the world.

Senate Committee Approving AM-FM Royalty Bill

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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A House subcommittee on Thursday approved legislation requiring AM-FM radio broadcasters to pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Broadcasters decried the proposal, and have invoked the xenophobia card, saying as much as $2.4 billion a year in royalties would go to "foreign-based" record companies. The music industry labeled the broadcasters as pirates and the proposal moves to the House Judiciary Committee.

Mars Soil Appears 'Very Friendly' to Life

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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A mission scientist reports that, based on the first of Phoenix lander's soil samples, there is "nothing about [Martian soil] that would preclude life."

Video: Bio House Keeps You Younger, Say Designers

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:15pm EDT by Video Department

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Arakawa and Madeline Gins say a $2 million house they designed "staves off death." It features uneven floors, striking colors and no doors, which the artists say boosts the immune system.

Review: Walkman Phone Nails Form, Not Function

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Sony Ericsson's new W350 Walkman phone is indisputably attractive but proves hard to get along with -- kind of like your high school crush.

Poll: Should McCain Learn To Use A Computer?

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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John McCain admits that he's computer illiterate. Does it matter that the Republican presidential candidate is clueless when it comes to technology? Take our poll.

Best Robot Love Stories, From Wall-E to Weird Science

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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When cute trash compactor Wall-E first lays eyes on Eve, a flying, laser-gun-equipped fembot, it's binary love at first pixel.

Although Pixar Animation Studios' Wall-E takes inspiration from classic sci-fi films, the G-rated galactic adventure that hits theaters Friday is, at heart, an old-fashioned love story. It's the latest roboromance in a long line of on-screen infatuation involving at least one automated being.

From Star Wars' classic brotherly droid love between R2-D2 and C-3PO to the computer-generated babe in Weird Science, here are some of the best and -- as with the cybersex hostage in Demon Seed -- worst roborelationships ever to hit the screen.

Which unforgettable android affair did we leave out? Submit your faves in the comments below.

Left: Wall-E

Love-struck Wall-E does his best to wow Eve with his treasure-trove of relics from humanity's reign on Earth -- a Rubik's Cube, light bulbs and even a spork. Though separated by seven centuries of technological advances, Wall-E and Eve find common ground in the quest to save humanity. Sort of like HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with none of the killer instincts.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 4/5: This kid-friendly, sugary-sweet romance should warm even the coldest of metal hearts.

The Stepford Wives

When Joanna Eberhart (played by Katharine Ross) moves to Stepford, Connecticut, she discovers a sinister secret about the perfectly coiffed, submissive female residents of the sleepy suburban town: They're all high-tech bots. In this 1975 thriller, the men of Stepford -- hoping to quell the early strains of feminism -- have all killed and replaced their wives with engineered robot replicas.

Joanna's discovery comes just a moment too late, as she soon falls victim to the same fate at the hands of her husband. The film was updated in 2004 with a version starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, but the original won a spot on our list for the creepy atmosphere and genuinely disturbing premise at the heart of the story.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 1/5: As cool as the idea of bioengineered human replicas is, this home-wrecking thriller bottoms out in the creepy factor for being too Hans Reiser-y.

I.K.U.

This Japanese surrealist sci-fi flick follows Reiko, a shape-shifting sexbot whose job entails racking up as many intimate experiences as possible. Her inner circuitry records each one-night stand, and a large corporation sells the virtual-reality romps from vending machines.

It's not long before a rival company seeks to destroy Reiko's popular wares, but before that happens, viewers are treated to eyefuls of kinky, medium-core rolls in the hay ... and in spider webs ... and even in fish tanks.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: A shape-shifting fembot whose entire existence revolves around collecting "data" on orgasms? This fantasy pleasurebot rates high for having a one-track program compatible with any operating system.

Weird Science

When Gary (played by Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) use their computers to design the perfect woman, they never expect her to be more than an online fantasy. But thanks to an electrical storm, a Barbie doll and headgear fashioned out of bras, Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) is suddenly brought to life in their bedroom.

Breakfast Club director John Hughes' 1985 nerd classic redefined the ideal geek girlfriend -- Einstein's IQ, a rock 'n' roll attitude and the ability to transform pesky older siblings into amphibian hybrids and materialize sports cars out of thin air.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 4.5/5: Even though Gary and Wyatt never actually get home-schooled in the birds and the bees, they receive high marks on our scale for scoring priceless life lessons. And, of course, the shower scene.

Cherry 2000

In this 1988 vision of a post-apocalyptic future, sex machines are all the rage, and lovebot Cherry 2000 (played by Pamela Gidley) is in high demand.

Unfortunately, a romantic interlude too close to a malfunctioning dishwasher causes a model owned by wealthy businessman Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) to short out. Sam must travel into an intrepid no-man's land of outlaws to retrieve a replacement for his beloved android.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 2/5: This movie gets low marks since all that stood in the way of Sam's "happily ever after" with his sex droid was blatant violation of the most basic rule electronics -- avoiding contact with water.

Electric Dreams

When San Francisco architect Miles Harding (played by Lenny von Dohlen purchases a personal supercomputer called Edgar to help him with a project, he takes home more than he bargained for.

After a data overload and a spilled bottle of champagne bring the computer to life, the newly animated device becomes increasingly needy. As Harding ignores the feelings of his machine and pursues his cute next-door neighbor, Edgar (voiced by Harold and Maude's Bud Cort) grows more and more resentful, forming a bizarre love triangle with a disastrous end.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 2/5: All Edgar wanted was some love and attention. If Miles, or "Moles," would have worked on the relationship, he could have avoided the whole "pesky attempts on his life" fiasco.

Metropolis

In Fritz Lang's 1927 epic silent drama, Earth is a paradise for the upper class of "thinkers," and hell for the working class. After Freder (played by Gustav Fröhlich), the upper-crust son of the city leader, falls for charismatic lower-class Maria (played by Brigitte Helm), he pursues her relentlessly only to discover that she's a robot, fabricated by a mad scientist intent on chaos.

Luckily, the real Maria had been kidnapped, and eventually the two are reunited, helping resolve the inequities and injustice of the futuristic city of Metropolis.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 3/5: Although Maria didn't want a bot body double, it served as a great stand-in when an angry mob was hot on her trail. So even though there was technically no android affair, Maria's roboreplica did allow for an emotional reunion with her human counterpart's love interest.

Blade Runner

Bounty hunter Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) falls hard for a genetically engineered clone called Rachel in Ridley Scott's 1982 cyberpunk thriller. Although Deckard's primary mission is to assassinate rogue "replicants," he finds the charms of an experimental model (Sean Young) difficult to resist.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: Since all signs indicate that replicant assassin Deckard was likely a clone, too, Blade Runner gets points for cyborg-on-cyborg romance.

Star Wars

George Lucas' iconic 1977 space opera introduces us to one of the best examples of brotherly love ever to hit the silver screen -- the comically codependent relationship between R2-D2 and C-3PO. The two droids are rarely apart, and help their owner, Luke Skywalker, with repairs, statistical information and etiquette (when they're not bickering like a couple that's been married for years).

RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: R2-D2 and C-3PO positively sparkle as they bring the original and most endearing bot "bromance" to the silver screen.

Saturn 3

Original Charlie's Angels sex symbol Farrah Fawcett plays Alex, the object of an android's affection, in this 1980 sci-fi film about a pair of scientists who have left an overpopulated Earth to live on one of Saturn's moons.

After a deranged psychopath masquerading as a technocrat arrives at their colony with designs to build a super-intelligent, 8-foot-tall robot, things quickly spiral out of control. Once completed, Hector the robot begins a terrorized pursuit of Alex and will stop at nothing -- or no one -- to win her over.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 1/5: Hector's supposed to be a highly advanced automaton, but really, he just kills people. He loses major points for not being able to deduce that Alex is just not that into him.

Demon Seed

Artificial-intelligence system Proteus IV has a unique molecular makeup that's equal parts microchips, RNA and psychopath psyche. After the system gains self-awareness, it becomes hell-bent on spreading its cyberseed, and imprisons unlucky Susan (played by Julie Christie) in order to do so.

This tale of forced laboratory love begets one of the most unsettling images of an infant with an unfortunate gene pool since the demonic spawn in It's Alive.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 2/5: As cool as superadvanced artificial intelligence is, Demon Seed rates low on our scale for the whole hostage-and-rape story line.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The fifth and sixth seasons of TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured an unusual cast addition: a roboreplica version of Buffy Summers, the vampire-slaying teen created by geek maestro Joss Whedon.

Originally created at the request of bad-boy vampire Spike for use as a sex slave, the Buffybot gynoid is later put to use as a stand-in for the real Summers in battle and after her death.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 4/5: Billy Idol look-alike vampire Spike's got it bad for Buffy, and since he ultimately uses her robotwin for good, we rank this bot-nightwalker union high on our scale.

Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar's chrome toasters show no love for humans, but the skinjob Cylons are a pack of intergalactic orgasmatrons.

Their affinity for doing the robonasty with humans generated a lot of heat when the Sci Fi Channel's re-imagined series got off the ground, and Cylon sexpot Number Six (played by Tricia Helfer) makes such a strong physical and emotional connection with Gaius Baltar (James Callis) that the doctor just can't get her out of his head.

RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: Revelations about secret Cylons working (and boinking) among the colonists show just how natural human-skinjob love can be. Bonus points for what's been called the "glowing spines of Cylon Lurrrrrve."

Rule the Blogosphere in 5 Easy Steps

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Maybe you're new to blogging. Or maybe you've been around a while and you just want to give your site a boost. Either way, there's no excuse for going unnoticed. Here are Webmonkey's tips for increasing your blog's visibility, professionalism and all-around awesomeness.

Broadcasters Playing Race Card of Sorts in AM-FM Royalty Flap

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 7:15pm EDT by Threat Level

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The NAB suspiciously leaves off the only American-based major label on its ad concerning an upcoming congressional vote on whether U.S.-based AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels.

Netroots Nation Organizer Says McCain Welcome to Attend

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by Threat Level

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Gina Cooper, executive director of the massive blogger convention Netroots Nation (formerly known as YearlyKos,) discusses this year's gathering in Austin, Texas with Wired.com. John McCain is invited, but Cooper says she wonders whether he knows whether they even exist.

Hands-On: User-Gen Xbox Games Are Rough But Promising

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 5:40pm EDT by Game|Life

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Microsoft's XNA Creators Club makes it simple for indie developers to craft and distribute Xbox 360 titles. Most of the videogames are only half-baked, but the service shows definite promise.

Prince Sues to Destroy All Copies of Tribute Album

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Listening Post

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A Norwegian record label's plan to give away 5,000 copies of a Prince tribute compilation to honor the star's 50th birthday backfires. Prince throws a royal conniption fit, demanding that all copies be destroyed.

Microsoft Delivers Long-Awaited Mac Open XML Converters

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Microsoft's Open XML format is now compatible with older Mac versions of its Office suite. The updates finally put the ISO-ratified file format in the hands of everyone.

FCC Free Wireless Equals Censorship Technology Bonanza

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by Threat Level

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The Federal Communications Commission's proposal to open up part of the public airwaves to provide free wireless internet requires that content providers filter out pornography and "any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents."

Stoners, Like, Totally Solve Nation's Air Travel Woes

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:53pm EDT by Autopia

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Marijuana advocates in Denver say air travel would be less stressful -- and passengers less likely to get unruly -- if airports installed marijuana lounges. If people can get hammered before flights, they argue, why can't they get stoned?

All-Seeing Car Reads Road Signs For You

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Autopia

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General Motors builds a car that reads signs and warns drivers when they're straying into another lane, giving people yet another reason not to focus on the task at hand.

Scientists: It Once Rained on Mars

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 11:46am EDT by Wired Science

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Precipitation once fell on Martian soil, according to a new geochemical analysis, although the forecast probably permanently changed several billion years ago.

Interactive Advertising's Coming Out Party

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 11:45am EDT by James P. Othmer, Portfolio.com

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Consider this:

A viral online video phenomenon won a Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival that was usually reserved for only the best in traditional TV advertising.

A cyber campaign about a supposedly dying medium—yes, ironically, television—won another Grand Prix.

And a groundbreaking Japanese online effort for a clothing retailer won the most coveted creative prize of all, the Titanium Grand Prix, and had everyone gushing about the unlimited future of interactive branding.

Whatever you call it—online, interactive, viral, 360, or cyber—a new advertising paradigm has finally come of age after years of empty hype and broken promises.

"TV used to be the sun and all other mediums were merely satellites around it," said David Lubars, chief creative officer at BBDO New York, which was named the agency of the year. But this year's festival represented the first true global validation of the power of interactive work, he added.

"TV is still the only place where you can get 70 million eyeballs on an ad," Lubars said, "but now, if your message is engaging enough, you can get people to voluntarily spend 10, 20, 30 minutes, totally engaged with a brand."

Take the Titanium Grand Prix, which went to the 4-year-old production boutique Projector Tokyo for the breadth, depth, and refreshing level of consumer engagement of its work for the Uniqlo clothing retailer.

Projector's creative director, Koichiro Tanaka, said the challenge was to create a relevant, portable experience. The result combines user-generated media and the Uniqlo website with a nonstop fusion of dance, sound, and viral video. It's available via product catalogs, screensavers, ringtone downloads, and customizable T-shirts. There isn't a single 30-second TV spot to be found.

(The fun starts here.)

Other notable interactive Grand Prix winners include 42 Entertainment's "Year Zero" viral campaign for Trent Reznor and a new Nine Inch Nails album, as well as T.A.G. and McCann Worldgroup's imaginative "Believe" campaign for Halo 3.

But the Uniqlo work was seen as a seminal, barrier-breaking moment. While the Nine Inch Nails and Xbox work benefited from an already rabid audience eager to glean clues about a favorite artist or game, Uniqlo managed to be compelling and immersive in the relatively unsexy business of clothing retailing. With retailers, expectations are low and websites often offer little more than online catalogs.

Entertainment and social-responsibility advertisers have had interactive hits, but Uniqlo is among the first to show that an interactive effort can be breathtakingly creative, engaging, viral—and, most importantly, still increase sales.

"The industry is always talking about viral," said Titanium jury panelist Jean-Remy von Matt, founder and member of the board. "The Uniqlo work is viral-branded utility. It's so simple, smart, and beautiful. All over the world people have it on their desktops, giving them a brand presence in countries where their products don't even exist."

Mark Tutssel, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett Worldwide and jury judge of the Titanium and Integrated Lions, said that more than the film award, the Titanium Grand Prix has become the most prestigious honor in the industry.

"It's a glimpse into the future of what we do," Tutssel said. It is, he added, "the most prestigious [award] and the new standard for what everyone should work for."

The compelling nature of interactivity was also apparent in the august Film Lion Grand Prix for the best TV ad. Fallon London won for its "Gorilla" short, which it created for Cadbury Dairy Milk, a British chocolate bar.

Originally intended for the British market only, the film, which features a gorilla playing a drum solo while listening to the Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight, spread virally on the internet. Even better, it generated thousands of consumer-produced remixes. Total views on viral-video platforms by fully engaged audience members: close to 10 million.

The fact that the Film Lion went to a viral-video hit that became interactive, and that many awarded campaigns crossed or defied categorization, says much about the transitional state of the industry and gives Cannes Festival leaders something to ponder for next year's awards.

But, because Cannes is one of the few for-profit advertising-awards shows and the cost of entering work is more than $1,000 (there were 28,000 entries this year), don't expect fewer categories or awards at the 2009 festival. Just more award-winning work that transcends traditional labels.

More coverage of the Cannes International Advertising Festival and advertising in general can be found here on Portfolio.com.

T-Mobile Rolls Out Broadband/Landline Service

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:08am EDT by Associated Press

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T-Mobile USA is launching a nationwide service that lets customers place unlimited domestic calls with their landline phones over a broadband connection. The service is targeted at people who are reluctant abandon their landline completely in favor of wireless.

Pending FISA Spy Bill Redefines WMDs

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:30am EDT by Danger Room

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The new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act update (the one that lets telecom companies skate for snooping on your phone calls and e-mails) includes a new definition for "weapons of mass destruction." The definition is a lot more broad -- and vague -- than the atomic-bomb-scale weapons originally described by the United Nations.

Lore Sjöberg's Alt Text: Earth to Aliens -- We're a Bunch of Dorks

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lore Sjöberg

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Humans have been attempting to send messages to the stars since ... I'm going to say the early '70s. I mean, theoretically some caveman could have yelled, "Hey! Stars! You suck!" a hundred thousand years ago, but he was an idiot.

But of all the messages sent into space, which ones are good? Which ones conform to quality standards? That's what I'm here to tell you.

Alt Text Podcast
Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

The Pioneer Plaques
These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.

Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we're living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C
The Voyager Record
I love that we sent an LP. It's so delightfully retro! I expect alien life forms to discover it and say, "Clearly, this is the work of a truly groovy civilization. We do not know what to expect when we visit their planet, but we should prepare ourselves for an extremely mellow experience." In actuality, the funkiest track on the album is "Johnny B. Goode," which I think is a poor choice. I mean, I'm not sure how one carries a guitar in a gunnysack, and I was born on this planet.
Grade: B
The Arecibo Image
This is actually a short binary message beamed into space. When decoded, it creates an image that looks remarkably similar to an Atari 2600 videogame. The apparent object of the game is to maneuver your guy through the cavern and up the waterfall, bypass the attacking spacecraft and grab a delicious slice of cake while avoiding the evil letter M. I'd play that game.

It should be noted that the human depicted here is also naked, but he's a pixel guy so it's fine. We don't want aliens to know we have genitals, but it's OK if they mistake us for table lamps.
Grade: A
The Teenage Message
This was beamed into space in 2001. It starts with some radio-transmission Doppler-tuning boring-boring-boring thing, segues into theremin music -- THEREMIN MUSIC -- and finally ends with some more binary images, including the logo of the Teenage Message program itself. So lame.

It's called the Teenage Message because it was put together by Russian teenagers. I think that will be apparent to anyone who receives it. "Blaxnorvag! What is this tedious message from another world?" "I don't know, Jerry, but it sounds like something put together by Russian teenagers."
Grade: D
Television Signals
A common science fiction trope involves aliens intercepting our television shows and being so impressed that they use it as a basis for their entire civilization. That's pretty egotistical. Even human beings don't base their entire lives on one long-defunct television show. Well, except for Firefly fans.

Presumably aliens who can detect our faint signals can get any channel on any planet, and I hear Canopus has some pretty compelling public-access shows. Still, we should use this to our advantage. We need to immediately produce a television show about benevolent aliens who come to Earth and give human beings candy and hugs and play Super Smash Brothers Brawl with them, but don't use Pit because he's cheap.
Grade: C-

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a futurist, a futurologist and a futilitarian.

June 25, 1867: Barbed Wire -- the Beta Version

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1867: Lucien B. Smith patents barbed wire, an artificial "thorn hedge." It's an idea whose time clearly has come, but not quite in this form.
Smith's design called for spools of four short, sharp metal spikes at right angles. The spools would revolve loosely and be set every 2 to 3 feet along the fence wire.

William D. Hunt patented a similar design that year, and Michael D. Kelly did so the next. A patent battle was sure to follow, but none of these guys would win.

The great need was the Great Plains. As American settlement moved West in earnest, the spaces to enclose got bigger, while nearby materials for building fences -- wood and stones -- got scarcer. Growing hedgerows took time ... and water, also scarce. Shipping in materials for fencing got more expensive the farther you got from their source.

The fencing wire fence available at the time was brittle, and cattle could rub against the smooth wire with impunity until it broke or the fence posts loosened. Then the critters could wander into your kitchen garden, your cash crops, your neighbor's ranch or the wide open spaces where the deer and the antelope roamed.

Joseph F. Glidden got his idea for barbed wire when he saw Henry M. Rose's invention at a county fair: boards with sharp nails hanging from a smooth-wire fence. Glidden thought the board unnecessary and expensive: Why not put the barbs directly in the wire?

He rigged the crank of household coffee-bean grinder -- his wife's suggestion, the legend goes -- to twist the wire into loops that were then clipped off into sharp points. Irritating.

Glidden patented his version in 1874, then sold half his patent rights to hardware merchant Isaac Ellwood for $265 ($4,500 in today's money). Together they formed the Barb Fence Co. and started making and selling the stuff.

Soon there were 570 different patents for different types of wire, twists and barbs. A three-year legal battle ensued, but Glidden triumphed over all. By the time of his death in 1906, he was one of America's richest men.

Some people objected to the "devil's rope" as cruel to livestock, and they formed anti-barbed-wire associations. They initially got legislation passed in some states to ban barbed wire or at least hold fencers responsible for any damages they caused. But barbed wire caught on, as it were, because it was more effective and less expensive than other cattle fences. By the early 1880s, U.S. manufacturers were turning out half a million miles of barbed wire every year.

Railroads used prodigious amounts of the stuff to protect their rights-of-way from livestock and livestock from their locomotives. Ranchers put up more thousands of miles on their own lands and sometimes, perhaps not legally, on public lands.

Herding livestock across the range to a distant market was no longer practical, and the era of cattle drives came to an end. Barbed wire fenced off much of the prairie, and the deer and the antelope roamed no more.

Barbed wire, of course, also works to deter humans and soon found uses protecting land and buildings against trespassers and burglars, and battlefield turf against enemy troops. British military manuals were already recommending its use by 1888, and it played a key role in the Spanish-American War, the Boer Wars in South Africa, and of course the extended trench warfare of World War I.

Source: Various

Clive Thompson on How Email Bots Can Deal With Your Overstuffed Inbox

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

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Suppose you need to reach me with an urgent email? Try hitting Send at precisely 10:47 am. Statistically speaking, that's when my most crucial messages arrive each day — and when I'm most likely to ping you back.

How do I know this? Because I've been using a new software app called Xobni to manage my horribly overstuffed inbox.

Among other cool tricks, Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. It identifies, for instance, who your most important contacts are, what time of day they typically send email, and how long it takes you to reply to one another. I discovered that the missives I care about most — from my wife, editors, and closest friends — tend to arrive in bursts during the mid-morning and late afternoon.

This is incredibly useful knowledge. These days, instead of leaving my email open all the time and jumping with Pavlovian slaver at each ding, I check in only during what I now know are my two "hot zones." I can work uninterrupted most of the day with the confidence that I'll be online when the on-fire messages arrive.

Artificial intelligence in the service of life-hacking: It's the future of email.

And God knows we need a better future for email, because the present is intolerable. This once-miraculous productivity tool has metastasized into one of the biggest timesucks in American life. Studies show that there are 77 billion corporate email messages sent every day, worldwide. By 2012, that number is expected to more than double. The Radicati Group calculates that we already spend nearly a fifth of our day dealing with these messages; imagine a few years down the road, when it takes up 40 percent of our time. "It's madness," says Merlin Mann, who runs 43Folders.com, a leading productivity blog. "We're all desperately trying to figure out how to cut stuff so we can get through the day, and it just gets harder and harder." (Mann advocates dealing with incoming messages immediately so your inbox is always empty. Me, I've got 12,802 messages in there right now.)

Why has email spun so badly out of control? Because it's asymmetric — incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.

For example, in one minute I can send an email to a thousand coworkers asking them to review a document. Let's say each recipient spends five seconds disgustedly discarding it. Boom: In just one minute, I've wasted 5,000 seconds — 1 hour, 23 minutes — of my organization's time. Equally insidious is the growing plague of semi-meaningful emails — friend requests, one-word replies from your boss. Email apps weren't designed to recognize such idiocies, which is why our inboxes become unruly messes, with important messages pushed offscreen and out of mind.

Thankfully, this has begun to change in the past year with the arrival of AI-equipped email monitors like Xobni. Another of my favorites is ClearContext, which identifies your most valued contacts — people you reply to quickly and frequently — and flags their incoming messages. It also endows you with superpowered sorting. If a work-related thread goes off the rails — like when colleagues hijack a project discussion to argue about Lost — you can zap it. From that point on, new messages in the thread are filtered out and deleted automatically.

For my money, though, the best part of these nü-email apps is more subtle. They give you insight into yourself — how and why you email at all.

After a few days of using these tools, I began to see that much of my supposedly "crucial" correspondence wasn't really all that urgent. I was wasting a lot of time on endless volleys that could have been dispatched with a quick phone call. (Helpfully, Xobni auto-extracts phone numbers from emails, making this a snap.) I've started typing less and dialing more.

A really good email app, in other words, encourages you to use email less. And that seems like the best solution of all.

Email clive@clivethompson.net at precisely 10:47 am EST.

FBI Arrests Six More in Citibank ATM Heists

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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Ten have been arrested so far, as the FBI engages in a cat-and-mouse game with New York-area fraudsters stealing millions in cash from Citibank ATMs. Citibank is still closed-mouthed about the computer intrusion that put an unknown number of customer PIN codes in the hands of a Russian cybercrime boss.

FBI Visits Leaker of Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:30pm EDT by Listening Post

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A blogger who goes by the name "Skwerl" says two "Mulder and Scully" types from the FBI questioned him in the lobby of his workplace about the nine songs he leaked from Guns N' Roses "Chinese Democracy" album, which fans have been anticipating for over 14 years. He says he's not worried, even though distributing an unreleased album is punishable by fines, jail time or both.

Genetic Testing Company Details Regulatory Defense Plan

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Science

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A high-profile genetic testing company reveals how they plan to stay in business after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from California's health department. Their argument? DNA is data.

By Open Sourcing Symbian, Nokia Kicks Off the Mobile Age

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney

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The mobile software age is here.

Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.

With that move, Symbian joins two other major platforms -- the Google-backed Android operating system and Apple's OS X iPhone -- that give programmers tools for creating and deploying software for smartphones.

The Symbian OS dominates the world market, with about 60 percent of the installed base among smartphones. According to Nokia, more than 200 million phones currently in use worldwide are running Symbian software. But Symbian trails in the United States, where Research in Motion, Palm, Windows Mobile -- and now the iPhone -- are the major players.

Nokia uses Symbian software across its range of mobile devices, primarily with the extremely popular S60 interface. Other handset companies also use some variety of the Symbian operating system, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo.

"Nokia could, if they found inside the corporation the resolve to do so, come out with the definitive open platform," said Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and CEO of Kiloboot. "They would have a platform of the type we haven't seen since the original Palm. When that was dominant, there were 16,000 applications available to install. The question is, can they find the corporate resolve?"

The prospect of thousands of mobile apps -- instead of the few dozen typically available through most wireless carriers -- is something new in the wireless world. And the 6 million iPhones sold to date show that mobile users like having open, unfettered access to web applications and online content.

In short, what matters to handsets now is not so much features, graphics chips and innovative interfaces -- though those do help. What's critical is an easy-to-use development platform that enables programmers to create a wide range of software quickly and easily, so that they can give consumers the content and the software they demand.

Android (whose first handsets are expected later this year) is clearly aimed at that goal. And while it's not open source, Apple has built a complete developer ecosystem around the iPhone, including everything from development tools to a store (which will open next month) for selling finished applications.

That's a significant shift from just a year ago, when programming tools for handsets were specialized and difficult to use, and carriers and handset manufacturers alike kept a tight rein on mobile application deployment.

To support the new open source project, Nokia is establishing the Symbian Foundation, a collective of hardware and software companies that have pledged to donate code and resources to Symbian's development. Phone makers Motorola and Sony Ericsson are on board, contributing software from their UIQ project, a touchscreen interface for Symbian. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has pledged support and is contributing its Symbian interface, MOAP(S). Other supporters include AT&T, Samsung and Texas Instruments.

"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, somewhat hyperbolically. But it is true that Nokia has, at one stroke, created an enormous open-source ecosystem, thanks to the huge number of Symbian phones already in use.

Nokia's move is a defensive one, of course. The Symbian Foundation plan is strikingly similar to Google's plan with the Open Handset Alliance, a collective of industry players who have come together to build and nurture the Android open source mobile operating system. On the carrier side, Google has NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board. On the hardware side, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have signed on to support Android.

Nokia says it is even taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the open source code. It will release components of its code under an open source license at first, with the full OS to follow "over the next two years." Right now, Nokia says, it intends to release Symbian under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

But not everyone is convinced that open source operating systems are the way to go.

"With the success of Apple's and RIM's models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. "We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm)."

And it's still too soon to tell which mobile platform will win out. Symbian has the advantage of a large installed base; Android will benefit from the pure innovation seen when developers take a "sky's the limit" approach to building a new OS. And Apple provides a complete, turnkey approach to software sales via its iTunes App Store, which may appeal to consumers.

One thing's for sure: The floodgates are opening, and the coming year will see an explosion of mobile software for a wide range of smartphones.

Additional reporting by Betsy Schiffman.

Ferrari Building a Smaller, Lighter, Quicker Enzo

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Ferrari believes smaller, lighter cars will help it cut fuel consumption by 40 percent and emissions by 25 percent, and its engineers are working on a 600-horsepower supercar that weights a scant 2,200 pounds. Look for it in 2010.

How to Throw a Perfect High-Five

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:40pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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The classic high-five says a lot of things: I'm awesome, you're awesome, the moment we just shared was awesome. But there's nothing more un-awesome than a botched high-five. So the next time you get rad with your buddies, make sure you have your technique down. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.

Get Started With REST

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by Webmonkey

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REST is another of those tech-savvy acronyms that make you cringe in fear. But REST assured, using it is easy. In fact, if you’ve ever filled a form out online, you are already familiar with REST. Make a few GET and POST requests using our REST tutorial.

Inside the MPAA's Understanding of Copyright Infringement

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 6:58pm EDT by Threat Level

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Two of the leading lawyers for the Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday that no actual transfer of copyrighted works is required to prove peer-to-peer infringement under the Copyright Act. "You don't have to prove actual distribution. You need to prove there's works in the share folder, and that is distribution," the MPAA lawyer said.

Cheating Fans Give Avril Lavigne a YouTube Lift

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 6:10pm EDT by Underwire

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A bogus campaign pushes the Canadian singer's video toward the top of the heap.

Six Crazy Concept Bikes You'll Never Ride

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab Blog

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Ultralight folding bikes, a bicycle made of cardboard, and a street cruiser with an infinitely variable transmission are just a few of the way-out concepts in this gallery of prototypes and high-end fringe bicycles.

Greener Jet Engine Could Reduce Aviation's Carbon Footprint

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Dave Demerjian

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One of the biggest names in aviation has developed a jet engine that is more efficient, less polluting and cheaper to use than almost everything else in the sky, and it could revolutionize an industry facing skyrocketing fuel prices and mounting pressure to clean up its act.

Pratt & Whitney has spent the better part of two decades developing the geared turbofan engine that burns 12 to 15 percent less fuel than other jet engines and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 1,500 tons per plane per year. It's being called one of the most exciting developments commercial aviation has seen in years, and it was a hot topic at the Eco-Aviation Conference, where the aviation industry spent two days charting the course to a greener future.

"It's technology like that geared turbofan that's going to drive fuel efficiency forward for this industry in the short and medium term," says Earnest Arvi of the Arvi Group. "Alternative fuels show great potential, but they're decades away."

Pratt & Whitney was just one of the heavy hitters at the conference, an unprecedented gathering that underscored the severity of the issues the industry faces. With airline passenger growth rates and aircraft emissions expected to double by 2020 and 2030, respectively, the pressure is on to address those problems quickly. The conference saw a lot of talk -- and a little green-washing -- about developing alternative fuels to replace jet fuel, easing airport pollution, and building greener aircraft to replace the industry's aging fleet. Nearly 1,000 planes flown by domestic carriers will be more than a quarter of a century old by 2015, and Boeing officials have said that more than 10,400 new planes will be needed in the coming decades and making them as green as possible will go a long way toward reducing commercial aviation's carbon footprint.

That's why Pratt & Whitney has so much to brag about with its geared turbofan, which significantly advances jet-engine technology. Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. Then it's blown through a turbine, generating thrust. It works, but it's inefficient because the fan is connected to the engine and turns at the same speed as the turbine. Fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

Pratt & Whitney solved that problem with a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and it spins at one-third the speed of the turbine, creating a quieter, more powerful engine the company says requires less fuel, emits less C02 and costs 30 percent less to maintain. Pratt & Whitney has been torture-testing the engines, and its engineers have simulated more than 40,000 takeoffs and landings.

The company's VP of Technology and Environment, Alan Epstein, says the engine will not only cut CO2 emissions, but will also reduce nitrogen-oxide emissions, noise and -- ultimately -- ownership costs. "For the next generation of single-aisle aircraft, there's no question that engine performance will be key," he says. "Both economically and environmentally, this engine will deliver significant benefits."

The industry seems to agree and is lining up behind the engine, which Pratt & Whitney expects to have in regular service by 2013. It's already slated for jets currently being developed by Mitsubishi and Bombardier.

Pratt & Whitney isn't the only firm developing greener aircraft. Airbus is dabbling in alternative fuels and researching ways of recycling more than 6,000 planes slated for retirement during the next 20 years. Boeing is dabbling with hydrogen fuel cells and investing in algal fuels while pushing lighter planes like its 787 Dreamliner. Boeing says composite materials make up nearly 50 percent of the plane, which can carry as many as 330 people, making it far lighter than other planes its size. It is 20 percent more fuel-efficient and produces 20 percent fewer emissions than similarly sized aircraft, company officials say. Boeing is betting composite construction will bring huge improvements in fuel economy and emissions to commercial aviation.

Further gains could come from improving the nation's outdated air traffic control system, something nearly everyone at the conference said must happen. The current system is based on radar technology that dates to World War II, and plans to replace it with a satellite system known as NextGen are at a standstill while FAA reauthorization is stalled in Congress. But the industry has several other ideas, from allowing flights through military airspace to widespread adoption of a quieter, more efficient landing technique called continuous descent approach. Industry experts say adopting such steps could significantly reduce fuel consumptions and delays. The International Air Traffic Association says cutting just one minute from every commercial flight would save more than 1.9 million tons of fuel and 6.3 million tons of CO2 annually.

The air travel industry has taken a lot of heat for being slow to address its environmental impact, and some say parts of the eco-conference were just slick PR. But even some critics say the fact the industry is discussing environmental stewardship shows it's finally getting serious about the issue -- if only because doing so is in its best interest. "Climate change could mean fewer coastal vacation destinations, inaccessible airports and a general economic malaise that cuts travel spending," says Liz Barratt-Brown of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Looked at in that context, you could argue that the aviation sector has the most to lose from global warming."

Charter Freezes Web Eavesdropping Plan

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 1:27pm EDT by Threat Level

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Charter Communications, the nation's fourth largest ISP, is halting a plan to test ad technology that monitors its customers' web and search engine usage. The move comes after customers complained about the proposed pilots and a powerful lawmaker questioned the legality of the eavesdropping.

Review: Nokia E66 Is Business up Front, Party in the Back

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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The new Nokia E66 smartphone is out, and it comes with some goodies: a beautiful, chassis, solid web apps and a button that can switch you to two separate screen modes. Trouble is, the thing heats up hotter than the sun and tears through batteries like greased lightning.

'Guitar Hero' for the Blind and for the Wii

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 11:56am EDT by Game|Life

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Everybody wants to be a fake ax slinger, and researcher Eelke Folmer makes the videogame accessible for those who can't see the screen.

Hackers Crack London Tube's Ticketing System

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Autopia

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Dutch researchers ride the Underground for free after hacking the smartcards riders use to pay their fares. The hack has huge implications because similar cards provide access to thousands of government buildings, hospitals and schools throughout Britain.

Nokia Buys Up Symbian, Sets It Free

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:58am EDT by Associated Press

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Nokia said it intends to buy 52 per cent of Symbian and set the world's leading smartphone operating system free. All but one of the previous owners all previous owners of Symbian, have committed themselves to accept the offer and Nokia says it expects holdout Samsung to join them shortly.

Facebook's Newest Friend? Visa

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:32am EDT by Associated Press

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Facebook is a gated community whose members make up demographics that are relatively easy to quantify -- and yet, it remains something of a barren wasteland for advertisers. Now Visa is stepping up with a $2 million ad buy that seeks to tie in with the roughly 80,000 small businesses on the social network.

Microsoft/Yahoo Takeover Talks On Again

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:26am EDT by Epicenter

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The on-again, off-again Microsoft/Yahoo takeover talks are on again, Techcrunch reports, citing several anonymous sources. Word that the seemingly estranged parties might yet meet at the altar sent Yahoo shares soaring more than 7 percent.

Global Warming Scientist: 'This Is the Last Chance'

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Associated Press

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Global warming has become so serious a problem that the world's only hope is drastic action, the NASA scientist who first warned of the phenomenon 20 years ago tells congress. "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path,"says James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences.

June 24, 1947: They Came From ... Outer Space?

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Tony Long

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1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.

Arnold was an experienced pilot with more than 9,000 hours of flying time. He had diverted from his flight plan -- Chehalis to Yakima, Washington -- to search for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane reported down in the Cascades near the southwest slope of Mt. Rainier. A sweep of the area revealed nothing, and Arnold resumed his original course.

As Arnold recalled, the afternoon was crystal clear, and he was cruising at an altitude of 9,200 feet. A minute or two after noting a DC-4 about 15 miles behind and to the left of him, he was startled by something bright reflecting off his plane. At first he thought he had nearly hit another aircraft but as he looked off in the direction the light had come from, he saw nine "peculiar-looking" aircraft flying rapidly in formation toward Mt. Rainier.

As these strange, tailless craft flew between his plane and Mt. Rainier and then off toward distant Mt. Adams, Arnold noted their remarkable speed -- he later calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 mph -- and said he got a pretty good look at their black silhouettes outlined against Rainier's snowy peak. He later described them as saucer-like disks … something the gentlemen of the press glommed on to very quickly.

At the time, Arnold said, the appearance of these flying saucers didn't particularly alarm him, because he assumed they were some kind of experimental military aircraft. If they were, nobody in the War Department (soon to be merged into the Department of Defense) was saying.

In fact, the official Army Air Corps position was that Arnold had either seen a mirage or was hallucinating. He insisted he was perfectly alert and lucid, adding that he was not a publicity hound, either. He also invited both the Army and the FBI to investigate. The Army sent a couple of officers out to talk with Arnold. Even though they concluded that "a man of [his] character and apparent integrity" almost certainly saw what he claimed to have seen, the Army's initial verdict remained unchanged.

As Arnold's story leaked out, other people stepped forward to say they had seen the objects, too. The most-credible report may have come from a United Airlines crew, which reported seeing nine similar disk-like objects over Idaho only 10 days after Arnold's sighting.

Whether Arnold actually saw something or not, the resulting publicity touched off a worldwide spate of UFO sightings. Barely two weeks after Arnold's flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.

Was it the power of suggestion that led to all these sightings, or was 1947 a peak travel year for little green men? You decide.

Source: History.com, Project 1947

Gallery: Surreal to Sublime, Wired.com Readers' Geekiest ASCII Art

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lisa Katayama

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We asked for ASCII, and you delivered.

Two weeks ago, Wired.com launched an art contest inspired by our gallery, "Art and ASCII: The Stories Behind All Those Brackets, Slashes and Carets."

Thanks to all you keyboard art experts, we got dozens of entries that blew our minds. To help us judge the contest, we solicited the help of two ASCII art experts from Japan, entrepreneur Osamu Higuchi and online media expert Ichiroo Kiyota.

The votes are in, and the winner is John AuCoin of Texas, who submitted this drawing of the Creation of Adam. Congrats John -- we'll have some Wired.com swag headed your way momentarily. Click through to see other geeky ASCII creations, from pop culture stars to robots.

Creation of Adam

By John AuCoin of Houston

The judges said: "This is an orthodox piece of work with a Japanese manga-esque touch." AuCoin claims this was the first time he ever tried ASCII art. Apparently he's a natural.
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Astral Apple

By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland

Haavisto says: "In 2004 I got interested in surrealism in ASCII art and ever since I've drawn several surreal ASCII pieces. This is one of my own favorites. It was drawn for an Apple-themed demo party in 2006. I wanted to show that ASCII art was not just about animals and cartoon characters."
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Tiger

By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland

Haavisto says: "I spent weeks tweaking every little detail of this picture. I like combining line art and so-called 'solid style' in the same piece for more lively results."
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Scooter Girl

By Piller Gregerson of Norfolk, Virginia

Gregerson says: "It's a punk rock woman with a punk rock scooter!"
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Servbot

By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Dwight

By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Giant Robots

By Joseph Barrile of New York City

Barrile says: "This piece is part of a collection of four ASCII Battle-Bots and the mad scientist who created them."
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Battles show poster

By Michael Tabie of Orlando, Florida

Tabie says: "This is an ASCII art piece I created for a gig poster to promote a Battles show here in Orlando. It's actually screen-printed two colors (white and silver) on black French paper, 18x24. It's featured in this year's Graphis poster annual."
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Radiohead poster

By Todd Slater of Round Rock, Texas

Slater says: "I designed this hand-pulled silkscreen poster for Radiohead's show in Virginia a few weeks ago. The image is a comment on how the band distributed their newest album, In Rainbows."
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Captain Picard

By Andy Evelhoch of Thousand Oaks, California
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Stephen Colbert

By Taylor Handleton of Maryland

Handleton says: "This is everybody's favorite reporter, Stephen Colbert. I can't seem to find the source image, but I made it in a few hours in Metapad (for the transparency)."
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Marlboro poster

By Nozomu Wakabayashi of Kanagawa, Japan

Wakabayashi says: "Making ASCII art is a hobby. There's a lot of hype about the high price of cigarettes these days, so I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a cigarette poster like this one?'"

Recording Industry Decries AM-FM Broadcasting as 'A Form of Piracy'

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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The recording industry and U.S. radio companies are squaring off over whether AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Billions of dollars are at stake. The recording industry is seeking new income avenues in the wake of wanton peer-to-peer piracy and declining CD sales in part due to the iPod and satellite radio. A U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as Thursday on a royalty measure.

'Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs' Ramps Up the Raunch

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Underwire

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Fry, Bender and the rest of the crew return with a surplus of intergalactic one-liners (and an extra ration of adult humor) in the franchise's second direct-to-DVD movie release. See an exclusive clip on Wired.com.

Are Internet Genetic Testing Services Really Illegal?

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 6:13pm EDT by Wired Science

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Your DNA might be your data, but governmental control over analyzing that data appears to be enshrined in California law.

Nation's Spies Say Climate Change Could Spark War

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Danger Room

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Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, in a classified national document, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

DNA Testing Company Stops Internet Sales in California

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Wired Science

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The regulatory battle over genetic testing has claimed its first victim in the state of California as HairDX shutters its direct-to-consumer Internet sales after being sent a cease-and-desist order from the state's public health department.

Save Money, Go Adventuring With Japanese RPG Piggy Bank

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 4:51pm EDT by Game|Life

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BankQuest, a castle-shaped repository for loose change, makes fun the coin of the realm.

Report: Beatles Eye 'Rock Band,' 'Guitar Hero'

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 11:47am EDT by Listening Post

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They aren't on iTunes yet, but word is that the keepers of the Beatles flame are considering a licensing deal that would put music by the Fab Four on Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Was that tie-in with American Idol the crack in the dike that make lead to many other interesting things?

Romenesko and the Dawning of Gossip Journalism

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 10:45am EDT by Howell Raines, Portfolio.com

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News from Portfolio.com

Also on Portfolio

Motorola: Dead Company Walking

Poll: Has Murdoch Improved the Journal?

U.S.-Made Guns Arming the Drug Wars
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Howell Raines was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003.

Back in 1999, I was at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Jim Romenesko was introduced as Poynter's newest hire. Sandy Rowe, editor of the Oregonian, in Portland, was there too, along with a venerable prof from Columbia’s journalism school. As ink-stained traditionalists, we were aflutter about Poynter president Jim Naughton's nervy decision to hire an obscure gossip blogger to increase traffic on Poynter's dignified website. Poynter called our little group of visiting editors its advisory board, which meant we got a free trip to sunny Tampa Bay every January. Little did we suspect that in the person of Romenesko, a shy journalism nerd from Wisconsin, we were looking at the future—or at least the next decade.

I found Romenesko recently, where he begins every day, in his home office. Since he inhabits a virtual world, it was a virtual interview. I watched the famously reclusive blogger on my computer via an iChat video hookup that let him see me as I asked questions about the death of American newspapers. Romenesko described how his inspiration, circa 1998—to link up all the journalists in America on a blog originally called MediaGossip—had made him a cloistered digital monk, rising at 5 a.m. every day to begin doggedly posting tidbits of journalism-related news gleaned from other websites (he looks at more than 100 sites a day). A true obsessive, he quit taking vacations because he knew his second-guessing would drive any stand-in editor crazy. In the early days, he read some print newspapers every morning, but like the rest of America, he got over it: "They can stack up for a week plus, and maybe on a weekend, I'll finally get to them."

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

So did the disgruntled newsies who quickly discovered that by having Romenesko post their internal memos they could manipulate their bosses. Poynter had retitled Romenesko's "one-man show," as he calls his site, to remove the noxious word gossip. In short order, Bill Mitchell, the director of Poynter Online who first spotted Romenesko, said that his new star helped Poynter surpass the journalism reviews as the place where professionals get their "news about news." The site soared to ever-greater prominence after 9/11, Romenesko says, and by "following little dramas in journalism, like the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times." Ouch! It's true that the late Gerald Boyd and I, then the top two editors at the Times, were among the first to get Romenesko'd out of our jobs. According to Roy Peter Clark, the senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the verb form of Romenesko's name quickly established itself as journalistic shorthand for getting zapped, often fatally, by unflattering publicity. I never really blamed the messenger. Since then, however, hard times have hit the newspaper business, and today, many editors are doing just that, grousing that Romenesko's blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation's newsrooms with its instantaneous reporting of layoffs, declining ad revenues, and fire-sale prices being paid for metropolitan dailies.

Romenesko himself sees the irony. With typical Midwestern modesty, he says he didn't set out to create a media-economics monitoring service but rather a national "community of journalists" for "people like me who are obsessed with newspapers." That his site has become a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe was merely a side effect. In a sense, Romenesko is both the medium and the message. Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product—verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko's rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it's not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

That's the big picture for journalism and Romenesko. They are both being done in by large impersonal forces like the commoditization of news, accelerated obsolescence, mutating news values, and what happens when newspapers try to wring 21st-century profits from the 18th-century technique of transporting, by cart and hand, individualized packages of words on paper. So there was something vaguely Conradian about the video image of Romenesko’s apartment and his soft pleasant features, and his obviously sincere devotion to words on paper that came through my laptop's tiny speaker. It's not that either of us was mumbling about "the horror, the horror." But we are both survivors of the print era destined to be bucked off the same bronco of change. Some of us and our papers are already history. I'm not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence as the most famous trade name in media blogging.

Right now, though, life is good. Romenesko is Poynter's highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year. The advent of WiFi has freed him from his one-bedroom apartment in Evanston, Illinois. By 6 a.m, he's dressed and off to the Starbucks across the street, drinking coffee and multitasking on his MacBook Air. He also runs Starbucks Gossip, an independent blog about the company, a job that "pays for my coffee and maybe a sandwich." Then he moves to other WiFi-enabled spots, notably the Unicorn, a café crowded with "old fogies like me reading newspapers" and Northwestern University students munching sandwiches and staring at their computer screens. "I like to think they don’t see me as a dinosaur site," Romenesko says when I suggest that he, like print newspapers, has an aging readership, and the kids are probably not on his blog. Indeed, there are signs that younger journalists are looking elsewhere for trade news that is intentionally satirical and loaded with political spin and contempt for the bosses.

One site of choice these days is Gawker, which promises "media gossip and pop culture round the clock." Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko's and has paid backhanded tributes to "mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one)." Gawker has also needled the pioneer of its craft about his Starbucks gig, and its readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. "I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me," says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper. "I think Romenesko is what Gawker would look like if it had morals. It's basically a newspaper on newspapers and provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry—an invaluable tool for that master's thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper."

Even without such scholarship, we know that the internet chews up content faster than print or broadcasting, and more impersonally. The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace, and the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker, too, has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press. Given my age, I tend to regard Romenesko's legitimation of gossip as unfortunate and his devotion to the tradition of fairness as noble. There's a word for these kinds of distinctions between the tawdry state of today's journalism and the golden age of immutable values: quaint.

In little more than a century, journalism has been conducted under a variety of short-lived labels. Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism. To some of us, the New Journalism looked like a destination, but that was before the passage through gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.

The fogies are in an uproar about the internet's glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in Romenesko's old bathrobes. Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe, one of the more original thinkers at a legacy newspaper, counsels us to ignore the "journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation." We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be before Romenesko's great leap, which she defines as "the whole notion of the viral broadcast of often unverified information." According to Rowe, the instant peer review that Romenesko has instituted by nationalizing newspaper shoptalk has two sides: "At its worst, it stifles creativity, makes executives risk-averse, and wastes valuable time and energy," Rowe said in an e-mail exchange in which we shared memories about the day we met Romenesko. "Advantages: It's fast, it's free, it's efficient, and sometimes it's even correct.”

I would simply add that you should read Romenesko while you can. He won't be around forever, but his contribution will last. I’m not talking about his wholesaling of newsroom gossip; I'm talking about his trailblazing business model, succeeding where the websites of major newspapers have pretty much failed. That is, he's proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable. Both the Huffington Post and the investors behind Tina Brown's proposed aggregation site are also betting on that.

Because Romenesko is an online pioneer with old-fashioned newspaper values, he chose to do it in a nonprofit environment, but money can be made with his formula. That's why Poynter has steadily boosted his pay and why Roy Peter Clark and others at the institute are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of him to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website. Poynter comforts itself with the thought that Romenesko didn’t found MediaGossip back in the dawn of the digital era with the idea of becoming rich. But like the rest of us, he might not mind wealth if it plopped into his lap. He wisely declined a 2002 job offer from Steven Brill, founder of the now defunct Brill's Content. With the velocity of creative destruction in the information industry ever increasing, though, I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.

Submit Your Best UFO Pics

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 6:16am EDT by Autopia

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Police in Britain say a flying saucer almost hit their helicopter, which makes us wonder -- who else out there has had a close encounter with a UFO? Submit your favorite pics.

George Carlin Dies at 71

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 2:14am EDT by Listening Post

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George Carlin, who pushed the boundaries of language and culture in five decades as a stand-up comic, dies of a heart attack. He was 71

June 23, 1983: DNS Test Sets Stage for Internet Growth

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1983: Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel run the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System. DNS will lay the foundation for the massive expansion, popularization and commercialization of the internet.

The fledgling internet of the time (Arpanet and CSnet) relied on a bulky and exponentially growing "phonebook" of addresses called the "host tables." It was a text file maintained by SRI International in Menlo Park, California. You contacted another computer on the network by looking up its numerical address, and typing it in.

Craig Partridge, another DNS pioneer (.ppt), later called the host tables an "operational nightmare." Everyone on the network had to copy it nightly to get the latest version. There "were many opportunities for error," Partridge wrote, "and we experienced many of them."

"People had figured out that the old scheme wouldn't work forever," Mockapetris told Computerworld a few years ago. He worked at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, and his manager, Jon Postel, assigned him to devise a new way of assigning and recording internet addresses.

Their solution was brilliant. It still used an underlying system of numerical designations, but allowed you to reach a computer by name as well. It was also hierarchical and distributed. Top-level domains would mark out various types of users, like .mil or .edu. Once a name like berkeley.edu got assigned to the University of California at Berkeley, its local network administrator could independently add computers within the domain, numbering and naming them. Or the Berkeley administrator could subdelegate areas of the domain.

After testing the new plan and tweaking it for a few months, Mockapetris, Postel and Partridge published their idea in a Request for Comments (RFC) memorandum in November 1983. The system gained gradual adoption over the next few years (with prodding from the Arpanet overlords at Darpa), first supplementing and then entirely supplanting the host tables.

The first generic, top-level domains weren't officially established until October 1984 (and implemented in January 1985), but they live on: .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org. Though DNS was originally designed to handle 50 million-plus entries, it's been expanded and internationalized. There are now probably more than a billion entries, counting all the DNS names hidden behind firewalls.

Without the Domain Name System, it's doubtful the internet could have grown and flourished as it has. Would a dot-com boom (and bust) have been the same as a dot-22.33 boom (and bust)? If numbers were being used as addresses, would Web 2.0 have emerged as Web B? Would I be writing this? Would you be reading it?

Source: Various

Regulatory Deadline Looms over DNA Testers

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Wired Science

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Genetics testing companies face off against California's health department requirement that they submit plans for coming into compliance with the biological materials testing laws or face civil and criminal sanctions.

Console Makers Open Doors to Indie Game Designers

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 5:25pm EDT by Associated Press

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The game industry has been a tough sell for indie game makers. However, now players like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are opening up digital distribution channels and reaching out to the independents.

Brain Drainer Puts Audience to Sleep With Music

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 4:51pm EDT by Listening Post

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Famed Japanese "sleep doctor" Takuro Endo attempts to lull an audience of 1,500 to sleep with a playlist that includes Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Japanese tenor Masafumi Akikawa. The result? A partial snooze.

NASA Hopes for Microbe-Friendly Mars

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 1:25pm EDT by Associated Press

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Bizarre microbes, like those that survive in punishing environments on Earth, might also thrive on Mars, some researchers speculate.

Harvard Docs Uncover New Clue in Alzheimer's Battle

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 1:08pm EDT by Associated Press

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Researchers discover that a particular form of beta-amyloid, a sticky protein found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, causes dementia in rats where other forms of the same protein don't. The findings help explain why not all patients with the protein develop the disease.

'Cinematic Titanic' Makes Hot Hollywood Debut

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 5:00am EDT by Underwire

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While hosting an impressive collection of fresh studio features, award-winning documentaries and competitive short films, the Los Angeles Film Festival turned the spotlight toward celluloid's ugly side with a painfully funny live screening of The Doomsday Machine with the cast of Cinematic Titanic.

GlaxoSmithKline Goes Open Source on Cancer Info

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 9:44pm EDT by Wired Science

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GlaxoSmithKline donates a massive amount of information -- gleaned from studying cancer cells -- to the online research community. The data, which now lives on a website run by the National Cancer Institute, should aid in the discovery of new drugs and blood tests.

Critics Blast Pending Clean Air Rule

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 2:37pm EDT by Associated Press

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Opposition mounts to a pending Environmental Protection Agency rule that some say would threaten air quality in national parks.

Pasture of Muppets: Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 10:44am EDT by Listening Post

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Listening Post scored an interview with the editor of the only publication that refused to pull their review of Metallica's upcoming album. As heavy metal continues to evolve, its publicists remain tragically rooted in the past.

Super Antennas, Made From Invisible Stuff

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 9:30am EDT by Danger Room

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The Pentagon is using "metamaterials" for revolutionary new antennas with obvious commercial spin-offs. These bundles of carbon fiber might be used to create an invisibility cloak, or even a cloak of silence -- some day.

Microcontrollers Made Easy for Hardware Hackers

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Geek Dad

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With a little training, hardware hackers will find that arduinos, or easily programmed microcontrollers, are inexpensive, fun and a cinch to manipulate.

Scientists: Did Ice on Mars Ever Melt?

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 2:36am EDT by Associated Press

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The discovery of water ice near Mars' north pole is big news, but scientists still don't know whether that ice ever melted and remained liquid for long enough to sustain life on the red planet.

Video: Watch Fire Researchers Torch Homes, Offices and Warehouses

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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To model how flames turn buildings into ashes, the nation's leading fire researchers don't play with matches over the sink. Instead they burn down entire homes, cubicles and warehouses.

At the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, researchers set huge fires under a 40-foot-long by 30-foot-wide exhaust hood that is connected to an $8 million control unit.

Using measurements of oxygen consumption, the researchers can precisely determine the temperatures inside the room as well as the heat-release rates of different materials. Then, using software like Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview, the researchers run virtual and real-world side-by-side comparisons of how combustion works.

By modeling the way flames and smoke travel under real conditions, the fire scientists are creating new strategies and technologies for fighting tough blazes.

In this video gallery, you'll see Christmas trees fires, dorm rooms ablaze, and cubicles melting.

Poor Bunny

In this clip, we see how quickly a dried out Scotch-pine Christmas tree can light a room on fire. Within 30 seconds, the room is engulfed in flames. According to the NIST, holiday trees account for more than 400 fires, 10 deaths and $15 million in property damage every year.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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At the end of the nerd-classic Office Space, Milton, the much-abused office loser, sets fire to the cubes of Penetrode, where the main characters work. Here, fire scientists give you an unintentional peek inside the movie's end. The video shows how quickly flames spread from ignition to a point known as flashover, when the room becomes engulfed in flame, in an open office plan.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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When you can't trust your college roommate not to accidentally drop a lit cigarette into a trash can, this video proves that you don't need to -- as long as your college has sprinklers installed.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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Following a six-fatality fire in Chicago in 2003, NIST modeled what happened on the 12th story of the Cook County Administration building. To understand how the fire got out of hand, the researchers measured the heat release rate of different components of the office building. In this video, we see four workstations with chairs in a 23-foot by 24-foot enclosure.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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Here's another video from the series of tests intended to model the Cook County Administration building fire. This time the researchers tested a single workstation that wasn't enclosed. Eventually, these tests helped NIST recommend safety changes that should prevent future fires from turning deadly in similar environments.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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Part of NIST's mission is to educate the public about how fires work. In this video, we watch as a living room goes from spark to flashover in mere minutes.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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When firefighters lit up this Phoenix warehouse, they employed infrared cameras, lasers, sonar, vibration sensors and video to look for clues about how to predict structural collapse. They didn't find any dead giveaways, even with all that tech, but their conclusions and data can be seen here (.pdf).

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
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For firefighters, one of the worst things that can happen is the building collapsing on top of them, so figuring out how and when that's going to happen has been a focus of NIST research. In this video, dummy firefighters on top of a burning house fall through the roof before being pulled out by ropes.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski

Photographer Documents Secret Satellites -- All 189 of Them

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner

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BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.

The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.

"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."

More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.

"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.

Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.

"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.

"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."

With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.

He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.

"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."

Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.

"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.

Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.

"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."

Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."

How to Snap Killer Candids

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 8:13pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Avoid the same boring picture of someone waving to the camera and take a candid photo instead. Candids illuminate photos storytelling. Follow these tips to snapping on the fly and surprising your subject. We asked famed paparazzo Ron Galella for advice on making your next photo killer.

Google Trends Adds Site Comparison Feature

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 7:24pm EDT by monkey_bites

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Google Trends adds a feature that graphs daily unique visitors of competing websites. The feature allows the site to compete with Alexa, Compete and Comscore.

Citibank Replaces Some ATM Cards After Online PIN Heist

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 4:46pm EDT by Threat Level

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In the wake of an arrest of two Brooklyn men caught with over $800,000 in cash, Citibank warns bank customers that their ATM PIN codes may have been leaked in a breach of a "third party" processor. The FBI says a hacked Citibank server was at fault.

Spoof Yahoo Resignation Letter Lets You Tell 'Em

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Epicenter

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Wired contributor Matt Honan lets you vent at Yahoo just by using the handy pulldown menus. You can pick your reasons for why you'd quit Yahoo.

Mars Ice FAQ: How Do You Know It's Water?

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 4:02pm EDT by Wired Science

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Wired Science answers some of the most frequent questions about the Mars Phoenix Lander's discovery of water on the surface of Mars.

MPAA Says No Proof Needed in Copyright Infringement Lawsuits

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 3:24pm EDT by Threat Level

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The Motion Picture Association of America says intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement. Having to prove violations, which are nearly impossible on peer-to-peer networks, would deprive copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances, the group tells a federal judge in a case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Supercomputing Power Hits the Desktop, Minus the Software

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner

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The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.

"We're talking about every man, woman and child basically having a supercomputer on their desk," says Jon Peddie, a graphics-industry veteran and president of Jon Peddie Research.

AMD, which acquired graphics maker ATI in 2006, released two new chips, the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia, the other dominant player in the space, unveiled its new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 processors.

According to both companies, the new series of chips feature performance measured in teraflops (that's a trillion floating point operations per second), billions of transistors, hundreds of cores and new architectures that, according to industry analysts, could have a staggering effect on not only Crysis frame rates, but also how and what we use our computers for.

Indeed, cheap access to such formidable computing power could mean that, over the next few years, we will see an explosion of new independent research along with profound new discoveries, analysts say. Additionally, new consumer applications will be able to draw on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for even more eye-watering special effects and even occasionally useful visual information.

"We'll start to get things like real-time mapping from Google that incorporates all manner of real world information," says Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. "All of this is going to bubble up more and more."

As Peddie observes, it was only 11 years ago that the U.S. government spent approximately $33 million to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve 1 teraflop. The new graphics chips offer similar power to the 1997-era supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.

"Now we can go down to Fry's or Best Buy and buy a graphics board that has 1 teraflop of processing power for $600 or less," says Peddie.

Getting that processing power to work for the average computer user, however, remains a challenge.

With the exception of a few games, most applications still aren't made to take advantage of the GPU's power. That's because GPUs are made for parallel processing (crunching lots of bits of data at the same time, then assembling the results all at once), whereas most current software programs are written to be executed serially (operating on one piece of data at a time, then proceeding to the next step).

That is starting change, albeit slowly, thanks to new initiatives designed to spur parallel processing.

Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks.

In many ways, it's the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language.

Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard.

Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group.

If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility's super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors.

Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn't your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.

Review: Samsung Instinct Gives iPhone a Run for Its Money

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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The Samsung Instinct is released today. This iClone, offered solely by Sprint, is the first we've seen that can legitimately compete with the Jesus phone.

House Grants Telecom Amnesty, Expands Spying Powers

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 2:20pm EDT by Threat Level

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The government will have expanded powers to wiretap from within the United States, and courts will dismiss lawsuits against telecoms that secretly helped President Bush spy on Americans without warrants, under a controversial measure passed by the House Friday. The Bush-approved bill now goes to the Senate, where it has wide support.

Oh Hai! Icahn Haz a Blog? LOLWUT?

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 2:03pm EDT by Epicenter

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The long-awaited blog by 'corporate activist' Carl Icahn went live this week, but it's sadly lacking in specifics. The blog doesn't even mention his latest target, Yahoo.

Review: 'Descent' Delivers Simple, Dungeon-Crawling Fun

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by GeekDad

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Descent is a hybrid between Dungeons & Dragons and a board game. It provides straightforward, playable dungeon fun for kids aged 10 and up.

Airports Slowly Greening Up

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 10:12am EDT by Listening Post

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We all know that commercial airliners are essentially polluting machines that fly. What about the airports where they land? Pretty grim, too. But the people in charge say they are trying to green up. To be fair, the task is daunting. And there are some examples of innovation. But overall, the report card is pretty underwhelming.

3 More Yahoo Execs Reportedly Jumping Ship

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 9:47am EDT by Associated Press

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Three more Yahoo executives have decided to leave, the AP reports, citing blogs and the New York Times: Qi Lu, the EVP of Yahoo's search and advertising technology; Brad Garlinghouse, an SVP who oversees communications tools like mail; and Vish Makhijani, an SVP involved in search. This all seems related to a major reorganization Yahoo prez Susan Decker wants to complete as early as next week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Hurry Up and Wait for Clean Jet Fuel

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 8:21am EDT by Autopia

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The commercial-aviation industry scrambles to find alternatives to jet fuel, which is hitting record prices. Algal fuels are promising, but so far from viability that the industry is looking at quicker -- and dirtier -- alternatives to petroleum, like tar sands.

Sex Drive: Boyfriend X Misses the Mark

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Regina Lynn

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The scary part about taking your sex-tech project to the mainstream is that on the long, hard journey from quirky to safe, you risk wrecking the very thing that made you special.

Then, when the Bowdlerized version doesn't do well, the backlash affects everyone in the sex-tech space, not just the particular application or product. "See?" say the analysts and the venture capitalists and the advertisers. "That's why we don't back sex things."

Then when there's a new sex thing they cautiously express interest about, the developers bend over backwards to show how nonthreatening and comfortable it really is.

Ah, the cycle of romantic startups.

Two years ago, I gave "relationships-management software" Girlfriend X a cautious thumbs-up. Now I'm bummed I can't do the same for its latest incarnation, or for the beta version of its sister site, Boyfriend X.

The genius of the original Girlfriend X and its companion PDA app ("GFX Wingman") was that it indulged in so-impolitic-it-must-be-true irreverence. Marketed as a dating solution for men, it took all those things that women naturally do in our heads and turned it into a database-driven toolset for players -- or those who wanted to play at playering.

For example, its Yield Generator module plotted how much money you spent against how much sex you got, presenting you with a nice cost-per-hookup graph. Other modules sent automated love notes to the right woman at the right time, tracked anniversaries and other milestones for ongoing arrangements, and suggested hundreds of (terrible) pickup lines whose very awfulness could serve to break the ice with new prospects.

After that column came out, Sex Drive readers inundated the developers with e-mail -- at least half a dozen requests, says founder Rick Pierce -- for a similar application for women.
Because yeah, we're good at keeping this stuff in our heads, but parallel dating -- sleeping with more than one person on a regular basis, without those people knowing any details other than, "I'm seeing other people" -- can get complex to keep up with if you do it for more than a month or two.

Unfortunately, Boyfriend X lacks the rueful humor of the early Girlfriend X, managing to be bland and insulting at the same time. (The first question in the Boyfriend X FAQ is "What if I'm not smart enough to get this all working?") And Girlfriend X was neutered on its way from stand-alone software to web-based portal.

Pierce says they wanted to get more serious and to make a sort of "one-stop shop" for relationship management, blending a niche contact manager with a content-driven site.
In other words, there's no Put Out Calculator for Boyfriend X that compares how many bases you've let him touch to how much money he's spent on you, then recommends what you could hold out for next.
The watered-down Girlfriend X is still about creating bad boys out of nice guys, in their minds if not in their actions. But then Boyfriend X warns women to stay away from bad boys and find nice guys.

It may be what the moneymen believe the masses want (without the taint of associating with porn), but it also turns off the very people who might have used the racier version.

No wonder the sex-positive movement despairs of the mainstream.

Girlfriend X and Boyfriend X do have their redeeming qualities. It is handy to have access to dozens of dating and networking sites from one page, and it's great to be able to search all of the reviewed profiles at once regardless of their site of origin.

Both services encourage members to rate people's online dating and social networking profiles (he's short! she's fat! he's married! she's psycho!) and to post positive testimonials for friends and dates. Both provide detailed tracking mechanisms where you can store details about each person and every interaction you've had.

The mashups Pierce plans in the coming months are definitely cool. One compares a person's interests with a local events calendar and the weather forecast, then generates a list of targeted date ideas. Another sifts through the headlines to keep you apprised of current affairs relating to your prospect's interests, so you always have something to talk about.

If they manage to automate more of the data entry -- perhaps an import function so you can bring profile information into your contact manager with a single click -- then X will mark the spot indeed, and the convenience will more than make up for the loss of personality.

I guess I'll have to track my own blow-job-to-oil-change ratio from now on.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier.

June 20, 1840: A Simple Matter of Dots and Dashes

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1840: Samuel F.B. Morse receives a U.S. patent for his dot-dash telegraphy signals, known to the world as Morse code.

The code Morse devised in partnership with Alfred Vail uses a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. It went into practical use in 1844, after he and Vail produced a working electromagnetic telegraph transmitter. Vail worked on various refinements to the transmitter before leaving the business altogether in 1848, feeling that he was being low-balled on his salary.

Some scholars argue that it was Vail, not Morse, who actually came up with the dot-dash system. He did hold a small piece of Morse's patent but didn't get rich from it.

Regardless of who devised it, the original code was a little different than the one in use today. What we recognize as Morse code is actually an international variation of the original, or "American," code. The American code contained not only dots and dashes, but also spaces in five letters: C, O, R, Y and Z. (C, for example, was rendered like this: . . .) The numbers 0-9 were also different.

The international version, known as Modern International Morse Code, was introduced at a conference in Berlin in 1851. The American code remained in widespread use until the 1920s, when everyone finally lined up behind the international version.

1840 was a busy year for Morse. An accomplished, respected painter trained in photography, he opened a portrait studio in New York. Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris the previous year, and in New York he taught the daguerreotype process to several photographers -- including Mathew Brady, who put it to pretty good use during the American Civil War.

Following a failed run for mayor of New York, Morse turned his attention in earnest to telegraphy. With Vail, he finished up work on the first telegraph transmitter. He spent several years trying to drum up interest in his telegraph, which was met with initial skepticism, both official and unofficial.

When he finally received a patent for the telegraph itself, it came first from the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid in Constantinople (now Istanbul), who personally tested it and gave it his blessing. Others, notably Englishmen Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke, had patents on similar (and some say, superior) hardware, but Morse eventually triumphed in the legal battle. His adept promotion, one-wire transmission system and simple software -- the Morse code -- won the day.

Morse code has now been in use for more than 160 years. It still has practical applications in the modern world because almost anything can be used, from telegraph key to flashlight to pencil to fingertip, to tap out or flash a message. Severely disabled people even use Morse to communicate, sending out the code by eye movement or puffing and blowing.

Source: Various

How to Make a Presentation Like Al Gore

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by How-To Wiki

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Al Gore's dramatic slide show featured in "An Inconvenient Truth" was awesome enough to win him the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar. Let's see if you can do any better. Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, the firm behind Gore's presentation, shares her secrets to creating killer slide shows.

Gallery: Mechanical Marvels Hide in Plain Sight

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Dylan Tweney

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:
You don't have to trek out to the dusty hell of Burning Man in order to see inspired feats of mechanical art and engineering. In fact, the back rooms and museums of your hometown may conceal feats of industrial genius that would put any steampunk artist to shame.

Take San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Tourists know it for picturesque views of the bay, vendors selling clam chowder in bread bowls and bad street-corner buskers. But tucked into the corners of the San Francisco waterfront are such marvels as the most advanced mechanical computer ever made, prototypes of a gigantic clock intended to run for 10,000 years and a working steam engine three stories tall.

"It just occurred to me -- the most mechanical geek I know -- that if I didn't put these things together, the rest of San Francisco didn't either," says Alexander Rose, one of the organizers of a one-day, self-guided tour of San Francisco's mechanical marvels.

The tour, dubbed Mechanicrawl and sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, where Rose works, will take place on July 12. Wired.com got an early preview of some of the day's attractions, which include special access to exhibits at the Exploratorium, the Long Now Foundation's offices, a World War II submarine and Liberty ship, and the Musée Mécanique.

Left: One of the stops on the tour is San Francisco's hands-on museum, the Exploratorium. During the tour, volunteer docents will point out exhibits that are particularly interesting to the mechanically minded. Here, kids pedal to generate electrical power in an exhibit built by museum founder Frank Oppenheimer. The generator is mounted on an early 20th-century cast iron lathe.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Caution: 2,000-Degree Sparks
The Exploratorium's "Catch a Falling Spark" exhibit gives visitors a chance to turn a hand-cranked grinding wheel, spinning it against a thick piece of twisted steel cable to generate white-hot sparks and a distinct odor of burnt clutch. Although the sparks are 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, they're so small that it's safe to let them bounce off your bare hand.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Loop Dreams
The Exploratorium's "Rope Squirter" is a simple powered flywheel that throws a loop of rope into the air, forming an appealing curve of string that you can play with.

The museum's "head explainer" Ken Finn says he took this exhibit to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where it sparked a controversy about whether the shape of the rope's arc is parabolic or not. Of course, the exhibit is equally appealing to children, making it a good vehicle for stimulating mechanical imagination in young and old alike.

"My six-year-old can enjoy it and I can watch geophysicists argue about it," says Finn.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Visible Sound
The Exploratorium's Kenn Finn shows how the museum's "Oscylinderscope" works: An oversized "guitar" with extra-long nylon strings is set up in front of a spinning drum that has alternating bands of black and white. As the drum spins, you can actually see the vibrating strings' waveforms against the moving stripes. Pluck the strings closer to their middles and you get nice, round sine waves; pluck them closer to the guitar's bridge and you get sharper saw-tooth waves that correspond to the harsher sound.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Never Needs Winding
At the offices of the Long Now Foundation, visitors check out some of the foundation's recent work. The foundation is designing and building a clock intended to run for 10,000 years -- an engineering challenge that requires designers to anticipate problems like the accumulation of dust and the fact that ball bearings will freeze up if they sit for long periods without moving.
In the middle of this picture is a mechanical orrery -- a kind of planetarium -- designed to show the current positions of the six planets visible to the naked eye.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Mechanical Binary Computing
The mechanism of the Long Now Foundation's orrery lies underneath the model planets. It consists of a stacked set of geared wheels. The rotation of each wheel corresponds to the rotation of one of the planets in the orrery above.

The orrery's mechanism is a binary mechanical computer with 28 digits of precision for calculating each planetary period. The wheels and levers of each layer comprise a mechanical code for calculating the rotational speed of each planet (for example, 224.68 Earth days for Venus, 11.862 Earth years for Jupiter).

The gear-and-lever design of the orrery resembles that of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, although the Difference Engine operates on decimal (base 10) numbers instead of binary (base 2).

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Equation of Time
Some early clockmakers used a kidney-shaped cam to convert between clock time and solar time. That's because the Earth does not revolve around the sun at a constant speed, so solar noon (when the sun is at its highest point) varies from clock noon by as much as several minutes, depending on what time of year it is. The shape of these cams was governed by something known as the equation of time.

The Long Now Foundation's clock uses an equation of time, too, because it resets itself daily based on local solar noon, ensuring continued accuracy over the millennia it will be working. However, the Earth's orbit varies slightly from year to year. For a clock that's expected to run for 10,000 years, those differences mean that a single cam would be reasonably accurate only for a relatively short time (just a few hundred years at most).

To overcome that problem, the clock's designers came up with a three-dimensional cam, whose cross-section gradually changes shape along its vertical axis. This complex, compact shape enables the clock to compute the difference between solar time and clock time for every day over a period of 12 millennia (there's a grace period of 1,000 years on either end of the cam's expected useful life). The numbers along the cam correspond to years (02000, at the bottom, is the year 2000).

The Long Now's Equation of Time cam is available in the foundation's gift shop for $500.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Torpedo Targeting
Volunteer docent Richard Pekelney shows off the torpedo data computer (TDC) aboard the U.S.S. Pampanito, a World War II-era diesel submarine docked on San Francisco's waterfront.

The TDC was built in 1943. It was -- and may still be -- the most-sophisticated mechanical computer ever made. It used a combination of clockworks, electric motors, dials and levers to compute the angles at which torpedoes should be launched in order to hit their targets.

Torpedo targeting wasn't the only computation-intensive problem at the time. High-powered naval guns developed in the early 20th century proved difficult to aim, because of their long trajectories, the effects of wind and even the Earth's rotation. As a result, research into mechanical and electronic computing proceeded hand-in-hand with weapons research throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

"Most of what we consider early computing was driven by the need to aim these long guns," says Pekelney.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Stay on Target
The Pampanito's torpedo computer was hand-built in the 1940s in New York, primarily by Jewish émigrés from Germany, says Pekelney.

"What you've got here is the precision of a fine Swiss watch," says Pekelney.

In order to perform its calculations, the TDC incorporated data about the sub's location, bearing and speed as well as those of the target ship. The computation involved multiple differential equations, integrations and mathematical operations.

The TDC resides in the Pamapanito's conning tower, an area of the sub usually off-limits to visitors. However, it will be open to Mechanicrawl visitors on July 12.

For people interested in how the targeting computer worked, the complete TDC manual is available online. Archivists have also digitized rare audio recordings of a successful torpedo attack utilizing a TDC.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Torpedo Tube
World War II-era torpedoes could make a single turn, shortly after being fired from the sub, so the TDC computed the radius of that turn, then transmitted the setting to the torpedo by means of a remote servo before the torpedo launched. The servo controlled a small rod, which extended into the torpedo tube and connected with a mechanical linkage on the torpedo itself.

This image shows a close-up of the hatch on the back of a torpedo tube. The painted-on flag represents a Japanese ship sunk by a torpedo fired from that tube.

According to Pekelney, submarines were among the most dangerous places to work during World War II, but also were one of the war's most effective weapons. Submariners represented less than two percent of the fleet's personnel, but they were responsible for more than half of enemy ships sunk by the Navy.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Three-Cylinder Steam Engine
In the berth next to the Pamapanito floats the S. S. Jeremiah O'Brien, a World War II Liberty ship. This vast cargo ship has been restored to working order and the O'Brien now makes occasional fundraising cruises in the San Francisco Bay.

The O'Brien, like other Liberty ships, is powered by an enormous three-cylinder steam engine. It was designed to be very simple to build and very reliable.

This photo shows the engine's three cylinder heads. High-pressure, superheated steam enters the smallest cylinder on the right, then passes to a larger, lower-pressure cylinder in the middle, and finally goes to the largest, lowest-pressure cylinder on the left. This design, known as a triple expansion steam engine design, enables the engine to capture as much of the steam's energy as possible.

At cruising speed, the engine spins at just 76 RPM, pushing the metal hulk through the water at 7 knots. Although the ship will remain docked, the engine will be running during the Mechanicrawl event July 12.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Wrench Collection
At least 2,715 Liberty ships were built; only a few survive. The Jeremiah O'Brien was restored in the 1970s but, says the Long Now Foundation's Alexander Rose, many of the people who restored the ship are no longer living.

Rose hopes that the Mechanicrawl will inspire a new generation to begin restoring and caring for mechanical treasures like the O'Brien.

"The steampunk crowd, they go all the way to the point of dressing up in period clothing and restoring old steam engines. It would be really awesome if they'd help the Jeremiah O'Brien maintain its steam engine," says Rose.

Plus, then they'd get to play with cool tools, like these enormous wrenches in the Jeremiah O'Brien's engine room.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Phoenix Lander Finds Water Ice on Mars

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Wired Science

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NASA Mars Phoenix Lander finds water ice on the red planet, NASA scientists announce via on their Twitter stream.

Bloggers Get Obama Accuser Hauled Off in Handcuffs

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Threat Level

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Bloggers rally around Obama and have an accuser holding a press conference at the National Press Club hauled off in handcuffs.

Carbon Footprint Be Damned, the Cannonball Run Is Back

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Autopia

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The Great American Run brings back the glory days of cheap gas and unfettered speed with a modern take on the famous Cannonball Run that leaves a Shaq-size carbon footprint.

Drupal's Creator Envisions Web Publishing's Plug-and-Play Future

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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When Dries Buytaert built a simple bulletin board system for his classmates, he wasn't setting out to create something that would eventually grow into one of the web's most beloved open source publishing systems. But that's exactly what happened.

Darpa Chief Slams Pentagon's 'No Accountability' Money Men

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Danger Room

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In an exclusive interview, the head of the Defense Department's premiere science and technology arm blasts the Pentagon's higher-ups. It's part of an unusually public spat over tens of millions of dollars for cutting-edge research.

Dems Agree to Expand Domestic Spying, Grant Telecoms Amnesty

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 3:09pm EDT by Threat Level

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Congress is set to free the nation's telecoms from lawsuits accusing them of illegally helping the government spy on Americans and greatly expand the government's ability to plant wiretaps inside the nation's telecom infrastructure. The win for the White House comes as Democrats backed down over election fears after having resisted the president's demands in February.

A Day After 'Launch,' Major-Label Tunes Scarce on Qtrax

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 2:15pm EDT by Listening Post

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The good news is that the wait is over: Qtrax has finally begun offering its first free downloads of major-label music. Now for the bad news: Only a smattering of songs are available, and for many, they won't play.

Paris Hilton Parody Curbs 'WoW' Gold Inflation

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 1:25pm EDT by Game | Life

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A mock character modeled on the hotel heiress is sells high-end bags and jewelry to free players of their excess cash.

Tron Guy Takes Flight in Custom-Designed Aircraft

Posted: June 19th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Underwire

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Jay Maynard, better known as Tron Guy, has purchased a custom airplane designed to match his hand-painted unitard inspired by characters from the '80s Disney film.

Regulators Take Aim at Infant DNA-Testing Industry

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told the crowd today at BIO, the world's largest biotechnology conference, "If you have anything to do with biotech, California is one of the best places to set up shop."

But the actions and tough talk of his public health department have biotech companies in one of the most promising areas of the field -- genetic testing -- questioning whether they can do business in the state at all.

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

The health department's actions are a direct challenge to the viability of the infant DNA-testing industry, for which physician involvement is shaping up to be a major battleground. As far back as a September 2006 meeting, health department officials were voicing concerns over "nutrigenetic tests that analyze a limited number of genes to give personalized nutritional and lifestyle recommendations."

But genetic testing companies say they are "information services" that simply provide data about their customers' DNA. Genetic testing companies argue that they should be subject to a similar level of oversight as over-the-counter tests, like those available for determining paternity. Only New York requires a prescription for a paternity test.

The cease-and-desist letter, signed by Nickles, cites seven California statutes, beginning with the Business and Professions Code Section 1241, which requires that "all clinical laboratories in California ... possess a clinical laboratory license."

But the letter's strongest wording is reserved for a section of the law, Business and Professions Code Section 1288, which requires a doctor's note for all laboratory tests, unless, like pregnancy tests, they are specifically exempt from that law.

"Genetic tests are NOT exempt," the letter reads. "As such, the test must be ordered by a physician or surgeon."

Kristine Ashcraft, director of operations for another genetic testing company, Genelex, which was not sent a cease-and-desist letter, criticized New York's policy and the application of that framework to genetic testing in California.

"All they've done is created an extra billing event for the doctor," Ashcraft said.

As Navigenics CEO Mari Baker put it, "You hope [the health department officials] understand the difference between a genetic risk assessment and a diagnostic test."

Nevertheless, Baker says that her company has taken pains to involve a California-licensed physician in its process. Furthermore, she stated that her company outsources its laboratory work to Affymetrix, which does possess a licensed clinical laboratory in California. Affymetrix, we confirmed with a company source, was not served with a cease-and-desist letter.

In a June 13th health department conference call, officials stated that 25 "genetic businesses" were part of an extensive investigation.

In a summary of the regulatory action, Nickles said that 13 companies were to immediately cease testing and "desist from ever doing it again."

Nickles added that the state had talked with the state of New York, which sent similar letters, and looked forward to federal regulation.

While Nickles took issue with the testing business, she said that "public interest in personalized medicine" was driving the use of genetic information.

Though the health department has stated that the investigation of genetic testing companies came as a result of "multiple" consumer complaints -- no specific incidents were mentioned in the call.

DNATraits.com managing partner Bennett Greenspan, whose company received a letter from the health department, said that he didn't believe that consumer outcry sparked the investigation.

"If we could find out who put the bee in their bonnet, my guess it's the medical community," Greenspan said. "I think that the medical community doesn't want to lose control of who orders the test."

Reporter's note: No transcript or online version of the June 13 call is available, but interested parties can call 866-837-8032 and enter Access 123-9562 until July 8th to listen to a recording of the whole three-plus-hour call. (Be forewarned: There's no skipping ahead, and the genetic testing discussion follows a variety of procedural discussions before it gets to the relevant information.)

Professors Siding With Jammie Thomas in RIAA Case

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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A group of university professors is weighing in on the Jammie Thomas case, telling the trial judge he erred when instructing jurors that having an open share folder filled with copyrighted music amounts to infringement –- even absent proof that somebody else downloaded songs.

Gear Gallery: Flip-Top Cams, RC Cars and Pocket Printers

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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:
Forty-percent smaller and 100 percent slicker than its predecessor, the pocket-friendly Mino (pronounced like the SS Minnow) is the newer, trimmer, quicker-on-the-draw feel and decidedly more fun version of the Flip Ultra.

Despite the smaller body, USB 1.0 compatibility and more sensible battery it’s hard to say just why you’d really want to spend $30 more for the Mino instead of the soon-to-be-reduced Ultra. The Mino features a slightly improved video-compression engine, but you’re still getting the same frame rate (30 fps), same 1/4-inch VGA CMOS sensor, same bitrate, same 640 x 480, and same 2-GB hard drive without any of the higher-end, higher-res optics or features (3x zoom?) that a pocket-friendly $200 digicam will give you. —Steven Leckart

WIRED Buttons can be muted (great for weddings, lectures, pirating movies); easy to shoot, download and upload vids; internal battery equals no need to go hunting for AA batteries. Elegant Vader-black or Storm Trooper-white casing.

TIRED No optical zoom, no upgradeable memory, no Bluetooth, no decent stills. FFWD could be FSTR. Macheads must upgrade to OSX 10.5. Eager-beaver touch buttons are too sensitive and have a tricky sweet spot.

$180, Flip

Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.
:
First, the good news. Getting the MBS-100 connected to my Bluetooth gadgets (cellphones and laptops mostly) is idiot-proof due in no small part to its excellent synchronization ability. The device defaults to "search mode" when first powered on and the pass code is "0000." Want to add another device? Just hold down the sync button on the bottom of the speaker, wash, rinse and repeat. It's that simple.

Now the bad news. Sadly, audio is another story. After busting out some raaawk by Rise Against, it was clear that the MBS-100 was doomed. I cranked up the volume but between the relentless kick drum and the mid-range of the frantic guitar work, the MBS-100 sputtered surprisingly distorted audio even at medium levels. R&B and classical music performed much better at comparable and higher levels, but even those sounded anemic when it came time to deliver low-frequency bass. —Terrence Russell

WIRED Easy to use and extremely portable. Carrying case included. Decent wireless range and relatively smooth streaming. Supports advanced audio distribution and audio and video remote control profiles.

TIRED A damning combination of being pricey/underpowered. Bass-hungry beat fiends need not apply. Only 50 hours of standby?!

$100, Sony Ericsson

Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.
:
If you frequent LAN parties, or an ill-tempered downstairs neighbor disapproves of muzzle fire at 4 a.m., you might want to give the A40 Audio System a listen. Consisting of a headset and a dedicated mixer and amplifier (sold as a set or as individual components), it’s geared towards Xbox and PC gamers who want solid surround sound without violating municipal noise ordinances.

The headset is fairly impressive: comfortable, great sound and fairly attractive. Noise, however, does leak from the headset: The included foam inserts help cut some of the excess din, but bystanders could still hear the occasional clashing of swords or revving engine. The A40 really shines when it’s paired with the A40 MixAmp. Powered by four AAs (which last for about seven hours of continuous use), it can also run on USB power, or via an optional rechargeable battery pack. Just for gamers: Multiple units can be daisy-chained together via a connector tucked into the base of the unit, creating a sort of hardware-based Teamspeak (assuming you and your buddies get several MixAmps). —Nate Ralph

WIRED Comfort, for multiple head and hair sizes. Clear voice quality is a plus for talking smack. Connectivity options to complement most setups.

TIRED PC gamers won’t mind, but wireless La-Z-Boy warriors probably don’t want to be tethered to their audio system.

$270, Astro Gaming

Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.
:
Imagine a radio-controlled car with a camera that’s mounted from the viewpoint of where the miniature plastic driver would sit. Then imagine donning video goggles and earphones so you see and hear where the car is as you drive, and when you turn your head, the driver does too. Now imagine that you get to use it for five minutes at a time because it keeps breaking.

An included visor contains two LCDs that make for big-screen driving fun. An accelerometer in the controller detects head movement and turns the driver's head in any direction, so you can look around while you drive. Dual mics transmit stereo sound all the while.. But for us the joy was intense -- and short-lived. Within five minutes of simple driving on a flat surface, the too-powerful motor loosened in its housing and disengaged from the crankshaft. After some puzzling and screwing around with a tiny Phillips-head, we got the thing running again, but many users will think the thing broken and due for a tearful return. —Roger Hibbert

WIRED Mind-blowingly awesome fun. You see and hear out of the frigging thing! Causes strong, bittersweet memories.

TIRED Soul-crushingly broken. Doesn't come with a manual. Controls are hard (for us monkeys) to figure out. Doesn't appear to have a U.S. retailer (yet).

$1,050, Go With the Shark

Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.
:
Polaroid’s newest product is a portable printer called the PoGo. Here's how it works -- you snap off a picture with your cam phone or Pict-Bridge-enabled shooter and then send the image to the PoGo via Bluetooth or USB. The PoGo then prints out a borderless image onto a 2-inch by 3-inch slice of thermal ZINK photo paper.

We synced it up with a Nokia N82 and N95 -- two phones renowned for their image-capturing ability. The pics we printed actually turned out fairly well. While colors are not totally accurate and the images were slightly cropped, we were still able to take a look at our shots and say, "Yes, that's definitely a picture of the llama that spit on me." The heat-sensitive paper is well, rather sensitive. After my colleague printed out a pic of a Ferrari, he instinctively started shaking it to make it develop. Although the image was fully baked, the tight grip of his thumb and forefinger on the thermal paper actually discolored it slightly. Word to the wise: If you scoop up a PoGo, keep your shots away from moderate heat. —Daniel Dumas

WIRED It'll take you longer to actually line up, compose, and shoot a decent photo than it will to transfer that same photo to the Pogo. Thermal ZINK photo paper is a hoot to use.

TIRED Colors are washed out. Wouldn't it be awesome, I mean really awesome, if you had to shake the heat-sensitive paper once or twice to make it develop?

$150, Polaroid

Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.

No Mocha For Me, Thanks. I've Gotta Buy Gas

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Autopia

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Pity the poor barrista, alone with his espresso machine because people are giving up caramel jambachinos to pay for gas. They're also giving up DVDs, ballgames and eating out.

Citibank ATM Server Allegedly Hacked, Leading to Cash Machine Crime Spree

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 7:45pm EDT by Threat Level

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A Citibank server in charge of processing ATM withdrawals from 7-Eleven convenience stores suffered a breach last year, according to federal prosecutors, who say two New York men used the stolen account numbers and PIN codes to withdraw at least $750,000 in cold, hard cash.

Report: NebuAd Forges Packets, Violates Net Standards

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 5:44pm EDT by Threat Level

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An advertising system that eavesdrops on ISP customers' online behavior doesn't just sniff traffic, it injects fake packets into sites such as Google, according to a report released Wednesday by a net freedom group. That injection of JavaScript into other company's pages amounts to a browser hijack that violates core internet principles, FreePress argues.

Review: 'Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard' Brings Back That Old-School Masochism

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Game | Life

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The Nintendo DS game's archaic gameplay and high level of difficulty will prove too frustrating for some players. But for others, it's a heady combo.

Darpa Brain Drain Costs Agency $32 Million

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:32pm EDT by Danger Room

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Due to Darpa's shortage of qualified staff, the Pentagon says that the premiere research agency "continues to underexecute" and reassigns $32 million of its funding to other defense projects.

How Fast Is Your Browser? Find Out With Webmonkey's Stopwatch

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The latest releases of Firefox, Opera and Safari claim to be faster than ever, but which one is fastest? We whipped up an online stopwatch you can use to find out which browser gets to wear the crown.

Flickr Founders Flee Yahoo

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Microsoft deal or not, Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake are bidding an odd adieu to Yahoo.

Reddit Embraces Transparency, Gives Away Source Code

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

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Social news aggregation site Reddit has released its source code under an open source license. More than just a PR move, it is a noble commitment to the open web.

MySpace's New Look Helps Quell the Clutter

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

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Is the ugly duckling of social networks growing into a beautiful swan, or is MySpace's redesign just lipstick on a pig? Webmonkey chats with the user-experience designer behind the site's refresh.

Firefox 3 Racks Up 8 Million Downloads on Its First Day

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

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Mozilla shatters all expectations by recording a whopping 8 million downloads of its Firefox 3 web browser in the first 24 hours of its release. The company waged a worldwide campaign to be the most-downloaded software application.

Kid Rock: Steal This Song

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 11:21am EDT by Listening Post

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While Metallica continues to pussyfoot around the internet Kid Rock has thrown down the gauntlet. His advice to the cool kids? Boycott iTunes. Download pirated versions of his work. Why? Because the only person who makes any money the legit way is The Man, so it's not as if he'll be losing that much coin. Ahhhh ... rock star logic.

China's Water Problems Reach Olympian Proportions

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Peter Waldman, Portfolio.com

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As the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing draws near, spare a thought for a Chinese peasant named Yan. He lives in the mountains about an hour's drive north of the main Olympic Green, not far from the Great Wall. His village, Shijiayao, is wasting away.

That's because authorities in Beijing, bent on fueling the capital's epic growth, have commandeered nearly every drop of water they can pump from the surrounding countryside. Deprived of government help to drill wells or dam springs, Shijiayao's 30 inhabitants—all that's left of a population of about 300 peasants two decades ago—have no water to farm their terraced fields. They subsist on a rain-dependent crop and on raising a few scrawny donkeys, which they sell for cash or slaughter for meat.

Shijiayao's main water source is a seep in a notch in the barren mountainside, which drips about a dozen bucketfuls a day—except in summer, when it dries up completely. No one bathes in Shijiayao. Next month, while visitors to Beijing amble along man-made lakes and fountains at the grand Olympic Green and Olympic Forest Park, Shijiayao residents will trek about 12 miles a day for drinking water. Li Feng Xian, the village's 91-year-old matriarch, pleads with us to tell Shijiayao’s story and bring its inhabitants water. (View slideshow.)

Adding to these water woes: May's earthquake in south-central China that killed tens of thousands and injured about 250,000. The quake also sent engineers scurrying to inspect 400 dams across the nation, highlighting yet another risk of relying on distant water sources for a city the size of Beijing. What happens if the infrastructure fails?

Part of the problem is a decade-old drought that has sapped water supplies across northern China. But the main cause of Shijiayao's decline and the collapse of many other nearby villages goes back over a thousand years, to the demands of imperial Beijing—which is currently in a headlong rush to stoke economic growth in China's big cities. Even in wet years, peasants in the highlands north of the capital are no longer permitted to cultivate rice because growing the staple requires too much water. Instead, the runoff from their lands is captured for the Miyun Reservoir, Beijing's last repository of unpolluted surface water.

Now the Olympics are exacerbating China's water problems. To ensure enough potable water for an expected 1.5 million visitors in August, Beijing is tapping 80 billion gallons of so-called backup supply from four reservoirs in neighboring Hebei Province. Yet water levels in these reservoirs are already dangerously low. So to sustain the population boom on the semiarid Beijing plain, China's water planners are scrambling to build pipelines, canals, and water tunnels farther and farther into the hinterlands.

Worse, the water routed from Hebei to the Olympics site was supposed to shore up Lake Baiyangdian, an environmental jewel with its own drought problems. To feed the lake, China is pumping 40 billion gallons of water from the Yellow River in Shandong Province, 250 miles away. For every gallon from the Yellow River that arrives at the lake via the 1,400-year-old Grand Canal, nearly four gallons are lost along the way, according to the Dazhong Daily, a state newspaper in China.

Beijing itself is quietly sinking. With much of its surface water fouled by pollution—and a population that has exploded from 2 million in 1948 to 18 million today—the city relies on groundwater for most of its needs. But drought and overpumping are rapidly depleting the area's underground aquifer, causing sinkholes that have destroyed factories and homes. Subsidence is threatening sections of the Beijing-Shanghai railway line and parts of the city's international airport. "Subsidence security" is a major issue.

So it's easy to see why many Chinese environmentalists regard the splashy Olympic site in Beijing as a Potemkin village. The rowing and canoeing venue is on the Chaobei River, but the Chaobei hasn't flowed in nine years. To refill two miles of dry riverbed, organizers spent $57 million diverting 450 million gallons of water from the Wenyu River eight miles away. The Chaobei now boasts one of Asia's most potent fountains, its water jet thrusting 450 feet in the air.

Almost half of the Olympic events will take place at the Olympic Green, a symbol of China's pledge to throw a green Olympics. The 1,000 acres of wetlands, lawns, plazas, and stadiums are carved right into the concrete core of north-central Beijing. In 2004, as part of an effort to find an architecture firm for the Olympic Green and the adjoining Olympic Forest Park, China's Olympic organizers asked for bold ideas in urban ecology. Sasaki Associates of Boston won the contest with a blueprint for an aquatic landscape of rain-fed canals and lagoons designed to support wildlife in the urban park. Within months, though, the plan encountered problems. "We saw it all unravel before our eyes," says Mark Dawson, the project's leader.

Chinese officials were concerned that locals would hunt any animals or waterfowl reintroduced to the city, Dawson says. The officials opted instead for a shallower aquatic system—decorative, not ecological—fed by an existing canal just north of the site. The American designers knew that farmers and others depended on that canal for water and felt such a diversion would be counter to the spirit of the green Olympics that China had promised. In the end, the project was reassigned to several Chinese design institutes.

Beijing's water bank, in the surrounding Hebei Province, is broke. Among China's provinces, Hebei ranks near the bottom for available water resources in per capita terms, at just 12 percent of the national average. In southwest Hebei, an obelisk atop Xidayang Dam, a two-hour drive from Beijing on jammed country roads, bears slogans from Chairman Mao glorifying the "taming" of China's rivers. Built in 1958 by 84,000 workers, the dam created a reservoir that flooded 1,700 square miles, as well as the homes of 29,000 people. The reservoir supplies water to Baoding, a city of 11 million; next month, somehow, it will also supply the Olympics. Yet since 1996, its water level has steadily retreated; it's now at less than 30 percent of its capacity. The drought has left the dam and a pair of pipeline-control stations looming 10 stories above the reservoir.

Downstream, in Wangdu County, villagers have turned a dried-up, tree-lined canal into a garbage dump. A pipeline from Xidayang now bypasses the villages, carrying water destined for Beijing via a new cement-lined channel that workers are rushing to complete for the Games. In Yan's village of Shijiayao, summer rains cascade down the denuded mountainside, flooding paddy terraces and the access road. But with no storage facilities, the village can't save the runoff. Yan says his people have but one hope: that the sprawling capital will grow to engulf them and thus permit them to tap their own water supplies.

Ka-Ching: LinkedIn VC Investment Implies $1 Billion Value

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 10:40am EDT by Epicenter

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Professional networking site LinkedIn gets $53 million in new funding for an implied valuation of $1 billion. Profitable since 2006, LinkedIn says the money will be used to help "execute on our vision."

LinkedIn Connects To $1 Billion Valuation

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 9:11am EDT by Associated Press

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Four VC firms are betting that LinkedIn, the social network for your business contacts, is worth a cool $1 billion. Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners announced today that they are taking a 5 percent stake in the company for $53 million.

Robotic Navi-Bear as Annoying as It Is Cute

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 7:00am EDT by Autopia

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The fact someone put a navigation system inside a talking robotic teddy bear isn't bad enough. No, they had to give it an alcohol detector so you can be scolded by a bear next time you knock one back.

Verizon Adds 10 States to 50 MB FiOS Rollout

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 12:53am EDT by Associated Press

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Verizon customers in 10 more states who have the need for speed get their prayers answered with a FiOS upgrade offering 50 mbps downloads and 20 mbps uploads. Congratulations California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington -- you get the chance to pay $140 a month for internet.

June 18, 1178: English Monks Observe 'Lunar' Explosion

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1178: Just after sunset, according to the English monk and chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, five monks watch the moon explode into flames.

Gervase said the observers were looking at a new crescent moon when the upper part "suddenly split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out … fire, hot coals and sparks…. The body of the moon, which was below, writhed … throbbed like a wounded snake."

Since the timing appears to have been about right, what they may have seen -- according to at least one astronomer -- was the asteroid impact that led to the creation of the lunar crater Giordano Bruno. Others doubt this theory, because there is no historical record of the subsequent meteor shower that would have been visible following a collision of this kind.

What the monks may have actually seen, the current thinking goes, was the explosion of a meteor that, from their vantage point, was passing in front of the moon.

The crater, incidentally, was named for the Italian philosopher, priest and cosmologist Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for heresy in 1600, during the Roman Inquisition. Bruno is considered an early martyr for science, perhaps the first. The crater named for him measures roughly 14 miles wide and is located on the far side of the moon.

Gervase -- who was ordained by Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170 -- is remembered mainly for his Chronica, an ecclesiastical history of Canterbury. Gervase died in 1205.

Source: Various

How to Shoot Awesome Black-and-White Photos

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by How-To Wiki

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Turn up the drama in your snapshots by ditching the bright colors and going with moody black and white. You can get some great black-and-white results using just about any digital camera by following these simple tips. In Wired's How-To Wiki.

How to Fix Your Broken NES

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by How-To Wiki

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That snarky Duck Hunt dog has nothing on you, if only your old Nintendo Entertainment System still worked. Wax nostalgic with Mario and Luigi by repairing your NES for only a few dollars.

Alt Text: Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd

Posted: June 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lore Sjöberg

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Cookbooks are a lot like Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. They contain seemingly rigid rules that, in practice, require a certain amount of adaptation for your own tastes.

So how come cooking gets its own TV channel and role-playing games don't even get a show on G4? Maybe the population at large doesn't want to pretend to be a half-elf. Maybe RPGs take more imagination than most people have.
Alt Text Podcast
Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

However, it just might have something to do with the role-playing community. If geeks talked about cookbooks the way they talk about RPG books, the results would not be pretty:

Posted: 12:15 a.m. by LordOrcus I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version.

Posted: 12:42 a.m. by Kathraxis Hey, I have a question! When you preheat the oven, can you start it before you measure out the ingredients, or do you have to do it afterward? Please answer quickly, my friends and I have been arguing about it for four hours and we're getting pretty hungry.

Posted: 12:48 a.m. by Goku1440 I found an awesome loophole! On page 242 it says "Add oregano to taste!" It doesn't say how much oregano, or what sort of taste! You can add as much oregano as you want! I'm going to make my friends eat infinite oregano and they'll have to do it because the recipe says so!

Posted: 1:02 a.m. by barrybarrybarry I can't believe I spent 35 dollars on a cookbook that doesn't have a recipe for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When I buy a cookbook, I expect it to tell me how to cook. And don't tell me to just make a PBJ myself, I'm not some sort of hippy artist pretentious "freeform cook."

Posted: 1:08 a.m. by jvmkanelly Where are the recipes for chatting with friends while cooking? Where are the recipes for conversation over the meal? When I throw a dinner party, I want it to be a PARTY. I guess the idiots who use the Better Joy Cookbook just cook and eat in stony silence, never saying a word or even looking each other in the eye.

Posted: 1:23 a.m. by LordOrcus Hey, guess what? They're coming out with The Better Joy Book of Hors D'oeuvres. It just goes to show that the publishers are a bunch of corporate greedheads who care more about money than they do about cooking. Is it too much to ask for a single cookbook that contains all possible recipes?

Posted: 1:48 a.m. by specsheet Hey, everyone. I can tell just by reading the recipe that if you prepare eggs benedict as written, the sauce will separate. My mom always said the other kids made fun of me because they were jealous of my intelligence, so I must be right. Everyone who's saying that they followed the recipe and it came out perfect is either lying, or loves greasy separated hollandaise sauce.

Posted: 1:52 a.m. by IAmEd As I have pointed out MANY TIMES, several of these recipes contain raisins, and I, like most people, am ALLERGIC to raisins! And before you tell me to substitute dried cranberries, I will reiterate that I am discussing the recipes AS WRITTEN. I do not appreciate your ATTACKING ME with helpful suggestions!

Posted: 2:12 a.m. by Herodotus I just have to laugh at the recipe for Beef Wellington. In Wellington's day, ovens didn't have temperature settings! And pate de foie gras certainly didn't come in cans. It's like the authors didn't even care about replicating authentic early 19th century cooking techniques!

Posted: 2:17 a.m. by LordOrcus I have read the new Better Joy Cookbook and I am devastated to my very core. Their macaroni and cheese recipe, the very macaroni and cheese I've been making since I was in college, has been ravaged and disfigured and left bleeding on the page. Where once it contained only cheddar cheese, now the recipe calls for a mix of cheddar and Colby. It may contain macaroni, and it may contain cheese, but it is not macaroni and cheese. This is a slap in the face and a knife in the gut. You have lost me, Better Joy Cookbook. I would bid you goodbye, but I wish you nothing but the pain and rage you have delivered unto me.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to go by the Secret Service code name "Infinite Oregano."

Gallery: 10 Best Apocalyptic Vehicles

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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: Photo submitted by CruiseKiller
Global warming. Faltering economies. Dwindling resources. Mankind has finally set in motion environmental, political and social policies that will surely destroy the world as we know it.

Not everyone will fall. Those who survive will roam the scorched wasteland to fend for themselves against the predatory undead while scavenging what they can to survive. The end of days is at hand, and the only question is this: What will you drive when it all comes tumbling down?

Click through our reader submissions to see your best bet for survival.

Left:

Toyota FJ40

The FJ is Toyota's answer to the Jeep CJ, and flame wars between fanboys of the two vehicles will continue long after the apocalypse begins. The consensus is the Toyota will take more abuse -- a big plus when roaming the desolation -- but it's harder to fix when something goes sideways. Fortunately, it's a Toyota, so you'll break before it will.
: Photo submitted by Anonymous
Intimidating mass to frighten zombies? Check. Absurd ground clearance to crush your foes? Check. Room for several crates of black-market MREs and barrels of pilfered fuel? Check. When it comes to planning for the apocalypse, those Germans know their stuff. But this Benz-built beast gets a paltry 13 mpg, so you're going to spend a lot of time scavenging fuel.
: Photo submitted by Lance Miller
The Ural Patrol has two-wheel drive, it climbs like a goat and damn near everything on it can be repaired with a hammer, a screwdriver and duct tape. If it was good enough for the Russian armies, it's good enough for post-apocalyptic road warriors.
: Photo submitted by Rossum's Child
Roam the wastelands in style! The Concept T has a heads-up display to keep you focused on the zombie horde ahead, the ground clearance to handle those who don't get out of the way and a stop speed of 140 to escape the inevitable attack. The challenge will be getting one -- you'll have to break into the smoldering remains of VW's HQ to snag it.
: Photo submitted by Stefan
The Dingo will haul 3.5 tons of looted bounty; it's more heavily armored than a bank vault and it comes with your choice of a 7.62mm machine gun or a 40mm grenade launcher. As if that weren't sweet enough, it's got air conditioning! Global warming? What global warming?
: Photo submitted by Zip Lock
Go ahead and laugh. Unicycles aren't very fast and you can't carry much, but they're cheap, they're reliable and you won't have to scavenge fuel. What's more, with both hands free you'll have no trouble firing your rocket-propelled grenade.
: Photo submitted by Anonymous
Ubiquity is a desirable quality in an Apocalypsemobile, and Jeeps are everywhere. What's more, their questionable reliability means abandoned Chrysler dealerships will have tons of parts. The closest that most Jeep-owning poseurs come to off-roading is parking on the grass -- so let the zombies fight for the new ones while you hit the local frat house and score a gently used model that's probably never even seen dirt.
: Photo submitted by Anonymous
"Last of the V8 Interceptors, eh?" Not everyone is lucky enough to be an Aussie ex-cop with access to a garage containing one of these, but if you're handy with the steel you might be able to smoke the guy who is. This down under Ford Falcon-based muscle car, complete with hood-popping blower, is not exactly easy on the fuel, but if you're rolling in the original Apocalypsemobile, you've probably got what it takes to score a few gallons from anyone in the wasteland.
: Photo submitted by Anonymous
Unfriendly survivors trying to keep you out of their water source? No problem: They're going to have to do a little better than that jerry-rigged wall of salvaged timber and corrugated steel if they want to keep you out. When you absolutely, positively need to kill everything between here and the horizon, it's tough to beat the Stryker. If you want one, you might start in Iraq. Most of these eight-wheelers are serving over there.
: Photo submitted by giantjoe
The VW Beetle is the Swiss Army knife and Timex watch of cars -- you can do anything with it and no amount of abuse will kill it. When Armageddon comes and the last man falls, the only thing left will be the cockroaches and the Beetles.

RIAA Defends Refiling Contested Piracy Case With New Judge

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Threat Level

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The Recording Industry Association of America says it is dropping a file-sharing case against a New York mother and is refiling the identical case to in a bid to learn the identity of the Kazaa user who shared copyrighted music on the mother's Verizon internet account. The RIAA dropped the initial case, refiled it with a different judge, as the original judge was weighing whether the case should be dropped.

BMW Brings Back the M1 Supercar

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 8:10pm EDT by Autopia

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The M1 was a seminal car that proved BMW could run with the likes of Ferrari and Porsche. Thirty years after it redefined the supercar, BMW's bringing it back.

Fan Demand Resuscitates 'You Suck at Photoshop'

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Underwire

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The world's most bitter photo-editing tutor will bring his bile-filled expertise back online.

Review: A Week of Filming With the Flip Mino Reveals Some Flaws

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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We were initially a bit ga-ga over Flip's newer, slimmer pocket camcorder. But after a week's worth of testing, we've found some cracks in the facade.

Its Back Against the Wall, Airline Industry Looks to Come Clean

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 6:45pm EDT by Dave Demerjian

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These are tough times for any industry that burns a lot of fossil fuel or emits a lot of carbon dioxide, and the air travel business does both. The airlines never gave it much thought before, but with sky-high oil prices and mounting concern about global warming threatening not just their bottom line, but their existence, they're getting serious about reducing the industry's carbon footprint.

"They’re definitely in bad shape," says John Scholle, an economist with Global Insight. "And going forward, things look bleak."

It is against this backdrop that executives from the U.S. commercial aviation industry gather later this week in Washington D.C. to plot a new course.

The Air Transport World Eco-Aviation conference marks the first time the industry has come together on such a large scale to talk about the environment. The conference underscores the severity of the issues facing commercial aviation and the need to begin addressing them collectively and quickly.

With airline passenger growth rates and aircraft emissions expected to double by 2020 and 2030, respectively, time is of the essence.

Rising fuel prices have airlines around the world hemorrhaging money, and losses could hit $6.1 billion this year. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are threatening to crack down on emissions. And environmentalists are lining up against an industry that, like the automakers before it, has long considered environmental responsibility an afterthought.

Commercial aviation has seen tough times before, experts say, but never before has the challenge been so great and the prospects so grim.

Topping the conference agenda is determining how big a role government should play in regulating aviation-related emissions. This is an issue of mounting importance now that the European Union says airlines must join its carbon trading program and with environmentalists petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate aircraft emissions. It is, they say, the only way to get the airlines to clean up their act.

"Market mechanisms for cutting pollution won't work," says Danielle Fugere of Friends of the Earth, the group that filed the petition.

The airline industry disagrees, of course, and says it has increased fuel efficiency 110 percent since 1978. It also claims to have reduced emissions 4 percent between 2000 and 2006, despite a 12 percent increase in passengers and a 22 percent climb in cargo. "Airlines are already motivated to reduce fuel burn and the resulting greenhouse gases as much as possible," says Nancy Young, vice president of environmental affairs for the Air Transport Association.

Much of that progress has come by replacing outdated planes with more fuel-efficient models. The industry has long counted on technology to reduce fuel consumption and says advancements in engine designs, composite materials and airframe construction will make tomorrow's airliners leaner and greener. "Less weight equals less power," says Ernest Arvi, CEO of aviation consultancy The Arvi Group. “Less power equals less fuel, and less fuel equals less pollution.”

Perhaps the biggest example of the trend is Boeing's much-delayed 787 Dreamliner, which uses composite construction to produce an aircraft the company says is 20 percent more fuel efficient and produces 20 percent fewer emissions than similarly sized aircraft. Pratt & Whitney promises similar performance improvements from its geared turbofan jet engine.

But even the most fuel-efficient airplane relies on fossil fuel, an increasingly expensive commodity. Jet fuel recently topped $150 a barrel, a price for which no airline has a business plan. That's got them pushing hard to develop biofuels. Virgin Atlantic recently made a test flight of a Boeing 747 fueled by a mixture of kerosene and biofuel derived from coconut and babassu oil. But the emphasis is on algae, led by Boeing's recent commitment to the alt fuel and efforts by JetBlue and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to turn pond scum into fuel.

Christopher Surgenor, editor of GreenAirOnline, says algal fuel is the most promising alternative because "It has the right properties for a jet fuel and can be produced in comparatively large quantities." But others say it's too early in the game to pick a winner, and Arvi warns that narrowing the research to one field "is self-defeating. It stifles innovation."

For all the advancements in engines and airframes, the system we use for moving all those planes around is stuck in the 1940s. Airlines say replacing the radar-based air traffic control infrastructure with a satellite system would reduce fuel consumption and cut emissions by 10 to 15 percent while making the business of getting planes in and out of airports more efficient. Adopting a more efficient means of approaching airports -- called "continuous descent approach" -- would further cut fuel consumption and emissions while also reducing noise.

As promising as these ideas appear, don't look for them at your local airport anytime soon. "Next generation aircraft will begin to arrive in two to three years, but modernized air traffic control is at least a decade away," says Scholle, the analyst from Global Insight. He's even less optimistic about alt fuels. The economics needed to make it work just aren't there. "We’re at least five years away from alt-fuels being anything but a publicity stunt," he says.

And that is exactly what critics call the commercial aviation industry's push to clean up its act -- a publicity stunt. "The only reason they’re having this thing is so it looks like they care. The industry is positioning itself to look like it's addressing environmental issues, so the government doesn’t do it for them," aviation consultant Mike Boyd says of the upcoming conference. Critics said the same thing when Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Atlantic, hailed his company's experiments with biofuels.

But the industry and its defenders say there's more than green washing going on here, and to suggest otherwise is both cynical and shortsighted. "Those of us working in aviation are no different than anyone else," Arvi says. "We care about the environment and we want a clean planet. We just don't want the industry to get ruined in the process."

New Strategy in Tuberculosis Fight: Free Cell Minutes

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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Doctors are in an ongoing battle to get some TB patients to take all their medication, which generally involves a six-month regimen of multiple drugs. Researchers at MIT believe they have a new weapon in the battle against tuberculosis: Free cellphone minutes.

Bloggers Seek Professional Training From Journalists

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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Non-journalists entering the world of blogs, online feedback forums, online videos and news websites provide information that newspapers and other media can't or don't. But many are now turning to professional journalists for guidance.

Videotape Confusion Acquits R. Kelly in Child Porn Case

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Listening Post

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After a six-year legal battle, Chicago's R&B all-star R. Kelly is acquitted on all charges related to videotaping himself having sex with a minor.

Oil Companies Get OK to Harass Polar Bears

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 11:30am EDT by Associated Press

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Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.

Yahoo Customers Pan Google Ad Deal

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Epicenter

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Just one day after Yahoo's announcement of its plan to outsource some of its ad business to Google, marketers say they plan to cut their spending on Yahoo and take their business elsewhere.

Coolest Movie Metamorphoses, From Wolf Man to Hulk

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Jenna Wortham

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: Image: Marvel
When a scientist witnesses Bruce Banner's transformation into an anger-fueled green giant in The Incredible Hulk, he calls it the most extraordinary thing he's ever seen.
The CGI spectacle starts with the classic green-eyed flash in the eyes of actor Edward Norton, who plays Banner, and moves impressively through vein-popping, muscle-roiling territory into all-out lab-trashing ferocity. It's the best screen presentation yet of the radiation-induced metamorphosis that turns the brooding Banner into the smash-prone Hulk, and the latest in a long line of silver-screen transformations in sci-fi and horror flicks.
From the The Fly's Brundlefly to the fleshy, obese explosion of Neo-Tokyo biker Tetsuo in Akira, here are some of the best.
Which unforgettable scenes did we leave out? Submit your faves in the comments below.
Left: The Incredible Hulk
Each time molecular scientist Bruce Banner, played by Ed Norton, forgets the cardinal rules of anger management, audiences are rewarded with his transformation into an enormous green brute.
: Image: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
The quintessential werewolf movies starring Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man used extensive camera trickery, yak hair and rubber prosthetics to produce the actor's full-body transition from man to wolf man.
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David Cronenberg's 1986 sci-fi flick about a lab experiment gone horribly awry features one of the most memorable long-form transformations in movie history. When a fly zooms into the teleportation device used by scientist Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum, the results are disastrous. First the scientist gains superhuman strength and libido thanks to a dose of housefly DNA. Then, he quickly deteriorates into a jawless, decaying, acid-vomiting mess he calls Brundlefly. Ick.
: Image: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
Animal House director John Landis' 1980s comedy-horror film beats out its lupine brethren Teen Wolf, Wolven and The Howling purely for its lethal combo of camp and creep. The mixture of robotic and prosthetic body parts used in the extended lunar transformation sequences led the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create an award for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup in 1981 -- and hand An American Werewolf in London the Oscar.
:
Shape-shifting supervillainess Mystique wowed fanboys and fangirls alike in 2000 with her seamless CGI transformations into various characters, and the blue-skinned bodysuit worn by former model Rebecca Romijn as the cerulean evildoer only added to the appeal.
Romijn works Mystique's magic in all three X-Men films before she's finally transformed into Raven Darkholme, after being injected with an antidote that suppresses her mutant X-gene.
:
When rebel biker Tetsuo Shima uncannily channels the psychic power of a superhuman 10-year-old by the name of Akira, he inherits kinetic powers beyond his bodily control.
The futuristic city of Neo-Tokyo is no match for Shima's grotesquely deformed body, which eventually becomes an obese blob of tentacles, mechanical parts and veiny appendages. Did we mention Akira was buried in a cryogenic chamber beneath an Olympic stadium nearly 40 years earlier? Yeah, he's that powerful.
: Image: Marvel
Forget Spidey sense. When an extraterrestrial symbiotic life form takes up shop in Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace), the slimy reporter becomes a powerful creature with superhuman strength and a mangled maw of pointy chompers.
Known as Venom, Brock resembles an evil, mirror image of Spider-Man, and he's hell-bent on conducting a vendetta against Spidey's alter ego, Peter Parker.
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Though this film was ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, there's nothing funny about slowly liquefying into a gelatinous, murderous mass.
Steve West, the only surviving astronaut from an ill-fated mission to Saturn, begins a rapid descent into insanity and gloop upon his return to Earth. Before West disintegrates into a pile of red slush, viewers are treated to lengthy eyefuls of open sores, jellylike matter and bones in this late-'70s screen gem.
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When Norwegian researchers awaken an alien being in Antarctica, they're probably hoping for a friendly creature a la E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Instead, they got the Thing. John Carpenter's 1982 creature feature revealed the darker side of an alien invasion -- a murderous, shape-shifting being able to infect and assimilate anything.
: Image: John Springer Collection/Corbis
After swilling his highly addictive home-brew tonic, Dr. Jekyll (Fredric March) morphs into his skirt-chasing, hard-drinking alter ego in a transformation sequence that stunned movie audiences in 1931. With the help of camera tricks and lens filters, the kindly scientist devolved into the iconic Mr. Hyde on-screen.
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Michael Bay's 2007 live-action adaptation of the cult classic '80s cartoon didn't shy away from full-frontal money shots of the army of Deceptacons and Autobots as they assembled. Though the 2007 movie adaptation included cameos from Starscream to Jazz, it was Optimus Prime's lengthy transition from red-and-blue cab into a massive, 20-foot-tall bipedal bot that stole the show.
:
Step aside, Silver Surfer. The upgraded T-1000 cyborg killing machine in James Cameron's 1991 Terminator sequel is able to mimic almost any shape, thanks to its poly-alloy molten-metal form. The T-1000's effortless mutation into other people and simple weapons creates one of the most terrifying -- and eye-popping -- movie villains ever.

'I'm Voting Republican' Is Top of the Pops Online

Posted: June 14th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level

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A new satirical video that mocks Republicans tops the charts on YouTube and elsewhere this week, perhaps illustrating that there's an untapped market online for budding Michael Moores.

Feds Scrape Together $30M for Plug-In Hybrids. That's All?

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 8:45pm EDT by Autopia

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The Department of Energy ponies up a whopping $30 million to help get plug-in hybrids on the road -- by 2016. That isn't nearly enough money, and it's too long a timeline. It's time for the government to make EVs a national priority.

'Obama Girl' Celebrates One Year Anniversary

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 8:10pm EDT by Threat Level

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Obama Girl has inspired dozens of musical responses from around the globe.

'Fat Guy Stuck in Internet' Spoofs 'Tron,' 'Star Wars'

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 6:47pm EDT by Underwire

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Adult Swim's new shorty show lays the geek shtick on thick as it follows the exploits of a goofball cyberadventurer and his pals.

Gallery: Satellites Document War, Destruction From Outer Space

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 6:45pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
If your town was bombed out of existence, would anyone care?
If you live in one of the dusty, poor corners of the world, maybe not. Carnage in developing countries often goes unnoticed in the more wired, wealthy parts of the world.
That's where the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences' Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project comes in. It is charged with using the latest in technology, primarily high-resolution satellite photography, to detect and call attention to possible human rights violations.
"I don't consider what we look at to be war in the sense that it's two armies [or] groups of soldiers. These things are slaughters, genocides, butchery and the like," said Lars Bromley, director for the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, who was profiled in Wired 15.12. "Women and children are the primary targets. It's rare we look at anything that approaches an actual battle."
This gallery presents a variety of before and after satellite photographs spanning the globe, including the most recent photographs from Ethiopia, which helped make the case for what Human Rights Watch declared "crimes against humanity" by government soldiers in the Ogaden region of the country. When before and after pictures are shown, the before shot is above the after shot.

Left: In this before-and-after sequence, you can see the aftermath of a visit by Ethiopian troops to the town of Labigah. In the after shot at the bottom, taken six months after the attack, Bromley's team counted dozens of destroyed buildings. Bromley believes that the blue-grey color of some rubble indicates the presence of ash.
"You still have apparent ash on the ground six months after the attack took place," he said. "It was probably a pretty significant burning event."
That's backed up by the team's ability to pull out the infrared signature from the raw satellite data, and in that spectrum, Bromley said that burned material has a distinctive spectral signature.
"Really what we do is stare at these things forever and verify each structure from one image to another," Bromley said.
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
Burma's military junta has long been suspected of waging a campaign of repression against its political adversaries in the state of Keren, which borders Thailand. In April, Bromley got reports that the town you can see in the top left image had been attacked. During a break in the monsoon-season clouds, a satellite snapped this shot of the village's former site. All that remains of the village is burn scars.
"This place was attacked and wholesale burned to the ground, which is relatively rare for Burma," he said. "Most of the attacks are shelling and mining and shooting."
Despite presenting this evidence in the United Nations, which caused an international stir, the government in Burma, also known as Myanmar, remains in power.
"We're getting images of human misery on pretty much a daily basis and where do we go from here?" Bromley asked. "Governments are less confident that they can hide these things, but they are more confident they can get away with it."
The settlement in the image pair at left shows burn scars for about 12 to 14 structures. This corresponds with reported attacks in the area on April 22, 2007 (Lat: 18.54 N Long: 97.05 E).
The before image was taken on Dec 13, 2006. The after image is from June 24, 2007.
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
In July 2006, intense fighting broke out between Israeli troops and the Hezbollah paramilitary group in Lebanon. As rockets rained down on northern Israel, the Israelis responded with a devastating aerial attack on Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut.
Referring to the neighborhood pictured here, Bromley said, "The so-called Hezbollah suburb in Beirut is the most catastrophic destruction we've ever looked at."
A strange amendment to the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act, which governs U.S. satellite image distribution, prevents the commercial distribution of high-resolution satellite images of Israel, so Bromley's team was unable to assess the damage that Hezbollah rockets did to Israeli towns. Human Rights Watch placed the death tolls of the short conflict at 1,200 Lebanese and 39 Israelis.
As an indication of scale, you can see a soccer field in the lower left-hand corner.
Pictured are close-up satellite images of part of Beirut City before (June 19, 2006) and after (August 12, 2006) attacks.
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
Since coming to power in 1980, Robert Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist. These aerial photographs show the erasure of the town of Porta Farm, a settlement that had the bad luck of being in a known opposition area. Bromley wryly called it Mugabe's version of "gerrymandering."
"He destroyed all the homes, because if you don't have a home, you're not gonna vote there," he said.
While seeing the destruction can be easy once you know where to look, finding areas in distress can be difficult. And once they are found, local informants have to be very careful to avoid getting caught distributing this type of information.
"We had really good communications with the people inside, [who were] writing to us on Hotmail accounts in the middle of the night, that kind of stuff," Bromley said.
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
In February 2008, the Sudanese government launched a military campaign in Western Darfur to drive out rebels fighting under the name the Justice and Equality Movement. The images show the damage from a single town in the region, Abu Suruj. The areas in red show all of the areas that burned during the conflict.
A UN report on the attacks (.pdf) noted the Sudanese offensive included "aerial bombardments by helicopter gunships and fixed-wing aircraft." In addition to showing the ashy remains of homes, the close-up picture shows what is probably a rebel stronghold in the upper-right portion of the image. Crater impacts, probably from mortar fire, are visible within the ring-like defensive perimeter.
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
Back in 2000, during a two-year war between Ethiopia and Eritrea over what Bromley described as "literally 10 square miles of the most desolate place on Earth," Ethiopian troops occupied a portion of Eritrea. In the process, they destroyed several Eritrean towns. One of them, Serha, is shown in these images. The seven buildings clearly visible in the top photograph from June 2000 had been destroyed when a new satellite image was taken in August. These images were used in international legal proceedings against Ethiopia that resulted in a monetary settlement for Eritrea, which was never paid. Relations between the countries remain tense.
"The Ethiopians and Eritreans are about to go at it again, hammer and tongs," Bromley said.
He did note, however, that at least in the case of actual national armies, blame can be assigned to countries and politicians. That's not always an option that his team has.
"When you get into Darfur and some of these other places where it's just five thousand kids with guns, you get a more horrific medieval situation."
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
From 2000 to 2004, the Israeli Defense Forces began the construction of a security wall around Israel. As part of that effort, they removed about 2,500 homes in the Gaza Strip. "The Israeli security forces wanted to clear a perimeter and they went in with bulldozers and cleared what they needed to clear," Bromley said.
Bromley did note, however, that the missing buildings in this case were not caused by burning or bombing but by "bulldozers surrounded by tanks."
: Photos: Courtesy AAAS Science and Human Rights, © 2007 DigitalGlobe
Satellite images of North Korean prison-labor camps, like this one, helped human-rights groups show the extent of what they called the "hidden gulag" system. By showing the images to escaped prisoners, the researchers were able to estimate the layouts and capacities of the camps. Their stunning estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people were being held focused attention on the scale and gravity of the situation.
"Governments are less confident that they can hide these things," Bromley said.
But, he noted, atrocities that have long been documented in satellite images and from on-the-ground accounts still rage on.
"We're getting images of human misery on pretty much a daily basis," Bromley said. But his organization can't stop the fighting, and neither can nongovernmental organizations or (generally speaking) the UN.
"Have we ended all human suffering? No. Does that bother me? Yes," he concluded.

Do Fear the Reaper: Readers Visualize Death Data

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 6:30pm EDT by Wired Science

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Two Wired.com readers, an actuary and a computer scientist, create exclusive visualizations of data on your risk-of-death from a variety of causes.

The Microhoo Aftermath: What Doesn't Kill Google Makes It Stronger

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 5:29pm EDT by Associated Press

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The dust has hardly settled in the aftermath of the collapse of any kind of Microsoft/Yahoo tie-up but it's already pretty clear Google is in an even stronger position than before. The Google/Yahoo partnership not only gives more reason for advertisers to favor Google, it keeps a potentially valuable weapon out of Microsoft's control.

RIAA: The Perpetual Litigation Machine

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 5:20pm EDT by Threat Level

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The Recording Industry Association of America dropped a copyright infringement case against a New York family and refiled it with another judge. The original judge was to rule soon on a motion to dismiss. The defense lawyer called the move "judge shopping." The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 for unlawfully sharing music on peer-to-peer networks.

Build Your Own Iron Man Armor

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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When engaging in close-range combat with terrorists and gun-wielding thugs, few items offer better protection than a custom-built bulletproof suit. Be your own Iron Man by following our guide.

Extension Developers Race to Support Firefox 3

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The browser is prepped and ready to go, but are the add-ons? Find out which of your favorite extensions are going to be ready for Firefox Download Day Tuesday.

Gadget Lab Costume Contest: Win a $2,000 Iron Man Phone

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 2:47pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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It's contest time in the Gadget Lab again. For this challenge, we want you to submit a picture of yourself wearing your very own homebrewed, DIY superhero costume. The winner will receive an ultra-rare $2,000 Iron Man phone from LG.

Screaming-Fast Banshee Media Player Hits 1.0

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

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iTunes-like media player Banshee released a speedier version of its software today. 1.0 sports some cool features to make playing music on Linux a whole lot more desirable.

IBM's 'Artificial Passenger' Reads Lips, Tracks Movements

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Autopia

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IBM's "Artificial Passenger" steering wheel reads your lips, responds to your facial expressions and lets you channel your inner rock 'n' roll drummer in traffic. To which we ask: Why?

Parsing Yahoo: Move Along, Folks ... Nothing to See Here

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Jack Flack, Portfolio.com

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News from Portfolio.com

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So why was it Yahoo, not Microsoft, that revealed to the Wall Street Journal's Matt Karnitschnig that the latter was no longer interested in a full-blown acquisition of the former? Because Yahoo surely wanted to get the word out before any more shareholders punched their ballots, while Microsoft surely enjoyed the idea of Carl's slate getting as many votes as possible.

The Yahoo statement not only begs for the event to be seen as the end of the saga, but also for a good parsing.

Yahoo: Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced that discussions with Microsoft regarding a potential transaction -- whether for an acquisition of all of Yahoo! or a partial acquisition -- have concluded.

Translation: We're absolutely, positively sure that this time this is actually the end.

Yahoo: The conclusion of discussions follows numerous meetings and conversations with Microsoft regarding a number of transaction alternatives, including a meeting between Yahoo! and Microsoft on June 8th in which Chairman Roy Bostock and other independent Board members from Yahoo! participated.

Translation: We tried really hard. And adult supervision was present.

Yahoo: At that meeting, Microsoft representatives stated unequivocally that Microsoft is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo!, even at the price range it had previously suggested.

Translation: We're still dreaming of $37 in May of 2008. They're now dreaming of $17 in May of 2009.

Yahoo: With respect to an acquisition of Yahoo!'s search business alone that Microsoft had proposed, Yahoo!'s Board of Directors has determined, after careful evaluation, that such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo! stockholders.

Translation: It was never consistent with that view, but we were willing to make that sacrifice to stay independent."

Yahoo: Yahoo! remains focused on maximizing value for stockholders by continuing to execute on its strategy of being the "starting point" for the most consumers on the Internet and a "must buy" for advertisers.

Translation: Though we've heard rumors another company may already occupy those positions.

Yahoo: The online advertising industry is projected to grow from $40 billion in 2007 to approximately $75 billion in 2010...

Translation: The growth of the industry will outpace our ongoing share losses within that industry.

Yahoo: ...and the company believes it has the right assets, strategic plan, Board of Directors and management team to capitalize on this growth opportunity.

Translation: It was all just a bad dream. We're so grateful to back in Kansas.

UK's House of Lords Join the YouTube Generation

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 6:42am EDT by Associated Press

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Britain's House of Lords isn't a bunch of rich, out-of-touch old guys, they want you to know. But somehow that's the lingering impression among much of the populace, at least among those who knows the body still exists. So, to increase their street cred the Lords are releasing some snappy videos on their own YouTube channel -- thus ensuring that there will always be an England.

ATT Mulls Upcharge for Big Downloaders

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 5:06am EDT by Associated Press

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ATT, the nation's largest ISP, is considering big downloaders more. A spokesman calls the policy "inevitable" but announced no specific plans. Overall bandwidth is surging, ATT says, and the top 5 percent of users eat 46 percent of the total. Other ISPs have secret caps, and Time Warner Cable already has a pilot surcharge plan in Beaumont, Texas.

Critic Uncovered Judge's Porn Stash

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 4:34am EDT by Threat Level

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Cyrus Mark Sanai went digging through 9th Circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski's personal website after the judge allegedly hosted a court document relating to Sanai's divorce proceedings. The porn and MP3s he found set off a firestorm of controversy.

June 13, 1983: Pioneer 10 Reaches an End ... and a Beginning

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1983: Pioneer 10 becomes the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto's orbit and leave the central solar system.

Pioneer 10 must be considered one of the most successful spacecraft of all time. Designed for deep-space exploration, which at the time of its launch in 1972 meant pretty much anything beyond the moon, Pioneer 10 achieved a number of firsts while sending back valuable data along the way. Among the milestones:

Following liftoff, Pioneer 10 achieved a breakaway speed of 32,400 mph, making it the fastest human-made object to leave the Earth. It shot past the moon in a mere 11 hours and crossed Mars' orbit in just 12 weeks. By the time it reached Jupiter on Dec. 3, 1973, Pioneer 10 was moving along at a crisp 82,000 mph.

On July 12, 1972, Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to pass through the asteroid belt. NASA described this as a "spectacular achievement" and, considering that asteroids the size of Alaska hurtle through the belt at 45,000 mph, there's no reason to dispute the claim.

Upon reaching Jupiter, Pioneer 10 sent back the first direct observations and close-up images of the solar system's largest planet. It was data from Pioneer 10 that confirmed that Jupiter is mostly a liquid planet.

After clearing Pluto's orbit (considered the boundary of the planetary solar system in the decades before astronomers decided Pluto isn't really a planet), Pioneer 10 continued to send back valuable data regarding solar wind, until its scientific mission ended in 1997.

All attempts to contact Pioneer 10 were terminated following the spacecraft's last transmission of telemetry data on April 27, 2002. Nevertheless, NASA's Deep Space Network received a final, faint signal on Jan. 22, 2003. It's been silence ever since.

Although lost to contact forever, Pioneer 10 continues its endless journey through interstellar space. It's headed in the general direction of Aldebaran, the brightest star in constellation Taurus, forming the bull's eye. According to NASA, it will take about 2 million years for Pioneer 10 to reach Taurus.

So Pioneer 10's mission, originally intended to go 21 months, lasted 25 years and change. As project manager Larry Lasher said, "I guess you could say we got our money's worth."

Source: NASA

Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Brandon Keim

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Little green men might shock the secular public. But the Catholic Church would welcome them as brothers.

That's what Vatican chief astronomer and papal science adviser Gabriel Funes explained in a recent article in L'Osservatore Romano, the newsletter of the Vatican Observatory (translated here). His conclusion might surprise nonbelievers. After all, isn't this the same church that imprisoned Galileo for saying that the Earth revolves around the sun? Doesn't the Bible say that God created man -- not little green men -- in his image?

Indeed, many observers assert that aliens would be bad for believers. Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research, once wrote that finding intelligent other-worldly life "will be inconsistent with the existence of God or at least organized religions." But such predictions tend to come from outside Christianity. From within, theologians have debated the implications of alien contact for centuries. And if one already believes in angels, no great leap of faith is required to accept the possibility of other extraterrestrial intelligences.

Since God created the universe, theologians say, he would have created aliens, too. And far from being weakened by contact, Christianity would adapt. Its doctrines would be interpreted anew, the aliens greeted with open -- and not necessarily Bible-bearing -- arms.

"The main question is, 'Would religion survive this contact?'" said NASA chief historian Steven J. Dick, author of The Biological Universe. "Religion hasn't gone away after Copernican theory, after Darwin. They've found ways to adapt, and they'll find a way if this happens, too," Dick says.

The central conundrum posed to Christianity by alien contact would involve the Incarnation -- the arrival of Jesus Christ as God's representative on Earth, his crucifixion and the absolution of humanity's sins through his forgiveness.

"It would still be true -- but if there are other races and intelligences, then what is the meaning of this visit to our race at that time?" asked Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, who in 2005 penned the booklet Intelligent Life in the Universe?

Some propose that the Earthly incarnation of Jesus some 2,000 years ago redeemed all intelligent creatures, in all places and -- since a space-faring race is likely older than us -- in all times. Others have suggested that Jesus could take multiple forms.

"Just as Jesus is human like you and I, you would find an alien-specific Jesus," said Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary professor Ted Peters.

But Peters and others also say that aliens may not have fallen into sin, instead existing in a state of grace, neither having nor needing Jesus. In that case, missionaries would have no call to convert them.

"Would sin be the same on another planet as we conceive of it here? Would there even be sin, or would God be present to that species in a completely different way?" says Richard Randolph, a Kansas City University ethicist.

All this, however, assumes that humanity not only encounters new forms of life but also understands them. Other intelligences may be incomprehensible to us, thus intensifying another doctrinal question: What does it mean to be made, as the Bible proclaims, in God's image?

Many astrotheologians argue that God's image refers to our spiritual nature, with our physical forms being irrelevant. Not everyone, however, agrees.

"If there are aliens, the Bible specifically does not say that they were created in his image," said Mark Conn, pastor of the Noble Hill Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri. "God created many other intelligent beings on this planet, and they were not created in His image."

Conn's church recently met to discuss the issues posed by extraterrestrial contact, ultimately deciding that "if they're there, they're there. It doesn't change a whole lot."

Unlike Peters, Conn suggested that missionary work may be required, something the aliens may not welcome -- especially if, as many postulate, they are technologically superior to humanity and do not have religions of their own.

"Maybe they'll say that they used to need religion but have outgrown it. Some people say that would be a great blow to religion, because if an advanced civilization doesn't need it, why do we?" said Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at SETI.

"I don't buy it, though. I think religion meets very human needs, and unless extraterrestrials can provide a replacement for it, I don't think religion is going to go away," he continued. "And if there are incredibly advanced civilizations with a belief in God, I don't think Richard Dawkins will start believing."

Artifacts From the Future

Posted: June 13th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Sean Hamilton Alexander

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Review: 'Incredible Hulk' Is a Handsome Hunk of Mayhem

Posted: June 12th, 2008, 10:00pm EDT by Underwire

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By sticking to anger-fueled action and keeping Bruce Banner's angst to a minimum, Marvel's big green guy scores on his second big-screen romp.

Mysterious Hillary4Mccain.com Directs Voters to McCain Campaign Site

Posted: June 12th, 2008, 10:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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Someone has registered hillary4mccain.com, which directs to McCain's presidential campaign site. They've also provided false domain name registration.

Judge Weighing Ameritrade Hack Lawsuit Settlement

Posted: June 12th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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A federal judge on Thursday put off approving a proposed settlement of a class-action representing as many as 6.3 million TD Ameritrade customers whose data was breached when hackers stole personal identifying customer information.

How to How-to Like We Do

Posted: June 12th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Wired.com's How-To Wiki thrives on user-generated content. Know something we don't? Log in and add it yourselves. While you're thinking about it, read through our (very meta) how-to guide to writing a how-to.

June 10, 1943: Biro Brothers Patent Ballpoint Pen

Posted: June 10th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1943: Brothers László and Georg B&#237ró, Hungarian refugees living in Argentina, patent the ballpoint pen. A half-century-old idea is coming to commercial fruition.

Lewis Waterman's invention of a practical fountain pen, patented in 1884, had solved the problem of portability. You no longer had to carry around an inkwell to be able to write when and where you wanted. But the ink still took awhile to dry and was subject to running and smudging.

American banker John L. Loud patented a ballpoint pen in 1888. It used a ball-and-socket to deliver sticky, quick-drying ink. Too sticky: The ink was so coarse, it didn't really work well on paper. (It was a good idea on paper, except literally.) It did find industrial uses for writing on leather and cloth.

László B&#237ró was a Hungarian journalist who saw an idea in the quick-drying inks newspapers use. His brother Georg, a chemist, helped him with technical aspects. They used a tiny -- and precisely ground -- ball bearing to serve two functions. It distributed ink evenly from the cartridge to the paper for writing, and it contained the rest of the ink inside the cartridge.

The B&#237ró brothers made progress on improving the ballpoint to the point, so to speak, that it could write as smoothly as a fountain pen. But the situation in their homeland was deteriorating. When World War II started, they fled from Budapest to Paris, then to Madrid and finally to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There, they applied for a patent and sought financial backing. One of their contacts, an English accountant named Harry Martin, realized that the ballpoint solved a problem faced by Britain's Royal Air Force: Conventional pens were unsuitable for writing aircraft logs, because they leaked, were too sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and wouldn't let you write on a vertical or overhead surface.

Martin eventually flew to Washington and London, convincing both the U.S. Air Force and the RAF to adopt the new technology. By the time the Allies won the war, the ballpoint shared the luster of victory.

When the pens went into commercial production in 1945, they were a sensation. In the United States, the Reynolds Pen sold for $12.50 (about $150 in today's money). Yet people swarmed a New York department store to buy 8,000 of them on the first day of sale.

What? People lining up to be the first to buy new technology? Where have we heard that before? You mean, it happened in the old days, too?

Some of the earliest versions of commercial ballpoints leaked and smudged, but manufacturers eventually worked the bugs out. What? A technology brought to market before it's quite ready? How could that be?

Today, the ballpoint is what most people mean when they say just pen. And in much of the world, the generic name for a ballpoint pen is biro. In Argentina, by the way, it's a birome.

Source: BBC h2g2

Hypermilers Push the Limits of Fuel Efficiency

Posted: June 10th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It's a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He's getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He's a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. "It's like a videogame," he says. "Can I beat my new high score?"

It's a game that some say started during the gas-rationing days of World War II and came back during the oil embargo of the 1970s. It's catching on again as fuel prices spiral out of sight, and skilled players say small changes in driving style -- eliminating hard acceleration, turning off the engine at stop lights, coasting to a stop -- can bring big improvements in fuel economy no matter what you drive.

"If you combine a handful of simple hypermiling techniques, you can easily see increases of 20 percent," said Tim Fulton, a 25-year-old designer from West Bend, Wisconsin. "Use a few more techniques and 30 percent is yours."

Fulton routinely gets 55 mpg from his 1997 Toyota Paseo, a car the EPA rates at 29 mpg. He started hypermiling about 18 months ago when he landed a new job 37 miles from home and got tired of burning so much gas. He mastered "pulse and glide" -- turning off the engine and coasting while driving. "This technique alone dramatically increased my mileage from 38 mpg to 47 mpg on my first tank," he says. "I was blown away."

Pulse and glide is controversial -- and in some states, illegal -- because the engine drives the power steering and brakes. Shut it off, critics warn, and you can't steer or stop effectively. Hypermilers say the risks are overstated. Still, there are easier -- and, arguably, safer -- things you can do to boost fuel economy. The first suggestion?

"Try the speed limit," says Rick Harrell, a moderator at the website ecomodder.com and its list of more than 100 ways to improve fuel economy. "It's a crazy idea, but it works."

The U.S. Department of Energy says gas mileage plummets above 60 mph. Every 5 mph above that speed is akin to paying another 20 cents a gallon for gas. For that reason, hypermilers scrupulously obey the speed limit. They also use the accelerator and brake as little as possible, preferring instead to coast. The truly hardcore coast to a stop, avoid using brakes around corners and draft behind trucks or other large vehicles.

Following the speed limit was quite a change for Harrell, who favored high-performance cars before getting the hypermiling bug three years ago. "I knew I needed to slow down for both environmental purposes and not to scare the living daylights out of my passengers," he says.

These days he's driving a 1998 Acura Integra and getting as much as 40 mpg in a car the EPA rates at 24. His quest for better fuel efficiency started with the car, which got a tune-up and an engine-block heater for more efficient starts. He inflated the tires to the maximum listed on the sidewall to reduce rolling resistance. And he installed a fuel-consumption gauge that provides real-time data about how much gas he's burning. He and other hypermilers highly recommend them.

"The instant feedback was great," Harrell says. "Simple things like slowing down on the highway, timing traffic lights (to maintain) momentum and coasting with the engine off started to push that fuel-efficiency number higher and higher."

Hypermilers call the gadgets "game gauges" because they're always trying to see how high they can go. The best of them get absurd figures. Wayne Gerdes, founder of cleanmpg.com and the king of hypermilers, recently drove a Honda Civic hybrid 800 miles from Chicago to New York on a single tank of gas. That works out to 65 mpg.

That's low for Darin Cosgrove of Brockville, Ontario. The co-founder of ecomodder.com averages 69 mpg in his 1998 Geo Metro, a car that got 40 mpg off the showroom floor. He's gotten as many as 133 mpg on a long trip by going slowly and using pulse and glide. He's also modified his car to make it more aerodynamic and tinkered with the drivetrain to improve efficiency.

Fahimuddin hopes to achieve those kind of numbers with his 2000 Honda Insight. It was a heap when he bought it and he's overhauled just about everything, but the clutch is shot so he's only getting 45 mpg or so. He'll replace it eventually, and add a belly pan to improve aerodynamics under the car. He figures that and a few tweaks to his driving style will get him to 60 mph.

But that's just the beginning.

"I'd like to hit 70 mpg. Seventy would be pretty sick," he says. "It's doable."

Hypermiling 101: Convert Your Car Into a Super-Saver

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Your gas budget doesn't go as far as it used to, but that doesn't mean your standard engine won't. You don't have to buy a hybrid to get good mileage. All it takes is a light touch on the accelerator and a well-tuned engine. Learn how with our hypermiling guide.

Developers at WWDC Looking Forward to iPhone 3G Platform

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Attendees at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference are looking forward to the new iPhone's features and the fact that it will enable them to create applications for corporate use. Some, however, think the enhancements don't go far enough.

McCain's Ties to Telecoms Questioned After Wiretapping Flip-Flop

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 8:50pm EDT by Threat Level

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Telecom lobbyists, current and former, hold some prominent spots in Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's campaign. After a week of flip-flopping on the legality of warrantless wiretapping, a civil liberties group that is suing AT&T for allegedly spying on Americans is asking what that might mean.

Gallery: The iPhone 2.0 Keynote

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 8:45pm EDT by Dylan Tweney

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: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
SAN FRANCISCO -- As conferences go, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference ranks low on the sexiness factor. It's a good bet that, without the promise of a new, iPhone 3G, the programmer-centric conference would not have drawn the hundreds of broadcast, print and blog journalists that it did.

Fortunately, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did have a new iPhone up his sleeve, and after spending an hour selling the company's new iPhone development tools and previewing some of the platform's forthcoming apps, Jobs delivered what we all came for: the new phone.
The iPhone 3G, as it will be called, will cost $200 for an 8-GB version, $300 for a 16-GB version. Both will be available in a new, slightly rounded case with a shiny black-plastic back. The 16-GB version will also be available with a white back.
Breaking with Jobs' keynote tradition, the iPhone 3G is not yet available: Both models will go on sale July 11 in 22 countries. Apple plans to make the phone available in 75 countries within several months.
For details, check out our full coverage of the WWDC 2008 keynote, or browse these slides for the highlights.

Left: Jobs' normal "reality-distortion field" seemed to be at ebb during today's keynote, which many observers noted was less exciting than a typical Jobs presentation. Indeed, Jobs -- looking thinner than ever in his trademark black mock-turtleneck -- let his deputies take most of the stage time. More than one audience member noticed that Jobs seemed to be looking a little wan and have less energy than usual. And maybe it's time for a new turtleneck? This one was looking a little gray, not to mention baggy.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Apple's Phil Schiller, a regular fixture at Apple keynotes, touted the phone's new integration with Microsoft Exchange using "ActiveStink -- I mean ActiveSync." Was that an intentional dig at the Cupertino company's sometime competitor, sometime partner? Or was it a true Freudian slip, indicating Schiller's habitual distaste for the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft standard?

It's not clear. One thing is sure, though: Apple has provided deep and meaningful enterprise tools in the 2.0 version of the iPhone software, including the ability to "push" e-mail, calendar and contact updates. The company has also given IT managers the ability to zero out any data on a corporate iPhone, remotely -- handy when one of them goes missing.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Apple executive Scott Forstall demonstrates how easy it is to create an iPhone application using the software development kit's new tools. You just drag in this snippet of code here, drop a button there and presto! Instant contact manager.

Like other software-development demos, this one had a lot in common with cooking demonstrations on TV: So much depends on having everything set up just right, ahead of time. In real life, you'd spend half a day doing prep work before you got to do the five minutes of dragging-and-dropping that Forstall showed onstage.

Still, developer after developer testified to the ease of developing iPhone apps. It's clear that if you're used to coding OS X apps, the iPhone should be a cakewalk.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
One of the applications shown at the March preview of the iPhone SDK was Sega's popular Nintendo DS title Super Monkey Ball. This game will be available for the iPhone for $10 -- once the iPhone App Store opens -- and will feature all four cute little monkeys and more than 100 different levels. Players control the rolling monkeys simply by tilting the iPhone this way and that.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Developers who want to create location-aware applications have plenty to drool over with the new iPhone 2.0 operating system, which has plenty of support for geographic data. In addition to the first-generation iPhone's ability to do geolocation by triangulating nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers, the iPhone 3G will also have a GPS receiver, giving the device the ability to track its movements with great precision.

In this demo by location-sensitive social network Loopt, the orange pin denotes the user's location, while blue pins show nearby friends. Looking for someone to have lunch with? Loopt can help you hook up with someone and can even help recommend a cute little local cafe. (Friends not included.)
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Major League Baseball's iPhone app takes advantage of the phone's fast 3-G and WiFi data connections to provide real-time game scores -- and "real-time video clips." That doesn't mean you'll be able to watch streaming video of the whole game, but highlight clips will be available for you to view within "minutes" after they happen, the MLB developer promised.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Among the most impressive iPhone app demos of the day were graphics-intensive ones, including a medical-imaging program and this game, called Kroll, from Digital Legends. In the demo, a fully animated character ran through a beautifully rendered fantasy landscape, battling winged demons and an immense, scary-looking giant whose steps shook the very screen.

Like the many other developers who took the stage, Digital Legends touted the ease of porting its OS X software to the iPhone -- and also provided an impressive demonstration of the phone's built-in 3-D video capabilities. In terms of graphics quality, this game looked comparable to what you might find on a PlayStation 2.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Perhaps the biggest news of the day was a three-digit number: $199, the price of the 8-GB iPhone 3G. That's a significant drop from the current price for the 8-GB first-generation iPhone ($399), and a huge drop from the $600 that it cost when Apple first introduced the iPhone a year ago.

As if the mere figure weren't impressive enough, Jobs had the price stomp onto the screen with massive booming sounds, saving him from having to actually say the word Boom.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
The new iPhone 3G comes with a shiny black-plastic back, in contrast to the current model's matte aluminum. If you decide to spring for the more capacious 16-GB model (which will cost $299), you can also choose a shiny white-plastic back.

The iPhone 3G itself doesn't appear to be any smaller, thinner or lighter than the current version, although it has tapered, slightly rounded edges, which will either make it feel thinner or make it feel more like a bar of soap.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Jobs made his customary brief appearance in the middle of the crowd, surrounded by burly bodyguards, after the keynote wrapped up. However, he didn't spend any time chitchatting with the hoi polloi, and no one got any hands-on time with his shiny new gadget.

Physicist Debunks Cellphone Popcorn Viral Videos

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 7:40pm EDT by Underwire

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Gadgets can pull off some pretty amazing feats these days. But popping corn? That's a bit beyond the scope of even the hottest feature-packed mobile.

Rising Gas Prices Finally Kill the Once-Mighty SUV

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Autopia

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They've had a good long run, but after almost two decades on top, SUVs are dead, done in by rising gas costs and consumers' desire for more fuel-efficient cars. Good riddance.

How to Plant Trees to Cool Your Home and the Planet

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Hammock owners rejoice, planting trees isn't just for tree-huggers any more. Studies show it can save you money by shading your home. Get your hands dirty without a green thumb by using our guide. Read more...

Blind Teenage Hacker Arrested for Intimidating Verizon Security Official

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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Barely a month after turning 18, a blind phone phreak in Boston faces federal charges after showing up uninvited at the home of a Verizon security official who tried to turn off his phone.

Scientists Think Like a Hurricane to Beat the Next Katrina

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by David Axe

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When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in late August 2005 and the levees around the city broke, flooding the city and killing hundreds, Ed Link was as surprised as everyone else.

He shouldn't have been. As one of the nation's foremost hurricane experts, Link, a professor at the University of Maryland, had access to the government's most sophisticated mathematical models for predicting damage from big Gulf Coast storms. But those models weren't accurate because the data they were based on were incomplete, out of date or just plain wrong.

As the floodwaters receded and the Army Corps of Engineers rushed to repair the levees, the government asked Link to lead a team of engineers and scientists from the government and private sector -- 300 in all -- to recode those old models. The goal of the vaguely named Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force was twofold, Link told Wired.com: first, "to get that knowledge built back into the levee repairs so the same vulnerability wasn't built into the system again. The second was to come up with a 'risk assessment' looking forward."

In other words, to have a much better idea, grounded in solid science, of who might be killed or have their property destroyed in future Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The levees have long since been fixed and upgraded, but the risk assessment -- based on a mind-boggling 2 million equations -- is just now nearing completion. As the math came together beginning in 2007, the task force began publishing color-coded, interactive maps in an effort to show Gulf Coast residents what kind of danger they likely faced from hurricanes. The Google Earth-based maps can be found on the Army Corps website.

The ultimate "risk" map, the culmination of the task force's work representing tens of thousands of square miles from Florida to Texas, is slated for release this week.

Gathering the data for the levee upgrade and the risk maps took three years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort by hundreds of team members using a surprising mix of high technology, old-fashioned detective work, trick psychology and, when all else failed, intuition. The results have revolutionized authorities' understanding of Gulf Coast hurricanes.

But whether the public will pay heed is another matter.

Katrina dissipated on August 30, 2005. In early September, rescuers had just begun going house to house in New Orleans looking for the living and the dead. But Link's team was already on the ground collecting what he called "perishable" data, such as the depths and locations of floodwaters.

For many team members, data collection was dirty, dangerous, thankless work -- and it meant short-shifting their day jobs. "A lot of people just quit what they were doing and basically worked full-time" on the new storm model, Link told Wired.com.

But for one key team member, it wasn't just about sloshing through flooded streets. Don Resio, a scientist working for the Army Corps of Engineers, went hunting for old data sets from decades-old storms, in hopes that historic hurricanes might whisper hints about future ones.

Resio told Wired.com that his hunt mostly involved polite requests to cooperative government agencies like the National Weather Service. But other, equally vital reams of data were locked in the safes of the Gulf Coast oil companies, who, with billions of dollars invested in offshore drilling platforms, were especially concerned with the high winds that come with big storms.

Resio needed that data, but it wasn't his to demand. His solution? "I made 'em feel guilty," he recalled with a laugh.

Slowly, the data came together, culled from more than 150 storms dating back a hundred years. Key figures came from new, high-tech microwave sensors installed aboard "hurricane-hunting" C-130 and P-3 airplanes operated by the Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A scale-model levee was stress-tested in the world's most powerful centrifuge.
Courtesy Army Corps of Engineers
To create entirely new data from scratch, the task force built a detailed model of New Orleans and flooded it, essentially recreating Katrina on a nonlethal scale. And to zero in on the levees, the team built a miniature earthen levee inside the world's most powerful centrifuge. They added water and spun the centrifuge at speeds duplicating hurricane-force wind and waves, looking for when, where and how the levee would fail.

There were some surprising revelations in the course of the task force's investigation … some of which helped explain why Katrina had taken so many people by surprise. For one, Link's team found that the existing elevation maps of New Orleans were way off and would have to be totally redrawn. "We found things two feet below where people though they were," Link said. Obviously that made the city more vulnerable to flooding.

Also, in tightening up and rewriting the old mathematical models, the task force gained a clearer understanding of the limitations of modern science. "There's a lot we just don't know," Resio told Wired.com. But, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are "unknown unknowns," which are bad, and there are "known unknowns," which are somewhat better. Finally the hurricane task force knew the basic outline of what it didn't know.

But when it comes to math, even known unknowns can be tricky. Resio said that for some equations, he and the other researchers needed figures, any figures. So they had to guess. That meant thinking like a hurricane, trying to intuit how wind and water might behave under certain conditions.

Necessary educated guesses aside, Resio told Wired.com that uncertainty is a key parameter of the new storm models -- especially as global warming whips the planet's fundamental weather patterns in unpredictable ways. The team knew they had to capture this unpredictability mathematically and build it into the models.
Spinning at speeds duplicating a hurricane, the scale earthen levee turns to liquid and disintegrates.
Video courtesy Army Corps of Engineers
"We did a bunch of numerical tests to determine variability," Resio said. In other words, they looked at the surprising behaviors of past storms. Were winds unusually fast? Or was the ratio between the size of the storm and wind speed different than the norm? "We added that variability back into the model as a random function," Resio said, so that when officials use the new models to predict hurricane damage, they get a range of predictions. It's one of the new models' greatest strengths, Resio said.

After three years of labor by hundreds of engineers and scientists, emergency managers now have a much better understanding of what kind of damage a major storm might cause. But that doesn't mean that the people most at risk -- Gulf Coast residents -- take these predictions seriously.

Sometimes all the mathematical models and colorful maps in the world won't change a person's mind, which is why many New Orleans residents have rebuilt destroyed homes in exactly the same place, and to the same construction standard, as before Katrina.

To combat public ignorance and complacency, Resio's team includes "risk communicators" -- basically, PR reps for hurricanes. Ironically, the high-tech storm models and sophisticated maps that the risk communicators rely on might actually undermine their work, according to one academic who has studied storms.

"The technologically enhanced discourse of prediction conveys the sense that weather media viewers can be prepared," Marita Sturken, from New York University, wrote in 2006. She called this a technological "selling of preparedness."

Resio is aware of the challenge in making potential hurricane victims believe that they're at risk, even when the world's most sophisticated storm models insist they are. "How do you convince people they need to be concerned?" he said, sighing. "The risk communicators have their hands full."

GPS-Equipped iPhone Could Enable New Citizen Science

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Wired Science

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The iPhone's new price and geolocation tools could bring a new army of data-collecting citizen-scientists to bear on the world's environmental problems.

Encyclopaedia Britannica to Follow Modified Wikipedia Model

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Epicenter

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It may not exactly be a sign of the Apocalypse, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica is dipping its toes in wiki waters with a plan to invite the general public to contribute to its online version. Not just anything will get into the main version, mind you, and comparisons to Wikipedia may be exaggerated, but the invitation to "lay contributers" is a first.

Top Pentagon Scientists Fear Brain-Modified Foes

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Danger Room

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The Pentagon's most-prestigious scientific advisory panel is spooked about "enemy activities in sleep research," neuro-pharmaceutical performance enhancement, "brain-computer interfaces," and other ways adversaries could "exploit advances in Human Performance Modification, and thus create a threat to national security."

WWDC: Location-Aware iPhone Tools Set to Flood the Web

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Web Monkey

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If the rumors are to be believed, Apple is going to announce new iPhones — possibly GPS-enabled — at the company’s WWDC event, set to kick off later today. For iPhone fans it could mean access to all kinds of useful, location-aware data. One interesting possibility is a new service by the name of CitySense.

TSA Nixes Flying Without I.D.

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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Airline passengers will no longer be able to fly without identification starting June 21, unless they convince a Homeland Security employee they lost it, according to rules announced Friday. The new rules change a little-known policy that let civil liberties-minded individuals choose extra screening over showing identification, but they don't close the biggest airport security loophole.

Play Chickenfoot With the DOMinoes of the Web

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Chickenfoot, the scripting tool with the funny name, lets Firefox users build automated behaviors for their favorite sites. Some see it as an improvement over the more popular Greasemonkey, in that Chickenfoot code is simpler to understand. Find out for yourself with Webmonkey's getting-started guide.

Metallica Kills Blogger Reviews. Will They Never Learn?

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 1:57pm EDT by Listening Post

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So near, and yet so far. Metallica got some cred last week for releasing on the internet, a turnabout from their eight-year jihad against fans downloading their music. But when a pig flies ... this week they forced bloggers to pull reviews of their album. Did we mention that the bloggers were invited to a listening party? Did we mention there was no nondisclosure agreement?

The Lost Space Colonies of NASA

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 1:05pm EDT by Wired Science

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A Swinging '70s take on space colonies, courtesy of the (paisley) suits at NASA.

Sometimes, It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief

Posted: June 9th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by David Critchell, Portfolio.com

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Wired: Top Stories (332 unread)

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:25pm EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:06pm EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:52pm EDT by Threat Level

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:16pm EDT by Wired Science

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 11:05am EDT by Listening Post

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:20am EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 8:00am EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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Posted: June 29th, 2008, 11:18pm EDT

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Posted: June 29th, 2008, 8:13pm EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: June 29th, 2008, 4:31pm EDT by Wired Science

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Posted: June 29th, 2008, 10:34am EDT by Underwire

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Posted: June 29th, 2008, 3:59am EDT by Underwire

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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:55pm EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:23pm EDT by Underwire

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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Listening Post

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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Listening Post

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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 1:41pm EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Autopia

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:59pm EDT by Wired Science

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:49pm EDT by Underwire

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:41pm EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:15pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 3:44pm EDT by Threat Level

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:35pm EDT by Game|Life

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:15pm EDT by Threat Level

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Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:04pm EDT by Autopia