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How to Turn Anything Into a Screenplay

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:12pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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You may fancy yourself a screenwriter, but have only your household pet as a muse. No problem. According to screenwriting guru Robert McKee, you can make any idea into a screenplay easily if you just follow some basic dramatic rules. Pull out a typewriter and some white paper and lets get started.

The $46,616.47 Oil Change and Size-22 Carbon Footprint

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Someone with more money than sense flies his Lamborghini from Qatar to Britain for an oil change. Environmentalists want the guy's head, but Britain's Lamborghini club can't see what all the fuss is about.

Cheap Catalyst Could Turn Sunlight, Water Into Fuel

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:33pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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A new, cheap catalyst developed by MIT chemists could make storing the energy from solar panels feasible.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha Previews Sleek New Features

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson

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Firefox 3.1 alpha has been released, and the preview has more features than your typical x.1 release. The alpha features several multimedia embedding features, Photoshop-like styles and a coverflow-like tab browser. The alpha has some hidden surprises for web developers, too.

Next-Gen Prius Is More of the Same, But Bigger

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 1:24pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Toyota abides by the old rule "don't fix it if it ain't broke" and makes the 2010 Prius a little bigger and a little quicker but otherwise the same as those it's selling today.

Study Promises Benefits of Exercise in a Pill

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 11:02am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Scientists say that a pill designed to mimic exercise's intracellular impacts increased the endurance of out-of-shape mice by 44 percent.

Scrabulous -- er, 'Wordscraper' -- is Back

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 10:08am EDT by Associated Press

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The game formerly known as Scrabulous is back on Facebook as "Wordscraper." And that isn't the only change its developers have made to avoid any unwelcome confusion with Scrabble: the squares are now circles. Scrabble is there too, of course. Let the games begin ...

Project toRebuild Internet Gets $12M, Bandwidth

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:23am EDT by Associated Press

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A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along. The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) has received $12 million in government funding (the five-year project is estimated to need $350 million) and donations of considerable network capacity by two major research organizations.

What Do Small Open Source Projects Do With Money? Not Much

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Scott Gilbertson

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A coding blog donated a substantial amount to an open source project it liked. What did the project do with the money? Nothing. In many cases small projects like these need a developer's time, not more money, to succeed.

Playlist: Thumpin' Rmxxology, Reebok's Monopoly Sneakers, Hitachi's Ultrathin HDTV

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT

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: Somewhere, chart guru Edward Tufte is squirming: This site's homages to pop culture come in the form of perverted infographics. From the map indicating which countries a Flock of Seagulls deem "so far away" (Iran) to a bar graph illustrating the possibilities at the Hotel California (checking out: 100 percent; leaving: 0) and a flowchart for deciding what game console to buy (pivotal question: Do you have any friends?), GraphJam will give you newfound respect for the awesome power of Microsoft Excel.

: The closest Chick-fil-A is 45 miles from Wired's offices, so we can't easily enjoy its superlative chicken sandwich. Good thing McDonald's has hatched the Southern Style Chicken Sandwich, a feat of culinary reverse engineering that astonished even staffers from below the Mason-Dixon line with its similarity to the Chick-fil-A original. And there's a Golden Arches right down the street. Yum.

: Bust it! Two decades after launching seminal rappers like Young MC, LA label Delicious Vinyl is back with this collection of old-school gems reworked by the likes of Eminem and Peaches — who electrifies Tone-Lôc party anthem "Wild Thing." Not feeling Hot Chip's take on the Pharcyde? Use the included instrumental tracks to make your own rmxx.

: All hail Anglo-Franco pop! Having endured the death of both bandmate Mary Hansen and the alt-rock '90s, the reigning royals of postmodern electrolounge return. Eschewing forays into droning avant interludes, Chemical Chords showcases Stereolab at its shortest and sweetest — as the purveyor of pure '60s-tinged bliss. Light up a Gitane, swoon with your sweetheart, and imagine you're drifting among Godard's nouveau stars.

: Normally a 47-inch LCD with full 1080p resolution and a 120-Hz refresh rate is thicker than Finnegans Wake. Not this $4,699 supermodel. At 1.5-inches, the UT47X902 is heroin-chic thin, with a video processor that boosts the frame rate from the standard 24 fps to a gorgeous 28 fps. But why does such a beauty have such an ugly moniker?

: Truly fit for a player, these '90s-style kicks are sure to be a hot property when they hit stores (and eBay) in late August. Advance to Go, drop $85, and you'll soon be walking on Park Place.

: Architect John Lautner's insane engineering, space-age designs, and Los Angeles backdrops have been catnip to filmmakers. Chemosphere, his 1960 flying- saucer house that sprouts out of the Hollywood Hills, played a supporting role in Body Double, while other Lautner homes stole scenes in Diamonds Are Forever and The Big Lebowski. Through October 12, these ingenious buildings get their close-up in this exhibition at LA's Hammer Museum.

: The bon mots from Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of Juno, keep coming, this time via Twitter. Her stream of consciousness — "I'm at the Denver airport eating a Pizza Hut grease mattress because I clearly hate myself" and "I went with 'That's a cut!' instead of just 'Cut'; I've always favored the conversational approach" — should tide you over until her next project, The United States of Tara, debuts on Showtime next year.

: Kids don't understand you? Send them to film summer school via these reissues of '80s cinematic essentials. Perhaps if they spend a weekend watching Airplane!, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Fatal Attraction (among others), they'll grok your familiarity with jive, nostalgia for "Twist and Shout," and fear of keeping a pet rabbit. Plus: Each disc includes a bonus CD with songs from A-ha and Erasure. Roger, roger.

: The Robot Chicken guys got carte blanche from George Lucas to make this 23-minute stop-animation spoof of the Star Wars trilogy. And for good reason: The DVD extras alone are worth the purchase price, with clips of show cocreator Seth Green acting out sketches and countless behind-the-scenes shots of the cast and crew goofing off.

July 31, 1790: New Nation Issues First Patent

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1790: Samuel Hopkins of Vermont gets the very first U.S. patent. It covers a process for making potash and pearl ash (potassium carbonate).

Under the Articles of Confederation, inventors had applied to state legislatures to obtain monopolies on the use of their inventions. But Article I, Section 8 of the new U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

Many inventors petitioned and lobbied the first session of the First Congress in 1789 for patents and copyrights, but in the midst of setting up a whole new government, Congress took no action on any of them. At President Washington's urging, Congress passed a patent law the next year, and the president signed it into law April 10 -- seven weeks before Rhode Island ratified the Constitution to become the 13th state.

The new law directed patent applicants to file a petition with the secretary of state. He, with the secretary of war and attorney general would grant a patent if they found "the invention or discovery sufficiently useful and important." The application required a written description, drawings and, if practical, a model of the invention. These needed to be sufficient to allow a skilled workman to make and use the invention. Thus, the public would benefit when the patent expired after 14 years.

Complete application and document fees for a patent ran $4 to $5 (roughly $100 in today's money) depending how lengthy your specifications were: You had to pay a copying charge of 10 cents per 100 words, because the patents for carbon paper, photography, photocopying and optical scanning were yet to be applied for. (Today's U.S. patent fees, by the way, start at a bargain $75 for a basic application, but rapidly jump into the thousands with fees for search, examination, documents and maintenance.)

Hopkins got his patent at New York City (then the national capital) July 31, complete with signature of President Washington. It covered a method of making potash and pearl ash by burning wood ashes a second time before dissolving them to extract potash. Potash and pearl ash were important ingredients in making glass, china, soap and fertilizer.

The cabinet officers who made up the patent board, or Commissioners for the Promotion of the Useful Arts, were busy men. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, for one, found many applications to be of minor importance. The board, in fact, issued only two more patents in 1790: one to Joseph S. Sampson for manufacturing candles, and the other to Oliver Evans for flour-milling machinery.

The potash process also received the first Canadian patent. The Governor General in Council awarded the patent in 1791 to Hopkins and Angus MacDonnel, a Scottish soldier stationed in Quebec City.

Although Hopkins received the first U.S. patent, it wasn't Patent No. 1. That's because the government issued 9,957 patents before starting a numbering system July 13, 1836. On that occasion, U.S. Patent No. 1 went to John Ruggles of Maine for a traction wheel for steam locomotives. Ruggles happened to be chairman of the Senate Committee on Patents. Two years later, the Senate investigated him for alleged corruption regarding a different patent case. He was exonerated.

Source: The Patent Office Pony, by Kenneth W. Dobyns

How American Youth Will Screw Viacom

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Viacom posts decent enough results, but tucked in there is evidence that youth-oriented networks VH1 and MTV were not carrying their weight. The fundamental problem could be that the youth demo Viacom has hotly chased after for the last couple decades is a bust.

How to Stop a Fight

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 7:15pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Round one, fight! Unless you're Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, the only thing to gain out of fighting is a black eye and a sore fist. Sure, two wrongs don't make a right, but how do you keep your friends and enemies from fighting? We take a level-headed approach.

New YouTube Audio Compression Stymies Uploaders

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Google's wildly popular YouTube recently changed something about its audio-compression algorithm, making some newly uploaded music sound truly awful.

South Park Studios Releases Uncensored 'Imaginationland'

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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A new director's cut of the three-episode arc is available online for free.

British UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon Is Coming to America

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:33pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen

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The House of Lords shoots down the final appeal of a British hacker who penetrated U.S. military computers looking for a UFO coverup, despite his complaints that he might be sent to Guantanamo.

First Look at Nintendo's Summer of Japanese Awesome

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:29pm EDT by Chris Kohler

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A trio of games available now overseas -- Fatal Frame, Wario Land: Shake It and Rhythm Heaven -- bring the fun to Wii and the Nintendo DS.

'FailWhale' Gives Frustrated Twitterers Something to Smile About

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:55pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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A symbol of failure turns into a cultural rallying cry for Twitter users.

World's First Computer Displayed Olympic Calendar

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:53pm EDT by Brandon Keim

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The ancient world's most complicated machine, the Antikythera Mechanism, plotted the movements of the stars -- and Greek athletes.

Go to Space With Your Frequent Flier Miles

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:34pm EDT by Dave Demerjian

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Virgin Atlantic is offering customers with truckloads of points to compete for a chance to go sub-orbital on SpaceShipTwo. Beats using your points to buy a bundt cake.

Windows Mojave Gimmick Looks Like a Mirage

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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Microsoft's Vista blind taste test releases its results in a series of recorded videos. The videos eagerly show people's prejudice with the unpopular Vista, then their delight with Vista under the name Mojave. However, the videos don't tell Vista's whole story.

The New Arms Bazaar: From Russia, With No Love

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:25pm EDT by Sharon Weinberger

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The Americans want to funnel Russian-built arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. But various sanctions make that illegal. So the government is in the awkward position of trying to evade its own laws.

Think Your're Fast? Prove It With Your iPhone, Punk

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:44pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Two cool apps turn your iPhone into an "automotive performance meter" that will tell you whether you drive like Lewis Hamilton -- or his father.

Air Force Looks to Laser-Proof Its Weapons

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Noah Schachtman

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Real-life laser weapons aren't here, yet. But they're getting closer. Which is why the Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles -- with spray-on coatings, no less.

Why Richard Garriott Can't Play 'Tabula Rasa' in Space

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 11:22am EDT by Earnest Cavalli

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When he visits the International Space Station, the game designer won't be booting up his his "Immortality Drive," which contains every avatar from his new MMO. But he will be toting some scientific gear and doing some pharmaceutical research.

From Wall Street to the Secrets of Life

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:45am EDT by David Ewing Duncan, Portfolio.com

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News from Portfolio.com

Also on Portfolio

NFL Streaming Deal: Misunderstanding the Web?

China's Booming, Lucrative Art Market

Bank Execs: 'I Said What?!'

Subscribe to Portfolio magazine

Secretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street.

Now this former computer scientist at Columbia University-turned-tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history. Not to make a killing on the stock market, but to solve some of the trickiest problems in biology: How the molecules that comprise "life" function and interact at the most basic level.

It may seem like a James Bond movie: mysterious billionaire-genius designs megacomputer to probe life's secrets. Will he perhaps tinker with them, too, in a nefarious scheme to dominate the world by creating enhanced life forms or bio-silicon superbeings?

There's no sign that Shaw is going super-villain. Nor does he need to, considering the practical and potentially profitable uses for his megacomputer.

Knowing more about the complex interactions inside us could lead to better and more efficacious drugs, and to develop computer models that can simulate what happens even at the atomic level of life. It could lead to new ideas for developing computers and other machines based on cells and molecules.

Shaw's device, which he's named "Anton" in homage to pioneering microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, might also take humans several steps closer to having a schematic of how life works at its most elemental levels.

Several years ago, Shaw stepped down from the day-to-day management of his derivatives firm, D.E. Shaw and Company—which in June 2008 was managing upwards of $39 billion in investments.

He became chief scientist of his own computer laboratory, D.E. Shaw Research, home of the team making Anton.

Characteristically, Shaw has been mostly mum about Anton, referring the inquisitive to a technical paper on the project in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

His computer uses the massively parallel computing technology that Shaw helped develop at Columbia in the 1980s. Anton simultaneously runs 512 specialized processors called application-specific integrated circuits.

Unlike other supercomputers that have more general-use applications, including weather forecasting, these processors are specifically designed to calculate the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules.

Shaw's team could use Anton to solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of molecular life: how proteins, the building blocks of life, each acquire a distinctive three-dimensional shape that allows them to perform millions of functions in a living organism.

Proteins, which include enzymes, hormones, and the collagen in bones and skin, are made in cells according to instructions from DNA. They're strands of amino acids bunched up like wads of string into distinctive shapes and held together by subtle physical forces that are still poorly understood.

Current supercomputers, including IBM's BlueGene/L and Stanford University's Folding@home (which uses legions of idle laptops to increase computing power), can take thousands of hours to simulate the folding of a single protein. Even then, these computers can create simulations of functions in molecules that last only a billionth or a millionth of a second. Scientists must then validate the findings.

Anton could run simulations going up to 1,000 times longer, allowing scientists to get much closer to what really happens when, say, a protein folds. "If you can do a thousand times longer, real proteins come into play," Shaw reportedly said in a lecture at Stanford in 2006.

The more that scientists know about proteins and other critical molecules in the human body, the more precise they can be when developing drugs.

"He's making a big step forward with this," Benoit Roux, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times.

Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, suggested in the Times article that scientists may not know what such a powerful computer is capable of until they use it.

He pointed out that the original Anton—Van Leeuwenhoek, who perfected the microscope in Holland in the 17th century—didn't know that protozoa and other single-cell organisms existed in pond water until he trained his newfangled lenses on a sample.

Shaw also is a major investor in Schrödinger, a chemical and bio-physical simulation software business that could benefit from Anton's new technology.

Dude -- Are You Going to Get a Dell MP3 Player?

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:32am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Back when the MP3 market was young, Dell tried to be a player with the Dell DJ. Oprah liked it and, frankly, so did we. But it crashed and burned while Apple sewed things up to the point where even Microsoft's Zune is a distant also-ran. So, naturally, Dell wants back in now, five years later. We who are about to die salute you!

Nintendo Q1 Profit Surges -- Wii!!!

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:04am EDT by Associated Press

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Nintendo Q1 profits surge 34% as Wii sales shoot up. Nintendo sold 5.2 million Wii machines worldwide during the quarter, 1.7 million than for the same period last year. It also sold 3.4 million "Wii Fit" games and 6.4 million "Mario Kart Wii" games.

How to Set Up a Velvet Rope on Facebook

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Got some killah party pics from that bender in Maui? Wanna share them with all your buds on Facebook? Think again. Here's how to avoid those potentially career-ending images from getting into the wrong hands.

How to Promote Yourself, Boost Your Geek Cred, and Be the Hero

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Learn from the pros the secrets to beating out the most popular kid in school to become class president, Tweeting your readers to tears, or creating a fan base for whatever your endeavor may be.

How to Impress the Rubes and Win at the Carnival

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Midways are notorious hives of scum and villainy. Impress the rubes by emerging triumphant.

How to Be Understood at ComicCon

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Learn how to speak in various native tongues at the annual geekfest known as ComicCon.

Cancer Center Warns of Kids' Cellphone Risks

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 6:30pm EDT by Associated Press

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The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute issues an unprecedented warning to faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer, especially for children. The advice is contrary to many studies, but Dr. Ronald B. Herberman says he's basing his alarm on early, unpublished data.

If You Wanna Sell Plug-In Hybrids, You Gotta Make 'Em Sexy

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 5:53pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Plug-ins may be our best chance to save the planet, but many consumers aren't convinced. Automakers need to sell buyers on the technology -- and amp up the cars' sex appeal.

Intel CEO Calls for 10 Million Plug-In Conversions Within Four Years

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Andy Grove's called for 10 million vehicles to be converted to plug-in hybrids within four years and laid out some ideas to help get us there.

Security Matters: Lesson From the DNS Bug: Patching Isn't Enough

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Bruce Schneier

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Despite the best efforts of the security community, the details of a critical internet vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky about six months ago have leaked. Hackers are racing to produce exploit code, and network operators who haven't already patched the hole are scrambling to catch up. The whole mess is a good illustration of the problems with researching and disclosing flaws like this.

The details of the vulnerability aren't important, but basically it's a form of DNS cache poisoning. The DNS system is what translates domain names people understand, like www.schneier.com, to IP addresses computers understand: 204.11.246.1. There is a whole family of vulnerabilities where the DNS system on your computer is fooled into thinking that the IP address for www.badsite.com is really the IP address for www.goodsite.com -- there's no way for you to tell the difference -- and that allows the criminals at www.badsite.com to trick you into doing all sorts of things, like giving up your bank account details. Kaminsky discovered a particularly nasty variant of this cache-poisoning attack.

Here's the way the timeline was supposed to work: Kaminsky discovered the vulnerability about six months ago, and quietly worked with vendors to patch it. (There's a fairly straightforward fix, although the implementation nuances are complicated.) Of course, this meant describing the vulnerability to them; why would companies like Microsoft and Cisco believe him otherwise? On July 8, he held a press conference to announce the vulnerability -- but not the details -- and reveal that a patch was available from a long list of vendors. We would all have a month to patch, and Kaminsky would release details of the vulnerability at the BlackHat conference early next month.

Of course, the details leaked. How isn't important; it could have leaked a zillion different ways. Too many people knew about it for it to remain secret. Others who knew the general idea were too smart not to speculate on the details. I'm kind of amazed the details remained secret for this long; undoubtedly it had leaked into the underground community before the public leak two days ago. So now everyone who back-burnered the problem is rushing to patch, while the hacker community is racing to produce working exploits.

What's the moral here? It's easy to condemn Kaminsky: If he had shut up about the problem, we wouldn't be in this mess. But that's just wrong. Kaminsky found the vulnerability by accident. There's no reason to believe he was the first one to find it, and it's ridiculous to believe he would be the last. Don't shoot the messenger. The problem is with the DNS protocol; it's insecure.

The real lesson is that the patch treadmill doesn't work, and it hasn't for years. This cycle of finding security holes and rushing to patch them before the bad guys exploit those vulnerabilities is expensive, inefficient and incomplete. We need to design security into our systems right from the beginning. We need assurance. We need security engineers involved in system design. This process won't prevent every vulnerability, but it's much more secure -- and cheaper -- than the patch treadmill we're all on now.

What a security engineer brings to the problem is a particular mindset. He thinks about systems from a security perspective. It's not that he discovers all possible attacks before the bad guys do; it's more that he anticipates potential types of attacks, and defends against them even if he doesn't know their details. I see this all the time in good cryptographic designs. It's over-engineering based on intuition, but if the security engineer has good intuition, it generally works.

Kaminsky's vulnerability is a perfect example of this. Years ago, cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein looked at DNS security and decided that Source Port Randomization was a smart design choice. That's exactly the work-around being rolled out now following Kaminsky's discovery. Bernstein didn't discover Kaminsky's attack; instead, he saw a general class of attacks and realized that this enhancement could protect against them. Consequently, the DNS program he wrote in 2000, djbdns, doesn't need to be patched; it's already immune to Kaminsky's attack.

That's what a good design looks like. It's not just secure against known attacks; it's also secure against unknown attacks. We need more of this, not just on the internet but in voting machines, ID cards, transportation payment cards ... everywhere. Stop assuming that systems are secure unless demonstrated insecure; start assuming that systems are insecure unless designed securely.

---

Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

IPhone 3G Users Complain About Network Issues

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:46pm EDT by Brian Chen

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Complaints are mounting among iPhone users about the quality and consistency of AT&T's third-generation (3-G) data network. In Gadget Lab.

The Broadband Boom May Be Over

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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AT&T reports a measly 46,000 broadband subscribers added during the second quarter, down from nearly half a million in the first quarter. The numbers imply that broadband growth has come to a screeching, painful halt. The news doesn't bode well for other broadband providers.

Road Trip! Young Republicans Blog and Twitter Their Way Across the U.S.

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:18pm EDT by Sarah Lai Stirland

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Four young political activists are syndicating their diary entries and impressions of Republican America across the web. The project is called Whereisthered.com.

The Coffee Fix: Can the $11,000 Clover Machine Save Starbucks?

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Mathew Honan

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It's 10 am on a Thursday, and the line at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco snakes out the door. Inside, an espresso machine hisses like an angry tomcat as customers order their cappuccinos. But the real action is taking place a few steps away, where a scruffy barista stands at a stainless steel contraption, introducing the coffee he's about to serve to his rapt audience. "The Honduran is sweet," he says, "with a refined acidity and an excellent finish." He lets one perfectly measured scoop of fresh grounds shimmy deep into the machine, then goes to work, twiddling knobs, pushing buttons, and whirling a whisk in a chamber at the top of the silver box.

Forty-five seconds later, he sets down a single cup of custom-made coffee that's Jessica Alba hot, Bill Gates rich, and as unique as a snowflake. No foam. No caramel. No whip. Just beans and water — pushed through a cool little machine called the Clover — for a pricey $4 a pop.

The Clover coffeemaker debuted in a handful of cafés in 2006 and was promptly hailed as the best thing to happen to coffee lovers since the car cup holder. With an $11,000 asking price, the Clover has become a fetish object among the coffee-obsessed. Long queues signal its arrival in new cities, and self-described "Cloveristas" post videos on YouTube demonstrating the machine's flashy brewing process. There are more photos on Flickr paying homage to this shiny gadget (700 and counting) than actual Clovers in existence (roughly 250 worldwide).

Writer Mathew Honan tries out the Clover machine at Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco.

For more, visit video.wired.com.

The Clover also wowed Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks. Last year, Schultz stumbled upon the machine in New York City when he had spotted a line of people standing outside a tiny joint called Café Grumpy. He tried a sample and declared it "the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted." In March 2008, Starbucks announced the acquisition of the Coffee Equipment Company — the Seattle-based startup that manufactures Clovers in a converted trolley shed. His hope is that the Clover will bolster Starbucks' bottom line.

Chalk up some of the excitement — and the equipment's hefty price tag — to artisanal tech. A robotic hybrid of a French press and a Dirt Devil, the Clover is the first coffeemaker that lets the user program three key variables: dose, water temperature, and brew time. (Example: 37.5 grams of Brazilian Fazenda São João at 204 degrees for 43 seconds.) After the coffee steeps, a piston mechanism extracts the liquid from spent beans, resulting in a fresh cuppa in less than a minute. A filter platform pops a hockey puck of grounds out of the top, where it's easily wiped away. An Ethernet port connected to an online database is designed to let users save favorite recipes for specific beans. Made of stainless steel and copper, a single Clover typically takes several hours to assemble by hand. Fast, fancy, and idiot-proof? No surprise that Starbucks is all over the Clover — the company has been rolling them out since last summer. Half-caf nonfat toffee-nut latte lovers, get ready for a real cup of coffee.

I'm a coffee achiever, as that old ad campaign goes. I own two French presses, a stainless steel Cuisinart grinder/drip, a retro De'Longhi espresso machine, an Italian Vev Vigano moka pot, and a Vietnamese drip that I purchased in old Hanoi for making ca phe sua nong. My San Francisco neighborhood has five coffee shops within a five-block radius: four mom-and-pop operations and a Peet's. But compared with David Latourell, CEC's 42-year-old resident coffee expert, I'm a Sanka-slurping rube.

Latourell and I are standing in the middle of CEC's cupping room, a tasting area next to the company's small Seattle factory. The Clover is specifically designed to bring out the nuances of high-end coffees like Los Delirios, which comes from a Portland, Oregon, company called Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua. Actually, it's on a micro lot located at 13° 22'45.99"N x 86° 28'50.45"W, between 1,050 and 1,450 meters above sea level, according to a manila "origin" card that comes with each bag of beans. Underneath the farm's GPS coordinates are flavor descriptions that read in part, "violets and black cherry, baking chocolate, and chocolate covered raisins."

Latourell hands me a cup of Los Delirios coffee made in the Clover. We both take slow, even sips. "I'm picking up a little chocolate," he says with a toss of his shoulder-length hair. I sip again, summoning every taste bud. I just taste — well, coffee. Delicious, sure, but coffee.

Like wine and, more recently, chocolate, a quality coffee bean must reflect a certain terroir — the climate, soil composition, and elevation of its place of origin. At least in theory, this gives a bean its unique and desirable flavor. Whether or not your average caffeine fiend can tell a Guatemalan Maragogype bean from a Honduran Catuai is debatable, but terroir explains how Stumptown can sell bags of beans for $40 a pound (about 10 times the price of commercial-grade coffee) and cafés can charge from $3 to $7 for a single cup of joe. "For $7, you can get a bad glass of wine," says CEC cofounder Randy Hulett. "Or you can get one of the best cups of coffee in the world."

Illustration: Jameson Simpson Clover, From the Grounds Up

Clover looks like just another countertop coffee machine. But peek under the hood and you'll find an innovative brewing system. Here's how it works: 1. A barista selects dose, water temperature, and steep time. 2. A piston pulls down the filter platform while freshly ground coffee is poured into the chamber. 3. Hot water flows into the chamber. 4. The barista briskly stirs the grounds with a whisk, and the water and beans steep for several seconds. 5.The piston rises, creating a vacuum that separates the brew from the grounds, then lowers, forcing the joe out of a nozzle below. 6. The piston rises to the surface again, pushing up a disc of grounds, which are squeegeed away.

Then there's the top-shelf stuff. Stumptown sells beans from Nicaragua called Las Golondrinas for $80 a pound. On the international market, Esmeralda Special, a rare kind of Panamanian bean, can go for $130 a pound wholesale. And consider Kopi Luwak, also known as catshit coffee: It's an Indonesian bean that's eaten by a civet cat, then "harvested" from the animal's dung. (The bean's bitter flavor is apparently greatly improved by passing through a cat's digestive tract.) A single cup of Kopi Luwak at the Peter Jones espresso bar in London goes for $100, and a pound of the beans can cost as much as $600.

If you're going to pay that much for beans, of course, you want to have the right machine. Back in the cupping room, Latourell fires up the Clover and goes to work on a second cup of Los Delirios: He measures out 46 grams of beans, grinds them, and then slides them into the recessed chamber on top. Next, he programs a new brew time and temperature, raising the heat from 205 degrees to 207 and increasing the brewing time from 45 seconds to 50. As the hot water rushes into the chamber from a topside nozzle, Latourell stirs the blend with a metal whisk, being careful not to break the stream, which would cool the water. "The temperature has a massive effect on the extraction of chemicals that affect flavor," he explains.

I take a swig. Bang, there it is: chocolate. Scharffen Berger, eat your heart out! A few tweaks and I have a new beverage. And it's not just the chocolate flavor; the mouthfeel and acidity are completely different from the first cup. All Latourell did was adjust the brew time and temperature and add 6 grams of beans. Taste-testing it against the earlier brew, I wouldn't have guessed they were the same bean. I'm starting to become a Clover convert.

Photo: RJ Shaughnessy

Brewed coffee is awful.That's what Zander Nosler thought back in 2001, when he was developing a commercial coffeemaker for — of all places — Starbucks. The bespectacled, rail-thin product designer had previously spent 18 months at Ideo developing everything from sunglasses to medical supplies. As he tinkered with a revolutionary single-serve, push-button brewing machine targeted for the workplace, he realized that most makers were as stale as the coffee. "I got to see firsthand how coffee was better by the cup," Nosler says. "The coffee coming out of those glass office pots is wretched." (Starbucks later called the prototype the Interactive Cup.) When the project was finished, Nosler kept thinking about the single-brew concept. He soon decided he could do better, making a superior brewer that wasn't one-size-fits-all.

By 2004, Nosler had cooked up a business plan. He recruited other Stanford alums, including Hulett, 34. Within a year, the team raised half a million dollars from friends and family and set up shop inside an old trolley shed a few minutes north of downtown Seattle. The Coffee Equipment Company was born.

For months, the group reworked the design. They abandoned the office market in favor of cafés, ditched the grinder, and shrunk the countertop footprint. By spring 2005 they had the first Clover prototype. Code name: Chalupa. Made of particleboard, with its guts bolted crudely on the outside, it looked like Mr. Coffee designed by Dr. Frankenstein. But to roasters wanting a high-end single-serve option, it was gorgeous. CEC demo'd a final prototype that October at a local party and sold three units before they were even built. When Clover debuted at the Specialty Coffee Association of America event in 2006, Nosler was mobbed. "People saw us walking in and began chanting, 'Clo-ver, Clo-ver!'" he says, his eyes wide at the memory. To the little indie guys, Nosler was a god.

While interest in CEC was percolating, Starbucks was crashing. Its share price had dipped from nearly $40 in 2006 to around $19 in January 2008. The company that brought macchiato to the masses had lost its way — and a chunk of its profit margin. Was Starbucks in the market of selling coffee drinks or fancy milk shakes? Cappuccinos or compact discs? Was it competing with Peet's or Mickey D's? After just three years, CEO Jim Donald was on his way out, and Schultz, Starbucks' founder, retook the helm. On Valentine's Day 2007, Schultz wrote an internal memo (later leaked to the press) lamenting the state of the company. "I'm not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee," the missive read. "You certainly can't get the message from being in our stores ... At a minimum [we] should support the foundation of our coffee heritage."

Schultz announced that Starbucks would return to its roots. No more vacuum-sealed bags of beans or breakfast sandwiches (the smell of bacon and eggs overwhelmed the coffee aroma). Starbucks would once again grind beans in the store. It would introduce new blends and better espresso machines. But most important: It was going to road-test a little machine that Schultz had discovered a few months before on a walk through New York's Chelsea district. "In my 25 years at Starbucks, the Clover machine unquestionably delivers the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted," Schultz later gushed to his stockholders. "And we want to share this experience with our customers."

Starting in summer 2007, Starbucks discreetly purchased and installed a few Clovers at stores in Seattle and Boston. It sold a cup of Clover-made coffee for as much as $3.05, about a dollar more than Starbucks' regular brew. The early reviews were glowing. As one Yelper put it, "If you're a coffee snob who normally scorns Sbucks and its burnt offerings, you might try the Clover pressed coffee at this location and be pleasantly surprised."

After roughly six months of successful trials, Schultz proposed buying Clover's maker, the Coffee Equipment Company. "We thought Starbucks wanted to take us out on a few dates," Nosler says of the deal. "But they wanted to go steady." Michelle Gass, a senior VP of global strategy for Starbucks, is slightly less romantic: "Frankly, we just don't want anyone else to have it."

Starbucks is willing to share custody, however, of the 250 machines already out there, plus maintain and repair them, but it won't sell any more Clovers to independent cafés. The company has already pulled the plug on CloverNet, the online database that tracks sales, maintenance, and brewing preferences for Clover owners.

Clover's early adopters are outraged to see their coffee machine become part of the Coffee Machine. "We made the decision to purchase the Clover to support this small independent manufacturer," says Stumptown owner Duane Sorenson, who bought the first Clover in the US. "When we found out that CEC was sold to Starbucks, we made the decision to sell our Clovers."

Nosler shrugs off the criticism: "Everyone has their favorite little band that they've watched change as it signs with bigger labels," he says. "But I can defend to anyone that selling to Starbucks was absolutely the right thing for us to do. Starbucks has a larger market than all the independent roasters and specialty shops combined. I'm a product designer first, a coffee guy second. I love coffee; I'm passionate about it, but I want to make products, plural. Having a gigantically hungry customer is appealing on a lot of levels. It was the best of all possible paths for us — and the coffee industry as well."

By the end of 2008, there will 80 machines installed in upscale urban markets across the country. Next year, Starbucks plans to remodel those stores with the Clover as their centerpiece. "Other than espresso, there's been no innovation in brewed coffee to speak of," Schultz says. "Now we're driving new traffic because of the Clover." Then there's that other counter where the Clover is destined to end up — the one in your kitchen. "The Clover is a commercial machine," he says, "but there's potential to create more consumer-based opportunities, specifically at home." Today, you buy a $10 bag of Starbucks French Roast to take home. Soon, you might buy a $40 bag and use your very own Clover to brew it.

Photo: RJ Shaughnessy

Coffee snobs are skeptical. "Clover will differentiate them from the Dunkin' Donuts, the McDonald's," says Tony Konecny, an industry consultant who runs the coffee blog Tonx.org and was one of the first to see a Clover prototype. "But it comes down to the coffee." The machine is only as good as the beans you put in it. Which is a problem for Starbucks, a chain that purchases coffee in mass quantities and can't deliver fresh bags of beans as quickly as the indie cafés. Then there's quality control: "By the time the customer experiences it, the beans have been blended and have been sitting in a bag for six weeks. Anything special about the coffee is lost."

A few days after my cupping room challenge, I'm standing in line at a hilltop Starbucks in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood — one of Clover's beta sites. I do a taste test: a cup of Clover coffee versus brewed coffee. A young barista tells me they're out of the first two specialty coffees I request and suggests instead Starbucks' everyday blend, called Pike Place. During brewing, the barista stirs the grounds into the Clover with a clunky rubber spatula — not a metal whisk — and pours the concoction into a crummy paper cup. I smell, I sip, I inhale. I can't tell which cup of coffee is which — and neither is anything special. Is it the beans? My palate? After a few minutes, I finally pick it out: This coffee tastes a little bit like hype.

Mathew Honan (mhonan@gmail.com) offers tips on Twittering in our How To: Self Promote package.

Q&A: X-Files' Chris Carter Talks Paranoia, Secrecy and Surprise

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:30pm EDT by Hugh Hart

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X-Files creator Chris Carter dishes about surveillance cameras, movie scripts and mountain climbing.

Drug Companies Get Healthy, but at Whose Expense?

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 11:45am EDT by Russ Mitchell, Portfolio.com

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Trevor Foltz was six months old last fall, fresh off a visit to Disney World in Orlando, when the spasms first began.

Healthy until that point in his life, he began thrusting backward in his car seat, repeatedly and forcefully, as he rode with his parents north toward home in Rhode Island. "I thought it was temper tantrums," says his mother, Danielle. The next day, at home, Trevor was hit with a series of 40 convulsions and rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with infantile spasms, a rare form of epilepsy. Treatment would cost $1,600 per vial of steroid drug H.P. Acthar Gel, and Trevor would need three of them.

As if the idea of a $4,800 tab wasn't bad enough, when the Foltzes submitted their claim, they found out the company that made the drug, Questcor Pharmaceuticals, had just recently jacked up the price—to $23,000 per vial, or $69,000 for a three-vial treatment—and the insurance company wasn't going to pay. And all the while, unbeknownst to anyone at that time, an alternative, for $15, existed.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee will open hearings in Congress on dramatic price hikes for drugs used to treat children, with a focus on companies such as Questcor and Ovation Pharmaceuticals, which in 2006 bought rights to a drug that treats heart problems in premature infants, and increased the price 1,800 percent to $1,875 per three-vial treatment.

"We need answers to why a company would increase the price of a drug 18-fold when costs related to marketing, physician education, and research appear stable," says hearing chair Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota.

Politicians say they are not opposed to drug companies earning strong returns on the costs of researching innovative drugs, and understand the high prices of many medications. But they are investigating whether some companies are price-gouging, concerned more about executive stock options than about running innovative companies.

Some of those drugs, like Questcor's, are decades-old drugs that were bought on the cheap and redesignated under the federal government's Orphan Drug Act, which marks its 25th anniversary this year. Not infrequently, the drugs' new owners pass on big price hikes to consumers.

At Questcor, the increase is explained as the cost of doing business with an orphan drug.

"The company was heading toward bankruptcy," says Steve Cartt, executive vice president for business development at Questcor, which is based in Union City, California, an industrial enclave on San Francisco Bay.

"The whole rationale for the price increase was to ensure availability of the product," says Cartt. "We talked to physicians. They wanted the drug to be available. The choice was risk of availability or a price increase."

Originally approved for multiple sclerosis in 1952, Acthar Gel had been owned by pharma giant Aventis, which was losing money on it, when the 11-year-old Questcor acquired it in 2001. Questcor, too, failed to gain traction with M.S. patients, so it sought a new track.

Now the gears at Questcor began to turn more quickly. It won orphan designation for Acthar Gel in 2003, and proceeded to the next step: getting F.D.A. approval to market the drug explicitly for infantile spasms, which under the orphan act would also include a seven-year monopoly for Questcor. The company prepared for a marketing blitz and doubled its sales force early last year. But when the F.D.A. rejected Questcor's application in May 2007, the company quickly slashed its staff and jacked up the price.

Cartt says the price was set "within the range of other orphan drugs," noting that many others go from $50,000 to $500,000 a year or higher. For instance, BioMarin, an orphan-drug specialty company, charges $70,000 a year for Kuvan, a drug to treat phenylketonuria, a genetic enzyme disorder that can cause mental retardation and brain seizures. But unlike BioMarin, which spends 64 percent of sales on research and development, Questcor spends very little; in 2007, Questcor's research and development accounted for 9.5 percent of sales revenue.

What other considerations played into the price Cartt would not say. Sales for 2007, when the price hike took effect, were $49.7 million, and net income was $37.5 million—a net profit margin of 75 percent. It was significant not only for its size, but also because it was the first profit since the company was formed, as Cypros Pharmaceuticals, in 1990.

Investors were pleased, driving up Questcor's share price from 40 cents to over $6 after the August 2007 price hike. But executives at the company started selling their shares in December, seven months after the former C.E.O., James Fares, stepped down and around the time Questcor executive Don Bailey took his place. Since December, Cartt himself has sold shares based on grants and options totaling $1.68 million; many of those options were granted at 46 cents a share. He holds nearly a million more options on Questcor stock.

Doctors were unhappy with the price hikes.

"Most of us in the child-neurology community were outraged at the extent of the price hike, unusual even for orphan drugs," says Eric Kossoff, a pediatric neurologist and infantile spasms expert at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. "Most of us had no choice, unfortunately. At the time it was felt to be the best drug out there, and they're the only company that makes it. This is an incredibly serious form of epilepsy with devastating implications if not treated."

Curiously, though, he found that the price hike "was one of the best things that could have happened." Why? "Because we found something better and cheaper." Far cheaper, it turns out. "We spent a few days going through all the medical literature, looking for what works, what doesn't."

The team turned up a study from the United Kingdom that gave infants high doses of prednisolone, a well-known, generic steroid. Prednisolone had been dismissed as relatively ineffective for infantile spasms-based research that used low doses. The high doses made all the difference: The British study found efficacy rates reached 70 percent and more. Johns Hopkins began using high-dose prednisolone and found it worked in about 70 percent of cases, on par with the hospital's experience with Acthar Gel. And the price was $15 per injection—essentially free—compared with the three-injection $69,000 treatment from Questcor. "It was like in times of war. You get focused, and amazing things come out," Kossoff says. "We don't use [Acthar Gel] at Hopkins anymore for infantile spasms because the oral steroids [high-dose prednisolone] work just as well."

It's unclear, though, how many other doctors and hospitals in the U.S. will switch from the $69,000 drug to the $15 drug.

"I don't understand what's behind the price increase," says Finbar O'Callaghan, a pediatric neurologist at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children and coauthor of the United Kingdom Infantile Spasms Study, or UKISS. The study showed that high-dose prednisolone and a synthetic form of ACTH, the active hormone in Acthar Gel, were equally effective. He cautioned that the purpose of the study was not to compare the two, but to compare steroid treatment with another drug called vigabatrin. "Having said that, you couldn't get a piece of paper between the results of the prednisolone and the results of the ACTH."

Costs aside, Hopkins is achieving the same results against Acthar Gel. "There is no reason to favor one over the other, unless there is a financial reason for doing so. That's been a big issue in the U.S.," says O'Callaghan. Comparing $15 against $69,000 "puts a different perspective on it," he says.

"Historically, and unfortunately," he adds, "doctors in general are very traditional and tend to use what's worked before."

Asked about the $15 price on prednisolone, Cartt said studies from the 1990s show low efficacy rates for the drug. When informed that those studies looked at low doses, not high doses, Cartt said no one knows the long-term implications of high-dose prednisolone, and said the company's higher profits will help it find out. "We can afford to study the long-term effects" of Acthar Gel and the alternatives, he said.

What the congressional hearing may find is that Questcor had a business problem: While its drug had a potential market of 300,000 multiple sclerosis patients, not enough of them were buying. But among a smaller market, just 2,000 babies per year, Acthar Gel was extremely effective in fighting infantile spasms. Questcor's astronomical rates may simply be a matter of hard business realities in a small potential market.

For the Foltzes, Questcor's high prices proved irrelevant, after much struggle. When at first his insurance company, WorldWide Insurance, rejected the claim, Trevor's doctor faxed in a letter stating that there was a good chance Trevor would end up mentally retarded for life without treatment; the insurer relented. But on Thursday, his mother, Danielle, will join those who testify against companies like Questcor. She says, "I feel they're going to soak every penny if they can get it."

Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 11:35am EDT by Brandon Keim

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Magicians don't play with the laws of nature -- just your mind.

NASA Scientists Suggest Planting a Lunar Garden

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 11:18am EDT by Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

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NASA scientists want to send a plant-growing module loaded with dirt and mustard seeds to the surface of the moon.

Review: Stephen Hawking's Secret Key to the Universe

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Matt Blum

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George's Secret Key to the Universe, by Stephen and Lucy Hawking, is full of information about the universe, black holes and the wonders of science -- all presented in a gentle, child-friendly way. And the author's scientific credentials are unimpeachable.

Why Castlevania Became a Fighting Game

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 10:47am EDT by Chris Kohler

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Two-player fighting game Castlevania Judgment returns to a console near you.

S.F. Admin Coughs Up Passcodes to Mayor

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 10:30am EDT by David Kravets

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San Francisco regains control of its network after the city admin who hijacked the system nine days ago turns over the stolen passwords to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a secret jailhouse meeting.

Permalink for 'Wired__Top_Stories/2008/07/23/Google_Throws_Open_Rival_for_Wikipedia___8212__Anon_Authors_Discouraged'

Google Throws Open Rival for Wikipedia — Anon Authors Discouraged

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 10:00am EDT by Steven Levy

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Google announced on its official blog Wednesday the debut of Knol, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia penned by authoritative sources.

Udi Manber loves cartoons. Not animations, but the single-panel graphics that appear in magazines like The New Yorker. He studies the history of the field, has covered the walls of his house with framed originals, and has edited a book of cartoons about Google, where he works as the head of search engineering.

"Udi's not just a fan, he's a connoisseur," says Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker.

When not thinking about cartoons, Manber spends endless time thinking about how search can be improved. One big reason many searches don't succeed, he believes, is that despite the 20 billion or so Web pages in Google's indexes -- including the 2 million items in Wikipedia -- the information simply isn't there.

For instance, what if you wanted to learn all about Peter Arno, a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist who died in 1968? You wouldn't get lucky. The items appearing in the first page of results give only the barest information on Arno's life and work.

Of course, it's not just information about cartoonists that's missing -- according to Manber there are thousands of black holes when it comes to things searchers want to know. What people need, Manber concluded about a year-and-a-half ago, is the information that would come "when an expert who knows this topic would tell you, if they had 15 minutes to explain."

So Manber began what he refers to as his pet project -- an effort to generate exactly those kind of answers in the top search results. The product, announced Wednesday, is called Knol.

"It's a nice, very simple word to remember, and it's part of knowledge," says Manber.

Google hopes that Manber's project will give experts who know their stuff a platform to share it with everyone else. Google is especially keen on seeding this information internationally, in languages where the online corpus is sparse.

From the Knol team's loft at Google headquarters, software engineer Mohsin Ahmed works out bugs in front of a panel of monitors at Googleplex. With $20 Ahmed created a simple red, yellow and green light bug detector that glows green above his head.
Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com

Here's how Knol works. Experts in a given subject log into a Google account and use the Knol software to post an item, also known as a knol. In some senses, the process is like producing a blog post -- but in this case it's not something written off the cuff but carefully crafted to coherently explain a single subject.

One key attribute: Knols are meant to be signed with the author's actual name. With permission, Google will actually verify the writer's identity, either by credit card or phone.

"The process will take 20 seconds with credit cards," says Knol product manager Cedric Dupont. Phone checks will take a minute or so. This vetting, Manber hopes, will give knols accountability and, in the case of high-status authors, the benefit of a solid reputation.

The format and tone are up to the author: Google won't intervene if your knol on F. Scott Fitzgerald opines that The Great Gatsby was really a dud. And it will certainly help if the knol delivers the goods in a pithy, captivating style. (Google won't, however, tolerate knols that violate copyright or include porn.)

Google is attempting to establish a model for a standard item, and has seeded the "Knolosphere" with a few hundred entries appearing on launch, largely in the field of health and medicine. Working with Google on this is Robert M. Wachter, a professor of medicine at the University of California, who also sits on Google's health advisory council.

Just like blogs, knols can include images, video and links. As a special bonus, The New Yorker will allow knol authors to include, free of charge, a single cartoon from the publication's 20,000-image archive to illuminate the subject. (Guess which Googler was behind that deal.)

Knols are treated pretty much like any web page -- found by following links, but readers will encounter most through search results from Google or other search engines. Google says that knols will get no special favors when its algorithms choose results, but clearly expects the best efforts to rocket towards the top of search results. Maybe even ahead of the ubiquitous Wikipedia items.

"A high-quality knol will rise up not just on Google but all the search engines," says Michael McNally, the project's technical lead.

Knol software engineer Ben McMahan concentrates on "firefighting last-minute bugs."
Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com

There's no limit on how many people can write knols on the same subjects, but presumably the inferior ones will be stalled in the back results pages while searchers encounter the best ones immediately.

Why would an expert on a subject take the time to write a knol? One reason would be an altruistic impulse to share wisdom with the world. There's also the ego juice that might come with being the first authority one encounters in a search for absinthe or Daryl Lamonica. By default, knols use a Creative Commons copyright license, which allows copying and remixing. If they wish, authors can change the settings to register traditional copyright protection.

In addition, there's money involved. If authors OK it, Google will compensate them with revenue from advertisements served by the company's AdSense program. If someone writes a top-ranked knol on a subject that's matched with high-value clicks from Google ads (diseases, travel destinations, personal finance), the payout could be thousands of dollars. (Purists can keep the ads off.)

But Manber is emphatic that his project is not about the bucks. "If Knol doesn't improve search but generates some revenues, that'll be a failure for me," he says.

Many people, however, will find it puzzling that Google thinks it necessary to create a new platform for people to share information. Why bother, when Wikipedia will give you answers whether you're wondering about George M. Dallas (James Polk's vice-president) or the 13th Floor Elevators (an Austin psychedelic rock band formed in late 1965)?

One person asking that question is Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who learned about Knol a few months ago, when Google posted a blog teaser about the project.

"What is the added value?" Wales asks. "People already can put up web pages somewhere on the internet, put some ads on it if they want to get revenue or not put ads if they don't want the revenue."

Wales clearly thinks that his brainchild will satisfy most searchers. "If I type in Thomas Jefferson, there's a pretty good chance that the Wikipedia entry is more or less exactly what I'm looking for," he says.

Google says it isn't trying to compete with Wikipedia, but providing an alternative.

"I'm not suggesting one is better than the other, but different," says Manber.

And what would the difference be?

"One article is written by one person, and it's one person's opinion," says Manber. "You know who that person is and where they're coming from."

From the team's loft, Xiangtian Dai makes sure that Knol runs uniformly on different web browsers.
Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com

During one of my interviews with Manber I asked him to compare the first commissioned knol, about insomnia, with a Wikipedia item. The knol was written by Manber's wife, Rachel, who is an associate professor at Stanford University's Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Sleep Center.

Though Rachel Manber's item is a more coherent and thorough treatment of the subject than Wikipedia's, in some respects it's similar to the crowdsourced entry: a general definition followed by a discussion of causes and treatments.

But the top of the Wikipedia page on insomnia displays this caveat: "This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject." Touché.

By the way, Google isn't rejecting the wisdom of the crowd. Once an author creates a knol, the general public can improve it. People can suggest corrections, edits and amendments to the content -- a technique Google calls "a moderated edit."

Readers can also leave comments alongside the content. While the author is the arbiter of the item itself, and can reject suggestions, he or she can't delete the comments. Users can also rate knols on a five-star scale.

"I'm sure there will be knol spam," says Dupont, who says that Google will use its experience fighting spam in Blogger and other products to minimize it.

"If Google is able to pull it off, bring expert knowledge to the masses, that's absolutely wonderful," says Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, the company best known for providing trusted expert information in an encyclopedia format.

It's not Google that worries him, but Wikipedia, and he sounds like he'd like some help fending off Britannica's crowdsourced rival. "It's not the presence of Wikipedia that's a problem, it's the omnipresence of Wikipedia," he says.

In fact, he says, from what he hears about Knol, "it's very similar to things we're thinking and retooling Britannica to do." He hints that the company might be changing from its subscription model to a scheme where much of its content would be free to users -- and show up in search engines.

"If you're charging for content, you're behind the firewall. And if you're behind the firewall people don't call on you first," he says. As part of this process Britannica now encourages anyone to link to its items. Those following the link can read the full article free. Britannica also posts a daily info-nugget on Twitter.

But Cauz does imply that Google is stepping out of its sweet spot by generating content. "The issue here is that Google will become a publisher and will have moral liability and moral obligation for something that happens under its own brand -- and that is something that Google has never done," he says.

Google sees it differently, viewing Knol as a common-carrier platform like Blogger or YouTube. Knol pages won't even carry a Google logo.

"We are not publishers," says Manber. "We do not want to be editors. We do not want to have influence over what is written." He can't say it enough: It's about search. "There are millions of people with something in their head that they're not writing down," he says. "If I can get some of them to write it down, I'm helping everybody."

If Google's plan works, future searchers will get higher-quality results from searches of subjects commonplace and obscure -- even Peter Arno. In fact, a knol has already been written about The New Yorker cartoonist. If its author posts it -- he hasn't pulled the trigger yet -- Google won't have to work hard to verify the expert who worked for weeks to pen that item. It's Udi Manber.

Most of the Knol team takes a moment from working out last minute bugs to pose for a group shot at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Photo courtesy Kat Wade/Wired.com

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Disclosure: Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker.

Indie Game Developers Enlist Algorithms to Do the World-Building for Them

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00am EDT by Jim Rossignol

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What's the difference between an indie game and a blockbuster? About 5 million man-hours. Producing a big-budget title like Grand Theft Auto 4 requires armies of people to spend years painstakingly sculpting every individual object in the game world. Indie games, which are designed by small teams of geeks, can't possibly match that. But an increasing number of garage coders are building elaborate 3-D environments by outsourcing the design work — not to Bangalore, but to algorithms.

Take the upcoming online game Love (shown here), due out later this year. Around 100 players will be able to explore the virtual world together, establish towns, and fight monsters. And its impressionistic watercolor environment was created by an army of one, Swedish coder Eskil Steenberg.

Love's world starts as a generic landscape divided into almost 100,000 blocks. "The game's engine uses an algorithm to turn the blocks into hills, valleys, and oceans," Steenberg says — a method called procedural generation. It then examines the terrain and adds bridges, tunnels, and buildings to ensure that each area is interesting and accessible. Once the world is created, it can still be modified. "It's like a Lego kit that both the players and the game itself can use," he says. Players can rearrange trees and boulders, reconfigure buildings, or hollow out new caves in hillsides. The gorgeous vistas are also subject to natural phenomena like erosion, thanks to Steenberg's tectonics system.

Love's vast, morphing creation demonstrates how one man can become like a god — he sets the world in motion and lets simple rules, random numbers, and inhabitants do the rest.

As Summer Heats Up, An Ode to the Man Behind AC

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00am EDT by Dave Banks

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Summer's indispensable invention is the product of Willis Haviland Carrier's mind. It's too bad his branding didn't catch on: Te called his air-conditioning rig "the Weathermaker."

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00am EDT by Scott Brown

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It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire"; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan; the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US. In the midst of all this came WarGames, a fizzy little thriller about looming Armageddon. It's a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game — and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn't have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the "computer company" he's infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game — Global Thermonuclear War — is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III.

Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. (Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals.) "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing."

The original WarGames theatrical trailer.

For more, visit video.wired.com.

WarGames: The Dead Code attempts a reboot.

For more, visit video.wired.com.

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero — and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game?

In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later.

Walter Parkes, Screenwriter: WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology.

Lawrence Lasker, Screenwriter: We were complete newbies. In 1979, we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers.

Peter Schwartz, Futurist and creative consultant: I spent 10 years at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1972 to the end of 1981. That's where all this began. Walter and Larry came to SRI with a script idea called The Genius. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking.

Lasker: For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating — that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS. So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. That resonated with Walter. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there.

Parkes: Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. It wasn't even much about computers yet.

Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military — and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames.

Schwartz: There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers. SRI was in Palo Alto, and all the computer nerds were around: Xerox PARC, Apple just starting — it was all happening right there. SRI was node number two of the Internet. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. Space war games. Military simulations. Things like Global Thermonuclear War. SRI was one of the main players in this. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military.

Screenshot: Courtesy MGM

In the summer of 1980, Parkes and Lasker went looking for inspiration for their war room set. They found it when they pestered their way onto a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center — 2,000 feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away.

Lasker: As we're walking back to the bus that's going to take us to the hotel, James Hartinger [then commander in chief of Norad] walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me!" he says. "Let's go to the bar." Walter says: "Well, we have to get on the bus to go back to our hotel." And Hartinger replies: "Are you insane? I've got 50,000 men under my command. You think I can't get you back to your hotel? Plus, I can't drink off the base. So c'mon." He was all for the message in our script. We kind of simplified it to "machines are taking over." He said, "God damn, you're right! I sleep well at night knowing I'm in charge." So we based General Beringer, played by Barry Corbin, on the real commander at Cheyenne Mountain.

Parkes: We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. In one version, this kid was connected via computer to someone known as Uncle Ollie, or OLI. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. This was another version of what the WOPR became. We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on.

David Scott Lewis, Solar-tech entrepreneur and model for David Lightman: Hacking was easy back then. There were few if any security measures. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics.

Lasker: David Lewis wasn't exactly the inspiration. But he was a model. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself?" And he'd say, "Yes! Number of players: zero."

Screenshot: Courtesy MGM

Parkes: There was a guy named "Captain Crunch," John Draper. He was the famous phone phreak, one of the first telephone hackers. He was called Captain Crunch because he used a toy whistle given away in the cereal to activate a telephone trunk line, enabling him to make unlimited free calls.

John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Early hacker and reformed phone phreak: I talked to them about how phone phreaks did it: The use of a dialer scanner program came from me repeatedly dialing up numbers until I found a computer modem. It's called wardialing now because David Lightman used it in the movie to make contact with the Norad computer. I called it scanning.

Kevin "The Condor" Mitnick, Early hacker who served five years in prison for computer-related crimes: Scanning was a common hacking technique. But it seemed like something from a James Bond movie.

In early '82 , the script grew so ambitious that the filmmakers needed to build the Hollywood version of Norad's Crystal Palace command center. Universal Pictures began to balk at the prospect of shooting a tech-heavy movie its executives didn't fully understand. The project stalled and ended up at United Artists, where director Martin Brest was hired. He began making changes in the script, starting with the key character, Falken.

Lasker: I still wish we'd been able to stick with the original dying-astrophysicist character. It was Marty Brest who didn't like the idea of a man in a wheelchair in a war room, because it was too much like Dr. Strangelove.

Parkes We always pictured John Lennon, because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking.

Lasker: We had communicated with Hawking — not directly. And through David Geffen, we'd communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role. I was writing the first scene where we meet Hawking — Falken — in the movie. He was an astrophysicist in our second draft. I was staring at the cover of the November '80 issue of Esquire, with Lennon on the cover, and describing his face, when a friend of mine — a bit of a jerk — called and said, "You're gonna have to find a new Falken."

They had to find a new director, too; UA wasn't happy with the footage Brest had produced. The studio fired him and called in John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever.

Geek Goddess

Those eyes. That laugh. Those khakis. For a legion of young WarGames fans, 20-year-old Ally Sheedy was a lust object second only to the Imsai 8080. A quarter century later, Wired caught up with hacker culture's first crush. — Scott Brown

Wired: So it wasn't a love for microprocessors that drew you to this role.

Sheedy: I couldn't make heads or tails of the script. It was easy for me to do the part where she's asking questions.

Wired: What about now?

Sheedy: To be honest, I haven't seen the movie since it came out. It's probably kind of quaint.

Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. I sometimes feel really at sea with technology. I love email.

Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one's accountable. And I have a 14-year-old daughter, so I worry.

Wired: Wow. You have a 14-year-old daughter. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who'd like to hit on you ... Do hackers hit on you?

Sheedy: No, I don't hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don't. Thankfully. No.

Wired: Just one no would've been fine.

John Badham, Director Leonard Goldberg, the producer, shows me some footage they'd shot — it was a scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy going into his bedroom, early in the movie, and he shows her how he can change her grades on his computer. She freaks out and leaves. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "What's wrong here?" Driving home that night, I realized what it was. I stopped the car, found a phone booth, and called Leonard. "I know what the problem is!" I said. "They're not having any fun!" These kids were treating this as if they're involved in some dark and evil terrorist conspiracy. If I could change somebody's grades on the computer, I'd be peeing in my pants with excitement to show it to some girl. And the girl would be excited about it! I wasn't taking the point of view that there was something wrong with this guy.

Parkes: There was such a myth that we were all subject to, that personal computing would lead to a generation of disconnected loners who stayed in their rooms. But it actually led to social networking of a kind we've never seen before. The David Lightman character we first wrote was an edgier character than the one that Matthew portrayed. The final version was edgy enough but in a slightly more playful way.

Schwartz: The first thing on his mind was impressing the girl: "I'm changing your biology grade!" He was more about that than the art of hacking. The two computer nerds he goes to visit, Malvin and Jim (played by Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin), are much more in the mold of the conventional hacker.

Eddie Deezen, Actor [New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael said that I was the first computer nerd of film, and since then nobody has ever challenged me.

To ensure accuracy, Badham invited a small army of computer whizzes on set.

Badham: You could get all the hacker geekiness you wanted just by standing on the set. We were dealing with things like when Matthew sits at the computer, we've got an actor who can't even type. I'd say, "No, I just really want him to type in 'David' and have him get on." They said, "No! You can't do that! You have to go through all these elaborate sequences!" I said, "No, we're not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time."

Draper: I was taken down to the set as a technical assistant. I don't really believe that there were any technical glitches — the fact that you can find a game company by scanning for phone numbers was real. That military computer, the WOPR, on the other hand, was a stupid, crazy thing. That was crazy. That was silly.

Made for $12 million, the movie was released on June 6, 1983. It was a hit, nabbing $80 million at the box office (the fifth-highest total of the year) and three Oscar nominations (for original screenplay, sound, and cinematography). Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "an amazingly entertaining thriller" and "one of the best films so far this year." When the WOPR spoke the movie's penultimate line ("A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"), audiences, unnerved by years of US-Soviet nuclear brinkmanship, spontaneously applauded. And Ronald Reagan did not find the WOPR crazy or silly when he saw the movie at a special Camp David screening during its opening weekend.

Lasker: I arranged that screening. Reagan was a family friend. My parents were in the movie business, and I grew up in Brentwood. We had Saturday night parties, and much the same people came. The Reagans — you could set your watch by them. At 7 o'clock, there they would be — ding-dong!

Days after the screening, wrote Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, Reagan held a closed-door briefing with some moderate members of Congress, wherein he sidetracked discussion of the MX ballistic missile program by bringing upWarGames. Had any of them seen the film? he asked, then launched into an animated account of the plot. "Don't tell the ending," cautioned one of the lawmakers.

Parkes: I remember the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. The timing of it all was really interesting.

William Lord, Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command: It was a great movie! A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, "Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?" It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, "If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?"

Poster art: Courtesy MGM

WarGames had its most indelible influence on hacker culture, not defense policy. The Cold War was ending, but the cyberwar was just getting started. The year after the movie's release saw the debut of 2600 magazine — a hacker zine named after the 2600-Hz tone Draper used to phreak phones. In 1993, the first hacker convention opened its doors. It was (and is) called Defcon, an affectionate nod to the movie that helped popularize the term. But WarGames' legacy isn't all smileys and Sunday wardrives. This was Silicon Valley's Jaws, doing for the digital demimonde what Spielberg's thriller had done for sharks: It introduced the world to the peril posed by hackers.

Mitnick: That movie had a significant effect on my treatment by the federal government. I was held in solitary confinement for nearly a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if I got near a phone, I could dial up Norad and launch a nuclear missile. I never hacked into Norad. And when the prosecutor said that, I laughed — in open court. I thought, "This guy just burned all his credibility." But the court believed it. I think the movie convinced people that this stuff was real. They tried to make me into a fictional character.

Parkes: Between John's instinct and Matthew's interpretation, Lightman ended up being a more accessible, real kid. We didn't know it at the time — we went into this researching hackers — but we probably drew a picture of a gamer. I mean, look at the line "I wanna play those games."

Lewis: In those days, there were no blackhats or whitehats. I didn't do anything too serious. Just wanted to see what I could get away with. Just like in the movie.

Parkes: If there's something naive about the movie, it's that we didn't anticipate the power of hackers. For the handful of people who ended up doing things like unleashing viruses, well, most of those guys got arrested and then worked for the computer security business. So I guess it's all worked out.

Mitnick: It was a cool script, and Lightman becomes the hero. He was just doing it for fun. Today people aren't doing it for the fun. I was an old-school hacker, doing it for intellectual curiosity. It was more innocent. Trying to find a cool game to play and accidentally stumbling across a game that was for real.

Contributing editor Scott Brown (scott_brown@wired.com) wrote about the new Batman movie in issue 16.07. Additional reporting by David Downs.

Bike Multitool Packs a Big Kit Into a Tiny Package

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 8:27am EDT by Charlie Sorrel

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The sturdy Topeak Hexus includes 16 different bicycle repair tools in one compact package, making it an excellent choice for on-the-road repairs.

Electronics Giants to Create Wireless HD Standard

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 7:31am EDT by Associated Press

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Wireless HD video gets a big boost as Sony, Samsung Motorola, Sharp and Hitachi join forces to support a technology that could send high-definition video signals from a single set-top box to screens around the home. Consortium members Sony and Samsung also support a competing technology, but at least the race is on.

Diving Knife Stabs, Pumps Out Explosive Ball of Frozen Gas

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 6:48am EDT by Charlie Sorrel

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The Wasp Injector Knife has a CO2 cartridge in the handle. Stab it into an unsuspecting underwater predator, and the knife instantly pumps out a basketball-size bolus of frigid CO2 gas, freezing the target's internal organs (and blood) and carrying it harmlessly to the surface. See the video in Gadget Lab.

Prosecutor: Admin Rigged City Network for 'Failure'

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 3:56am EDT by David Kravets

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A San Francisco prosecutor told a judge that network admin Terry Childs rigged the city's network for "failure" if there was a power outage. A routine outage was scheduled for July 19 but was canceled out of caution. Childs' attorney called the accusation "spurious" and a judge declined to release Childs from jail.

Report: PlayStation 3 Game 'Failing Epilepsy Tests'

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Jean Snow

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Reports indicate that the delay of the PlayStation 3 game Wipeout HD is due to the high-speed racing game's neon flashing lights "failing the epilepsy tests."

July 23, 1956: Bell X-2 Sets Aircraft Speed Mark

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1956: A Bell X-2 rocket plane sets the record for fastest speed by an aircraft, reaching Mach 2.87, or more than 1,900 mph, 60,000 feet above the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

The X-2 Starbuster, an experimental plane built by Bell Aircraft to test stability and control at supersonic speeds, made its debut in June 1952. Two were built, but only one became operational: The other was lost in a captive-flight explosion that killed its pilot in 1953.

Lt. Col. Frank "Pete" Everest was at the controls for the record flight. Everest, who flew over 150 combat missions during World War II, became a test pilot after the war, setting several speed marks and establishing an unofficial altitude record of 73,000 feet in a Bell X-1.

The 1950s were the golden age for test pilots, with numerous high-speed, experimental aircraft rolling out of Bell, Northrup and Douglas factories to test the limits of manned flight. Everest piloted almost every single aircraft type during his stint as a test pilot.

His July record-setter was the X-2's ninth powered flight, which began with the plane being carried to altitude and released from its mother ship, a B-50 bomber. Everest engaged the Curtiss-Wright XLR25 liquid-fueled rocket engine, and was off to the races. As he recalled in a 1998 interview with Aviation History magazine: Once [the rocket is] going … you’re hanging on and trying to fly a prescribed flight path to give you the best performance. This isn’t easy to do, because you have to climb and try to get to about 60,000 feet, then level off and perhaps dive a little to try and get the maximum Mach number out of the airplane. You do this until your propellants are exhausted and then head home.

Simple as that.

Even as he set the speed mark, Everest was gathering data. He reported later that the X-2's flight controls were not completely reliable at top-end speeds, the aircraft becoming more difficult to handle. Pressure shifts were also a factor, and Everest's impression was that the plane would encounter significant stability problems as it approached Mach 3.

Everest's record was broken a little over two months later by Capt. Mel Apt, flying the same X-2. Apt reached Mach 3.2, becoming the first pilot ever to top Mach 3, but that flight ended tragically when he attempted to adjust his course and the aircraft spun out of control and crashed. Apt's death was the end of the X-2 program, and most supersonic research was suspended until the North American X-15 arrived three years later.

Source: Various

What Works, What Doesn't, on Mobile Web

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Scott Loganbill

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Remember when your phone couldn't do much more than make phone calls and send text messages? We've come a long way in a short amount of time, but, as Webmonkey Scott Loganbill explores in this analytical essay, we still have some work to do before we can ditch our desktops for good.

Pentagon Slices and Dices Darpa Budget

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Sharon Weinberger

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The Pentagon's storied research and development arm turned 50 years old this year. Its birthday present from the Pentagon brass: another $100 million in budget cuts.

New Geoengineering Scheme Tackles Ocean Acidification, Too

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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A geoengineering scheme that could fight ocean acidification and climate change has resurfaced -- and it's got some early backing from a big oil company.

How to Ace Your Math SATs

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Wired's How-To Wiki offers some expert test-taking tips sure to boost your math-geek cred as well as your SAT score.

Higher, Faster, Stronger: 1950s Experimental Aircraft

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Tony Long

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: Photo: U.S. Air Force

The 1950s was the decade of the test pilot and the experimental aircraft, as aviation technology turned to the jet engine and pushed its limits in both speed and endurance. With the world divided in Cold War, the stakes were high. Jet aircraft dominated both U.S. and Soviet arsenals and the data returned by subsonic and supersonic test flights had implications for the coming space race as well.

A number of aviation companies turned out experimental aircraft, primarily for the armed forces. The pilots who flew them measured success in ways their predecessors could only dream of. They set records for speed and altitude that were unimaginable only a few years earlier, piloting aircraft that were volatile, unpredictable and often flat-out dangerous. When the time came to select astronauts for the nascent U.S. space program, it's not surprising that NASA recruiters turned to their ranks seeking the guys with the right stuff.

Hiller X-18

The X-18 was an experimental cargo-transport aircraft designed to be the first testbed for tilt-wing and STOVL (short takeoff and vertical landing) technology. The Hiller Aircraft Corporation began design work in 1955 and received a manufacturing contract and funding from the Air Force, resulting in the only X-18 ever produced.

: Photo: NASA

The Bell X-2 Starbuster was built to investigate flight characteristics in the Mach 2-3 range. This 1952 photograph shows an X-2 with a collapsed nose landing gear after a rough landing on its first glide flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The aircraft pitched and slid along its main skid, causing the right wingtip bumper to hit the ground and break off. The nose wheel collapsed upon making contact with the ground.

: Photo: NASA

A composite photograph showing the Bell X-5's variable-sweep wing.

The Bell X-5 was the first aircraft capable of changing the sweep of its wings in flight. It was inspired by the untested wartime P.1101 design of Germany's Messerschmitt Company. The German design, however, could only be adjusted on the ground. Bell engineers devised a system of electric motors to adjust the sweep in flight.

: Photo: NASA

The Bell X-14 was an experimental aircraft flown during the 1950s. It was built to demonstrate unorthodox maneuverability, including vertical takeoff, hovering ability, transition to forward flight and vertical landing.

: Photo: NASA

The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was a 1950s experimental jet aircraft with a slender fuselage and a long, tapered nose, manufactured by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Its primary mission was to investigate the design features of an aircraft suitable for sustained supersonic speeds, which included the first use of titanium in major airframe components. It was, however, seriously underpowered for its purpose and could not even exceed Mach 1 in level flight.

: Photo: U.S. Army

The Goodyear Inflatoplane was an experimental aircraft made by the Goodyear Aircraft Company, a subsidiary of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The Inflatoplane was roughly equivalent to the commercial Piper Cub. Although a capable enough aircraft, the Inflatoplane project was discontinued after the Army was unable to find a valid military use and remarked, unkindly perhaps, that it "could be brought down by a well-aimed bow and arrow."

: Photo: U.S. Air Force

The Ryan X-13A-RY Vertijet, Ryan Model 69, was another vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. This one was used by the Air Force.

: Photo: NASA

The Vertol (later Boeing Vertol) VZ-2 (or Model 76) was designed in 1957 to investigate the tilt-wing approach to vertical takeoff and landing. The aircraft had a fuselage of tubular framework (originally uncovered) and accommodation for its pilot in a helicopter-like bubble canopy. The T-tail incorporated small ducted fans to act as thrusters for greater control at low speeds.

: Photo: U.S. Army

The Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee was a unique, direct-lift rotor aircraft, using a counter-rotating ducted fan inside a platform carrying a single pilot. The craft, which first appeared in 1953, was maneuvered by the pilot shifting his body weight to tilt the platform in the desired direction.

: Photo: U.S. Air Force

The North American X-15 rocket-powered aircraft was part of the USAF/NASA/USN X-series of experimental aircraft, begun with the Bell X-1. The X-15 set numerous speed and altitude records in the early 1960s, reaching the edge of space and bringing back valuable data that was used in the designs of aircraft and spacecraft. The altitudes reached by the X-15 remained unsurpassed by any piloted aircraft (except the space shuttle) until the third space flight of SpaceShipOne in 2004.

: Photo: U.S. Air Force

The Lockheed X-7 (dubbed the "Flying Stove Pipe") was an unmanned testbed for ramjet engines and missile-guidance technology. It was carried aloft by a B-29 or B-50 Superfortress carrier aircraft. The booster ignited after launch and propelled the vehicle to a speed of 1,000 mph (1,625 km/h). The booster was then jettisoned, and the underslung ramjet took over from that point. The X-7 eventually returned to Earth, its descent slowed by parachute. A maximum speed of 2,881 mph (4,640 km/h, or Mach 4.31) was attained, setting a record for fastest air-breathing aircraft. A total of 130 X-7 flights were conducted between April 1951 and July 1960.

: Photo: NASA

A Convair XF-92A in flight over Edwards Air Force Base around 1953. Powered by an Allison J33-A turbojet engine, with an afterburner, the XF-92 was America's first delta-wing aircraft. The delta wing's large area, thin airfoil cross-section, low weight and structural strength gave this design a great potential for a supersonic airplane.

Google Maps Gets More Pedestrian

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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The popular mapping site added walking directions to its arsenal of on-the-go search info. While the results aren't perfect just yet, the service is capable of finding and recommending the most direct, flat and pedestrian-friendly route.

Alt Text: Back to the Batcave: Grading More of Batman's Gear

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lore Sjöberg

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Part of the enduring appeal of Batman is that he accessorizes. He was toyetic before toyetic was even a word. A horrible, horrible word.

In that sense, he's much like those who fanatically follow his adventures: He avoids the sun, dresses in a, shall we say, idiosyncratic manner, collects neat stuff and spends a lot of time on a computer looking for excuses to get into fights. We'll just gloss over the fact that he's in tip-top physical shape and probably doesn't have the complete Buffy series on a hard drive somewhere.

Alt Text Podcast

Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast

This, then, is Part 2 of our look at Batman's stuff. We look at the Dark Knight's various possessions, and subject them to the harsh, cold light of judgment. Because when you don't spend every night wiping crime from the streets like a vengeful Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, you have plenty of time to write stuff like this.

Batcave

The Batcave has aged well. Underground bunkers never go out of style! If anything, in this age of constant surveillance your secret base would have to be underground to avoid space lasers and Google Maps. I am, however, disappointed whenever the Batcave is depicted without a life-size dinosaur statue. I don't care how gritty and morally ambiguous your story is, there's always room for an anatomically inaccurate T. rex. On the other hand, Wikipedia informs me that the Batcave originally just held a desk and filing cabinets. Bat-cubicle!
Grade: A

Rebreather

This is usually depicted as a small device that Batman can hold in his mouth like a Binky. A Bat-Binky. However, rather than providing Batman with comfort while teething or tripping on ecstasy, the rebreather turns Batman's superheroic exhalations back into life-giving oxygen, allowing him to survive unpleasant gases or even breathe underwater. Carbon dioxide into oxygen? Batman could solve global warming on his own, but he won't. Global warming didn't kill his parents.
Grade: C+

Batplane

I'm not even going to consider how Batman deals with air-traffic control. I assume he just tells them he's the god-damned Batman and they'd better get all the other planes out of the sky because some villain is launching a series of awkwardly themed crimes and needs to be flied at. I like to think that Batman also has another Batplane, a simple woodworking tool he uses for home improvement. One shaped like a bat.
Grade: B

Explosives

Batman has explosives? Many sources agree. It seems to me that if you have explosives you don't need much else. Really, Explosives Man is probably going to frighten more cowardly, superstitious criminals than a bat theme. Criminals have one main superstition: "If someone explodes you, you die." Yeah, I know Batman doesn't kill, but if he plays his cards right, nobody ever has to find that out. Just convince them you're completely crazy. In that outfit, that's not tough to do.
Grade: C-

Flashlight

In some incarnations, Batman has night-vision lenses, but I like it when he just has a plain old regular flashlight. Why? Because I carry a flashlight. That means I am, in some small way, like Batman, if Batman had a key chain. Which I guess he doesn't? At any rate, I'm hoping in the future Batman will carry around a Leatherman, a BatPod MP3 player and a miniature bottle of Tabasco. Then the parallels will be uncanny.
Grade: B-

Shark-Repellent Bat Spray

Whenever I talk about Batman's utility belt -- and I do that far too often -- someone always mentions the Shark-Repellent Bat Spray from the Adam West Batman movie. Yeah, that was pretty awesome.
Grade: A

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a dark knight, a white knight and Michael Knight.

Yahoo Q2 Profit Down, Below Analyst Views

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 5:20pm EDT by Associated Press

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Yahoo's performance isn't as bad as many investors feared after its rival, search and advertising leader Google Inc., posted second-quarter earnings that disappointed Wall Street last week.

Details of DNS Flaw Leaked; Exploit Expected by End of Today

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 5:15pm EDT by Kim Zetter

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The details of a critical vulnerability in a core internet infrastructure have leaked onto the web, despite efforts to keep the information under wraps. The security researcher who found the hole the the Domain Name System is now urging everyone to fix the vulnerability before it's too late.

EMusic Extends Into Social Networks

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 4:12pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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The DRM-free music retailer eMusic has linked up with several Web 2.0 hotspots to give subscribers more bang for their buck and allow them to post album excerpts to social networks.

Computer Security Dire as Malware Spammers Get Sense of Humor

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 3:52pm EDT by Ryan Singel

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Computer security threats are constantly changing, but what madness will ensue when online criminals start developing a sense of humor?

Electric Cars Are Inevitable ... and Essential

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 3:27pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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The DRM-free music retailer eMusic has linked up with several Web 2.0 hotspots to give subscribers more bang for their buck and allow them to post album excerpts to social networks.

Bin Laden Driver Faces Life Behind Bars Even if Acquitted

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 3:01pm EDT by David Kravets

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Opening arguments get underway in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, against Salim Ahmed Hamdan -- Osama bin Laden's driver -- in what is the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II. But Hamdan faces a lifetime behind bars if convicted or acquitted. He's deemed an enemy combatant, which the Bush administration says means he can be held indefinitely.

TiVo to Cash In on Couch Potato Commerce

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 2:20pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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TiVo is looking for new ways to generate revenue from its existing subscriber base. Its most recent plan: Let subscribers shop through Amazon while watching TV.

Net Censorship Law Struck Down Again

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 2:06pm EDT by Ryan Singel

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A federal appeals court struck down yet again a law that would have required websites to verify all visitors' ages if any of its content wasn't suitable for minors. Tuesday's ruling from the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals adds to a decade of losses for the government's attempt to regulate speech on the internet.

Microsoft to Sell Home-Brewed Xbox Games, Share Revenue

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Chris Kohler

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Microsoft announces its going to let home-brew gamemakers sell their games to other Xbox 360 owners online, and take a share of the revenue.

GM Joins Utilities to Ensure Plug-In Hybrids Can Plug In

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 1:37pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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General Motors is working with more than 30 utilities nationwide to ensure the nation's grid can handle an influx of cars that run on electricity.

Even McCain Campaign Hopes to Profit From Obamamania

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Sarah Lai Stirland

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John McCain’s campaign is using a sarcastic new video to conduct his latest round of online fundraising .

FavTape: Playlists Don't Get Any Faster Than This

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 11:05am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Got a second? That's more than you'll need to create a sharable mix of your favorite songs at Favtape. Their lightening-fast online mixtape creation tool uses your Last.fm or Pandora account to retrieve 10 songs that you have bookmarked or favorited.

Report: 'Dark Knight' Star Bale Accused of Assaulting His Mom, Sister

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 9:30am EDT by Lewis Wallace

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Batman behind bars? Sounds like a Joker plot, but the allegations are real. British police reportedly arrest Christian Bale in the wake of a family scuffle.

Step Right Up and Buy ... The Holy Grail!

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 7:30am EDT by Matt Blum

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A mouth-watering selection of geekly movie memorabilia is going on auction, including Indiana Jones' Holy Grail and Charlton Heston's The Ten Commandments. There's stuff from Blade Runner, Alien, Conan the Barbarian, Austin Powers, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Back to the Future to name just a few.

Video: Hands-On With the $11,000 Clover Coffeemaker

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Video Department

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Wired.com takes a look at the Clover, an $11,000 coffee machine hand-built by Stanford engineers.

Seafloor Zombie Microbes May Look Like Exo-Organisms

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Primitive organisms found on the sea floor have a metabolism so slow that it might be more accurate to call them undead rather than alive. And how they live may be a model for how life might survive on Mars or a Jovian moon.

July 22, 1952: Genuine Crop-Circle Maker Patented

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1952: Frank Zybach gets a patent for the center-pivot irrigator. Hundreds of thousands of crop circles will appear on landscapes around the world ... eventually.

You've seen 'em if you've flown across farmland in the United States or other nations: big green circles of irrigated land, making repeated dot patterns. But they weren't always there.

Zybach grew up in Nebraska but was farming in Colorado in 1947 when he saw a demonstration of modern movable irrigation. Workers were moving and connecting pipes fitted with sprinkler heads from one part of a field to another. Sprinklers could beat a couple of problems: uneven, hilly terrain and the tendency of water to run into sandy ground before getting to the end of the ditch.

But Zybach, a lifelong tinkerer, saw something more: Why have humans set up, take down, move the equipment and repeat? Why not have the equipment move itself?

Zybach built his first prototype within a year. It rotated around a center wellhead. Guy wires that were attached to support towers held the sprinkler-fitted water pipes above the ground. Control wires and two-way water valves kept the towers in line. The first support towers moved on skids, but Zybach soon replaced those with wheels propelled by the irrigation water itself.

He applied for a patent for the "Zybach Self-Propelled Sprinkling Apparatus" in July 1949. He knew he needed to improve his invention -- making it tall enough to work for corn, among other things. So, the same year he got his patent, he moved back to Nebraska and went into business with a friend, A. E. Trowbridge.

The duo didn't immediately succeed, partly because Zybach kept making improvements before Trowbridge could sell the models they'd already manufactured. They sold the patent rights for a 5-percent royalty to farm-equipment manufacturer Robert Daugherty of Valley Manufacturing (later Valmont) in 1954.

Valley built only seven systems the following year, but it kept on improving the device. Variable pressure let farmers apply different amounts of water on each full rotation. They could apply fertilizer and pesticides automatically, too. End guns let water reach those dry corners between the circles. Business took off in the 1960s. The amount of land tended by one irrigation worker quadrupled from about 400 acres to 1,600 acres.

More than a quarter-million center-pivot irrigation systems now water fields around the world. Modern systems run in forward or reverse on rubber wheels driven by electric motors. The control sensors that keep the support towers in line have evolved from simple mechanical linkages to computerized sensors. Some systems use GPS and wireless to control water flow. They take directions from laptops and cellphones. Sophisticated mechanical trusses, not wires, support the pipes.

But what about those empty corners between the circles? Some countries now arrange their circular fields in large, hexagonal patterns to minimize the unsprinkled areas. That's hardly practical in the United States and elsewhere where land holdings have already been divided up in big, old-fashioned squares. So, the up-to-date center-pivot systems rely on low-voltage, radio-signal wires buried in the corners of the field. A sensor at the end of the pivot arm picks up the signal and telescopes the pipe outward toward the corner, then retracts again, following the border of the field.

And, as that technology spreads, the circles you see from your jet-plane window seat may someday be a thing of the past.

Source: Wessels Living History Farm

Blogs for Print Nerds: Zine Fest Flaunts Camp and Crafts

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Emily Lang

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: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO – More than 100 zine-makers packed the County Fair building in Golden Gate Park over the weekend to celebrate San Francisco's annual Zine Festival.

The two-day conference featured a wide variety of DIY arts and crafts, zines, comics and a gypsy-like atmosphere. Attending noobs were also treated to hands-on workshops, from bookbinding to illustration and Q & A sessions with accomplished self-publishers.

For zinesters, zines are like the blogs of the print world. They're an essential part of offline geek and underground culture and their DIY aesthetic has influenced an entire generation of designers and writers.

Click through the gallery for highlights from this DIY ComicCon.

Left: Festival-goers browse through the plethora of independently published zines and books.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, one half of the production company Two Fine Chaps, displays an array of his self-published work. His work ranges from a large, full-color illustrated book of the poem Beowulf to a very small, hand-made, three-dimensional pop-up fable titled The Clockmaker's Joy.

"I wanted to make books that are fun to hold, interesting to read and beautiful to look at," Fetter-Vorm said.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Rani Goel's Typecritters zines feature letter art made from mirroring and layering type. Her booth also displays her Servings zine, which tackles the issue of body image and our cultural obsession with weight and food.

"There's something about someone's handwriting, something more real about it than a MySpace or a blog, something raw," Goel said. "And there's room to be messy, it doesn't have to be perfect."

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Jennie Hinchcliff (left) and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler, of Pod Post, model their zine merit badges.

"We wanted the merit badges to be about something we care about," Hinchcliff said. "Merit badges for book and zine making." "Instead of cookie selling," Wheeler adds.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Amy Martin, a cartoonist, gets a little work done at her booth and perhaps a head start for next year's festival.

"Last year was the first [festival] I did," Martin said. "The shows are great and you get to meet lots of people."

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Matt DeLight, illustrator and co-producer of several comics, described his work as autobiographical, funny and tragic.

"It started with a love of comics as a kid," DeLight said. He stumbled upon an issue of Too Much Coffee at 16 that detailed how to make your own mini comic. "It blew my mind to think that I could go to Kinko's and make my own comic."

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

The 2008 SF Zine Festival moved to the SF County Fair building in Golden Gate park this year in anticipation of more exhibitors and a larger crowd than ever -- twice the size of last year's.

: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Kelly Lee Barretts (right) mans her street-photography mini-book booth with Jon LaSalle (middle).

"I had taken a bunch of photos and was rolling around with them on the floor of my room one night and decided to make a book out of it," said Barretts, a UC Santa Cruz graduate. Barretts has books available in three different sizes, from the miniscule to the pocket-size.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Lori Stein (left), author of Ranger Strange Bunny, shares table space with professional Yo-Yoer and ziner, Doctor Popular.

Doctor Popular peddled his zines, hand-made iPhone cases and yo-yos. "Three things keep me alive: yo-yoing, crafts and tailoring," Popular said. "Some of that is represented here."

How to Use URL Patterns and Views in Django

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The last time Webmonkey looked at Django, we showed you how to install the web framework and set up a simple blog application. Easy enough, but your site didn't do much, and it wasn't very interesting to look at. In this tutorial for advanced web builders, we show you how to dress up a basic Django-powered website by building URL patterns and constructing views.

Search Every Craigslist Site at Once

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 8:17pm EDT by Marty Orgel

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Craigslist limits you to searching its classified listings locally. What if you don't care where your stuff comes from as long as you find the right stuff? Using Google, you can scan through all of Craigslist's listings globally in one search query.

Interview: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 7:52pm EDT by Chris Kohler

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The creator of Super Mario talks Nintendo's future plans, including new Wii motion controllers, Wii Music, and the future of his famous franchises. Wired.com video interview by Chris Kohler.

Simon Pegg's Geek Roots Show in 'Spaced'

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 7:17pm EDT by Erin Biba

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The star of genre-twisting flicks like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz talks about the geek references in his Brit TV show and his future as Star Trek's Scotty.

Piracy-Schmiracy: 'The Dark Knight' Rakes in the Dough

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Hollywood execs argue that piracy is killing their business. Just how much has it hurt business? "The Dark Knight," with bootleg copies available online almost immediately, grossed a record-breaking $155.3 million in one weekend.

Facebook's Redesign Mimics FriendFeed

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson

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Facebook's new look includes a total redesign of the default user homepage, combining each user's news, updates and statuses into one feed -- a layout scheme which closely resembles that of the social network aggregation service FriendFeed.

Macs, iPods Carry Apple to Record-Setting Revenues

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 4:37pm EDT by Brian Chen

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Record-setting Mac computer sales, plus robust iPod sales, helped propel Apple to high revenues and earnings in its fiscal third quarter. Nevertheless, jittery investors pummel the stock in after-hours trading, focusing on the company's cautions regarding its upcoming fourth quarter.

Tools for Web Developers: The 5 Best Firebug Extensions

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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The Firebug web-development extension for Firefox has gotten so popular, a gaggle of meta-extensions building upon Firebug's core functionality has sprung up around it. Webmonkey rounds up the five best extensions for Firebug.

Dear Open ID: You Deserve Better

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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The nascent identity management service OpenID is suffering from half-hearted adoption by web heavyweights Yahoo and Google, and from publishers' unwillingness to move away from traditional, more-restrictive user-registration models.

GOP 'Caving' From Trademark Lawsuit Threats

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 4:11pm EDT by David Kravets

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The Republican National Committee on Monday backed down on its threats to sue CafePress for allowing its online vendors to sell GOP-related merchandise. The GOP, however, said while it is backing off on litigation threats, it will demand vendors acquire licenses of shirts, stickers or other goods if they solely display the trademarked letters G-O-P or the trademarked GOP elephant.

A Week of Car Shows, a Century of Transportation

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 2:45pm EDT by Keith Barry

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A week's worth of car shows celebrating everything from the Model-T to three-wheeled post-war microcars shows us where the automobile has been, where it's going and how the past will shape the future.

Turns Out Porn Isn't Recession-Proof

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 2:12pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

Tags: [edit]

Adult filmmakers have reason to be glum. The DVD market has peaked; there's an onslaught of free, amateur content; and piracy is eating away at revenue. An industry that has historically been "recession-proof" is feeling the pains of the economic downturn.

'Tongue Drive' Controls Computers and Wheelchairs

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 11:36am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Researchers at Georgia Tech have created a new control system that could allow severely disabled people to control computers and wheelchairs by moving their tongues -- taking advantage of the tongue's agility and nearly direct connection to the brain.

Crude Reporting: Ask the Tough Questions About Oil

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 11:20am EDT by Howell Raines, Portfolio.com

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News from Portfolio.com

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The cover of a recent BusinessWeek about the runup in oil and gasoline prices framed the question of what's causing it nicely: "Speculation or Manipulation?" But the story was maddeningly evenhanded. By dodging its own question, the magazine raised another.

When it comes to the cost of gasoline, who should we believe? Here are some nominees and their viewpoints:

1. The oil companies: It's supply and demand at its most basic, just like your professor outlined in your freshman economics course.

2. The petro-toadies in Congress: All we have to do is open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the waters off Florida and California.

3. The Department of Energy: OPEC has to pump more, and we've got to allow more refineries by rolling back environmental restrictions.

4. King Abdullah: OPEC pumps plenty of crude but "despicable" oil-futures speculators in the West are driving up the prices due to their "selfishness."

5. Senator John McCain: Exxon Mobil has done such a good job of demonstrating the magic of the marketplace that it deserves another $1.2 billion in tax breaks.

6. Senator Barack Obama: Impose a windfall-profits tax to remind American oil executives that price gouging can backfire politically.

7. About 90 percent of the print and TV reporters in America: See No. 1. It really is that ol’ devil supply and demand.

8. The White House: Never mind. Nobody’s home.

For my money, a sounder answer as to whom to believe is Don Barlett and Jim Steele, the investigative reporting team that has won two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards for exposing government theft and corporate greed. Their 2003 series for Time magazine on oil economics remains required reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of how gas at $4 to $5 a gallon represents a carefully arranged screwing of consumers.

"The bottom line for the oil people is, 'How much can I make while spending the least I can get by with on refineries, synthetic fuels, and for exploration and drilling on the vast, unused acreage in existing oil leases?'" Barlett says. He notes that Canada has become the United States' No. 1 oil supplier by funding joint government- industry exploration of the tar-sand fields of Alberta. "The most chilling statistic is Exxon Mobil's. It spent twice as much last year to buy back stock as it did on exploration."

As for shallow journalism that helps Big Oil, Steele makes the point that the newsrooms that were once staffed by the redistributionist children of the New Deal and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. are now populated with the children of Reaganomics: "Younger reporters come out of a mind-set that the market rules, taxes are evil, and government ought to let these people in the oil industry go about their business."

As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there's no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

Then there's the problem of letting general-assignment reporters, rather than energy specialists, cover gasoline prices mainly as a story of consumer suffering. About 40 percent of U.S. oil is produced domestically, and Washington has declined to regulate auto fuel as an essential commodity. That's where the vertical integration of a giant like Exxon Mobil creates market leverage. It owns oil fields, processing plants, and retail outlets, creating some monopoly-like advantages in controlling supply and fixing prices in the U.S. market. Then there is the remarkable job that the oil companies have done in persuading network-TV anchors and correspondents to depict them as they want to be seen: powerless victims of a supply-and-demand cycle that is as immutable as gravity and as random as lightning. Congress, responding to demands for tougher laws on oil speculation, would prefer to blame environmental regulations. Much of the context-free reporting about what the executives say, in Congress and on television, is marked by breathtaking gullibility.

Speaking of television, no one of any age can doubt that the industry's star performer in the public relations battle over gasoline prices is Rex Tillerson, chairman and C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil. His appearances on the Today show have become five-minute promos for price escalation, with Matt Lauer cast as the surrogate for a nation of consumers who don't fully understand their role—helpless and sacrificial—while the company maximizes shareholder value, "our reason for being."

This is a "demand-driven price run-up, no question about it," Tillerson drawls, fingers intertwined and as fidget-free as Chance the Gardener. Lauer gamely zeroes in on Exxon Mobil's dirty secret—that it spends only 5.3 percent of revenue on exploration at a time of record revenue. "If you're making $400 billion a year, should consumers expect you to pay or spend even more on exploration?" Lauer asks.

The unflappable Tillerson describes this modest expenditure as "very, very robust." He adds, with apparent conviction, "We would do more if we could gain access to more areas." In other words, give us ANWR, then we can talk price at the pump. In fact, no unbiased expert claims that exploiting the fields in the Alaskan wilderness would cause more than a bump in world supply or prices in the U.S. By the way, Tillerson observes, the industry needs more refineries too.

Lauer, charmingly outpointed at every turn, finally blurts, "Mr. Tillerson, you're always nice with your time."

"My pleasure, Matt," the oil king rumbles, not a hair out of place on his salt-and-pepper corporate coif.

And it was, no doubt, a pleasure for him to slip out of Rockefeller Center, built with Standard Oil dollars accrued in an earlier era of rapacious pricing, without addressing the oil-company claims that are most easily disproved by that old-fashioned journalistic method called reporting. The plain truth is that the record profits cited by Lauer—$10.9 billion in the first quarter of this year for Exxon Mobil—reflect an industrywide decision to flow revenue directly to the bottom line rather than to capital expenditure. To buy Tillerson's story, you'd have to believe that profit is an accident, when it is, irrefutably, the result of a company strategy tailored to this unique moment of opportunity.

Oil executives generally believe in an updated version of the peak-oil theory, introduced in 1956 by geologist M. King Hubbert. It posits that because of oil-field depletion and the expense of production, American-oil-industry output will reach a maximum level and then start to decline. An updated version of Hubbert's bell curve—which factors in the number of wells being drilled and refinery capacity—sets the year that the peak will be reached at 2020. If you're getting a prime price for a product that will be harder to acquire in a few years and less valuable due to competition from other fuels, the smart play, obviously, is to divert every penny into profit while the Black Gold Casino is still open. To confuse the press and public, you set up several straw men to take the blame for the supply shortage that you’ve seen coming for a half-century: refinery capacity, environmental legislation, and the imaginary supply potential in undrilled portions of the continental shelf and ANWR.

But let's look at the Cheneyesque fantasy that drilling in ANWR is a major national-security priority that would make us less dependent on foreign oil. The fact is, the Trans-Alaska pipeline that is supposed to bring us that new ANWR oil probably couldn't handle it right now because lack of maintenance has left it in bad shape. (Business Journalism 101: You can reinvest revenue in infrastructure or pull the money out as profit.) Plus, there's not enough Alaskan oil to affect price. It would be gone in a few months if we could pump it at maximum capacity. From a national-security standpoint, the smart thing would be to leave it in the ground for use in case of some future civilization-threatening cataclysm.

Oil-friendly members of Congress like to blame environmental regulation for the lack of refinery capacity. But the oil companies themselves choked supply by closing more than half of their 300 U.S. refineries in the past 25 years. (Business Journalism 201: You can reinvest in manufacturing capacity or ride the demand curve to higher profits.) Studies by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a respected, oil-friendly consulting firm, indicate that even if all environmental regulations were removed from refinery construction, few would probably be built right away because of a 75 percent rise in construction costs since 2000, largely driven by the increased fuel cost of transporting building materials.

I don't mean to imply that when it comes to cutting through industry and congressional malarkey, Barlett and Steele are the only game in town. The Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Texas Monthly, and other publications have all done credible oil series during the past few years. The problem is that headlines on today's pump prices trump the revelations of yesterday's in-depth reporting. The digital-news era is good at letting us know what happens now. But it's lousy at reminding us of what's happening again. Take the richly symbolic case of ANWR. Oil executives know that they haven't explored 80 percent of their existing leases in the continental U.S., according to Barlett. But they also know that if they can crack the wildlife refuge, Congress will lack the political will to keep them away from the other government land and the ocean floor they covet. In that sense, ANWR fits a historical leitmotif. For more than a century, oil companies have been gaming the federal oil-leasing system to receive bargain prices on the raw materials under public ownership.

Oil companies have always depended on the transfer of unpumped oil from public to private ownership. In the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, oilmen bribed officials at the Interior Department to gain ownership of an oil field owned by the U.S. Navy. With ANWR and the offshore leases, everything will look aboveboard if Congress and consumers can be whipped into a demand-driven frenzy. Oil companies will blame the Arabs and environmentalists for a supply shortage they've maintained as a matter of policy since the days when the Texas Railroad Commission set quotas on how much oil could be pumped out of the ground.

Decade after decade, the oil companies claim that they would pump more if only they were allowed to. Barlett calls it playing the short-supply card. "Every freaking reporter out there falls for it," he says. "And if I'm the P.R. guy for an oil company, I’m going to play that sucker for all it’s worth."

Supply and demand? Sure, but as John Lee, a business journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times for many years, reminds me, supply and demand in oil are not just "two pie charts—where it comes from, where it goes, measured maybe five years ago." There are more complex reasons for pain at the pump. "American gasoline prices have always reflected the latest spot price, namely what you have to pay to buy bulk gasoline on the open market. This is last-in pricing, rather than pricing based on inventory costs."

Now, let's say you're an oil company selling bulk gasoline, and suppose your inventory contains some gasoline made from $140-a-barrel oil and some that was purchased for $75 a barrel. That leaves a lot of room for price manipulation. But please, whatever you do, don't think for a minute that's what Tillerson and Exxon Mobil are up to. Just like you and me, they are powerless slaves in the fields of supply and demand. Now tote that barge, lift that barrel.

Nintendo's Cammie Dunaway: I'm Not Faking It

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 11:16am EDT by Chris Kohler

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The gamemaker's new executive vice president swears she's excited about the casual games in the pipeline for Wii and DS.

Court Tosses FCC 'Wardrobe Malfunction' Fine

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 10:55am EDT by Associated Press

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A federal appeals court throws out the $550,000 fine levied by the FCC against CBS for that 2004 "Wardrobe Malfunction" by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. The court says in effect that the FCC's decision was entirely arbitrary, and found that it deviated from a 30-year policy concerning the definition of indecency.

Yahoo Gives Carl Icahn +2 Invite: Your Table Is Ready

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 8:49am EDT by John C Abell

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Carl Icahn and two hand-picked candidates are invited to join the Yahoo board, and the corporate raider withdraws his slate of candidates to take it over at the Aug. 1 shareholders meeting. Love isn't exactly all around, but isn't this a step in the "right" direction (whatever that is)?

Yahoo Appoints Icahn to Board; Control Crisis Averted

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 7:39am EDT by Associated Press

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Last week Yahoo was complaining that Carl Icahn had no clue about their business, today he is the latest member of their board -- such is life in the fast lane of high-stakes proxy wars. In a bid to avert an even uglier fight for control the two sides agreed to seat Icahn and two of his hand-picked candidates; eight existing members will seek re-election.

Hackers Unlock iPhone 2.0, Now You Can, Too

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 6:13am EDT by Charlie Sorrel

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The iPhone Dev Team has released its Pwnage 2.0 software, which lets anyone unlock an iPhone or iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.0 operating system. See how it works, in Gadget Lab.

July 21, 1925: Evolution Teacher Found Guilty

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1925: John Scopes, an unassuming high school biology teacher and part-time football coach, is found guilty of teaching evolution in schools, in violation of Tennessee law.

Scopes agreed, after some persuading by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, to serve as the guinea pig in an attempt to challenge the law on constitutional grounds.

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow led Scopes’ defense team in what the press quickly dubbed the Monkey Trial. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president and a paradoxical blend of progressive conservatism, represented both the state and the fundamentalists who opposed Darwin’s theories.

The trial took eight days in the sweltering Tennessee summer. National newspapers covered it in detail, including dramatic confrontations between Darrow and Bryan both in and out of the courtroom.

Whether Scopes actually taught evolution to his biology class remains unclear. Although he told the court he had done it and would do it again, he later admitted to a newspaper reporter that while he used a textbook that included a chapter on evolution, he skipped the chapter.

Darrow expected a guilty verdict and stood ready to appeal the decision to a higher court. The jury did not disappoint him. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 (about $1,200 in today's money). The Tennessee Supreme Court later upheld the constitutionality of the statute but overturned Scopes’ conviction on a technicality.

Bryan, meanwhile, died only five days after the conclusion of the Monkey Trial.

The Butler Act, as the anti-evolution law was known, remained on the books in Tennessee until its repeal by the state legislature in 1967.

Source: University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law

Love: The One-Man Multiplayer World

Posted: July 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Jim Rossignol

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Although Love’s environment was created by an army of one — Swedish coder Eskil Steenberg, armed with an algorithm called procedural generation — about 100 players will be able to explore this virtual world together, establish towns, and fight monsters.

Steenberg has a rare gift for both the art and the science of creating modern videogames. The most obvious strengths of his design are the astounding, impressionistic visuals. The world is dusky and smoky, or bright and watery, all within the same mysterious abstract scheme.

By creating landscapes mathematically, Steenberg avoids spending the vast man-hours that are normally sunken into creating immersive game worlds. This means he can get on with tweaking the gameplay.

Steenberg's experience in creating tools software has allowed him to create his own general toolset, which he's using for the creation of Love. One of his main concerns? Making accessible, easy-to-use tools that will work for geeks and artists alike.

Steenberg's 3-D modeling tools allow for playful manipulation of multi-dimensional objects. The clickable interface makes modeling, deforming, and reworking 3-D aesthetics remarkably easy, which ties into Steenberg's personal philosophy: The more fun the tools are to use, the more productive the user will be.

Players will be expected to work together to build and defend small towns, as well as explore the larger world around them. The feel of the play is expected to be as freeform as the look of the game. The story will seamlessly unfold through the choices players make as they interact with the monsters and in-game items.

Love players will be able to carve out caves, build stairways up mountainsides, and generally interact with their world on a “physical” level.

How Love will develop once the game begins will all depend on the players’ actions. Steenberg is eager to see what they come up with.

Steenberg's auto-generated game world looks more like a Monet painting than one of the heavily hand-crafted worlds gamers are accustomed to.

Steenberg's work is entirely open source and will be available to be downloaded from his site (quelsolaar.com).

Comic-Based Movies Keep on Comin'

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Hugh Hart

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With Dark Knight, Iron Man and other comics flicks destroying the competition at the box office, the summer of the superheroes is spawning sequels.

Best Star Wars Remakes

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lore Sjoberg

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We can safely stop calling Star Wars a movie and recognize it for what it really is: a virulent media infection.

It's a great movie to be sure, but there are many superior movies, and none of them have inspired, say, thousands of people to dress up as faceless, nameless secondary characters. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a great movie, but you don't see 200 sanitarium orderlies marching in the Rose Parade.

Nowhere can you witness Star Wars' contagious qualities more clearly than in the realm of fan-made videos that, to one extent or another, retell the story of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the movie formerly known simply as Star Wars. Here are some of the best.

Left:

Star Wars Sweded

Modern computing gives the average middle-class American a level of graphical processing power that would have made a '70s-era special effects engineer pant continuously. But that's no fun! Why render lifelike X-wing starfighters when you can build one out of cardboard and run around the park?

Lightsabers portrayed by: Red and blue wrapping paper

Star Wars Remake

Balanced precariously on the line between impressive and ridiculous, this silent, late-'70s remake stars a micro-encephalic Darth Vader and a 10-year-old Han Solo. While not as self-consciously goofy as "Star Wars Sweded," cardboard is still vitally important to the oeuvre. They managed to recruit an impressive Mark Hamill "Luke-alike," though. Yes, I just made that pun right in front of you.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Transparent plastic dealies

Hardware Wars

Take the do-it-yourself sensibility of the previous two Star Wars tributes, add some hand puppets and jokes, and what do you get? The best Star Wars parody of all time, and yes I've seen Spaceballs. Toasters! Vacuum cleaners! Awesome. (Warning: brief fuzzy nudity at the end of the second part.)

Lightsabers portrayed by: Flashlights

Lego Star Wars

The Lego Star Wars games are a couple of the best co-op games out there, especially to play with younger children or friends who aren't really into videogames. As an added bonus, they're chock-full of amusing cut scenes portrayed with the sort of mute humor that only plastic bricks can provide. Even with the actual game parts removed, the resulting video is still fun to watch.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Legos, duh.

Star Wars in Three Minutes With Action Figures

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought of trying to play out the entire Star Wars movie using the little action figures with the uncomfortable-looking embedded lightsabers as a kid. So I find it satisfying that at least one person has made an all-figure reinterpretation of the movie. Plus, it's brief.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Glowing, computer-generated lines. That's actually kind of disappointing.

Star Wars Shortened

The George Lucas Appreciation Society -- I'm not sure if the fact that there are only three people in the society is supposed to be a backhanded slam -- covers all three original movies in just less than 10 minutes. Twice. Using one stage, some impressive vocal imitations, poetry, puppetry and interesting headgear.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Mime

Star Wars in Thirty Seconds With Bunnies

You can't really argue with the fact that bunnies make things good. For instance, any given piece of chocolate can be improved by being melted down and formed into a bunny shape. So it's natural that Star Wars with bunnies (or, in some cases, aliens with bunny-ear implants) is head-devouringly amusing. Although Princess Leia's tied-up little bunny ears look painful.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Flash animation

Star Wars Movie Mistakes

What better way to appreciate a classic film than by going through it bit by bit, nit-picking all the small errors? If you're the sort of person who always notices when a movie character's cigarette keeps changing length from shot to shot, you'll enjoy this. You'll also enjoy it if you like seeing widescreen movies squashed into YouTube dimensions.

Lightsabers portrayed by: A remote control and some digital effects

Store Wars

If you prefer your comedy served up with a side dish of heavy-handed social moralizing, this is the film for you. All the characters are portrayed by veggies and other edibles fighting over the concept of organic food. However, seeing R2-D2 portrayed as a block of tofu is worth being lectured by an Italian dessert.

Lightsabers portrayed by: Little lightsabers. Come on people! Ever heard of carrot sticks?

Thumb Wars

This little tribute combines comedy and nostalgia with intensely disturbing creepiness. All the characters, most of the spaceships and many of the props are thumbs, but what makes this particularly notable are the little faces the filmmakers digitally superimpose on the thumbs. The faces combine the eeriness of upside-down chin puppets with staring wide-eyed marionettes, creating creatures that would claw at the dream centers of my brain if they weren't, you know, thumbs.

Lightsabers portrayed by: You know, thumbs.

Star Wars According to a 3 Year Old

This isn't the shortest summary of Star Wars in this list, but it may capture the essence of the film better than anything else. I think the sublime apex of the Star Wars experience lies in her description of what the nerdiest among us call The Battle of Yavin: "The big thing that blowed up stuff, we blowed it up together." Yes, little girl, yes we did.

Lightsabers portrayed by: The phrase "little light-up sword."

Unlike John McCain, Many Seniors Rely on the Net

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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Blogs are buzzing over Sen. John McCain's recent admission that he's internet illiterate. According to data compiled by the Pew Internet Project, McCain is unusual for a college-educated white man over the age of 65.

Hundreds of Baby Penguins Found Dead on Brazilian Shores

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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Hundreds of baby penguins from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches.

Battlestar, South Park, Webisodes Scoop Emmy Nods

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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A staggering windfall of nominations for geek television for the 2008 Emmy awards is helping bring mainstream legitimacy to the sci-fi genre. Space opera Battlestar Galactica racked up a total of six Emmy nominations.

Game Controllers Driving Drones, Nukes

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by David Hambling

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War is getting more like a videogame, as hardware and software from the gaming industry is increasingly being adopted for military use. The latest sign of this appeared at the Farnborough air show this week, where arms-maker Raytheon showed off its new Universal Control System for robotic aicraft.

Napster: Worth More Dead Than Alive?

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Thill

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What's the future of Napster now that it's the laughingstock of downloading? According to Bloomberg, Napster is a possible takeover target for hedge funds in search of failing businesses whose cash on hand exceeds the value of their shares. One possible buyer is JDS Capital Management.

Sturdy Econo Speakers Rock Your Knoll, Blast Your Neighbors

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Christopher Jones

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These backyard boomers will satisfy your hard rock cravings. Sophisticated outdoor speakers combine earth-shaking bass with a clean, well-balanced sound.

Dark Knight Sets New Weekend Record With $155.34M

Posted: July 20th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Associated Press

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The Dark Knight takes in a record $155.34 million in its first weekend. This tops Hollywood's previous best of $151.1 million, set by Spider-Man 3 in May 2007.

Difference Engine: An Interview With Neil Halstead

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 6:15pm EDT by Scott Thill

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Neil Halstead leaves behind Slowdive's wall of gear and sound for a solo career featuring intimate pop. "We had a lot of pedals, a lot of love and some good grass," Halstead confesses. "When the love ran out, we sold the grass and smoked the pedals."

Flying Without ID? Know What's in Your Files

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Ryan Singel

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Under new rules from the Transportation Security Administration, travelers who try to fly without ID will need to provide personal information from public records to convince federal employees to let them past the x-ray machines and onto the plane.

Kids Predict Flying Cars Will Cure Cancer in Mural Project

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Brian X. Chen

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The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network launches the World Mural Project, which encourages children around the world to digitally illustrate their predictions of "what computers will empower us to do" in 40 years.

The Ghost in Your Machine: IPv6 Gateway to Hackers

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Kim Zetter

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It may be years before the new internet protocol IPv6 takes over from the current IPv4, but a security researcher is warning that many systems -- corporate and personal -- are already open to attack through channels that have been enabled on their machines to support IPv6 traffic.

Horror/Sci-Fi Great O'Bannon Brings the Pain

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by John Scott Lewinski

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Sci-fi and horror master Dan O'Bannon is returning to the horror genre with a new script, The Pain Clinic (co-written with Donald Grail). John Scott Lewinski shares some insights about O'Bannon's work gleaned from an exclusive interview.

Big Shareholder Supports Yahoo Board Over Icahn

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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One of Yahoo's largest shareholders is supporting the re-election of the Internet company's incumbent board, delivering a significant blow to an attempted coup being led by activist investor Carl Icahn.

Dark Knight Sets New Box Office Record

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Associated Press

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Stoked by fan fever over the manic performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, "The Dark Knight" sets a one-day box office record with $66.4 million on opening day.

The Car of Tomorrow Has an Extension Cord

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Forget hydrogen. The car of the future has an extension cord and a great big laptop battery.

The next evolution of the automobile will be plug-in hybrids that get their juice from a household electrical outlet. They'll start rolling into showrooms within in 18 months. Experts say plug-in hybrids could account for about 20 percent of vehicle sales within a decade -- and half of all sales by 2050.

"It all boils down to the three ways electricity is better than gasoline," says Felix Kramer of Cal Cars, a plug-in advocacy group. "It's cleaner, it's cheaper and it's domestic."

Advocates say plug-in hybrids are the best chance to address global warming and wean the nation from oil. Consumers remain unsure about electric vehicles. Ethanol's a shaky proposition because of the food-for-fuel debate. And it'll be decades before hydrogen is a viable option. That, advocates say, leaves plug-ins as the best option. They'll go up to 40 miles on a charge; but they'll also have a gas engine to keep you going beyond that at 80 to 100 mpg or more.

People have been converting conventional hybrids to plug-ins for years, but the auto industry has been slow to catch on. Now the big automakers and start-ups like Fisker Automotive are scrambling to build them despite questions about their cost and long-term reliability. Those are just two of the issues that automakers, battery manufacturers and utility companies will discuss next week at the international Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose.

"The discussion is no longer one of 'if,' but of 'when' and 'how,'" says Chelesa Sexton, executive director of the advocacy group Plug-In America. "This has moved beyond the grass-roots level into the policy and business arenas."

It all starts in 2010. General Motors promises to have the Chevrolet Volt rolling into showrooms by then. Toyota says it will roll out a small fleet of plug-in Prius hybrids to see how they do. Volkswagen has similar plans for its plug-in Golf. And Fisker hopes to have a few dozen pricey Karma sedans in driveways within 18 months. Ford and others are moving more slowly, aiming for 2012 and beyond.

Automakers know plug-in hybrids are their best shot at meeting tightening federal fuel-economy regulations, and California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate requires them to put nearly 60,000 of them on the road in six years. They're also responding to a seismic change in the market as record-high gas prices have consumers, fed-up with paying through the nose for gasoline, joining environmentalists to demand fuel-efficient cars.

"For the longest time, this was seen as a crunchy environmental California movement," Sexton says. "It never was, but now there's a broad coalition of people sitting at the same table to demand these cars. There's a collective frustration with the status quo."

Critics note that most of our electricity is generated by coal or natural gas and say plug-ins don't reduce carbon dioxide, they just move it around.

Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute says they're wrong. His research shows widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 450 million metric tons annually by 2050. That's the equivalent of removing 82.5 million gasoline vehicles from the road. "There's significant CO2 reduction with plug-in hybrids over conventional vehicles and hybrids, and that reduction increases over time," he says.

Duvall's research and a study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory suggest that the grid could easily supply as many as 168 million plug-in vehicles.

"We can handle as many plug-in hybrids as the auto industry wants to provide and people want to drive," he says. "The supply of electricity is almost limitless."

All those plug-ins would cut petroleum consumption from 20.6 million barrels a day to 16 or 17 million. But the lithium-ion batteries that will store that electricity remain the cars' Achilles heel.

The long-term reliability of lithium-ion batteries remains unknown, and by some estimates they cost as much as $15,000. That'll make selling plug-ins at a price most people can afford a tough proposition until the cars are made in volume -- and the cost of batteries comes down. GM says it doesn't expect to turn a profit on the $40,000 Volt anytime soon.

Sales undoubtedly will start off slowly. Analysts don't expect GM to sell more than 30,000 Volts annually for the first couple of years. Other automakers will see similar sales figures until the cost of batteries comes down.

"We're looking at small volumes initially," says Mike Omotoso of J.D. Power & Associates. "But we could see critical mass by 2015."

Advocates say politicians and policymakers can help by creating tax breaks to make it easier for consumers to buy the cars and automakers to build them. Such incentives -- coupled with perks like carpool-lane access -- helped hybrids gain a foothold, they say, and could do the same for plug-ins.

The Department of Energy has handed out more than $60 million since 2006 to advance hybrid and battery technology and hopes to disburse another $62.3 million by the end of next year.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have hailed plug-in hybrids in general -- and the Volt in particular -- in recent weeks and promised to spur development of such cars if elected. And Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has called for Washington to go further by launching a "New Manhattan Project" that would include getting plug-in hybrids on the road in large numbers.

"We have the plug," he says. "The cars are coming. All we need is the cord."

Palatial Tent Proves Nearly Pitch Perfect

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Eric Smillie

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This ripstop outdoor shelter gets top marks for comfort. Checklist: quick setup, six gear pockets, dual vents, plenty of sleeping room.

Gallery: From Tiny Machines to Security, the Future of Nano-Fabrication

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dave Bullock

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: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

LOS ANGELES -- As nanomachines move beyond just prototypes, a potential industry of microscopic mass production awaits its own Henry Ford to make it a reality.

In anticipation of this demand, researchers at a nanotech lab at UCLA are mass-producing billions of customizable microparticles using a machine normally found in the microchip fabrication industry. Lead by Dr. Thomas Mason, the team has created microscale letters to illustrate the possibilities of this new process.

"The idea is to make a powerful statement about a new class of materials that exist. Solid particles that have human-designed shapes. We can design millions of different kinds of shapes, highly uniform, highly precise," explains Mason.

Mason's ultimate goal is to quickly create large quantities of parts for complicated nanomachines. These parts would include nanogears, nanoengines and other small-scale parts that are currently created one at a time in an assembly line fashion. Click through the gallery to go behind the scenes of microfabrication.

Left: Billions of microscale letters on a silicon wafer reflect light like a diffraction grating.

: Photo: Thomas G. Mason and Carlos J. Hernandez

Zoomed in, one can see the microscale alphabet soup and the potential for information and codes embedded in various substances. Though each letter is a few microns across, this new mass production technique will be able to produce objects on the scale of nanometers with upgraded equipment.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

This is the unglamorous beginning of nanoletter production.

The white box at left is the spin coater, which applies the nanoletter polymer on a silicon wafer (see first slide), like the kind used to make microprocessors. First, a drop of the polymer is placed on a silicon wafer. Then the wafer spins and the centrifugal force spreads the liquid evenly over the silicon.

The polymer is photosensitive and hardens under exposure to ultraviolet light. In the next steps, the UV light takes on the shape of the desired micro-object and exposes that exact design in the polymer. The unexposed polymer washes away, leaving the hardened shapes, in this case letters, behind -- almost like cutting cookies from a sheet of dough.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

This lamp enclosure emits strong UV light. The light bounces through a series of mirrors into the machine that exposes the nanoletters, called a stepper (shown in next slide).

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

UCLA nanotech professor Dr. Thomas G. Mason explains the basic operation of the stepper -- so named because it steps, or repeats, an image multiple times over the silicon wafer. The machine prints a microscopic version of the image at each step by shining UV light onto the photosensitive polymer, like the way positive film is exposed.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Inside the stepper sits a 200-pound lens encased in stainless steel (center) which very accurately imprints a shrunken image onto the polymer. This lens is ground to an extremely high level of precision to avoid introducing errors into the image being exposed.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

A robotic assembly inside the stepper grabs the silicon wafers and exposes it one section at a time. It exposes an entire wafer in roughly one minute, creating billions of micro-objects.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The stepper rests on a pneumatic dampening system (black cylinders with blue tops) to virtually eliminate vibrations. Just as you don’t want your camera shaking when you take a photo, you don’t want your stepper shaking when you make billions of nanoletters.

A positioning platform (middle, illuminated in pink) precisely moves the wafers between exposures.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

This scrapped stepper system sits outside the clean room. It's now used for spare parts, just like that old car on cinder blocks in your front yard.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Mason and Kun Zhao don gloves before entering the clean room where the Ultratech XLS stepper resides. Dust particles can ruin the nano and microscale patterns the stepper images on the silicon substrate.

Permalink for 'Wired__Top_Stories/2008/07/18/McCain_Announces_His_Running_Mate___8212__The_Chevy_Volt'

McCain Announces His Running Mate — The Chevy Volt

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:25pm EDT by Keith Barry

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The Chevrolet Volt has become the most important political accessory since the flag lapel pin, and Sen. John McCain is all but promising to put one in your driveway.

Pigeons: The Next Step in Local Eating (No, Really)

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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With global demand for meat threatening to topple the food system, it's time we put Pollan on steroids and remembered: pigeons are fowl.

'The Dark Knight' -- 'Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?'

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 5:15pm EDT by Daniel Dumas

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Batman is just a gadget geek at heart. A very, very wealthy gadget geek. But until recently, he's employed some tech that's, well, pretty unbelievable. Ice skates popping out of boots? Come on!

Not in The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan's version of Batman is an almost-believable early adopter, with every high tech gizmo at his disposal firmly grounded in real-world technology. To get the lowdown on the five coolest pieces of gear from the film, we sat down with the film's Oscar-nominated production designer, Nathan Crowley, to find out where the inspiration for each Bat-gadget came from.

Bat-Pod

After the Batmobile (aka the Tumbler) is destroyed, Batman is forced to continue his pursuit of the Joker on this machine-gunning, shoulder-navigated, gimbals-sporting two-wheeler. This is a vehicle made for multitasking, allowing Batman to fire its guns, steer hands-free and maneuver hard without much risk of a wipeout. Says Crowley, "If you go over on its side, it keeps you upright."

Real-World Counterpart: Dodge Tomahawk
The Bat-Pod most closely resembles the V-10, 500-horsepower Dodge Tomahawk concept vehicle. But designwise, Crowley says, the 'Pod draws most of its inspiration from the general design of the Tumbler itself. Just compare the front tires on the two vehicles: They're the same. "We didn't want it to be anything more than raw function, and that's why it looks like it does," says Crowley.

Cowl

Past Batmen have had a hard time turning their heads (paging Michael Keaton), because the cowl was a solid piece of rubber attached to the suit itself. Not this time. Able to move independently of the suit, Batman's new mask now allows him to crane his head up and down and side-to-side with ease.

Real-World Counterpart: Motorcycle Helmet
When racing a Hayabusa at 180 mph, visibility and flexibility are everything. That's why the independently pivoting design of a motorcycle helmet and racing suit served as the chief point of reference for Batman's cowl design.

The Batsuit

The new Batsuit is designed with mobility in mind. Batman can now turn his head up and down and side-to-side.

"We really wanted to change up the suit," Crowley admits. Adding more protection in addition to more flexibility (and less nipple) than previous versions, the armor worn by Batman comprises hundreds of interlocking plates that move independently of each other. The result? Batman is more mobile, can do more stunts, and can kick a lot more ass.

Real-World Counterpart: Samurai Armor
The interlocking plates of the Batsuit -- while made of modern materials like Nomex, titanium and Kevlar -- share their design with ancient armor once worn by Samurai warriors in feudal Japan. These lightweight, lacquered get-ups were strong, contained hundreds of interlocking pieces, and allowed their wearers a full range of motion.

Sticky-Bomb Gun

When Batman has to apprehend a villain in Hong Kong, he utilizes a weapon that fires sticky, orange bomb pellets that adhere to glass. The gun is collapsible, breaking down to small pieces that Batman can store on his belt. "It's more like a piece of origami than anything else," says Crowley.

Real-World Counterpart: Collapsible Rifle
The sticky-bomb gun owes its DNA to any collapsible weapon. Just have a look at the M-40 rifle (.pdf) favored by Marine Corps snipers: The gun can be broken down into multiple parts for easy transportation. The explosive, sticky ammo, though? That's 100 percent pure Crowley.

3-D Sonar System

Since the Joker does not have a lair or a base, Batman must track the constantly mobile madman through the streets of Gotham. To do this he uses a cowl-mounted sonar device that triangulates the baddies' cellphone signals and then renders the sound of their communication into a 3-D visual map.

Real-World Counterparts: Lidar and Sonar
Usually utilizing lasers, a Lidar system measures reflected light to find the range, dimensions and other properties of far-off objects. Sonar, of course, is the technology of bouncing sound waves off faraway objects to get a realistic picture of where those objects are. Combine the two, and you've got the 3-D system Batman uses to hunt his quarry.

Gamemakers Hear the Music Loud and Clear at E3

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 5:06pm EDT by Chris Kohler

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With Rock Band and Guitar Hero revitalizing rock 'n' roll's moneymaking mojo, suddenly everybody's grooving on music games.

Universal Says DMCA Takedown Notices Can Ignore 'Fair Use'

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by David Kravets

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Universal Music told a federal judge that it need not consider "fair use" when it sends takedown notices to video-sharing sites like YouTube. The notices require automatic removal of the video. Fair use allows certain limited uses of content without a copyright holder's permission.

Film and Geo-Tag Your Next Car Accident

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 4:26pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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The CarCam Voyager Pro not only records what happened, but where and when it happened. Just the thing for convincing your insurance agent you didn't cause that six-car pileup.

Opera Brings iPhone Experience to Windows Mobile

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 3:36pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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Software-maker Opera has released a new beta version of its popular mobile browser for Windows Mobile devices. Opera Mobile 9.5 is a vast improvement over Microsoft's standard Windows Mobile browser, and it even shows off some iPhone-like behaviors on touchscreen devices.

iPsychedelia: Use Your iPhone to Take Bendy, Distorted Photos

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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The iPhone's camera has a bug, but it's a bug you can easily exploit to create stunningly warped photos. All it takes is a well-timed twist of the wrist. Learn more at Wired's How-To Wiki.

The Bat-Pod Officially Has a Complex

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 2:45pm EDT by Stuart Schwartzapfel

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It isn't the Bat-Pod, but the Icare concept from Enzyme Design is almost as cool -- even if it's got a stupid name.

There Are No Winners (or Losers) in the Amazon-Netflix War

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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By the looks of it, Amazon declared war with Netflix with the launch of a competitive, on-demand streaming-movie service. The thing is, there isn't much of a market to fight over yet.

Five Things to Do With Your Old iPhone

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 11:35am EDT by Charlie Sorrel

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So you've made the plunge to the iPhone 3G -- what about your old, first-generation iPhone or iPod Touch? Here are five ways to turn it from yesterday's news into something useful, from a multitouch controller for your Mac or Windows PC to a mini media server for your kitchen.

Facebook: Too Creepy, Childish for the Workplace

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 10:30am EDT by Simon Dumenco, Portfolio.com

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Bill Gates doesn't get a lot of credit these days for being a visionary. But when it comes to his relationship with Facebook, he may still be a step ahead of the rest of us. The Sun, a British tabloid, reported this year that Gates had quit his half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, partly because he was getting more than 8,000 "friend" requests daily but also because he was finding "weird fan sites about him." (View a slideshow of several "weird fan sites.") A Microsoft representative confirms that the boss has gone cold turkey but wouldn't disclose whether Gates knew of a Facebook group called "Would you have sex with Bill Gates for half of his money?"

Actually, it's a wonder that Gates was on Facebook in the first place (Microsoft's $240 million investment in it notwithstanding). Bill Gates obviously doesn't need to schmooze on Facebook. And neither do you, despite the pressure you've doubtless felt to join it (because, y’know, everyone is on Facebook). Perhaps you're like Ben Rosen, who co-founded venture-capital fund Sevin Rosen, which has bankrolled such companies as Electronic Arts and Compaq (which he once led as C.E.O.). Rosen is hardly averse to sharing personal information online; he says his blog, BenRosen.com, has become a small social network of sorts. But he has yet to use his Facebook account. "I'm trying to figure out the utility for me," he says.

Or perhaps, like Gates, you just find Facebook a little … creepy. Businesspeople often claim to use Facebook for vague "market research" purposes or to satisfy idle curiosity. But the social norms of social networking are still in flux, making privacy a real issue, says internet-marketing writer David Weinberger. "Younger people violate older people's idea of proper behavior when it comes to privacy," he says.

"It's kind of eerie how much information is available about you on a social network," says Michael Fertik, C.E.O. of online-privacy service ReputationDefender, "and how many conclusions, tentative or otherwise, can be made so handily, fairly or unfairly, based on that information." Fertik estimates that all 55 of his employees use Facebook, and although he doesn't, he's unsettled by the all-consuming, constant-update M.O. it encourages. "I’ve seen a lot of quiet, passive-aggressive resentments and rumors that come from people just knowing that much about your business," he says. "If you're updating people, like, 'I’m at a barbecue at my colleague's house,' someone you work with might ask, 'Why am I not at that barbecue?'"

The ease with which Facebook can be used to broadcast your whereabouts adds a particularly disturbing dimension for executives who would surround themselves with security in real life but are lulled into complacency by Facebook's tidy veneer. Last year, the British military sent a directive to its army units to avoid revealing their service connections online—"Be particularly careful if you are on Facebook, MySpace, or Friends Reunited"—fearing that, yes, Al Qaeda could use them to track prey. Your business competitors might not be terrorists per se, but Facebook can be useful for anyone trying to poach your M.V.P.’s.

Even social-networking evangelists are legitimately nervous about Facebook, given its fiasco last fall with Beacon, an advertising engine that automatically announced users' activities on other sites—revealing their purchases, for example—without the users' necessarily realizing that their every click was being chronicled. Facebook apologized, but that sort of unwitting dissemination of potentially sensitive information has strengthened the market for Connect Beam, a consultancy that sets up secure social networks for the corporate intranets of Fortune 500 companies. "Companies like Honeywell," says Puneet Gupta, Connect Beam’s C.E.O., "could not take a chance to put their information on someone else's cloud"—meaning on the servers of a social-networking site the company doesn’t control.

But Facebook's ick factor in the executive suite might have as much to do with its shiny, happy world of "friendship" as with security. "There's almost an inverse relationship between seriousness and how much you participate in social networking," says ReputationDefender's Fertik, laughing. That basically nails it: Facebook is simply unserious—particularly given how it prompts hard-driving business executives to regress into adolescent vernacular. "Poking" people, requesting "friends," writing on someone’s "wall": It’s cute when you're in high school or college. But in a corporate environment, it sounds disingenuous and downright silly.

Ultimately, Facebook candy-coats the true nature of business relationships. And it will rot your teeth.

Avril Lavigne Expects $2 Million From YouTube Despite Gamed Play Count

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 9:30am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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According to her manager, YouTube owes teenybopper pop star Avril Lavigne around $2 million for playing her videos. There's just one problem: Her YouTube play count appears to have been gamed by an automated web page that generated publicity for the video.

'Mythbusters' Want You -- to Test the Archimedes Death Ray

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 7:30am EDT by Kathy Ceceri

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The Mythbusters are doing a do-over of their attempt to vet of the world's oldest tales — did the Greek scientist Archimedes set fire to a Roman fleet of ships using only mirrors and sunlight? Their first attempt was ... inconclusive. Now they are drawing on the crowd (300 hearty souls, to be exact) for a new try in September. One of them could be you.

The iPhone 3G: Wired's Official Review

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 12:40am EDT by Mathew Honan

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The results are in. After week upon week of relentless hype, we rate the iPhone 3G and find that the phone is not without its flaws. Sure, it still has the best touchscreen interface we've ever seen, but a few glaring blemishes prevent the phone from achieving perfection.

July 18, 1876: Royal Commissioners Wrinkle Their Noses

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1876: The British government appoints a Royal Commission on Noxious Vapours to look into the growing problem of industrial air pollution. Its report two years later would bring better regulation but warn of impeding economic growth.

England had been trying to do something about air quality for centuries. King Edward I in 1306 prohibited burning sea coal in London, because of all the smoke it caused. By act of Parliament, anyone who sold and burned the outlawed coal could be punished by torture or hanging. Richard II and Henry V issued further regulations and restrictions in the following centuries.

The Industrial Revolution worsened things, with factories putting out a toxic soup of new pollutants. The 1853 Smoke Nuisance Abatement (Metropolis) Act provided for an inspector to work with the metropolitan police to reduce "nuisance from the smoke of furnaces in the Metropolis and from steam vessels above London Bridge." A similar act four years later applied to Scotland.

A new process for manufacturing alkali (sodium carbonate, used in manufacturing glass and other products) was releasing huge volumes of the byproduct hydrochloric acid into the air. That led to a deluge of lawsuits and a loud public outcry. This resulted in passage of the Alkali Act in 1863. It required a minimum 95 percent capture of the acid and set dilution standards for what was emitted: 0.2 grains of HCl per cubic foot.

Chief inspector Robert Smith and four assistant inspectors worked with manufacturers to show them how to transform what would be pollution into marketable byproducts. The Alkali Act was extended and amended in 1874 to require manufacturers to use the "best practicable means" of controlling the acid vapors.

Still, things were so bad by 1876 that the Conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli appointed the Royal Commission on Noxious Vapours. The commissioners visited industrial areas around England, inspecting "alkali works, cement works, chemical manure works, coke ovens, copper works of all descriptions, glass, lead and metal works, potteries and salt works."

The commission asked 14,000 questions of 196 witnesses, including "manufacturers, landowners, farmers, clergymen, occupiers of houses, lands and gardens, land-agents, scientific witnesses, medical persons, local officers" and the Alkali Act inspectors.

Witnesses complained of damage to trees, crops, vegetation and human health. They said the noxious industrial gases were carried far and wide by the wind and caused coughing, difficulty breathing and nausea. The alkali manufacturers gave the commission a statement rebutting the allegations.

The commission made 10 recommendations in August 1878. New legislation increased the frequency of inspections and made the inspectors' reports public records. The commission concluded (.pdf) that "it is not a question of a few manufactories, but of industries all over the country, which in relation to man are causing pollution of the air in degrees sufficient to make them common-law nuisances." So, the Alkali Acts were extended to include the production of sulfuric acid, chemical fertilizer works and coke ovens.

But witnesses who argued that noxious vapors were inevitable if the nation was to prosper had their effect. The commission noted that regulation was only practical if it did not involve "ruinous expenditure." And courts remained reluctant to shut down polluters if the result would destroy the industry of a town.

London suffered a killer smog in December 1952 that killed as many as 12,000 people. Britain passed its Clean Air Act in 1956. The United States passed a weak Clean Air Act in 1963 and strengthened it in 1970.

Source: Various

Gallery: VC Money Drives Solar-Tech Innovation Around the World

Posted: July 18th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

Tags: [edit]

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO -- Despite uneven support from the U.S. government, solar power is experiencing a global explosion. Concerns over climate change and rising energy prices have driven billions of dollars into developing the efficiency and variety of technologies that capture power from the sun.

And we're not just talking about new photovoltaic panels. The entire production chain is being re-engineered, from materials to manufacturing process to solar tracking.

Check out the hottest advances in sun-energy harvesting on display at this week's Intersolar North America conference.

Left:

China's Red-Hot Solar Water Tech

These strange-looking pipes are actually part of a solar hot-water heater produced by the Chinese company WesTech. Stick these on your roof, and they collect heat energy from the sun, heating the water inside, and insulating like a thermos to keep warm.

While U.S. residential setups usually employ other, more-expensive technologies, Chinese systems often just use evacuated tubes like these. Lower price points have helped drive the Chinese domestic market: An estimated one in 10 Chinese households owns one. And now, Chinese companies with big manufacturing capacity are trying to bring their low-cost tech to the United States.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Solar-panel placement is like sunbathing: You want maximum exposure to the sun's most direct rays. That’s the idea behind this rotating rack for solar panels. As the sun moves across the sky, the superstructure and circular track rotate to keep the panels in the most direct sunlight.

SunCarrier (pictured) and RW Energy, which make similar systems, claim the rigs increase the efficiency of solar panels by 30 percent.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Photovoltaics have long been the province of scientists and green idealists. That's one reason why less than 1 percent of the world's energy is derived from solar power. To make a dent in the world energy market, solar players are going to have to scale up -- and fast.

One major way, said Ian Chen of Multicontact, which makes solar-panel connectors, is the way industry has always done it: automation. It's not just "doing the same process you've been doing in a garage but at a larger scale," he said. To cut costs and increase production, solar companies are having to design processes for automation from the ground up.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

This machine from Adept uses machine vision and a vacuum to pluck solar cells off a conveyor belt. This speedy, spidery robot -- the Quattro -- can be had for under six figures, according to Jay Sacharia, the company's head of corporate marketing.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

You could be staring at the future of solar power. SolFocus' concentrating solar panels use mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a small amount of highly efficient photovoltaic material. First, the primary mirror -- the curved backstop -- concentrates the light onto a smaller mirror that you can see the back of in the image. That second mirror bounces the light down the unit's optical rod to the waiting PV cell.

The setup allows SolFocus to capture light over a large area while keeping costs down. How much? Stephanie Southerland, head of corporate development, said the company's goal is "cost parity with fossil fuels by 2010." Talk like that has tickled investors' imaginations: They've already poured $95 million into the company through two rounds of financing.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Lumeta's new solar panels are the first "solar stickers." Developed by a roofing-and-construction company for easy installation, contractors simply peel-and-stick the panels onto flat roofs. While the panels are lighter than traditional racked systems, they lose the optimal angle to the sun by sticking flat on the roof. Lumeta COO Stephen Torres told Wired.com in May that this downside costs his company's panels about 5 percent of their power production.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

"Integrated solar" has been a catch phrase for a long time. It refers to solar panels that can be manufactured directly into buildings and products. At the conference, Global Solar was showing off a thin-film, building-integrated product it calls PowerFlex Solar Strings. These striplike solar cells offer 70 to 90 watts per meter of material, according to the company.

Global Solar also uses its technology in solar chargers like the one pictured, which generates 6.5 watts and goes for about $100. Charles Gambill, the company's corporate product director, said it could charge a cellphone in two to three hours. And most important, it looks just like Wall-E's fold-up charger.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Considering that Intersolar was held in conjunction with Semicon West, it's no surprise that semiconductor companies were crawling around the showroom floor. What was surprising was the buzz surrounding Applied Materials' entrance into the photovoltaic market.

One show participant, Nathan Singsen of SolarFrameWorks, even went so far as saying, "Applied Materials will probably take over the whole solar industry." Chris Beitel, Applied Materials' thin-film manager, would probably agree. He argues that Applied's experience scaling and optimizing semiconductor production will be directly applicable to similar problems in PV. "We can go to a new level of scale."

As proof, Applied showed off this extra-large thin-film panel, which Signet Solar manufactured with Applied technology. Solar companies appear to buy the rap: Beitel said they've already signed $3 billion worth of contracts.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

As solar companies receive more venture capital, they can afford to invest in new materials that could drive innovation. That's where Agilent's Nano Indenter comes into play. It measures the mechanical properties, like stiffness and elasticity, of ultrathin materials. The indenter presses on the material at nanoscale and measures the shape and nature of the impression that it makes.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Silicon wafers have to be sliced and diced in order to become the chips that go into your PC and phone. A similar process has to occur to make solar cells. Chipmakers used to use diamond blades, but the German company Jenoptik has a new way: thermal laser-beam separation. The company's representatives said using lasers instead of diamonds provides a cleaner cut, which reduces the amount of wasted material.

Sex Drive: Coming Soon: Your Own Personal Sex Machines (NSFW)

Posted: July 17th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Regina Lynn

Tags: [edit]

(Editor's note: Links in this story that are not safe for work are marked NSFW.)

UNIVERSAL CITY, California -- It's the ultimate revenge of the nerds as product developers use their big brains to create sex machines that kick pleasure into overdrive. In fact, the very nature of the sex "toy" is changing as a new generation of sex-positive engineers infiltrates the industry.

From the smooth, silent glide of the Monkey Rocker Tango to Le Chair's ability to put two people into a dozen compromising positions, the new products and prototypes unveiled at this week's Adult Novelty Expo straddle the line between toy (a passive, frivolous object) and machine (a substantial apparatus that inspires commitment and even emotional attachment).

Here are some of the most interesting.

Power Bullet
Bullet

The gigantic Power Bullet gives you the stealth option, because it doubles as a muscle massager and hides its complex machinery inside a velvety, matte-black cylinder. It wouldn't be out of place in a Pilates studio or a physical therapist's office for people to roll up and down their quadriceps, but straddling it on a pillow is going to be a lot more effective at relaxing muscles and relieving stress. Its motors provide a deep throbbing touch and its single button offers a simplicity much appreciated by tired tech workers with wrist pain. I'm just sayin'.

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Imatah

As you can see in this photo, Imatah spokesmodel Danka takes the machine's debut very seriously. That's a custom-made dildo mounted on a plate connected to a mechanism that can pump straight in and out or move in an oval pattern. The Imatah weighs about 5 pounds and comes with a fabric sleeve that hides its legs and prevents the machine from falling off the bed when you use it.

"The machine becomes part of you!" gushes inventor James Hatami, who is working with Fleshlight (NSFW) to add functionality for male users. The Imatah requires only a 12-volt power supply "so you don't electrocute yourself," Hatami says.

- - -

Monkey Rocker

The original Monkey Rocker (NSFW) is an amazing cybersex accessory, a silent machine that responds to your body motions without any complicated control panels or need for batteries. It's handmade from powder-coated, 100 percent recovered and recycled wood fiber -- PermaCore MDF, if you want to get technical -- and supports up to 400 pounds.

- - -

Monkey Rocker Tango

The new Monkey Rocker Tango brings the cybersex experience offline -- when you meet your online lover in person, you can both ride it at the same time (as long as your combined weight is less than 450 pounds). The Tango also works for folks who skip the whole cybersex thing and just have a regular ol' fashioned, in-person relationship. (Weird!)

- - -

Le Chair

In a surprise departure from its inexpensive signature collections from porn stars and sex therapists, an upcoming robotic sex chair from California Exotic Novelties (NSFW) is based on love furniture already available in Japan.

This prototype, called Le Chair, comes with motors in the seat and back supports that can pound, vibrate or stroke. One seat adjusts up and down to place lovers in optimal positions for various intimate activities, and both sides provide arm and leg support as well. A representative confided that the company plans to work with programs to help get Le Chairs to war veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at low or no cost.

At right, we have Le Chair with people in it, to give you an idea of its scale. For this picture, we have raised one seat and reclined its back support. If the woman were to lie back, her pelvis would be positioned conveniently for her partner's mouth. The target audience for Le Chair is "adventurous people" and "people with physical limitations," says California Exotic Novelties, although of course it's fun for everyone.

- - -

Menage-A-Tool

I'm convinced that the man who goes by "Preston Penobscott" developed the Menage-A-Tool (NSFW) simply as an excuse to spend more time in his machine shop, machining things. The tool is an adjustable, lightweight rod with two attachments for various dildos, so you can penetrate two people at a time and still have one hand free for someone else.

"The next one's gonna be hydraulic," he enthuses, already sketching out how he wants to make the new version even more adjustable so the dildos can go closer together for double penetration or further apart if whatever you're doing requires more space between your partners.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

- - -

Regina Lynn is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier. She blogs at reginalynn.com.

GOP Threatens CafePress over Shirts, Stickers and Logos

Posted: July 17th, 2008, 7:42pm EDT by David Kravets

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The GOP is threatening to sue online vendor host CafePress for allowing vendors to sell trademarked GOP regalia such as T-shirts, stickers and images of the trademarked Republican elephant. Much of the paraphernalia is positive toward the Republican Party.

The iPhone 3G Visualized Through Cloud Tag 'Wordles'

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Jose Fermoso

Tags: [edit]

Everyone, it seems, has the iPhone 3G on the brain, but what are people really thinking, deep within the oblongata? To find out we use Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle program to create some interesting Word Tag Clouds.

Brilliant 'UFO' Controlled Remotely by SMS

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Hugh Hart

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New York artist Peter Coffin teams with London interactive architect Dominic Harris to launch a "UFO" of their own design that can be controlled remotely by SMS messaging.

As Hellboy II Arrives, del Toro Has Hobbit Headache

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by John Scott Lewinski

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With Hellboy II: The Golden Army now in theaters, attention will turn to how its director, Guillermo del Toro, along with Peter Jackson, will handle the adaptation of his next project, Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit.

Lost Jimi Hendrix Rock Conjured From Beyond

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Scott Thill

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The greatest rock guitarist that ever lived passed away in 1970, but his music lives on. A 1969-1970 Jimi Hendrix team-up with Stephen Stills might soon see the light of day.

The Environmentalism of Wall-E

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Brandon Keim

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The decade's most powerful environmental film doesn't star Al Gore or Greenpeace activists, but a trash-compacting, Hello Dolly-loving robot with a cockroach for a best friend.

Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Kevin Kelly

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A single worldwide computer -- think of it. We are even now collectively assembling this megacomputer from our billions of net-connected devices. Its software is our collective online behavior. Forget Web 3.0: The One Machine is the next stage of tech evolution.

Software Problems Irk Buyers of iPhone 3G

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

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The launch of Apple's iPhone 3G turns into an information-technology meltdown on Friday, as customers are unable to get their phones working.

Gallery: Einstein's Legacy: Inside the Quest for Gravity Waves

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Dave Bullock

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: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

PASADENA, California -- Like radio and gamma waves before them, the detection of gravity waves will likely expose a new layer of the universe and change the study of physics as we know it.

As Einstein predicted in 1912, gravity waves are emitted by massive bodies in space that don't necessarily leave visual evidence of their existence, such as black holes. Directly observing gravity waves, in a sense, would make these invisible phenomena visible.

On the forefront of the discovery of gravity waves is one of the largest projects ever funded by the National Science Foundation, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The LIGO facilities house extremely long lasers that are sensitive to disturbances down to fractions of the width of a proton -- just sensitive enough to register the relatively weak gravity waves.

While the main LIGO data is generated from 2.5-mile-long laser beams in Washington and Louisiana, upgrades to increase the lasers' accuracy and sensitivity are developed on a smaller prototype at Caltech. Tour the LIGO labs at Caltech in this gallery.

Left: A pristinely ground and polished mirror hangs like a pendulum over a testing bench. Although transparent to visible light, this mirror reflects nearly 100 percent of the infrared light of the lasers inside the interferometer.

An interferometer is the device in which these lasers are contained. It uses the light from infrared laser beams to very accurately measure distance. The longer the laser beams, the more sensitive the interferometer can be. When a significantly strong gravity wave passes through an interferometer, it should change the length of the instrument only slightly due to the ripple in space and time that it causes.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The view from on top of the Caltech interferometer shows the "L" shape of the device, with each arm containing a laser beam that extends for 40 meters. These stainless steel chambers are emptied to roughly one-billionth of an atmosphere, creating an impressive and necessary vacuum for the beams.

This is a similar but smaller prototype of the interferometers in Washington and Louisiana which have arms measuring 2.5 miles each. Having these two similar facilities allows scientists to confirm that a detected anomaly is actually a gravity wave and not cars passing by the labs, waves crashing on distant shores or even the minute inconsistencies in the lasers themselves.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Inside the vacuum chamber, the beam-splitter sits at the intersection of the two arms of the interferometer (the joint of the "L"). This table is composed of an array of mirrors, prisms, filters and other optical devices. From here, the infrared laser beam is sent down each arm of the system.

Each laser beam is calibrated to the same, extremely precise resonance. If one beam has met with any interference it can be measured here against the other beam.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The problem with detecting gravity waves is that the changes they exert over the Earth are extremely small. The powerful waves generated by distant events are relatively weak by the time they reach Earth. For this reason, the instruments used to detect them must be extremely precise and elaborate.

At left, the end of one arm of the interferometer contains one of four main mirrors (center right) along with an assortment of smaller mirrors. All these mirrors are used to calibrate and align the laser. The main mirror reflects the laser beam back to the joint of the "L" for measurement.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The laser (before it splits) originates in the white tube on the right. This tube contains the elaborate and delicate instruments used to correct for as much signal noise as possible.

The amount of noise-correcting technology at work in the lab is mind-boggling, with layers and layers of isolation. The beam comes out of a 20-cm quartz tube suspended on a pendulum, which itself is on springs, on a seismic isolation stack, in a vacuum chamber. The chamber is temperature-controlled and insulated with fiberglass.

The photons bouncing back and forth inside the suspended cylinder stay resonant at the exact length at which the interferometer operates. Any shift in frequency or deviation in length of the laser beam causes the cavity to fall out of resonance and is detected by the system.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

An optics bench at the end of one arm of the interferometer is used to monitor the intensity, position and angle of the laser beam.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

This optic bench is used to sense light from various ports at the intersection of the interferometer arms, which is where the gravity waves may some day be detected. To do this, it's covered with LIGO-built detectors.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The three boxes in the center of this photo are quadrant photodiodes (QPDs), which are used to detect the precise position of the laser beam.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The LIGO prototype interferometer requires an extremely high vacuum of roughly one-billionth of an atmosphere, or about the level of vacuum found in low-Earth orbit. To attain this extreme level of emptiness, a vibration-free, magnetically levitated turbo-pump is employed. Pictured are a vacuum manifold and remote-controlled valves that help power the vacuum.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

These expansion bellows allow the length of the interferometer arm to be adjusted to compensate for the temperature expansion of the stainless steel. Without these bellows the high-vacuum chamber would be pulled and dragged across the floor every time the ambient temperature changed.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

From left: Alan Weinstein, Steve Vass and Rob Ward next to the LIGO interferometer.

Weinstein is a professor of physics and applies his understanding of high-energy physics to studying the nature of dark energy and detecting gravitational waves. Vass has managed the LIGO prototype lab for over 20 years.

Ward is a graduate student and one of the co-authors of a recent Nature article entitled “A quantum-enhanced prototype gravitational-wave detector.” The paper focuses on reducing the quantum-noise in the LIGO interferometer.

: Image: NASA

Though the direct detection of gravity has yet to be accomplished, last month information generated by LIGO helped diagnose the cause of the Crab Nebula's rapid energy loss.

Asia's Underground Markets Eagerly Await New iPhone

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

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As Apple rolls out the iPhone 3G, dealers and buyers are anticipating the popular device in Asia's thriving underground marketplace in as little as a few days.

Inside the Motion Picture Industry's Cuddliest Anti-Piracy Operation: DVD-Sniffing Canine Unit

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by David Kravets

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John Malcolm, the director of anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America was thinking "outside the box" when he envisioned a PR-friendly way to combat movie piracy. How about training dogs to sniff DVDs? Those dogs have recovered millions of counterfeited DVDs and have led to the arrest of dozens of alleged pirates.

How to Install and Customize a WordPress Blog

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The simple open-source publishing engine WordPress is flexible, powerful and remarkably easy to set up and customize. Webmonkey shows you how to get a basic WordPress blog up and running, then offers advice for tricking it out to your heart's content.

First Look: iPhone 3G Fires on (Almost) Every Cylinder

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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Wired.com's Gadget Lab takes a first look at the iPhone 3G. The verdict? This is a solid, if not groundbreaking upgrade, making the iPhone seriously competitive with other smartphones. But you may not need to buy one to get its most powerful benefits.

Video: Hands-On With the iPhone 3G

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 6:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab

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The iPhone 3G is a worthy upgrade to Apple's groundbreaking smartphone. But is it worth $200 and a two-year contract? In the debut episode of the Gadget Lab videoblog, Wired editors Dylan Tweney and Joe Brown debate the atest features -- and the value -- of the summer's hottest handset.

22 iPhone Apps for Science Geeks

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 3:44pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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We highlight 22 iPhone apps for the fancy phone-toting science lover.

Review: 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' Pops in 3-D

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Lewis Wallace

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Brendan Fraser stars as a scientist on a classic subterranean adventure in this family-friendly romp.

Ameritrade Hack Settlement: $2 Per Victim, $1.8 Million for Lawyers

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 2:55pm EDT by David Kravets

Tags: [edit]

A proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit representing as many as 6.3 million TD Ameritrade customers whose data was stolen by hackers last year equals about $2 in compensation for each victim and $1.8 million in fees to the lawyers representing them. The settlement, which requires the Nebraska brokerage house to increase data security, does not publicly state whether lax security controls allowed last year's data breach.

Gadget Lab Video Productions Presents: The iPhone 3G Release

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 2:43pm EDT by Jose Fermoso

Tags: [edit]

The iPhone 3G was released today. So Wired.com unleashed its crack video team to document the event at the downtown San Francisco Apple Store. Take a ride with Wired.com Senior Editor Dylan Tweney as he interviews the good, the bad and the slightly wacky patrons in line to buy the iPhone 3G on opening day.

Make an Outdoor Theater

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Terrance Russell

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Take advantage of the summer weather and project your movie outside. Making a theater outdoors is easy if you have the right equipment and a few white bedsheets. Invite a few friends and you'll have your own DIY backyard theater in no time.

Will Sony, Microsoft Try to 'Out-Wii' Nintendo at E3?

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 1:52pm EDT by Chris Kohler

Tags: [edit]

Nintendo's motion-sensing controls have changed the way people play games. Makers of competing consoles would be stupid if they weren't planning to jump on the Wiimote bandwagon.

Comcast Faces FCC Sanctions for Blocking Web Traffic

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Sam Gustin, Portfolio.com

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Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, violated federal guidelines when it blocked and degraded Web traffic, the head of the Federal Communications Commission will announce Friday.

The sanctions would be the first time the commission has come down on an internet provider for denying consumers the right to open, unfettered internet access. It may set a precedent on how the federal government oversees management of internet traffic flows in the future.

Last fall, Comcast reluctantly acknowledged that it had temporarily blocked certain peer-to-peer traffic (file sharing). The cable giant called its actions "reasonable network management."

But consumer rights groups and internet experts accused the company of violating the F.C.C.'s 2005 "Internet Policy Statement," which established four principles intended to guarantee consumers unfettered access to all legal Web content, applications, and services.

The chairman of the F.C.C., Kevin Martin, now agrees.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the internet," he told the Associated Press on Thursday night. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

The consumer advocacy group Free Press trumpeted Martin's decision as a victory for consumers.

"This is going to be a bellwether," said Ben Scott, federal policy chief for Free Press.

The decision, contained in an order to be circulated by Martin, brings the agency's nine-month investigation of Comcast close to completion. Martin, a Republican, is expected to gain support from the two Democratic F.C.C. commissioners for his position, which would ensure the order's passage when the commission meets on August 1.

Comcast has long maintained that the government's standard gives it the right to manage its digital traffic "reasonably" for the sake of "network management."

For almost a year, consumer rights groups have battled Comcast, after an Associated Press investigation discovered that Comcast was blocking legal peer-to-peer traffic.

Comcast faced further public outrage after it admitted to paying people off the street to sit at a public hearing at Harvard, while members of the public were prevented from attending. At the time, Comcast claimed it merely paid people to save spots at the hearing for Comcast employees, but the event's organizer disputed that claim.

Same Time, Next Year: Queues Everywhere for the IPhone 3G

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 9:36am EDT

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It doesn't have the revolutionary cachet that the first gen model had just a bit more than a year ago but eager buyers of the iPhone 3G -- many current and former owners of last year's model -- are lining up to get one all over the world. Why? Everyone has a theory, it seems, including this one from a grad student in Atlanta: "Chicks dig the iPhone."

IPhone Debuts in Japan To Cheers and Smoke

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 7:59am EDT by Associated Press

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Apple iPhone goes on sale in Japan for the first time to eager buyers who had waited in lines around a city block. The celebration Softbank's store in Tokyo had swirls of smoke and a digital clock ticking away over the entrance, part of a rollout in 22 Asia/Pacific nations, including Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

News Corp 'Unlikely' to be in a Yahoo Deal: Murdoch

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 7:54am EDT by Associated Press

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Rupert Murdoch says it's "very unlikely" News Corp would get involved in any sort of Microsoft-led deal for Yahoo. He doesn't even think there will be a deal: "There are bad personal feelings ... In six months, Microsoft will walk away."

Unbreakable Fighting Umbrella Splits Watermelons, Defends Presidents

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 7:36am EDT by Charlie Sorrel

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The entourage of the Philippine president employs an unusual defense weapon -- umbrellas. Not ordinary umbrellas, but unbreakable fighting umbrellas.

Racing to Canada in a Hydrogen Car

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 7:00am EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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The name of the race is the North American Solar Challenge, but the University of Missouri wants to prove hydrogen is the fuel of the future.

MobileMe Falters on Eve of IPhone 3G Launch

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 2:35am EDT by Associated Press

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MobileMe -- formerly known as .Mac -- gets off to a rocky start on the eve of the iPhone 3G launch, preventing subscribers from logging on to their accounts.

Photo Contest: First Day With iPhone 3G

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

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The excitement over the new iPhone this Friday is global, but we want you to act locally and show us your photos of this highly coveted gadget. We want to see outrageous shots from the line, disappointed faces after the phones sell out and most of all, the star of the show itself. We'll award the best photo a subscription to Wired magazine and display the top 10 photos in a gallery on Wired.com.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your iPhone 3G photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. Some of the submissions will later appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage.

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).

Vote on iPhone 3G photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your iPhone 3G photo.

Submit your iPhone 3G photo.

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

July 11, 1979: Look Out Below! Here Comes Skylab!

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1979: The Skylab space station reenters Earth's atmosphere after six years in orbit. It is perhaps the most highly anticipated return of any spacecraft ever, save Apollo 13.

America's first space station, launched in May 1973 as a science and engineering laboratory, was not a success. Originally intended to remain in orbit as a shelter for crews from the new space shuttle program, Skylab was badly damaged during liftoff and plagued thereafter by a power deficit that played a significant role in its premature demise.

NASA's plan was for Skylab to remain in relatively low orbit until a space shuttle equipped with a reboost module could reach it in 1979 and boost it into a higher orbit. Subsequent shuttle missions would focus on overhauling Skylab, making repairs and replacing various components.

It was intended that Skylab remain in orbit throughout the 1980s. It fell well short of that, but there were some achievements, especially in the areas of solar research and the adaptation of astronauts to longer periods in space.

Three crews traveled to Skylab aboard Apollo spacecraft -- spending a total of 171 days aboard and returning by splashdown -- and some repairs were made. The space station was placed in a parking orbit after the third Apollo crew departed, to await the eventual arrival of the first space shuttle. But delays in getting the shuttle program off the ground, coupled with Skylab's deteriorating orbit, compelled NASA to consign its space station to a fiery death.

With Skylab out of control, NASA ground controllers were unable to conduct the routine reentry procedures.

As they prepared to bring Skylab down, the world watched in an atmosphere that can only be described as circus-like. Skylab news coverage was amped up and sensationalized, merchandise was hawked everywhere, and bookmakers took bets on when and where the 77.5-ton space station would hit the Earth's atmosphere.

The San Francisco Examiner, in one of its loopier promotional campaigns (disclosure: I was on the paper's editorial staff at the time), even offered $10,000 (about $30,000 in today's money) to the first person who could deliver a chunk of Skylab debris to the paper's newsroom.

That person turned out to be Stan Thornton, a 17-year-old from Esperance, Australia.

Ground control had struggled to coax Skylab into a position that would cause the spacecraft to break up over the Indian Ocean. Most of it did, but parts of it came down over Western Australia. It also hit the atmosphere at a shallower angle than intended, resulting in bigger pieces, a number of which managed to fall to Earth intact.

A small piece landed on Thornton's roof in Esperance and the kid was off to San Francisco to claim his 10 grand.

Source: NASA, Space.com

A Day in the Line: Queuing Up for the iPhone 3G Launch

Posted: July 11th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Danny Dumas

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: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO, California — It's finally here. After months of waiting, salivating and prognosticating, the iPhone 3G finally became available worldwide today.

Lining up in front of the San Francisco Apple store during the wee hours on Friday morning, Wired.com correspondents talked to a litany of fascinating iPhone fans, geeky tech-heads and even some cynics. Here's a smattering of some interesting faces we encountered from that crowd, plus a few glimpses of other queues from around the world.

Left: The line outside the downtown San Francisco Apple store stretched around the block by 7 a.m. While Apple claimed its mandatory in-store activation would only take 15 minutes, technical problems caused the morning's early setups to drag on for 45 minutes or more.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Many patrons who got in line early for the iPhone 3G came prepared with hammocks, sleeping bags and tents. Here, an unidentified member of the queue grabs a few winks before the phone went on sale at 8 a.m.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

JT, a web designer from San Francisco and his dog, Chaya, literally cheese for the camera, simultaneously showing off their love for Apple communication devices and partially hydrogenated cheddar-flavored products spewed from pressurized cans.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Lane, an Alameda, California, resident and iPhone line holder exercises some capitalist muscle, offering his spot near the front of the queue for $100. Lane had no takers at the time this photo was taken at 7:30 a.m.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

In the space of an hour, the line outside the AT&T Wireless store in downtown San Francisco nearly tripled before doors opened at 8 am.

: Photo: Ed Ou/Associated Press

A customer, right, purchases a new Apple iPhone 3G in New York's Apple Store. IPhone buyers had waited in lines around a city block and happily counted down the final 30 seconds before launch.

: Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

Future iPhone owners wait in the line outside Japanese mobile carrier Softbank's flagship store in Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district late Thursday, July 10, 2008, before the first sales of Apple's iPhone in Japan Friday.

: Photo: Sang Tan/Associated Press

Customers queue inside the Apple retail store on Regent Street, London, for the phone's launch.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Angelique Guillermo, left, assistant manager of the downtown-S.F. AT&T store, explains to Mark Hogenson, right, and Ellen Davis, center, that after a long morning of waiting in line, they may not get an iPhone due to dwindling supplies. "It's probably not looking too good," Davis commented on her chances of getting a new phone today. "I really have to pee, so I'm debating what's more important at this point."

: Photo: Kin Cheung/Associated Press

Models hold the new iPhones today in Hong Kong. Dealers and buyers said it's only a matter of time -- maybe as little as a few days -- before the popular device hits the region's thriving underground marketplace.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Technology "evangelist" Robert Scoble (center, wearing pistachio-colored shirt) showed up at San Francisco’s iPhone 3G launch, documenting the event digitally, of course.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Dominic Sagolla, organizer of iPhoneDevCamp, literally takes a whiff of his new iPhone 3G. Sagolla was the first customer to emerge from the Apple store in San Francisco with the new device in hand.

Pack a Hefty Backcountry Load Without Breaking Your Back

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Eric Smillie

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Impressive capacity and clever shock-absorbing stabilization make this cavernous expedition pack so comfortable we almost forgot we were wearing it.

Global Geek Out: iPhone 3G Launches Worldwide

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney

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Geeks around the world are lining up to be among the first to buy Apple's upgraded iPhone 3G, which goes on sale everywhere at 8 am (local time) July 11. Gadget Lab has ongoing coverage of the launch -- and the phone itself.

8 Cool Things You Can Do With Your iPhone 2.0

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Michael Calore and Scott Loganbill

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With Thursday's launch of the Apple App Store, the iPhone is suddenly capable of a whole lot more. Here's our list of the eight things you can do with the iPhone's latest software upgrade -- from finding a restaurant to tuning your ukulele.

Gallery: Fire Arts Festival Opens in Blaze of Glory

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham and Emily Lang

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: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

OAKLAND, California -- Talk about a hot night. From a fire-spouting piano to flame cannons that licked the smoky sky, the attractions Wednesday night at the Fire Arts Festival kicked California's heat wave up a few degrees.

"Who doesn't like fire?" said Hick Messiah, 47, of Oakland as he took in the event.

More than 50 different artists from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond showcased infernal contraptions and sizzling performances at the fest, which was more three-ring circus than safety demonstration. The Fire Arts Festival, organized by Oakland industrial arts nonprofit The Crucible, runs through Saturday.

Left:

Modeled after a county fair attraction, this shooting gallery substitutes flamethrowers for pop guns.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

A member of the Unmata urban belly-dance group twirls balls of flame during opening night festivities at the Fire Arts Festival.

During Unmata's short routine, which was set to up-tempo techno and ethnic beats, members of the Sacramento, California, collective swiveled their hips and twirled flaming poi balls on a stage festooned with colored lights. The stage was also rigged to shoot bursts of fire synchronized with songs.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Artist Sean Orlando's Steampunk Tree House could double as a set prop in a Tim Burton film. The 25,000-pound monstrosity is powered by a 1920s steam engine that breathes life into the coppery creation, sounding a cacophony of steam whistles.

The towering structure stands tall within the patron pavilion at the Fire Arts Festival. Visitors willing to pony up the additional cash for a VIP ticket are granted the opportunity to climb hand-over-foot to the top of the 40-foot-tall sculpture for a bird's-eye view of the event. The roped-off pavilion also housed a bar, catered snacks and a swanky red-velvet lounge area.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Unmata's dancers sway and shake their bellies to electronic tunes. The crowd swelled forward as the group's performance opened the Fire Festival.

Afterward, a wide array of acts -- including a troupe of fire-swallowing vaudeville bartenders, youth dance troupes, trapeze artists and fiery Flamenco dancers -- occupied the stage until midnight. For the grand finale, San Francisco-based lo-fi funk band Gooferman created a crazed carnival atmosphere with its bouncy beats.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

A Pswarm fire sculpture presented by Department of Spontaneous Combustion bursts into flames. All the Pswarm sculptures were interactive, with the group pulling people from the crowd and letting them fire up the artwork.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Bay Area-based Omega Recoil inverts a Tesla Coil for a performance dubbed Electricity Theater. "To our knowledge, that's never been done before," said Omega Recoil member Sparky Jewell.

The Tesla coil wasn't the only aspect flipped during the campy show: Members dressed as mad scientists coerced an unwilling soul -- Human Test Subject No. 1 -- through the high-voltage maze.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

What keeps the human guinea pig from becoming Fried Human Test Subject No. 1? "It's definitely not prayer," quipped Omega Recoil's Chris Ruedy, who played the test subject, after the show. Ruedy wore a homemade Faraday cage made from steel mesh that kept the electric charge flowing around his body rather than through it. After successfully completing his tasks, he claimed his reward -- a can of beer.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Smoke and flames pour from a large 3-D skull constructed by Oakland's Department of Spontaneous Combustion. To build the piece, members of the art collective bought a wooden 3-D puzzle of a human skull, scanned each piece and enlarged it several times. After tracing and cutting the shapes from steel, they refit the pieces together.

The Department of Spontaneous Combustion also displayed a fire-breathing Venus flytrap and a 20-foot fire cannon, which member Matthew Andreoli affectionately referred to as the "Space Invaders cannon."

"If any aliens attacked me, I'd blast 'em with it!" he said.

First-time festival attendee Shana Muwwakkil took aim Wednesday and fired the cannon from behind a protective cage. "A friend made me come tonight," said Muwwakkil afterward. "But I really liked that -- it was different."

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

At Matisse Enzer's Flamethrower Shooting Gallery, people blast steel targets shaped like the Burning Man effigy known as "The Man."

Enzer got the idea for this fiery twist on a traditional county fair game after Paul Addis prematurely torched Burning Man's giant icon at 2007's desert art party. "My nickname for this project is, 'You too can burn the Man,'" said Enzer, who lives in the Bay Area.

Flamethrowers are illegal in California, so Enzer's rig got an in-depth assessment from the Oakland fire inspector -- and failed. "She took a step back when all four throwers went off," Enzer said. "And she's been working this event for years." The inspector decided that demonstrations were permissible -- but only technicians and safety personnel were allowed to participate.

: Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

San Francisco electronica outfit Gooferman closes out opening night at the Fire Arts Festival with a high-octane performance. In addition to shooting bursts of fire synchronized to songs, band members wore sparkling costumes and jester's caps, along with harlequin-inspired face paint, creating a crazed carnival atmosphere.

Gooferman's gritty beats filled the air as the band's entourage -- including latex-wrapped stilt-walkers, gymnastic floor tumblers and cheerleaders clad in spangled bodysuits -- moved to the music. Earlier acts on the main stage included fire-eating vaudeville bartenders, youth dance troupes and trapeze artists.

The Crucible's eighth annual Fire Arts Festival runs every night through Saturday. Tickets range from $5 to $55.

Hacker Sentenced to Two Years For MySpace Cyber Stalking

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 5:48pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen

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Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, aka V.I.P., is shipped off to a California state prison after being arrested for allegedly trying to extort phone sex from a teenage internet video star.

Sweet: Pandora's Streaming Radio App for iPhone

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 5:03pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Online-radio favorite Pandora has unveiled a super slick version of its interactive music service for the iPhone -- the first time Pandora has ever been available for free on a cellphone. Color us impressed.

Jesse Jackson TV Show Comment Takes On Life Of Its Own Online

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 4:52pm EDT by Sarah Lai Stirland

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Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has apologized to Barack Obama for wanting to "cut his nuts off" in front of millions of Fox News' viewers on Sunday -- but as with other controversial events the televised comments have taken on a life of their own on the internet.

Review: 'Hellboy II' Is Hell-Bent on Monstrous Visuals

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 4:28pm EDT by Lewis Wallace

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Pair the comic hero's tough-guy humor with director Guillermo del Toro's gorgeous imagery and you've got a one-two punch that heats up the screen.

Pogue, Mossberg, Baig Review IPhone 3G

Posted: July 9th, 2008, 7:01am EDT by Gadget Lab

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At T-two days the big boys from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and USA Today give their verdicts on the second coming of the iPhone. The consensus? The 3G model isn't so great a leap forward that you should ditch your original model; just wait for the 2.0 software.

Wired.com Readers' Top Superhero Costumes

Posted: July 9th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Staff

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:
When we put out the call to show us your best superhero costumes, we knew Wired.com readers would be up to the task. And we weren't disappointed: From the Thing to the obscure Scarlet Spider, it's clear that you people know and love your superheroes. And apart from a slightly odd fascination with Edward Scissorhands (who was represented in two separate entries -- and who is really only a superhero among the emo crowd), we're completely cool with that.

Left: The winning entry is "Used Electronics Man," by Ryan Peters. Peters built the suit out of old electronics parts while taking summer school in college, and wore it to class one day. Peters' creation combines the aesthetic of Robocop with the ingenuity of Peter Stark's Iron Man suit, so although it's not strictly speaking a superhero costume, it's a worthy champion for the Gadget Lab contest.
:
Justin Fields' amazing custom-built costume is an incredibly faithful tribute to Marvel's super-strong, scaly behemoth. The Thing was a close second to Used Electronics Man when the Gadget Lab polls officially closed, although subsequent, unofficial voting has since propelled him to the top of the reader's choice list.
:
Thomas Boggs' entry is an obscure Spider-Man clone known as the Scarlet Spider. Yes, folks, this is an actual superhero -- a supervillain, actually -- not just some failed attempt at a Spider-Man costume. Boggs' effort includes an impressive pair of web-shooters.
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Jessica Hurst's costume is an over-the-top tribute to a British cartoon that came to life in a quickly-forgotten 1995 movie of the same name. The only thing missing from this awesome getup? A mutant kangaroo sidekick.
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Never fear, the "comfortably armored superhero of softly padded justice" is here! Reader "JD" submitted this entry, which is made entirely of industrial-grade carpet underlayment, found in a local dumpster. Now that's recycling, folks.
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Crystal Foley sent in this photo of herself as one of the X-Statix, an attempt by Marvel at creating a more poppy, cynical brand of superhero. "I even made the stuffed Doop!" Foley writes.
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David Martindale writes, "This is me when I'm super." We give him points for chutzpah: Since his "costume" exists entirely on the Photoshop plane, it's a dubious entry for this contest. The bike is amazing, though.
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One of two submissions in the Scissorhands category, this one was sent in by Robert O'Brien. One criticism: The blades look a little dull.
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Ed Steel's costume owes more to the classic, 1960s-era TV show than the more recent Heath Ledger reinterpretation of the Joker in Dark Knight. Still, we like it: He's got the demonic grin down pat.
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Marc-Antoine L. Frenette and companion pose as Captain Jack Sparrow, a superhero among pirates.
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Clare McDermott strikes a pose as Barbarella, complete with futuristic ray gun. You go, girl!
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Wikipedia defines an aquitard as "an impermeable layer along an aquifer." It's not clear to us how that translates into bicycle helmets and spandex, but it must make sense to Sarah Crane, who submitted this photo with the note, "We are aquitards. Our super power is the ability to stop water."

July 9, 1993: Yes, They're the Romanovs, DNA Tests Confirm

Posted: July 9th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

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1993: DNA testing identifies nine bone fragments found in an unmarked grave in a Siberian forest near Ekaterinburg as those of Nicholas II -- the last czar of Russia -- and members of his family.

The identification, made by British scientists working with Russian colleagues, ended a 75-year mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the Romanovs, the last ruling family before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union.

Drs. Peter Gill and Kevin Sullivan of the British Forensic Science Service in Birmingham were able to establish with near certainty that the remains found in the Koptyaki Forest indeed belonged to Nicholas, the Czarina Alexandra, four of their five children (the remains of Prince Alexei were not recovered), the family's personal physician and three servants.

Despite some subsequent criticism of the scientific methodology employed in the nuclear- and mitochondrial-DNA testing, the 1993 findings are considered to be accurate.

Nicholas and his family were arrested by the Bolsheviks, who were then engaged in a struggle with the Mensheviks, or Whites, for control of Russia following the country's collapse during World War I.

Although the Bolsheviks originally planned to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the Russian people, the sudden approach of White troops caused the Red Guard to panic. Fearful that the czar might be rescued, the guard commander, with Lenin's approval, executed the Romanovs on July 17, 1918, in the basement of the Iptiev House, the Ekaterinburg mansion that served as their makeshift prison.

As the lab tests eventually determined, the bodies were taken to Koptyaki and buried in a mass grave. Further testing in Great Britain established the mitochondrial-DNA haplogroup and sequences for the Romanov family line.

The Soviet Union kept mum about the family's fate until finally admitting, in 1926, that they were dead. Although two Russians -- a movie producer and an ethnographer -- claimed to have discovered the grave in 1976, the burial site remained a closely guarded state secret until the USSR itself ceased to exist in 1991.

The mystery remained fixed in the popular consciousness throughout most of the 20th century, and there was no shortage of crackpots and frauds emerging from obscurity claiming to be Princess Anastasia or some other down-at-the-heels member of the czar's family.

Once the remains were examined, tested and identified, they were laid to rest in the imperial crypt in Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, exactly 80 years after the Romanovs' execution. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the czar and his family in 2000.

Complete closure came earlier this year when DNA testing on some newly unearthed bone shards identified Prince Alexei, the last missing Romanov.

Source: Various

Nanotubes Hold Promise for Next-Generation Computing

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney

Tags: [edit]

Carbon nanotubes have been around for more than a decade, but so far they haven't shown up anywhere outside of R&D labs and tennis racquets.

Now, two separate groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics.

Because they are so small and could potentially replace two of the basic components of modern microchips (conductors and semiconductors), nanotubes have continued to pique the interest of electronics researchers. And that interest continues to grow, especially as the current technology used to make chips for electronics begins to reach its physical limits.

The trouble is that, until recently, making nanotubes was a somewhat random affair: You'd mix the required ingredients, grow a batch of nanotubes, and then sort through the resulting batch to see what you got. Researchers had no effective way to grow exclusively metallic or exclusively semiconducting nanotubes, and even ordering the nanotubes in regular patterns was a challenge. That has made using nanotubes on an industrial scale impractical to the point of impossibility.

"An ant is incredibly strong for its size. But nobody uses ants to do useful work, because they all run around in different directions," says Mike Mayberry, the director of components research for Intel. (Mayberry was not involved in the research.)

And so nanotubes have grown for the past 15 years -- knotty and bent -- since the single-walled variety were discovered in 1993 by IBM researcher Donald S. Bethune and NEC researcher Sumio Ijima. As molecular oddities, carbon nanotubes have always been fascinating. Each nanotube is made of a "sheet" of interlocked carbon atoms, rolled up into a single- or multi-walled cylinder. Although each cylinder is a single, narrow molecule no more than a nanometer (nm) or two in diameter, the molecules can grow up to several centimeters in length -- or 30 million times their width. A human hair that long would stretch 1.5 miles.

Even better, these strange carbon molecules exhibit great physical strength because they're held together by atomic bonds. They've also got unusual electrical properties: Depending on which way the sheets of carbon are rolled up, nanotubes are either metallic, making them good electrical conductors, or semiconducting, making them potentially useful components for the logic components of microchips.

A paper -- presented last month at the VLSI Symposium by Nishant Patil, Albert Lin, Edward R. Myers, H.-S. Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, all of Stanford's electrical engineering department -- addresses the problem of getting the nanotubes straightened out so they could be put to work in chips.

To be useful in large-scale chip manufacturing, nanotube components will have to be integrated with existing silicon-based chips. Unfortunately, growing nanotubes on silicon wafers produce a disorderly mess. The authors tackled that problem by growing the nanotubes on crystalline quartz, where they grow in orderly rows, then transferring them to a silicon wafer.

"If you grow carbon nanotubes on silicon, you will see that the carbon nanotubes are really unruly, like a bowl of thin rice noodles," says Mitra. "If you use a quartz wafer, the nanotubes are largely aligned with each other. They still have kinks and bends and so on, but they're pretty good."

Even if the nanotubes are reasonably straight, the problem of selectively creating semiconducting and metallic carbon nanotubes remains. Another paper, published last week in Science by Stanford and Samsung chemical engineers Melburne C. LeMieux, Mark Roberts, Soumendra Barman, Yong Wan Jin, Jong Min Kim and Zhenan Bao, reports that by changing the substrate on which the nanotubes are grown, manufacturers can control what kind of nanotubes form. Using a substrate of aminosilanes, the resulting nanotubes were almost entirely semiconducting, while substrates of aromatic compounds (such as phenyls) produced metallic nanotubes.

That's a more effective way of getting the right kind of nanotube than previous techniques, which involved sorting nanotubes after they are made using electrical or magnetic fields -- and which weren't usable on a commercial scale.

Nanotubes might be coming on the scene just in time, as modern chipmaking technologies approach their physical limits. Current cutting-edge chip technology creates circuit elements that are 45nm wide, and the next-generation technology, expected in prototype form later this year, will be 32nm. (Smaller circuits are faster and also allow chipmakers to pack more components into a single chip, making processors more powerful and capable.) That's getting pretty close to the limit of current technologies for two reasons: leakage and light.

As silicon-and-copper circuits get smaller, electricity leakage and heat dissipation become proportionally greater problems than they are with larger circuits. By contrast, a nanotube circuit could potentially be as small as 1 or 2nm, and it would be extremely efficient, even over comparatively long distances.

Also, the photolithography techniques used to etch microchip circuits are running into a physical barrier: The components are smaller than the wavelengths of the light used to etch them. Going smaller will require a completely different technology.

"Lithography is running out of steam," notes Subhasish Mitra, a co-author of one of the nanotube papers.

While industry researchers welcomed the new papers, they cautioned that it will be quite awhile before nanotubes are used inside microchips.

"These techniques and others are all steps in the right direction. They're good progress along the way," says Mayberry.

In the meantime, however, nanotubes might find applications on a larger scale than the inside of a chip. For instance, Mayberry notes that Intel has done research into using nanotube-based wiring as the interconnecting wires between different sections of microchips, or even as part of a chip package's cooling system.

Alt Text: Documentaries Decoded for Half-Dressed Movie Fans

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lore Sjöberg

Tags: [edit]

Forty years ago, if you wanted to see a full-length movie with no interruptions you needed to spend the evening in the company of those with a similar desire to sit in the dark and do nothing.

Twenty years ago, you could bring the movie home, but you needed to get out of the house long enough to have a public argument with your significant other at the video store. Ten years ago, Netflix started to send the movies to you, but you still needed to get to your mailbox, which for most people involves mandatory pants.
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Being generally anti-pants, I recently picked up the Netflix Player, a device that allows you to stream movies directly into your home. Being a recluse has never been easier!

The device works quite nicely. It's easy to set up, easy to use and the image quality is arguably better than a garage-sale VHS tape. The main limitation is in the movie selection. Not everything is available for instant download, and what is available is often somewhat ... perverse. For instance, you can watch Young Guns II, but not Young Guns. That's something like Round Table coming out with an all-crust pizza.

There is one area where Netflix is chock-full of options, though, and that's in the realm of the documentary. As it turns out, pretty much anything that can be documented has been, and it's all ready to be poured into your lap like so much hot soup. You're going to need some help sorting through this mountain of movies.

Luckily, most documentaries come in one of three varieties.
Educational
First off, there's the sort of documentary you can get high school extra credit for watching. These are about old things, or scientific things. These are easy to spot, because the title tells you what the movie's about and why you should care.

Possible titles:

Turning Point: The Battle of Stalingrad

Seismology: When the Earth Kills

Wordsworth: You Probably Know a Couple Lines From Some of His Poems

Irritational
The second sort of documentary involves a director who wants you to throw off the shackles of convention and/or oppression and get really steamed about some variety of injustice. For some reason, these titles are always weird half-puns. I'm not sure why lackadaisical wordplay goes hand-in-hand with social activism, but that's how it works.

Possible titles:

Standing on the Shoulders of Victims: The Glando-Meditech Scandal

Children of the Scorn: The Glade Valley School District Free Lunch Voucher Distribution Controversy

John B. Scanvander: Rebel Without an Original Subtitle

Cultivational
The third type of documentary is about some semi-obscure band, artist or quirky person with a cult following. These are marketed to people who are already fans of the subject, so the moviemakers don't need to explain what the documentary is about. In fact, the more obscure the title, the better -- that makes the fans feel smart for "getting it."

Possible titles:

Shocking Blue: The Bananarama Story

David Em: Rendered

Meryn

Bonus: Quick-Pick Picture Mode
When in doubt, you should go with something with a dinosaur, a penguin or a fighter plane on the cover when choosing a documentary. They're all pretty good, and it's a proven fact that penguin, fighter plane and dinosaur documentaries are being made faster than you can actually watch them, so you'll never run out.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to start development on a documentary about a dinosaur-penguin-fighter pilot.

How to Run Linux Applications in Windows

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Discover the perfect app for the job only to learn that it's optimized for Ubuntu? Don't worry, there are several options for running that Linux application on your Microsoft desktop. Follow this guide to unlock a world of free software options within Windows XP and Vista.

Tesla Finally Hires Someone Who Knows What He's Doing

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 6:19pm EDT by Autopia

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Tesla Motors turns to Detroit and hires one of the sharpest engineers around to lead the development of its forthcoming all-electric sedan.

Use Mapstraction and Avoid Embedded-Map Hassles

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 5:20pm EDT by Webmonkey

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Dealing with Google or Microsoft map APIs can be a pain. A JavaScript library called Mapstraction helps take the pain out of geocoding and allows you to tinker with maps in ways the other APIs won't. Our guide helps you get started embedding maps with Mapstraction in four easy steps.

Vivaty Scenes Taps Facebook, AIM for 'Immersive Internet'

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 3:02pm EDT by Game|Life

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A new service lets users build tiny virtual worlds that they can decorate with video and images imported from YouTube, Facebook and other websites.

FISA Activists Use New Tools, Tactics to Pressure Lawmakers

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 2:57pm EDT by Threat Level

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Liberal and libertarian bloggers have hired the political media consultants behind Ron Paul's online fundraising "moneybomb," set to go off on Aug. 8, the day Richard Nixon resigned.

New Gmail Features Protect Your Inbox From Prying Eyes

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

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New enhancements to Google's online mail application give users more control over their privacy. Gmail now keeps a log so you can monitor your account, and it lets you sign off from a remote computer.

Southwest Airlines' Seven Secrets for Success

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 1:20pm EDT by Joe Brancatelli, Portfolio.com

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What's the airline-industry jargon for unconventional wisdom? Southwest Airlines.

By some estimates, the country's major carriers have consumed perhaps $100 billion in capital during the past decade, but Southwest Airlines continues to be profitable. It's been in the black for 33 consecutive years and, last week, for the 127th consecutive quarter, it paid a modest dividend. Its balance sheet, with about $3 billion in cash on hand and $600 million in available credit, is the envy of an otherwise fuel-price-ravaged industry.

Its competitors among the network carriers—American, United, Delta, Continental, Northwest and US Airways—are shrinking passenger capacity by more than 10 percent and grounding hundreds of aircraft starting in the fall. Southwest will add a handful of daily flights. It will take delivery of another dozen aircraft next year and still plans to grow by 2 to 3 percent. And Southwest now carries more passengers annually (101 million last year) than any other U.S. carrier, a nifty trick for an airline that didn't fly outside Texas at the dawn of deregulation in 1978.

Even the fickle financial markets, which have long discounted Southwest's relentless growth and steady profits, have finally taken note. As oil prices doubled in the past year, share prices of the six network carriers have slid, with the drop-offs ranging from 76 to 94 percent. Southwest's decline has been more modest, within a point of the Dow's 21 percent 52-week drop. As a result, Southwest's market capitalization yesterday (about $9.7 billion) is now more than the combined $5.7 billion market cap of its Big Six competitors.

What does Southwest know that no one else in airlines does? It keeps things simple and consistent, which drives costs down, maximizes productive assets, and helps manage customer expectations.

One Plane Fits All

Unlike the network carriers and their commuter surrogates, which operate all manner of regional jets, turboprops, and narrow-body and wide-body aircraft, Southwest flies just one plane type, the Boeing 737 series. That saves Southwest millions in maintenance costs—spare-parts inventories, mechanic training and other nuts-and-bolts airline issues. It also gives the airline unique flexibility to move its 527 aircraft throughout the route network without costly disruptions and reconfigurations.

Point-to-Point Flying

Network carriers rely on a hub-and-spoke system, which laboriously collects passengers from "spoke" cities, flies them to a central "hub" airport, and then redistributes them to other spokes. Not Southwest. Most of its flying is nonstop between two points. That minimizes the time that planes sit on the ground at crowded, delay-prone hubs and allows the average Southwest aircraft to be in the air for more than an hour longer each day than a similarly sized jet flown by a network carrier. Southwest's avoid-the-hubs strategy also pays dividends in on-time operations. According to FlightStats, Southwest's 78 percent on-time performance in June is eight percentage points higher than the industry average and higher than that of any of its major competitors.

Simple In-Flight Service

Business travelers haven't always loved Southwest's über-simple service, but it's looking better and better as competitors cut back. There is just one class of service, a decent coach cabin that is slightly more spacious than those of Southwest's competitors. There are no assigned seats. There have never been meals, just beverages and snacks. Keeping it basic allows Southwest to unload a flight, clean and restock the plane, and board another flight full of passengers in as little as 20 minutes compared with as much as 90 minutes on a network airline. Airline efficiency experts say that the savings allow each Southwest jet to fly an extra flight per day. Extra flights mean extra revenue.

No Frills, No Fees

As other carriers have rushed to remove perks and pile on fees and restrictions, Southwest has kept its customer proposition streamlined and transparent. The airline only sells one-way fares and only in a few price "buckets." That not only keeps costs down—complex fare structures are expensive to manage—it convinces fliers that they are getting value for money. Prices are all-inclusive too. Southwest doesn't have fuel surcharges, doesn't charge for standby travel or ticket changes, and continues to permit travelers to check two pieces of luggage free. And since every seat on every flight is virtually identical, travelers know exactly what they will get when they make a purchase.

Strong Management

The public face of Southwest Airlines for a generation, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, always-leave-'em laughing Herb Kelleher, finally stepped away from the carrier earlier this year. Kelleher's bonhomie masked the discipline that Southwest has had throughout its history. The airline has always avoided fads and eschewed anything that increased costs or complicated the basic travel proposition. When it has changed—last year it ended its infamous cattle-call boarding process to favor its most frequent fliers and highest-fare customers—it has done so without slowing down the movement of aircraft. Management ranks are lean, but well compensated and, most importantly, productive. I once calculated that the top executives of Southwest generated 10 times more revenue per dollar of compensation than did the C-suite types at some of the network carriers.

A Relatively Happy Workforce

Network carriers have railed for decades about the power of their employee unions. But guess who's the most unionized carrier in the nation? Southwest, of course. The airline says that 87 percent of its employees belong to a union. Southwest has never had a strike, and now that the network carriers have whacked away at salaries and benefits, Southwest staffers are generally the highest paid in the industry. But since Southwest has about 30 percent fewer employees per aircraft than its network competitors, it has the lowest non-fuel C.A.S.M. (cost per available seat mile) of any of the major carriers.

Aggressive Fuel Hedging

Rampaging fuel prices now represent around 40 percent of an airline's costs, but, as usual, Southwest Airlines has been ahead of the curve. Since 1999, the airline's aggressive fuel-hedging program has saved it an estimated $3.5 billion. In the first quarter, for example, it paid $1.98 a gallon for fuel, approximately a dollar less than its network competitors. And Southwest's future position is admirable: It is 70 percent hedged at $51 a barrel through the end of the year and 55 percent hedged at the same price next year.

In a world of $140-a-barrel oil, suggesting that any airline is a guaranteed winner is beyond hubris. But this much can be said: Southwest Airlines is sitting on a pile of cash and fuel hedges and has a proven and easily adaptable service model. And history shows that Southwest has comfortably survived every airline-industry downturn, then grown rapidly and profited hugely when the business cycle turns.

The Fine Print…

British Airways announced last week that it would buy L'Avion, the French carrier that flies all-business-class jets between Newark and Paris. B.A. says that it will integrate L'Avion with its own boutique carrier, OpenSkies, which launched last month. L'Avion was the last of the four independent all-business-class trans-Atlantic carriers that have launched since 2005. The others—Maxjet, Eos, and Silverjet—all folded in the past seven months.

Cheney Tried to Suppress Climate Change Testimony

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

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The vice president's office cuts six pages of congressional testimony linking man-made factors to climate change and environmental damage, but a well-placed Democrat at the EPA blows the whistle.

Uncertainty Aplenty as Web, Media Leaders Convene

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 7:14am EDT by Associated Press

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Media and online moguls are descending on Allen & Co. investment bank's annual retreat in Sun Valley in search of new acquisitions and alliances and perhaps the opportunity to retool their businesses. High on this year's agenda: the internet's increasing fragmentation and the old media / new media fight for online advertising revenue.

From Zero to Zero Emissions in 2.9 Seconds

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 5:00am EDT by Autopia

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An eco-conscious motorcycle fanatic hopes to bring a touch of green to the Isle of Man TT next year with what he calls the world's first high-speed zero-emissions grand prix.

Quiz: What Should You Really Fear?

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Josh McHugh

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In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki told us to go with the flow. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell advised that we trust our gut. In The Science of Fear, Canadian journalist Dan Gardner warns us to start second-guessing both the media-driven popular consensus and our instincts. Fatally bad decision-making occurs when the gut — the subconscious mechanism of self-preservation that got us through the pre-CNN epochs — identifies a media-amplified image, story, or statistic as a clear and present danger. The resulting inchoate sense of foreboding causes us to grossly overestimate the danger of highly unlikely threats (West Nile virus, terrorist attacks, abduction, plane crashes, shark attacks) and underestimate far more serious, if mundane, threats (car accidents). Our best defense against the media's (mostly) well-intentioned Chicken Littles? Do the math, Gardner tells us, and turn off the television.
Quiz: What Should You Really Be Afraid Of?

1. What was the total death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
a. 3,000
b. 4,595
c. 20,000

2. The most recent suicide bombing in the US was carried out by ...
a. a foreign Muslim terrorist.
b. a native non-Muslim terrorist.
c. a foreign non-Muslim terrorist.
d. a native Muslim terrorist.

3. Man-made and naturally occurring pollutants cause what percent of cancer cases?
a. 2 percent
b. 33 percent
c. 62 percent
d. 83 percent

4. Ratio of mad cow disease deaths in England to the number of BBC News stories about mad cow disease:
a. 20:1
b. 10:1
c. 3:1
d. 1:1

5. Ratio of deaths from smoking to BBC stories about smoking deaths:
a. 2:1
b. 1:1
c. 1:2
d. 8,571:1

6. How many people did the early '90s Ebola virus outbreak in Virginia and the 1995 outbreak in the Congo kill, respectively?
a. 3 and 7,035
b. 0 and 255
c. 1 and 824
d. 12 and 11,700

7. Approximate number of deaths caused by 1998 civil war in the Congo:
a. 2.9 million
b. 900,000
c. 100,000
d. 255

8. An American student is 75 times more likely to be killed ...
a. on campus.
b. off-campus.

9. Chances that an asteroid 100 meters across, delivering the explosive equivalent of 3,500 Nagasaki bombs, will hit Earth in the next century:
a. 1 in 5,000
b. 1 in 250
c. 1 in 100
d. zero

10. Age at which breast cancer is most likely to strike:
a. 40
b. 50
c. 60
d. 80+

11. Number of dead at which "compassion fatigue" starts to occur:
a. 40,000
b. 50
c. 2
d. 500,000

Answers 1: B The approximately 3,000 who died in the initial attacks, plus the 1,595 who in the wake of 9/11 decided to drive instead of fly and as a result died in car accidents the following year. 2: b Joel Henry Hinrichs III, a Timothy McVeigh wannabe, blew himself up outside a full football stadium at the University of Oklahoma on October 1, 2005. The media barely covered it — the demographics of the bomber just didn't fit with the current foreign/Muslim narrative. 3: a; 4: C; 5: d; 6: b; 7: A; 8: b; 9: c; 10: d, then c, then b, then a — everyone picks the younger ages, because those are the cases we hear about most. 11: c Psychologist Paul Slovik shows that for any given incident, people are emotionally affected less with each death greater than one, so when you get to genocide-level numbers, they barely register on an emotional level.

Gallery: Top 10 Worst Aircraft Ever

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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In the 105 years since the Wright Brothers took to the air, dreamers, engineers and aviation buffs have designed every kind of airplane imaginable in a never-ending quest to fly higher, faster or further. Some were innovative, some were beautiful and some even made history. Others, well, let's just say they must have looked good on paper.

Here's a tribute to some of those that surely looked better on paper.
Tupolev TU- 144
The Concorde gets all the love, but Russia's Tupolev TU-144 was the first supersonic transport and the only commercial plane to exceed Mach 2. The "Concordski" was fast but plagued by bad luck. Three crashes -- including a dramatic mid-air breakup during the 1973 Paris Air Show -- relegated it largely to a lifetime delivering mail. It was mothballed in 1985 but briefly brought back a few years later as a research plane.
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The Comet was the premiere commercial jet airliner and a landmark in British aeronautics when it first flew in 1949. Today it's better known for its atrocious safety record. Of the 114 Comets built, 13 were involved in fatal accidents, most of them attributed to design flaws and metal fatigue.

:
The “Spruce Goose” was either a brilliant aircraft years ahead of its time or the biggest government boondoggle ever. By far the largest aircraft ever conceived -- its wingspan was 319 feet -- the Spruce Goose was intended to be a military transport plane. But it wasn't finished until well after World War II ended, rendering it both obsolete and irrelevant. It only flew once.
:
The Zubr was as useless as it was ugly. Not only was it incapable of flying with the landing gear retracted, the airframe was so highly stressed the plane could disintegrate without warning. If that wasn't enough, it couldn't take off with a payload much heavier than a few cartons of cigarettes. The Polish Air Force had a few in its fleet during World War II, but none of them saw combat.
:
Cool name, lousy plane. Dr. William Christmas didn't know the first thing about planes when he designed one for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and it showed. He didn't think the plane needed wing struts, so of course the wings fell off during the plane's maiden flight in 1918.
:
With its carbon-composite construction, unique design and rearward-facing turboprop engines, the Starship was a groundbreaking aircraft. But it was slow, difficult to fly and a bear to maintain. It took to the air in 1989, but Beechcraft only sold a few of the 53 it built.
:
The Hiller VZ-1 hovercraft must have looked good on paper, because it sure didn't look good in the air. The idea was simple -- a fan provides lift and the pilot steers by shifting his weight. The Defense Department loved it until it saw the Pawnee in flight. It was good for just 16 mph and it tended to be uncontrollable. The project was killed in the late 1950s.
:
Defense Department projects are famous for cost overruns, and General Dynamic’s flying wing bomber was a doozy. The Flying Dorito was the most troubled of the stealth aircraft projects the Pentagon embraced during the 1980s, experiencing problems with its radar systems and use of composite materials. When the projected cost of each plane ballooned to $165 million, a Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney killed it in 1991.
:
With its anemic engine, poor maneuverability and gunner blocking the pilot's view, the B.E. 2 was doomed from the start. German aces had no problem shooting them down during World War II, making it just about useless as a fighter. It had no problems against German Zeppelins, though, so the plane lived out its days attacking them instead.
:
The XB 15 was the largest plane ever built in the United States until the Spruce Goose came along. The heavy bomber was so massive it had passageways in the wings and bunks for the crew. But big planes need big engines and no one made one big enough to give the XB any kind of speed for its maiden flight in 1937. The plane maxed out at 200 mph, and the U.S. Army Air Corps killed the project. The only XB ever built saw duty as a cargo plane in the Caribbean during World War II.

15th Anniversary: Revenge of the Wii

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

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In January 2003, when we last spoke to Nintendo's secret weapon, lead designer Shigeru Miyamoto, we urged him to start making games with a "grown-up aesthetic" — you know, something like Grand Theft Auto. Thankfully, he ignored us. With more than 20 million Wii consoles sold, Nintendo is now winning the videogame wars. This time, we asked Miyamoto what he thinks.

Wired: Is the traditional joystick dead?

Miyamoto: Well, as the individual who created the traditional controller, I certainly don't want to speak badly of it! What we're trying to do now is develop interfaces that are more welcoming to a broader audience. But we took a very big gamble in developing the Wii remote.

Wired: Your biggest titles seem more like software than games.

Miyamoto: I think of Wii Fit as a communication tool for families. It's a new kind of play that makes you more aware of your body and physical well-being. You can call it a game, but ultimately it's a type of interactive entertainment.

Wired: Nintendo is huge now. How do you maintain quality control?

Miyamoto: I'm always instructing my game designers on the history of the characters and worlds we've created. Often we're in development and I'll say, "Oh, this looks like a Sega game. We need to make it look more like Mario."

100th Anniversary of Kinemacolor

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1908: Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process is demonstrated at a scientific meeting in Paris.

1908? Really? It seems as if most of the '30s movies were produced in black-and-white, with the occasional color blockbuster like Gone With the Wind. Even the 1940s seemed to reserve color for big-budget productions. Were color movies really around 100 years ago?

Yes. But no.

British inventor Edward Turner actually received a patent on a three-color motion picture process in 1899. The problem is, his system didn't work all that well. He teamed up with Charles Urban, an American expatriate who was already a force in the fledgling British film industry, in 1901. Turner died soon thereafter, and Urban put Albert Smith on the project.

Smith couldn't make Turner's process function and decided in 1906 to try a simpler two-color system using standard black-and-white film. But, instead of exposing the then-standard 16 frames a second, the new process exposed 32 frames. A spinning wheel of transparent filters exposed alternate frames in red and green. A similar wheel was used to project the film, and just as persistence of image makes movie frames merge into seemingly continuous motion, so the viewer's brain merged the two partial-color images into full color.

Sort of. The system was notoriously deficient in presenting blues and getting a true white. And because the red frame and the green frame were shot 1/32 of a second apart, rapid motion caused color fringing where the red and green images didn't exactly overlap. (Not that we've ever seen a digital entertainment technology that blurs with rapid motion. Oh, no.)

Urban previewed the system for the press in London before giving it a scientific debut in Paris, where film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière attended. Kinemacolor got its name in 1909 and was used to film George V's coronation as emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar in 1912.

The process was more economical than the frame-by-frame hand tinting employed by some producers at the time, which sometimes used stencils to create several hundred color prints for commercial distribution. Kinemacolor also spawned some offshoots, including color-wheel systems that exposed side-by-side, rather than alternating, red and green images.

Kinemacolor had plenty of drawbacks. It was one thing for a top-notch cinematographer to synchronize the spinning color wheel with the camera shutter, but quite another to expect projectionists all over the world to master the complicated system, even if their employers were willing to pay for the expensive equipment. Urban also had to fight patent battles. Then came World War I, which -- besides its tremendous toll in blood -- devastated European economies.

Kinemacolor never caught on in the United States, some say because of opposition from the Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust of producers and film-stock suppliers (namely Eastman) that had huge power in the film industry.

Starting in the late teens, it also had to face a superior technology, one that used stationary prisms instead of moving wheels to film and project color separations. Devised by MIT-trained engineers in Boston, it was called: Technicolor.

Source: Various

Cops: Judge Agreeing to Reduce Reiser's Sentence in Exchange for Nina's Body

Posted: July 8th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level

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The authorities said the judge who presided over Hans Reiser's jury trial is backing a deal to reduce the murder's first-degree conviction to second-degree. The deal would lower his sentence to 15-to-life from 25-to-life. The plan was hatched after Reiser led authorities to where he his his wife's body, which was discovered Monday in a wooded area about a half mile from his California house.

Hans Reiser Leads Police to Nina's Body

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 10:45pm EDT by Threat Level

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Police recover the body of Hans Reiser's murdered wife at a construction site in the Oakland Hills.

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Science

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Epidemiologists are tracking global disease by parsing Google News sources and public health list-serves into data that could provide an early warning about the next big disease outbreak.

Get Started With Movable Type

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Webmonkey

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The Movable Type blogging engine is easy to set up and customize. This Webmonkey tutorial covers the basics of templates, plug-ins and everything you'll need to inject some personality into a vanilla MT installation.

ATM-Owner Cardtronics Issues Non-Denial Denial in Citibank Breach

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Threat Level

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The company that owns the 7-Eleven ATMs implicated in a massive leak of PIN codes issues a statement announcing that it doesn't anticipate issuing any statements.

How to Check Yourself for Genetic Abnormalities

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Curious about that wheat-gluten allergy that runs in the family? Wondering if you're more likely to develop cancer than your mate? There are several options for testing the stuff your genes are made of, ranging from online DNA-sequencing shops to home-brew basement kits. Grab your cotton swabs and confront your future.

'Hellboy' Creator Mike Mignola Talks 'Language of Monsters'

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 7:18pm EDT by Underwire

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The Golden Army's creatures incubate in Guillermo del Toro's fertile imagination, then evolve from simple concept art to bizarre onscreen glory.

Amendment Would Put Spy Lawsuits, Amnesty On Hold Pending Investigation

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Threat Level

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As the Senate takes up the FISA bill on Tuesday, an odd amendment from New Mexico Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman appears to be the last real hope for those who want a court to rule on the legality of Bush's spying program.

Netroots Activists Mad at Obama for Spy Bill Flip-Flop

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 4:42pm EDT by Threat Level

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Netroots activists are using a wiki and Barack Obama's social networking tool to try and change the senator's mind on an upcoming vote on overhauling warrantless wiretapping legislation.

Tumor-Targeting Nanoparticles Stop Cancer From Spreading

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Wired Science

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Scientists have been able to stop cancers in mice from spreading, using nanoparticles infused with cancer-fighting drugs. The technique allows for much smaller doses of the drug, which carries heavy side effects.

Lawyers Claim Hans Reiser Is Competent, Incompetent

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 3:05pm EDT by Threat Level

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Is Hans Reiser competent or incompetent? Reiser, the developer of the ReiserFS filesystem, was convicted in April of killing his wife, Nina Reiser. Some of his lawyers think he's competent and others don't. The difference could mean the being sentenced to prison or a mental institution.

Rising Fuel Prices Hit Transit Riders

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Autopia

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Think riding the bus makes you immune to rising fuel prices? Think again. Transit systems are getting hit hard, and they're raising fares to make up for it.

'Futurama' Gets Medieval in 'Bender's Game'

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 1:25pm EDT by Underwire

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A thoroughly modern plague -- high fuel prices -- sends the Planet Express crew back in time. Catch a sneak peek at the third direct-to-DVD space adventure.

Exclusive: Sneak Peek at the 3G iPhone OS

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 11:46am EDT by Gadget Lab

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The 3G iPhone may not be launching until Friday, but we've got an early preview of the OS now. Loaded onto a first-gen iPhone, the 3G operating system shows us some surprises in GPS tech, address book navigation and push e-mail.

Google's Long Reach Muddles Boardroom Picture

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 11:10am EDT by Josh McHugh, Portfolio.com

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Last month, Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt, who sits on Apple's board of directors, revealed that he's been compelled to leave Apple board meetings on more than one occasion because Google's mobile-device platform, Android, poses a direct challenge to Apple's iPhone. If Google were to adopt a similar practice of asking its directors with conflicts of interest to step outside, its board meetings might start getting pretty small.

The first to get the heave-ho would be John Doerr, who finds himself on the other side of the Android-iPhone fault line: In March, Doerr launched the $100 million iFund to invest in companies writing applications for the iPhone. If Google's board went on to discuss App Engine, Google's cloud computing initiative, Doerr would again have to excuse himself since he sits on the board of Amazon, whose fast-growing Web-services business competes directly with App Engine.

Should the conversation turn to Google's vigorous efforts to optimize its services for the iPhone, Doerr could return to the meeting. But if talk veered toward Google's plans to acquire wireless spectrum, John Hennessy, who sits on Cisco's board, might have to recuse himself, since Cisco has scrapped publicly with Google over who deserves to get the biggest slice of the new wireless broadband spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission.

Google's venture-capital investments? Sergey Brin should take a walk—after all, his new bride, Ann Wojcicki, is a founder of bio-info startup 23andMe. After Brin returns, perhaps the board would like to address tactics in the pitched battle between Google's Checkout payment service and eBay's PayPal. Might director Ann Mather, who served as a board member for Shopping.com before eBay acquired it for $634 million in 2005, care to head to the cafeteria for a coffee?

Of course, Google isn't deliberately stacking its board with representatives from its competitors. It's just that, as anyone whose business Google has targeted with its ever-expanding arsenal of services knows, there's no escaping the Googleplex. One suggestion: Rather than asking its directors to run hither and thither, Google could have its engineers build a boardroom version of the Cone of Silence from this summer's film version of Get Smart.

'Force Unleashed': Destroying TIE Fighters With My Brain

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Game|Life

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The Star Wars galaxy comes alive in an upcoming battery of games. Each version is artfully tweaked so the gameplay makes the most of the platform.

Microsoft to Yahoo: Ditch the Board and Let's Dance

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 10:35am EDT by Epicenter

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Microsoft adds insult to injury by telling Yahoo it won't deal at all with the current board -- but that anything is possible if the Carl Icahn slate is installed at the Aug. 1 shareholder meeting.

NBC To Use Olympics as a 'Billion Dollar Research Lab'

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 8:52am EDT by Associated Press

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NBC is using the Beijing Olympics as a "billion-dollar research lab" to get a sense of how people are using such platforms as video streaming, video on demand and mobile phones. The company will use about 10 methods for measuring audience beyond the broadcast.

Ride the World's Best Motorcycle Roads

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 12:07am EDT by Autopia

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Anyone who's spent any time on a motorcycle has a favorite road. Here are some of ours. Tell us some of yours.

Top 10 Hottest Digital Music Websites

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Listening Post

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Change is the only constant in the music business, and that goes double for the digital music business. So, for the moment at least, we've assembled a list of the 10 hottest digital music websites ... in the world!

July 7, 1936: Get a Grip — Phillips Screws Up the Toolbox

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox.
Phillips was a Portland, Oregon, businessman who invented something to solve a problem that few home repair folk or do-it-yourselfers even knew existed. In those days, if you wanted to drive a screw into a hole, you just grabbed the right-size slotted screwdriver and did the deed. The only thing you needed to puzzle over was the size. Too big wouldn't fit; too small wouldn't give you enough torque.
So why do you now need to grab the right kind, as well as size, of screwdriver? It's enough to make you cross.
Phillips wasn't trying to make life with hand tools easier. He was trying to solve an industrial problem. To drive a slot screw, you need hand-eye coordination to line up the screwdriver and the slot. If you're a machine -- especially a 1930s machine -- you ain't got no eye, and your hand coordination may depend on humans.
The Phillips-head screw and Phillips screwdriver were designed for power tools, especially power tools on assembly lines. The shallow, cruciform slot in the screw allows the tapering cruciform shape of the screwdriver to seat itself automatically when contact and rotation are achieved. That saves a second or two, and if you've got hundreds of screws in thousands of units (say, cars), you're talking big time here.
And not only does a power Phillips driver get engaged fast, it stays engaged and doesn't tend to slide out of the screw from centrifugal force. Another advantage: It's hard to overscrew with a power tool. The screwdriver will likely just pop out when the screw is completely fastened.
It turns out that Peter L. Robertson had patented a self-seating, square-socket screw in Canada in 1907. Some Canadian factories adopted it, but Robertson was vexed by the onslaught of World War I and his own insistence on maintaining tight control of the technology.
Phillips applied for his own patents in 1934 and '36. After years of rejection, he got the American Screw Company to spend $500,000 ($5.7 million in today's money) to develop a manufacturing process. Then they convinced General Motors to try the new-fangled fasteners on the 1936 Cadillac.
Presto, change-o. Nearly all American automakers had switched to Phillips screws by 1940. The American jeeps and tanks of World War II, not to mention the aircraft, were assembled with speed and efficiency, thanks in a small part to Henry Phillips.
Today, manufacturers can choose from a wide array of screws -- including the Robertson square, the Allen hex and some exotic varieties developed by the Phillips Screw Co.
If you're a weekend handyperson who has to keep your toolbox stocked with all kinds of screwdrivers (or driver bits), the variety may be annoying. The Phillips cam-out -- when you've gone far enough and the tool pops out of the screw -- has led to plenty of workshop profanity. And loosening a machine-driven Phillips screw with a hand-held screwdriver has apparently reminded many, judging from their language, of the tenacity of a female dog protecting its newborns.
Still, remember Henry Phillips gently. His screws are holding your life together.
Source: American Heritage Invention & Technology

Gallery: Japan's Hottest Celebrity Bloggers

Posted: July 7th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lisa Katayama

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If you go to Japan and tell people you're a blogger, they might assume you're a celebrity. While blogs are making incredible headway as a source of credible information in the United States, in Japan they are mostly thought of as high-profile diaries.

"It's an evolution of Japan's diary culture," which dates back to the 8th century, says Ichiro Kiyota, an editor at Gizmodo Japan. "Celebrities say things on blogs that they can't tell the mainstream media, and we all read it so we can get to know them better."

Japan's celebrity bloggers run the gamut in terms of popularity and topics they write about, but they have several things in common: They're good-looking, they're geeky and they love to blog. Here are our 10 faves.

Name: Shoko Nakagawa

Age: 23

Blog: Shokotan blog

Claim to fame: Japan's new Queen of Blogging makes geeks go wild with her impressive otaku cred.

Traffic: By some estimates 100 million pageviews per month.*

Day job: Actress, singer, etc.

Favorite topics: Nails, cake, cats, cosplayers, cellphone bling, sexy figurines. Most recently, she created worldwide buzz when she put a cat in her mouth.

*Traffic is self-reported unless otherwise specified.
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Name: Kaori Manabe

Age: 27

Blog: Kaori Manabe's Between You and Me

Claim to fame: The original Queen of Blogging was one of the first celebrities to exploit the influencing power of the web.

Traffic: N/A

Day job: Actress, book author, former swimsuit model.

Favorite topics: Food she cooks; getting drunk.
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Name: Chiaki Kyan

Blog: Kyanchi Everyday

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 25,000 pageviews per day.

Day job: Bikini idol

Favorite topics: Gundam; her cat; web video sites like Nico Nico Douga and YouTube.
:
Name: Noriko Saito

Blog: DropB

Location: Tokyo

Age: 25

Traffic: 250,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: Web director of a media company.

Favorite topics: Programming languages, iPhones, 12 reasons why she'd make a good wife (she can program; she's funny; she knows everything about 2channel).
:
Name: Asami Shinohara

Blog: iGirl

Age: 26

Location: Osaka

Traffic: 120,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: TV show host, manager of AuPair Japan.

Favorite topics: Her blinged-out cellphone; her snack addiction; books she's reading (The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan, Speed Reading Skills for Kings); her desire to be as beloved as a Mac product.
:
Name: Yumi Fukuda

Age: 25

Blog: Yumiking Diary

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 13,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: Freelance journalist

Favorite topics: Her new FOMA F906i mobile phone; pictures of her breakfast.
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Name: Johnny Kusakabe

Age: 27

Blog: Johnny Kusakabe's Case File

Location: Osaka

Traffic: 3,000 pageviews per day

Day job: Salaryman

Favorite topics: Videogames; outrageous 2channel threads about eating cockroaches. He also has a parody blog called the Shoutan blog.
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Name: Yuko Matsumaru

Age: 29

Blog: Matsu-You's Eye

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: N/A

Day job: TV MC, designer, model

Favorite topics: Lacy, romantic pink things (a pink Care Bears pouch, a shiny pink Zima).
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Name: Benijo

Blog: Do You Like Geeky Women?

Traffic: N/A

Day job: R&D at a social media consulting firm.

Favorite topics: PHP and MySQL, debugging, making Japan's No. 1 geek databases.
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Name: Shuho Saito

Age: 32

Blog: Shuiro Note

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 5,000 pageviews per day

Day job: Homemaker who used to work at Six Apart.

Favorite topics: Fancy homemade lunch boxes; affiliate links to household items like pots, pans and mixers.
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Name: Kamiji Yusuke

Blog: Kamiji Yusuke's Official Blog

Claim to fame: He holds the Guinness World Record for "most unique users on a personal blog in 24 hours."

Traffic: 6 million pageviews per day.

Favorite topics: Posts titled "Um," "Ah" or "Last Night" trigger an instant wave of thousands of comments by fawning fans.

News From Yellow Business Pages » Wired: Top Stories » July 2008

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Wired: Top Stories (253 unread)

Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:12pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:33pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 1:24pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 11:02am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 10:08am EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:23am EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Scott Gilbertson

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT

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Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 7:15pm EDT by How-To Wiki

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:33pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:29pm EDT by Chris Kohler

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:55pm EDT by Jenna Wortham

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:53pm EDT by Brandon Keim

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:34pm EDT by Dave Demerjian

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Adam DuVander

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:25pm EDT by Sharon Weinberger

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:44pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Noah Schachtman

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 11:22am EDT by Earnest Cavalli

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:45am EDT by David Ewing Duncan, Portfolio.com

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:32am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

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Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:04am EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Magazine

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 6:30pm EDT by Associated Press

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 5:53pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Bruce Schneier

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:46pm EDT by Brian Chen

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

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Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:18pm EDT by Sarah Lai Stirland