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Wired: Top Stories (13 unread)
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Oct. 15, 1900: Boston Embraces the Sound of Music
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Tony Long
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1900: Boston's Symphony Hall, an acoustical marvel in its day and still regarded as one of the world's great concert halls, opens with an inaugural concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Unlike most American concert halls, which tend to favor a wider, fan-shaped configuration, Symphony Hall was built along European lines — deep, narrow and high. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White modeled the Boston hall after Leipzig's Gewandhaus (which was destroyed during World War II). But the architects also did something unprecedented: They hired Wallace Clement Sabine, a young assistant physics professor from nearby Harvard, to act as acoustical consultant. For the first time ever, scientifically proven acoustical principles were applied to concert-hall design. On the basis of Sabine's work, the hall was built using brick, steel and plaster, with wooden flooring the only soft material used. The side balconies are narrow to avoid trapping sound, and — to help focus it — the stage walls are banked inward. The architects also carved niches into the walls and topped the hall with a coffered ceiling, which, in acoustical terms, guarantees nearly every seat the optimum aural experience. One interesting quirk: While the proscenium arch is ringed with a number of plaques, only one is inscribed. The intention was to inscribe each plaque with the name of a great composer, but in the end only Beethoven was deemed worthy enough by the directors to be so...
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Vote: Who Should Be the First U.S. Copyright Czar?
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 7:12pm EDT by David Kravets
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President Bush signs legislation Monday creating a copyright czar, a cabinet-level position on par with the U.S. drug czar. Here's your chance to nominate who you think should assume the newly created post.
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Firefox 3.1 Beta Available For Download
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 6:45pm EDT by Michael Calore
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The first beta release of the Firefox 3.1 browser was made available to testers and early adopters on Tuesday. This release includes substantial performance improvements and better web standards support. The final browser is due early 2009.
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Liquid Comics Banks on Indian Epic With 'Ramayan 3392 AD' Film
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 5:34pm EDT by Scott Thill
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Gotham Chopra's new imprint mines an ancient Sanskrit text, re-imagining the Ramayana for a colorful comic that could become a 21st-century movie.
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How to Optimize Your Web Connection
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Scott Loganbill
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We feel the need ... the need for speed. Your internet may be chugging along fine, but armed with a few networking shortcuts, your browser can roar. It doesn't matter what network connection you're using, there are a few tweaks you can use to streamline your uploads and downloads. Soon enough, you'll be leaving tire tracks on the information superhighway.
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Top NSA Scribe Takes Us Inside The Shadow Factory
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 4:37pm EDT by Noah Shachtman
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No outsider spends more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But despite three books on the U.S. government's super-secret, signals-intelligence service, even he gets lost in the maze.
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Did Anti-Spam Group Create a Backstory For DarkMarket's Undercover Fed?
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 4:36pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen
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Until Monday, the U.K.-based spam fighters at Spamhaus had an extensive profile of "Master Splynter," the assumed identity of the FBI agent who took over the cybercrime trading post DarkMarket. Was it all part of a cunning plan to establish a back story for a crime lord who never existed?
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McCain's Sex Offender E-Mail Registry Signed Into Law
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 3:15pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen
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Legislation dreamed up by MySpace and authored by John McCain requires registered sex offenders to report their e-mail addresses to a national database available to social networking sites. Pedophiles are quaking in their boots.
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First Look: OpenOffice 3.0 Is a Free Replacement for MS Office on Mac
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 3:15pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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The latest release of the free and open source OpenOffice suite is the first to offer native support on the Mac OS X desktop. It's also the first version with full support for Microsoft's new OOXML file format.
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Veggie-Oil Lotus Wins Alt-Fuel Race to Vegas
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 3:05pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
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Only two of the five alt-fuel vehicles that attempted to scavenge the fuel they needed to Escape from Berkeley made it to Sin City. The winner made the trip in 1,418 minutes.
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Reason No. 37 Why TV Networks Are Screwed: The Credit Crisis
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 2:57pm EDT by Besty Schiffman
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The television networks are up against a perfect storm: Ratings stink; piracy is rampant, as viewers migrate to the web; and now, thanks to this little credit crisis, advertisers are expected to cut ad spending or cancel buys.
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Sex-Crazed Apes Feast on Killing, Too
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 1:33pm EDT by Brandon Keim
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Bonobos, considered by scientists to be a relatively peaceful species, are observed killing and eating monkeys in the wild. The chimp-like primates have a female-led society, but apparently aren't free of all aggressive behavior.
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Video Simulates Earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Betsy Mason
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The USGS creates video simulations of earthquakes on the Hayward fault in the San Francisco Bay Area. Scientists think that fault will likely have the next big quake in the region.
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