An otherworldly narrative is playing out at TapJoint.com through coded messages transmitted using a virtual telegraph machine. The unknown sender tells of a city's resistance movement gearing up for a revolution on Illumination Day, an annual holiday celebrated March 9th.
Just in case you haven't seen the memo: Drones are coming to a city near you. Why now? Under a fresh mandate from Congress, the FAA will begin to relax its restrictions around the domestic use of "unmanned aerial systems," leading to greater use of drones by public agencies and, eventually, the private sector. The FAA?s primary concern is safety. But civil liberty groups are worried about what they see as a greater danger: the specter of massive surveillance.
If nothing else, AMD's unexpected acquisition swashbuckling server startup SeaMicro has reignited the chip designer's long-running rivalry with Intel. Intel says that before SeaMicro sold itself to AMD, it tried to sell itself to Intel -- and that Intel turned it down. But, yes, SeaMicro says otherwise...
The OnLive Desktop -- a tool that streams a virtual Windows desktop onto Apple iPads and Android devices -- is apparently in violation of the licensing terms for Microsoft's flagship operating system. "We are actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario, and we are committed to seeing this issue is resolved," Joe Matz, corporate vice president of worldwide licensing and pricing at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Predicting when the blades of a ceiling fan will stop after you turn it off might seem impossible. Lucky for you, there's kinematic physics at your disposal. Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain walks you through how to calculate your ceiling fan's stopping time.
Iran is planning to build surveillance drones for the Venezuelan military. But don't expect an invasion of the machines led by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez quite yet.
A key component in an Austrian skydiver's campaign to freefall from 120,000 feet is ready for flight.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering a new type of virtual server instance atop its Elastic Compute Cloud service. The new "Medium" instance isn't as powerful as the service's Large instances, but it's cheaper, and it's more powerful than the low-end Small instances.
The most powerful solar storm in five years hit Earth on March 8, and could create northern lights far south of their usual range.
You don't need gears in an electric vehicle, but that isn't keeping the retro-loving blokes at Morgan Motor Co. from installing a five-speed in their slick Plus E roadster.
Apple's iCloud will back up at least some digital copies of movies that come with purchases of a DVD or Blu-ray.
It's like the Iditarod, but with shopping carts. And costumes. And beer. OK, maybe it's not like Iditarod. But it sure is fun, and for a great cause.
Another pair of Stanford faculty said this week they were starting a company around Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). According to Inside Higher Ed, engineering professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller have started Coursera, which includes content from Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California Berkeley.
Add another eerily life-like robot to the military's rapidly expanding android army. This one is, of all things, a mechanical firefighter. And not only can it climb ladders like its flesh-and-blood counterparts, it's designed to interact with human handlers in a kind of human/robot bucket brigade.
Apple's newest iOS app uses OpenStreetMap, the "Wikipedia of maps," instead of Google Maps, to display your photos on a map. Apple is just the latest of several high-profile converts to the world of open source mapping.
A $1 million purse that Google has offered to hackers who can produce zero-day exploits against its Chrome browser appears to be safe after the first day of its three-day Pwnium hacking contest, which yielded just one contestant and one successful zero-day attack.
As you no doubt know by now, Apple unveiled its new iPad to the world on Wednesday to much ado. So now that we know how the myriad rumors have held up to what was actually unveiled, it's time to check in on how Wired did in reading the tea leaves. Which of our staff aced the pre-release predictions?
One evolutionary idea suggested that embryos, as they develop, resemble the forms of their ancestors -- and it's completely wrong. But mathematician and Social Dimension blogger Samuel Arbesman explains how the rule does describe the evolution of human culture.
A new tech demo featuring sophisticated performance-capture technology made by the game developer Quantic Dream ( .
A new report at the Wall Street Journal says that the U.S. Department of Justice has threatened Apple and five major publishers with an antitrust lawsuit, alleging the publishers and Apple colluded to fix e-book prices.
From underwater stun guns to burning hot pain rays, the Pentagon has plenty of far-out ideas for a trove of futuristic less-lethal weapons. And one American inventor might have outdone the entire military. An inventor named Joel Braun came up with a mashup less-lethal that stuns, shoots, blinds and sprays its targets.
Maddie is a sweet-tempered Coonhound from the Cobb County animal shelter in Atlanta, GA. She?s also the star of photographer Theron Humphrey?s side project, Maddie the Coonhound: A Super Serious Project About Dogs and Physics.
Harry Shum, who oversees research and development for Microsoft?s Bing search engine, believes his company has now matched Google?s ability to build software platforms that can harness the power of tens of thousands of servers.
Moon Nazis, superheroines, indie videogame documentaries, chess in Brooklyn: This year's South by Southwest film festival begins Friday and brings with it more films than any one person could watch in just nine days. Here are the ones we're hottest to screen.
There is a field guide to almost anything, and microbiologist Jonathan Eisen's enormous collection contains classic, beautiful and very strange examples including guides to birds, birders and road kill.
IBM Researchers have built an optical chip that can transfer more data per second than pretty much anything else on the planet. They this transceiver the Holey Optochip -- holey because they've taken a chip wafer and fired 48 holes in it so that laser light can be blasted in and out of the chip, moving data at one trillion bits per second. That's eight times faster than the fastest comparable optical components on the market today, and about 10,000 times faster than the 100 Mb/second Ethernet that's still common on corporate networks.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
A new online art project called Idle Screenings chops up Hollywood blockbusters like into a sea of flickering, dreamlike images.
When the ePub file format was created for e-books, it was meant to be an open standard, meaning that ePub e-books could be opened and read on any compatible device. Unfortunately, who's ever heard of a standard that's perfect in practice? Cue the evil intro music and enter DRM, the stick in the mud that's wrecking this whole open ePub e-book love-fest.
Apple has released a free tool that allows schools, businesses, and other operations to configure and deploy large numbers of iPads and iPhones. The tool was not mentioned when Apple unveiled its latest iPad during a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, but it's now available from the company's online Mac App Store.
An anonymous reader writes "We've frequently discussed the growing trend among video game publishers to adopt a business model in which downloading and playing the game is free, but part of the gameplay is supported by microtransactions. There have been a number of success stories, such as Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. During a talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, Valve's Joe Ludwig officially added Team Fortress 2 to that list, revealing that the game has seen a 12-fold increase in revenue since the switch. He said, 'The trouble is, when you're a AAA box game, the only people who can earn you new revenue are the people who haven't bought your game. This drives you to build new content to attract new people. There's a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players.' He also explained how they tried to do right by their existing playerbase: 'We dealt with the pay-to-win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there's no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying.'"
ananyo writes "Researchers have for the first time managed to give patients a complete bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor. The recipients were also able to accept kidneys from the same donors without the need for immunosuppressive drugs. Normally, such transplants would trigger graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) — an often deadly complication that occurs when immune cells from an unrelated donor attack the transplant recipient's tissue. The researchers report that five of eight people who underwent the treatment were able to stop all immunosuppressive therapy within a year after their kidney and stem-cell transplants, four of which came from unrelated donors (abstract)."
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at a tech conference in Seattle this week, former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie had some interesting things to say about the state of the computing industry. 'People argue about "are we in a post-PC world?" Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world. That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.' Ozzie also thinks Microsoft's future as a company is strongly tied to Windows 8's reception. 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'"
wiredmikey writes "This month, Ford is borrowing something from the software industry: updates. With a fleet of new cars using the sophisticated infotainment system they developed with Microsoft called SYNC, Ford has the need to update those vehicles — for both features and security reasons. But how do you update the software in thousands of cars? Traditionally, the automotive industry has resorted to automotive recalls. But now, Ford will be releasing thirty thousand USB sticks to Ford owners with the new SYNC infotainment system, although the update will also be available for online download. In preparing to update your car, Ford encourages users to have a unique USB for each Ford they own, and to have the USB drive empty and not password protected. In the future, updating our gadgets, large and small, will become routine. But for now, it's going to be really cumbersome and a little weird. Play this forward a bit. Image taking Patch Tuesday to a logical extreme, where you walk around your house or office to apply patches to many of the offline gadgets you own."
S810 writes "Discovery News is running an article about the U.S. Navy developing a robot capable of 'throwing extinguisher grenades.' From the article: 'SAFFiR would need finger and hand coordination to wrestle fire hoses into place or accurately throw extinguisher grenades. It similarly would need the sure-footed balance of a veteran sailor's sea legs to confidently walk the wave-tossed decks of warships. An infrared camera could allow such a robot to see through smoke-filled hallways, and perhaps it could detect the location of fires through gas sensors. The robot's battery is intended to pack enough energy for half an hour of firefighting action.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Robert S. Mueller III, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), yesterday warned Congress of terrorist hacking. He believes that while terrorists haven't hacked their way into the U.S. government yet, it's an imminent threat. Mueller said, 'To date, terrorists have not used the Internet to launch a full-scale cyber attack, but we cannot underestimate their intent. Terrorists have shown interest in pursuing hacking skills. And they may seek to train their own recruits or hire outsiders, with an eye toward pursuing cyber attacks.'"
Vigile writes "In a talk earlier this year at DICE, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney discussed the state of computing hardware as it relates to gaming. While there is a rising sentiment in the gaming world that the current generation consoles are 'good enough' and that the next generation of consoles might be the last, Sweeney thinks that is way off base. He debates the claim with some interesting numbers, including the amount of processing and triangle power required to match human anatomical peaks. While we are only a factor of 50x from the necessary level of triangle processing, there is 2000x increase required to meet the 5000 TFLOPS Sweeney thinks will be needed for the 8000x4000 resolution screens of the future. It would seem that the 'good enough' sentiment is still a long way off for developers."
New submitter Paul Fernhout writes "Physicists from MIT claim to have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Researchers suggest this LED acts like a heat pump somehow (abstract). Is it true that 230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics?"
An anonymous reader writes "The DoJ says Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan and HarperCollins conspired to raise the prices of ebooks. The report originates from the WSJ, but the BBC adds comments from an analyst bizarrely claiming increased prices are somehow a good thing and thinking otherwise is the result of 'confusion'. I'd like to see an explanation of why the wholesale model, while continuing to work fine (presumably) for physical books, somehow didn't work for ebooks and why the agency model is better despite increasing costs for consumers."
angry tapir writes "While Android is open source, it won't work on a phone without software that generally isn't open source. The Replicant project is an attempt to build a version of Android that doesn't rely on binary blobs for which the source code isn't available to end users, and the software currently works on a handful of handsets. I caught up with the project's lead developer to talk about their efforts to make a completely open source version of Android."
suso writes "A design flaw in the VTE library was published this week. The VTE library provides the terminal widget and manages the scrollback buffer in many popular terminal emulators including gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, terminator and guake. Due to this flaw, your scrollback buffer ends up on your /tmp filesystem over time and can be viewed by anyone who gets ahold of your hard drive. Including data passed back through an SSH connection. A demonstration video was also made to make the problem more obvious. Anyone using these terminals or others based on libVTE should be aware of this issue as it even writes data passed back through an SSH connection to your local disk. Instructions are also included for how to properly deal with the leaked data on your hard drive. You are either encouraged to switch terminals and/or start using tmpfs for your /tmp partition until the library is fixed."
beelsebob writes "In the recent release of iPhoto for iOS it appears that Apple has started using OpenStreetMap's data. Unfortunately, there are still some problems. Apple is currently not applying the necessary attribution to OSM; they are using an old (from April 2010) dump of the data; and they are not using the data in the U.S. Fingers crossed that Apple works through these issues quickly! Apple is now one of a growing list (including geocaching, and foursquare) to Switch2OSM."
jones_supa writes "By reinventing the Start Menu in Windows 8, Microsoft has caused some resistance to the new Start Screen. For those longing for the classic way of doing things, Stardock comes to rescue. The Start8 is a piece of software which replicates the functionality of the button and menu found in previous versions of Windows. Supported is starting applications, the Run and Shutdown features, and search."
nk497 writes "The first shipment of Raspberry Pi devices has been delayed, after the factory manufacturing the cheap educational computer used non-magnetic jacks instead of ones with integrated magnetics. The problem is already nearly fixed, but new jacks need to be sourced for subsequent shipments, so those could be delayed slightly. 'It's inevitable, isn't it — you're freewheeling along perfectly happily and then you get a puncture,' said spokeswoman Liz Upton, apologizing for the delay."