Is NASA Building an Antigravity Machine?

Superconductive Components of Columbus, Ohio is scheduled to finish a prototype of the device for NASA this coming May. ?To say this is highly speculative is probably putting it mildly,? admits Ron Koczor, assistant director for science and technology at NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Despite this, NASA has awarded a $600,000 contract to the company.
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1109

Coolest Space Science Images of 2001

In 2001, amateurs got in on the game in an unprecedented way, as two near-space spectacles provided rare and compelling opportunities to enjoy and record the night sky.
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/coolest_2001_011221.html

Just Reached 3000 Seti@Home Workunits

Your credit:
Results Received 3000
Total CPU Time 4.597 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 13 hr 25 min 22.4 sec
Last result returned: Sat Dec 22 16:47:35 2001 UTC
Registered on: Sat May 15 17:43:17 1999 UTC
View Registration Class
SETI@home user for: 2.608 years
Your rank: (based on current workunits received)
Your rank out of 3442266 total users is: 22605th place.
The number of users who have this rank: 30
You have completed more work units than 99.342% of our users.

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?email=marduk@cyber-rights.net&cmd=user_stats_new

Funniest Joke Found

An online humor experiment found that men and women have much different tastes in humor. Men prefer aggressive jokes and women favor wordplay...
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson says, "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, its quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." Holmes replied: "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!"
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science12210104.html

Intelligent Space Suits

Astronauts of the future could receive text, graphics and even video through a wearable computer built into their space suits. At present, during space walks, astronauts get their instructions via radio. But the American space agency (Nasa) reckons the way to maximise information exchange is to send it visually into the astronauts helmet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1717000/1717075.stm

IBMs Quantum Hacking

IBM researchers said on Wednesday they have demonstrated a calculation that could be used to break complicated codes, marking a small step in the advance of quantum computing, a technology based on quantum mechanics. IBM scientists will publish details in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday of the demonstration of "Shors Algorithm," a method of factoring numbers that was developed in 1994 by AT&T scientist Peter Shor. It was that algorithm, and the promise it holds for its ability to break large encryption codes, that spurred interest in quantum computing in the 1990s.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,49268,00.html

Jaron Lanier: The Central Metaphor of Everything?

One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best understanding - if not in the present but any minute now because of Moores law - of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. Its as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.
http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_lanier.html

Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet

...And if theyre programmers, trying to come up with the next great version of the Linux operating system, for example, they may find their development efforts put them at risk of criminal and civil penalties if the tools they develop are inadequately protective of copyright interests. Indeed, their sons and daughters in grade-school computer classes may face similar risks, if the broadest of the changes now being proposed becomes law.
http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-net-mg.htm

/. Thread on the Prevalance of Water in the Solar System

Alchohol was detected in interstellar clouds, making obsolete the theory that drunken, rowdy crowds were a Terran phenomina. Oceans are believed essential for life, but so was the habitable zone. It is the height of "optimism" to believe that if one is wrong, the other must be even more right than before. There is life on Earth which exists in deep, oceanic trenches, near hot volcanic vents. Since that life could not exist prior to the volcanic vent opening, it can be assumed that the formation of life, at its most basic, is occuring on a regular basis. These life-forms may or may not have any nucleic structures we would recognise. For this reason, until such extreme life-forms on Earth are better understood, and the range of conditions in which they can form are better quantified, only the very brave, or very stupid, could claim that "factor X will make life more/less abundant in our Universe". All we really know is that the picture is a hell of a lot more complicated than it used to be.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/19/1419200

Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft

Oh, man, join the list.
During interrogation, Afroze, 25, also claimed that a member or members of Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant "trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP," according to Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a New Delhi information systems and telecommunication consultant.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/173039.html

Case Made for Life on Jupiter Moon

Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue, of Jupiters ocean-bearing moon, Europa.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20011210/europa.html

Water: First finding for Mars Odyssey

The Mars Odyssey (MO) spacecraft has made its first significant discovery: it has detected large deposits of hydrogen - possibly water - near the Red Planets poles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1708000/1708420.stm

HAARP Used to Find Bin Laden

The United States is using its growing expertise in virtual spelunking to search Afghanistan?s maze of caves for Osama bin Laden. Satellite imagery and an experimental underground mapping program hidden away in rural Alaska are just some of the tools at Washington?s disposal.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/663580.asp?0na=x2214140-

Cool Kurzweil Article

Are We Becoming an Endangered Species? Technology and Ethics in the Twenty First Century
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0358.html

SETI@Home Current Progress

Not bad... 111 gaussians matched twice, 4 matched 3 times.
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/process_page/

Excellent Mars Pic

Is this a picture of Mars or Earth? Oddly enough, it is a picture of Mars. What may appear to some as a terrestrial coastline is in fact a formation of ancient layered rocks and wind-blown sand on Mars. The above-pictured region spans about three kilometers in Schiaparelli Crater. What created the layers of sediment is still a topic of research. Viable hypotheses include ancient epochs of deposit either from running water or wind-blown sand. Winds and sandstorms have smoothed and eroded the structures more recently. The "water" that appears near the bottom is actually dark colored sand. The image was taken with the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that has now returned over 100,000 images.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0111/marslayers_mgs_big.gif

Future of the ISS

The Young panel urged that the highest priority be given to research aimedat enabling humans to survive for long periods in space, a prerequisite formore ambitious space exploration. Meanwhile, four Nobel Prize winners haveurged that the station support potentially "groundbreaking" research inphysics in low gravity. But in truth, it has never been clear just whatscience needs to be done on a permanently manned platform in space asopposed to an unmanned platform or an earthbound facility.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&rnum=1&selm=T1aM7.183409%24ez.24915955%40news1.rdc1.nj.home.com

Java Neural Networks Tutorial

Neural Java is a series of exercises and demos. Each exercise consists of a short introduction, a small demonstration program written in Java (Java Applet), and a series of questions which are intended as an invitation to play with the programs and explore the possibilities of different algorithms.The aim of the applets is to illustrate the dynamics of different artificial neural networks. Emphasis has been put on visualization and interactive interfaces. The Java Applets are not intended for and not useful for large-scale applications! Users interested in application programs should use other simulators.The list below covers standard neural network algorithms like BackProp, Kohonen, and the Hopfield model. It also includes some models that are more biological, and features visualizations of the Hodgkin-Huxley and the integrate-and-fire models.
http://diwww.epfl.ch/mantra/tutorial/english/

DeathClock

nuff said.
http://www.deathclock.com/

Behind the Scenes of Metal Gear Solid 2

For Kojima, the discovery of video games was not just a way to pass his time but the opportunity to learn about a new form of entertainment. Always a fan of movies and entertainment, Kojima spent his teenage years watching TV shows such as Bewitched and I Dream of Genie and movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Taxi Driver. "I really did want to become a film director," he explains. "The people of my generation are visually oriented. Unfortunately we cant go out ourselves and film our own professional films because of the cost."
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/btg_mgs2/index.html

Looking For Gravity Waves

NASA scientists expect to use barely perceptible speed variations in the Cassini spacecraft as it moves toward Saturn to provide the first direct detection of gravitational waves, a basic feature of how the universe behaves.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space11210102.html

FBIs Keylogger Virus

The FBI is developing software capable of inserting a computer virus onto a suspect?s machine and obtaining encryption keys, a source familiar with the project told MSNBC.com. The software, known as ?Magic Lantern,? enables agents to read data that had been scrambled, a tactic often employed by criminals to hide information and evade law enforcement. The best snooping technology that the FBI currently uses, the controversial software called Carnivore, has been useless against suspects clever enough to encrypt their files.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/660096.asp

"Cyclone" blows computer bugs out of code

A new computer language designed to avoid unforeseen programming errors could prevent many computer security breaches, according to the US researchers behind the project. -- Ill believe it when I see it.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991578

Hidden Dangers of Carnivore

The three primary dangers of Carnivore to innocent people can be called the Backdoor problem, the Rogue Agent problem, and the Mishap problem.
http://www.stopcarnivore.org/threeproblems.htm

Bruce Lee to Star in NEW Film

More than 28 years after Bruce Lees death, CGI technology will resurrect the kung-fu icon to star in the $50 million-budgeted chopsocky actioner "Dragon Warrior."
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1584

EU Anti-Hacking Proposal

This anti-hacking proposal of the EU Commission makes provisions worse than those already in COE Cybercrime Treaty. If this proposal becomes EU law, "illegal access" will be considered a "serious attack against information systems" even if the access was unintentional. As penalty for any indirect damage in course of "illegal access" the maximum sentence must a minimum of four years. The proposal has not been published and is to be presented November 27, 2001, in Brussels.
http://cryptome.org/eu-antihack.htm

Particle physics telescope explodes

One of the worlds leading particle physics instruments has been severely damaged in an accident. The underground Super-Kamiokande Observatory in Japan detects elusive neutrino particles from space by using photomultiplier tubes to register the flashes of light they produce when they pass through a huge tank of water.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1664000/1664447.stm

Space Power

Two new studies looking at the feasibility of space-based solar power - orbiting satellites that would serve as high-tech space dams - suggest the concept shouldnt be readily dismissed and could generate both Earth-bound and space-based benefits.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/solar_power_sats_011017-1.html

Non-metallic magnet could be dream computer memory

A transparent, flexible magnetic material made from an exotic form of carbon could turn out to be the dream computer memory. The substance, which was discovered accidentally by a Russian physicist hunting for high-temperature superconductors, is the first non-metallic magnet to work at room temperature.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991443

Salons Review of Lynchs Mulholland Drive

"Mulholland Drive" is beautifully and intricately structured: Those who delight in disassembling Lynchs puzzles will have a great time flipping the plot around, tracing its breadcrumb clues back from the end to the beginning. But it also works out perfectly if youre interested only in the interplay between its hypnotically beguiling characters (or even if youre interested only in seeing them go to bed with one another). At the very least, the luxe air of menace that hangs around "Mulholland Drive" like a vapor is evidence of Lynch at his best. If you could put the essence of 3 a.m. in a perfume bottle, it would smell like "Mulholland Drive" looks.
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/10/12/mulholland_drive/index.html?x

Long-lasting Martian Duststorm

Scientists dont know why the storm became so gigantic. Richard Zurek, of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said, "We dont understand the details." In June, the storm apparently grew from a smaller duster that appeared in a plain in the Hellas basin. Sequential images show that dust from that basin spread north and east, eventually covering the whole planet in a reddish-orange cloud.
http://www.wired.com/news/photo/0,1860,47511,00.html

Linux Watchpad

The watchmaker and computer giant on Thursday unveiled the WatchPad, the first prototype to come out of their collaboration. IBM researchers have come out with prototypes on their own over the past year and a half. Besides telling time, the WatchPad comes with calendar-scheduling software, a pager-like application for sending and receiving short messages, and a Bluetooth chip for wireless communication with notebooks, handheld computers and cell phones.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7489545.html?tag=lh

Bitchin Nokia Out

Key features: Digital Music Player and Recorder, Nokia Audio Manager PC software for copying personal CDs, organizing and downloading music files from a compatible PC to the Nokia 5510, FM stereo radio, full keyboard for fast text input, 5 games, WAP, multiple chat, multiple SMS sending...
http://www.nokia.com/phones/5510/index.html

More Terror Attacks to Come

...why was this given the file name of skyfall?...
Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to believe that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States and against U.S. interests overseas over the next several days. The FBI has again alerted all local law enforcement to be on the highest alert and we call on all people to immediately notify the FBI and local law enforcement of any unusual or suspicious activity.
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/skyfall.htm

Slugbot!

The aim of this project is to build a robot with animal-like self-sufficiency in both information and energy. We dont expect to be able to match the speed and performance of a cheetah chasing a zebra, within the time frame of this project, so we decided to chase something slightly slower ... slugs. Apart from their relative ease of capture (compared to zebras), slugs were chosen because they are a major pest, are reasonably plentiful, have no hard shell or skeleton, and are reasonably large. It is also more technologically interesting to catch mobile prey rather than just grazing on plants. Of course, the organic resources, or food (i.e. slugs), will have to be converted to a form of energy that is useful to a robotic system. We propose to convert the organic material to electricity using microbial fuel cells. Agricultural fields of winter wheat offer a suitable test bed for the robots because slugs (Deroceras reticulatum, Arion ater ater and Arion ater rufus) are plentiful, with up to 200 per square metre. Slugs are mainly active at night, especially just after sunset and just before sunrise, so the robots will have to be active at these times, and resting in order to conserve energy during the day when most slugs are underground. Since energy conservation will be of prime importance, and moving heavy items over soft ground will consume large amounts of energy, the fermentation vessel, engine and generator will be stationary. One or more robots will deliver slugs to the stationary charging system and obtain power from it. In order to minimise the amount of movement each of the robots will be equipped with a 1.5m long arm, mounted on a turntable, which will be used both for detecting and collecting slugs which is now working under closed loop computer control...
http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/goto.html?slugbot

Hilarious Salon Comic

http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2001/10/11/boll/index.html

New Glass-Eating Microbes Found

From small things come great hope. Glass-eating microbes discovered 300 meters below the Earths ocean floors have given scientists further evidence that life on Mars and Europa is a possibility.The newly found microbes are literally at the rock bottom of the food chain. And they survive on a bare minimum: water, heat, and nutrients they digest from volcanic glass in the ocean floor. These lithoautotrophs, as they are called, are so bare bones they could easily exist on other less hospitable worlds.
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/mars_glass_011005.html

Good Pic of Afghanistan Damage

Residents look at damage caused by U.S.-British airstrikes to an alleged United Nations building in Kabul, Afghanistan Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2001. The U.S. hit targets in Afghanistan and key installations of the Taliban regime with cruise missiles for the second night for harboring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. Officials at the scene said the victims of the Monday night bombing raid were U.N. workers who cleared anti-personnel mines in Kabul. Photo by Amir Shah.
http://news.excite.ca/photo/img/ap/afghanistan/attacks/20011009/kab101?r=/photo/ap/011009/08/news-attacks-rdp

Astronomers Find Galactic Building Block in Early Universe

Gravitational lensing, a feature of Einsteins theory of General Relativity, offers a unique short cut to viewing the earliest light in the universe while scientists wait for the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), a 6.5 meter telescope to be launched in 2009. Exploiting gravitational lensing, an international team of astrophysicists has detected a very small, faint stellar system in the process of its formation during the first half billion years or so of the universes existence.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space10050102.html

Its Christmastime on Io

The volcanic material reached the spacecraft no more than a few minutes after rushing out of the source vent on the ground. The particles are apparently snowflakes made of sulfur-dioxide molecules with as many as 15 to 20 molecules clumped together in each flake.
http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1005012.htm

Good Bono Commentary/Quotes

At 41, Bono is at an age when many rock musicians start exploiting bygone successes to keep feeding at the trough of fame. But with Bono, its more than a rock n roll career. Behind the black leather togs and wraparound shades, there has always been an earnest social crusader. Embarrassingly earnest? Perhaps. But, oddly, thats part of his charm. In a business where people sell their souls for success, he has constantly risked celebrity-cause cliché -- and he knows it. "The only thing worse than a rock star," he told the starry-eyed Harvard grads, "is a rock star with a conscience. Ive seen great minds and prolific imaginations disappear up their own ass, strung out on their own self-importance. Im one of them."
http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/10/02/bono/index.html?CP=RDF&DN=310

Black Deaths Genome Sequenced

Normally, a gene map for an all-but-vanquished disease would interest only microbiologists and medical historians. But fears of biological warfare have increased since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. government grounded crop-dusting airplanes for several days after the attacks. Spreading plague bacteria in the air could mimic the effects of the inhaled version of the disease.
http://news.excite.ca/news/ap/011003/14/plague-gene-map

Nother Great Onion!

http://www.theonion.com/

Toddler Fed By Bear?

A mother bear appears to have cared for a missing 16-month-old Iranian toddler who was found safe and sound three days later in the animals den, the Kayhan newspaper said Tuesday.The childs parents, from a nomadic tribe in western Lorestan province, returned to their tent after working in the fields to find him missing, Kayhan said.Three days later, a search party found the baby, who they said had probably been breast fed by a mother bear, in a den some six miles away from the nomadic settlement. A medical examination showed the baby was in good health, the daily said.
http://news.excite.ca/news/r/011002/11/odd-toddler-dc

Fusion Power Within Reach?

To make nuclear fusion occur, atoms must first be broken down into electrons and atomic nuclei. This produces an electrically charged gas called plasma. The bare nuclei must then be forced together so that they merge. Because like charges repel, this is difficult. At the heart of our Sun, fusion takes place at a temperature of 15 million degrees and a pressure of 100,000 atmospheres. Because it is not possible to reproduce these conditions on Earth, terrestrial fusion reactors must operate at lower pressures and higher temperatures - about 100 million degrees.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space10020103.html

Bizzaro Pic of Iranian Policewomen

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20010930/wl/1001877697iran_police_women_teh103.html

Blade 2 Pictures

In french, but still shows the pics.
http://www.premiere.fr/portfolio_film.php?id_film=4099

Mass Produced Fuel Cell Generators for Sale

Ballard Power Systems announced Thursday the commercial launch of its Nexa portable hydrogen fuel cell, designed to be used as a pollution-free power source for industrial and consumer uses.Ballard, best known for developing automotive fuel cells, calls Nexa the "worlds first volume-produced, proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell system." The power module generates up to 1,200 watts of electrical power. Because it only emits heat and water as the byproducts of its power generation, the equipment the fuel cell is installed in can be used indoors.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010927/10/ballard-power-systems

More Eros Data

The first detailed global mapping of an asteroid has found that most of the larger rocks strewn across the body were ejected from a single crater in a meteorite collision perhaps a billion years ago. After flying by the asteroid Mathilde in 1997, Near-Shoemaker became the first space probe to orbit and land on an asteroid when it flew around the asteroid Eros earlier this year. Then, although it was not designed to land on Eros, it was commanded to touch down. Images were returned during its descent but ceased when the probe hit the surface. However, data continued to be returned from the gamma-ray spectrometer for several days, revealing the surface composition of Eros which seems to be covered with sediment, forming striking flat "ponds" within craters.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space09270101.html

Good Enterprise Review

Saw it last night. Really, really good.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/tv/2001-09-26-enterprise-review.htm

Deep Space 1 Commentary

"This was sort of like a Dove Bar the size of Mount Everest," said Don Yeomans, a comet expert at the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where results of the flyby were displayed at a news conference Tuesday.The three jets of dust are thought to emanate from deep, well-like structures located in bowl-shaped depressions in the nucleus.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010926/10/close-up-pictures-of

Hilarious Onion Today!

http://www.theonion.com/

Deep Space 1 Survives Comets Tail

Deep Space 1s risky encounter with comet Borrelly has gone extremely well as the aging spacecraft successfully passed within 2,200 kilometers (about 1,400 miles) of the comet at 22:30 Universal Time (3:30 p.m. PDT) today. "The images and other data we collected from comet Borrelly so far will help scientists learn a great deal about these intriguing members of the solar system family," said Dr. Marc Rayman, project manager of Deep Space 1 at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Its very exciting to be among the first humans to glimpse the secrets that this comet has held since before the planets were formed."
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/release_2001_189.html

Ontario Refuses to Honor Gene Patent Rights

Excellent move... a company shouldnt be able to patent human DNA...Ontario is defying an American companys demand that the province stop funding a cancer-screening test, arguing private patents on human genes that are used in such tests put Canadas health-care system at serious risk.Ontario has no intention of following British Columbia by excluding the predictive test for ovarian and breast cancers from the provinces health plan, Premier Mike Harris said on Wednesday. Moreover, Harris told a gathering of geneticists, Ottawa has to seize the initiative and look at how Canadas patent laws are applied to the rapidly advancing field of genetics."The frontier of gene patenting has been treated like the Wild West for too long," said Harris."The benefits of a worldwide effort such as the human genome project should not be the property of a handful of people or companies."
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010919/13/ontario-defies-us

Cryptography Controls Wont Help Fight On Terrorism

Law enforcement groups have suggested that the terrorist groups associated with devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon used encryption to communicate securely over the internet.Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has already called for the government to be given backdoors into all encryption products. In a speech just days after the strikes, Gregg said that software companies "should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include backdoors in their applications.But experts say that trying to control encryption may be a waste of time and effort. Terrorists are, they say, far more likely to use steganography, which involves obscuring messages from detection in the first place, as well as straightforward codeword-based messages."If I was a terrorist, the last thing I would do is use encryption," says Brian Gladman, a UK computer scientist. "We need to find out whether encryption was used in these events at all."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991309

Hackivism Going Strong

Hackers in the US are taking down Afghanistani web sites, and posting wanted posters for Bin Laden.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/630310.asp?0si=-

Bitchin Little Gamers

Remeber this Seanny Ray?
http://www.little-gamers.com/daily.gamer?date=20010919

Ultima 1 Reborn!

Remember the ancient PC game Ultima? Its being remade in 3D -- Cant wait to see this one. Staying true to the origional rules and story line as well...
http://www.peroxide.dk/ultima/

One of 2600s Staff Comments on the WTC

One of the first thoughts that went through my head after it became clear that this was the work of terrorists was that we would no longer be living in the same country as we were the day before. What little innocence we had left had been wiped away like a stain. From this point we would be hardened, suspicious, vengeful. How could it be any other way?
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=716

Excellent Rant by the Origional Writer of AI

But consciousness and its lower strata of unconscious awareness yield not only pleasant imaginings. I mentioned the faultiness of humankind. Other bizarre kinds of life or non-life persist, inimical to our peace of mind. Take the androids of AI, Blade Runner and other science fiction movies. Such impossible beings are the inheritors of a long ancestry of chimeras plaguing our imaginations. Goblins, gnomes, fairies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, leprechauns, dragons, water sprites of various kinds, nameless things that go bump in the night: they haunt us. Above them sits a bewildering and unending hierarchy of gods and goddesses: Baal, dusky hags like Ishtar and Astarte, Zeus, Hera, Nemesis, Isis, Mithras, all the way to old Silenus, Lucifer and Satan, the Hitler of the Underworld. Such preposterous gubernatorial creatures have been and are all-pervasive. They permeate our vocabulary. Nemesis lives on. Even the word "galaxy" is named for the milk spurted from the breasts of a goddess. Thousands of these spectres have governed human life since human life began and someone lit a fire. Senior bogeymen still determine what we should eat or not eat, which way we should face when abasing ourselves to them, with whom we may or may not sleep, and against whom we should go to war. Faulty? Id say. A definite genetic misfire.
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/likehuman.jsp

Senate OKs Increased Use of Carnivore And Wiretapping

A dark day, not only for civilization, but civil liberties as well... The U.S. Senate has just approved the FBIs use of the Carnivore email surveillance system to investigate terrorist acts and computer crimes in response to Tuesdays terrorist attacks. The Senate also approved broader "wiretapping" of the Internet by law enforcement, and is urging the government to "make better use of its considerable accomplishments in science and technology" to combat terrorism.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/paranormal09170101.html

Natural Networks

Now ideas for advances in data routing are beginning to emerge from a surprisingly simple model: the ant.Indeed, applying the study of ants to complex engineering problems is something of an intellectual trend. The topic drew attention at a recent international conference on artificial intelligence in Seattle. It has been discussed in a variety of scientific journals. And a new book by Steven Johnson, "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" (Scribner), points to ant behavior as a way to further, among other things, understanding of the World Wide Web.What makes ants worth studying, if not emulating? For one thing, they exhibit something called swarm intelligence. That is, the teamwork of social insects is decentralized. Individually, an ants actions are primitive, but collectively, they result in efficient solutions to complex problems like finding the shortest route between the nest and a food source.
http://nytimes.com/2001/09/13/technology/circuits/13ANTS.html?pagewanted=all

Ancient Black Hole Speeds through Suns Galactic Neighborhood

Astronomers using the National Science Foundations Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope have found an ancient black hole speeding through the Suns Galactic neighborhood, devouring a small companion star as the pair travels in an eccentric orbit looping to the outer reaches of our Milky Way Galaxy. The scientists believe the black hole is the remnant of a massive star that lived out its brief life billions of years ago and later was gravitationally kicked from its home star cluster to wander the Galaxy with its companion.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space09120101.html

6000 Year Old Scottish Farmhouse Found

A farmhouse which was built 1,000 years before the pyramids has been unearthed in a Scottish field.University researchers found the 80ft long and 30ft wide house complete with living rooms, bedrooms and a kitchen.Archaeologists say the 6,000-year-old structure suggests Neolithic people were engineers as skilled and intelligent as modern man.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_392300.html?menu=news.scienceanddiscovery

Viking Data Still Causing Debate

Gilbert Levin was involved in the design of the LR experiment and the analysis of the results. For 25 years he has labored to show that the best explanation for the results is that they were produced by Martian organisms. He has collected microbes from Alaska and Antarctica and subjected them to the LR experiments with results that match some of the Viking results. He has experimented with a range of non-biological chemicals see if they can produce the same results. He has questioned assumptions about the absence of liquid water on Mars and the chemical effects of bombardment of the soil by ultraviolet radiation. Levin has made a tremendous contribution to the study of extra-terrestrial life and he has designed new experiments for future Mars missions that could resolve the ambiguous Viking results. Unfortunately his enthusiasm for the issue has put off some scientists who regard his claims about the Viking experiments extravagant and unfounded. Levin has pushed the pendulum towards a biological explanation for the Viking results but, as Klein pointed out, this as a long way from unambiguous evidence of life on Mars.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/space/20010906/sc/viking_data_still_cause_stir_about_mars_life_1.html

King Conan?

News on a possible new King Conan: Crown of Iron... basically an arguement about script decisions, but a new Conan movie nontheless!!
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1520

NASA spacecraft limps to a close encounter with distant comet

A battered NASA spacecraft will attempt to fly within 2,000 kilometres of the heart of a comet this month to give scientists only their second glimpse of the dark heart of a glowing space snowball. The Deep Space 1 spacecraft will swoop past the comet Borrelly on Sept. 22, snapping up to 32 black-and-white images of its nucleus.If it succeeds in sending back close-up images of the nucleus during its approach - and the odds are slim - it will be the first to examine the dark yet dynamic core of a comet since the Giotto spacecraft flew past Halley in 1986.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010909/22/nasa-spacecraft-limps

Amazing Arctic artifacts discovered

Primitive stone tools and other artifacts discovered close to the Arctic Circle in the desolate far north of European Russia indicate that a band of hunters set up camp there almost 40,000 years ago ? far earlier than previously thought, researchers report.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/arctic010905.html

Researchers create human blood cells

PRIMITIVE HUMAN blood cells, known as hematopoietic precursor cells, were produced from human embryonic stem cells by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, led by James A. Thomson. Similar work has been done in mice, but this is the first time human blood cells have been developed from embryonic stem cells, said Dan S. Kaufman, one of the authors of the study appearing in Tuesday?s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Embryonic stem cells are the basic building blocks for the 260 or so cell types in the body. During development, stem cells transform into heart, muscle, brain, skin or other tissue.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/623437.asp

Shitty Beer

Even the keenest beer drinker may hesitate before sampling the latest beverage on sale in the Orkney islands off northern Scotland -- a "Stone Age" beer flavored with animal dung.
http://news.excite.ca/news/r/010902/07/odd-dung-dc

Excite@Home Commentary

This week, more than three million Internet users who get their high-speed cable modem connections from Excite@Home watched their ISP struggle to survive. On the surface, it was a simple matter of a $50 million loan being called due, but underneath, the real issue was the very viability of broadband Internet access. With DSL companies failing one after another, and now the number one cable Internet provider apparently about to go under, is broadband, itself, in trouble?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010830.html

Millionaires on Mars?

Several dot-com millionaires have formed a foundation to bankroll space shots aimed at putting humans on Mars, a founding member tells MSNBC.com. Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk says the first mission should get off the ground as early as 2003. That mission could involve putting mice in Earth orbit to test an artificial-gravity system.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/621237.asp?cp1=1

First controllable 2D nanopatterns imaged

The first vision of a peaceable kingdom in which deposited atoms form orderly, controllable 2-D nanopatterns has been observed by researchers at the Department of Energy?s Sandia National Laboratories. Pattern control at this level means that nanotemplates could be formed to fine-tune the device characteristics of self-assembling nanostructures. Possibly, characteristics could be tailored for devices like photonic lattices, an advanced method for controlling light and of wide interest to the huge telecommunications industry.
http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/dotbar.htm

Quantum Security System To Be Tested

A portable system that will allow electronic messages to be transmitted to and from satellites in absolute secrecy has now been built by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The researchers will test the system to send quantum information 10 kilometres through horizontal free space at the start of September. Air density at this at this level approaches that experienced when transmitting information to a satellite 300 kilometres above the Earth.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991214

/. Thread on Microsoft Security

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/30/2247211

Parasitic Computing

Siphoning the computational power of the Internet, U.S. scientists have figured out a way to induce unwitting Web servers across the world to perform mathematical calculations. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana solved a complex math problem with the unauthorized help of computers in North America, Europe and Asia. Using a remote server, the team divided the problem into packages, each associated with a potential answer. The bits were then hidden inside components of the standard transmission control protocol of the Internet, and sent on their merry way.
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/08/29/stealth.computing/index.html

Cool Exhibition of High Speed Photography

The flash unit discharged twice as the water balloon was being punctured, once during the puncture and again as the water flooded the table. JoLynn took this photograph as part of a 4H-sponsored course in high-speed imaging at the Edgerton Explorit Center. She is an 8th grader at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island, Nebraska...
http://www.pacsci.org/public/education/gallery/high_speed_photos/student_photos.html

Scramjet Tested Successfully

The Sacramento Bee is running this story about the first powered device to achieve "hypersonic" speeds in the Earths atmosphere. In a series of DARPA-sponsored tests, at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, a scramjet engine, encased in a titanium projectile, was fired from a 130-foot cannon, at an initial velocity of Mach 7.1. The scramjets engines then ignited, and the object moved another 260 feet, in just 30 milliseconds, before it came to rest in a series of steel plates designed to halt the flight. Peak acceleration: about 10,000 Gs. Elapsed time, including cigarettes & pillowtalk: less than a second.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/28/1551229

Peru to Charge Fujimori

Prosecutors were given the green light by Perus Congress to charge former President Alberto Fujimori with crimes against humanity, a move officials hope will step up pressure on Japan to force the exiled leader to face justice. In a special session Monday night Congress voted 75 to 0 to lift Fujimoris constitutional immunity, opening the way for prosecutors to file charges of homicide and forced disappearances for two massacres committed by a paramilitary death squad.
http://news.excite.ca/news/ap/010828/06/int-peru-fujimori

/. Thread on IBMs Molecular Computer Initiative

Yahoo has reports that IBM researchers have created the first ever single molecule computer circuits which may someday lead to a new class of smaller and faster computers that consume less power than todays machines. The IBM team made a `` voltage inverter -- one of the three fundamental logic circuits that are the basis for all of todays computers -- from a carbon nanotube, a tube-shaped molecule of carbon atoms that is 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. IBM scientists will present the achievement today at the 222nd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society being held in Chicago and it appears in the web edition of the ACS journal Nano Letters.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/26/1954243

New algorithms speed molecular simulations

Biologists and computer scientists have joined forces to create new algorithms that allow supercomputers to model molecular activity on an unprecedented scale. The technique could enable medical researchers to better predict the impact of drugs on cells "in silico", i.e. before any experiments on cells or animals. The researchers, led by a team at the University of California, San Diego, used a recent mathematical discovery to accelerate hugely the speed at which supercomputers can process the data needed to simulate electrostatic atomic interactions.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991179

Detecting Dark Matter

Telescopes may soon be able to "see" the Universes dark matter - all that stuff in space that does not emit any light. Astronomers have succeeded in locating and weighing a galaxy cluster solely by the effect its gravity has on light from more distant objects. Within a decade, their work could lead to a 3D map of the Universes dark matter, which outweighs visible stars and galaxies by at least a factor of 10. The astronomers exploited the phenomenon of "gravitational lensing", in which light from very distant galaxies is distorted by the gravity of massive objects situated in a direct line between them and Earth. The shape and extent of the distortion tell you about the location and mass of the intervening matter.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991187

DMCA To Be Exported

While Russian graduate student Dmitry Sklyarov potentially faces five years in prison under the first criminal prosecution of a controversial new US law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed at the request of Hollywood in 1998, its backers are now busily exporting overseas its dangerous legal theories of excessive copyright protection at the price of civil liberties. Worldwide public intervention is immediately necessary to restore freedom of speech as a value promoted by free societies.
http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010816_eff_ftaa_alert.en.html

Fusion energy: The fast igniter shapes up

A main focus of work towards nuclear fusion reactors is inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses powerful energy beams, such as lasers, to compress and heat hydrogen fuel to fusion temperatures, and uses the inertia of the fuel itself to confine it long enough for fusion to occur. A modification of the fast igniter approach to ICF, reported this week, could be a significant advance towards efficient laser fusion ignition. The new system makes use of ultra-intense laser light with a novel compression geometry to achieve a laser driven implosion with picosecond fast heating by a laser pulse timed to coincide with peak compression.
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/010823/010823-4.html

Scary Amounts Of Power in MPAAs Hands

One recent Monday, my boyfriend and I returned home from a long weekend away. As usual, one of the first things we did was check our e-mail, only to discover, to our dismay, that Time-Warner Cable, our Internet service provider, had cut off access to our account sometime around midnight the Friday before. My boyfriend, a software engineer who takes his e-mail seriously, called the tech support line and was transferred to several people that evening, none of whom could help. All he could find out was that the account had been suspended for "security reasons." The next morning, we received an express-mailed letter from Time-Warner Cable, which stated that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had accused us of distributing copyrighted material. The MPAA had determined that someone, supposedly with an Internet protocol (IP) address assigned to our computer by Time-Warner at the time, had distributed the material on July 4. The part that got me was the second paragraph: "In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section 512, (ISP name) has removed or disabled access to that material."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirate/index.html

The Life of a WWII Physicist

...I worked on developing a streamlined target, towed by airplanes, that could be maneuvered to simulate realistic fighter attacks while flying far enough below the tow plane to keep the plane safe from stray trainee bullets. In our first launch from a bomb bay, the target got jammed against the tow planes fuselage in such a way as to prevent the bomb-bay doors from closing. So we couldnt land. At the pilots insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case. After that experience, we mounted the target externally and soon had a usable offset tow-target system...
http://physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-8/p40.html

Meteorite Crashes Into Ocean Near New Brunswick

A meteorite that apparently crashed into the ocean off New Brunswick early Sunday prompted a flood of calls to a Moncton newspaper. Most callers told a similar story. The entire sky lit up for a few seconds, as if during an incredible lightning storm or fireworks display, then a tadpole-shaped ball of fire flew through the sky and appeared to crash nearby. The fireball - seen from as far away as Halifax and Fredericton - appears to have travelled at a sharp downward trajectory, passing Sackville, N.B.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010821/21/nb-residents-flood

Regina Amateur Astronomer Discovers Comet By Accident

Excellent story. This guy in Regina goes to a Star Party and at 4 a.m. accidently discovers a new comet.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010821/21/regina-amateur-astronomer

Good Training Weapons Maintenance Advice

From Bu Jin Design.
http://www.bujindesign.com/faq-wooden.html

In Search of Antimatter

If equal amounts of matter and antimatter in fact existed, they would promptly combine and annihilate each other in a burst of energy. Indeed, a particle and its antiparticle are equal yet opposite in every way and should behave similarly. Physicists call this property symmetry. The fundamental symmetries of nature include charge and parity, or handedness. So an electron should behave the same way as a positron (its antiparticle), just as a particle in a right-handed coordinate system should do the same things if viewed in a three-dimensional mirror, thereby putting it in a left-handed system. Because our matter-dominated universe exists, though, physicists have been looking for situations in which particles and their antiparticles break from symmetry.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2001/082001antimatter/

Good Cassini/Voyager/Saturn Article

The Cassini-Huygens mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will reach Saturn on July 1, 2004. Cassini will be the first craft to orbit Saturn, and a half year after it arrives, its piggybacked Huygens probe will descend onto Saturns moon Titan. With the probe, scientists will be able to answer questions remaining from the earlier explorations.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space08210102.html

Salon Commentary on .NET

Microsofts .NET plan, which some observers see as part of a comprehensive strategy to battle AOL Time Warner for mastery of the online universe, is built on the premise that users will allow the consolidation of their personal information on centralized Microsoft server computers. The payoff is supposed to be "seamless" access to a vast array of online services. But to critics, the consolidation of e-mail, instant messaging and other goodies in the hands of Microsoft -- beyond, obviously, sounding antitrust alarms -- would make everyone more dependent on Microsofts software infrastructure. And that infrastructure is already prone to virus attacks and other weaknesses that the rest of the Net has so far managed to evolve strong defenses against.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/21/hotmail/index.html

Contact Addresses Regarding FTAA

...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individuals rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has gravely chilled scientists and computer security researchers freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US, and resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer. The FTAA provisions, which serve no one but American corporate copyright interests, are even more overbroad than those of the DMCA.
http://www.steenerson.com/IPcontact.htm

MIT & HP To Develop Quantum Computer

The project, announced last week, is part of a $25 million, five-year alliance launched in June 2000. Researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California and Bristol, England will work with their counterparts in MITs Media Lab, including Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac Chuang. Gershenfeld and Chuang are described as pioneers by HP in its press release, because of their past work in actually building and operating a simple quantum computer.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/20/quantum.computer.idg/

NIST Special Publication on Intrusion Detection Systems

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are software or hardware systems that automate the process of monitoring the events occurring in a computer system or network, analyzing them for signs of security problems. As network attacks have increased in number and severity over the past few years, intrusion detection systems have become a necessary addition to the security infrastructure of most organizations. This guidance document is intended as a primer in intrusion detection, developed for those who need to understand what security goals intrusion detection mechanisms serve, how to select and configure intrusion detection systems for their specific system and network environments, how to manage the output of intrusion detection systems, and how to integrate intrusion detection functions with the rest of the organizational security infrastructure. References to other information sources are also provided for the reader who requires specialized or more detailed advice on specific intrusion detection issues.
http://cryptome.org/sp800-31.htm

Star Trek Shields to Protect Supertanks

Each vehicle would be covered in smart armour using electrical fields, instead of thick metal, to give protection against anti-tank weapons. The technology, which is being perfected by defence researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, would transform armoured-vehicle construction.
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,539143,00.html

Cloned KFC

Once a chicken with desirable traits has been bred or genetically engineered, tens of thousands of eggs, which will hatch into identical copies, could roll off the production lines every hour. Billions of clones could be produced each year to supply chicken farms with birds that all grow at the same rate, have the same amount of meat and taste the same.
Sun, which complained about Microsoft having Java in Windows, is now complaining about Microsoft not having Java in Windows. Sun is publicly demanding that Microsoft support Java, and is writing its own Java Virtual Machine for Windows just in case Micros

Microsoft Trying to Kill Java Again

Sun, which complained about Microsoft having Java in Windows, is now complaining about Microsoft not having Java in Windows. Sun is publicly demanding that Microsoft support Java, and is writing its own Java Virtual Machine for Windows just in case Microsoft doesnt see the light. This is ludicrous. Sun looks stupid and Microsoft can point to its actions as simply being in accordance with the terms of their legal settlement. And while many XP users may load Suns JVM, most probably wont and Java will be seriously hurt as a de facto standard. A great irony here is that Sun is really getting the end it asked for, but didnt expect to achieve. The Java license agreement was written with Microsoft in mind and tested at great expense by the best legal minds in Silicon Valley. It was a trap set by Sun for Microsoft only Microsoft has turned the tables.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010816.html

Pentagons Stealth Email

The Onion Routing solution, which follows much the same recipe as Zero Knowledges Freedom software and cypherpunk-developed mixmaster remailers, is to forward communications through a complicated network that bounces Internet packets around like pinballs and hides the origin and destination from all but the most determined eavesdroppers.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html

New Black Ops Spy Plane Uncovered

Soon to take to the air is the X-47A Pegasus. Shaped like a kite, the craft is to be tested at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California.
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=h_pegasus6_02.jpg

Berkeley Breathed Interview

Berkeley Breatheds wildly successful newspaper comic strip Bloom County was like no strip before or since. From its 1980 inception, Breathed changed hats on a regular basis: He was intermittently a political cartoonist, calling attention to feminist issues, SDI, cosmetic testing on animals, and pork-barrel politics. At other times, he was a social critic, making fun of artistic trends and celebrity foibles. Sometimes he was just plain whimsical, as his characters took dandelion breaks, explored closets full of anxieties, or created Star Trek fantasies to inhabit. Whatever mode he was in, Breathed was a success: Bloom County collections consistently hit bestseller lists, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for editorial cartooning.
http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3728/avfeature_3728.html

Planetary System Found Similar to Ours

Astronomers have found a planetary system remarkably similar to the suns -- two planets traveling in circular orbits around a star in the Big Dipper. The star is similar to the sun in chemical composition, and astronomers say the circular paths and sizes of the two planets hint at the presence of smaller, Earth-like bodies in tighter orbits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/A15988-2001Aug15.html

New Military Supercompooter

ASCI White was designed for the government by IBM Corp., which delivered it to Livermore last year in 28 tractor-trailers. The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997. The machine is networked to researchers at Livermore and the Sandia and Los Alamos national labs in New Mexico via an encrypted line. It went through months of testing and debugging before being dedicated Wednesday.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010815/22/worlds-most-powerful

Dancing Around A Black Hole

A heavy Black Hole aggressively feeds on its surroundings. As the neighboring gas and stars finally spiral into the Black Hole, a large fraction of the infalling mass is transformed into pure energy. However, scientists do not yet understand exactly how, long before this dramatic event takes place, all that material is moved from the outer regions of the galaxy towards the central region. To better understand this, a team of French and Swiss astronomers carried out a series of trailblazing observations with the VLT Infrared Spectrometer And Array Camera (ISAAC) on the VLT 8.2-m ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space08150103.html

Anonymous Online Speech Upheld in US

Pre-Paid said it needed to know the identities of the posters to determine whether they had revealed company trade secrets. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the posters, argued they were merely exercising their First Amendment right to criticize the company, and Pre-Paid was trying to silence its detractors by bullying them. According to the EFF, Cabrinha ruled from the bench during a hearing Friday to quash a subpoena requiring Yahoo to turn over the names.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6863061.html?tag=mn_hd

Professor to Speak About Cracking SDMI

A Princeton University professor plans to publicly detail on Wednesday how his research team disabled the music industrys latest anti-piracy technology after receiving assurances from the industry he would not be sued.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46067,00.html

/. Thread On 3D Games

Interesting discussion... from Stephensons Metaverse to a response from IDs John Carmack.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/13/1629258

Canadian Version of the DMCA

In order for Canada to be an important player in the emerging digital economy, the Copyright Act may need to be amended to ensure that it continues to be meaningful, clear and balanced. In particular, the examination of key digital copyright issues is necessary to fully realize the governments priority of promoting the dissemination of new and interesting content on-line, for and by Canadians. The departments believe it is now an opportune moment to initiate consultation with stakeholders on whether the Act should be amended to:
- set out a new exclusive right in favour of copyright owners, including performers and record producers, to make their works available on-line to the public;
- prevent the circumvention of technologies used to protect copyright material; and,
- prohibit tampering with rights management information.
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/ip00001e.html

Majestic Review

...must...get...this...game...You only use 12% of your brain. Mind if we play with the rest?
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/10/majestic/index.html

Penny Arcade

Lots of funny stuff today. Tim, check this one.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3

Eliza Eats Spam

Check this out. Remeber that old Eliza basic program? Somebodys ported it to perl and is using it to respond to spam. Source code included!
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=103656&lastnode_id=104196

Windows 2020

Gates and his minions literally went underground in 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled against the company for the 1,249th time in the antitrust case that began in 1997. Authorities gave up trying to extract them after concluding that cracking open the bunker might hurt the people inside, who technically werent criminals because theyd never actually been charged.
http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

Kurzweils AI Site

Check out the interactive Ramona engine.
http://www.kurzweilai.net

Kurzweils One Half An Arguement

Interesting response to Jaron Laniers One Half a Manifesto.

The brain is not one big neural net. It consists of hundreds of regions, each of which is organized differently, with different types of neurons, different types of signaling, and different patterns of interconnections. By and large, the algorithms are not the sequential, logical methods that are commonly used in digital computing. The brain tends to use self organizing, chaotic, holographic (i.e., information not in one place but distributed throughout a region), massively parallel, and digital controlled-analog methods. However, we have demonstrated in a wide range of projects the ability to understand these methods, and to extract them from the rapidly escalating knowledge of the brain and its organization.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil//kurzweil_index.html

Exposing the Talibans

Social change: this is what the net is for.
A very courageous story.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45974,00.html

Bitchin Webserver!

Humanclock.com runs on a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, using a stripped-down version of the Apache webserver software (version 100-BASIC.12 beta). The graphic files are stored on magnetic tape accessed via a modified Radio Shack personal cassette player (CAT NO. 14-1215). The webserver is powered by a 6 volt TRS-80 AC Adaptor (CAT NO. 26-3804). We take our web hosting very seriously at humanclock.com, therefore we have installed 4 "AA" batteries in the webserver in case of power failure. Whereas some battery backup systems last for only 20 minutes and cost hundreds of dollars, our power backup solution lasts for 20 hours and costs $2.49, (due to it being double coupon Tuesday). In the case of power outage however, it takes our webserver about one second to come back online, something that would take a common UNIX/NT system over two minutes.
http://www.humanclock.com/webserver.html

RC4 Broken

The problem lies with the RC4s Key Scheduling Algorithm, which is derived from a secret key, and is used to convert messages into code. The researchers found that, under certain circumstances, this process is predictable and discovered that with WEP they could reverse the process, discover the secret key and decipher all messages.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991114

Genetic Packaging More Important Than Once Thought

Allis, and others, think the newly identified switch may be a key part of the answer. Whats more, Allis believes the switch may be controlled by a heritable genetic code, separate to that found in DNA.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991140

Software Innovation is Dying?

The Internet under its original design built a platform that induced lots of innovation in applications and content. And it did this by embracing an end-to-end principle, which meant that the network would remain as simple as possible and push all of the intelligence and, therefore, innovation to the end. This is the vision that is now enabled by a peer-to-peer architecture, and its the environment that has inspired the greatest amount of innovation around the Internet in its history. Now this architecture threatens existing interests, business interests and Hollywood interests, and in response to that threat there have been a number of changes that have occurred in both the technical and legal environment, aiming to undermine this platform for innovation, aiming to change it into a platform where its easier for certain interests to exercise control over innovation on that platform.
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/08/07/lessig.html

FBI Hunts Code Red Writer

"We are very serious about finding the authors of Code Red and SirCam," the NIPCs Debra Weierman said. "Intentional transmission of worms or viruses across the Internet is a felony. This is a major offense, not some inconsequential lark."
Maybe if people would bother to close the holes caused by M$ products, this stuff wouldnt happen to begin with.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,45956,00.html

Matrix 2 Delayed

In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, Joel Silver, producer of the two upcoming Matrix sequels, stated that the release of the first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, likely wont happen until 2003. "Its going to be summer now, summer 2003," Silver said in an interview at the premiere for Osmosis Jones, in which he has a cameo role. But there are also rumors had The Matrix Reloaded opening as soon as Christmas 2002. And as for the release of The Matrix 3, Silver simply said, "Youll see."
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1493

/. Thread on Anti-Virus Viruses

Hmm... a virus that takes advantage of backdoors opened by other viral systems which then nuke the bad virus and repair the damage. Interesting idea.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/08/1311210&mode=thread

Toronto Heat Emergency

The citys heat alert was upgraded to a "heat emergency" Tuesday morning as residents awoke to yet another stifling summer day. A heat emergency is declared when there is a likelihood of more than 90 per cent that people will die from the heat, said Emergency Medical Services spokesman Dean Shaddock.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010807/10/45-degree-threat

Human Cloning to be Attempted in US

An shocking announcement is set to be made at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on Thursday: Up to 200 women will soon be impregnated with cloned embryos in the worlds first attempt to produce a human clone. The test is planned for November, possibly on a boat in international waters to avoid political interference. Scientists will use a technique similar to the one developed to produce Dolly the sheep.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/paranormal08070101.html

Good Diesel Sweeties Today

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/strips/sw216.shtml

/. Thread on Nanotech and the Law

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/01/194208

Four Simple Cryptographic Attacks on HDCP

Intel has developed a new standard for device authentication and digital content encryption. It was developed specifically for encrypting uncompressed digital video on its way to a monitor (either a computer monitor or a television) specifically with DVI (digital video interface). It is, however, general enough to be used for other forms of digital information. The standard is availible from Digital Content Protection, LLC, a corporation formed to act as a holding company for the standard. My sources have told me that the MPAA has been pressuring the direct satellite services (DirecTV and the DishNetwork) to require that all movies be transmitted from the satellite set-top box to the monitor via DVI protected with HDCP. They believe it to be more secure than the existing high-definition analog connections. I respectfully must disagree.
http://cryptome.org/hdcp-4attacks.htm

Immortal Cancer Cells Subject of Film

On Oct. 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Poor and black, the daughter of tobacco pickers in rural Virginia, and mother of five, the 31-year-old woman might have died in obscurity, forgotten by all but her immediate family and friends. Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951, is the subject of Gilberts documentary. But Henrietta Lacks will live forever - in laboratories and research centers worldwide that use her unique, immortal cells for medical research. The cells of her cancer, known as HeLa cells, were the first human cells discovered to thrive and multiply outside the body, seemingly forever, allowing researchers to conduct experiments previously impossible. HeLa cells were instrumental in creating the polio vaccine and may, one day, help cure cancer. In what has become a billion-dollar industry, HeLa cells have traveled around the world and been shot into space.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/07.19/04-filmmaker.html

Heartless God Always Chooses Continue

Hilarious Onion Today!
http://www.theonion.com/onion3726/video_game_character.html

Enterprise Spoilers

Starfleet is less than twenty years old in 2151 and with the founding of the Federation decades away, humanity has only now been able to construct advanced warp technology capable of traveling warp 5. The Vulcans refused over the century since Cochranes warp flight in First Contact to share their advanced warp technology and the new mark of warp 5 breaks a barrier to exploration that has hindered human expansion. At warp 5, 10,000 inhabited planets are within one years journey, compared to only 18 at warp 2.
http://www.section31.com/stories/july-2001/072901_c.htm

Supercomputer to Model Universe

The supercomputer is built of 152 processors, can perform 10 billion calculations per second and will use astronomical data to create detailed simulations of how the Universe formed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1465000/1465018.stm

Echelon: the Risk is There

EU government press release on the reality, and dangers of Echelon.
http://www.cyber-rights.org/interception/echelon/

Spacecraft to Bring Back Bits of Solar Wind

Genesis will travel beyond Earths magnetic field to a spot 1.6 million kilometres away from the planet. It will spend about 2½ years circling that imaginary point, gathering bits of solar material hurtling by at more than 1.6 kilometres an hour.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010730/00/spacecraft-to-bring

Viking Was Wrong?

Working from a printed record that the initial NASA team had saved, Miller has been able to assemble and analyze about a third of the data and plans to present his initial findings on Sunday at a scientific conference in San Diego. Miller found the gas emissions from the soil sample fell into a cycle of precisely 24.66 hours -- the length of the Martian day -- a pattern that was linked to a slight variation in the temperature inside the mostly insulated lander.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010727/sc/space_mars_life_dc_1.html

Best Video Ever?

Curve videos now up at launch.com. This is a link to Curve
Horror Head.
http://www.launch.com/musicvideos/view/not_start/1,,158295~570,00.html"

African Manual for Covert Ops

Fascinating African National Congress manual for covert actions, which was published during 1988-90. Check this out:
Secret methods are based on common sense and experience. But theymust be mastered like an art. Discipline, vigilance and self-control are required. A resistance organiser in Nazi-occupiedFrance who was never captured said this was because he `neverused the telephone and never went to public places like bars, restaurants and post offices. He was living a totallyunderground life. But even those members of a secret movement who have a legal existence must display the qualities we have referred to.
http://cryptome.org/anc-manual.htm

Wireds Story on the New Popularity of SETI

... endeavors that are underway include an ambitious survey of the sky for laser signals to begin next year in Boston; the completion of construction of the Allen Telescope Array, the largest instrument dedicated to the search for ET, in Northern California; and NASAs possible launch of the Kepler Mission, a space-based telescope designed to hunt for Earth-like planets.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45559,00.html

/. Thread on the Re-release of Akira

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/25/1213202

Recent Water on Mars

New images of the surface of Mars provide the first direct evidence that the climate of Mars changed during the last 100,000 years, much more recently than the hundreds of millions of years scientists had previously thought, according to Brown University geologist John Mustard. The high- resolution images show evidence of water ice closer to the equator than had previously been observed.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=5597

$200K US For Factoring a Number!

OK, so its a *big* number... 617 digits.
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/factoring/numbers.html#RSA576

Moores Law and the Ultimate Laptop

"Something else has happened with computers. Whats happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings ? and their artifacts ? we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd/lloyd_index.html

Microchips Over Matter

Implanting tiny chips, data, algorithms and programs in your head will not, as Kosko contends, boost cognitive function one bit, if by that we mean "thinking." Being able to access "all knowledge and all databases at the speed of light" is a little like being able to park a teeny-tiny version of the Library of Congress inside your skull. Then what? Not much. Lots of data, even if access to it could be wired in the brain, skipping the display screen, does not impart "bit-based omniscience," in Koskos Promethean phrase. Youd have to think about it with that flawed brain.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-000057575jul14.story

Security Through Obscurity?

The most misunderstood statement in the computer security field has got to be "security through obscurity is bad."
http://securityportal.com/beale/beale20010720.html

MI6, Bush, and Foot and Mouth

Interesting article from crypthome... last December, just after Bush?s confirmation by the Reagan-nominated US Supreme Court, a thief walked through fences and walls and got into the British Ministry of Defence Laboratory at Porton Down, a maximum security facility which contains a wide range of the most dangerous viruses and poisons in the world. The thief knew what he was looking for ? he escaped with a phial of foot and mouth virus.
http://cryptome.org/mi6-bush.htm

NASAs Space Droids

It looks like something straight out of a Star Wars movie. And to hear it described -- a self-propelled, floating, talking, computerized personal assistant with artificial intelligence -- you might suspect it really is a "droid" from a science fiction film. The similarity isnt a coincidence. The design was actually inspired by the small floating sphere that Luke Skywalker sparred against in the original Star Wars!
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23jul_1.htm?list153858

Jet Li & Jackie Chan Togeather

It?s the moment martial arts fans have been waiting for since Hong Kong?s two biggest action stars first kicked spectacular arse on the big screen. Martial arts masters Jackie Chan and Jet Li will be thrown together for the first time in an upcoming film set to start filming in fall 2002, according to Variety.
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1474

25 Years After Viking

The mightiest probe ever to land on another planet settled down on Mars on this day 25 years ago, igniting a scientific firestorm that still rages today -- Does the red planet possess life?
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/20/viking.anniversary/index.html

Excellent Streaming Radio Station

http://www.pulsefm.co.uk/

Been a Good Year for AI

I just nominated four recent breakthrus in AI that I think are especially significant: robots that walk on two legs, software that can recognise faces, the computer games The Sims and Black & White, and the semantic web (XML) movement...
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9j9a4u%24cqi%241%40mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU

Sweet Webpad

Looks pretty sweet. Pretty hefty pricetag though... $2.3K US.
http://store.sonicblue.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10?xid=25971&SP=10023&PN=1&V1=315568&DSP=&CUR=840&CACHE_ID=0

Sex From Space

Comet or asteroid impacts could have stressed asexual organisms enough to send them down the path of sexual reproduction after forcing a flurry of genetic mutations, the study shows. Heavy doses of radiation might also have done the trick.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/origin_sex_010710.html

Digital Organisms Confirm Darwin

Digital organisms, essentially computer programs obeying the laws of mutation and natural selection, can be used to investigate the interplay between the basic processes of evolution. One such experiment puts a new spin on the darwinian concept of the survival of genotypes with high replication rates ? the survival of the fittest.
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/010719/010719-4.html

New Form of Bose-Einstien Condensate Discovered

Through tinkering with magnetic fields, the researchers have successfully shrunk the condensate, which is followed by a tiny explosion -- similar in some ways to a microscopic supernova explosion and which Wiemans team has dubbed a "Bosenova." About half of the original atoms seem to disappear during the process, he said.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science07190102.html

So I Married an Australopithicene

http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2001/07/19/boll/index.html

Kursk is Comin Up

Naval engineers using a remote-control, deep-sea vessel conducted exploratory work Tuesday at the site where the Kursk nuclear submarine sank, laying the groundwork for the complex, two-month operation to raise the shattered ship.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010717/04/russian-naval-experts

More New/Old Enterprise Pics

Also see this picture
http://www.section31.com/stories/july-2001/071301_b.htm

Looking for Dumb Aliens

Interesting article... what if aliens are too dumb or dont want to talk? How do we find them then?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2001/071601alien/

IBM Releases AI Helpdesk Ware

IBM announced on Thursday the release of software that intends to replace humans on perennially understaffed computer help desks. The software, called Virtual Help Desk, incorporates an artificial intelligence component that can understand complaints in normal prose - typed, not spoken - and fix the problem, said John Richards of IBMs eBusiness support division. IBM bills the program as a ``self-help, self-healing and self-diagnostic tool, released as part of its ongoing ``autonomic computing technology billed under the name Project eLiza.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010712/tc/ibm_ai_software_1.html

Pulsars and the Theory of Relativity

In a recent joint effort, astronomers from Australia and the U.S. utilized CSIROs Parkes radio telescope to measure the distortion of space-time near a star 450 light-years from Earth, thus completing the most precise astrophysics experiment in history.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space07160103.html

New Jet Li Movie

The film tells the story of a man traveling through alternate realities, killing the other versions of himself to absorb their power. Li plays both the evil entity and an alternate version who must stop him.
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1470

Pravda Reports New Energy Source Discovered

Russian scientists have made a sensational discovery. Some fundamental investigations realized by them could entail a real revolution on the field of industry and power engineering and allow to make series of new inventions.
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/12/9954.html

/. Thread on Why Shower Curtains Pull In

A UMass professor, Dr. David Schmidt, used computer modeling to figure out why shower curtains suck inward during showers. He designed an image of his mother-in-laws shower, filled it with 50,000 3D velocity/pressure sensors, and turned on the virtual water. 1.5 trillion calculations later, he found that drag on the falling water drops creates a mini-hurricance, producing a low-pressure eye that attracts the shower curtain.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/15/1355250

/. Final Fantasy Reviews

Excellent /. thread on Final Fantasy. Ignore the Katz review at the top and read on below... I just saw the movie and thought it was excellent. The plot became a little preachy at the end, but still fabulous.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/12/0112213

Most Accurate Clock Created

Researchers have just come up with a new type of atomic clock even more precise than the current technology in use. The clock is accurate to one second in the lifetime of the Universe -­ about 15 billion years ­- and it works on the same basic principle that microwave atomic clocks have used since the 1950s. However, the new clock uses optical light, which is of a higher frequency, providing more accurate timekeeping.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science07130101.html

New Farthest Objects Found

According to a report by BBC News, scientists at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have recently detected the two most distant objects to ever be observed. Dr. Donald Schneider of Pennsylvania State University says that two quasars have been spotted with redshifts of 6.0 and 6.2, which break the previous record established by last years SDSS discovery of a quasar at redshift 5.8.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space07120103.html

ISS Sucks?

International Space Station sucks says commander... Leaked documents show astronauts on board the International Space Station had to put up with dozens of irritating problems which made their lives a misery. Medical labels in Russian, noisy machinery and even a lack of shampoo left them at their wits end.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_349682.html

Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer

Most conventional supercomputers employ parallel processing: they contain arrays of ultrafast microprocessors that work in tandem to solve complex problems such as forecasting the weather or simulating a nuclear explosion. Made by IBM, Cray and other computer vendors, the machines typically cost tens of millions of dollars--far too much for a research team with a modest budget. So over the past few years, scientists at national laboratories and universities have learned how to construct their own supercomputers by linking inexpensive PCs and writing software that allows these ordinary computers to tackle extraordinary problems.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html

Antimatters Not So Tough

Looks like antimatter is not all its cracked up to be, a group of international physicists have announced in a finding which proves there is a good reason for our universe, made of matter, to exist.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/antimatter_universe_010709.html

DARPA RFP for Chip Scale Atomic Clock

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting research proposals in the area of Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC). Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state-of-practice. DARPA seeks innovative proposals in the area of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) implementation of CSAC. The final goal is to demonstrate an integrated, MEMS-fabricated, ultra miniaturized atomic time and frequency reference units that will achieve significant reductions in size (for example, 1 cm cubed in final package excluding battery) and power consumption (on the order of 30 mW) over state-of-the-art devices, while providing frequency accuracy on the order of 1x10 to the negative 11th power (Allen deviation at one-hour integration time).
http://cryptome.org/darpa070601.txt

Microsoft-English Dictionary

Hilarious:"Cross-Platform" - (1)(n) - Industry standard definition for a product that runs on multiple computing environments (See "Platform"). (2)(n) - Microsofts marketing term used to mean a product that runs on any of Microsofts platforms. (e.g., Microsofts Java is cross-platform since it runs on Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, and XP.)
http://www.infowarrior.org/articles/2001-04.html

Human Embryos Created for Harvesting

Scientists at Eastern Virginia Medical School have created human embryos from donated eggs and sperm for the sole purpose of harvesting embryonic stem cells for research, according to a study published Wednesday.
http://news.excite.ca/news/ap/010711/12/stem-cell-research

First Peeks at the New Enterprise

Heres the design of the new/old enterprise. Looks a whole lot like the Akira class... strange to see from a pre-tos design. A bigger pic is also here.
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/TP/scoops/scoops.html#enterprise

Underwater Ruins Found in Peru

Interesting. When we were in Puno, the locals were exitedly talking about ruins found recently by divers in lake Titicaca. We wanted to go, but the altitude sickness forbid us from even thinking about it.
http://www.discover.com/jan_01/featatlantis.html

Radar Map of Victoria

This three-frequency spaceborne radar image shows the southern end of Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada. The white area in the lower right is the city of Victoria, the capital of the province of British Columbia. The three radar frequencies help to distinguish different land use patterns. The bright pink areas are suburban regions, the brownish areas are forested regions, and blue areas are agricultural fields or forest clear- cuts. Founded in 1843 as a fur trading post, Victoria has grown to become one of western Canadas largest commercial centers. In the upper right is San Juan Island, in the state of Washington. The Canada/U.S. border runs through Haro Strait, on the right side of the image, between San Juan Island and Vancouver Island.
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev16/ev1610_PIA01830_md.jpg

Curve Working With Republica!

Dean and I are presently working on some material with Saffron from Republica, its all very poptastic and sleazy just like we like it.
http://www.curve.co.uk/news.htm

Interesting New Celestial Object Found

There are many kinds of celestial objects in the Universe but we are far from knowing them all. XMM-Newton may have discovered a new one: a very luminous soft X-ray source that is pulsating extremely rapidly in the central region of the Andromeda galaxy. This unusual object could be a new kind of accreting white dwarf.
http://sci.esa.int/content/news/index.cfm?aid=1&cid=1&oid=27568

Brain Ballon!

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20010704/us/mensa_brain_balloon_txks103.html

Atari Lives!

The original king of the consoles is 24 years old, boasts clunky graphics and dinky sounds, yet is still doing quite nicely, thank you.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/09/atari/index.html

Good Sugano Sensei Interview

Sugano Sensei taught at the 2000 summer camp, which I attended. Excellent instructor.
http://www.aikidoonline.com/feat_0601_sug.html

Strange Glowing Lights on Io

Strange glows have been seen dancing over Jupiters moon Io. They were recorded during an eclipse of Io in January, witnessed by the Cassini spacecraft that was on its way to Saturn.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1409000/1409117.stm

Hopi Indian Legend May Be Proved Out

Until recently, the story was considered Hopi mythology, which said the clan traveled in the four directions of the compass but there seemed to be no proof the Hopis ever left the Southwest and brought their culture elsewhere. Now Canadian archaeologists, with help from an American photographer, are beginning to change their minds and believe the story of the clans travels just might by history rather than myth.
http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=199193

Excellent Hubble Mars Pic

http://www.cosmiverse.com/space07050105image2.html