Next-Gen Tablet PCs

Tablet PCs will be available in two basic formats: the "convertible" model with an integrated keyboard and a display that rotates 180 degrees and can be folded down over the keyboard, and the "slate" style with a removable keyboard. The Scribbler is a slate model. The Scribbler came pre-loaded with Microsofts Windows XP Professional Tablet PC Edition. Digital Ink is the tablets killer app, allowing users to input information by writing or drawing with a stylus directly on the screen. Its like jotting notes on a piece of paper.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56130,00.html

/. Thread On "Broadjump Client Foundation"

Scary -- I had this installed and didnt know it.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/26/2311244&mode=thread&tid=172

150 Years Of Silly Patents

Inventors have been registering bright ideas with the UK Patent Office for 150 years. While the flush toilet, computer and aspirin have proved invaluable, the same cannot be said of every innovation. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time: an alarm to be fitted inside a coffin, just the thing to guard against premature burials. Or how about a moustache protector and trainer, or a ladder for spiders to climb out of the bath?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2327327.stm

BBC Wins Police Tardis Case

The BBC has won a battle to keep control of Dr Whos Tardis after the Metropolitan Police unsuccessfully argued it should own the trade mark of the distinctive image. The time travelling vessel became the subject of a legal wrangle as the Metropolitan Police fought to gain control of the blue box, which was a familiar sight on the streets of London up until the 1960s. The police objected to the BBC using the image of the Tardis on comics, T-shirts, videos and other merchandise, something it has done since the 1970s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/2352743.stm

Confirmed: ALH84001Contained Life

The strange shapes seen in a rock from Mars that some researchers say are fossilised bacteria really are tiny micro organisms, say American researchers. But while they are confident the Mars rock contains fossilised life they cannot quite bring themselves to say it comes from the Red Planet, it might be Earthly contamination. Despite the uncertainty about their origin establishing that the small structures really were living things, and not just mineral globules, would be an advance in a field that has sharply divided opinions. Lawrence Taylor of the University of Tennessee told BBC News Online that so-called "nannobacteria" found on Earth resemble those found in the Mars rock." The next task is to find a way to determine if they really came from Mars.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2354533.stm

China Circumnavigated The Globe In 1423?

Plans are afoot to try and emulate the travels of a Chinese eunuch who is believed to have discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus. Admiral Zheng He is extremely well known in China, where he is considered one of the pioneers of marine exploration. But he is virtually unknown in the West, where it is widely considered that Columbus discovered the "New World" first in 1492, although many Scandinavian historians claim the Vikings beat him by nearly 500 years. Gavin Menzies, a retired British submarine commander who is bringing out a book on Zhang He next month, says many academics not just in China but also on the West Coast of the US believe he found North America and Australia during a two-year odyssey which began in 1421.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2349929.stm

More Wolfram Universe As Code Stuff

Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of Science and creator of the Mathematica software system, captivated the audience at PopTech with his theory in a session titled "The Rules of Reality, Revealed." "Any system whose behavior doesnt look obviously simple to us is as simple as any computational system," said Wolfram, explaining the principle of computational equivalence.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,55939,00.html

FDA Approves ID Chip Implants

A surprise decision by the Food and Drug Administration permits the use of implantable ID chips in humans, despite an FDA investigators recent public reservations about the devices. The FDA sent chip manufacturer Applied Digital Solutions a letter stating that the agency would not regulate the VeriChip if it was used for "security, financial and personal identification or safety applications," ADS said Tuesday.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55952,00.html

Brutal -- US Patent Disallows Breast Cancer Testing

A key breast cancer test can no longer be done in B.C. because an American company has the gene patent.Utah-based Myriad Genetics Inc. has put a patent on two genes that can signal whether a woman may develop hereditary breast cancer.Dr. Simon Sutcliffe, who runs the B.C. Cancer Agency, said 200 of the tests are now being routed annually to Ontario, which is ignoring the patent.The agency used to do its own tests until the B.C. government recently ordered it to stop after legal threats by Myriad.
http://canada.com/victoria/story.asp?id=%7B0D0279FC-B2F4-48CA-9A46-6DFF52DE2173%7D

Downloading Your Brain

Wed all like to live forever, but biology wont cooperate. So heres a modest proposal. Why dont we scan our most essential feature - our mind - digitize it, and transfer it to a computer? The result could be a kind of digital immortality. It would also release us from the limitations of our bodies, and allow us, paradoxically, to fulfill even more of our human potential, in a computer. This is the radical idea of inventor and writer Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines he draws a roadmap, showing how advancing computer technology and Artificial Intelligence will lead to the possibility of existence inside of a computer in just a few decades.
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/archives/02-03/oct19.html

Power Homes

Sure, you might have DSL and Wi-Fi, an Xbox and a TiVo, maybe a Bang & Olufsen stereo with 5-foot speakers and a six-CD changer, but youre still an amateur in the world of extreme home networking ? where computer-controlled window shades and palm-scanning security systems are de rigueur. It is a world driven by insatiable gadget lust and no small amount of money. Youve met these people before: the rich, often famous, who build and furnish outrageous homes to match their larger-than-life personas. In the 70s they installed the latest in hi-fi, in the 80s remote everything, and in the 90s megaplex-scale home theaters. The newest generation of electronics pioneers is different, because home networking is more than just the latest entertainment indulgence. It will be the backbone infrastructure of the 21st-century lifestyle. Just as the office LAN, designed to let PCs share printers and exchange files, helped supercharge the growth of the Internet, so the home network will help seamlessly weave the Net into our lives.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/power_houses.html

Supermassive Black Hole In The Center Of The Galaxy

Observations of the star closest to the heart of the Milky Way confirms the existence of a colossal black hole there, astronomers announced Wednesday. The star passes within 17 light-hours of a compact radio source known as Sagittarius A, pegged as the galactic center, and completes an oval orbit around the super hot spot every 15.2 years. The orbital attributes mean that the entire mass of the interior object, between 2.6 million and 3.7 million times that of the sun, is crammed within a space about three times the size of our solar system. The staggering density could only result from a supermassive black hole, according to physicist Rainer Schoedel, who with colleagues published the findings in this weeks journal Nature.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/10/16/black.hole/index.html

Protien Folding Modelled

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California, San Diego, have created the first computer simulation of full-system protein folding thermodynamics at the atomic-level. Understanding the basic physics of protein folding could solve one of the grand mysteries of computational biology.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/news/tech/1002/tech10160201.html

Seti@Home: Now Past 4K Work Units

Results Received 4053
Total CPU Time 5.980 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 12 hr 55 min 33.5 sec
Average results received per day 3.24

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

New Peruvian Inca Grave Found

Peruvian archeologists have discovered the first full Inca burial site at Machu Picchu since the famous mountaintop citadel was discovered 90 years ago, officials said on Saturday. "Its important because nothing like this -- a burial site and all that goes with it -- has been found since the Bingham era," Machu Picchus administrator, Fernando Astete, told Reuters, referring to the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham who rediscovered the Inca citadel in 1911. "The find is significant because of the funeral objects, such as stone and clay pots and five metal objects accompanying the remains of bones of a person, probably a woman," he added.
http://www.rense.com/general30/SITE.HTM

The Importance Of Receiving

The problem that arises out of comparing Aikido to other martial arts is that Aikido exists in the absolute world while other arts deal with the relative world. This is not to say that everyone is in the place of no contest: the absolute, but OSensei pointed the way through his practice and his character and gave the art direction. It seems that everyone these days is worrying about Aikidos effectiveness or how it will do against this art or that art. Let me give an example of Aikido trainings "effectiveness" from my own experience.
http://www.aikiweb.com/spiritual/messisco1.html

New Teotihuacan Find

A new discovery at the pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico is revealing a pre-Hispanic past that was probably less egalitarian and less peace-loving than some scholars believed. Recent archaeological digs have turned up the first evidence of a ruling elite and provided more evidence of mass human sacrifices at Teotihuacan, a vast complex of pyramids outside Mexico City that was a thriving metropolis of 150,000 at the time of Jesus.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/820810.asp?0dm=N25GT

Mars Biological Potential

Researchers Bruce Jakosky, Stacy Varnes, and Thomas McCollom have looked at the biological potential of Martian hydrothermal systems, presenting their findings this week at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society in Birmingham, Alabama."Weve been working on this for several years. What weve done is look at the availability of geochemical energy in the environment of Mars as a source of energy that might support metabolism of organisms," Jakosky told SPACE.com. On Earth there are organisms that use that source of energy - energy given off by chemical weathering reactions like oxidation of iron and minerals, Jakosky said.Organisms on Mars could, in a figurative sense, stick their finger into that reaction, mediate it, and take advantage of the energy, Jakosky said. "What weve done is to look at the types of environments that occur on Mars and use them as a constraint to calculate how much energy could be available," he added.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_biological_021011.html

The Plastic Brain

An intricate society populated by billions of demanding neurons exists inside every brain. Each of those neurons has a complicated life with desires that must be met in order to stave off stupidity, according to research presented at the American Neurological Associations (ANA) annual meeting. Brain plasticity doesnt refer to the texture of ones gray matter, but instead indicates how the 100 billion or so neurons in a brain communicate with each other. A plastic brain is a learning brain.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55779,00.html

Oh, No: A Live-Action Remake Of Akira?

Warner Bros. Pictures will produce a live-action, English-language remake of Japans anime classic "Akira." Director Stephen Norrington, who has just wrapped superhero drama "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," has reteamed with "League" screenwriter James Robinson to develop the project. Released in 1988, "Akira" was the brainchild of Katsuhiro Otomo, who directed the film and wrote the comic from which it stemmed. The remake will tell the story of a bike gang leader who must rescue his younger brother from his involvement in Akira, a secret government project. In the process, the biker must do battle with anti-government activists, greedy politicians and irresponsible scientists.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=600&e=5&cid=848&u=/variety/20021010/film_variety/film_akira_dc

"In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

/. Thread -- How To Write A Blog

"Long-time weblogger Rebecca Bloods The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog is an excellent introduction to the currently white-hot world of weblogs. Blood covers all the bases, from a history of the weblog form, through starting a blog of your own, and finally onto finding (and retaining) readers for your site. The book doesnt offer as much for the veteran blogger, but even the bloggeratti wont go away completely empty-handed -- Bloods weblog history provides a valuable common vocabulary for debating what is and isnt a weblog, and her discussion of weblog ethics should be required reading for anybody who claims to be serious about their weblogging."
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/03/1323250&mode=thread&tid=99

New Planet(?) Found

A new planet-like object has been found circling the Sun more than one and a half billion kilometres beyond Pluto. Quaoar, as it has been dubbed, is about 1,280 kilometres across (800 miles) and is the biggest find in the Solar System since Pluto itself 72 years ago. The object is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and circles the Sun every 288 years. It is half Plutos size, but apparently larger than the ninth planets moon, Charon.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2306945.stm

Why The Big Net Slowdown Last Thursday

The problem affected roughly 20 percent of UUNets U.S. customers -- which translates to millions of users across the United States and around the world -- for most of Thursday, according to WorldCom spokeswoman Jennifer Baker. The problem began around 8 a.m. EDT. Baker said in a statement that the company had fully restored service by 5:15 p.m. Thursday evening. Preliminary investigation by UUNet indicates the problems were caused by "a route table issue."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,55580,00.html

Broadcast Quantum Crypto

Quantum cryptography, a technique of producing secret messages that are reputedly uncrackable, may soon be used by orbiting communications satellites thanks to experiments by British and German researchers.The traditional weakness of sending encoded messages is eavesdropping. Quantum cryptography gets around this by sending an encoded message and, separately, a key to decode it, which are transmitted in pulses of individual light particles called photons.By the nature of quantum mechanics, if a single photon is intercepted en route, that changes the state of the information package as it arrives at the other end.That is a telltale for the legitimate recipient that his message has been tampered with -- the same as if someone received a letter that had been clumsily opened and then resealed, leaving traces of glue and fingerprints on the envelope.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?art_id=23998757