Astronomers Relegate Pluto to Dwarf Status

After a week of contentious public and private debate, a small cluster of astronomers voted to demote Pluto from its planetary status. The world wept, and we wept with you.

Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers

Dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, this large, predatory fish bears a number of features found in the four-limbed creatures that eventually gave rise to all amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Plus, it gave our editor in chief another chance to take on creationism.

Really, add a cell phone, bone conduction headphone taped to your jaw and voice dialing, you have the functional equivalent of telepathy.

"Silent" Speech Device May Aid Divers, Firefighters, Cell Phone Users
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
December 27, 2006

It's technology that lets you speak your mind—literally.

NASA scientists are developing a speech recognition system that can understand and relay words that haven't been said out loud.

The system uses electrodes attached to the throat to detect biological signals that occur as a person reads or talks to him- or herself.

George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move
By Nick Allen

Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- It's Saturday night in Middlesbrough, England, and drunken university students are celebrating the start of the school year, known as Freshers' Week.

One picks up a traffic cone and runs down the street. Suddenly, a disembodied voice booms out from above:

"You in the black jacket! Yes, you! Put it back!" The confused student obeys as his friends look bewildered.

"People are shocked when they hear the cameras talk, but when they see everyone else looking at them, they feel a twinge of conscience and comply," said Mike Clark, a spokesman for Middlesbrough Council who recounted the incident. The city has placed speakers in its cameras, allowing operators to chastise miscreants who drop coffee cups, ride bicycles too fast or fight outside bars.

Metafilter finds some wild stuff.

December, 2006: We have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) for high-level control of a humanoid robot. The BCI allows a human subject to command the robot, via brain activity, to pick up a desired object and bring it to a desired location.

• Details and pictures of the BCI
• Press Release
• Video of the brain-controlled humanoid robot in action (also in MOV format). The robot walks up to a table containing two objects and conveys the images of the objects to the human. The BCI infers which of the two objects the human wants and communicates this choice to the robot. The robot picks up the selected object and proceeds to the center of the room. The human then selects a destination for the object (again through brain activity) and the robot brings the object to this destination location.
• Video of brain responses during operation of the BCI. The brain responds differently when the target object currently being attended to flashes, compared to another object. This difference is detected and used by the BCI to infer which object the human wants. A similar procedure is used to infer which target location (destination) the human wants the robot to go to.
• Students involved: Christian Bell, Rawichote Chalodhorn, Ravi Kiran, Pradeep Shenoy.
• "Brain-actuated control of a humanoid robot: Towards embodied BCI systems": Presentation at the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing Workshop, December 9, 2006.

I am seriously happy with XAMPP. Not only is starting and stopping the whole package easy enough that I don't have to run it as a service, it comes with a batch file to flip the configuration between PHP version 4 and 5. And yes, it can run from a thumb drive...though there's no cool PortableApps menu entry. 

I know a number of programmers editors that will fit on there, but no actual PHP development environments yet. I actually know of a candidate or two but it's not really worth the effort. I'm happy with my current editor.

Still. It is truly a thing of beauty for a development system to flip between PHP versions at will. I need to be able to work in both, and IIS makes that too damn hard.

I have a 1 gig thumb drive I found on sale...a 2 gig drive would be nicer. I doubt getting a proper development environment on one of them, but one can dream.

PortableApps Suite 1.0

PortableApps Suite is a combination of several popular software programs, all made portable and packaged with an integrated menu to tie things together. The PortableApps Menu has a familiar layout and works on any PC (from Windows 95 through Vista and even Wine under UNIX). You can even add other apps to it with ease. The included PortableApps Backup utility allows you to easily backup your documents, app data or entire drive with just a few clicks. The Suite also includes a set of folders to store your documents, music and pictures in, all accessible right from the menu. It will even automatically offer to start up when you plug it into most modern Windows computers.

Blogging with syndication feeds feels WAY different than actually reading the websites that produce them. Much easier to produce volume but much less serendipity.

I'm restructuring my whole computing environment, separating out the communications and personal stuff from the development and media stuff. And I'm migrating my tool set too. I have a really great PHP development environment, Zend Studio, but you have to buy this stuff. I'm going to look into the Eclipse environment. Also, it's been so long since I did any serious desktop development I decided not to load the MSDN/Delphi/Visual Studio stuff. I may get back to it later, I don't know. And I'm actually considering using OpenOffice.org rather than Microsoft Office.

Been having database connectivity problems recently. Looks a lot like DOS attacks...I'd actually have a lot better traffic figures otherwise.

You realize just printing a piece of paper doesn't add a bit of security, don't you? How would you actually do a recount?

Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election
By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.

New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

C'mon. You know this has gone too far.

Note the woofers are moisture-proof. The tweeters aren't. I don't know what's up with that.

Back when we were concerned about warrantless wiretaps I wrote a longish post talking about England's project to track every car in the country's location in real time and similar possibilities in the USofA. The Electronic Freedom Foundation noted a Federal judge reversed precedent, allowing the feds to track your cell phone location without probable cause.

Bad Ruling on Cell Phone Tracking: What a Difference a G Makes

December 21, 2005

Yesterday, Magistrate Judge Gorenstein of the federal court for the Southern District of New York issued an opinion permitting the government to use cell site data to track a cell phone's physical location, without the government having to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause.

Judge Gorenstein's flawed legal analysis is in sharp contrast to three other federal court opinions strongly rejecting the government’s legal arguments, including a decision by Magistrate Judge Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York. While Judge Orenstein referred to the government's legal arguments variously as "unsupported," "misleading," and "contrived," and a Texas court called the convolutions of the government’s theory “perverse” and likened its twists and turns to a "three-rail bank shot," Judge Gorenstein bought the government's arguments hook, line and sinker.

My concern at the time was

This will be great...we already have a major head start with all the cars eqipped with OnStar...all cell-phone equipped and so all immediately trackable. Much cheaper, and people voluntarily carry the tracker. No need for those camera thingies and best of all, no government bill. YOU pay for it when you buy your car. And of course there's the cell phone in your pocket...we get to follow you to that tryst with your co-worker as a side effect of tracking cars. Because your co-worker's cousin lent a cell phone to a guy who is related to a student that studied the Middle East with a foreign exchange student whose uncle was in the Iraq military makes her a person of interest.

With that in mind...

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
By Declan McCullagh
Story last modified Fri Dec 01 18:46:27 PST 2006

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Stryker brigade first to take Land Warrior to Iraq
By Matthew Cox
staff writer

Stryker brigade soldiers will deploy to Iraq next year with a wearable computer designed to cut through the fog of war. See the 360-degree tour.

The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division — the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team — recently completed a successful test of the Land Warrior system at Fort Lewis, Wash., which clears the way for the unit to take the high-tech ensemble of digital communications and navigation equipment with them on their scheduled deployment to Iraq next summer, said Lt. Col. Bill Prior, battalion commander, in a recent press release.

I'm deleting like 150 spams a day dor the last week or so. Not having it.

I'll give it a week or so and try allowing them again 

I'm going to try out Ubuntu Linux, so I doubt I'll actually use this joint, but if I had found it a couple of months ago...

Welcome to Giveaway of the day project, the new initiative in the software distribution world! Every day we offer for FREE licensed software you’d have to buy otherwise!

Our new initiative, Giveaway of the day, is finally open to its visitors and ready to present hot software titles and best software authors from all over the world. We wish you a Happy Giveaway!

Giveaway of the day is a win-win solution for both publishers and clients

The idea behind this initiative is that many sites and publishers offer trial downloads; but only we offer giveaway downloads. What does that mean?

Wireless Energy Transfer May Power Devices at a Distance

Tired of your laptop's battery dying during presentations or bursting into flames? Take heart: scientists are perfecting a new method for transmitting electrical energy from a base station using a technique that resembles a wireless Internet connection. Researchers say that a specially designed device should be able to draw power from a strong magnetic field permeating a room.

The effect, which has not yet been demonstrated, would take advantage of the stationary magnetic field that surrounds a charged loop of metal. This so-called near-field can be powerful--it is what makes an electric motor turn. And in principle its oscillations can induce an electric current in another nearby loop, because dynamic magnetic fields create electric fields and vice versa. The second loop could act as a battery or recharger, but it would normally receive only a slight current because the near field fades rapidly over distance.

"In the current climate there is an implicit, if demonstrably false, sense that if your actions are based on a belief in God you are good person, and if they are not you are a bad person," Krauss said. "We should be very concerned that our political system reinforces the notion that the more you pray for guidance, the better suited you are to govern."

Think Tank Will Promote Thinking
Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A19

Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.

The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational , the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.

The announcement was accompanied by release of a "Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism," which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.

When a reporter's hand was placed against the robot's taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Everyone knows people taste just like chicken...

Japanese unveil robot wine steward
By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press writer

TSU, Japan — The ability to discern good wine from bad, name the specific brand from a tiny sip and recommend a complementary cheese would seem to be about as human a skill as there is.

In Japan, robots are doing it.

Researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University have designed a robot that can taste — an electromechanical sommelier able to identify dozens of different wines, cheeses and hors d'oeuvres.

UK scientists ask permission to create human-cow hybrid
12:30 07 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
New Scientist staff and AFP

Scientists in the UK applied on Monday for permission to create part-cow, part-human embryos for research aimed at treating diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The procedure would involve inserting human DNA into cows’ eggs that have had their own genetic material removed. The embryos created from this process would then be almost entirely “human”, with the only cow DNA being outside the cells’ nuclei.

If they manage to pull off the feat, the human-bovine embryos would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days, the researchers say.

The flaw with any database driven website is you can bring its database down by overwhelming it with volume. The request doesn't even have to be valid, it just has to look valid enough that the app will try to do something with it.

Red Hat downplays Novell/Microsoft deal
11/5/2006 4:18:11 PM, by Ryan Paul

In response to a recent agreement between Microsoft and Novell, Red Hat's corporate secretary Mark Webbink has predicted that Red Hat "will be the dominant player in the Linux market" a year from now, and that "by that time there won't be any other Linux players." In light of Microsoft's partnership with Novell and Oracle's ambitions of Linux support dominance, Webbink's statement doesn't seem all that realistic.

I thought Oracle's Unbreakable Linux support program announcement was bad news. Now that Microsoft and Novell are teaming up, kinda, Linux's future is looking really corporate.

You need to understand this stuff before the end of the year so you can harrass your local officials to fix it before next summer. You don't want these questions open in 2008.

How to steal an election by hacking the vote
By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

One bad apple...

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America's private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents' basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they'd been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might've been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it's all too real.

Thanks the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you've been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we're (not) doing on the infosec front.

Not really...I'm convinced Second Life is how they got everyone into those Matrix tubes.

Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.

Lawmaker opposes taxing online virtual economies
Wed Oct 18, 2006 7:26 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - The Republican head of a U.S. congressional committee said it would be a mistake if the Internal Revenue Service introduced regulations to tax virtual economies such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Toolkit to Disable Automatic Delivery of Internet Explorer 7

Brief Description
The Internet Explorer 7 Blocker Toolkit enables IT Administrators to disable automatic delivery of Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates and the Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites.

US internet addicts 'as ill as alcoholics'
12:55 18 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service
New Scientist Tech staff and AFP

The US could be rife with "internet addicts" who are as clinically ill as alcoholics, according to psychiatrists involved in a nationwide study.

The study, carried out by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US, indicates that more than one in eight US residents show signs of "problematic internet use".

The Stanford researchers interviewed 2513 adults in a nationwide survey. Because internet addiction is not a clinically defined medical condition, the questions used were based on analysis of other addiction disorders.

The whole Frankenfood thing disturbs me...I don't like the idea of eating things that CAN NOT be natural...like when you add DNA from one species to the genome of an entirely unrelated one. But this

Some consumer groups and individuals, for example, oppose the marketing of meat from clones because many clones die in the first days of life, increasing the level of suffering in the world. Others argue more philosophically that every animal deserves a degree of individuality and integrity that would be violated by the production of cloned replicas.

...is nuts. And this

Still others called for a slowing of animal biotechnology out of concern that the techniques will lead to unethical applications in humans.

...is the wrong concern. It's humans that need checking. 

Religion a Prominent Cloned-Food Issue
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 19, 2006; A09

With federal officials close to approving the sale of meat and milk from cloned livestock and their offspring, experts for and against that policy said yesterday that such decisions should be based not only on the question of human safety -- the criterion used by the Food and Drug Administration -- but also on issues of ethics and animal welfare.

"These are animals. They're not just economic units. . . . They're not just machines," said Michael Appleby of the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals. [P6: They're crops.]

Among the problems raised by the new technologies are how followers of some religions will manage their strict dietary rules if, say, meat in stores is made by a process deemed sinful or contains genes from an organism they are not supposed to eat.

So we have a new Space Policy. And I understand you have to say this.

"Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power," the policy asserts in its introduction.

I understand the importance of the assets we got up there, from weather sattelites to GPS and missile guidance systems. 

So why even bullshit?

The administration said the policy revisions are not a prelude to introducing weapons systems into Earth orbit. "This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period," said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record.

via Foreign Dispatches we see Iran committing the slowest possible suicide.

Iran's Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture - by banning high-speed internet links.

In a blow to the country's estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran's telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net.

After having seen this, I feel this movie has great potential.

Hawking to star in Big Bang, the movie
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking, Britain’s world-renowned physicist, is to switch from theories of multidimensional space to the three dimensions of the Imax cinema by starring in a film that sets out his ideas on the origins and fate of the universe.

The film, Beyond the Horizon, will tackle some of the most daunting theories espoused by Hawking and other cosmologists, from the idea that space has up to 11 dimensions to the cause of the big bang itself.

The report found that agencies are often slow to realize that data thefts have taken place or how many people were affected by the breaches. And it was unclear how often they have informed citizens that their data might have been compromised, the report added...

...Most of the nearly 800 incidents of data losses have never been publicly reported.

Data Theft at Agencies Not as Uncommon as Hoped
A House report deems the incidence of lost or stolen information more pervasive than thought. Most cases are outright theft, it says.
By Moises Mendoza
Times Staff Writer
October 14, 2006

WASHINGTON — Incidents of lost or stolen personal data at federal government agencies are more widespread than previously thought, affecting all 19 federal departments and millions of citizens since 2003, according to a congressional report released Friday.

Vista Licenses Limit OS Transfers, Ban VM Use
By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb Technology News

Microsoft has released licenses for the Windows Vista operating system that dramatically differ from those for Windows XP in that they limit the number of times that retail editions can be transferred to another device and ban the two least-expensive versions from running in a virtual machine.

The new licenses, which were highlighted by the Vista team on its official blog Tuesday, add new restrictions to how and where Windows can be used.

"The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device," reads the license for Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, and Business. In other words, once a retail copy of Vista is installed on a PC, it can be moved to another system only once.