moon_monkey writes "Researchers in Japan have developed a display that makes 3D objects solid enough to grasp. The system, created by engineers at Japan's NTT, combines a 3D display with a haptic glove, making 3D items that look real but also feel solid to touch. Two cameras are used to image an object, to make the 3D image. A computer also uses this to render a solid representation. It could be used to inspect products remotely, or even to shake hands with someone on the other side of the world, the researchers say."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Kottke reports that you can hack up your "third party" headphones with an Exacto knife to get them to work with the iPhone.

Excuse me, but I like my headphones as they are, and the iPhone is a pretty lame iPod, crippled if you ask me, so I'll stick with my 60GB unit and hope that some other manufacturer gets their act together and teaches Apple some manners with their customers' money.

Can you imagine the meeting at Apple where they decided that they had the market power to force their customers to get new headphones! Such chutzpah.

xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: A Google employee has clarified her offer to use Google's services to defuse the impact of Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. Lauren Turner is the "account planner, health" for Google, and she made headlines with a post on the Google Health Advertising Blog where she offered the healthcare industry a chance to run ads for anti-Sicko sites alongside Google searches for "sicko."

Today, Turner posted a clarification, stating that her opinions of Moore's movie were her own, and not Google's, and reaffirming the use of advertising to "handle challenges," calling it "a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue." She went on to say that this view of advertising is the official Google policy, though reiterating that Google is silent on the questions raised by Moore's movie.

But the more important point, since I doubt that too many people care about my personal opinion, is that advertising is an effective medium for handling challenges that a company or industry might have. You could even argue that it's especially appropriate for a public policy issue like healthcare. Whether the healthcare industry wants to rebut charges in Mr. Moore's movie, or whether Mr. Moore wants to challenge the healthcare industry, advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue.

Have I mentioned how much I loved this movie? Go see it. Then do something about living in the last industrialized nation in the world without universal healthcare, a situation maintained by a staff of four healthcare lobbyists for every Congressperson.

Link

See also: Google to HMOs: pay us and we'll defuse "Sicko"

An anonymous reader writes "You may have noticed that over the past few years it has become increasingly common to find supermarket and large retail store shopping carts equipped with 'boots' designed to lock up if you try to take the cart outside of the store. Now, someone has discovered through some clever analysis the signal used to both lock and unlock carts, and has designed a portable system that locks up all carts within 20 feet of the emitter! They have released the schematics, software, and detailed instructions for assembling the systems on Instructables, an online magazine dedicated to releasing howto's for everything from rat taxidermy to Shopping Cart EMPs under a Creative Commons License."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If the iPhone were some little obscure thing then pages like this wouldn't be such a concern. Screen shot.

Viewing it by iPhone, it's an RSS reader, viewing this site, that's why it showed up in my referrers. Not clear why it can't be displayed in Firefox on my Mac laptop.

If you're working on the phone to TG connection, this new web service, twitterGram.newPhonePoast, simplifies the problem; makes it easier to implement the connection.

Dr. Eggman writes "According to an article on Ars Technica and its accompanying General Relativity and Gravitation journal article 'The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology', in the far future of the universe all evidence of the origin of the universe will be gone. Intelligences alive 100-billion-years from now will observe a universe that appears much the way our early 1900s view of the universe was: Static, had always been there, and consisted of little more than our own galaxy and a islands of matter. 'The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise--the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin. Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bushido Hacks writes "The Washington Post reports that the Federal Trade Commission has fumbled the Network Neutrality Act, again, as of this past week. However, the FTC defended its actions saying that their decision was not a give-in to the big telecom and cable companies. Instead, the FTC report urges caution on Network Neutrality Regulation. While this news is disappointing, the FTC's decision appears to be thought out and a message to remind people to not let the subject of Net Neutrality be abandoned by the general public so corporations could undermine the interest of consumers. We discussed the row this created, but with constant stalling tactics being employed here how long will it be before net neutrality opponents craft their own legislation?"

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Cory Doctorow: It's Canada Day, the day that marks the anniversary of Canadian Confederation on July 1, 1867. We Canadians celebrate it with days off work, beer, and fireworks. It's like July 4, without the revolutionary overtones.

There is no more potent symbol of Canadianness than the National Film Board of Canada's musical short, The Log Driver's Waltz: more than Leonard Cohen's groans, more than Dan Ackroyd's rampant toryism, more than "timbit" jokes about Tim Horton's tragic car accident, The Log Driver's Waltz defines Canada for its expatriate thirtysomethings. Just singing a few bars of this in a crowded space is enough to flush the crypto-Canadians out (Canadians are like axe-murderers, we look just like regular people) in throaty voice. It's even more reliable than stepping on everyone's foot until someone apologises.

Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians, both domestic and expatriate.

As a bonus be sure to catch this unforgettable punk cover from Midget Militia. Link

I keep forgetting that it's a camera too.

Click on the pic for the Flickr photo page.

prostoalex writes "FastTCP technology, developed by researchers at CalTech, is being commercialized. A company called FastSoft has introduced a hardware appliance that delivers 15x-20x faster FTP transmissions than those delivered via regular TCP. Says eWeek: 'The algorithm implemented in the Aria appliance senses congestion by continuously measuring the round-trip time for the TCP acknowledgment and then monitoring how that measurement changes from moment to moment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott Mace sent some advice that worked, that made it so that my example page looks good in Safari on an iPhone without the user having to adjust the resolution.

Open this page on the iPhone, you'll see it reads quite well.

If you don't have an iPhone, here's a screen shot.

The trick is to add a <meta> element to the page:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320">

View source on nytimesriver to see how it works.

Here's a thread where this is discussed.

PS: The same page looks good on a Blackberry too.

Gadgets Lover writes "According to CrunchGear's 'trusted source' that the upcoming MacBooks which are expected to be released around October will support the iPhone's multi-touch technology built into their touchpads. The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook's files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that's nothing new. I'm talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen) On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: Chris sez, "The Wisconsin Historical Society has a smallish but excellent gallery of about forty covers from late-sixties underground newspapers. I'm a sucker for Robert Crumb, so Gothic Blimp Works #3 was my immediate favorite, whereas I think Space City's 'psychosurgery' cover will probably haunt my dreams." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

See also: Free Press: reproductions of underground papers, 1965-75

Cory Doctorow: Wendy Seltzer has a great essay up today about the process by which ICANN is allocating new top-level domains (TLDs, like .com, .net, .org, and so forth). Wendy is the copyfighting civil liberties cyberlawyer who founded Chilling Effects and previously worked with me at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She's served on the ICANN board for years -- this is the US-chartered corporation that oversees the domain name system, the only really centrally governed piece of the entire Internet.

ICANN has been thrashing for years over the creation of more TLDs, like ".sex" -- the idea is to recapture the edenic glory days when all .COMs were companies, all .ORGs were educational institutions and all .WS sites were in Western Samoa. A .sex TLD would be overseen so that only porn sites got .sex domains, and so that porn sites would be forced out of the .com/net/org spaces. This merely requires that some perfectly infallible institution be set up to rake in gigantic profits from the sex industry while accurately dividing all material on the web into "porn" and "not-porn." Simple.

Another faction has bigger ideas: they want to blow the lid off of DNS, to allow for the creation of an infinite number of TLDs. Wendy is in this faction and in "Aging the Internet Prematurely," she sets out a stirring call-to-arms for the TLD multiverse.

To trust the market, ICANN must be willing to let new TLDs fail. Instead of insisting that every new business have a 100-year plan, we should prepare the businesses and their stakeholders for contingency. Ensuring the "stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems" should mean developing predictable responses to failure, not demanding impracticable guarantees of perpetual success. Escrow, clear consumer information, streamlined processes, and flexible responses to the expected unanticipated, can all protect the end-users better than the dubious foresight of ICANN's central regulators. These same regulators, bear in mind, didn't foresee that a five-day add-grace period would swell the ranks of domains with "tasters" gaming the loophole with ad-based parking pages.

Link

Cory Doctorow:
Frank Buchwald, a German lamp designer, specializes in gleaming, steampunky lighting that takes your breath away. This guy is to lighting what Roger Wood is to clocks. Link (Thanks, GDNL!)

More steampunk stuff on Boing Boing

Monk writes "Multiplayer games these days have one problem. Cheating. Cheating is out of control because of failed attempts by software such as Punkbuster, and VALVe's Anti-cheat (VAC). Now it seems that could change change with Intel's own Anti-cheat Software/Hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.