A brand new Japanese warship that apparently has the country's latest and greatest radar system, was unable to spot a fishing boat in its path, leading to a collision and two missing fishermen. This is raising all sorts of questions about the quality of the radar system, but some are saying that the collision was really due to human error and that the radar system is designed more to watch out for missiles in the air, rather than ships below it. That's a fair enough response, but does point out that vulnerabilities come from all directions -- and you can make the best system in the world, but if it's looking for the wrong thing, it won't stop something bad from getting through. It does seem rather ironic to set this ship up to be the best in the world at spotting threats from the sky -- and forget to include a decent system to find threats right next to it in the sea.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

coondoggie writes "The National Science Foundation announced today 14 grand engineering challenges for the 21st century that, if met, would greatly improve how we live. The final choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish — sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living. The committee did not attempt to include every important challenge, nor did it endorse particular approaches to meeting those selected. Rather than focusing on predictions or gee-whiz gadgets, the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive, the group said. A diverse committee of engineers and scientists — including Larry Page, Robert Langer, and Robert Socolow — came up with the list but did not rank the challenges. Rather, the National Academy of Engineering is offering the public an opportunity to vote on which one they think is most important."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EFF's Deeplinks blog has an excellent discussion about Adobe's plans to add DRM to Flash. Flash has become something of a defacto standard online, and it's partly the lack of included DRM that allowed this to happen, encouraging creative uses, such as mashups. However, with the latest version of Flash, apparently Adobe wants to include DRM. As the EFF notes, this clearly is not to stop copyright infringements -- as no DRM has ever stopped copyright infringement. However, thanks to the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause, it will make it possible for Adobe to block out competitors from making tools and players to work on Flash, by failing to license that DRM to them as well. This was not the purpose of the DMCA at all.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has a clip of that RIAA training video produced with the NDAA for US prosecutors that was leaked to torrent sites a few days ago. It argues they should pursue piracy cases because it leads to bigger and badder wares, like handguns, drugs, terrorist orgs, and hardcore repeat offender criminals. It's kind of sad how far they're stretching to bring law enforcement into the matter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a Google Talks video featuring the late Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2).

This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.

Link

Reservoir Hill writes "Verified Identity Pass, a firm that offers checkpoint services at airports, has announced a $500,000 award for any solution that will make airport security checks quicker and simpler for passengers. The cash prize will go to any individual, company or institution that can get customers through airport security 15% faster, at a cost of less than 25 cents per passenger, using technology or processes that will be approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Passengers must not need to remove their clothes or shoes, something that slows down processing significantly. "We're looking at moving things that are conceptual or in the lab to things that we can deploy," says company spokesman Jason Slibeck and added that over 150 individuals, start-ups, defense contractors and universities have shown an interest in the prize. One promising procedure is mass spectroscopy, which involves analyzing the mass-charge ratio of ions on a swab sample taken from a passenger's clothing or air collected from around them to spot traces of substances including explosives or drugs. The Pre-Registration Package Information Sheet is available online."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US politicians have, for years, been coming up with bogus arguments about why P2P technology is just plain evil. Most of these have little to do with file sharing of unauthorized material, but you can bet that it was the entertainment industry who put these ideas in our elected repesentatives' minds. There was the bogus claim that P2P was responsible for porn on the internet (despite the fact that studies have shown there's no more porn on P2P networks than on the rest of the internet). Then, of course, Congress started talking about how P2P technology was responsible for identity theft and was potentially endangering national security.

Over in Europe, however, the good news is that some folks there have at least realized that P2P is merely a tool, and as such, can help enable very good things as well. That's why it's nice to see the EU invest $22 million in helping to build a new, open source, BitTorrent client, designed to help broadcasters better distribute their content. Kind of nice to see in comparison to the grandstanding and misleading rhetoric coming from US politicians, blaming a technology, rather than recognizing that the technology itself is neutral.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "French scientists have developed a new rubber that can heal itself after being cut or broken. If two broken ends of the material are pushed together, and left for an hour, they join to become just as stretchy as before. There is even a video of the supposed creation in action. 'Regular rubber gets its strength from the fact that long chains of polymer molecules are coupled, or "crosslinked," in three different ways: through covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonding between molecules. Of these three bond types, only the hydrogen bonds can be remade once a material is fractured, although normally there are not enough hydrogen bonds for the rubber to re-couple in this way. The solution devised by Leibler and colleagues is to simply get rid of the ionic and covalent bonds. They developed a transparent, yellowy-brown rubber in which crosslinking is performed only by hydrogen bonds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets we took a look at Fright Catalog (dot com's) wondrous animatronic monsters, HP's entry into the UMPC/Eee subnotebook space, a belt-fed NERF cannon, upcoming multitouch interfaces from Apple, a kitchen device that works more or less as a steak toaster, a weightlessness-simulating treadmill, the thought that goes into designing a low-end camcorder, a gee-whiz linear propulsion toy, a documentary about circuit bending, a concept emergency shelter in a 50-gallon drum (and some ideas I have about blogging from the forest this spring), the hopefully impending death of The Sharper Image, a game that plays with the idea of a 2D character in a 3D world, a headset that reads your thoughts to control games, and a tortuous puzzle box in which to stow gifts. And deals and retro links.

The video game gender debate has been going on for years now, fueled mainly by complaints that the video game industry continues to make games that primarily appeal to males. Perhaps it's not the fault of the video game industry, but a result of a psychological tendency. A new study reports that men's brains are more responsive to video games than women's. According to MRI scans, the zones of the brain associated with reward and addiction are much more active in men's brains when they played a simple video game. Last year, there was an effort to get the American Medical Association to classify video game addiction as an official disorder -- perhaps these folks now have some more empirical evidence to support that claim.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

holy_calamity writes "Academics researching how technology addiction affects businesses and employees say 'habit-forming' gadgets like Blackberries should be dispensed along with warnings about the effect they can have on your life. 'We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fancy interface for visually setting hypertext. Could be helpful for those first learning the CSS properties we have at our disposal. #

ScienceDaily is reporting that a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is part computer, part robot, and part child. Part of the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit "WizKid" is able to focus on human faces and follows your movement allowing you to interact with objects on it's display simply by waving your arms. "Wizkid looks like a computer with a neck. But there the similarities with the familiar personal computer end. Wizkid isn't static. The screen on the mobile neck moves about like a head, and it's trained to hone in on human faces. Once it sees you, Wizkid focuses on you and follows your movement. Unlike a computer, which requires you to stop what you're doing and adapt your behavior and social interactions in order to use it, Wizkid blends into human space. There's no mouse and no keyboard. You don't touch anything. There's no language getting in the way. On Wizkid's screen you see yourself surrounded by a "halo" of interactive elements that you can simply select by waving your hands. If you move away or to one side, Wizkid adapts itself to you, not the other way around. If you're with a friend, Wizkid finds and tracks both of you and tries to figure out your relationship, expressing surprise, confusion or enjoyment when it gets your response."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sagan Appreciation Society is petitioning for the US Postal Service to issue a postage stamp honoring astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan. An article last week in the Ithaca Journal says the petition should be available online at the Society's site, but it isn't currently there. This is one of the proposed stamps, illustrated by Skeptics Society founder Pat Linse. From the Ithaca Journal:

“Carl was an avid stamp collector as a boy, and we treasure the albums he made then, (said Sagan's wife Ann Druyan.) "They’re filled with his handwritten notes in the margins — perhaps the earliest evidence of his passion for the diversity of Earth’s cultures. So this particular tribute to Carl would have held special significance for him, as it does for me.”

Link

Say what you want about the Wall Street Journal, but they're generally pretty reliable on fact checking and not reporting baseless rumors. That's why it's strange to see a report in the Journal about Google's supposed interest in buying up a balloon-based wireless data company. For many years, we've seen all different reports about attempts to offer wireless data services using various types of floating devices. Sometimes it's via blimps, sometimes it's via other systems using bizarre names like "HAPs" (for "high altitude platforms"), or "stratellite" or "aerostats". Then there's my favorite such plan: broadband delivered via retired Soviet spy planes. All of these plans had slight differences in terms of how they worked -- but one similarity: they were basically all full of hot air.

While they tend to generate plenty of attention, they tend not to be particularly practical. The stratellite folks have been particularly egregious in issuing press releases that gullible reporters fall for every six months or so. The WSJ story about these balloons seems even more ridiculous in terms of practicality: the balloons only stay afloat for 24-hours, before they burst and the transmitter floats to the ground, where it needs to be recovered and then relaunched. Seriously. Yet, the WSJ says that Google may be interested in buying this company, offering nothing to back that up other than "people familiar with the matter." This reads like a story placed by the company itself trying to drum up interest. I don't doubt that folks from Google may have met with the company, but it seems like a stretch to think that they're seriously interested in sending up balloons with data transmitters every 24-hours. Then again, who would have thought they'd send around people in cars taking photos of everything. It just seems that Google's interest should have a bit more evidence behind it before taking it seriously.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

dangerz writes "CNN has fired one of its producers because of his personal blog. Chez Paziena, the ex-producer, has stated that he started the blog 'mostly to pass the time, hone my writing skills, resurrect my voice a little, and keep my mind sharp following the [brain tumor] surgery.' After a few months, CNN found out about it and ended up letting him go because his 'name was "attached to some, uh, 'opinionated' blog posts" circulating around the internet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "Are you one of the few who boarded the HD-DVD Titanic ship headed to the bottom of ocean to join BetaMax? Fret no longer, friend, simply convert those and pretend like you never invested in the wrong technology! All you need is a Windows machine with a fast processor, an HD-DVD drive, a Blu-Ray burner, 30GB of free disk space, at least, though 40GB or more is recommended and an internet connection to download the software! Or you can sit and be the crazy guy who continues to argue that HD-DVD is the superior technology whether it's true or not."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love that OS X automatically fires up iPhoto when I plug in my digital camera. It’s one of the Mac’s many little touches that make it such a pleasure to use.

But ever since I got an iPhone, I’ve been frustrated that plugging it in opens up iPhoto, too. The combination of iPhoto and iTunes opening and syncing slows my computer to a crawl. And it’s particularly painful when most of the time I just want to sync my address book or music.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to work around this annoyance. Keep reading to see how you can teach your Mac to open iPhoto when you plug in your camera but not your phone.

I recently stumbled across an option in Image Capture’s preferences that lets you select any application to open when a camera is connected. That gave me an idea: what if I could tell it to open a special application that would check to see which camera I’d plugged in? Then that application could in turn open iPhoto only if I’d plugged in my Digital Rebel.

It turns out you can do all of this using the command line and a little bit of AppleScript. Here’s how:

1. Set up the script

Open Script Editor (in the AppleScript folder inside your Applications folder). Copy and paste this script into the editor window:

on device_is_connected(device_name)
  set check_for_device to "ioreg -rn " & quoted form of device_name
  return (length of (do shell script check_for_device) is not equal to 0)
end device_is_connected

on run
  if device_is_connected("") then
    tell application "iPhoto" to activate
  end if
end run

2. Get a list of all the USB devices connected to your computer

Keep Script Editor running, and open Terminal (in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder). Copy and paste this command into the terminal window:

ioreg -Src IOUSBDevice | grep '^\+' > /tmp/ioreg

This command lists all the USB devices connected to your computer and stores the list in a temporary file.

3. Find OS X’s name for your camera

Plug in your digital camera and turn it on. Then copy and paste another command into the terminal window:

ioreg -Src IOUSBDevice | grep '^\+' | diff /tmp/ioreg - |
  tail -1 | sed 's/^> \+-o \(.*\)@.*/\1/' | pbcopy && pbpaste

This command again lists all the USB devices connected to your computer and compares it with the previous list you saved to a temporary file. Then it extracts the name of the camera you just plugged in. You should see this name displayed in the terminal (for example, when I plug in my Digital Rebel XT, I see Canon Digital Camera). It’ll be copied to your clipboard, too.

4. Insert the camera’s name into the script

Quit Terminal and switch back to Script Editor. Find the line that reads:

    if device_is_connected("") then

Place the cursor between the two quotes and choose Paste from the Edit menu, so that you see your camera’s name in the quotes, like this:

    if device_is_connected("Canon Digital Camera") then

Make sure there’s no line break between the camera name and the last quote mark.

You can also change “iPhoto” on the next line to “Aperture” or “Lightroom”, if you’d prefer to open one of those applications instead.

5. Save the script as an application

Choose “Save As…” from the File menu, pick “Application” in the “File Format:” dropdown, and save the script as “Camera Connected” in your Applications folder.

6. Set the application to run when you connect your camera

Quit Script Editor and open Image Capture (in your Applications folder). Choose “Preferences…” from the Image Capture menu and pick “Other…” in the “When a camera is connected, open: