I recently flew on Richard Branson's new Virgin America airline, and one of the nice features was the fact that you could order food or drinks via the touchscreen on the back of the seat in front of you. It made the process a lot more efficient. Apparently, a number of restaurants are starting to feel the same way, as these electronic menus are becoming more popular in restaurants. What's interesting, though, is that people seem to have widely divergent views on the things. Some people love them, and find them more useful, while others think they're an annoying gimmick. The restaurants have found that people tend to spend more, and restaurants probably save even more money on needing a smaller wait staff. The article notes some other innovations that are being tested, including the idea of allowing people to order in a restaurant using their own laptops or mobile phones connected to the restaurant WiFi network (which may run into some problems concerning an Apple patent on the concept). Of course, those restaurants still need waiters to deliver the food -- unless they follow the path of the restaurant we described last summer that had built a somewhat complex set of metal rails.

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An anonymous reader writes "It looks like SCO will be emerging from the almost dead soon, with new owners and $100 million on board. SNCP is adjusting the business strategy, according to this report on TG Daily, SCO is saying goodbye to CEO Darl McBride and is also preparing to appeal the summary judgments in the cases against Novell and IBM. If you have thought the chapter was closed, think again. Those $100 million can go a long way (even if SCO has to pay 17% interest on it)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Deck welcomes two excellent sites: FFFFOUND! and Clusterflock to the premier advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals. SimpleBits joined The Deck this past January and we’ve been happier and have noticed increased deckishness ever since.

The New York Times has a write up about Check Out, the new Wal-Mart blog that has been making waves with its blunt style. The blog's authors are purchasing agents for the giant retailer, and they aren't pulling their punches. "My life has not changed dramatically," one Wal-Mart employee wrote about Vista, "well, for that matter, it hasn’t changed at all." It's a fascinating move on Wal-Mart's part, and it may pay off for them. Wal-Mart has done a great deal of good for the American economy -- especially low-income individuals, by improving the efficiency of the retail sector and thereby reducing the price consumers pay for almost everything. But because they've been so narrowly focused on improving the efficiency of their operations, they haven't done a very good job with PR. They're widely seen as monolithic, heartless, and and impersonal.

The new blog seems likely to pay off for the retailer in several ways. First, by making it clear that contributors are expressing their personal opinions, it gives Wal-Mart a platform to call out manufacturers who produce bad products while maintaining some distance between the blog and Wal-Mart's official perspective. Second, by allowing comments, it allows consumers to communicate back to Wal-Mart, helping the retailer's purchasers keep tabs on consumers' complaints about its products. Finally, and most importantly, it may help to personalize the store and give it a reputation for candor and openness it currently lacks. This will pay off, for example, next time Wal-Mart faces a PR challenge; a widely-read blog can give the store a way to get its side of the story in a way that's more personal and credible than a press release. The risk, obviously, is that a blogger might say something that causes flack for the company as a whole. Presumably they were careful to choose bloggers who won't say anything too intemperate. But Wal-Mart is probably in a pretty good position on this front. It's so huge that it doesn't have to worry too much about alienating its suppliers; they're going to be eager to get their products onto Wal-Mart's shelves no matter how much they might dislike what Wal-Mart says on its blog. So it can afford to be more candid than a smaller chain that might have to worry about jeopardizing its relationships with key suppliers.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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alexj33 writes "Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let's face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task is huge. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite possible, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane's proposal includes a couple of major caveats: the trip to Mars should be one-way, and have a crew of only one person."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Zen Monkeys has a fun list of five controversial moments in the life of William F. Buckley.

Buckley famously smoked marijuana — after sailing his boat outside the U.S. territorial limits, where it would no longer be illegal. Finally at the age of 78, Buckley wrote an editorial for the National Review decrying the war on pot.

"Legal practices should be informed by realities," Buckley argued, citing 700,000 pot arrests each year, 87% of which involved only possession of small amounts. "This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone."

But would America ever rise up and demand a change in marijuana laws?

It is happening, but ever so gradually. Two of every five Americans, according to a 2003 Zogby poll cited by Dr. Nadelmann, believe "the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children". The Dutch do odd things, but here they teach us a lesson.

Buckley's position was unexpected, but it offered an honorable example of his real commitment to intellectualism. He began his essay by writing that "Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great."

His son said Buckley died "with his boots on," according to BBC News — writing at his desk. "If he had been given a choice on how to depart this world," the National Review wrote, "I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas."

Link

Snip from post by Kevin Poulsen, at Wired Threat Level blog.

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, CTO of New Jersey-based IGXglobal told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."

Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Wired contacted Verizon, and a company spokesperson declined to comment:

"What you're talking about sounds as if it would be classified and involving national security, so I wouldn't be able to find out the facts."

Link to full post, with related documents.

The Vanishing Point, a site dedicated to urban exploration and secrets of the built environment, has a page about the massive abandoned Tailrace tunnel at Niagara Falls. (The entire Vanishing Point site is mesmerizing, rich with great writing and fantastic photography.) Part of the decommissioned Toronto Power Co. hydroelectric plant, the tunnel is ten stories underground and only accessible through a hidden slit in the ceiling. From Vanishing Point:

Lying below a river that will relentlessly tear into the bedrock until all has been obliterated from Queenston to Erie, this tunnel thirty-three feet in diameter is imprinted into my being forever. A swirling army of red brick millions strong, the eye of a petrified hurricane leading us right into the centre of the stalled but fighting storm that is Niagara Falls. Standing in its back-blast, in a place far deeper and darker than any middling storm sewer, I breathed and drank from the fount of the universe and swam closer to its centre than I ever will again.

Link (via DIGG)

The Swiss firm Bank Julius Baer learned all about the Streisand Effect last week, after somehow convincing a judge to force Wikileaks offline for hosting a document that they objected to (most likely because it alleged corruption and fraud on the part of the bank). However, in forcing the entire site offline, the whole thing got a lot more attention, raising free speech concerns, and the judge eventually put the site back online. While the bank claims that it never intended to have the whole site shut down, people pointed out that it certainly didn't rush to court to tell the judge to leave it up. Well, now that Wikileaks and the specific documents in question have been all over the news (as opposed to before, when almost no one knew they existed), Bank Julius Baer, tail between its legs, has dropped the lawsuit against Wikileaks. One more lesson for overly aggressive lawyers to think about the consequences of certain actions, rather than just launching lawsuits because they can.

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Today, electronic noses are used in applications from air quality monitoring to food flavor research. The problem though is that they cost $5000 to $10,000. However, printable organic electronics could bring the cost down to tens of dollars, leading to a slew of new applications like refrigerators that sniff out spoiled food, pest-detectors for gardens, and pocket-sized medical diagnostic devices that can smell disease. The new issue of IEEE Spectrum looks at the latest in electronic nose research. The article was written by Josephine B. Chang, a former UC Berkeley student, and Berkeley professor Vivek Subramanian, whose early work on e-noses I wrote about in Lab Notes here. From their IEEE Spectrum article:

This e-nose will be the culmination of decades of work at countless laboratories, where researchers have sought to create a tiny, cheap, automatic sniffer that would let wine bottles monitor the aging of their contents, allow meat packages to flag spoilage, and enable mailboxes to check for bombs. Imagine barroom coasters that double as Breathalyzers, bumper stickers that monitor car emissions...

Rather than developing one nose for wine monitoring and a different one to detect bad fish, the same piece of hardware could be trained separately for different tasks. Imagine an electronic-nose system shipped with standard pattern-recognition libraries. Load up one for the refrigerator and the system will sniff for spoiling foodstuffs; load up a different one for the garden and the system searches instead for the telltale odors of snails and other pests. And what if you want the e-nose to learn the difference between Grandma's apple pie and Mom's? Well, chances are the manufacturers will have never met Grandma or Mom or sampled the output of their ovens. But they may have included software for generating new pattern-recognition libraries. If so, you would hook up the nose to the training system, introduce it to one apple pie at a time, and find out if the pies generate distinguishable responses in the array. If they do, then generate a new library, load it up, and you've got a personalized apple- pie connoisseur.

Link

An anonymous reader writes "An unnamed U.S. wireless carrier maintains an unfiltered, unmonitored DS-3 line from its internal network to a facility in Quantico, Virginia, according to Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant who did work for the company in 2003. Customer voice calls, billing records, location information and data traffic are all allegedly exposed. A similar claim was leveled against Verizon Wireless in a 2006 lawsuit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, I attended Jane Swarm and John Storm's talk, "Of Necessity and Humanity: What Cuba Can Teach Us About Ourselves and Our Own Technology," a fascinating talk about the technology lessons to be learned from the largely technology-free Special Period in Cuban history, about the hacker culture that inspired, and about what's likely to come of it in the future as technology floods into Cuba.

Tech emerges from Grey Market

* Resolver: excuse to be illegal to make ends meet

* Buying PC parts out of the back door of a gov't facility, assemble PC, sell back to gov't

* In Cuba all goods constantly circulate

* Inventar: improvise from limited resources

* Everything is misc and modular

* New means new config of existing parts

* A cinderblock house can be built ina week -- what's what's "new"

* Barter:

* Man wants wood for a raft for Miami, traded laptop -- political freedom for national freedom

* Piracy:

* Castro says it's a legit response to embargo

* Political act

Link to my notes, Link to precis

Kinescope writes "The motion picture industry has said that its profits are at risk due to piracy, but a record-setting 2007 box office has some wondering if the industry is crying 'wolf.' Last year, the US box office totaled $9.63 billion, a 5.4% increase over 2006. 'Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It's so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year "lost" to Internet piracy. It's so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore years of common carrier law and the promises of "safe harbor" and start filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations. The real world isn't quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the MPAA's college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study's methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the last few months, I've been doing research on a forthcoming paper for the Cato Institute on the network neutrality debate. In the next few weeks, I'll be doing a series of posts on the major themes of my paper. My goal will be to highlight some interesting stories from the tech world, and then highlight their broader policy implications.

This week, the blogosphere is abuzz with the story that Iran may shut down the Internet on the date of its elections next week. I should note at the outset that I'm a little bit skeptical of this story, which seems to be rather thinly sourced. It's been picked up by a bunch of news outlets, but they all point back to the same International Herald Tribune article. That story cites two unnamed Iranian media outlets, which apparently don't even agree with each other about the reasons for the supposed Internet blackout. And the idea of blocking Internet access on election day just doesn't make a lot of sense. I can imagine why an authoritarian regime would shut down the Internet for a week or two before the election to suppress access to information about the election. But a block on the day of the election -- especially one that's announced a week ahead of time -- doesn't seem like it would do the government any good.

In any event, this certainly wouldn't be the first time Iran has instituted broad restrictions on Internet access in an effort to suppress the free flow of information. In 2006, Iran reportedly required that home Internet connections be reduced to 128 kbps. That doesn't make a lot of sense either; 128k is still plenty of bandwidth to download compressed audio, for example. But the Iranian government turned to a broad restriction on bandwidth after other efforts at content filtering failed. It seems that "as fast as they put up information roadblocks, Iranians have found detours around them." The only way the Iranian government has found to cut off the flow of information it doesn't approve of is to restrict the flow of information, period.

Some advocates of network neutrality seem to think that network neutrality is an issue of free speech. The fear is that AT&T or Verizon will use sophisticated filtering technologies to block content and websites they don't approve of. A conservative telco might block liberal blogs or YouTube videos, say, or maybe Ford would pay telcos to block access to Chevy's website. But if the government of Iran -- an institution with an almost unlimited budget and the ability to throw people in jail -- can't keep information it doesn't like away from its citizens, it's awfully hard to imagine that AT&T or Verizon would be able to do so. Iran has found that the only way to limit access to content it doesn't like is to limit access to the Internet altogether. Obviously that's not going to work for telcos, which are in business to make money. There are certainly some plausible arguments for network neutrality regulations, but fears of telco censorship are pretty low on the list.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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AVIDJockey writes "In a pleasantly surprising move, AOL has changed its tune when it comes to third-party access to the company's chat network. America Online has recently launched a service called OpenAIM 2.0, which provides open, uninhibited access to services like Meebo, or all-in-one IM clients like Pidgin, allowing them to freely and easily use the AIM instant messaging network. 'At the moment, multi-platform IM desktop clients like Pidgin or Adium (the popular Mac client) generally rely on hacking and reverse engineering access to chat networks run by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Not only is that bad for developers since it means more work, it also means that such clients often can't use all the features of a particular network.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A tourist in Australia's Northern Territory teasing a crocodile beside his boat annoyed the animal so much that it jumped out of the water at him. The man escaped. From The Telegraph:

"I began playing with it for a photo,'' Mr Mashiah said. "I was pointing at it when it suddenly jumped up at me - I didn't realise that crocs were so aggressive.''

The "saltie" – which experts believe probably approached the boat in search of a free feed of fish – propelled itself out of the water with terrifying speed. After narrowly missing its prey, it smashed into the side of the small metal boat before plunging back into the water.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)