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Congress Coaxes States to Collect DNA
Federal lawmakers are using the purse strings to coax more states into adopting rules that require suspects who are arrested for various crimes — but not charged — to submit to DNA sampling for inclusion into a nationwide database. It doesn’t matter if the suspect was charged or even acquitted. Sponsored by Harry Teague (D-New Mexico), the [...]
05.20.10 -
Lightning May Cause Hallucinations
Talk about a flash of insight. Lightning strokes could stimulate people’s brains and cause them to hallucinate bright blobs of light the same way a medical procedure that applies magnetic fields to the brain does, two physicists propose. The findings could help explain some reports of “ball lightning,” mysterious floating orbs that have been reported [...]
05.20.10 -
50 Artists Remix Twilight Zone’s Brain-Frying Concepts
With the fate of the Oceanic 7 fast approaching, 50 artists salute The Twilight Zone, the show Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams says was a prime influence. Like Lost, Rod Serling’s TV series served up brain-frying conundrums weekly. In an effort to re-channel Twilight Zone’s time-warped tales of eerie behavior from the 1960s, a Los Angeles [...]
05.20.10 -
iPads on Track to Outsell the Mac
Sales of the iPad are already outpacing those of the Mac in the United States, according to an analyst’s calculations. Apple is selling more than 200,000 iPads per week, says Mike Abramsky, an RBC Capital Markets analyst. That’s almost twice the rate of Mac computers, which average about 110,000 units sold each week. The iPad isn’t outselling [...]
05.20.10 -
Hubble Watches as Star Slowly Devours Planet
Six hundred light-years from Earth, a huge exoplanet circling close to its home star is slowly, inexorably being devoured. WASP 12B orbits just 2 million miles from its star, which means the surface of the planet reaches temperatures over 2,800 Fahrenheit. The sun’s gravitational pull is stronger on the front surface of the planet than on [...]
05.20.10 -
Congress to Gates: Screw You. Again.
The U.S. military is bracing for lean years, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has warned that the past decade’s “gusher of defense spending” is coming to an end. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011, passed last night. Among [...]
05.20.10 -
Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life
Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time. In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally. “We all [...]
05.20.10 -
Google Challenges Apple’s Music Dominance
Google is taking aim at Apple’s dominance of online music, offering Android users the opportunity to buy music on the web and have it automatically sync to their mobile devices — as well as stream all the music on their home computers to their phones. Google announced the new initiatives at its Google I/O developer conference [...]
05.20.10 -
Google Introduces Google TV, New Android OS
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft and Apple have been trying to get into your living room for years, with a variety of television-oriented products. Now Google thinks it can succeed where other computer companies have seen only middling success. The company announced a new set-top box platform here Thursday: Google TV will marry television and the web, so [...]
05.20.10 -
Lost Hacking Documentary Surfaces on Pirate Bay
After collecting cobwebs in a studio vault for the better part of a decade, an unreleased documentary on the 2003 hacking scene leaked onto the Pirate Bay Thursday. Narrated by actor Kevin Spacey, the 90-minute Hackers Wanted follows the exploits of Adrian Lamo, who pleaded guilty in 2004 to cracking the internal network of The New [...]
05.20.10
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Playlist: Flaming Lips Go to Dark Side of the Moon
Listen to The Flaming Lips’ cover of Pink Floyd’s “Money” in this week’s Playlist podcast. The tweaked-out song is part of the Oklahoma band’s larger project to cover Floyd’s seminal stoner album The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, Playlist Podcast: Episode 26 http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/playlist/Playlist0026.mp3 Subscribe on iTunes » Plus, you’ll hear songs from Jamie Lidell, Sleigh [...]
05.20.10 -
First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS
Flash has been a contentious point for the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe. The latest volley: Adobe is releasing Flash Player 10.1 for mobile phones and desktops today. And it is piggy-backing on Google’s fast growing Android operating system to hit back at Apple. Google’s latest mobile operating system, Android 2.2, aka FroYo, will support Adobe’s Flash [...]
05.20.10 -
Google Chrome Web Apps Store Offers Lifeline to Media
If the browser is the new operating system, where will we buy software for it to run, and content for it to display? Google thinks it has found the answer, with its Chrome Web Store, announced at its own Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Just like you can buy apps for your iPhone, [...]
05.20.10 -
Google’s New Cloud Storage Service Takes on Amazon S3
Google plans to go head to head with Amazon’s popular S3 cloud storage service with the new Google Storage for Developers. Like S3, Google’s new service offers developers a cheap, scalable way to store data online. While it isn’t exactly the fabled “GDrive,” Google Storage for Developers certainly lays the groundwork for Google to create a [...]
05.20.10 -
Darpa Wants Code to Spot ‘Anomalous Behavior’ on the Job
Can software catch a cyberspy’s tricky intentions, before he’s started to help the other side? The way-out researchers at Darpa think so. They’re planning a new program, “Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination” or SMITE, that’s supposed to “dynamically forecast” when a mole is about to strike. Also, the code is meant to flag “inadvertent” disclosures [...]
05.20.10 -
Voice-Controlled Alarm-Clock Does Your Bidding
Like me, most of you have probably given up on purpose-made alarm clocks in favor of a cellphone under the pillow, or the less brain-boiling option of an iPod or other non-cellular clock. Unlike me, you probably get out of bed when the alarm rings, or at least after a few rounds of hitting snooze and [...]
05.20.10 -
Pakistan’s Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others Inaccessible
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) — Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube indefinitely in a bid to contain “blasphemous” material, officials said on Thursday. The blockade came after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) directed Internet service providers to stop access to social network site Facebook indefinitely on Wednesday because of an [...]
05.20.10 -
Weave Update Offers More Speed, New Name
Mozilla is rebranding its Weave Sync feature, which keeps your bookmarks, history and other Firefox data in sync across computers. As of version 1.3, Weave will be now be known as Firefox Sync. The name change is intended to help less tech-savvy users understand what Weave does — namely, sync Firefox. However, because Weave also works [...]
05.20.10 -
Jonathan Bender Talks Lego Conventions
Journalist Jonathan Bender spent a year immersed in the adult fan of LEGO community for his new book, LEGO: A Love Story, out this month. The past two years he has spent purchasing LEGO bricks; however, they can no longer be considered work-related expenses. Jonathan has written a guest post for us, sharing some tips [...]
05.20.10 -
Honl Adds Softbox to Light-Shaping Tools
Dave Honl, our favorite maker of light-shaping tools, has added a circular soft-box to his lineup of small-flash accessories. The nylon and polyethylene cone folds flat and joins Dave’s snoots, grids and reflectors. The big difference between the new traveller8 softbox is that, as its name suggests, it softens light and spreads it out. All [...]
05.20.10
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Unity Engine Lets Anyone Design Their Own Computer Games
GeekTeen John has been teaching himself to design computer games using the game engine Unity. Here’s his report: With all the recent advancements in videogame technology, it’s no surprise that we would get some programs that allowed anyone to create 3D games. One of these programs is Unity, a simple-to-use game engine that was released for [...]
05.20.10 -
Human Terrain Teams MIA in Afghanistan?
The ‘Security Crank’ is a former employee of the Army’s Human Terrain System, now working in the bowels of the national security establishment. This is the Crank’s first post for Danger Room. How do you properly vet the insurgents you’re trying to “win over” to your side? Is simply promising not to attack your forces [...]
05.20.10 -
Ten Amazing Classic Electronic Toys And Their Modern Equivalents
The ’80’s and early ’90’s were a magical decade for gadgets for kids. Computing power and display technology were evolving and cost effective enough to penetrate the toy market in a big way. Purely mechanical toys evolved into electromechanical toys and gave birth to the digital toy revolution. For example, LED games of the ’70’s [...]
05.20.10 -
Convertible Coffee-Table Desk, for Tall People With Short Arms
There’s likely a reason that Hammacher Schlemmer’s product page for the Convertible Coffee Table doesn’t show any pictures of people using it. It would probably crick your spine into a Quasimodo-hunch within mere moments of springing it open. The table sits innocently in your living room, its slightly too-tall shape providing a shiny brown surface, [...]
05.20.10 -
Arcade Game Made from LEGO Bricks
Ben Fleskes of Big Ben Bricks created a tabletop game unit out of LEGO pieces. Obviously, the electronics are not made from LEGO pieces. Ben used a JAMMA Arcade PCB board so the unit can play classic 80s arcade game including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga and 45 others. He even found a switchable 4-way/8-way joystick [...]
05.20.10 -
Comics Spotlight On: Spider-Girl
Spider-Girl is not a character in regular Marvel continuity. She’s not a male hero. And she’s been canceled twice. But she keeps coming back. Though no longer in print, she currently has a series of digital adventures, though those are coming to an end soon and her original stories may cease. Still, May “Mayday “Parker is good [...]
05.20.10 -
Stars Strike Back for Charity on Empire’s 30th Birthday
Han Solo and Chewbacca reunited Wednesday night to benefit the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital almost 30 years to the day since Star Wars: Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back premiered around the world. Empire stars Harrison Ford, Peter Mayhew and Billy Dee Williams joined Ewan McGregor, Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau and the voice cast of The Clone [...]
05.20.10 -
International iPad App Store Now Open for Business
Good news for international iPad owners. Apple has finally switched on the iPad App Store in your country. Or rather, it is in the process of switching it on in those countries that will be lucky enough to get the iPad itself at the end of this month. Up until today, getting iPad apps outside the [...]
05.20.10 -
Netflix Update Adds iPad Video-Out
The Netflix iPad application will now let you watch your streamed movies on the big screen. The 1.0.2 update brings support for the iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter, allowing you to pipe the video out to any VGA-compatible TV, monitor or projector. The trick with Apple’s $30 dongle is that developers need to explicitly give [...]
05.20.10 -
HTC Hero Gets Android 2.1, Erases All Your Data
Oh, you lucky HTC Hero owner. As of yesterday, you can download and install Android 2.1 from the HTC site and enjoy some speech-to-text and pinch-to-zoom. But not so fast. Heed this warning from the download page: WARNING: Installing this software will erase your current user data. Please see instructions below for details. Specifically, applying [...]
05.20.10
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Google Opens Up the Buzz API
Since you’re probably a little Googled out with the barrage of announcements coming out of I/O Wednesday, we’ll keep this one brief. Google has publicly released an API for Buzz, its real-time social product for sharing status updates, comments, photos and other media on the web. Here’s an overview from Google’s DeWitt Clinton. The Buzz API is [...]
05.19.10 -
Chinese Counterfeiters Release First Android Tablet
Chinese counterfeiters have beaten Google to producing an Android tablet. The Chinese wholesaler ActFind, which carries knockoffs of many electronics including iPhones and iPods, is selling an iPad-lookalike running the Android OS. Priced at $150, the Android tablet is haphazardly labeled “MINI iPadⅡ8 Inch Android1.6 Ebook Tablet PC UMPC MID Netbook.” According to the product description, it [...]
05.19.10 -
Farm Wars: How Facebook Games Harvest Big Bucks
Kira Greer was sitting in a meeting one afternoon when she suddenly remembered an urgent deadline. The San Francisco instructional designer knew there was no time to waste. She excused herself, saying she had to go to the bathroom, then rushed back to her desk. Quickly opening Facebook, she began furiously clicking on rows of virtual [...]
05.19.10 -
On Web Video Support, Safari Now Stands Alone
SAN FRANCISCO — When Google announced it would be releasing the VP8 video codec under an open source license, all of the major browser vendors jumped up to support it. Well, all of them except Apple. The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a [...]
05.19.10 -
Pennsylvania Attorney General Tries to Unmask Twitter Critics
An anonymous blogger critical of Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett plans to challenge a grand jury subpoena ordering Twitter to reveal the blogger’s identity. “It doesn’t really matter why we are criticizing him,” said ”Signor Ferrari,” one of the two Twitter users targeted in the subpoena from Corbett, who won the Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday. ”It’s our First [...]
05.19.10 -
MSpot Unveils Cloud-Based Music System for Android
In the race to make music accessible from anywhere, MSpot’s music service has a somewhat novel approach: Don’t sell anything, yet, and don’t sign any major label deals. Instead, the service allows people to upload their music — be it purchased, ripped or downloaded for free — and access it from any Mac, Windows or Google [...]
05.19.10 -
Inside Red Dead Redemption’s Sprawling Wild West
Red Dead Redemption could have been titled Grand Theft Horse. That would have been a terrible name, but totally accurate. Rockstar Games’ latest epic, released Tuesday for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, takes the open-world formula that works so well for Grand Theft Auto and applies it to a wholly different place and time. Now you’re [...]
05.19.10 -
Video: An Artificial Butterfly Takes Flight
runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience86641640001', 'anId');brightcove.createExperiences(); A tiny artificial butterfly takes flight in a new high-speed video. Engineers Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama of Harvard University and University of Tokyo, respectively, created the tiny butterfly to try to understand [...]
05.19.10 -
Google, Typekit Join Up to Improve Web Fonts
Google has announced a new Font API and a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their site designs for free. The Google Font API allows you to embed any of the new Google fonts on your website using CSS. The fonts themselves are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif [...]
05.19.10 -
Argonaut Octopus Mystery Solved
After centuries of speculation, biologists have documented one way a strange group of octopus-like creatures use their seashell-shaped cases. Female argonauts, a group of four species that are close cousins of octopuses, grow delicate white shell-like cases. Biologists have found argonauts with air bubbles in their cases, and now it turns out the animals use the [...]
05.19.10
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Vigilantes Hack Criminal Carding Forum and Expose Underground Dealings
A German cybercrime forum was hacked by attackers who have exposed the underground dealings of the criminal denizens. The hackers snagged the database containing what appears to be all the private correspondence of the forum members, and posted it to the web. The hackers also posted information on the IP addresses forum members used when they [...]
05.19.10 -
Dragon Quest IX Launches July 11 in U.S.
Dragon Quest IX will be in American stores on July 11, Nintendo said today. Square Enix’s role-playing game series has never been as popular in the U.S. and Europe as it has been in its native Japan, where each iteration sells between four and five million copies. Nintendo hopes to make Dragon Quest IX a going [...]
05.19.10 -
NSFW: Winnebago Man Trailer Brings the F-Bombs
After outtakes from an ’80s video shoot went viral online, foul-mouthed RV pitchman Jack Rebney became known as “the angriest man on Earth” or simply “the Winnebago man.” Now his bizarre life story is being told in a documentary, Winnebago Man, that tracks Rebney’s bizarre trajectory from industrial actor to underground VHS treasure to reluctant internet [...]
05.19.10 -
Adobe Adds HTML5 Creation Tools to Dreamweaver
SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe will begin shipping a package of HTML5 web design tools for Dreamweaver, the company says. The HTML5 Pack for Dreamweaver will available for download on Adobe Labs some time on Wednesday. It will be a free download for anyone who owns Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, and Adobe will roll it into an [...]
05.19.10 -
Bawdy 8-Bit Music Video Spawns iPhone Game
Hit movies spawn dozens of videogames a year, but this may be the first time a music video has served as the basis for one. On Tuesday, Mobigames released Trucker’s Delight, a retro-styled racing game inspired by the video for a song of the same name by the French electronic artist Flairs. The original music video [...]
05.19.10 -
Gitmo Shutdown Means More Drone Strikes, Officials Claim
The White House has essentially forced the Pentagon and the CIA to fire off more and more drone strikes in Pakistan, because of “executive orders to ban secret CIA detention centers and close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.” It’s one of a number of remarkable assertions military and intelligence officials make to Reuters’ Adam Entous in [...]
05.19.10 -
Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov
One year ago this Friday, United States chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — [...]
05.19.10 -
Penn Jillette Readies New Rants for Penn Point
Magic libertarian Penn Jillette will tackle technology, politics and pop culture in a new Revision3 show, Penn Point. “I’m saying and shooting whatever I want, wherever I want, and the team at Revision3 is just going to make it better in edit,” said Jillette in a press release Wednesday. “We’ve been working on the first few [...]
05.19.10 -
Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
SAN FRANCISCO — The web received a shiny new gift Wednesday morning — a truly open and royalty-free video codec for HTML5 web pages. The new open media project is called WebM. As expected, the VP8 codec is at the center of WebM. Google acquired the video technology earlier this year, and developers have been itching [...]
05.19.10 -
Taliban Stages Big Attack on (Allegedly) Pro-U.S. Ground
This wasn’t supposed to happen here. U.S. forces and the people living around the massive Bagram Air Field got along, allegedly. They cooperated on all kinds of projects. Yet somehow, the Taliban managed to launch one of their biggest, most complex assaults of the year, on this seemingly-friendly ground. Now, one American contractor is dead [...]
05.19.10
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Twitter Expects Hundreds of Advertisers This Year
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter plans to have hundreds of advertisers using its new ad system in the fourth quarter as the company ramps up plans to become a self-sustaining, profitable business. Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said the company’s newly launched advertising system would provide a key pillar in Twitter’s plans [...]
05.19.10 -
Yugo Driver Finds Picture of His Own Ride on Bad Cars Post
It’s every car lover’s worst nightmare: You click on a blog post about bad cars, and there’s a picture of your ride. Not just a car exactly like yours, but your car. That’s you behind the wheel, fresh from a trip to Taco Bell. That’s just what happened to Ben Hase, a Yugo owner from Wausau, [...]
05.19.10 -
Pentagon: Missile Critics Use ‘Wile E. Coyote’ Physics
Last week, missile-defense critics Theodore Postol and George Lewis touched off a controversy after they questioned the Pentagon’s claims of test success for the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptor. But in a roundtable yesterday with bloggers, Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner suggested, in effect, that the two critics were relying on Looney Tunes physics to [...]
05.19.10 -
May 22nd is Identification Day At The American Museum Of Natural History
Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks are in your backyard? Has your dog ever found a bone that you want identified? OK the bone is probably from your neighbors garbage, but it might be something interesting. On May 22nd The Museum Of Natural History is holding its annual Identification Day. [...]
05.19.10 -
Dork Tower Wednesday
Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.
05.19.10 -
Danger, STRATCOM Conference!
I’m running a panel at next week’s U.S. Strategic Command Cyber Symposium. Give me a holler if you’re going to be there, too.
05.19.10 -
Review: The Adventurers—Five Exciting Ways to Die
In the course of about an hour, you can be squashed by moving walls, burn in a lava pit, be thrown over the edge of a waterfall, fall through a rickety bridge into a bottomless chasm, or get crushed by a boulder. Oh, or you might escape the ancient Mayan temple with riches untold. But [...]
05.19.10 -
Use The Fork, Luke: Star Wars Cookbooks Serve Up Recipes For Boba Fett-ucine, Qui-Gon Jinn-ger Snaps & More
If there’s anything my kids love more than eating everything in the house, it has to be Star Wars. Now, thankfully, they can combine their two favorite pastimes with a couple of books we recently discovered (but Kathy first looked at a couple years ago): The Star Wars Cookbook and The Star Wars Cookbook 2. The manuals [...]
05.19.10 -
GeekDad HipTrax #50
This show marks the 50th regular episode of GeekDad HipTrax. Oh, how far we’ve some! To celebrate the occasion, this episode is heavily hip-hop. It is also heavenly hip-hop. (See what I did there?). Today’s edition features: “Different Language” by Beefy Our own GeekDad Curtis reviewed Beefy’s newest offering With Sprinkles earlier this week. I can’t imagine you need [...]
05.19.10 -
Army’s New 3D Trainer, Complete with Funny Helmet Attachment
The military pours plenty of money into training and simulations, but their video game-style trainers are often dull and static, and involve sitting or standing in front of a large, unmoving screen. So now the Army is trying out a more immersive approach with a new training helmet that allows trainees to move around in [...]
05.18.10
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The Empire Strikes Back — in ’50s-Style 3-D
Star Wars gets warped back to the ’50s in this mashup trailer showing what The Empire Strikes Back might have looked like as a retro 3-D sci-fi flick. The faux trailer is the latest “premake” by YouTube user whoiseyevan, who has previously tackled Raiders of the Lost Ark and Ghost Busters, among other classics. “Ever since [...]
05.18.10 -
30-Year Time-Lapse: Mount St. Helens Recovery From Space
runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience86348784001', 'anId');brightcove.createExperiences(); The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 has a special place in the evolution of our scientific understanding of volcanoes. Though it won’t go down in the record books as the biggest, longest or deadliest eruption, it is one of the best-studied eruptions in history and the only major volcanic [...]
05.18.10 -
Video: Ghostbusters Bust Ghosts at NYC Library
A team of Ghostbusters converge on a New York City library to capture sheet-wearing specters in the latest public prank pulled by Improv Everywhere. Watch the video above, and check out many more photos on the Improv Everywhere page that documents the Ghost Busters-inspired stunt. [via Mashable] Follow us on Twitter: @lewiswallace and @theunderwire. See Also: Improv Everywhere Talks R.E.M., [...]
05.18.10 -
Yahoo Buys Online Content Factory for $90 Million
Yahoo has joined the race to mass-produce content for the web with its purchase Thursday of Associated Content for a rumored $90 million. Associated Content, like Demand Media and AOL’s new Seed project, relies on thousands of freelancers to write and film how-tos, profiles and top-whatever lists for web publication — with help from search algorithms [...]
05.18.10 -
Facebook to Launch “Simplistic” Privacy Choices Soon
Reacting to the latest privacy backlash, Facebook will be rolling out new “simplistic” privacy options for its users in the coming weeks, according to Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani. “Now we’ve heard from our users that we have gotten a little bit complex,” Sparapani said in a radio interview Tuesday. “I think we are [...]
05.18.10 -
Classic Gamers Chase After Burner Championship
The planners of the Annual International Classic Video Game Tournament never reveal the classic arcade games that will be played before the day of the event. But this year they’ve got something special planned. In June, the American Classic Arcade Museum at the world famous Funspot in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire will host the first-ever World [...]
05.18.10 -
LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times
Apparently, when you publish your Social Security number prominently on your website and billboards, people take it as an invitation to steal your identity. LifeLock CEO Todd Davis, whose number is displayed in the company’s ubiquitous advertisements, has by now learned that lesson. He’s been a victim of identity theft at least 13 times, according to [...]
05.18.10 -
Foucault’s Pendulum Dented in Museum Mishap
The cable holding a model of Foucault’s pendulum snapped last month at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, sending the 60-pound ball crashing to the ground. It was permanently dented in the fall. Léon Foucault’s 1851 experiment remains a mesmerizing evidence that the Earth does, in fact, rotate. Scientists were aware of this, but [...]
05.18.10 -
Gamera DVD Puts Fresh Sheen on Classic Sci-Fi
By modern standards, Gamera might look cheesy, yet the giant turtle still packs a weirdly hypnotic punch. Fifty-five years after it first ravaged Tokyo, the fire-breathing amphibian gets a fresh chance to scare the hell out of civilians, thanks to a newly remastered DVD package. The unedited, special edition of Gamera, The Giant Monster, released Tuesday, [...]
05.18.10 -
Spotify Adds U.S.-Friendly Service Plans
Spotify, our favorite freemium music service you probably can’t use, announced two new payment plans for its service in addition to the free, ad-supported and premium versions it has offered in Europe for over a year now. The new plans bear some similarity to the rules by which U.S.-based music services play, and that could mean [...]
05.18.10
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Copyright Lawsuits Plummet in Aftermath of RIAA Campaign
New federal copyright infringement lawsuits plummeted to a six-year low in 2009, the year after the Recording Industry Association of America abandoned its litigation campaign against file sharers, court records show. Copyright lawsuits numbered 2,192 in 2009, down almost a third from the previous year, and represented more than a 50 percent drop from 2005, when the recording industry’s legal machinery was [...]
05.18.10 -
Facebook Backlash Sparks Transparency Tools
The continuing backlash against Facebook’s growing power on the web and its ongoing push to make its users share more data has inspired hackers to develop transparency tools that demonstrate the site’s privacy threats. One shows you your own data leaks; another lets you peek at the forehead-slapping foibles of others. The Facebook privacy scanner available at [...]
05.18.10 -
Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Also Get the Disease
Elderly people who care for a spouse who has dementia are at increased risk of developing dementia themselves, a study finds. The stress of attending to a mentally incapacitated spouse may somehow contribute to the added risk, scientists report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Previous studies have shown that chronic stress leads [...]
05.18.10 -
Report: Final Fantasy Versus XIII Could Go to Xbox 360
Hold on tight for this one. Everybody’s favorite piece of vaporware might soon be scheduled to not get released anytime soon on two platforms. When the spinoff game Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced over four years ago at E3, it was a PlayStation 3 exclusive like its big brother. Even Final Fantasy XIII’s shift to [...]
05.18.10 -
Nintendo Magic Book Tells (Partial) History of Wii
Ever wonder just how Nintendo created the company culture that produced the Wii and DS? Well, tough cookies. As the author of a new book called Nintendo Magic states repeatedly, Nintendo doesn’t like to talk about its management philosophy. But Nikkei Business writer Osamu Inoue has enjoyed some enviable access — exclusive interviews with company president [...]
05.18.10 -
Missile Defenders Blast Critics After Interceptor Attack
The Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon directorate charged with developing anti-missile technology, might want to consider a new line of defense: Intercepting articles by critic Theodore Postol before they land in reporters’ inboxes. Postol’s record as a missile-defense skeptic is well established: The MIT professor famously — and correctly — questioned the Army’s claims about the [...]
05.18.10 -
Pakistani Site: Drones Only Killed One Terrorist in 2010 (If You Don’t Count Taliban)
Read one American analysis, and you’ll be told that U.S. drones haven’t killed a single civilian in Pakistan this year. A look through one pair of local eyes yields a very different result, however. According to the website Pakistan Body Count, America’s drones have only hit a single terrorist in 2010, while slaying dozens and [...]
05.18.10 -
Boeing’s Newest, Oldest Airliners Fly Together
Boeing’s chief test pilot Mike Carriker was able to take a brief break from the busy flight test duties earlier this month to fly formation with the oldest flying Boeing airplane. After photos were leaked on the internet last week, many were thinking it was a creative digital editing job, but the photo shoot has [...]
05.18.10 -
Judge Issues Legal Opinion in Brooklyn fMRI Case
The judge in a recent Brooklyn case in which brain scan evidence was offered has delivered an opinion on why he ultimately excluded the fMRI data. In Judge Robert H. Miller’s written opinion, obtained by Wired.com, he decided that under the Frye test, which is slightly different from the Daubert standard used in federal court, lie [...]
05.17.10 -
Fox Fries Up a New Dork Family Cartoon Bob’s Burgers
In the tradition of The Simpsons and Family Guy, Fox’s new animated series Bob’s Burgers wrests its laughs from a madcap brood of irredeemably misguided goofballs. The midseason replacement, unveiled Monday at the network’s upfront presentation in New York City, bears the wry, dry stylings of creator Loren Bouchard, who earlier produced Comedy Central’s egghead [...]
05.17.10
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Eyewitness Account of ‘Watershed’ Brain Scan Legal Hearing
The very first federal admissibility hearing for fMRI lie-detection evidence wrapped up May 14 in a Tennessee court room. The decision, expected in a couple weeks, could have a significant influence on the direction that brain scan evidence takes in the courtroom. A special session was held to determine whether brain scans that were generated by [...]
05.17.10 -
Summer Glau Sees Fresh Action in The Cape
Summer Glau, Joss Whedon’s go-to ass-kicker, is taking a fresh stab at small-screen heroics in NBC’s upcoming superhero caper The Cape. As seen in the teaser clip embedded above, the series centers on the adventures of a good cop (played by David Lyons) who dubs himself The Cape — taking the name from his son’s favorite [...]
05.17.10 -
5 Lessons TV Should Learn After Losing Heroes
NBC finally canceled Heroes, a move early adopters of the ultimately underwhelming superhero show probably saw coming soon after Season 2. But all is not lost. Heroes‘ meteoric rise and ignominious fall leave behind much residual data for those looking to build faster, stronger, smarter and more resilient programming. Here are five ways upcoming NBC show [...]
05.17.10 -
Hybrid Power, CNG Shine at Nürburgring 24 Hour Race
After more than 22 hours of racing around the punishing Nürburgring circuit, Porsche nervously waited for the remaining two hours to tick by. After unveiling its new hybrid drive system back in February, the company’s new 911 GT3 R Hybrid was in the lead of the grueling Nürburgring 24 Hours. The company had only a [...]
05.17.10 -
Robo-Thriller The Gift Triggers Hollywood Frenzy
Robot thriller The Gift is that rare species of “branded” entertainment that hits an artistic home run not through corny product placement, but by making its sponsor look cool. Shot by TV commercial director Carl Erik Rinsch on the streets of Moscow, the futuristic short film follows a ‘bot on a mission that entails a [...]
05.17.10 -
Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
The use of custom fonts on the web is finally a viable option for designers. Browser support for CSS’s @font-face rule is pretty solid — even IE 5 can be wrangled into displaying custom fonts loaded from your server. Services like Typekit, which licenses fonts from well-known font foundries, and free services like Font Squirrel are [...]
05.17.10 -
Screens: Adjectives Make Super Scribblenauts Even Crazier
Super Scribblenauts is the official title of the sequel to last year’s most innovative Nintendo DS game, Warner Bros. said Monday. In Scribblenauts, players solved puzzles by writing words, which magically transformed into the very objects they described. If you needed to climb a tree, for example, you could write “ladder” (or “jetpack” or “wings” [...]
05.17.10 -
Review: Horror Game Alan Wake Can’t Keep It Creepy
The first thing you hear when beginning Alan Wake is the following line, spoken by the videogame’s eponymous protagonist: Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations. They’re antithetical to the poetry of fear. In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why. But there [...]
05.17.10 -
Students, Parents Allowed to View Webcam Scandal Photos
Suburban Philadelphia parents and their high school-age children soon will learn the extent of a potentially criminal webcam scandal. A federal magistrate on Friday ordered the Lower Merion School District to start sending notification letters to any student covertly spied on through their school-issued Macbook, as well as to their parents. The order covers screenshots taken [...]
05.17.10 -
Gameloft Sidesteps Android Market for Mobile Assassin’s Creed, HAWX
Unlike iPhone users, owners of Android smart phones aren’t tied to a single app store. On Monday, mobile game publisher Gameloft made 10 of its Android games available directly through its website, bypassing the need to use Google’s Android Market. The games, which run on Android handsets like the Motorola Droid, HTC Desire and Nexus One, include [...]
05.17.10
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Smart Makes Art With Its Own Oil
It’s no secret that the Smart brand positions itself as a patron of the arts, sponsoring more works than the House of Medici. The latest “Smart art” is both high-concept and high tech, using a robot to translate the sound waves from an accelerating fortwo into visual art. To contrast the differences between internal combustion engines [...]
05.17.10 -
If Yamaha Went Electric, It Would Look Like This
SONOMA COUNTY, California — If you want to build a competitive electric motorcycle, start with a competitive gas-powered motorcycle. That’s what the crew at Electric Race Bikes did when it set out to build the EGP, its entry in the TTXGP electric grand prix. They wanted something light, something nimble and something proven, so they started [...]
05.17.10 -
Join the Revolution And Bike to Work
Now that we’re deep into spring and the weather has changed, hopping on your bicycle probably is looking more and more tempting — just in time for national Bike Month. Bike Month is, as the name implies, recognized throughout May. But it kicks into gear today with the start of Bike to Work Week and hits [...]
05.17.10 -
TTXGP Electric Motorcycle Race Becomes a Dogfight
SONOMA COUNTY, California — Seasoned pro Shawn Higbee won North America’s first-ever electric motorcycle grand prix today in a race that was tighter than the finish would suggest. Ten riders competed in the 25-mile race around Infineon Raceway, but all the action was at the front of the pack. The 11-lap race was a dogfight most [...]
05.16.10 -
Seasoned Pro Takes Pole At Electric Motorcycle Race
SONOMA COUNTY, California — Shawn Higbee handily led a field of 10 riders to take pole position in North America’s first electric motorcycle grand prix. Higbee, a seasoned racer, lapped the 2.28-mile course here at Infineon Raceway in 1 minute 56.86 seconds to take pole in the TTXGP electric motorcycle race on Sunday. He rode his [...]
05.15.10 -
New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes
David Recordon, one of the key architects of OpenID and other identity technologies that have emerged over the past five years, has envisioned a new direction for OpenID. His proposal, which was drafted with input from several people in the OpenID community, is called OpenID Connect. At the highest level, it essentially rebuilds OpenID on top [...]
05.15.10 -
This Should Be Zero Motorcycle’s Next Electric Bike
SONOMA COUNTY, California — We have one thing to say to Zero Motorcycles about this bike: Build it. Zero Motorcycles rolled into the TTXGP electric motorcycle grand prix here at Infineon Raceway with a pair of bikes built specifically for the race. The big dog is a converted Suzuki GSX-R600 running a pair of Agni 95 [...]
05.15.10 -
Electra Racing Goes Old-School With an Electric Norton
SONOMA COUNTY, California — Team Electra’s entry in the TTXGP electric motorcycle race looks like something from the 1960s. That’s because it is. Team Electra is among the 12 teams here at Infineon Raceway to kick off the TTXGP North American electric motorcycle race series this weekend, and it is the only one coming out of the [...]
05.15.10 -
Q&A;: Trek Nation Director Scott Colthorp on Star Trek, Optimism and Dissed Fans
Documentary Trek Nation, Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry and Scott Colthorp’s philosophical peek into the sci-fi franchise’s enduring cultural appeal, has yet to touch down in theaters. But from its desire to be the anti-Trekkies to its all-star interviewees like George Lucas, J.J. Abrams and Patrick Stewart, the movie is approaching warp factor geek. In an e-mail interview [...]
05.15.10 -
Photos: Lost Props Set for Summer Sale
As Lost heads toward its finale, cast-offs from the prop department are bobbing to the surface with news that keepsakes from the ABC series will be auctioned to fans hankering to hold on to a little piece of the show. Memorabilia to be auctioned by Profiles in History this summer includes a fake passport used [...]
05.14.10
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Farm Wars: How Facebook Games Harvest Big Bucks
05.19.10 -
Video: An Artificial Butterfly Takes Flight
05.19.10 -
LifeLock CEO’s Identity Stolen 13 Times
05.18.10 -
Inside Red Dead Redemption’s Sprawling Wild West
05.19.10 -
Argonaut Octopus Mystery Solved
05.19.10 -
Pennsylvania Attorney General Tries to Unmask Twitter Critics
05.19.10 -
HTC Hero Gets Android 2.1, Erases All Your Data
05.20.10 -
Vigilantes Hack Criminal Carding Forum and Expose Underground Dealings
05.19.10 -
Pakistan’s Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others Inaccessible
05.20.10 -
Pentagon: Missile Critics Use ‘Wile E. Coyote’ Physics
05.19.10 -
First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS
05.20.10 -
Maker Faire Preview: Animatronic Dragon Breathes 8-Foot Fireball
05.19.10 -
MSpot Unveils Cloud-Based Music System for Android
05.19.10 -
Google Chrome Web Apps Store Offers Lifeline to Media
05.20.10 -
30-Year Time-Lapse: Mount St. Helens Recovery From Space
05.18.10 -
Ten Amazing Classic Electronic Toys And Their Modern Equivalents
05.20.10 -
Google Introduces Google TV, New Android OS
05.20.10 -
Chinese Counterfeiters Release First Android Tablet
05.19.10 -
Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov
05.19.10 -
Facebook Backlash Sparks Transparency Tools
05.18.10
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