] Albert Titus, an assistant professor of electrical
] engineering at the University at Buffalo, New York, has
] created a silicon chip that mimics the structure and
] functionality of an octopus retina.
]
] His "o-retina" chip can process images just like an
] octopus eye does. The chip could give sight to rescue or
] research robots, allowing them to see more clearly than
] human eyes can in dark or murky conditions.

Titus notes, "the retina is an extension of the brain, so where does the distinction between seeing and perceiving begin and end?"

Wired News: The Octopus as Eyewitness

] 2.13 x 0.94 x 0.08 in
] (54 x 24 x 2.1 mm)

The picture of this thing that appears on my monitor is larger then the device itself. 802.11 is now small enough for use in bugs.

Socket Communications: SDIO Wireless LAN CF Card

(U: BTW, the section of this article that deals with prisons is worth the price of admission, but I'll focus on something else...)

] 4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
]
] In reality, these sad devices are heat bulbs.
] Supposedly a lighting technology, they produce nine times
] more raw heat than they do illumination. The light they
] do give, admittedly, is still prettier than the eerie
] glow of compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes.
] But it's still a far cry from the glories of natural
] daylight.
]
] Plus there's the cost of light bulbs, their
] fragility, the replacement overhead, the vast waste of
] energy, glass, and tungsten, the goofy hassle of running
] air conditioners to do battle with the blazing heat of
] all these round little glass stoves let's face
] it, these gizmos deserve to vanish.
]
] They will be replaced by a superior technology, something
] cheap, cool, and precisely engineered, that emits visible
] wavelengths genuinely suited to a consumer's human
] eyeball. Our descendants will stare at those
] vacuum-shrouded wires as if they were whale-oil lanterns.

So, they are slowly replacing traffic lights with LED lights in atlanta. If LEDs are bright enough for this purpose, one must imagine that you could create a suitable light bulb replacement that:

A. Screws into a socket.
B. Essentially consists of a stick covered in white leds.
C. Has a translucent plastic filter covering it which only emits "lightbulb" wavelengths.

Why is this hard?

(U: Maybe the power transformer you'll need to convert your whopping 120 volts of AC power into 5VDC will create just as much waste heat as your lights did. As almost every device in your house now has an AC to DC power converter, maybe it makes sense to start talking about putting a centralized AC to DC converter in your house and running two circuits, an AC cicuit for major appliances, and a DC circuit for basically everything else. It would reduce a lot of costs, and improve the safety of most home wiring. Of course, cutting over to something like this would be a huge effort that would require widespread coordination from several industries. (For those of you who aren't electronics savvy, basically what I'm saying is that your house ought to have the "power supply" rather then your computer.)

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

] Network Solutions, a full-service provider of domain
] names, Web sites and e-mail services, today announced
] specific precautions customers can take to protect their
] personal information associated with their domain name
] registrations with the launch of a new consumer privacy
] advocate Web site, http://www.internetprivacyadvocate.org

It would obviously be totally out of character for them to do something benevolent. So what is the deal here? OIC, they want you to file a comment asking ICANN to allow Network Solutions to prohibit bulk whois transfers. Obvious there are privacy implications, but obviously bulk whois transfers were not created for the benefit of spammers in the first place. Who needs bulk access to this data? Who is getting screwed here? Anyone know?

Network Solutions(R) Launches Internet Privacy Web Site

] The typo-catching wildcard is a fundamentally broken
] idea. It cannot be fixed; it is impossible to patch it to the
] point of acceptability.
]
] The technique should be eschewed in all contexts. The
] best that can be done with it is to hold it up as an
] example of how things go wrong when protocols are abused.

Hrm. This view is probably too radical, and so this is unlikely to be adopted, but it is interesting.

Best conspiracy theory I've heard so far:

Verisign can break the security of any https connection. Typos to https sites get redirected to Verisign. Verisign can MITM.

Internet Draft against typo catching wildcards

] "One would hope that something of this magnitude would be
] properly covered in the contracts," Cerf said. It would
] be in nobody's interest to take control of .com away from
] VeriSign, Cerf said, but ICANN may face an all-or-nothing
] choice of whether to revoke VeriSign's contract.

OK, Is this Cerf making a comment in the Post that they might cancel Verisign's contract, or is this a journalist putting his opinion intentionally close to Cerf's name to generate drama?

VeriSign Ignores Request To Suspend New Service (TechNews.com)

] VeriSign, Inc. , the leading provider of critical
] infrastructure services for the Internet and
] telecommunications networks, today announced that it has
] been selected by Accenture to provide hosting, security
] consulting, authentication services and Managed Public
] Key Infrastructure (MPKI) services for the Department of
] Defense's Secure Electronic Registration and Voting
] Experiment (SERVE.) Upon full deployment, SERVE will
] enable absentee uniformed services members and overseas
] United States citizens from eight participating states to
] cast absentee ballots via the Internet for the 2004
] primary and general elections.

Now THAT is a perfect storm...

VeriSign Selected by Accenture to Secure Department of Defense E-Voting System

inignoct wrote:
] interesting concept. viable?

Clueless AND Dangerous.

An iPod IS a hard drive. You cannot enforce your digital expiration date. This will not stop piracy.

However, the reason this author doesn't "get" that is that he sees the ipod as a closed device that you can't tamper with. That is what he is advocating, and you are going to see more and more of that, for TV as well...

The idea is to replace all these pesky personal computers that people can program and control for their own purposes with devices that are closed and which only serve the purposes of the media industries. The "mini-DMCA" laws that are making the rounds in the state legislatures are an attempt to ban all personal electronics that do no obey the edicts of the media industry from being attached to the networks in your house. This is the direction that things are moving.

This will not prevent piracy, this will prevent innovation. In order to deploy a new service you will have to get buy in from the companies that control these devices. If you innovate in a way that threatens established industries, they aren't going to let you in. This isn't an end run around "file swapping pirates" so much as it is an end run around the personal computing revolution.

The only reason this guy's article makes all of this sound cool is that he says things like "And trying to capture such music would be about as easy as trapping mist in a jar." Sounds neat. Unfortunately what he is presenting is an extremely dark, dystopian future in which all of this new technology does not serve to better inform or better communicate, but only to better push products.

RE: A Wireless iPod Can Torpedo the Pirates

The Fall/Winter 2003 issue of CIO Magazine is a special issue that focuses on "technology's impact on everything."

They've assembled quite the team of contributors for this issue, including Ray Kurzweil, Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, Bjorn Lomborg, Robert Reich, Howard Gardner, Jonathan Zittrain, Paul Saffo, Newt Gingrich, The Dalai Lama, Howard Rheingold, Robert Ballard, Barry Steinhardt, and more.

Here's how the Barry Steinhardt piece begins:

PICTURE THIS: You're attending a trade show in Las Vegas.

Strolling around the city one evening, you happen upon a sex shop and pause for a moment to snicker at the curious items in the store's window. Then you continue on your way.

However, unbeknownst to you, the store's Customer Identification System has detected a radio identification signal emitted by a computer chip in one of your credit cards, and is recording your identity and the date and time of your brief stop. A few weeks later, your spouse is surprised to find in the mail a lurid solicitation from the store mentioning your visit.

You've got some explaining to do.

Technology's Impact on Everything | CIO Magazine

An interesting discussion of how Google manages it's server farm...

Paper on Google's filesystem