Nov 7th, 2008 · In what sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot, the Home Office has made public plans to outfit the country's Internet with upstream data recorders to log pretty much everything that passes through. 'Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw …
Nov 4th, 2008 · Wired has an interview with Alan Kay on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the idea of the laptop computer. Kay's vision, which he dubbed the "Dynabook," was for a 2-pound, 1-Mpixel color computing device. "...the Dynabook was never built. But it …
Oct 27th, 2008 · The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web-- that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving …
Oct 9th, 2008 · This article on Absolute Gadget details how researchers at Boston University's College of Engineering are working on devloping wireless networks that use LED lights instead of normal radio waves. This research apparently has other uses in the automobile …
Oct 3rd, 2008 · Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The 'Latitude ON' feature is said to offer 'multi-day' battery …
Sep 27th, 2008 · Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from CNet: "Google's vision of tomorrow's wireless network is in stark contrast to how wireless operators do business today, setting the two sides on a possible collision course. Earlier this week, the search giant …
Sep 22nd, 2008 · The Washington Post reports that the US Congress is funding laser weapons for use in the near future. Low-power lasers called 'dazzlers' are already being used in Iraq to temporarily reduce a person's vision. High-power laser weapons would allow precision …
Sep 22nd, 2008 · From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality. Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves …
Aug 27th, 2008 · New Scientist reports on a neat DARPA idea that uses the shimmer of heat haze to allow binoculars to see further. It works by exploiting the fact that some distortions from heat haze actually magnify objects behind them. The binoculars collect a series …
Aug 25th, 2008 · In a recent blog post, Wizards of the Coast's Vice President of Digital Gaming, Randy Buehler announced that they were killing their Gleemax social networking site. Originally designed to create a central hub where gamers could meet, discuss, and play …
Aug 21st, 2008 · Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the wisdom of standardizing on a single language in the wake of the ECMA Committee's decision to abandon ECMAScript 4 in favor of the much less ambitious ECMAScript 3.1, stunting the future of JavaScript. Had …
Aug 15th, 2008 · Anti-Globalism sends this except from the Guardian: "In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development …
Aug 4th, 2008 · A team from the University of Maryland has won the 11th Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, held in San Diego, CA, this weekend. Twenty-five teams from around the world (US, Canada, Japan, and India) built autonomous submarines …
Jul 27th, 2008 · As part of their research efforts aimed at building real-time human-level artificial vision systems inspired by the brain, MIT graduate student Nicolas Pinto and principal investigators David Cox (Rowland Institute at Harvard) and James DiCarlo (McGovern …
Jul 19th, 2008 · General Motors researchers are working on a high-tech windshield that users lasers and infra-red sensors to identify and enhance important objects for older drivers with vision problems. 'For example, during a foggy drive, a laser projects a blue line …
Jul 3rd, 2008 · Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the transforming nature of the Web now that Tim Berners-Lee's early vision has been supplanted by today's much more complex model. AJAX, Google Web Toolkit, Flash and Silverlight all have McAllister …
Jun 27th, 2008 · CNET is reporting that on Monday Orbitz will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, both 'part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, …
May 29th, 2008 · Debates about the profitability of 'free' continue to rage, but at least one major media conglomerate — Viacom — is pushing forward with releasing paid-for content for free on the Internet. Of course, the prospect of free and easy full-length …
May 26th, 2008 · This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to …
May 14th, 2008 · Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University have launched GWAP, a new web site for 'Games With A Purpose.' By playing these online games, humans help provide data for problems that are hard for computers to solve, such as computer vision and …
