Monthly Archives: April 2005

Congress confuses file sharing with manslaughter

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By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Thursday 21st April 2005 16:01 GMT

Making a movie available electronically prior to its release can now result in a three year sentence, thanks to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act approved Tuesday by the House. The Senate has already passed its own version, and the final bill is expected to be signed by the President.

The bill also calls for three years in cases where a person is caught recording a movie in a theater with a camcorder – and six years for a second offence. It also indemnifies theater operators against all criminal and civil liabilities arising from detaining suspects “in a reasonable manner.” (Welcome to movie jail.)

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Inventor Creates Soundless Sound System

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PORTLAND, Ore. – Elwood “Woody” Norris pointed a metal frequency emitter at one of perhaps 30 people who had come to see his invention. The emitter ? an aluminum square ? was hooked up by a wire to a CD player. Norris switched on the CD player.

“There’s no speaker, but when I point this pad at you, you will hear the waterfall,” said the 63-year-old Californian.

Norris’ HyperSonic Sound system has won him an award coveted by inventors ? the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize. It works by sending a focused beam of sound above the range of human hearing. When it lands on you, it seems like sound is coming from inside your head.

Yahoo!

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‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana

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Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed.

The study for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in “infomania”, with people becoming addicted to email and text messages.

BBC News

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Popewatch: Vatican Votes For Fear By Choosing “The Enforcer”!

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The smoke was white, and so is the winner: Contrary to weeks of speculation, the princes of the Catholic Church didn’t pick an African or Latin American to head their billion-plus congregants. Nor did they choose a moderate, as some pope watchers had suggested. Instead, on only their second day of voting, the cardinals selected Joseph Ratzinger to be the next pontiff.

For years Ratzinger has been known as the “Enforcer” for his crusade against Church dissidents, including those who flauted the Church’s rules on ordination of women. And as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Ratzinger has enacted John Paul II’s conservative interpretation of Catholic doctrine for more than 20 years.

Village Voice

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A Time for Disobedience

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The administration of George W. Bush has raised secrecy and information control to a level never before seen in Washington. The press has been grappling with how to cope with this extreme control and distortion of news, some reporters and editors more than others. One possibility they might consider is civil resistance, as in quiet, nonviolent, respectful rebellion.

GNN republished from Village Voice.

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Is America Preparing for Martial Law?

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A collection of facts about US Security collected by The Centre for Research on Globalization:


The Department of Homeland Security recently carried out an extensive anti-terrorist exercise entitled TOPOFF 3 (April 4-8, 2005). The “drill” was described by officials as “a multilayered approach to improving North American security”.


The stated objective of the TOPOFF 3 “Full Scale Exercise” was to “prepare America” in the case of an actual bioterrorism attack by Al Qaeda:


Centre for Research on Globalization

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Cyc’ed Out: Machines that Think

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“I believe we are heading towards a singularity and we will see it in less than 10 years,” says Doug Lenat of Cycorp, which is putting an artificial brain called Cyc online for the world to interact with.

Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute.

New Scientist

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Bill Introduced To The Senate Would Make Free Local Weather Updates Extinct

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Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone?

That information is available for free from the National Weather Service.

But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear.

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

PalmBeachPost

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Intelligent bacteria?

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Bacteria are by far the simplest things alive, at least among things generally agreed on as being alive. Next to one of these single-celled beings, one cell of our bodies looks about as complex as a human does compared to a sponge.

Yet the humble microbes may have a rudimentary form of intelligence, some researchers have found.

Some researchers, though, have found a systematic way of addressing the question and begun looking into it. This method involves focusing not so much on the behavior itself as the nuts and bolts behind it?a complex system of chemical ?signals? that flit both within and among bacteria, helping them decide what to do and where to go.

Researchers have found that this process has similarities to a type of human-made machine designed to act as a sort of simplified brain. These devices solve some simple problems in a manner more human-like than machine-like.

WorldScience

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Happier is healthier, study shows

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Steptoe and colleagues asked 200 middle-aged men and women to keep daily journals, conducted “brain teaser” type tests to induce a bit of mental stress in the laboratory and then took blood samples to see whether they could identify biological markers that correlated with the subjects’ daily moods. They found that the happiest of the lot had reduced stress hormones, a stronger immune system and a more robust cardiovascular system.

NewsDay

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Bicycle Day

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It was 62 years ago today when Albert Hofmann first deliberately ingested 250mcg of LSD. Then he and his lab assistant rode their bicycles home, thus spawning a yearly tradition practiced by psychonauts everywhere – Bicycle Day.

Here’s what he says about the experience in LSD: My Problem Child:


lsd_blotter_hofmann.jpg

4/19/43 16:20: 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = 0.25 mg tartrate. Taken diluted with about 10 cc
water. Tasteless.

17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh.

Supplement of 4/21: Home by bicycle. From 18:00- ca.20:00 most severe crisis.

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High-tech Probes Sneak Inside Your Cells

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The newest generation of nano-sized probes should give scientists a look into the secret lives of nuclei within your body, researchers say.

The tiny probes, called quantum dots, are a melding of biology and technology. The crystalline semiconductors with a biological protein coating are no larger than a few hundred atoms. Importantly, they shine brilliantly when hit with a laser.

Live Science

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Physical World Hyperlinks

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While the cell phone is changing society at many levels, the most fundamental change is yet to come. This is when our phones start to bridge the physical and the digital worlds, to enrich our lives in ways we can currently only guess at.

Just as hyperlinks allowed the web to fulfil its potential, physical world hyperlinks read by our cell phones, will take the role of technology to a whole new level in our lives.

kuro5hin

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