-
E-Readers Will Survive the Onslaught of Tablets
If you think the coming wave of tablets is about to make e-book readers obsolete, guess again. Although dozens of tablets are scheduled to hit the market this year — from companies like Apple, HP and Dell, as well as upstarts like JooJoo — executives in the e-reader industry aren’t particularly worried. Instead, they say, tablets and [...]
03.12.10 -
GDC: Final Fantasy’s Future Is Interactive Cut Scenes, Downloadable Content
SAN FRANCISCO — For the future of Final Fantasy, director Motomu Toriyama is looking to Uncharted 2. The interactive cinematic scenes in Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed action game seem to have inspired Toriyama to try the same thing in the Final Fantasy games, he said at his Game Developers Conference panel on Friday. “In Final Fantasy [...]
03.12.10 -
GDC: What Final Fantasy XIII Looked Like on PlayStation 2
SAN FRANCISCO — Final Fantasy XIII began its life as a PlayStation 2 game. Here’s what it looked like. Speaking at Game Developers Conference on Friday, FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama talked a bit about the development history of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game, showing the early screenshot pictured above. The battle system, Toriyama said, [...]
03.12.10 -
Research Reveals Early Signs of Autism in Some Kids
BALTIMORE ??? Some infants headed for a diagnosis of autism, or autism spectrum disorder as it???s officially known, can be reliably identified at 14 months old based on the presence of five key behavior problems, according to an ongoing long-term study described March 11 at the International Conference on Infant Studies. These social, communication and motor [...]
03.12.10 -
FBI Hoaxes Boost Online Fraud
Online fraud in the United States doubled to a reported $560 million in losses last year as illicit phishing expeditions by thieves posing as the Federal Bureau of Investigation represented the biggest consumer complaint, according to a Friday government survey. The e-mail phishing scams represented 16.6 percent of all complaints. The next closest category, at 12 [...]
03.12.10 -
McLaren Cribs From Planes, Flutes to Build Faster F1 Cars
With the start of the Formula One season upon us, all eyes are on McLaren and its drivers, reigning world champion Jenson Button and former world champion Lewis Hamilton. But the attention isn’t exclusively on the champs. Everyone’s talking about the creative aerodynamics of the MP4-25 cars they’re driving. Nobody outside the team is sure of [...]
03.12.10 -
Big Earthquakes Cause Premature Births
A new study of a 2005 earthquake in Chile supports the surprising hypothesis that pregnant women who experience earthquakes during the first trimester of their pregnancies have increased risk of premature birth and slightly smaller babies. While the drops in birth weight and gestation time are relatively small, they are big enough to suggest that earthquakes [...]
03.12.10 -
LEDs Could Transmit Future Broadband Signals
The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency. Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and [...]
03.12.10 -
Electric Motorcycle Racing Becomes a ‘Race to Own’ Co-Op
The man who jump-started electric motorcycle racing believes a new form of motor sport requires a new form of governance, so he’s created a cooperative where teams racing in the TTXGP help make the rules, settle the disputes and share in the profits. Azhar Hussain’s approach stands in stark contrast to the centralized structure of most [...]
03.12.10 -
Stopping Afghanistan’s Fertilizer Bomb Factories
In Iraq, insurgent networks had a motherlode of military-grade explosives for making roadside bombs. In Afghanistan, fertilizer bombs are the weapon of choice, making detection and interception a much greater challenge, according to the head of the Pentagon’s bomb-fighting organization. In a bloggers roundtable today, Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, Director of the Joint IED Defeat Organization, [...]
03.12.10
-
NetFlix Cancels Recommendation Contest After Privacy Lawsuit
Netflix is canceling its second $1 million Netflix Prize to settle a legal challenge that it breached customer privacy as part of the first contest’s race for a better movie-recommendation engine. Friday’s announcement came five months after Netflix had announced a successor to its algorithm-improvement contest. The company at the time said it intended to expand [...]
03.12.10 -
Video: Cold, Little Comet Is No Match for Big, Hot Sun
A small, newly discovered comet will not get a chance to enjoy its fame for long. As you can see in this image sequence obtained by NASA’s Solar and Heliosopheric Observatory, the comet is on a collision course with the sun. Things will not end well for the comet, which will burn. The comet is believed to [...]
03.12.10 -
China Warns Google Over Search Censorship
BEIJING (Reuters) - China warned Google against flouting the country’s laws on Friday, as expectations grow for a resolution to a public battle over censorship and cybersecurity. The chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, said this week he hoped to announce soon a result to talks with Chinese authorities on offering an uncensored search engine in [...]
03.12.10 -
Solar Slumber May Have Been Caused by Magnetic Flows
Newly reported observations of gas flows on the solar surface may explain why the sun recently had such an extended case of the doldrums. From 2008 through the first half of 2009, the sun had a puzzling dearth of sunspots, flares and other storms, extending the usual lull at the end of the 11-year solar activity [...]
03.12.10 -
SXSauced: Crafty Cocktails at East Side Show Room
AUSTIN, Texas — Crafting a quality cocktail takes “precision, passion and patience,” says Adam Bryan, the bar master and “executive drinkist” at the East Side Show Room. The potent potables he turns out from behind the bar at the funky, steampunk-inspired East Austin eatery speak of his dedication. Each of his creations mix the Old World [...]
03.12.10 -
Plastic Logic Delays Que E-Reader
Plastic Logic, which was set to ship its large screen Que e-reader in April, is now delaying it to “sometime this summer.” The company sent notifications to pre-order customers late Thursday afternoon announcing the delay and saying it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.” Plastic Logic launched the Que at the Consumer [...]
03.12.10 -
Apple’s iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books
When it began taking pre-orders for the iPad this morning, Apple also published some new details about how the tablet device will function as an e-book reader. It turns out the iPad will read books out loud to you with audio dictation, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon’s Kindle last year. Also, Apple [...]
03.12.10 -
Slacker Radio Secretly Preparing On-Demand Music Service
Slacker, the critically praised interactive radio service our readers helped us discover in ‘07, plans to launch an on-demand subscription service combining elements of Pandora, Rhapsody and Spotify in the next few months, Wired.com has learned from a well-placed source whose statements were confirmed by a Slacker spokesman. Slacker’s on-demand music subscription service will include deep [...]
03.12.10 -
Operator Error Usually The Cause of Unintended Acceleration
As stories of Toyotas suddenly accelerating as if possessed continue making the news, many are starting to wonder if it’s really anything to be worried about. History shows most cases of unintended acceleration are more often than not a problem with the driver, not the equipment. And it appears to be a problem most often [...]
03.12.10 -
How It Works: The Hurt Locker’s Bomb-Fighting Suit
When James, the main character in the Oscar-winning movie The Hurt Locker, straps on his blast-resistant suit, he undergoes a transformation. In a recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, actor Jeremy Renner described his “love-hate” relationship with the 60-pound suit. “The suit was such a big part of that character, a massive part of [...]
03.12.10
-
iPad Gets New Button: Screen Rotation Lock
As we comb through the updated Apple website for more iPad-related clues, up pops this new picture detailing the physical buttons on the iPad. Now, in addition to the sleep/wake, home and volume buttons familiar to iPhone users, there is a new button named screen rotation lock. And thank God. One of the most annoying things [...]
03.12.10 -
iPad and Accessories Available for Pre-Order
The Apple Store was down for a short spell this morning, and it has popped back up with a pre-order page for the iPad. If you want to get your shiny new Wi-Fi Apple tablet delivered on April 3rd, you can buy it now. If you are holding out for the 3G version, you can [...]
03.12.10 -
Dork Tower Friday
Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.
03.12.10 -
Darpa Looks to Tap Nature’s Quantum Effects
For years, some scientists have suspected that quantum mechanics might have a little something to do with biological processes. Now, over a year after they first announced plans to look into quantum effects in biology, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm is asking for research and prototypes that may help harness that knowledge. Researchers have already established [...]
03.12.10 -
SXSW: See All Austin Check-ins in One Place
Cliqset has produced this nifty web app that aggregates status updates and check-ins sent from people in and around Austin to all of the different major location-sharing services — Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter, Brightkite and of course Cliqset. It’s called Cliqset Crowd It’s a nice tool you can use to get in on the location sharing game [...]
03.12.10 -
Fingers-On with Streetfighter IV for iPhone
There are three* video games I know anything about, and all of them I played obsessively through my college years. One of those games is Streetfighter II, Capcom’s amazingly popular (and awesome) one-on-one beat’em-up. So when Streetfighter IV turned up on the App Store yesterday, I downloaded it to my iPod Touch and pretty much [...]
03.12.10 -
Great Geek Debates: Plants vs. Zombies
Zombies have been a staple of horror movies for over seventy years, and it’s not hard to see why. Dead people rising from the grave, coming to kill you and eat your brains ??? who wouldn’t be afraid of that? Plants, on the other hand, have never really been trendy as horror film monsters, but [...]
03.12.10 -
What If You Can’t Say You Can’t Play?
“You can’t play.” “We already have enough people for this game.” “You don’t have the same dolly as us, otherwise we’d let you play.” “Maybe you can play next time.” Some kids hear these type of words a lot, and some kids say them a lot. I know that my daughter’s school is plastered with posters about bullying and [...]
03.12.10 -
Mercedes Builds A Car To Protect Us From Ourselves
MONTVALE, New Jersey — Mercedes-Benz has been on a relentless quest to achieve hyper-safe accident-free driving since 1959, when it introduced the first car to feature energy-absorbing crumple zones. At long last, it’s getting pretty close to reaching its goal. The Experimental Safety Vehicle concept car essentially turns the entire vehicle into an airbag using novel [...]
03.12.10 -
Leaked Shots Show Sony Mirrorless Touch Camera Interface
[UPDATE: It's official, although it's not clear whether the screen is touch-enabled. See the Sony video embedded below] The folks at Geeky Gadgets have got ahold of some screenshots from Sony’s upcoming mirrorless Alpha camera. It appears that the innovation isn’t all on the outside: this camera will have a touch screen and a smart new [...]
03.12.10
-
Enjoy Some Mental Syrup in Breakfast With Socrates
Every day we follow a routine filled generally filled with the same day to day activities. Some of our routines vary from week to week and every once in a while we mix in other similarly mundane but less frequent activities. We have a passive acceptance of the behavior and mental state associated with these [...]
03.12.10 -
Free Dinosaur App from The American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History has put out an app that lets you peruse dinosaur images and information, almost as if you were at the museum itself. And it’s free! You could spend hours studying the interesting images in this application, or you could just pick it up and learn a little bit at [...]
03.12.10 -
Cloak Bag: Shoot With the Camera Still Inside
The Cloak Bag is a camera bag that lets you take pictures whilst your camera is still inside. It also doesn’t look anything like a normal camera bag, making it doubly secure if you’re a vulnerable traveler on vacation. Like all the best niche products, the shoot-through bag was born of specific need. After two near [...]
03.12.10 -
Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail
A fierce attempt to keep endangered Virginia big-eared bats alive in captivity has shown just how difficult that noble task may be. The effort was prompted by the discovery of white nose syndrome, an extremely virulent disease that has killed more than a million bats since 2007, in one of the handful of caves where Virginia [...]
03.12.10 -
Solar-Powered iPhone Battery Case: Apple Approves
Solar power combined with fancy-looking cases? The perfect storm for getting an end-of-the-week mention on the Gadget Lab. Today its the turn of the Novothink Solar Surge, an iPhone and iPad Touch case with a solar panel and a lithium-ion polymer battery. Instead of just gluing some photo-sensitive panels to the back of a case, [...]
03.12.10 -
SXSW: First Look at American: The Bill Hicks Story
With a razor-sharp mind and a butcher’s knack for finding the soft underbelly of American society, stand-up comic Bill Hicks sliced through pop culture with a white-hot intensity rarely seen. And then he died. Now the late outlaw comic’s story is being told in American: The Bill Hicks Story, a documentary that combines Hicks’ righteous performances [...]
03.12.10 -
Pink Floyd, Flaming Lips Defend Dark Side’s Honor
We planned our Wednesday celebration of Dark Side of the Moon’s 37th anniversary months ago. Pink Floyd evidently had plans of its own as well. And so does The Flaming Lips. The day after Dark Side’s anniversary, British judge Andrew Morritt ordered the legend’s label EMI to stop selling singles from its brilliant concept albums [...]
03.11.10 -
Alt Text: Resurrected Movie Gimmicks of the Future
James Cameron’s Avatar is the highest-grossing movie ever. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland recently opened to a record-breaking box office haul. What do these two movies have in common? No, not men with weirdly colored faces. No, not people having an amazing size-changing adventure. What? No, Alan Rickman wasn’t in Avatar. Flowers? What are you … [...]
03.11.10 -
The ’70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth
<< previous image | next image >> Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation’s environment writ large. Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar of the National Archive and onto Flickr Commons, where they are getting a wider viewing [...]
03.11.10 -
February NPD: BioShock 2, Xbox 360 Top the Charts
The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 topped the sales charts in February, moving half a million copies in a month packed with big game releases, the NPD Group said Thursday. Boosted by BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and continued sales of Modern Warfare 2, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling home game console in the U.S. last [...]
03.11.10
-
Photo: Silent Hill Composer Rocks Out at GDC
SAN FRANCISCO — “Audio is my lover,” Akira Yamaoka said as he kicked off his presentation Thursday at Game Developers Conference. Pulling out his guitar, he played some music that he composed over the past day on his trip from Tokyo to San Francisco. Yamaoka is best known for his years at game publisher Konami, creating [...]
03.11.10 -
Pass the Camera: Many Directors Shoot 1 Star-Studded Comedy
In a zig-zagging departure from the one-person-steers-the-ship movie-making standard, Untitled Comedy is being shot by half a dozen different filmmakers. They include X-Men 3 director Brett Ratner, There’s Something About Mary’s Peter Farrelly and subversive Mr. Show co-creator Bob Odenkirk. The concept: Each director takes charge of one segment of a feature-length picture. The [...]
03.11.10 -
TJX Hacking Conspirator Gets 4 Years
Humza Zaman, a co-conspirator in the hack of TJX and other companies, was sentenced Thursday in Boston to 46 months in prison and fined $75,000 for his role in the conspiracy. The sentence matches what prosecutors were seeking. Zaman, a 33-year-old former network security manager at Barclays Bank, was charged with laundering between $600,000 and $800,000 [...]
03.11.10 -
You Are a Tamagotchi: Turning Your Health Into a Game
In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried [...]
03.11.10 -
Hate Blogger Wins Second Mistrial
Deadlocked jurors in the Hal Turner hate blogger case were excused late Wednesday after deliberating two days. It’s the second mistrial in the government’s case to prosecute the New Jersey man for allegedly threatening to kill judges. Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan said a new trial was “highly likely.” A third trial was tentatively scheduled April [...]
03.11.10 -
GDC: Metroid Creator Inspired by Italian Horror Films
SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo’s Metroid games take their creative cues from an unlikely source: Dario Argento, the Italian horror film director. At his keynote speech during the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto said that Argento’s films Susperia and Deep Red, which he discovered in his youth, awoke his creative sensibilities. The horror [...]
03.11.10 -
Audi Sees Solid Future for EVs
A mere 10 years from now Audi expects 5 percent of its sales will be electric vehicles. That’s not the wishful thinking of tree-huggers or even the fanciful projection of some think-tank. It is the bold prediction of Michael Dick, Audi’s technology chief. Audi is getting into electrics in a big way, creating a specific brand [...]
03.11.10 -
White House: Ask What Game Developers Can Do For Your Country
SAN FRANCISCO — Kumar Garg, policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wants the game industry to address America’s “national challenges.” In a keynote entitled “Grand Challenges for Game Developers” delivered at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, Garg focused on videogames’ unique ability to engage, immerse and teach. “We don’t [...]
03.11.10 -
Quantum Computing Thrives on Chaos
Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers. Quantum computers promise superfast calculations that precisely simulate the natural world, but physicists have struggled to design the [...]
03.11.10 -
Super Stealth Plane Breaks Through Cost Barrier
The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing today on the future of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and things are not looking pretty for the next-generation stealth aircraft. It’s likely the Air Force will have to declare the program has soared past a key cost-containment barrier, in addition to being more than two years [...]
03.11.10
-
Pink Floyd Beats EMI in Creativity Flap
Pink Floyd prevailed Thursday in a legal brawl with its label when a British judge ordered EMI to stop selling individual downloads of the acid-inspired group’s songs without permission. The artists behind The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, and other top sellers claimed its decade-old contract with EMI required the band’s music to [...]
03.11.10 -
Help Us Review Google Maps for Bikes
Google Maps has finally added bike routes. That’s?? great — but how well does it work? You tell us. Google’s “Bike There” mapping tool provides directions for cyclists in 150 cities in the United States and covers some 12,000 miles of trails. There’s no way we can even begin to assess the accuracy of so vast a [...]
03.11.10 -
The FCC Wants You to Test Your Broadband Speeds
The FCC is asking the nation’s broadband and smartphone users to use their broadband testing tools to help the feds and consumers know what speeds are actually available, not just promised by the nations’ telecoms. Starting Thursday, netizens can go to the FCC’s Broadband.gov site, enter their address and test their broadband speed using one of [...]
03.11.10 -
Your Chilean Sea Bass Dinner Deprives Killer Whales
A one-of-a-kind killer whale population appears to be threatened by human appetites for Antarctic toothfish, better known to restaurant-goers as Chilean Sea Bass. As fishing fleets patrol their waters, catching what was their primary source of food, the whales are vanishing. It’s not certain whether they’ve only moved on, or are dying out, or both. But [...]
03.11.10 -
Al Franken Jokes, But Google Fiber Is No Laughing Matter
Now U.S. Senator Al Franken has been enlisted to lobby Google in a bid by two midwestern cities to get free upgrades to gigabit internet connections. Comedy from the funniest man in Congress may give the towns of Duluth and Superior an edge in the increasingly clownish bids by municipalities across the country to win [...]
03.11.10 -
Feds: TSA Worker Tried to Sabotage Terror Database
A former Transportation Security Administration contractor is being charged in Colorado for allegedly injecting malicious code into a government network used for screening airport security workers and others. The malicious code, a logic bomb installed last October, was designed to cause damage and disrupt data on servers on an undisclosed date but was caught by other [...]
03.11.10 -
GDC: Sony’s Motion Controller Underwhelms With Janky Games
SAN FRANCISCO — Sony’s motion controller is called PlayStation Move and will be released this fall, the gamemaker said Wednesday. Whether any killer app games will be released with it is still in question. At a lavish press briefing taking place a few blocks away from the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the final name and [...]
03.11.10 -
Arctic Reindeer Go Off the Circadian Clock
Reindeer adapt to the Arctic’s endless summer light and winter dark by silencing their circadian clock. The adaptation may be a general one that helps Arctic animals make the most of their weird environment. “If you are being driven through a subjective day and night by an internal timer, you may be in ‘night mode’ when [...]
03.11.10 -
Let Troops Get Their Drink On, Senator Says
After a long day in a war zone, why not knock back a cold frosty one? If you’re in the U.S. military, not a chance: In Iraq and Afghanistan, deployed troops are under General Order No. 1, which forbids the consumption of alcohol, as well as gambling and possession of pornography. In part, the order is [...]
03.11.10 -
Paragliding the Himalayas With iPhones, So You Can Go Too
From jagged, snow-capped mountain peaks to peaceful villages adorned with colorful prayer flags, there are perhaps no more breathtaking views on earth than from high above the Himalayas. Five paragliders are right now flying and hiking the length of the Himalayas all the way through Nepal, and they’re sharing the once-in-a-lifetime experience with anyone who [...]
03.11.10
-
Google-ize Your Hometown
Google announced several weeks ago they were going to select a city for a high-speed internet pilot.?? Several cities have done some crazy things to woo the Googleplex to their neck of the woods. Some are pretty funny, and it seems, why should politicians have all the fun? It started with Topeka, Kansas. The city passed [...]
03.11.10 -
Acorn Filmmaker’s Fresh Tapes: Inside HUD
In January, conservative activist and guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe was arrested for slipping into the New Orleans offices of Senator Mary Landrieu. O’Keefe and three others were charged with “entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony” after they impersonated telephone repairmen to enter the Senator’s suite. It wasn’t the [...]
03.11.10 -
Iconica: Not Just Another Pretty Face
When I first read about Iconica on BrettSpiel, I was immediately struck by the graphic design on the cards, which really looked unlike any of my other board games. (And considering I’ve got upwards of 150 games in my collection, this is saying something.) The norm seems to be hand-drawn illustrations, with a handful of [...]
03.11.10 -
Family Time with the DSi XL
The new DSi XL ticked my early adopter button and I decided to get one at launch. Having had one in hand now for a few days I???m surprised at the aspects I like and those features that don???t make a big difference. Firstly I really miss the GBA slot. Having traded in my DS Lite [...]
03.11.10 -
Gort Awards Draw From Sci-Fi’s Past, Future
When he set out to create the statuette for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival’s Gort Award, designer Casey A. Riley wanted to tap into the best science fiction movies of the past, present and future. “I incorporated an amalgamation of classic and modern sci-fi influences, from the art deco lines of the robot Maria in Metropolis [...]
03.11.10 -
Growing Up Corey
I remember the day I learned that the Coreys had a drug problem. My cousin had loaned me a copy of Tiger Beat from a few years before (I jumped on the Coreys bandwagon a little late, being born in ‘81, and by ‘92 everything was all Jonathan Brandis and Jonathan Taylor Thomas). I was [...]
03.11.10 -
Heavy Rain Forces You To Make Tough Decisions
When it comes to consoles, I’m more of an Xbox guy. There’s nothing fanboy about my preference, it’s just the system I’ve fallen into playing more. Every so often, I’ll play a Wii game with my kids, but most of time is spent on the Xbox - it just has more of the games I [...]
03.11.10 -
GDC: Google Courts Game Devs With Free Phones
SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones. At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the [...]
03.10.10 -
Classic Videogames Mutate in Game Over Art Show
<< previous image | next image >> Classic videogames like Street Fighter and Ms. Pac-Man inspired the artists whose works will be displayed in the Game Over 3 exhibition. Put on by geek magazine turned art, design and clothing purveyor Giant Robot, the group gallery show will feature pieces from dozens of illustrators, painters, cartoonists, artists and [...]
03.10.10 -
Webmonkey Goes South, Then West, for SXSWi
We’re headed to Austin, Texas tomorrow along with the crew from Wired’s Underwire blog to attend South By Southwest Interactive. The week-long nerd fest starts Friday, and we’ll be reporting from the trenches. If you’re headed down to SXSWi, here’s what Webmonkey will be checking out. If you’re not going this year, you’ll be able to [...]
03.10.10
-
Obama Supports DNA Sampling Upon Arrest
Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting. Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, [...]
03.10.10 -
Classmates.com’s Facebook Mimicking Prompts Privacy Suit
The site set up to locate long lost pals, Classmates.com, has been hit with a class action privacy lawsuit. It alleges the company violated the law when it decided to make user profiles public to compete with Facebook. The suit says Classmates.com duped its paying customers in late January when it sent them an e-mail telling [...]
03.10.10 -
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Eclipses Concept Album Classics
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon turns 37 Wednesday after another year kicking ass on every concept album that came before or after it. The English quartet’s sixth studio effort is a seamless masterpiece that cannot be readily sliced and diced into iTunes singles for sale, as the band argues during its ongoing dispute [...]
03.10.10 -
OnLive: Money For Nothing
SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference. Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that [...]
03.10.10 -
Shocker: New Study Shows Web Video Is Still a Mess
A new study released Wednesday pits Flash Player’s video performance against that of native HTML5 video playback in several different web browsers. The verdict? Flash is a CPU hog in some cases, and native H.264 video is a CPU hog in some cases. That’s right — both options threw strikes and gutters. Video playback in the browser [...]
03.10.10 -
‘Galactica: Sabotage’ Creator Discusses Her Brilliant Beastie Boys Sci-Fi Mashup
Katie King, a self-described “media-obsessed chick who digs all things sci-fi,” impressed even jaded meme connoisseurs this week with her re-creation of the music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” using scenes from Battlestar Galactica. Drawing on video-editing skills from her day job as art director at an ABC television affiliate in Virginia, King cobbled together [...]
03.10.10 -
European Parliament Rips Global IP Accord
The European Parliament delivered a political blow to Hollywood and the Obama administration, voting Wednesday 663 to 13 in opposition to a proposed and secret intellectual property agreement being negotiated by the European Union, United States and a handful of others. Wednesday’s developments concerning the Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement are substantial because the European Union’s [...]
03.10.10 -
Porsche Wants To Build The 918 Hybrid Supercar
We, like just about everyone else in the automotive world, were blown away when Porsche took the wraps off the 918 Spyder hybrid supercar. The wizards in Stuttgart built the plug-in hybrid on the QT and kept it super-secret until rolling it out in Geneva, where it almost literally stopped the show. Now it seems Porsche [...]
03.10.10 -
Behind the Fence at Britain’s Atomic Bomb Factory
When researching a book on atomic weaponry, my co-author and I toyed with the idea of visiting Aldermaston, the home of Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. No luck: We made an inquiry through a recommended channel, but didn’t even get a polite refusal. Geoff Brumfiel of Nature had better fortune. He was able to go behind the [...]
03.10.10 -
Google’s Schmidt: China Negotiations Should End ‘Soon’
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that the search and advertising giant was actively negotiating with China over censorship that would end soon. His remarks came two months after the company revealed in-country attempts to hack into the GMail accounts of human rights activists and declared that it would stop censoring results on google.cn ??? [...]
03.10.10
-
Playlist: Gorillaz, Freelance Whales and a Tribute to Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous
We pay tribute to fallen indie icon Mark Linkous, better known as the man behind the curtain of Sparklehorse, in this week’s Playlist podcast. Linkous died Saturday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We present music from one of his last projects, the Dark Night of the Soul collaboration between David Lynch and Danger Mouse, which [...]
03.10.10 -
Apple Beware: Dell (With A Little Help From Amazon and Google) is Taking on iTunes
The formidable triumvirate of Amazon, Dell, and Google is apparently poised to give iTunes the first serious run for its money just as the iPad is about to take Apple’s downloadable media megastore where no computer has gone before. Engadget has posted two slides that appear to come from a Dell presentation showing that the [...]
03.10.10 -
Google Launches Web Store for Cloud-Based Apps
If you have Google Apps running on your domain, now you can install third-party apps that fully integrate with Google’s apps. Google has debuted the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store where Google Apps users can browse different cloud-based applications and add the ones they like to their suite of online tools. The apps can share [...]
03.10.10 -
MotoCzysz Puts the Sizzle in Electric Motorcycles
We are in the midst of an electric motorcycle revolution, and nowhere is that more obvious than on the racetrack. The new technology is not about tweaking the status quo. It???s about shattering it. And that???s just what Michael Czysz plans to do at the TT Zero motorcycle race. The head guy at MotoCzysz — that’s [...]
03.10.10 -
Mach 6 Cruise Missile, Ready for Prime Time?
This spring, the Air Force was preparing for a groundbreaking test of the X-51 WaveRider, a hypersonic cruise missile that would reach speeds of up to Mach 6. But it looks like the WaveRider’s debut flight will have to wait while some technical issues are addressed. Boeing spokeswoman Christina Kelly confirmed to Danger Room that the [...]
03.10.10 -
Review: FlashForward DVD Offers Half-Season Flashback
Rewatching the first half-season of FlashForward on DVD makes me wish I could flash forward to upcoming episodes immediately. The show’s opening event — a catastrophic global blackout during which nearly everyone on the planet glimpses two minutes of their lives six months into the future — serves as an intriguing set-up for the ensuing intrigue. As [...]
03.10.10 -
Google Maps Finally Adds Bike Routes
At long last, Google Maps has routes specifically for bikes. With the click of a mouse, the new feature allows you to plot the best (and flattest!) ride from Point A to Point B. Several cities, including New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, have bike-specific mapping sites. But Google is rolling it out in [...]
03.10.10 -
Facebook Finds its Place in the Location-Sharing Landscape
The biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday. Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users [...]
03.09.10 -
Google Gets a New Geocoder
Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map. The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance [...]
03.09.10 -
Review: Science Trips Out on Music in The Heart Is a Drum Machine
What is music? It’s a simple question, but it leads director Christopher Pomerenke in many complicated artistic and scientific directions in his documentary The Heart Is a Drum Machine, out Tuesday on DVD. digg_url ="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/review-heart-is-a-drum-machine/"; It’s an expansive, inviting film, which embraces everything from Voyager’s Golden Record and aboriginal funeral chants to brain-music therapy and pop music [...]
03.09.10
-
Veil Lifts Slightly on Apple’s Secret Plan to Control the Universe
The recently unveiled secret agreement that Apple makes iPhone developers sign supports what many have suspected all along: Apple is trying to control the universe. Much has been written anecdotally about the Apple app-approval process, with the words “arcane” and “Kafkaesque” coming up a lot. But the letter (and crimping spirit) of the agreement was a [...]
03.09.10 -
Hot Property Sex.com on Auction Block
It’s a sadly familiar story from the high-flying market of the past few years: Speculator thinks values will continue to go up, up, up. Overbids for a hot property. Can’t keep up with the payments. Lender is forced to foreclose. Only this isn’t about real estate ??? it’s about the most expensive domain name in the [...]
03.09.10 -
Flynn Lives in Tron Legacy Teaser Trailer
Oscar winner Jeff Bridges gets his close-up in the last few seconds of the new Tron Legacy trailer. Reprising his Kevin Flynn character introduced in the 1982 sci-fi flick, a weary-sounding Bridges offers a raspy greeting that hints at the sequel’s back story. Introduced in theaters Friday at screenings of Alice in Wonderland, the clip [...]
03.09.10 -
Iron Man Variant Covers Ride Sequel Lightning
Iron Man gets shoved through the era, genre and style grinder in these cool variant covers for upcoming Marvel Comics, which show shellhead in various states of cyborg ass-kickery. The covers for various Marvel titles, by artists like Adi Granov, David Finch, Mike Del Mundo, Greg Tocchini and Gabrielle Dell’Otto, are part of the publisher’s Iron [...]
03.09.10 -
‘500 AK-47s, Please’: Art Imitates Blackwater (Updated)
Back in 2008, an employee of Blackwater (d.b.a. Paravant) signed for hundreds of automatic weapons, under the name ???Eric Cartman.??? According to a Senate investigation, the rifles were unaccounted for for months afterward. Now it looks like the next episode of South Park will be taking a crack at this. Inspired, no doubt, by coverage of [...]
03.09.10 -
Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle
Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards, and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities. But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website. A job posting [...]
03.08.10 -
Google, Dish Network Reportedly Test Android-Based Satellite TV
Google has set reportedly its sights on the television set-top box with a small test in conjunction with Dish Network that adds Google’s Android operating system to the satellite television experience. Viewers search satellite programming alongside websites such as Google’s YouTube with a keyboard and watch videos from either source on their televisions, reports the [...]
03.08.10 -
Get Jazzed for Monster Miles Davis Giveaway
One of the 20th century’s most influential musicians, Miles Davis shredded the jazz envelope for decades until his passing in 1991. You can sample most of that shredding in Wired.com’s expansive, expensive giveaway featuring the Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection box set, a Miles-branded iPod, T-shirt and USB stick, as well as a pair [...]
03.08.10 -
Is 2010 the Year Digital Will Eclipse Print Ad Spending?
Spending on digital advertising is poised to surpass print for the first time in 2010, according to a new study prepared even before the announcement of Apple’s iPad, with all of its media game-changing potential. But another view is ??? So what? It’s bound to happen, sometime soon if not this year. Out of their collective [...]
03.08.10 -
Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway
We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today. A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got [...]
03.08.10
-
The ’70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth
03.11.10 -
McLaren Cribs From Planes, Flutes to Build Faster F1 Cars
03.12.10 -
iPad and Accessories Available for Pre-Order
03.12.10 -
Alt Text: Resurrected Movie Gimmicks of the Future
03.11.10 -
OnLive: Money For Nothing
03.10.10 -
Feds: TSA Worker Tried to Sabotage Terror Database
03.11.10 -
The FCC Wants You to Test Your Broadband Speeds
03.11.10 -
Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail
03.12.10 -
Video: Cold, Little Comet Is No Match for Big, Hot Sun
03.12.10 -
Quantum Computing Thrives on Chaos
03.11.10 -
Super Stealth Plane Breaks Through Cost Barrier
03.11.10 -
GDC: What Final Fantasy XIII Looked Like on PlayStation 2
03.12.10 -
Apple’s iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books
03.12.10 -
NetFlix Cancels Recommendation Contest After Privacy Lawsuit
03.12.10 -
Solar Slumber May Have Been Caused by Magnetic Flows
03.12.10 -
SXSauced: Crafty Cocktails at East Side Show Room
03.12.10 -
SXSW: First Look at American: The Bill Hicks Story
03.12.10 -
Research Reveals Early Signs of Autism in Some Kids
03.12.10 -
Classic Videogames Mutate in Game Over Art Show
03.10.10 -
Electric Motorcycle Racing Becomes a ‘Race to Own’ Co-Op
03.12.10
Services
Quick Links: Contact Us | Login/RegisterLogout | Newsletter | RSS Feeds | Tech Jobs | Wired Mobile | FAQ | Sitemap
Corrections | Sitemap | FAQ | Contact Us | Wired Staff | Advertising | Press Center | Subscription Services | Newsletter | RSS Feeds 
Condé Nast Web Sites:
Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (Revised 8/28/2008) and Privacy Policy (Revised 8/28/2008).
Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital. All rights reserved.
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast Digital.