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Actual Reality writes
"It is ironic to me that much of the same sentiment that thwarted the nuclear power industry back in the 80's is partially responsible for reviving it. Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel. The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology. We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again stifle our progress."
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SimHacker writes
"Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name
"Micropolis", which was
SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create
'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply
Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."
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Vox writes
"As we discussed here a few days back, AT&T's Terms of Service has very broad language giving them the right to terminate the account of any AT&T Internet service customer who criticizes the company. Ars Technica notes that such broad language is not unusual in ISPs' terms of service, and that AT&T told them they won't be changing the contract. A company spokesman said it's not a big deal because they have no intent to censor criticism. AT&T claims to respect its subscribers' right to voice their opinions and says that the contract is aimed at stopping the exploitation of children, and other tangible wrongs. As the article notes, taking the company on faith after the spying scandal is asking maybe a little too much."
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An anonymous reader writes
"Wired has an article looking at this Fall's bumper crop of geek TV. McG, who directed the pilot for the show Chuck, opines that the appearance of nerd culture on network television is a long-overdue reflection of real life. From the article: 'Hollywood, he said, is playing catch-up with IT culture. "The classic shape of the computer geek is over when Bill Gates became the (richest), most aspirational, coolest guy in the world," he said. "He is the original thick-glasses, pocket-protector guy. Now who doesn't want to be like Bill Gates?"' They have reviews of the lengthy list of shows, for clues as to what to watch and what to miss."
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Iftekhar writes
"Wil Shipley, of Delicious Monster fame, has written a very candid essay on what he perceives as Apple's growing trend toward platform lock-ins. He writes: 'Why is the iPhone locked to a single carrier, so I can't travel internationally with it? There's really only one viable reason: Apple wanted a share of the carrier's profits, which meant giving AT&T an exclusive deal. Which meant, we get screwed so Apple can make more money. It's that simple. [...] As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation. We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'"
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Stony Stevenson writes
"Citing recent highly publicized corporate data breaches that have beset major companies like Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Bank of America, McAfee CEO David DeWalt, said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide. Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, DeWalt said. 'Worldwide data losses now represent US$40 billion in losses to affected companies and individuals each year, DeWalt says. But law enforcement's ability to find, prosecute, and punish criminals in cyberspace has not kept up: "If you rob a 7-11 you'll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online," DeWal remarked. "The cross-border sophistication in tracking and arresting cyber-criminals is just not there."'"
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klubar writes
"Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman who says he was the first to use three keystrokes. 'Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.'"
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gsfprez writes
"It took us a long time, but the Air Force has finally moved off of the 1970's mainframe GPS control system and is now running on a new Unix-based Control System called AEP — Architecture Evolution Plan. It's important to remember that current GPS satellites are basically solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks that simply playback whatever we upload into them at a precise rate. They don't actually have any idea where they are — its the control system at Schriever Air Force Base that does. The new system will be a lot cheaper to support and modify since Sun stocks things like SATA drives - while digging up Saturday Night Fever-era DASDs isn't simple. AEP will also allow us to be ahead of the curve: we're basically good to go to fly the new IIF birds."
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sneezesteve writes
"How do you secure your nerd-cred for eternity? By acquiring a life-size replica of Han Solo in Carbonite, having Han's face removed, and replacing it with your own. 'It is made from fiberglass, and the short story is that a friend who is a special effects guy owned the piece, which was a direct casting off the original prop. He was moving, (aka getting married and yelled at) and asked me if I wanted it. I screamed a huge lispy "Yes!", and picked it up, but knew I wanted to do something cool with it. So I called my other nerdy special effects pals, and they offered to replace Harrison Ford's face with mine. I was so tired of hearing this offer in my daily life, but decided to finally consider it, so off it went.'"
