Only Online: Murder Trial Details
Concerns that news reports might taint the jury in the trial of an alleged serial killer have led a Canadian judge to admonish Internet and foreign journalists, calling on them to comply with a ban on publishing certain details revealed in court. As a result, online coverage late last week of the high-profile trial of Robert Pickton, a Vancouver-area pig farmer accused of murdering numerous prostitutes, was mostly limited to reporting British Columbia Provincial Court Judge David Stone's stern warning to three foreign reporters: Honor the publication ban or risk being barred from the courtroom. But that doesn't mean the non-Canadian journalists will comply. Editors at The Seattle Times are taking a wait-and-see approach. "We're going to evaluate this as we have to on a daily basis," said Lucy Mohl, senior news producer for Seattletimes.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57272,00.html
Tech Predictions for the Decade
How will technology change our lives in the next 10 years? If scientists and analysts at the market research firm IDC are proven right, paraplegics will be able to walk thanks to sensors embedded in their legs that will receive directions from a computer. Doctors will monitor a person's vital signs through a computer that is connected to tiny sensors implanted inside the body. Buildings made of "nanotubes," or carbon particles that are a thousand times stronger than steel, will withstand virtually any natural disaster. And the Web will be intelligent enough to give users exactly what they are looking for: no more scouring hundreds of pages on Google. These are but a few of the predictions made by IDC last week about the technologies of the future, said John Gantz, chief research officer for IDC.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57238,00.html
DMCA: Ma Bell Would Be Proud
Get out your wallet. Big business has found another way to tighten the screws on customers, in league with its new partner: the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just as naysayers predicted when it was enacted, the DMCA's anticompetitive impact is reverberating widely beyond the entertainment and software industries, with potentially devastating effects on consumers. Not so many decades ago, you couldn't buy or legitimately connect your own phone or other telecom equipment to the public telephone network in the United States, except in some cases if you were the government or a newspaper wire service. Virtually everything related to telephone communications had to be leased from the local monopoly phone company, which also performed all installations and maintenance.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57268,00.html
China Awaits High-Speed 'Maglev'
Shanghai, China's largest city, is gearing up to launch the world's first commercial maglev train, which uses electromagnetic levitation to carry passengers as speeds of up to 430 kmh. The 30-km (18-mile) maglev line, built using German technology from Transrapid International at a cost of more than $1.2 billion, is launching sometime in summer 2003. It enables passengers to travel from Shanghai's financial district to its international airport in about eight minutes. The same journey by car typically takes between 45 minutes to one hour. The high speeds of the maglev, or magnetic levitation, trains are possible because there is no friction between the track and the train's wheel. The train glides about 10 millimeters above a single track called a guideway, propelled and held in position by powerful magnets.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,57163,00.html
No Harmony Yet in Content Land
It was a warm and fuzzy occasion by Washington standards, but the deal reached between music and tech groups last week may only signal more turmoil in the coming months as old and new rifts surface. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Business Software Alliance and the Computer Systems Policy Project agreed to jointly oppose digital copy-protection mandates from Congress, devise voluntary copy-protection schemes and educate consumers on piracy. It was a strange triad, considering the mud slung between the music and tech camps in recent years over file sharing and peer-to-peer networks. The BSA and CSPP represent major players such as Microsoft, Intel and Dell. Both sides lose quite a bit of control over their products if Congress enacts strict copy-protection mandates. Hardware makers would have to relinquish control over development and content companies would lose control over distribution.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57267,00.html
Scientists Giddy About the Grid
One pesky word has doomed many collaborative supercomputer projects to the purgatory of the suggestion box: feasible. Sure, universities could conceivably link their most powerful machines. But just like back in the kindergarten sandbox, differing standards prevented everyone from playing well with others. Now, the advent of grid computing is teaching scientists how to share, and financial incentives from the government are helping to smooth over differences. "The assumption is that people will buy into this and we'll be one unified community," said Dan Abrams, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is working on a $10 million federal project to connect the nation's earthquake study centers.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,57265,00.html
Segway Hits City Roadblock
Known for its love of geek chic as well as its congested streets, San Francisco might have been expected to embrace a new, environmentally friendly personal vehicle that promises to pull people out of their smog-spewing cars. Instead, the city on Monday becomes the first large municipality to outlaw the Segway Human Transporter on its sidewalks more than a month before the chariot-like vehicles are made available to the public. The Board of Supervisors acted last month following intense lobbying by Segway in state capitols to change laws to permit the two-wheeled vehicles on sidewalks. In all, 33 states, including California, approved Segway-enabling legislation. But that doesn't mean major cities will roundly embrace the scooters touted by their inventor, Dean Kamen, as apt to "change civilization" when he introduced them to great fanfare in December 2001.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57292,00.html
After the copyright smackdown: What next?
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Congress was within its constitutional bounds to extend the duration of all copyrights by 20 years -- up to 70 years beyond the life of the author and potentially infinitely -- many saw the ruling as a knockout blow to the movement to reform copyright. Some on the public interest side are tempted to lament what could be called the "Dred Scott case for culture," unjustifiably locking up content that deserves to be free. After all, six of the nine justices concurred with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she issued a stark opinion that cavalierly dismissed the historical "bargain" that justified American copyright in the first place: We the People agree to grant a limited, temporary monopoly to a creator or publisher in exchange for access to creativity and the eventual return of the work to a state of freedom.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ght/index.html
Dipstick gives rapid plague diagnosis
A new dipstick test for bubonic and pneumonic plague will help dramatically reduce the number of cases in countries still blighted by the diseases. Bubonic plague is highly contagious and spreads rapidly into epidemics. It is almost eradicated in the developed world, but there at least 4000 confirmed cases every year in more than 20 countries, mainly in Africa. This number is likely to be a vast under estimation, says Suzanne Chanteau at the Pasteur Institute and Ministry of Health in Madagascar, who developed the test. About 20 per cent of people with the disease die, she says, despite the disease being easily treatable with streptomycin, a cheap and effective antibiotic. However, early detection is crucial. Pneumonic plague is always fatal unless treated within 24 hours.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993279
Volcanoes: All hot and bothered
One in ten of the world's people live in the shadow of active volcanoes. Vesuvius overlooks Naples, Rainier towers over Seattle-Tacoma and, most ominously of all, Popocatépetl looms above Mexico City, perhaps the world's largest megalopolis. The residents of these cities, and others like them, are sitting, in effect, on ticking time-bombs. In the past few months, the residents of Catania, Sicily's second-largest city, located near the volcano Etna, have found that living atop a lava stream and under a shower of ash is not pleasant. Etna began its most recent eruption at the end of October. And though the intermittent ash and steady lava flow have not been good for business — over 30 people were injured at a tourist complex just before Christmas — they have been a boon to those seeking to understand volcanic eruptions.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1534663
NASA boosts nuclear propulsion plans
NASA has requested a "very significant" increase in funding for the development of nuclear propulsion systems for spacecraft, according to Sean O'Keefe, the administration's chief. Existing chemical rocket technologies have restricted missions to the same speed for 40 years, he said. "With the new technology, where we go next will only be limited by our imagination." O'Keefe revealed the significant new emphasis in an interview with Los Angeles Times: "We're talking about doing something on a very aggressive schedule to not only develop the capabilities for nuclear propulsion and power generation, but to have a mission using the new technology within this decade." The request has been approved by US President George Bush and will now pass to Congress for approval. NASA's Nuclear Systems Initiative will also be renamed Project Prometheus.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993285
Recipes for bioterror: censoring science
Several months before 11 September, Australian scientists published a paper describing how they had unintentionally created a "supervirus" that, instead of sterilising mice as intended, killed every last one. Could this information help someone to create a human supervirus in the same way? And in 2002 American researchers described how they had made a polio virus from scratch by mail-ordering bits of DNA. The method could be used to build far more deadly viruses. These papers are now at the heart of a fierce debate. Are such articles more of a gift to would-be bioterrorists than to civilised science? If so, should they be published at all? The US has already introduced a barrage of legislation, such as the USA Patriot Act, to restrict access to dangerous pathogens and determine who is allowed to work with them. There are also moves to limit access to unclassified but sensitive information. But what constitutes "sensitive" is the greyest of areas.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993266
Chemistry guides evolution, claims theory
That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results. The metaphor of the blind watchmaker has been famously championed by Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford. But Robert Williams, also at Oxford, and Joäo José R. Fraústo da Silva of the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal say that evolution is not strictly random. They claim Earth's chemistry has forced life to evolve along a predictable progression from single-celled organisms to plants and animals.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993267
Shawn Fanning to appear with Kevin Mitnick on TechTV
One of the world's most famous computer hackers gets off probation this week and plans to dive back into the Internet, his former playground where breaking-and-entering landed him in jail for five years. On Tuesday, 39-year-old Kevin Mitnick will log on to the Internet for the first time in eight years, during the live TechTV show "Screen Savers." Also scheduled to be on the program are Shawn Fanning, creator of Internet music downloading pioneer Napster, and Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. Mitnick says he is ready to go to work, ironically, in a position where he will be helping protect companies against the kind of hacking he used to do. He has a job interview scheduled for Monday, but declines to name the company.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../01192003f.php
Welcome to .NET - how MS plans to dominate digital music sales
Once upon a time Microsoft discovered the Internet, and the browser wars ensued. More recently it's become apparent that the company sees music sales as the Next Big Thing, but so far, the extent, intricacy and all-encompassing nature of its plans for Digital Rights Management and secure content distribution haven't been widely grasped. When they are, the browser wars may look like a sideshow. Essentially, there are three major components to the plan. First, the ubiquitous platform - Windows Media Player is reprising Internet Explorer as an integrated part of the OS, so it will become the client of choice manque, and the associated technologies will become the standard technologies. Second, there's the music business. Presented with a near-universal (one might muse that Apple can expect another visit on the subject of MS Office shortly) platform and associated protection mechanisms, the record companies can surely be induced to adopt it. Especially if they still can't figure out an alternative mechanism for stopping their revenues escaping via the Net.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../01192003g.php
Music piracy 'great', says Robbie
Singer Robbie Williams has said he believes music piracy is a "great" idea. He made the comment at a music trade fair in Cannes, predicting it would anger his record company EMI. Williams said he had investigated the issue of music piracy before renegotiating his new recording contract last year. He said: "I think it's great, really I do. "There is nothing anyone can do about it. "I am sure my record label would hate me saying it, and my manager and my accountants." The record industry estimates that it loses millions of pounds each year thanks to the public downloading tracks free from the internet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/2673983.stm
More news later on
