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I tell my students, and only somewhat flippantly, that arts policy is the most important policy arena. Seriously? Well, most people think health policy is right up there—but why live longer if life isn’t worth living? And if you don’t think government has a lot to do with whether and how you can…
DNS is a distributed read-mostly fault-tolerant hierarchical database, where different partitions are controlled by different people.
The most common use of DNS, by far, is to look up IP addresses from human-readable names. It was originally created in order to do exactly that. Still, if we want to…
Vortex Bladeless is a radical company. It wants to completely change the way we get energy from the wind. Think wind stick instead of a massive tower with blades that capture blowing winds. Wind stick. Really. Lest you think I’m mad, I've included a picture of this bladeless generator that helps…
Humanity’s increase in lifespan may be our greatest achievement. Most of the world’s children and their parents and grandparents will live long, productive lives. Even counting the wretched of the Earth, the typical person at birth today worldwide can expect to live to nearly 70, up from her 30s in…
Bill Pugliano / Getty A new book about Elon Musk, written by Bloomberg technology reporter Ashlee Vance, is filled with quotes and anecdotes that provide an inside look at the entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and PayPal. Several quotes paint a picture of just how much time Musk commits to…
What costs more, the computer or the electricity? Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that power is critically important for phones, tablets, and laptops and that we can put more silicon on a modern chip than we can…
Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast (or beautiful Hillsboro, OR — the home of the Hillsboro Hops — to be…
Naturalists have long regarded ants and bees as a sort of living parable on the benefits of universal virtue. ‘Karl Marx was right, socialism works,’ said the great ant specialist Edward O Wilson; ‘it’s just that he had the wrong species.’ Certainly, the eusocial insects (from the Greek eu meaning…
Lenovo and adware maker Superfish came under more legal fire yesterday as two new lawsuits were filed in California federal courts taking the firms to task for putting consumers at risk of hacker spying and information theft. The two complaints -- the second and third since the China-based computer…
It was nearly midnight when my phone lit up with a stream of text messages. It was my brother, Darren. Darren was out of town, and my mom had borrowed his car. Now, she was dealing with a flat tire. Great. I quickly came to the realization that I wasn’t going to bed in the next 15 minutes. A minute…
This week, together with Public Knowledge and Engine , EFF submitted written comments to the Patent Office regarding its Patent Quality Initiative . We urge the Patent Office to ensure that this program actually reduces the number of invalid patents being issued. Its quality efforts should serve the…
Our universe seems real, but is it really? As humans get better at simulating artificial intelligence, it seems at least plausible that we could create life that is both conscious and has free will. And if we can create conscious life, who's to say that the universe, as we know it, wasn't created by…
Activists from the Pirate Party’s youth wing have wiretapped high-level political surveillance hawks at Sweden’s top security conference. They set up an open wi-fi access point at the conference and labeled it “Open Guest”, and then just logged the traffic of about a hundred high-ranking…
A clay tablet from ancient Babylon reveals that no matter where (or when) you go, good customer service can be hard find. So it was revealed by the irate copper merchant, Nanni, in 1750 B.C. The merchant’s aggravation is evident, spelled out in cuneiform on a clay tablet now displayed in The British…
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined…
by Michael Huemer Abstract: I look for explanations for the phenomenon of widespread, strong, and persistentdisagreements about political issues. The best explanation is provided by the hypothesisthat most people are irrational about politics and not, for example, that political issues…
It’s now been over 50 years since the birth of the AI field, and we still have no androids or sentient computers. Some believe it’s because Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is simply unachievable, others say it’s because we just don’t have the computing capacity required yet, and then some…
The Jejune Institute might have gone the same way. Over three years, the game/art installation/social movement became a living metafiction, encompassing a series of "episodes" staged around San Francisco as well as an online community. You might call it an alternate reality game, but its creator…
E very December, the ranching staff at a Texas Panhandle dairy farm owned by the Braum’s burgers-and-ice-cream chain conducts an audit of its cattle herd. Most years, the audit is nothing more than a bland bookkeeping exercise, the i-dotting and t-crossing of maintaining a 38-square-mile ranch on…
The lower the regional income, the more payday loan centers you will find.Photograph: Alamy I am driving down Route 180 in St Louis, Missouri , past empty plazas and vacant shops, down a stretch of road that terminates in an abandoned mall. Yet on this road are promises of wealth: “Loans Up to…
The popular developer Comex has posted online a video Proof-of-Concept to demonstrate that it is possible to run arbitrary code on the Apple Watch. The Internet of things is probably the paradigm that most of all is invading our daily life, smart objects surround us and collect a huge quantity…
Laura Klunder’s newest tattoo runs down the inside of her left forearm and reads “K85-160,” a number that dates to her infancy. Klunder was 9 months old when
As many as half of all stars in the universe lie in the vast gulfs of space between galaxies, an unexpected discovery made in a new study using NASA rockets. These stars could help solve mysteries regarding missing light and particles that theory had suggested should exist, scientists say. In the…
CAMBRIDGE — The smoky, slightly sweet smell of mesquite filled the air outside Harvard’s science and engineering buildings off Oxford Street early Monday morning. But this was no springtime diversion — instead, it was a 15-hour final exam for a class with a single, mouth-watering problem to solve:…
Former National Security Agency contractor and American whistleblower Edward Snowden has sharply criticised the Australian government's data retention laws, calling them a "radical" departure from liberal society. Snowden labelled the laws "dangerous," while speaking via satellite from Moscow on…
10 May 2015: hello Hacker News 11 May 2015: ... and Reddit! Below are links to bare-bones JPEG versions of the World Religions Tree segmented into images of reasonable size.The diagram's creation was sponsored by the 40 Foundation ,and it was produced by Фанк і Консалтинг .The JPEG was first…
Blue sunset on Mars. (Source: Curiosity Rover Twitter page) NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has captured stunning images of the Sun setting on the red planet, showing blue hues of the serene sundown over the Martian horizon. The Sun dips to the Martian horizon in a blue-tinged sky in images sent home to…
Now on Nevada highways Daimler AG By Aviva Rutkin The next big thing in autonomous vehicles really is big. At a ceremony at the Hoover Dam last Wednesday, automotive manufacturer Daimler unveiled a self-driving truck – the first to be cleared to drive on US roads. For the freight industry, the…
Losing a finger is something that you might more readily associate with horrific industrial injuries, or the result of failing to pay back a gangland loan shark. In the UK, however, broadband access is now seen as such a vital service that people would rather lose a digit than lose their high speed…
Six years ago, I wrote a story for Bloomberg News about an interesting research review that looked at which studies of antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft got published in medical journals and which didn’t. The review found that almost every clinical trial that got published in a…
How roleplaying games and fantasy fiction confounded the FBI, confronted the law, and led to a more open web On January 17, 1980, FBI agents descended on a small business in Wisconsin to investigate a plot against the life of an American business executive in Beirut, Lebanon, named William…
Washington (CNN) The White House is dismissing as "baseless" a controversial report alleging President Barack Obama's administration lied about the circumstances surrounding the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. "There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each…
LONDON — Meet Sally, an incredibly sinister housekeeper and nanny who's actually a robot. Sally will cook your supper, lead your children off to bed, and probably go haywire and destroy you in the night. She's the latest product for Persona Synthetics , a company offering affordable cyborgs for home…
Alex Cusack Jan 29, 2015 We’re still in the first phase of the education revolution. Technology is being used to improve the old way of doing things, but we have yet to explore the radically new models that are being made possible by these technologies. The collegiate campus: The genesis of the…
The credo of Thiel’s venture-capital firm: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Credit Photograph by Robert Maxwell Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the…
It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an…
The tube pulls in to a busy station along the London Underground’s Central Line. It is early evening on a Thursday. A gaggle of commuters assembles inside and outside the train, waiting for the doors to open. A moment of impatience grips one man who is nearest to them. He pushes the square,…
Advertisement Photo: AP Photo Unearthly Interlopers: An automobile dashboard camera captures the entry of a 19-meter-wide asteroid over the city of Chelyabinsk, in Russia. Humankind lives in a cosmic shooting gallery. For evidence of that, we need look no further than the events of 15 February 2013.…
F armers in the United States benefit from hundreds of government programs. In 2015 alone, they will receive about $18 billion in the form of direct taxpayer-funded subsidies. These so-called "farm income safety net" payments flow to farmers through federal crop price support, dairy income support…
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