Google searches - will be performed by mind control.

That's an interesting statement...

Brain-reading technology is improving rapidly. Last year, Sony (Charts) took out a patent on a game system that beams data directly into the mind without implants. It uses a pulsed ultrasonic signal that induces sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images.

I hope it doesn't upload a rootkit...

Controlling devices with the mind is just the beginning. Next, Wolf believes, is what he calls "network-enabled telepathy" - instant thought transfer. In other words, your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else's brain. If you think instant messaging is addictive, just wait for instant thinking.

Imagine what this will do for the world of spam.

Future Boy: This is your brain on Google - Jul. 21, 2006

Looks like all that heat generated by your laptop may finally be useful for something other than frying eggs -- a group of grad students led by professor Orest Symko at the University of Utah has unveiled an array of "thermoacoustic" engines that turn heat into sound, which can be directed at a piezoelectric mechanism to produce electricity. The US Army-funded research seems promising but is obviously still in its infancy -- one of the designs the researchers demonstrated is half the size of a penny but pumps out 120dB of noise (about the same as a siren), while another bumped out over 135dB, (which is roughly equivalent to a jackhammer). The team expects that future, smaller designs will work at ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing. Although we're not expecting hybrid-siren-powered laptops to hit anytime soon, you Utes out there may want to invest in some earplugs -- Professor Symko says they'll be testing these designs at the University's water-heating facility in the next year.

It would be funny to hide these on cars.

Tiny thermoacoustic engines pave the way for screaming gadgets - Engadget

Billy relays a great story:

Optyx is in Atlanta for the week and we got some drinks with John Terrill last night. A good time was had by all talking about crypto, web apps, the homies on #vax, brushes with the law, security charlatans, and new opportunities. The night was finished with a stumbling tour of Pat and my old stomping grounds: Georgia Tech.

If you don't know Optyx, he's forgotten more hacker stories then I'll ever have. The following is, as best as the beers will let me remember, the story of the Cray-2. I've tried to tell the story as close to the way Pat did. Any errors are the fault of Guinness

So I was living in San Francisco working at a web hosting startup. A friend of mine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory gives me a heads up, saying they were decommissioning their Cray-2 super computer. I decided to buy it but the regulations said the lab had to hold a public auction to sell it. However, it didn’t say how far in advanced the time or place of the auction had to be published. Through some help from my friends at the lab an auction got setup where I was the only bidder.

The auctioneer wasn’t in on the scheme and he opened the bidding at $2000. I looked around, saw I was the only guy, and said “$1000.” They sold me the Cray-2 for a grand and I took back to my house on Treasure Island in the back of a U-haul. A Cray-2 weights more than a ton so this was not an easy task.

The big problem I had was how to power the thing. I hacked together a power converter and ran it off the 3 phase power outlet for the clothes dryer. But I had this girl roommate who used to complain about not being able to dry her clothes when she wanted because the computer was on. So the uptime of the super computer was dependent on the laundry habits of a roommate!

After the first month, I got the power bill. It was $2200. I decided it was time to sell the Cray.

Through a mutual friend, I found some .com yuppie who wanted to buy the Cray and use it as a couch. I sold it for around $3500 to recoup the cost of the machine and the power bill. I visited his house which was on the side of a hill in SF. You’d park in a 1 car garage underneath the house and used stairs to go up into it. It was like a big loft space on the 1st floor and that is where he decided to put the Cray-2. I asked him if his floor was reinforced because the Cray-2 weighted a ton. The yuppie said the house had steel floor beams and not to worry. I broke the Cray down for shipping (which consists of breaking it into 300 pound pieces you move around with a pallet dolly) and... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

'The Most Beautifil Destruction...'

Imagine if someone, somewhere managed to find the exact formula for producing the most perfectly awful example of the uncanny valley (say, for a horror movie or something). Now, accept the fact that this organization is the Japanese Science and Technology Agency, and that they managed to produce the most disturbing machine you've ever seen, without even realizing it. The 33 kilogram CB2 is literally beyond words in its freakiness, not only in its nailing of the uncanny valley, but in its description. Apparently it emulates "the physical ability of a 1- or 2-year-old toddler, can turn over and stand up with assistance," has 51 compressed air-powered actuators, and has 200 tactile sensors in its "skin." It sends so many shivers up our spine to think of the CB2's lifeless putty coating as "skin" that it's a wonder we're even able to continue typing. Seriously, just so that we can stop and move onto something else a little more human (heck, even a motherboard feels homely next to this), go check out the video after the break of the horrifying little thing writhing about on the floor.

All of the potential uses for such a thing are all bad. I think Asimov forgot to make a law here.

CB2 Child Robot is possibly the most disturbing machine ever built - Engadget

Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic "atoms".

Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.

They came up with the idea based on "claytronics," the animation technique which involves slightly moving a model per frame to animate it.

"We thought that a good analogy for what we were going to do was claymation - something like the Wallace and Gromit shows," Dr Mowry told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.

"When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like it's moving itself. That's something like the idea we're doing... in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the 'clay', as though the clay can move itself.

"So if it was a dog, and you want the dog to move, it will actually move itself. But it is a physical object in front of you - it's not just a picture or hologram or something like that."

Intar-web Golem clones.

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Teleporting' over the internet

Made by Meccano, Spyke is the first robot to be built that you can transform and control from a computer through a WiFi connection! Moreover, you can control him from anywhere in the world via the Internet!

Spyke comes with a video camera, a microphone, a loudspeaker and 2 motors.

He is a Spy Robot, and can move, watch, hear, speak, take pictures, record video and sound.

He is equipped with light and sound effects, video filters and…Spyke is a telephone!

He can be used as a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone & webcam and is compatible with Skype 3.0.

Spyke is a Digital Music Player that allows you to listen to your own music, or keep the dog entertained by putting his favourite songs on while you’re at the office!

Spyke is a video surveillance device! When a movement is detected, Spyke activates an alarm or sends you a picture by e-mail.

When the battery charge gets low, Spyke returns back to his recharging station automatically!

Approx. Dimensions: 35(H) x 25(W) x 25(D) cm

Technical Spec.

• PC & MAC compliant
• WiFi / 802.11 b/g
• Joystick compliant
• PC requirement / software: Windows 2000 / XP with .NET framework 2.0
• MAC requirement / software: Mac OS X
• Open source software
• MMI software details: 1.1 Mb / user interface in Microsoft.net
• Compatible with Skype 3.0 (PC) technology
• Camera: 320x240 – local mode:15 fps / distant mode: depending on the Internet connection
• Speaker: 2W / no driver required

Spyke Wifi Spy Robot :: Innovation :: RED5

Nurses are to be replaced by robots. No, really, it is not April Fool’s Day. It is going to happen in a hospital near you. Soon.

Nurses, those caring people who have pulled many a patient back from the brink with their expertise, brow-wiping and tender words, are likely to be replaced soon by yards of wiring, transistors, hydraulics, a motherboard and light-emitting diodes. Enter the Robo-nurse.

I'm surprised we're closer to making robot nurses before sex-droids. Maybe robotics developers are fetishists. Dirty old men will be disappointed.

NHS Blog Doctor:

Being crazy is hard, but it's worth the effort. Especially if you're a cop, paramedic, or social worker who may someday need to deal with a person having a psychotic episode. At those times, empathy can be crucial.

That's where Virtual Hallucinations comes in. The training device, created by Janssen L.P., is a rig with earphones and goggles that plunges the wearer into the mind of a serious schizophrenic. The system offers two interactive scenarios. In one, you're riding a bus in which other riders appear and disappear, birds of prey claw at the windows, and voices hiss, "He's taking you back to the FBI!" The other features a trip to the drugstore, where the pharmacist seems to be handing you poison instead of pills, and hostile customers stare at you in disgust.

I hope apple includes something like this in the next generation iPod.

Virtual Hallucinating Device Drives Police Insane for a Day

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

A sad, sad robot song to sing.

Bots on The Ground - washingtonpost.com

Having heard that Vista's CD/DVD burn utility by default uses a nonstandard format, possibly as a result of yet another one of Microsoft's lock-in schemes, I decided to check things out for myself. That would also give me a nice chance to see what Vista was all about.

The plan was simple:
1. Locate a Vista box,

2. Bring empty CD's plus some arbitrary files on a USB stick, and

3. Burn CD's in several ways while making screenshots.

As it turned out, the planning was the simplest part by far. The rest is best described as a tale of frustration.

From the article, it seems that Vista really goes out of its way to try and make the user use a non-standard CD/DVD image format - when it works at all.

Burning Issues With Vista