The two patents in question (http://www.google.com/patents?id=0koWAAAAEBAJ and http://www.google.com/patents?id=nREIAAAAEBAJ) date from 1999 and 2001 and seem to be for the same thing, what a racket. Also, how much longer can Immersion (issued the 1999 patent, above) claim an exclusive on a patent, I thought patents ran out after 7 years or something like that?

OT but might be useful if spiders are spying on you.

This technique, minus the arguably superfluous tube, is great for finding roaming spiders at night or in a dark room. Their eyes shine back like colored jewels.

Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Steve Kurtz's co-defendant in this case, plead guilty in October 2007 to a misdemeanor charge of "mailing an injurious article" to Kurtz. He had to plead guilty because the prosecution had ruined him financially, and made his personal battle with cancer all the more impossible.

A distinguished scholar, collaborating with another (like many had done before him and fewer afterwards?), on important, cross-disciplinary work, saw himself forced to take a rotten plea deal to avoid putting himself and his family further into a financial and emotional hole. The plea deal racket is but one way where overzealous prosecutors get away with theirs.

The police thought they had a 'terrist cell' and the prosecutor, even when the evidence early-on was plainly to the contrary, wanted this feather in his cap at any cost.

Even the innocent don't come out unscathed if The System leaves this much power in the hands of politically motivated and ambitious bureaucrats. Who punishes them for the victims they create?

They could argue that the system worked in the end. Well that's just fucking great if you ignore the trail of dead and wounded.

Verizon hobbles their phones and limits their users much worse than Sprint. I just got a Centro and it works nicely when I need EVDO.

Looks more like a Star Trek 1.0 shuttle.

@JAKE0748

It's an editorial joke.

Falkenrath is no dummy and someone who's dealing with an almost impossible job when it comes to radiation, chemical & bio terror. Manhattan's few handfuls of detectors that "conform to standards of quality and reliability" are not enough to cover the entire city. On top of that -- given an attack -- vaccine supplies have to travel from DHS stores somewhere outside the city to begin immunizing folks around the hot spot(s) following some unpublicized schedule/protocol while coordinating a simultaneous evacuation plan that the populace have been poorly educated on and that -- even if we knew where to go -- would almost certainly be foiled by transit bottlenecks. The human and economic costs of false alarms and any resulting panic are huge.

Cities, even sophisticated ones like NYC, are given little control -- not to mention money -- by DHS on the control and disposition of countermeasures such as vaccines. That they would be taking seriously further suggestions to centralize mitigation measures by DHS is surprising. The devices in question are one item that cities are given and NYC has more of them than other cities at several dozen. Whereas I can understand his need to minimize false alarms, this seems the backwards way to go about it.

When one looks at which systems worked during other calamities (e.g., earthquake, Katrina, 9-11) one that worked well and most consistently was the DECENTRALIZED one. Person-on-the-street stories cite countless selfless acts of bravery and ingenuity saving proportional numbers of lives and limbs.

Perhaps Flakenrath and others in his unenviable position should go the other way. Use some of the monies for rad-bio-chem attack prevention at the Federal level to develop/create a distributed network of small (industrial ones are still microwave-oven-sized because of the air throughput they need), *open-source* detectors, to be carried by volunteers and city infrastructure all over (e.g., mobile devices, lapels, automobiles, buses, subways, etc.), that would sniff around the clock and report to similarly distributed grid-computing apps where-when deadly materials are detected and that build-in the false-positives handling made possible by their ubiquity. These are sci-fi at this moment but unleash the dorks to work on the problem! A decentralized approach might minimize the need to try to evacuate/vaccinate an entire city after a small event and may help direct and coordinate appropriate response(s).

The wholesale outlawing of unlicensed detectors is exactly the wrong way to go about this problem.

I think this plugin should be called Rose-Colored Spectacles. Talk about covering the sky with your hand to pretend it's not there....

@THIVAI

I agree that it'll eventually pass. But they'll use substitution as a compromise--where the government sits in with them in court and fights the telcos' battle. That way, the telcos don't have to sue the Administration and we foot the bill while they buy time!

Meanwhile, this administration comes and goes and the next one, who'll likely be in just as(s) deep with the telcos gets to stall discovery further.

Dodd is a hero, leaving his campaign to work for all of us. QWEST is also heroic for telling the Administration to show them the court order first; and where did it get the CEO? ...prosecuted for some other questionable shit.

I say tear as much down as possible, or remix whats there, and build something new every year...hell, every day. Start with the airport.

I've been watching this issue and related ones and Democrat notwithstanding, Pelosi will be pushing for a compromise, she won't be backing the ban on retroactive immunity for telcos, starting to grumble about it not being the telcos' fault (aka the Yahoo defense). And Arlen Specter (PA; ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary) is calling for "substitution," where the government would basically be sitting-in in the place of the telcos in any lawsuit related to their possible violations of law.

As of now, that is the only "compromise" on the table. It's just sad.

Folks need to call Specter's office in the next week telling him that substitution is NOT an acceptable option and Pelosi's office to tell her that it's one thing to cooperate with the government on homeland security issues and quite another to go along with clearly illegal requests.

Related to the LRADs, and now in regular use in at least 10 municipalities in the USA, are the so-called "rumblers" which blast you if you don't get out of the way of emergency vehicles fast enough because you're clueless, deaf or are listening to loud music. The feeling has been described as making your stomach jump around.

Disrupters aren't far behind! Then maybe Scanners! 'splode! Yay!

It's a real testament to Mark's foresight and that of his co-editors of The Happy Mutant Handbook--including Gareth--that at least one of the MAKE best-of projects remains so relevant after a similar DIY project (the Fat of the Land Project biodiesel car) appeared in said book 12 years ago. Congratulations!

@#7 MRFITZ

I think Ms. Pacman's frottage burn would agree with me that there was no bait and switch.

The Daily Mail has the journalistic clout of the Weekly World News anyway.

Yes, evolution is not an active force in the sense that language seems to suggest. Fish didn't just bear down and push lungs out. Still, some evolved lungs. Evolution is a passive phenomenon that can be analyzed as an active one in retrospect. And, evolution is always happening.

To say that a rapidly changing environment halts evolution is so wrong. Neoteny--the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood--among other "strategies," seems to arise in populations subjected to rapidly changing environments. One psychological domain that is evolving a tendency towards neoteny is pop culture in technologically mature populations.

Ours is a culture of adolescence: hungry and ever open to the new and ruthless towards senescence. Perhaps as a result, our phenotypes are increasingly being engineered to skew juvenile, proximately to drive consumer-driven economies, and increasingly so are our genotypes.

Theories can only be disproved. Evolutionary psychology is the fragile child of evolutionary biology because it's so much harder to definitively disprove some of its more controversial hypotheses.

I read recently, in a global warming denier's website, that, by law, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth wasn't allowed to be viewed by English school kids unless there was a teacher present (in fact that applies for all movies expounding a "partisan political" thesis). This interruption may be a conflation of this with this man's warped reality on that day. I'd say the interrupter was insane, or an asshole.

@ABQ HALSEY

You mean "insufferable douche bag" like people who say "irregardless" and clumsily malign the recently dead?

O Pioneers! What a loss.

"Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed."

- W. B. Yeats, Two Songs From a Play

Pretty depressing that there are such ill-informed people here. I venture to guess that Electro et al. wouldn't know art if it * on them. Serrano's work is about YOU. Master or not, it'll be History's judgment but it looks like he's got a good head start on you pious, fig-leaf painters.

Aha! Now I understand something that's been messing with my noggin:

"Watch
for Giant Erasor as there
is a great danger of the
human Word Animal being
self-erased. You cannot
comprehend the actual 4 simultaneous days in single
rotation of Earth, as 1 day
1 God ONEism blocks the
ability to think opposite of
the ONEism crap taught.
Education destroys brain."

Thank you, EternaLight's GeneRay X1!