lifestream of designer Dr P Fenderson
About a month ago, we reported that Nevada (with a healthy dose of lobbying by Google) was considering legislation that would effectively legalize self-driving cars in that state. Today, Assembly Bill No. 511 passed, granting the Department of Transportation the authorization to draft a set of regulations and rules governing autonomous cars. Pop goes the champagne in Mountain View.via PopSci
Google, Yahoo and Bing have jointly unveiled a new vocabulary for the web that provides a standardised way to markup content so that it can be interpreted by search engines.Sites that use Schema.org will get preferential treatment in the search results.
Unsurprisingly, this has tread on a few toes because the open standards community has been working on open semantic markup standards for years, and was not consulted about this. The main complaint is that this move enables the search giants to control the markup that's used on the web, instead of allowing people to choose what works best for them.
This is such a terrible idea, Google, Bing, And Yahoo. Especially that they will be preferential to the people using Schema markup. Why would they circumvent all the hard work, development, and natural evolution that went into creating the current, open standards in microformatting?
I wonder if the backlash will be great enough to get them to change and adopt any of the many current standards out there. Really, the only people who care about this are going to be the people who know the most about it - and know how to do the most to change their minds.
The New York Times reports that the US State Department will have spent upwards of $70 million on "shadow networks" which would allow protesters to communicate even if powers that be pull the traditional plug -- so far, it's spent at least $50 million on a independent cell phone network for Afghanistan, and given a $2 million grant to members of the New America Foundation creating the "internet in a suitcase" pictured above. It's a batch of mesh networking equipment designed to be spirited into a country to set up a private network.
This looks very interesting. I understand how the government would like to use this encourage revolutions in other countries, but at the same time it seems like it could be super useful for any revolutionary.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:vicox/syspeek sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install syspeek
The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.
Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr
We humans are always so worried that we can doom the planet by creating some genetically anomalous creature. But we fail to consider that nature has been randomly creating new mutant creatures for billions of years - and the only ones alive today are the baddest of badasses. No way are we gonna accidentally create something in a lab that can beat out billions of years of evolution and take over the planet. I mean unless we somehow combined influenza, velociraptors and cockroaches to create a constantly reproducing and mutating vicious intelligent killing machine that is impossible to kill. THEN we'd be in trouble.
Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.
Czar Hadji Van Donut. Dreamer, designer, cyborg, or something.
