The NSA says the agency would violate Americans' privacy even more than it already has if it provided statistics on how many citizens it's spying on via a loophole in a 2008 law.
The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won't tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so. That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, which Danger Room acquired.
Fred Smith, the founder and commissioner of the World Musical Chairs Federation, has set an ambitious goal for himself, and his sport. Smith, a short, balding and -- he says -- ???beautiful,??? man, recently left a career as a corrections officer to make the childhood game of musical chairs a worldwide sport. ???This is what I plan to do with the rest of my life,??? he said in all seriousness. As if that weren???t ambitious enough, he hoped to draw 8,000 people to the World Musical Chairs Championship. Why? Well, why not?
If the dot-com boom a decade ago was about putting the world on the Internet, the twenty-teens are about bringing the Internet to the world. With cheaper sensors and 3-D printing, more and more people have access to tools that bridge the digital/physical divide. Of course, the new instruments are responsible for lots of serious innovation, but there???s some fun to be had, too. The era of mass customization means that we can export even our avatars from the pixilated screen to our plywood desk. Here???s a collection of those toys ready for tweaking.
Today Microsoft will be hosting a super-secret product announcement at Milk Studios -- and Wired will be live-blogging the event in real-time. Stay tuned to this URL.
Pocket Planes wants you to believe that you're driving a car, but in reality, it only wants you to press the gas pedal. There's no steering wheel with which to make mistakes or improve your skills. Playing the game pushes its systems forward, and not playing allows it to languish. It's no more complicated than that.
Government agencies across the United States sought user data from Google 6,321 times for the six months ending December 2011, up from 5,950 the six months prior, according to a new Google report.
A simple timeline of the achievements of Alan Turing, the great mathematician, World War II hero, computer scientist and visionary.
When people talk about cloud computing, what comes to mind??? First people think about the value they want out of clouds, like speedy deployment, self-service, elastic resources and pay-as-you-go cost models. Second, people start to think about the technology of cloud, like virtualization, image libraries, storage and network configuration. But when you step back, what [...]
Alan Turing achieved more in the space of a few decades than anyone could hope to achieve in a lifetime. Here, Wired breaks down some of the most significant contributions Turing made to modern science.
Launching in Hollywood ??? as opposed to Silicon Valley or Redmond ??? hints that Microsoft might be working closely with the entertainment industry on its rumored tablet.
Microsoft may be more than two years late to the tablet fight, but Windows and Office still spew so many billions every year that the world's third-largest company can still afford not to be great.
One of the top supervisors over Venezuela's drone program is an engineer who helped build ballistic missiles for Iran. He's also part of a mystery involving drones shipped from Iran to Venezuela while hidden in secret cargo containing possibly more military hardware than just drones.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't happy with Nvidia. And he wants you to know it. Late last week, at a hacker meetup in Finland, Torvalds laid into Nvidia, calling it "the single worst company" the Linux developer community has ever dealt with, complaining that the chipmaker doesn't do as much as it could to ensure that its hardware plays nicely with his open source operating system. He even turned to the camera filming the event, flipped the company the proverbial bird, and dropped the proverbial F bomb.
Saturday, our 15 man convoy drove half across the country to perform drop tests of Tycho Deep Space ???Beautiful Betty??? at Lindoe Industripark. The day was dedicated to learn as much as possible about Betty and water. The main objective was to learn about: - General water stability and buoyancy capabilities - Impact behaviour - [...]
The 80th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans happened in France this past weekend, and with it came the introduction of new technology, a new top-tier competitor and one radical concept that's been heralded as the future of Le Mans Prototype racing.
Physicists have developed a theory to help explain the weird collective behavior that arises when many individual atoms work as one, leading to bizarre materials such as superfluids, Bose-Einsten condensates, and neutron star matter.
The cloud is more green than traditional on-premises setups, according to a recent Carbon Disclosure Project survey. But that survey did not sit well with Cloudline readers in March. Now Google is championing the Carbon Disclosure Project, and touting the energy efficiency of the cloud as well as the green cred of Google Apps.
Woody. Buzz. Nemo. Mike. Sully. Lightning McQueen. Wall-E. Mr. Incredible. Remy. Flik. Russell. Hmm. What do they all have in common? All beloved major characters for Pixar movies? Yes, of course, but you might have noticed something else about this list. All of the major Pixar characters are male. But with the release of Brave, we'll be adding Merida to that list.
Microsoft surprised the tech world when it announced an event with only four days notice. The invitation, like the reason for the event, was laced with mystery and produced more questions that answers.
Last Friday, XOXO, an art and technology conference scheduled to take place in Portland, Oregon, in September, became the highest-funded project of its type in Kickstarter history. Over the course of the campaign, organizers raised a whopping $175,000. XOXO???s 400 available tickets ??? procured by funding the project at the $400 level ??? sold out in only 50 hours. With speakers like Makerbot's Bre Pettis, the web comic creator R. Stevens, Star Wars Uncut co-creator Jamie Wilkinson, and the founders of tech-savvy creative communities like Etsy, Metafilter, and Kickstarter???all that fall in the realm of what the conference founders call "disruptive creativity" ??? it???s no wonder. The organizers pulled together a host of makers working at that sweet spot where art and technology meet and then invited the public to join in.
The center of the US drone war has shifted to Yemen, where 23 American strikes have killed as estimated 155 people so far this year. But you wouldn't know about it -- or about the cruise missile attacks, or about the US commando teams in Yemen -- by reading the report the White House sent to Congress about US military activities around the globe.
[This essay was originally posted on October 6, 2010.] In his 1931 account of fieldwork in Patagonia, Attending Marvels, the 20th century paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson considered the appropriateness of the phrase “fossil hunting” to his profession: Fossil hunting is far the most fascinating of all sports. I speak for myself, although I do not [...]
Dork Tower is an online comic created, written and drawn by John Kovalic. It chronicles the lives of a group of geeks living in the fictional town of Mud Bay, Wisconsin.
Aerospace has long been an American bulwark. In most years Boeing is the nation???s leading exporter. America has more airports, builds more airplanes, trains more pilots, and arranges more of its economy around aviation than any other country, by far. China would very much like a piece of this???to have Boeings, NASAs, Cessnas, and fully fledged GPS systems of its own.
Mozilla is hard at work on Firefox for the iPad, but don't expect this to be your father's Firefox. Instead the company is hoping to "reinvent the browser for a new form factor."
Mark Andrews has worked in animation and live-action as a storyboard artist, story supervisor, writer, and even as a voice actor, including The Incredibles, John Carter, The Iron Giant, Spider-Man, Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars. With Brave, he makes his debut as a feature film director.
Ten questions with Clay Shirky, the startup guru, NYU professor and author, touching on the rise of GitHub, Facebook's weak spot, the regression of online politics, his mistaken trust in large tech companies, and his all-time favorite email service.
A commercial satellite has spotted a mysterious unmanned aerial vehicle parked at Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunk Works facility. Aviation geeks are scrambling to figure out what the drone might be.
The GeekMom Book Club continues their discussion of Let???s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (AKA The Bloggess).
The new book "Coming of Age on Zoloft" explores the running debate about overmedication for depression and what it means to come of age -- and of identity -- while on these meds. Neuron Culture blogger David Dobbs interviews the author, Katherine Sharpe.
Six driving itineraries and a guided tour show the Brave side of Scotland.
When some guy takes a self portrait every day for 8 years, Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain sees a calculative opportunity. See how he found out the guy's hair growth rate.
Most public libraries host Summer Reading Programs. If you're on the lookout for more options, here is a roundup of four Summer Reading Programs online and in stores.
Welcome to Pixar Week at GeekMom! We are so excited for this week's release of Brave that we have dedicated some of our posts this week to all things Disney/Pixar.
Ok, so my children have never seen a Star Trek episode. Not one. Stop throwing things at me! We were hanging out with my dad awhile ago and he and I started chatting about the ethics of Voyager episodes when he asked the kids their opinion. They didn't have one. His eyes got wide when he found out they didn't have an opinion on any of the shows. "They haven't seen Star Trek?!"
Arvind Narayanan isn't a household name yet in computer science, but there's a chance he learned your name when he reverse-engineered a Netflix contest to show how easy it is to de-anonymize anonymous data. And as we march further into the age of big data, you're likely going to be hearing more from our choice for the World's Most Wired computer scientist.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced hundreds of possible new top-level domain names last week, which is great because clearly we need more unqualified successes along the lines of .mobi, .xxx and .travel. Here's a look at some of the TLDs applied for, along with my thoughts.
Before Danica Patrick and GoDaddy, there was Elizabeth Feinler and the NIC. From 1972 to 1989, Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler ran the Network Information Center at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California -- the place that oversaw the use of internet addresses before the arrival of commercial outfits like GoDaddy and Network Solutions. If you wanted a domain name, you came to Jake.
She rides into history aboard the shuttle Challenger, opening up new vistas to a young generation.
Win prizes for visiting playgrounds!
Henry Hargeaves, a Brooklyn-based New Zealander, recently shocked audiences with his photos of deep-fried gadgets like the iPod, Mac Book, Gameboy and iPad. But all is not quite as it seems.
If there's one thing fans of Community do well, it's make art as creative as the show with which they are obsessed. It's about time they graduated and got an official gallery show. Get a sneak peek at images from the upcoming Six Seasons and a Movie exhibit, which runs June 23 and 24 in Los Angeles.
I seem to have a thing for offbeat housing options in recent years. There have been the tree forts, pods, Funky Bunkys and most recently, the dome home. Today, it's the rotating house. Seriously, I think I'm getting cabin fever down in my basement office. Anyway, back to the subject at hand, the rotating house. I just read an article in the National Post about a couple building a rotating home on Prince Edward Island that will offer water views from every room in the house. It's a very cool idea.
The US military has dozens of different types of drones in its arsenal. Each one has its own unique controller. And each of those various controllers flies a single robot. There's no system that controls multiple drones at once. One Pentagon office thinks that's an archaic way of doing business. Inside the Pentagon's Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller -- which it likens to an App Store.
The CloudFTP device was originally a Kickstarter project that was successfully funded back in January 2012. It's now a retail product available for purchase by anyone, and it fills a much-needed gap for iPad users who have various mobile storage devices (such as cameras or hard drives) and wish to access them via WiFi.
So the slow progress may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. I'm getting a crash course in business, which has been much more fun than it would have if I wasn't motivated by starting a business. I'm slowly learning how to implement my idea much better than if I had just bought the equipment and hung out a sign, which was my original plan. And I got to make a running joke about money market accounts, which has to be a first in the annuals of human history. As I develop a more thought out and serious implementation of my MindGear idea my next challenge will be to do all this and stay within budget. I wish I had planned for a larger reserve.
A massive liquid-cooled supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has received the bragging rights that come with being the world's most powerful calculating machine.
The first GeekDad Day ever has come and gone. According to our tally, over 180,000 people in all 50 states and 22 countries around the world took our challenge to step beyond the greeting cards and cheap ties, and turn Father's Day into a celebration of modern parenthood.
As he showed in his bestselling thriller Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson can write. The Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticist, who wrote several books of humorous nonfiction before turning to fiction in 2011, has a voice and style very much like Stephen King. But unlike King, Wilson also has the chops to base the weird beings in his stories on hard science. In his new novel Amped, Wilson creates a different scenario: reactionary political groups turn their ire against people who use electronic implants to make them normal, or even better than normal. Super-abled.
In case you were wondering, in this beautifully composed video by Michael John Blake, this is what Phi sounds like.
The GeekDad Puzzle of the Week from this past week was solved by most using some straightforward snippets of code. While no one was disqualified for claiming to have checked all 1,000,000+ possibilities by hand, most every did admit (brag?) about the code they wrote. Here's the puzzle as posted...
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Each Sunday, a new quiz will be posted and you will have until 5 pm EST the following Friday to submit your answer. The kind folks over at ThinkGeek will be providing a $50 gift certificate for each week's winner.
Meet the father and son who hold two of the seven Lego Master Builder spots in the United States. The Lego apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Remembering the dads who carry a unique load on Father's Day this year.
We here at GeekMom are humming with excitement over the latest teaser image release showing Princess Merida sword playing with her father King Fergus.
Just in time for Father's Day, Errol Elumir -- the Errol half of geek music duo Debs and Errol -- redid his video of Super Dad, a funny song that I think all parents will get greatly appreciate, especially the fathers out there who spend the day having make-up applied by their daughters.
By now you've probably heard that we're taking over Father's Day, transforming it into National GeekDad Day. On top of all the other things already going on for the day, we thought it would be fun to talk to some of our favorite people at one of our all-time favorite entertainment companies about what Father's Day means to them. The great folks at Disney were, as usual, more than happy to oblige, coming through with some great interviews and quotes, in addition to a lot of good stuff about upcoming shows we can expect to see.
Some ideas are destined to be. Just as the coming together of Lego, Star Wars and a video-game was written in the stars, LEGO Lord of the Rings has been looming on the horizon as inevitably as night following day. As Matt Blum recently posted, LEGO Lord of the Rings has recently been announced, along [...]
We had a fantastic day performing drop tests of our DIY space capsule. Stay tuned for much more data coming soon. So far, I just want to share this fantastic photo with you.. Ad Astra Kristian von Bengtson
Some of you asked for updates on my summer experiment to eliminate or limit access to electronics for my kids. Here is my first update, two weeks after we first began.
I discovered local multiplayer would be returning to the portable Lego games in LEGO Batman 2 DC Heroes!
Happy Father's Day! And Happy National GeekDad Day! If you've got a GeekDad around the house, point him to today's Google Doodle. It features a cute remote-controlled robot, delivering Dad a steaming mug of coffee.
Piloted Mars-Venus flybys enjoyed high-level support in the 1960s, but fell victim to budget cuts along with most other plans for NASA's post-Apollo future. The concept enjoyed a brief revival in the mid-1980s, after a CIA memo suggested that the Soviet Union might attempt such a mission in the late 1990s. Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree describes NASA's optimistic Shuttle-era piloted flyby plan, which would have used Space Station and Lunar Base hardware.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
The second copy of the Air Force's X-37B robotic space plane landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early Saturday morning, ending a record-breaking 469-day orbital mission. It's an indisputable triumph for the U.S. military and space industry. Much less certain is the X-37's future. Budget cuts, labor woes and the looming specter of a Chinese rival could blunt the diminutive robo-shuttle's orbital edge.
Barbara McClintock: Nobel Prize Geneticist, a biography by Edith Hope Fine, is free on Kindle June 16 and 17.
A dozen suggestions for geeky drinks for Father's Day / National GeekDad Day.
As usual on Saturday's I get to announce our Puzzle of The Week winner who was selected at random from all the correct entries.
You're mistaken if you think synth-pop started with Devo. In the '70s, YMO used tools like a programmable drum machine and a synthesizer to create a unique sound.
Win a Neato XV-21 Pet and Allergy Automatic Vacuum Cleaner!
The first season of The Aquabats! Super Show! delivered delightfully deranged comedy. It also greatly pleased its fearless leader, Aquabats vocalist The MC Bat Commander, better known to entertainment suits as Yo Gabba Gabba! co-creator Christian Jacobs.
Who invented email? That's a question sure to spark some debate. And where there's debate, the appearance of Noam Chomsky should come as no surprise.
It's no secret that people can be mean on the internet. You know the archetypes. Trolls. Flame warriors. Cyber-stalkers. And weirdos. As a writer, I receive my fair of the negative and the nasty. I would say the kind of feedback I receive falls into three categories: 1) You made an error. 2) I disagree with you. 3) I'm just crazy.
For parents and teachers wanting to raise curious children, "Hunting the Elements" is an amazing tool which shouldn't be missed.
I could find many good reasons to build and play with Lego bricks. At the top of the list would first come creativity, then education, fun and art. But none of them could equal this project from GlobalGiving called Bricks for Good. When a true good cause meets the best toy ever invented, the result can only be exceptional. The Bricks for Good team has put together three different custom sets of Lego bricks, corresponding to three different charitable causes: Build a Well, Build a School, and Build & Plant a Tree.
Piloted spacecraft differ from most other types of space vehicles in that they need to return precious cargo to Earth's surface. Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree describes how, a year after the last manned Mercury mission, a NASA engineer proposed that Mercury capsules be re-purposed to return a new precious cargo: photographic film containing high-resolution images of comets, stars, and galaxies.
This week's Ultimate Spider-Man features Wolverine as the special guest star and GeekMom has exclusive images. After a run in with a telepathic mutant, Wolverine and Spider-Man find that they are not quite themselves. Actually, instead of being themselves, they're actually each other! In a Freak Friday like twist, our favorite web-slinger and bad attitude carrying mutant must work together find a way to get back to normal.
Here's one mobile strategy Mark Zuckerberg could try: Buy Nokia. If the 28-year-old cashed out all his Facebook stock today, he could buy up all of Nokia's and still have a little under $6 billion left for himself.
Tomorrow is yet another fantastic day for Copenhagen Suborbitals. In cooperation with Lindoe Space Test Center and Blue Water Shipping will be performing a drop-test of Tycho Deep Space. The purpose is to validate how the capsule will react to water impact when landing with three large main parachutes. The parachutes are designed to create [...]
The mythical beast known as the CSS Variable is about to be released into the wild. WebKit, the engine that powers browsers like Safari and Chrome, will soon support one of the most requested features for CSS -- variables.
Inspired by the first days of summer vacation, and Wes Anderson's twee tribute to scouting in Moonrise Kingdom, we bring you this roundup of scout gear on Etsy.
To many ??? too many ??? science is something like North Korea. Not only is it impossible to read or understand anything that comes out of that place, there are so many cultural differences that it???s barely worth trying. It???s easier just to let them get on with their lives while you get on with [...]
My kids and I were rabid fans of the first Avatar series and eagerly awaited Korra. We have not been disappointed.
This week on the Gadget Lab Show, we go hands-on with the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, splash around with some Super Soakers, and take a look at the latest updates surrounding iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion.
Bringing technology down to the ol' fishing hole might anger rod-and-reel purists. But, it's hard to argue with a cooler full of fish.
Safety Not Guaranteed pulls off an extremely hard hat trick: It's a smart movie about time travel that delivers comedy as well as heart and soul.
The Central Intelligence Agency continues to refuse to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, despite President Barack Obama and even a former CIA director???s admission of the agency???s targeted killing program. Despite numerous public comments on the CIA???s drone attacks in far-flung locales such as Yemen from [...]
When Apple announced a bold new mapping platform in iOS 6, it provoked two important questions: Why did turn-by-turn navigation take so long to implement, and how will Apple compete in a relatively mature mapping landscape?
Apple's announcement that Siri is coming "Eyes Free" into cars left more questions than answers at WWDC this week. But after talking with automakers, examining how voice controls are currently embedded in vehicles and looking at Apple's own patent filing for a steering wheel-mounted remote, we have a clearer view of how Apple's personal assistant will integrate into your next ride.
The Central Intelligence Agency continues to refuse to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, despite President Barack Obama's and even a former CIA director's admission of the agency's targeted killing program.
We know you all want to know, desperately, what we thought of E3. Right?
After more than 20 years of research and development, the Navy's dreams of laser weapons are about to come true. But like the dog who chases the car and doesn't know what to do when he catches it, the Navy's thoroughly unprepared for its coming arsenal of focused-light weapons. A new congressional study warns that the Navy runs the risk of outfitting its surface ships with laser guns that their on-board power systems can't handle.
New book Prometheus: The Art of the Film sheds light on the alien evolutionary biology of Ridley Scott's new sci-fi movie. Enter to win a copy.
A documentary on the history of 8-bit art, on PBS? The Evolution of 8-Bit Art is the latest installment in PBS' fantastic OffBook web video series, which has showcased Reddit, graffiti, generative art and Lego-based art in previous episodes.
Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid sedan is in its first year of full production, and after six months of sales, the Volt has toppled the Chevy Corvette in the retail race. So far in 2012, Chevy has offloaded 7,057 Volts, compared to the the Corvette’s 5,547 sales. It deserves noting that the figures General Motors — Chevrolet’s [...]
In his new book, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, science writer Matthew Hutson argues that we're all believers -- even the staunchest of skeptics.
Read an excerpt about why people tend to blame god for their problems from the new book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking by science writer Matthew Hutson.
A Brooklyn artist has added a striking multicolored water tower made from 1,000 pieces of reclaimed Plexiglas to his neighborhood's skyline.
