Buzz Out Loud 788: Roughing it Vegas-style

Stuck in a side hall in the Las Vegas Convention Center, using borrowed equipment and sharing two power outlets among four power-hungry devices, we somehow pulled off a podcast. We talk about the plucky bravery of Psystar, the plucky bravery of the District Court, and, of course, the plucky bravery of Jason-- just because he was able to get it all to work. And a big thanks to our old friend Veronica Belmont for joining us.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 788

Podcast and New Media Expo
http://www.newmediaexpo.com/

Psystar “Definitely still shipping” Mac clones
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/14/1413201

Ruling is a victory for supporters of free software--NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/technology/14commons.html?_r=1
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080813-court-violating-copyleft-copyright-infringement.html

Twitter kills SMS service in some countries over costs. Will someone kill SMS already?
http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/13/twitter-kills-sms-service-in-some-countries-will-someone-kill-sms-already/

What’s Behind the iPhone 3G glitches
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2008/tc20080813_430402.htm

You’ve got jail! AOL spammer sentenced to seven years
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-youve-got-jail-aol-spammer-sentenced-to-seven-years.html

Password resets worse than reusing old password
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/13/2241242

CAPTCHAs work--for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080814-captchas-workfor-digitizing-old-damaged-texts-manuscripts.html

Indie-game developer finds success on Xbox 360 — Est. $825K sales in first week
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/8/indie-game-developer-finds-success-on-xbox-360-est-825k-sales-in-first-week

The evolving release dates of Spore … sigh
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/16-08/pl_games_spore

E-MAIL

In episode 786, Bill from Portland called in and you were talking about the “kill switch” in the iPhone and how that is different than the malicious app removal tool in Windows. Molly also mentioned that the iPhone app PhoneSaber had been taken down, but I wanted to point out that according to the dev’s Web site, http://themacbox.co.uk/2008/08/phonesabers-future/, they took it down themselves (at THQ’s request). As THQ does official Star Wars apps on mobile devices, they contacted him to request it come down, but they didn’t seem to “lawyer up”. From the description, it sounds as if they had a civil conversation and simply want to release an official “branded” app that was similar (unclear if this will be free or paid). Now the PhoneSaber developer looks to be working with them with more access to the official content.

It seems to be an example of how it should work and not an example of our all-too-often broken system.

Love the show, and I should mention that it was Leo Laporte and This Week in Tech that discussed BOL at one point and got me listening through his recommendation. Please don’t stop Molly from ranting, that’s my favorite part

Thanks,
Bill from NC

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Hi guys,

I was checking out some science/tech news today when I came across this story on Neurophilosophy:
(http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/08/robot_controlled_by_neurons_in.php#more)
and Engadget
(http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/13/uk-researchers-give-robot-a-biological-brain/)
It's about a group of researchers who have created a robot controlled by real neural tissue (so I had to also blog about it myself (http://neurotechnica.com/2008/08/13/robots-with-a-brain/)). The group grew a culture of nerve cells in a dish that had tiny electrodes that could both send and receive signals from the neurons in the culture.
These signals were directly (this is important) passed to/from the robot with a bluetooth connection. No computer was required to interpret the signals and guide the robot’s actions--the robot took direct orders form the neural tissue and gave feedback directly. All other work like this has required a computer to sit in between the robot and neural tissue, but this intermediate step causes the experiment to lose a fair amount of validity. The researchers plan to use this new method to investigate how memories are formed and recalled, which may help patients suffering from Alzheimer’s, dementia, etc. Anyway, thanks guys, and love the show!

Tommy,

the neuroscience student from Houston

**********

Hey BOL’s Molly, Tom, and of course Jason,

I have been on vacation (without Internet!) for the last week, so I am still catching up on BOL, but I decided to do some research on the 55 miles per hour law and see just how much of a difference it really makes. My “tests” were done in the Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming with the least amount of variables I could get, leaving the cruise on at these speeds for 5 minutes each on a VERY FLAT AND LLONGG ROAD. The car I was driving was a 2006 Acura MDX rated at 24 mpg on the highway, and which has instant mpg feedback in the menu. Here are my results. 80 mph=18-20 mpg, 75 mph=22-24 mpg, 65 mph=26-28 mpg, 55mph=30mpg. Though these results are in no way official, this truly shocked me. Keep in mind, I am against this law, but these results will slow me down at least a little bit. If someone would have told me before that there was a 10 mpg+ difference, to be honest I would have laughed at them.

Love the show,

Brandon

**********

Hey Crew,

Just wanted to make sure you’d heard there’s a version of the iPhone “I Am Rich” app for the Nokia Internet Tablet. It’s called “I Am Free”. Saw it while I was checking for updates, thought “could it be what I’m thinking?”And found out it was, in fact, an annoyed Linux hippie responding to the hype.

http://ywwg.com/wordpress/?p=438
Owen’s Photolog ? Blog Archive ? I Am Free, and so are you

Runs just fine on my Nokia N800.

Chris the College Librarian

p.s. I could sure use a Linux chaser.