OK, Computer

"We're conforming to the way machines play music. It's robots' choice. It used to be ladies' choice — now it's robots' choice."
Donald Fagen of Steely Dan

Culture Lag

"The thesis is . . . that the source of most modern social changes today is the material culture. The material-culture changes force changes in other parts of culture such as social organization and customs, but these latter parts of culture do not change as quickly. They lag behind the material-culture changes, hence we are living in a period of maladjustment."

William F. Ogburn

How I Quit Smoking by Jay Shuster

This reminds me of the scene in Office Space where the boys take a bat to the copier. How cathartic.

Made possible by my good friend Ground Control. Expect more of his transmissions in the future.

Software to Cajole, Nag, Accuse, Insult and Needle Laptop Thieves

Front Door Software's Retriever application helps missing laptop find their way home by displaying the owner's contact info. However, if nobody out there's good enough to return it to you, Retriever lets you get a little more aggressive. You can remotely command the system to display accusatory pop-ups, demand extra passwords, or just yell and scream at the thief. You can also use it to track the computer's location.

More at TechNewsWorld

History of Video Games (1972-2007)

The quality of this video isnt great, and it only spans through 2007, but when I first saw this, it was the closest to the weepy eyed nostalgia that video game memories evoke within me. I make fun of myself for misty eyed Golden Eye musings, or fond reveries of Super Mario 3. But I am a child of technology, and my sensory triggers include video games.

Please list any video games that give you that old tingly feeling of the days o' yore. I'll start.

Turok for the N64.
oh, and Q-bert for the Colecovision.

Everything Louder Than Everything Else

This is an older article, but as far as I know, things have gotten worse not better.

Joe Gross writes:

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."
— Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone magazine

The ranting of a cranky old man? Perhaps.

One man's opinion? Hardly.

In August, an open letter from a music industry executive on the state of commercial compact disc mastering and manufacturing was sent to an industry tip sheet/e-mail list run by a music pundit named Bob Lefsetz.

The letter was written by Angelo Montrone, a vice president for A&R (the folks who scout and sign music acts) for One Haven Music, a Sony Music company.

"There's something . . . sinister in audio that is causing our listeners fatigue and even pain while trying to enjoy their favorite music. It has been propagated by A&R departments for the last eight years: The complete abuse of compression in mastering (forced on the mastering engineers against their will and better judgment)."

More from Joe Gross

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Here's what killed your 401(k) David X. Li's Gaussian copula function as first published in 2000. Investors exploited it as a quick—and fatally flawed—way to assess risk. A shorter version appears on this month's cover of Wired.

Probability Specifically, this is a joint default probability—the likelihood that any two members of the pool (A and B) will both default. It's what investors are looking for, and the rest of the formula provides the answer.	Survival times The amount of time between now and when A and B can be expected to default. Li took the idea from a concept in actuarial science that charts what happens to someone's life expectancy when their spouse dies.	Equality A dangerously precise concept, since it leaves no room for error. Clean equations help both quants and their managers forget that the real world contains a surprising amount of uncertainty, fuzziness, and precariousness.
Copula This couples (hence the Latinate term copula) the individual probabilities associated with A and B to come up with a single number. Errors here massively increase the risk of the whole equation blowing up.	Distribution functions The probabilities of how long A and B are likely to survive. Since these are not certainties, they can be dangerous: Small miscalculations may leave you facing much more risk than the formula indicates.	Gamma The all-powerful correlation parameter, which reduces correlation to a single constant—something that should be highly improbable, if not impossible. This is the magic number that made Li's copula function irresistible.

More over at Wired

Collisions in space

At 16:55 Greenwich Mean Time on Tuesday, February 10th, two satellites collided. One of them was a communications satellite launched in 1993 by the Russians and which had since died; the other was Iridium 33, one of about seventy communications satellites providing global phone services. They did not collide head-on; they sideswiped each other, so their collision speed was only a fraction of their orbiting velocity. However, since they were orbiting the Earth at about 30,000 km/h, they hit at thousands of kilometres an hour. Both satellites were smashed into fragments.
More at Keremeos Review

Social Engineering: Anatomy of a Hack

As the founder of Lares, a Colorado-based security consultancy, social-engineering expert Chris Nickerson is often asked by clients to conduct penetration testing of their on-sight security. Nickerson leads a team which conducts security risk assessments in a method he refers to as Red Team Testing. Watch Nickerson and his team pull off a diamond heist in this video.

Nickerson and crew recently took on such an exercise for a client he describes as "a retail company with a large call center." With some prep work, Nickerson says the team was able gain access to the company's network and database quite easily. Read on to find out how they did it, and what lessons you can take away for shoring up your organization's defenses. (To learn more about social engineering techniques, also see Social Engineering: Eight Common Tactics.)

More from Joan Goodchild

The artificial morality of the robot warrior

Nicholas Carr writes:

Great strides have been made in recent years in the development of combat robots. The US military has deployed ground robots, aerial robots, marine robots, stationary robots, and (reportedly) space robots. The robots are used for both reconnaissance and fighting, and further rapid advances in their design and capabilities can be expected in the years ahead. One consequence of these advances is that robots will gain more autonomy, which means they will have to act in uncertain situations without direct human instruction. That raises a large and thorny challenge: how do you program a robot to be an ethical warrior?

More from Nicholas Carr