Steve Herrod wants to put a virtual machine on your phone. Even if your phone is an iPhone. More »

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Can VMware Put a Virtual Machine On Your iPhone? [Phones]

angry tapir writes “An Oregon man has been convicted of seven courts of wire fraud for helping thousands of people steal Internet service. Ryan Harris, 26, of Redmond, Oregon, was convicted by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He faces a prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the seven counts.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Man Convicted For Helping Thousands Steal Internet Access

Sadly, even though digital pirates are anarchic on one level, they do still need rules and, in fact, the overlords of torrent sites often meet to establish quality standards. Sadly, their latest decisions have the torrent community up in arms. More »

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Torrent Users Throw a Hissy Fit Over Changing File Types [Piracy]

PatPending writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
“The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend. In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders. RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. ‘The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,’ he said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing Is Booming

With the patent officially expired on the original NES technology, tons of third-party companies are swooping in to make new products with the classic system. Check the via link for more cool NERDGASM-worthy video game stuff and geektastic stuff from Toy Fair 2012!

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WIN!: Portable NES WIN

Science writer Sally Adee provides some background on her New Scientist article describing her experience with a DARPA program that uses targeted electrical stimulation of the brain during training exercises to induce “flow states” and enhance learning. The “thinking cap” is something like the tasp of science fiction, and the experimental evidence for it as a learning enhancement tool is pretty good thus far — and the experimental subjects report that the experience feels wonderful (Adee: “the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.”)

We don’t yet have a commercially available “thinking cap” but we will soon. So the research community has begun to ask: What are the ethics of battery-operated cognitive enhancement? Last week a group of Oxford University neuroscientists released a cautionary statement about the ethics of brain boosting, followed quickly by a report from the UK’s Royal Society that questioned the use of tDCS for military applications. Is brain boosting a fair addition to the cognitive enhancement arms race? Will it create a Morlock/Eloi-like social divide where the rich can afford to be smarter and leave everyone else behind? Will Tiger Moms force their lazy kids to strap on a zappity helmet during piano practice?

After trying it myself, I have different questions. To make you understand, I am going to tell you how it felt. The experience wasn’t simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up.

The experiment I underwent was accelerated marksmanship training on a simulation the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified M4 close-range assault rifle, first without tDCS and then with. Without it I was terrible, and when you’re terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at.

Then this happened:

The 20 minutes I spent hitting targets while electricity coursed through my brain were far from transcendent. I only remember feeling like I had just had an excellent cup of coffee, but without the caffeine jitters. I felt clear-headed and like myself, just sharper. Calmer. Without fear and without doubt. From there on, I just spent the time waiting for a problem to appear so that I could solve it.

If you want to try the (obviously ill-advised) experiment of applying current directly to your brain, here’s some HOWTOs. Remember, if you can’t open it, you don’t own it!

Better Living Through Electrochemistry

(via JWZ)

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What it’s like to wear a brain-stimulating “thinking cap”

theodp writes “Over at Salon, Annie Keeghan does an Upton Sinclair number on the math textbook industry. In recent years, Keeghan explains, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of lagging U.S. students. But with state and local budgets constrained, math textbook publishers competing for fewer available dollars are rushing their products to market before their competitors, resulting in product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed. Keeghan writes: ‘There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you’re trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.’ The comments on Keeghan’s article are also an eye-opener — here’s a sample: ‘Sales and marketing budgets are astronomical because the expenses pay off more than investments in product. Sadly, most teachers are not curriculum experts and are swayed by the surface pitches. Teachers make the decisions, but are not the users (students) nor are they spending their own money. As a result, products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful.’ So, can open source or competitions build better math textbooks?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Math Textbooks a Textbook Example of Bad Textbooks

Current solar cell designs need to be aimed directly at the sun to be most efficient. But a Japanese company has come up with a clever new approach using spherical micro cells that can harness the sun’s rays from any direction. More »

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Brilliant Spherical Solar Cells Don’t Need To Be Pointed Directly At the Sun [Solar]

A high-level summit of the torrenting world’s elite release groups — the groups responsible for the highest quality, earliest infringing video releases — has resulted in a consensus on dumping the venerable Xvid codec (a video compression scheme) for x264, requiring the torrent-downloading public to rethink which tools, devices and converters they use. Here’s the official consensus. Torrentfreak’s Enigmax has more:

The document – ‘The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012′ – is extremely detailed and covers all sorts of technical issues, but the main controversy stems from the adoption of the x264 codec.

“x264 has become the most advanced video codec over the past few years. Compared to Xvid, it is able to provide higher quality and compression at greater SD resolutions,” the rule document begins.

“This standard aims to bring quality control back to SD releases. There are many standalone players/streamers such as TviX, Popcorn Hour, WDTV HD Media Player, Boxee, Xtreamer, PS3, XBOX 360, iPad, & HDTVs that can playback H264 and AAC encapsulated in MP4,” the doc adds.

From February 22nd and earlier in some cases, release groups including ASAP, BAJSKORV, C4TV, D2V, DiVERGE, FTP, KYR, LMAO, LOL, MOMENTUM, SYS, TLA and YesTV began releasing TV shows in the new format. Out went Xvid and avi, in came x264 and MP4.

BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid

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BitTorrent’s elite switches from Xvid to x264

It’s a sad day for the concept art world. Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who created concept designs for the first Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica television show, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and other science fiction classics, has passed away at age 82. He set our minds on fire and made so many of us fall in love with science fiction. He’ll be missed. [Tor] More »

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R.I.P. Ralph McQuarrie, the man who designed Darth Vader [Obituary]