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Monday March 5, 2012 Daily edition   News and Blog Headlines How to jam annoying talkers Tablets + cloud vs. desktop PCs Avatars meet in Second Life to celebrate Future Day 2012 Can you build a human body? Instruction for masses knocks down campus walls Stuxnet: computer worm opens new era of warfare 1 in 8 chance of catastrophic solar megastorm by 2020 Google’s new privacy policy: what has changed and what you can do about it NSA builds Android phone for top secret calls Latest News Tablets + cloud vs. desktop PCs March 5, 2012   As the action moves to tablets, mobile devices, and the cloud, what’s the future for the desktop PC? Dim, according to OnLive, Inc., which has just introduced Onlive Desktop Plus, which displays a Windows 7 desktop on an iPad, with the full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Adobe Reader, and Flash videos, plus 5 GB … more… Can you build a human body? March 5, 2012   The Bionic Bodies series on the BBC News website will be looking at how bionics can transform people’s lives. We will meet a woman deciding whether to have her hand cut off for a bionic replacement and analyze the potential to take the technology even further, enhancing the body to superhuman levels. Instruction for masses knocks down campus walls March 5, 2012 Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) — a tool for democratizing higher education. In the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition … more… Stuxnet: computer worm opens new era of warfare March 5, 2012 Could future malware, modeled on Stuxnet (whose target appears to have been the centrifuges in a top-secret Iranian nuclear facility) target other critical infrastructures — such as nuclear power plants or water systems? What kind of risk do we face in this country? Steve Kroft reports on 60 Minutes. 1 in 8 chance of catastrophic solar megastorm by 2020 March 4, 2012   The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade,  according to space physicist Pete Riley, senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, California, writing n Space Weather on Feb. 23. This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a … more… Google’s new privacy policy: what has changed and what you can do about it March 3, 2012   Google’s broad new privacy policy went into effect March 1. “The main change is for users with Google Accounts,” Google said at the time of its January announcement. “Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services.” European regulators are … more… NSA builds Android phone for top secret calls March 3, 2012   The National Security Agency (NSA) has developed and built 100 ultra-secure but low-cost Android “Fishbowl” phones that allow U.S. Government staff to discuss top-secret subjects, with a “kind of police app” designed to monitor operations on the device. NSA says anyone can reproduce the phone using specifications published online because it uses off-the-shelf components. New BLOG POSTS How to jam annoying talkers March 5, 2012 by Amara D. Angelica   Attention, telephone babblers, library whisperers, and hecklers: Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology want you to shut the bleep up. They’ve developed the “Speech-jammer” gun, which will reduce you to incoherent stuttering from up to 90 feet away. It works by recording your words and then sending them back … more… Avatars meet in Second Life to celebrate Future Day 2012 March 5, 2012 by Natasha Vita-More   The first Future Day on March 1 featured events in 14 cities in 8 countries. The largest event was at Terasem Island in Second Life, with about 50 attendees. The auditorium at Terasem Island was full and we were eagerly awaiting three of the speakers to arrive: Ben Goertzel, Martine Rothblatt, and Howard Bloom. I introduced … more… New EVENTS   Personalized Life Extension Conference 2012 Dates: Mar 29 – Apr 1, 2012 Location: San Francisco, California more... Latest Kurzweil Collection posts Men must merge with machines: an interview with inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil   Source: Santa Barbara Independent — March 3, 2012 | Lynda Weinman Some have called inventor, author, and future-thinker Raymond Kurzweil the Thomas Edison of the 21st century, and rightly so. The National Inventor Hall of Fame inductee began his career making technology that helped blind people read — Stevie Wonder, in fact, is a good friend because of this — and then went on to pen … more… Read full article here Ray Kurzweil: the ultimate thinking machine   Source: Montecito Journal — March 1, 2012 | James Buckley He is a visionary, an inventor (the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first music synthesizer that could recreate the keys of a grand piano), an entrepreneur, and has been described as a “restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal. He is also a New York Times best-selling author. Ray has … more… Read full article here Visit KurzweilAI.net You are currently subscribed to the KurzweilAI.net newsletter as *|EMAIL|* To unsubscribe, please click here. To change your email preferences, please click here. *|LIST:ADDRESS|*.