TOM HANKS TAKES IMAX TO THE MOON HACKING ONLINE POKER All you-can-eat of tomorrow with your host Jon Stewart Why YAHOO! will be The Dream Factory the center of the How to turn your million-channel universe desktop into a custom “Fab Lab” ESPN thinks oustide the box The Wired Blood Feud Guide to TV 2.0 Greed, Denial, and DNA in Indian Country LOOK! UP IN THE SKY! The science of superheroes page 60 Watch it, buddy September 2005 September 2005 www.wired.com/wired 134 128 56 102 55 77 FEATURES DEPARTMENTS 102 The TV of Tomorrow 25 RANTS & RAVES: Feedback. He’s the smart-ass host of the Daily Show. But more than that, Jon Stewart is helping to invent a new kind 29 START: Technology. Business, People. of TV- time-shifted and multiscreen. by Thomas Goetz PLUS: TV 2.0! Six new ways to watch, from the 32 Scofflaw: ‘80s classics on your PSP internet to celevision. 38 What I did at geek summer camp 106 The Super Network With video search and holywood muscle, Yahoo! 42 B.F.D.: Self Healing microchips! hopes to dominate the million-channel universe.by Josh McHugh 44 The do-it-yourself space program 112 ESPN Thinks Outside the Box 46 Infoporn Raw data. Web, WiMax, cell phones, and more. The sports Tracking the censors: The nations the block Web sites powerhouse is about to be on every screen in your and what really offends them. PLUS. Jargon Watch, life. by Frank Rose Wired Tired Expired, and more... 96 On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Bot 55 PLAY: Culture. Gear. Obssesions. In the Bustling world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. 56 How fans saved Joss Whedon’s Firefly Are you in, human? by David Kusher 58 Death Cab’s favorite MP3 blogs 118 Blood Feud These are boom times for the Five Civilized tribes of 77 Fetish Technolust. Oklahoma. But bad times for thousands of black Indians Even Forty’s personalized foosball table, Nemo’s battling for tribal citizenship. Now the Freed men are turning inflatable tent, Nike’s sun blooking contact lenses to genetic science for help. by Brendan I. Koerner 80 Test Consumer reviews. 126 One Giant Leap Micro-laptops, bloggin service, water guns, and what Tom Hanks takes Imax to the moon. by Spencer Reiss the wired gang bought this month. Plus: Motor, Arts, Reviews, and more... 128 Dream Factory From design to delivery, custom manufacturing is coming soon 87 POSTS: Dispatched from the Wired frontier. to a desktop near you. Inside the “fab lab” revolution. Wiring the Middle East’s war zone by Clive Thomson 90 The Baltiomre Ravens go digital 134 The Inside Story of Doctor Atomic Composer John Adams set off a chain reaction in the 92 Engines and the people who love them opera world with his explosive works on Nixon and the PLUS: Lessing on how MGM v. Grokster affects Apple Middle east. Now he’s taking on the father of the Abomb. By Johnathon Keats 154 FOUND: Artifacts from the future. WIRED - 9/05 - 009 ARTS DRAFT ANIMALS Theo Jansen has engineered his own spe- which he set loose for a day in Amsterdam ping wings pump atmospheric pressure cies. His giant sea creatures, or Animaris, last year. Despite its size, the Rhino walked into lemonade bottles - allowing it to keep have skeletons of steel or electrical tubing so efficiently that children were able to pull moving when the gusts subside. It’s the lat- and scamper about on multiple legs with- it on a leash. His newest creation, Percip- est link in an evolutionary process Jansen out the aid of motors or electricity - they’re iere, will traverse the main square of Linz, hopes will one day lead to Animaris living propelled only by the wind at their backs. Austria, in September as part of the Ars autonomously on the beaches of the Neth- The Dutch artist’s biggest beast is the Electronica Festival. Percipiere is the first erlands. Darwin would be terrified. 15-foot-tall, 2-ton Rhinoceros Transport, Animaris to store wind energy - its flap- - Robert Capps What has 12 legs, stands 15 feet tall, and is propelled by wind? The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport 068 - WIRED - 9/05 B.F.D. Computer, Heal Thyself! Soon Electronics will self-repair when they break. by Sunny Bains Microchips are like potato chips: More of outs. But advances in fabrication are finally tion, enough to kill a person (or give them them come out of the oven broken than lowering the price. superpowers). After getting fried, the sys- whole. And of the chips - micro, not potato tem started fixing itself, attempting up to - that make it to market, many have built- “There’s little need for fault-tolerant chips 100 configurations per second until it found in weaknesses that eventually cause them in the market,” says Jason Lohn, a com- one that worked. to fail. Most people don’t care. The use- puter scientist at the NASA Ames Research ful lifespan of an electronic device is only Center. “But for space applications, we Ultimately, though, engineers hope that about three years, and it’s hard chips will do more than recover to consume just one. By the time from a blast of cosmic radiation. your cell phone’s processor melts “We want systems that can grow, down, you’ve already bought a self-repair, adapt, cope with envi- newer model. ronmental changes, and give us fault tolerance,” says Andy Tyrell, But if you’re planning to send a electronics department chair at computer on, say, a 10 - year mis- the UK’s University of York. Tyrell sion into deep space, then you is working on what he calls immu- need more staying power. The notronics, a digital immune sys- best option used to be to send tem, complete with antibodies. lots of spare processors and cross He has designed an electronic cir- your fingers. As your probe flew si- cuit that can distinguish between lently through the night, you would self and other, just like a human dream about chips that could fix being does - though the ma- themselves. chine uses strings of data instead need much longer lifetimes.” His team is of proteins. The system looks for “dis- It’s not crazy. A type of processor called a working on systems with two processors eased” information (data with unexpected field programmable gate array really can that are proprietary variations of FPGAs. If characteristics) and, if it finds some, recon- recover on the fly. Invented in 1984, FPGAs a fault occurs in one, the backup chip takes figures itself. don’t have hardwired patterns of circuits. over, generating a new configuration using Instead , their wiring runs through program- an evolutionary algorithm - it tries differ- Microprocessors may not come into the mable intersections called logic blocks. ent approaches until a layout emerges that world with finesse, but they’re learning to They’re slower than ordinary chips, and gets the job done. Researchers at NASA’s grow old gracefully. until recently their high cost limited their Jet Propulsion Laboratory exposed their application to rapid prototyping of chip lay- self-healing chip to 250 kilorads of radia- Sunny Bains ([email protected]) wrote about liquid lenses in issue 13.04. Jargon Watch Pulse Non-Analytical Dirt-Style Toyetic Meat Puppet You can’t stop the evolution of digital content Positive adj. Having hip adj. Suitable for n. An online iden- delivery (see “TV 2.0,” page 105), but Wired adj. Coined by graphic design that merchandising. tity created solely to readers like things the way they are. Just 10 the US Anti-Dop- remixes stodgy, Describes a media stuff a wiki or usenet percent of 1,290 readers polled hoped to ing Agency as a amateurish Web property, like a ballot box. The term watch TV on cell phone, iPod, or PDA. euphemism for guilty content for ironic movie, that’s easily is an extension of of using perfor- aesthetic ends. exploited for selling sock puppet, a How will you prefer to watch digital video mance-enhancing Think: the vi- other products, such pseudonym created content? 4% drugs based solely sual equivalent of a as a McDonald’s by a usenet member 6% on circumstantial mash-up. Happy Meal. (Usage: to second one’s own evidence. (Usage: “Say what you will opinion. Computer “He won’t submit to about cinematog- TV 33% our voluntary drug raphy, Star Wars: 57% testing? Then he Episode I is more iPod/PDA must be non-analyti- toyetic than My Din- Cell Phone cal positive.”) ner With Andre.”) - Jonathon Keats ([email protected]) WIRED - 9/05 - 042 We interupt this broadcast to bring you a Special Report from Jon Stewart: REINVENTING TELEVISION The Wired Interview, by Thomas Goetz; Photographs by Matthias Clamer ake up, television executives of America: Jon Stewart - the wiseacre host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show - knows more about your business than you do. Sure, The Daily Show may just seem like a smart comedy program on wbasic cable; nothing more thanical satire and a spot - on parody of “Getting video off the Internet,” says Daily Show host Jon Stewart. “is no different than getting it off the TV. 102 - WIRED - 9/05 WIRED - 9/05 - 103 TV News pieties. But it’s also a demonstration of for a conversation about television: where it might over. The one thing that you have control over What was the symbol for stop supposed to be? So applying your Goodness Theorem, if you start television done right.