california

In this week's installment of Show Us Yours, we take a look at Curt Cozad's home theater. As a Packers fan living on the West Coast, Curt had to get DirecTV with Sunday Ticket to watch his favorite team. His thinking behind the 123-inch screen was that he wanted more than just a TV room--and the fact that all his friends want to have their birthday parties at his place tells us he succeeded. Click through to see all the photos including his own slot machine, a Ms. Pacman arcade system, and a popcorn maker.

Previous Show Us … Read more

Glitches in touch-screen electronic voting machines without paper trails tend to rack up the most attention these days. But an irregularity over ballots marked by hand and scanned by a computer like standardized tests--known as the "optical-scan" approach--is poised to create a snafu in upcoming mayoral elections in San Francisco.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle report on Wednesday, there's concern among state officials that "less-sensitive" scanning machines at polling places across the California city won't be able to pick up ballots marked with anything other than a No. 2 pencil or a special … Read more

I'm a big fan of solar power. But as with anything, I like to know exactly what I'm getting. One of the big unspoken issues in the solar sector is the difference between the rated or estimated potential output of a solar system--and the actual production of kilowatt-hours. A range of factors from the margin of error in the modules, to temperature, dust and losses from wiring, conversion to AC power and any batteries all can contribute to as much as 30 percent lower actual power production--even in the first year.

Compounding this problem in my mind is … Read more

Camp Pendleton, home of push-ups and pugil sticks, will now offer a three-dimensional, virtual-reality immersion training course complete with smoke, explosions and the wail of the Muezzin to give U.S. Marines a taste of what they're in for.

Known as "FlatWorld," the course is an in-depth blend of stagecraft and high tech created by the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. Choosing the bureaucratic vernacular of the Pentagon, the Marines call it the "Infantry Immersive Trainer." Whatever the name, it's designed to replicate the chaos and confusion of close-quarter battle … Read more

From my vantage point in the peanut gallery, it's oh so tempting to hold our elected officials up to ridicule. But truth be told, it's sometimes impossible to resist. And when it comes to that increasingly busy intersection between the worlds of politics and technology, it seems the hits just keep on coming.

So it is that California State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) introduced a bill that would "prohibit any person from forcing any other person to undergo an implant in their body of a radio frequency identification device."

I kid thee not.

His fellow … Read more

Open government is a central tenet for democracy. After all, if it's your government then you have the right to know what your money is going toward. But what about the rights of public employees' personal privacy? As reported in today's SFGate , the California Supreme Court has ruled that "the public has the right to know the names of police officers and the salaries of local and state government employees."

… Read more

A recent report documenting computer scientists' ability to hack into voting machines certified for use in the state of California has already begun reverberating on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who happens to be one of the chief sponsors of a bill that would prohibit paperless voting machines by the 2010 federal elections, says she plans to hold a hearing in September on the report in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which she leads. The politicians are expected to break for the summer at the end of this week.

In a statement Tuesday, Feinstein expressed dismay at &… Read more

Forgive me if this isn't some major news flash, but let's document it for posterity anyway: University of California computer scientists have recently shown it's possible to carry out a bevy of hacks on electronic voting machines currently certified for use in the Golden State.

In reports released late last week, the researchers chronicle their five-week endeavor, at the request of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, to exploit examine machines made by Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold. The same models are also in use in many other states, according to a database compiled by the Election Reform Information Project. … Read more

I rolled into the seaside city of Santa Monica, Calif., home of the E3 Media and Business Summit, this morning after a flight out of New York City that wasn't technically a red-eye, but might as well have been because it was pretty darn early (would you call that a pink-eye?). Let's just say it's a far cry from the conference's former home at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The above photograph shows something that I snapped with my camera while--no kidding--on the way to pick up my press wristband for Sony Computer Entertainment America's … Read more