Source: Gizmodo | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:50 pm

Video: Cut and Paste confirmed for iPhone 3.0, says Kevin Rose

During the SXSW taping of Digg Nation, Internet darling Kevin Rose confirmed that cut and paste were coming in 3.0 and that everything the Pre can do, the iPhone will be able to do as well. However, there won’t be any background app action or video recording this go-around. But like Alex said, “something I wanted seven f*cking years ago.”

This is just getting stupid. Way to drop the ball, Palm. You might as well tell us exactly what the Pre and webOS are capable of now, if you want any chance of people waiting around for it. Or, you know, release the thing this week or set a launch date and price.

via 9to5mac

Source: CrunchGear | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:46 pm

The Object of Her Affection [Voices]

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:45 pm

Automatic Breakfast Machine Fails to Awake Interest

The teasmaid and its close relation, the automatic coffee maker, are fundamentally flawed. Not as designs, but at a conceptual level: The only time you actually need coffee before you can leave the bed is when you have a monstrous hangover — which means that, by definition, you were unable to prepare the machine the night before.

Of course, the wish for breakfast in bed is a strong one. I favor the “tantrum method" to get mine: I kick, scream and moan until the Lady relents and goes to fetch me a delicious smoothie (this morning it was the usual mango, but with a curiously bitter almond smell). Those of you less obstinate could opt for De Dietrich’s Wake Up alarm, which not only prepares coffee but dispenses juice and hot toast.

Like any automatic food preparation device, the Wake Up is horribly complicated. As these two illustrations show, you’ll need to fill various compartments with water, juice, ground coffee (or chocolate) and bread. Miss a single one of these and you’ll have to visit the kitchen to complete your auto-breakfast, defeating the whole point.

The Wake Up is just a concept design, and destined to remain so. Instead of buying another cupboard-filling white elephant, you should instead follow my example: I simply reverse the order of my meals. Breakfast is eaten before I go to sleep (in the sack of course, thus making it technically “breakfast in bed"). I have a big lunch followed by a siesta, and upon waking up first thing in the morning I reach for a nightcap — in honor of the spiked milk I was given for breakfast as a baby, I usually choose gin.

Wake Up to An Alarming Juice, Toast, and Coffee [Yanko]

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:45 pm

It’s Still the Economy, Silicon Valley [BoomTown]

Last week, the economy took a much needed breather from its toilet-circling behavior of late, with the stock market showing gains for several days running.

Who knows what today will bring, given all the volatility. But most of the big consumer-focused digital companies–I am using Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) as proxies for the sector–saw solid upticks over the last five days.

Yahoo shares rose close to four percent, Google was up just over five percent, Microsoft gained almost nine percent, while Amazon leaped 11.3 percent and Apple shot up 12.5 percent.

You could also feel the reverie from afar at the South by Southwest gathering that started this weekend in Austin, Texas, with lots of Web 2.0 partying and discussions of a Twitterific-Facebooktastic future.

Maybe happy days are here again, right?

Um, nope, just as when BoomTown wrote last September in a piece called: “Dear Web 2.0: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!”

At the time, I wrote:

“Most companies in Web 2.0–despite their massive valuations over the last few years–-aren’t going to have the chance get frothy and light enough to become so poppable.

Instead, most will likely fizzle away quietly, with no exits in sight as the economy weakens and puts a vise grip on companies that cannot survive the very tough financial road ahead.”

Why? Well, because there still is no traction in sight for a true recovery and there will not be any for quite a while.

You need only to look at those big public companies and their stock market performance over the last six months, the true scoreboard, results which will iterate downward throughout the sector.

And, it has been exactly as the econalypse has advertised: Yahoo down 28.3 percent; Microsoft down almost 38 percent; Google dropping 25.2 percent; Amazon off 11.3 percent; and Apple dipping 31.6 percent.

And, of course, most expect that the next round of first-quarter earnings, coming around the end of April, to be weak overall for this group, given their reliance on consumer spending, advertising and general bonhomie that is surely lacking.

That, in turn, means few acquisitions and still no IPOs for Web 2.0 companies. Although only Facebook is likely to try for that gold ring, its prospects are still uneven at best, despite impressive audience growth at the social networking site.

So, as I said before and will say again: It’s the economy, and Silicon Valley–as it was true six months ago–is still not immune.

One bright light, when it does manage to turn, is that tech will likely see the first bounce, especially compared to pretty much all the other sectors of the economy.

Tech companies are relatively healthy with strong cash balance sheets and have shown a commitment to making cost cuts and layoffs that are long past due.

That’s all good. But, of course, the only thing that will send this all back into truly positive territory will be new products and innovations to introduce when the world is ready to spend again and grow.

Source: Gizmodo | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:27 pm

boxee iPhone App now available

Great news for boxee and iPhone users. The official boxee app was finally approved by Apple and is now available on the App Store. We hear the app is basic but it should be good enough for simple playback controls. It’s too bad that it took so fraking long for Apple’s stamp of approval.

The little boxee logo works as the main control. Click it for pause/stop/play control and drag it around the screen for directional control. Seems simple. It’s definitely a pleasant alternative than a screen full of icons.

Source: CrunchGear | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:23 pm

Names of Advisors Cleared To Access ACTA Documents

1 a bee writes "With the White House claiming national security grounds for failing to release ACTA related information, including negotiating documents and even the list of participants, the spotlight is now on just who does have access. Turns out, according to James Love, hundreds of advisers, many of them corporate lobbyists, are considered 'cleared advisers.' The list looks a who's who of captains of industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Gizmodo | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:04 pm

Mobile Web Addiction Rising, Researchers Say [Digital Daily]

Just as the mobile Web and the wired Web are converging, so too are their audiences which are destined to reach parity in size — and sooner, rather than later. According to the latest metrics from comScore (click on charts below), day-to-day mobile Internet usage in the states doubled over the last year. In January of 2008 there were 10.8 million people who visited the mobile Web at least once a day. Now there are some 22.4 million. Most do so looking for news or other basic information, though many are looking for interaction as well. Social networking, for example, saw a massive spike in usage, its audience growing 427 percent year over year.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” said comScore’s Mark Donovan. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information. Social networking and blogging have emerged as very popular daily uses of the mobile Web and these activities are growing at a torrid pace,” observed Donovan. “We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches.”

Obviously, the mobile browsing experience hasn’t yet matched its wired counterpart in quality. But clearly it’s getting there. And right now it’s at the “decent enough” stage to woo the audience that will drive its further and more rapid improvement.

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:00 pm

Tinfoil Hat Report: iPod Shuffle Earbuds Contain DRM Chip

Apple may be locking down its iPod hardware, even as it opens up the software side of its business (a DRM-free iTunes Store, for example). A chip has been discovered inside the new Shuffle headphones and it is being speculated that this chip is required for the headphones to work with the tiny new iPod.

What is worse, the chip will be licensed to third party manufacturers. Their headphones won’t work without it and, of course, the price increase will be passed on to you, the customer. Rob and Joel over at Boing Boing Gadgets tore a set of the earbuds apart and found the evil chip skulking behind the buttons in the remote control. The latest iPhone headphones with remote and mic also have this chip.

Lets assume that this is true, and that Apple really is trying to squeeze a few extra bucks from the headphone makers. Is it really a disaster or, as iLounge’s Jeremy Horwitz writes, “a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans"?

First, the real problem only surfaces with the Shuffle. Without the inline remote there’s no way to usefully use the thing (although you can force it to play by switching it off and then on again). But all other iPods have — right now — a full complement of controls, either touch screen or clickwheel. Sure, the remote is more convenient but is it really a “nightmare" not to have it? Indeed, given how poorly Griffin’s TuneBuds work with the iPod Touch, maybe a little quality control would be a good thing.

Given that this “feature" appears to be in all new remote headphones from Apple, though, it could give us a hint as to the future. Perhaps, one day, no iPod will have any buttons at all. Voice control and “VoiceOver", along with these proprietary inline switches, will make The Button obsolete. That day, Grasshopper, Steve Jobs’ mission on this earth will be complete.

Apple iPod shuffle (Third-Generation) [iLounge] We found the chip inside the new iPod headphones…but is it DRM [BBG] Photo: Jase Wells/Flickr

See Also:

• Hands-On with Apple's Earphones with Remote and Mic
• Griffin TuneBuds Now Support iPods Touch, Nano and Classic …
• Tiny New iPod Shuffle Talks to You

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:53 am

The Applause Machine

Designed by Martin Smith, the applause machine is available for £200. Here's video of it in motion.

Description: Push the button and the Applause Machine claps it's hands for you.

Materials:Powder coated steel, brass, Walnut wood, plastic and motor.

Dimensions:Height 450mm.

Power: 2 x AAA Batteries (included).

Edition: 250 in this colour.

I fire up mine whenever I write a clever, incisive post and no-one comments.

Product page [Laikingland via The Automata Blog]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:41 am

The thousand-pixel stare

Here's Oh Gizmo's Andrew Liszewski on these cool arcade badges from Supermandolini: "If you’ve ever wondered what someone’s rank was in the hipster army, just count the number of ironically cool mini badges on their jacket. The more badges, the more seniority."

Arcade Badges [Supermandolini via OhGizmo]

Previously: Medals for Videogame veterans

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:35 am

High-tech mousetrap gains engineer a new friend

Jim Clark made a mousetrap of unimaginable complexity, expense and coolness. Hooked up to a camera and strobe lights, it captured the nightly misadventures of a mouse that took up residence in his kitchen.

There was a humane and happy ending, too: once he finally caught it (rather than just took photos), Jim ensconced the mouse in a well-appointed cage.

Building a better mousetrap [Strobist via Wired: Gadget Lab]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:35 am

Kevin Rose: Apple to Cure Pre-Ness Envy with Cut and Paste

We don’t know if Digg’s Kevin Rose is diddling with us, but at a live session of the Diggnation show at South by Southwest he offered the scoop on the new iPhone 3.0 operating system, to be officially detailed on Tuesday.

The new update will bring, at last, copy and paste, Kevin says. It works thusly: You double tap a word and it gets magnified, much like the cursor-placing magnification in the current version. You then pinch to choose the highlighted text (which is apparently indicated by a set of quote marks). Last, you choose from a button: cut, copy or paste.

In the video, the crowd goes wild. Rose then tells us "No background apps." Sensible, as they would be battery killers. Apple is also bringing parity with the Pre, adding everything that Palm’s yet-to-be released new handset will have.

This last sounds odd. The Pre was only announced in January and Apple is unlikely to have had time to study the phone’s OS (at all demos to date, we haven’t even been allowed to touch the Pre. And I mean literally. Not even a pinky on the screen).

Rose also reports that there will be "no video in this release" (recording, of course — we already have a video player).

We won’t have to wait long to see if this is true, but it’s fun to watch the video (if you don’t mind Alex Albrecht using the F word over and over — if you do, don’t click play). Rose’s reports have a spotty history. They’re either spookily accurate (like the iTunes 8 and iPod Nano reports) or just way off.

What do y’all think? Prediction in the comments. Most accurate wins a Gadget Lab pat-on-the-back.

Kevin Rose On iPhone 3.0: Cut/Paste, Features Equal Palm Pre [Giz via iPhoneHacks]

See Also:

• Kevin Rose Predicts New iPod Nano, iTunes 8.0
• Tomorrow's Big Apple Surprise? ITunes Subscriptions
• Apple to Preview iPhone 3.0 Next Week
• Full Coverage: Wired @ SXSW 2009

 

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:30 am

New York At Risk Of Hurricane, Storm Surges

Scientists warn New York City could be at risk to damage from hurricanes and storm surges because they predict global warming could lift sea levels twice as fast as global rates.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:30 am

A Sneak Peek at Cisco’s Big Announcement [Voices]

The rumor mill has been swirling for months now that Cisco Systems, the giant maker of networking hardware, is going to start selling computers, too. The big reveal is almost here: Cisco (CSCO) on Monday plans to tell the world what it has been working on in secret for the last two years.

Though the company is still holding back details, it has not disputed speculation that points to a kind of “blade” server, the compact back-office machines that power corporate data centers. The blade design uses hardware modules that are arranged vertically–-like books on a shelf–-and plug into a chassis. People who have seen the hardware describe a refrigerator-sized chassis that can accommodate computing blades–powered by x86 microprocessor chips from Intel (INTC)–as well as networking blades.

Read the rest of this post

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:27 am

Man replaces lost finger with USB drive

Meet Jerry Jalava. Jerry lost half a finger in an accident. The finger is now a USB drive caddy.

USB Finger, more details [Protoblogr via Geekologie]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:17 am

Brilliant hack: Eye-Fi standalone uploads

Hack-a-day contributor Jeff Tchang has figured out how to get the Eye-Fi cards working on ad-hoc networks. All you need now is the card, a computer, and you're smokin'.

So I spent some time over my vacation learning a bit more about Python. What better way to learn a language than to implement something you want or need, right?

I am releasing a standalone Eye-Fi server written in Python. Basically I saw Dave Hansen's post (http://dave-hansen.blogspot.com/2008/12/freestanding-server.html) and went ahead and did it.

Normally, Eye-Fi's WiFi-enabled SD cards expect to be on a normal network, with a router, a IP address, and internet access to Eye-Fi's servers.

Standalon Server [Return Boolean True at Hack a day]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 11:00 am

Engineer Builds World's Most Expensive Mousetrap, Mouse Survives

Jim Clark, inventor of the PocketWizard remote controls for flashguns, is a softy and a geek. When he discovered there was a mouse in the house, he did what any of us would do — he set a trap. Only Jim’s trap, instead of being a lethal, spring-loaded death device, was instead photographic. To begin with, at least.

David Hobby over at the Strobist has the full rundown, written in typically dry, funny style. The bite-sized version follows. Jim set bait on the kitchen counter (peanut butter is, apparently, very popular amongst gourmet rodents) and lined up his camera. In the dark room, a strobes were hooked up to a sound-detecting trigger via two PocketWizard Flexes. As you can see, it worked (also, dead on with the exposure. Way to go, Jim).

Next: Catch the mouse. Jim’s plan was to let the mouse live, so he concocted a rather cunning trap. A board was balanced on the counter-edge with some delicious peanut butter to tempt the rodent. When the little feller scampered out to take a bite, the board tipped, dropping the mouse (and his snack) into a bucket on the kitchen floor.

Of course, a camera was rigged to capture the falling mouse, although this time it was a conductive strip on the piece of board that triggered the camera — not the sound detector. Again, success, as you can see in the action sequence below.

And the mouse? Safely tucked up until Spring. Jim bought the critter a cage and plans to keep him as a pet until the weather warms up. A touching tale, and in stark contrast to my own mousy story.

Last week my lazy, hippy flatmate (soon to be ex-flatmate) decided to catch a rat that was living somewhere in the walls. He set a sticky-board, a card sheet with a very strong, syrupy glue spread on it. These boards catch the mouse, but usually the animal panics and tries to gnaw off its own leg to escape. I was alone in the house that night when I heard excited squeals from the kitchen (and it wasn’t my flatmate thinking about tofu and lentils).

I found the tiny mouse chewing at a limb, and decided I had to end it quickly. One plastic bag and clanging frying pan later and the job was done. Like Jim, I took photos. Unlike Jim’s, mine will remain private, used only to show my flatmate how cruel his “hippy” trap had been.

Building a Better Mousetrap [Strobist. Thanks, David!]

Product page [PocketWizard]

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 16 Mar 2009 | 10:44 am

An Injured Woz Dances On: You Owe Him Your Vote! [BoomTown]

Last week, BoomTown turned partisan in what is perhaps our only truly fair election these days: “Dancing With the Stars.”

Because he is so lovably dorktastic, it seems as if Silicon Valley has to pull out all the stops to make sure the anti-Fred Astaire stylings of Apple (APPL) Co-Founder Steve Wozniak remains in the television competition.

Woe to everyone when it was revealed that he had hurt himself dancing, with a fractured leg.

But–unlike other competitors who have been sidelined by injuries–Woz is sticking and is headed into a quickstep routine tonight.

There are several updates by Woz on his Facebook page here, with one note yesterday saying, in part:

“I found that I was getting delirious from the energy expenditure of yesterday and I could barely walk at all, even in my socks. I have never looked so funny or so in pain in my life. It took me about 5 minutes just to maneuver my body into the bathtub. I don’t take baths normally, and anyone who knows me knows that it would take a great occasion or emergency to get me into a bath, but I needed it badly.”

TMI! But let’s try to ignore it and move on!

The next broadcast of “Dancing with the Stars” is tonight at 8 pm EST, with the voting open for various times after the show via phone, SMS or online. Also, Chicago-style, you can vote up to 13 times, but check with the ABC site for all the rules.

The first results show is tomorrow night. That’ll be scary given Woz scored a paltry 13 points from the snotty judges for last week’s cha-cha disaster, although it’s not clear what the public thought of his debut dance.

So, if his quickstep is–it has to be said–like quicksand, stuffing the ballot box is the only option for geek domination.

As you will see from this video of his first outing, Woz needs all the help he can get:

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 10:32 am

Kevin Rose: Apple to Cure Pre-Ness Envy with Cut/Paste

The scoop about iPhone 3.0 from Kevin Rose at SXSW: Cut and Paste (yes); background apps (no); video recording (no); everything the Palm Pre will have (yes) (?)

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 16 Mar 2009 | 10:30 am

Kevin Rose: Apple to Cure Pre-Ness Envy with Cut/Paste

The scoop about iPhone 3.0 from Kevin Rose at SXSW: Cut and Paste (yes); background apps (no); video recording (no); everything the Palm Pre will have (yes) (?)

Source: Wired Top Stories | 16 Mar 2009 | 10:30 am

Xeni on the road in West Africa: Coffin Shaped Like Taxi, Presumably for Deceased Taxi Driver

(In case you've missed previous posts and tweets, I've been traveling in West Africa for the past couple of weeks.) Driving in Benin this weekend on the long road from the Burkina Faso border down to the port capital of Cotonou, Benin, we spotted this: a car carrying a handmade coffin which was crafted to resemble a taxi cab. Presumably, this bespoke box was to be the final resting place for a taxi driver who perished. It is customary in some West African cultures to create coffins that call to mind some aspect of the deceased's life or work. Not everyone here gets buried in a customized coffin like this, but it is a sort of regionally specific popular art form. Perhaps someone more versed in West African culture than I can chime in, in the comments. I don't have Photoshop on this laptop, so I can't blur out the number, but please don't call it. The guy's not gonna answer, and it might ring one of his survivors, which would be mean and rude.

Source: Boing Boing | 16 Mar 2009 | 10:17 am

Bebo social network expands into Europe (AFP)

AFP - Social networking website Bebo on Monday announced the launch of five new European-language versions, its first major expansion outside the English-speaking world.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Mar 2009 | 9:49 am

Cloudera Raises $5 Million Series A Round For Hadoop Commercialization

Cloudera is definitely a startup that will have many eyes fixed on it in the future. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, it’s doing interesting things with equally interesting open-source software. The company is today announcing the general availability of its flagship product, Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, in conjunction with a $5 million capital injection led by Accel Partners, where one of the founders was Entrepreneur in Residence.

Cloudera is pushing a commercial distribution for Hadoop, a free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data, technology that’s being put to use by Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, AOL, Baidu, The NY Times, Joost and many more.

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is distributed as a pre-packaged RPM bundle for Red Hat Linux systems or an Amazon EC2 image, for free under the Apache 2 software license. The startup is launching the my.cloudera.com portal today where people can use a Web-based configuration tool to create custom packages that are optimized to their specific needs.

There are some big names involved with Cloudera. The founding team at Cloudera includes Mike Olson (former VP at Oracle and prior to that CEO at open source database pioneer Sleepycat Software), Christophe Bisciglia (created and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative), Dr. Amr Awadallah (co-founder of VivaSmart, acquired by Yahoo!) and Jeff Hammerbacher (key member of the data team at Facebook).

Investors in and advisors to Cloudera include Diane Greene (formerly CEO VMware), Mike Abbott (senior VP, Palm), Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr), Dr. Qi Lu (president of the Online Services Group, Microsoft; former executive vice president, Yahoo!), Marten Mickos (former CEO, MySQL), Jeff Weiner (president, LinkedIn; former senior vice president, Yahoo!), Gideon Yu (Facebook CFO; former CFO at YouTube).

The NY Times broke the news on Cloudera’s launch, and offers some interesting tidbits on the side, like the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt himself gave the startup its blessing even though the company could make reasonable claims to IP ownership, and more information about Hadoop’s underlying technology.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch | 16 Mar 2009 | 9:40 am

Europe Is Testing 12.5 Gbps Wireless

Lorien_the_first_one brings word that in Europe, a breakthrough for post-4G communications has been announced. A public-private consortium known as IPHOBAC has been developing new communications technology that is near commercialization now. Quoting: "With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s. The technology — known as 'millimeter-wave' or microwave photonics — has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 16 Mar 2009 | 9:01 am

Giant graphite sculpture/pencils in the shapes of iconic weapons

AS Batle, who makes gorgeous graphite sculptures that double as huge pencils that last for eight years, has a new line of tools in the shape of iconic weapons. Noah sez, "They're really gorgeous and have a unique poetic/pacifist bent: the more you draw or write poetry with them, the more they transform from weapon to art."

The newest line in this series features weapons: a 30mm shell, and AK-47 and "Little Boy" the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The text on the box reads: "This [weapon] will change into words and pictures with normal use. To begin, place [weapon] in hand as if it were a pencil. Drag [weapon] across paper until poems and drawings appear. Continue using until [weapon] disappears."

The "hand" designs are cast from his young son's own hands and are the most remarkable thing to hold and draw with. Available in right- and left-handed models.

A. S. Batle Graphite "Pencils" (Thanks, Noah!)


Source: Boing Boing | 16 Mar 2009 | 8:57 am

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable [Voices]

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at The New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

Read the rest of this post

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 7:05 am

Bono Has a BlackBerry? [Voices]

A question inspired by this week’s news that Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry, has become the chief sponsor for U2’s next bombastic world tour: Who exactly is profiting from this deal? U2, like most big rock acts, has never been shy about taking corporate lucre, but it usually allies with companies that it claims share its change-the-world vision—the prime example being RIM’s rival Apple. In 2004, Steve Jobs dedicated the first special-edition iPod in U2’s honor; the 20 GB black-and-red model sold for $349, and U2 agreed to make some of its music available exclusively on iTunes. In 2005, Bono defended the deal with Apple by saying that the company shared the band’s creative spirit. “Selling out is doing something you don’t really want to do for money. That’s what selling out is. We asked to be in the ad,” he told the Chicago Tribune. He added that Apple is “more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. These men have helped design the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar. That’s the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”

Read the rest of this post

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 7:04 am

ABC News to Interview John McCain — on Twitter [Voices]

One of the biggest complaints about Twitter is that its 140-character limit is simply not enough to say what you need to say sometimes. Of course, this limit works both ways — it can also stop people from going on for too long about something. And that’s something that politicians are known for. So in a way, an interview with a politician conducted entirely over Twitter almost makes sense. Almost.

And that’s exactly what ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos is planning to do next week. On Tuesday, Stephanopoulos will interview senator and former presidential candidate John McCain for his show, “This Week.” To conduct what the network is calling the first “twitterview,” both the questions and answers will be sent out via Twitter, bound by the 140 character limit.

Read the rest of this post

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 7:03 am

Content Companies Demand Subsidies From ISPs… While ISPs Demand Subsidies From Content Companies [Voices]

It’s sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning “too much.” That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we’ve seen — from net neutrality (where the ISPs think Google is earning too much) to the music industry (where record labels think ISPs and Apple are earning too much). But sometimes it leads to rather amusing contrasts. For example, up in Canada, the entertainment industry is complaining that ISPs earn too much, and therefore are pushing for laws that would require broadband providers to pay money to the entertainment industry to develop new content.

But contrast that to the situation in the UK, where there’s an ongoing push for content companies to pay extra to help subsidize the cost of broadband deployments. The argument there is that all the content that’s being put online is creating a drain on broadband network resources. But, isn’t that exactly what the content creators in Canada are saying is a “free ride” for the ISPs?

Read the rest of the post

Source: All Things Digital | 16 Mar 2009 | 7:02 am

CrunchGear Week in Review: Mad Lab Edition

Poken: Tiny RFID thingies that share all your personal data with others
RCTiger.com: Real-time web-based tank warfare
CrunchMayhem: how to open some keypad-secured doors
Dyson presents smaller vacuums built for the Japanese market
USB Motion Skull

Source: CrunchGear | 16 Mar 2009 | 7:00 am

Giant orc statue on Blizzard's lawn

Blizzard Entertainment's new Orange County offices are graced with a giant raging orc statue.

Blizzard puts up 12-foot orc on wolf in Irvine (via Wonderland)



Source: Boing Boing | 16 Mar 2009 | 6:06 am

How $1,500 Headphones Are Made

CNETNate writes "A tour of Sennheiser's Hanover factory reveals for the first time how its audiophile headphones are assembled by hand. The company recently announced its most expensive and innovative headphones to date, the HD 800, which discarded the conventional method of headphone driver design for a new 'donut-shaped' ring driver idea. Only 5,000 of these headphones can be made in a year, and this gallery offers a behind-the-scenes look at the construction process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 16 Mar 2009 | 5:49 am

Orbitron Apocalypto, Or, How I Became a Death-Cheating Toad in Mexico and Broke the Ancient Aztec Alien Curse Put on My Family by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's Lost Show Car

Iowahawk wrote a tremendous, lengthy story about the history of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth's fantastic Orbitron show car, which had been, until discovered parked in front of a Mexican sex shop in 2007, "one of the two lost grails of Rothdom." More than being just about the Orbitron, though, Iowahawk's story is an engrossing personal account (he met Roth as a child and their lives were sort of intertwined) of revisiting and reflecting on Roth's creations, both cultural and vehicular. Even if you don't like hot rods I recommend reading it.

In his July 1963 interview with Rod & Custom, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth teased readers with news about a new project he had started, one he called the Bald Eagle. “I am going to build a car that will be irresistible to women,” said Roth. “They will want to climb on it, scratch the paint and just crawl all over it.”

That chick-magnet project was later renamed the Orbitron. In ’63 BDR was under pressure from Revell to produce another wild show car, one that would become, like the Outlaw and Beatnik Bandit and Mysterion before it, a show circuit sensation and million-selling plastic model kit. BDR pull all the stops for the effort: Working from an idea by Roth, Ed Newton drew a concept and Roth and Dirty Doug began shaping its fiberglass form in the Maywood shop. It was long and low, asymmetric, built like a UFO dragster with the driver sitting behind the axle. Like the Beatnik Bandit and Mysterion it featured a bubbletop blown at Acry Plastics, but with a spacious angel fur interior big enough to accommodate Roth and one of those girls he talked about in R&C. The previous year Ford had given Roth three new 406 crate motors, two of which went into the Mysterion; the third went into his ’55 Chevy daily. Roth chromed out the ‘55’s original 265 small block and stuffed it in the Orbitron’s engine compartment. Its centerpiece was a long tubular nosecone, jutting forward of the front wheels, containing a pod of Red-Green-Blue lights that, BDR explained, would combine into a single white beam. After getting a luscious Larry Watson blue fade paintjob, it was ready for its debut in early ’64.

By all rights the car should have been another triumph. At the time Big Daddy was King and his Rat Fink Empire was at its peak; Roth Studios was pumping out millions of grotesque t-shirts and doodads for rebellious kids around the globe, model kit royalties were pouring in, and the Maywood shop was the undisputed center of the kustom car universe. He had just been lionized by Tom Wolfe in the bestseller Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which compared him to Salvador Dali and called his cars things like “baroque” and “Dionysian.”

Instead, the Orbitron was a flop. On the ’64-’65 show circuit, it was greeted with public indifference. Contemporary photographs show the Orbitron in the parking lot of Revell awaiting measurement for a model kit that was never released. Roth theorized the Orbitron was too similar to the Mysterion, and that he screwed up in hiding the chromed engine behind its body panels. He also blamed the Beatles, whose 1964 appearance on Ed Sullivan coincided with the Orbitron’s debut and ushered in a new wave of youth culture more attuned to electric guitars than fantasy show cars.

Orbitron Apocalypto (Thanks, Coop!)


Source: Boing Boing | 16 Mar 2009 | 4:35 am

March 16, 1802: Army Engineers Get New Foundation

1802: An act of Congress establishes the Army Corps of Engineers. The corps will help shape the nation, literally.

General George Washington appointed the first U.S. Army engineers June 16, 1775, the day before he actually received his commission from the Continental Congress "to be General and Commander in chief, of the army of the United Colonies." Colonel Richard Gridley served as the army's first chief engineer.

Congress waited until 1779 to establish a separate Corps of Engineers. Army engineers, with the help of some French officers, made significant contributions to key battles of the Revolutionary War, right up to the final victory at Yorktown, Virginia.

The new Congress of the Confederation was reluctant to maintain a large, standing army, and the engineers mustered out after the war ended. After the U.S. Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, Congress organized a combined Corps of Artillerists and Engineers in 1794.

The current Corps of Engineers traces its history directly back to the second foundation in 1802. Congress also directed on March 16, 1802, that the Army create a new military academy 50 miles up the Hudson from New York City at a location called West Point.

One of the Corps' first jobs, in fact, was to build the U.S. Military Academy. West Point's first superintendent, Jonathan Williams, became chief engineer of the corps. From its founding until 1866, every superintendent of the academy was an engineer officer.

For its first half-century the academy was the nation's foremost engineering school, and the only one until the Rensselaer School was founded still farther up the Hudson at Troy, New York, in 1824. (The University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science arrived in 1836, and MIT didn't show up until 1861.)

Besides the obvious function of building fortifications for the rapidly expanding nation, the corps picked up civilian duties and responsibilities almost from the start. It built lighthouses, constructed jetties and piers for harbors, and charted navigation channels. (You could argue that these projects had defensive as well as commercial intent, but it was the Army building them, not the Navy.)

Inland, the Corps of Engineers mapped large swaths of the West. The corps became the primary federal flood-control agency in the 20th century, integrating and building out thousands of miles of levees in the Mississippi River system. Its dams and lakes also became a major provider of hydroelectric energy and recreation.

Some Corps of Engineers projects have been criticized as pork-barrel giveaways to one region or another. Various critics have questioned how well some of the projects work, or if on balance they're causing more harm than good. Environmentalists in particular have decried dams and levees for confounding the continent's natural drainage system, and have made a case that coastal erosion-control structures are worthless or worse.

Congress has attempted several times to reform the corps and make it more responsive to these concerns. But the shifting sands of politics and the military do not always move as fast as evolving ways of how we view the natural world.

Source: Army Corps of Engineers, others

Source: Wired Top Stories | 16 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am

With No Long-Term Solution, Nuclear Pallbearers Bury Waste in America's Backyard

This summer, dozens of workers at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in central California will carry out an internment. They'll carefully begin moving 133 tons of spent fuel from temporary cooling ponds into a nuclear necropolis of eight cement-and-steel tombs in a field adjacent to the plant. If all goes according to plan, they won't have to worry about the radioactive detritus for another 100 years.

If all goes according to plan.

The Diablo Canyon storage casks, each weighing about 180 tons and costing more than $1 million each, were authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its ongoing struggle to deal with the 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that's already been produced by the nation's nuclear plants. Structures like these, measuring about 18 feet high, will soon dot the landscape at almost all the nation's more than 104 active and shuttered nuclear reactors — near neighborhoods, streams and oceans in 38 states.

According to the Department of Energy, there is enough spent nuclear waste in the United States to fill a football-field-sized hole 15 feet deep. From a plethora of proposals, scientists and politicians have selected on-site storage as the safest solution for the buildup. But it's a temporary solution. The waste will be fatal to humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years — yet the storage tombs are expected to last only a hundred years.

These scattered nuclear graveyards are emblematic of a failed U.S. nuclear energy policy — a policy that is rarely discussed even as regulators entertain proposals to build roughly 30 new nuclear power plants. This month, President Barack Obama killed a controversial plan to house nuclear waste in a $100 billion facility in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The move thrilled critics of the 30-year-old plan, but left the U.S. no closer to a practical, long-term solution, even as an additional 30,000 metric tons (.pdf) more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades.

"The reality is we created waste that we don't know what to do with," says Don Hancock, director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque, New Mexico nuclear think tank. "People are capable of creating problems we don't know how to solve."

Statistics from the National Energy Institute show 63 active and defunct nuclear power reactors have on-site dry-cask storage in the United States. Utilities representing another 52 reactors have cask s under construction or in the licensing stage. Critics worry that the plan has the U.S. populating its landscape with dozens of radioactive targets for terrorists. About 160 million Americans already live within 75 miles of temporarily stored nuclear waste.

Scientists from across the globe are searching for something better. Europe, Russia and Japan recycle spent fuel — meaning there is less waste to store. That practice was largely abandoned in the United States, because the process can produce weaponized plutonium, potentially sparking an international outcry. As an alternative, physicists at the University of Texas at Austin propose burning the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor. The technology, they reported (.pdf) in December's Fusion Engineering and Design, would hasten the speed at which the radioactivity of waste decays.

"You would only have to isolate the waste on the order of hundreds of years," researcher Swadesh Mahajan says in an interview. "That's a far, far easier thing to do than thousands of years."

Other proposals involve sealing waste inside the polar ice caps, housing it at the bottom of the ocean. or even rocketing it into space. Each technique comes with its own problems, such as the cost of launching thousands of rockets and the attendant risk of one exploding in the Earth's atmosphere.

"Nuclear power plants were not designed to have the capacity to store waste indefinitely," says Steve Kerekes, a director of the NEI. "The government's policy is, 'We'll work out the details later.'"

For now, on-site storage is becoming a big business. One of the world's leading temporary-storage–facility manufacturers, Holtec International in Pittsburgh, churns out about 100 storage casks a year. Each takes two years to produce and costs about $1 million.

The company now has so-called "dry-cask–storage" contracts with 49 nuclear sites around the world, including Diablo Canyon and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which in 1986 released a plume of radiation stretching from its home in the Ukraine to Europe and beyond.

"We have a billion dollar backlog," says company spokeswoman Joy Russell.

Holtec's Hi-Storm 100 System casks are the models being installed at Diablo Canyon. They stand erect about 18 feet high. Their 11-foot diameter is outfitted with two, 1-inch carbon-steel shelves surrounded by about 28 inches of concrete. Within, the spent waste is encased in a half-inch–thick stainless-steel–and–lead canister about 68 inches in diameter and 15 feet long. Before it is welded shut, it is filled with helium, which circulates over the waste naturally by convection.

The convection pushes the heat to the canister's fringes, which are cooled naturally by fresh Pacific Ocean air that seeps in through eight ducts carved into the cement. The ducts are covered with a mesh screen to keep out insects and rodents. The radioactive waste inside smolders at about 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Russell says the caskets her company produced for Diablo Canyon and elsewhere can withstand a jet crash. A newer version, which sits almost entirely underground, is under development and is even stronger, she says.

That's a good thing. Some scientists believe above-ground, on-site storage is susceptible to terror attacks. Those concerns have spawned a lawsuit opposing the on-site storage plans at Diablo Canyon and elsewhere. Gordon Thompson, director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, says a potential terror attack on storage facilities is not far-fetched — a position the physicist shared with the federal appeals court weighing the lawsuit.

"Hidden inside is a extremely hazardous material," says Thompson. "If you look forward 100 years, the threat of an attack is more than theoretical."

The NRC, though, disagrees. In a decision last year the agency calculated the probability of a terror attack on the Diablo Canyon site "that results in a significant radiological event to be very low."

Jane Swanson, a member of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, lives about 11 miles from Diablo Canyon. The group — formed to protest the Vietnam War — filed the on-site–storage lawsuit against plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric in 2002. The group hopes the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will block the expected June 1 deployment of storage casks at Diablo Canyon.

"What we would like, the big overall goal, would be us to be responsible as a society and stop generating the radioactive waste," says Swanson.

The United States wasn't supposed to end up pockmarked with nuclear waste.

Decades ago Congress realized that it wasn't a good idea to allow tons of nuclear waste to be kept in the hands of private and public utilities. Beyond the obvious environmental risk, in the wrong hands, the waste could be reprocessed to make nuclear weapons.

So with the adoption of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, (.pdf) the government promised nuclear operators it would remove their waste to a permanent repository. In exchange, the utilities were required to levy a small customer tax on their power. Those fees now total $16 billion and counting, according to the NEI, the lobby group funded by the U.S. nuclear power industry.

Beginning in June, the Diablo Canyon plant will begin the first phase of its dry-storage campaign. Workers will load eight Holtec casks bolted to hulking slabs of cement. The cost of the operation is $100 million. The NRC has approved another 130 storage casks at Diablo Canyon to idle waste for the life of the plant's 40-year operating permit.

Emily Christensen, a Diablo Canyon spokeswoman, says all the waste will be "safely" stored on site. But the power plant has no idea when the government will make good on its promise and cart away the waste.

"At this time we do not have a date to when that will take place," Christensen says in an e-mail. "However, it is the Department of Energy's responsibility to remove and take ownership of the spent fuel."

With no place to put it, the United States' lack of a viable and permanent storage plan is costing taxpayers billions in legal costs alone. The utilities are successfully suing the government over its broken promise to remove the waste. The monetary awards, already at $1 billion, are likely to balloon to hundreds of billions of dollars to fund on-site waste-storage facilities.

In the United States, where 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear power, the official solution to the waste crisis has long been a permanent underground storage facility in the Yucca Mountain desert straddling California and Nevada. But after years of scientific discord over the soundness of burying highly radioactive waste hundreds of yards deep into the earth, and concerns about transporting the waste by rail, the Yucca Mountain plan was officially scrapped this month in Obama's proposed 2010 budget.

"The Yucca Mountain program will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the Administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal," reads Obama's budget document. (.pdf).

That leaves the country with another central nuclear graveyard: the Waste Pilot Isolation Plant in the New Mexico desert near Carlsbad. After confronting issues similar to Yucca Mountain, the underground facility finally won an operating permit a decade ago. Carved out of salt beds, it's permitted to receive tons of radioactive waste stored in 1,000-pound drums from 23 Defense Department sites across the country. But it doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to handle the droppings of America's nuclear plants.

"We're talking about stuff that ought to be isolated for thousands of years," says Jay Silberg, a Washington, D.C., attorney and expert on nuclear power law. "But it will always be the next presidential administration to come up with a plan, and then they'll say: 'We need to study this more.'"

Source: Wired Top Stories | 16 Mar 2009 | 4:00 am

Free Apps Roundup for March 15th, 2009

FROM APPLETELL - It was another slow week on the App Store—no big name freebies—but I still managed to dig up some cool free apps and games… MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 16 Mar 2009 | 3:06 am

STS-119 Finally Launches Into Space

Iddo Genuth writes "After several delays, including twice over the past week, the space shuttle Discovery has finally been launched into space. The spacecraft took off at precisely 7:43 p.m. EDT, embarking on the STS-119 mission, which will provide the International Space Station with the fourth and final set of solar arrays — and which will make the ISS brighter than Venus. The shuttle will also deliver to the ISS its newest crew member, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, who will replace flight engineer Sandra Magnus at the station."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 16 Mar 2009 | 2:41 am

Phone banking service launched in Africa, Mideast (AFP)

AFP - South African mobile phone operator MTN on Monday said it was launching a banking service on mobile phones in 21 African and Middle East countries where access to traditional banks is poor.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Mar 2009 | 2:33 am

Scientists consider geo-engineering

British scientists say they are looking for ways to reduce global temperatures and curb greenhouse emissions through geo-engineering. Researchers are looking into the feasibility of using artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide or reflect sunlight away from Earth, the Times of London reported Sunday.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Mar 2009 | 1:51 am

Death leaves online lives in limbo (AP)

AP - When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Mar 2009 | 1:32 am

Obama Continues Bush-Era Extremism on Liberties, Secrecy

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

The Obama administration has undone a few of the Bush administration's worst policies, true. Yet when it comes to Obama's increasingly clear disdain for some core civil liberties and his administration's penchant for secrecy despite cheerful rhetoric to the contrary, Salon's Glenn Greenwald arrives at a dismal -- but sadly, logical -- conclusion:   

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years.  Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true:   they are rushing to actively embrace them.  And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no real intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

Democrats in Congress and much of the political left have been silent or nearly so despite the evidence. You expect cowardice from Congress, which spent the Bush presidency in a perpetual bent-over posture. The Netroots folks who did so much to elect Obama should be screaming bloody murder by now. Too few are even slightly audible. A shame.

Maybe the Republicans will re-discover civil liberties at some point. Nah.

(photo via Flickr by Marcin Wichary)

Source: Boing Boing | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:40 am

SXSWi: Web Awards Honor 2009's Big Names, Underdogs

Hulu, Flickr and other web mainstays pick up SXSW trophies alongside lesser-known sites like The Bygone Bureau and Lost Zombies.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:27 am

Morality of Throttling a Local ISP?

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small (400 customers) local cable ISP. For the company, the ISP is only a small side business, so my whole line of expertise lies in other areas, but since I know the most about Linux and networking I've been stuck into the role of part-time sysadmin. In examining our backbone and customer base I've found out that we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customers' bandwidth and our pipe. I've gone to the boss and showed him the bandwidth graphs of us sitting up against the limit for the better part of the day, and instead of purchasing more bandwidth, he has asked me to start implementing traffic shaping and packet inspection against P2P users and other types of large downloaders. Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really only have the choice between my ISP and dial-up. I'm struggling with the desire to give the customers I'm administering the best experience, and the desire to do what my boss wants. In my situation, what would you do?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:27 am

Small software makers ripe for takeovers: report (Reuters)

Reuters - Some smaller software companies may be compelling acquisition targets, despite depressed stock valuations in the sector, business weekly Barron's reported in its March 16 edition.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:20 am

Death and the Internet addict

Section: Communications, Email / IM, Gaming, Web, Web 2.0, Websites

If you actively use the Internet to socialize on social networking sites, participate in forums, blog, or play games, then you know that communication is key.  In any sort of online game, death is the worst possible outcome.  It could meaning losing all of your valuable items, starting over, and humiliation.  The focus of this article isn’t dying in a game, but dying in real life and what it means to your life on the Internet. 

Dying is always hard for your close friends and family, but what if you actively play in online games and all of a sudden you pass away?  Even if you write on your own blog, and something were to happen to you, all of your readers would have no way of knowing what happened.  If you have an account for a social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace, your account could always remain active unless someone closes it for you.  Many of your online acquaintances have no way of knowing what happened to you, and such a problem prompted a few Internet websites to pop-up and try to profit in this industry.

Solutions for notifying friends after death

Only in the 21st century has death become more of a problem in terms of letting people know.  Before the 2000s, there were no such things as social networking sites, online games, email accounts, or blogs.  So many people did not have to worry about their accounts if something unfortunate happened.  A person named Robert Bryant and his father had a unique solution in case something would happen.  His father told Bryant about a location of a small USB drive which contained important contacts to notify as well as the administrator to an online group. 

Deathswitch

Neuroscientist, David Eagleman, sees many people in critical condition with no way of letting people know what has happened to them.  He decided to start a website called Deathswitch, which let people know that they died by emailing a pre-written email.  Basically, after you sign up, the system periodically asks for a password to make sure you are alive and functioning.  If you fail to enter your password, the system will keep prompting you and after multiple failures, it will conclude you are dead or in critical condition.  Based on whether you opted for the free service or paid service, one of two things will occur.  It will either send out one pre-written message to a person of your choosing - no attachments.  Or, for $20 per year, users have 30 messages that can be sent to 10 recipients each, and these types of emails allow for attachments of pictures, documents, or even videos.

SlightlyMorbid

In case you don’t want to go with that service, there is a different service called SlightlyMorbid.  Basically, this service gives you a certificate of information that should be passed on to a trusted person in case something happens to you.  That trusted person has the ability to log into your account and then send out your pre-written emails to people of your choosing.  This service is not free either, but varies from $10 - $50.  You can check out a comparison chart here. 

Why should I even consider one of these services?

Think about all the accounts to websites you have.  Think about all the passwords only you know to things such as your email, social networking sites, forums, and blogs.  Even if you don’t want your friends to be notified, you may want each and every of your accounts to be closed.  While death may be an uneasy topic to ponder about, always remember - it can happen at any time, and it’s best to be prepared for the worst. 

Read: [Associated Press]
Learn more: [Deathswitch]
Learn more: [SlightlyMorbid]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 16 Mar 2009 | 12:00 am

Space shuttle Discovery lifts off

Seven astronauts headed toward the International Space Station following Sunday's launch of space shuttle Discovery at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The shuttled lifted off at 7:43 p.m.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 15 Mar 2009 | 11:58 pm

AIG Ripoff Gets More Maddening

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

It's even more disgusting than we heard yesterday. According to the Wall Street Journal, AIG, the financial giant that has taken more than $170 billion of our money to save it from extinction -- and given lots of it to other financial companies -- is paying almost half a billion dollars in bonuses (my emphasis in first quoted paragraph)

to employees in its financial products unit. That division was at the heart of AIG's collapse last fall, which compelled the U.S. government to provide $173.3 billion in aid to keep it running....

Those payments are in addition to $121.5 million in incentive bonuses for 2008 that AIG will start making this month to about 6,400 of its roughly 116,000 employees. AIG, which was rescued in September as it faced potential bankruptcy, is also making over $600 million in retention payments to over 4,000 employees.

Together, the three programs could result in roughly $1.2 billion in retention and bonus payments to AIG employees.

Who's worse? The legislators and executive-branch people who let this happen, or the AIG executives who are showing themselves to be supremely greedy, and who must be laughing at the rest of us by now. Close call...

Source: Boing Boing | 15 Mar 2009 | 11:18 pm

Indian Opposition Party Backs Open Source Software (PC World)

PC World - India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said Saturday ahead of parliamentary elections in the country that the national government will standardize on open standards and open source software if the party is elected to power.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 15 Mar 2009 | 10:50 pm

Utah Senate, House Pass Jack Thompson's Game Sales Bill

Ars Technica reports that the Utah State Senate and House have both passed Jack Thompson's proposed legislation that would stiffen penalties for the sale of M-rated games to minors. Oddly, on its trip through the state legislature, amendments rendered it largely ineffective; retailers are in the clear if the employee who sold the game goes through a training program, or if the minor misrepresents his age. It's also possible that the bill could cause some retailers to simply take down their ESRB-related advertising. Thompson's statements about the bill put the focus on advertising, but discussion on the Utah Senate floor had a familiar ring, touching on the story of a Grand Theft Auto player who killed two policemen in 2003. The ESRB wrote an open letter in opposition of the bill, saying it could undo the efforts they've made to popularize their rating system. The bill's sponsors fired back, questioning the industry's overall commitment to ratings, and now it awaits only the governor's signature before becoming law.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 15 Mar 2009 | 10:14 pm

Resignation letter on cake

W. Neil Berrett quit his job by presenting his boss with a resignation letter on a sheet cake.
"Cake of Resignation"


Source: Boing Boing | 15 Mar 2009 | 10:01 pm

What Scents Did The Egyptians Use?

Researchers in Bonn aim to recreate a 3,500-year-old scentPharaoh Hatshepsut was a power-conscious woman who assumed the reins of government in Egypt around the year 1479 B.C.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 15 Mar 2009 | 9:09 pm

How Cancer Cells Become More 'Gloopy' As They Die

The viscosity, or 'gloopiness', of different parts of cancer cells increases dramatically when they are blasted with light-activated cancer drugs, according to new images that provide fundamental insights into how cancer cells die, published in Nature Chemistry today (15 March).The images reveal the physical changes that occur inside cancer cells whilst they are dying as a result of Photodynamic Therapy (PDT).
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 15 Mar 2009 | 9:05 pm

Vista is the word for future versions of Windows

Section: Computers, Software / Applications

Sorry XP fans, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 and all future versions of Windows will be little more than minor revisions of Vista, the OS everyone either loves or hates, with little middle ground in between. They claim this will help insure that every app that works on Vista will work on Windows 7.  Microsoft says by doing minor revisions and tweaking the internal version number, the chance of apps breaking when run on new versions of Windows is slim to none:

..., the version number change is actually one of the biggest impacts on application compatibility. When we moved to Windows Vista from XP going from a version number of 5.1 to 6, actually breaks [sic] lots of apps that check for the major version number. So a lot of people look at the version number and try to read something into it.

I run both Vista and XP.  My main system runs Vista Home Premium and my netbook runs XP Home.  Both systems are fast, stable and run just fine.  I’m hoping this trend will continue with Windows 7, (and really hoping that IE 8 will be a major improvement. I’m not happy with IE7 at all. Too buggy!) Are you going to upgrade to Windows 7, stick with Vista or a diehard XP fan? Or perhaps Linux or Mac is your favorite flavor? Drop us a comment and let us know!

Read [PCMagazine]

Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 15 Mar 2009 | 9:04 pm

Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace?

SpuriousLogic writes "I work as a senior software engineer, and a fair amount of my time is spent interviewing new developers. I have seen a growing trend of what I would call 'TV reality' college graduates — kids who graduated school in the last few years and seem to have a view of the workplace that is very much fashioned by TV programs, where 22-year-olds lead billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jet around the world. Several years ago I worked at a company that did customization for the software they sold. It was not full-on consultant work, but some aspects of it were 'consulting light,' and did involve travel, some overseas. Almost every college graduate I interviewed fully expected to be sent overseas on their first assignment. They were very disappointed when told they were most likely to end up in places like Decater, IL and Cedar Rapids, IA, as only the most senior people fly overseas, because of the cost. Additionally, I see people in this age bracket expecting almost constant rewards. One new hire told me that he thought he had a good chance at an award because he had taught himself Enterprise Java Beans. When told that learning new tech is an expected part of being a developer, he argued that he had learned it by himself, and that made it different. So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students, and I want to ask this community: are you seeing the sorts of 'crashing down to Earth' expectations of college grads described here? Is working with this age bracket more challenging than others? Do they produce work that is above or below your expectations of a recent college grad?" We discussed a similar question from the point of view of the young employees a few months back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 15 Mar 2009 | 8:58 pm

iPod shuffle 3G: A suggestion for Apple

FROM APPLETELL - How do we connect the iPod shuffle to other stuff? Cars, speakers, TV…anything that accepts a line-in connection can play music from an iPod. But what do we do with this new shuffle? MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 15 Mar 2009 | 8:37 pm

Ersatz Wall-E

From Something Awful's hilarious "Dress up as movie characters using shit from your room!" thread, MustelaFuro's fantastic Wall-E constructed from cereal boxes, spatulas, light bulb boxes, and other assorted crap.