Jill-e Clutch Bag: Tote Your Compact Camera in Style

Jill-e makes camera bags for girls. Or rather, it makes camera bags that aren’t the dorky nylon utility packs everybody else makes. The bags combine designer-purse style looks (patent leather, chain straps and fancy detailing) with a practical, padded interior. The triple advantage is that the ladies can have a bag that goes with their outfit, protects their gear and doesn’t attract the eyes of a bag-snatcher.

The latest bag is this clutch, a red leather purse with a silky interior to keep compact cameras comfy. The snap-shut clutch has adjustable pads inside to fit your camera, and the production version, due in the Summer, will have credit-card slots inside the top section. Best of all, it comes in at a distinctly camera-pouch price, not a designer handbag price: $25. And boys, if you’re jealous, don’t be. Jill-e also makes the Jack line for the stylish gentleman about town.

Jill-e Clutch [Photography Bay]

Photo credit [Photography Bay]

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 22 Mar 2010 | 4:14 am

The InfoWorld Westmere blade server shoot-out

UK Gov Shifts To Open Data, Broadband – But We Could Use Some Detail

Motorola Milestone in India Price , Specs and features - ABH News

ZDNet (blog)

Motorola Milestone in India Price , Specs and features ABH News Motorola Milestone Droid is the coming to Indian market with Android 2.0. Motorola Milestone Droid known for offering a 3.7-inch screen and a large QWERTY keyboard. Equally important is Google Maps Navigation Beta, the first version of Google Maps for ... Google disappointment over Nexus One salesWhite Hat News AT&T's 3G Service Crisis:Will iPad Make it Even worse?ZDNet (blog) Firefox Mobile browser Fennec spotted on Google AndroidOromo Index Pittsburgh Post Gazette -Inked Up (blog) -ZDNet (blog) all 18 news articles »

Chinese shrug shoulders at possible Google pull-out (Reuters)

Wall Street Communications Retained by Monroe Electronics

Dueling Summary Judgment Motions In Viacom v. YouTube

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Memory card exposed 3,000 phones to virus

Nurse Jackie's Doctor Coop will be posting on Twitter during the show

Vermont cop tases and tases a mentally ill homeless 59 year old woman

Vermont cop tases and tases a mentally ill homeless 59 year old woman

Nottingham cops declare war on kids

Nottingham cops declare war on kids

Something like 90% of urban England Over 1,000 English cities and towns have a curfew for young people, giving police (and fake "citizen cops") the power to send kids home after dark for any reason, if, in their judgement, the kids are apt to be disturbing "real" people. Many stores and restaurants have signs on the door that say "no more than two kids at one time" (imagine if it said "No more than two Jews" or "No more than two blacks"). And there's a kind of para-law called the Anti-Social Behaviour Order that gives courts the power to invent laws for people (mostly kids) who face complaints about their behaviour (the accused aren't allowed to rebut the evidence against them).

You have to wonder what kind of values about citizenship, fairness, privacy, and the social contract are being imparted to young people by these measures.

The major operation involved 200 officers as part of a Home Office project targeting 13 to 24-year-olds.

Officers and a specially-trained dog met young people coming off a number of bus routes.

Metal detectors were used in an effort to find concealed weapons while drug testing was also carried out.

A search centre was set up where a full body scanner checked suspects.

Quantum Technology Promises Wedding Photos From Phone Cameras - Wired News

Wired News

Quantum Technology Promises Wedding Photos From Phone Cameras Wired News A new sensor technology promises to make cellphone cameras good enough to use for wedding photos. InVisage Technologies, a Menlo Park, California-based company, has developed an image sensor using quantum dots instead of silicon. ... Company Sees Leap for Cellphone CamerasNew York Times InVisage aims to remake camera sensor marketCNET Quantum film threatens to replace CMOS image chipsEETimes.com VentureBeat -TechRadar UK -infocera all 28 news articles »

Viral Video: Stewart Does Beck. Really, He Does. [BoomTown]

Last week, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart spoofs Fox News’ Glenn Beck in a blackboard parody that is almost as good as Tina Fey’s spot-on impression of Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live.”

The conservative pundits seem to be the online comedy gift that keeps on giving.

Here it is in two videos:

UPDATE 1-Polish PGNiG 2009 net up 39 pct, above forecast

UPDATE 1-PBG meets raised guidance with stadium boost

Ending the Internet's Trench Warfare [Voices]

By Yochai Benkler, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard

Imagine that for $33 a month you could buy Internet service twice as fast as what you get from Verizon (VZ) or Comcast (CMCS), bundled with digital high-definition television, unlimited long distance and international calling to 70 countries and wireless Internet connectivity for your laptop or smartphone throughout much of the country.

That’s what you can buy in France, and similar speeds and prices are available in other countries with competitive markets.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

"Fear and Loathing in Farmville" [Voices]

By Soren Johnson, Game Designer

GDC 2010 is now in the books, and it will be a hard one to forget because the whole conference seemed to be obsessed with one thing, which I summed up in this tweet. Or, as Sirlin puts it here: “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Anonymous Comments: Are They Good or Evil? [Voices]

By Mathew Ingram, Senior Writer, GigaOm

Updated: I enjoy a good debate about media-related topics pretty much any time, even when I’m supposed to be on vacation with the family in Florida. Today, in between playing shuffleboard and bocce and taking the kids to the swimming pool, I had a rousing back-and-forth on Twitter with Howard Owens — who was formerly with Gatehouse Media and is now running a local news site called The Batavian — about the evils (Howard) and virtues (me) of anonymous comments.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trump Google For News & Can't We Measure Twitter Correctly? [Voices]

By Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief, Search Engine Land

Earlier this week, Hitwise put out stats suggesting that Facebook is beating Google (GOOG) and Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to news sites. I dug a little deeper, and I beg to differ.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Forget Foursquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-of-Purchase [Voices]

By Kunur Patel, Contributor, Ad Age

It’s the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you’re at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It’s a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

CrunchGear Week in Review: Mosquitos Edition

Here are some of last week’s stories on CrunchGear:

Mosquitos of the future may vaccinate against malaria, instead of spread it
Gallery: Thermal imaging of household objects
If only you had actually seen The Hurt Locker
Today in history: the flight data recorder
Video: Mini fuel cell powering a robot fish

Startup Says Quantum Dots Can Transform Cellphone Cameras [Voices]

By Don Clark, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Most cellphones can take pictures, but their resolution lags far behind the images created by more costly digital cameras. InVisage hopes to change that.

The Silicon Valley startup says it can bring a four-fold improvement in the performance of cellphone cameras with little increase in cost. InVisage, which has been laboring in secrecy since 2006, opted to make a fundamental break from a semiconductor technology that has been a mainstay in cameras.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Quantum Technology Promises Wedding Photos From Phone Cameras

A new sensor technology promises to make cellphone cameras good enough to use for wedding photos.

InVisage Technologies, a Menlo Park, California-based company, has developed an image sensor using quantum dots instead of silicon. The company claims its technology increases sensor performance by more than four times.

“We have all heard ‘Gee, I wish the camera on my iPhone was better,’” says InVisage’s President and CEO Jess Lee. “But the heart of the problem is in the heart of the camera, which is the sensor.”

Most cameras today used either a CCD (charged-couple device) sensor or a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor)-based sensor. The silicon in current image sensors has a light absorbing efficiency of only about 50 percent, says Lee.

Reducing efficiency still further are the layers of copper or aluminum circuitry laid on top of the silicon. The metal blocks the light, so only a fraction of a sensor’s silicon is exposed to light.

Replacing silicon with quantum dots could change all that. A quantum dot is a nanocrystal made of a special class of semiconductors. It allows manufacturers to have a very high degree of control over its conductive properties, and is about 90% efficient at absorbing light, according to Lee.

The quantum dots are usually suspended in fluid. InVisage takes a vial of these and spins it onto a layer of silicon, then adds the required metal circuitry to create a new type of sensor that it is calling QuantumFilm.

In addition to the increased sensitivity, InVisage’s technology allows the metal circuits to be placed underneath the quantum film, where they don’t block the light.

“This is entirely different from the type of image sensors that we have right now,” says Tom Hausken, director with market research firm Strategies Unlimited. “Usually you see incremental improvements in sensor design, but these guys have made a a significant change in the process.”

Quantum dots can be made from silicon, tellurides or sulphides. InVisage won’t reveal exactly which material it is using.

As opposed to silicon’s indirect band gap, quantum dots have a direct band gap. Lee says Invisage can tune the Dots’ band gap much more efficiently than silicon so it is more sensitive to visible light, ultraviolet and even infrared waves.

In the last few years, manufacturers have been touting megapixels as the measure of a camera’s prowess. But the true measure of picture quality is not as much in the megapixels but in the size of the sensor used in the device.

To capture the light, imaging sensors need to have as much as area as possible. Powerful DSLR cameras have an imaging sensor that’s about a third of the size of a business card, while camera phones sport sensors that are only about a quarter inch wide (see top photo). Smaller sensors mean less light sensitivity for each pixel on the sensor, and that translates into lower-quality images.

Quantum dot-based sensors won’t be more expensive than traditional CMOS-based sensors, promises Lee. InVisage says it will have samples ready for phone manufacturers by the end of the year and the sensors could be in phones by mid next-year.

Though quantum dots are commercially produced by other manufacturers, they have never been used on image sensors before, says Hausken.

“Mostly people have looked to use it in displays, solar cells and as identification markers,” he says. “So we will have to see how effective and reliable it is as a sensor.”

See Also:

• Olympus’ Omni-directional Camera Sensor Makes Pictures Look Like HAL 9000 Clones
• Panasonic’s Big-Sensor Camera Disappoints NYT Reviewer
• How Does Fujifilm’s New Camera See in the Dark?
• Olympus Camera Packs SLR Aspirations in Compact Body
• Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket

Photo: CCD senor (Divine Harvester/Flickr)

Photo: Jonathan Snyder / Wired.com

New Chip Offers Virtual Windows Desktops, On TVs

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PBG 2009 net up 35 pct, in line with guidance

China's CNPC to issue 20 bln yuan bonds -sources

RPT-Polish PGNiG 2009 net up 39 pct, above forecast

Polish PGNiG 2009 net up 39 pct, above forecast

ChaCha Launches ChaCha.me For Social FAQs. Businesses And Celebrities Welcome.

I like recent products that let users created personal FAQs one step at a time based on questions from others. You put up a box that invites people to ask you anything. People then ask questions. You answer the ones you want to and publish them. In no time you’ve got an interesting profile of your personality, likes and dislikes.

We wrote about Formspring in January, and Tumblr launched Ask Me a few days later. Now comes ChaCha.me, a new product from ChaCha, where people and businesses can ask and answer questions.

ChaCha.me has good integration with Facebook and Twitter right off the bat, and they’ll allow question asking and answering through their mobile apps and SMS (something ChaCha does well already). But ChaCha is also partnering with celebrities to get them to use the service right away. ChaCha thinks the product is a perfect way for celebrities to talk to fans.

They’re starting things off with 2010 Grammy winner David Guetta – his page will launch later on Monday but users are already lining up the questions. If you’re willing to step things down a few notches you can see my ChaCha page here, and I’ve already answered a few of the questions.

Lots more features are coming in the next couple of weeks, says ChaCha. Among the changes – 15 million or so listed U.S. businesses in ChaCha will have the Q&A feature added to their profiles and will be able to answer questions from users.

ChaCha thinks celebrities and businesses will feel safe using ChaCha.me because they only have to answer the questions they like and they can stay in control of the discussion.

And ChaCha users will be able to integrate the Q&A feature directly into their Facebook pages as well. ChaCha already lets users ask their friends questions on Facebook. The new feature turns that around and lets friends ask you questions, too.

James Randi is gay

From some seventy years of personal experience, I can tell you that there's not much "gay" about being homosexual. For the first twenty years of my life, I had to live in the shadows, in a culture that was -- at least outwardly -- totally hostile to any hint of that variation of life-style. At no time did I choose to adopt any protective coloration, though; my cultivation of an abundant beard was not at all a deception, but part of my costume as a conjuror.

Gradually, the general attitude that I'd perceived around me began to change, and presently I find that there has emerged a distinctly healthy acceptance of different social styles of living -- except, of course, in cultures that live in constant and abject fear of divine retribution for infractions found in the various Holy Books... In another two decades, I'm confident that young people will find themselves in a vastly improved atmosphere of acceptance.

(Image: RANDI.jpg, Wikimedia Commons)

James Randi is gay

RIP Palm: it's over, and here's why - Ars Technica

Latest Gadgets (blog)

RIP Palm: it's over, and here's why Ars Technica In January of 2009, shares of Palm traded at a little over $3 as everyone awaited details of the once-mighty smartphone maker's plans to save itself from certain death. ... Can Palm compete in today's mobile space?ZDNet (blog) Palm: End of Days. Was it their SDK that killed them?Touch Reviews Palm Plans Pre And Pixi Production HaltInformationWeek (blog) BusinessWeek -CNNMoney.com -Computerworld all 25 news articles »

Beautiful old typewriters in photos

Comprised of typewriters from the very beginning of the typewriter industry (1880s & 1890s), it is the largest of its kind in Canada. The collection contains many rare and historically important typewriters, showing the remarkable diversity and beauty of the world's first typing machines.

Beautiful old typewriters in photos

JVC Everio HD Camcorder With Bluetooth Which Turns Out Is Actually Useful

Science fiction in cake form

Science fiction in cake form

Sunday Sweets: 2010 Cake Odyssey (Thanks, Steven!)

Business-card is a transistor amp

Eric sez, "Aaron Alai designed this kicking electronic business card, which demonstrates how transistor amplifiers work. When you touch two electrodes on it, a small amount of current is conducted through your body, which is then amplified by a transistor to light an LED. I like the clean design, which is both functional and descriptive of how it works."

Aaron calls it a "small interactive exhibit" in business-card form. I've always had a passion for great cards -- this one is a cake-taker. I stand in awe.

Business Card / Transistor Amplification (Thanks, Eric!)

News Flash: Einstein Is Still Right

ThickButtons for Android Makes Touchscreen Typing Easier

Remember the Loop? It was an accelerator-equipped remote for media centers that arrived last June. It worked pretty well. Now the company behind it, Hillcrest Labs, is going to try its hand at a web browser called Kylo—for television! More »

Source: Gizmodo | 21 Mar 2010 | 10:01 pm

Channeling Earth: Rivers Seen From Space

L.A. band tries to cash in with free monthly album (AP)

AP - In an instrument-filled garage almost every day for the past year, musician John Wood has tried to find a new way to make a living.

March 22, 1995: Longest Human Space Adventure Ends

Carbon-14 Dating Reveals 5% of Vintage Wines May Be Frauds

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health care reform passes House with 219 votes

Help Us Google, You’re Our Only Broadband Hope. (The Government Has No Spine.)

For the future of innovation in the United States, few things seem as important access to broadband Internet connections. The FCC seems to realize this, which is why they’ve set up the National Broadband Plan. And yet, we’re screwed.

As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler lays out in an excellent op-ed today in the New York Times, this new broadband plan may sound great, but it won’t go nearly far enough. The reason is that there is simply nowhere near enough competition in almost all of the markets in this country. In fact, under the new plan, some 85% of homes covered would have no choice when it comes to a provider. So while it’s great that just about everyone will potentially have broadband access in 2020, plenty likely won’t be able to afford it.

And even those lucky enough to have a choice, are probably only going to be able to choose between two options — and again, both of those are likely to be very expensive. The U.S. has the highest broadband prices among advanced nations, while countries like Japan and France get faster (and better) services, for a fraction of the price many of us pay. Again, it’s all about competition. So why do we put up with it? Because the U.S. government has no backbone and ruins its own ideas (such as the National Broadband Plan) because they give into corporate lobbyists.

As Benkler points out in his piece, Time Warner is quite pleased that it can set higher prices due to a lack of competition. Meanwhile, Comcast is raking in just about a billion dollars in profit each quarter thanks in large part to their pricing bullshit.

Is it expensive to lay down the necessary fiber for these super-fast networks? Of course. But there are plenty of ways that competitors could help the big players offset those costs if the government would simply make them open the pipes. But the big players don’t want that — they’re perfectly happy to pay the large upfront costs to ensure that they can reap the much larger rewards on the other end thanks to this lack of competition.

We may have but one hope.

While plenty are wary of how big Google is becoming, the Internet giant has so-far proved to be on the right side with regard to universal Internet access. They were instrumental in making sure the wireless spectrum would be (at least somewhat) open, and now they’re pushing the wired broadband movement in the right direction too with their insanely fast fiber push. While the FCC’s 100 Squared plan would put 100 megabit-per-second broadband in people’s homes by 2020, Google wants to put 1 gigabit-per-second connections in people’s homes much sooner.

Yes, Google is talking on a much smaller scale (500,000 homes vs. 100 million), but, if the initial response is any indication, Google may become a much, much bigger player in this space than they envision right now.

We’ve written a couple of stories about cities doing some wacky things to get Google’s attention so that they might bring the broadband to their cities (here’s Topeka, Kansas and Baltimore, Maryland, for example). But there are dozens of other cities also foaming at the mouth for access. Some examples:

• Longview, Texas has a Twitter account devoted to it and a website
• Both are true for Jersey City, NJ as well
• San Mateo, CA is issuing press releases to the media about its excitement and is getting TechCrunch 50 Red Beacon to lobby on its behalf
• Fresno, CA has a Facebook fan page for fiber with about 7,500 fans so far
• Grand Rapids, MI has a website, Facebook fan page (with over 33,000 fans), and Twitter account
• And yesterday, Greenville, SC had thousands of citizens line up to create a huge Google logo

Those are just a few of the ones we’ve been tipped about. The reaction around the country to Google’s idea should make it very clear that the people of this country are demanding better access. And yet, the government won’t take the necessary steps to open the market up, and let it bloom because the lobbyists from the companies that stand to lose the most are actually the ones in control. If Google, one of the largest companies in this country, only believes they can afford to hook up 50,000 to 500,000 homes with their plan, how is any other company expected to compete with the incumbent players?

They won’t. Not unless the government grows some balls and backs real openness.

[photo: 20th Century Fox]

Hoping to Attract Google? Go Jump in the Lake - New York Times

The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Hoping to Attract Google? Go Jump in the Lake New York Times The mayor of Duluth, Minn., threw himself into the ice-ringed waters of Lake Superior. The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., immersed himself in a tank filled with bonnethead sharks, simply to one-up him. The mayor of Wilmington, NC, ... Google Traffic Dominates the InternetPC World Google Broadband Test Has US Cities Vying for High-Speed InterneteWeek Cities wooing Google's networkFort Wayne Journal Gazette Texas A&M The Battalion -Sarasota Herald-Tribune -Michigan Radio all 56 news articles »

HTC Desire shows up on Verizon’s site, but probably not how you’d expect

Hey there, friends! You know what time it is? It’s “Good news, bad news..” time!

The Good News: An anonymous tipster just spotted this little gem on Verizon’s own website, listing the “HTC Desire” as one of the items that comes in the Droid Eris box.

The Bad News: As much as we’d love to think this is some rogue employee’s covert way of leaking details or some sort of crazy Freudian slip (Freudian typo?), neither of those are probably the case. You see, the “Desire” name has served as an internal codename for other HTC Android handsets in the past, including, unfortunately, the Droid Eris. As it currently stands, we can only assume that this is a lingering placeholder that’s somehow gone unnoticed for months.

Oh well, we can always hope. And if that fails? Well, there’s always the Incredible!

Ben Folds + Chatroulette = homage to Merton

"Ben Folds has connected, feel free to talk now." The alt.pop piano composer pays homage to internet improv artist Merton, in this hilarious video taped at a live show. He's even wearing Merton's slouchy hoodie! Video contains cussin', but thankfully all the anony-wieners have been edited out.

Chatroulette Piano Ode to Merton.m4v (YouTube, thanks to the many, many readers who suggested this)

TRUSTe Places Privacy Seal Of Approval On Virtual Currency Platform gWallet

Virtual currency platform gWallet is announcing a partnership with online privacy certification company TRUSTe to reinforce gWallet ethical guidelines in the virtual currency space. gWallet partners with both brands and game developers to bring users virtual currency offers on games within social networks.

Following the Scamville controversy in the virtual offers space, the startups which provide these offers on games have been working to rid their platforms of misleading offers. In fact, Offerpal CEO George Garrick promised to take a leadership position in cleaning up scammy ads. Competitor Gwallet has also promised to never offer these type of ads, and is now partnering with TRUSTe to certify gWallet’s privacy practices. TRUSTe will also monitor offers submitted by gWallet‘s advertisers to ensure they aren’t misleading. For example, previously fake quizzes would be tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and and other scams. And Gwallet is betting on TRUSTe to keep these offers at bay.

gWallet, which recently raised $10 million in funding, was founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal. gWallet works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model and uses branded video campaigns to engage with consumers. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, Coke, and The History Channel are all using gWallet’s video campaigns on social networks, which are powered by Tube Mogul.

gWallet also announced an early-stage venture fund to invest in social gaming companies and promote innovation within the social gaming ecosystem. gWallet faces competition from Offerpal and SuperRewards.

Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chat sur l’ordinateur, avant l’ordinateur

Apparently this has been happening for a long, long time.

Digitally, Location Is Where It's At - New York Times

TIME

Digitally, Location Is Where It's At New York Times Last Monday night in Austin, about 200 people were milling around the bar at the Driskill Hotel, an unofficial headquarters for the name-badge-infested horde attending the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. ... Tech Trends for 2010TIME SXSW: Twitter proved to be more than a social networkThe Guardian Foursquare, Gowalla Get the SxSW BumpGigaOm (blog) AdAge.com (subscription) -My Gadget News (blog) -Orange County Business Journal all 11 news articles »

Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bulk iPads – the more you buy, the more you save!

If the full-color e-reader functionality didn’t already tip Apple’s hand regarding educational applications of the iPad, then this bulk pricing for schools surely does. You can get 10 for $4790, which is a savings of… wait, only $200? Come on!

Now of course I think this is great, and I’m sure schools and teachers would be able to think of a ton of great uses for a full-color, wi-fi connected tablet computer. But here in Seattle our schools can barely afford transparencies for the overhead projectors we’ve been using since the 70s. Could a school like my own Garfield High (go Bulldogs) justify the purchase of even a few iPads? not likely, and I wonder if even the private schools around here have that kind of cash to throw around.

So while it’d be nice to have iPads in the classroom, I’m guessing we’re going to see e-ink devices and cheap Android tablets like the Marvell Moby. As private citizens, we are free to spend $500 on an iPad, but as a value proposition for a school spending public money, it’s a little harder to justify buying items that cost four or five times as much.

And if you’re thinking of using the 10-pack to bypass the 2-per-customer limit… good luck. You need an authorized education purchaser login.

[Mac Rumors via Gizmodo]

Google Building Browser Plug-In To Protect Consumer Privacy - Mediapost.com

TopNews New Zealand

Google Building Browser Plug-In To Protect Consumer Privacy Mediapost.com Google is working on a browser plug-in that allows consumers to block being counted when landing on a Web site that monitors visits with Google Analytics. The Mountain View, Calif. company's engineers continue to test ... Google Reconsiders Privacy PracticesPC World Consumer Privacy to Be Protected by Google's Browser Plug-InTopNews United States Google to release global browser based plug-in for AnalyticsThe Money Times ClickZ News -Register -V3.co.uk all 30 news articles »

Medical Professionals Aren't Leaping For E-Medicine

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If ET Calls, Who Speaks For Humanity?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Demolition Derby is Never-Ending in Saturn's Rings

Peter Watts wasn't convicted of assault

India First To Build a Supersonic Cruise Missile

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What Is Holding Back the Paperless Office?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Cold Fusion' Moves Closer To Mainstream Acceptance

McLaren MP4-12C: We live in a world where $225,000 cars are considered ‘affordable’

Watch out, Nicholas writing about cars, there’s bound to be errors! (No different from anything else, really.) It’s the McLaren MP4-12C, a £150,000 ($225,000) supercar that McLaren is actually positioning as “affordable.” I mean, an Xbox 360 Arcade SKU is “affordable,” maybe even a fancy gaming mouse when you consider what they do… Oh, I know who would consider this supercar affordable: people who play for Manchester City.

The British supercar made its fancy debut yesterday, surrounded by Formula One drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. Supposedly it’s the UK’s answer to the Ferrari 458—Italian, of course.

It can go 0 to 60mph in 3.4 seconds. I believe that’s an impressive number.

The exterior is one single piece of carbon fiber. That’s the new “cool” material, right, carbon fiber? You hear about it all the time on Top Gear.

There’s no video of it in action, unfortunately. Someone call The Stig, or Matt. Whoever’s available.

Apple Still Checking Off To-Do List Before iPad's Arrival - eWeek

IntoMobile (blog)

Apple Still Checking Off To-Do List Before iPad's Arrival eWeek With the iPad arriving April 3, Apple is reportedly still trying to negotiate for more content for the tablet to access, as well as tying up loose ends. Still, the bookmakers are offering 3-to-1 odds that Apple sells 6 million iPads before the year's ... Apple's IPad Debut Is Unlikely to Outdo IPhone StartBusinessWeek Cybercrooks take shine to Apple lineupWashington Post Will iPad Sales Beat the iPhone? Who Cares?PC World Ars Technica -Apple Insider -The Mac Observer all 173 news articles »

NSFW: Jimmy Wales Wants Me Dead (The Neutrality Of This Article Is Disputed)

Some weeks, writing this column is easy. All it takes is for an influential person – a politician, a business person, perhaps even a fellow columnist – to say something dumb and I get to spend a thousand words or so explaining precisely why they’re wrong. The “why x is wrong about y” construction is the columnist’s best friend: it’s as old as the hills and even easier to build a house on.

Some weeks though, it’s even easier than that. Someone will say something so breathtakingly wrong – so tracheotomy-cravingly moronic – that I don’t need to explain anything. Simply quoting their words back at them is sufficient to make the point.

Step forward, Jimmy Wales.

Speaking this week at the Guardian’s Guardian Changing Media Summit, Wales – the founder of Wikipedia – uttered the following statement when asked about the future of newspapers…

“I don’t see the added value [of opinion columnists] and question whether a newspaper should be paying large sums of money for them anymore… The best of the political bloggers are easily the equal of the opinion columnists at the New York Times.”

Those words could stand alone as a monument to Wales’ wrongness – a warning for future generations on why we must never heed the advice of a man who calls himself ‘Jimbo’. But the very fact that Wales was invited to opine about the future of news at a major conference despite having no identifiable qualifications to do so compels me to elaborate. If people take his opinion on newspapers seriously enough to ask him to speak on the subject then there’s a terrifying possibility that they’ll take him seriously enough to act on his advice.

And who could blame them? Newspaper owners are terrified – destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked – and desperately seeking any advice on how to cauterize their bottom line. The cause of their madness is, of course, the Internet and so it’s logical – after a fashion – that they should turn to Wales for answers. After all, he’s The Man From The Internet: surely he has all the answers?

Yeeeeah. Not so much.

For the benefit of those poor befuddled newspapermen, let’s take a few minutes – and a thousand words or so – to break down all the reasons why you shouldn’t listen to Jimmy Wales when he tells you how to run a newspaper.

For a start, let’s consider what Wales actually does for a living. Or rather what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t own, operate or edit a newspaper. He doesn’t employ any journalists, has never sold an advertisement and he doesn’t have a single customer who pays to read the content he relies on volunteers to produce. For those reasons, his lack of understanding of the “added value” that high profile personalities bring to newspapers is understandable – forgivable even. Or at least it would be were it not for the fact that Wikipedia uses Wales’ own high profile personality to encourage its users to donate money in order to ensure its survival.

“A message from Jimmy Wales” reads the banner at the top of Wikipedia entries during the site’s regular donation drives. These banners link to a personal appeal for support, written by Jimbo and complete with an above-the-fold photo of his face. Jimmy Wales is the first encyclopedia editor since Alain T. Britannica to build a cult of personality around the gig. Why? Because he knows that personality creates familiarity, which in turn creates loyalty, which in turn creates value. Except, apparently, when it comes to newspapers.

Which takes us to the real nub of Jimmy Wales’ wrongness. No one would argue that the newspaper industry – in print form – is screwed. Speaking at the same Guardian conference, media commentator and Murdoch fanboy Michael Wolff summed the situation up nicely when he said “Every big-city newspaper in the U.S. is either in bankruptcy or will be in bankruptcy in the foreseeable future – that’s 12 months. The newspaper industry in the U.S. is over”.

The future of news is online, but that future brings with it the total commoditisation of facts and the death of straight reporting as a way to drive reader loyalty. Newspapers aren’t just competing with other newspapers, but also with Twitter and Facebook and blogs and thousands of other channels through which facts can be disseminated. If one paper puts its news behind a pay wall, the chances are that same news will be available elsewhere for free. Even with high quality investigative reporting, if the story is big enough then someone will simply rewrite it – perfectly legally – and post it on a blog, where it will then be reblogged and retweeted and aggregated. (The aggregators themselves encourage this: Gabe Rivera told me recently that the best way for a blogger to get content on Techmeme is to paraphrase something that previously appeared behind a pay-wall).

The battle to force people to pay for general news, then, is lost. Likewise, thanks to micro-aggregators like Techmeme and macro-aggregators like Google News, the fight to maintain reader loyalty through news reporting is finished too. Sure, some people may still cling to the BBC or the New York Times out of habit, but the trend towards decentralisation – with readers choosing their news source on a story-by-story basis – is inexorable.

There remains, however, one reason to remain loyal to a single newspaper – or at least to visit that newspaper’s online edition every day. And that’s for its editorial voice: the unique tone with which a publication interprets the basic facts of a news story and helps us form an opinion on it. Which, of course, is where columnists come in.

Columnists – and other opinion-driven journalists – are the heart and soul of a news organisation: they’re what makes us tune in to Fox News (Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly) or MSNBC (Keith Olbermann). They’re why we buy the Wall Street Journal (Peggy Noonan) or The New York Times (Maureen Dowd). Newspapers know this of course, which is why when Murdoch desperately (and misguidedly) wanted to protect hard-copy sales of his flagship UK tabloid, The Sun, he removed his big name columnists from the web and confined them to print.

Wales may claim that the best political bloggers are better than their mainstream rivals but he’s wrong about that too. For a start, professional columnists carry with them the weight of their entire publication. Maureen Dowd’s opinion pieces are so powerful because they are packed with insight and fact, much of which stems from the access she enjoys as an internationally recognised columnist. The vast majority of independent political bloggers can only dream of that kind of access and are instead forced to rely on second-hand reporting for the basis of their writing. But even if a political blogger does manage to deliver the goods, it’s only a matter of time before they’re snapped up by the mainstream media. I don’t care what crap they spout while they’re struggling to make it, every political blogger in the world would kill their own puppy to write for a nationally – or internationally – recognised publication. The first thing Nate Silver did when FiveThirtyEight went stellar? Take a gig at the New Republic.

This symbiosis – columnistists clamouring to write for newspapers, and newspapers needing great columnists to define their voice – is where the real key to the survival of newspapers lies. Rival papers, and bloggers and Twitterers may summarise and rewrite your news scoops, depriving you of readers, but they can’t do the same with your columnists. Personality is simply not reproducible – there’s only one Maureen Dowd and there will only ever be one Glenn Beck (inshallah) so if readers want to hear what they have to say, they have to go to the source. Moreover, while news ages rapidly, opinion doesn’t. A story published online by the New York Times is dated the moment it appears and people begin tweeting out the key facts, but a well-crafted opinion column has an infinite shelf life.

For all of these reasons, only the most imbecilicly terrified newspaper editor would heed Jimmy Wales’ advice and fire their most valuable assets. For all the others, there’s actually a compelling argument to do precisely the opposite. It’s comment and opinion, not news, that really adds value to newspapers in the Internet age – and as such the really smart editors will get rid of all their costly reporters and use the money instead to fill their pages with nothing but highly paid opinion columnists. Only then can newspapers be assured of their survival.

I know it sounds scary, newspaper owners, but you’ll just have to trust me on this one. After all, I’m The Man From The Internet and I have all the answers.

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Best Buy now hawking Viliv’s wares

Viliv makes some hot, little portables. That’s a fact. The X70 and S5 touchscreen along with the S7 convertible netbook are among the best in their respective niche markets. But previously the products were only available from online retailers, which of course limits their visibility from a whole segment of potential customers. Starting Monday though, Best Buy shoppers will be able to pick up the products in store and online. There will even be an instant rebate available on the none-3G modem-equipped models.

The $579 S7 will be available with a $50 instant rebate if the buyer signs up for a Sprint Mi-Fi or Overdrive hotspot. That’s of course a nice offer, but the slightly more expensive $649 S7 features a built-in unlocked 3G modem allowing owners to pop-in any ol’ activated SIM card for mobile hotspot-free Internet connectivity.

As of writing it doesn’t seem that any Best Buy locations have the portables in stock, but YMMV. Give your local store a quick minute or two before bothering computer associates about when they will be getting their first Viliv shipments. [Best Buy]

Aquapod Bottle Launcher: You know, for kids

I was just outside trying to shoot a water rocket I bought at a science museum, recalling the heady days I once spent shooting a similar rocket into the air when I was a young lad. Sadly, the poorly built rocket failed and the pump started just sucking in water, leading me to the Internet for solace.

The sweet Internet doth offer succor, friends, in the form of the Aquapod Bottle Launcher. While you could just make your own water rocket out of a water and some piping, this $24.99 kit allows you, with the aid of a soda bottle and bicycle pump, to become a mini Goddard in your own back forty.

The Aquapod is the most exciting and safest bottle launcher available. This intriguing hobby toy requires no
assembly and is ready to launch with the addition of a regular 2-liter plastic soda bottle and an ordinary
bicycle pump. The Aquapod has a florescent orange futuristic one piece design that captures the eye instantly.
Not only does the Aquapod launch a bottle up to 100 feet in the air, but no other launcher out there has a built
in safety valve that releases pressure at 60psi in order to keep everyone safe from over-pressurizing the entire
system.

Just fill a 2-liter plastic bottle half with water and secure it over the white launch tube upside down. Using
any ordinary pump, pressurize the Aquapod through the valve stem until the check valve inside the front leg
releases pressure and water. Then, stand back with the strap in your hand that is attached to a 15 foot string
and give a short, quick tug on the string to launch the bottle high into the air.

The Aquapod is built with high quality thick durable plastic and is designed to last.

The Aquapod is also available in bulk in case you want to start your own hamster space program.

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