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Earth

Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow? 877

Posted by timothy from the four-horsemen-dressage dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, Yellowstone National Park has been having a very unusual number of earthquakes. Many of the most recent tremors have been deeper underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!"
The Almighty Buck

Computer Models and the Global Economic Crash 361

Posted by kdawson from the not-able-rightly-to-comprehend dept.
Anti-Globalism passes along a review in Ars of some recent speculation on the role of interconnected computer models in the global economic crash. "If Ritholtz, Taleb, Mandelbrot, and the rest of the computer modeling and financial engineering naysayers are correct about the big picture, then we really are arguably in the midst a bona fide computer crash. Not an individual computer crash, of course, but a computer crash in the sense of Sun Microsystems' erstwhile marketing slogan, 'the network is the computer.' That is, we have all of these machines in different sectors of the economy, and we've networked all of them together either directly (via an actual network) or indirectly (by using the collective 'output' of machines in one sector as input for the machines in another sector), and like any other computer system the whole thing hums along nicely... up until the point when it doesn't."
The Internet

Robots Are Net's Future, Says Vint Cerf 118

Posted by timothy from the would-be-great-for-remote-grocery-picking dept.
Ned Nederlander writes "Vint Cerf talks the future of the Internet with Ed Cone: 'I expect to see much more interesting interactions, including the possibility of haptic interactions — touch. Not just touch screens, but the ability to remotely interact with things. Little robots, for example, that are instantiations of you, and are remotely operated, giving you what is called telepresence. It's a step well beyond the kind of video telepresence we are accustomed to seeing today.'"
Data Storage

Blu-ray Gone In Five Years, Samsung Claims 554

Posted by timothy from the oh-great-now-you-mention-it dept.
schliz writes "Samsung expects Sony's Blu-ray technology to be superseded within five years, despite winning the high-definition format war in February." Maybe that means five years from now will be the perfect time to stock up on cheap Blu-ray disks and equipment.
Science

Oldest Skeleton In New World Discovered 485

Posted by CmdrTaco from the god-is-burying-tests-again dept.
Death Metal Maniac writes "Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton along with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula could provide new clues to how the Americas were first populated. The skeletons' skulls hint that the people may not be of northern Asian descent, which would contradict the dominant theory of New World settlement. 'The shape of the skulls has led us to believe that Eva and the others have more of an affinity with people from South Asia than North Asia,' González explained."
Biotech

Submission + - Doping: Beyond Sports? (latimes.com)

Submitted by runamock
runamock writes: The Los Angeles Times ran a story on the growing use of 'mind drugs': 'Forget sports doping. The next frontier is brain doping.. Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions.. Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.'
Networking

Netgear Introduces Linux-Based NAS Devices 128

Posted by kdawson from the backup-and-archive-with-daring-and-whimsy dept.
drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."
The Internet

Only 2 in 500 College Students Believe in IP 649

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the ethics-classes-waiting-for-new-material dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting story about how fewer and fewer people believe that infringement is wrong. He mentions talks he gave back in 2005 where people were willing to believe that making backups of DVDs you own is wrong. Today, however, at his talks, he was only able to get two people out of a crowd of five hundred college students to say that downloading a movie or album is wrong. He goes on, like many before him, to bemoan the immorality of young people today, saying: 'I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
Google

Submission + - Quoted in Google News? Post a Comment

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From NYT[Reg req] Google News has a feature it calls "Comments From People in the News." The idea is simple: if you have been quoted in an article that appears on Google News, you can post a comment that will be paired with that article. (Journalists can comment, as well, Google says, though none have done so thus far.) Since it was introduced in the spring, the feature has largely existed under the radar, with roughly only about 150 total comments having been made. Thus far, Google News has used e-mail messages to encourage people quoted in articles to submit comments — an effort to prime the pump similar to the process that results in the first issue of a new magazine magically having letters to the editor.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Intel Virtualization Benchmarking

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: MacTech has a write up on the differences between booting Windows XP in the three different options on an Intel-based Mac. They benchmark Parallels, VMware Fusion and Bootcamp. They come to surprising results in the virtualized options with Parallels on top of VMware's Fusion. In some cases the virtualized OS was faster than the bare metal.
Media

Submission + - Big Media Allies with 3 Guys in a Garage (3guysinagarage.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: ATLANTA, GA, December 14 — Former product development manager from Turner Broadcasting recently unveiled a new digital media incubator called 3 Guys in a Garage to develop innovative Internet and mobile products.

Remember when the proverbial "three guys in a garage" — a small group of Internet startup innovators with a big idea, passion, and modest resources — would undercut a big corporation by innovating faster, cheaper, and better? CraigsList, Google, YouTube and others may come to mind. They started out as three guys in a garage and quickly grew to be household names and businesses worth billions of dollars. Meanwhile, their disruptive innovations have threatened the existence of bigger, entrenched corporations.

3 Guys in a Garage — founded by Cornelius Colin McNab, former new media strategist and product manager at Turner Broadcasting (a Time Warner company) — aims to incubate ideas by forming strategic partnerships with media companies.

"We're doing things differently at 3GG. First, rather than undercutting big media companies as three guys in a garage, we're offering companies an opportunity to get in early and work with us. Second, the cost to develop new products and launch companies is going down, so instead of getting venture capital, we're doing joint ventures with media companies to launch products within six months for $500,000 or less. They need the innovative ideas and faster speed-to-market that we have, and we need the funding and marketing resources that they have. So it makes sense to collaborate," McNab said.

Outside incubators can innovate faster, cheaper, and sometimes better than big companies typically do. While big companies are good at achieving operational efficiency, they often struggle with radical innovation and adapting to major market changes, such as those created by the Internet. The difference is in the culture, incentives, bureaucracy and politics.

This year, several big media and Internet companies have backed outside incubators for new media product development. Oak Grove Labs is a new media incubator in stealth mode and funded by a Fortune 200 media company, according to their website. Yahoo built Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous business unit at a remote location, to foster new product development. mtvU and Cisco teamed up in a digital incubator that gives grants to students with big online ideas. LaunchBox Digital was launched last month by a group of veteran Internet execs from AOL and InterActiveCorp.

So far, Atlanta-based 3 Guys in a Garage has launched an alpha prototype of Yucimi.com ( http://www.yucimi.com/ ), a video recommendation service, and formed a partnership with BrainReactions ( http://www.brainreactions.net/ ), a "crowdsourcing" company with online brainstorming and social applications that have over 500,000 users. The company has a deal in progress with an undisclosed traditional media company.

In 2008, the company plans to execute two to three more deals with big media partners. According to McNab, who holds degrees from MIT and Yale, "We have a lot of great ideas in our network that we'd like to incubate with interested media companies. For instance, we're working on a virtual living room for watching sports, game shows, and concerts online with friends; producing a multi-platform talk show for teens to discuss stuff teenagers care about; and developing applications and widgets for social networks using Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's developer API. We can do a lot with a little because we're doing what we love."

###

3 Guys in a Garage is a digital media incubator and innovation consultancy, based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. For more information on 3GG, please visit http://www.3guysinagarage.com/ . Yucimi is a registered trademark of 3 Guys in a Garage LLC. All company and product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Government

Submission + - Canadian Song Writers push for legal P2P (songwriters.ca) 1

Submitted by spiri
spiri writes: The songwriters association of Canada is proposing a new law that will compensate artists when their songs are downloaded on p2p networks.

"The plan we propose would not change or interfere with the way Canadians receive their music. No one would be sued for the online sharing of songs. On the contrary, the sharing of music on Peer-to-Peer networks and similar technologies would become perfectly legal. In addition, Music Publishers and Record Labels would be fairly compensated for the crucial role they play in supporting Canadian music creators."

Will Canada be one of the first to think of its citizens before the recording industry? You can view the proposal here.
Privacy

Submission + - GnuPG turns 10 years old (gnupg.org)

Submitted by Gemini
Gemini writes: 10 years ago today, the very first (version 0.0.0) release of the program that became GnuPG was released. The Gnu Privacy Guard is a free (in the speech and beer senses) implementation of the OpenPGP cryptography standard.

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