Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."

alphadogg writes "Is the advent of the 802.11n wireless standard the 'end of Ethernet'... at least in terms of client access to the LAN? That's the provocative title, and thesis, of a new report in which the author began looking into the question when he heard a growing number of clients asking whether it was time to discontinue wired LAN deployments for connecting clients. Would 11n, the next generation high-throughput Wi-Fi, make the RJ45 connector in the office wall as obsolete as gaslights?"

owlgorithm writes "Apple's new store in Montreal has three parking meters on the street in front of it. The city is in the middle of a campaign to reduce downtown parking. In Apple's ever-conscientious attempt to improve design, they offered to reimburse the city for the parking meters and their revenue if the city would remove them. Answer: Non — because 'We've never done it before, so we can't.'"

grrlscientist writes "Yesterday, I received the devastating news that Alex the African Grey parrot, who was both a study subject and colleague to Irene Pepperberg, died unexpectedly at 31 years of age. 'Even though Alex was a research animal, he was much more than that. This species of parrot generally lives to be 50-60 years old, so Alex was only middle-aged when he died. According to some reports I have read, it is possible that Alex might have succumbed to Aspergillosis, a fungal infection of the lungs that he has battled in the past. However, the cause of death will not be known until after a necropsy has been completed... Alex's veterinarian is returning from vacation to personally conduct this necrospy.'"

daria42 writes "Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world.""

An anonymous reader wrote us with a link to News.com's coverage of the first official YouTube get-together. Video aficionados from as far away as Australia descended on the Pier 39 shopping complex in San Francisco to meet and, of course, videotape each other. An estimated 100 some people attended the 'As One' event, which allowed some of the most popular bloggers and video posters to meet their fans. "'I don't have any groupies yet,' said Ben Going when asked whether his Internet fame has changed his life. The 21-year-old waiter from Huntsville, Ala., has a regular YouTube audience that numbers nearly 26,000. Two minutes after making his joke, Going was approached by two red-haired teenagers who asked him for an autograph. Going, known at YouTube as Boh3m3, shrugged at a reporter and appeared simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed. Lowering his hat, the one Going wears in many of his videos, he signed away."

musicon writes "A group of scientists at Purdue University have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper, and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power. It could also have widespread civilian applications in the future. Researchers tested the first tactical biorefinery prototype in November and found that it produced approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumed."

Steve Kerrison writes "Despite a woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock, and a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance (and who would I be not to mention the diminishing AMD fanboy numbers?), AMD's still got enough tricks up its sleeve to retaliate against Intel in due course. HEXUS.net has an opinion piece on why AMD isn't up the creek. From the article: AMD has been showing off its 65nm wafers for a few months now, which means the Rev G core is on its way. Even if the DDR2 memory controller which arrived with the Rev F only had a small performance benefit, Rev G has a few more improvements than just the die shrink. The latter will enable higher clock speeds and a lower price, plus allow AMD to compete on an equal playing field to Intel, which has been manufacturing 65nm processors since the Pentium XE 955 at the end of 2005."

Cilibrin writes "PC World has posted a story on the 25 dumbest dot-coms and silliest sites. Among those to make the list are the pet-related Neuticles — a site for testicular implants for pets — and every child's favorite, Rabies for Kids." From the article: "As venture capitalists scramble to throw money at anything labeled Ajax or Web 2.0, and Web publishing becomes so simple that anyone with a working mouse hand can put up a site, we offer our list of the 25 worst Web sites of all time. Many of our bottom 25 date from the dot-com boom, when no bad idea went unfunded. Some sites were outright scams — at least two of our featured Net entrepreneurs spent some time in the pokey. Others are just examples of bad design, or sites that got a little too careless with users' information, or tried to demand far too much personal data for too little benefit. And to prove we're not afraid to pick on somebody much bigger than us, our pick for the worst Web site may be the hottest cyberspot on the planet right now. "

BrentRJones writes "I signed up for the Do Not Call registry the first day I heard of it, and I have to say that I have gotten very few telemarketers calling over the past couple of years. However, there now seems to be more calls that start, 'This is a survey...' or some other such excuse. I do not mind getting a few charity appeals or calls from those I have done business with in the past, but I do wish that I could avoid the political phone calls. I am curious what other Slashdot folks are experiencing, and I am also wondering if I say, 'Please remove from any list that you have.' when I am called, will this do any good?"

An anonymous reader writes "A Virginia appeals court has upheld the first felony conviction under a state anti-spam law. In the process, the court also suggested that spam recipients might be able to sue spammers for money damages. According to the court, taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property. Perhaps because of this decision, spammers will soon find themselves on the receiving end of a million dollar class action suit."

gerald626 writes "IBM announced today that they have formed an agreement to purchase ISS for 1.3 billion dollars." From the article: " The all-cash transaction of about $28 per share is meant to bolster IBM's ability to deliver security services to corporations, the company said. ISS builds network protection products and services, including intrusion detection and monitoring tools. IBM said it intends to use ISS's expertise and software to provide more robust security-related services to its corporate customers."

Noryungi writes "Hot on the heels of Despair dot com, here comes... the Star Trek Inspirational Posters!. Imagine a mind-meld of Mr Spock, Despair's demotivational attitude and the Linux Distro Parodies, and you have one heck of a funny site. If you are a true Trekkie, don't click on the link, as this is certainly going to offend you..."