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Education

Submission + - Drop out and innovate (timeshighereducation.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week.

With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it "stopping out" — and work full time on their ideas.

"Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation," Thiel says. "This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either."

Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. "And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies."

But his plan also clearly challenges the ability of conventional universities to foster innovation. "I do think there are a lot of things people learn in school," Thiel says wryly. "I don't think they learn anything much about entrepreneurship."

Submission + - Postal Trucks to Become Sensor Platforms? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Postal Service may face insolvency by 2011 (it lost $8.5 billion last year). An op-ed piece in today's New York Times proposes an interesting business idea for the Postal Service: use postal trucks as a giant fleet of mobile sensor platforms. (Think Google Streetview on steroids.) The trucks could be outfitted with a variety of sensors (security, environmental, RF ...) and paid for by businesses. The article's author addresses some of the obvious privacy concerns that arise.
Moon

Moon May Have Once Had Water 89

Posted by CmdrTaco from the also-i-may-once-have-had-whisky dept.
Smivs writes "US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed.The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object. Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water. But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago. This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence."
Censorship

Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet 561

Posted by timothy from the but-nancy-pelosi-was-in-the-other-room dept.
selil writes "A story popped up on the ChicagoBoyz Blog. It says 'Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, "Fairness Doctrine" that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums — nothing.'"
NASA

Nasa Details Shuttle's Retirement 400

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can-see-your-house-from-there dept.
schliz writes "Nasa has announced that it intends to officially retire the aging space shuttle fleet by 2010, four years before it has a replacement craft ready. The space shuttle fleet will make ten more flights, mainly to add modules to the International Space Station and carry out repairs and upgrades to the Hubble orbital telescope. The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years, until the Ares booster programme is complete. European and Russian launchers will service the space station in the meantime."
Linux Business

Best Buy Is Selling Ubuntu 656

Posted by kdawson from the but-wait-you-also-get dept.
SirLurksAlot writes "It appears that Best Buy is now selling Ubuntu, both through its Web site and in its brick-and-mortar locations. Going by the release on the product page, Ubuntu has actually been available for the low, low price of $19.99 since May 6th of this year. It is being packaged as the 'Complete Edition.' While they don't specify on the site what version is being offered, a quick call to a local store revealed it to be Hardy Heron, the latest Long Term Support version. How did this development fly under the radar for over two months without anybody noticing?"
Announcements

Submission + - Amazon.com acquires dpreview.com

Submitted by Streetlight
Streetlight writes: Digital Camera Review (http://www.dpreview.com/) announced May 14, 2007, that they had been acquired by amazon.com.



"We're proud and excited to announce that Dpreview has been acquired by the world's leading online retailer, Amazon.com. Started as hobby site in 1998, dpreview.com has grown to be the number one destination for anyone interested in digital cameras and digital photography. Each month dpreview.com has seven million unique visitors (over 22 million sessions) who read over 120 million pages. 'We've worked very hard over the last eight years to deliver consistently high quality content to our readers', founder Phil Askey said. 'It will be fantastic to be able to expand and build on that without compromising our quality or independence. With the support and resources of Amazon we can achieve this.'"
Security

Submission + - Distributed Open Proxy Honeypot Project Results

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Honeypot Project is capturing live web attack data with sensors placed around the world to provide concrete examples of the types of attacks occurring "in the wild," in addition to raising awareness and developing effective countermeasures to new threats. Since January, the Honeypot Project has logged nearly one million web requests and here are the results.
Google

Submission + - Goolgle Indexes Links Found Only in Gmail?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, I purchased a domain to use for a pro bono website I'm building for a local, annual event. I put up a placeholder site, pointed the domain at it, and mailed my contact at the organization (using my Gmail account) to tell her about the domain. This is the only place that the domain was ever mentioned — neither of us have mentioned it to anyone else or any any other website, and have sent no traffic there by any other means than typing the URL into our browsers or clicking on the links in the email. We didn't want anyone to see it yet, since it's not done (or even yet begun, for that matter). When I registered it (several weeks ago), numerous relevant Google keyword searches as well as an explicit search for the domain turned up no results. Now any of these searches brings up this site as the first hit.

From the Gmail Privacy Policy:

When you use Gmail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).
So my hypothesis is that Google gleaned address out of my email via its URL-tracking voodoo and then indexed it, and this possibility does seem covered by their privacy policy. But I still find this pretty disturbing: can't I email someone a URL without the whole world finding out about it? What if the contents of this site fell into what the broader Google Privacy FAQ classifes as "sensitive information"?

..information we know to be related to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality and tied to personal information.
Math

Submission + - $25,000 question: Is this Turing machine universal

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, is offering a 25k prize to anyone who can prove or disprove his conjecture that a particular 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. If true, it would be the simplest universal TM, and possibly simplest universal computational system — even simpler than rule 110. The announcement comes on the 5-year anniversary of the publication of NKS, where among other things Wolfram introduced the current reigning TM champion.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Best way to run Linux Programs in Real-Time

Submitted by sabre86
sabre86 writes: I'm researching using Linux as the operating system for a (preferably hard) real-time, distributed (with approximately ten nodes) environment running on multicore commodity — not embedded — x86 hardware. What Linux and/or open source solutions exist for real-time applications and how do they compare with commercial offerings such as VxWare, RTLinux and QNX?
Security

Submission + - Prof. Johan Pouwelse to Take on RIAA Expert

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Marie Lindor has retained an expert witness of her own to fight the RIAA, and to debunk the testimony and reports of the RIAA's expert" Dr. Doug Jacobson, the "reliability" of which has been challenged by Ms. Lindor in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. Ms. Lindor's expert is none other than Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. It was Prof. Pouwelse's scathing analysis of the RIAA's MediaSentry "investigations" (pdf) in Foundation v. UPC Nederland in the Netherlands which caused the (pdf) courts (pdf) in that country to direct the ISP's there not to turn over the names and addresses of their subscribers, thus nipping in the bud the RIAA's intended litigation juggernaut in that country. Prof. Pouwelse testified in the Netherlands that the RIAA's MediaSentry investigation — upon which Dr. Jacobson relies and the veracity of which he 'assumes' — was 'limited' and 'simplistic', failing to "resolve... relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying....[failing to implement] "actual complete file transfer....simply [taking] filenames at face value and ...[failing to make] any correction for pollution on Kazaa [despite] [p]ollution levels [on Kazaa which] can be as high as 90% for some files....[not being aware of] the limitations of Kazaa in file searching.....[failing to take] computer hygiene precautions ..... [with respect to] multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, [making it] ... difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses ...[it being] possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, [with] ... involvement [but] ...no actual contribution". The notice of designation of expert witness and his curriculum vitae are here."
Businesses

Submission + - The real secret of Mechanical Turk

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Has anyone ever made any decent money completing hits on Mechanical Turk? After "working" for three hours writing trivia questions, I made enough to pay the shipping for my next order at Amazon and then never went back. Obviously it's not for average people like me to make a little extra vacation money. Whatis.com has a new theory — the purpose of Mechanical Turk is to make natural language search a reality. So what's the big deal about natural language search? You need it for enterprise search. It's a whole different animal with a whole different set of issues. Go Bezos!

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