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BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."

Jonathan Wise writes to share with us an interesting bit of prose describing life as a software engineer. "I am, in the States, known as a Software Engineer. In Canada we're not allowed to call ourselves engineers, although the discipline is no less rigorous than any other kind of engineering. But perhaps its for the best, because 'engineering' describes only a part of what I do. A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy."

An anonymous reader sends us to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for a developing situation. Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, made a post earlier today revealing that Apple was offering him some money (in the wake of the ThinkSecret shutdown) to close down his blog. He said he was interested in taking it. A few hours later, Lyons posted again revealing that Apple's lawyers had contacted him angrily, saying the details of the deal were supposed to remain private. Fake Steve replied 'we either deal out in the open, completely transparently, or we don't deal.' A third post gives details of Apple's lawyers' next response, going totally medieval on him. Since then the situation has calmed down a bit.

YokimaSun writes "PeterM has today released the first beta of his port of the classic game Quake for the Nintendo Gamecube and Nintendo Wii. Awesome release. Quake on Gamecube now runs At 320×264 (PAL), demo 1 runs at comfortably over 70 frames per second. At 640×528, it runs at just under 30. Wii Owners must ensure they do not update to the latest system software which disables support for the SD Media Homebrew Launcher."

The storms that threatened to kill NASA's Mars rovers have abated somewhat - but the rovers are not out of the woods yet

http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=d11c1e45b0c412a6b46b0a342d978857

Jeek Elemental writes ""Courtesy of the US Pentagon, troops in Iraq can now unwind after a hard day's urban warfare and play a video game in which they command a Christian fundamentalist army waging urban warfare in America ! On the streets of New York City ! How cool is that?""
http://www.atheistnation.net/news/?atheist/article,00090

ianare writes "Slight clearing of still-dusty Martian skies has improved the energy situation for both Spirit and Opportunity, allowing controllers to increase the rovers' science observations. Energy production from solar arrays increased to 295 watt hours on Spirit's 1,276th sol (Martian day), which ended early Aug. 6, and to 243 watt hours on Opportunity's sol 1,255 which ended midday Aug. 5. Dust storms obscuring the sun have cut daily output as low as 261 watt hours on Spirit and 128 watt hours on Opportunity in recent weeks, compared with levels above 700 watt hours per sol before the current series of Martian dust storms began in June."
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20070807a.html

chance_encounter writes "President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus has published an article in the Financial Times in which he seems to equate the current global warming debate with totalitarian thought control: 'The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced ... The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.' At the end of the article he proposes several suggestions to improve the global climate debate, including this point: 'Let us resist the politicization of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus," which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.'"

thyrf writes "It seems as though those independent comparisons stated by the producer of the recently uncovered Hatto music fraud took an interesting turn, the BBC reports. Since it was first revealed, William Barrington-Coupe, the late Joyce Hatto's producer and husband admitted replacing the original tracks with those of other artists. However, all is not as it seems. Barrington-Coupe claims he first began to replace snippets of certain tracks where his wife, who had cancer, could be heard groaning in pain. "It is very touching and he does go through every detail and how he did it and he makes it very credible," Mr von Bahr of the BIS music label said. As he got better at replacing the material, the sections grew longer until they in some cases ended up being the entire piece itself. Though we don't quite know why he ended up replacing entire tracks, his confession is convincing enough to call off the legal-heavies. "I don't see how either myself or the industry can get any satisfaction for pure revenge, I think the whole thing is deeply tragic story"."

What is it with hearing aid technology? Having reluctantly discovered I need one, I find that they are stuck in 19th century technology, with anti-competitive practices selling old tech at high prices. I have a nice phone, with a bluetooth headset. My phone plays the radio until a call comes in. Why can't I buy a phone that doubles as a hearing aid, amplifying sounds instead of playing a radio? Come to that, why can't I buy a nice looking bluetooth hearing aid headset? Why do all hearing aids look like they were designed a century ago in Russia? There must be a great product/design opportunity here.

petercasier writes "When asked: "Previous countries visited?"
And your answer is: "Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Then at that moment even a UN diplomatic passport and a Belgian citizenship is not good enough to enter the US.
The story: The Day I Got Deported from the US."

arhhook writes "An executive with South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will plead guilty, serve 10 months in prison and pay a $250,000 fine for conspiring to fix prices of computer memory chips, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday. Young Hwan Park participated in the conspiracy while he was a vice president of sales at Samsung, the world's top memory chip maker, the department said. Park is currently president of Samsung Semiconductor Inc., the company's U.S.-based subsidiary. Park also has agreed to assist the Justice Department in its ongoing investigation, which focuses on dynamic random access memory, or DRAM chips, the kind found in all personal computers."

Kieran C. writes "AT&T looks to be behind a 'grassroots' organization set up to lobby for AT&T's new fiber-to-the-node network. The WHOIS record for the Advanced Technology Alliance currently points to Domains by Proxy, but that hasn't always been the case: 'Earlier this year, the WHOIS record for iltechalliance.org pointed to Jasculca/Terman and Associates of Chicago, a PR firm that specializes in "grassroots outreach and coaliation building."' AT&T is one of their clients and has refused to answer questions about the group and its funding."

Salvance writes "Yahoo News (via ComputerWire) is reporting that Oracle and Red Hat are turning up the heat in the battle over Oracle's new enterprise Linux offering. While Oracle claims they'll be able to offer their 'Unbreakable' version of Red Hat's Linux offering for half the price, Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering.

At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."

Coryoth writes, "In a report commissioned by the UK government, respected economist Sir Nicholas Stern concludes that mitigating global warming could cost around 1% of global GDP if spent immediately, but ignoring the problem could cost between 5% and 20% of global GDP. The 700-page study represents the first major report on climate change from an economist rather than a scientist. The report calls for the introduction of green taxes and carbon trading schemes as soon as possible, and calls on the international community to sign a new pact on greenhouse emissions by next year rather than in 2010/11. At the very least the UK government is taking the report seriously; both major parties are proposing new green taxes. Stern points out, however, that any action will only be effective if truly global."