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Delchanat points out a blog entry which notes, "The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon and Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems. Not only because they want to, but because they need to. If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as efficiently as possible. You need your technology to be able to scale in a similar way as other, comparable utilities or large real-time systems are scaling — utilities like telephony and electricity. Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires. Amazon SimpleDB is built upon Erlang. IMDB (owned by Amazon) is switching from Perl to Erlang. Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on."

I certainly don't want to nit-pick, but isn't this already widely known? I've read dozens of articles about how glass panes in very old buildings have settled to the point where the top is so thin it breaks at the barest touch, while the bottom of the panes have thickened to near-translucence. Even in high school (many moons ago) we were taught that glass is technically a liquid.

WTF? Someone modded me insightful! Mods can't possibly be that dumb can they? (Yeah, yeah, I must be new around here... ;)

How is this any different than what GPL did to BSD? Show up, act like you invented the term "free software", impose a bunch of draconian restrictions that didn't used to exist and loudly tell everyone that your choice of strictures does good for the community?

Preparing for inappropriate troll and flamebait mods. It's still a legitimate question.

An anonymous reader writes "The New York TImes is reporting:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat — even if it has caused a "near civil war" within the organization.

The organization said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."

"

eldavojohn writes "Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It's about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. 'If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory ... To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.'" And ... cue the evil chortling.

JoeTechie writes "DARPA has another challenge. Saw it in WIRED, but it is quite old already. First response was January 2007.
Build an electronic student that can learn anything with no new programming.
More than your old Machine Learning program that gets better at one thing your new system should be able to learn new tricks with no interventions by you. (So the military can teach it that killing is good?)

Bootstrapped Learning Description
http://fs1.fbo.gov/EPSData/ODA/Synopses/4965/BAA07 -04/BLDescription.pdf

Bootstrapped Learning Proposer Information Pamphlet
http://fs1.fbo.gov/EPSData/ODA/Synopses/4965/BAA07 -04/BLPIPfinal.pdf"
http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/bl/index.htm

sesshomaru writes "Game Politics is reporting that the Entertainment Software Association has been editing Wikipedia entries on modchips and abandonware so that they will be more favorable to their point of view. In other words, they've edited them so that any discussion of legal or moral gray areas are removed and the Wikipedia entries say that these things are illegal, period. Here's a link to the Game Politics article:

ESA Altered Wikipedia Entries on Mod Chips, Abandonware

Links to the alterations made in the article can be found in the article, and thanks to Wikipedia Scanner for uncovering this scandal."
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/08/18/esa-altered-wikipedia-entry-on-mod-chips/

The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public.
http://www.scivee.tv/

Shawn Wilson writes "Nginx (Engine-X) provides a FOSS alternative to high priced Global Traffic Management Appliances from F5 Networks and Global Server Load Balancers from companies such as Foundry Networks and Nortel. Nginx provides a fast and lightweight solution that enables Global Traffic Management. GTM or GSLB is a technique used to direct browsers to faster local copies of the same web content, by using the source IP to identify the geographical location of the user. Detailed installation and setup instructions are available in issue 6 of o3 magazine, a free open source / business digital magazine. The magazine is showcasing the solution, as it is hosted on a Content Delivery Network using the very same solution. Using F5 or another vendor, would have cost the magazine approximately US$250,000, instead of two weekends to configure and test the solution."
http://www.o3magazine.com/pastissues/issue6/

KentuckyFC writes "The largest supernova ever recorded ain't what it seems. Astronomers watched this thing explode in real time last year and were amazed to see it release 100 times more energy than any other supernova. Now astrophysicists think the only way to account for all the energy is if the star were made entirely of quarks. That's cool because quark stars were proposed by Ed Witten at Princeton over 20 years ago."
http://arxivblog.com/?p=13

blast writes "Given the broad field of candidates, I was wondering who the community thinks will make the best President when it comes to representing issues Slashdot readers might care about? Eg: privacy, 'total information awareness', Internet regulation and taxation, net neutrality, copyright/patent reform, the right to read, the right to secure communications, the right to tinker. Who do you think best represents your views? "

Mike writes "Sony Corporation has put online a video of their new flexible 2.5 inch display. The display can be bent in half, is full color, and is apparently relatively inexpensive to make. This could be used in hundreds of cool new products, as well as enhancing thousands of existing products. In fact, it's hard to see where this kind of display wouldn't be used, especially in portable consumer electronics. 'The display combines Sony's organic thin film transistor, or TFT, technology, which is required to make flexible displays, with another kind of technology called organic electroluminescent display, it said. The latter technology is not as widespread for gadgets as the two main display technologies now on the market - liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels. Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that's so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough ... "In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."'"

kbox writes "Some of TiVo's patents have obvious applications and some of them are really held more for defensive purposes, but it's the bizarre ones that I find most interesting and on Tuesday, TiVo was issued a patent for a method of locking down hard drives, that involves creating a password, that is so hard to guess, it would take longer than the expected life of your hard drive for someone to crack. According to the patent document, the method is described as the following.

An authentication system for securing information within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer such that it is difficult or impossible to access the drive by any system other than a designated host is disclosed.

Full Story"

Ant writes "New Scientist reports that it appears that the opposite sex is much more interested in human's face than their bulging biceps or elegant figure, especially if you're a man. At least that's the upshot of the first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to someone's overall attractiveness... Seen on Blue's News."