General Lee's Peking writes to mention an Associated Press article about a sad development in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Because of some new DoD-related legislation, the organization will no longer be able to award the $2 Million prize to grand challenge winners. It's not all bad, though; they still get a trophy. From the article: "The absence of a lucrative cash prize has forced some teams to retool their game plan and others to drop out. Some fear it would be harder to attract corporate sponsors and hurt media coverage of the race, which drew a throng of reporters last year and inspired a PBS documentary. 'The icing on the cake is gone,' said Ivar Schoenmeyr, team leader of California-based Team CyberRider, which is retrofitting a Toyota Prius hybrid."

FleaPlus writes "UCLA neuroscience professor Dario Ringach, known for his contributions to our understanding of how the visual system processes information, has been forced to give up his experiments by the actions of animal-rights extremists. Although he and his family had endured harassment and vandalization by animal-rights activists for years, Ringach reconsidered after extremists tried to firebomb a colleague's home and accidentally left their Molotov cocktail on an elderly neighbor's doorstep. Ringach sent an email to animal activist groups saying, 'You win... please don't bother my family anymore.'"

eldavojohn writes "The Yankee Group (a Boston Technology firm) recently announced that it predicts Sony's PS3 to lead the market with a 44% share through 2011. Most interesting is their prediction that the Wii will maintain only 16% of the market share. From the article: 'The analyst group believes Sony will lead in next-gen market share by 44% in 2011, with Xbox 360 taking a close 40% share, followed by Wii with a wee little bitty 16% share.'"

lukfil writes "We all know of floating point numbers, so much so that we reach for them each time we write code that does math. But do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?"