Here we have a young Michael Phelps and the man he would pull through the water while training.

An anonymous reader writes "Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop."

If you're like me, the first thing that pops into your mind when you think about chess is the Wu-Tang Clan. Now the Clan have launched a website called WuChess.com , "the world's first online chess and urban social network." I hope instead of black and white they use east coast, west coast pieces.

spielermacher writes "Gamasutra is running an interesting analysis written by Flying Lab Software Producer Joe Ludwig explaining why there are not more successful Console MMOGs. Some reasons given: lack of keyboard, MMOG players like to play in pairs, business model doesn't always work out for the developer, larger installed base of game-quality PCs, and others."

geekinchief points to a just-posted interview at Laptop Magazine "with Canonical's market manager, Gerry Carr, where he talks about Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Some interesting details: Canonical does not plan to make the Netbook remix available for download or sale. It will only come pre-installed on new systems. It will boot in 5-10 seconds."

wiredog writes "According to National Geographic, Robert Ballard's search for the RMS Titanic in 1985 was a cover operation for the real search: They were looking for the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that sank during the Cold War." ABC News also has a story on this two-fer undersea search.

amplt1337 writes "Debates about the profitability of 'free' continue to rage, but at least one major media conglomerate — Viacom — is pushing forward with releasing paid-for content for free on the Internet. Of course, the prospect of free and easy full-length Daily Show episodes has caused some tension with cable providers, who pay a hefty premium for a heretofore-exclusive right to distribute the conglom's content (there are obvious parallels with the conflict between labels and musicians). What strikes me as really interesting is that even an old, entrenched company like Viacom has enough vision to see the opportunity for increased profits through free distribution — provided they can control that distribution (see their YouTube lawsuit) and have discretion over just how free they go. Of course, the NYT itself has had its own experience with expanding access to previously fee-based content ..."

Ubisoft's Julian Geright is apparently quite confident in the power of the next installment of the Tom Clancy series with Tom Clancy: Endwar . Designed specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Geright hopes that this is a breakthrough for console RTS play similar to Goldeneye's FPS breakout. "This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar, [...] It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."

himicos was one of many readers to point out one recent success of scientists working to develop working brain-machine interfaces, writing "A team at the university of Pittsburgh has finally advanced a 2002 technology enough for use in prosthetic limbs, the targeted application all along. Training computer models to the firing patterns of the neurons in the parts of the brain that control motion, they are able to project the intentions of a monkey to a robotic arm, which follows the will of the animal. The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored." Reader phpmysqldev adds a link to coverage at the BBC, and writes "This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities." (Note that this research has been going on for quite some time.)