[Quote:]

“The Sony ‘Connect’ DRM-tastic music store is closing shop on March 31, 2008. Another failed experiment in DRM is leaving its paying customers out in the cold with soon-to-be unusable content (unless you violate the DMCA) in the form of audio files DRM locked to Sony’s ATRAC media players. Yet another in a seemingly endless stream of examples of how media companies are punishing their paying, legitimate customers for the RIAA’s own infuriating technological shortsightedness.”

[Quote:]

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them.

Even the packaging suffers from poor usability.

via

[Quote:]

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares.

The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.

Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.

62% above for a company in decline? Sounds like desparation..

[Quote:]

Lend me $10, but give me only half of it.

Then you’ll owe me $5, and I’ll owe you $5, and we’ll be even.

[Quote:]

Goldwyn and Sylvia Schroeder, of Sacramento, both 73, said they were nearly victimized by the practice. The chain of events began when an insurance agent made an offer to the couple that sounded like easy money.

That’s really a dead giveaway, isn’t it?

[Quote:]

m a stickler about the use of words like “evidence” and “proof”. So if someone tells you there’s no evidence for some controversial belief, you can be fairly confident that they’re a bad scientist. There’s always evidence, or there wouldn’t be a controversy. If somebody says that “we proved that this was true” or “we set out to prove that this was true” that’s another bad sign. The point here, as [Karl] Popper noted, among others, is that you can never prove anything is true; you can only refute it. So researchers who talk about proving a hypothesis is true rather than testing it make me worried.

SETH: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They overstate; they twist things around to make it come out the way they want. They are way too sure of what they…

TAUBES: Yes, and the really good scientists are the ones, almost by definition, who are most skeptical of evidence that seems to support their beliefs. They’re most aware of how they could have been fooled, how they could have screwed up, or how they might have missed artifacts in their experiment that could have explained what they observed. They’re very careful about what they say. If you ask them to do play devil’s advocate, and tell you how they could have screwed up, then at the very least, they’ll say “Well, if I knew how I could have done it, I would have checked it before I made the claim”. So when I’m talking about discerning the difference between a good scientist and a bad scientist, I’m talking about how they speak about their research, the evidence itself, it’s presence or absence.

[Quote:]

As are the more than 600 cities, towns and villages, almost 200 rivers, and a rudimentary road network marked with thin red lines and extending to some 3,000 miles.

Along with countless hills, mountains, lakes, forests - New Forest and Sherwood - and even Hadrian’s Wall, labelled with its popular name, murus pictorum, the Picts’ Wall.

The significance is enormous, as a new book reveals.

“It is the first modern map of Britain and the oldest surviving map which shows the coastline in recognisable form,” says author Nick Millea, map librarian at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

“All previous maps gave a theological interpretation, showing how Britain fitted into the Christian world.

[Quote:]

The US is in desperate need of 100Mbps “big broadband.” That’s the conclusion of a new report from EDUCAUSE (PDF), a group that represents IT managers at over 2,200 colleges and universities. But these 100Mbps connections are coming slowly; in the meantime, countries like Japan already have them. To avoid falling further behind, the report calls for a national broadband policy to be passed this year, one that includes $100 billion for a fiber-to-the-home infrastructure that will connect every household and business in the country.

The report opens by citing the familiar, dreary facts: US broadband might now be widely available, but it’s slow and relatively expensive. Between 1999 and 2006, the US fell from third place to 20th in the International Telecommunications Union’s broadband usage measurements. When it comes to average connection speeds, the US isn’t beaten just by Japan but also by France, Korea, Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Germany. And it’s not about population size or density, either; Finland, Sweden, and Canada beat us on most broadband metrics despite having lower population density. Finally, we’re getting beat on price, coming in 18th worldwide when it comes to cost per megabyte.

The response from the White House: Mission Accomplished.

[Quote:]

The female rhino survived for 35 hours after being shot twice and having her horn sawn off at Kazrianga National Park in India.

A great series here. One of the more surreal pictures:

[Quote:]

After a Dutch journalist declared that his private investigation had solved the mysterious disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway, the chief prosecutor in Aruba announced today that he is reopening the case.

This all over the front pages over here, and people can hardly talk about anything else. I’ve got a few Aruba-born friends who will be glued to the TV coming sunday, when Peter R. has his show…

[Quote:]

Four men who run one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world have been charged with conspiracy to break copyright law in Sweden.

This will probably go all the way to the european courts..