Quanetic Software

A piece up at Mashable explores how some schools and universities are finding success at integrating social gaming into their education curriculum. Various game-related programs are getting assistance these days from sources like the government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "For the less well-to-do educator, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. Gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection. Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman has been evaluating the educational impacts of the game and is optimistic about her preliminary findings. 'The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. Their questions were insightful. I felt like I was having a discussion with scientist colleagues,' said Stegman. Perhaps more importantly, the video game excites students about science. Motivating more youngsters to adopt a science-related career track has became a major education initiative of the Obama administration. So desperate to find a solution that motivates students to become scientists, the government has even enlisted Darpa, the Department of Defense’s 'mad scientist' research organization, to figure out a solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "The only smartphone Linus Torvalds doesn't hate is that much less unlikable now that Google has quietly chopped $200 off its early termination fee on the Nexus One. Customers who cancel the service had been on the hook for $550, including a $350 Google cancellation charge. Google has reduced their fee to $150 — but users are still liable for a $200 ETF from T-Mobile. Users have a 14-day grace period during which they do not have to pay either charge, although they may be hit with a restocking fee. The $350 total fee matches one of the highest in the industry, charged by Verizon. Google did not announce the change but simply altered its online terms-of-service document." The price cut could add momentum to a phone that, by one reckoning, costs only $49 unlocked.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GJdeBoer writes "The book is aimed at people who are managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it's not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, and it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti." Read on for the rest of GJdeBoer's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the oh-so-dreaded Hallmark holiday on the horizon we are flooded with tips and tricks (mostly designed to sell us things our mates cannot live without) of how to please/capture/sedate the ones we care for. One writer even suggests ways to capture the interest of a geeky girl. That said, what are some of the crazier romantically inspired, geeky V-day stunts or activities that you or someone you know has executed to terrible success or failure?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Part II, dig deeper into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. Explore how to incorporate SVG in a cross-browser friendly manner, including using SVGWeb to ensure that the SVG shows in Internet Explorer. And discover the unique characteristic that makes SVG ideal for page backgrounds: scalability.

Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. In Part I of a two-part series, Shelley Powers covers important basics of working with SVG, including browser support and accessibility.

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

Because clients expect everything to be faster, better, and simpler, web professionals must take an instant, foolproof, paperless, modern approach to how clients approve proposals and sign contracts. Implementing an instantaneous contract agreement helps to get projects off the ground, attract clients on tight timelines, and prevent potential delays. All it takes is a little PHP and some PDF magic.

As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content. Erin Scime shows us how.

Until now, chances are that if we dropped text onto a web page in a system font at a reasonable size, it was legible. But with many typefaces about to be freed for use on websites, choosing the right ones to complement a site's design will be far more challenging. Many faces to which we’ll soon have access were never meant for screen use, either because they’re aesthetically unsuitable or because they’re just plain illegible. Jason Santa Maria, a force behind improved type on the web, presents qualities and methods to keep in mind as we venture into the widening world of web type.

Web fonts are here. Now that browsers support real fonts in web pages and we can license complete typefaces for such use, it's time to think pragmatically about how to use real fonts in our web projects. Above all, we need to know how our type renders in screens, in web browsers. To that end, Tim Brown has created Web Font Specimen, a handy, free resource web designers and type designers can use to see how typefaces will look on the web.

It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.

"Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery.

A bad client relationship is like a bad marriage without the benefits. To avoid such relationships, or to fix the one you’re in, learn the five classic signs of trouble. Recognizing the never-ending contract revisionist, the giant project team, the vanishing boss and other warning signs can help you run successful, angst-free projects.

The Rhode Island School of Design has a set of beautiful designs for dazzle ship camouflage. Dazzle Camouflage was a way to confuse submarine operators as to the heading and speed of warships, so that they could not effectively fire torpedoes to sink them. Certainly a lot more colorful than today's camo! (previously)

Compare and Contrast: Dougal Wilson's video for Goldfrapp's "Happiness" vs. Norman McLaren's "Neighbours." (previously)
Despite the several previous posts that reference McLaren, I think the connections (and divergences) between what may be the greatest work of pixilation of all time* and Wilson's video for "Happiness" (which is, in effect, a live action version of what McLaren's actors in "Neighbours" did to achieve the illusion of flight) merit a post.

*of all time!

Earlier today, the first Viet Nam veteran ever elected to congress, died. John Murtha (as of this past Saturday, Pennsylvania's longest serving congressman) was the 19 term representative of Pennsylvania's 12th district, most notably the home of Johnstown, and which for most of his service included Shanksville. He was a hawkish, conservative Democrat, infamous for his involvement in the Abscam controversy, and most recently the FBI's inquiry into the lobbying firm PMA. He could be said to have been very representative, and certainly very supportive of his blue collar district—Pro-gun, anti-abortion, and at first a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, but eventually one of its greatest critics. But that criticism came at a price. John Murtha was 77.
His acceptance speech for the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award

His last filmed interview

His last print interview

Wikipedia

His obituary in his local paper

In the New York Times

Health Care: Who Knows 'Best'? "...comparative research on effectiveness is only part of the strategy to improve care. A second science has captured the imagination of policymakers in the White House: behavioral economics. This field attempts to explain pitfalls in reasoning and judgment that cause people to make apparently wrong decisions; its adherents believe in policies that protect against unsound clinical choices. But there is a schism between presidential advisers in their thinking over whether legislation should be coercive, aggressively pushing doctors and patients to do what the government defines as best, or whether it should be respectful of their own autonomy in making decisions. The President and Congress appear to be of two minds. How this difference is resolved will profoundly shape the culture of health care in America." Interesting NY Review of Books article by Jerome Groopman.

Charlie Nothing made guitars--
Dingulators--from American cars.
He'd play them and sing a song about wars or higher powers,
or how to keep from spending time behind bars.
His something-side wrote, and helped bees with the flowers.
Good-bye, Charlie Nothing, wherever you are.

He was an enigma, a man looking for a home, producing writing that was cryptic and full of longing.... the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy's background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word.

The real Timothy McSweeney, after whom Dave Eggers' website was named, has died. (hattip: Kottke)

The singer Pink's recent performance at the Grammy's evoked this reaction from comedian Joe Rogan: Her performance was like Jimi Hendrix doing the star spangled banner while Michael Jackson moon walked and Susan Boyle sang back up. The song, "Glitter in the Air," is from Pink's 2008 album "Funhouse." Much of that album was Pink's reflections on the breakup of her marriage to motocross star Carey Hart. But the story between Pink and Hart doesn't end there...
Pink and Carey Hart were married in 2006 (she asked him to marry her by holding up a sign during one of his races). They separated in early 2008 prompting Pink to write her number one hit "So What." The song opens with the lines "I guess I just lost my husband, I don't know where he went." The video includes a giant pillow fight.

Later that year Hart's brother died in a motorcycle accident. Pink attended the funeral, sang at a benefit, and the two eventually reconciled. Hart then surprised Pink in Hannover, Germany at the final show of her "Funhouse Tour." During Pink's performance of "So What," the song about the end of their relationship, the dancers sneaked Hart, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, on-stage (in place of the dancer who is supposed to represent Hart). Pink pulls his hood off and, upon recognizing Hart, staggers backwards in surprise. Then she pulls him in for a kiss. Cue the pillow fight...

"What Would You Change About the NYC Taxi Cab?" is one response to The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission's call for a new taxi cab design.
New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission:

Today's taxi fleet is made up of 16 different vehicles, supported by 9 manufacturers. None of the vehicles currently approved as taxis were designed by the original manufacturers as taxis; rather they have all been outfitted ("hacked up") by third party upfitters, garages and meter shops to
conform to TLC's taxicab specifications. But these current vehicles fall short of meeting the
needs of stakeholders: there is no one vehicle that is clean, accessible, and comfortable and
meets the needs of a New York City taxicab.

The goal of the RFP is to seek a highly-qualified manufacturer that has the knowledge
and practical experience necessary to bring the TLC's and its stakeholders' vision of the next
generation of taxicab to fruition, representing all the stated qualities below:

• Meets highest safety standards


• Superior passenger experience


• Superior driver comfort and amenities


• Appropriate purchase price and ongoing maintenance and repair costs


• Smaller environmental footprint (lower emissions and improved fuel economy)


• Smaller physical footprint (with more usable interior room)


• Universal accessibility for all users


• Iconic design that will identify the new taxi with New York City

PDF

The United States and Australia have long shared a peaceful alliance, but it was not always so. In 1942, U.S servicemen and Australian soldiers fought openly and violently in what is known today as The Battle of Brisbane.
During World War 2, almost 300,000 US servicemen were stationed in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Although the relationship between American and Australian soldiers was a mostly cooperative and friendly one, many Australian soldiers were disgruntled with not only the better pay and rations American soldiers recieved, but also the greater success that American soldiers were enjoying with Brisbane women as a result. Many Brisbane residents often complained at the behaviour of American service personell, with a popular phrase amongst most Brisbanites saying that the Americans were "overpaid, oversexed and over here." As a result, tensions began to rise between the two groups.

Because the events of the Battle of Brisbane were largely supressed at the time, there have been differing versions told of how the fighting began. However the most widely accepted story says that on November 26 an intoxicated Private James R. Stein of the U.S. 404th Signal Company left the hotel where he had been drinking when it closed at 6:50pm and began walking to the Post Exchange PX on the corner of Brisbane's Creek and Adelaide Streets. Stopping to talk to three Australian (it is unclear if they were soldiers or civilians), an American MP challenged Stein for his leave pass. In his drunken state it took Stein a little while longer than it should have to find it and the MP began to arrest him. The Australians verbally defended Stein and when the MP went to strike the Australians, the Battle of Brisbane began in earnest, running over the course of two nights with the end result seeing one Australian soldier killed, several U.S soldiers injured and several hundered people injured.

"Imagine, amid the grey serge of wartime France, a tribe of youngsters with all the colourful decadence of punks or teddy boys. Wearing zoot suits cut off at the knee (the better to show off their brightly coloured socks), with hair sculpted into grand quiffs, and shoes with triple-height soles - looking like glam-rock footwear 30 years early - these were the kids who would lay the foundations of nightclubbing. Ladies and gentlemen, les Zazous."
Similar to the Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Kids of Germany and the Schlurfs of Austria, Les Zazous protested Nazi 'culture' through their dress, dance, and other acts of nonconformism.

"When the yellow star was forced on Jews, non-Jews who objected began to wear yellow stars with 'Buddhist', 'Goy' (Gentile) or 'Victory'. Some Zazous took this up, with 'Zazou' written below the star. When the French Jews were removed from the scene, the Vichy regime and their Nazi masters turned on the Zazous."

"Soon, round-ups began in bars and Zazous were beaten on the street. They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organisations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. 'Scalp the Zazous!' became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest."

Zazous: dancing under the Nazis in France

Images of Les Zazous

Inspirations:
Zaz Zuh Zaz, by Cab Calloway
Georges Brassens' cover of Je Suis Swing, by Johnny Hess
Ils Sont Zazous, by Johnny Hess

Found Functions. An elegant demonstration of beauty in mathematics (and landscape). Nikki Graziano is a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology; some of her photographs were recently featured in Wired. Graziano "overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. ... Graziano doesn't go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she's got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph."

This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You. Also available new and used but with the dust-cover missing from Mythic Pictograms who presumably think that it's a "no prize" [via].

The strangely sexist ads of Super Bowl XLIV, beginning with the woman hating Dodge Charger ad that broke my mind. (via The A.V. Club's Super Bowl Ads roundup)
See also the Bud Light Book Club, the "Regain-your-spine" ad for a portable television and the Dockers "no-pants" ad.

People are also worked up about the Bridgestone ad where a guy prefers his tires to a woman, but the real sin there is the bad wife/life pun.

And, of course, there was the Focus On The Family anti-abortion ad, which is notable for not really saying anything at all other than Tim Tebow's mom loves him. The Hater hates on it here.

Other notable ads include the Google search story ad and the Late Show ad with Letterman and Leno (previously).

Oh, and these commercials were aired during the most watched program ever to air on television, and the ads themselves are featured on prominate pages on both YouTube and Hulu.

"...one of the most famous of all vaudeville tramps at the beginning of the 20th century was Nat Wills. He appeared on stage with a toothless grin, scruffy face, rough clothes, and oversized shoes, but he spoke like a gentleman and delighted audiences with his topical humor and observations on modern life. Released in 1909, his monologue, 'No News, or What Killed the Dog' took off like a wildfire and became one of the early recording industry's all-time biggest smash hits." // Collected Works of Nat M. Wills.

The screen test offers a disorienting angle on 'behind the scenes' footage—straight through the camera.
More fun screen tests and auditions:

Marilyn Monroe for Something's Got To Give
James Dean and Paul Newman can't print what they think of each other.
Guy Williams really wants to start working in about a week.
Adam West and Burton Gervis strike a pose.
Don't worry, Bruce Lee will not hit that man.
Dick van Dyke gums and spins.

Sam Neill's friends call him...
John Belushi horks his Brando impression. (More SNL auditions previously.)
Sharon Stone rehearses her interrogation and the lie detector scene. (NSFW)
Natalie Portman auditioning for Leon.
Dustin Hoffman has a little laryngitis.
"Vicky" Smith is an all-Texas girl. (pNSFW)

The Von Trapp Family auditions in four parts: 2, 3, 4

And finally, a groovy little selection from Andy Warhol's countless reels of screen tests:
Bob Dylan
Nico
Lou Reed
Edie Sedgwick
Ingrid Superstar

'As part of its budget for the next year [pdf], DARPA is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating "the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement."' Via Futurismic
I was relieved to see that Danger Room included the following (emphasis mine):

Of course, Darpa's up against some vexing, fundamental laws of nature — not to mention bioethics — as they embark on the lab beast program. First, they might want to rethink the idea of evolution as a random series of events, says NYU biology professor David Fitch. "Evolution by selection is nota random process at all, and is actually a hugely efficient design algorithm used extensively in computation and engineering," he e-mails Danger Room.

Came across this video today and thought I'd share. The original track of Darth Vader's voice as performed by the British actor that played him, David Prowse. Imagine how different Star Wars would have been if they had left it like this. From the 2004 documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy.

Hi, I'm Vincent "Vinny" Van Gogh...artist, mad man, dead guy. I live with James T Kirk and Jesus in the City of Industry--where we pretty much just watch TV all day. This is my blog about it.

Originally developed for military tasks, amphibious buses have found a niche running tourist services in various cities around the world. But now, Scotland is about to get the first timetabled amphibious bus passenger service, replacing a ferry route in Glasgow and extending it inland to a nearby town and a shopping centre.
While tourist operations typically use modified military personnel carriers, the Glasgow service will use a purpose-built amphibious passenger bus named the Amfibus, of which costs £700,000, looks much like a regular road bus and has been used by tour operators in the Netherlands, and will cross the Clyde between Renfrew and Yoker. The service made its maiden voyage today, but was temporarily grounded afterward after a flotation bag had worked loose.

Internet Archaeology is archiving the early graphics of the Internet. There are still graphics, animated ones, and complete websites. They also have a blog featuring select images. (via) Some images NSFW.

Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur. Being a Statistical Analysis of Graffiti Found at the University of Chicago Library.
Full Dataset. (google docs spreadsheet)

B-Level Men's Bathroom

(Previously-ish)

The Qanat; a water management system from C7th BC still in use today;is one of the wonders of the world, and keeps the desert alive. This fascinating 17 min video from UNESCO is a good introduction to the subject.
Cooling provided by Qanat's is still in use in Yazd, Iran.
Modern warfare scores a gigantic fail in the battle for hearts and minds. (wiki)

Slacker is a unique film written and directed by Richard Linklater that follows the life of various characters in a Austin, Texas. Mind-numbingly boring or oddly captivating, Slacker provided an inspiration to other independent movies of the era and helped established the image of slacker as we see it today. Quoting Ebert, "We don't get a story, but we do get a feeling. " A Salon retrospective.

Do not be alarmed! Salt substitute is radioactive, but it's ok to eat. It also helps keep the earth's core warm.

Jeff Koons joins other modern artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella in treating BMW cars as a canvas for art.
All the BMW art cars. (Previously, with lots of dead links.)

The U.S. Coast Guard is shutting down a mapping service called Loran-C, which has been in use since World War II. Some advocates say killing Loran will make the U.S. too reliant on its replacement: GPS.

Police in China have shut down what is believed to be the largest Web site for training computer hackers, according to local media reports.

Mission managers loaded the crew into the space shuttle Endeavour early Monday for a second attempt in as many days at getting into orbit.

Google long has been an advocate of a single Web, one that's free of government censorship and barriers to information access.

A proposed partnership between the French government and Google is stoking fears in France that the country's literary treasures will fall under commercial control of a U.S. technology company.

As the players, coaches and halftime performers -- not to mention the Lombardi Trophy -- made their way to Miami's Sun Life Stadium for the Super Bowl on Sunday, Jerry Hunter and company were keeping a close eye on them.

The price of power has always been a political issue -- but now campaigners argue it could be the key to starting a green energy revolution.

On the eve of Sunday's launch of space shuttle Endeavour, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said he supports President Obama's goal of making the space industry a commercial venture, but is concerned about potential job losses at the agency.

Facebook updates its homepage to emphasize games and apps and make it easier to find updates from friends. The site now has 400 million users.

If you subscribe to the adages "the more, the merrier" or "bigger is better," then you should be plenty happy with Sony's MAG -- a PlayStation 3 exclusive that lets you battle with up to 256 players over the Internet in a number of near-future skirmishes.