Last Christmas I wrote a little essay entitled: "A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an atheist."
The Wall Street Journal ran it, and it caused quite a stir. I was even asked to answer some of the comments.
So for Easter I thought I'd do another one. Here it is.
By: Ricky Gervais, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Don't live in an established startup hub? Grow your own. Venture capitalist Brad Feld, the author of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepeneurial Ecosystem in Your City, helped create one in Boulder, Colorado. He explains how.
By: Tom Cheshire, Edited by: David Cornish
Larry Page lives by the gospel of 10x. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by ten per cent. Not the CEO and cofounder of Google.
The way Page sees it, a ten per cent improvement means that you're doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won't fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.
That's why Page expects his employees to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition. That means he isn't satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand-per-cent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what's technically possible and having fun in the process.
By: Steven Levy, Edited by: David Cornish
Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, has a missile -- the Hyper-Velocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) -- that could blast nearby space rocks by exploding them from within, Armaggedon-style. Up front: a "kinetic energy interceptor". In the back: a nuke.
By: Ben Paynter, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
In 1982, Caltech chemist Harry Gray discovered that electrons "tunnel" -- skip across chains of molecules -- through proteins. This turns out to be how living things convert energy into fuel. It's all made possible by hybrid molecules called metalloproteins, which combine the flexibility of proteins with metal's ability to catalyse chemical reactions.
By: Thomas Hayden, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
It's hard, clear, chemically inert, frictionless and an excellent conductor of heat. And it's made of one of the most common elements: carbon. Diamond -- just carbon crystal, really -- is exceedingly useful in fields from microelectronics to water treatment. Unfortunately, large diamonds are also rare. But imagine if the stuff was as ubiquitous as steel.
By: Ted Greenwald, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
A Soyuz capsule has arrived at the International Space Station just six hours after launch, having been the first to take a quicker route to the orbiting science lab.
Instead of the normal 36 orbits and more than fifty hours of journey from the surface to the ISS, the capsule instead circled the Earth just four times, using intricate ballistics manoeuvres to take a quicker route.
By: Duncan Geere,
Online retail giant Amazon has bought social book discovery website Goodreadsfor an undisclosed sum.
The San Francisco based company describes itself as a "social cataloguing" website, and was founded in 2006. It lets users build up a personal library of books that they've read, create reading lists, and suggest titles to others.
By: Duncan Geere,
In 1956, a bunch of the top brains in their field thought they could crack the challenge of artificial intelligence over a single hot New England summer. Almost 60 years later, the world is still waiting.
The "spectacularly wrong prediction" of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence made Stuart Armstrong, research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford, start to think about why our predictions about AI are so inaccurate.
The Dartmouth Conference had predicted that over two summer months ten of the brightest people of their generation would solve some of the key problems faced by AI developers, such as getting machines to use language, form abstract concepts and even improve themselves.
If they had been right, we would have had AI back in 1957; today, the conference is mostly credited merely with having coined the term "artificial intelligence".
By: Mark Piesing, Edited by: Olivia Solon
A Soyuz capsule has arrived at the International Space Station just six hours after launch, having been the first to take a quicker route to the orbiting science lab.
Instead of the normal 36 orbits and more than fifty hours of journey from the surface to the ISS, the capsule instead circled the Earth just four times, using intricate ballistics manoeuvres to take a quicker route.
By: Duncan Geere,
Online retail giant Amazon has bought social book discovery website Goodreadsfor an undisclosed sum.
The San Francisco based company describes itself as a "social cataloguing" website, and was founded in 2006. It lets users build up a personal library of books that they've read, create reading lists, and suggest titles to others.
By: Duncan Geere,
BT has convinced residents of Kensington and Chelsea that they can live with "ugly" fibre optic cabling cabinets on their streets. The move comes after the Royal Borough rejected 96 of the installation proposals submitted by the national telco in May last year.…
This week we delve into the murky oceans to find out who's been taking ninja action on our planet's internet backbone; we get envious of the 17-year-old lad who sold a company he founded for $30,000; and we'll discuss the worm-like amphibian that munches on its mother's skin for sustenance.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Mesh-networking standard ZigBee now has support for IP, allowing embedded devices (from 'leccy meters to lightbulbs) to be directly addressed as long as the addresser is using IPv6.…
A US Congressman has said that Sprint and its Japanese suitor Softbank have both pledged not to use equipment manufactured by China's Huawei in Sprint's wireless network, a move that could help the companies clear a hurdle in their planned merger.…
Google has vowed to not sue users, distributors, or developers of technologies covered by some of its key patents, and has started out by protecting the cloudy Hadoop community.…
Living in a city centre is no guarantee of nimble broadband speeds in Blighty, as download rates are a postcode lottery.…
Just a month after chowing down on MongoDB provider ObjectRocket Rackspace is announcing plans to devour another company, this time gobbling up a Redis hoster Exceptional Cloud Services.…
Paypal is floating thousands of its servers on open-source OpenStack and sidelining VMware to become faster than smaller competitors at building payment apps for the cloud.…
Orange is once again the most whinged about telco in the UK, the communications watchdog Ofcom confirmed today.…
At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference on 28 March, Sony Senior Staff Engineer Chris Norden went into greater technical detail on some of the PlayStation 4's underlying hardware, including the PS4 Eye depth-sensing camera. While all of this information is not finalised and subject to change, the presentation gave us our deepest look yet at Sony's next generation of console hardware.
Norden started by focusing on the chips, including the 64-bit x86 CPU that he stressed provided low power consumption and heat. The eight cores are capable of running eight hardware threads, with each core using a 32KiB L1 I-cache and D-cache, and each four-core group sharing 2MiB of L2 Cache. The processor will be able to handle things like atomics, threads, fibres, and ULTs, with out-of-order execution and advanced ISA.
Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level.
By: Kyle Orland, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
Astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova.
Until now there have been two classes of supernovas known, both are extremely luminous events that cause a burst of radiation that can outshine a whole galaxy. A core-collapse supernova is the explosion of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as the Sun. A Type Ia, or thermal runaway supernova, occurs in binary systems, with one star being a tiny white dwarf, when material from the parent star streams onto its surface resulting in a runaway fusion reaction and complete destruction of the white dwarf.
The new class of supernova, called a Type Iax, is fainter and less energetic than Type Ia. Although both varieties come from exploding white dwarfs, Type Iax supernovas may not completely destroy the white dwarf.
By: Jenny Winder, SEN.com, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola's distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most.
You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it's easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke's success, he saw an opportunity.
"Child mortality was very high and the second-biggest killer was diarrhoea, which is simple to prevent," he says. The standard treatment is oral rehydration solution, or ORS, which is essentially salt, sugar and water. "I had the idea of transporting ORS through the Coca-Cola system."
By: Tim Maly, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
Britain's advertising regulator has upheld complaints brought against Virgin Media by BSkyB and BT over the cable company's "unlimited" broadband claims.…
Indonesia will effectively ban cross-border e-commerce and make it harder for foreign firms looking to invest in the country, by mandating that anyone wanting to sell goods online must register a local .ID domain.…
The National Audit Office has warned that the British government's fixation with its digital-by-default agenda could create a "them and us" mentality that excludes more vulnerable members of society who don't access the internet.…
The government of Australia's Capital Territory (ACT) has issued a statement about the use of Bluetooth-sniffing technology for traffic studies.…
Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in seven nations, says Microsoft mouthpiece corporate vice president of corporate communications Frank X Shaw.…
Citrix is moving into application management as part of the company's continued shift away from merely delivering virtualized Windows apps.…
A spokesman for the Egyptian military has reported that three scuba divers have been arrested in the Mediterranean as they tried to cut a submarine data cable owned by local telco Telecom Egypt.…
First virtualization chewed up processors and regurgitated them as a pile of fungible compute resources, then it started gobbling storage, and now it's turned its hungry eye to networks, and IBM wants to help VMware, OpenStack, and others, do the chewing.…
A cyber attack described as the largest in history is currently underway, and it's apparently all because of an argument over some spam.
The Spamhaus Project, based in both London and Geneva, produces lists of email addresses and servers that are known to send out things that most people won't want, from penis enlargement scams to malware and viruses. Someone isn't happy about being blocked -- and right now, a vast cyber attack is directed right at Spamhaus, threatening the internet's core infrastructure.
By: Ian Steadman, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Children's book publisher, Egmont has announced its range of official Minecraft books.
Egmont acquired the publishing rights for the award-winning game in 2012 and has now confirmed that the starting lineup for the project will include four handbooks (The Beginner's Handbook, The Redstone Handbook, The Combat Handbook and The Construction Handbook), an annual, a poster book and an official magazine.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Ofcom designed its 4G auction so there would be four winners - but the UK's fourth player is in no rush to turn on 4G-LTE.…
Ailing Japanese IT giant NEC could be set to jettison yet more of its business and move further from the mobile space after reports suggested its ready to sell subsidiary NEC Mobiling for up to $850 million.…
A couple of Australian optics labs have joined up with vendor Finisar to demonstrate an energy-efficient optical system transmitting 10 Tbps over 850 km.…
Telstra has determined that the catastrophic fire in its Warrnambool Exchange, which in late 2012 took 100,000 Victorians offline, was an accident.…
Portly peoples' hero dictator Kim Jong-un has put the brakes on North Korea’s efforts to haul itself into the 21st century after appearing to ban mobile internet services for tourists less than a month after a historic decision was taken to relax 3G data restrictions.…
Amazon is plugging ultra-secure key management appliances into its cloud to calm enterprise security admins while locking them into its way of doing things.…
One of the most irritating expressions people can use, “broadband at the speed of light”, is a little closer to coming true thanks to researchers from the University of Southampton, who have demonstrated air-filled fibres with propagation happening at 99.7 percent of c.…
Third-ranked US wireless carrier T-Mobile has announced a radical restructuring of its rate plans that includes the elimination of annual contracts, in a move that CEO John Legere says is designed to address consumer frustration.…
The European Commission is off-track and will stifle innovation with its data protection proposals because it's only just catching up with web 2.0, a term coined in the 90s, according to James Leaton Gray, head of information policy and compliance at the BBC. He issued this warning at the Westminster eForum seminar on eprivacy, flagging up the impracticalities of the proposed reforms, pointing out that the future of computing is in your TV -- and the proposals aren't taking this into account.
"It makes me extremely nervous," said Gray. "If you look at IPTV, you're connected to the internet and directly to thousands of TV channels across the world. The present remote control will become a search engine -- it won't be things you type into, it will be about the semantic web, accessing and exchanging data. The idea that it's confounded to computers and a computer-based world is a fallacy."
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Ian Steadman
BT is the only company still bidding for Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) government funds after Fujitsu officially walked away from the process last week: unsurprisingly the national telco has won another fibre contract.…
Google has connected up ten Cape Town schools using unlicensed White Space radio spectrum, hoping to drive legislation permitting broader use of the technology in South Africa and the world.…
Imagine the sitting in a room in the dark in the middle of the night. Then imagine scouring the room for any faint light source: cracks in floorboards, street lighting leaking in through the window, LEDs in electrical fixtures, mobile phone screens… once these are all eliminated, you are left in an unnerving blanket of darkness. It is under these conditions that experimental theatre performance Ring takes place.
Audience members are given wireless headphones to wear and ushered into a room which, after a few minutes, is plunged into complete obscurity. After a few moments, the lights come back up and we are given the option of leaving; otherwise we will be stuck for the next 50 minutes. One lady does. It's not clear whether or not she is a stooge, but it exacerbates the sense of foreboding.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
Vodafone UK reckons it will be strong-armed into sending smutty text messages to kids, thanks to a new proposal by Ofcom.…
Samsung's Galaxy S4 smartphone will use the Qi wireless charging standard, putting Sammy in bed with the Consortium for Wireless Power despite its avowed commitment to the Alliance for Wireless Power it founded with Qualcomm.…
Oracle has added another network-focused tech company to its business as Ellison & Co. try to takeover the IT stacks of telecommunications companies.…
Japan’s reputation as a global technology trend setter has received some rather unlikely validation: after graves in the country started sporting QR codes, the little squares of encoded data have now appeared in cemeteries in China. The codes are placed to provide links to information about the deceased.…
An agricultural research group is working to create a hypoallergenic apple by substituting natural proteins for those which don't cause an allergic reaction.
Apples don't tend to cause the same level of violent allergic reaction as you get with nuts or bee stings but those sensitive to the fruit can still experience unpleasant irritation and blistering of the tongue and lips.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The British Linux company Canonical is teaming with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to create Ubuntu Kylin, a Linux distribution specifically for China.
Kylin will include support for Chinese characters and input methods, and it will integrate with Chinese web services, including music services, online banking tools, and the mapping service operated by local web giant Baidu. The plan is to release the distribution in April 2013.
The reference architecture is being defined by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre, or CSIP. Canonical and CSIP will also be working with the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab in Beijing. The project is part of China's most recent Five Year Plan, which includes strengthening the country's information technology industry.
By: Klint Finley, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
Belgian researchers at ICTEAM have announced a Multipath TCP (MPTCP) demonstration that's routed 50 Gbps of traffic across multiple different paths.…
Last week, T-Mobile scrambled to patch a vulnerability uncovered by two University of California Berkeley students that made its Wi-Fi calling feature susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.…
The EU is examining Apple's deals with network operators, to ensure it's playing fair - but hasn't yet opened an official investigation.…
To make precise digital maps, you just need a balloon and a smartphone, says Stewart Long of Boston's Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, which promotes "making open-source tools to monitor our environment". So how about helping to build the world's most detailed public aerial map?
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan, Edited by: David Cornish
China Mobile will build 200,000 LTE base stations, covering 500 million people and costing 41.7 billion yuan, despite the fact that 4G licences won't be awarded until the end of 2013.…
On the show this week: tiny implantable blood test chip could personalise medicine, UK Samsung Galaxy S4 not getting eight-core processor, botnet defrauds advertisers of £4m per month, Samsung 'Galaxy Watch', new Xbox is 'Always On, Always Connected', geneticists revive extinct frog that gives birth through its mouth, 'prayer' currently best defence against unidentified nearby asteroids.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Brit internet and communications provider Entanet is slowing bringing its systems back to life today after they metaphorically keeled over last night.…
Motorola Solutions' MTP6750 is a police radio with a difference: it sports a five-megapixel camera that not only takes pictures but autographs them to stop bent or bungling coppers tampering with the evidence.…
Myanmar’s gradual re-integration with the rest of the world has taken another step forward after Google partially unblocked its Play app store and switched on a .mm search engine for the region, ahead of a visit by Chairperson Eric Schmidt.…
Australia's National Broadband Network, due for completion in 2021, has announced a three-month delay in its fibre-to-the-premises construction schedule, which if not recovered would represent a miss of a couple of percent on the project's timing.…
After almost a year of continuous technical development, Cloudant is taking the wraps off of a database-as-a-service product served out of data centers operated by Joyent – a product that looks to be technically superior to its nearest as-a-service rival, Amazon's DyanamoDB.…
Google has altered its policy on the use of trademarks on AdWords, extending permission advertisers to use rivals' trademarks in their ads to every nation on earth.…
Some species of sea snake have developed "comically small" heads as a result of nosing around in sand eel burrows.
A research team led by zoologist Kate Sanders of the University of Adelaide discovered that while some sea snakes require a larger skull in order to indulge their diet of larger spiny fish, others prefer to forage in narrow sand eel burrows for food thus benefitting from a more slender cranium.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The joint venture which tried to challenge Qualcomm and Intel in the baseband chip market has collapsed, with the loss of 1,600 jobs and another 3,000 or so finding themselves working for someone else.…
Vodafone, O2 and EE sent their respective CEOs to Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club this morning, hoping to seduce the UK's advertising industry with the promise of SMS and banner deliveries across networks, with bonking to follow.…
BlackBerry Balance, the new feature in BB10 aimed at meeting demand for bring-your-own-device regimes, has been found insufficiently secure for that purpose by Britain's Communications Electronics Security Group (CESG).…
Google has taken its Street View service to new heights after deciding to ditch the infamous car in favour of a simple tripod and camera as it unveiled new shots of some of the world’s tallest mountains.…
Worldwide, the rollout of DNSSEC can comfortably be described as “glacial”, but Google valiantly continues to try to give it profile. Having launched its own DNSSEC service three years ago, Mountain View has now added DNSSEC validation to its public DNS resolvers.…
Phone companies and ISPs in the US have convinced a top advisory panel to hold back the American government from forcing a set of basic IT cybersecurity standards on them.…
Tiny vole-sized ladders are being installed in a London canal to give the resident voles access to new nesting and feeding sites.
The little ladders will be installed at Hanwell Lock Flight in Ealing. The work is part of a wider conservation effort by the Canal and River Trust aiming to boost the water vole population.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Liat Clark
Bill Wei thinks it's time artworks had a little more to identify them than a sticker on the back and a document declaring provenance. "All that's forgeable," says the conservation scientist. His solution is Fing-Art Print, a technology that gives an object a unique fingerprint. The prototype device uses surface-profiling techniques to measure an artwork's roughness, down to a thousandth of a millimetre. "Roughness pretty much stays the same as it ages," Wei explains, making it ideal for identifying artefacts.
The Fing-Art Print consists of a NanoFocus uSurf confocal profilometer, which enables non-contact surface analysis, on a robotic arm, measuring tiny differences in height across the object to produce a three-dimensional false colour image. But Wei wants to take the technology beyond the museum. "The idea is to also fight illegal trafficking of archaeological objects," he explains. The lack of security at digs in the Middle East, for example, makes objects vulnerable to plundering. If they were fingerprinted immediately on discovery, stolen goods could be easily identified.
By: Victoria Turk, Edited by: David Cornish
Researchers at the University of Glasgow have found that cloud storage apps that say they send files to the cloud also leave retrievable versions of files on the devices.…
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) declarations are always news, and with good reason: The ACCC's regulated prices set the floor underneath a host of retail services – mobile, broadband, telephony, business data and so on.…
A team at the Teddington-based National Physics Laboratory (NPL) has developed ReUSE, a type of printed circuit board (PCB) that can be, yep, recycled by immersing it in hot water. Currently only two per cent of a PCB can be recovered at recycling plants. "But we can recover up to 90 per cent," says Martin Wickham, technical leader at the NPL.
The new material comprises layers of polymer connected by a glue that also holds the electronic components of the circuit board together. The glue softens and loses its adhesion when exposed to water hotter than 80 degrees Celsius. This allows the PCB's components, including resistors and capacitors, to be separated from the base with minimal force, and redeployed.
By: Charlie Foster, Edited by: David Cornish
The 2013 Formula 1 season kicked off in Melbourne on 15 March, ending a winter's worth of speculation about which team has found the biggest loophole in the annual update of the rulebook.
For the past several decades those who write the regulations for the world's most popular form of motorsport and those who actually do the racing have engaged in an elaborate dance to find out how far the rules can be stretched and prodded. The result is some of the most creative engineering in the world of racing.
By: Jason Paur, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
Fujitsu has admitted it will no longer bid for money from a £530m pot of taxpayer cash to roll-out broadband in Britain's countryside - effectively leaving the lot up for grabs by BT.…
AT800 - the guys tasked with stamping out radio interference caused by 4G mobile broadband - will switch on 4G transmissions near Dudley to see if Freeview survives the experience.…
Eagle-eyed weibo fans in China have uncovered what appears to be a pre-meditated and co-ordinated attempt to smear Apple following a high profile consumer rights programme on national TV which slammed the firm for its customer service.…
The word “cloud” has become horribly over-used. Your correspondent has even heard hosted PABXs referred to as “cloud telephony”.…
Non-practising entity VirnetX has had its patent case against Cisco dumped by a Texas jury, meaning it won't be seeing any of the $US258 million it had demanded of the networking giant.…
Huawei has been accused of poor security practice by Russian researcher Nikita Tarakanov, who told Black Hat Europe last week that the vendor's 3G and 4G devices are vulnerable and its update server is a massive attack vector.…
RSS reader Feedly says Google's decision to drop its Reader service saw 500,000 people migrate to its services in 48 hours.…
This week, we find out why the Ukraine's military dolphins went AWOL, Bill Gates' assessment of the shortcomings of capitalism and what Samsung has in store for us with the Galaxy S4
By: Olivia Solon,
The chief architect for Google+ is asking Google Reader users what they liked about the due-for-execution RSS service.…
SoftLayer's public cloud business has IBM and EMC sniffing around for a reported $2bn buyout as both companies look to bolster their own networks.…
SoftLayer's public cloud business has IBM and EMC sniffing around for a reported $2bn buyout as both companies look to bolster their own networks.…
Data analysis suggests that the "Higgs-like" particle produced by the Large Hadron Collider in July, 2012 is indeed a Higgs boson.
However, the announcement is still being couched in tentative language as despite the data pointing towards the particle being a Higgs boson the next obstacle will be determining which Higgs boson.
By: Philippa Warr, Edited by: Liat Clark
Samsung is putting an increased focus on the gaming side of its new Galaxy S4 smartphone with an accessory called Game Pad.
The device -- which looks remarkably similar to an Xbox 360 controller -- docks the S4 and connects to the device via Bluetooth. While docked, gamers can use twin analogue joysticks as well as a D-pad and four action buttons while gaming.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Deep beneath the ocean floor off the Pacific Northwest coast, scientists have described the existence of a potentially vast realm of life, one almost completely disconnected from the world above.
Persisting in microscopic cracks in the basalt rocks of Earth's oceanic crust is a complex microbial ecosystem fuelled entirely by chemical reactions with rocks and seawater, rather than sunlight or the organic byproducts of light-harvesting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
Such modes of life, technically known as chemosynthetic, are not unprecedented, having also been found deep in mine shafts and around seafloor hydrothermal vents. Never before, though, have they been found on so vast a scale. In pure geographical area, these oceanic crust systems may contain the largest ecosystem on Earth.
By: Brandon Keim, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
LG announced that its Optimus G Pro smartphone will pause video playback when it detects that its owner has stopped looking at it - just hours before Samsung unveiled the same feature for the Galaxy S4.…
Google's decision to shut down its RSS Reader product has set the internet alight with protest and migration plans.…
BT has inked a deal to roll out fibre broadband in Lincolnshire, scooping up yet more cash from the British government.…
Google has updated its BigQuery cloud analytic service to make it attractive to people familiar with SQL.…
