PaulSpoerry.com

“Services like box.net, openomy, and eSnips are more than just places to access your files from the web. Some include media organization tools, Windows shell integration, drag-and-drop uploading, tagging, and social content sharing. ExtremeTech has a review up of six online storage services with Web 2.0 twists.” Curiously missing from the list was xdrive. XDrive was one of the first movers in this area, and has been bought buy AOL so it has some big muscle behind it.

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Check out Weather.com’s new interactive weather map based on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. You can zoom in and out smoothly and animate the satellite and radar views. You can adjust transparency and map-type. Very slick stuff!!

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Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only winner in a federal jury’s $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format.

Backers of alternative formats have sought for years to replace MP3, which offers relatively lower quality sound than next-generation technologies — including the nominal successor to MP3 itself, MP3Pro. Apple uses the MPEG industry standard, AAC; Microsoft uses its proprietary Windows Media format; and Sony has developed its own, largely ignored flavor. Open-source, royalty-free options, such as Ogg Vorbis, remain dark horse competitors. But none have displaced MP3, the first and most widely adopted format of all.

Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.

It’s not immediately clear what the implications of Thursday’s judgment are for other MP3 licensees, which include hundreds of companies who already pay royalties to Fraunhofer/Thomson — previously accepted as the only licensor of MP3 technology.

What’s interesting is that this article doesn’t even mention FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. (BTW if you want to play FLAC in Windows Media Player see this guide)This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio. FLAC is a total open source codec

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This is an informative article based on a pro-evolution standpoint from Scientific American. When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution’s truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere–except in the public imagination.

Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as “intelligent design” to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a “wedge” for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.

Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.

To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common “scientific” arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.

(Poster’s note… I don’t have a problem with people believing in creationism. For most people, I believe faith is a good thing, I just don’t like them pushing Creationism aka Intelligent Design in school science classes)

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Google co-founder Larry Page has a theory: your DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed, making it smaller than any modern operating system like Linux or Windows.

The programming language of humans, if you will, would include the workings of your brain, said Page, who offered his hypothesis Friday night during a plenary lecture here at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. His guess, he said, was that the brain’s algorithms weren’t all that complicated and could be approximated, eventually, with a lot of computational power.

“We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale,” Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. “It’s not as far off as people think.”

Google has probably has some of the most powerful parallel processing in the world and they’re trying to build AI. What the article doesn’t speculate is what kind of AI? Search AI? Totally humanlike AI? What most people don’t realize is that AI is around us all the time. Traction control on your car… that was revolutionary AI at the time to be able to adjust to slipping without human intervention, but now people just dismiss it as something a car should have.

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