Scientists: New laser could lead to age of nuclear fusion
Two-million degrees Fahrenheit.
That is temperature produced by a new laser beam, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The department, which on Wednesday announced the successful experiment of the fastest and purest x-ray laser pulses ever achieved, said the laser could achieve temperatures as hot as 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the sun’s corona. Scientists say the laser beam is billion times brighter that any other man-made X-ray source, making it the brightest entity ever created.
http://www.thestatecolumn.com/science/scientists-new-laser-could-lead-to-age-of-nuclear-fusion/#ixzz1kbZGG3mx
U.S. Takes First Steps Toward Internet Voting
The 2012 Republican primary‘s first vote was not cast in New Hampshire, as most Americans would assume. An Okaloosa County, Fla., resident living in Thailand got that privilege in December, thanks to a new technology called LiveBallot.
http://mashable.com/2012/01/26/online-voting-absentee/
Tapie-Full Tilt Poker Deal Hits Pay Dirt
No formal confirmations of additional investors yet, but the noise is ever louder today; Group Bernard Tapie has lined up at least one moneyman “ready to punt.” According to several generally informed sources familiar with weeks of efforts to raise more funds, GBT has locked up a commitment with at least one and maybe two substantial participants to nail the acquisition of the Full Tilt brand. Additional funding might not be crucial, but for Tapie’s reluctance to put in more capital of his own than suits his taste.
http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/content/tapie-full-tilt-poker-deal-hits-pay-dirt-11874
Google Spent Nearly $2 Billion On 79 Acquisitions In 2011
Yesterday, Google filed its 10-K with the SEC, revealing the number of acquisitions and money spent on these purchases in the year. As of Q3, Google had spent over$1.4 billion on 55 acquisitions for the year. Google ended 2011 spending $1.9 billion (including cash and stock) on completing 79 acquisitions during the entirety of the year.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/27/google-spent-nearly-2-billion-on-79-acquisitions-in-2011/
The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google’s home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes. At the same time, the data is being processed by thousands of individual server processes, each doing everything from figuring out which contextual ads you will be served to determining in what order to cough up search results.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/the-big-disk-drive-in-the-sky-how-the-giants-of-the-web-store-big-data.ars
How Siri is ruining your cellphone service
Like a few million other people this past holiday season, we bought an iPhone 4S, with its much-hyped Siri feature. The vocal interface allows users to speak all kinds of commands into the phone (“What’s the weather in San Francisco?”) and get answers from a sultry-voiced robot/concierge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/apples-siri-threatens-to-damage-cellphone-service-for-all/2012/01/23/gIQAZ1O5TQ_story.html
Page Rage Escalates As Google Cancels Twitter Android Meeting
We’ve heard from insiders that Google’s PR strategy to the Don’t Be Evil toolbar bombshell– which exposed just how much the search giant is meddling with search results– is just to stay quiet until it blows over. And then press ahead with the“Search-plus-your-world-or-else” strategy.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/26/page-rage-why-twitter-doesnt-work-better-on-android/
Facebook Readies IPO Filing for Next Week
Facebook Inc. could file papers for an initial public offering as early as next week and is close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter for its IPO, said people familiar with the matter.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577187062821038498.html
Twitter isn’t censoring you. Your government is.
It’s barely been a day since Twitter made the announcement that, going forward, tweets could be censored based on the local laws that govern a user’s location, and the rumour mill is hard at work trying to figure out the reasons behind the decision.
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/27/twitter-isnt-censoring-you-your-government-is/
