The future of dating is now?

Bad Day For Microsoft (And Cloud) Following T-Mobile Sidekick Snafu

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and T-Mobile have egg on their faces and it's another dark day for cloud-based services following word from T-Mobile that users of Sidekick -- the T-Mobile smartphone that gets software and online services through Microsoft's Danger subsidiary -- would not be able to recover personal data following a week's worth of Sidekick service outages.

T-Mobile confirmed over the weekend that user data such as contacts, stored photos and other information is probably gone forever, due to a technical glitch with Microsoft's servers. In a message posted to its Web site Saturday, T-Mobile admitted that any data not stored locally on users' Sidekicks has "almost certainly" been lost.


ChannelWeb

You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?

Not long ago I met a filmmaker friend for lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, where she was doing some work. She showed up in her sports car with her digital video gear and spent much of our meeting setting it up. At some point she got a call and took it on her BlackBerry. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned a new piece of software I had downloaded.

"I don't get that stuff," she nervously confided. "I'm such a Luddite."

ars technica

3 Americans win Nobel in physics

Three American "masters of light" who created technologies that made it possible to capture digital images and transmit them and other electronic information long distances today won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

Charles K. Kao, a naturalized American who did most of his work in England and Hong Kong, will share half the $1.4-million prize for demonstrating that highly purified fibers of glass can carry light waves for long distances, setting the stage for the globe-girdling fiber-optic networks that transmit the bulk of everyday television, telephone and other communications.

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who worked at Bell Laboratories, will share the other half of the award for developing the charge-coupled device, the electronic eye that makes digital photography possible and that in less than two decades has filled the world with inexpensive digital cameras and camera-bearing telephones.

Los Angeles Times

i want to be a machine-ultravox

found the bones of all your ghosts
Locked in the wishing well
While birdsong gourmets dragged empty nets
I slumbered in my shell

In mitternacht, die mensch-maschine
Kissed me on my eyes
I rose and left the fire-ladies
Glowing lonely in the night
With all the pornographers
Burning torches beneath the sea

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

I stole a cathode face from newscasts
And a crumbling fugue of songs
From the reservoir of video souls
In the lakes beneath my tongue
In flesh of ash and silent movies
I walked at boulevards again
A nebula of unfinished creatures
From the lifetimes of my friends
I hope your innocence has depraved me

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

Broadcast me, scrambled clean
Or free me from this flesh
Let the armchair cannibals take their fill
In every cell across wilderness
We'll trip such a strangled tango
We'll waltz a wonderland affair
Let's run to meet the tide tomorrow
Leave all emotion dying there
In the star cold beyond all of your dreams

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

Ah!


Thanks to brother Melvillian for the post!

Virtual composer makes beautiful music—and stirs controversy

When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child's toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That's because most of us haven't heard of Emily Howell. No, that's not a person—it's the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, "her" first CD through Centaur Records.


ars technica

Microchip in the Eye Seeks to Restore Vision

A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.

Wired

The Future of Smoking

Have you heard of the "E-Cigarette"? If you haven't and you're a smoker or even a non-smoker, you're seriously missing out! It looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette, taste like a cigarette, but isn't! It's so much more! The E-Cigarette is really the healthier future of smoking. This high-tech electronic smoking device provides the nicotine you crave, in a completely non harmful manner! Non-harmful to yourself and to others around you!

The Future of Smoking

Thanks to Jonathan for this gem

Addicted to the Internet?

http://netaddictionrecovery.blogspot.com/

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The rest from Nicholas Carr