Yahoo stock, and the internet search engine roadmap

From the Joe Duck blog:
I’ve been waiting for a “sign” to buy Yahoo (well, some SHARES of Yahoo ) which seems due for a huge surge when their publisher network revenues kick in later this year. Yahoo has more traffic than Google but you sure wouldn’t know it from the buzz, even among industry insiders. [...]

Italy now assigning civil rights to seafood!

Italy restaurant fined for “cruel” lobster display
The real prey here is the poor restaurant owner. (oh! and also … human rights).
An Italian restaurant was fined 688 euros ($855) for displaying live lobsters on ice to attract patrons, in an innovative application of an anti-cruelty law usually affecting to household pets.
A court in the northeastern city [...]

The Politics of Oil - making sense of it all

The Politics of Oil: The Discourse Must Change
by The Oil Drum Editors
Leaders of both political parties are expressing concern about the high price of gasoline. President George Bush announced yesterday that he was suspending deliveries to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to make more oil available to consumers as well as putting on hold [...]

Regressor luddites in the recording industry

A fine example of our favorite regressor luddites “the recording industry” desperately clinging to the past, but now with even more draconian govenrment help.
Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill
For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium [...]

Hints of the new economy

Man using Web to barter paper clip for house

Kyle MacDonald had a red paper clip and a dream: Could he use the community power of the Internet to barter that paper clip for something better, and trade that thing for something else — and so on and so on until he had a house?
After a [...]

Adult Stem Cells … positive clinical results.

Adult stem cell implant first in orthopaedic patient
The Royal Melbourne Hospital has performed the world’s first implant of cultured specialist stem cells into an orthopaedic patient who suffered a broken femur nine months ago which failed to heal.
Mr Richard de Steiger, the Director of Orthopaedics at the hospital, performed the operation as an alternative to [...]

Orderly Nanofibers

This is admirable, take a 72 year old methodology and with it create something that is on the very bleeding edge of the technology world.
Nanofibers Created In Orderly Fashion
For 72 years, scientists have been able to use electric fields to spin polymers into tiny fibers. But there’s been just one problem: Like worms that won’t [...]

Motorized nanocars!

Rice scientists attach motor to single-molecule car

Two motorized nanocars on a gold surface. The nanocar consists of a rigid chassis and four alkyne axles that spin freely and swivel independently of one another….

The car’s light-powered motor is attached mid-chassis. When struck by light, it rotates in one direction, pushing the car along like a paddlewheel.

More Machine & Life Convergence

One technology that has been slow to evolve, when comapired to the rest of the electronics industry, is energy storage (batteries). So any news indicating even incremental inprovement to the current state of the art is really important. This news is a big big deal!
Ultra-small batteries powered by viruses
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [...]

Beware the regressors!

The Time Traveler …
by Dan Simmons
The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid [...]

IBM scientists tout tool to possibly build atom-size computers

This has interesting possibilities. I wonder where this fits in with Quantum computing?

IBM scientists tout tool to possibly build atom-size computers
Scientists at an IBM research center in Silicon Valley have created a magnetism-manipulating tool suited to building molecular computers, the company revealed.
The development was touted as a step toward making computers based on the [...]