Sci-Tech-Business Shorts 12-08-08

Tuesday Aug 12, 12:35PM

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Bill Gates wants to make Capitalism more Creative.
A top US scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks
War of the Words: Scrabulous Is off Facebook in the US, but Did Hasbro Win the Game?
Plenty of digital ink has been spilt this week over the launch of the suicidally-monikered new search engine Cuil.com - "Lunch is ordered in every single day... Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area..."
Inside Google's AdWords auction.
Britain's top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers - something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs.
Twitter's Business Model?
Managers seeking to hire star employees away from competitors are likely to be disappointed with their costly new employee's performance - and the star is likely to be unhappy, too - according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
How big is the free economy?
Pretty disturbing report on NHS computers, dumped in Ghana, where their hard drives are mined of confidential data by criminal gangs and children die melting down the highly toxic empty shells.
Next Generation Web-Browsing.
A US intelligence office Friday warned Americans traveling to the Beijing Olympics or elsewhere to expect cyber spies to surreptitiously compromise their laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices.
In an assessment that could lead to a substantial charge against its future profits, Google Inc. believes its $1 billion investment in advertising partner AOL is souring.

Complexity Digest

Finance Focus

openstreetmap.org
It's official: The Home Office is listening.
Fiction: Engineers' Dreams by George Dyson - For 400 years, we have been waiting for machines to begin to think.
Extract: The Last Theorem by Arthur C Clarke and Frederik Pohl.
Two weeks ago, the US Navy canceled plans to build the rest of its hulking stealth destroyers. At first, it looked like the DDG-1000s' $5-billion-a-copy price tag was to blame. Now, it appears the real reason has slipped out: The world's most advanced warship is all but defenseless against one of its best-known threats.
Unsolved problems in philosophy
Book Review: "The Gridlock Economy" by Michael Heller
The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September.
Aston Martin unseats the Veyron as the World's Most Expensive Car.
Profile: Raymond Kurzweil - Still Inventing.
The term "cloud computing" encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service.

PhysOrg

Slashdot

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Some amazing photos of the Large Hadron Collider which is due to destroy the world at the end of the year.
The Russians have withdrawn their claim to have made the deepest freshwater submersion in Siberia's Lake Baikal after hitting bottom at just 1,580 metres (5,180 feet) - short of their planned touch-down at 1,680 metres (5,510 feet).
The Bugatti Veyron is among the most exclusive cars in the world, a 1,000-horsepower super exotic owned by fewer than 150 people. Every one of them is about to be upstaged by the drop-dead gorgeous roadster Bugatti will unveil later this month.
"The pollution from driving a Lamborghini is bad enough, but flying one thousands of miles for a service is taking climate-wrecking behavior to new heights." - Tony Bosworth of Friends of the Earth.
Secretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street. Now the former computer scientist at Columbia University-turned-tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history.
"It's a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that." - George Church, The Personal Genome Project.
At over 3 kilometres beneath the surface, sitting atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, it's the hottest water ever found on Earth.
For some philosophers, attending the World Congress in Seoul is a huge privilege. So why does it leave British delegates cold?
UK scientists publish more research than any other country in the world except the United States.
Scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.
Research in diamond mechanosynthesis - building diamond nanostructures atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy -- just received a major boost with a $3 million grant from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
A carbon membrane only a single atom thick has been used to create a pressurised "balloon" that is impermeable to gas.
High-flying kites tethered to generators could supply as much as 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 100,000 homes, according to researchers from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.