All aboard for London's transport design icons. From railway signs to tube seats, the next stop could be your house

When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

A chatbot is a computer program that's intended to fool us into thinking that it's human. Historically, this has been a tricky thing to do, and for the last 20 years there's been a $100,000 prize and gold medal waiting for the first computer program that can carry on a conversation indistinguishably from a human. Arguably (very arguably), this could also be the first computer program to demonstrate an artificial intelligence.

Cornell's Creative Machines Lab decided to see what would happen if they put two chatbots face to virtual face and got them started talking to one another. Things didn't go quite as crazy as might have been expected, but a fair amount of pointless argument, passive aggression, and random hilarity did ensue:

Native support for IBM i

Security researchers have discovered a counterfeit web certificate for Google.com circulating on the internet that gives attackers the encryption keys needed to impersonate Gmail and virtually every other digitally signed Google property.

When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

Ich wage eine Prognose: Die Zeit von 1985 bis 201x, die wir vielleicht nur als leidlich aufregend empfanden bzw. empfinden werden, wird in den nur noch elektronisch abrufbaren Geschichtsbüchern künftiger Generationen einen ebenso großen Platz einnehmen wie das Römische Reich oder die Industrialisierung. Und zwar nicht in erster Linie wegen 09/11, sondern weil sich in dieser Zeitspanne der Herzschlag der Welt umstellte – von analog auf digital.

Yes, it’s true that I have dumped a good number of social software tools out there on the Social Web in favour of G+ itself, or, at least, thanks to it I have reduced my involvement with those social tools quite a bit. But there are two of them that I am not ready, just yet, to kiss good-bye and move them into SNS. One of them is my Flickr account and the other one, of course, is my blog. This blog. And Hugh explains it very very well how I, too, feel about it overall on why I still think there is a place and a time for blogging out there on the Internet, as well as the Intranet, by the way. Here are a couple of noteworthy quotes from his blog entry I thought were worth while sharing across:

“The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.” [Emphasis mine]

So why would anyone learn this stuff, anyway? Well, there are several reasons which come to mind:

* Your major requires a course in assembly language; i.e., you're here against your will.
* A programmer where you work quit. Most of the source code left behind was written in assembly language and you were elected to maintain it.
* Your boss has the audacity to insist that you write your code in assembly against your strongest wishes.
* Your programs run just a little too slow, or are a little too large and you think assembly language might help you get your project under control.
* You want to understand how computers actually work.
* You're interested in learning how to write efficient code.
* You want to try something new.

Fast jeder fünfte Versicherte wurde gemahnt und knapp jeder zehnte exekutiert. Das System trifft die Wenigverdiener am härtesten, jetzt formiert sich Widerstand

Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it ...

The AmigaOnline concept has been improved! http://t.co/1JmFnyS

Offener, pragmatischer, politischer: 30 Jahre #CCC – Hacky Birthday. http://t.co/U4uKDdV

Happiness is a warm gun ... carried by a girl http://t.co/InBQPMq - Katee talks about female action stars in movies (or lack thereof) -admin

Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions – review http://t.co/S6N27Tp

A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM's Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte "drive"—that's 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.