Now that Sirius and XM have merged, everybody is happy—not. The subscribers are ticked off; the stockholders are beyond ticked off. And Clear Channel? Extra ticked off.

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I looked at the latest Top 500 Supercomputers list and what did I see? An NVIDIA (GP)GPU and the brains of the PS3.

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Zenbe is a fresh-out-of-beta service that wraps together a new perspective on e-mail with a social, collaborative dashboard of rich media wiki tools and even Twitter and Facebook integration. You can keep your current address when giving Zenbe a try, so we did exactly that.

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Intel has officially launched Core i7, a.k.a. "Nehalem." Details inside.

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Dante_J writes "In the final report published by the Australian Senate inquiry into 'The Current State of Australia's Space Science & Industry Sector' entitled 'Lost in Space? Setting a new direction for Australia's space science and industry sector,' it calls for the formation of a 'Space Industry Advisory Council' to oversee the creation of a fully-fledged Australian Space Agency. Of the top 20 GDP nations, Australia is the only one without a Space Agency, which impacts on many aspects of ordinary life, not to mention Research and Engineering endeavors. Every satellite operated by Australia is owned by another party and the costs of this alone are comparable to that of a Space Agency. The report is a tidy piece that drew upon submissions form Andy Thomas, and an impressive collection of Australian Academics and Space Science entities frustrated by successive generations of government apathy. While this report is welcome, lethargic Government action in a climate of competing concerns is not expected to stem the flow of Space Science brain drain out of Australia any time soon."

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JagsLive was one of several readers to point out Jerry Yang's departure as Yahoo CEO. He's not leaving the company; he will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo, whatever that entails. Yang has been under fire in recent months from investors for his handling of Microsoft's recent acquisition attempt."Yahoo, under fierce financial pressure, has begun a search to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive, the company said Monday. 'Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,' Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement."

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Adobe has announced plans to bring Flash Player 10 and the AIR web runtime to the ARM architecture. This port is the beginning of an effort by Adobe to close the gap between Flash in desktop and mobile contexts.

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zootropole alerts us to a press release issued today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announcing the production of 'billions of particles of anti-matter.' "Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma 'jet.' This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts." The press release doesn't characterize the laser used in this experiment, but it may have been this one.

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Muni WiFi never lived up to its promise to bridge the digital divide and bring a third pipe to homes. But it didn't quite fail, either. More quietly, a new round of networks has been built, and San Francisco's Meraki hopes to be part of that future.

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The USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced the completion of the USB 3.0 standard today, clearing the way for a new wave of Super Speed devices... eventually. We won't actually see support for the standard on devices or motherboards until late 2009/mid-2010.

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holy_calamity writes "Engineers at Polytechnic University Brooklyn have discovered that digital snaps shorn of any metadata still reveal the make and model of camera used to take them. It is possible to work backwards from the relationships of neighboring pixel values in a shot to identify the model-specific demosaicing algorithm that combines red, green, and blue pixels on the sensor into color image pixels. Forensics teams are already licking their chops."

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Jerry Yang is out as CEO of Yahoo. Given his tumultuous reign, the news is hardly a surprise.

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In recognition of the growing importance and influence of Internet- and IP-related legislation, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers is taking over IP issues from the body's Courts subcommittee—and giving it discretion over antitrust issues (including net neutrality) instead.

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Ponca City, We love you writes "Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."

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geaux and other readers let us know that the new Top 500 Supercomputer list is out. The top two both break the Petaflops barrier: LANL's IBM "RoadRunner" and ORNL's Cray XT5 "Jaguar." (Contrary to our discussion a few days back, IBM's last-minute upgrade of RoadRunner salvaged the top spot for Big Blue. Kind of like bidding on eBay.) The top six all run in excess of 400 Teraflops. HP has more systems in the top 500 than IBM, reversing the order of the previous list. Both Intel and AMD issued press releases crowing over their wins, and both are correct — AMD highlights its presence in 7 of the top 10, while Intel boasts that 379 of the top 500 use their chips.

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Last week, CC founder Lawrence Lessig sent the following letter (and offer) to our email lists. However, I thought it was important that everyone who is interested enough in CC to read our blog, should have the opportunity to read this as well. If you’d like to sign-up for our ccNewsletter list, please do so here. 

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Dear Creative Commoner:

It has been an exciting week in America. Many of us had been focused on this presidential election. Few have had the time to think about the other projects we have that are working hard to do good.

I’m writing today to ask you to think again about one of those projects that will always be important to me — Creative Commons. We’re in the middle of our annual drive. The success of this drive is essential to our ability to run. The vast majority of CC’s supporters, including of course its Board, and current CEO, are volunteers. But the organization depends upon a small number of wildly underpaid staffers, as well as modest infrastructure to keep the system alive.

This is a tough year to ask for support, I know. All of us are facing difficult decisions about what we can really afford to do. But as I looked out at the packed audiences in Hong Kong celebrating the launch of the 50th Creative Commons jurisdiction, I saw again just how critical it is to keep this movement growing. We have made important progress over the year, including most importantly for me, winning the confidence of the Free Software Foundation so that they will permit FSF licensed wikis (including Wikipedia) to relicense to a CC license. But there is an enormous amount of work left to be done.

Please help us in this. Whatever you can give is important. And if you’d like something tangible in return for your gift, I’m happy to send you a signed copy of my latest (and last in this field) book, REMIX, inscribed however you like. (I’m only going to sign a limited number for this purpose, and we’re going to charge an insanely high price, but if you’re interested, visit here. And if you’re ordering from outside the United States, you’ll get the Bloomsbury Academic version of the book, with the CC license explicit inside.)

I’ve not pestered you much this year. It has been important to me to see this organization thrive when I’ve not been at the center of its work. But Creative Commons remains the work I’m most proud of. And like any parent, it still keeps me awake with worry at night. Please help us make this year another success. Do what you can. Get 6 friends to do the same. We’ve been depending on small donations long before America could spell “Obama.” And we depend upon those donations still.

Please support Creative Commons today.

schwit1 sends along an Ars Technica report covering the release of documents obtained under the FOIA suggesting that the Justice Department may have been evading privacy laws in their use of "triggerfish" technology. Triggerfish are cell-tower spoofing devices that induce cell phones to give up their location and other identifying information, without recourse to any cell carrier. "Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that 'triggerfish' technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all. The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices..." The article does mention that the Patriot Act contains language that should require a court order to deploy triggerfish, whereas prior to 2001 "the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology."

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A recent bust in China netted several hundred pirated HD discs ripped from Blu-ray masters. The discs were only 720p, not 1080p, but their mere existence shows that Blu-ray's amped-up DRM schemes, AACS and BD+, won't be enough to stop pirates.

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CWmike writes "Few tears were shed when alleged spam and malware purveyor McColo was suddenly taken offline last Tuesday by its upstream service providers. But behind the scenes of the McColo case and another recent takedown of Intercage, a ferocious struggle is taking place between the purveyors of Web-based malware and loosely aligned but highly committed groups of security researchers who are out to neutralize them. Backers claim that the effort to shut down miscreant ISPs is needed because of the inability of law enforcement agencies to deal with a problem that is global in nature. But some question whether there is a hint of vigilantism behind the takedowns — even as they acknowledge that there may not be any other viable options for dealing with the problem at this point."

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Does it make sense to subsidize water-efficient irrigation? According to a study of the upper Rio Grande Basin, subsidies interact with water rights in a way that can undermine the goals of the subsidies.

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