Hugh Pickens writes "While it's probably not true that P. T. Barnum was the originator of the saying 'there's a sucker born every minute,' the proliferation of nearly 23,000 Ponzi schemes on YouTube, with an astounding 59,192,963 views, proves that the sentiment is still alive and well. The videos usually don't ask for money directly, but send viewers to web sites where they are urged to sign up for the 'gifting program,' usually for fees ranging from $150 to $5,000. One of the videos recently added on YouTube featured Bible quotes, pictures of stacks of money and a testimonial from a man who said he not only got rich from cash gifting, but also found true happiness and lost 35 pounds. 'They make it seem like it's legal and an easy way to make money, but it's nothing more than a pyramid scheme,' says Better Business Bureau spokeswoman Alison Southwick. Some of the videos claim that because it's 'gifting,' it's somehow legal. 'They talk about "cash leveraging," whatever that means, and other vague marketing talk,' says Southwick, but the basic scheme is that participants are told to recruit more people who will put in more money. 'It's just money changing hands,' says Southwick, 'and it always goes to people at the top of the pyramid.' A spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., said the company doesn't comment on individual videos."

Subm writes "Lamborghinis, motion-capture rooms, secret new weapons — these are a few things included in the profile of Epic Games and its Design Director, Cliff Bleszinski. 'A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a "band dynamic." Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic's most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic's recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, "we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things."'"

Wired is running a story about the small but vocal, and growing, number of people who aren't waiting for automakers to deliver plug-in hybrids. They're shelling out big money to have already thrifty cars converted into full-on plug-in hybrids capable of triple-digit fuel economy. "The conversions aren't cheap, and top-of-the-line kits with lithium-ion batteries can set you back as much as $35,000. Even a kit with lead-acid batteries — the type under the hood of the car you drive now — starts at five grand. That explains why most converted plug-ins are in the motor pools of places like Southern California Edison... No more than 150 or so belong to people like [extreme skiing champion Alison] Gannett, who had her $30,000 Ford Escape converted in December. Yes, that's right. The conversion cost more than the truck."

cecom writes to share that Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games and the main brain behind the Unreal engine, recently sat down at NVIDIA's NVISION con to share his thoughts on the rise and (what he says is) the impending fall of the GPU: "...a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the venerable, SGI-authored OpenGL. Game engine writers will, Sweeney explains, be faced with a C compiler, a blank text editor, and a stifling array of possibilities for bending a new generation of general-purpose, data-parallel hardware toward the task of putting pixels on a screen."

Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that in a recent interview, Marc Henauer has revealed that security researchers are falling behind now that malware is starting to be able to change its signature every few hours. "Unfortunately the know-how and construction kits used to create this shape-shifting threat are now readily available and are unleashing a wave of malware based on social engineering techniques. [...] Sweeney believes that a non rules-based monitoring process must be set up to defend all ingress and egress points covering SMTP, DNS, HTTP(s), IM etc."

Vigile writes "Tom Forsyth, a well respected developer inside Intel's Larrabee project, has spoken to dispel rumors that the Larrabee architecture is ignoring rasterization, and in fact claims that the new GPU will perform very well with current DirectX and OpenGL titles. The recent debate between rasterization and ray tracing in the world of PC games has really been culminating around the pending arrival of Intel's discrete Larrabee GPU technology. Game industry luminaries like John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and Cevat Yerli have chimed in on the discussion saying that ray tracing being accepted as the primary rendering method for games is unlikely in the next five years."

maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."

An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily is running an interesting interview with EPIC founder and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is anyway very clear about his views on the gaming industry, but it is surprising how sharply he criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine. He's especially unhappy with Intel, which he says has integrated graphics chipsets that 'just don't work'."

sevej writes "As a lead-in to an article in the August 2007 issue, Scientific American recently published an interview with Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Latanya Sweeney regarding the trade-offs between security and privacy. Dr. Sweeney provides a refreshing counter-point to Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy's 'famous quip', 'Privacy is dead. Get over it.' She advocates the idea that privacy is not primarily a political expediency, but rather a biological one. Suggesting that technological design doesn't have to take a 'soup OR salad' approach, she calls for changes in the way present and future computer scientists are trained. Dr. Sweeney is quoted as saying, 'I think if we are successful in producing a new breed of engineers and computer scientists, society will really benefit. The whole technology-dialectics thing is really aiming at how you should go about teaching engineers and computer scientists to think about user acceptance and social adoption [and also that they] have to think about barriers to technology [from the beginning].'"

Maximum Prophet writes to mention that a collection of glass plates containing astronomical information from the late 19th century through the mid-1980s is being considered for digitization. "The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity's only record of a century's worth of sky. 'Besides being 25 percent of the world's total of astronomical photographic plates, this is the only collection that covers both hemispheres,' said Alison Doane, curator of a glass database occupying three floors, two of them subterranean, connected by corkscrew stairs. It weighs 165 tons and contains more than a petabyte of data. The scary thing is that there is no backup." I'm sure that anyone with a spare $5 million or so would be welcomed with open arms.

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