Geeks Need a New Home

Major Internet companies have formed a united front in their opposition to the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. Well, almost. One exception has been the domain registrar GoDaddy. In a op-ed published in Politico shortly after SOPA was introduced in the House, GoDaddy applauded the bill and called opponents “myopic.”

Now furious Internet users at reddit (owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast) have organized a boycott of the registrar.

If you’re reading this on Chrome, you’re part of a wave that has ditched Internet Explorer or Firefox and helped vault Google’s browser to the top Web browser spot worldwide.

Have a website? Encourage Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade by displaying the countdown banner to Internet Explorer 6 users only.

In a recent paper in Nature, astronomers have found two of the biggest – black holes that have the same mass as almost ten billion Suns. These black holes are so large that about five of our own solar systems could fit comfortably inside them.

An international team of astronomers utilizing NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), believe that they’ve identified a candidate for the smallest known black hole.

AT&T on Monday announced that it has ended its bid to acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telecom.

Mehlhase has decided to help promote the LHC to students by taking the time to recreate a 1:50 scale model of it using Lego bricks. In total he spent 81 hours creating it, which was split between 48 hours of designing the model on his laptop, and a further 33 hours putting it together.

This is an awesome photo!

Phil Plait, aka “The Bad Astronomer,” explains what the laser does (aside from making epic pictures like these).

This reddit thread discusses a few alternative registrars with better policy alignments.

If you’ve ever owned a laptop or a netbook, you know that their batteries come with a finite lifespan. But what about a longer lasting alternative to powering up your computer? Fuel cells, namely hydrogen fuel cells, not only boast a longer useful life, but they are also capable of running for weeks without requiring a recharge. Not surprisingly, it is reported that Apple is looking into using this technology, recently filing two patents incorporating the cells.

Canadian researchers have been given a green light to test a vaccine for HIV/AIDS on humans.

At the end of 2011 the tablet market is overwhelmingly an iPad market. There are some Android tablets, but they’re mostly either highly customized like the Amazon Fire or Barnes and Noble Nook Color, or cheap pieces of garbage without even a capacitive display. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one clear exception to the rule.

This reddit thread discusses a few alternative registrars with better policy alignments.

A small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using the environment as their chiller, tapping nearby rivers, underground lakes, wells and even the Baltic Sea. A new project in Norway plans to draw cold water from an adjacent fjord and use it to cool data halls.

Who got fat, who got hot, and is that old crush of mine still single? Whatever happened to that weird kid with the hair? Wait, am I the one who got fat?

When one tiny circuit within an integrated chip cracks or fails, the whole chip – or even the whole device – is a loss. But what if it could fix itself, and fix itself so fast that the user never knew there was a problem?