Ljung (left) and Wahlforss demonstrate the new SoundCloud features at the company's San Francisco office.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired
WASHINGTON — In an effort to encourage nuclear power, Congress voted in 2005 to authorize $17.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors. Now, six years later, with the industry stalled by poor market conditions and the Fukushima disaster, nearly half of the fund remains unclaimed. And yet Congress, at the request of the Obama administration, is preparing to add $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to next year’s budget.
Even supporters of the technology doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned.
“My gut feeling is that there is going to be a delay,” said Neil Wilmshurst, a vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif. News on Thursday that Exelon Corporation, the nation’s largest reactor operator, planned to buy a rival, the Constellation Energy Group, only reinforces the trend; until late last year, Constellation wanted to build, while Exelon was firmly against it.
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ON Wednesday, Kim Kardashian is going to die a little. So is her sister, Khloé, not to mention Lady Gaga, David LaChapelle, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Serena Williams and Elijah Wood.
That day is World AIDS Day, and each of these people (as well as a host of others - the list keeps growing) will sacrifice his or her own digital life. By which these celebrities mean they will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.
"Dry your eyes, everybody," Ryan Seacrest, the "American Idol" host and another participant in this cyberstunt, says in a videotaped "Last Tweet and Testament" that will be posted on his Facebook profile - and appended to a final post on Twitter - sometime after midnight on Tuesday night. "I don't plan to be dead for too long." He adds, "Please buy back my life."
"Come on, y'all," the actress Jennifer Hudson says in a similar videotaped plea. "Buy my life back. Go on a shopping spree and buy as much of it as you can."
It's all part of the latest gambit by ...
PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than two decades, e-mail has been the killer application of the Internet. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, believes that e-mail is antiquated.
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a new unified messaging system on Facebook that allows people to communicate with each other regardless of whether they are using e-mail, text messages or online chat services.
“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He said that e-mail is too formal, too slow and too cumbersome, especially for young people who have grown up communicating using online chat and text messaging systems. The new Facebook service, which will allow users to have @facebook.com e-mail addresses, intends to integrate the three forms of communication into one inbox that is accessible from PCs or mobile phones.
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