Amazon Down For 2 Hours Friday

Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, appeared to have been caught by surprise Friday when its U.S. site crashed for about two hours. For the first hour, visitors to the site got the cryptic message you see to the left, "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." Later, the company was able to put up a "we're sorry!" message with the corporate logo.
Every person contacting Amazon regarding this got the same response: "Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible."
I highly doubt that Amazon was doing any site maintenance in the middle of a weekday. It seems more likely that there is another answer, such as a DDOS attack.
Some estimate that the retailer lost $30,000 each minute the site was unavailable.

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120,000 Year Old Bacteria Discovered Two Miles Under Glacier

Sounding suspiciously like an episode of the X-Files, Penn State scientists announced the discovery of a 120,000-year-old microscopic bacteria that live two miles under the ice of a Greenland glacier. The bacterian are so tiny that it is able to pass through microbiological filters.
The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system.

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Time Warner To Begin Bandwidth Caps

Time Warner Cable will begin imposing bandwidth caps on consumers in Beaumont, Texas this week as part of a trial program. Consumers who exceed the bandwidth caps will pay $1 for every additional gigabyte consumed.
As the article intimates, this is clearly a move to discourage new BitTorrent users (undoubtedly the '5% of subscribers using half the bandwidth'.) However, as more and more devices start to connect to the net, and households start using more content-on-demand services, this will begin to affect more than 5% of Time Warner subscribers.
Bandwidth caps started to become a prominent tech issue when Comcast last fall axed the service of some of it's subscribers when they reportedly reached some kind of unpublished limit on bandwidth consumption.

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Trek Producer Robert Justman Dies

From Trek United:
Robert Justman, producer of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation succumbed to Parkinson’s disease at the age of 81. A driving force behind the first two Star Trek series, Bob Justman was brought on board for the original Star Trek pilot, ‘The Cage,’ back in 1964, as an associate produced under Gene Roddenberry.
Justman’s death comes within days of receiving the news that two other Star Trek legends, TOS director Joseph Pevney and Star Trek theme composer Alexander Courage, had also passed away. Robert Justman’s son, Jonathan Justman, said “There seems to be a big Star Trek convention and everyone is going. Everyone is getting beamed up.”

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Paramount Reportedly Inserting Audio Dropouts In Indiana Jones

I honestly can't say I noticed this when I saw the film. I did notice a slight misframe that lasted about 10 minutes. Is there no pride in film presentation anymore?
Via BoingBoing:

While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don't bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.

Our favorite studio, Paramount, involved in another hair-brained anti-piracy scheme? Say it aint so!

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Billboards That Spy On You

Minority Report is finally here. Cameras are now everywhere. At retail stores, at street intersections, at work and even at church. Now, behind the billboard above the street. I foresee some kind of personal surveillance jamming technology becoming available for those who don't care to be recorded everywhere they go. It will be illegal, of course.

For the most part, [billboards] are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by--their gender, approximate age, and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.

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Fire At Universal Studios Hollywood

Fire broke out just before dawn on a sound stage at Universal Studios Hollywood this morning and has claimed at least one building and three blocks worth of movie facades. Included among the destroyed sets include Universal's New York City facade used in films from King Kong to Bruce Almighty; the 'clock tower' Courthouse Square seen in Back to the Future; and the King Kong attraction.
No injuries have been reported thus far and there are unconfirmed reports that some filming was going on at the time and that the studio's film vault was threatened.
The theme park did not open today as firefighters were still dousing hot spots this afternoon some 10 hours after the blaze began.

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