BravoBug News

NASA has released the official news: the lander has found water on the Martian surface!

“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”

Some great and highly anticipated news for users of Apple’s MobileMe services:

MobileMe, having had a bit of a bumpy launch (to put it mildly), is now fully functional according to a recent status update (as reported by MacNN).

UPDATE: Just a quick side-note, I gotta say… I sure do feel sorry for the Apple engineers who had to work the kinks out of this system. There are times when I’m debugging code and it gets so stressful and mind-boggling I feel like the universe has flipped upside down. But man, compare that to how an Apple engineer must feel who has hundreds of thousands of customers who are all waiting on him to try to fix the glitches in such a large, complex system which he’s trying to work on with a number of other engineers, meanwhile the support lines are on fire and every news network and media outlet in the Blogosphere is piling on the pressure (along with, I’m sure, his senior managers and Mr. Jobs himself)… I certainly feel for those engineers!

I sure hope they can improve their search algorithms. Until then, back to Google.

As of this Tuesday, NASA is 50 years old. As posted on Slashdot:

“Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the United States Public Law 85-568, National Aeronautics and Space Act to create NASA. In the fifty years since its creation, NASA has made manned missions landing on the Moon, put a space station in orbit, launched numerous unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, and beyond, as well as launching reusable manned spacecraft in orbit. Some of the failures included the loss of two manned spacecraft and their crews as well as the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training mission. Although the future of the organization is in question, Americans, and the world, are looking forward to another fifty years of progress including a return trip to the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars.”

This cat means business…

Kitty Vs Laser – Watch more free videos

Fortune has a great article up on the Cuil vs. Google situation, with some interesting takes, including a quote I thought was pretty great:

It’s a new kind of technology and platform that is going to unseat a company like Google – not a company that’s trying to beat them at their own game. – Scott Kessler

I guess we’ll have to just wait and see how Cuil evolves. It’s certainly off to a bold start!

Created by several former Google developers, a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced ‘Cool’) has arrived on the net. It boasts an astonishingly huge page index, a unique interface, and its search results are pretty impressive (considering this is its first day out in the open).

More importantly (to me, at least), its Privacy Policy states:

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

SOLD.

With Google coming under fire for its privacy policies, this is a breath of fresh air.

NOTE: I should mention at the time of this writing I’m getting on/off service from it, which is understandable. The traffic this new engine must be trying to cope with is suffocating its servers. But I’m sure that problem will be fixed in time.

UPDATE: Yeah. This search engine definitely does have some things it needs to fix. And I’ve had several searches return some pretty wonky or disappointing results. But, that being said, this is still impressive for being so new. As one Slashdotter pointed out, Google has been around for years. I’m anxious to see what this will grow into.

I have to admit I didn’t really notice just how much weight Steve Jobs had lost in this years keynote. I guess I wasn’t paying very much attention. But the photo in this New York Times article sure slams the point home.

The more I listen to Elliott Smith the more I realize the world lost one of its most amazing musicians and artists when he passed away. But at least he left behind a legacy of beautiful music for us to listen to!