The work on QRBG Service has been motivated by scientific necessity (primarily of local scientific community) of running various simulations (in cluster/Grid environments), whose results are often greatly affected by quality (distribution, nondeterminism, entropy, etc.) of used random numbers. Since true random numbers are impossible to generate with a finite state machine (such as today's computers), scientists are forced to either use specialized expensive hardware number generators, or, more frequently, to content themselves with suboptimal solutions (like pseudo-random numbers generators). The Service has begun as a result of an attempt to fulfill the scientists' needs for quality random numbers, but has now grown to a global (public) high-quality random numbers service.

Neat. Could be useful someday.

Best Brands" Harris Poll for the first time ever.

Pretty amazing that when asked "Which three brands do you consider the best?", anybody would answer Microsoft or even Kraft Foods.

The Moscow Arbitrary Court has ruled that Visa's decision to terminate its contract with Alltunes, MP3sparks, and AllofMP3 was illegal under Russian law because they operate legally according to ROM, the Russian Organization for Multimedia & digital systems.

This is like a never ending story…

Download them here in MP3 format. [via Frank]

Matt wrote:

Fashion or not, trend or not, there's no excuse for riding your success and market share in to the ground instead of innovating. Even if you don't get it right, don't have "The Next Big Thing," you at least have to try.

I saw the ad too, and I don't get it either.

Maddox is in fine form:

No, I'm not going to get an iPhone, quit emailing me about it. I'm not getting one because I already have a phone that's better: it's called the Nokia E70, it's the pinnacle of human achievement, and I love it more than my family…

The lawsuit, filed by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuses Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O, of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he briefly worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own fledgling social-networking site, now known as ConnectU.