Author: Serkadis

These videos show Spyker to the rescue of Saab, given the 11th hour deal that finally went through, saving the company from closure by parent, General Motors. Saab seems relieved at the outcome, and we’ve no doubt the two European brands will find their way ahead nicely, although possibly slowly.

The videos show the press conference with Saab CEO Jan Åke Jonsson (who looks very pleased) and Spyker CEO Victor Muller, who looks quietly confident. Here’s to hoping the future will be a bright one for Saab. After the jump is a celebratory video of workers from Trollhättan, who got the day off when liquidators packed up and went home.

Source | Autoblog.com

As part of its sponsorship agreement with the Northwest Flower & Garden Show this year, scheduled to be held between February 3-7, 2010 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Subaru will showcase the 2010 Outback and 2010 Forester in a skybridge Japanese Tea Garden display.

A 2010 Forester will also be showcased in the Subaru Sustainable Garden display, located inside the show’s entrance.

"We are glad to once again sponsor the Northwest Flower & Garden Show," said T… (read more)

Yesterday’s car launch event at Maranello gave Ferrari’s CEO Luca di Montezemolo the chance to talk for the first time this year about the Scuderia’s plans, likes and dislikes of the upcoming Formula One season. While expressing his hope that 2010 will mark Ferrari’s comeback into the elite of the Great Circus, the Italian boss also launched a covert attack on rivals Mercedes.

Di Montezemolo told the media present at the event that he considers his company to be the only true manufacturer in … (read more)

What’s the most in-demand games on the PlayStation Store today? According to the latest PS Store update, everyone’s still going ga-ga over Final Fantasy as the top two spots are occupied by FFVIII and FFVII, respectively.
 
 
 

The 24-year-old son of three-time Formula One World Champion Nelson Piquet will make his official ARCA Racing Series debut for Eddie Sharp Racing (ESR) on February 6, during the Lucas Oil Slick Mist 200 at Daytona International Speedway. Piquet Jr. will be driving ESR’s No. 6 Toyota.

"I’m very excited! I can’t wait to reach 200mph side-by-side and rubbing paint!" Piquet said. "The plans for the season are coming together really well, and I am racing with two very strong teams. … (read more)

Drive your toys to Illinois is an important event powered by the Fleetwood MotorHome Association (FMA) which invites all motor home owners to a national rally. The event will include the latest Fleetwood line up, factory service support, informative seminars by key industry suppliers, kids activities, and a variety of family-friendly entertainment.

"We are looking forward to this year’s "Drive Your Toys to Illinois" national rally," said John Draheim, president and COO of … (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate

A CONTROVERSIAL climate change scientist at a top university faced mounting calls for his resignation last night after it emerged he breached rules by withholding research data from critics.

Professor Phil Jones, director of University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit – funded by £13million in grants – colluded with colleagues to block freedom of information applications for details of his activities, the Deputy Information Commissioner Graham Smith found.

Emails begging other scientists to help him fight off the applications showed the requests were “not dealt with as they should have been”, Mr Smith said.

The university could have faced an unlimited fine for the breaches but escaped because of a loophole. More than six months had passed since the offences happened and there is a time limit on penalties.

As resignation calls mounted the university last night refused to back Professor Jones saying it was waiting for an independent review to be finalised. The professor has temporarily stepped aside as head of the unit pending the result of that review.

Source: express.co.uk

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Ferrari have barely launched their Formula One challenger for the 2010 season and the team already considers developing a B version of the car. Of course, nothing has been made official by the Scuderia, but media reports in the UK have suggested that Ferrari are not at all happy with the level of performance from their F10 model.

The report was showed in Britain’s Times newspaper, whose sources revealed that Ferrari has already started work on a development version of the F10. According to th… (read more)

The North American division of Volkswagen announced it will debut the ‘Punch Dub’ campaign in a 30-second ad during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV and through a new online campaign. The ‘Punch Dub’ is based on a game played by kids, where the first to see a Beetle would yell ‘punch Bug’ and playfully slug his or her friend.

The new campaign will feature actor and comedian Tracy Morgan and will various people in different driving situations gently slugging others in the… (read more)

Article Tags: Opinion

I shall rephrase this question. Is the sun a major factor in causing climate change?

The answer is YES and I shall endeavor to explain the current thinking on the subject.

Global warming is now more commonly called “climate change”, which can include global cooling. Also, I don’t wish to blame the sun because it can’t help doing what suns and planetary systems have to do, by virtue of their existence. Do we blame dogs for barking?

The correlation of sun spot activity to climate was first reported by Sir William Herschel in 1801 who noticed a relationship between solar activity and the price of wheat, from the data given in Adam Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations” published in 1776.

Source: helium.com

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Shortly over a year after The Lost and Damned debuted on the Xbox 360, Grand Theft Auto IV’s Episodes from Liberty City will no longer be exclusive to Microsoft’s console. Rockstar just announced plans to bring both The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and Damned to PC and PlayStation 3 this March.

The two episodes were temporarily Xbox 360 exclusives thanks to a little encouragement on Microsoft’s part — $50 million worth, to be precise. That deal appears to have run its course, however, and with all the talk of lower-than-expected sales of the expansions on Xbox 360, it shouldn’t be too surprising to see them turning up on other platforms.

Look for both GTA Episodes on the PlayStation Store, the Games for Windows Live Marketplace, and at retail on March 30.

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The fourth of the four announced titles from Platinum Games in partnership with Sega has finally been revealed, this time from Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. The first teaser trailer for Vanquish (which we first heard about via a leaked Sega document last year) has hit the web. With a look similar to Mikami’s P.N.03 for GameCube, the shooter is said to be coming to PS3 and Xbox 360 later this year.

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I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because no one likes a blogger who says “I told you so.” But, Spotify fans: Paul Carr and I told you so.

StrategyEye reports that less than 4% of users of Spotify—the gorgeous online music app with a troubled business model—are paying subscribers. StrategyEye quotes Universal Music International digital VP Rob Wells who says the company needs 10% to 12% of its users to subscribe to be a sustainable business. It’s only at the 10%-12% threshold that Spotify is able to ink revenue share deals with labels, until then, it has to pay for music by the stream, driving its costs up substantially.

StrategyEye further cites Wells saying Spotify has those numbers in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France, but not larger markets like the UK and Spain. And the only thing more far-fetched than Spotify’s claims last summer that it would be profitable by the end of the 2009 and “definitely” be in the U.S. by early 2010 is the idea that paid-subscriber rates would be higher in the U.S. than the rest of the world.

Americans don’t like to pay for things online. As we wrote in our August article about Spotify, even the giants of the Web struggle with this. Netflix only has 10 million subscriptions and Match.com has less than 1 million. Hell, US Web audiences don’t even like free services that make money through intrusive advertising. (Yes, that’s an invitation to complain about our new interstitial advertising format in the comments.)

Unlike consumer Web properties like Twitter and Facebook that can build first and monetize later, online music is a graveyard full of companies sucked dry by the labels and left for dead. Pandora is one of the few to make it and that took $56 million in venture funding, a huge user base, years of employees not taking salaries and a user revolt so extreme it broke fax machines on Capitol Hill.

As a result, Spotify is going back to its invite-only model to throttle back widespread free usage in money losing markets like the UK. Meanwhile, labels are pushing for the product to be subscription only in the US. According to Mike, Google was at one point so hungry for Spotify on Android that it was willing to subsidize those per-user fees. That deal has apparently gone cold for now, which isn’t a shock to European VCs I’ve spoken with who’ve dealt with the startup in the past. Spotify is known for naming outrageously high valuations and not budging until it gets what it wants. That’s an odd tact for a company in such a brutal market to take. While it makes sense that Google would be drooling over the application, why not sit back, let Spotify’s funding dry up and then just buy it on the cheap?

At the very least, Spotify will have to raise more money to launch in the US without a Google-like deal, and many local venture capitalists I’ve talked to echo what European investors who passed on the deal told us last August: There are just too many leaps of faith for this company at such a nosebleed valuation. Of course, the Valley being the land of too much venture capital, if worst comes to worst someone will fund it at some price—it just may not be the deal Spotify wants.

Look, I love the service, I love that the founders believe in it enough to invest their own money and I love that the company is ballsy enough to think it can succeed where hundreds of music startups have failed. But the only way Spotify can have a shot in this near-impossible market is with truly stellar execution, and the experiences I’ve had with the management team have been marked by misleading “off the record” statements and unchecked arrogance. (As always, I’d love to talk with CEO Daniel Ek more about the company. Alas, so far he’s responded to requests for interviews by telling me he “doesn’t like (my) tone.” He has offered to meet up sometime when we’re on the same continent, which I genuinely hope happens.)

I usually root for startups with great products not to sell early, but this may be one case where a stunning and much-beloved app would do better in someone else’s hands. With any luck, a bidding war could still make good on that $250 million valuation.

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You know that 49-port USB hub you picked up last year? Sissy. Thanko just introduced an 80-port USB hub to charge all of your gadgets from a single location. Fantasy or nightmare? Well, first you have to consider the price: ¥14,800 (about $165) and the cabling chaos this will bring. Then you must know that the hub seems to charge your devices only: no USB data. And are you really man enough to handle the replusive stares that a device like this will surely invoke from your family and so-called friends? Who cares! When a gadget promises this:

“When viewed from the side of the port in line, you feel powerful and somewhat like a soldier in the army.”

You’d be crazy not to want it.

80-port USB hub makes you feel like a powerful soldier originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Article Tags: Water Vapour

Climate scientists have overlooked a major cause of global warming and cooling, a new study reveals today.

American researchers have discovered that the amount of water high in the atmosphere is far more influential on world temperatures than previously thought.

Although the findings do not challenge the theory of man-made global warming, they help explain why temperatures can rise and fall so dramatically from decade to decade.

Source: dailymail.co.uk

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Article Tags: James Delingpole

George Monbiot is cwoss. Weally, WEALLY cwoss. And I don’t blame him one bit. God it must be an awful thing when you’ve squandered half your career acting as cheerleader for a cause which, on closer examination, turns out to have been a complete load of cobblers. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s humiliation after the Hitler Diaries is surely as nothing to what poor George – Britain’s second-most-famous Old Stoic after Perry Worsthorne – must be experiencing now.

I’m afraid I don’t read his Guardian columns as often as I used to. Pre-Climategate, they were a great place to go trolling for Moonbattisms which I could then post up on this site and expose to mockery. But these days there just isn’t time. There are so many bigger stories to report on the collapse of the AGW scam that really Monbiot’s views on the subject are about as relevant as a cavalry trooper’s would have been after the invention of tank warfare.

So I quite understand why a man in as desperate a position as George’s has to grab what few crumbs of consolation he can. That’ll be why he’s got so terribly excited about a blog I wrote the other day – and then spiked – about an orchestrated campaign by a green pressure group to get sympathetic individuals in over 200 constituencies to send letters to their local Tory candidate testing him on his environmental correctness.

I called this “eco-bullying” and “stalking”, as I believe it is. Of course free individuals are perfectly entitled to write to their prospective parliamentary candidate on whatever subject they wish. I have no objection to that. What I do very much object to is concerted campaigns by pressure groups. Since my moles at Tory HQ tell me lots of very similar letters to the one I quoted were received by Tory candidates all over Britain, using similar phrasing, I don’t think this was an accident.

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Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk

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We’ve been discussing how Lord Lucas in the UK has spoken out against Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill, which would give Mandelson (and his successors or anyone he deputized) massive powers to change copyright law on a whim. Beyond that, the technology-savvy Lord Lucas has been proposing various amendments to the bill, including requiring copyright holders to detail actual damages and also a penalty for bogus copyright threats.

Another proposed amendment, as pointed out by Copycense would automatically exempt search engines from copyright law. While, for the most part, what search engines do seem to be covered by existing law (fair use, and the like), there are still some questions about whether or not the fundamental actions of search engines do or do not infringe. Clearly exempting them, however, could expand what search engines could do in some pretty impressive ways. This would also serve to negate the threats by the likes of Rupert Murdoch to remove News Corp. content from Google (since Google could then ignore any attempted block, as there would be no copyright violation).

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