simoniker writes "Following the recent announcement that Microsoft-owned Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios would close after the completion of Halo Wars, Gamasutra has discovered that a now-canceled Halo MMO was in development at the studio, unearthing prototype UI and level screenshots of the Ensemble-developed project. The prototype art, which was at one point made available on an Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio website, further confirms previous rumors that the studio was working on an MMO based on the Bungie-created sci-fi franchise." We discussed the future closing of Ensemble Studios a couple weeks ago. The set of pictures which seem to be screenshots and graphic models from the canceled Halo MMO has been posted on Flickr. In other Halo news, Bungie may be teasing the announcement of the next game on their website.

PreacherTom writes "Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that propagates about 300 times faster than light would travel in a vacuum. The pulse seemed to exit the chamber even before entering it." This research was published in Nature, so presumably it was peer-reviewed. It's impossible from the CBC story to determine what is being claimed. First of all they get the physics wrong by asserting that Einstein's special relativity only decrees that matter cannot exceed the speed of light. Wrong. Matter cannot touch the speed of light in vacuum; energy (e.g. light) cannot exceed it; and information cannot be transferred faster than this limit. What exactly the researchers achieved, and what they claim, can only be determined at this point by subscribers to Nature.

The Walking Dude writes "BBC News asked Frank Abagnale if technology is driving the old-school conman into extinction. 'Mr Abagnale really ought to know', as the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can was based on his life. He served five years of a 12 year prison sentence for check fraud before being offered a job with the FBI. 'There may, after all, be life in the old con yet.'"

Max Fomitchev submitted a little blog entry where he proposes that the ratio of unique IPs to actual unique users is 10:1. This flies in the face of the numbers you usually see attached to these sorts of things. I'm not sure about the logic he uses to come up with these numbers either.