Hasta La Gadget!

Bad news for all those rooting for a come from behind
victory for the fleshy mammalian underdogs. IBM‘s
Watson trounced Jeopardy’s top all time 
winners, pulling in a cool $77,147 in winnings over three days. Ken
Jennings and Brad Rutter ended the tournament with a respectable (in human
terms) $24,000 and $21,600, respectively.

All three contestant managed to correctly guess the Final
Jeopardy answer, Bram Stocker (Answer: William Wilkinson’s “An Account of the
Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia” inspired this author’s most famous
novel)–Jennings even snuck a winking Simpsons homage into the response,
writing, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

Nice try, Jennings.
Everyone knows that it’s the giant ants that get us in the end.

Miss your old eight-tracks? Good news, now you can go to Texas to look at the things behind glass. The media, which has been obsolete for nearly a quarter of a century, is the focus of a new Dallas-based museum. The Eight Track Museum, which opened in Texas this Monday, is music historian Bucks Burnett’s labor of love.

Burnett’s museum is less about the music than the package–you won’t actually be able to listen to the tapes if you pop in. “I am focusing on the cartridges themselves as visual objects,” he told AOL. “If you want the music, listen to a CD or MP3. When you see an exhibit on ancient Egypt, you don’t get to pick up an Egyptian spoon.”

Burnett’s museum also offers a little love for other obsolete formats, from the Edison Wax Cylinder to the cassette tape. “We will even have a gift store that will sell music in these formats,” he explained, describing what is sounding more and more like a record store.

Julian Assange has become one of the most feared men amongst the governments of the world, thanks to his leadership of whistleblowing Website, Wikileaks.org. And if a new book from German I.T. worker, Daniel Domscheit-Berg is to be believed, he’s also kind of a giant jerk.

Domscheit-Berg became a colleague, friend, and roommate with Assange, and now he’s got some less than kind things to say about the Australian hacker-turned-activist in his book, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, due out today on Crown Publishers. The piece contains such revelations as, “In early 2010 his tone toward me changed radically. ‘If you f*** up, I’ll hunt you down and kill you,’ he once told me.”