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Peter Thiel's plan to pay college students to develop their promising concepts instead of attending school is attracting students as well as critics.

Best known as a co-founder of PayPal, the Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur has also made early-stage investments in companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yelp. Now he's investing in college students, awarding fellowships of $100,000 each to youth under 20 years old, essentially encouraging them to drop out of college to become entrepreneurs.

In an interview for tonight's "60 Minutes," Thiel tells Morley Safer that his program is a viable … Read more

The world is a bit smaller than we thought.

In a continuation of the concept of "six degrees of separation," Facebook and the University of Milan announced tonight they had determined that the average number of people who separate any two individuals in the world is actually 4.74.

While Stanley Milgram's 1967 "small world experiment" drew on 296 volunteers and pegged the average number of people separating two individuals at 5.2, or six "hops," Facebook's findings were extrapolated during the course of a month from all of Facebook's 721 … Read more

Minesweeper is right up there with solitaire as a classic time waster. But if you think you mastered Minesweeper in middle school, think again; Minefield 6D takes the popular strategy game and adds several more dimensions. Although it uses the same basic gameplay as traditional Minesweeper, it takes a while to wrap your head around it, and it will challenge you in a way that Minesweeper never has.

The game's interface is plain, looking quite similar to the original Minesweeper with a slightly different color scheme. Since we weren't sure exactly how Minefield 6D worked, we started with … Read more

I spend a fair bit of my working life meeting with people, listening to their plans for their next product, project, strategy, initiative, or campaign. My job? Review, evaluate, and give feedback. It's great when I can confirm they've got things right. Check! Good! Yep! Oh, yeah, I like that! I help confirm and build confidence in the plan.

It's a good thing I have the opportunity to be positive, because the larger and more important part of the job is decidedly less affirming: figuring out where they've gone wrong. What's missing? What's vague … Read more

The U.K. government on Thursday launched a Google Earth layer that models what Earth might look like in the event of a significant worldwide rise in temperature.

Specifically, the interactive map visually demonstrates what could happen if carbon emissions are not curbed, and as a result, Earth's temperature rises four degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial worldwide climate average. As a plethora of scientists and politicians have repeatedly stated, an increase in things like drought and agricultural disruption as a result of drought, could lead to instability and violence in some parts of the world.

The free downloadable Four Degrees Celsius layer … Read more

WinStart Manager provides a helpful organizer designed to improve a computer's start-up time. With a clean layout, simple commands, and useful results, this program is a real winner.

The program's interface was smartly organized with intuitive commands and a strong visual layout. The program's online Help file gave us instructions to some of the smaller elements, but was largely unnecessary because everything felt so easy to use. We were able to easily view every program that runs at start-up and disable or enable it with a simple button click. In addition, we could tinker with the start-ups … Read more

I read with interest that open-source messaging vendor Open-Xchange is building a "meta-address book" service that brings together your contacts from various social networking sites into "one continuous stream of updating contacts." While promising, I don't think it goes far enough.

It's nice to have a centralized address book. It's even better to analyze the connections between contacts and deliver services based on that data, as I recently argued.

One area in which this information would be hugely valuable is in connecting enterprises through their respective employees. Think about it: most companies spend … Read more

Natali Del Conte's alter-ego, Motherboard, returns to the show to fight your computer worms and viruses! On today's show, we start off with a bit about fishing and gadgets. I think we have a new show idea: Ms. Del Conte will demo the latest fishing technology on a boat every week. Any takers?

Radioshack is trying to be cool again by renaming itself "The Shack." Too easy when it comes to jokes. There's no way that we're going to hang out at "The Shack." For a matter of fact, the only reason we can think to really go to Radioshack is if we needed something random, like a cable or a transistor.

Further down the show, we find out that scientists think women are getting hotter because of evolution. Apparently, attractive women tend to breed more, but for some reason or another this has no effect on men. We're ugly as ever. Natali testifies to this when she looks at Jeff and Wilson.

A recent graduate of Monroe College in the Bronx decided to sue her school after her information technology degree proved pretty useless in this economy. While we don't know the details of the situation, this can't be good for art school. Perhaps students will get disclaimers when they get Bachelor of Fine Arts or anthropology degrees?

We finish the show with some iPhone app updates. The new OS 3.01 has beefed up Wi-Fi connections in addition to its SMS fixes, but it still doesn't discount Apple's move to block Google's Voice app on its App Store. The Palm Pre gleefully still holds onto its Google Voice app. Finally, Steven Spielberg announces that he will be remaking the Jimmy Stewart classic "Harvey." Why? Didn't Hollywood see what happened to the remake of "Miracle on 34th Street?"

… Read more

Microsoft announced Thursday it expanded its Exchange ActiveSync IP licensing program and posted technical documents to spur development of prototype applications that link to its Exchange Server and Exchange ActiveSync-enabled mobile phones.

The Exchange ActiveSync software is designed to allow mobile phones to receive wireless push e-mail, as well as synchronize calendar, contacts and tasks. It also aims to allow companies to manage wireless devices and enact security policies.

The software giant also posted the protocols on the Microsoft Developer Network and expanded the licensing program to establish greater clarity on the steps and licensing terms that are needed when … Read more