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The 404 758: Where it's Wilson vs. Watson on Jeopardy 404 (podcast)

Last night, IBM's "Watson" supercomputer competed against the top human competitors on "Jeopardy" to test Watson's ability to use artificial intelligence in the context of the English language.

Represented by a lighted blue avatar, Watson performed well against quiz game champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing the first round with a tie against the latter at $5,000. It did this with the help of 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, although like everyone else we wonder if the speed at which Watson can "press" a buzzer is fair to the other contestants.

Either way, this sounds like the exposition for an unwritten Roland Emmerich movie starring Will Smith, so start loading up your ID4 viruses.

Howard Stern's "Private Parts" aired on HBO last weekend, and the King of All Media himself pulled a Tang and liveblogged behind-the-scenes commentary throughout the showing. In addition to answering questions from fans, Stern also talked about his co-stars, revealed details about specific shots, and even dished about adult film star Jenna Jameson's antics onset.

Stern's arrival on Twitter is an obvious move, although it took him a while to jump on the bandwagon--the star joined the Twitterverse on February 3, the same day he defended David Letterman's honor and galvanized his crew on "The Late Show."

Stern's incendiary approach to celebrity gossip and media makes Twitter an apt medium for speaking to his more than 270,000 followers. The Lord of Fart Manor can be found at @HowardStern.

Next on the show, we discuss Gawker and Facebook's recent site redesigns. The Internet is giving a cold shoulder to the Gawker network after it debuted an app-style blog layout last week.… Read more

A DIY document scanner for iPhones

All right, this isn't the flatbed scanner we are more familiar with, but more rightfully a stand for the iPhone. What it does is let you take 8.5 x 11-inch documents on a fixed pedestal, so your snaps look consistent. It seems like a DIY project cobbled together given the detailed pictures on the creator's Web site, but of course, there's always an easier way out of the manual hassle. Which is to buy it from his online shop for a hefty $45.

(Crave Asia via fosfor)

Look out! Here comes your Spider-Mac!

OK. Don't read past this first paragraph yet. I want you to look at the pic above and try to guess what's going on. Go ahead. I'll be here when you get back.

Figure it out? I didn't. At first I thought it was some kind of "Internet-speak joke" that I'm not hip enough to get. Thankfully, it's something much cooler.

By way of Lifehacker, I bring you the Spider-Mac desktop. Not its official name (not yet at least). Basically one of Lifehacker's readers, Zack Shackleton took a Spider-man comic panel … Read more

Skype To Go provides cheap calls from any phone

eBay's Skype Internet telephony service remains a hugely popular, highly efficient way to communicate with colleagues and family all over the world at a free or very low cost per call.

With the addition of a new feature allowing your Skype To Go number to be used to make outbound calls from any landline or mobile phone, it just got a lot easier and cheaper to dial internationally. This service also ratchets up Skype's ability to better monetize a massive but largely unpaid user base:

A Skype To Go number lets you make superlow-cost international calls from mobiles … Read more

User revolts on social networks: They're here to stay

AUSTIN, Texas--If you run a social media site, from a blog to a virtual world to a network like Facebook, you're going to have to deal with angry users, and that's a fact of life.

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called "Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting."

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker … Read more

Alarmd: The most expensive, non-energy-efficient alarm clock ever

Your computer might be able to help cure cancer, or run fancy shmancy high-end games, but let's face it, that high-resolution display would make a really great-looking alarm clock. User interface programmer Zach Leatherman seems to have had the same thought, and has designed a very Webby desktop alarm clock service called Alarmd that runs right in your browser. It gives you a few options to choose how you want your slumber interrupted, like music from Last.fm, a video from YouTube, or a hosted MP3.

Users can set alarms for any day of the week, and keep track … Read more

Clippings makes browsing and online shopping easier

Clippings is a superhandy Firefox browser extension that allows you to easily paste text from a list of saved clipboards. It may sound boring, but using Clippings for Web forms and multiple e-mail signatures lets you complete those tasks more quickly, saving your keystrokes for something more important, such as actual communication.

Clippings installs as a contextual menu. Right-clicking an empty form or writing area lets you select a saved snippet from your clipboard. It took me only a minute or two to set up a fairly extensive list of commonly used entries.

The big question: How is Clippings better … Read more