The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades. “

(Source: U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP: Chart of Day – Bloomberg.com)

The increased consternation began with the suspected Chinese breach of Google’s servers earlier this year. Since then, press accounts, congressional pronouncements, and security industry talk have increasingly sown panic about an amorphous cyberthreat.

Bush administration cybersecurity chief Michael McConnell recently warned that the United States ‘is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing.’ “

(Source: Cyberattacks: Washington is hyping the threat to justify regulating the Internet – CSMonitor.com.)

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.”

(Source: Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking – Times Online.)

The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked ‘unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.’ It concluded that ‘WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army’ — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on Monday. “

(Source: Army Sees Document Web Site as a Potential Threat – NYTimes.com.)

The couple fed their 3-month-old daughter once a day between marathon stretches in a local Internet cafe, where they were raising a virtual child in the fantasy role-playing game Prius Online, police told local reporters Friday.

Prius Online is a 3-D game in which players nurture an online companion, Anima, a young girl with mysterious powers who grows and increases her skills as the game progresses.”

(Source: Police: Couple nurtured virtual child while real baby starved – CNN.com)

Made public Thursday, the files are the fifth collection of records about unidentified flying objects to be released by the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives as part of a project to open the files up to a wider audience.

Thursday’s release is the largest so far, totaling more than 6,000 pages of material from 1994 to 2000.”

(Source: Britain releases new UFO files – CNN.com.)

‘It’ll be possible for constructs that we build in Second Life and things like it in a simulated space to actually think,’ he told me in 2007. ‘It’s only a decade away, the simulation engines.’ I just didn’t imagine he’d essentially take the helm on that project himself.”

(Source: New World Notes: Philip Rosedale Attempting to Create Sentient Artificial Intelligence That Thinks and Dreams in Second Life!.)

Yet his parents say this is the only way they can guarantee not to lose him.

His father Chen Chuanliu works as an unlicensed rickshaw cyclist in Beijing, taking fares all over the city, while the boy’s disabled mother collects rubbish at the roadside. “

(Childcare, Chinese style: Father chains two-year-old son to a post while he’s at work | Mail Online)

(Source: World of Fedcraft: SAIC buys virtual world company Boing Boing.)

(Data breach costs top $200 per customer record – Network World)