DavidGarganta writes "A patent troll firm in suburban Philadelphia, Rembrandt IP Management, is trying to force large cable operators and major broadcasters to pay substantial license fees on the transmission of digital TV signals and Internet services. The firm is apparently trying to get 0.5% of all revenues from services that supposedly infringe on the patents. The targeted companies include ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter and Cablevision. According to MultiChannel News, Rembrandt's assault is especially aggressive, even for a patent troll: 'It is attacking two key technology standards used by the cable and broadcast industries, CableLabs' DOCSIS and the Advanced Television Systems Committee's digital-TV spec. "If they're successful, this could affect everything from the cost of cable service to the price of TVs," said the attorney close to the litigation, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.'"
The 10 astronauts aboard the linked space shuttle and space station wrapped up their joint work on Sunday and got ready to say goodbye. With the hatches between the two spacecraft... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 1:41 pm
Reservoir Hill brings us a New York Times story about a man who will be allowed to keep the money he gained through hacking into a computer system in order to gain early access to a company's earnings statement. From the Times: "On Oct. 17, 2007, someone hacked into a computer system that had information on an earnings announcement to be made by IMS Health a few hours later. Minutes after the breach of computer security, Mr. Dorozhko invested $41,671 in put options that would expire worthless three days later unless IMS shares plunged before that. The next morning the share price did plunge, and Mr. Dorozhko made his money by selling the puts. 'Dorozhko's alleged "stealing and trading" or "hacking and trading" does not amount to a violation' of securities laws, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of United States District Court ruled last month. Although he may have broken laws by stealing the information, the judge concluded, 'Dorozhko did not breach any fiduciary or similar duty "in connection with" the purchase or sale of a security.' She ordered the S.E.C. to let him have his profits."
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."
DHAKA (Reuters) - Bird flu has spread to another district in Bangladesh despite massive culling by authorities to control the outbreak, officials said on Sunday, bringing the number of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:13 am
By Bill Bartleman, The Paducah Sun, Ky. Feb. 17--It is a social problem that needs to be fixed. If it is done right, it could significantly improve relationships and have a profound effect on society. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Judith Nygren, Omaha World-Herald, Neb. Feb. 17--A new emphasis on nature to control storm water runoff in the Papillion Creek watershed has won favor with communities in the Omaha metropolitan area. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Doug Pike, Houston Chronicle Feb. 17--Three cheers for us, as a society, for our willingness to roll up sleeves and fix broken things, but I grow weary of collecting other people's trash. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Nick Green By Nick Green Staff Writer The chance of a proposed municipal reservoir in Lomita failing in a major earthquake is less than two-tenths of a percent, according to a recently released environmental analysis. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Mary Gail Hare, The Baltimore Sun Feb. 17--Faced with an additional 10 years of filtering an elementary school's water supply, parents are renewing efforts to hook the building into the public system. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Mike Torralba, The Charlotte Observer, N.C. Feb. 17--An aging bridge in southwestern Union County will be replaced sooner, but the road it's on will be closed longer than engineers initially expected. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
By Curtis Morgan, The Miami Herald Feb. 17--In Southeast Florida, a lot of what gets flushed winds up where people fish and sometimes swim. Every day, six plants in Miami-Dade, Broward and south Palm Beach counties pump about 300 million gallons of sewage into the Atlantic Ocean. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 17 Feb 2008 | 11:00 am
Washington DC based Cookthink billis itself as being like Pandora for recipes with a tested cooking database that returns results based on user desires. The key pitch of Cookthink is the “cookthink... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 10:53 am
eldavojohn writes "Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It's about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. 'If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory ... To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.'" And ... cue the evil chortling.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:39 am
Iran's recently launched research rocket has successfully transmitted scientific data back to the country, state television reported. The rocket transmitted the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:38 am
Susannah Breslin writes, Ellen Forney is a Seattle-based artist, cartoonist, and illustrator who has a new book out, Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads from Seattle's The Stranger , from the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:31 am
The 10 astronauts aboard the linked space shuttle and space station have wrapped up their joint work and prepared to say goodbye. The hatches between the two spacecraft Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:24 am
Our 6th daily Comments Competition winner comes from a comment on our post 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web . It came from Alan Wilensky , who wrote that "all of the [Semantic Web] tech that... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:20 am
The 10 astronauts aboard the linked space shuttle and space station wrapped up their joint work and got ready to say goodbye. The hatches between the two spacecraft were to be sealed... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:20 am
A U.S. computer expert predicts computers will have the same intellectual capacity as humans by 2020. Ray Kurzweil was one of 18 people chosen by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to speak on future technological challenges, The Independent reported. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Kathleen Gallagher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 17--In the lawsuit it filed this month against Intel Corp., the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is going after a familiar adversary. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
COMPUTERS will be as intelligent as humans in 20 years - meaning robots like Star Wars' R2-D2 may become reality. Expert Ray Kurzweil claims technology will progress 32 times quicker in the next 50 years than in the entire 20th century. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Rickwood, Lee While pro wedding and event videographers often regard a reception hall, house of worship, or school sports complex as the most common place to work, we spend a lot of time in the edit suitemany of us spend more time there than behind the camera. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Orr, Bill Just when bankers are getting a feel for the benefits of Web 2.0 now comes security 2.0, a radical new approach to foiling "malware," malicious software whose target is the nitty gritty transaction details of online banking. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Edited by Katie Stirling THERE'S a man who's on his trolley for a change. Thanks to Margaret Henderson, of Glasgow, who sent it in to win my weekly tenner. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
CAMPUS gunman Steven Kazmierczak poses in a T-shirt emblazoned with a handgun and the Stars and Stripes. In this chilling photo posted on MySpace he grins for the camera and shows off his heavily tattooed arms. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Vermond, Kira Blogs. Wikis. Facebook. Linkedln. Social networking technology has taken on the consumer world and there's no going back. But can it - should it - be used for business? Enter Enterprise 2.0. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
TOURISTS to the Highlands are being confused by a fake website. A Norwich firm bought www.invernessairport.com which has nothing to do with the airport but looks official. The site has timetables and "new routes" from three years ago. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Stanley Miller Ii, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Feb. 17--With the explosion of online video, it would be easy to stumble across DiversityTV.net and peg it as just another Web site with free videos. And you'd be wrong. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow, who played a key role in developing NASA's program of lunar and solar system exploration but was much better known as a television commentator who explained space science... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Apple's upcoming iPhone software development kit will do more than enable programmers to create new software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Wired reports. "It will also turn iTunes into a software... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 7:32 am
mjasay writes "IDC has released a report looking into industry adoption of open software. In the study, analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing trend: IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies. While IDC believes this is a bad thing, the data in the report suggests otherwise. 70% of the enterprises surveyed did their own implementations, while roughly 90% supported their own open-source deployments. This might be a cause for alarm if the projects weren't so successful: 70% of the projects were deemed to be of "Critical" or "High Importance" compared to other IT projects and 90% plan to maintain or increase their investment in open source projects. Could it be that open source is liberating enterprises from an unhealthy dependence on vendors, and that early results suggest that this will be a Very Good Thing for the success of IT projects, many of which have failed historically."
Security systems can now block the first computer viruses attack on cell phones, but the mobile industry sees new risks stemming from upcoming open software platforms such as Google's Android. [via... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 7:02 am
Spanish language social networking site Sonico is the biggest social networking site you’ve probably never heard of before today, and you wouldn’t be alone, it has zero hits in Google News... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 5:42 am
An anonymous reader writes "AMD is set to launch what is considered its most important product against Intel's Core 2 Duo processors next week. TG Daily reports that the triple-core Phenoms — quad-core CPUs with one disabled core — will be launching on February 19. Oddly enough, the first company expected to announce systems with triple-core Phenoms will be Dell. Yes, that is the same company that was rumored to be dropping AMD just a few weeks ago. Now we are waiting for the hardware review sites to tell us whether three cores are actually better than two in real world applications and not just in marketing."
WASHINGTON Forgotten but not gone, the waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors that the federal government was supposed to start accepting for burial 10 years ago is still at the reactor sites, at least... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 3:36 am
Gerard Boyers writes "Some members of the US National Academy of Engineering have predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. Ray Kurzweil leads the charge: 'We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029. We're already a human machine civilization, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.' Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers, and a gentleman we've discussed previously. He was chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter."
KingArthur10 writes "It will be the last lunar eclipse until December 2010, and it should be spectacular. Shades of turquoise and red will pour over the moon's surface as it moves into the Earth's shadow around 8:43pm EST. As NASA reports: 'Transiting the shadow's core takes about an hour. The first hints of red appear around 10 pm EST (7 pm PST), heralding a profusion of coppery hues that roll across the Moon's surface enveloping every crater, mountain and moon rock, only to fade away again after 11 pm EST (8 pm PST). No special filter or telescope is required to see this spectacular event. It is a bright and leisurely display visible from cities and countryside alike. While you're watching, be alert for another color: turquoise. Observers of several recent lunar eclipses have reported a flash of turquoise bracketing the red of totality ... The source of the turquoise is ozone.' So, all of you amateur astronomers need to get out there and take pictures. It might be worthwhile sharing them on sites like SpaceWeather or Flickr so that our Asian, European, African, and Australian brethren can witness the sight as well."
Reuters confirms Toshiba will cease manufacturing HD-DVD equipment, which leaves Blu-Ray as the presumptive victor in the irrelevant optical disk format war. Rob Beschizza reports in his Gadget Lab blog.
Reuters confirms Toshiba will cease manufacturing HD-DVD equipment, which leaves Blu-Ray as the presumptive victor in the irrelevant optical disk format war. Rob Beschizza reports in his Gadget Lab blog.
Some of the world's top companies vowed Friday to step up efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, saying governments were failing to show sufficient leadership in the fight against global... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 1:27 am
Malaria is the world's deadliest disease, but can Bill Gates's dollars create a vaccine to save Africa's children? John Carlin reports from the frontline Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 12:07 am
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is refusing to remove medieval artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 17 Feb 2008 | 12:06 am
A teenage girl who has four kidneys is hoping to be able to donate two of them to patients in need of a transplant Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 11:19 pm
Googling Yourself writes "Harpers magazine has published a blueprint of Google's new data center at The Dalles, Oregon where they will be tapping into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. Although the plans show three 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, only two of the buildings have been constructed so far. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot, the Dalles plant can be expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity. Google's server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Across the street from the Google data center is an example the last generation of high energy consumers; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also planning data centers on the Columbia River."
On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 10:36 pm
AmishElvis writes "The New York Times reports that 'glitch' gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network. A hundred or more accounts may have been accessed, rather than 'the lone e-mail address' that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation. The episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought."
If you are looking to sell your company to Google, David Lawee is the guy to be stalking. Lawee, a source says, is the new Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, a spot that has been vacant... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 9:57 pm
Like CSI detectives, scientists around the world are combining their skills in a new field of "nuclear forensics" to combat the threat of atomic terrorism. "Nuclear terrorism is a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 9:47 pm
It's shaping up to be a bad flu season, and U.S. health officials say it's partly because the current vaccine doesn't protect against most of the spreading flu bugs. The flu shot is a good match for only about 40 percent of this year's flu viruses.
The switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts will be complete in just one year, on Feb. 17, 2009, and many consumers are puzzling over how the shift will affect them. What exactly do they need to make the transition?
After four months aboard the international space station, astronaut Daniel Tani can't wait to get back on the planet so he can dine with a plate and spit after he brushes his teeth. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 8:44 pm
Canadian marketing company you can be punished for it, in your pocketbook. DDB Canada said this week it has issued a new company-wide policy that creatively discourages staff from... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 8:44 pm
With several panels dedicated to biofuels at the AAAS annual meeting, the sustainability of growing a large percentage of our transportation fuel is emerging as a major theme of the conference. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.
Mac-erati are busy debating about the virtues of the supermodel skinny. John Gruber, who was a bit lukewarm earlier, compares MacBook Air to a convertible coupe and writes, “it’s a secondary... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 8:11 pm
Glitchy software isn’t just annoying, as more and more objects get electronic brains in the form of chips, it can be deadly. Automatic drug injection patches to the steering systems on advanced cars... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 8:08 pm
CAN Silicon Valley become a world leader in cheap and ubiquitous solar panels for the masses? Given the valleys tremendous success in recent years with such down-to-earth products as search engines and... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 6:36 pm
THE best way to learn a foreign language may be to surround yourself with native speakers. But if you cant manage a trip abroad the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, too, bringing... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 6:36 pm
A mother said she was "stunned" to discover pornography on a new mobile phone she bought at Woolworths. Sandra Bamlet, from Darlington, was taking pictures of her dogs... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Feb 2008 | 4:56 pm
