#TDSBreakingNews @RickSantorum suspends presidential campaign. Dibs on the "Romney Licks Santorum" headline.

Back in the day, Netscape was going to merge with Yahoo! and move their headquarters to Israel. The new company would be called NetandYahoo!

This was 35 minutes after Martin was shot. In that time Zimmerman was 'treated' and then transported in handcuffs. What kind of invisible treatment could they do and how could he take off the bandage while wearing handcuffs? And EMTs put dressings over hair all the time. So far there has not been any due process as the killer is still free with his gun.

If the EMTs treated Zimmerman, then they would have put a dressing over any break in the skin to prevent infection. The back of his head does not even have a band aid on it. If he had a broken nose there would have been blood on his shirt and jacket and you would likely see nose plugs to stop the bleeding. There also would have been swelling. No evidence of this either.

Someone screwed up badly as you should never fire any weapon when there are people living in an area within the maximum range of the weapon you are firing. According to the article the round went more than 700 yards off the range which is way more than just an oops.

The Playbook sold out up here in Canada within hours of going on sale last week and it looks like the same thing is happening in the US. According to this CNet article'the $199 BlackBerry tablet is now listed as 'unavailable' at most Best Buy stores in the U.S. For example, a Best Buy in suburban Los Angeles said it had sold out of the $199 PlayBook "a couple of days ago," according to a sales representative.'

RIM has sold 165 million BlackBerry smartphones to date and currently has 70 million subscribers. A Canadian success story that I, as a Canadian, am very proud of.

Many doubt that Mars has sufficient gravity to maintain an atmosphere and without a magnetic field to protect them, anyone there will die from radiation exposure. Venus on the other hand is about the same gravity as earth and has a magnetic field. It is really hot and has a poisonous atmosphere but solar shields and self replicating terraforming factories could fix that in 100 years or so.

Just to be clear, in a light water reactor, you need water between fuel rods to have fission. Neutrons have to be slowed down ("moderated") by interacting with the water molecules before they are of an energy that can effectively fission the U-235.

A solid pool of melted LWR fuel cannot become critical.

While fission probability decreases as neutron energy (and speed) increases, it is not zero. Therefore it is not impossible for fast neutrons to cause fission, just much less likely. The melted fuel may be becoming critical for short periods of time which would explain the iodine.

Actually when I am at home, I prefer using my desktop for work and my laptop for checking something while I am watching TV. I have been using my Blackberry when away from home for quick news and stock updates but banking and stock trading is not easy on a small screen. The Playbook is ideal for casual computing away from home. On the boat, plane, car etc. It fills a niche. Blackberry has identified their market. 50 million people use their smartphones and the PB is the perfect companion device. It is not aimed at Apple users but at people who need to get things done.

Actually people are already carrying two devices with them. A smartphone and a laptop in most cases. A tablet is more convenient than carrying a laptop for most most tasks. The PB is the best choice for someone who already has a Blackberry. As an aside, having the PB saves me from upgrading my Blackberry so it was a win win in my case.

Having a larger size tablet loses its advantage if it is not portable enough to go everywhere with you. The Playbook is just the right size for me and since I carry my Blackberry everywhere already, I always will have an email client and calendar app on my PlayBook and connectivity without having to pay for a separate data plan. RIM only needs a fraction of the 50 million Blackberry users to buy a PB to be a success.

This article from the Ottawa Citizen sums it up nicely. The Playbook is sleek and well designed. It supports Flash and QNX is the best mobile operating system available. The PB's smaller size makes it more portable and therefore more useful. It fits in my jacket pocket or my wife's purse. It is much lighter than carrying a laptop. Wifi is all I need at home or in a hotel room. The bridge to my Blackberry works well when wifi is not available. Yes there are not a lot of apps available yet but I still love it. They make a big deal about not having a native email client but the web based email clients like Gmail work just fine. I am very happy with my Playbook and it will only get better as they release the android app player in a month or so.

Better article here. One of the biggest advantages is that there is no signal processing on site and therefore no need for a hut at the bottom of the tower. The processing is done at data centres and signal sent to tower via fibre optics. Clustering the baseband units makes it easier for maintenance and also makes it easier to do load balancing across a region. When commuters are driving into work, for instance, the baseband cluster can turn its combined energy to handling the signal load coming from towers along the highways and train lines. During the day, processing could handle heavy downtown traffic, while it shifts focus to the suburbs in the evening. Such load-balancing doesn't produce any additional spectrum or data throughput, but it does mean that a carrier can operate fewer baseband processors, saving the carrier cash.

The connections are fast enough to support a standard called CoMP, or Co-ordinated Multipoint. CoMP, which is currently moving through standardization, relies on the fact that, in many locations, a user's wireless gadget is in range of multiple towers (the closer one comes to the edge of each cell, the more towers can typically see the device). This is usually a waste, since multiple towers spend bandwidth contacting the gadget but can't independently deliver different data. CoMP turns it into a bonus by dividing up requested download data and using all cells in the area to deliver a different slice of it at once—akin to the way BitTorrent operates. The phone then combines the data from all the towers in the proper order. This additive approach to using different towers means that a user's total throughput can go up substantially, but it requires centralized baseband to function.

Finally, the new lightRadio baseband bear can do software-defined protocols. Upgrading to LTE? Just upgrade the software on the baseband processor. (Traditional rack-mounted baseband processors required dedicated units for each protocol.) A new baseband chip from Freescale makes it possible, but it gets even cooler when used in conjunction with the new wideband antennas. LightRadio uses a new antenna that, in Alcatel-Lucent's words, collapses three radios into one. The radios are tiny cubes of 2.5 inches square, and each can operate between 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz. They use tiny amps that can be located atop the tower, built into the antenna enclosure, which keeps the amp size down and dramatically cuts down on the power loss.

These radio cubes are stacked in groups of 8 to 10 in order to make an antenna element, and when one cube in the array goes down, the others remain unaffected. (In a traditional system, the whole antenna unit would fail.) The amps cover enough different frequencies that, in many cases, simply changing the software configuration on the baseband unit can control whether each antenna offers a 2G, 3G, or 4G signal.

The antennas also do "beam forming"—fine-grained directional control over the radio signal—in both the horizontal and vertical dimension to better connect with local wireless devices. Alcatel-Lucent claims capacity improvements of 30 percent through the use of vertical beam-forming alone.

The end result of the system: lightRadio cell towers don't need huts, they don't need air conditioners and heaters, big amps, fans, or even local processing gear. Baseband processing moves closer to the data center model and gets cool new capabilities like CoMP and load-balancing. The system's cost savings come from power (Alcatel-Lucent claims a 50 percent reduction), along with lower construction and site rental fees. The total macro capacity of the system should double while cutting operator costs dramatically.

Blackberry OS6 is only a placeholder until they port QNX to their smartphones. Blackberry bought QNX last April and there are rumours that the new storm 3 will run on QNX. Blackberry already has QNX running on the Playbook. Full multitasking with flash support on a dual core processor. It will be an interesting year but RIM is not preparing to fade away.